Monday, November 27, 2006
No Animals Were Injured in the Writing of this Post
The Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin is a little tight-lipped just now about an AP story on Kansas science standards.
The article, huffs Casey, wrongly asserts that the standards have a “tilt toward intelligent design.” As if that weren't bad enough, "the article mentions intelligent design 7 times"!
Moreover, John Hanna, the AP reporter in question, completely ignores the fact that the science standards themselves flatly state they “do not include Intelligent Design" and the standards “neither mandate nor prohibit” teaching ID.
"Why," our boy Casey demands to know, "were these quotes left out of this article?"
RSR is unable to channel Hanna's thoughts, but we suspect they were left out because no one takes the disclaimers inserted into the standards by ID activists seriously.
The current Kansas standards -- the one's supported by Luskin's Discovery Institute and John Calvert's ID Network -- may contain some fine print stating they don't include intelligent design, but they also include statements, such as this:
The ingenuous disclaimer fools no one, with the possible exception of the self-deluded Luskin himself. It is merely the "past performance is no guarantee of future results" of the Kansas standards.
Luskin can write anything he wants. He can even write a 20-part essay on the AP story. But there's one thing he can't do, and that's stop the newly elected state board from throwing out the old ID-inspired standards.
That's what the voters of Kansas said they wanted when they went to the polls. And nothing Luskin or Calvert or anyone else says or writes is going to stop them from getting it.
The article, huffs Casey, wrongly asserts that the standards have a “tilt toward intelligent design.” As if that weren't bad enough, "the article mentions intelligent design 7 times"!
Moreover, John Hanna, the AP reporter in question, completely ignores the fact that the science standards themselves flatly state they “do not include Intelligent Design" and the standards “neither mandate nor prohibit” teaching ID.
"Why," our boy Casey demands to know, "were these quotes left out of this article?"
RSR is unable to channel Hanna's thoughts, but we suspect they were left out because no one takes the disclaimers inserted into the standards by ID activists seriously.
The current Kansas standards -- the one's supported by Luskin's Discovery Institute and John Calvert's ID Network -- may contain some fine print stating they don't include intelligent design, but they also include statements, such as this:
These articles of pseudo-scientific faith -- only lately adopted by ID "theorists" -- have been hiding under the rock of creationism since before the Scopes Trial.The view that living things in all the major kingdoms are modified descendants of a common ancestor (described in the pattern of a branching tree) has been challenged in recent years by:
i. Discrepancies in the molecular evidence (e.g., differences in relatedness inferred from sequence studies of different proteins) previously thought to support that view.
ii. A fossil record that shows sudden bursts of increased complexity (the Cambrian Explosion), long periods of stasis and the absence of abundant transitional forms rather than steady gradual increases in complexity, and
iii. Studies that show animals follow different rather than identical early stages of embryological development.
The ingenuous disclaimer fools no one, with the possible exception of the self-deluded Luskin himself. It is merely the "past performance is no guarantee of future results" of the Kansas standards.
Luskin can write anything he wants. He can even write a 20-part essay on the AP story. But there's one thing he can't do, and that's stop the newly elected state board from throwing out the old ID-inspired standards.
That's what the voters of Kansas said they wanted when they went to the polls. And nothing Luskin or Calvert or anyone else says or writes is going to stop them from getting it.
