This musing is my personal blunder in a concerted attempt to not share a bit of opinion on a somewhat controversial topic in the world today. Alas, as in the famous words of Darth Vader, my failure is complete, you shall now witness the true power of the Dark Side! Anyway, Showtime recently started showing a very interesting documentary about the controversy surrounding the Intelligent Design(ID)/Evolution debate called A Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus. All in all, the film does a good job explaining the controversy surrounding the above debate because it makes the argument accessible to most audiences by showing both sides of the controversy and illustrates them very well. Where the film’s true success lies is in its ability to spur a larger population to unbiased thinking on what can be a very passionate topic for many people for various reasons. For me personally, not only did it reconfirm some of my already unwavering points of views (which are few and far between), but it also opened a whole other can of worms in terms of where some other viewpoints, regardless of how asinine they might seem to some people, do have a place in education.

The current ID/Evolution debate is centered in the goings-on of several state school boards around the country, the most notable being the board of the great state of Kansas. Proponents of ID are presently saying that they just want to make sure that the ‘theory’ of Intelligent Design at least be introduced in public school science classes when the ‘theory’ of Evolution is presented and taught. Even though they aren’t saying that they want the Theory of Intelligent Design taught as an actual topic in science classes, this still causes a multitude of problems for evolutionary biologists and scientific thinkers.

The first big…BIG problem is calling both concepts theories. For scientists, this implies that both topics can arguably be debated at the same level. Agreeing with this assumption is a good way to really piss off the majority of the scientific community because evolution, while there are still many holes in linking ancestral developing organisms to the current crop of the “fittest” survivors, there is still a ton of evidence that you can touch and feel that is based in years and years of research that thousands of scientists in the world agree to be natural law. In addition, if you ask any one of these members of the scientific community about evolution and how it works, you’re going to basically get the same answer from all of them. *Interesting side note: I recently read an article in National Geographic about Carl Linnaeus (the guy who used plants back in the 1700s to develop an effective taxonomic species-classification system that is actually still in use today), and apparently biologists are very close to linking every single organism that has existed on the planet to the LUCA, or the Last Universal Common Ancestor (the little guy that everything organic on the planet can call great grandpa times a zillion).

I digress. Now compare evolution to ID, a concept that is entirely based on human intuition and will not garner a common answer when probing its foremost experts. Science is based on fact and evidence. Science class is for science. I’m sure everyone remembers their first day of science class and you learned to attack a problem by coming up with a hypothesis, generating alternative solutions, testing them, and making a conclusion based on the results. Unfortunately, the ID concept doesn’t make it past the hypothesis stage because it’s untestable…where is any evidence that can be tested? Therefore, it probably doesn’t belong in science textbooks or science classrooms, but it does have a place in education and I’ll get to that later.

Another problem that the teaching of ID presents for evolutionists is that it presents a way of looking at the natural world that shunts analytical thinking. “The world in its complexity is just way too variable to be able to be explained by evolution alone,” is an example of what an ID proponent might say. A hardcore biologist would respond to this comment by saying that this way of thinking is just plain lazy. I can agree with that statement (although I wouldn’t be as harsh) because from the point of view of a scientist, it’s basically conjuring a simple answer as an explanation for an incredibly complex area of study. In Flock of Dodos, an ID proponent who sits on the Kansas public school board is interviewed. She says that she can’t possibly believe that one day a lungfish decided to walk ashore and live on land. I have to admit that I laughed at this very nice woman and immediately felt bad for having done so, but that is a basic misunderstanding of how natural selection works. Even if you are joking when making that comment, the mindset is still there, and the attitude of simplistic answers for diverse areas of questioning is easily scattered amongst and absorbed by the young minds being taught in these very schools. The jettison of critical thinking in American schools should be the topic of outrage of not only parents and educators, but also anyone who cares about the development of the country.

Obviously, I don’t think the teaching or even the mentioning of ID belongs anywhere near science classes, but I do think it belongs in education. The current American youth is the most informed generation in the history of American youths. This will always be the case. The inquiring mind has access to ANY information that can be made into electrons. Kids will find out about this whole ID/Evolution thing going on, and it’s the job of parents and educators to make sure they get the facts straight. Admittedly, the most likely place for this to come up is in biology class when they open their books and see a picture of Charles Darwin and they ask, “Teacher, teacher, why does the Discovery Institute hate the Galapagos Islands?” I sure as hell hope that teacher is able to equip that student with the right tools to think about the issue for him or herself rather than letting that individual blindly accept one side or the other.

So here’s where I get on my soapbox if I’m not up there already. This is where America is seriously lacking in this day and age…education. The majority of America’s youth is behind the power curve in comparison to the rest of the developed world, especially when it comes to mathematics and science. It may seem like a problem that is solitarily effectuated by the school systems that are currently in place. True, there are school boards out there with people like the lungfish lady sitting on them, but these aren’t the only responsible parties. When you look at the isolated case of ID vs. Evolution, ID seems to be winning the battle even though the majority of the scholastic community finds it a preposterous decision to teach it alongside Darwin. A big influence on this situation is that ID folks are backed by charismatic, business-minded organizational leaders with Mariana’s Trench-like pockets. So where are the scientists?

When invited to the debate, evolutionary biologists don’t show up. It’s not that they didn’t get that memo Mr. Lumbergh, it’s that they refuse to acknowledge that there is even a debate. I for one can see where they are coming from. In looking at their fields of expertise and what they do from day to day, why would you acknowledge that there is an equally contradictory theory with an arguably mystical basis? If I’ve spent the last thirty yeas in a crater in the middle of the Gobi Desert taking and comparing the forelimb measurements of fossilized cockroaches that are 100 ft under the modern level of stratified rock and then writing 500-page papers with the off chance that it might be published after competing for a government grant against 50 other guys doing the same thing for my next dig with, I’m not going. Even if you could get a self-respecting biologist to the debate, it would be over after the first question based solely on the fact that biologists and other scientists suck at communicating. Scientists are stubborn, socially uncouth, and hopelessly unable to use words with less than 5 syllables assembled in sentences that can be wrapped around the equator 10 times using Times New Roman font size 12. You think the average person wants to spend more than 10 minutes in a closed space with the individual described above to actually learn about something?

Anyway, I think I’m done. I’ve opined enough and will now leave you to the sweet escape of top boob and farting.