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Kansas Science Hearings: World Magazine Tells The Rest of the Story

World has a good news story on the Kansas science hearings, one that goes well beyond the MSM’s rusty boilerplate about scientists clashing with Bible thumpers:

In Kansas, Darwinists won back control of the State Board of Education in 2000 and restored the older standards. But conservatives have now retaken the board, and they are expected to vote this summer to adopt the revisions debated in Topeka.

The Darwinist response to such a challenge is no secret. “My strategy at this point is the same as it was in 1999,” wrote Liz Craig of Kansas Citizens For Science on the group’s discussion board in February. “Notify the national and local media about what’s going on and portray them in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc. . . . we can sure make them look like asses as they do what they do.”

Then there are these facts, widely misreported by several major newspapers and magazines:

Lost in the propaganda and facial expressions is just how modest the proposed revisions are. For all the comparisons to the Scopes trial, the roles in that trial have been reversed 80 years later. Today, it’s the critics of Darwinism who want to introduce what they see as important scientific evidence into science classrooms and it’s the Darwinists who are fighting to keep out what they see as heresy.

And yet, the revisions would not require the teaching of ID, which is fine with ID advocates who admit that their theory is too new to be the focus of classroom instruction. The revisions would merely have teachers teach Darwinism and the scientific evidence that supports it, but not treat Darwinism as revealed religion that must not be questioned.

A reading of the revisions turns up no mention of God, no mention of a young Earth, no mention of the Bible. What they do call for is more information in classrooms — a requirement that science teachers present both the scientific evidence for Darwinism and the scientific evidence against it.

Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute testified that there is a “tremendous amount of criticism of the theory that students should be permitted to know about.” For example, nearly 400 scientists, including professors at MIT, Rice, and Yale, have signed a Discovery Institute statement that questions “the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.”

Other Darwinian skeptics may be flying under the radar. For instance, the April 28 issue of the science journal Nature reported approaching a skeptical researcher who declined to be interviewed because he did not want to hurt his chances for tenure.

Jonathan Witt

Executive Editor, Discovery Institute Press and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Jonathan Witt, PhD, is Executive Editor of Discovery Institute Press and a senior fellow and senior project manager with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His latest book is Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design (DI Press, 2018) written with Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola. Witt has also authored co-authored Intelligent Design Uncensored, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, and The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot. Witt is the lead writer and associate producer for Poverty, Inc., winner of the $100,000 Templeton Freedom Award and recipient of over 50 international film festival honors.

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