WP editorial: Kansas voters move science education out of Victorian era

[DeepModem Mom]

Nothing Wrong With Kansas
State voters move science education out of the Victorian era.
Sunday, August 6, 2006; Page B06

FOR THE SECOND time in less than a year, voters have turned out of office policymakers who insisted on teaching kids bad science. Last year, the people of Dover, Pa., got rid of a group of school board members who injected the theory of "intelligent design" into high school biology. Last week, Republican primary voters in Kansas ousted the conservative majority on the state Board of Education, which had adopted science standards embracing intelligent design and casting doubt on Darwinian evolution. Moderate Republicans replaced two conservatives -- giving those supporting science at least a 6-to-4 majority, even if the other conservatives hold on in the general election. The vote, which should lead to changes to those embarrassing standards, is an encouraging sign that even in conservative jurisdictions, most people want kids to be taught biology, not religion.

The Kansas board has been fighting over evolution since 1999, when it moved to eliminate references to Darwinian theory from statewide standards. After anti-evolutionists lost their majority, the board restored evolution's place. But the conservatives regained the majority in 2004 and moved to promote intelligent design -- a challenge to Darwinian theory based not on biblical inerrancy or overt creationism but on purportedly scientific flaws in the theory. Its proponents claim that they merely intend to make sure that schoolchildren get a full sense of the scientific controversy over evolution.

The trouble with this liberal-seeming pose is that there is no scientific controversy over whether evolution happens or over its essential mechanisms. Intelligent design is a defensible theological position -- the belief that life is so complex and perfect that a creator must lie somewhere behind it. But being untestable in its positing of a supernatural explanation for natural phenomena, it is no more scientific than the belief that Athena was born from Zeus's head....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/05/AR2006080500718.html?nav=most_emailed

[DavidDvorkin]

1. The Victorian Era was when Darwinism triumphed

In England, anyway.

It was a time of belief in scientific and technological progress and the scientific explanation of nature. The problem is that when it comes to science, we're living in the Counter-Victorian Era.

[Slyder]

2. I fear

that we are living in an anti-Enlightenment era. The axial age of science that was borne of the writings of the second Aristotle, Francis Bacon, is slowly coming to an end. We will have to endure a thousand years of the theocrats before a new Renaissance arrives on the scene. Christianists seek to destroy all the science of the past four hundred years and take us Pol Pot-like back into a dark age of substance agriculture. I full expect to be killed by Christianists on my front porch because I wear eye-glasses. Such the the evil of the times in which we live. I do hope I am wrong. As a Kansan I do not like what I see, in spite of the election. When a female candidate for Secretary of State of Kansas, who stood a small chance of winning last week's primary, advocates taking the vote from women, I worry a lot.

[DavidDvorkin]

3. You may well be right

I sometimes fear the same thing.