PUBLIC TESTIMONY of John A. Kingman, January 21, 2009

As I mentioned last time, the Discovery Institute is pushing a new anti-evolution book called Explore Evolution. Two of the co-authors of the book, Stephen Meyer, of the DI, and Dr. Ralph Seelke, were invited to join your review panel.

Most of what I have to say can be found on the website TeachThemScience.org. This site is a great resource for helping sort out the various allegations of weaknesses with evolution. I would just like to point out that most of these allegations have been around for a long long time and have in no way invalidated evolutionary science. Please refer to TeachThemScience.org, for the explanations as to why these alleged weaknesses and others are not valid and giving them credence would damage our children's science education.

So what's wrong with Explore Evolution?

Previous anti-evolution textbooks have directly advocated creationism, Creation Science, or Intelligent Design (ID). Court cases have determined that all of these are still creationism, with Kitzmiller v. Dover deciding this for ID in 2005. Creationism evolves fast, however, and Explore Evolution was published in 2007 to get around all these court cases. Explore Evolution is the first anti-evolution textbook to just teach the false weaknesses with evolution without directly advocating for creationism. Public schools that use this book are inviting the next court case.

Explore Evolution systematically undermines science education. To see this, consider four example alleged weaknesses taken from the book. At TeachThemSience.org you will see that the alleged weaknesses with evolution are false rhetorical arguments. To teach from this book is to teach students to think unscientifically.

• Claim: There aren't enough transitional fossils
  With this claim, the authors of Explore Evolution present false information about evolution, make a false analogy to this false information, and then unscientifically claim to deduce a fact about the real world from this false analogy. Do we really want this “weakness” to be a model of scientific reasoning for students to emulate? I hope not!
• Claim: Haeckel faked his drawings, so evo-devo is wrong
  This alleged weakness teaches students that it's legitimate to respond to century-old claims without first doing any research about what might have transpired in the intervening decades. It also teaches students to think that one mistake anywhere in science undermines all of the science forever after. It teaches students that scientific theories are fragilely dependent on every bit ever offered as evidence for the theory. Nonsense!
• Claim: Macroevolution isn't microevolution writ large
  The a arguments presented by Explore Evolution in this section teach students to appeal to intuition at the expense of logic and evidence. A false analogy is presentd having nothing to do with evolution, and teaching it teaches students that rhetorical arguments constitute valid scientific reasoning.
• Claim: Evolution cannot produce new information
  This argument is based on a false assumption: that there is no source of information outside of natural selection. Mutation is a significant source of new information in evolution, but Explore Evolution fails to mention it in this chapter because doing so would undermine the argument. Even though the next chapter does talk about mutation as a claimed source of “evolutionary novelty,” students are deceived by not mentioning it in a chapter that dedicates itself to arguing for an alleged weakness that the existence of mutations completely invalidates. After reading this argument and then seeing mutation mentioned as a source of information later in the book, students learn by example that an argument in science cites only supporting evidence and ignores contrary evidence. This book teaches students that science is more about convincing people to believe something than about meticulously and honestly teasing answers out of the world, making sure all facts are accounted for.

Keep the alleged weaknesses out of the science standards and keep Explore Evolution out of schools.

Don't be the weakest link, for the sake of the children of Texas.

Keep Texas science education STRONG!

Thank you.