BTW, both of those polls left out an option.

Of course it’s framing. Everytime you open your mouth and talk it’s framing. The thing you have to do is recognise it and combat the dishonest uses of framing typically used by anti-science forces. You can refer to framing as “baggage” or “connotation” if the word “framing” either confuses or annoys you.

The questions that are sorely needed should simply ask whether one thinks that:

1. Life has a ~4 billion year history, as nearly all biologists and many evolution-deniers believe.

2. Humans share common ancestors with other species as nearly all biologists and some evolution-deniers believe.

Another question, which would identify those who claim to accept evolution (or what they think is evolution) but still think it’s fair to “teach the controversy.” I would phrase it:

3. Do you think it’s fair to teach long-refuted misrepresentations of evolution disguised as “critical analysis” when there is unlikely to be enough time in class to fairly cover the technical refutations of them?

BTW, both of those polls left out an option.

Teaching Evolution and ID…scratch “creationism”. From those polls, one would have to choose to teach all three or only one of them.

I still say cut Florida loose.

What I’m looking for is a way to communicate the issue properly, which is that we need to teach science in science classes, and not teach non-science there. Is that “framing the problem away”? I don’t think so. The fact is that where progress has been made on this issue, this is exactly what has worked, as in Darby, Montana. Once the voters realize that the arguments peddled under “intelligent design” or the label of the week are not “cutting-edge science”, they lose enthusiasm for the project of making their children learn them. The voters shifted proportionally far enough in Dover, PA to toss the IDC-pushers out on their bums long before the court decision came down.

We already know that students and the general populace are amazingly ignorant of evolutionary science, so I don’t see how one can argue that the SP Times poll as is is edifying. This is a simple consequence of the antievolution efforts that have been going on since before the Scopes trial being effective. What we need to find out is how amenable Floridians are to making concepts pass scientific muster before being topics in K-12 science classes. That certainly was not elucidated by the SP Times poll.

Matt Penfold spewed some drivel directed my way over in comments on Pharyngula. Matt talks big about what I do or don’t want, without any basis in what I have actually said or done. There no such thing as me “blaming new atheists” for anything. If Matt wants to build strawmen, I’d ask him to kindly leave my name out of it.