Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – February 6, 2006.

President Bush and Science Education

President George W. Bush has spent most of the past week following his State of the Union Address last Tuesday, calling for more funding for math and science education. In fact, his newly unveiled budget proposes increasing the annual allocation to the National Science Foundation by 7.8%—to $6 billion for 2007, according to today’s New York Times. It is the President’s avowed wish that the United States stay competitive with other nations in the global arena—especially in medicine, engineering and other areas of applied science.

This of course is welcome news. We are a nation that has long since become accustomed to being # 1 in just about everything. And we Americans are especially fond of the latest gadgets and advances in health care that seem somehow synonymous with our lifestyle of good living.

But there is another side to our willingness to accept the fruits of the scientific endeavor. The tendency to pick and choose what in science is acceptable—and what is not—has never been stronger in America than right now. Today’s New York Times, in an article 6 pages before the news on Bush’s spending priorities on science, also carried the news of religious-inspired efforts to throttle the teaching of evolution in Utah, Kentucky and Indiana. The usual denials are repeated—i.e. the bills are not about religion, but simply attempts to override supposed excesses in the teaching of science that is not supported by the evidence.

So we are still trying to have it both ways. You can legislate support of science in the allocation of funds to appropriate agencies—but you can also legislate an anti-science stance by attacking specific topics in science that the local community decides it doesn’t like. We must remember, even while we applaud President Bush’s decision to increase funding for science and science education, that he has himself recently said that teaching intelligent design in schools is OK—because students ought to hear all opinions on the subject. As if all such opinions have equal value.

But we cannot have it both ways. We cannot teach physics in a vacuum, hoping that we will produce leaders in experimental and theoretical physics, and in engineering. Kids must be exposed to the entire spectrum of science—learning that all of science is a game of matching wits between the human imagination and the natural world. All of science is conducted in the very same way: someone gets curious about a phenomenon, and gets an idea that suggests what ought to be observed if that idea is true. We test the idea by going back to nature (either by direct experimentation, or looking harder at the natural world) to see if our expectations hold true.

We do this in physics and chemistry. We do this in biology, geology and paleontology. Evolution is one of the central ideas in science—the basis of interpretation of all biological phenomena—including all the modern research in genetics and genomics—research that in turn is the basis of our fight against infectious and other diseases. Indeed, George W. Bush has earmarked an additional $2.65 billion, on top of the $3.3 billion already allocated, to fight the threat of an influenza pandemic originating from avian flu. Without the concepts of mutations and evolution, we would not know enough even to see the possibility of the avian virus changing so it can be spread directly among humans.

In other words, we cannot support some form of science and oppose the teaching of others—without sending a hopelessly garbled message about the basic nature of science to the very kids we hope will be our scientific leaders tomorrow. As I said in my letter to the editor in today’s New York Times Book Review (‘On Evolutionism,’ p. 4), “science does not offer equal opportunity choices: like it or not, apples fall, continents move around, and species evolve.” This letter is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/review/05mail.html –along with two other letters with different, informative critiques of Judith Shulevitz’s essay “When Cosmologies Collide.”

If President Bush is sincere about his current support of science, he should retract his recent endorsement of “intelligent design” in the science curriculum.

Niles Eldredge

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