Let's Start Light

Well I'm back, and I see the blogesphere has been quite active in my absence. So I'm going to start light by linking to this post at The Panda's Thumb that explains why "teaching the controversy" over evolution is a bad idea. It makes some great points.

As I see it, if you wanted to teach the non-existent controversy in public schools, there’s only one way you could do it and give it justice. First, you’d have to give the students a very thorough background in biology and evolutionary theory. You could then introduce the ID claims and the mainstream scientific responses, and the responses to those responses, etc. You could then take things a step further and have students “critically examine” the scientific evidence, including reading important contributions to the literature. The problem is, once you manage to successfully do all this, the kids are ready to graduate college.

Now technically the Discovery Institute does not advocate teaching ID in classrooms. They only advocate teaching "evidence" against evolution. (They seem to use this strategy a lot, like how they decline to identify the IDer, thus allowing them to officially deny criticisms against them while allowing popular perception to do their work for them.)The points in this post apply nonetheless.