by Mike Gray
Susan Mazur gained notoriety for reporting on the 2008 Altenberg 16 conference where critics of neo-Darwinism gathered in Altenberg, Austria to discuss insufficiencies of the modern synthesis of evolution. According to Mazur, there are “hundreds of other evolutionary scientists (non-creationists) who contend that natural selection is politics, not science, and that we are in a quagmire because of staggering commercial investment in a Darwinian industry built on an inadequate theory.”
Some people are all for “separation of church and state” until it’s their cherished beliefs—and their checkbooks—that stand to receive taxpayer support. Casey Luskin elaborates:
The goal of the Evolution Readiness Project is to get “young children” to “believe in” evolution. According to the National Science Foundation’s website, they’ve spent $1,990,459 of taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) dollars to bankroll this project. Welcome back to school.
The agenda of the project is further clarified in the NSF Grant Award Abstract which states that it aims “to support a learning progression leading to an appreciation of the theory of evolution and evidence that supports it.” That’s fine, but why only the evidence that supports evolution?
Before I say anything else, let me state that I am a firm advocate of teaching evolution. The scientific evidence that “supports” evolution should be taught. But that’s not all that should be taught. In fact, a paper in Science from earlier this year found that students learn science best when they learn both the “evidence that supports … or does not support” a given concept. Clearly that beneficial pedagogical philosophy has been rejected by the Evolution Readiness Project.
The project justifies its dogmatic approach by promoting the myth that there is no scientific dissent from the consensus view on natural selection . . . .
Darwinism isn’t just a failed science, however, it’s a failed secular religion, yet somehow it still gets federal money:
Also in 2008, William Provine, a Cornell University historian of science and evolutionary biologist, gave a talk before the History of Science Society titled “Random Drift and the Evolutionary Synthesis.” An abstract of his talk argues “[e]very assertion of the evolutionary synthesis below is false”: Natural selection was the primary mechanism at every level of the evolutionary process. Natural selection caused genetic adaptation . . . Macroevolution was a simple extension of microevolution. . . . Evolution is a process of sharing common ancestors back to the origin of life, or in other words, evolution produces a tree of [life] . . . The evolutionary synthesis was actually a synthesis.
