Texas Creationists Now Attacking Earth and Space Sciences
We’ve had several posts about the creationist fanatics in Texas who are trying to push creationism/intelligent design/whatever into public school biology classes, but biology isn’t the only field they’re attacking. Earth and Space Science (ESS) courses are now a target as well, because they deal with scientific concepts like radiometric dating: Young Earth Creationist Attack on the New Earth and Space Science Course.
The new Earth and Space Science (ESS) course standards (and all other science course standards) will be up for approval before the State Board of Education (SBOE) during January 21-23. Some SBOE members—the seven who are Young Earth Creationists (YECs)—will attempt to make changes to the ESS standards in ways that will damage the scientific integrity and accuracy of the course. In particular, these SBOE members will try to negatively modify or delete the standards that require students to understand the following topics that deal with scientific topics they consider controversial: age of the Earth and universe, radiometric dating, evolution of fossil life, and the origin of life by abiotic chemical processes. These topics are the ones that YECs consider to be controversial; indeed, they are obsessed with them to the exclusion of everything else.
Texas citizens should write letters to the individual SBOE members and ask them to adopt the new ESS standards without change. That’s the simple message of your letter: to accept the proposed ESS standards without editing or modification, because I strongly suspect an effort will be made to do exactly that by members of the SBOE. A group of ten individual Earth scientists worked together for a year during several intense meetings to create these standards. These individuals worked to make the new ESS standards the finest possible. They sometimes had disagreements that were resolved by patient discussion and often compromise. Their very careful effort and hard work should not be derailed by the actions of nonscientists who have ideological and political agendas. Under the Texas Constitution, the SBOE members are politically-elected officials who actually have the power to write whatever science standards they wish, and several have expressed their intention to modify certain standards to align with their religious and ideological agendas. These standards would include the ones identified above.
In addition to writing letters to each of the 15 SBOE members asking that the ESS standards—indeed, all the science standards—not be modified in unscientific ways against the intentions of the scientists and science teachers who wrote them, I also request that you write to your colleagues and ask them to do the same. We need a tremendous outpouring of support from Earth scientists in both academia and industry to counter the probable equal outpouring of support from critics of science among the citizens of Texas.
Read the whole thing. It’s a glimpse at the inside tactics used by the groups who promote pseudo-science in America.
Frank says: