I remember, when I was in high school, questioning the theory of evolution. Just thinking about things very superficially, it seemed like there should be more existing steps or links along the way between Species A and Species B. All of them died out? Just didn’t seem likely. Plus, animals don’t really make sense. Once organisms can engage in photosynthesis, and make their own food, why do they really need to do anything else? Why would you ever need to evolve beyond the simple algae?

Of course, this is very superficial analysis. The results of the evolutionary process are not the culmination of what necessarily “should” have happened, but simply what managed, over the course of nearly infinite possibilities of circumstance and permutations, to (either randomly or by design) develop and survive. A lot can happen over billions of years. And I’m sure there are countless advanced biology textbooks with countless explanations and examples and everything else, persuasively charting the course.

Plus, really, what difference does it make?

Do people – even doctors or medical researchers – work with evolutionary principles on a daily basis?

Darwinism, it seems to me, is more important as a philosophical construct than as an actual scientific principle.

And, ironically, most of the Republicans who want to teach Creationism in school are, at the same time, the most ardent advocates for Economic and Social Darwinism.

I understand the offense taken by scientists and other academics who – when confronted by the polling data that more than 50% of Americans apparently believe in Genesis – reply that the purpose of education is not to validate ignorance.

And I certainly understand the gut reaction to a movement that seems so anti-Enlightenment on its face.

But I don’t really see the harm of spending a few minutes to teach people Creationism or Intelligent Design alongside Darwinism.

It’s not like they are proposing not to teach evolution.

(At least not now.)

Kids are pretty smart. Can’t they sort things out for themselves?

(How do we really know what teachers are telling them anyway?)

It would seem to me that someone who is going to be a doctor, or a geneticist, or a pharmacologist, or a biology professor, is going to learn whatever he or she needs to know about evolution somewhere along the way.

And aren’t the people who believe in Creationism ultimately going to believe in that anyway?

Seems strange that people – on either side – would invest so much time and effort and energy fighting about it.

Really, the interesting thing about the Intelligent Design movement is that the Republicans are adopting a position that is so unabashedly liberal.

As noted recently in a Stanley Fish article:

“George W. Bush said recently that evolution and Intelligent Design should be taught side by side, so that students ‘can understand what the debate is about.’ ...

“Intelligent Design polemicists say that every idea should at least get a hearing; that unpopular or minority views should always be represented; that questions of right and wrong should be left open; that what currently counts as knowledge should always be suspect, because it will typically reflect the interests and the preferences of those in power.

“These ideas have been appropriated wholesale from the rhetoric of multiculteralism....

“In Graff’s book, Beyond the Culture Wars, ‘teach the controversy’ is a serious answer to a serious question: namely, how can we make students aware of the underlying issues that structure academic discourse?

“In the work of Intelligent Design proponents, ‘teach the controversy’ is the answer to no question.

“Instead it is a wedge for prying open the doors of a world to which they have been denied access by gatekeepers – individual scientists, departments of biology, professional associations, editors of learned journals – who have found what they say unpersuasive. In their hands, the idea of teaching the controversies ceases to be an academic proposal directed and students and becomes a political proposal directed at legislators, school boards, and the general public. They say ‘teach the controversy,’ but what they mean is that biology, having rejected Intelligent Design on scientific grounds, should nevertheless be forced to include it on the larger grounds of fairness....

“Typically, those like John Stuart Mill and Learned Hand who make pronouncements like ‘the First Amendment presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues than through any kind of authoritative selection’ assume (without saying so) that the tongues making up the multitude will belong to persons who are committed to the protocols of rational inquiry; frivolous persons, persons who exploit these protocols or play with them to gain political ends, are not imagined....

“Intellectual Designers and Holocaust deniers, despite the great differences between them, play the same shell game; they both say: Look here, in the highest reaches of speculation and inquiry in general, and not there, in the places where the particular, nitty-gritty work of inquiry is actually being done. They appeal to a higher value – a value of controversy as a good no matter what its contents or who its participants – an thereby avoid questions about the qualifications necessary to be legitimate competitors.

“In the guise of upping the stakes, Intelligent Designers lower them, moving immediately to a perspective so broad and inclusive that all claims are valued not because they have proven out in the contest of ideas but simply because they are claims.

“When any claim has the right to be heard and taught just because it is one, judgment falls by the wayside and is replaced by the imperative to let a hundred (or a million) flowers bloom.

[It strikes me, in this vein, that the Intelligent Design debate seems a lot like the campaign that Big Tobacco launched with its “scientific debate” around the “theory” that cigarettes caused cancer.]

“Polemicists on the right regularly lambaste intellectuals on the left for promoting relativism and its attendant bad practices – relaxing or abandoning standards, opening the curriculum to any idea with a constituency attached to it, dismissing received wisdom by impugning the motives of those who have established it; disregarding inconvenient evidence and replacing it with grand theories supported by nothing but the partisan beliefs and desires of the theorizers. Whether or not this has ever been true, it is now demonstrably true of the right itself, whose members now recite the mantras of ‘teach the controversy’ or ‘keep the debate open’ whenever they find it convenient.”



[Notes - See Stanley Fish, “Academic Cross-Dressing: How Intelligent Design Gets Its Arguments from the Left” Harper’s, December 2005, p.70. - The views expressed on this political blog and legal blog about Bill O'Reilly, gay marriage, the secularist agenda, intelligent design, and other issues are the personal views of Steve Herman (and/or Stanley Fish) and are not intended to represent the views of Herman Herman Katz & Cotlar, LTLA, TLPJ, the Civil Justice Foundation, or any other organization.]

No where in the Constitution does it allow for Executive Privilege. There is no implication or anything to suggest this is a "power" or right. The only argument that a person has to hand their hat on, is that... previous Administrations have been accorded this request. The key component is that it is a request and not a law, if this privilege is allowed, it is because a political body allowed to take hold. The Legislative Branch is to ensure that the Executive and Judicial Branchs do not over reach their powers... checks and balances. An allowance of Executive Privilege circumvents this process.

Never forget that it is in the best interest of both the Republican and Democratic Parties to keep this enjoyment and not have it challenged.

There is plenty of rhetoric and hyperbole surrounding the grandstanding of this "self granted" beyond the Constitution benefit but never is a Statesman-like stance taken.

Does anyone want to discuss Presidential Directive?