Ernst Mayr and the complexity of life

摘要

On August 2, 2005, President Bush stated publicly that he favours that Intelligent Design be taught side by side with the Theory of Evolution in science classes, since he believes that the complexity of organisms can be explained best as having been created by an Intelligent Being (e.g. Bumiller 2005). While Intelligent Design has been promoted by a powerful political machine (e.g. Alter 2005; Anonymous 2005; Krugman 2005), for the American public there may be more weighty consequences in these utterances of a president seemingly making a plea for a balanced curriculum. As it is, the words 'scientific' and 'science' have lost much of the absolute credibility they enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries, and fewer and fewer students choose to become scientists and engineers. The President's remarks will only embolden political powers to meddle even more in science education and, thus, undermine science's mission to free humanity from superstitions, fallacies, and misconceptions.