Presentations

Sandra Gade made the following presentations to the School Board at their Wednesday night meetings on May 10, May 24, June 14 and June 28.

Presentation to OASD School Board on 5/10/06

I am here to request a change in the way Evolution is taught in the two high schools, particularly in the Biology 1 course. I recently talked to most of you about this. You can make a change either by doing it without substantial input from the citizens in the district or possibly with an advisory referendum.

I tried to make a change in the way evolution is taught by working with school officials and the science departments at West and North but was rebuffed.

I learned from that, that only instructional materials that are supportive of evolution are used. Teachers interpret the two benchmarks on evolution to mean only teach favorable topics. That means evolution is taught as fact. It also means that significant contrary evidence is hidden from students.

You should realize that the case for evolution is weaker now than it has ever been since Darwin proposed it about 150 years ago. The reason for that is that the two primary sources of evidence according to Darwin that would make or break his theory have essentially broken it. The two sources are transitional fossils and origin-of-life experiments. Darwin believed that the earth’s sedimentary layers would be stuffed with sequences of transitional fossils connecting the major types of plants and animals, such as invertebrates and fish, amphibians and reptiles, dinosaurs and birds, etc. These sequences do not exist and that deficiency becomes more significant as time elapses and they are not found.

The other primary source of evidence--origin-of-life experiments is based on the belief of Darwin and other scientists of his day that life at the microscopic level was simple. They described it as blobs of protoplasm and that scientists would be able to demonstrate how an evolutionary process made it. That turned out to be completely wrong. Instead of being simple, cells are so complex that all attempts to show how they originated have failed. After 50 years of trying, scientists cannot show how any cellular system originated including proteins, DNA and RNA.

I want to remind you that students are a captive audience especially since Biology 1 is a required course. Students are forced into receiving a dose of evolution. The least we can do is to make sure that they are told the whole story so they can form their own beliefs as to how life originated on earth.

Presentation to OASD School Board on 5/24/06

Last time I talked about origin-of-life experiments as being a primary source of evidence regarding evolution. That the scientists of Darwin’s time thought that once life at the microscopic level became known, scientists would be able to make cells. They believed cells were relatively simple and, therefore, easily made. The quest to make cells began in the 1950s, about the time DNA was discovered.

They started at the ground level trying to make amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins and nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. So we are now more than 50 years into this quest. How successful has it been?

I want to answer that question two ways, first by giving the facts which show that the quest has met with essentially total failure and secondly the answer according to the high school biology textbook . My intention is to show that the textbook’s presentation is an egregious distortion of the truth so that you will change the situation.

How successful has the quest been to make cells?
Scientists have successfully determined how amino acids could have come into existence but not nucleotides. Scientists do not know how proteins, DNA and RNA came into existence. In other words they have not been able to show how amino acids join to make proteins. And with DNA and RNA they can’t even make the nucleotides.

Next consider cellular structures and cellular processes
Some cellular structures are the nucleus, mitochondria which supply the cell’s energy, ribosomes which assemble proteins. Some process are the synthesis of proteins, the transport of materials across the cell, the conversion of glucose to a chemical fuel. Scientists do not know how these or any other cellular structure or process came into existence.

Obviously scientists do not know how cells came into existence or any of the complex organs and processes in multi-celled organisms.

Now let’s consider how the biology textbook* spins this bleak reality into something supportive of evolution.
Page 267 says that scientists have produced the nucleotides in DNA and suggests there were many ways that they might have formed on the young earth.
Page 270 falsely implies that scientists are on the verge of showing how RNA came into existence.
Page 268 says that protein molecules form spontaneously in the laboratory from solutions of simple organic chemicals.
It says cell-like structures have been made and implies that they only lack RNA from being alive.
A summary of this false story is cell-like structures consisting of proteins spontaneously form from solutions of simple organic chemicals. The cell-like structures lack an hereditary molecule, such as RNA, from being alive. But scientists have made nucleotides and are on the verge of making RNA from them. This false story will lead many students to infer that scientists are close to making cells.

What’s the purpose of this deception? To convince students that the complexity gap between inanimate materials and cellular life is not that great so that as reasonable people they should believe that life evolved.

I’ll end with two quotes.

The biochemist David Green writes in his book Molecular Insights into the Living Process : “the macromolecule-to-cell transition is a jump of fantastic dimensions, which lies beyond the range of testable hypothesis. In this area all is conjecture. The available facts do not provide a basis for postulating that cells arose on this planet.”

Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, writes in his book Life Itself:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.”

* A. Towle, Modern Biology, ( Austin, Texas: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1999).

Presentation to OASD School Board on 6/14/06

Tonight I want to talk about transitional fossils, a topic which is hidden from students. You will see why it must be hidden, if teachers are to follow the advice of their professional societies to only teach materials supportive of evolution.

All animals are classified into 35 groups or phyla, consisting of 34 invertebrate phyla and a single vertebrate phylum which includes fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Some invertebrates are insects, crustaceans, earthworms, leeches, clams, scallops and coral. Now the phyla supposedly evolved from single-celled protozoa in the order of protozoa to the 34 invertebrate phyla to fish. What is the fossil evidence for this?
There are no fossils between protozoa and the animal phyla so that it is not known if that transition occurred once, twice or many times. Secondly there are no intermediate fossils between phyla so that scientists do not know the evolutionary sequence of the invertebrate phyla. Thirdly there are no intermediate fossils between invertebrates and fish.
Until 1999 fish were assumed to have evolved 50 million years after invertebrates when fossils of two species of fish were dated the same as the earliest invertebrates.

What about the timing of these events? There is about a two billion year gap between protozoa and the appearance of the animal phyla. Then in a period of time no longer than 5 million years all the animal phyla suddenly appear about 530 million years ago. And no new phyla have appeared since then.

In addition no sequences of fossils have ever been found that show small changes accumulating to make a major change. For example, no sequences showing the evolution of wings, legs, jaws and vertebrae.

Fossils of some vertebrates, such as turtles, frogs, bats and pterosaurs, are so easy to identify that it is a particular challenge to explain the absence of transitional fossils showing their evolution. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles with wing spans of 12 meters. Fossils of 90 species are found on all continents except Antarctica and yet their ancestry is unknown.

Everything I’ve mentioned so far is not told to students. I want to mention two topics that are presented but deceptively so.

First Table 14-1 in the biology textbook* lists four isotopes used in radioactive dating, carbon and three more. The text explains that since carbon is found in living organisms, it can be used to date fossils. However, because of the short half-life of carbon, it can only be used to date recent fossils. It then explains that the other three isotopes are used to date older fossils because they have longer half-lives. End of story! Students aren’t told that these isotopes are not found in fossils or even in the sedimentary rocks that contain the fossils. Many, if not most, students will incorrectly infer that these isotopes are, like carbon, found in fossils. It makes the radioactive dating of fossils to be a piece-of-cake when in reality the opposite is true.

Table15-1 Geological History of Earth* gives the impression that if you dig deeply enough in your back yard you will find all the fossils that are neatly displayed from top to bottom in the table-- first humans, other mammals farther down, dinosaurs still farther down all the way down to invertebrates and protozoa. Many students will infer that this sequence of layers actually exists and furthermore exists in most places. The fact is that in most places very little of it is found and the entire sequence of layers is not found ANYWHERE on earth. Students should be told that.

Finally if the significant evidence that I have been presenting is kept from students, then evolution is not being taught as science; it is being taught as dogma. I ask you again to change that.

* A. Towle, Modern Biology, ( Austin, Texas: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1999).

Presentation to OASD School Board on 6/28/06

I have been telling you about scientific evidence that is very damaging to evolution.
You may be asking yourself how can such evidence exist when a large majority of scientists believe in evolution. Let me explain how that has happened. Let’s look at the four basic sciences; Physics, chemistry, biology and geology and consider the extent to which evolution is taught in each. It is not taught in physics or chemistry, including biochemistry. The closest geology comes to evolution are courses in paleontology, stratigraphy and sedimentology. No biology majors are required to take a course which is strictly on evolution except the secondary education majors and that course, at least the one at UWO, omits contrary evidence. So no one at the bachelors, masters or Ph. D. level in the four sciences takes a course which lays out the evidence relevant to evolution. Rather what happens is that students believe because their professors let it be known that they believe and this perpetuates from generation to generation. As a result most scientists accept evolution without ever having considered the evidence. I know that the evidence I have compiled is unknown to the vast majority of scientists in Oshkosh.

I want to comment on the May 4th memorandum that Dr. Herzog sent to you regarding my challenge to the way evolution is taught. The memo recommends no changes in the Biology I course based on the expertise of three UWO professors, the high school science staff and Federal Court decisions.

Except for the comments of the three professors, the memo and all attachments were about Intelligent Design and Creationism. That is a total disconnect from my request as a scientist to teach all relevant scientific evidence. My intention is obvious from all I have said and written. The three professors do not accuse me of advocating Intelligent Design and furthermore corroborate much of the science I presented. The science staff’s response to my scientific evidence was a paper on Intelligent Design. They have been so effectively brainwashed by their college experience that they are unaware of the existence of contrary evidence. So they did not know if my evidence was true and instead of researching it, they blew it off by characterizing it as Intelligent Design.

The science teachers say they are teaching evolution as their professional societies, such as the National Association of Biology Teachers, want them to teach it. In 1995 the leadership of that society defined evolution as “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process”. Subsequently they reluctantly removed the words “unsupervised and impersonal” because they revealed the society’s atheistic bias.

You are violating the First Amendment by allowing evolution to be taught the way it is.
The Supreme Court has ruled that public schools shall neither proselytize for religion nor be antagonistic to it. The way evolution is being taught is antagonistic to students’ religious beliefs. Students are told that it is a scientifically established fact that evolution, a purely natural process made all living things. Certainly that is antagonistic to religion. It says God is redundant. But you ask, what about theistic evolution? Evolutionists would say “How foolish to believe in a supernatural cause which is completely unknowable and undetectable when science has proven the existence of a natural cause, namely evolution. Of course, the big lie that evolution is a fact is perpetuated by concealing contrary evidence. Now that you have been enlightened, you must make changes or else stand accused of violating students’ First Amendment rights.

I recommend three things;
Change the way evolution is taught.
Require biology teachers to receive instruction on all evidence relevant to evolution.
In future hirings of biology teachers check their college curriculums to make sure they are taught all relevant evidence. Avoid hiring them from UWO.