Bush and creationism
There’s been a stink recently about some comments Bush made on intelligent-design creationism. (Via Cosma Shalizi.) Here’s what Bush actually said:
Q I wanted to ask you about the — what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design. What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?
THE PRESIDENT: I think — as I said, harking back to my days as my governor — both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.
Q Both sides should be properly taught?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, people — so people can understand what the debate is about.
Q So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?
THE PRESIDENT: I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I’m not suggesting — you’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.
Q So we’ve got to give these groups —
THE PRESIDENT: Very interesting question, Hutch. (Laughter.)
There’s a charitable interpretation of these words, and an uncharitable one. The charitable one suggests that Bush is a fool, but no more a fool than most people. The uncharitable intepretation says that he’s actively trying to push an ideology that he knows is false.
Quite a number of people suggest that intelligent design ought to be brought into a debate with evolution in front of students, where they can make up their minds freely. The standard responses to this are, I’ve found, threefold:
- Sure, why not? Let the debate happen, and let people decide.
- “Creation science” has the same scientific backing as flat-earth hypotheses or Holocaust denial, and we’d never give them equal airtime in a school. (Relatedly, this equal-airtime policy gives greater benefit to charlatans than to those who tell the truth.)
- Creation science is not science. It is pseudoscience whose goal is to advance a political agenda. It may belong in school, but not in a science class.
As it happens, I support items 2) and 3) above. Item 1), I think, comes from the same school of thought that suggests the New York Times should always interview one person from one side of an argument, and one person from the other. We know the consequences of that policy: the public thinks that outright liars are respected members of the scientific community. It’s not a fair fight. Allowing “creation scientists” in schools means inviting a fight between those whose goal is explicitly political, and who are trained in PR warfare; and those who are untrained in how to fight dirty.
But still, it does seem possible that we could include intelligent design in a good curriculum — as an example of what the data have proved wrong. I would have loved to have learned why people thought the earth was flat when I was growing up, and what eventually convinced them that it wasn’t. (People sailed ships for a long time. Why did it take them so long to notice that the mast disappears below the horizon after the hull?) But no one seriously believes the world is flat anymore, and any curriculum that pretended there was still a debate should be laughed out of the room. However, learning about the advancement of science, and about actual evidence of the earth’s roundness, seems like a good way to teach the current state of our knowledge. Let’s not give fools any more than a moment of our time, however.
P.S.: Chris Genovese has a great idea:
Perhaps a fitting response to Monday’s statements, symbolic or otherwise, would be for each of us to send the President a good book on evolution.
Why not send him a copy of, say, The Blind Watchmaker?
P.S. #2: Oddly enough, Krugman today (August 5, 2005) has an op-ed about intelligent design, asserting that the whole point of the doctrine is to sow doubt about the foundations of evolutionary theory. It’s not an actual alternative to natural selection, but science isn’t the point.
This gets back to a point I made a while ago: that I think liberals are at a disadvantage in this sort of war, because we quite often believe that the truth will win out. So we argue for truth, whereas our enemies are arguing for politics. Their strategy is likely to succeed with more people, because that’s what their strategy aims at. Ours is likely to succeed with the rather smaller group of people who care about evidence and understand statistics.