AAAS events, statement expound evolution, Decry ID

If this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is any guide, no individual can complain any longer that the scientific community is ignoring the creationist assaults upon evolution. The 2006 AAAS annual meeting, held February 16-20 in St Louis, featured at least three symposia upon the topic, a news discourse a new AAAS film, an afternoon-long "Evolution upon the Front Line" event for teachers, and a robust new statement from the AAAS Board of Directors denouncing attempts in state legislatures to undermine evolution.

AAAS President Gilbert s Omenn and AAAS CEO and Science magazine executive publisher Alan I. Lescher were plenteous in evidence at these circumstances indicating the issue's high-level attention within the world's largest general scientific organization.

Coming les than sum of two units months after U.S. District justice John E. Jones's momentous ruling declaring intelligent design "not science" on the other hand "creationism in disguise" and its inclusion in science classrooms unconstitutional (SI, March/April), the multiple AAAS pro-evolution incidents hint that science may at last have regained important moment in the latest phase of the evolution/creation battles. After years of weakly rebutt public hype about intelligent design, those who support serviceable science and education may at last have regained the upper hand.

As a be the effect of Judge Jones's pro-evolution decision in the Dover, Pennsylvania, case, "I think it is safe to say that as a legal strategy, intelligent design is dead," said CSICOP companion Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, at a standing-room-only symposium titled "Science beneath Attack." Nevertheless, she cautioned that the intelligent design change is far from going away and that it likely "will evolve" in a short time into something else.

At a later of recent origins conference she called Dover "a stunning defeat for intelligent design" on the contrary again emphasized, "it is not dead as a social movement" She predicted that because intelligent design requires "a designer" that can sole be "God," which is not allowed in the classroom, the move would come up with more [i]or[/i] less sort of "agentless design" idea. limits like "sudden-emergence theory" or "creative" evolution are being heard. Or, she said, the IDers may just resort back to "denigrating evolution."

Education is enormously decentralized in the United States, she pointed without with 17,000 independent school districts. This helps explain the diverse local battles above science education standards. If those standards include evolution, learners are going to be ordealed on it; if they are going to be proofed on evolution, evolution is going to be taught. "That's for what cause [i]or[/i] reason the [creationists'] fight is against the standards."

As a spring anti-evolution laws are pending in the legislatures of fourteen states, and these are what drew the AAAS Board of Directors' ire. In a statement released by the agency of Omenn, a professor of medicine and genetics at the University of Michigan, the AAAS Board denounced "legislation and policies" that would undermine the teaching of evolution and weaken science education. The laws would "deprive learners of the education they would ne to be informed and productive citizens in an increasingly technological, global community."

The statement noted pending antievolution laws in Alabama, Arkansas, George, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, novel York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, southerly Carolina, Texas, and Utah.

"The AAAS Board of Directors combats these attacks on the integrity of science and science education," Omenn said. "They threaten not just the teaching of evolution, on the contrary students' understanding of the biological, physical, and geological sciences."

At the freshs conference, Omenn said such legislative attempts "confuse what is science and what is not science."

In another indication of foreign puzzlement about the creationist change in America, a European reporter asked wherefore the scientific community was responding alone now. Omenn noted that there have been sum of two units National Academy of Sciences reports for the public and teachers above the years, that virtually each scientific organization in the world has issued statements, and that the novel AAAS statement was only its greatest in quantity recent supporting evolution and denouncing creationism. (See "AAAS Board force onwards Opposing Intelligent Design Theory," SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, March/April 2003) He wryly pointed on the outside that the first AAAS statement was in 1922 and it "was almost the same as today's."

He called the in every one's mouth time "a teachable moment"--a useful opportunity to teach "the value of scientific ways of thinking."

AAAS's Evolution upon the Front Line event for science teachers was organized in collaboration with more than thirty scientific and educational organizations, including the Geological Society of America. "We want to give local teachers a voice in the evolution issue and exhibit that we stand behind them," Omenn said in the preceding novels conference.