National Center for Science Education

PUBLISHER:

redshirt

Shaun Johnston:
In modern times we've made two revolutionary discoveries. One is, how changes in physical matter can be accounted for in terms of physical laws that can predict precisely what will happen next. Having given rise to science (how this can be studied) and industry (how it can be applied) this revolution is well under way.

The second revolution is, how emergence of species of living creatures can be accounted for in terms of them evolving from one another. This revolution, despite its promise of how much it could tell us about ourselves, remains stillborn through the mistaken application to it of principles coming out of the first revolution--reductive physicalism.

For this second revolution to advance it should be taken from under the wing of science and studied on its own terms. Tip: one recent product of evolution is creatures with minds. Minds are better studied through methods of the humanities than through those of science. Tell me, does this interest you?

Details: Hits: 11592 11592

The National Center for Science Education is supported primarily by membership contributions, with some additional assistance from grants.The Center is the premier institution dedicated to keeping evolution in the science classroom and creationism out. (From the NCSE web site.) The Center is located in Oakland, CA.

The Center identifies evolution with Darwinism. "Evolution accounts for the striking patterns of similarities and differences among living things over time and across habitats through the action of biological processes such as natural selection, mutation, symbiosis, gene transfer, and genetic drift." In practice, the Center is a private pressure group acting to suppress opposition to Darwinism, on the grounds that any such opposition could only be a front for Creationism. Darwinism is held up as poster child for all of reason and science, and any challenge to Darwinism is hailed as the onset of barbarism.

Because the NCSE is a child of the clash between two silly theories, Darwinism and creationism, it it has been driven into upholding some silly positions of its own. One of these is to forbid mention in school science classrooms of "intelligent design." It's obvious that living creatures are intelligently designed, to become adaptated to their environment for example. All of Darwin's "Origin of Species" is an account of how the blind process of natural selection accomplishes the intelligent design evident in living creatures. By insisting living creatures are not intelligently designed the Center sells evolution and Darwinism short. The reason for the Center's prohibition against acknowledging intelligence in evolution has to do with some confusion of intelligence with religion.

You will look in vain through the Center's web site for any consideration that the strength of creationism could be due to inadequacies in Darwinism as an explanation for evolution.