http://www.discovery.org/a/3536 Testimony of Ralph W. Seelke, Ph.D., before the Education Committee of the Michigan House of Representatives June 7, 2006 I hold a doctorate in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota, where my thesis work was in microbial genetics. By training, and perhaps by nature, I am an experimentalist: I am most assured as to the truth of a matter, when it can be demonstrated experimentally. I am currently a Professor of Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. UW-Superior is a small, public liberal arts university in northwestern Wisconsin, and my primary duties there involve teaching students about the wonders of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Microbiology. Since 2000, UW-Superior has also been the place where I have pursued my research passion, which is answering a very simple, but important question: What can evolution REALLY do??? Not, what we think it can do, or what we infer it can do from the fossil record or from DNA sequence analysis, but what it can REALLY do, when given a specific evolutionary task, trillions of organisms to address that task and/or thousands of generations in which to evolve. I have been pursuing this research with the help of funding from the Merck Foundation and also with the help of a sabbatical at Stanford University that I took during 2004. It is partly on the basis of my experience as an evolution researcher that I come before you today. While this bill specifically mentions both global warming and the theory of evolution, my comments will be directed towards my support for critical analysis of evolution. However, I would support critical analysis of global warming as well, simply on the basis that this approach will also produce a more informed citizenry. Why do I think that having students critically analyze evolution is a good idea? First of all, in any area where there is considerable disagreement, a sound teaching strategy is to teach the controversy: allow the students to examine both the strengths and weaknesses of arguments for both sides, and in so doing make up their own minds about the subject. There is a term used when we only want student to learn one side of a story. It is called indoctrination, not education. In the case of the theory of evolution, it is often taught as if there is no disagreement about the theory, or that any disagreement was due to ideology, not science. One text that I have used said, in effect that Darwin's theory was SO convincing that it left no room for reasonable scientific doubt. Thus, those who questioned Darwin were either unreasonable or unscientific. In fact, over 600 Ph.D. scientists have signed "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism", expressing public skepticism about the adequacy of evolutionary theory to explain the astonishing diversity and complexity of life as we know it- in other words, for evolution to truly "deliver the goods". (This is only part of his testimoney. I highlighted part of the last sentence in this quote. Prairie)
I read that recently, but am not sure where. Maybe on here, when we were discussing with the guy with the PhD in Biology about what "real" science was....?
