The Controversy That Isn't
Throughout this case, the other side has argued that this is a matter of "academic freedom" and that we should "teach the controversy." Here's a great article from the Guardian, co-authored by Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, about why that argument just doesn't hold water.
Read the entire pdf version of "One Side Can Be Wrong"
Thanks to Jerry Coyne for sending this along to us. We couldn't have put it better!
It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the heart of educators like ourselves.
…What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all.
Read the entire pdf version of "One Side Can Be Wrong"
Thanks to Jerry Coyne for sending this along to us. We couldn't have put it better!
posted by ACLU of Pennsylvania at 10/10/2005 05:17:00 PM
2 Comments:
Dawkin's carefully doesn't mention any particular kind of "supernaturalism" but the physicist Alan Sokal writes of his encounters with proponents of Native American creationism and sociologists who maintain that science is only a product of dominant groups oppressing the incommensurable but no less true belief systems of those who can't afford the PR of institutional professors like Richard Dawkins. Darwinism and the kind of strict and ultimately self-destructing materialism that Dawkin's advocates is in fact the societal consensus, beginning with Henry Ford, also a vehement anti-Semite. Even for George W. Bush and his clientele of business executives. What is Dawkin's afraid of anyway? The end of science? That's laughable. Most scientists are employed by gigantic corporate firms in the bio-tech industry, the Pentagon, General Electric, etc etc etc...If they truely felt threatened by "intelligent design" it would be banned from every school in a second.
Talk about "sound and fury, signifying nothing". That anonymous post is an amazing conglomeration of words utterly failing to make a rational point.
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