Richard Gallagher is one of those guys I’m not ever going to like much. He’s the editor of The Scientist, yet he wrote an editorial encouraging us to embrace Intelligent Design in the classroom, in the perverse hope that by giving ID that much attention, students will naturally disregard it. That was crazy stupid enough, but where he lost my respect completely was in a published rebuttal to my criticisms where he maliciously distorted my point from one advocating the teaching of science as a process based on evidence (which is why ID fails in the classroom) to a false claim that I want to shield kids from critical thinking. Lies and misrepresentation to get ID into the classroom? The Discovery Institute loved it and republished his article.
Now he has published another editorial, one in which he finally realizes the danger of letting pseudoscience into the classroom, and finally he gets it right…but I’m going to be much less charitable than Tara. What finally motivates him to speak out for good science teaching based on reason and evidence is a perceived threat from “New Agers” and the “spiritual Left” with their wacky “mother earth sensibility.”
