Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Our new Texas ESS course is innovative and pathbreaking, and I seriously believe it will serve as a national model for ES and ESS courses in the future. The standards we wrote compare favorably to the new ES Literacy Initiative standards; we anticipated many important topics and concerns. The course standards are composed of three traditional themes and three very non-traditional strands. The three themes (or topical sections) are Earth in Space and Time, Solid Earth, and Fluid Earth. The first contains the most important information about cosmology and planetary astronomy in addition to traditional historical geological topics. It emphasizes geological time, stellar system and planet formation, the origin of the Earth's atmosphere and ocean, and fossil life. The second deals with plate tectonics, internal heat transfer, Earth structure, continent formation, geophysics, mountain building, volcanism, erosion and mass wasting, mineral resources, fossil fuels, etc. The third section discusses the movement of heat and fluids in Earth's atmosphere and hydrosphere, sea-level changes, the origin of life as a result of chemical processes and geochemical cycles, solar radiation, various chemical cycles, groundwater, and climate.

The innovative part of the course are the three strands: systems, energy, and relevance. We tried to incorporate these strands in every student expectation and at least in every knowledge and skill requirement. The course uses a system concept which shows the interactions among Earth's subsystems and can be modeled. Energy formation, movement, transfer, and effect as Earth process driving forces are emphasized throughout. Finally, every topic required was judged for its relevance to student lives. If a topic was not very relevant, it was omitted. Believe it or not, we actually left out about a third of traditional physical and historical geological topics, almost all of meteorology, much of non-planetary astronomy, and much of physical and biological oceanography. Some critics said the course was too long, but actually it could have been twice as long if we left in all the traditional topics. Also, our standards are longer than other high school courses because we were more specific in listing topics rather than lumping many of them under simple headings.

We decided to create a course that looked at fewer topics in depth rather than many topics superficially. Left out are rocks and minerals, desert processes, most erosion and weathering processes, different types of volcanic and plutonic bodies, a detailed survey of the geologic periods, almost everything dealing with weather, all discussion about galaxies and types of stars, and large parts of oceanography. Instead, we included a great deal about climate and climate change, Earth's geologic hazards, energy resources, geophysics, geologic time, origin of planets, the Moon, smaller planetary bodies, the history and chemistry of Earth's water and elements in the oceans and atmosphere, stratigraphy, sedimentary basins, fossil fuels, and the origin and evolution of ancient life. We wanted to keep as many relevant, exciting, and thought-provoking topics as possible to attract and interest students, and we left out much about topics that some students find to be uninteresting. We also emphasized the use of space imagery and modern instruments such as GPS, personal computers, and the Internet.

I think this course will be something special: a course that many students will want to take as an elective (since the former Texas Earth Science Task Force couldn't get an ES course accepted as required credit). Many students will want to take this course in their senior year, and even students going on in science who are taking an AP course their senior year may want to take ESS as a fifth science course in high school, simply because it will be exciting and relevant. This is a course I think Texas Earth scientists can be proud of, especially geologists (meteorologists probably won't like it, but climatologists will love it!).

And he reports on a minority faction on the committee made up of two YECs who are issuing their own report, in a mirror image of what happened in Kansas in 2005:

There will certainly be an effort made by some members of the SBOE to rewrite and injure the ESS standards in ways that will weaken them and make them unscientific. Whether they have a majority or not is uncertain. I know this will happen because two individuals appointed to the ESS panel by two radical religious-right SBOE members are attempting to sabotage the new ESS standards before they are even approved. The following is a copy of a "minority report" that was sent to all the members of the SBOE on 2008 November 6. You can obtain a copy of the original email and fax at http://www.texscience.org/pdf/Sigler-Henderson-ESS-Minority-Report-2008Nov6.pdf. It was written by two members appointed to the ESS standards-writing panel or workgroup, Roger Sigler and Tom Henderson. Both Sigler and Henderson are Young Earth Creationists (YECs) and Flood Geology believers (that is, Noah's Flood). Sigler was appointed by Terri Leo and Henderson was appointed by David Bradley, also both YECs and members of the SBOE. It is my opinion that Sigler and Henderson were deliberately planted into the ESS workgroup by two of the most extreme YEC radicals on the SBOE to disrupt the work of the panel and ultimately write a minority report (if they couldn't get their unscientific changes to the standards accepted by the other panel members, and there was almost no chance of that happening). During the initial panel meetings, both Sigler and Henderson suggested wording and revisions that would have weakened the scientific accuracy and reliability of ESS topics that YECs find to be controversial, such as radiometric dating, ancient ages of Earth and universe, evolution of fossils, the abiotic origin of life, and similar subjects.

The minority report was sent in secret to the SBOE without the knowledge of the other ESS panel members. Secret minority reports are especially reprehensible, since the scientist panel members, the "majority," did not have a chance to respond to or forestall the minority report by more discussion and possible compromise. Also, minority reports are supposed to be written after all the work of the panel is completed and the two sides are at an impasse, which was not the case here. This minority report was written on November 6, soon after the Oct 30-Nov 1 penultimate meeting of the ESS panel. The last meeting was scheduled for Dec 4-6, so there was plenty of time to deal with issues contained in the minority report and make changes that might be agreeable to all. Sigler and Henderson sent the minority report was sent to all the SBOE members--the ultimate decision-makers--without any context or forewarning to their colleagues on the ESS panel. The majority on the ESS panel never had an opportunity to respond to or even read the minority report, and have never had the opportunity to write a rebuttal to the SBOE. For almost two months, the minority report was the only ESS report that the SBOE had--the de facto ESS report--which is extremely destructive and unfortunate.

Needless to say, the November 2008 minority report is nonsense and contains numerous untruths. The ESS panel members examined and took into account all the expert feedback and made several changes in light of that feedback. Sigler and Henderson say "the thrust of the 'expert opinions' was inadequately incorporated," but what they mean by this is the "opinions" of the three Creationist "expert" reviewers--Stephen Meyer, Charles Garner, and Ralph Seelke--was not given preference. Indeed they were not, since almost all the suggestions of those three in their feedback documents were grossly anti-scientific, such as promoting retaining the unscientific phrase "strengths and weaknesses." Contrary to the claim, not a single standard in the ESS document was "dogmatic," but firmly based on mainstream science. The claim of scientific "dogmatism" is common among Scientific Creationists, who are angry that legitimate scientists won't accept their pseudoscientific beliefs.

With one exception, the majority members of the panel, i.e. the non-YEC and legitimate Earth scientists and teachers, were concerned and upset when they learned about the existence of a minority report, because it undermined the unity and legitimacy of the ESS panel. SBOE members antagonistic to science--and there are almost a majority of these--could use the minority report to question the credibility of the ESS panel and its proposed ESS standard recommendations. In fact, this was almost certainly the intended goal of the minority report. Unable to produce scientific reasons to convince the other panel members to write specific standards in ways that suggested scientific uncertainty or weakness, the YECs on the panel and the SBOE cooked up this plan to discredit the work of the panel, thus giving the SBOE YECs an opportunity to attack the ESS standards as too controversial, incomplete, or dogmatic to accept without extensive revision. SBOE religious-right member Terri Leo has used the minority report ploy in the past, in 2003 for the biology textbook review panel, and I believe she and Roger Sigler planned to use this tactic from the beginning. Tom Henderson went along with this plan. He told me that Roger originally wrote and sent him an even stronger minority report that he wouldn't sign, but they agreed on this one which Tom thought was reasonable.

I was the one exception on the ESS workgroup who thought a minority report might happen. Because of my long familiarity with American pseudoscience (I consider myself the national expert on geological pseudoscience, and of course I know biological pseudoscience intimately), I was the only one on the panel who recognized at the first meeting that the two members appointed by Terri Leo and David Bradley were YECs and Flood Geologists. Tom Henderson is a retired NASA engineer whose main occupation now is giving YEC PowerPoint presentations to churches and Sunday Schools about Young Earth Creationism (see http://users.hal-pc.org/~tom/bkg.html and http://users.hal-pc.org/~tom/topics.html). These presentations include such things as dinosaurs dying by a giant extraterrestrial impact during Noah's Flood and claiming the Acámbaro Figures (miniature ceramic figures of dinosaurs!) found by Waldemar Julsrud in 1944 in Mexico--a notorious hoax--are authentic artifacts that provide evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together in historical times. One long presentation is devoted to proving that all radiometric dating methods are wrong and the Earth is no older than 10,000 years. He is not an Earth scientist but, as he told us, knows something about planetary astronomy because he frequently attends talks at the Lunar and Planetary Institute of NASA! Roger Sigler is a community college geology instructor who does have a M.S. degree. He has worked for years with the Institute for Creation Research students in a study about Noah's Flood deposits in California's Mojave Desert, "Submarine Flow and Slide Deposits in the Kingston Peak Formation, Kingston Range, Mojave Desert, California: Evidence for Catastrophic Initiation of Noah's Flood" at http://www.icr.org/research/index/researchp_rs/ (also see http://www.icr.org/article/4310/ and http://www.rae.org/ICCreport.html). His paper correlating the record of Noah's Flood in the Hebrew Bible with the geologic record, "Hebrew and Geologic Analyses of the Chronology and Parallelism of the Flood: Implications for Interpretation of the Geologic Record," can be found at http://www.drbarrick.org/Website%20Files/ICC2003PaperRev030130.pdf. Both Tom and Roger believe in Flood Geology and, and I believe, Impact Catastrophism as primary mechanisms for forming Earth's surficial features during the last 10,000 years, the maximum age of the Earth in their view. If you are not aware of the extent of Flood Geology (or Creation Geology) in our country, you should visit http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25wwln-geologists-t.html for a report about this community and http://www.cedarville.edu/event/geology/ for access to their pseudoscientific publications. This is the kind of geological pseudoscience that I deal with all the time, and I am probably the only person opposing this nonsense in the country in an organized way (because almost the entire national effort is quite correctly focused on opposing Creationism and Intelligent Design Creationism). It is not just biology that is being attacked by organized Creationism--geology is at risk, too.

Kansas all over again.