Kansas educators have done a bad job explaining science and its benefit to the public, the director of Kansas University’s Natural History Museum said Thursday.

“We teach science and evolution well in the classroom, but we have done a terrible job disseminating to the public what science is and isn’t and why science is critical to our day-to-day lives,” Leonard Krishtalka said, responding to a question put to him during an online chat at ljworld.com. “The public realizes this with medical science, but has a much more difficult time grasping this for the other sciences. Society pays for most of scientific research with its tax dollars, and therefore deserves to know its benefits and how it is done. We need to do a much better job of translating complex science to society.”

Krishtalka, who is working on a new exhibit, “Explore Evolution,” which opens Nov. 2 at the KU museum, responded to more than a dozen questions during the chat.

One questioner asked whether the debate about evolution shows how well the “scientific paradigm” has been taught in the past 50 years.

Leonard Krishtalka, director of KU's Natural History Museum, responds to reader's questions online.

During the chat, Krishtalka also discussed intelligent design, which is the counter-evolution theory that an intelligent being created the universe, rather than random mutations and unplanned natural selection.

“The main point is that ID is not science, because it invokes supernatural explanations for the occurrence of phenomena,” Krishtalka wrote. “Science seeks and invokes only natural explanations for natural phenomena.

“The fact that ID also invokes biblical creationism would make it violate church/state separation if it were introduced into the classroom as science.”

Krishtalka said there would be no problem teaching intelligent design as part of a course on the history of science, because intelligent design, previously described as natural theology, was popular in the 1700s and early 1800s.

The Kansas State Board of Education is poised to adopt classroom guidelines for evolution teaching that incorporate recommendations made by proponents of intelligent design but which are opposed by scientists.

For a transcript, go to www2.ljworld.com/news/chats/.