Yesterday’s election results are in, but the biggest news is not who won the governership in New Jersey or Virginia, but instead what the Kansas School Board is again doing to their science education curriculum. This time, they’ve made two major changes to their standards: 1) Teachers may teach the supposed holes in evolutionary theory, and 2) the definition of science has been altered at the state-level to no longer require that natural explanations be required. The changes do not require local school boards in Kansas to alter their curricula, but they do determine what will be on standardized tests. This decision, motivated by religion and politics, not science, will do nothing but harm Kansas students by giving them a sub-standard education. More importantly, by altering the definition of science that is taught to students, the Kansas school board stands to do more long-lasting damage to their students than could any psuedoscientific theory.
My very conservative definition of science is: “the systematic collection of evidence and development of theories that explain the natural world around us” (at its core, science is not a method, as many would claim, nor is it a philosophy*). But, science cannot explain supernatural events, nor can it explain natural events by invoking the supernatural, for this is not evidence. Explanation of the supernatural is the purvey of religion. Explanation of natural using the supernatural is mere superstition.
Crippled by this fundamentally incorrect definition of science, a generation of Kansas students may face the prospect of being ignorant of what science truly is. Kansas will graduate students who believe astrology is science (as Michael Behe, Intelligent Design’s star witness in the Dover trial, allows), Extra Sensory Perception is real because somebody’s sister’s cousin said she knew beforehand that her neighbor would die in a car accident, amazingly humanoid aliens really have been landing and abducting Americans for further study, and a thousand other crackpot psuedoscientific ideas. Even worse, some of those students will grow up and be the next generation of politicians and be totally unprepared to make science policy decisions.
Teaching science does not involve teaching what we don’t know and invoking God as a cause. Teaching science is showing students the explanatory power of evidence and theory. Students should be taught controversy, if science agrees that there truly is controversy. For when intelligent design is a historical footnote, its fallacious argument: “absence of evidence IS evidence of absence” long since proven baseless, Kansas students will go on believing. They will think science a matter of belief and convincing rhetoric rather than evidence and sound theory.
* I actually believe that the practice of science is more than just gathering evidence and making theories. It is a rich process that is best done systematically and impartially. The peer-review process is an extremely effective auditing mechanism that manages to keep most bad science from being published, while preventing very few good ideas from getting a hearing. But, the core of science is the explanation of the natural world, and this can be done haphazardly and with no peer-review, as Newton, Galileo and Copernicus most certainly did.
