Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Kansas education board repeals guidelines questioning evolution
(John Hanna, Associated Press, February 14, 2007)

Kansas has repealed public school science guidelines questioning the theory of evolution that brought the state international ridicule, but educators aren't sure how long it will be before the decision is overturned.

The State Board of Education approved new, evolution-friendly science standards with a 6-4 vote Tuesday, replacing ones that questioned the theory and had the support of ''intelligent design'' advocates.

The change occurred because a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans won control of the board from conservative Republicans in last year's election. While conservatives said after Tuesday's vote they weren't planning to reopen the debate even if elections go their way in 2008, state law will require another review of the standards by 2014.

Another shift in power is possible. The latest science standards are the fifth for the state in eight years.

''I think we're good for two years,'' said board member Janet Waugh, a Kansas City Democrat who supported the new standards. ''Who knows what the election will hold in two years?''

The new standards reflect mainstream scientific views of evolution. The board deleted language suggesting that key evolutionary concepts _ like a common origin for all life on Earth and change in species creating new ones _ were controversial and being challenged by new research.

The board also rewrote the standards' definition of science, specifically limiting it to the search for natural explanations of what's observed in the universe.

Some scientists and science groups believed the board's latest action was significant because it turned back a subtle attack on evolution that encouraged schools to teach about an evolution ''controversy,'' rather than mandating that creationism or intelligent design be taught. Intelligent design says an intelligent cause is the best way to explain some complex and orderly features of the universe.

The board's vote came a day after the 198th anniversary of Darwin's birth, which the University of Kansas celebrated with a costume party and a showing of a pro-evolution documentary, ''Flock of Dodos.''

But many Kansans still harbor religious objections and other misgivings about the British naturalist's theories. The Intelligent Design Network presented petitions with almost 4,000 signatures opposing the standards the board eventually adopted.

John Calvert, a retired attorney who helped found the group, accused the board of promoting atheism. And Greg Lassey, a retired Wichita-area biology teacher, said the new standards undermine families by ''discrediting parents who reject materialism and the ethics and morals it fosters.''

John Calvert, a retired attorney who helped found the group, accused the board of promoting atheism. And Greg Lassey, a retired Wichita-area biology teacher, said the new standards undermine families by ''discrediting parents who reject materialism and the ethics and morals it fosters.''

wande quoted-

Quote:

John Calvert, a retired attorney who helped found the group, accused the board of promoting atheism. And Greg Lassey, a retired Wichita-area biology teacher, said the new standards undermine families by ''discrediting parents who reject materialism and the ethics and morals it fosters.''

Has this newly constituted Board a genuine mandate for these changes when it is widely agreed that the election was a popular verdict on the war in Iraq?

The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power; by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them. When this sense is awakened in us, as to objects without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can. Poetry,indeed, interprets in another way besides this; but one of its two ways of interpreting, of exercising its highest power, is by awakening this sense in us. I will not now inquire whether this sense is illusive, whether it can be proved not to be illusive, whether it does absolutely make us possess the real nature of things; all I say is, that poetry can awaken it in us, and that to awaken it is one of the highest powers of poetry. The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare, with his

"daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;"

it is Wordsworth, with his

"voice . . . .heard
In springtime from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides;"

it is Keats, with his

"moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round Earth's human shores;"

It seems to me intolerable to appear to men other than one appears to God.

Destiny, who loves these surprises, has wafted from the farthest Indies into my arms.

Outreach and Education in Evolution Journal Launches

One hopes not in Mr Darwin's style with descriptions of plumage and personal habits.