Hi Zathras, enjoying your guest-blogging enormously. I second the motion--the sooner Frist moves back to Tennessee the better. What a disappointment he has become.

ID is the modern equivalent of locking-up Galileo. It's an effort to halt science, to say that the outstanding problems with and questions about an area of scientific inquiry -- in this case evolution -- cannot be resolved by science, but only by religion. Essentially, to teach ID in schools is to teach students that evolutionary biology has run its course. Even if this is true, it's not a good lesson to teach. Scientists should continue to try to answer questions using science. To throw up your hands and say a particular problem is too difficult, so we'll just attribute the solution to God, doesn't serve anyone's interests (including God's, I would think).

Frist has essentially come out as an anti-intellectual. His stem-cell position was justified on the grounds that the research may provide cures for disease and injury, not on purely scientific grounds. And Frist's Schiavo comments clearly had nothing to do with science.

It's one thing for cowboy Bush to be anti-intellectual. He's never claimed to be anything but, and he wears his simplicity well. It's another thing for a doctor to be anti-intellectual. Frist simply comes across as a bumbling politician.

The preceding comment about Frist is largely on the mark. The comment about Bush is not. Bush is a man with significant native intelligence. On subjects that really engage him, like winning elections, he does very well acting in an instinctive fashion. In these domains, he exhibits the real mark of a capable person, which is choosing capable subordinates. What he has not done nor ever been encouraged to do, is to develop his critical faculties. Nor is he, like Harry Truman for example, a particularly curious person. This features account, in part, for his poor choice of public policies, especially with regard to issues touching science. Presidents certainly cannot be expected to be intellectuals but being anti-intellectual in a complicated world where policy decisions depend on looking at complex scientific and technical issues, is a major defect.
PS: Its a common misconception that physicians are intellectuals.

That President Bush has "native intelligence" and acts in an "instinctive fashion" are not, I believe, inconsistent with the point I made. The claim that Bush hasn't developed his "critical faculties" reinforces my point. And the idea that "choosing capable subordinates" is the "real mark of a capable person" is just strange.

Also, I'm not saying that physicians are necessarily intellectual by virtue of their profession. (Nor would I argue that one needs to be engaged in intellectual activity as a profession for one to be an "intellectual.") I am saying, though, that Frist is acting in an anti-intellectual fashion when he proposes that Intelligent Design should be presented as the scientific equivalent of evolution.