One of the new buzz phrases for all things liberal is "science-based evidence." It's a term being used to justify restrictive government policies, promote biased agendas, usurp parental authority and obstruct open dialogue.
The federal judge who ordered the FDA to make the morning-after pill available over-the-counter to teenagers without parental consent used that phrase. He claimed the federal agency ignored science-based evidence when it originally restricted sales to teenagers -- in other words, there was no science-based evidence to deny the drug to teenage girls.
The administration will use that phrase a lot when it pushes for more and more environmental controls, but that's a subject for a blog of its own.
"Science-based evidence" also is at the heart of a debate that's raging this week in Texas. The Texas Board of Education has been holding hearings and will take a final vote tomorrow on science standards that critics say seek to cast doubt on the theory of evolution.
The board in January voted to replace language that called on science teachers to focus on the "strengths and weaknesses" in all scientific theories with language urging students to use "empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing" to "analyze and evaluate scientific explanations." In addition to this change, the board will be voting on an amendment that calls for the analysis and evaluation of "the sufficiency or insufficiency" of the common ancestry idea to explain the fossil record as well as amendments that question ideas in the earth and space sciences -- plate tectonics, radioactive decay and how the solar system developed.
More than 50 scientific societies sent a letter to the board urging it to support "accurate science education." Calling evolution the foundation of modern biology, the scientists say, "We oppose any efforts to undermine the teaching of biological evolution and related topics in the earth and space sciences, whether by misrepresenting those subjects, or by inaccurately and misleadingly describing them as controversial and in need of special scrutiny."
Recognizing that the theory of evolution has itself evolved over time, other scientists recognize that conventional scientific theory must always be subject to question and analysis. After all, that is what science is all about. Galileo questioned the geocentric thinking of his day and started what became a scientific revolution. Einstein challenged the thinking of many noted scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries and got us thinking relatively about light, quantum physics, black holes and so many new possibilities.
To establish any theory, opinion or agenda as "science-based evidence" -- to discourage students from questioning any scientific theory logically and empirically -- is to refute the very basis of scientific study.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
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It is amazing to listen to the evolutionists defend their theory. By their own methods they have shown over and over again that nature was designed, but that does not fit their theory so they throw it out. Sagan often is quoted as saying the fossil record proves evolution when in fact it proves just the opposite. Almost all mathmaticians no longer believe in the theory of evolution as presented.
ReplyDeleteQuoting from the Truth Project, do we believe their was nothing-nothing that suddenly became everything? Or do we believe the Cosmos has always been? The third law (law not theory) of thermodynamics says that our enegy or the energy of the Cosmos should be rapidly depleting but it is expanding. Thats scientific evidence for you.