Ken Fisher of Ars Technica contributes further to my general level of skepticism about “intelligent design” proponents:

Intelligent Design backers spend no shortage of time trying to portray what they believe as science, but an embarrassing fact has come to light about the book that Dover would have the kids read, Of People and Pandas. As it turns out, the book was originally a work of Christian apologetics, and it explicitly promoted creationism. Indeed, the version published now is the largely the same, save one minor fact: they more or less did a search and replace, substituting Intelligent Design where Creationism once sat in the text.

More on this theme from this week’s Economist, courtesy of my ex-co-blogger Robert Prather, who’s now back and blogging up a storm at Insults Unpunished.

W comes out in favor of teaching Intelligent Design (a.k.a. Creationism with the serial numbers filed off) in public schools. Someone really needs to tell the president he can’t run for reelection, and thus no longer needs to behave like an idiot to gain votes. I take it all back—although, in my defense, I was discussing Congress and not the executive branch.

Unfortunately, the Democrats will fail to extract the correct lesson from this: teachers*, not politicians, should decide what should be taught, and the only way to stop politicians from deciding what gets taught is to get the government completely out of the education business. Instead, they will attempt to back evolutionary theory ad nauseum and further alienate the crowd in Kansas (and the rest of rural and suburban America) which they can’t figure out what’s the matter with.

þ: TigerHawk.

Update: Alex Knapp is sharing my wavelength today.