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.

"Which "evolutionisits" share the blame for the current sorry state of American public eduction? Very few practicing evolutionary biologists I know of have anything to do with public education. Some write biology textbooks, maybe, but I haven't seen any evidence that biology textbook quality is particularly bad. It's the history, math, and English books that seem to be the worst."

What do you mean some write the textbook maybe? If they are not writing the textbook then who is? Evolution is not limited to just biology textbooks, every "science" book presented in public school has some portion of the TOE as foundation.

Exactly how does one practice evolutionary biology? Do they have a business name?

What evolution contains no math, no history, and void of English? The mindset of the evolutionists permeates every discipline and appears a blindness afflicts that mindset."

"The people primarily responsible for destroying are schools are the education bureaucrats, teachers' colleges, and teachers' unions. Why aren't you fighting them?"

Let's not leave out some parents as well. None of the listed above as destroyers are against evolution.

"One of the reasons why education is suffering is because conservatives are wasting resources on this stupid fight about "intelligent design" nonsense instead of fighting to improve standards, abolishing teacher tenure, purging the social science and humanities curriculum from leftist and revisionist garbage, etc."

What resources are being wasted?? How much is it costing you?? You want the fight to end put up the white flag.

"With all the leftist horrors in public education, the one thing that gets seems to get conservatives most worked up is evolution. If that is the best we conservatives can do, our country is doomed."

TOE entered the system of education first, you tell a child they are descendants of animals they are going to act like animals. Might surprise you the good brothers donating to the public school system.

Evolution is not a sterile walled discipline, the theory/ideology is that which all other disciplines flow.

Now evolutionists may well seek to separate themselves from the liberal swill, but I have found no such effort exists.

Then you haven't looked. But then maybe you wouldn't want to look. You'd be likely to find that your prejudices bear an inverse relation to reality.

It's been a good number of years now, but I was heavily involved in evolution controversies at one point, and talked with many on both sides of the issue. I even attended a couple creationism conventions, including one at a fundamentalist college in Dayton, TN where the Scopes trial occurred.

In my experience I came across many, many pro-evolution/anti-creationism activists who were also deeply concerned about how physiology, ecology and other biological topics were taught, and about the (often abysmal) state of science education and science textbooks in general. Sure there were liberal/left groups like PfAW who were only interested in the evolution issue, but there were always many more with broader interests.

On the creationist side I never (at lest personally) came across a single, solitary activist who demonstrated any interest in anything but the subject of evolution (or the age of the earth, or other subjects perceived as related to religion or biblical inerrancy).

As to not just distancing from, but directly and ruthlessly attacking liberal shibboleths -- e.g. environmentalism and the destructive evils of capitalism -- as represented in texts or curricula, here are just a couple examples from William J. Bennetta. Bennetta was a vociferous opponent of creationism in California and elsewhere. These are from reviews for the Textbook League which was specifically created as a pro-evolution organization.

BTW, I just happened to come up with these examples involving American Indians because of the way I was googling, that is using terms from an article I happened to remember.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do Biology

For many schoolbook companies, fraud is a routine activity, thievery is a daily practice, and the swindling of school districts is a normal way of doing business. Generally, therefore, the advent of another fake schoolbook doesn't seem to be a remarkable occurrence. Once in a while, however, a book appears which is so blatantly and pervasively phony that it achieves historical significance and merits special attention.
Addison Wesley Longman's book Scott Foresman - Addison Wesley Biology: The Web of Life is such a product, and I hope that our major education libraries will buy and preserve copies of it. I hope that The Web of Life will be available indefinitely to historians because it illustrates, in exceptionally clear and compelling ways, various aspects of the corruption that has spread through American public education during the closing years of the 20th century. It thus deserves a place in our archives, I assert, alongside Glencoe Health, Glencoe's Biology: Living Systems, Prentice Hall's World Cultures: A Global Mosaic, McDougal Littell's America's Past and Promise, West's United States History: In the Course of Human Events, Silver Burdett Ginn's World Cultures, and other particularly flagrant fakes.
The Web of Life is not a biology book or a science book, by any stretch of the imagination. I think that it can best be regarded as a kind of valentine -- a gaudy, 5-pound valentine that AWL has composed for all the state officials who run crooked textbook-adoption proceedings, and for all the local textbook-evaluation committees who approve books without reading them. The Web of Life is a book by fakers and for fakers, and the fakery begins with the book's very name.
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"The Web of Life"! That catchy subtitle looks as if it may actually mean something -- and we soon learn where it allegedly originated, because AWL's writers have put this epigraph on their book's title page: " 'We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.' -- CHIEF SEATTLE"
Yes, folks, he has returned again -- old Chief Seattle, the silver-tongued spokesman for the Eco-Freak Brigade of the Noble Savages. Readers who keep track of phony-Injun lore will recall that the Chief is famously associated with a splurge of mawkish rhetoric titled "Chief Seattle's Speech," though there is no evidence to suggest that he uttered any of it. In short, the speech is bogus. Fanciers of phony-Injun stuff will also know that the so-called speech doesn't contain the sentences that the AWL writers have used for their epigraph. The writers have taken two lines from the bogus speech and have doctored them to make them politically correct. In short, the writers have concocted a fake "quotation" from a speech that was phony to begin with, and their epigraph is fakery squared. [See "Fakery Squared" on pages 6 and 7 of this issue.]
After that, things just get worse.

Since "all" you allegedly hear "out of the evolutionists is a paralyzing fear of ID/creationists," you might want to read the remainder (the substance) of the review excerpted above, noting the wide variety of subjects engaged. Evolution doesn't happen to be mentioned at all (except incidentally in a passing comment about similar heat retention mechanisms evolving independently in sharks and tuna) and creationism isn't mentioned period.

BTW here's more on the fake "Chief Seattle" speech wherein Bennetta unravels the history, notes how Seattle was transformed into a "full-fledged eco-freak" by rewrites of his fake speech in the 70's, and mocks Al Gore and his use of the speech in Earth in the Balance:

Fakery Squared

The following is a review in which Bennetta savages a different biology text for the inclusion of multiple "clever-aborigine tales," wherein pandering, politically correct (and phony) claims are made or intimated that Native Americans anticipated various modern (or not so modern) innovations, along with bloviations about how modern man has come to appreciate the native American's "oneness with nature" as we recoil from our savaging of the environment:

Bisonflop

More can be found on The Textbook League's homepage, including equally energetic and fact laced attacks on anti-Western critiques of the Crusades; a fluffy, apologist textbook on Islam; and (by another author) a review of a textbook on terrorism:

But then comes Part III, "Responding as a Nation," and here the editors display their own confusion while they foment confusion in the minds of their readers. In an article titled "Justice, Not War," an obscure sociologist named Kevin Danaher seems to advocate that we should respond to terrorism by doing nothing, though he recommends that we "demand internationalism rather than isolationism, justice rather than revenge, and love rather than hate." Likewise, Richard Rothstein (in a piece headlined "The Other War, Against Intolerance") endorses schoolhouse "multiculturalism" as a device for combating "rash views," and Laurie Goodstein (in an article titled "The Real Face of Islam") creates the impression that most Muslim religious leaders condemned the 9/11 attack -- an impression that is clearly false.
[...]Part IV, "Responding as Individuals," is clearly the worst. It is a bundle of feel-good anecdotes and pop-psychology fancies, with titles like "A Victim of Terrorism Helps Others" and "Should We Be Afraid?" and "Helping Children Understand." (Children? Isn't this supposed to be a book for high-school students?) As a whole, Part IV encourages the notion that a terrorist attack is merely a kind of psychological trauma, and that a citizen's response to terrorism needn't be any different from visiting a shrink.
[...] this book fails to deliver the knowledge that would enable ordinary students or teachers to grasp the global phenomenon of terrorism. Superficial and emotional approaches to terrorism (or, worse, pseudopsychological approaches) help nobody. Students need to know that they, like everyone else, are targets -- but The Challenge of Terrorism doesn't teach this lesson.
[...] One must wonder how teachers who have absorbed the habits of political correctness and the doctrines of "multiculturalism" -- habits and doctrines that now are normal features of American public education and are publicly promoted by the predominant teachers' union, the National Education Association -- might deal with some of the items that are included in this book. For instance: How can "multiculturalism," which demands uncritical respect for whatever non-European people do, be squared with what students will read in the article that fills pages 79 through 89? Headlined "Osama bin Laden on the Attacks," the article is an excerpt from a transcript of a conversation in which Osama bin Laden and one of his followers express their gratitude to Allah for the success of the 9/11 attacks. Political correctness and "multiculturalism" simply are not compatible with any serious analysis of contemporary terrorism, most of which is Islamic and is perpetrated by Muslims

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