"Is our children learning?"

Cripes. Where to begin? In a talk with reporters yesterday, Bush gave his opinion that intelligent design should be taught in science classes alongside evolution. This is apparently in direct contradiction once again with the comments from his own science advisor. I'd hate to be that guy today.

My two cents: Evolution (once defined for me as simply the gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form) is a fairly solid idea in science. It's mostly the theory of natural selection that has a few holes. It's still the best we have right now, and while we can't go back in time and observe millions of years of speciation, there is compelling evidence.

A population genetics lecture in the genetics class that I did the teaching assistant thing for this past Fall included a short discussion of research the professor did on fruit flies and starvation time. Typical lab flies will live 20 hours without food. For this experiment, they isolated the flies that lived the longest without a foodsource and mated those to form the next generation. After 60 generations, the flies would live an average of 240 hours. Regardless of the natural process that caused this change, this is evolution in action.

Intelligent design is really just creationism dressed up to make it seem more scientific. There's less actual biblical speech and talk of a designer rather than "God," but this still ultimately is a supernatural explanation for things. It's not science. I just finished reading a book by the physicist Michio Kaku where he points out that miracles are by definition not repeatable and therefore completely untestable.

Analogous SCIENTIFIC debate shows that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory. Should we teach the competing theory of tiny ghosts that carry our electrons around on their backs in high school physics?

I'm glad to see that there's an uproar in response, but considering that he's on record as having this opinion since at least his governor days in 1999, I can't shake the feeling that this is yet another ploy to turn the media and national debate away from Karl "Icky Pants" Rove and the utter mess in Iraq.