Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones on the MORI Poll

See the post below this for more details.

Both Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones, also writing in The Guardian, weighed in on the MORI poll results today. Jones is professor of genetics and heads the biology department at the University College of London, where Michael Day also works. He writes:

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.

Dawkins is a tad less charitable:

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.

I agree with Dawkins on very little when it comes to theology, but as far as science goes, he is right this time.