Several people (including Lauren) have mentioned this article on teaching Intelligent Design to me. I've got to say…I wasn't impressed with it. I get the point—the author thinks that silly theories, from ID creationism to Hoyle's panspermy to von Daniken's ideas about aliens can be entertaining hooks to draw kids to the good science—but his own article illustrates why it is a bad idea. It's a strategy that leads to a superficial, cartoonish view of the subject.

Controversies are fine as a tool to start a discussion, but they require that a) the teacher understands the material very well and can clearly state why some ideas, such as von Daniken's, fail to meet scientific criteria, and b) students have to understand the core ideas being critiqued first. Charging in with a laundry list of crazy ideas without a foundation and without a plan to teach kids how to evaluate them is a recipe for confusion.

Here, for example, David Morris completely mangles an idea. It does not fill me with confidence that this is a good plan to teach science.

I recommend that biology teachers begin by discussing Elisabeth A. Lloyd's decidedly scientific book, The Case of the Female Orgasm. No school board member should complain. The book's subtitle, "Bias in the Science of Evolution," clearly fits with the new requirement that teachers critique evolutionary theory.

Hold it. Lloyd's book is a somewhat technical book by a philosopher of science; how does Morris plan to introduce it to high school students? I'd be reluctant to ask college students to read this book, except in an upper-level course dedicated to the general subject. You're going to have to find a much shorter treatment of the subject in order to make this work at all (there is one, but I would have hoped that anyone proposing this lesson plan would have already been familiar with it.)

Darwinians can explain the male orgasm. After all, the male ejaculation is necessary for the survival and perpetuation of the species, and if giving the male great pleasure while doing so promotes that, then natural selection would eventually endow the male orgasm with that characteristic.

Stop again. Yes, there are Darwinian explanations for orgasms. Do these hypothetical students understand them? Morris is assuming what he is supposed to teach. Before we can plunge into problems in the explanation for the female orgasm, these students need to understand the basics of selection and adaptation.

When it comes to the human female orgasm, however, evolutionists are stumped. No other female of the animal kingdom experiences an orgasm. Professor Lloyd examines 21 evolution-based explanations for the female orgasm, and demolishes every one of them.

Uh-oh. Professor Morris has just flopped. He got the story all wrong. This does not bode well for the lesson plan.

First of all, the Darwinian explanation for the male orgasm is still perfectly applicable. If it is advantageous for males to associate sex and pleasure, driving them to procreate more frequently, the same is true for females. I may not have known much myself as a teenager, but I could understand how it would be to my advantage sexually if the girls also enjoyed sex.

The adaptive dilemma is why women are not 'optimized' to achieve orgasm from vaginal intercourse. It's not surprising that women have orgasms, but that the way they have orgasms isn't more directly coupled to procreation. I think it would be an excellent idea to teach high school kids that the best way to stimulate a woman involves clitoral stimulation and doesn't require penile insertion at all, but that's going to lead the class off into entertaining directions that aren't necessarily going to help them learn about evolution.

Secondly, Morris has his facts wrong. Other female mammals do have orgasms; like us, though, copulation is relatively ineffective, but they respond to clitoral stimulation. Lloyd's book explains this; hasn't he read it?

Finally, he has misstated Lloyd's conclusion. She demolishes the adaptive explanations, not the evolutionary ones. This is a significant distinction that the students will need to understand in order to grasp this story, but apparently the teacher here is oblivious to it. Why, without understanding that, the teacher might screw up and propose Intelligent Design as the only remaining alternative, rather than the actual explanation given by Lloyd…like this:

Here the biology teacher might offer the class the alternative explanation of intelligent design. Is the intelligent power simply leveling the playing field between the sexes? Or is Professor Lloyd right that the female orgasm is "just for fun," and the intelligent power is female?

It's obvious that Morris has not read the book he is telling us we should use, and has completely misinterpreted Lloyd, or is dishonestly misleading us about the contents of the book. The actual answer is the same one SJ Gould gave in his essay, "Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples" (which, by the way, cited Elisabeth Lloyd's work…in 1991), from Bully for Brontosaurus. It's all about development—male and female genitalia are derived from identical beginnings, and evolved in parallel. Gould's explanation is simple and clear.

Males and females are not separate entities, shaped independently by natural selection. Both sexes are variants upon a single ground plan, elaborated in later embryology.

No mention of intelligent designers, female or otherwise. No unwarranted teleological goal of "leveling the playing field".

If we want to take Morris's suggestion of bringing exciting issues into the classroom, it seems to me that we don't need von Daniken or the Discovery Institute, and that these bogus controversies actually detract from what the students should learn. Read Gould's essay; what you'll find is a substantive discussion of the genuine conflict between adaptive explanations and structural nonadaptations.

Why would anyone propose that we lecture on nonexistent controversies when there are real ones that are more interesting and more productive and more useful to students of biology? It seems the only people who suggest such things are the ones who don't understand the science in the first place. Maybe if they hadn't wasted their time reading screwy stories about ancient astronauts or genes floating down from outer space, they wouldn't garble the biology so badly.