After a bit of an absence, I''ve returned to blogging about education. But this time around, I''m going to keep things more casual.

First up, it''s good to see that Julie Bishop has decided that Intelligent Design shouldn''t be a part of the science curriculum. (You''ll have to excuse my pun in the title.) Of course, she hasn''t dismissed the theory outright (politicians don''t dismiss things if they can avoid it). But her position seems firmer than the one held by her predecessor, Brendan Nelson.

For those wondering why Intelligent Design doesn''t belong in high school science (or in high school full stop), let me provide a quick explanation. To make the argument  as clear as possible, let''s assume that Intelligent Design is Just Another Scientific Theory (and not one developed with an eye to religious ideas).

If Intelligent Design is Just Another Scientific Theory, should we teach it in school? Put simply: no. There are far too many theories to teach them all. Even if we were to teach only those theories that most students could understand, the number of theories would still be overwhelming. Instead, we have to select the theories that we teach our students.

But which theories do we select? We could select ''the best'' theories, but how do we decide which are the best? Fortunately, science already provides an answer. Without getting into the finer points of the issue, the best theories are those that are the most successful at making predictions and that provide the simplest (but most thorough) explanations.

Evolutionary theory has spent close to 150 years generating correct predictions, and has helped researchers in biology, medicine, psychology, computer science, engineering and even contributed to some recent ideas in physics and the social sciences. In its simplest form, it can be understood by anyone, and can be tested with a pen and paper, some dice and some patience. As it applies to life on earth, all of the evidence we have ever been able to gather (in the form of fossils, biology and biochemistry, and geographical data) agrees with the theory. Evolutionary theory might have been disproved a thousand times over: for example, we might have found a human fossil that dates back 4 billion years, or perhaps found animals that are not based on DNA or that have absolutely no genetic material in common. We can easily imagine these things, but they''ve never happened, and evolutionary theory --- perhaps fittingly --- survives.

And Intelligent Design theory? As Just Another Scientific Theory, it has performed poorly. The theory''s name is new, but the basic idea --- that life is too complex to have evolved via natural selection --- has been around since as long as evolutionary theory itself, and has never made a dent. It hasn''t made a contribution to any field of science, and it''s difficult to see how it could. It doesn''t make any predictions. It either isn''t simple or it isn''t thorough. And it isn''t clear how we could even imagine a finding that would either contradict it or, at the very least, make us more confident about the theory.

There are many budding, but tentative, scientific theories that one day may bloom brightly or wither wetly. We block them all from our classrooms because they just don''t meet our standards. It would be perverse to let Intelligent Design be the lone theory to bypass this process.