Jack Layton, Brian Alters and The State of Science in Our Society

This thursday I had the pleasure of participating in a meet and greet with the leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, at Publix Bar on St-Laurent. Being a member of the NDP and all, I thought it would be a good opportunity to pick Jack's brain about the abyssmal state of science education in the country. In order to do so, I decided to invoke the case of Professor Brian Alters,a McGill professor who had a research grant turned downed by the SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council). Professor Alters was interested in investigating the adverse effects that Intelligent Design was having on the theory of evolution and therefore science education in Canada. Amazingly, the SSHRC ruled that Alters had not supplied "adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct"(The Gazette, April 5 2006). Of course, this rejection of his research proposal was a first-hand demonstartion of the phenomenon Professor Alters wanted to investigate.

In any event, I told Jack about this and he said he never heard about this case and that I should email him all the facts, which I will be doing in a relatively short time. Nevertheless, I think that the Alters case is symptomatic of the poverty of science education in Canada. A surprising amount of people believe that the theory of evolution is invalid or that it has somehow been disproven. For example, my next door neighbour, who has a Phd in Biophysics, thought that the theory of evolution was rejected sometime in the 1980s! It just boggles the mind that people who are very intelligent can get so badly misinformed about certain issues.