Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Scripted Answers
"The descent of Kansas" by John W. Nelson on the Enter Stage Right website takes an erudite look at the Kansas Science hearings that not only manages to draw a comparison between our incomparable Kathy Martin and Antoine Arnauld, a 17th-century Sorbonne priest, but to explain lucidly why scientists and educators were right to boycott the hearings.
Why shore up the feeble defenses of pseudoscience by indirectly lending the patina of intellectual credibility to its practitioners?
Such considerations were no doubt behind the decision of scientists to boycott the Kansas Board of Education hearings convened last month to reevaluate the state's science standards and decide how the theory of evolution should be taught in public schools. In a farcical tribute to the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial, a subcommittee of the board listened to proponents of ID provide scripted answers to questions posed by John Calvert, a retired lawyer and operator of the Intelligent Design Network, who presented the creationists' objections to evolution.
