College Board’s May 18 AP Biology exam will be given online and EXCLUDES Unit 7, i.e., the 24-page section on natural selection that describes natural selection as a “major mechanism of evolution.”
WHY THE DELETION? I’d like to think my series of stories about the College Board natural selection racket shaped its decision, stories that were widely circulated, including to College Board’s board of trustees—although College Board appears to have found Covid-19 a convenient cover for explaining away the test revamp.
Indeed, Trevor Packer, who has been with College Board since 2003 and heads its Advanced Placement Program, “responsible for the ongoing development and management of 38 AP courses,” including biology, said the following in a just-published interview at Education Week:
“We had all of this year’s exams printed and boxed up and ready to ship out to schools when it started to become clear that many would never reopen this academic year.”
What is not clear is whether that boxed version of AP Biology included Unit 7—natural selection.
In the Education Week interview Packer then sketched-out College Board’s quick fix:
“The questions themselves are a subset of the question types asked on the longer AP exams. Students have traditionally hand written their open-ended responses and can continue to do so this year, photographing their handwritten response with a smartphone into our platform. Or they can type their responses on desktop or laptop. Math and science students are primarily planning to handwrite responses, although some report that they will be typing.”
Psychometricians largely steer education testing—people skilled at psychological and educational measurement. Trevor Packer’s two degrees are in English (Bachelor’s and Master’s), both of those degrees from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints-sponsored school, Brigham Young University.
Packer is also a member of the LDS church and is known in LDS church circles for the article he co-authored about LDS founder Joseph Smith, entitled: “The Newly Found Manuscript of Doctrine and Covenants Section 65.”
BYU notes the following regarding the Packer article:
The most interesting detail about this document stands in its heading. The 1981 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants identifies Section 65 as a “revelation given through Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Hiram, Ohio, October 1831,” and notes, “The Prophet designates this revelation as a prayer.” The McLellin manuscript, however, gives two further details. First, it gives the exact date: “A revelation of Joseph the Seer 30 Oct.. 1831,” and second, it specifies that this revelation is “on the 6th Matthew 10 verse.” This information allows us to recognize, for the first time, that Section 65 is not simply an ordinary or spontaneous prayer, but is deeply related to the Lord’s Prayer, especially Matthew 6:10, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”
Lest we forget. This is Joseph Smith’s Doctrine and Covenants Section 132 on the principle of plural marriage.
Lynn Margulis in 2010, the year before she died, asked if I’d write a book about the Mormons that she would then publish. Margulis did not like the political reach of the LDS church nor the Saints’ “aptitude for surveillance technology” and she insisted on sending her handwritten edits-for-accuracy to our book interview via FedEx from Oxford University where she was spending the year at Balliol College. Lynn was not completely comfortable with FedEx either.
I had covered the Mormons and Fundamentalist Mormons at length in print some years earlier for the Financial Times, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer and online at CounterPunch and Scoop Media, also appearing on Fox Television News, and frankly, I’d had my fill of the subject. So I disappointed Lynn.
However, at the time I was chasing the story I did note that the chief information officer for Robert Mueller’s FBI—Darwin A. John—had come straight from the Mormon church, where he served as LDS chief information officer for over a decade.
And as it has been revealed through the years, the Mormon church has a long history of feeding personnel to US intelligence. Alex Shoumatoff in his book Legends of the American Desert recounts running into CIA Director Bill Casey in the VIP gallery of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City:
“One afternoon in the summer of 1983, I sat in the VIP gallery [of Salt Lake City’s LDS church] with two fidgety men in their thirties and an old man, who turned out to be William Casey, then director of the CIA, and his Secret Service guards. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation recruit heavily from the Saints, who make ideal operatives because they are extremely patriotic and have an aptitude for surveillance technology.”
Heads should roll at College Board for its manipulative policies—particularly for retarding the education of a generation of students by pushing Darwinian natural selection on them when it has been evident for well over a decade that no one in the scientific community takes Darwinian natural selection literally anymore.
Those taken advantage of by the College Board natural selection fraud should seek recompense.
OSCILLATIONS 