Neither side of the evolution debate is able to address the issue usefully in the classroom. When President Bush suggested that "intelligent design" be introduced in schools so students could understand the vital cultural debate we are having, he was denounced as a political opportunist and scientific philistine. But the president is correct on this issue: schoolchildren should be introduced to the principles of so-called intelligent design theory and encouraged to hammer out the scientific and theological issues at stake. A spirited, ugly debate on intelligent design from coast to coast is the best way to make sure Darwin's insights are introduced to students well. All participants in the evolution debate seem to believe that the school system is training children to be evolutionists, and that the introduction of intelligent design will undermine unquestioning belief in natural selection. That's absurd. The opposite is true.

The root of Americans' unbelief in evolution is not in the ninth grade biology but first grade general science. Children are being taught science in the way they are taught religion: as a body of fixed truths. Four Gospels, nine planets, the Deluge, the dinosaurs. Yet science is a body of knowledge continually in flux as new information comes to light and the mistakes of human scientists are corrected. In my own lifetime, science has repudiated Pluto's planetary status, denied the existence of the brontosaurus, and even reconsidered the design of the periodic table.

Yet when astronomers try to take Pluto off the list, people refuse to admit it's not a planet, out of some sort of preposterous sentimental attachment for a lump of ice smaller than the moon hundreds of millions of miles away. Why? Because we accepted our teachers' authority blindly, and to admit unfaith in Pluto would feel like scientific apostasy. We ask children to take the word of authority that light is both a particle and a wave in exactly the manner we ask them to believe that God is both three and one. Teaching children to believe in science is the opposite of teaching them science.

Scientific method gone awry was recently illustrated brilliantly in an essay at Tech Central Station, when a father recounted replicating, for his son's science fair, Galileo's experiment describing the force of gravity. In the course of the experiment, they proposed a false hypothesis -- that objects fall at a constant rate -- and instead showed that, no, falling objects accelerate. The judges are befuddled, because in science, "you are supposed to prove your hypothesis, not disprove it." This is, of course, wrong. Science is the story of the rise and fall of ideas that fit one experiment and later were shown to not fit others. It wasn't so long ago that a German postal clerk demonstrated that Newtonian physics was a special case. The unexamined theory is not worth accepting.

This methodological understanding is crucial to the study of biology because evolution, biology's bedrock principle, is an analog to the scientific method. Just as theories rise and fall as data supports them and then abandons them, so species adapt to their environment. When information contradicts a scientific theory, the theory is revised or discarded. When environmental factors endanger a species, the species adapts or becomes extinct.

Our current method of teaching children science does too little, too late to impart the philosophy of empiricism that is the one sacred principle of scientific method. They are unaccustomed to the Sherlock Holmes dictum that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must contain the truth. As a result, children are ill equipped to understand why empirical data can falsify a great range of hypotheses before settling on something as bizarre as, say, electron shells. Why, then, are we so surprised that a minority of Americans believe a delicate and complex organ like the eye could not be the strange outcome of random chance, environmental factors, and time? Unless our children understand reductio ad adsurdum, they will not understand reductio ad platypus. The student who accepts natural selection without a healthy measure of skepticism doesn't get it.

When creationists stopped insisting evolution be banned from schools and instead began insisting their own quackery be inserted alongside it, they offered scientists an opportunity to save evolution and defeat this humbug for once and for all. Presented with one theory, students will accept it as authoritative truth. Presented with two, teachers and students will have to grapple not only with what's on the test but how to think about the two competing hypotheses. They'll have to get out the fruit flies and Mendelian genetics, the fossil records, and most importantly, the processes of rational thought that winnows out theories unfit for survival. And because the very process of consideration is itself a Darwinian selection mechanism, the longer open minds wrestle with the issue, the more they will be inclined to admit Darwin is on to something.

I don't know what the president's intentions were when he suggested allowing intelligent design into the classroom, but I support it. Let Darwinism and intelligent design go toe to toe on Darwinism's home turf. Let teachers from California to Kansas to Florida get children and their parents talking about evolutionary principles. Let them delve into the thorny issues of proof and data, until all sides at least understand the principles at stake, even if they remain doubtful. I suspect very few children will change their churchgoing (or non-churchgoing) habits, but their understanding of evolution can only deepen if its uncertainties are discussed. As our Christian president phrased it: bring 'em on.