Jay Mathews thinks we ought to include Intelligent Design creationism in the classroom. Why? Because biology classes are boring, and a little controversy would spice them up and get the students involved.

Let's not stop there. Physics is incredibly boring, and that Einstein guy is just old dogma; let's make them more lively by including discussions of Victor Zammit's…peculiar…interpretations of E=MC². Heck, toss in some Time Cube, too, and really get the class on a cosmic sidetrack. Those physics teachers don't really have much else of substance to get across, so a little lively entertainment is the best thing to do in those classes. Even better, let's have the federal and state governments step in and require that physics teachers dedicate at least one lecture to those topics.

Oh, look! Tinkerbelle!

Aren't pointless distractions good? They make things fun!

This is the colossal failure of Mathews argument, and it's a sad one for an education specialist to make. Yes, we don't want to turn our classes into droning recitations of dry facts. We try to talk about how we know what we know, and we bring up dead ends and controversies and odd little facts. In my genetics class, I spend a fair amount of time going over Darwin's genetical errors, and when we get into the complications of modern genetics, I explain how these factors would have stymied Mendel if he'd run into them. I even try to flesh out the abstractions of genetics by talking about specific heritable diseases, their causes and consequences. But I don't talk about Tinkerbelle. I don't drag in random bits of funny nonsense that have no relevance to genetics.

Intelligent Design creationism is a fat hairy Tinkerbelle.

The same with Zammit and Timecube—unless there is some specific bad example of poor science we're trying to highlight, it is unproductive to waste time on it. I talk about controversies all the time; all good science teachers do. It's just that I'd rather talk about real and informative controversies than the usual phony ones cobbled up by the wanna-be theocrats of the Discovery Institute. Mathews is cluelessly elevating a religiously-motivated rationalization for dogma to the status of a genuine scientific issue.

And speaking of the Discovery Institute, Mathews concludes his poorly thought-out opinion piece by praising the work of John Angus Campbell. Campbell is a fellow of the Discovery Institute. He is one of the people working to replace good biology with the misinformed babble of the creationists. What was he thinking? How little did he examine the background of his sources?

Two other points about this misbegotten article. One, I found it extremely annoying that he kept insisting that biology classes consist of a "slow, deadening march of memorization". This is slander, a misrepresentation of my entire discipline, and more typical of dishonest creationists than someone who claims to be "as devout a Darwinist as anybody" (and right there in that phrasing we can see a couple of serious problems). Mathews clearly knows absolutely nothing about biology, or how it is taught, yet poses as a critical expert. He is a fraud.

His second problem is that he cites the fakirs of the Discovery Institute heavily, and clearly believes them. He's gullible. Look at this:

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.

Baloney. There is no evidence for ID creationism, and it has already failed the stated test. To mention one example: choanoflagellates, single-celled organisms that carry many of the complex signalling molecules we metazoans use to regulate our patterns of development. The molecular evidence is also clear and indicates a prolonged period of evolution of the genes we consider the hallmark of multicellular animals that preceded the Cambrian. We have evidence that complex lifeforms did not just poof into existence a half-billion years ago. Common descent is one of the facts of evolution.

The Discovery Institute was lying, and Mathews knows so little of the subject on which he is pontificating that he couldn't tell.

Steve Reuland also bashes Mathews at the Panda's Thumb.