The NYT does another big piece on creationism -- again, it's portrayed as a debate, as a back-and-forth argument about the world around us. A "balanced" article would have emphasized that ID has virtually no backing in the scientific community -- they claim 400 scientists support ID or at least think it's worth debating. I can find 400 scientists who think UFOs and aliens visit earth regularly. 400 scientists is what, .0001 percent of all scientists in the world? You don't teach grade school children "both sides" -- you teach them what is widely accepted. Period.
The article calls ID a "school of thought," when it should be called a religious belief with no scientific standing which can't be proved or disproved because it depends on faith. The article hints at how its all been stirred up by just a handful of people funded by the Discovery Institute and ALL their successes are at school boards and in politics -- none of them are in the laboratory or in science journals. Shouldn't that be the focus of every article?
William Safire even weighs in via his grammar column. Annoyingly, he ends it with a quote from an apparently clueless Nobel laureate at Brown University named Leon Cooper:
''If we could all lighten up a bit perhaps, we could have some fun in the classroom discussing the evidence and the proposed explanations -- just as we do at scientific conferences.''First, middle school kids aren't trained scientists debating an issue. Second, can you imagine the outcry if a science teacher really "taught the debate" and emphasized that ID -- as far as science is concerned -- is total hogwash?
