It's been a while since I've linked to the Botany Photo of the Day even though I read it all the time.
Jerry Coyne has discovered that a course at Ball State University (Indiana) teaches science from a viewpoint that's sympathetic to Intelligent Design Creationism [“Science” course at Ball State University sneaks in religion]. It looks like a really bad course and I'm glad that it's getting a lot of negative publicity. It looks like the instructor is advocating Intelligent Design Creationism.
But that's not the only troubling thing about Jerry Coyne's post and the comments it has stimulated. Jerry thinks that it is unconstitutional (i.e. illegal) for a university professor to be advocating religion in a publicly-funded university. He says,Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana, is a public university (i.e., part of the state university system). As such, it must abide by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has been interpreted as disallowing religious viewpoints (or religiously based theories) in public-school science classes. It is of course kosher to teach courses on the history of religion, or on the relationship between science and religion, but those must not pretend to be “science” courses, and must present balanced views—they can’t push a particular religious viewpoint.Is he right? Does the US Constitution really specify that you can't advocate a religious viewpoint in a university classroom?
But it’s come to my attention that a science course at Ball State University—actually two courses, because it seems to be cross-listed—is little more than a course in accommodationism and Christian religion, with very little science. It’s my firm opinion that teaching this course at a state university not only violates the First Amendment, but cheats the students by subjecting them to religious proselytizing when they’re trying to learn science.
1. There are some limitations, but let's not quibble over details. Teaching that Michael Behe, Ken Miller, Francis Collins, and Bill Dembski might be right don't qualify as exceptions.
Sixty years ago on this day, Nature published three back-to-back papers on the structure of DNA. It was a momentous day for science. Here's how Horace Judson describes it in The Eighth Day of Creations (pp. 154-155)...The letter to Nature appeared in the April 25 issue. [It was submitted on April 2—LAM] To those of its readers who were close to the questions, and who had not already heard the news, the letter must come off like a string of depth charges in a column sea. "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest," the letter began; at the end, "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." That last sentence has been called one of the most coy statements in the literature of science. According to Watson, Crick wrote it. Wilkins's paper followed, signed also by two of his associates at King's College, A. R. Stokes and H. R. Wilson. It was a restatement of helical diffraction theory, and sprang to life and significance only in the last paragraphs, where Wilkins briefly reported that his x-ray diffraction studies of intact sperm heads and bacteriophage—both, of course, containing a high proportion of DNA—gave patterns that suggested that DNA in living creatures has a helical structure similar to the model just proposed. The note by Franklin and Gosling came next. It was a revision and extension of their draft from the middle of March, in the light of the model. It presented the crucial diffraction photo structure B and analyze that and the other experimental evidence to show—with curt authority—that Franklin's data were compatible with Watson and Crick's structure.The three papers are ....
"We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."
"The biological significance of a two-chain nucleic acid unit has been noted (see preceding communication). The evidence that the helical structure discussed above does, in fact, exist in intact biological systems is briefly as follows: ..."
Franklin, R. and Gosling, R.G. (1953) Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate. Nature 171:740-741. [See: The Franklin & Gosling Nature paper (1953)] [PDF]"Thus, while we do not attempt to offer a complete interpretation of the fibre-diagram of structure B, we may state the following conclusions. The structure is probably helical. The phosphate groups lie on the outside of the structural unit, on a helix of diameter about 20 Å. The structural unit probably consists of two co-axial molecules which are not equally spaced along the fiber axis, their mutual displacement being such as to account for the variation of observed intensities of the innermost maxima on the layer lines; if one molecule is displaced from the other by about three-eights of the fibre-axis period, this would account for the absence of the fourth layer line maxima and the weakness of the sixth. Thus, our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and crick in the preceding communication."
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| The Shadow by Michael J. Kaluta |
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