UniBrow

Here’s an infuriating story about Matthew LeClair, a junior in a New Jersey public high school, who tape recorded a history teacher telling his students that they’re going to hell if they don’t believe that Jesus died for their sins, that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark, and that there’s no scientific basis for evolution or the Big Bang theory. The school board has up to this point kept mum about what, if any, disciplinary action it has taken or will take against the teacher. So far it has only removed him from LeClair’s class, and it’s the student who seems to be catching the flak:

Since Matthew turned over the tapes to school officials, his family and supporters said, he has been the target of harassment and a death threat from fellow students and “retaliation” by school officials who have treated him, not the teacher, as the problem. The retaliation, they say, includes the district’s policy banning students from recording what is said in class without a teacher’s permission and officials’ refusal to punish students who have harassed Matthew.

Jerry Coyne, the biologist who wrote a withering indictment of the intelligent design movement last year in The New Republic, returns with a piece on the hysterical demonization of evolution to be found in A.C.’s current book. He gets more personal than he needs to here and there, but–unlike, say, Jane Smiley–he brings the goods.

Just in case you were in a good mood today, here’s a depressing AP story about the Cobb County, Ga., school board’s efforts to oppose the teaching of evolution in district schools. The school board was ordered last year by a court to remove the stickers it had been placing on science textbooks–disclaimers describing evolution as “a theory, not a fact”–but a federal appeals court has now sent the case back to the district court for another look, saying the lower court neglected to adjudicate the specific question of whether the school board’s action was “religiously neutral.” So it’s not settled yet.

But do enjoy this glimpse of the custodians of public education in Cobb County, Ga.   

It had been the school’s policy since 1995 to tear out chapters on evolution from science textbooks out of “respect for the family teachings of a significant number of Cobb County citizens,” according to Thursday’s opinion. But, in the spring of 2002, when the school district selected a new biology book that contained 101 pages on evolution, school officials decided to affix a disclaimer sticker instead of removing the section.

More details, including links to the court documents, can be found here.

Go here to read about a uniquely loopy ID/creationist who has deemed science a threat to national security. Be sure to hit all the links.

By far the best article I’ve read in the media concerning evolution v. intelligent design appeared in The New Republic of Aug. 22, 2005. The article is by Jerry Coyne, a professor in the University of Chicago’s department of ecology and evolution. It’s a very long review of a textbook called Of Pandas and People, the book that the Dover, Pa., school district (until stopped by a court) was requiring teachers to recommend to students as a counterweight to classroom instruction in evolution. Here’s a link to TNR’s website, where you can search the article out–but you’ll have to be a subscriber to get to it. In the meantime, some pithy extracts. To the ID-camp charge that evolution is “a theory, not a fact,” Coyne responds that in reality evolution is “a theory and a fact”:

In science, a theory is a convincing explanation for a diversity of data from nature. Thus scientists speak of “atomic theory” and “gravitational theory” as explanations for the properties of matter and the mutual attraction of physical bodies. It makes as little sense to doubt the factuality of evolution as to doubt the factuality of gravity.

And he notes that IDers–who, seeking a way around the First Amendment’s establishment clause, dress their religious agenda in pseudoscientific garb–finally give the game away by singling out evolution for classroom disclaimers about rival theories:

Why haven’t school boards put similar warnings in physics textbooks, noting that gravity and electrons are only theories, not facts, and should be critically considered? After all, nobody has ever seen gravity or an electron. The reason that evolution stands alone is clear: other scientific theories do not offend religious sensibilities.

There ensues a devastating, withering, unmerciful dismantling of every ID claim so far hazarded, not excepting ID’s crown jewel, the ”irreducible complexity” doctrine. In due course Coyne wonders:

Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again? Would an intelligent designer produce animals having a mixture of mammalian and reptilian traits, at exactly the time when reptiles are thought to have been evolving into mammals? Why did the designer give tiny, non-functional wings to kiwi birds? Or useless eyes to cave animals? Or a transitory coat of hair to a human fetus? Or an appendix, an injurious organ that just happens to resemble a vestigial version of a digestive pouch in related organisms? … Why, about a million years ago, would the designer produce creatures that have an apelike cranium perched atop a humanlike skeleton? And why would he then successively replace these creatures with others having an ever-closer resemblance to modern humans?

Of course the creationist has no answer to any of these questions, except perhaps that, well, God’s ways and means are mysterious; He did it this way because He did it this way. But in that case, Coyne notes, we have ”a theory that cannot be rejected. … And a theory that cannot be rejected is not a scientific theory.”