I find this very depressing. Do those teachers believe that they should also teach the possibility that water is H3O, that Bacon wrote Shakespeare and that babies are brought by storks?
The logic is exactly the same: and there is just as little, or as much, scientific controversy about the idea of evolution as there is about those of physics and chemistry.
Next year is, of course, Darwin Year – the 200th anniversary of his birth and 150th anniversary of publication On The Origin of Species). It is my profound hope (likely to be disappointed) that teachers and everyone else should learn to stop treating him as a prophet, or a pariah, or a philosopher, or even as a trained ecclesiastic who turned to atheism – and just take him for what he was, the greatest biologist in history.
He made biology into a single science linked by the idea of evolution, rather than a bunch of ideologies.
Steve Jones is professor of genetics and head of the biology department at University College London. His lastest book – due for publication in the New Year – is Darwin's Island
The 'Michael Reiss position' is defensible. Just as a chemistry teacher might discuss the phlogiston theory, or a physics teacher might discuss the Ptolemaic theory of the planets as history of science, so it is defensible to teach that there are people called creationists, and they believe what they believe.
But if teaching creationism 'alongside' evolution means what it seems to mean, it is no more defensible than teaching the stork theory alongside the sex theory of the where babies come from.
If 29% of science teachers really think creationism should be taught as a valid alternative to evolution, we have a national disgrace on our hands, calling for urgent remedial action in the education of science teachers. We are failing in our duty to children, if we staff our schools with teachers who are this ignorant – or this stupid.
Prof Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and fellow of New College, Oxford. He wrote The God Delusion