The science journal Nature worries that a creationist may inveigle her way into the White House and then all will be lost:
The most worrying thing about a McCain presidency is not so much a President McCain as a Vice-President Palin. Sarah Palin, Alaska's governor and McCain's running mate, opposes all research into human embryonic stem cells. She is a creationist....
But there's still hope. Barack Obama may ride to our aid and rescue us from the calamity of having a vice-president who thinks that students should be able to discuss the issues involved in the debate and decide for themselves what to believe rather than being told what to believe. Nature interviewed Barack Obama on this issue. Here's what they said about his response:
Contrast that with Obama's statement on page 448, in which Nature asked him about the teaching of intelligent design in science classes. It is not easy to address students' questions about evolution without falling prey to the false notion of 'teaching the controversy', as the Royal Society's director of education discovered last week in a public-relations meltdown (see 'Creation and classrooms'). But Obama could not be more clear: "I do not believe it is helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny," he wrote.
Isn't it odd that Barack Obama didn't think questions about the philosophy of science to be above his pay grade? Anyway, maybe someone will ask our science educator-in-chief whether he thinks ideas like string theory and the multiverse should be excluded from physics classes.
RLC
