Join us for presentations on and discussion of the legal, professional, and scientific perspectives of ‘academic freedom’ bills such as the Louisiana Science Education Act.
The Louisiana Science Education Act was signed into law by Governor Bobby Jindal in 2008. Five other states debated similar proposals designed to promote “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, origins of life, global warming, and human cloning”. What are the legal and professional implications of these “academic freedom” bills? What is the history behind these bills? Are these bills really aimed at scientifically controversial topics? What are appropriate scientific theories to use in developing critical thinking? Where is the leading research in these disciplines? The course will include presentations by: Dr. Barbara Forrest, Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and a witness in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District; Dr. Louise S. Mead, Education Project Director at the National Center for Science Education; Dr. Sarah Wise, Visiting Fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Using the Polebridge title, Stones & Bones—selected by BioScience magazine for its Fall 2008 Focus on Books—Louise Mead will demonstrate strategies for introducing children to the marvelous nature of science as they take a walk through time to learn about the evolution of their favorite animals.

NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott and UC Berkeley professor David Wake will be discussing a new anthology -- Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, edited by NCSE Supporter Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis (Harvard University Press, 2009). Eugenie Scott contributed a chapter entitled "American Antievolutionism: Retrospect and Prospect," to the volume. Professor Wake, one of America's principal evolutionary biologists, contributed to the book's impressive and encyclopedic "Alphabetical Guide."

Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 was an extraordinary milestone for science, but it also had profound effects on theology, philosophy, literature, and society in general. Nowhere is this more true than in the United States, where the teaching of evolution has been contentious since the early part of the 20th century. Why have Darwin’s ideas been so valuable– and yet so controversial? The answers lie not in science, but in history and culture.