Alabama Board of Education Quotes
No one was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life's origins should be considered as theory, not fact.
Alabama Board of Education, Required text in all Biology Textbooks, 1999
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
At the time, it was very difficult for people who had been taught all their lives that God was directly responsible for the creation to accept the notion of evolution. At the time, there was not the overwhelming evidence proving Darwin’s theory that we have today. Nor did theologians realize that evolution and Darwinism were not inconsistent with the concept of a creator and supreme being. Nonetheless, there are still those who, like Agassiz, reject evolution and insist that the Biblical version of creation is literally true. See {586990}. Then there are people who have come up with the concept of Intelligent Design which originated with Agassiz though he never called it that. Most religious people today, in contrast, see no conflict in natural selection as described by Darwin and later proven, and the concept of God. They see the Biblical creation as metaphorical and natural selection as the product of an omniscient supreme being.
Ms. Holloway had led the majority of the board that had voted to revise the education standards of Kansas to exclude evolution. She was defeated in the Republican primary election afterward. See Sue Gamble {602752}
This is another oft quoted statement of Darwin’s. The phrase “by the Creator” is often cited to show that Darwin did not preclude the role of a prime mover of God in the process. God may have started the system going and created the laws of evolution and physics and then the world evolved. At the time, most religious authorities believed that the only way for a new species to exist is if God created the species. Darwin was trained in theology and was extremely sensitive to the effect of what he discovered on the religious leaders and believers of his day. However, this quotation is particularly interesting because the phrase “by the Creator” never appeared in his original manuscript, nor did it when the bombshell book was published. There was great excitement and great religious opposition to publication which Darwin had delayed for years. The mention of the Creator never appeared in the first 5 printings. Only in the 6th printing did it appear.
The Science Guy
Some parents of the school district wanted the teachers to include the views of those who opposed evolution—the so called “creationists” and “intelligent designers”—in the science classes as a “compromise.” Most scientists and science teachers do not regard this as a reasonable compromise and no one has explained the reason better than Dickson.
While Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was rejected as heresy by many Christians, where were other’s who warmly embraced it, and frequently lectured on the subject.
Actually no school teaches that. What they did teach when covering Evolution was that some modern apes (chimpanzees and bonobos) and humans were both descended from a common ancestor. The Congressman was at that point an evangelical Christian fundamentalist, Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
The Alabama State Board of Education is a nine-member body which sets and authorizes the education policy for the state of Alabama for K-12 schools. The state has a separate appointed board that administers the Alabama Community College System. The governor is the ex officio president of the K-12 board and has voting privileges on all matters, although they are seldom exercised. The remaining eight members are elected to four-year terms in partisan elections from single-member districts of approximately equal population. However, most issues before the board are not necessarily considered as partisan in nature. There is no limit on the number of terms to which members may be elected. Members in Districts 1, 3, 5, and 7 are elected in the same cycle as the President of the United States, with their next election scheduled for 2020. Members in Districts 2, 4, 6, and 8 are elected in the same cycle as the Governor of Alabama, with their most recent election occurring in 2018. The eight single-member districts are re-drawn by the Alabama Legislature following each di-cennial U.S. Census.
