>==============================================================
>National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT)
>
>STATEMENT ON TEACHING EVOLUTION
>
>[Adopted by the Board of Directors, March 15, 1995.]
>
>The National Association of Biology Teachers, an
>organization of science teachers, endorses the following tenets
>of science, evolution and biology education:
>
>The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an
>*unsupervised*, *impersonal*, unpredictable and natural process of
>temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by
>natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing
>environments.
When we see a definition like this, we don't necessarily have to accept it
as authoritative. One of my pet peeves with some creationists is that they
quote definitions like this as though they have some authority. Then the
supposed authority of that definition becomes part of the basis of their
attack on evolution.
The alternative is to look at the definition, expose its flaws, and work
toward a better definition. The obvious flaw in this definition is the use
of "unsupervised". It is not within the competence of science alone to
determine whether a natural process is supernaturally supervised. Since
these people are teaching our children, we need to set them straight.
The use of "impersonal" doesn't particularly bother me, because _processes_
happen to be impersonal. People are personal. God is personal. Processes
aren't.
It seems to me that if we insist that scientists constrain their
pronouncements (the ones labelled as science anyway) to valid scientific
conclusions, that the most they can say about the issue of supervision is
that they _cannot establish_ by scientific means whether the process of
evolution is supervised or not. That is not the same as saying evolution
is unsupervised. There's a world of difference.
Bill Hamilton | Chassis & Vehicle Systems
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
810 986 1474 (voice) | 810 986 3003 (FAX)
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