Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Lessons of Ohio
The debate in Ohio drew so much attention that the state board was inundated with 40,000 e-mails, letters and petitions, said Owens-Fink, the board member who promoted the intelligent design view. That kind of pressure, many agreed, helped push the board in October 2002 to insert language into the standards that said: “Describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolution.”
When the Discovery Institute immediately claimed victory, Wise said, she negotiated additional language that said the October clause did not mandate the teaching or testing of intelligent design. The board included that language when it approved the standards unanimously in December 2002.
But the controversy did not end there.A committee then began working on suggested lesson plans for teachers who wanted help implementing the standards. By late 2003, rumors began circulating of lesson plans that contained intelligent design concepts. The board ended up approving one of the plans that called for critical analysis of evolution.
If you taught intelligent design, what would you teach? The so-called "theory" has no substance. Its proponents won't even entertain a hypothesis about when or how life developed or evolved on the planet. The truth is that all there is of intelligent design is a half-baked critique of evolution. If there were no theory of evolution, there could, by definition, be no intelligent design theory.
In essence, "teaching the controversy" is teaching intelligent design -- there is nothing else.
