Split Outcome in Texas Battle on Teaching of Evolution: Response

The Discovery Institute gave kudos this week to the New York Times. They actually reported accurately what the Texas Academic Freedom Bill represents. If one wants to see how media bias operates, then the issues of ID, creationism and evolution debates are a place to look.

I wish the New York Times would have offered the rebuttal to the assumption science is in danger with ID teaching.

Split Outcome in Texas Battle on Teaching of Evolution. By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. Published: January 23, 2009

But some defenders of evolution said the amendment was intended to engender doubt in students about what most biologists accept as fact: that evolution occurs, even if there is debate about how and why.

The fact that evolution occurs in observation is not debated by ID proponents. evolution meaning genetic changes from progeny to progeny is not disputed by ID scientists and scientists who advocate creation. (there is a difference in these two types of scientists.)

Friday’s voting capped two days of discussion on the state’s science standards, which are routinely revisited every 10 years. But the final vote does not come until March.

Whatever the 15-member board decides then will have consequences far beyond Texas, since the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the nation. The new standards will be in place for the next decade, starting in 2010, and will influence the writing of the next generation of biology texts, which the state will order this summer.

Though the requirement to teach strengths and weaknesses of theories was first adopted here two decades ago, teachers have largely ignored it. But it has taken on new importance in recent years, as groups questioning Darwinism have invoked the mandate in raising objections to evolution’s being taught to the exclusion of other theories.

We will be waiting and seeing what Texas does in the March meeting. Between now and then, there is a hope that critics of ID will actually realize what the issues are about. Children in public schools do not deserve to be brain washed into thinking there is only one way life came into existence.