Notes From Off Center - Latest Comments in Smuggling Creationism into Science Class

Re: Smuggling Creationism into Science Class

Drew Tatusko — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:39:38 -0000

White founded Cornell with Ezra Cornell who floated the bill.

The first real secular program of study was through Charles Eliot at Harvard. Eliot was the first founder of the secular program of study.

Union College was technically the first non-sectarian college. Johns Hopkins was the first to be founded with a non-sectarian religious purpose. Cornell's curriculum had the openness of a Quaker curriculum even if White (who was a classmate of Gilman who founded JHU) was adamant about a non-dogmatic perspective. Religion was not the issue for White as much as dogmatism. For any of these the influence of the Society of Friends on the curriculum and the trajectory of the early history is palpable.

Are you deriving this from a particular source? I am not sure it is accurate. Suggest you read Veysey's book and Reuben's book for better information on this account. Marsden is also very good here as well as Ringenber and Rudolph.

Again, idea that evolution is an ideological claim rather than a scientific basis for theorizing is an assertion without evidence you continue to make.

Re: Smuggling Creationism into Science Class

ReACTIONary — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:44:37 -0000

I don't know what you mean by "origins speculation". Do you mean the origin of life in general, or the origins of species?

I am certianly not sure about pedagological history, but Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species would, even today, be an exemplary text for the teaching of evolution in a college classroom. I would have thought that it would have been used that way back then.

Re: Smuggling Creationism into Science Class

Looney — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:43:13 -0000

Of course I don't believe ID is science either, but the Scopes Trial topic is one that I always like to remember:

In 1928, the primary college text for support of evolution was "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom", 1896, by Andrew White, prof of History; president and founder of Cornell. This was long before the discovery of proteins and DNA, so the argument basically boiled down to this: "Evolution is science, because scientists say 'so', and if you don't believe, then you are one of those flat earth fools. So accept it. Or Else!". White, as a history expert, cited Washington Irving's creative version of the flat earth story as genuine history, putting it into my textbooks that I was given not far from where the Scopes Trial was held in Tennessee. As the founder of America's first 'secular' university, White was also in a position to make implied threats real. Whether evolution has a solid scientific basis today will always hit considerable skepticism due to the methods of White and others.

This would, of course, be another reason for disjoining origins speculation from science in the class room: Both sides have an extensive track record of victory at all costs and by any means.

Re: Smuggling Creationism into Science Class

ReACTIONary — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:55:21 -0000

Not only scientists, civil libertarians and educators, but also at least one conservative pundit, at the National Review no less, has spoken out against this benighted law. Including a particularly forthright denuciation of the Discovery Institutes as a “gang of sleazy confidence tricksters.”

http://corner.nationalrevie...