The latest Wichita Eagle story on the upcoming Kansas science hearings does a solid job of explaining that the 23 scientists are coming to testify about the weaknesses in Neo-Darwinism, not to push for public school teaching of intelligent design. The story is mostly balanced, giving the Darwinists against balanced classroom coverage of their theory plenty of rope to hang their argument. As one reads the story, their reasoning becomes all to clear. Boiled down it works something like this:
We Darwin defenders can be trusted implicitly to hear reasonable criticisms of our cherished theory. We refuse to hear criticisms. Ergo, they must be unreasonable. Oh, and those scientists who think those criticisms are worth hearing, they aren’t real scientists because the criticisms aren’t reasonable because scientists said so and the scientists who said otherwise aren’t scientists because they aren’t reasonable because …
You get the idea.
One portion of the story, however, does create some confusion:
Moderate board member Carol Rupe of Wichita said she doesn’t think the politicians on the board have any business judging science or any other subject.
That’s why the board appoints experts to the standard-writing committees, she said.
“We don’t have the expertise to do that,” she said.
The story should have immediately noted that a sizable number of the scientists on the science-standards committee did call for more balanced coverage of Neo-Darwinism in the classroom. The sensible thing would be for all the members of the science-standards committee to attend the hearings and explain their position. But for some reason the very scientists who don’t want students learning about the weaknesses in Darwin’s theory also won’t show up at the hearings to explain why.