Mr Bobby,
You are too narrow minded despite your comic genius. You claim to have received no emails offering a “reason†to allow Intelligent Design theory into the high school curriculum. OK! How about academic freedom? No good science course disc uses only proven facts. The desire to remove any taint of religiosity from the public schools is as convincing an argument for the abolishing of public schools and the establishing of voucher supported private schools as I have ever heard.
Science was invented in medieval religious schools ( culminating at the cathedral school at Chartres) precisely because free theorizing and disputation of radical ideas was welcomed and bitterly(thus thoroughly) fought.
In the 1960s the Biology classes I taught in three different high schools. I was liberally allowed to discuss proposed theories, and not just ‘proven‘ theories, since informed theorizing and disputation are the twin spring freshets of science. In my classes we chewed over many incompletely researched theories, Continental Drift(In those days not a credible theory) , the SETI project in Puerto Rico, Climate Variability and its causes and cures, possible pesticide effects on avian fertility, core sample evidence for the advent of sudden ice ages and glaciations, etc.
We considered the unproven theories of the now out-of-fashion Baxter effect in plants, and the articles in the now discredited “Worm Runners Digestâ€Â, published by reputable scientists studying the possible passing of learned knowledge to flatworms regenerated from pieces of a parent worm. All this was beneficial to the students understanding of the methodical sifting, assembling, and discarding of knowledge through science.
“Where is science headed???†we asked.
Being an inveterate reader of technical journals in 1960 I was almost alone in correctly informing my student concerning the falseness of the “fact†that humans have 48 pairs of chromosomes, despite most college faculty’s and textbook’s presentation as fact through 1965. Actually there were and are 46 pairs. The fact was disproven.
There IS actually a rational case for “intelligent design†if that term means that all processes like evolution are nested within a creation process. Parallel and convergent evolution evokes implications of design tendencies that seem prewritten to many veteran scientists after a lifetime of consideration. These implication ARE worth discussing, especially in science class. A few years back “OMNIâ€Â, a layman’s science journal, published a collection of their monthly interviews with the acclaimed scientists of the day. Over 95% of them these scientist “saw†the presence of a godlike designing hand in the physical world. Being a proud atheist at the time I found their sentimentality disgusting. Now as an old man, still reading and observing the natural world, I full of suspicion that I was the fool.
How do you do it? Haven’t you , in your personal Weltanschauung, found that such fool-doom is easier to maintain in today’s indoor society We live a CRT-fixated life, shut off from the distraction of actual stars and moths, manufacturing bloodless music and mechanistic theories that will someday be thought to have originated from renegade robots. Down with the hermetically sealed Public School System. Charles Coughlin
