Christian and a member of Alabama's curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.
"The Crafty Attacks on Evolution" (editorial, Jan. 23) argues correctly that creationism and its recent progeny, intelligent design, are thinly veiled expressions of religion. They are also, at their heart, profoundly anti-science.
It is only through scientists' taking on the most interesting and challenging questions of their era that scientific progress is made.
There are always gaps in scientific knowledge. It is the task of the scientist to fill in those gaps, not to assume that the answer cannot be found.
Even scientific theories that are thought of as "laws" and that are enormously useful for centuries are, over time, challenged and corrected. The imposition of intelligent design in the science classroom would limit the imperative to study the challenging scientific questions whose answers still elude us.
David Klasfeld
New York, Jan. 23, 2005
The writer was a lawyer for the plaintiffs in McLean v. Arkansas, the case that found that creation science was not science and could not be taught as a competing theory with evolution.