OK, proxy

Where the crux comes is that it IS the responsibility of the government, in the form of US public schools, to tell students how to think about science, and that includes the science of evolution. While there are local Republican institutions directly advocating questioning evolution (http://sd42.mngop.com/SD42Res08.pdf), please do notice what these advocates are asking for. While they may be drawing the wrong conclusions personally about evolution as science, when they are acting as advocates for policy, what they are doing is not evidence of fear of science; rather, they want to have the scientific content fully aired out. No one is advocating that evolution NOT be taught in public schools; this is not a replay of the Scopes trial. They DO want to raise questions about evolution as a robust scientific theory. If evolution is as valid and reliable a theory as liberals say it is, then such a critical examination poses no threat to the scientific education of our students whatsoever; indeed, it may benefit them to see how scientific process actually works, by closely examining specific issues in the theory in a rigorous critical approach.

The problem is not that scientists are not the ones "drawing the wrong conclusions personally about science". It is that the anti-scientists are willfully ignoring literally centuries of scientific research and promoting as "science" theories that have long been discarded by the scientific community.

As for this...

If evolution is as valid and reliable a theory as liberals say it is, then such a critical examination poses no threat to the scientific education of our students whatsoever;

Are you saying that evolution is the province of "liberals"? You need to talk to Elephantman.

But it remains true that people are trying to keep evolution from being taught in public schools. Science cannot be taught in the same manner that debate is taught. In science you have good theories and bad theories, and the bad theories were discarded long ago. It serves no purpose to bring in "alternate theories" or to mumble nonsense about the "weaknesses" or "holes in the theory".

The people who say that it is not a "robust" theory are simply ignorant.

At this point, I usually tell a person criticizing evolution to read a scientific paper and explain exactly what is wrong about it. That usually gets the person to shut up, or in some cases they whine that the scientific paper is not "accessible". But that is the level at which science is debated, and it takes years of training to understand the technicalities of some of the arguments.

So actual scientists are put in a position where they either say "trust us, creationism is junk" and we get blamed for telling people to rely on trust, or we say "ok, read the literature yourself" and are told that it is inaccessible. Actually, I wish people would admit that they don't understand the science. More often, the anti-science non-expert simply picks and pokes at a paper, and distorts its logic and misrepresents its conclusions.

Anybody who still earnestly believes that evolution is less than a "robust" theory needs to explain, in detail, just what their objection is. And, more than that, they need to propose some alternate theory for how the various species of the Earth fit so neatly into a phylogenetic hierarchy when their respective DNA are compared. If you don't have evolution, you don't have common descent - and yet we have overwhelming evidence for common descent. We saw this at a phenotypic level centuries ago, and it can only be viewed as confirmation of the theory of evolution that genetically generated phylogenies from modern DNA and protein data agree with the trees proposed in earlier years by taxonomists.

When you are building on the work of previous generations of scientists, you cannot simply ignore what they have done. I get really tired of conservatives with a middle school understanding of science being promoted to positions of public influence based on the lie that evolution is somehow flawed or less than a robust theory. It doesn't need to be debated in the high schools of the US. What needs to happen is for students in the US to learn what the scientific method is, and then they can understand why evolution is the only theory that explains the history of biological development.