Monday night, PBS aired a fantastic documentary, Judgment Day, about the Dover School Board's controversial attempt to add intelligent design to the science curriculum, and the resulting federal court case.
For those of you who don't recall, the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, attempted to add the book Of Pandas and People, an intelligent design "textbook," to the biology curriculum as a companion textbook and required biology teachers to read a one-minute statement about how evolution is "just a theory." (All quotation marks are intended to convey my derision.) Parents of Dover students objected: Teaching intelligent design is the same as teaching religion in the classroom, and calling evolution "just a theory" shows a real lack of understanding about how much scientific evidence there is for evolution and also what scientists mean when they use the word "theory." (Gravity is also "just a theory," after all.)
Judgment Day gives an excellent explanation of these issues, and I thought it was very fair and even-handed, giving all parties an opportunity to tell their side of the tale. I was riveted to this documentary, all two hours of it. If you haven't yet seen it, watch it. My understanding is that it will be available in full on the PBS site starting tomorrow.
Update: Here's a link to a clip of what was my laugh-out-loud favorite portion of the documentary. Ha!
1 comment:
We don't get PBS. I'm going to have to nag Dad a little more about that.
"Just a theory" won Einstien a Nobel Prize for his work on photons.
It's up to the English teachers to make sure kids learn their vocabulary and are taught to be critical thinkers.
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