A Baton Rouge native who last year led the fight the repeal the creationist-friendly Louisiana Science Education Act — an effort he is again spearheading in this year’s legislative session — is one of two recipients of this year’s Friend of Darwin award from the National Center for Science Education.
Zach Kopplin, now a freshman at Rice University, shares this year’s distinction with Judy Scotchmoor, assistant director for education and public programs at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Kopplin was a senior at Baton Rouge Magnet High last year when his attempt to repeal the LSEA died in committee. State Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, is once again sponsoring the legislation that would repeal the 2008 act. Seventy-five Nobel laureates in the sciences have endorsed Kopplin’s effort.
According to the NCSE, the “Friend of Darwin award is presented annually to a select few whose efforts to support NCSE and advance its goal of defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools have been truly outstanding.” Recent recipients include Tammy Kitzmiller — plus six fellow plaintiffs — the namesake for “Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover Area School District,” the watershed 2004 federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania that tied Intelligent Design to creationism and prohibited instruction of the topic in public school science classrooms.
Read more about the LSEA here: http://www.theind.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10018:lsea-repeal-bill-filed&catid=84:indreporter&Itemid=93
For more on the Kopplin’s national accolade, go here: http://ncse.com/news/2012/03/friend-darwin-awards-2012-007242
MAY 24 Blogger Robert Mann posts this entry about the Baton Rouge Chamber's recent report on Louisiana's higher education system. It's critical to economic development, and yet our system is facing a "funding crisis" with no way to resolve it, the report says. The Chamber says control of tuition and fees must be returned to the higher ed governing boards.
MAY 24 Here's a NBC33 story about Tyrann Mathieu. He has signed with the Arizona Cardinals, inking a $3 million, four-year deal. He gets a signing bonus of $265K, but gets another, larger bonus if he doesn't get cut from the team for doing drugs. The deal reportedly includes mandatory tests and meetings for the player.
MAY 24 Jarvis DeBerry posts here about the redonkulus rhetoric that would have us believe NOLA is a safe city with a murder problem. Maybe the city's crime stats don't compare with its murder stats because you can't manipulate a murder, he says: a dead body's a dead body. It just doesn't make sense, he says, and his readers agree: a poll asks if they believe the city is safe, and more than 90 percent say no.
MAY 24 Jindal administration officials announced Thursday that the privatization of public health care is going to cost a lot more than they budgeted for, the Advocate reports here. "I'm so surprised," said no one. Anywhere. The cost they're projecting now is more than $1 billion - a lot more than the $626 million budgeted for it. And, it's more than it cost the state to operate those hospitals. So why are we doing this again?
MAY 24 Blogger CB Forgotston ridicules the recent PR campaign by the state GOP in the wake of a legislative auditor's request to both major parties. The GOP (apparently unaware that the Dems got the same request) started yammering about being targeted because it had "killed" a tax increase. CB finds that laughable, but it's also pretty funny that the GOP was comparing this episode to the IRS scandal (Because the President has so much to do with our state auditor. Right?).
MAY 24 Politico details some recent fund-raising efforts by Sen. David Vitter, which have raised the question of his future political plans. This time, it is a $5,000 per head "bayou weekend" that includes "Cajun cooking" and an all-caps "alligator hunt," the story reports. Funds raised go to a super PAC that can spend money to support Vitter in federal or state races, the story points out.
MAY 24 The pink building on Royal in the quarter was sold at a sheriff's sale Thursday, this Picayune story reports. An injunction that would have halted the sale wasn't enforced because the family failed to post a $150,000 bond, the story reports. So the owner of the mortgages on the building bought it, for nearly $7 million. Now the feuding family will have to negotiate with that company to get a lease on the building that has housed their business for close to 60 years.
MAY 23 This post in Louisiana Voice tells us about a bill by a Winnsboro lege that would require all public high school students to take at least one Course Choice online class in order to graduate. (What?) Blogger Tom Aswell says it's a monument to "waste and corruption," especially in light of the problems he's exposed with the program in recent weeks. Idaho had a similar program, but voters removed it by a 2-1 margin, Aswell says.
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“Evolution” is a vague word.
Micro evolution is minor changes within a species, this is real and observable and uncontested.
The conflict pertains to Darwinian/Macro evolution which asserts that:
1) All living things had a common ancestor. This implies that your great….. great grandfather was a self replicating molecule.
2) The observable world has come into existence by totally natural, unguided processes and specifically WITHOUT the involvement of an intelligent designer.
The vague and changing definition is poor science and a thinly disguised strategy to make it easier to defend and propagate.
Do a YouTube search on “kansas evolution hearings” to hear real, credible scientists, present powerful arguments which debunk Darwinian/Macro evolution.
Dr John Sanford (Geneticists and inventor of the GeneGun) said .
“The bottom line is that the primary axiom [of Darwinian/Macro evolution] is categorically false, you can't create information with misspellings, not even if you use natural selection.”