Joined: Nov. 2005
A teacher's perspective on the science standards
|By ROBIN BROWN|
Special to Florida Baptist Witness
Published February 14, 2008
Editor's note: This statement was given at a public hearing on the proposed science standards for Florida held in Jacksonville last month.
Good afternoon, my name is Robin Brown. I am a recently retired teacher from Polk County. I taught for 31 years with the last 15 years being middle school science. I have traveled here today because I feel this topic is one of the most important topics in education and with the over 200,000 ratings of the new science standards, many people in Florida feel the same.
The Florida Science Curriculum Framework states that certain principles supporting the vision for science education should include the evaluation of new ideas and alternative ways of knowing. Students should be encouraged to make well-reasoned decisions and to use the processes of science successfully that include honesty, skepticism, creativity, curiosity, tolerance, open-mindedness and sharing, recognizing the diversity of ideas and acceptance of different views, according to the Framework.
One benchmark in the new proposed science standards stipulates that students "Explain how evolution is demonstrated by the fossil record, extinction, comparative anatomy, comparative embryolgy, biogeography, molecular biology and observed evolutionary change."
Most scientists once said that the fossil record shows that evolution occurred gradually. But today, scientists deny that gradual change can be seen in the fossil record. A few scientists now even question whether fossils necessarily show that evolution itself occurred. Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould says the fossil record does not show evolution occurring gradually. "The fossil record with its abrupt transitions," he writes, "offers no support for gradual change." Gould calls these repeated unfilled gaps, "the trade secret of paleontology."
There is a process in the field of science that any discussion of a theory include both "pro" and "con." This practice is observed throughout the scientific community except when the theory of evolution is involved. Whenever evolution is discussed, only the arguments "for" evolution are considered. Scientific evidence "against" evolution is consistently censored.
Sometimes the evolutionary process is questioned, such as gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, but all such discussions never question the evolutionary assumption.
Dr. Karl Popper, the world's leading philosopher in science states, "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program." Sir Fred Hoyle said, "The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through the evolutionary process is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein."