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- -11-07-04 Theory of Evolution in Court (CBS News)
" 'School officials in suburban Cobb County go to court Monday to defend themselves against a lawsuit accusing the district of promoting religion by requiring that science textbooks warn students evolution is "a theory, not a fact.' " 10-04
- -Editorial: Complexity and Intelligent Design (ABC News - Paulos)
"The theory of intelligent design, the purportedly more scientific descendant of creation science, rejects Darwin's theory of evolution as being unable to explain the complexity of life. How, ask supporters of intelligent design, can biological phenomena like the clotting of blood have arisen just by chance?"
"But the theory of evolution does explain the evolution of complex biological organisms and phenomena, and the above argument from design, which dates from the 18th century, has been decisively refuted. Rehashing the latter explanation and refutation is not my goal, however. Those who reject evolution are usually immune to such arguments anyway."
"Rather, my intention here is to develop some loose analogies between these biological issues and related economic ones and to show that these analogies point to a surprising crossing of political lines." 8-05
- -Editorial: Evolution of Creationism (Slate)
"Essentially, ID [Intelligent Design] proponents are gambling that they can concede evolutionist earth science without conceding evolutionist life science. But they can't. They already acknowledge microevolution—mutation and natural selection within a species. Once you accept conventional fossil dating and four billion years of life, the sequential kinship of species loses its implausibility. You can't fall back on the Bible, you've already admitted it can't always be taken literally. All you're left with is an assortment of gaps in evolutionary theory—how did DNA emerge, what happened between this and that fossil—and the vague default assumption that an 'intelligence' might fill in those gaps." 8-05
- -Editorial: Schools Are Teaching Creationism Using Public Funds (Slate.com)
"A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students, Zack Kopplin recently reported in Slate. Creationist teachers don’t even need to be sneaky about it—the Texas state science education standards, as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school teachers to teach 'alternatives' to evolution." Editor's Note: Awesome Library staff have not confirmed the information presented in this essay. 02-14
- -Key Link in Human Evolution? (Time.com)
"Evolution skeptics like to trot out the argument that if Darwin had been right, scientists would have discovered transitional fossils by now — creatures with a mix of features from earlier and later species. Since they haven't, the deniers say, evolution must not be true."
"The truth is that paleontologists have found transitional species by the score, from many different time periods. But none have materialized from as crucial a point in our evolutionary past as a pair of skeletons whose discovery was announced today by the journal Science"
"The fossils, which have been determined to be a new species, Australopithecus sediba, were initially found by Matthew Berger, the 9-year-old son of paleontologist Lee Berger of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand (the elder Berger tried in vain to get the editors of Science to list Matthew as a co-author on the paper). The bones belong to a pre-teenage boy and a woman estimated to be in her late 20s or early 30s; the individuals died at about the same time, and before their remains had fully decomposed, they were entombed in an avalanche of sediment and nearly perfectly preserved deep in the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa." 04-10
- -Texas Board of Education Votes on Evolution (CNN News)
"A final 13-2 vote approved language that will be printed in textbooks beginning in 2011 and remain there for 10 years, CNN affiliate KPRC-TV in Houston reported:"
" 'In all fields of science, analyze, evaluate, and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental observation and testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the students.' "
"The scientific community has overwhelmingly scorned creationism and its latest incarnation, intelligent design, as a pretext for biblical explanations of how the world came to be, and asserts that there is no weakness or doubt in the scientific community about evolution."
"Last year, the National Academy of Sciences called for the public to be better informed about the importance of understanding and teaching evolution. The academy released a booklet titled 'Science, Evolution, and Creationism' -- the third explanation of evolution put out since 1984 by one of the nation's leading scientific organizations." 03-09
- Bush Remarks on Intelligent Design (Washington Post)
"President Bush invigorated proponents of teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools with remarks saying that schoolchildren should be taught about 'intelligent design,' a view of creation that challenges established scientific thinking and promotes the idea that an unseen force is behind the development of humanity."
"Bush's comments were 'irresponsible,' said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He said the president, by suggesting that students hear two viewpoints, 'doesn't understand that one is a religious viewpoint and one is a scientific viewpoint.' " 8-05
- Comparison of Skulls (TalkOrigins.org)
"As this table shows, although creationists are adamant that none of these [skulls] are transitional and all are either apes or humans, they are not able to tell which are which."
"But according to evolutionary thinking, these fossils come from a number of closely related species intermediate between apes and humans. If this is so, we would expect to find that some of them are hard to classify, and we do." 03-06
- Creationism - Arguments Against (Foley)
Provides arguments against the creationist position that there is a clear dividing line between early human fossils and ape fossils. Also argues against the idea that insufficient physical evidence exists for ancient hominids.
- Creationists Try New Strategy (Christian Science Monitor)
"In June of last year, Louisiana became the first state to pass what has become known as an 'academic freedom' law. In the past, fights over evolution took place at the local school board level, but academic freedom proponents specifically target state legislatures." 02-09
- Editorial: Argument for Intelligent Design (United Church of God - Good News Magazine)
"So in the intelligent design theory, since we take it as a given that there is such a thing as intelligence, information is not matter or energy. We say, yes, there is something else in DNA, and that is the intelligence component." 02-06
- Editorial: Intelligent Design - It's Not Even Wrong (AgiWeb.org - Holt)
"Science, by definition, is a method of learning about the physical universe by asking questions in a way that they can be answered empirically and verifiably. If a question cannot be framed so that the answer is testable by looking at physical evidence and by allowing other people to repeat and replicate one's test, then it is not science. The term science also refers to the organized body of knowledge that results from scientific study. Intelligent design offers no way to investigate design scientifically. Intelligent design explains complicated phenomena of the natural world by involving a designer. This way of thinking says things behave the way they do because God makes them behave that way. This treads not into science but into the realm of faith."
"Creationists and others who denigrate the concept of evolution call it a theory, with a dismissive tone. They say that, as a theory, it is up for debate."
"There are actually very few theories in science, including atomic theory, the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, and the theory of the standard model of particle physics. Without the ability to test the hypotheses of Intelligent Design, it cannot be considered a theory in the scientific sense." 12-05
- Essay: Why Historians Have a Stake in the Debate Over Evolution (History News Network)
" As any newspaper reader knows, the American public has little regard for the theory of evolution. Despite its nearly universal acceptance among scientists worldwide, both the president of the United States and the Senate majority leader—an MD—favor the teaching of a competing, unscientific (indeed, antiscientific) theory known as 'Intelligent Design' as a counterpoint to evolution in the public schools." 9-05
- Essay: Why Historians Have a Stake in the Debate Over Evolution (History News Network)
" As any newspaper reader knows, the American public has little regard for the theory of evolution. Despite its nearly universal acceptance among scientists worldwide, both the president of the United States and the Senate majority leader—an MD—favor the teaching of a competing, unscientific (indeed, antiscientific) theory known as 'Intelligent Design' as a counterpoint to evolution in the public schools." 9-05
- Evolution - Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (National Academy Press)
Provides a rationale for why evolution must be taught as part of teaching about science and the scientific method, despite controversy. Includes examples on how to approach the topic and presents facts used in teaching about evolution as part of scientific inquiry. 5-00
- Evolution Curriculum Conflicts by State (NPR.org)
"Policymakers in at least 16 states are currently examining the controversy." 8-05
- Evolution as Science (WhyFiles.org)
"By endorsing the theory that evolution through natural selection is an unproven theory, the elected board defied 150 years of science. It also raised doubts about a foundation of biology that has been resolved by the mounting evidence that all forms of life are interrelated."
"Evolution, the scientific study of the origins and development of life, has roots in geology, paleontology and field biology. It explains, for example, why so many insects but so few dinosaurs are alive today, or why certain flowers can only be pollinated by certain birds. It explains why microbes can become resistant to antibiotics, why cancers become resistant to anti-cancer drugs, and why the bones in a bat wing resemble the bones in your hand."
" 'A theory in science is not a hunch or "just a theory" as some say. It is an explanation built on multitudinous confirmed facts and the absence of incompatible facts.' Omitting evolution from biology, Singer pointed out, 'is comparable to leaving the U.S. Constitution out of civics lessons. Evolution is the framework that makes sense of the whole natural world...' "
" 'In the past 10 or 20 years, we have developed this completely independent record. Studies of the genome [an organism's genetic code] have in most cases completely confirmed...the relationships deduced from the fossil record.' "
- Groups Attempt to Present "Intelligent Design" as Science (ABC News)
"The [Discovery] think tank is promoting an idea [Intelligent Design] that all of the nation's top biologists say has no scientific basis. But the institute insists there's a raging debate among scientists on both sides of the evolutionary divide." 9-05
- Groups Attempt to Present "Intelligent Design" as Science (USA Today)
"The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying 'intelligent design' is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only creates confusion."
"The author, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Darwin's theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution 'represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth.' "
"He lamented that certain American 'creationists' had brought the debate back to the 'dogmatic' 1800s, and said their arguments weren't science but ideology." 01-06
- Horse Evolution (TalkOrigins.org - Hunt)
Provides evidence on the evolution of horses. (No pictures are included.) "A Question for Creationists: Creationists who wish to deny the evidence of horse evolution should careful consider this: how else can you explain the sequence of horse fossils? Even if creationists insist on ignoring the transitional fossils (many of which have been found), again, how can the unmistakable sequence of these fossils be explained? Did God create Hyracotherium, then kill off Hyracotherium and create some Hyracotherium-Orohippus intermediates, then kill off the intermediates and create Orohippus, then kill off Orohippus and create Epihippus, then allow Epihippus to 'microevolve' into Duchesnehippus, then kill off Duchesnehippus and create Mesohippus, then create some Mesohippus-Miohippus intermediates, then create Miohippus, then kill off Mesohippus, etc.....each species coincidentally similar to the species that came just before and came just after?"
- Intelligent Design as Science (ActionBioscience.org - Natural History Magazine)
"In the final analysis, the biochemical hypothesis of intelligent design fails not because the scientific community is closed to it but rather for the most basic of reasons -- because it is overwhelmingly contradicted by the scientific evidence." 8-05
- Intelligent Design as Science (NewYorker.com)
"Unlike earlier generations of creationists—the so-called Young Earthers and scientific creationists—proponents of intelligent design do not believe that the universe was created in six days, that Earth is ten thousand years old, or that the fossil record was deposited during Noah’s flood. (Indeed, they shun the label 'creationism' altogether.)"
"Though people often picture science as a collection of clever theories, scientists are generally staunch pragmatists: to scientists, a good theory is one that inspires new experiments and provides unexpected insights into familiar phenomena. By this standard, Darwinism is one of the best theories in the history of science: it has produced countless important experiments (let’s re-create a natural species in the lab—yes, that’s been done) and sudden insight into once puzzling patterns (that’s why there are no native land mammals on oceanic islands). In the nearly ten years since the publication of Behe’s book, by contrast, I.D. has inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights into biology. As the years pass, intelligent design looks less and less like the science it claimed to be and more and more like an extended exercise in polemics."
"Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism, they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science." 8-05
- Intelligent Design as Science (Wikipedia.org)
"Despite ID sometimes being called Intelligent Design Theory, the National Academy of Sciences has said, intelligent design 'and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life' are not science because their claims cannot be tested by experiment and propose no new hypotheses of their own, instead they find gaps within current evolutionary theory and fill them in with speculative beliefs. The scientific community does not recognise ID as a scientific theory and considers it to be creationist pseudoscience." 8-05
- Judge: Remove "Evolution" Stickers from Books (Bloomberg.com)
"Georgia's Cobb County school system must immediately remove stickers from science textbooks that say evolution is a 'theory, not a fact,' because a federal judge ruled the disclaimers were unconstitutional."
"At least five parents filed a lawsuit challenging the stickers on the grounds that they violated the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of the state of Georgia. A section of the state's constitution says that 'no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, cult, or religious denomination.' "
"Cooper also placed a permanent ban on the stickers being disseminated. Cobb County is north of Atlanta." 01-05
- Pennsylvania Voters Oust Intelligent Design Supporters (USA Today)
"Voters came down hard Tuesday on school board members who ordered a statement on intelligent design read in biology class, ousting eight Republicans and replacing them with Democrats who want the concept stripped from the science curriculum."
"Eight of the nine school board members were up for election Tuesday. They were challenged by a slate of Democrats who argued that science class was not the appropriate forum for teaching intelligent design." 9-05
- Senator Frist Remarks on Intelligent Design (MSNBC News)
"Frist, a Republican from Tennessee, spoke to a Rotary Club meeting Friday and told reporters afterward that students need to be exposed to different ideas, including intelligent design."
"The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation. Nearly all scientists dismiss it as a scientific theory, and critics say it's nothing more than religion masquerading as science." 8-05
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