When there is serious debate, children should know about it. Science does change and develop, and this year's hot new discovery becomes last year's aether or phlogiston.
My own opinion is that Darwin will be out the door in about ten or fifteen years, everywhere except maybe in our public schools, where liberal judges will remain adamant.
Seemingly Darwin has had nine lives, and when each brand of neo-Darwinism is disproved, another springs up to take its place. But Marx is dead, Freud is dead, and in due course Darwin, the third great purveyor of the hermeneutics of suspicion, will be dead.
In the meantime, students should know that the issue is debated.
This sounds good, but I don't know what it means. Would you mind explaining?
Agreed. If ID is ever a serious scientific issue -- that is if it succeeds as science to the point where it is actually being utilized and implicated by profesisonal scientists in the prosecution of ongoing research -- then it can be included in curricula. In fact at that point "can" is irrelevant. It will come to be included as a matter of course, rather than by means of politically achieved intellectual affirmative action.
In the mean time: tough &*($. We're not budging an inch.
My own opinion is that Darwin will be out the door in about ten or fifteen years, everywhere except maybe in our public schools, where liberal judges will remain adamant.
This view is deluded. If evolution disappears from science it will also (with some lag time) disappear from science texts.
Look, textbooks are often wooden, stupid, boring, badly written and inadequate. But there's no freakin' conspiracy. Authors seek to include in textbooks those ideas that are actually in science.
Now granted that it might (and does) happen sometimes that some minor theory or illustrative example might persist as a stock textbook cliche even after being falsified and abandoned by working scientists. But this notion that a MAJOR theory could be cast aside by science and yet remain in science textbooks. Well, that's just whacked. It's genuine unhinged paranoid conspiracy stuff.
The fact that you, and so many other antievolutionists, could seriously entertain such a notion should be an indication that you're overdue for a reality check.