Page 43 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

er than another Board member? We’ll never know.
Based on Steven’s cover letter to the Board, the standards themselves, comments made in public to the Board, conversa- tions that I had with Board members, and things I’ve heard from other advocates who had conversations with Board members, I believe that this Board understood evolution to be the only current scientific explanation for the history and diversity of life, and that “alternatives” are essentially religious. After months of private and public discussion about evolution and its unscientific alternatives, most of them actually had a reasonable understanding of the unified, testable, yet inherent- ly tentative nature of scientific practice and knowledge. They understood that, unlike some religious faiths, science makes no claim to Absolute Truth. Most of them also understood that science is no less certain about evolution than it is about other
broad, unifying scientific theories.
I’m still proud (and a little surprised) that our Board
members came to a pretty sophisticated understanding of scientific knowledge and evolution in 2003. It gave me hope that logical persuasion can affect elected officials, when there is enough time to get past sound bites and rhetoric, and when there are enough concerned citizens willing to write and speak patiently and respectfully about the issues.
To illustrate the plasticity of scientific knowledge, I still like to explain how the principle of conservation of energy had to be adapted to include nuclear energy in the 20th cen- tury. That profound change in scientific consensus arose as experimental evidence convinced the scientific community that the earlier, separate concepts of mass conservation and energy conservation were sometimes wrong. It did not arise from talking elected officials into changing how physics was taught in high school. And it did not make previous knowl- edge obsolete; it was an augmentation of previous knowl- edge.
The aftermath
The Department of Education gave the standards to New Mexico’s 89 school districts, and to its Assessment and Accountability Division to help create standardized tests. They remain in force today.
The Fordham Institute judged our new science standards to be 7th best in the U.S., and the only state’s standards to go from “F” to “A” in one step.21
IDnet-NM began a campaign of distortion of our science standards one week after the Board adopted them, with an op-ed22 in New Mexico’s largest newspaper saying in part:
“The only way to preserve the integrity of science is to teach the facts that support the currently dominant paradigm [i.e., evolution] as well as those that challenge it. ... This is an area where it is necessary to present the evidence and the arguments for and against, and let the students decide for themselves what to believe. A great strength of the new stan- dards is that they explicitly recognize these issues, and require their presentation and discussion.”
This is worth studying, as a good example of anti-evolu- tion sophistry. Sentence 1: Assert the falsehood that there are facts challenging evolution, as if everyone should know something so obvious. Sentence 2: Rephrase the assertion of
falsehood, and then appeal to the reader’s sense of fairness— that students should be free to decide. Sentence 3: Assert another falsehood—that the New Mexico standards require that these non-existent facts be presented.
In late 2003, in a reorganization of state government unrelated to science standards, our State Board of Education was stripped of all statutory authority. Its former powers are now split between the state legislature and the governor- appointed Secretary of Education. The Department of Education was renamed the Public Education Department.
In 2005, a 3-2 vote by the board of one New Mexico school district adopted a policy friendly toward creationism, which was opposed by the district’s science teachers, their superintendent, the Public Education Department, and most people who showed up at the school-board meetings. Local media covered the story month after month. When one seat changed hands in the next election, the policy was repealed
23
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Creationist strategies are evolving. One current
approach is to try to guarantee teachers the “academic free- dom” to “teach the strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, and “let the students decide.” The phrase “intelligent design” is unlikely to find its way into curricula today, in the after- math of the Kitzmiller v Dover decision. As a supplementary biology text, Of Pandas and People has been supplanted by Explore Evolution.25 Avoiding “intelligent design,” it uses the phrase “a polyphyletic view of life,” giving a new, more scien- tific-sounding name to the same old claim that the sudden appearance of each kind of animal, without shared ancestry, is a legitimate scientific viewpoint.
Anti-evolution legislation, resembling a Discovery- Institute model,26 has died quickly in the New Mexico legisla- ture the past few years. At the 2007 committee hearing of 2007 HJM 14, the sponsor introduced his legislation with a discussion about immorality in youth, whom he said could hardly be expected to behave themselves if they were taught that they were no different than monkeys. No members of the audience spoke in favor, and about a dozen of us spoke against. The sponsor then graciously withdrew the bill before the committee could vote on it. Two years later, 2009 SB 433 was never even heard in committee, though many of us stayed on alert for weeks, ready to dash to the capitol on short notice, responding to false alarms once or twice. Most recent- ly, with a committee hearing of 2011 HB 302 approaching, IDnet-NM supported the bill with a full-page advertisement in New Mexico’s largest-circulation newspaper, which included the statement that evidence “that refuses to line up with the theory” of evolution is censored by “The Scientific Establishment,” which is “ruled by what is in effect, a priest- hood and the worldview of this priesthood is ‘materialism.’” A few days later, I met the sponsor of the bill in his office, intending to show him the Kitzmiller v Dover case, how our science standards guide the teaching of evolution and respect the rights of students with contrary beliefs, etc. He seemed to already be comfortable with all of that. He expressed dismay that his bill had been “hijacked by those people” who bought
in another 3-2 vote.
Current events
Sucked into the Culture War 39