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Steven Williams Resigns from Cupertino Schools

By stcynic on August 20, 2005.

The teacher who sued the Cupertino school district, falsely claiming that his rights were violated, has resigned and is moving to Oregon. This just days after he withdrew his lawsuit.

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I suspect that was part of the terms of the settlement agreement. That is usually something that CTA works out prior to such settlements; it is pretty much SOP for resolution of these sorts of cases. Mr. Williams will receive no official negative statement from the District if he applies to work in another one in the state. However, the publicity surrounding this case will hamper his hiring chances. He would do well to find one of his patrons to sponsor him in a private teaching position with some local Oregon church school.

Another off-topic, but possibly interesting matter, from today's Boston Globe, regarding a matter that may be of interest on this blog. It's a letter to the editor.

Intelligent Design has no backing from science
August 21, 2005

GARETH COOK'S account last Sunday of the intelligent design theory appears to be a sober, evenhanded treatment of a scientific controversy (''Project on the origins of life launched," Page A1, Aug. 14). But it is not a scientific controversy. It has little or nothing to do with science.

Cook cites the claims of biochemist Michael Behe, but fails to make it clear that every one of them has been refuted in the scientific literature. The opinions of Behe and the few other ID proponents with scientific credentials are not evidence; they have never been presented in the primary literature of science. When confronted with refutation, Behe and others of the ID effort retreat to Cook's platitude: ''Neither proves or disproves the existence of God."

Anyone who reads the voluminous output of the ID movement, or hears its speeches to the religious, knows that it is primarily a public relations venture. Its central claim is that evolution and evolutionary biology are false. It insists that the ''errors" in evolutionary biology be taught -- as disclaimers of modern biology -- to schoolchildren, and that biologists are conspiring to cover up the truth. There is nothing platitudinous about this. It's just good PR.

Cook's other truism is that ''Darwin's theory . . . does not explain how the universe began, or describe forces that act outside the material realm." But neither Darwin's theory nor any other modern biology is about how the universe began. That's a question in cosmology. And whether or not science makes further progress in research on the origin of life -- today a busy, independent discipline -- Darwinian evolution is the only robust scientific explanation we have for the history of life. If there are ''forces that act outside the material realm," then so far, at least, no shred of objective evidence for them has been presented.

PAUL R. GROSS
HinghamThe writer is a professor emeritus of Life Sciences at the University of Virginia.

To continue the off-topic, you all should really catch this week's Bill Maher episode on cable. He really rips the ID people and their supporters -- and intelligently too -- at the end of the show in his ending monologue. It's a must watch.

I've already seen the NYT article, but hadn't seen Paul's letter to the Boston Globe. There's a pretty big story that will hit the papers coming out of the Pennsylvania trial in the next few days. Keep an eye out for that.

We don't need him here in Oregon. We have enough people propagating religious indoctrination in schols, I.D. and whether or not our country is truly a Christian one vis a vis the beliefs of the founding fathers.