I attended the Minnetonka school board study session last night. Rumors of the demise of good science teaching in that Minneapolis suburb have been greatly exaggerated; to the contrary, I'd count that school district as solidly in the pro-science camp. The efforts of the Intelligent Design creationists there are pathetically weak. They aren't even trying to get ID on the curriculum, but are nitpicking over wording in the local science standards, trying to reduce their rigor. This long, long meeting distilled down to creationists wanting this line deleted:

Students will understand that the great diversity of organisms is the result of more than 3.5 billion years of evolution that has filled every available niche with life forms.

There was an official study session first, in which only the board and invited individuals discussed the matter. It was clear that Eaton (the creationist) was struggling against the tide. The board seemed unsympathetic, and several of the local science teachers were there: they were impressively strong and came down solidly against any revision of the statement, on the grounds that it is good, tested science and it was their job to teach science in the classroom. I could have just left for home at that point, since it's easy to see that the kids in Minnetonka are in good hands.

I hung around for the open community discussion afterwards, though, when everyone had the opportunity to make 3-minute statements. I did say a few brief words, but since I didn't want to seem like a carpetbagger, I restricted myself to simply praising the existing standards and the rigor of the science teachers (and mentioning that I'd be very pleased to see more Minnetonka students attend UMM!). I counted 21 people who came up to speak their piece; of those, 7 were on the ID side and wanted the revision, the rest were against it.

The acting chair of the board, Judy Erdahl, made a very strong, unambiguous comment to open the discussion, saying that Intelligent Design was not and would not be on the table—the Minnetonka school district simply will not condone teaching it. The pro side was in general positive in affirming the value of good science and saying great things about the school community. Again, several schoolteachers from the area were among this group; I think any attempt to impose ID on Minnetonka from the top down is going to fail the instant it hits the bedrock of the body of science teachers there.

That a third of the speakers from the community were for ID sounds terrible, but they were a mostly unimpressive bunch who parroted creationist lines. The most common claim was that there are no transitional fossils, which is ridiculous. I heard two new and original and creative creationist arguments, though, which was a real treat. Too bad they were completely bogus.

• One was classic pseudoscience. A fellow brought graphs: he showed a smoothly rising curve of increasing complexity or species number (he wasn't too clear in defining the axes), and said this was what Darwin predicted. Then he showed a complicated graph that showed a step function at the Cambrian boundary, and said that this is what the fossil record showed. Because the two did not fit, he said evolution must be rejected. Of course, his second graph consisted entirely of "data" that he made up, sitting at his computer; it showed a flatline of no complexity or species or whatever before the Cambrian, and he made a few strange errors, such as stating that there were 18 phyla (someone explain to me…why do all creationists state numbers so far from the standard values on a matter that is so easily looked up?).
• One fellow gave the usual laundry list of creationist canards, and then brought up a new word: "sceathers". I marveled at it. There are no known transitions between scales and feathers, he said, and it was a strike against evolution that no one had ever been able to show an intermediate that he called a "sceather". How curious; I guess he had never noticed that a chicken foot is covered with scales, and its leg with feathers. I suspect reality is irrelevant though, and because a feather is an innovative modification of an epidermal scale, he would reject anything with a tubular germ as fully non-scale, fully feather. There is also a very thorough scientific literature on the evolution of feathers:

  Brush AH. 1993. The origin of feathers. In: Farner DS, King JS, Parkes KC, editors. Avian biology. London: Academic Press. p 121-162.

  Brush AH. 1996. On the origin of feathers. J Evol Biol 9:131-142.

  Brush AH. 2000. Evolving a protofeather and feather diversity. Am Zoolog 40:631-639.

  Brush AH. 2001. The beginings of feathers. In: Gauthier J, Gall L, editors. New perspectives on the origin and early evolution of birds. New Haven: Yale University Press. p 171-179.

  Prum RO. 1999. Development and evolutionary origin of feathers. J Exp Zool (Mol Dev Evol) 285:291-306.

  Prum RO, Brush AH. 2002. The evolutionary origin and diversification of feathers. Q Rev Biol 77:261-295.

  Prum RO, Dyck J. 2003. A hierarchical model of plumage: morphology, development, and evolution. J Exp Zool (Mol Dev Evol) 298B:73-90.

  Prum RO, Williamson S. 2001. A theory of the growth and evolution of feather shape. J Exp Zool (Mol Dev Evol) 291:30-57.

  (I just happened to have all that handy—I've got a pile of papers filed away on my computer, and might someday write something here about feather evolution.)

There was one person who favored the ID-backed changes for a reason I could appreciate. She pointed out that the discussion the community was having on the issue was very informative, and she thought that this kind of thing would also be of value to the kids. Why not have the debate in the classroom? It is true that working through errors can be informative, but the point of standards is to specify what knowledge is important for kids to acquire, not how they learn about it. I suspect that hearing a mathematician explain details of number theory and why 2 plus 2 is not equal to 5 could be challenging and enlightening, but what we want from our school system is that students understand that 2 plus 2 does equal 4; watering down our expectations of our math classes to the point where we tell teachers that kids should graduate with the knowledge that 2 plus 2 might equal 4 is not productive.

I do agree that there should be more public discussion of the evolution-creation wars. The creationists at this meeting seemed to have gotten all their information about evolution from Jonathan Wells and Ken Ham, and haven't heard a single rebuttal.

The results are reported in the Star Tribune.