The latest US education war has officially begun with a court fight over intelligent design in Pennsylvania. Of course the first signs of the war appeared in Kansas months ago. And some have identified alternative creation theories that I will confess I find more compelling. (Full disclosure: I love pasta.) But America is a nation that looks to its court battles to sort things out, so I see this trial as the formal start. Note that everyone still argues about abortion while the new war starts.

A colleague at work passed along a remark he heard that the first job of science should be to explain how things happen. Intelligent design, he pointed out, does not explain the how of anything. Worse, to me, is that proponents of this theory have taken an already lazy theory and used the lazy end run of politics to get around all existing science. I might, for example, argue that evolution could not explain a mutation as drastic as a spider, creating webs to catch food. I might go explore that hypothesis and prove evolution wrong. Or I might try to cut off debate by winning enough school board elections.