Must have been warm down there in January. In South Carolina, according to the Palmetto Post and Courier:
Biology professor Robert T. Dillon’s job teaching genetics and evolution at the College of Charleston has little to do with editing, but he’s found himself chasing three adverbs with a red pen for nearly a decade.
Dillon said in an interview Wednesday that he knows he and his advocacy group, South Carolinians for Science Education, are “sensitive” when it comes to pages 49 and 78 of South Carolina’s kindergarten through 12th grade science standards.
But three adverbs on those pages mean more than they appear to, he said, as they ask students to “critically” analyze topics dealing with climate change and evolution. The standards read simply “analyze” in all of the other standards.
“I just don’t like these three … words!” Dillon said in an interview. “How could that be so hard [to change]? They’re trying to make evolution appear controversial, they’re trying to make it somehow different. Well, it is controversial, but the controversy is political or religious, it’s not scientific. It’s this richly symbolic situation.”
So, his bitch is with “critically”? The Uncommon Descent news desk has been engaged in a decades-long war against his “richly symbolic,” which includes carpet-bombing with red pens.
Apparently, Prof Dillon’s peeve is over “alternative theories of evolution,” which he sees as introducing creationism. Maybe where he lives. In general, however, tell that one to Uchicago James Shapiro,who is pioneering discussions of alternative theories of evolution and taking heat for it—but is not a creationist. The Palmetto State could always catch up.
See from just yesterday, for example: Self-organization theorist publishes new paper on non-Darwinian means of evolution
and
Origin of life: Is RNA world overlapping with self-organization theory (because it is otherwise impossible?)
The big question in origin of life is really “Can we wring information from matter — shake the bit out of the it?”
Re alternative theories of evolution, train left station some while back.
Hat tip: Slawek Bioslawek
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