Re: Challenges to teaching biology

Janice (and others),

My instincts here are telling me that the phrase "origins of life" is being
used in at least two different ways by several different people (that is, by
Janice, by the authors of the websites she is quoting, by the teacher in LA,
and by the reporter and also perhaps by her audience) in this situation.

In Dover, when the school board forbade teachers from talking about "the
origins of life," I at first naively assumed (as Janice is apparently doing
here) that they were talking about various theories that purport to account
for the first formation of the chemicals out of which you and I are made.
And I was puzzled, since very little is presently known about the first
appearance of life, amino acids, etc, on this planet, and even leading
critics of ID such as Ken Miller very clearly say this when they are asked
about it. That is, there is little or nothing to teach about this topic
presently.

Not so. Upon further investigation, I learned that the creationists on the
Dover school board were using "origins of life" to mean "common descent,"
pure and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. This is actually what many
creationists mean, when they say "origins of life"; they really mean what
Darwin called "the origin of species," and of course they object to that
part of evolution being taught. I alert Janice to this, and suggest that it
might account for what is written in the story; then again, it might not,
since I wasn't writing the story and I didn't teach that class. Even
seasoned reporters might not see this important distinction.

A further comment: the kinds of challenges that students are bringing are of
course precisely what Kent Hovind told them to do when I heard him in Dover.
 Point out the "lies," and help your teachers recognize the "lies" when they
are in texts. One possible beneficial outcome of all this: perhaps the
biologists who teach future teachers will start to take more seriously the
need to cut some material from some of their courses, in order to spend
significant time explaining how scientists actually come to the kinds of
conclusions that are found in the historical sciences. This of course
should have been happening all along, but it rarely does in my experience as
an outside observer. One more biochemical pathway, one more example of
adaptation, is seen as more important for the syllabus than a few days--let
alone a few weeks or even a whole course or two--of teaching students how to
reason forensically, which is what scientists in the historical sciences are
doing. I've talked about this before, of course, but I keep doing so b/c it
keeps being central to the problem.

ted

***** (the rest is from Janice's post)

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 ...."

<Snip> by Ted all the rest, on global warming.
Received on Sun Apr 2 14:12:29 2006