Ashcroft Nation

Attorney General John Ashcroft resigned in the first of a string of departures expected before President Bush is inaugurated for a second term. Mr. Ashcroft's resignation will end one of the more controversial tenures in the attorney general's office in recent decades. To his critics, he has been willing to skirt the Constitution to fulfill his and President Bush's concept of national security.

"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved," Mr. Ashcroft wrote without a hint of irony in a five-page, handwritten letter to Mr. Bush.

Here was the reaction in Missouri:

"Hell yeah! Did you hear that? Ashcroft resigned! He's going....

[face falls, pregnant pause]

...home."

Meanwhile, back here in Georgia, the Cobb County school district is placing stickers in biology books saying that read, "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

A lawyer for the school district said it was silly to consider the stickers a promotion of religion. "It doesn't say anything about faith. It doesn't say anything about religion," he said.

The parent who led a petition drive that pushed for the stickers, Marjorie Rogers, testified that the stickers were needed because science books discriminate against people who believe men were created by God, not through a slow process of natural selection. "My problem is that only Darwinian evolution is presented. None of the criticism is presented," Rogers said.

Georgia is 49th in the nation in education, as measured by SAT scores. Without a proper education, how does the Cobb County school district expect students to "critically consider" their own textbooks? Ask a preacher? Of course, a critical lack of education goes a long way toward explaining Ms. Marjorie Rogers.

The basic problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way science uses the term "theory." Cobb County's logic is seriously flawed: Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease.

This is what scientists mean by theories: In the scientific hierarchy, theories are higher than fact, because theories explain facts. Facts are simply individual, isolated, verifiable observations or experimental results. Evolution is a theory that makes sense of millions of facts of natural history -- the age of the earth, the succession of fossils in the fossil record, the genetic capabilities of organisms -- and as such it ties things together in an extraordinary way that has been equaled by few theories in biology.

Should evolution be critically examined? Yes. Everything in science should be critically examined. If the disclaimer were to urge that all scientific theories should be critically examined with an eye toward the evidence and contrary points of views and so forth, it would have my complete agreement. However, the Cobb County disclaimer singles out evolution as the only theory that should be critically examined in science. There are counter-arguments to just about everything in science. The mistake of the disclaimer is to single out evolution for special attention and special criticism as if it alone among scientific theories is uniquely weak, uniquely shaky or uniquely suspect. That is definitely not the case.

Meanwhile, Kipperkipp and I have been exchanging emails all day - we're up to about 5 volleys back and forth so far, by my counting. The conversation's been interesting, and had covered things from the aboriginal migration to Australia (how'd they get there anyway?) to traffic patterns on Highway 400 to New Guinean penis gourds to dick jokes in general ("Is that a penis gourd in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?").

It's amazing how quiclkly these things can deteriorate . . .