No Debate Among Scientists - Regardless of Faith, Intelligent Design Is Not Science
Archaeologist R. Joe Brandon has organized a massive, four-day online campaign in the scientific community in response to the Discovery Institute's ongoing efforts to include Intelligent Design content in public school science classes. The petition, at http://www.ShovelBums.org, was circulated between September 28th and October 1st to scientists trained in evolutionary theory and gave them an opportunity to publicly state that Intelligent Design should not be taught in public schools within the science curriculum.
The results were overwhelming -- 7,733 signatories, more than half of whom are scientists with Ph.Ds. "I organized this project as a response to the Discovery Institute's four-year petition initiative which gathered only 400 scientist signatures opposing evolution and promoting Intelligent Design as a scientific theory," said Brandon.
"During my short, four-day experiment, I received about 20 times as many signatures at a rate that was 697,000 percent higher than what Discovery Institute can claim."
Scientists who signed the petition, including 21 National Academy of Science members, nine MacArthur "genius" awardees, and a Nobel laureate, object to efforts to place Intelligent Design on par with scientific theory, Brandon said.
Signatory Dr. Steve Brill of Rutgers University agrees. "To be called a scientific theory, Intelligent Design must be at the very least, disprovable. Since there is no way for Intelligent Design to be disproved, it fails the simplest test of scientific theory."
Michael Behe, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University, is often at the center of the controversy pushing for ID's acceptance. Yet, twenty of his peers at Lehigh University remarked collectively that "As Michael J. Behe's faculty colleagues ... we lend our voices to the chorus of nearly all scientists who conclude that 'Intelligent Design' is not a scientific theory, but rather a loosely veiled attempt to explain natural phenomena by invoking the concept of a supernatural entity. Intelligent Design is not a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution and has no place in the biology classroom."
The Discovery Institute introduced a "Friend of the Court" brief in the ongoing Kitzmiller v. Dover case on October 3rd in an attempt to divert attention from the fact that scientists agree that there is no scientific theory in Intelligent Design. The brief, signed by a comparatively scant 85 scientists, asserts that "the nature of science is not a question to be decided by the courts."
Signatory and biologist Mark Siddall of the American Museum of Natural History replied, "This is not a fight about what the nature of science is. Scientists have already determined that. It's a fight about what our daughters and sons will be taught is the nature of science."
Siddall, who helped Brandon analyze the massive response to the petition, added, "R. Joe's efforts elicited an overwhelming response from the scientific community -- one that cut across lines of faith as deeply as it did across fields of scientific study."
Shovel Bums LLC, http://www.shovelbums.org, is a free service for all levels of archaeology and Cultural Resources Management (CRM) employment. This 8,500 professional member community was founded in 1999 by R. Joe Brandon and has grown by word of mouth to be the largest archaeology organization in the world.
I propose that the next pro-evolution petition consist of Republicans and conservatives concerned not just about what the creationist movement is doing to education, but its effects on the party, the conservative movement, and our culture and society as a whole.