By all means spare yourself the burden of reading, as I did this week in the esteemed National Review Online, that criticizing sneaky attempts to undermine evolution in k-12 science class is somehow akin to promoting eugenics.
John G. West of the Discovery Institute (home of most of the misguided intelligence behind the Intelligent Design campaign), a self-styled "contrarian" and a political scientist, not a natural scientist, took to NRO to defend Louisiana's new Science Education Act, signed late last month by that state's generally savvy governor, Bobby Jindal. That measure allows teachers to introduce into their science classes supplemental material that will supposedly rev the kids' "critical thinking" and foster "an open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning."
West has a grandiose view of the type of critical discussion that such supplements will stir in the minds of elementary and secondary school pupils, far too many of whom can scarcely read and few of whom could construct a coherent paragraph differentiating James Madison from James Bond. But no matter, says West--now that Louisiana finally offers to its science teachers the protection they've long craved from academic oppression, the discussional atmosphere will flourish.
Where, one wonders, are these oppressed teachers who until now have been browbeaten or cowed from communicating objective scientific information to their charges? West identifies none in his piece, and when the Discovery Institute, which has had its fingers in similar bills around the country, was asked that very question several months ago by Florida reporters, it named no names.
What failed in five other states (Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, and South Carolina) but passed in Louisiana is a legislative cure to a problem that doesn't exist. These are not modern-day, k-12 Galileos who fought for the Science Education Act; they are closer to modern-day Savonarolas in disguise.
The Discovery Institute, having watched Intelligent Design run into a vexing obstacle when a (devout Christian) judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, ruled in 2005 that ID "is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," has lately taken a different tack. Which is why West has draped his organization's true goal of undermining evolution in fashionable "academic freedom" garb, and why the Discovery Institute has thusly paraded it to state legislators.
To that end, West writes that "in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education." And in "this environment of politically correct science, thoughtful teachers who want to acquaint their students with dissenting views and conflicting evidence can expect to run afoul of the thought police." (Italics mine.)
Of course, it is West's preferred scientific theory that is propagandistically propagated in schools. Neither he nor his organization gives any credence to evolution, which every serious scientist accepts as the cornerstone of modern biology. West and the Discovery Institute, by contrast, offer only unscientific doubt.
As for the eugenics canard, West asserts that it was the public's uncritical fealty to scientists working to "keep us from sinning against Darwin's law of natural selection," that led to the forcible sterilization of 60,000 Americans. Therefore, he writes, we must allow for "scientific inquiry" about evolution in k-12 classes or risk embracing all sorts of similarly noxious practices (like, psst, even more eugenics!).
What bosh. We haven't the space to list all the obvious reasons why this analogy is junk much less to investigate the more nuanced ones. But West's scare-tactic deserves a response similar to that garnered by promoters of Ben Stein's film Expelled, who chose to push their product by drawing overblown correlations between the teaching of evolution in science classes and Nazis.
Bottom line, beyond West's awful article, is that Louisiana's talented new governor and its legislators have embarrassed themselves and their state by passing a transparently deceptive law that will surely undermine science education in the bayou.