Marty,
My apologies if you felt the _expression_ I used was in poor taste and inappropriate. While I view the _expression_ differently, I can understand why a person would view it as you do, and I'll refrain from using it here again.
As to the biology text in question, it's certainly appropriate, given the numbers of people who do not believe in evolution, to take three sentences out of a 400 page textbook to say that not everybody buys into evolution. The alternative is to paint a picture for students of a unanimity of thought that simply does not exist.
Brad
Marty wrote:
Brad: I think "drinking the koolaid" is in extremely poor taste in virtually any setting, but is especially inappropriate here, considering where the phrase originated and the subject of this thread.
I did not mean to suggest anything Machiavellian. But I also do not think that the text in question is "simply an acknowledgment that not everybody believes in evolution, and that those who don't believe in evolution, demographically speaking, are largely viewing the matter from a religious perspective." No such acknowledgment is necessary -- I'm confident that virtually every student in the Broward County high schools is aware that "not everybody believes in evolution," and that such non-belief, more often than not, is a function of religious belief. That's why it would seem fairly silly -- and completely inapposite to the biology course -- if the book actually said: "Not everybody believes in evolution, and that those who don't believe in evolution, demographically speaking, are largely viewing the matter from a religious perspective." Students would, with good reason, wonder what that statement was doing in a biology text.
But that's not the statement.
Marc is correct that the text doesn't pass off religious belief as "science." But it would appear to present the religious belief as relevant to the scientific information appearing on the surrounding pages -- i.e., as suggesting to students that perhaps it is the case "that the complex structures and processes of life could not have formed without some guiding intelligence." I don't know whether that's an EC violation; but I'm fairly certain it's unjustifiable from a scientific perspective, and thus an inadvisable and unfortunate curricular decision.
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