Stephanie Sandifer's Library tagged education →  View Popular

2:33 - We now turn to Earth and Space Science. Bob Craig has a single sheet with five different amendments. These are recommended by the ESS TEKS-writing panel. They are available on the TCS website in the ESS Report linked there. Barbara Cargill mentioned me by name and mistakenly said that I wrote the amendments. In fact, the amendments were written by the eight members of the ESS panel using email discussion. Terri Leo also complained that she hasn't seen these amendments. This is false, too. The SB members got these twice by email before the meeting and in paper form yesterday when Kyle Lewellen testified. He handed out the ESS Final Report on the ESS amendments. This document contained these amendments. Cargill is taking the lead to oppose these amendments, which is understandable since she was responsible for getting the original bad amendments passed in January.

The five amendments are now being voted upon. The first four are minor changes, but the last is of major importance since what Cargill got passed is very unscientific. The first one failed 6-8 with Agosto voting with the right wing YEC Republicans. The second one failed 7-7. Mavis Knight is having trouble getting the amendments since she is in Dallas. She needs to have them faxed to her. Cargill wants the standards to suggest humility in what scientists know. She says her wording is better and suggests humility better. The third one failed 7-7. Now Terri Leo is moving an amendment to change "sources of heat" to "thermal energy sources" that passed without objection. The fourth ESS/Craig amendment passed without objection.

Now we come to standard 8A, which is grossly unscientific since it suggests that there is fossil evidence against universal common descent. This is doubly wrong, since fossils do not provide evidence for or against common descent and there is no other evidence against common descent. The amendment failed 6-8, with Agosto voting No with the seven YEC religious right Republicans.

Barbara Cargill now has some more nasty amendments to ESS. As usual, she is springing them on the SBOE members and public at the last minute without explanation and expert evaluation. She will need a majority vote to get these passed. Will Agosto give the Republicans the vote they need to further damage ESS? I can't get a copy of these amendments right now. However, the first one she wants is to strike the current standard for the Big Bang and remove the 14 billion year old age from it. She is promoting a Young Earth Creationist view, of course. Many times in the past the SBOE has changed standards that mention millions and billions of years to simple "a long time ago." She wants to substitute a standard from Astronomy that simply adds, "add current theories of the evolution of the universe including estimates for the age of the universe" to the Big Bang standard 4A. Cargill's amendment to strip a very ancient number of years one that is equivocal about the age of the universe passed 11-3, with only Knight, Miller, and Nunez voting No. So the SBOE holds true to its wonderful tradition of stripping any date older than 10,000 years from science standards!

Cargill has a second amendment to ESS. I still do not have a copy of her amendments. She is keeping them hidden from the public, and she and Leo had the gall to complain that they only just now got the ESS amendments of the ESS panel that Craig presented, when in fact they got them several times, including on paper on Wednesday. Her motion is to add "thought to have occurred" to 6A about the formation of the solar system. This absurd amendment passed 10-4.

I now have a copy of the amendments. The third one is not bad: it substitutes different language for the radiometric dating standard 7B that simply re-arranges the words in a not-harmful way. It passed 8-6.

Cargill's fourth and last ESS amendment adds the words "given the complexity of living systems" to the conclusion of the origin of life standard 13F. This passed 9-5 with Agosto and one other voting with the Republicans. I guess I should be grateful that Cargill didn't just delete the entire origin of life standard.