Re: Challenges to teaching biology

At 07:17 PM 4/1/2006, Keith Miller wrote:

To all: This is a very sobering account of the reality of teaching
biology in some school districts. I happen to know the teacher being
featured in this article. He is one of best biology teachers in
state and nation. ~ Keith

@ Biology teachers wouldn't have so many problems teaching
"evolution" if, before they begin their instruction, they made it
clear to all their students that "the scientific community does not
consider the subject of "life's origins" to be a part of evolutionary
theory, which assumes the existence of life and is directed to an
explanation of how life evolved after it originated." (See McLean
v. Arkansas Board of Education linked below)

Notice these telling quotes from the LA Times article:

Los Angeles Times Testing Darwin's Teachers By Stephanie
Simon Times Staff Writer March 31, 2006

LIBERTY, Mo. -- Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the
origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the
overhead projector and braces himself. ...

...For the first 27 years of his career, he taught life's origins
without controversy.

.. Missouri does not require teachers to introduce criticisms
of evolution or alternative accounts of life's origins.

..Religious accounts of life's origins have generally been kept out
of the science classroom, sometimes by court order. But polls show a
majority of Americans are unhappy with the evolution-only approach.

...he'll even sit down with a student to talk about God -- though
only after class.

  ...Frisby still believed that God created the universe, but his
faith couldn't tell him what happened next.."

"I don't want to be in a debate about religion .... My job is to
explain evolution .."

".. more than a third of the students wrote in their class
evaluations that they did not accept their teacher's account of how
life emerged."

@ Based on the above, it looks to me as if Frisby is teaching
scientism as part of evolution theory in Biology class.

TalkOrigins.Org: "... the theory of evolution doesn't depend on how
the first life began. The truth or falsity of any theory of
abiogenesis wouldn't affect evolution in the least."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html

" ... 3. In 1982, in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, a federal
court held that a "balanced treatment" statute violated the
Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Arkansas statute
required public schools to give balanced treatment to
"creation-science" and "evolution-science". In a decision that gave a
detailed definition of the term "science", the court declared that
"creation science" is not in fact a science. The court also found
that the statute did not have a secular purpose, noting that the
statute used language peculiar to creationist literature in
emphasizing origins of life as an aspect of the theory of evolution.
While the subject of life's origins is within the province of
biology, the scientific community does not consider the subject as
part of evolutionary theory, which assumes the existence of life and
is directed to an explanation of how life evolved after it
originated. The theory of evolution does not presuppose either the
absence or the presence of a creator.
(<http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html>McLean v.
Arkansas Board of Education (1982) 529 F. Supp. 1255, 50 U.S. Law
Week 2412) .." ~ National Center for Science
Education
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/3747_8_major_court_decisions_agains_2_15_2001.asp

* The LA Times article continues (excerpted remarks):

...Two decades of political and legal maneuvering on evolution has
spilled over into public schools, and biology teachers are struggling
to respond.

...Far tougher are the science-based queries that force teachers to
defend a theory they may not ever have studied in depth.

... if you insist on more information, the teacher will quickly run
out of credibility," he said.

Anxious to forestall such challenges, nearly one in five teachers
makes a point of avoiding the word "evolution" in class -- even when
they're presenting the topic, according to a survey by the National
Science Teachers Assn.

"They're saying they don't know how to respond.... They haven't done
the research the kids have done on this," said Linda Froschauer, the
group's president-elect.

In a classroom cluttered with paper models of DNA, newspaper
clippings about global warming and oddities such as ...."

@ No doubt some of those "clippings" profusely quote Dr. James Hansen.

If so, before quoting him, he should inform his students that Hansen
is an extremist political hack who has admitted to deliberately using
exaggeration and propaganda as political tools in the debate over
global warming. Many "teachers" haven't done proper research on
that subject either which makes them unqualified to "teach" it
. This will get them started:

HANSEN EXPOSED

The real (attention-seeking) agenda of the allegedly gagged
climatologist who seemed extremely audible anyway

The scientist touted by CBS News' "60 Minutes" as arguably the
"world's leading researcher on global warming" and spotlighted as a
victim of the Bush administration's censorship on the issue, publicly
endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president and received a $250,000
grant from the charitable foundation headed by Kerry's wife.
Scientist James Hansen has also admitted that he contributed to two
recent Democratic presidential campaigns. Furthermore, he acted as a
consultant in February to former Vice President Al Gore's slide show
presentations on "global warming," which Gore presented around the country.

But Scott Pelley, the "60 Minutes" reporter who profiled Hansen and
detailed his accusations of censorship on the March 19, edition of
the newsmagazine, made no mention of Hansen's links to Kerry and Gore
and none to the fact that Kerry's wife -- Teresa Heinz Kerry -- had
been one of Hansen's benefactors. Pelley's "Rewriting the Science"
segment focused on Hansen's allegations that the Bush administration
was preventing his views from becoming publicized because it did not
like his conclusions. Hansen's complaints were first publicized in
January. "In my more than three decades in the government, I've never
witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to
communicate with the public," Hansen told Pelley.

But Hansen had made similar claims of another Republican White House
allegedly censoring his views. In 1989, Hansen claimed that President
Bush's father - then-President George H. W. Bush - was censoring his
climate research. Kerry and about a dozen other senators eventually
co-signed a letter written by Gore, who was also a senator at the
time, demanding an explanation for the alleged censorship.

Hansen has previously acknowledged that he supported the "emphasis on
extreme scenarios" regarding climate change models in order to drive
the public's attention to the issue, but Pelley's "60 Minutes" report
made no mention of that admission. "Not only are [Hansen's]
apocalyptic predictions not coming true, but more and more countries
are beginning to realize that they will destroy their economies just
under Kyoto 1, to prevent about 0.1 degrees of warming," Paul
Driessen, the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power - Black Death,
told Cybercast News Service. "Hansen's rants might still garner
headlines in the Washington Post and New York Times, and raves from
CBS - especially if you believe every beetle infestation, forest
fire, cold snap, hot flash, dry spell, flood, frog death and malaria
outbreak is due to global warming - but they're complete hogwash,"
Driessen said.

In endorsing Kerry's presidential bid late in the 2004 campaign,
Hansen conceded that it could harm his reputation. "Dr. Hansen, 63,
acknowledged that he imperiled his credibility and perhaps his job by
criticizing Mr. Bush's policies in the final days of a tight
presidential campaign." according to the Oct. 26, 2004, edition of
the New York Times. In a speech delivered on that same day, Hansen
praised the Massachusetts senator, declaring that "John Kerry has a
far better grasp than President Bush on the important issues that we face."

Three years earlier, Hansen had accepted the $250,000 Heinz Award
granted by the foundation run by Kerry's wife Teresa. But the same
day Hansen publicly endorsed Sen. John Kerry's presidential candidacy
in 2004, the New York Times quoted Hansen as saying that the grant
from the Heinz Foundation had had "no impact on my evaluation of the
climate problem or on my political leanings."

But George C. Deutsch, who served as a spokesman for NASA until
resigning in February, said he quickly learned that "Dr. Hansen and
his supporters have a very partisan agenda and ties reaching to the
top of the Democratic Party." Deutsch resigned his post earlier this
year following a controversy surrounding a false resume claim that he
graduated from Texas A&M University. Deutsch also denied that the
Bush administration was clamping down on scientific views that did
not support its preferred conclusions. "There is no pressure or
mandate from the Bush administration or elsewhere, to alter or water
down scientific data at NASA, period," Deutsch said, according to a
Feb. 11, article in the Washington Post.

Instead, he said, there existed a "culture war" at the federal
agency. "Anyone perceived to be a Republican, a Bush supporter or a
Christian is singled out and labeled a threat to their views. I
encourage anyone interested in this story to consider the other side,
to consider Dr. Hansen' s true motivations and to consider the
dangerous implications of only hearing out one side of the global
warming debate," Deutsch added.

Hansen fired back at Deutsch's assertions in an online statement
published in February, calling Deutsch's claims "nonsense." "I can be
accurately described as moderately conservative," Hansen wrote, while
acknowledging that he had endorsed Kerry for president in 2004
"because he recognized global warming problem." Hansen stated that he
had great respect for former Vice President Al Gore, noting that he
met with Gore in January 2006 and ended up consulting Gore on his
climate change slide show presentations. "I have great respect for
Vice President Gore and his dedication to communicating the
importance of global warming. He has a better understanding of the
science of global warming than any politician I have met, and I urge
citizens to pay attention to his presentation, which I understand
will come out in the form of a movie," Hansen wrote. Hansen wrote
that his only two political contributions were to Bill Clinton's 1992
presidential campaign and to either the 2000 Al Gore presidential run
or the Kerry 2004 campaign. "I don't remember which," Hansen stated.

Hansen, described by Pelley in the "60 Minutes" report as an
"independent," also reportedly refused to go along the Clinton
administration on the issue of "global warming." The Clinton
administration "wanted to hear that warming was worse than it was,"
Pelley reported.

In the March 2004 issue of Scientific American, Hansen appeared to be
justifying the past use of climate models to scare the public into
believing the "global warming" problem was urgent. "Emphasis on
extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the
public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global
warming issue," Hansen wrote in 2004. "Now, however, the need is for
demonstrably objective climate-forcing scenarios consistent with what
is realistic under current conditions."

Patrick J. Michaels, the author of several books on climate change,
including the recently published "Shattered Consensus: The True State
of Global Warming," declared that Hansen has "advocated the use of
exaggeration and propaganda as political tools in the debate over
global warming." Michaels, who leveled his charges in a Feb. 21
commentary entitled "Hansen's Hot Hype," wrote that "Hansen thought
the public should be subjected to nightmare scenarios regardless of
the scientific likelihood of catastrophe, simply in order to gain
people's attention." Michaels, who believes claims of catastrophic,
human-caused "global warming" are scientifically unfounded, is a
climatologist at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at
the Cato Institute. Michaels has previously credited Hansen with
taking a more moderate stance toward climate change. "The irony is
that, in recent years, Hansen's positions on global warming have come
increasingly in line with those of the administration he claims is
censoring him," Michaels said.

Several attempts to contact Hansen for comment were not returned.
Telephone calls to Bill Owens and Catherine Herrick, the two CBS News
employees who produced Pelley's "60 Minutes" segment, were referred
to the network media affairs office. "60 Minutes" spokesman Kevin
Tedesco defended the segment, telling Cybercast News Service that "it
was a fair and accurate
report."
<http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=\Politics\archive\200603\POL20060323a.html>Source
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=\Politics\archive\200603\POL20060323a.html

Greenie
Watch
http://antigreen.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_antigreen_archive.html#114320800122634224

~ Janice
Received on Sun Apr 2 11:59:42 2006