This is what so irritates me about the ID lobby, more so than the YEC lobby. Firstly, they have spent a large amount of time arguing that they are a suppressed minority and often turn to bizarre conspiratology often involving phrases like "liberal media" and "godless", "Darwinist" etc. . But, if you want your views respected in the relevant discipline to which that particular notion belongs what do you do? Well, if you think you have a good idea, you buckle down and demonstrate it. There have been times throughout history that scientific theories now widely accepted were once ridiculed (Germ theory, dark matter, the existence of atoms). However, we cannot simply reverse that statement to say that what is now ridiculed will become widely accepted, because there have also been times throughout history that bad ideas were detected by the majority of the scientific community, and relegated to the dumpster of bad ideas (N-rays, polywater, cold fusion). Those who were on the emerging side of a brand new theory provided overwhelming evidence for their theories and ignored ridicule. That makes the ID lobby suspect. If you want respect among biologists, why would your target audience be a high school? Why spend so much in the court of law, when what really matters is the court of scientific opinion? During the later years of his life, Boltzmann was suicidally depressed partly because his theory of atoms was being ridiculed. Could you imagine if Boltzmann had decided, "well, I suppose the best thing to do would be to start an entire conspiratology branch and, travel the country handing out pamphlets to random people instead of trying to convince physicists". Boltzmann killed himself, but a short while later, Albert Einstein wrote a paper which proved once and for all that atoms existed and shamed Boltzmann's detractors. But seeing ID proponents believe that the entire scientific community is involved in this massive, evil, conspiracy, they largely avoid interaction with the disciplines of biology they are attempting to critique! So of course they are going to be ignored, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy!

I'd like to think I speak for many scientists when I say that our principle reason for looking on ID with largely contempt is not because it "dares to challenge a mainstream view", but rather because a) of the aforementioned tactic and b) because it is not criticism we are opposed to, it is ignorant criticism. With epistemic rights come epistemic responsibilities. The process of "questioning" is a rigorous process which has certain prerequisites. It is troubling that I eliminate most of my creationist opponents by asking them to give a one-line scientific definition of evolution. This is why most biologists look at the anti-evolution lobby with contempt. Most of them are so unfamiliar with basic biology they wouldn't know evolution if it kicked them in the balls. To exercise one's epistemic rights, one must fulfill their epistemic responsibilities, and very few anti-evolutionists have fulfilled their epistemic responsibility to know at least something about basic evolutionary biology.

Let me state that I am unopposed to the notion of "critical thinking and logical analysis" in science. What I am opposed to is to tell students that evolution is epistemologically worse off than, say, heliocentricity or atomic theory. The position of virtually all biologists on the matter of evolution is very much the same as the position of astronomers about the fact that the earth revolves around the sun. In the astronomy community, the reason heliocentricity is not debated is not because of some dogma or religious order, but because there would be no point. There happens to be an excellent reason why there is a concensus about heliocentricity in the astronomer community. From an epistemological standpoint, evolution has a similar status among the biologist community. In academic debates, we don't debate because it's fun, or because we have nothing else to do. We do it because it helps to clarify issues. We desire a concensus. Concensus can be a good thing! There is a debate among evolutionary and molecular biologists called the "introns early/introns late" debate about the origin of the non-coding sequences that break apart the conding sequences in Eukaryotic genomes with respect to the origin of Eukaryota. The reason there is no concensus is because it is very hard to ascertain the answer to this question, but the more evidence that comes in on one side, we will move towards a concensus one way or the other. That's what we want.

What disturbs me about the bill is that they don't seem to be interested in "logical analysis and critical thinking skills". The easiest way to promote that is to introduce a scientific methodology class. Too often students are taught science as a sete of disjointed facts as opposed to the underlying methods and practices. Yet knowledge of method is perhaps more important then merely knowledge of bodies of scientific literature and concepts, although that is important too. However, the bill seems to be highly selective. It appears to only be "promoting logical and critical thinking skills" with respect to several ideas, those ideas the legislators evidently did not really like. This is not acceptable.