Questioning Darwin

I've been thinking a lot about science education recently, having just given a two-day lab on bacterial transformation to a group of high school freshmen in the Bronx. It's really a great lesson; the kids get to transform bacterial with GFP and make them glow green. It shows them, first hand, the concepts of cloning, antibiotic resistance, and the link between DNA and protein expression. It really piques their curiosity. Which is what science is supposed to do. And why I was both pleased and dismayed by an article in the WaPo today.

The author goes on for a bit about some old high school history teacher that made him question everything and made history fun for him, whereas his science classes were boring and rote memorization. And if it's one thing the IDers have done for him was show him that biology can be questioned in the same, exciting way.

And it can. But not the way that IDers do it. He writes:

The intelligent-design folks say theirs is not a religious doctrine.
They may be lying, and are just softening up the teaching of evolution
for an eventual pro-Genesis assault. But they passed one of my tests.
They answered Gould's favorite question: If you are real scientists,
then what evidence would disprove your hypothesis? West indicated that
any discovery of precursors of the animal body plans that appeared in
the Cambrian period 500 million years ago would cast doubt on the
thesis that those plans, in defiance of Darwin, evolved without a
universal common ancestor.

See, that's all fine and good. That is a great way to disprove Darwin's hypothesis. Only such an ancestor has yet to be found. And until it has, evolution has not been disproved. Now, this author must turn around and ask the IDers how to disprove their hypothesis. What? They can't do it?

See the difference? Not questioning the facts of Darwinism in a science class is bad teaching. Bad teaching is a problem that is entirely exclusive from whether or not evidences for intelligent design or theories of irreducible complexity should be presented to students. If students aren't being forced to ask tough questions in their science classes, they aren't being educated properly.

But to introduce ID, specifically, alongside evolution and proffer it as another possible explanation is like teaching medical students that mental illnesses can be diagnosed by phrenology. Sure, there are probably a few doctors out there who may think that that is an alternative method, but any curriculum that gave phrenology any semblance of credence would be laughed out of accreditation. Saying that our current methods of diagnosis are incomplete, however, is a whole other story...