"The Philadelphia Inquirer"
Monday, December 11, 2000

Commentary

Let's change science standards and let students do real science

By Jonathan Wells

Should Pennsylvania's science standards be changed?

Draft language for the standards is expected to go before the state
legislature early in 2001. According to standards adopted in 1998,
students are expected to "know" that "organisms arose from materials and life
forms of the past" because of "evidence of evolution in the form of fossils . . .
embryological studies and DNA studies."

If the proposed changes are approved, students will be expected to analyze
these same forms of evidence, as well as "new scientific facts," to determine whether
the facts "support or do not support the theory of evolution."

Defenders of the old standards object that the proposed changes will leave
"room for debate" over the validity of evolutionary theory and open the door to the
teaching of biblical creationism in science classes. But the new standards say nothing
about creationism. They merely encourage students to ask whether the evidence
supports or does not support evolutionary theory.

Isn't this what scientists are supposed to do? According to the U. S.
National Academy of  Sciences, "it is the nature of science to test and
retest explanations against the natural world," and "all scientific
knowledge is, in principle, subject to change as new evidence becomes
available." Even a theory as widely held as Darwinian evolution must be
tested and retested against the evidence.

Yet much of the "evidence" for evolution in current biology textbooks is
false. For example, a 1953 experiment is widely used as evidence that
life's building-blocks could have formed from materials on the early
earth. But geochemists have known since the 1960s that early earth
conditions were probably nothing like those used in the 1953 experiment.
When realistic conditions are used, the experiment doesn't work. Textbooks
omit this important fact.

All biology textbooks show branching-tree diagrams that trace the
evolution of modern animals from a common ancestor and claim that this pattern
is confirmed by scientific evidence. But most textbook ignore the "Cambrian explosion," in which the
major groups of animals appear in the fossil record fully formed at about the same
time, without evolving from common ancestors - a fact that Darwin himself considered a
"serious" problem for his theory.

As far as Darwin knew, the "strongest" evidence for his theory came from
embryo drawings made by his German contemporary, Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel's
drawings purport to show that all animals with backbones have strikingly similar embryos,
implying that they share a common ancestor.

But Haeckel faked his drawings. The embryos actually look quite different
from one nother. Stephen Jay Gould wrote in the March, 2000, issue of Natural
History magazine that scientists should be "both astonished and ashamed by the century of
mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large
number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks."

Ten years ago, molecular biologists were hopeful that DNA studies would
confirm Darwin's  "tree of life." As they compared more and more genes,
however, they found that relationships among the major kingdoms of life are a tangled
thicket rather than a branching tree. In 1999, molecular biologist W. Ford Doolittle
wrote in Science that scientists should stop trying to "force the data . . . into the mold
provided by Darwin."

As evidence for Darwin's theory of natural selection, most textbooks rely
on the story of peppered moths. Before 1820, most peppered moths were
light-colored, but during the industrial revolution they became mostly dark-colored.
In theory, the shift occurred because light-colored moths were more visible against
pollution-darkened tree trunks, and thus were eaten by predatory birds. Textbooks typically
illustrate this story with photographs of peppered moths on tree trunks. In the 1980s,
however, biologists discovered that peppered moths in the wild don't rest on tree
trunks. The textbook photographs were staged - often by gluing or pinning dead moths in place.

Clearly, a person does not have to be religious - much less a
fundamentalist - to object to the way students are now being taught
evolution in Pennsylvania classrooms. Using falsehoods to insulate a
theory from critical analysis is not education, but indoctrination.

The proposed new standards will encourage students to do what good
scientists are supposed to do - examine the evidence and think critically about it.
Pennsylvanians who want their children to receive the best possible science education should
welcome them.
 

Jonathan Wells holds a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California
at Berkeley and is currently a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in
Seattle. He is the author of "Icons of Evolution."

Oryginal:
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/12/11/opinion/wells11.htm

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