I’m not sure that I would have expected anything else, but it’s still deeply irksome that Bush is such a dolt about this:
Transcript of the roundtable interview of President Bush by reporters from Texas newspapers on August 1, 2005, in the Roosevelt Room.
Question: I wanted to ask you about the — what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design. What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?
THE PRESIDENT: I think — as I said, harking back to my days as my governor — both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.
Both sides should be properly taught?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, people — so people can understand what the debate is about.
So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?
THE PRESIDENT: I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I’m not suggesting — you’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.
Bush sort of waffles around on it, but … damn, Mr. President, the ideas I expect to be taught in science class are, well, science, not mystical mumbo-jumbo about how life is too complex for us to understand it, thus there must be someone smarter behind it all (Prometheus, natch) and, by the way, all that evil-ution claptrap is unAmerican and immoral.
That’s not science, Mr. President. That’s sitting around in caves, scared by the thunder, and deciding it must be the giants playing nine pins or something.
For shame. Somewhere in Beijing, the Minister of Long-Term Educational Planning and Taking Over the World’s Economy through Scientific Training is cackling maniacally.
It might be amusing if they were “properly taught” so that people would know what the debate was about.
“Evolution is science. Intelligent design is not; it is not even a theory in the scientific sense. It is poorly disguised religious dogma. They got nothin’. End of comparison.”
Now in religion classes things would be different. And, yes, if science classes have to go over intelligent design then religion classes should have to go over evolution.
I’ve been puzzling over this for some time – the best answer to ID is a better understanding of some rather abstract concepts of the scientific method. (What is a testable hypothesis, a supportable theory, etc.) But schools approach subjects as 1) isolated from one another, and 2) a body of concrete facts that somehow just appeared out of nowhere. (The political filtering process remains well hidden from the kids).
It seems our educational process is driven by the dogma that in early childhood, no abstraction is possible. Many students crash and burn when academic subjects turn to abstractions later in their school careers (such as the transition from arithmetic to algebra).
Hmm…