Below is an excerpt from a letter that I wrote to the Ohio BOE before
their final vote on the lesson plan.
> This letter is to strongly urge you to delete the 10th grade "Critical
> Analysis of Evolution" model lesson plan, and replace it with one that
> is true both to the methodology and content of science. I have read
> the lesson plan and find that it is filled with errors and
> misrepresentations. If I was a teacher in Ohio, I could not teach
> from this lesson plan without violating my professional integrity and
> ethics. I could not present, or have students be required to learn,
> material that I knew was factually false or misleading. The model
> lesson plan also gives a false view of how science proceeds, and of
> the meaning and place of hypotheses, theories, and observational
> anomalies.
>
> This lesson does not promote the objective for which it was written --
> which is to critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.
> Evolution is an incredibly dynamic science with many interesting and
> exciting issues being debated within the scientific community.
> Unfortunately, the model lesson plan ignores these real current
> scientific debates and substitutes falsely-constructed arguments that
> are designed to support discredited anti-evolutionary positions. Why
> not actually discuss some of the exciting and challenging issues that
> face evolutionary theory that are really a part of current debate?
> Some of these include: the roles of selective and non-selective
> mechanisms in speciation, the controls on the rate of evolutionary
> change, the evolution of HOX and regulatory genes, different methods
> for constructing evolutionary trees, the importance of extinction in
> the evolutionary history of life, the importance of sex and sexual
> selection in evolution, the roles of coevolution and predator/prey
> arms races, etc.
>
Keith
Keith B. Miller
Research Assistant Professor
Dept of Geology, Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-3201
785-532-2250
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
Received on Sat Mar 13 09:59:11 2004
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