It is truly appalling that at a time when our public K-12 system is failing so badly that, for example, 60% of African-American 4th graders (ALL African-American children, not just low-income ones) can't read a simple children's book (like the one my 1st grader read to me tonight), we're wasting time and energy on utter horseshit like intelligent design.  This NYT editorial further shreads this ridiculous, transparent attempt to bring religion into the science classroom.  Isn't it bad enough that the Chinese and Indians are already kicking our butt in math and science without trying to teach kids that evolution is an unproven theory?!

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December 22, 2005

Editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/opinion/22thur1.html?pagewanted=print

Intelligent Design Derailed

By now, the Christian conservatives who once dominated the school board in Dover, Pa., ought to rue their recklessness in forcing biology classes to hear about "intelligent design" as an alternative to the theory of evolution. Not only were they voted off the school board by an exasperated public last November, but this week a federal district judge declared their handiwork unconstitutional and told the school district to abandon a policy of such "breathtaking inanity."

A new and wiser school board is planning to do just that by removing intelligent design from the science curriculum and perhaps placing it in an elective course on comparative religion. That would be a more appropriate venue to learn about what the judge deemed "a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism and not a scientific theory."

The intelligent design movement holds that life forms are too complex to have been formed by natural processes and must have been fashioned by a higher intelligence, which is never officially identified but which most adherents believe to be God. By injecting intelligent design into the science curriculum, the judge ruled, the board was unconstitutionally endorsing a religious viewpoint that advances "a particular version of Christianity."...