Anthonares

Now that both President Bush and a potential future candidate Bill Frist have weighed in on their belief that Intelligent Design should be taught in public schools, I thought I should weigh in on mine. After all, my personal beliefs are every bit as relevant as Bush’s and Frist’s personal beliefs in determining what SCIENCE should be taught in our schools. Intelligent Design (ID) goes basically like this: humans, and other creatures, are too complex and our parts too interdependent to have arisen via a series of random evolutionary changes. Further refinements of the theory, including some articles that ID specialists have managed to get published in very low profile peer-reviewed journals, talk about the “information content” of the human genome and use information theory to prove that such content could not arise randomly. Now, given that we are here, and we could not have arisen by random evolutionary chance, we must have been created by some Intelligent Designer–aka God (or aliens if your a Scientologist ).

So, ID sounds scientific, and it is a theory in opposition to evolution, so why shouldn’t it be taught in our biology classes? At a conference in May, I had a delightful conversation with a man who informed me that the theory of planet formation is totally wrong. Planets actually form by growing slowly over thousands of years. The grand canyon is evidence of this planetary growth, he said. Eventually, the Earth, and all other planets, are destined to grow to the size of our sun and become stars themselves. Why don’t we teach this gentleman’s ideas in our basic astronomy classes at the University?

There are, in science, always going to be alternative theories to explain some physical phenomena. If held by a very few, and not supported by even a scrap of evidence, reasonable people would agree that a minority scientific theory should not be taught in our schools. Children, even high school age children, cannot be taught science by being offered a smorgasbord of crackpot theories from which to choose their own personal blend. This “scientific relativism” is as abhorrent to a technological society as “moral relativism” is to the civilized one. Science can seek absolute truth because it speaks of only observable phenomena. We may not yet know the truth, but new theories need to bring us closer to that truth by predicting and explaining the world around us–and then be verified by direct observation. Evolution by Natural Selection is such a theory. Perhaps it is not entirely correct in all of its aspects, but it has been largely verified by millions of direct observations over the last 150 years.

ID, or any theory that seeks to be an alternative to Evolution in our schools, needs to provide some scientifically compelling reason for its adoption. It must explain some observed phenomenon more accurately, or explain something that Evolution cannot. The arguments that humans are “too complex” to have evolved from inert chemicals, or that our genomes contain “too much information,” are philosophical arguments that can neither be verified nor contradicted. And, of course, the ultimate suggestion of ID, that we are in fact created by a Designer, is not scientific at all. There are no observable tests to this part of the theory–therefore it is either philosophy or religion, but not science. We SHOULD teach our high schoolers about ID. We should teach them about the controversy in whatever class teaches them about current events. But to think that a non-scientific theory full of hand-waving arguments that was concocted by “Creation Science” proponents about 15 years ago should be taught as an alternative to a scientific theory that has been supported by millions of observations over the last 150 years is ridiculous. Politics and religion, not science, are driving this controversy.

If we let politics and religion dictate what we teach in our science classes, we may find ourselves suffering from a 21st century version of Lysenkoism. Communist Russia taught a completely incorrect genetic theory invented in part by Trofim Lysenko because the alternative genetic theories were considered to be politically unpleasant–they were too “bourgeois” to be taught in Communist schools. Here we are, 80 years past this terrible failure of scientific education that has permanently damaged Russian biology, talking the exact same way that Stalin was talking when he subverted science because it did not fit his political and religious ideas. If our public schools no longer teach science, we will have eroded the foundations of our world-class universities and research institutions, and perhaps of our modern technological society itself.