Restrain the monkeys: Keep Intelligent Design out of the classroom
Issue date: 1/23/06 Section: Opinion
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The Utah State Senate has begun its general session of 2006 and will be soon debating Senator Chris Buttars'(R) infamous Senate Bill 96: "Public Education - Instruction and Policy Relating to the Origins of Life." This is a bill that would change how our public schools teach biology in a fairly fundamental way. Admittedly, I have become a little weary of the whole debate. Not for lack of interest, though. After all, I could quote the final sentence in Darwin's "Origin" word for word at 17, read every major Darwin biography and named my dog after Gregor Mendel.
I think for me, maybe it's the premise of this whole worn-out affair: That this evolution/intelligent design problem is a rational debate, when really, deep down, we know it's ruled by passion. We are not rational. "Deal with it," as my good friend counsels me when I complain with endless elaborate reasons why math is so horrible that I am throwing it all away for a career pouring cement grave slabs in the Northwest territories. A rational being would see the day-in-day-out doldrums of a four-year degree as a means to an end, a goldmine at the end of a rainbow. Of course, we all have something that blows the rational circuits in our brain. It would be nice to say rational behavior is what separates us from the monkeys - sorry, try again later. Monkeys … maybe that example digs up more passion than we can handle right now. How about dogs?
My dog was passionate about garbage (and cats and birds and female dogs). He would get into the garbage and I would punish him over and over and yet, still I would come home to garbage on the floor and find him hiding in the darkest corner, shivering with terror and I would think, "He knows it's REALLY bad to get into the garbage, yet it continues?" This mystery lasted a while, until one day he swaggered past me in the kitchen, gave me the, "Hey, what's up dude with the thumbs" nod, and proceeded to walk right up to the garbage, drop his head right in and choke down a ball of old rice, then walk back to the living room. Then, it hit me as I looked at the clean floor around the garbage can. His simple little passion-overridden brain had concluded that only the dropping of the inedible evidence to the floor constituted a punishable act. Eating some nice mouthfuls with no spillage was totally cool because nothing bad ever happened. "Eating things … GOOD! Dropping things … BAD!" He just lives in the here and now. He doesn't make important connections between more than two events and neither did I as a dog trainer. So, we both have passion.
I think for me, maybe it's the premise of this whole worn-out affair: That this evolution/intelligent design problem is a rational debate, when really, deep down, we know it's ruled by passion. We are not rational. "Deal with it," as my good friend counsels me when I complain with endless elaborate reasons why math is so horrible that I am throwing it all away for a career pouring cement grave slabs in the Northwest territories. A rational being would see the day-in-day-out doldrums of a four-year degree as a means to an end, a goldmine at the end of a rainbow. Of course, we all have something that blows the rational circuits in our brain. It would be nice to say rational behavior is what separates us from the monkeys - sorry, try again later. Monkeys … maybe that example digs up more passion than we can handle right now. How about dogs?
My dog was passionate about garbage (and cats and birds and female dogs). He would get into the garbage and I would punish him over and over and yet, still I would come home to garbage on the floor and find him hiding in the darkest corner, shivering with terror and I would think, "He knows it's REALLY bad to get into the garbage, yet it continues?" This mystery lasted a while, until one day he swaggered past me in the kitchen, gave me the, "Hey, what's up dude with the thumbs" nod, and proceeded to walk right up to the garbage, drop his head right in and choke down a ball of old rice, then walk back to the living room. Then, it hit me as I looked at the clean floor around the garbage can. His simple little passion-overridden brain had concluded that only the dropping of the inedible evidence to the floor constituted a punishable act. Eating some nice mouthfuls with no spillage was totally cool because nothing bad ever happened. "Eating things … GOOD! Dropping things … BAD!" He just lives in the here and now. He doesn't make important connections between more than two events and neither did I as a dog trainer. So, we both have passion.
