research-based evidence for Intelligent Design?

It would seem not. Rhiggs over at Four Dollars, Almost Five decided to contact the Discovery Institute in order to ask the simply, straight-forward question, what scientific data is there to support intelligent design. Casey Luskin replied, and rhiggs did all of us the favor of posting the extended email exchange that ensued.

Go over there and check it out.

Creationism in education

I recently came across a website called Education News. It seems to be, as the name would imply, a site dedicated to news and information about education. I haven't really explored it too much, but on the surface it seems pretty good. Just a big repository for news about education, both K-12 and higher ed. Unfortunately I was on the site for about 30 seconds when I noticed a column titled "No one is really talking about any weaknesses in evolution."

Even more unfortunately, it is exactly what it sounds like, creationist propaganda. It is written by a "guest columnist" named David Shormann.

Shormann begins his column with:

In March, the State Board of Education will vote on amendments to the new Texas high school biology teaching standards. Please contact your State Board of Education (SBOE) representative and encourage them to unanimously approve of teaching strengths and weaknesses regarding all scientific theories, particularly evolution.

Oh no. I should have stopped there, but I continued:

Consider for example a female sockeye salmon in Alaska's Copper River. Let's say she lays 3,000 eggs, and all of them hatch. Now, to keep the population stable, only two of those eggs need to mature to adults and return, which means 2,998 of them will probably not make the return journey and produce offspring. Some will get eaten by birds, others by bears, or maybe even a salmon shark. Some will get smashed against rocks, others may starve. Only two are likely to survive to journey from their birthplace to the sea, then venture thousands of miles, before returning to their birthplace.
Now, do you really think the two salmon that survived to adulthood did so because they were clearly the best suited for the environment? Perhaps, but in reality, there is only a 1 in 3000 chance the salmon with the best set of genes survived to adulthood. And the likelihood gets smaller when you consider redfish, which can lay over one million eggs each season.

Okay. Wow. Where to start with that? It appears Dr. Shormann does not consider the possibility that perhaps some of the 3000 young salmon that starved to death did not have the best ability to find food, or that some of the ones that survived predators may have been a little faster than some of their kin which did not, or that just maybe a few of those young salmon who met their untimely fate by getting smashed against rocks were not as strong of swimmers as those that did not.

I say it appears Dr. Shormann did not consider any of these possibilities because he finishes with

Genes mutate, resulting in differences in parents and offspring. However, the low probability of mutation and selection working together to produce fitter populations is a weakness of natural selection theory, and Texas high school biology textbooks should explain such weaknesses.

I am not going to go into a complete take down of his argument here, because the presence of this column is not my big problem here. After I read the column I of course looked at the comments. Ednews.org allows commenters to rate the article with 1 to 5 stars. I am assuming the visitors to this site are mostly professional educators, which is why I found it so disturbing to see so many 5 star comments singing the praises of the article. In fairness, there are many one star comments that are excellent rebuttals to the article, but on a site dedicated to education and educators there are far too many responses that sympathize with the columnist. This is a problem. Far too many professional K-12 teachers (unfortunately including science teachers) are either outright creationists or simply don't understand evolution.

A brief, but excellent, history of Intelligent Design

From "A Brief History of Moonbats" by Lou at Crowd Head, Cozy Bed

By this point my son was livid at the dishonesty of the creationists, but there was more to come. At the time of the Edwards decision, a Christian Fundamentalist group called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics had been working on a high school targeted text book, ostensibly about Biology but in reality a Creation Science fakery entitled Biology and Origins. In response to Edwards the text was search/replaced, replacing each instance of “Creationism” with the new moniker “Intelligent Design”, “Creationist” with “design proponent”, and “God” with “Intelligent Designer”. The text got a shiny new title, Of Pandas and People. Unfortunately for Dr. Behe, who wrote the chapter on blood clotting, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics is as incompetent as it is dishonest and this would come to haunt him in federal court eighteen years later.

It is an excellent read and well researched. A must read for everyone interested in evolution, education, and the ID movement.

More ID nonsense. Florida's turn at bat

Florida State Senator Stephen Wise introduced senate bill 2396. The bill "Requires that the instructional staff of a public school teach a thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution and certain governmental, legal, and civic-related principles."

That 'critical analysis' is code for intelligent design. Florida is not the only state with an anti-evolution bill on the floor right now, but if this passes and Florida gets rid of teacher tenure any teachers wishing to even try to oppose this trash might not be around long enough to challenge it.

This, by the way, is not Sen Wise's first flirtation with teaching ID in public schools.