Monday, January 21, 2008

 

Sailing Off in a Kvetch


The boyz at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Department need some time off!

They're actually down to complaining that the Minority Leader of the Florida House of Representatives, Dan Gelber, got "a whopping 393 words ... a full 143 words more than is allowed letter writers by [The Palm Beach Post's] own guidelines" to air his support for the state's new proposed science standards and his opposition to teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools. Let me be the first to say ... gasp! An influential politician got a few extra words in a newspaper? How incredible!

The semi-serious complaint is that Rep. Gelber attacked Intelligent Design while, supposedly, there is no proposal to teach Intelligent Design.

Unfortunately, the draft Florida standards don't call for teaching students the full story about evolution, which is a shame. The best solution to that problem would be to add more about the scientific weaknesses of evolution, not mandate intelligent design. Never mind, that hasn't kept Darwinists from trying to make intelligent design an issue.
Apparently the boyz haven't been keeping up with the resolutions that local school boards have been passing, such as the one from Madison County that asks the Florida Department of Education to revise the standards "such that evolution is not presented as fact, but as one of several theories."

What might those "other theories" include, do you suppose? But even on the Discovery Institute's own terms, the attempt to keep evolution from being presented as fact by perpetuating long-refuted "scientific weaknesses" borrowed mostly from "creation science" is the entire sum and substance of ID, except for lame updates to William Paley's watch analogy, such as pretending DNA is like a computer program.

Rep. Gelber was exactly correct to finger the IDeologists for encouraging school boards to make fools of themselves ... which is why the DI is reduced to complaining about word counts.
.

Comments:
"the Code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard ....”
- Captain Barbosa, “Pirates of the Caribbean”
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

. . . . .

Organizations

Links
How to Support Science Education
archives