teach1st
08-15-2005, 05:48 PM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/evolutionjustteachit
(Opinion. Originally published in USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-08-14-evolution-teach_x.htm), 8/14)
In the beginning, creationists tried to ban the teaching of evolution altogether. Most famously, 80 years ago, John Scopes was tried for breaking a Tennessee law outlawing such instruction. He was found guilty, and evolution effectively disappeared from the high school curriculum shortly thereafter, though it continued to be taught in universities.
But when university scientists began writing high school biology textbooks in the late 1950s and early '60s, evolution returned to the curriculum, provoking a second outbreak of anti-evolutionism during the '70s and '80s.
Creationism was repackaged as "creation science" in the hope that it would be taught along with evolution.
In the '70s and '80s, at least 26 states tried to legislate equal time for creation science with evolution, bringing the courts back in. The 1982 U.S. district court decision in McLean v. Arkansas- Scopes II - showed that such laws violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by promoting a sectarian religious idea inappropriate for the public school science classrooms. In 1987, the Supreme Court reached the same decision in Edwards v. Aguillard.
Such decisions doomed creation science in the public schools, but they opened a niche for a repackaging of creationism: "intelligent design" (ID).
Like creation science, ID was presented as a scientific "alternative" to evolution, though its scientific content was intentionally vague. Its proponents claimed to have a method to identify natural phenomena that are, supposedly, incapable of being explained by evolution. ID advocates contend that "irreducibly complex" structures such as the bacterial flagellum can only be explained by appealing to the action of an intelligent agent.
To secure a wide base of creationist supporters, ID advocates are coy about when and how such actions occurred. Because creation science, which insists on a 6,000-year-old Earth, is still the dominant form of anti-evolutionism, ID can't afford to take a stand to the contrary. Nonetheless, the mainstream of the ID movement is sympathetic to what theologians call progressive creationism, where God creates in fits and starts over time, rather than in six days. It's still creationism, and so is ID.
Read more (http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/evolutionjustteachit)
(Opinion. Originally published in USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-08-14-evolution-teach_x.htm), 8/14)
In the beginning, creationists tried to ban the teaching of evolution altogether. Most famously, 80 years ago, John Scopes was tried for breaking a Tennessee law outlawing such instruction. He was found guilty, and evolution effectively disappeared from the high school curriculum shortly thereafter, though it continued to be taught in universities.
But when university scientists began writing high school biology textbooks in the late 1950s and early '60s, evolution returned to the curriculum, provoking a second outbreak of anti-evolutionism during the '70s and '80s.
Creationism was repackaged as "creation science" in the hope that it would be taught along with evolution.
In the '70s and '80s, at least 26 states tried to legislate equal time for creation science with evolution, bringing the courts back in. The 1982 U.S. district court decision in McLean v. Arkansas- Scopes II - showed that such laws violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by promoting a sectarian religious idea inappropriate for the public school science classrooms. In 1987, the Supreme Court reached the same decision in Edwards v. Aguillard.
Such decisions doomed creation science in the public schools, but they opened a niche for a repackaging of creationism: "intelligent design" (ID).
Like creation science, ID was presented as a scientific "alternative" to evolution, though its scientific content was intentionally vague. Its proponents claimed to have a method to identify natural phenomena that are, supposedly, incapable of being explained by evolution. ID advocates contend that "irreducibly complex" structures such as the bacterial flagellum can only be explained by appealing to the action of an intelligent agent.
To secure a wide base of creationist supporters, ID advocates are coy about when and how such actions occurred. Because creation science, which insists on a 6,000-year-old Earth, is still the dominant form of anti-evolutionism, ID can't afford to take a stand to the contrary. Nonetheless, the mainstream of the ID movement is sympathetic to what theologians call progressive creationism, where God creates in fits and starts over time, rather than in six days. It's still creationism, and so is ID.
Read more (http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/evolutionjustteachit)