From the Athens Daily Tribune,
August 8, 248 BC:
ATHENS - The Athens Metropolitan School Board last night passed a resolution by a 6-2 vote forcing science teachers to acknowledge that the Earth may not be round, as believed by most scientists.
The resolution is a victory for the so-called Intelligent Chariot (IC) movement, which holds that the movement of the sun across the sky each day is too complex to be explained by mathematics. Most IC proponents believe the sun is pulled across the sky each day by the god Apollo and his flaming chariot.
"We are pleased that children will at least now get more than one view," said Eurectates, a spokesman for the Coalition for Traditional Greek Values (CTGV). "The theory that the Earth goddess Gaia is not only round but also spinning is simply that, a theory. Just look in the sky - it's the sun that moves, not the Earth, and we feel the Earth-spinning theory does not adequately explain that. Who made it spin? Why would Apollo just sit still in the sky? There are too many holes in that theory to teach it as fact. I mean, what's next? Are we going to start teaching that Artemis doesn't live on the moon?"
But not everyone is happy about the decision. "It's a step backward," said Thalopholous, one of the two school board members to vote against the measure. "It's not like we're teaching lightning is caused by electricity or anything crazy like that. We all know lightning happens when Zeus is angry. But mathematics, geometry and science have shown again and again that Earth is a spinning ball. All IC has is an ancient story."
You get the point.
Here's the thing. President Bush recently cited the need to educate our kids in math and science. "This competitive world is going to demand a job skill set that emphasizes math and science," he said. "And if our kids don't have the talents necessary to compete, those jobs won't go away, they'll just go to another country."
Can't argue with that. But you're not going to make a kid into a biochemical engineer in high school. That's what college is for. High school science - well, all of public education, really - is supposed to lay a good foundation for vocational or higher education.
That means that while it's important to teach high school kids how the digestive system works and how atoms come together to form molecules, it's just as important (maybe even more important) to teach them exactly what science is.
I'm no scientist. But here's what I remember about the scientific method from sixth grade: you ask a question and form a hypothesis. You make observations and maybe do experiments and find out whether your hypothesis is right. Your observations and experiments lead to a theory.
Let's say, for example, the question is, "Why does the sun rise, move across the sky, and set?" One hypothesis is that a god carries it across the sky in a chariot. Another is that the earth is spinning. Observance of other celestial bodies, along with a good deal of mathematical calculation, shows that the latter is far more likely. Thales, among other very smart ancient Greeks, formed the theory, based on their scientific observations, that the earth is round and spinning. That theory was confirmed by Copernicus, Galileo, and many others over the centuries.
By contrast, the belief that Apollo's flaming chariot carried the sun was never tested scientifically. Not that I'm aware of, anyway. It never got passed the hypothesis stage. It was not a theory. It was a belief, probably clung to for decades by many people who lacked the capability to think of their home planet as anything but the center of the universe. The sun can't just move by itself, they thought. Someone must be pulling it!
Intelligent Design, or ID, isn't a theory, either. If I understand it right, it acknowledges that OK, maybe it wasn't literally six days, and maybe species did evolve, but it's all just so complex that somebody must have made it happen.
But that has never been tested. It never got passed the hypothesis stage. It is not a theory. It is a belief, probably clung to by people who can't wrap their heads around the intricacies of organic chemistry and the huge spans of time involved in evolution. Life can't just create itself, they think. Someone must have created it!
I will acknowledge that Darwin got a lot of things wrong. But he did form a hypothesis and then a theory based on observations. Over the last 150 years, more science has fleshed out his theory and filled in the gaps, all while confirming that the basics of it were right. Evolution, after literally millions of experiments and observations, is a theory (in the scientific sense), not a belief.
Yet the Discovery Institute, lots of right-wingers and even the President want schools to present the ID belief as a theory with equal standing to the theory of evolution.
Do they really think it's OK to teach a science class without being able to tell the difference between a theory and a belief? Can a kid go to college without knowing that a theory requires testable, verified data? Can we really expect to get kids through high school without that very fundamental foundation of science, send them off to college and into the high-tech, science-based workforce, and still compete in a global, high-tech, science-based economy?
Teach Intelligent Design - heck, teach Adam and Eve and the snake, alongside Uranos and Gaia and hundred-handed cyclops titans - in a religious studies or philosophy class, where discussion of beliefs belongs.
But if you want to remain competitive in an increasingly science-heavy global economy, don't let our students get through school with fundamental misunderstandings about what is science and what isn't.
If you don't do that, Apollo's chariot might be setting on America's time as a world leader.
From North Star Writers Group