The Smug Baldy Speaks

With every presidential candidate shifting into total balls-out (or labia-out, as the case may be) pander-or-perish mode, I think it’s important to cut through the inane hype where possible, and get at their positions on issues that matter to me. One such issue is education. While the uneducated and undereducated aren’t necessarily stupid, they’re still going to be ill-prepared to live and work well in the increasingly complex, information-centric, technologically-sophisticated global economy that America wants to lead in 2008 and beyond. Education isn’t really an issue, however, but rather a vast catch basin for many issues. No candidate is going to go on record as being against education, but there is great variability where candidates stand on various educational issues like funding for Head Start, teaching salaries, the NCLB program, sex education, and, of course, the teaching of Evolution.

Teaching Evolution shouldn’t be controversial, because of the vast scientific consensus that Evolution indeed occurred, and is still occurring. Idolatrous biblical lieralists, however, are keen to point out that they don’t believe the facts of Evolution, but have instead engaged in some nifty mental gymnastics to shoehorn the geological, biological, and paleontological data into the narrow confines of their Holy Writ.

So given the controversy manufactured by evangelicals, as well as the admission last May by three of the GOP candidates that they didn’t believe in Evolution, I wondered where the remaining candidates stood regarding Evolution. It turns out that I wasn’t alone, and since the Physics Today Blog started looking at the candidate’s positions on Evolution and other science-related issues, I thought I could summarize here.

On the Democratic side, there are just two candidates that fall into the “no quibbling” category. Those are Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. There’s no definitive statement from Dennis Kucinich. And John Edwards is something of a quibbler - wanting to believe that evolution is real, but that it’s perfectly consistent with his Southern Baptist version of Christianity.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist Minister who raised his hand in last May’s debate to deny Evolution, later refined his denial, saying, “If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I’ll accept that….I believe there was a creative process.” Here, Huckabee mistakenly equates Evolution with misplaced faith, as if an evolutionary biologist’s acceptance of the results of her studies were akin to testifying at Sunday service or speaking in tongues.

Interestingly, Ron Paul, the more libertarian GOP candidate has a somewhat convoluted anti-evolution position:

“Well, at first I thought it was a very inappropriate question, you know, for the presidency to be decided on a scientific matter, and I think it’s a theory, a theory of evolution, and I don’t accept it, you know, as a theory, but I think [ it probably doesn’t bother me. It’s not the most important issue for me to make the difference in my life to understand the exact origin. I think ] the creator that I know created us, everyone of us, and created the universe, and the precise time and manner, I just don’t think we’re at the point where anybody has absolute proof on either side.

Also on the GOP side we have Giuliani taking a reasonably pro-evolution stand, while John McCain and Mitt Romney are apparently in John Edwards’ “quibbler” camp.

McCain said:

“I believe in evolution,” Sen. John McCain said. “But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.”

While Slick Mitt has a bit of a loopy view of the relationship between science and religion:

“True science and true religion are on exactly the same page,” he said. “they may come from different angles, but they reach the same conclusion. I’ve never found a conflict between the science of evolution and the belief that God created the universe. He uses scientific tools to do his work.”

You may wonder whether it makes any difference what the various candidates position is on the Teaching of Evolution. I think it does for the simple reason that we live in a world that is driven by science and technology, and any President that is not a knowledgeable consumer of scientific information or cannot adequately evaluate scientific information when making policy decision is guaranteed to be a bad one. Indeed, MSNBC’s Alan Boyle quotes Science’s editor-in-chief, Donald Kennedy, who said:

“We need to know the candidates’ qualifications for understanding and judging science, and for speaking intelligently about science and technology to the leaders of other nations in planning our collective global future. I don’t need them to describe their faith; that’s their business and not mine. But I do care about their scientific knowledge and how it will inform their leadership.”

I completely agree. I don’t really care if a candidate believes in Noah’s sons riding flying dinosaurs, but I don’t want him or her driving the bus if they can’t speak intelligently and accurately about scientific matters without quibbling.