Sunday, December 25, 2016

Devos on Intelligent Design

What would Education Secretary Nominee Betsy Devos say about evolution? 12/23/16

We should expect confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments to include scaremongering about science education. This week’s fake news about a “petition” to VP-elect Mike Pence, demanding a moratorium on instruction about evolution, gives a hint of what may be to come. Atheist activists jumped on the petition as evidence of what the semi-mythic “Christian Right” has in store for the next four years. The petition’s creator, though, characterized it as “tongue-in-cheek.”

While Pence along with Trump’s HUD pick, Ben Carson, have commented in the past on questions of evolutionary origins and intelligent design, the focus is likely to be on Mr. Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. In The New Yorker, outspoken atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss has already sounded the alarm (“Donald Trump’s War on Science“).

As evidence against Mrs. DeVos, he cites her church membership and college majors (business administration and political science, rather than education). Krauss admits she has no record of saying anything at all about evolution, but her husband, Dick DeVos, in a run for governor of Michigan, had this to say:

I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design — that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory — that that theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas, not less.

The structure of the sentence by itself tells you that it was a casual remark. Granting Mr. DeVos the benefit of the doubt, it wouldn’t be the first time that a political aspirant invoked ID in such a context without having researched what ID means or what its advocates say. Notably, Discovery Institute, the major force in supporting research on intelligent design, strongly opposes requiring ID in public schools, and always has opposed it. (See our Science Education Policy.)

Instead, we call for permitting teachers to challenge students with an approach to evolution that sharpens their critical skills, using mainstream scientific sources to examine the strengths and weaknesses of standard neo-Darwinian theory. Two states (Tennessee and Louisiana) and multiple school districts have adopted this policy of academic freedom, teaching about legitimate disagreements among mainstream scientists.

But when did a little thing like accuracy trouble a Darwin activist equipped with a media bullhorn? Krauss inveighs: Continue Reading on www.evolutionnews.org


Comment

Betsy Devos is spot on. The recognition of evolution as a valid theory could de-politicize it and actually help archeology. They have never really found the “missing link”. The gaps in the theory of evolution need to be studied and commented on by the intelligent design oriented scientists who have studied evolutionists’ failures.

The religious questions revolve around how much of the Bible is metaphor and how much is confirmable history. I would like for the intelligent design folks to examine tools like carbon dating to make sure it is fraud-proof. This could actually take the pressure off of environmentalists if the intelligent design folks found no flaws in the tools.

This should not be an “either-or” question, but one where all of science is brought into question and given our “best guess, so far” on the facts.  I suspect that the 6 days of creation accounts are metaphors and that human beings very well may have been around for 2 million years. A thorough questioning of ancestral DNA analysis would be helpful.  We certainly need to get the politics out of science.


Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader 

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