Editorial: Voting down unintelligent designs
Though the verdict in the recently wrapped “intelligent design” trial in Dover, Pa., isn’t expected until January, voters there have already returned the right decision.
Dover’s public school board, comprised of nine Republican members, was sued for unanimously adopting new standards requiring high school science teachers to read a statement offering “intelligent design”–the notion that life is too complex to have arisen undirected–as an alternative to evolution to explain the origin and development of life.
Eight of the nine board members were up for re-election Nov. 8, and Dover voters replaced all eight with Democrats opposed to the standards, which the candidates aptly characterized as a means of weaseling Christian creationism into public curriculum.
Unfortunately, the voters in Dover may be more evolved then much of the general public. In a November 2004 Gallup poll, 45 percent of U.S. adults surveyed said they believed God created all life on earth, in basically its present form, within the past 10,000 years. Thirty-eight percent of teenagers responded likewise in March.
So, why not, in the interest of intellectual freedom, “teach the controversy,” as President Bush and other Republican leaders have so innocently suggested?
Because scientifically speaking, there is no controversy. “Intelligent design” is not a true theory, in that it posits nothing that can be tangibly tested. Having no content of its own, it antagonizes legitimate science and uses the reaction as evidence of contention.
The movement’s lead designer is the Discovery Institute, an organization that, like the movement itself, is essentially politics dusted with pseudo-science. (Remember when it used to be called “creation science?”) As evidence of its supposed mainstream validity, the Institute touts the more than 400 signatures it has gathered to date from scientists who doubt evolutionary theory.
In pointedly clever retaliation, the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education launched its own petition, named “Project Steve” after late theorist Stephen Jay Gould. To date, it has collected more than 600 signatures in support of evolution–just from scientists named or nicknamed “Steve.”
Still in perpetual pursuit of secular credibility, “intelligent design” advocates respond to religious criticism by saying they never specify who or what the “designer” is. But other than little green men, God looks to be the sole contender–assuming we set aside questions over why a perfectly rational deity would design human eyes with blind spots or waste time on vestigial organs and junk DNA.
For all its talk “Of Pandas and People,” “intelligent design” looks beyond the natural world. And despite recent actions by a conservative school board in Kansas (still carrying the torch 80 years after the Scopes trial) to rewrite its definition to the contrary, science is only concerned with natural explanations.
Pennsylvania voters saw past the rhetoric, and we hope to the unnamed“designer” the judge there will follow suit. Though the newly elected Dover board is prepared to overturn the standards regardless, “intelligent design” needs all the condemnation it can get.
When a third of American teenagers tell pollsters they do not know enough to say whether they think evolutionary theory is well supported, the last thing we need is less science in science class.
Dover’s public school board, comprised of nine Republican members, was sued for unanimously adopting new standards requiring high school science teachers to read a statement offering “intelligent design”–the notion that life is too complex to have arisen undirected–as an alternative to evolution to explain the origin and development of life.
Eight of the nine board members were up for re-election Nov. 8, and Dover voters replaced all eight with Democrats opposed to the standards, which the candidates aptly characterized as a means of weaseling Christian creationism into public curriculum.
Unfortunately, the voters in Dover may be more evolved then much of the general public. In a November 2004 Gallup poll, 45 percent of U.S. adults surveyed said they believed God created all life on earth, in basically its present form, within the past 10,000 years. Thirty-eight percent of teenagers responded likewise in March.
So, why not, in the interest of intellectual freedom, “teach the controversy,” as President Bush and other Republican leaders have so innocently suggested?
Because scientifically speaking, there is no controversy. “Intelligent design” is not a true theory, in that it posits nothing that can be tangibly tested. Having no content of its own, it antagonizes legitimate science and uses the reaction as evidence of contention.
The movement’s lead designer is the Discovery Institute, an organization that, like the movement itself, is essentially politics dusted with pseudo-science. (Remember when it used to be called “creation science?”) As evidence of its supposed mainstream validity, the Institute touts the more than 400 signatures it has gathered to date from scientists who doubt evolutionary theory.
In pointedly clever retaliation, the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education launched its own petition, named “Project Steve” after late theorist Stephen Jay Gould. To date, it has collected more than 600 signatures in support of evolution–just from scientists named or nicknamed “Steve.”
Still in perpetual pursuit of secular credibility, “intelligent design” advocates respond to religious criticism by saying they never specify who or what the “designer” is. But other than little green men, God looks to be the sole contender–assuming we set aside questions over why a perfectly rational deity would design human eyes with blind spots or waste time on vestigial organs and junk DNA.
For all its talk “Of Pandas and People,” “intelligent design” looks beyond the natural world. And despite recent actions by a conservative school board in Kansas (still carrying the torch 80 years after the Scopes trial) to rewrite its definition to the contrary, science is only concerned with natural explanations.
Pennsylvania voters saw past the rhetoric, and we hope to the unnamed“designer” the judge there will follow suit. Though the newly elected Dover board is prepared to overturn the standards regardless, “intelligent design” needs all the condemnation it can get.
When a third of American teenagers tell pollsters they do not know enough to say whether they think evolutionary theory is well supported, the last thing we need is less science in science class.
posted by Holly at 12:18 AM
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