The final draft of the 2019 Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards in Science will be implemented for the 2024-25 school year. Having looked over this document, I was wondering what they presented as proof for evolution in benchmark 9L.4.1.1.3; specifically, item 2 which says changes in environmental conditions may result in: “the emergence of new species over time.”
It references the National Academy of Sciences “A Framework for K-12 Science Education” citing (LS4.A) “Evidence for Common Ancestry” (section for grade 12), which states genetic information provides evidence of evolution.
But all they supplied was inferences of how things “might work;” nothing even close to explaining how molecules change into extremely complex molecular machines.
This document also references a book (ref.2) put out by the National Research Council (2008), that gives more detail on how evolution works; but there too, only imaginary scenarios are given.
You need to have a “theory” tying the evidence to the conclusion. The ttheory then must be checked by calculating probabilities to see if they are within reason. The reason we don’t see them is because the probability calculations do not support random mutation/natural selection producing things like dual-coding genes. An article in Computational Biology, 3 (2007) 855-861) stated “Dual coding genes are statistically unlikely.” In other words, next to impossible to be produced by random chance.
Common sense tells us a smartphone or 4-wheeler cannot come about by random mutation/natural selection processes. Yet here we have the education establishment telling kids that the human cell, with it’s 10 million factories (ribosomes) and vast communication network that rivals the internet, all came into existence by random mutation and natural selection.
The Minnesota Department of Education and Minnesota legislators need to backtrack and pull ‘species evolution’ out of the K-12 standards and replace it with Intelligent Design Theory.
It’s really a “no-brainer;” if molecular machinery cannot increase in complexity through random chance, then by default, it had to have been designed.
Phil Drietz
Delhi
