Capi­tol Plaza Hotel
Emer­ald Ball­room
1717 SW Tope­ka Blvd
(NE cor­ner of the Expocen­ter grounds)
7:00 — 8:30 pm (but show up early)

My name is Joshua Rose­nau, I’m a grad­u­ate stu­dent in Ecol­o­gy and Evo­lu­tion­ary Biol­o­gy at KU.

I want to thank the com­mit­tee for these pub­lic hear­ings. Like many peo­ple here, I’m dis­ap­point­ed that the Board has cir­cum­vent­ed these open meet­ings in order to push their ideas through.

The rec­om­men­da­tions that the com­mit­tee made in Draft 1 of the revised stan­dards are an excel­lent and hon­est descrip­tion of sci­ence as it is prac­ticed. In con­trast, the minor­i­ty report is a dis­tor­tion of the def­i­n­i­tion and prac­tice of sci­ence, and I hope the Board accepts the draft you’ve approved.

The minor­i­ty report would false­ly insert super­nat­ur­al expla­na­tions into the def­i­n­i­tion of sci­ence. Sci­en­tists look for testable expla­na­tions of the world. Evo­lu­tion is accept­ed and used by sci­en­tists because it gen­er­ates testable hypothe­ses and pre­dic­tions, and those pre­dic­tions are con­sis­tent­ly borne out.

To demon­strate this, com­pare two web pages, The Evo­lu­tion Project and The Non-Evo­lu­tion Project. At the first, we cat­a­log research demon­strat­ing or rely­ing on evo­lu­tion. The sec­ond would col­lect bio­log­i­cal research which demon­strat­ing or rely­ing on the super­nat­ur­al. In the last week, The Evo­lu­tion Project has col­lect­ed near­ly 300 pieces of research pub­lished since Jan­u­ary. The Non-Evo­lu­tion Project is still wait­ing for its first submission.

The research high­light­ed at the Evo­lu­tion Project ranges from hypothe­ses about Mar­t­ian life, to the process of spe­ci­a­tion, the evo­lu­tion of the eye, and treat­ments for Hunt­ing­ton’s dis­ease, schiz­o­phre­nia, and leukemia. None of those researchers could have achieved their results with the­o­ries about super­nat­ur­al design­ers, or with­out under­stand­ing and apply­ing evo­lu­tion­ary science.