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Thursday, September 01, 2005
Teaching the Stork Theory
Richard Dawkins
and Jerry Coyne eloquently brush off the ridiculous suggestion that Intelligent Design (ID) should be taught in classrooms alongside natural selection. They write in the Guardian:
(Link via email from Rahul Bhatia.)
Update: Ajay Bhat sends me two nice links on the subject, one serious and the other, heh, not quite so serious.
Update 2: Reader Swami Nathan emails to point me to an excellent letter to the editor in last week's issue of the Economist. Here it is:
and Jerry Coyne eloquently brush off the ridiculous suggestion that Intelligent Design (ID) should be taught in classrooms alongside natural selection. They write in the Guardian:[Intelligent Design] is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?In the rest of the piece, they explain why ID isn't a real scientific theory. Read the full thing.
(Link via email from Rahul Bhatia.)
Update: Ajay Bhat sends me two nice links on the subject, one serious and the other, heh, not quite so serious.
Update 2: Reader Swami Nathan emails to point me to an excellent letter to the editor in last week's issue of the Economist. Here it is:
SIR – Would it be too much to ask for those who would bring religion into the classroom to accept devoting an equal amount of time in Sunday sermons for the “alternative” theory of evolution?Well stated.
Jud Hendelman
Montreux, Switzerland
