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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