Open up the classrooms

Mathews at post See previous blog entry.

I was one of those four hundred and actually got a nice reply from Mathews.

The issue of letting open discussion into the classroom is beyond reproach, but the problem is that evolution/ID was never about opening minds, on any side of the aisle.
Education is a means to kidnap the minds of small children and fix them Jesuit style as young as possible. The current 'debate' is between the two candidates with large enough market share to be in the Ad Wars at all. None other need apply.
If open discussion is wanted, why not introduce Buddhist thought as an introduction to the evolutionary psychologies of the ancient yogas (hopefully without_ their_ propaganda.
Why not introduce the history of Higher Criticism, on the one hand, and the _secular_ history of Darwin criticism (which the ID people mostly ripped off, starting with Denton's Evolution: A theory in Crisis).
They could even introduce Spinoza, as a way to mediate current confused ideas about divinity, and bring a materialist touch to God talk.
Top that off with Hegel's version of what he ripped off from Spinoza. Hegel by the way resembles Dembski. How? Threatened by the austere strictures of Kant against rational theology, a way had to be found to counterattack and put Protestantism back in the picture with an Absolute Science that would do to Newton what Dembski wants to do with Darwin.
But then again, fairness would at this point require bringing that dreadful anti-hegelian, Karl Marx. He should go over well in Ann Coulter territory.

So let's be fair.
You know, if biologists were actually open they would have brought some secular Darwin critiques into biology quite a while ago. A book like Wesson's Beyond Natural Selection, or the Wistar institute symposium, or Koestler, or Lovtrup, or Robert Reid. Failure to present a self-critique has handed the football to the religious right wing, who most certainly don't have any intention of granting anyone else any objectivity.

In fact Darwinian biology is unique in making intelligent students completely stupid about evolution. Parrots with high IQ.
There is still time and plenty of opportunity to remedy this situation and fight off the ID assault, but that would require intelligent self-critique, and the paradigm is now too woefully hegemonic for that.