By Barbara Forrest

The title of this post may sound strange. But read on, and you will see that there is more backbone in a minority of the members of the Florida legislature than in the entire Louisiana legislature. Just as it was doing in Louisiana, the Discovery Institute, a creationist think tank in Seattle, was maneuvering in Florida to get its academic freedom (read: “stealth creationism”) legislation passed in the state of Florida in 2008. But the outcome in Florida was very different than the outcome in Louisiana. On February 29, 2008, a Discovery Institute “academic freedom” bill was introduced in the Florida Senate by Sen. Ronda Storms. That bill, SB 2962, passed. On March 4, a companion bill, HB 1483, was introduced in the House by Rep. Alan Hays. It also passed. In April, as the National Center for Science Education reported, “The antievolution bills — the so-called Academic Freedom Acts — in Florida are progressing, despite protests from teachers, scientists, and the Florida ACLU, and despite the criticisms of the legislature’s own staff.” By April 28, however, there was some doubt as to whether creationists in the Florida legislature could reconcile their own differences in time to get the bill passed before the legislature adjourned on May 2. They did not, and the legislation died. In 2009, creationists in the Florida legislature made another attempt at getting academic freedom legislation passed, but SB 2396 fortunately did not even get to the floor, and the bill died in committee. (See the excellent Florida Citizens for Science website.)

Florida seems to have learned its lesson (for the time being). The notable thing about Florida, however, was the vocal resistance to these creationist bills by Florida legislators on the debate floor of the House and Senate in 2008. (See videos below.) There was no such resistance on the floor of the Louisiana House and Senate when the Louisiana Science Education Act (LEA) was making its way through the legislature at exactly the same time as the Florida bills. In fact, where the Louisiana legislature is concerned, except for three “no” votes (pdf) in the House (which the three legislators cast without comment), there was no resistance at all.

The Florida Senate

Sen. Storms spearheaded the effort in the Florida Senate. In the video below, you will see her and a colleague, Sen. Don Gaetz, arguing for passage of the bill on the Senate floor, regurgitating the Discovery Institute’s code-language talking points. Notice that they were defending “critical analysis” in science classes. Sound familiar? Sen. Stephen Wise, another creationist representative (who sponsored the unsuccessful 2009 bill), tells his colleagues that “I just urge ya” to support the bill so that students and teachers could discuss “both sides” of the issue. Sound familiar? But you will also see Sen. Arthenia Joyner pointing out that the bill would permit introducing creationism into science classes. You will see Sen. Frederica Wilson pointing out that the bill promoted religion. Sen. Steven Geller also points out that the bill was intended to permit the teaching of intelligent design while deliberately avoiding the term “intelligent design.” Watch for yourself (2:44).

The Florida House of Representatives

Debate in the Florida House of Representatives was much the same. Discovery Institute shills repeated DI’s talking points. However, several legislators cut right through them, as you will see in the video below. You will see (at :37) Rep. Geraldine Thompson catch Rep. Hays in a lie about his bill (either he was lying or had not read his own bill). When she questioned Rep. Hays about a section of the bill that allowed students to skirt “normal testing procedures” by escaping penalties in their schoolwork for “subscribing to a particular position or view regarding biological or chemical evolution” — in other words, allowing students to write on their exams “what they believe rather than what they have been taught by their instructors” — Hays denied that this was in the amended bill. However, some minutes later, Rep. Thompson read from the engrossed bill that contained all the amendments, and, sure enough, that exemption was included. Hays, a retired dentist (shades of Texas?), should have known better than to lie to a retired college administrator and teacher whose hobby is historical research.

Later, when challenged again by another House colleague, Hays defended the bill as enabling students to engage in — here it comes! — “critical analysis” on this “lightning-rod issue.” Hays tried to fend off additional challenges from other House members. Finally, in a fit of exasperation, he fulminated on the House floor:

It’s very difficult for me to speak any more plainly than I’ve already spoken. But what this bill does is tells the teacher to go ahead and teach the theory of evolution and make sure that your students have a complete view of that theory, and [that] they know that it is only a theory. It is not gospel law. It . . . it . . . there’s no proof that any species has transitioned from one thing to another. No people have ever come from tadpoles. . . .

Hays got the rejoinder he deserved from Rep. Keith Fitzgerald (a college professor):

The sponsor of this bill told us the other day that there’s no evidence of evolution turning a fly into a monkey. But this bill shows definitively that bad bills can turn legislators into monkeys. . . .

Rep. Audrey Gibson (whose hobbies, quite appropriately, include weight training) then threw a punch of her own:

The difficulty that I have with this bill is that the sponsor seems not even to know what the definition of ‘critical analysis’ is. Well, if you can’t define a thing, then how in the world can you legislate it?

BINGO!

Hays faced similar challenges from other colleagues, Rep. Elaine Schwartz and Rep. Mary Brandenburg, who recognized full well what this law would do to Florida science education. Watch and enjoy (9:24).

Lagniappe

As lagniappe (a Louisiana word for “a little extra”), below is another video (3:22) in which Rep. Hays lies again, this time about Expelled, a Discovery Institute pro-intelligent design propaganda film that Hays, speaking from the House floor, urged his colleagues to see. Its release in Florida was timed to coincide with the legislative session — as it had been in Louisiana, but with little public awareness of it here. (Aside: Rotten Tomatoes says, “Full of patronizing, poorly structured arguments, Expelled is a cynical political stunt in the guise of a documentary.” The Internet Movie Database gave it a 3.7/10 rating. MSNBC called it “far worse than stupid.” For a real treat, read movie critic Roger Ebert’s review: “This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.”) Hays was confronted about the film by Rep. Fitzgerald: “This movie you’re talking about — is this not about being able to teach intelligent design in the schools, which you just said, in response to Rep. Gelber, is not what you’re trying to do with this bill?” Here is Hays’ reply:

No, it’s not about teaching intelligent design. It’s a documentary.

 

The same word that Judge John E. Jones III used to describe some of the defense testimony in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (2005) applies here: Rep. Hays’ reply was an exercise in mendacity. Only a few weeks earlier, Hays had sponsored a news conference (seen in the video above) featuring Ben Stein, the star and narrator of Expelled. Standing right behind Stein in front of the news cameras was Casey Luskin, the Discovery Institute staffer who promotes intelligent design for a living (see Casey’s press conference talking points). (See Little Green Footballs’ post about Casey. See Steve Doocy interviewing Casey on Fox News.) A few weeks later, Casey traveled all the way down to Louisiana to attend the May 21, 2008, House Education Committee hearing on the Louisiana Science Education Act — which our legislators were all too eager to pass. The Florida creationist legislators won the floor votes in the House and Senate, but they apparently couldn’t conquer their own internal disagreements in time to get the bill passed. Moreover, as seen above, they encountered loud, public, determined resistance from other legislators. At one point during, Rep. Hays questioned his fellow legislators:

“My question to you today is, what are you afraid of? Are you afraid that our students are going to learn how to critically analyze a theory? That’s what you seem to be saying. . . .

What Hays was hearing from his House colleagues who spoke out was definitely not fear. It was the sound of legislative backbones straightening up and standing up. We haven’t heard such sounds in Louisiana for . . .  gee, memory fails us here. We know what Louisiana legislators — even the half-way principled ones — were afraid of when the LSEA was coursing through the corridors of the Louisiana State Capitol:  Bobby Jindal. In the 2008 legislative session, when Jindal was newly inaugurated and still on his gubernatorial honeymoon, everyone was afraid to cross him. As it turned out, they apparently had reason to be — see Jeremy Alford, “Bobby Jindal — the Good-bye Guv.”

But with respect to Florida legislators who recognized the “academic freedom” legislation for what it truly was and spoke out against it, the thought of what they might be risking politically certainly did not intimidate them. In light of these Florida legislators’ willingness to publicly defend the teaching of science, we in Louisiana just have to ask:

Couldn’t even one Louisiana legislator have stood up publicly on the debate floor the way these Floridians did? Just one?

To increase high school students’ exposure to evolutionary theory prior to their enrolling in a college biology course, a high school biology teacher in Louisiana could request to show his/her students Judgment Day. The program appears to meet the ‘supplemental instructional materials’ criterion of the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA). Certainly we would argue that viewing Judgment Day ‘promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories’ . . . by its thoughtful coverage of the information presented by witness[es] for both the plaintiffs and defendants. Although the LSEA has all the appearances of a stealth creationism document . . . , it does not prohibit a high school biology teacher from requesting to supplement the standard textbook with high-quality scientific material such as Judgment Day.

The above passage is an excerpt from an article by Dr. Beth Leuck, Professor of Biology, and Dr. Greg Butcher, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, colleagues at Centenary College of Louisiana, in the November/December 2009 Reports of the National Center for Science Education. Entitled “The Effect of Viewing NOVA’s Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial Docudrama on College Students’ Perceptions of ‘Intelligent Design’ and Evolution,” their article describes the results of Leuck and Butcher’s survey of Centenary biology students’ attitudes toward evolution and intelligent design (ID) creationism both before and after viewing this PBS NOVA documentary (video below) about the legal case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District 2005 (see below).

After viewing the original broadcast ourselves, we decided that Judgment Day offered an educational and entertaining account of the theory of evolution and of a contemporary ‘evolution war’ to which college biology students should be exposed. Therefore, we decided to show the program to students in Centenary College of Louisiana’s Biology 101 class (Principles and Methods of Biology) to supplement the section on evolution that students had just completed.

The article is online here (html). It is downloadable in pdf here (with the kind permission of Dr. Leuck and Dr. Butcher).

The results that Leuck and Butcher observed in student attitudes after showing Judgment Day were remarkable. Before viewing the documentary, slightly more than 40% of the students disagreed with the statement, “Intelligent design is a scientific explanation for the history of life on earth.” After viewing the program, 60% of them disagreed. Whereas slightly over 20% weren’t sure before the program, only about 4% were uncertain after viewing it.

Leuck & Butcher Figure 1

The results showed that when students are offered truthful, understandable information, they are able to see the difference clearly between evolution, which is a robust scientific explanation of the history of life on Earth, and intelligent design, which is nothing more than a retread of traditional creationism that lacks scientific support. As Leuck and Butcher observed, “In the end, 70% of the students who watched Judgment Day believed that there are no scientifically valid data supporting ‘intelligent design’.”

Judgment Day, the Peabody Award-winning NOVA documentary about the case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District 2005, “the Dover trial,” was first broadcast on November 13, 2007. Kitzmiller was the first legal case involving intelligent design creationism. Eleven parents in Dover, Pennsylvania, filed suit after the Dover school board adopted a policy requiring biology teachers at Dover Regional High School to read a disclaimer to their students before teaching evolution. Intended to undermine students’ acceptance of evolution, the disclaimer instructed students that, among other things, “The Theory [of evolution] is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence.” The board also purchased 60 copies of an intelligent design creationist textbook, Of Pandas and People, for placement in the school library as a “reference” book for students interested in learning more about intelligent design. (As an expert witness for the plaintiffs, I wrote both an expert witness report [pdf] about the ID creationist movement and a supplementary report [pdf] about Pandas.)

The Kitzmiller case was ultimately the fruit of the relentless promotion of intelligent design by the Discovery Institute, the creationist think tank that later helped write the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) and sent representatives to argue for its passage before the Louisiana House Education Committee on May 21, 2008. Despite the fact that the trial had exposed ID as creationism and that its proponents’ arguments had been shredded in court by the expert witnesses and attorneys for the plaintiffs, the Discovery Institute — partnering with the Louisiana Family Forum — subsequently targeted Louisiana for passage of a version of its deceptively named “Model Academic Freedom Statute on Evolution.” Their scheme worked: with the passage of the Louisiana Science Education Act in 2008, our state became a victim of the Discovery Institute’s devious “Wedge Strategy” and the Louisiana Family Forum’s successful campaign to commandeer public school science education policy in order to advance its theocratic agenda.

By showing Judgment Day, Leuck and Butcher achieved notable results in dispelling students’ misinformation about evolution and their misconception of ID as science. (In addition to information about the trial, the program features excellent explanations of the science supporting evolution, illustrated by state-of-the-art animations.) They recommend that both Louisiana public school teachers and university professors show this documentary to their students:

Adding Judgment Day to classroom units on evolution at both the high school and college level may be particularly important in states like Louisiana that have a history of resistance to scientific explanations of the origin of life on earth.

Although the Louisiana Science Education Act was promoted and passed in order to allow creationist materials into Louisiana science classes, as its legislative sponsor Sen. Ben Nevers admitted, public school science teachers already had the freedom to supplement their instruction with quality materials that tell students the truth about evolution. Judgment Day tells the truth not only about evolution, but about what happens to communities and the educational process when creationists are permitted to push their divisive agenda at the expense of children.

The people of Louisiana should take this lesson to heart. As more of our children leave the state to seek opportunities elsewhere, they will encounter the fact that people who know about this law view the state as a laughingstock. This is what our fellow Americans see, rather than the efforts of dedicated teachers and scientists who quietly do their jobs every day. We should not want our children — all too many of whom will leave, and have already left, Louisiana for better opportunities elsewhere — to bear the burden of the ignorance of the public officials who assisted in the passage of the LSEA and the policies governing its implementation. (See “Louisiana Open for Business — Creationists Welcome” here.)

To facilitate the preview of the film by public school teachers and science professors who might wish to show it to their students, we offer it below in its entirety.

Kentucky House Bill 397, a clone of the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act, is dead.

HB 397 (BR 1517) – T. Moore, J. Carney

AN ACT relating to science education and intellectual freedom.
Create a new section of KRS Chapter 158 to encourage local district teachers and administrators to foster an environment promoting objective discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories; allow teachers to use, as permitted by the local board of education, materials in addition to state-approved texts and instructional materials for discussion of scientific theories including evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning; clarify that provisions do not promote religious doctrine or discrimination; provide that the section may be cited as the Kentucky Science Education and Intellectual Freedom Act.

Common sense has carried the day in the Bluegrass State!

The National Center for Science Education has posted an announcement of the demise of HB 397. (Download the entire bill here [Word doc]). The bill died in the Kentucky House Education Committee, to which it had been referred on February 10. The chair of that committee is Rep. Carl Rollins. We commend the Kentucky House Education Committee for letting this bill die rather than imitating the entire Louisiana legislature, Governor Bobby Jindal, and the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. They are living proof that politicians can follow principle rather than the dictates of the Religious Right — even in the Bible Belt, where Kentucky, along with Louisiana, is located.

The Discovery Institute, which is the headquarters of the intelligent design creationist movement, is heavily invested in the Louisiana legislation and the BESE policies. DI creationists helped write the LSEA and provided legal advice to the Louisiana Family Forum during the process of promoting the legislation and gutting BESE’s policies for administering it. DI staffer Casey Luskin showed up in Louisiana in May 2008 when the LA House Education Committee heard testimony on the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA). In March of this year, he wrote a gloating entry with an amusingly ominous headline at Evolution News & Views, DI’s news “analysis” blog:

Proliferation of Academic Freedom Bills Is Darwin Lobby’s Worst Nightmare

In this piece, Luskin used KY HB 397 as an example of how the champions of “academic freedom” legislation were scaring the bejeezus out of “the intelligentsia” who were “very worried about the prospect of teachers gaining academic freedom, as a bill presently in the Kentucky legislature would allow.” According to Luskin,

The Kentucky bill contains an excellent example of language refuting assertions from critics that these bills allow the teaching of religion: ‘This section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.’ The operative language of the academic freedom bills is entirely beneficial:

• The Kentucky bill encourages teachers to ‘promote critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories being studied.’

Luskin then cites both the Ouachita Parish academic freedom policy and the LSEA as among the precedents for the proposed Kentucky legislation, asserting that “it isn’t just academic freedom legislation from the past three years that’s calling for critiques of evolution in the classroom”:

• Ouachita Parish, Louisiana: ‘[T]he teaching of some scientific subjects, such as biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy … [T]eachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.’

(In November 2006, Louisiana Family Forum operative Darrell White persuaded the Ouachita Parish School Board to adopt its own “academic freedom” policy [pdf], which served as the template for SB 561 before it was revised as SB 733 and adopted as the LSEA. The Discovery Institute applauded the move.)

And finally — ta-da! — Luskin invokes the Louisiana Science Education Act:

And then of course there’s Louisiana 2008 Science Education Act, which requires that Louisiana schools shall ‘create and foster an environment…that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.’

And to think that the Louisiana legislature and Bobby Jindal literally handed the Discovery Institute this bragging point. At least the Kentucky House Education Committee had better sense.

If you have any friends in Kentucky, shoot them an e-mail and congratulate them. Their House Education Committee placed the interests of the children of Kentucky above the interests of the legislators who are shilling for creationists.

In Knox County, Tennessee, a parent named Kurt Zimmermann has complained to the school board about the use of the word “myth” in his son’s honors biology textbook, Asking About Life (Tobin and Dusheck, 2nd ed., 2001), which is being used at Farragut High School. Zimmermann’s complaint is nothing new. It sounds much like many other complaints made to school boards by creationist parents. But this one has a Louisiana connection.

Background

Mr. Zimmermann, a Sunday School teacher, objects that the book’s use of the word “myth” undermines his child’s belief in the truthfulness of the Bible and displays a bias against Christianity. In the complaint form that he filled out, he cites p. 319 of the book, on which there is a reference to “Creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian God in 7 days.” At the April 7, 2010, Knox County School Board meeting, Mr. Zimmermann offered some remedies for the situation: “You could pitch the book, you could fix the book, you could come up with an alternative. There’s things you can do.” His friend Steve Cook, also a Sunday school teacher, agrees: “I am at my church teaching that there is a creator and I have students coming to me telling me there isn’t a creator.” (See this video clip of the school board meeting. See also “Ban a Science Book? School Board Delays Action,” at Metropulse, 4/8/2010.)

In order to evaluate the complaint that the word “myth” is offensive to Christians, the school’s review committee consulted Dictionary.com. Mr. Zimmermann used Webster’s Dictionary, where he found a section of the definition reflecting his contention that the word is insulting to Christians: “Describing Christian beliefs, such as Bible stories, as myth is therefore usually considered an attack on those beliefs.” But there is nothing inherently offensive or disrespectful to Christianity about the use of the word “myth.” The most respected dictionary in the English-speaking world, the Oxford English Dictionary, gives this as the first definition of the word:

1. a. A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.

The OED provides a representative statement in which the word is used with this meaning:

1978 J. D. CRICHTON in C. Jones et al. Study of Liturgy I. 7 The myth was a sacred narrative, whether true or fictional, which gave an account of, or ‘explained’, the origins of human life or of the community.

The word can indeed be used in a way that reflects Mr. Zimmerman’s objection, as in the second definition in the OED:

2. a. A widespread but untrue or erroneous story or belief; a widely held misconception; a misrepresentation of the truth. Also: something existing only in myth; a fictitious or imaginary person or thing.

However, the very next definition that follows this one points once again to a perfectly respectable — and respectful — way to use “myth”:

[2.] b. A person or thing held in awe or generally referred to with near reverential admiration on the basis of popularly repeated stories (whether real or fictitious). [emphasis added]

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the most venerable of all school reference works, the article on “Christian Myth and Legend” opens with a wonderfully sensitive recognition of the importance of the concept of myth to Christianity:

Myths and legends number among the most creative and abundant contributions of Christianity to the history of human culture. They have inspired artists, dramatists, clerics, and others to contemplate the wondrous effects of Christian salvation on the cosmos and its inhabitants. They conjoin diverse cultural horizons and fuse them creatively with the religious histories that exist prior to and alongside the orthodox Christian world. . . .

But Mr. Zimmermann and his son find the word objectionable, so he and three like-minded supporters registered their complaints against Asking About Life (AAL) at the April 7 school board meeting. (Given the volatile nature of the issue, all parties — both complainants and board members — conducted themselves with admirable Southern courtesy, as shown in the school board’s 4/7/10 video of the meeting.)

The school board has a review process for citizen complaints, which Mr. Zimmermann apparently followed correctly. The book unanimously passed inspection by the six-member review committee appointed by the principal of Farragut High School. The committee members’ individual review forms, along with Zimmermann’s complaint, are included in the board’s April 7 agenda [pdf]. Below is the clip of the complaint, which reveals the Louisiana connection. Anyone who has followed the posts at the LA Coalition for Science website for the last two years will see a familiar name (click on image below):

Kurt Zimmermann's Complaint

For readers who are not familiar with what has been going on in Louisiana, here is the connection:

Where the form asks, “What reviews of this material have you read?,” Zimmermann wrote, “19 page Review by Charles H. Voss, Jr. Ph.D. dated August, 2006.” This indicates that Zimmermann is taking as his authority for evaluating Asking About Life none other than Louisiana’s own Charles H. Voss, Jr., a longtime creationist who is well known among creationist-watchers for his mischief-making in our state. In September 2009, working with the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), an affiliate of Focus on the Family, Voss was instrumental in persuading the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) to adopt a creationist-friendly procedure for reviewing complaints about the use of creationist supplementary materials in public schools. (See “Procedure Crafted for Handling Evolution-materials Complaints,” Baton Rouge Advocate 9/17/09.) One year earlier, the LFF had engineered the passage of the Louisiana Science Education Act under which the use of such materials is permitted.

Background on Voss

Voss has promoted creationism in Louisiana for years. In 1993, he wrote a pamphlet entitled “Did God Direct Evolution?” [pdf], in which he rejected the mainstream belief in theistic evolution (the religious belief that God used evolution to shape life on Earth), opting instead for full-blown, biblical, young-earth creationism: “Ninety percent of the known indicators of the earth’s age say the earth is young while only ten percent give old ages to the earth.” He contends that scientific evidence and the Bible make it “impossible to merge biblical creation and evolution into a single theory such as theistic evolution.” According to Voss, “God-directed evolution seems plausible on the surface, but it is in conflict with the biblical record. . . . God did not direct evolution!” Among his items of evidence is this: “Human-appearing sandal prints have been found in supposedly 600-million-year old rock — a 600-million year discrepancy.” (This little factoid is documented on websites such as “The Bible UFO Connection.”) In his biosketch in the pamphlet, he informs readers that he “considers creation research and Bible study as avocations and believes that he can show logically that God does exist.”

In 1994, he and his colleagues in the creationist Origins Resource Association attempted (unsuccessfully) to convince the Livingston Parish, LA, School Board to adopt a creationist curriculum guide that was riddled with errors. (See Barbara Forrest, “Combating Creationism in a Louisiana School District,” The Textbook Letter, July-August 1997.) He now partners with the Louisiana Family Forum to promote his “Biology Text Addenda” at TextAddOns.com, among which is the “19 page review” of Asking About Life that Mr. Zimmermann is using in Knox County. (The AAL addendum is included in the Knox Co. School Board agenda packet [pdf].) Voss has written creationist addenda for eleven well-known biology textbooks; he has posted them  in pdf for downloading by teachers, students, and parents. However, he does not have the expertise in biology that would qualify him to critique biology textbooks. His degrees are in electrical engineering, and he is a retired professor of electrical and computer engineering. His credentials are listed along with the names of the creationist reviewers of his addenda on his TextAddOns website [pdf].

By way of contrast, the co-author of Asking About Life, Albert J. Tobin, Ph.D., has distinguished credentials in the biological sciences.

Allan J. Tobin, Ph.D., is Managing Director of MRSSI and Senior Scientific Advisor to the High Q Foundation and to CHDI Inc., organizations dedicated to the development of therapies for Huntington’s disease. He is also Professor Emeritus at UCLA. Tobin received his S.B. (1963) from MIT, in Humanities and Science, and his Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard, in Biophysics. After postdoctoral training at the Weizmann Institute and at MIT, he became Assistant Professor of Biology at Harvard from 1971 to 1975. In 1975, he moved to UCLA, where he later became Professor of Physiological Science and Professor of Neurology. He was a visiting scientist at the Institut Pasteur in 1982 and at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2002-2003. At UCLA, he was Chair of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Progam from 1989-1995, Director of the Brain Research Institute from 1995-2002, cofounder of the NeuroEngineering Training Program, and, from 1996, the Eleanor Leslie Chair in Neuroscience. Tobin’s research laboratory at UCLA used molecular and cellular techniques to study the function, regulation, and degeneration of GABA-producing neurons in the brain and spinal cord, in order to address basic mechanistic questions important for Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and spinal cord injury. He was Scientific Director of the Hereditary Disease Foundation from 1979 to 2002 and is the coauthor of Tobin and Dusheck, Asking About Life, a prize-winning textbook.

Dr. Tobin’s co-author Jennie Dusheck is a professional science writer, currently an author at Cengage Learning, with a B.A. in English and zoology (terrestrial evolutionary biology, animal behavior and ecology) from the University of California-Berkeley. [UPDATE 4/12/10 — Ms. Dusheck has informed me that she is a freelance writer, not a Cengage employee. She wrote and is responsible for the chapters on evolution in AAL. Readers can see the full extent of her credentials here.] She also has an M.A. in zoology from the University of California-Davis (ecology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, plant-animal interactions, and statistics and experimental design). She earned a Certificate in Science Writing from the University of California-Santa Cruz. Ms. Dusheck is also a member of the National Association of Science Writers, the Northern California Science Writers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Authors Guild.

Back to Knox County

The school board did not vote on Zimmermann’s complaint at its April 7 meeting but decided to table it until a later meeting. Board chair Indya Kincannon noted that the textbook review committee members were not there to speak for themselves, so she moved to defer action for one month in order to allow the committee to be present at the next meeting. Although this move was very considerate on Ms. Kincannon’s part, if past experience in Louisiana is any indication of what is going on in Tennessee, when school boards defer such clear-cut creationist initiatives until a future meeting, the creationists then have extra time to marshal their forces even further, making them more difficult to deal with. Backed up by the review committee’s unanimous recommendation to retain the book, the board should have made an unequivocal decision to deny Mr. Zimmermann’s request. To their credit, the majority of board members, in a 6-3 vote, did reject an effort by board member Karen Carson to work out a compromise that would have permitted the use of Voss’s addendum:

Karen Carson, of the West Knox County 5th District, tried to find middle ground with an amendment that would have upheld the school committee’s recommendation but also offered to biology teachers a critical analysis of the textbook submitted by Zimmermann and written by Charles Voss. (Voss, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Louisiana State University, is a longtime activist for the cause of creationism and vice president of an outfit called the Origins Resource Association.) But Carson’s amendment satisfied no one, especially after she revised it to make it subject to review by school system science staff, and it failed on a 3-6 vote. [Metropulse, 4/8/2010; emphasis added] [See the Origins Resource Association here. See also the ORA's Facebook page.]

Note carefully that the addendum is referred to as a “critical analysis.” The LA Science Education Act is designed to promote “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” (emphasis added). Voss includes “critical thinking” exercises in his addenda, and the LA Family Forum promotes them on a “Critical Thinking in the Classroom” page on its website.

The August 2006 addendum that Zimmermann used and that Ms. Carson wanted to offer to Knox Co. biology teachers is interesting in another respect: this addendum is a sanitized version of an earlier one that was dated “October 2003.” The 2003 version is saturated with creationist language and young-earth creationist source citations. In 2006 — after the verdict in Kitzmiller v. Dover — Voss tried to cleanse the creationist language from his 2003 addendum; in fact, he “updated” all eleven of the addenda on the Textaddons.com website. (Each addendum is simply a variation on the same basic document, adjusted for a specific biology textbook.) In the October 2003 version of the AAL addendum, Voss’s first three table of contents entries are direct references to items on the page that Zimmermann cites in his complaint:

1. Creation is a Myth – p. 319
2. Creation is Not Science – p. 319
3. Each Species is Created – p. 319

Voss responded this way in the 2003 addendum to the use of the word “myth” that Zimmermann finds objectionable:

The statement ‘… and creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was created by the “Judeo-Christian God in 7 days”‘ has not been proven. Such a statement is not science but an opinion of the textbook authors and reveals a decided bias. Such statements do not belong in a science textbook. [p. 1]

(To the complaint form question, “What do you believe is the main idea of this material?,” Zimmermann wrote, “A clear bias by the authors towards Christianity.” To the question, “What would you like your school to do about this material?,” he wrote, “Immediately remove the book.”)

To the statement in AAL that “creation ‘science’ is not science” (p. 319), Voss responded in unequivocal creationist language in the 2003 addendum:

The statement ‘But creation “science” is not science’ is very misleading in that by context it implies that evolution is science. . . . Any definition of science that can label the term ‘evolution’ as commonly used as science will also include creationism as science. [p. 1; emphasis added]

To the AAL statement, “In that book [The Origin of Species] Darwin rejected the idea that each species had been specially created,” Voss responded:

The statement ‘In that book, Darwin rejected the idea that each species had been specially created’ may have been accepted in Darwin’s time but it is not accepted today by creationists. Today’s thinking is that, in general, the ‘Biblical kind’ is equivalent to the family level and in a few instances a genus. [p.1; emphasis added] ["Biblical kind" is a traditional creationist term that refers to the "kinds" of living things as God created them in the Book of Genesis.]

Voss’s sources in the 2003 version of the addendum include Creation Research Quarterly and Creation Ex Nihilo (now Creation Magazine), both young-earth creationist journals. He included numerous citations of articles by “John Woodmorappe,” which is the false name under which creationist Jan Peczkis writes. He even cited the intelligent design (ID) creationist supplementary textbook, Of Pandas and People, as a source. (Pandas was thoroughly exposed in my testimony and expert witness report [pdf] in Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005.) Voss cited the seminal ID creationist book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984), co-authored by Discovery Institute fellows Charles Thaxton and Walter Bradley (with Roger Olsen). He also cited Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), which helped bring about ID proponent Phillip Johnson’s creationist epiphany in 1987.

By August 2006, after the decisive verdict in the Kitzmiller case that teaching ID is unconstitutional, Voss had sanitized his addenda, just as Pandas had to be sanitized after the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard ruling that teaching “creation science” is unconstitutional. (The “creation science” language in Pandas was replaced with “intelligent design” language.) Most noticeably, he completely sidestepped AAL‘s statement about creationism and myth that Zimmermann finds objectionable, substituting instead an objection to the definition of evolution on p. 320. Here are his new TOC entries in the August 2006 addendum that Mr. Zimmermann is using:

1. What is Evolution? – p. 320
2. The Fossil Record Tells a Story of evolution – p. 327
3. Extinct Living Fossils – p. 328

Responding to AAL’s statements on p. 320 that Darwin’s theory of evolution includes the ideas of the common descent and natural selection, Voss voices his disagreement in terms of the traditional creationist objection to “macroevolution” but conspicuously avoids the word “creationism”:

Darwin observed the ability of organisms to adapt (micro-evolution) and assumed that on this basis macro-evolution was true. Macro-evolution could be said to occur if a dog became a cat or a dinosaur became a bird. It occurs at the genus or higher level and implies that all life on Earth descended from a few types of cells that somehow came into being in the past. Many scientists do not agree with this hypothesis. [p. 1]

The rest of the addendum is similarly sanitized — but only of the overtly creationist terminology, not the substantive creationist content. Nor did Voss cleanse out all the creationist citations. He retained Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and The Mystery of Life’s Origin. He also retained a citation of an article about Haeckel’s embryos that ID creationist and Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Wells slipped past the gatekeepers at American Biology Teacher in 1999. In this article, Wells recites his now-signature complaints against using Ernst Haeckel’s 19th-century drawings of embryos as evidence for evolution. This horse has been dead for years, and Wells’s complaints have been addressed many times, including in a later issue of American Biology Teacher. Yet the citation remains in both the 2003 and 2006 versions of Voss’s AAL addendum. [Update 4/12/10: Ms. Dusheck also pointed out that no edition of AAL contains the Haeckel mistake about which Wells complains in his article. I would add that Voss's one-size-fits-all addendum is not an accurate critique of any of the books that he has targeted.]

Voss has simply followed a page out of the Discovery Institute code language playbook by revising his addenda to make them appear superficially to be about evolution rather than creationism, just as the Discovery Institute did with its newest ID textbook, the deceptively titled Explore Evolution.

So what does all this analysis boil down to with respect to the Zimmerman complaint?

Here’s the central point: Mr. Zimmermann cited Voss’s creationist textbook addendum as his sole review material for a textbook in which he ostensibly objects to the use of one word, “myth,” which he says offends Christians. Zimmermann’s complaint about AAL zeroes in on exactly the item in the book that is the first item in Voss’s 2003 addendum, making exactly the same point: that calling creationism a myth betrays the bias of the authors and does not belong in a textbook.

There is nothing new in this type of complaint, just as there is nothing inherently offensive about the book’s use of the word “myth.” But there seems to be more to the story, which Zimmermann voiced through the national megaphone of Fox News. (Despite commenting at the April 7 school board meeting on the unwelcome attention “that I have received, and my family — socially, at work, in the media — nationally, incidentally,” he has appeared on Fox News at least twice, on April 7 and again on April 8. In fact, his April 7 appearance was on the morning of April 7, before the evening school board meeting.) Zimmermann has said that he lodged the complaint about the book after his son and some other students complained about the word. But in the April 7 Fox News interview, he elaborated on this basic account:

Since I brought that issue up, there’s been a host of other parents that have come forward, and there are other things in that book that are pretty, uh, technically inaccurate and things of that nature. So it’s more than just the statement that I was concerned about. So it’s kind of grown a little bit.

So now there are other things in AAL that he is complaining about. (Mark Littleton, a supporter of Zimmermann’s who spoke at the April 7 board meeting, read a list of “historical and scientific inaccuracies” in the book — which he compiled after having looked at it for the first time only a couple of days before the meeting.) There is more “technically inaccurate” material in the book, says Zimmermann, who professed during the April 7 Fox News interview that “It was really the kids who identified it ['myth']. I’m not smart enough to pick that stuff up. They are.”

This comment raises the question of who identified the other, “technically inaccurate” aspects of the book. Who is advising Zimmermann? The kids? That is very unlikely if the Knox County case, like so many other past creationism episodes around the U.S., runs true to form. Even if Mr. Zimmermann has not been working in tandem with a creationist organization so far, some group will now likely beat a path to his door. And if the Louisiana Family Forum runs true to form, they may very well contact Zimmermann since he is using one of their preferred “supplementary materials” as advertised on the LFF website. Indeed, Voss himself may already be directly involved. In response to a statement about the addendum that board member Karen Carson made during the meeting, Zimmermann said, “You’re talking about the addendum that was provided by Dr. Voss?” (emphasis added) Zimmermann’s statement sounds as though Voss actually gave him the addendum. (There is a precedent among LFF creationists for their involving themselves in such issues. LFF operative Darrell White inserted himself [pdf] into the Texas textbook selection controversy on behalf of the Discovery Institute in 2003.)

Here is the Fox News interview, followed by a closing message from the Louisiana Coalition for Science to the Knox County School Board:

To the ladies and gentlemen of the Knox County School Board: Please don’t give in to these creationist demands. When you compromise good science education with creationism, you don’t solve your problem — you exacerbate and prolong it. Sometimes you just have to say no. Stand your ground, as the Louisiana legislature and the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education refused to do when we were faced here with an effort to inject creationism into science education — an effort in which Dr. Voss was integrally involved. Set a different precedent — one that says to your local constituents and to the rest of America that the integrity of authentic science education will be protected at every level in the state of Tennessee. The rest of the country will admire you for it. The scientific community will appreciate your courage. And the supporters of good science education who in 2008-2009 tried and failed to stop Voss and his creationist colleagues in Louisiana will cheer you on.

Serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has been an honor that I have enjoyed since 2004. NCSE is the national clearinghouse for information about and assistance with protecting the teaching of science in public schools, especially the teaching of evolution.

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a not-for-profit, membership organization providing information and resources for schools, parents and concerned citizens working to keep evolution in public school science education. We educate the press and public about the scientific, educational, and legal aspects of the creation and evolution controversy, and supply needed information and advice to defend good science education at local, state, and national levels. Our 4000 members are scientists, teachers, clergy, and citizens with diverse religious affiliations.  (See NCSE’s FAQ here.)

The executive director, Dr. Eugenie Scott, recently gave a talk entitled “Creationism: Still Crazy After All These Years.” Her talk (56:03 minutes) is posted below for the information of LCFS readers. She is speaking about the history of intelligent design creationism as it has developed from the earlier “creation science” movement. At 29:54, she begins talking about Louisiana’s creationist law, the Louisiana  Science Education Act of 2008.

Dr. Scott’s talk is a very good primer on the development of creationism in the United States — all the way to our own state of Louisiana. Readers who want to support the important work that NCSE does can join online.

January 2010 Featured

By Sandhya Bathija

For Barbara Forrest, fighting for church-state separation and quality science education in Louisiana – and the rest of the nation – has become her civic duty.

“Someone once said, ‘knowledge brings responsibility.’ I had the skills to do it, I knew what was going on, I understood it,” Forrest said, describing why she wrote her first book with co-author Paul R. Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, a 2004 work (updated in paperback in 2007) that exposed the theocratic agenda of the Discovery Institute and other creationist organizations. “I don’t want these people running my country and running my kids’ schools.”

Read the rest of this article on AU’s website.

These interviews are posted so that Louisiana citizens will know that what has happened here has captured the attention of our fellow citizens around the country. They support us, but they are dumbfounded that Louisiana has once again passed creationist legislation after having precipitated the U. S. Supreme Court decision, Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) with the passage of the “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act” in 1981.

REMINDER: Readers with information that creationist materials are being used in Louisiana public school science classes should contact the Louisiana Coalition for Science.

In June 2009, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) received dozens of letters from concerned teachers, scientists, and citizens all over Louisiana asking them to reject a creationist-influenced policy governing the implementation of the creationist Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) of 2008. This law, written by the Louisiana Family Forum with assistance and legal advice from the Discovery Institute, permits the use of creationist supplementary materials in public school science classes. Several months later, in January 2009, BESE adopted the policy by which local school districts must implement the LSEA, gutting the prohibitions against teaching creationism that had wisely been written into the policy by the Dept. of Education on the advice of expert science teachers and scientists on the specially constituted Louisiana Science Education Act Advisory Committee. The policy was inserted as §2304, “Science Education,” into Bulletin 741 [doc], the Louisiana Handbook for School Administrators, to instruct parish and local school officials concerning the implementation of the LSEA. First, however, the policy had to be posted in the Louisiana Register for public comment (April 2009 [pdf], pp. 740-741). BESE received public comments in the form of letters from citizens, teachers, and scientists who support teaching science honestly and accurately. BESE ignored their letters, and the policy is now in effect. In January 2010, Louisiana begins the new year burdened with not only a creationist law implemented by a creationist policy, but now also a creationist complaint procedure that will turn every complaint about supplementary materials into a dog and pony show rather than a serious consideration of materials being used in a science class.

In September 2009, BESE adopted a complaint procedure which, like the implementation policy written by the Louisiana Dept. of Education, was also revised to suit the Louisiana Family Forum. Like the policy, the complaint procedure has been posted for public comment in the Louisiana Register (November 2009 [pdf], pp. 2590-91). In response to this posting, letters were sent to BESE by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the National Center for Science Education, and Barbara Forrest. The letter from Dena Sher, AU State Legislative Counsel, is here [pdf]. The letter from NCSE Executive Director Eugenie Scott is here [pdf]. (See NCSE’s article, “NCSE Advises Louisiana,” here.) The letter from Barbara Forrest is here [pdf].

BESE has consistently — and unanimously — supported the Louisiana Family Forum’s creationist revisions to the areas of the LSEA that are under its purview. The board has been fully informed by concerned citizens and organizations that it is doing the bidding of documented creationists. Louisiana citizens should download copies of the above letters, distribute them to their parish school board members, and let the board members know that they do not want creationist supplemental materials adopted for use in their public schools. When some school board or individual science teacher walks through the giant creationist loopholes in the policy and complaint procedure, it will be with the explicit consent of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, who refused to listen to their own staff at the Dept. of Education and to the teachers and scientists who actually do the work of educating students. BESE members cannot say that they did not know what they were doing. We have told them — twice.

LFF director Rev. Gene Mills, whose own children do not attend public schools, attended the meeting but did not speak. Among the creationists testifying was University of Louisiana-Lafayette professor John W. Oller, Jr., who is a member of the “Technical Advisory Board” of the young-earth creationist Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, Texas. He wrote anti-evolution articles for ICR’s magazine, Impact, for almost twenty years. [UPDATE 9/29/09: It gets worse. Further research has revealed that Oller is also involved with Answers in Genesis, the young-earth creationist outfit that operates the infamous "Creation Museum" in Kentucky. He was one of "eleven creation scientists" who attended a meeting there in 2006 and is shown in a photograph at the museum (left rear, in bright blue shirt). This museum has mis-educated thousands of children. See critiques of this facility here and here, along with a statement of concern by scientists (real ones).] Oller’s field is linguistics; he has no credentials in either biology or science education. In December 2002, he participated in the LFF’s effort to have evolution disclaimers inserted into state-approved biology textbooks (Advocate, 12/11/2002), a move that BESE at that time fortunately defeated by a 7-3 vote.

Also testifying at the September 16 meeting was Charles Voss, vice-president of the creationist Origins Resource Association, who attempted in 1994 to persuade the Livingston Parish School Board to adopt a creationist curriculum guide. LFF “consultant” Darrell White, who was also involved in the 2002 disclaimer effort and who promotes creationism on his website, testified, as did Wade Warren, a creationist at Louisiana College who works cooperatively with the Discovery Institute (DI), the creationist think tank in Seattle, WA, that helped write the LSEA. (See DI’s interview with Warren.)

Lenni Ditoro, who testified last year in favor of the LSEA before the Senate Education Committee, also spoke in favor of the changes to the DOE proposal. Ditoro is the former head of the LFF’s “Education Resource Council.” Oklahoma creationist Donald Ewert was brought in from out of state to testify. Ewert is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism“; his name appears on a list of “Intellectual Doubters of Darwinism” at the creationist IDEA Center website. In Oklahoma, Ewert promoted “academic freedom” legislation similar to the LSEA (SSPS audiotape, 9/16/09). He was involved in the creationist effort to influence state science standards in Texas in March 2009 (see below).

In its recommendation to the SSPS Committee, DOE proposed that, when a complaint about supplementary materials is filed, “the DOE will select three reviewers” who “should be experts” capable of determining whether the contested materials meet the necessary criteria for use in public school science classes. A meeting would be held in which both the complainant and the LEA (Local Education Agency, i.e., the school district) and their chosen representatives would present their positions and answer reviewers’ questions. Then, according to the DOE’s proposal, “the DOE will consider the report of the reviewers and make recommendations to BESE.” Further, the proposal specified that “the DOE may elect to support, reject or modify the recommendations of the reviewers or may substitute its own recommendation” to BESE. In short, DOE professionals, exercising their professional judgment, would do their jobs properly and preserve the integrity of Louisiana’s science curriculum.

However, on September 16 the LFF sought and obtained from BESE’s SSPS Committee a substantial change in the complaint procedure that diminishes the influence of DOE’s professional staff. As the revised draft of the complaint procedure now reads, “The DOE shall have the opportunity to appoint two reviewers of the materials. The challenger, the LEA, and the publisher (if any) shall each have the opportunity to appoint one reviewer of the materials.” Furthermore, rather than allowing DOE to consider the reviewers’ reports and then make its recommendation to BESE, the revised draft now requires that “the DOE will forward the reports of the reviewers to BESE,” even though “the DOE may elect to make its own recommendation.”

Consequently, the prerogative of DOE professionals to handle the review process and make a recommendation to BESE has been seriously undermined. There is no guarantee that the three non-DOE reviewers, especially the school district’s and the publisher’s appointees, will have the requisite expertise to evaluate contested materials. A school district that permits the use of creationist materials is likely to choose a creationist reviewer. The publisher of creationist materials is virtually certain to choose a creationist. Moreover, the involvement of the LFF in the response to such complaints is a certainty. Charles Voss has “published” on the Internet creationist supplementary materials that he calls “Textbook Addenda“, which the LFF promotes on its website as among the “many practical alternatives available today to the uncritical teaching of evolutionism.”

BESE’s amended complaint procedure guarantees that a creationist such as Voss himself or his supporters will be allowed to review their own materials. In fact, at the September 16 meeting, John Oller actually spoke in favor of a process that “provides the opportunity for people to produce supplementary materials along the lines that Dr. Voss has done” (audiotape of SSPS Committee meeting, 9/16/09). The same holds for reviewers appointed by publishers of materials such as the Discovery Institute’s stealth creationist textbook, Explore Evolution, and its creationist DVDs, which LFF also promotes on its website. Such reviewers would be manifestly unqualified to render judgments concerning materials for use in Louisiana’s public schools. In short, as BESE’s complaint procedure is now drafted, DOE’s expert reviewers will be in the minority, and DOE staff will not be allowed to independently assess the reviewers’ reports but must instead transfer the reports directly to BESE for evaluation.

Judging from BESE members’ consistent concessions to LFF creationists concerning the implementation of the LSEA, their evaluations will be unlikely to favor scientific expertise and professionalism. On the contrary, BESE’s actions since the passage of the LSEA indicate that the board will rubber-stamp anything that Bayard and the LFF recommend. The approved procedure will enable creationists and their allies to turn every complaint about creationist materials into a dog and pony show that they can manipulate and exploit. There are precedents for this tactic in other states.

In Kansas in 2005, creationists bogged down the revision of state science standards that were sent out for external review by the creationist-dominated Kansas Board of Education. They then staged a “kangaroo court” composed of creationists who testified about the standards before members of the state board. Earlier this year, creationists on the Texas Board of Education appointed their own “experts” (i.e., creationists) to the review panel charged with evaluating the draft of state science standards. At a hearing in March, Ewert presented pro-creationist testimony before the Texas Board of Education, just as he did at the SSPS Committee hearing on September 16 (SSPS Committee audiotape, 9/16/09). His Texas testimony is referenced on the Discovery Institute website by DI staffer Casey Luskin, who traveled to Louisiana to attend the May 21, 2008, House Education Committee hearing on the LSEA. Wade Warren also testified [pdf] before the Texas Board of Education. As a result of these efforts in Texas, creationist code language is now embedded in the standards and will remain for an entire decade until the next revision.

The LFF is using a similar tactic in order to control the policy implementing the LSEA, which they authored with assistance and legal advice from the Discovery Institute. The September 16 concession is the second time that BESE has allowed the LFF to dictate public school science education policy. On January 13, 2009, BESE voted 10-0 to delete vital safeguards against the teaching of creationism from the policy governing Louisiana school administrators in their implementation of the LSEA. In that case, too, the expert recommendations of the DOE were ignored. The very next day, on January 14, Mills told a religious news service that “Louisiana is open for business.”

This creationist-friendly policy is now in effect in Bulletin 741, the Louisiana Handbook for School Administrators. (See Bulletin 741, [doc] August 2009, p. 45). The September 16 draft of the complaint procedure will expand this policy. The passage of the LSEA — and BESE’s subsequent adoption of whatever policies the creationists at the LFF dictate — have damaged Louisiana’s already tarnished image in the rest of the country. In fact, these actions have done tangible harm to the state. In February 2009, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) notified Gov. Jindal that the SICB will hold its 2011 convention in Utah rather than in New Orleans because of his signing the LSEA. SICB will boycott Louisiana as long as the LSEA remains on the books. In August 2008, the president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, which met in New Orleans in April 2009, had already called for scientists to protest such decisions “with our feet and wallets”:

I think we need to see to it that no future meeting of our society will take place in Louisiana as long as that law stands, nor should we hold it in any other state (are you listening, Michigan and Texas?) that passes a similar law. And I call upon the presidents of the American Chemical Society, the American Association of Immunologists, the Society for Neuroscience, and all the other scientific societies around the U.S. and the world, to join me in this action and make clear to the state legislators in Louisiana, the governor of the state, and the mayor and business bureau of New Orleans that this will be the consequence.  (ASBMB Today [pdf], August 2008)

In June, concerned citizens and scientists from across Louisiana sent dozens of letters to BESE asking board members to restore the integrity of the policy that had been gutted in January. Their requests were ignored. Rather than restoring the protections against teaching creationism that the DOE had initially written into the policy, BESE published the policy in Bulletin 741 without the necessary safeguards. With the SSPS Committee’s approval of the pro-creationist complaint procedure on September 16, BESE has once again allowed the LFF to dictate policy governing science education in Louisiana.

Louisiana Coalition for Science is a grassroots group working to protect the teaching of science in Louisiana. On the web at http://lasciencecoalition.org. **Download press release here [pdf].

In “Why Science Standards Are Important to a Strong Science Curriculum and How States Measure Up,” Dr. Louise S. Mead and Anton Mates of the National Center for Science Education survey the science standards of 49 states and the District of Columbia. (Download the pdf here. Html text is here.) Mead and Mates point out that science standards are frequent targets of creationist attacks: “[T]here is no other arena in which the religious controversy surrounding evolution plays out to such a detrimental degree as in the generation of poor science standards.” Louisiana’s standards were given a grade of C in the well-known 2000 study conducted by Lawrence Lerner under the auspices of the Thomas Fordham Institute, Good Science, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States. (Paul R. Gross led a 2005 update of the Lerner study; Gross’s survey, using a slightly different grading scale than Lerner’s, awarded Louisiana a “B.”)

Science standards are the most important safeguards of quality science education in each state. As Lerner said in his 2000 study, “They are meant to serve as the frame to which everything else is attached, the desired outcome that drives countless other decisions about how best to attain it. If a state’s standards are unsatisfactory, some of its other reform efforts are apt to be less likely to succeed, maybe even futile.” Louisiana’s standards, which both the Lerner and the Mead-Mates studies judged to be adequate, have now been undermined by the Louisiana Science Education Act, which permits teachers to introduce creationist critiques of evolution into public school science classes. Moreover, Mead and Mates point out, the policy that the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) adopted to implement the law made matters even worse.

In the case of Louisiana, there is certainly reason to think that . . . evolution will be invidiously singled out for attention and that creationist critiques of evolution will be used. When Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted a policy about what types of supplementary classroom materials will, and will not, be allowable under the new law, a draft provision that ‘materials that teach creationism or intelligent design… shall be prohibited from use in science class’ was deleted. [See the LCFS post here.]

As if that were not bad enough, the LSEA’s permitting the use of creationist “supplementary” textbooks in addition to state-approved textbooks effectively functions as a disclaimer of the reliability of the state-approved textbooks, which Mead and Mates also point out. Here is Mead and Mates’s summary of Louisiana’s situation:

The coverage of evolution in Louisiana’s state science standards is actually adequate and would have received a grade of C but for the Louisiana Science Education Act. Following the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) was ordered to establish science education guidelines consonant with this act. These guidelines, passed in January 2009, state that BESE is to provide ‘support and guidance of teachers regarding effective ways to understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review concepts, laws, principles, and scientific theories.’ To this end, teachers are permitted to use ‘supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials,’ save for those prohibited by BESE after a lengthy and onerous review process. The Louisiana Department of Education proposed that these guidelines forbid ‘materials that teach creationism or intelligent design or that advance the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind,’ but BESE removed this caveat after objections by creationist organizations and the sponsor of the LSEA [Senator Ben Nevers]. The brief but adequate treatment of evolution in the state science standards is completely undermined by the LSEA, and the standards now score an F.

Louisiana is not the only state to flunk this evaluation. We are in the company of Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. But we are the only state that flunked for passing legislation to give teachers the “academic freedom” to mislead children about evolution and the true nature of science.