The powers that be in Kansas have recently decided to de-emphasize the role of evolution in education. While this debate has been going on for a number of years, I still find it interesting to watch. It's a little dishearting to see modern people rejecting the findings of science in favor of faith, not because I believe that the findings of scientific findings are inherently better than religious beliefs (I do believe that, but it is not what concerns me), but because I think that they are not proposing the right solutions.

The basic problem is that these people want a religious based education for their children, and our public school system is incapable of providing this (because of the principle of seperation of church and state, which IMO ought to be maintained). There are many ways to solve this (vouchers for transfering the public funds for the education of each child to a private school, church-funded classes that are overseen and accredited by the local public school system, etc), but focusing on the ape-to-man-is-a-theory-not-a-fact argument is really not a good path, it solves the wrong problem.

Anyone who teachs that man evolved from apes is a fact doesn't understand science. While evolution itself is fact, it does not follow that man evolved from apes. Evolution is a fact because we can observe and demonstrate that self-replicating things change over time (this is, in a nutshell, the definition of evolution). This is a very basic thing and it is easily demonstrated. We frequently see micro-evolution in microbes. We see macro-evolution in computer models of self-replicating things, and we can see that the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution is really just a difference in the time scale. However, it can be difficult to convince some people that macro-evolution occurs in nature. The evidence tends to be buried and incomplete and extracting information from it requires a great deal of background knowledge about the field. Convincing people who lack that background, or who lack a concept of the depth of knowledge required to see the connections can be very difficult. Particularly when they are confortable with a much simpler idea that explains the matter within their framework of knowledge (e.g., 'God exists, and is very powerful. Men don't look or act like apes, and I think too highly of myself to believe that my great*300,000 grandma could have been an ape, so it is clear that God created Man just as he appears now').

No one who knows anything about science should have any objection to telling people that the evolutionary theory of the orgin of species (man in particular) is 'just' a theory. Thats exactly what it is. Richard Feynman, a particularly gifted and insightful man once said "science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves." This is the most important thing that anyone should understand about 'science'. Science is not a belief system or a way of finding truth. It's the methods we've found that help us to eliminate ideas that are wrong from ideas that might be right.

I think that what supporters of theories (and I use that term very loosely here) like 'Intelligent Design' object to is not that their children are taught the evolutionary theory of the origin of man, but that they think (and are probably correct) that their children are being taught that the theory is fact instead of the best idea we've come up with that fits the observations and does not have the kinds of features that we've learned are typical when we are fooling ourselves.

Perhaps what our religious friends in Kansas should be pushing for is a better education about what science is and how it works. The fact that many people think that its a good idea to put a sticker on a science text book that warns that it is full of unproven theories points to a pretty serious and evidently widespread misconception of what science is.