Starry Wisdom

posted this article about President Bush’s call for school’s to teach Intelligent Design as an alternate to evolution to explain life. One sentence in this article infuriates me above all others “Scientists have rejected the theory as an attempt to force religion into science education.” The reason why this irks me so is that ID is not a theory, and it cannot be a theory. It is not science at all, but religious doctrine plain and simple. If schools teach ID as the non-scientific alternate to the generally well-conceived and well proven theory that natural selection leads to evolution of species, well, that I am indeed for. Because that will help showcase critical thinking.

An added bonus to this is that I am currently reading Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes by Stephen Jay Gould, which has a section devoted to essays on science and politics. In particular this section focuses on the legacy of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and the longstanding fight of creationism versus science that’s been going on since Darwin popularized evolution via his theory of natural selection. Gould himself was a witness in a legal battle over evolution vs creationism almost 25 years ago, 55+ years after the Scopes Trial. The more things change, the more things stay the same, the more we waste time on uselessness. But politicians need to appeal to their base, especially when they can’t seem to get anything actually useful done…