Get Your Christianity Out of My Kid’s Science Class

…And I won’t perform science experiments during your Sunday Mass.

So say 11 families in the Dover, PA school district. Their school district has decided it would ignore that silly and unnecessary Church and State separation, as well as some of the strongest governing laws, hypotheses, and theories of science that have been accepted by the more than just the overwhelming majority of scientists around the world, in order to make our kids the laughing stock of the planet.

The school board has now required that Intelligent Design be taught in the public – read that again – public – school system.

A while back, I wrote a blog about this very issue, but in case you haven’t read it (and shame on you if you haven’t), I’ll recap:

Evolution is a powerful and completely accepted, leading scientific presumption that is contested by almost no college professor, scientist or scholar of biology. Evolution uses the science of anthropology, biology and other studies, most of which is testable, constantly evolving with new information to support how life as we know it got to where it is today, backed by over a century of research.

Creationism is a group of religious fables consisting of imaginatively written literature, penned 2000 years ago by theocrats with the purpose of convincing everyone to subscribe to their religion.

Intelligent Design is the new Creationism. It intentionally and cleverly doesn’t mention God by name, but denotes that some being – some entity with “intelligence” and purpose allowed the development of life to take place. Now, take a wild guess as to which groups are pushing this theory, and you’ll be able to figure out which being they might be referring to. It doesn’t have any scientific validity, research, or support.

Yesterday Jerry Springer, who has a surprisingly entertaining yet adult-level-of-thinking talk show on Air America, had Doctor Andrew Petto from the National Center for Science Education, who also teaches biology at the University of Wisconsin on his show to comment on the debate that shouldn’t even be wasting our time.

The entire interview was both interesting and fulfilling especially if you’re one of them book-learnin’ folks – except for one guy who called in about 10 minutes through the interview. Here’s the transcript (or for those of you who might believe in I.D. and don't particularly get the whole "reading" thingie, here's the audio of the trans...funny symbols below):

Caller: Yeah, thanks Jerry for taking my call.

I’d like for (the professor) to explain if it’s not a science, why so many scientists seem to be jumping on board this potential theory, of Intelligent Design, number one.

And, secondly, if evolution has been such a successful science as he just stated to the previous caller, why do they keep on changing the theory every time a fossil record or something that’s discovered goes against their theory?

Such as, if evolution happened over billions of years, why is their not one fossil ever discovered that shows the morphing of one species into another species…so they change the theory to say, “well things happen in fits and spurts because we can’t prove the original theory.”

So just changing theories because the fossil records don’t support the original theory – I don’t think is a very successful science.


The Professor: Ok we’ve got a couple of issues there.

One – many scientists, you say? The Discovery Institute (the right-wing funded group on the west coast pushing I.D.) has put a thing on its web site that says there are 400 or so scientists (that believe in I.D.).

Do you know what the denominator is – do you know how many scientists there are in the world that reject that idea? We at the National Center for Science Education have kind of a playful project called “Project Steve” and we have over 500 scientists, just named Steve, who has come out in support of Evolution.

So you’re taking about maybe 450 people who have signed (onto I.D.). And they call themselves scientists, but they are sometimes economists, sometimes philosophers of science, sometimes historians of science. It’s true they’ve studied science –but they’re not scientific researchers, so I would reject the statement that there are many scientists. There is a dwindling minority of scientists.

The second question is, are they changing theories?

No, they’re not changing the theory. They theory is that the history of life on Earth and all the variations that we see and all the patterns that we see, is due to the interaction between living things in the environment, and as they go through generations there is a lot of variation; no two are exactly alike. Some of those variations are more successful, others are not. That theory hasn’t changed, really since Charles Darwin put it together.

What has changed is our understanding of the way that it works. In fact we’ve learned about ways of producing biological change that Charles Darwin couldn’t have imagined. In fact, Darwin didn’t know anything about genetics, and yet we know how important genetics are in terms of the ways in which variation occurs and the way it gets passed down.

Finally, the idea of one species morphing into another – that is a popular but incorrect idea about the way that evolution works; that one species or one individual changes into another. There is indeed variation, there are indeed differences from one population to the next, and they will diverge from each other. They will change over time in response to what’s going on in the environment. But, it isn’t necessary to see a species changing into another, because organisms live or die; they don’t change into something else.

What evolution says is the ratio of who lives to who dies is what changes the species, not an individual becoming say, half-lizard and half-bird.

My thoughts on all of this?

I personally feel this whole debate is embarrassing, and a shameful example of how religious conservatives prioritize their political agenda over wanting to improve or even hold any value for children’s education.

For a sect of people who seem to never stop thinking about how we can help America’s youth, they sure spend a lot of time decreasing the value their experience. I believe that if the Christian folk in this country want bullshit taught in our educational institutes, thus putting the very children they claim to protect at a significant disadvantage globally, then they can saved it for their deprived, home-schooled, poorly social-skilled child who will learn about Intelligent Design right after mom gets through her abstinence lesson, somewhere between Guiding Light, and another Maury Povich fat camp episode.

And when that kid grows up, he’ll end up working for mine.

For more on this topic, I suggest reading this article.