The Nature of the Arguments for Creationism,Intelligent Design,and Evolution

Seventy-two Internet documents promoting creationism, intelligent design (I.D.), or evolution were selected for analysis. The primary goal of each of the 72 documents was to present arguments for creationism, I.D., or evolution. We first identified all arguments in these documents. Each argument was then coded in terms of both argument type (appeal to authority, appeal to empirical evidence, appeal to reason, etc.) and argument topic (age of earth, mechanism of descent with modification, etc.). We then provided a quantitative summary of each argument type and topic for each of the three positions. Three clear patterns were revealed by the data. First, websites promoting evolution were characterized by a narrow focus on appeals to empirical evidence, whereas websites promoting creationism and I.D. were quite heterogeneous in regards to argument type. Second, websites promoting evolution relied primarily on a small number of empirical examples (e.g., fossils, biogeography, homology, etc.), while websites promoting creationism and I.D. used a far greater range of arguments. Finally, websites promoting evolution were narrowly focused on the topic of descent with modification. In contrast, websites promoting creationism tackled a broad range of topics, while websites promoting I.D. were narrowly focused on the issue of the existence of God. The current study provides a quantitative summary of a systematic content analysis of argument type and topic across a large number of frequently accessed websites dealing with origins. The analysis we have used may prove fruitful in identifying and understanding argumentation trends in scientific writing and pseudo-scientific writing.     

Should Intelligent Design be Taught in Public School Science Classrooms?

A variety of different arguments have been offered for teaching “both sides” of the evolution/ID debate in public schools. This article reviews five of the most common types of arguments advanced by proponents of Intelligent Design and demonstrates how and why they are founded on confusion and misunderstanding. It argues on behalf of teaching evolution, and relegating discussion of ID to philosophy or history courses.     

The Relationships Between Paranormal Belief, Creationism, Intelligent Design and Evolution at Secondary Schools in Vienna (Austria)

The present study is the first to investigate the relationships between a multiple set of paranormal beliefs and the acceptance of evolution, creationism, and intelligent design, respectively, in Europe. Using a questionnaire, 2,129 students at secondary schools in Vienna (Austria) answered the 26 statements of the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (R-PBS) and three statements about naturalistic evolution, creationism and intelligent design (ID). The investigated Austrian students showed an average R-PBS score of 82.08, more than 50% of them agreed with naturalistic evolution, 28% with creationism, and more than a third agreed with ID, the latter two closely correlated with each other. Females generally showed higher belief scores in the paranormal, creationism and ID. The agreement with naturalistic evolution correlated negatively with religious belief, but not with other paranormal beliefs, whereas the two non-scientific alternatives to evolution significantly correlated with both traditional and paranormal beliefs. Religious belief showed a significant positive correlation with other paranormal beliefs. All subscales of paranormal belief decreased during the eight grades of secondary school, as did acceptance of creationism and ID. However, the acceptance of naturalistic evolution did not correlate with age or grade. Possible reasons and implications for science education and the biology curriculum at Austrian secondary schools are discussed.     

Intelligent Design in the Public School Science Classroom

The ongoing battle to insert intelligent causes into the science classrooms has been met with political approval and scientific rejection. Administrators in the United States need to be aware of the law related to creationism and intelligent design in order to lead in local curricular battles. Although unlikely to appease the ID proponents, there is a purpose for ID in the classroom. ID can be used to illustrate the foundational epistemological structure of science, which requires natural explanations and empirical data as opposed to revelation, tradition, and authority.     

基于Cookie技术的隐私侵权裁判立场之再检视

对于Cookie信息的商业利用,网络服务商应充分考量信息内容的敏感度,确保网络用户享有充分的选择自由。以我国Cookie技术与隐私权纠纷第一案为例,重新审视精准广告推送一般不构成隐私侵权的裁判立场,对于个人网络痕迹不能一概采取“默示许可”,而“严重损害后果”之认定亦应从宽。在规制路径的设计上,有必要厘清隐私和个人信息的界限,并根据数据的属性和用途划分隐私风险的层级,基于具体信息利用场景进行提示义务的配置和治理框架的制定。     

高职扩招:政策落地、面临问题、对策建议——以浙江省为例

国务院出台高职扩招政策后,浙江省教育厅先后出台两个扩招文件,在政策上保障了高职百万扩招的落地。分析浙江省扩招计划,公办学校校均扩招人数位列首位,“双高”建设院校、民办高职扩招校均数较少。扩招面临的困惑主要是“质量扩招”的疑惑、“人才培养”的困惑、“合作办学”的挑战、“师资短缺”的应对、“扩招条件”的困难。在下一步扩招中要建立长效机制,解决扩招的生源问题,探索扩招的培养模式。     

Philosophy in the science classroom: How should biology teachers explain the relationship between science and religion to students?

This review explores Thomas Lessl’s “Demarcation as a classroom response to creationism: A critical examination of the National Academy of Science’s Science, Evolution, and Creationism (2008).” Lessl’s work examines philosophical debates about the relationship between science and religion from the perspective of communication dynamics between science teachers and audiences skeptical about evolution. His essay raises a number of important points that might help educators craft statements that are less likely to alienate religious students and to entrench any pre-existing opposition to evolutionary science. However, in this review, I raise a number of criticisms of Lessl’s account of the problems with the approach taken by the National Academy of Science. I argue that many of the criticisms of NAS’s approach to demarcation are not well-supported, and even were they to be strong criticisms, they do not justify skepticism toward evolution or science in general. Ultimately, I argue that addressing Lessl’s concerns means creating space for more intellectually rigorous and satisfying discussions of science and religion, but this is not appropriate in a biology classroom that merely wishes to introduce evolution. Addressing these concerns requires making more space for philosophy in the curriculum.

     

Creationism as a Misconception: Socio-cognitive conflict in the teaching of evolution

This position paper argues that students' understanding and acceptance of evolution may be supported, rather than hindered, by classroom discussion of creationism. Parallels are drawn between creationism and other scientific misconceptions, both of the scientific community in the past and of students in the present. Science teachers frequently handle their students' misconceptions as they arise by offering appropriate socio-cognitive conflict, which highlights reasons to disbelieve one idea and to believe another. It is argued that this way of working, rather than outlawing discussion, is more scientific and more honest. Scientific truth does not win the day by attempting to deny its opponents a voice but by engaging them with evidence. Teachers can be confident that evolution has nothing to fear from a free and frank discussion in which claims can be rebutted with evidence. Such an approach is accessible to children of all ages and is ultimately more likely to drive out pre-scientific superstitions. It also models the scientific process more authentically and develops students' ability to think critically.     

释简牍中的“莫食”

"莫食"是秦汉简中比较常见的时称,过去有不少出土文献将此时称读为"暮食",作为下午的时称看待。通过本文梳理可知,莫食应确定为上午时称,并表示"不食"之意,含义和时间范围大致相当于出土文献中的廷食、食坐。秦汉出土材料显示,至少在西汉中期仍然是一日两餐,并无材料能明确证明,此时已经开始出现早中晚一日三餐制。     

移动互联网垄断协议界定之疑难问题——以“苹果电子书定价垄断”一案为例

移动互联网产业是互联网产业发展的结果,是移动终端与互联网相互融合的高级阶段。一方面,与传统互联网市场相比。其技术更新、行业动态性更强,且具有传统互联网产业所不具有的相对封闭性;另一方面,新的“代销模式”取代旧的“批发模式”,MFN合同条款频繁出现,使得移动互联网垄断协议的界定变得吏为复杂。文章以“苹果电子书定价垄断”一案为切入点,探讨界定苹果公司行为存在的疑难问题,以期通过寻求垄断协议以外的规制途径——优势地位滥用的认定,为应对移动互联网市场动态发展中出现的问题提供解决思路。     

《三遂平妖传》介词“于”的句法语义特征考察

《三遂平妖传》作为我国小说史上第一部神魔小说,具有重要地位,又因其口语化强的特点,成为研究汉语的重要文献。本文选取中《三遂平妖传》介词“于”作为切入点,通过计量研究分析其用法,在了解介词“于”的起源与发展的基础上,对介词“于”做共时和历时比较。     

Groundworks for a Pedagogy of Evolutionary Love Ethics: Archetypes of Moral Imagination in the Pragmatisms of Peirce and Addams

In this essay, Russell G. Moses argues that Charles Sanders Peirce's article “Evolutionary Love” establishes a general normative framework for a logic of evolutionary, progressive imagination that can be used to elucidate an evolutionary continuity between the normative works of Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Alain Locke. This exercise contributes to an understanding of pragmatism as a philosophy that seizes insights from evolution in order to normatively reconstruct dynamic meanings of truth, reality, ethics, politics, and art. In a dynamic model of progressive evolution — one homologous to the Golden Rule of “love your neighbor” — we find a normative cosmology that animates the moral imagination of philosophy toward what Addams called “democracy and social ethics.” Moses concludes that in the Peircean model, together with subsequent developments, we may ultimately apprehend that evolution suggests a general form of development that may be hypothesized as a worthy normative guide for universal progressive education.     

From Dual-mode to Flexible Delivery; Paradoxical Transitions in Australian Open and Distance Education

Distance education has been a fundamental element of Australian education from early in the 20th century. The prevailing practice in higher education has been to have dual-mode organizations. This has led to some paradoxes unfolding in the recent history of Australian distance education that are grounded in the history and politics of the development of educational institutions and systems. Dual-mode institutions developed in Australia only partly because they suited the geographical and demographic circumstances of a new and developing nation. Rather, distance education often was added as a means of supporting the viability of small, on-campus institutions that had been established for party political expediency in favored rural towns. Attempts by governments in recent years to “rationalize” distance education provision have produced a paradoxical position where “distance education” and “dual-mode” are less frequently used terms, and yet the practices and systems embedded in both terms have flourished under the guise of “flexible delivery.” “Flexible delivery” brings with it some new connotations and practices that reflect the domination of economic rationalist ideologies.     

Darwinian Controversies: An Historiographical Recounting

This essay reviews key controversies in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: the Wilberforce-Huxley debate in 1860, early twentieth-century debates about the heritability of acquired characteristics and the consistency of Mendelian genetics with natural selection; the 1925 Scopes trial about teaching evolution; tensions about race, culture, and eugenics at the 1959 centenary celebration Darwin’s Origin of Species; adaptationism and its critics in the Sociobiology debate of 1970s and, more recently, Evolutionary Psychology; and current disputes about Intelligent Design. These controversies, I argue, are etched into public memory because they occur at the emotionally charged boundaries between public-political, technical-scientific, and personal-religious spheres of discourse. Over most of them falls the shadow of eugenics. The main lesson is that the history of Darwinism cannot be told except by showing the mutual influence of the different norms of discourse that obtain in the personal, technical, and public spheres. Nor can evolutionary biology successfully be taught to citizens and citizens-to-be until the fractious intersections between spheres of discourse have been made explicit. In the course of showing why, I take rival evolutionary approaches to be dynamical historical research traditions rather than static theories. Accordingly, I distinguish Darwin’s version of Darwinism from its later transformations. I pay special attention to the role Darwin assigned to development in evolution, which was marginalized by twentieth-century population genetical Darwinism, but has recently resurfaced in new forms. I also show how the disputed phrases “survival of the fittest” and “social Darwinism” have shaped personal anxieties about “Darwinism,” have provoked public opposition to teaching evolution in public schools, and have cast a shadow over efforts to effectively communicate to the public largely successful technical efforts to make evolutionary inquiry into a science.     

Student Visual Communication of Evolution

Despite growing recognition of the importance of visual representations to science education, previous research has given attention mostly to verbal modalities of evolution instruction. Visual aspects of classroom learning of evolution are yet to be systematically examined by science educators. The present study attends to this issue by exploring the types of evolutionary imagery deployed by secondary students. Our visual design analysis revealed that students resorted to two larger categories of images when visually communicating evolution: spatial metaphors (images that provided a spatio-temporal account of human evolution as a metaphorical “walk” across time and space) and symbolic representations (“icons of evolution” such as personal portraits of Charles Darwin that simply evoked evolutionary theory rather than metaphorically conveying its conceptual contents). It is argued that students need opportunities to collaboratively critique evolutionary imagery and to extend their visual perception of evolution beyond dominant images.     

High school biology evolution learning experiences in a rural context: a case of and for cultural border crossing

Although the concept of “rural” is difficult to define, rural science education provides the possibility for learning centered upon a strong connection to the local community. Rural American adolescents tend to be more religious than their urban counterparts and less accepting of evolution than their non-rural peers. Because the status and perception of evolutionary theory may be very different within the students’ lifeworlds and the subcultures of the science classroom and science itself, a cultural border crossing metaphor can be applied to evolution teaching and learning. This study examines how a teacher may serve as a cultural border crossing tour guide for students at a rural high school as they explore the concept of biological evolution in their high school biology class. Data collection entailed two formal teacher interviews, field note observations of two biology class periods each day for 16 days during the Evolution unit, individual interviews with 14 students, student evolution acceptance surveys, student evolution content tests, and classroom artifacts. The major findings center upon three themes regarding how this teacher and these students had largely positive evolution learning experiences even as some students continued to reject evolution. First, the teacher strategically positioned himself in two ways: using his unique “local” trusted position in the community and school and taking a position in which he did not personally represent science by instead consistently teaching evolution “according to scientists.” Second, his instruction honored local “rural” funds of knowledge with respect to local knowledge of nature and by treating students’ religious knowledge as a form of local expertise about one set of answers to questions also addressed by evolution. Third, the teacher served as a border crossing “tour guide” by helping students identify how the culture of science and the culture of their lifeworlds may differ with respect to evolutionary theory. Students negotiated the cultural borders for learning evolution in several ways, and different types of border crossings are described. The students respected the teacher’s apparent neutrality, sensitivity toward multiple positions, explicit attention to religion/evolution, and transparency of purposes for teaching evolution. These findings add to the current literature on rural science education by highlighting local funds of knowledge for evolution learning and how rural teachers may help students navigate seemingly hazardous scientific topics. The study’s findings also add to the current evolution education literature by examining how students’ religious perspectives may be respected as a form of expertise about questions of origins by allowing students to examine similarities and differences between scientific and religious approaches to questions of biological origins and change.     

Evolution and personal religious belief: Christian university biology‐related majors' search for reconciliation

The goal of this study was to explore Christian biology‐related majors' perceptions of conflicts between evolution and their religious beliefs. This naturalistic study utilized a case study design of 15 undergraduate biology‐related majors at or recent biology‐related graduates from a mid‐western Christian university. The broad sources of data were interviews, course documents, and observations. Outcomes indicate that most participants were raised to believe in creationism, but came to accept evolution through evaluating evidence for evolution, negotiating the literalness of Genesis, recognizing evolution as a non‐salvation issue, and observing professors as Christian role models who accept evolution. This study lends heuristic insight to researchers and educators seeking to understand the complex processes by which Christian biology‐related majors approach learning about evolution. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 1026–1049, 2011     

An Investigation of Pre-service Middle School Mathematics Teachers’ Ability to Conduct Valid Proofs,Methods Used,and Reasons for Invalid Arguments

The purposes of this study are to investigate Turkish pre-service middle school mathematics teachers’ ability in conducting valid proofs for statements regarding numbers and algebra in terms of their year of enrollment in a teacher education program, to determine the proof methods used in their valid proofs, and to examine the reasons for their invalid arguments. A proof questionnaire containing three proof statements was administered to 115 pre-service middle school mathematics teachers in a large state university in Ankara, Turkey. The results showed that more than half of the pre-service teachers were able to conduct valid proofs for the given statements. In terms of year levels, it was seen that the seniors were the least successful group in conducting valid proofs for each statement. When pre-service teachers’ valid proofs were analyzed, it was concluded that mathematical induction and direct proof were the mostly used methods for the given statements. When pre-service teachers’ invalid arguments were analyzed, it was seen that “inserting numbers to verify the given statement” and “rewriting the givens in the statement” were the common reasons for stating invalid arguments.     

Evolutionary biology today

One of the most common questions that people get asked is “What do you do?”. When I say that I am an evolutionary biologist, most people respond with “Oh, so you study fossils”. My response to this is to say that I do not work with fossils, and that I am an evolutionary geneticist. This clarification typically results in the person saying “Oh, so you work with DNA.” By the time I have said that I do not actually work with DNA either, the person who asked the question begins to appear somewhat confused. It seems that many people do not really have a clear idea of what evolutionary biologists today do, the kinds of questions they seek to answer, and the approaches and methodologies they use. Of course, many evolutionary biologists do work with fossils or DNA, or both, but there are also large numbers of researchers in evolution whose work does not fit into these stereotypes. In the first part of this series, we looked at the domain of evolutionary biology. In this article, we shall look at some of the sub-disciplines of evolution, embodying slightly different questions, techniques and emphases.