I agree that the Pa. court decision was a clear 'win' for the good guys.  But those numbers make depressing reading: we have so far to go.  What the heck happened to science teaching in this country that so many people still cling to the old creation myth?  Is it just the power of the religious right, or is it indifference amongst the rest of us?

Data courtesy of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut 

These numbers are sobering. How is it that only 15% believe in science? I'm sorry, I just don't understand. Any thoughts?

How is it that only 15% believe in science? I'm sorry, I just don't understand. Any thoughts?

Maybe not the main reason but I believe that science educators have done a poor job in communicating difficult ideas in easy to understand ways. What may be a simplified explanation to a scientist might still be utterly indecipherable to a lay person. Somewhere there is someone who can explain concepts like natural selection or even quantum physics in ways that are understandable to anyone. Cartoons anyone? Michael Moore was able to use a cartoon to great effect in "Bowling for Columbine".

Clarifying - it's 139 pages but it reads a lot shorter.

What I'm wondering is why this cockamamy is getting such coverage in the first place.  No scientist supports it;  no teacher of science supports it.  Only in the world of 'he said, she said' journalism do you see any credibility given to it.  And of course, 50% of the people polled think it should be given equal time with evolution.  That's precisely the formula they see on their television sets and in other media outlets day-in, day-out.

Given that, I'm not surprised to see the numbers in this survey. If asked whether it should be taught as a "science", I'm in agreement with Jay and MN that people really do know what time it is when it gets right down to it.

How many people will bother to find out what time it is?  And how many when the creationists re-jigger things to try, yet again?  The unfortunate thing here is that this is a battle that's been fought for almost a century now, and it shows no signs of ending with a court ruling, or a vote, or any series of laws.    

I have a theory that when the Soviets were around, the country sort of subconciously "knew" it couldn't afford stupidity like this, not something that touched a vital area like science.  But now that the U.S. is unchallenged, people figure, "why not?"  Indulge ourselves with asinine shit like this.  It can't hurt, at least not imediately, and nobody likes those science classes, anyway.  

But the beauty of Darwinism is precisely that the basic ideas are so simple. Inheritance, variation, and reproductive advantage. What's supposed to be hard to get? The difficulty a lot of people have with it is purely and simply emotional: design, purpose, and teleology simply have no basic role, and a lot of people just can't live with that.

The key thing here is to keep in mind the distinction between popular opinion as one arena of struggle, and jurisprudence as another.  The area of the politics is derivative from possibilities raised on the popular opinion side of the issue, but must be approached skeptically.

Polls that show widespread believe in creationism in the 80s, and at least some watered-down idea of ID today, do not necessarily imply that there is, as there was with busing, a potential simmering political power against "judicial activism" brewing.  After all, the issue of ID is one that the vast majority of Americans don't give what is described in the vernacular as a 'flying f&%#*' about.   It is mainly an issue pursued by rightwing fundamentalists, with the idea of using it as a vehicle to gain power in school boards dancing in their heads.  But popular opinion is not -- as in the Kelo case -- incensed and readily mobilizable on this issue, IMHO.  If school boards are forbidden from putting forward ID in biology classes (but after all, could include discussion of it in other courses, including high school electives on 'contemporary controversies' and such), I don't see masses of Americans charging to the polls to elect fundies to their local school boards in protest.  The judicial activism protestation would, however, move people in realms like that of ProteinWisdom.com, but those are merely the diehards.

And this issue, at root, is not so much about the confused ideas most Americans have about evolution (polls also show that high school seniors usually don't know the specifics of the FDR presidency or many other things not subject to this kind of controversy), but about the power to impose a religiously driven agenda in the public schools.  After all, there is no overt or covert suppression going on of ID thinking in the society at large.  Unlike authentic progressive politics, and comprehensive effective access to disfavored authentic progressives, the issue is unrestricted outside of the sphere of essentially imposing ID as a "scientific theory" on the captive audience of students in public school biology classes.  Again, I don't see most Americans being up in arms over that.  Fortunately for progressives, as Robertson well realizes, the fact that this judicial decision goes WITH the grain of democratic decisionmaking in Dover PA makes it all the less powerful as a springboard of protestation politics over "judicial activism".

There is, however, another consideration at the macro political level, especially when you look at the crucial comprehensive issues at stake in Edwards v Aguillard (1987), the key Supreme Court decision on this issue.  With Stevens at age 82, if Bush appoints his replacement, we could have a court that makes the quite conservative Rehnquist Court of the 1980s look like the Burger Court of 1968.  They would be poised to overturn Roe and possibly Edwards, and other cases that have not only policy but implications of power and fundamental rights.  The powers-that-pee in the US, who at the comprehensive level have long been able to (discreetly) do more or less whatever they please and get away with it without genuinely having to fear any sort of effective accountability, would now have even whatever restraints that do exist removed, and as we have seen in areas of torture, detention, warrantless wiretaps, etc. the removal of even those flimsy and typically flaccidly enforced restraints can make quite a difference.  The advent of the kind of Supreme Court that we almost have already could undermine the particular victory here from above.

   On the issue of Edwards, at the comprehensive level ONLY one side (the right) have been able to mobilize effectively under the rubric of this showcase.  Indeed, that reality has been quite different from the politics of creationism/ID, where there has been much democratic give-and-take.  This reflects how our system is designed merely for masses to engage in toy-telephone theatrics that don't have a chance at influencing the levers of real power, or real repression, as they are exercised.  And so the charade goes on.

Of course, speaking of politics that people are able at least to seriously discuss, it is curious that, as distinct from the practices of gay marriage and flag burning, which threaten to infringe secularly on the rights of NO ONE, there has not been any push, as yet, to amend the Constitution to protect against the kinds of power governments have been given in Kelo.  It would seem to me that here you have an issue where a Constitutional amendment should be able to garner broad bipartisan support, and it would be wise for liberals to pursue it, before the whole issue does indeed give rise to the kind of 'judicial activism' driven backlash Gitlin seems to fear in the ID area, to be mobilized and exploited against environmental policy, as supposedly 'takings'.

   I would also not that Christmas is something people do care a lot about overall, and RW fundies are exploiting that issue to try to foment a divisive 'culture wars' over references such as to 'holiday tree ornaments' (that one wise-ass blogger noted, until it was corrected, were being sold at FOX's own website).  The idea is, though, that such unnecessary politicization is nasty, and so the operative press meme has shifted to a 'plague on both your houses' (secularists and the religious right) in response to this unilateral juggernaut.  The point is that these kinds of forces and efforts are precisely what underlies ID -- an effort to find something popular to use to polarize society with themselves in the majority.  On ID, they are not likely to be successful.

I don't know. A good friend of mine - a virulently anti-Christian Right liberal who grew up in a fundamentalist GOP household and rebelled against that worldview during college - initially found the Intelligent Design line sympathetic, about a year ago when this whole debate really got started. Her response boiled down to showing me her hand, pointing at it, and saying, "I mean, look at this thing!" It was, in essence, precisely the point some of the ID people make: when we look at certain objects, they intuitively seem to us to have been designed. They're incredibly complex and obviously have a purpose.

I'm sure part of the popular anti-evolutionary sentiment has to do with protecting our sense of ourselves as the center of the universe, and part of it is doctrinaire religiosity. But part of it really is that animals are such complicated and sophisticated machines, with so many efficient and purposeful organs and behaviors, that the idea that they could have simply evolved out of the molecular soup, with no guiding intelligence, just as the natural consequence of circumstances, really does boggle the mind. It's much harder to comprehend than geology or astronomy, which merely confront us with vast expanses of time and space. I don't think Americans rebel so strongly against the idea that the universe is 15 billion years old or so. But the idea that your hand just happened really is counterinstinctive, and it takes some educating to get used to.

The new school board will not appeal it (they blew out the ID crowd you may recall) so it stops here in terms of moving up the ladder.  What I think is great is that the judge wrote his opinion to be the template for other suits.  Now what I think should happen in Kansas and Ohio (where some tepid ID went in a few years back) is that parents should back sue against the ID crowd to get it stripped out.  Then this can be the template and precedent to pry ID right out of those tenuous strongholds. 

Apologies if someone already posted it (I didn't see it) but link to the full text of the opinion is at:

http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf

Wikipedia has background and summary information at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_Dist
rict

I actually think that a strong tendency toward understanding nature teleologically is something that is wired into us -- by evolution, of course. But that's our problem, not nature's.