One side can be wrong: 'Intelligent design' in classrooms would have disastrous consequences

It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.

One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."

As teachers, both of us have found that asking our students to analyse controversies is of enormous value to their education. What is wrong, then, with teaching both sides of the alleged controversy between evolution and creationism or "intelligent design" (ID)? And, by the way, don't be fooled by the disingenuous euphemism. There is nothing new about ID. It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip (with some success, thanks to loads of tax-free money and slick public-relations professionals) under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state.

Why, then, would two lifelong educators and passionate advocates of the "both sides" style of teaching join with essentially all biologists in making an exception of the alleged controversy between creation and evolution? What is wrong with the apparently sweet reasonableness of "it is only fair to teach both sides"? The answer is simple. This is not a scientific controversy at all. And it is a time-wasting distraction because evolutionary science, perhaps more than any other major science, is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.

Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; "evo-devo"; the "Cambrian Explosion"; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.

Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?

So, why are we so sure that intelligent design is not a real scientific theory, worthy of "both sides" treatment? Isn't that just our personal opinion? It is an opinion shared by the vast majority of professional biologists, but of course science does not proceed by majority vote among scientists. Why isn't creationism (or its incarnation as intelligent design) just another scientific controversy, as worthy of scientific debate as the dozen essay topics we listed above? Here's why.

If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect.

The argument the ID advocates put, such as it is, is always of the same character. Never do they offer positive evidence in favour of intelligent design. All we ever get is a list of alleged deficiencies in evolution. We are told of "gaps" in the fossil record. Or organs are stated, by fiat and without supporting evidence, to be "irreducibly complex": too complex to have evolved by natural selection.

In all cases there is a hidden (actually they scarcely even bother to hide it) "default" assumption that if Theory A has some difficulty in explaining Phenomenon X, we must automatically prefer Theory B without even asking whether Theory B (creationism in this case) is any better at explaining it. Note how unbalanced this is, and how it gives the lie to the apparent reasonableness of "let's teach both sides". One side is required to produce evidence, every step of the way. The other side is never required to produce one iota of evidence, but is deemed to have won automatically, the moment the first side encounters a difficulty - the sort of difficulty that all sciences encounter every day, and go to work to solve, with relish.

What, after all, is a gap in the fossil record? It is simply the absence of a fossil which would otherwise have documented a particular evolutionary transition. The gap means that we lack a complete cinematic record of every step in the evolutionary process. But how incredibly presumptuous to demand a complete record, given that only a minuscule proportion of deaths result in a fossil anyway.

The equivalent evidential demand of creationism would be a complete cinematic record of God's behaviour on the day that he went to work on, say, the mammalian ear bones or the bacterial flagellum - the small, hair-like organ that propels mobile bacteria. Not even the most ardent advocate of intelligent design claims that any such divine videotape will ever become available.

Biologists, on the other hand, can confidently claim the equivalent "cinematic" sequence of fossils for a very large number of evolutionary transitions. Not all, but very many, including our own descent from the bipedal ape Australopithecus. And - far more telling - not a single authentic fossil has ever been found in the "wrong" place in the evolutionary sequence. Such an anachronistic fossil, if one were ever unearthed, would blow evolution out of the water.

As the great biologist J B S Haldane growled, when asked what might disprove evolution: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." Evolution, like all good theories, makes itself vulnerable to disproof. Needless to say, it has always come through with flying colours.

Similarly, the claim that something - say the bacterial flagellum - is too complex to have evolved by natural selection is alleged, by a lamentably common but false syllogism, to support the "rival" intelligent design theory by default. This kind of default reasoning leaves completely open the possibility that, if the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved, it might also be too complex to have been created. And indeed, a moment's thought shows that any God capable of creating a bacterial flagellum (to say nothing of a universe) would have to be a far more complex, and therefore statistically improbable, entity than the bacterial flagellum (or universe) itself - even more in need of an explanation than the object he is alleged to have created.

If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the Intelligent Designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation. To do so would be to shoot yourself in the foot. You cannot have it both ways. Either ID belongs in the science classroom, in which case it must submit to the discipline required of a scientific hypothesis. Or it does not, in which case get it out of the science classroom and send it back into the church, where it belongs.

In fact, the bacterial flagellum is certainly not too complex to have evolved, nor is any other living structure that has ever been carefully studied. Biologists have located plausible series of intermediates, using ingredients to be found elsewhere in living systems. But even if some particular case were found for which biologists could offer no ready explanation, the important point is that the "default" logic of the creationists remains thoroughly rotten.

There is no evidence in favour of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the "default" fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and - increasingly nowadays - molecular genetics.

The weight of the evidence has become so heavy that opposition to the fact of evolution is laughable to all who are acquainted with even a fraction of the published data. Evolution is a fact: as much a fact as plate tectonics or the heliocentric solar system.

Why, finally, does it matter whether these issues are discussed in science classes? There is a case for saying that it doesn't - that biologists shouldn't get so hot under the collar. Perhaps we should just accept the popular demand that we teach ID as well as evolution in science classes. It would, after all, take only about 10 minutes to exhaust the case for ID, then we could get back to teaching real science and genuine controversy.

Tempting as this is, a serious worry remains. The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.

Although the fossil record shows that the first multicellular animals lived about 640m years ago, the diversity of species was low until about 530m years ago. At that time there was a sudden explosion of many diverse marine species, including the first appearance of molluscs, arthropods, echinoderms and vertebrates. "Sudden" here is used in the geological sense; the "explosion" occurred over a period of 10m to 30m years, which is, after all, comparable to the time taken to evolve most of the great radiations of mammals. This rapid diversification raises fascinating questions; explanations include the evolution of organisms with hard parts (which aid fossilisation), the evolutionary "discovery" of eyes, and the development of new genes that allowed parts of organisms to evolve independently.

The field of evolutionary psychology (once called "sociobiology") maintains that many universal traits of human behaviour (especially sexual behaviour), as well as differences between individuals and between ethnic groups, have a genetic basis. These traits and differences are said to have evolved in our ancestors via natural selection. There is much controversy about these claims, largely because it is hard to reconstruct the evolutionary forces that acted on our ancestors, and it is unethical to do genetic experiments on modern humans.

Although evolutionists agree that adaptations invariably result from natural selection, there are many traits, such as the elaborate plumage of male birds and size differences between the sexes in many species, that are better explained by "sexual selection": selection based on members of one sex (usually females) preferring to mate with members of the other sex that show certain desirable traits. Evolutionists debate how many features of animals have resulted from sexual as opposed to natural selection; some, like Darwin himself, feel that many physical features differentiating human "races" resulted from sexual selection.

Evolutionists agree that natural selection usually acts on genes in organisms - individuals carrying genes that give them a reproductive or survival advantage over others will leave more descendants, gradually changing the genetic composition of a species. This is called "individual selection". But some evolutionists have proposed that selection can act at higher levels as well: on populations (group selection), or even on species themselves (species selection). The relative importance of individual versus these higher order forms of selection is a topic of lively debate.

Natural selection is a process that leads to the replacement of one gene by another in a predictable way. But there is also a "random" evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive.

Honestly not trying to be cute, Psycho_Bunny, but I thought the premise (whether one agrees or not) was laid out in the article pretty clearly, viz, The seductive "let's teach the controversy" language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America. So the assertion is that admitting 'supernaturalism' as an 'authentic part' of science would inevitably lead to the end of science education in America.

The thesis put forth is that teaching intelligent design would be "disastrous" yet nowhere in the article is it explained exactly how this would, in fact, be a disaster.

Well, perhaps "disastrous" is a tad hyperbolic, but the point is clear enough -- pawning off non-scientific supernaturalism as science will not be beneficial for the educational well-being of our youngsters.

In the art of argument, this is called "obvious".

Tell you what, you name for me one single "missing link" that's been "discovered" that hasn't been proven to be a hoax and I'll buy into your "theory" of evolution.

Since you seem so convinced that all current fossil offerings have been "discovered" to be hoaxes, perhaps you could provide, say, ten examples?

Show me ONE, JUST ONE, single piece of evidence that anything in this physical realm has "evolved" from anything else (just so you know.

Why? You'll just claim that it's a hoax. It's not like physical evidence hasn't been offered up countless times previously in these discussions.

I'll not accept the BS lies that adaptation "is" evolution.

So when confronted with facts that you don't like, you simply deny them. How...unsurprising.

SHOW ME the 4 or 5 million year old laboratories that have been collecting the "data" that you all use to draw your BS conclusions.

If you have a problem with the conclusions of biologists, perhaps you could actually name specific issues rather than just ranting and raving with nothing more than vague assertions?

And one more thing... stop pretending that Biologists buy into your ilk's junk science. REAL Biologists want nothing to do with your BS theories and "junk science."

Ah, so the hundreds of thousands of researchers who accept the theory of evolution aren't "REAL" biologists. A convenient way to "prove" that your opponents have no legitimate researchers on their side: redefine anyone who does accept the theory of evolution as "fake".

Do you have any facts to offer, or just empty rhetoric and hyperbole?

Don't believe everything you hear on the internet.

I've read Behe and Dembski and both reject the idea that they have anything to say either way about creation. In fact Behe believes in the evolution of species but believes some fundamental cellular structures and processes can't be explained by evolutionary theory.

Dembski says expressly that ID is a theory about how complex information is and how it gets that way.

I'm a creationist myself but reject ID becuase it denies that God has created natural process that can aggregate information at certain levels of density-I say we don't know. Also, I don't reject common descent I just reject that anyone has found the mechanism. Therefore the case is unproven.

Tell you what, you name for me one single "missing link" that's been "discovered" that hasn't been proven to be a hoax

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/15000.html

Show me ONE, JUST ONE, single piece of evidence that anything in this physical realm has "evolved" from anything else (just so you know. I'll not accept the BS lies that adaptation "is" evolution. You and I both know that is total crap

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

And one more thing... stop pretending that Biologists buy into your ilk's junk science. REAL Biologists want nothing to do with your BS theories and "junk science."

Over 99% of biologists accept the theory of evolution.

If you knew what science was, you'd know that ID is a claassic example of junk. The laboratory is more than 4 or 5 million years old. It's the fossil record and it goes back farther than hundred times 4 or 5 million years. Each new fossil discovered fits a predicted pattern. Each living thing is a transitional fossil, whose smallest transitional gap is a single generation, a parent-offspring transition. What is youjr alternative and what is the evidence for it?

And, based on your vitriol, I know you have never actually met, let alone talked with, a bonafide biologist.

Observe how creationists -- in pursuit of their allegedly "scientific" goals -- try to warp nature of science. How do they plan to go about this?

First, they want to tighten the requirements of science to exclude evidence they don't like. One way to do this is by restricting science solely to those phenomena that are reproducible in the lab. We see this argument being made quite often. Sometimes they also demand eyewitness testimony for everything, as an additional way to reject conclusions about events in the distant past. Were they successful in this effort, science would no longer include fields that rely on observations of natural phenomena, such as geology, plate tectonics, volcanism, astronomy, cosmology -- and of course, evolution. They reject the discoveries of those sciences by flippantly asking: "How do you know? Were you there?" They'll eventually have to exclude a lot of lab-reproducable science too, because atomic theory (specifically fusion) supports the age of the sun, and radiometric dating supports the age of the earth.

At the same time, they want to loosen the requirements of science to include "evidence" they do like, by opening up science to unverifiable (and perhaps supernatural) influences. This is the effort being made in Kansas:
Conservatives Seek Redefinition Of Science In Kansas Schools [Evolution vs Creationism].

They'll eventually have to exclude a lot of lab-reproducable science too, because atomic theory (specifically fusion) supports the age of the sun, and radiometric dating supports the age of the earth.

I guess I'm going to have to abandon my work in nuclear & particle physics to advocate my "Intelligent Binder" theory of the atomic nucleus:

The structure holding quarks together inside a proton or neutron has never been directly observed. Gluons, the supposed "gauge particles" that hold together nucleons have never been seen in particle accelerators. The theory of QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics) has failed miserably to produce closed form solutions describing the binding forces within nucleons; in fact "dirty tricks" such as renormalization, where infinite results that physicists don't like are "swept under the rug", are used to get the "correct" results that physicists want.

Such a complicated binding force that we obviously can't describe perfectly with science must be the product of an "Intelligent Binder". After all, the Bible says:

Christ, the Creator "Is before all things, and in him all things hold together". -Col 1:17, NIV

The Biblical evidence is clear. Also, traditional nuclear physics is the foundation of an immoral worldview, that has killed millions of innocent people; nuclear physics can be blamed for the destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Chernobyl Disaster, Three Mile Island and the creation of devastating super-mosters such as Godzilla and Mothra.

It's high time we teach the controversy about nuclear physics and give the Intelligent Binder theory equal time to the outdated, traditional nuclear theory.

(Special thanks to Jack Chick for inspiring the Biblical Selection)

It wouldn't stop at highschool. Next would be attempts to use the same political force to get colleges and universities to redefine science too. If the scientific community is ignored and popular demand is allowed to define science education then all bets are off. If it becomes a major political issue then politicians have a nasty habit of getting too involved.

It's already happening. University of California is being sues by Christian students who were denied admission because they were taught biology from non-accredited text books. These textbooks covered creationism and were used in a Christian highschool. They are claiming they are being discriminated against based upon their religious beliefs. Here's the FR thread:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1474790/posts

There are already people in FR claiming universities should have their federal funding cut if they teach evolution. Why? Because the Republicans (i.e. Christians with morals) are in charge now. This is becoming a very political issue and will cost Republicans at the polls if it becomes a strong party plank. Thankfully, this is not (yet) the majority view of fellow conservatives.

It's the fossil record and it goes back farther than hundred times 4 or 5 million years.

LOL YOU mean "fossils" like the Peking Man? Or maybe Lucy eh? Perhaps you're referring to the fossils of 'Neanderthal Man' hahaha.
Listen doc, all the "fossil records" that evolutionary kooks like to point to in an attempt to PROVE their "THEORY" are hoaxes. I realize that you're probably frothing at the mouth right now. I mean, how dare someone have an education and the ability to reason right?

You gave it a nice try doc (actually I'm being nice just saying that) but fossils are NOT laboratories much as you may wish they were. You must seriously REVAMP our entire language to come up with that crap. Next, your "theories" don't fly and all REAL scientists will tell you that.

If this crap that you're trying to peddle is what your education in the public schools has taught you then I'd say you have serious grounds for a lawsuit.

Forgive me folks but I just can't help myself IROTFLMAO... Just one more... Who can forget the HUGE discovery of the Nebraska Man. These evolutionary nutcases created an entire spiecies of pre-historic man from the tooth (one tooth folks) of a javalina. HAHA... I could go on all day and these kooks will still wonder why we don't take them seriously.

Here's the fact of the matter. Evolutionists are afraid of Creationists. The don't want Creationism taught to our children because they know that if it is their BS theories will be laughed out of existance.

Sorry guys but the idiocy of evolution just cracks me up.

As I've said PatrickHenry, all of those "transitional fossils" have been PROVEN to be hoaxes.
Let's just look at the "Archaeopteryx" for example (it's one of 'your' sources examples)

A little excerpt from real scientific research
Now we come to a totally opposite position: Archaeopteryx is not an extinct bird, but rather a planned hoax. At the same time that mounting evidence was beginning to indicate it to be a carefully contrived fake; confirmed evolutionists moved toward the position that Archaeopteryx was only an ancient bird and not a half-reptile / half-bird. By calling it a `bird," they avoided the crisis that struck the scientific world—and the major museums—when Piltdown Man was exposed as a hoax in 1953.

Three initial problems. Before considering the *Hoyle / *Watkins expose, let us first look at some other facets of this overall problem.

You will observe in the following discussion that there are some observational differences between this and the preceding approach to the problem. For example, while some experts consider Archaeopteryx to have had a body like a bird, those who consider it a fake believe the fossilized body to be a reptile. Somebody took a reptile fossil—and carefully added wings to it!

"Like the later Piltdown man, Archaeopteryx seemed a perfect intermediate form . . There are, however, disturbing analogies between Piltdown man and Archaeopteryx that have come to light with careful study. Both are hodgepodges of traits found in the forms they are supposed to link—with each trait present in essentially full developed form rather than in an intermediate state! Allowing for alterations, Piltdown's jaw was that of an orangutan; Archaeopteryx's skull was a dinosaur skull. Moreover, Piltdown man's cranium was a Homo sapien's skull; Archaeopteryx's feathers were ordinary feathers, differing in no significant way from those of a strong flying bird such as a falcon . . The lack of proper sufficient bony attachments for powerful flight muscles is enough to rule out the possibility that Archaeopteryx could even fly, feathers notwithstanding."—W. Frair and P. Davis, Case for Creation (1983), pp. 58-60.

You said, "Welcome to the rational world"? I say, Back at you sweet cheeks. You all can't keeps trying to blow smoke up our arses and expect us to keep believing it.

Listen... I suggest you do a little homework. Study both sides before peddling the bilge your chosen side pumps out.

If you are going to cite fakes, at least get the ones that are fakes correct. And it was the biologists you deride that deduced the fake Piltdown man. The fossil record is a laboratory. Sadly, you seem to think science can only be done in a room with a fume hood. In regards to scientific language, you need an education in that area if you want to argue. We don't want creationism taught because there isn't a single shred of science present in an idea based entirely upon the supernatural. You haven't even offered a better explanation and you willfully ignore evidence right in front of you. A closed mind is a terrible thing to waste.

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