A Comment About

Getting It Wrong about Atheism and Science

April 29, 2008 - 12:00 am - by John Derbyshire
griefer
2008-05-29 17:00:01

can’t you read warren?
lets try this one more time.

Nationwide, nearly half a dozen states are considering variants of such bills, some of which throw in the origin of life and climate change for good measure. Legislators in Florida recently introduced such a bill in response to new educational standards that were the first to formalize the teaching of evolution. Althought two incompatible bills passed the state House and Senate, they died when the legislature went out of session; similar measures are still pending in other states. These bills appear to have originated at the pro-Intelligent Design thinktank the Discovery Institute, and constitute part of its latest effort towards reducing the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Evolution clearly has no shortage of controversies. But none of those controversies involve the basic principles of evolution, and all of them operate within a framework where random mutation and selection play a key role in creating diverse species that are related by common descent. It’s clear that the Discovery Institute is trying to introduce controversies that don’t exist, while ignoring those that do. That’s why the academic freedom bills it’s promoting are such dangerous things; while supposedly promoting intellectual analysis, they’re actually an attempt to pave the way for misinformation to enter the scientific classroom.