He believes that intelligent design backers in academia may have to keep a low profile for a bit.
coco
Darwin's defenders go into battle again
Alec Russell
(Filed: 31/12/2005)
James Colbert has been on the frontline of America's culture wars for
20 years but his hoped-for final victory of reason over faith is not
yet in sight.
Now an associate biology professor at Iowa State University, he has
found since he started teaching that about a third of the students
beginning his introductory course are creationists, in many cases with
no knowledge of evolution at all.
While trying to tread softly to avoid offending their sensibilities, he
has increasingly had to defend his faculty and scholarship against what
he sees as a far greater threat - the incursion into science faculties
of backers of "intelligent design", the belief that evolution is so
complex that some higher force must be behind it.
So it might be expected that he was celebrating following a
high-profile ruling in America's decades-old judicial tussle over
evolution.
On Dec 20, a federal judge ruled against a Pennsylvania school board
that had been seeking to have intelligent design taught alongside
evolutionary science.
Not only were the members of the school board condemned for their
"breathtaking inanity" in trying to bring religion into science
classes, but also the judge excoriated the very idea of treating i.d.
as science. While delighted by the result, Prof Colbert, however, saw
it as a step forward rather than a complete triumph over intelligent
design. "It's a defeat at one juncture but that does not mean that it
will go away."
Emotions are running high in his faculty and others across America over
i.d., as academics fight for control over the minds of the nation's
youth. For decades America has been riven by "culture wars" over
science, religion and law, all set against the background of the
ancient US debate over the separation of church and state.
Traditionally the most heated argument has been over abortion but
creation has emerged as a similarly contentious issue.
In tune with the Rightward shift in American opinion, the
overwhelmingly evangelical Christian backers of i.d have been raising
their profile and advancing the theory as science and not theology.
They like to highlight holes in the evolutionary chain, arguing that
the science of evolution has many unproven elements and does not
deserve preferential treatment.
Stephen Meyer, the vice-president of the Discovery Institute, a
Seattle-based think tank, said: "A designer that acted in the past is
no more or less observable than the Darwinian processes. So on that
standard both are equivalent."
Prof Colbert says most scientists ignored such arguments as coming from
a lunatic fringe until August when President George W Bush backed
teaching i.d. alongside evolution. Alarmed at what he saw as the
growing influence of some i.d. supporters in the science faculty, Prof
Colbert drafted a petition condemning "attempts to represent
intelligent design as a scientific endeavour".
In response more than 40 Christian faculty and staff members signed a
statement calling on the university to uphold their basic freedoms and
to allow them to discuss intelligent design.
Guillermo Gonzales, an assistant professor of astronomy, was one of
those who saw the petition as a personal attack. He is the co-author of
a book, The Privileged Planet, which argues that the Earth's position
in the sky is evidence of a higher hand. He dismisses the impact of the
Pennsylvania judge's ruling. "Critics of i.d. might try to cite the
judge's statement that "i.d. is not science"," he said. "But the judge
has no competence to make such an assertion."
A similar feud is under way at the University of New Mexico. Leslie
McFadden, the chairman of the Earth and Planetary Sciences, accuses
i.d. proponents of ultimately believing that "the ills of modern
society - feminism, choice, relativism, post-modernism - are the result
of a culture gone wrong and a large part of that has to do with godless
science."
On the other side of the lines, Chris Macosko, who did his MSc at
Imperial College, London and is now professor of chemical engineering
at the University of Minnesota, has for eight years taught a seminar:
"Life by chance or design?" He says students leave his lectures saying
they had not appreciated "how shaky evolution is".
He believes that intelligent design backers in academia may have to
keep a low profile for a bit, particularly those without tenure. But he
believes that in the end there will be a backlash against the
Pennsylvania ruling
Jik Bombo
"coco" <aozo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136110256.9...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/31/wdesign31.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/31/ixworld.html
>
>
> Darwin's defenders go into battle again
> Alec Russell
> (Filed: 31/12/2005)
>
> James Colbert has been on the frontline of America's culture wars for
> 20 years but his hoped-for final victory of reason over faith is not
> yet in sight.
>
>
> Now an associate biology professor at Iowa State University, he has
> found since he started teaching that about a third of the students
> beginning his introductory course are creationists, in many cases with
> no knowledge of evolution at all.
Take that up with the public employee union cotrolled government schools.
Did they make you stupid, too?
coco
Meaning?
Lloyd Parker
in GA, the Republican Education Secretary tried to change the biology topic
from "evolution" to "gradual changes over time." After she got laughed down,
she backed off. (Her predecessor, the first Republican Ed. Secy. here, is
under indictment for fraud and theft of public money.)