09.22.06
Posted in Statewide News at 1:16 am by admin
The Livingston Press and Argus newspaper has a report on gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos and his now-public position on teaching intelligent design along with evolution in public school science classrooms. Included in the article was a reaction from MCFS President Robert Pennock:
Robert T. Pennock, president of Michigan Citizens for Science, agreed.
“How could Michigan students compete in the life sciences, so important to our economy, if DeVos has them learn pseudoscience?” he asked. “A federal judge appointed by President Bush ruled just last year that intelligent design creationism is ’sectarian religion masquerading as science,’ so including it in the public schools is unconstitutional. DeVos is not only recommending that Michigan schools abandon real science, but that they break the law as well.”
This is a very important point that the public needs to understand. By encouraging local school districts to incorporate intelligent design into their science curriculum, DeVos is inviting them into a Dover Trap. In that Federal court case last year, the Dover Area School District ended up with a legal bill in excess of $1 million dollars after going ahead with an ID policy against the advice of their own attorney. Every relevant court precedent is strongly against DeVos’ position and it is irresponsible for the state government to encourage local school districts to do what the Federal courts have already declared unconstitutional and risk their financial well being in the process.
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09.20.06
Posted in Statewide News at 5:50 pm by admin
Dick DeVos, the Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, has confirmed what we already knew from the report of one of our MCFS members in a letter to the editor last week, that he advocates teaching ID in public school science classrooms. The Detroit Free Press reports:
“I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory,” DeVos told the Associated Press this week during an interview on education. “That theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas, not less.”…
DeVos told the AP this week that allowing school districts to include intelligent design in science classes lets them to “expose students to a multitude of ideas, … to think through the challenges, to learn to discern between multiple theories.”
Up until now, of course, ID advocates have not developed an ID theory, their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, nor have they published any research supporting intelligent design. And as the Free Press notes, a Federal judge in Pennsylvania last year ruled that ID is merely a religious viewpoint wrapped in a thin veneer of scientific-sounding language and that it is therefore unconstitutional to teach it in public school science classes. DeVos’ policy, like the various legislative attempts to open the door to the teaching of ID in science classes, would lead local school districts into a Dover Trap, inviting them to violate the constitution and risk losing expensive lawsuits.
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09.15.06
Posted in Statewide News at 11:14 am by admin
On Tuesday, the Michigan Board of Education decided to postpone its vote on new science standards at the request of two conservative members of the state legislature. The postponement was to allow more time for the legislature to have “input” into the new science standards, which in reality means more time to weaken them and water them down in regard to the teaching of evolution. The Detroit Free Press had a prescient editorial on the matter in Thursday’s paper. They wrote:
This is just another attempt to keep a door open to teaching creationism or intelligent design. The board should have closed it, as science teachers requested. Board members get elected to make decisions, not to defer to political pressure.
The delay was requested by the chairs of the House and Senate Education Committees to accommodate Republican state Reps. Jack Hoogendyk of Kalamazoo and John Moolenaar of Midland, who want a key wording change inserted into the policy. As it stands, the policy directs that teachers demonstrate how fossil records, comparative anatomy and other evidence “may” corroborate the theory of evolution. Hoogendyk and Moolenaar are pushing to have the words read “may or may not.”
Sounds innocuous, but this is really about injecting faith and beliefs into science.
Michigan’s new curriculum is supposed to set tough guidelines, not try to spoon-feed an ideology to students. Teachers who are allowed to, will, no doubt instruct students in the value of thinking about science broadly and asking critical questions.
By deferring even this much to the legislators, the state board has essentially given science teachers a vote of no confidence and deprived them of a chance to collaborate on classroom strategies. That’s because the board won’t vote until Oct. 10, and the science curriculum guidelines were supposed to be in place by an Oct. 3 statewide conference for teachers on Earth science, biology, chemistry and physics.
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09.14.06
Posted in Statewide News at 10:21 pm by admin
Dr. Eric Fauman, a biochemist who works for Pfizer, reported to us last week on a question he got to ask Republican Gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos last week. That report has now been published as a letter to the Ann Arbor News. It is reprinted below with his permission:
As an interested Michigan voter I attended a campaign stop by Republican candidate for governor, Dick DeVos, at the Pfizer research center in Ann Arbor on Sept. 8. As a researcher with a PhD in biochemistry whose livelihood depends on exploring the biological and evolutionary underpinnings of disease, I was pleased with DeVos’s stated support for public education, the Life Sciences Corridor and Michigan’s global presence.
However, I was greatly disheartened by DeVos’s response when I asked him about his “position on the teaching of evolution in our public schools.” Although he espoused support for teaching the theory of evolution, DeVos volunteered his conviction that our children should also be taught other theories, “such as Intelligent Design.” As Judge Jones found in last years Kitzmiller v. Dover, “An objective observer would know that Intelligent Design [is a] Creationist, religious strateg[y] that evolved from earlier forms of Creationism.” One of Intelligent Design’s most prominent advocates, William Dembski, has stated that “Intelligent Design is just the Logos theology of Johns Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” At a time when our students’ science literacy is already significantly below average teaching our children sectarian religious beliefs as science can only harm our state’s ability to compete internationally.
Eric B. Fauman, Ann Arbor
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08.02.06
Posted in National News at 9:32 am by admin
Last night’s primary elections in Kansas was an enormous victory for science. For the last two years, the Kansas State Board of Education has been controlled by anti-evolution, pro-ID members by a 6-4 majority. Last night, the people of Kansas reversed that and put pro-science candidates back in charge of the state’s public school system. The new board will likely reverse the “critical analysis” language voted in to the standards by the pro-ID board.
The ID movement spent an enormous amount of money in Kansas on behalf of pro-ID candidates, while our side spent very little, but science still came out the winner. The MCFS board sends our congratulations to Jack Krebs, Liz Craig and all the other good folks at Kansas Citizens for Science for their hard work and dedication that led to this victory. We’ve been following their lead from the start here at MCFS and we couldn’t be more thrilled with how things turned out.
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06.29.06
Posted in Statewide News at 6:40 pm by admin
In a surprise move yesterday with virtually no public notice, the House Education Committee held a vote on HB 5251 and passed it on to the full house by a vote of 15-2. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Lawrence Wenke (R), the state representative whose district includes the Gull Lake School District, submitted an amendment that removed the specifics so that the bill now reads:
(10) Not later than August 1, 2006, the state board shall revise the recommended model core academic curriculum content standards in science to ensure that pupils will be able to do all of the following:
(a) Use the scientific method to critically evaluate scientific theories
(b) Use relevant scientific data to assess the validity of those theories and to formulate arguments for or against those theories.
Yesterday’s vote sends the matter to the full House for a vote, which could happen at any time. Our expectation is that the bill’s sponsors will attempt to re-amend the bill to add in the specific examples (adding “including, but not limited to, the theories of global warming and evolution” to the end of section a) when it comes up for a vote. We are urging everyone to call their state legislators, both in the House and the Senate, and encourage them to vote against this bill. It will only open the door to the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools, baiting local school districts into a Dover trap.
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06.07.06
Posted in Statewide News at 4:40 pm by admin
MCFS arranged to have several members of our board at the hearing this morning to testify against HB 5251. The way it works in such hearings in Michigan is that you have to show up before the meeting and fill out a card asking to testify, telling them who you are and what group you represent. The committee chair then goes through the cards during the hearing and calls people up. Committee chairman in the Michigan house are essentially all-powerful. If they choose, they can only allow one side to testify and not the other. They can give an hour to one side and 5 minutes to the other. And they can schedule a hearing on a bill with only a 24 hour public notice. Thus, the reason we didn’t find out about the meeting until yesterday. Several interesting things happened at the hearing.
First, it was obvious that the other side had far more than 24 hours notice to prepare to testify. They brought in a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to testify on behalf of the bill and he read from a prepared speech, so clearly this was set up well in advance. This professor’s testimony, however, was quite telling. After Rep. Moolenaar, the bill’s chief sponsor, declared in no uncertain terms that the bill had nothing whatsoever to do with intelligent design, the professor’s speech was a laundry list of ID arguments - irreducibile complexity, specified complexity, peppered moths, and so forth. The two main sources he cited were Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, and Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial. And then after taking all of the material of his testimony from the ID movement, he himself claimed that this had nothing to do with ID.
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Posted in Statewide News at 1:31 am by admin
In the aftermath of HB 5606, which was signed into law without any anti-evolution language in it, Rep. Moolenaar is reviving HB 5251, which contains the following language:
(10) Not later than August 1, 2006, the state board shall revise the recommended model core academic curriculum content standards in science to ensure that pupils will be able to do all of the following:
(a) Use the scientific method to critically evaluate scientific theories including, but not limited to, the theories of global warming and evolution.
(b) Use relevant scientific data to assess the validity of those theories and to formulate arguments for or against those theories.
This language is a transparent attempt to write the ID movement’s “teach the controversy” strategy into state law and open the door for the teaching of intelligent design in public schools science classrooms. The House Education Committee has scheduled a hearing on this bill tomorrow, June 7th, at 10:30 am, in room 307 of the House Office Building.
MCFS board members will be there to testify against the bill and we urge all MCFS members to call or email their local representatives to make their voice heard on this issue. For information on how to contact your local rep, click here.
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Posted in Administrative Stuff at 1:22 am by admin
As you can see, we’ve done a little housecleaning here. We’ve changed from Postnuke to Wordpress, primarily because Postnuke was highly unreliable and difficult to work with. I will have all of the features of the old MCFS page moved over as soon as possible.
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