June 22, 2005

Opting Out

Read an interesting article in today's New York Times. You have to register, but it's free and then you're set.

The article is about the refusal of mainstream scientists, including Dr. Kenneth Miller of Brown University, to testify or otherwise participate in the Kansas State Board of Education's hearings this spring on what the state's schoolchildren should be taught about evolution. According to the Times, "they offered two reasons for the decision: that the outcome of the hearings was a foregone conclusion, and that participating in them would only strengthen the idea in some minds that there was a serious debate in science about the power of the theory of evolution." The hearings are, as Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, described them, a show trial: "We are never going to solve it by throwing science at it."

Dr. Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, concludes: "Evolution is not the only issue at stake. The very definition of science is at stake."

I'll have to see if the library carries Dr. Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, mentioned in the article.

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