User:Ken Saladin

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Kenneth S. Saladin is a professor of biology at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, USA. He is best known as an author of college textbooks in human anatomy and physiology, an activist in opposition to the politics of creationism, and as plaintiff in a widely cited precedent-setting church-state separation case, Saladin v. Milledgeville, described below. His primary anticipated contribution to Wikipedia will be creating and editing articles in biology, human anatomy, and human physiology.

Background and Education
Saladin was born on 6 May 1949 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the eldest of the three children of Albert Roman Saladin and Jennie Louise Wing. He attended school in the Milwood area and graduated in 1967 from Loy Norrix High School. During the grades 8 through 12, he acquired an interest in the behavioral ecology of freshwater invertebrate animals and received a number of local and international science fair awards for research in this area. He attended Michigan State University as a zoology major and received his B.S. degree there in 1971. He moved to Florida State University for graduate school, where he received his Ph.D. in biological science in 1979, working under Professor Robert B. Short in the field of parasitology. Saladin’s dissertation research concerned behavior of the infective larvae (cercariae) of the tropical parasite Schistosoma mansoni, the agent of the human disease schistosomiasis (bilharziasis).

Family
Saladin married C. Diane Campbell in 1979. They have two children, Emory Michael Saladin (b. 1980) and L. Nicole Saladin (b. 1982), who entered the fields of interior architectural design and marine environmental conservation, respectively.

Postgraduate Career
Saladin joined the faculty of Georgia College (now Georgia College and State University) in 1977, where he has spent his entire postgraduate teaching career. He became full Professor in 1989 and was named Distinguished Professor in 2001. He teaches primarily human anatomy and physiology, biodiversity, histology, and animal behavior, and occasionally an honors colloquium on the creation-evolution conflict and a study abroad course on the natural and cultural history of the Galápagos islands. His other courses have included parasitology, sociobiology, general zoology, biomedical etymology, and a variety of specialized seminars. He is particularly active in the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society and is also a member of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, the American Association of Anatomists, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [make external links?]

Textbook Authorship
Saladin served in the 1980s as a developmental reviewer of college textbooks for the William C. Brown, Mosby, and HarperCollins publishing companies; progressed to writing instructors’ supplements for books by other authors; and began writing his own first textbook at the invitation of William C. Brown in 1991. That book, Anatomy and Physiology: The Unity of Form and Function, was first published in 1997 by McGraw-Hill Higher Education, which had since acquired the William C. Brown Co. The fourth edition was published in January 2006 and the fifth is in development. His second book, Human Anatomy, was first published in 2004, with a second edition due to be published in January 2007.

Religion and Activism in Evolutionary Education
Outside of biology, Saladin is most widely known for activism in various aspects of First Amendment law regarding church and state. He was raised in the United Missionary Church in Kalamazoo (formerly called the Mennonite Brethren), but drifted from the church in late high school and remained noncommittal but skeptical of religion through college. In graduate school, he was drawn to the philosophy of secular humanism and became active in the American Humanist Association. He founded the Humanist Fellowship of Tallahassee (Florida) and was one of the founders of the Humanists of Georgia. He was an editorial associate of The Humanist magazine from 1980 to 1982.

As a student in the 1960s, he was aware of the reform in biological education called the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, which in part was a reaction against the censorship of evolution in science textbooks, and he followed the case of Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), in which Arkansas biology teacher Susan Epperson won a Supreme Court decision declaring the censorship of evolution to be unconstitutional. The creationist opposition to evolutionary teaching was a significant factor in Saladin’s growing skepticism toward religion during his school years. He became more active on this issue in graduate school and as a professor, during a time when the scientific creationism movement became more politically active and the Institute for Creation Research backed an especially effective campaign to dilute the teaching of evolution by the inclusion of creationism in the curriculum.

In the wake of "creation-science" statutes passed in Arkansas and Louisiana in 1981, Saladin was one of the founding board members of the National Center for Science Education, which became the preeminent organization in the U.S. for opposing creationist politics and strengthening the teaching of evolution in public schools. He had also been instrumental in creating the Committees of Correspondence network, a predecessor to the NCSE that had functioned for communication and strategy sharing among anticreationist groups in various states.

Saladin engaged in stage debates with ICR vice president Duane T. Gish at Auburn University in Montgomery in 1984, at the Auburn campus in 1988, and at Georgia College and State University in 1990, where Gish came by his invitation as part of Saladin’s honors colloquium on creationism and evolution.

Saladin v. Milledgeville (1987)
At the time that Saladin moved to Milledgeville, Georgia in 1977, the official motto of the city was “Liberty, Christianity.” This was displayed on a municipal seal on letterhead and other city documents, the embossing tool used to officiate legal documents, the doors of city vehicles, and fire fighters’ uniform badges, among other places. At the same time, evangelical Christians associated with the Moral Majority were rapidly gaining in political influence, and were advocating that non-Christians should not be permitted to teach in public educational institutions. Saladin opted to challenge the constitutionality of the Milledgeville city seal to assert the necessity of religious neutrality in government and the equal citizenship of all persons without respect to religious beliefs. When the mayor and city council refused to entertain any suggestion of changing the seal, Saladin and three coplaintiffs filed suit in U.S. District Court in May 1983. When that court dismissed the suit in 1986 for lack of standing to sue, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed its decision and returned the case to District Court for consideration on its constitutional merit (Saladin v. Milledgeville, 812 F.2d 687 [11th Cir. 1987]). When Saladin’s ACLU-appointed attorney withdrew in 19__, Saladin was unable to obtain new counsel but continued the case as a pro se litigant, succeeded in winning another reversal from the Eleventh Circuit court in 19__. The city capitulated in 1992, removing the motto from use and agreeing never to use it again in any official capacity. Because of this settlement, the case never advanced to the point of determining whether the motto itself violated the Establishment Clause, but the Eleventh Circuit decision and its own history of previous Establishment Clause decisions,ref especially ____ v. Rabun County, left little doubt that it was prepared to find the motto unconstitutional.

The 1986 Eleventh Circuit decision set a wide-ranging precedent that was subsequently cited in hundreds of other cases concerning standing to sue, not only on issues of religious government mottoes and seals throughout the U.S., but also in many cases unrelated to religion. Saladin’s case garnered widespread attention from the national pressref and broadcast media. Primarily in recognition of this case, Saladin received the 19__ Humanist Pioneer Award from the American Humanist Association and the 19__ Freethinker of the Year Award from the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

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