PUBLIC TESTIMONY

John A. Kingman

November 19, 2008

Texas State Board of Education, Full Committee

As you know, in July, the Governor's Competitiveness Council reported that Texas needs strong science standards for the state to be competitive in the coming years.(1) I put it to you that you have a chance to achieve that goal right now. The new science TEKS could be the strongest yet.

Texas needs strong science standards.

The children deserve a solid educational base at every level. But I am seriously displeased that there is so much meddling in our educational process by outsiders. We're seeing interlopers from Seattle, Washington, trying to mess with our standards. Why? Because they are part of a PR and marketing organization called the Discovery Institute (DI). These people don't care about our children's science education, they only care about their ideology and their pocketbooks.

The DI has tried to have its way with school boards in Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. They got their fingers burned and cost the taxpayers of Dover, Pennsylvania, a million dollars in the Dover Area School Board trial in 2005. Now they're here to “help” you … at your request.

You should be afraid. Their so-called experts are bogus. Michael Behe, for example, probably the most high profile of their experts, testified under oath in the Dover trial that by his definition astrology would be a scientific theory! As alarming as this is, it follows from the DI's Wedge document, since the DI wants to eliminate science's focus on natural causes.

So now the DI has dumped the textbook Of Pandas and People and is deemphasizing its “ID theory.” However, they're recycling many of the same old arguments and pushing a new book.

The new book they want people to use is called Explore Evolution. It is an affront to science and science education, but, as the US distributors of the book, they stand to make millions of dollars on sales of the book. Two of the co-authors of the book, by the way, happen to be Stephen Meyer and Ralph Seelke.

You should check out the serious reviews of Exploring Evolution, by the way. Here are just a couple points of what a review by a biologist(2) had to say:

• The text of Explore Evolution … avoids any mention of intelligent design or creationism, but anyone familiar with the literature of these movements will recognize that their ideas pervade Explore Evolution. These go beyond the obsessive focus on problems with the fossil record and the repackaging of special creation.
• Collectively, these problems ensure that anyone using [Explore Evolution …] will leave their students with a picture of modern biology that is essentially unrelated to the way that science is actually practiced within the biological science community. More generally, the logical inconsistencies will leave students bewildered about the nature of scientific reasoning.

In conclusion, there has been a lot of discussion about the “weaknesses” here today, but I'd like to emphasize that if the science standards are watered down we will have weak standards.

Keep the “weaknesses” and “limitations” out of the science standards.

Don't be the weakest link.

Keep Texas science education STRONG!

Thank you.