Intelligent design won’t leave our schools alone. Or rather, politicians won’t.

Despite last year’s federal court ruling that intelligent design is a “direct descendent” of creationism, and that teaching it violates the separation of church and state, two Michigan legislators insist on injecting it into statewide science curricula.

Well, not exactly. They’re trying to be clever about it.

Last week, the state board of education voted 6-2 to delay the approval of a science policy directing teachers to demonstrate how a variety of scientific evidence “may” support the theory of evolution.

State representatives Jack Hoogendyk of Kalamazoo and John Moolenaar of Midland want that changed to “may or may not,” in effect necessitating the teaching of intelligent design in classrooms.

How so? Because, thus far, the established scientific community hasn’t found any evidence to debunk evolution.

On the contrary, our understanding of the theory as a means of generational species change becomes more comprehensive each day.

Still, a very small contingent of scientists—on the fringe of academia—believe that life forms are too complex to have come about without the help of some outside force.

However, proponents of this theory of intelligent design have yet to publish an article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and their claims have been variously revealed as ill-conceived, dubious and downright false by many researchers.

Yet politicians, including Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos, encourage this weakly supported concept be taught as an alternative to evolution, even though a huge majority of scientists don’t consider it an alternative at all. They don’t even consider it to be science.

Why the push to get intelligent design in the classroom, then? Despite its lack of scientific  acceptance, intelligent design is still a popular concept. It’s no surprise this is an election year and Hoogendyk and Moolenaar are on the ballot.

The debate needs to stop. Until researchers produce a rigorously scrutinized and thoroughly accepted alternative theory, evolution—the change in gene frequencies from one generation to the next—should be taught exclusively. To introduce poorly founded doubt on the matter is, educationally, a step backward.

Furthermore, it allows the tail to wag the dog—that is, it allows the thoroughly disproven findings of a politicized, renegade segment of academia to infiltrate our science education curricula.