CNN.com - 'Intelligent design' taught in Pennsylvania - Jan 19, 2005

CNN.com - 'Intelligent design' taught in Pennsylvania - Jan 19, 2005

If you choose to believe that God made the heavens and the Earth, I respect that.

If you choose to ignore the numerous common links in heredity among all known plants and animals, you're just being ignorant.

You don't have to believe it. It's your right, if you desire, to paint your face blue, bay at the moon, and preach that God exists solely as a Quiznos Sub restaurant napkin you dug out of the garbage last year. But the fact remains that the American school system is piss poor right now and it's only getting worse.

I blame this whole "creationism versus evolution" argument. Right now, the Indians are eating us alive and I can guarantee you that their education system isn't digging itself into a ditch over how to teach biology. If I try really hard, I can see a lean, mean educating machine made out of the American public school system. One where our children are actually competent, coming out of high school with a diploma that they can read, and able to withstand – and even outperform – the growing threat of internationalization.

This system I envision doesn't teach creationism. I do not want my children being tested on questions whose answers are "Because God said so." Nations that are competing for our business are not teaching their students this. So why are we?

Now, just to pull this all back to my first point, I should again reiterate that if you believe in creationism, I respect that. If you want your children to believe in creationism, guess what? Don't use my tax dollars to do it. Teach them yourself, in Sunday school, or catechism, or what have you.

Leave my country out of it. We have a job to do. Public schools need to stop wasting their time over foo-foo problems like this one and return to teaching concrete facts, not opinions. Evolution is a fact. (If you argue that there is no evidence to support evolution, I ask you justify to me why the skeletal structure of the dead-for-65-million-years allosaurus resembles that of the modern-day chicken's. If that doesn't stump you, please explain to me why human males have nipples.)

"Intelligent design" is really just a weak attempt to compromise between the two ideas, and one I fully acknowledge I used to consider as valid. It may even be right. I don't know. But I do know that there is quite a bit of work to be done in biology today, and American scientists aren't going to cure cancer just by praying about it. Evolution supports a logical structure, and failure to teach students about it is a crime of negligence, as bad as any book-burning that Bradbury could dream up.