Reflectorites
On Thu, 3 Feb 2000 21:27:47 -0600 (CST), Susan B wrote:
SB>Stephen Jones quoting an an op-ed piece written by Linda Holloway, Chair of
>the Kansas State Board of Education
>
>*this* is where you got this!!! (can you tell my most recent novel is out
>the door winging its way to the agent and I finally have time to wade
>through my old e-mails?)
Susan does not say what the "this" was that I was supposed to have "got"!
>SJ>As it was the Board actually *increased* the amount of teaching on
>>evolution that schools in Kansas were required to do. So all the fuss that
>>Kansas students would suddenly be disadvantaged by the Board's decision
>>is irrational. On that basis they had been even *more* disadvantaged
>>before, yet there was no national, indeed world-wide outcry previously!
To be fair, on re-reading this article, it does not warrant the above claim.
But there are other articles that I have posted which do justify my claim
that "the Board actually *increased* the amount of teaching on evolution
that schools in Kansas were required to do". For example, in a parallel post
today I cited a summary of the Topeka Capital Journal I hasd posted which
states "The new standards replaced ones that made little reference to
evolution" (http://216.116.225.186/stories/122799/kan_evolution27.shtml).
SB>as so much creationist garbage this bit of flotsom was not substantiated but
>merely asserted. I've compared the original standards and the new ones. The
>new ones leave out a substantial amount of extremely basic stuff. So,
>Stephen, if you continue to parrot this assertion, you'd better find out why
>she's saying this.
By "original" standards, I presume Susan means "the original" *draft*
"standards". But as I have made it abundantly clear, I am talking about the
"original standards" which *were in effect* for many years prior to July
1999.
I have taken steps to get a copy of those original standards *which were in
effect*, or at least a web page link to them.
I do not dispute that the KBoE deleted or modified statements about
macroevolution and the Big Bang which were in the proposed *draft*
standards.
>SJ>The U.S. Supreme Court stated in the Edwards vs. Aguillard case, "If the
>>Louisiana legislature's purpose was solely to maximize the
>>comprehensiveness and effectiveness of science instruction, it would have
>>encouraged the teaching of all scientific theories about the origins of
>>humankind."
>>
>>Our children in Kansas deserve no less!
SB>the implied lie here is that there are other scientific theory about the
>origins of humankind. There are not. There's a lot of wishful thinking
>pseudoscience, but nothing else.
Susan writes as if there is something called *the* "scientific theory about
the origins of humankind". There is no such thing. There are only
"scientific" *theories* "about the origins of humankind".
If Susan thinks there is actually something called *the* "scientific theory
about the origins of humankind", then she should post it, or where it can be
found, otherwise she is in fact indulging in "wishful thinking"!
As a writer Susan should appreciate this next quote, which concerns the
discovery in 1979 that "scientific" theories "about the origins of humankind",
do in fact fit the literary form of a "hero myth":
"Misia Landau was sitting in Yale University's Sterling Library, its leather-
covered chairs and high book stacks imposing a palpable sense of Ivy
League academia. It was the middle of her doctoral years, 1979, and she
was reading intensely The Morphology of a Folk Tale by Vladimir Propp, a
Russian literary critic. ... Landau ...was preparing to run to the
anthropology book stacks. ... "When I got to the shelves, the titles leaped
out at me: The Story of Man...The Adventure of Humanity...Adventures
with the Missing Link...Man Rises to Parnassus. Looking at them, I knew I
had made a discovery. ... She had discovered a missing link between
literature and paleoanthropology...
Having completed a human-biology degree at Oxford University, England,
she had enrolled in the graduate anthropology program at Yale and was
hoping to uncover something significant about the evolutionary history of
the human brain.....The combination of Landau's inclination to do
something theoretical and Pilbeam's historical perspective launched the
dissertation in a new direction: it would be some kind of analysis of early
paleoanthropological ideas. However, a further ingredient was to be crucial
in the new venture...literature, Landau's great love as a young girl. ... `I
started reading this material, and couldn't stop. I started making
connections between literature and the anthropology texts. I started
thinking in terms of a plot in these books. It was very exciting. " A friend
lent her a copy of Propp's Morphology of a Folk Tale, which is a classic
work in literary analysis.... On the basis mainly of Russian literature, Propp
describes the hero myths of folk tales in terms of a basic structure they all
follow: ...
The more Landau read, the more she perceived connections. "I was sitting
there, in the Sterling Library, reading Propp, and the folk tales seemed
so...familiar...I suddenly realized that the tale also described human
evolution, at least as written about in the books I'd been reading." This was
the point of discovery. When she got to the paleoanthropology shelves, she
now recalls, "I realized that I was standing in front of a genre of literature,
that I could approach the study of human evolution as a study of literature."
In other words, while Osborn, Gregory, and their colleagues considered
themselves to have written scientific analyses of human evolution, they had
in fact been telling stories. Scientific stories, to be sure, but stories
nevertheless... Each author had his own reasons for casting the
evolutionary scheme the way he did, but there is order in the apparent
chaos, argues Landau, because all followed the same basic structure in their
narratives: the form of the hero myth." (Lewin R., Bones of Contention",
1987, pp30-33).
SB>The children in Kansas deserve more than pseudoscience!
We agree on something! That's why students should be taught the theory of
evolution with *all* its philosophical assumptions laid bare, with *all*
its many difficulties frankly admitted, and allow and indeed *encourage*
students to read criticisms of the theory by outsiders like Phillip E.
Johnson, who is widely regarded as: "The most respectable academic critic
of evolution" (Weinberg S., "Dreams of a Final Theory," 1992, p247).
Anything less than this *is* "pseudoscience"!
Steve
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"If it is true that an influx of doubt and uncertainty actually marks periods
of healthy growth in a science, then evolutionary biology is flourishing
today as it seldom has flourished in the past. For biologists collectively are
less agreed upon the details of evolutionary mechanics than they were a
scant decade ago. Superficially, it seems as if we know less about evolution
than we did in 1959, the centennial year of Darwin's on the Origin of
Species." (Eldredge N., "Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian
Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria", Simon & Schuster:
New York NY, 1985, p14)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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