Evolution Roundup - Kansas and More
Ars Technica has once again outdone itself with inaccuracy (See this post for their previous lack of accuracy). Commenting on the Kansas Science Standards, John Timmer tells us that

Less than a decade ago, the board pulled evolution out of the science standards entirely,

Actually, they didn't. John then tells us of the current issue in Kansas

These new guidelines not only included specious criticisms of evolution, but redefined the entire activity of science to allow consideration of non-natural causes.

Actually, the Kansas standards are now in line with almost every state science standard in America. As for 'Specious criticisms', all criticisms in the standards appear in widely accepted secular science literature. Evolution News has info on this. One of the examples

The Standards state that criticisms of chemical origin of life hypotheses include “a lack of empirical evidence for a ‘primordial soup’ or a chemically hospitable pre-biotic atmosphere" and a "lack of adequate natural explanations for the genetic code" (pg. 77). These points are also validated by mainstream scientific literature

Should we really allow people like John who get it constantly wrong to decide what goes in the science standards.
(Evolution News and Views also has a post on Nasty Emails regarding the Kansas standards)

Creation Safari's has a good post highlighting the Evolutionary propaganda that continually tries to paint Evolution as Fact, whilst the science journal articles always seem less convincing.

When reading evolutionary science papers, one gets the feeling there are more than the usual number of words indicating conjecture, doubt and uncertainty. We decided to check this out in the July 11 issue of Current Biology. Scans for the words perhaps, probably, might, possibly, likely, may, apparently, seem and presumably and their derivatives were conducted on two papers dealing with evolutionary research and two papers of similar length on cell biology research that did not concern evolution. On average, the two evolutionary papers had 3.7 times as many conjecture words than the non-evolutionary ones....
The same issue contained an editorial that began, “As creationists seek to increase their influence on the scientific agenda, the world’s leading scientists urged schools and colleges last month to stop denying the facts of evolution.”

See the post for examples from the papers. You have to wonder if there are any 'facts' at all.

Mike Gene has a post about the metaphysical roots of Abiogenesis.

Whatever the precise timetable of the intellectual development of Haldane and Oparin, it is in any case significant that the sort of men who were in the process of evolving towards a dialectical materialist position in philosophy were in fact the men who tackled the problem of the origin of life and made the crucial breakthrough in this sphere.

Essentially, whilst Marxism was oft associated with Lysenkoism, there were many connections for most of the other theories in evolution. This shouldn't be a suprise as evoilution is such a fuzzy field that you can attach it to anything without breaking it.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, July 21, 2006