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.

Actually, I am beginning to favor teaching evolution, creationism, and ID PROPERLY in the science classroom. Teach the scientific theory of evolution presenting the voluminous amount of evidence that supports it. Teach that creationism is not science because science cannot include any supernatural, and therefore untestable, phenomenon, and then teach that ID is really just creationism in disguise to get around that pesky First Ammendment and is no more scientific than creationism. Of course, that's probably not what creationists/ID'ers have in mind when they shout "Teach both sides!"

I for one would have no problem with people believing whatever they want. If someone's religious belief is that God created everything in six days, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, then that's their right. However, it is the creationists that have made this into a political issue. The increasing association in the public mind between creationism and conservatism is potentially dangerous to conservatism. Please spare me any polls that suggest that the majority of people are creationists. There are many people who are religious and believe that God created the universe in six days but would oppose teaching such religious concepts in schools or otherwise politicizing their religious beliefs. Don't think for one second that the Democrats won't use this against us, labelling Republicans as "pig-ignorant idiots who want to turn the US into a theocracy." Don't think for a second that such attacks would not be effective among the general public.

We don't have proof of what the moon in bulk is made of. We have proof that there are a few small pieces of material that were removed from the moon by astronauts that turned out to be rock. The rest could very well be green cheese. We have made a completely and utterly unjustified extrapolation based on incomplete evidence. There is no proof that the ENTIRE moon is made of rocks. In fact, the rocks were probably fakes planted on the moon by the evil atheistic "moon rockers" to bolster their failing "moon is made of rock" theory. Any of this starting to sound familiar?

Then why no "controversy" about geology, stellar dynamics, plate techtonics, or nuclear decay? After all, one person in one lifetime cannot observe stars forming, rock layers forming, continents moving from one place to another or the decay of half of a sample of radioactive material whose half life is greater than 100 years or so. Why is evolution singled out on this basis?

To the average bear, if you can observe a continent moving 1 inch in year and you project that it moved 5 million inches in 5 million years it is viewed as a straight line projection.

If the average bear sees dirt layed down in a rainstorm over an existing soil he can see a layer form in one day. It is easy for him to believe that more and harder layers could be formed over millions of years.

But if you see the frequency of peppered moths increase in a population and project that the exact same process (evolution) turned mollusks into men he just doesn't see the straight line. Thus he says he wants more evidence, he wants to see something similar.

Note my only point here is to try to clarify that the line between peppered moth 'evolution' and vertibrate from sea slime evolution is not completely arbitrary. I can't prove macro-evolution didn't happen but I'm trying to make the case that differentiation between macro and micro evolution is not completely arbitrary.

I have never understood why TOE excites emotions, particularly among Christians, in a way that, say, quantum mechanics does not; maybe because everyone thinks they understand TOE, and you don't need all the maths : ). But quantum mechanics is every bit as 'threatening' (if that's how you choose to regard it) to religious beliefs as is TOE--or as irrelevant to religious beliefs as TOE, if that is how you choose (as I do) to view it.

IAWTC. I think you have hit a particularly good point there, that everyone thinks they undertand evolution. It's not a difficult concept, but in my experience anyone who is anti-evolution because it's "not science" has misrepresented the theory; however, there's nothing that can be done for those who think science is heresy anyway.

however, there's nothing that can be done for those who think science is heresy anyway.

Bingo--I think your point is right on the money here.

Science does not start with an unchallengeable doctrine, it commences instead with careful observation of the natural world, frames a hypothesis that seems to best explain those observations, determines what may be further predicted by that hypothesis, and then goes on to test that hypothesis against further observations (derived, where appropriate, from experimentation). If these further observations do not match the predictions of the hypothesis, then that hypothesis is amended or abandoned as appropriate. This is why the history of science is littered with abandoned hypotheses--but this is part of what doing science means, the errors in science are corrected by its own methodolgy. Dalton's atomic theory was a major step forward in the early 1800's, the best explanation up to that time for the behaviour of matter--but it wasn't the last word by any means, we know vastly more know about the behavior of atomic particles than Dalton ever could, but it was scientists, not churchmen, who built on his work, corrected errors, framed better hypotheses, and tested them. That's how it works: it's called the advancement of knowledge--and we are all beholden to it every time we visit the doctor, or step on board an airplane, or log on to FR, or--well, you get the point :-)

Religion does not (could not/should not) use this methodology. It is pointless (and in some views, blasphemous) to seek naturalistic, scientific 'proof' of God. For many (and I once was one) who feel science threatens faith, then it is a valid option to simply leave science alone and follow your faith. What is not a valid option (in my view, and I'm passionate about this one) is to try and change science to accommodate your faith. This is what I accuse the Creationists of doing. For, if you think TOE is flawed science, then use genuine scientific methodolgy to invalidate the hypothesis; do not break the proven methodolgy of science in order to sneak in wholly unscientific stuff from your existing theological schema! That is dishonest, debasing, and ultimately very dangerous. This is what Stalin did in Russia, the mullahs in Iran, and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

I can think of many, many cases in history where churchmen have persecuted, even to death, scientists for holding religious 'heresies' that are now accepted as everyday commonplaces. I honestly cannot think of a single case in history of a scientist who has persecuted in any degree a religious leader for that leader's scientific views! But I offer this point as a hypothesis: if anyone has a counter-example, I'll revise/abandon my hypothesis here in full accordance with the scientific method!

re : Right, Intelligent design would be a disaster in the classroom but the F word, as we learned last week, has been deemed an absolutely indispensable learning tool in UK classrooms. Let's face it England is doomed.

Doomed Doomed were all Doomed.

Followed by the Red Coats are coming the Red Coats are coming.

Or the Yankees are coming the Yankees are coming.

I love it when Yanks tell the rest of us we are all doomed.

hflynn, little whisper in your ear, sort your own house out before knocking others. LOL

I love it when Yanks tell the rest of us we are all doomed.

Yeah, your grandfather loved it in WW I and your father loved it in WW II.

hflynn, little whisper in your ear, sort your own house out before knocking others. LOL

Tonyc, little whisper in your ear, sort your own house out, just for once, before knocking the USA, better yet buy yourself a Koran because sorting your own house isn't something you've been able to do since your whole nation went on the dole.

What is not a valid option (in my view, and I'm passionate about this one) is to try and change science to accommodate your faith. This is what I accuse the Creationists of doing.

I'm being nitpicking and pedantic, but I'd word that a bit differently.

Agreeing with you that science is a hypothetical-deductive method which tests (rather than verifies) theories, neither the origin of a theory nor the motivations of its originator matter in the strictly logical sense (however severe may be the practical effects of dilettantes forming theories to meet extra-scientific demands). The only thing that matters is how the theory fares under testing.

Therefore I'd say it is strictly valid (again, however impractical) to TRY and "change science to accommodate your faith." What is invalid is to demand that such efforts be granted immunity from failure, or any other special dispensation wrt the demands that are placed on any other scientific idea.

THIS is the problem with what creationists and ID'ers are doing. If they want to play the game of science, then that's fine. The problem is that they are insisting they be declared winners or at least contenders (in textbooks and curricula) before the game has even got through the first innings! Science is a game that the vast majority of contenders lose. That is most new hypotheses and theories fail. If you want to play the game you have to accept the possibility of losing, but this creationists won't do.

So if the average bear can observe that DNA base pairs change at the rate of say a few hundred per generation on average, why can't he make the same straight line extrapolation to lead to the several million pairs difference seen between closely related species? It's exactly the same thing, with the exception that religious beliefs have led to the notion that there's some mysterious barrier preventing small changes to one species from leading to a new species. Once a new species has formed, then what's the barrier preventing it from changing and forming yet another species, and so on. The various species of life form a continuum. Maybe the average bear can't see this, but that's just because the entire continuum is not alive today; most of the species forming the continuum are extinct. The small changes observed in living organisms are not any different than the small changes in position of the continents or the small layers of dirt that are laid down in a rainstorm. The fact that the average person doesn't see this is irrelevant. The evidence is out there.

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