— Example of changes to an Environmental Protection Agency report made by White House officials under George W. Bush, June 19, 2003
Political staff are becoming increasingly bold in forcing agency officials to endorse junk science.
— Jeremy Symons, a climate policy expert at the National Wildlife Federation, June 19, 2003
Evolution is back in Kansas.
— Headline after the Kansas Board of Education reversed its 1999 vote, February 21, 2001. Two other fundamental scientific theories, cosmology (the origin and fate of the universe), and plate tectonics (the movement of continents), were also restored to the classroom.
In 1999 Darwinists launched a vicious campaign of threats and ridicule when the Kansas State Board of Education refused to require that Darwinism be taught as the sole explanation for life's diversity. (They did not ban the teaching of evolution, as the media widely misreported.) Sadly, those tactics paid off the following year, when state elections shifted the board's membership enough to reimpose the old orthodoxy.
— Mark Hartwig, Focus on the Family magazine, 2002. The theories of evolution and intelligent design are treated as matters of religious orthodoxy and opinion.
On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth.
— George W. Bush, 2002
Can Science Conquer Kansas?
— Headline after the Kansas Board of Education voted 6-4 on August 11 to make evolution a local option in the state's 304 school districts, September 27, 1999
Kansas just embarrassed itself on the national stage.
— Dr. John Staver, chairman of a 27-member committee of scientists and teachers that had worked for more than a year on questions of science and religion in the Kansas public schools, August 11, 1999
Trying to make it optional is like trying to make it optional to talk about gravity in a physics class. The real losers are the children of Kansas.
— Molleen Matsurmura, National Center for Science Education, August 11, 1999
They have no basis for their changes other than their own belief system.
— Loren Lukes, co-chair of the Kansas Board of Education science committee, August 11, 1999
We know who wrote the Bible. Now compare Him to whoever wrote this or that scientific paper.
— Joe Smith, Christian fundamentalist and chemical engineer from Olathe, Kansas, October 5, 1999. Mr. Smith has master's degrees in chemistry and environmental engineering.
One book in the library, called "Discovering Life on Earth," contains a neon orange warning: "Teachers Beware: This book contains evolutionary statements. Use material carefully." In another book about great scientists, the section on Charles Darwin is ripped out.
— Westminster Academy, a Christian school in Olathe, Kansas, October 5, 1999
A theory in science is not a hunch or 'just a theory' as some say. It is an explanation built on multitudinous confirmed facts and the absence of incompatible facts. Omitting evolution from biology is comparable to leaving the U.S. Constitution out of civics lessons.
— Maxine Singer, molecular biologist and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, August 16, 1999
Scientific Method
First, information is gathered by careful observation of the phenomenon being studied. On the basis of that information a preliminary generalization, or hypothesis, is formed, and this in turn leads to a number of implications that may be tested by further observations and experiments. If the conclusions drawn from the original hypothesis successfully meet all these tests, the hypothesis becomes accepted as a scientific theory or law; if additional facts are in disagreement with the hypothesis, it may be modified or discarded in favor of a new hypothesis, which is then subjected to further tests. Even an accepted theory may eventually be overthrown if enough contradictory evidence is found, as in the case of Newtonian mechanics, which was shown after more than two centuries of acceptance to be an approximation valid only for speeds much less than that of light (emphasis added).
— The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2000
No comments:
Post a Comment