Ed Brayton on Dispatches from the Culture Wars has done a great job critiquing both the legal reasoning and the general logic and use of quotations and authorities deployed in an argument that teaching about evolution in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment.
Ed’s critique meticulously picks apart particular flaws in the logic [...]
Monthly Archives: August 2006
evolution=atheism=religion=unconstitutional?
August 31, 2006 – 4:24 pm
Waxman letter on SMART Grants for Evolutionary Biology majors
August 27, 2006 – 11:24 am
Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Cal) has written to U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings demanding explanation and corrective action for the omission of Evolutionary Biology from a list of college majors eligible for need-based financial assistance, as discussed on this blog here and here and here, and on The Panda’s Thumb here and here.
Congressman Waxman’s letter is [...]
“Traipsing” authors on BookTV Aug 26-27
August 26, 2006 – 3:42 pm
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UPDATE: The BookTV page linked below now has a link for a video of this program that you can watch on your computer if you have RealPlayer installed. The URI for the video is http://www.booktv.org/ram/feature/0806/btv082606_4b.ram .
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Casey Luskin and John G. West, two of the authors of Traipsing into Evolution, will be on CSpan-2’s BookTV this weekend in [...]
Update: Evolutionary Biology to be restored to list
August 25, 2006 – 11:28 am
Today (8/25/06) a follow-up story in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that, according to the Department, the omission was inadvertent and will be corrected.
In this story Barmak Nassirian, the registrars’ association official who called attention to the missing major, is quoted saying, “I’m happy they’ve restored evolutionary biology””
‘But he also said the incident points to the [...]
Where’s a good “explanatory filter” when we need one?
August 24, 2006 – 10:03 pm
I was not planning to post this on my own blog, since appreciation of this would require more familiarity with ”ID theory” than people in Curriculum Studies would generally need (in particular, Dembski’s use of his ”explanatory filter”). I did post it as a comment on the Panda’s Thumb blog, whose readers are immersed in such things. Now, as a [...]
rebroadcast: Hobart Shakespeareans
August 24, 2006 – 7:31 pm
The Delaware/Philadelphia PBS station WHYY will rebroadcast the P.O.V. documentary “The Hobart Shakespeareans” on Saturday night/Sunday morning, September 3, at 12:30am. (It is not presently scheduled for broadcast again in MD or NJ the next two weeks. Elsewhere, check your local PBS affiliate.)
A piece by Jay Mathews on washingtonpost.com (Augus 6, 2006) features Rafe Esquith (whose [...]
Let’s get Congressman Castle on the case
August 24, 2006 – 4:49 pm
On a long list of undergraduate majors that qualify low-income students for SMART grants, a white gap has taken the place of Evolutionary Biology on the list. If Evolutionary Biology is not included, that means students majoring in that field would not be eligible for funding under the program.
The deletion of this undergraduate college major [...]
It’s not a matter of disallowing talk about ID
August 22, 2006 – 7:41 pm
In a post on Jonathan Wells’ Politically Incorrect Guide™ to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, Chris Mooney (author of The Republican War on Science) says on his blog that he agrees with Wells on the point that (quoting Wells) “Anyone who studies American history knows that telling people they are not allowed to talk about something [...]
Is(n’t) all biology “evolutionary”?
August 22, 2006 – 6:57 pm
On Panda’s Thumb, Matt Brauer comments on a news article by Sam Kean in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which reports that the list of majors eligible for the SMART grant omits only the code for “evolutionary biology” among all the biological disciplines.
Does this reflect a way of thinking in which those in the other sub-disciplines [...]
Ann Coulter et al. at Coral Ridge
August 22, 2006 – 4:24 pm
On August 20 the Coral Ridge Hour broadcast included a feature on “The ACLU vs. Creation in the Classroom,” featuring Anne Coulter and a number of others. The 7½-minute video can be viewed in RealPlayer, and is linked from http://www.coralridgehour.org/ — just click on “View” under the ominous ACLU graphic.
In an item on “Hitler as Darwin’s Love [...]
Journey, Map, or Territory? (some observations by John Dewey)
August 22, 2006 – 12:27 am
Informed by the meaning of the Latin root currere, we understand “curriculum” as the course of human experience in which the formation of human being takes place (in which human being(s) “take(s) form,” that is, not only as individuals, but also in the formation of human institutions, practices, cultures, and societies).
But the word “curriculum” is [...]
What is curriculum? — Some Observations by Maxine Greene
August 21, 2006 – 8:45 pm
My first posts on this blog will address the threshold question: What is curriculum?
For a start, I can do no better than to recycle this quotation from Maxine Greene, which I have often used in both my teaching and my writing. I am sure that I will be referring back to Maxine’s observations in my [...]
