Evolution

The Kansas State Board of Education will hear from scientists and scholars next week about how best to present evolution in the classroom. If you are not testifying to the board, there is still a significant role for you to play in the wider debate. Namely, write supportive letters to the editor to appear during the hearings next week, and the week following, in regional and national newspapers.

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From a colleague:

A 3-member Committee of The Kansas State School Board will conduct hearings in Topeka next week, and possibly the week after, to evaluate proposed changes to the state science standards. Thursday through Saturday next week, May 5-7, the Committee will hear testimony from scientists, philosophers and educators who think the standards should incorporate language about the problems with Darwinian evolution — a group knownofficially as “the Minority.” Witnesses will include William Harris, Jonathan Wells, Charles Thaxton, Giuseppe Sermonti, Ralph Seelke, Russell Carlson, Bruce Simat, Bryan Leonard, Daniel Ely, Edward Peltzer, Jill Gonzalez-Bravo, John Sanford, Robert DiSilvestro, Roger DeHart, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Angus Menuge, James Barham, John Millam, Mustafa Akyol, Nancy Bryson, and John Calvert.

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One of my favorite over-the-top quotes about the power of natural selection comes from novelist Barbara Kingsolver. According to her, natural selection is “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.” (Small Wonder, 2002). Another Kingsolver, however, is not so sanguine about the power of natural selection. According to J. G. Kingsolver et al. in a meta-analytic statistical study titled “The Strength of Phenotypic Selection in Natural Populations,” published in the March 2001 issue of The American Naturalist, “important issues about selection remain unresolved,” which ends up being a euphemistic way of saying that natural selection was found to have virtually no Read More ›

Hubert Yockey attended the 1996 Mere Creation conference at Biola University. At that conference he and I discussed his role in the ID movement. He described himself as an outsider who could do more good for ID by maintaining his intellectual independence and directing his energies at refuting the evolutionary reductionists than by explicitly making common cause with us. He has a new book with Cambridge University Press scheduled for release this summer that will need to be on the reading list of everyone with an interest in ID: Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life. Of especial interest will be chapter 12, titled “Does Evolution Need an Intelligent Designer?” Although I expect Yockey will be critical of ID in this chapter, I expect his objections will be answerable and help move our program forward.

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In a previous post, I remarked that John Paul II “seemed to sign off on conventional evolutionary theory save for the divine infusion of souls at the origin of humanity.” This is not quite accurate. As a friend and colleague who knows the Catholic world much better than I do noted to me by email:

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The National Center for Selling Evolution (NCSE) has a widely publicized, in their words, “tongue-in-cheek parody of a long-standing creationist tradition of amassing lists of ‘scientists who doubt evolution’ or ‘scientists who dissent from Darwinism’.” They call it “Project Steve.” (Go here for a description of the project and here for the list; go here for the list of dissenters from Darwinism that prompted Project Steve.)

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