The past couple of days have been pretty busy, not only for myself personally, but also for every other scientific pundit who has been working overtime contributing their own views on whether evolution in the United States is an established fact or a dangerous distraction from the serious business of promoting Christianity. What with everything else going in, I have not had time to gather many of the promised quotes demonstrating Darwin's own sympathies with the idea of nature as the tireless designer of the species of the earth, so instead I'll post a couple of thoughts about what others have written more recently.
One of the most interesting is the stance of the school board from Dover, Pennsylvania. No, not Kansas, but our very own PA, the home of Benjamin Franklin (discoverer of electiricity in the lightning bolt), and of the writing of the American Declaration of Independence. In a similar spirit of seeking discovery and questioning misplaced authority, the schoolboard of Dover has apparently ordered that a "disclaimer" should be added to the teaching of Evolution. You can find a sympathetic discussion of the disclaimer in this article, which is honest enough both to reproduce the entire text and to admit that this is only a first step towards the proper goal of teaching history from the book of Genesis.
The beginning of the decalaration to be read to students in Dover reads as follows:
Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
Rather than expressing outrage, I think most scientists could heartily endorse the spirit of scepticism expressed by the Dover declaration. After all, people (especially the media) are all too willing to encourage the public to swallow "science" without sensible questioning, and without distinguishing theory from fact. For example, "thing tend to fall downwards" is a fact. "All objects in the universe exert gravitational influence on all other according to their mass and to the inverse square of the distance in between them" is a theory, and only an approximate theory at that. Perhaps the Dover educators will extend their scrutiny of the curriculum to add the necessary disclaimers before the theory of Gravitation is taught to students. In fact, as soon as the school board gets down to business properly, they will discover a host of assumptions and incompletenessed in many other scientific theories that have been parading as truths for far too long, and I trust that the board will be willing to continue down the path of intellectual emancipation that it has so nobly begun.
Fortunately, our high school students are deemed too unsophisticated to be inculcated into the deeper mysteries of Quantum Theory and the Theory of Relativity, otherwise the list of cautions would probably take longer to read than teaching the theory itself. But these should at least be mentioned, otherwise students may be taught about the electric motor and the electromagnetic spectrum without realising that Faraday's and Maxwell's theories were, again, just theories, and relativity and the quantum theory have plenty to say in improving both of these. But there may be ample opportunity to teach the Copernican Theory of the solar system, and in this case the arguments for the Geo-centric Ptolemaic Theory and the Flat Earth Theory should be presented, at least to enable students to make up their own mind. Of course, the idea that humans are heterosexual and monogamous may be just a theory, but I wonder if it's even that general - the Bible certainly presents alternatives, and our children should probably be exposed to these and left to choose their own path. The modern value given for pi is deduced from the mathematical theory of complex analysis, and students should be told about the Biblical value of 3 as well.
Imagine the intellectual honesty that could result from a society where children are actively encouraged to question the things taught as scientific fact in less enlightened places. I should keep an eye on developments in Dover, if they encourage so much open-mindedness, I might be tempted to move there for the sake of my children's education.
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