Course on Evolution Features Richard Dawkins's God Delusion

Ok, not the book by Dawkins, an article of the same name, but it makes you wonder what it's doing in a biology course.

I'm not against a biology teacher exercising some latitude in relevant articles.  In fact I think it is scary the way neo-Darwinists and evolutionary materialists oppose such academic freedom.  But this sort of thing provides insight into the prevailing double standard, as California materialists indoctrinate our young with no fear of violating the 1st Amendment.

Cal State Bakersfield has some provocative papers in its syllabus for its Upper Division biology course on "Evolution."  While most don't seem to weigh in on the controversy over the theoretical adequacy of neo-Darwinism, noteworthy are the articles by Dawkins, Gould, Dobzhansky, as well as an article about "the creationists' time scale."  (Does anyone else smell a strawman argument in the works?)  In the aforementioned article about atheism (and precisely what is a populist argument for atheism doing in an evolution course?) follows the predictable syllogism:

Creationists (YEC?) use improbability arguments.
ID advocates use improbability arguments.
Ergo, ID advocacy is the same as creationism, and therefore absurd, so please, please, please don't take it seriously.

To drive home his rhetorical point in Dawkins' pithy article about those with the delusion of theism, there is a note at the bottom of the relevant page adding: "Intelligent design has been unkindly described as creationism in a cheap tuxedo."  (The above argument by Dawkins and other Darwinist evangelists has been unkindly described as atheism dressed in a "deranged homocidal clown" costume"*, but how does knowing that help you, dear reader?)

Methinks it is like a weasel.

Maybe all this would seem exploratory, even adventurous, rather than patently biased, if, in addition to Williamson and Vickers' "Origins of Larvae", the course were to require as well:  Michael Sherman's "Universal Genome in the Metazoa",  Denton's "The Types: A Persistent Structuralist Challenge",  Meyer's "Origin of Biological Information" and "Methodological Equivalence", and Laudan's, "Demise of the Demarcation Problem" and "Science At The Bar", along with Anthony Freeman's "The Sense of Being Glared At" and David J. Hess' "Disciplining Heterodoxy".  As long as we're exposing young minds to Gould's enlightened opinions on how science fits in with religion and politics, maybe we could get something further afield from materialism than Gould's generous concept of "non-overlapping magisteria." (Hint: Religion can continue to pronounce on morality (on a personal basis?), as long as science alone pronounces on reality.)

I would like all biology professors to be as free to admit their biases as Prof. Gobalet feels himself to be.  (It must be nice to be in a totalitarian majority.)




*In this blog, if nowhere else.  By the way, according to the Washington Post, Dawkins' anonymous informal quote may be attributed to a paleontologist at the University of Kansas.

  ^