A press release from the California Department of Education:
STATE SCHOOLS CHIEF JACK O’CONNELL DEFENDS CALIFORNIA SCIENCE STANDARDS
Opposes Intelligent Design Theory as Threat to Integrity of Teaching Natural Sciences
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LOS ANGELES — State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell today defended California’s science standards from efforts to inject the theory of intelligent design into natural science curriculum.
“The introduction of intelligent design theory in natural science courses would be a blow to the integrity of education in California,” O’Connell said. “Our state has been recognized across the country and around the world for the quality and rigor of our academic standards. Just like I will fight tooth and nail to protect California’s high academic standards, I will fight to ensure that good science is protected in California classrooms.”
California’s science standards, which include the teaching of evolution theory, were developed with input from national leaders in science. The Fordham Foundation has awarded California an “A” for its science standards along with just a handful of other states.
President Bush has been quoted recently saying that students should be exposed to intelligent design theory. A trial on the legitimacy of teaching the concept of intelligent design in science courses is currently underway in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
“The goal of public education is for students to gain the knowledge and skills necessary for California’s work force to be competitive in the global, information-based economy of the 21st Century,” O’Connell said. “We also want to give students the tools to become critical thinkers and to be able to discuss and reflect on philosophical questions. But, the domain of the natural sciences is the natural world. Science is limited by its tools — observable facts and testable hypothesis. Because religious beliefs are based on faith, and are not subject to scientific test and refutation, these beliefs should not be taught in the realm of natural sciences.”
O’Connell noted that discussion about divine creation, ultimate purposes, or ultimate causes would be appropriate topics for discussion in history-social science or English-language arts curricula.
Speaking at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, O’Connell was joined by the President of the California Science Teachers Association. O’s comments were also supported by Dr. Eugenie Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education.
“California’s unsurpassed state science standards treat evolution appropriately: as the central, powerful, unifying principle of the biological sciences that it is. I am gratified that Superintendent O’Connell recognizes the need to defend the teaching of evolution against religiously motivated and scientifically unwarranted attacks,” Dr. Scott said in a statement made from Pennsylvania, where she is monitoring the trial over the teaching of intelligent design theory in high schools in Dover.
“In California schools we are trying to educate students, not change their belief system,” O’Connell concluded. “We will best serve students if they graduate understanding the difference between scientific knowledge and values, faith or religious beliefs.”
Perhaps the single least surprising announcement in the history of surprising announcements.
That sound you hear is the sound of geeks’ heads exploding all over the world at the news that Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman have interviewed one another for a Time Magazine article.
At least, I hope it’s their heads.
TIME: Neil, you’re a big blogger these days, right?
NG: I’ve been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We’d be writing blog entries like, ‘the tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.’
These days there are 1.2 million people reading it. It’s very, very weird. We have this enormous readership, as a result of which now I feel absolutely far too terrified and guilty to stop. I’d love to stop my blog at this point, but there’s this idea that there will be 1.2 million people’s worth of pissed-off-ness that I hadn’t written anything today.
JW: That’s the problem with doing anything. Everybody expects you to keep doing it, no matter what.
NG: For me, it’s always that Mary Poppins thing. I’ll do it until the wind changes. The joy of doing Sandman was doing a comic and telling people, no, it has an end, at a time when nobody thought you could actually get to the end and stop doing a comic that people were still buying just because you’d finished. Probably of all the things I did in Sandman, that was the most unusual and the oddest. That I stopped while we were outselling everybody, because it was done. What everybody wants is more of what they had last time that they liked.
JW: Every other question I get is about the Buffy-verse.
NG: Except the trouble is, as a creator…I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do a better trick or a different trick because they’d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We’ve done it, so let’s do something different.
Inexplicably, the Daily Press/Hesperia Star float (a 1959 Ford Thunderbird convertible) won second place in the Vintage Car Division in the Hesperia Days parade. Maria has the trophy on her desk at the front of the office.
I must be just that damn pretty.
Sam Raimi and company have been maniacal about secrecy about the villains in the next Spider-Man movie, but it sounds like Kirsten Dunst, who plays Mary Jane Watson, may have just let the cat out of the bag:
“We have really great people though as the villains in this film, Thomas Haden Church and Topher Grace — Venom and Sandman,” says Kirsten Dunst while promoting her film “Elizabethtown.”
“Maybe I wasn’t supposed to say that,” she says, checking with her rep, who assures her the information has already been released.
The “Interview with a Vampire” actress is a little shaky on the information at first, saying that Church would play Venom and Grace would take on Sandman, before reversing her claim when a journalist expresses disbelief. “It’s the other way around. You’re right,” she concedes.
Skinny little Topher seems a strange choice for Venom, unless they’re doing him with CGI for the most part, which would make sense.
In addition to being able to rub elbows with the great unwashed World of Warcraft playerbase during BlizzCon (and getting a baby murloc pet to follow my character around in the game, making gurgling noises), the Offspring will be playing the final night of BlizzCon. Nice bonus.
I assume the Offspring play on the Horde side.
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