Bush and ID

Much has been written over the last couple days about President Bush's comments endorsing the teaching of ID in public schools. In his typical folksy (read: not terribly thoughtful) manner he said that students should be exposed to "different ideas" and "different schools of thought." One has to wonder, then, why he has been so adamant about funding abstinence-only sex education, where students are told solely about abstinence and are in fact scared off from ever using birth control. Apparently, exposing students to "different ideas" only counts when he agrees with those ideas. But that is the problem with putting ID into public school science classrooms in the first place - how do you then draw the line on what you do and don't teach?

There are religious or pseudo-scientific alternatives to every great idea in science. My friend Rob Pennock, in his book Tower of Babel wrote about the "it's only fair" argument. If "it's only fair" to teach both evolution and ID and let the students decide, then the same reasoning has to apply to dozens of other concepts as well. What about the Raelians? They believe that life on earth was bioengineered by aliens and they have followers all over the world, including many genuine credentialed scientists. Surely if "it's only fair" to present both ID and evolution, then "it's only fair" to present this alternative as well (and in fact the Raelians have issued a press release applauding the efforts of the ID movement to open up science classrooms to alternatives in the hope that they can get theirs in as well).

And this is not limited to alternatives to evolution either. If you're going to "teach the controversy" between evolution and ID, you're logically committed to teaching geocentrism along with heliocentrism (yes, there are credentialed scientists like Gerardus Buow who are geocentrists too), flat earthism along with normal earth science, astrology along with astronomy and much more. Wouldn't we also have to teach the mind-first views of Christian Science or the new age mind-over-matter views of Deepok Chopra along with the germ theory of disease? In all of these areas you will find genuine, credentialed scientists who accept them as true.

The fact is, we have precious little time to teach good science in public schools as it is. In most high school biology classes, evolution is only a small portion of the curriculum. And American students have already fallen well behind the rest of the developed world on all the science tests. If we dilute the time we have for teaching even further by bringing in fanciful alternatives, we will only continue to erode our ability to compete and undermine the education of our children.