There is a fellow, going under the name "Jason Spaceman", who can be relied upon to post any number of pieces dealing with evolution on the talk.origins usenet group.
It occurred to me that he might well have found my piece, as he scans the website where it appeared. He did, and it drew comments.
...continued in full post...
From: Rowan Malin Date: Sun, 08 May 2005 21:33:52 -0400 This has been a source of confusion for me for a while now. If the ID crowd are proposing to "teach the controversy" or advise students to "think critically", isn't it imperative on them to first train the students on the competing theories? After all, you can't weigh arguments without knowing what they are. In effect, if they take this track, the ID crowd are stating that you must learn and understand evolution (as well as whatever competing theories they care to put forward) before the discussion can even begin. Isn't this shooting themselves in the foot? Cheers, Rowan
My response to that was:
Absolutely! Hence, "Be careful what you ask for". When you equip people with tools, they may use them on things you didn't intend. ..........Karl
And Ken Shaw responded with:
From: Ken Shaw You're assuming the DI crowd is honest. This assumption is untrue. what they want to do is teach a strawman of evolution and then use their "critiques" to tear it down so as to leave the students open to outside indoctrination on the subject. Look at the Ohio education standards for how they want evolution taught. Ken
From: Cheezits Date: Mon, 09 May 2005 13:21:19 GMT Not once have I heard one of these people suggest that students "think critically" about the non-theory of ID. Never mind what they are taught in church. Sue
To which Von R. Smith replied:
I am all in favor of encouraging students to think critically about evolution, and to make a point of equipping them to do so. This would include going over several things earlier in the Biology curriculum: -A good review of scientific method, and the basic sort of critical thought that goes into it, along with consistent reinforcement and application of the method for the entire school year; -A good explanation of systematics, of the outstanding characteristics of the nested hierarchy, and how it is complemented and reinforced by other methods and tools (such as genetic phylogenies); -Discussion of the key concepts of ecology, biodiversity, and biogeography; -A decent survey of paleontology and what science can infer about the natural history of life from the evidence available(one can describe chronology and what appears when without explicitly referring to any "theory of origins"); -A good explanation of genetics, including population genetics, mutations, allele frequencies, etc.; -What is known about drift, selection, speciation, etc. -*Then* we can talk about evolution, and the notion of universal common ancestry, etc. At this point, students can "think and discuss critically" about evolution and what IDers think its weaknesses are.
Heh. How many hours of class time will that take up? In which grade did you want to teach all that? (Of course, I think that's the whole point.)
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