Guest guest Posted August 25, 2006 Report Share Posted August 25, 2006 12:28 24 August 2006 NewScientist.com news service Celeste Biever Why has Evolutionary Biology disappeared from the Department of Education's list? (arrow added)Related Articles God and science: You just can't please everyone 26 August 2006 Why doesn't America believe in evolution? 20 August 2006 Win for Darwin on Kansas school board 12 August 2006 Search New Scientist Contact us Web Links Lawrence Krauss, Case Western Reserve University US Department of Education Evolutionary biology is mysteriously missing from the list of undergraduate subjects eligible for a US federal grant. The department of education claims the omission is simply a mistake and insists that US students taking evolutionary biology majors are eligible for the grants. However, the incident has left pro-evolution campaigners wondering whether evolutionary biology was deliberately eliminated from the list by people who find Darwinian evolution impossible to reconcile with their own religious beliefs. " I have reason to believe there is a serious problem here, " physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, told New Scientist. Krauss wrote a story in the New York Times on 15 August warning of the dangers that anti-evolutionist school board members pose to science education. The day after his story was published, a " Washington DC source " , who Krauss declined to name, alerted him to the department of education's omission. Krauss emailed the US Department of Education (DoE) the next day and alerted The Chronicle of Higher Education, which brought the incident to public attention on 22 August. Peculiar omission The grants in question are known as National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent or SMART grants and are available to undergraduates at US universities studying mathematics, science technology, engineering and " critical " foreign languages. The DoE is offering them for the first time this year in order to encourage students " to pursue college majors in high demand in the global economy " . A pdf document on the DoE's website lists the hundreds of eligible majors, which include a variety of subjects from Artificial Intelligence and Robotics to Conservation Biology to Organic Chemistry. But, as this article is published, evolutionary biology is conspicuously absent. The nature of the omission is peculiar. Each subject is designated by a number and the list is arranged in numerical order. Yet there is a conspicuous white space flanked by the numbers 26.1302 and 26.1304, at the point where you would expect evolutionary biology, which is number 26.1303, to go (see graphic, right). " On its own, it's not really a smoking gun, " says Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education in Berkeley, California. " But in the context of actions that other people in the federal government have taken, it is suspicious. " Branch is referring to claims in February 2006 that a NASA public relations officer muzzled climate scientists who did not conform to the Bush administration's view. No explanation The DoE says the omission is a mistake that it will correct but offers no explanation for why it occurred. " Evolutionary biology is one of a number of majors under the " Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology " category of majors eligible to receive SMART grants, " says spokesperson Katherine McLane in a public statement. " There is no explanation for it being left off of the list - it has always been an eligible major. The department is making the necessary correction which will be in place before final guidance on AC/SMART grants is issued. " If George Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headline would read, " Views Differ on Shape of the Earth " Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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