I wish I could say that we weren't in Kansas anymore, Toto, but the real problem of the matter is that we are. The State Board of Education in Topeka has been holding a rash of hearings on new standards for the teaching of evolution in science class. Today was their third consecutive hearing, and the final day is scheduled for Thursday the 12th of May. The stalwarts of Kansas' science community have been boycotting the hearings in protest of the conservative subcommittee's pro-creationism bent. I can't tell you enough how much of a mistake I think this is.
It's a mistake because there are scientists standing in front of the subcommittee telling them that they believe in a creator and this gives the illusion of scientific legitimacy to the entire proceeding. That other scientists are not standing up in these hearings to state otherwise leaves a lone and brave lawyer to fight in favor of the proposed evolution-friendly guidelines. Throw in the fact that at least two of the subcommittee members have admitted to not doing more than glancing at the proposed guidelines, and it becomes a real problem.
The latest attempt to run evolution out of Dorothyville on a rail comes from adherents to the so-called school of intelligent design. These scientists and pseudo-scientists attempt to reconcile their chosen avocation with their religion by pointing to the beautiful and elegant complexity of nature and saying, "Look at how beautiful and elegant this is. It is so complex, so fragile, that it could only have been designed by a higher power, an intelligent guiding hand." It is not, they insist, creationism, which makes no logical sense what with creation and design being synonymous.
Intelligent design uses the language of science while willfully disregarding chief tenets of science. They point to things like gaps in the fossil chain as proof that evolution is wrong. They point to what we don't know and say, "See! You don't know! That means you're wrong!" Nonsense. As Richard Dawkins, perhaps evolution's foremost advocate and an outspoken (and wonderfully crass) atheist, has noted, having gaps in the fossil chain does not invalidate evolution. It would take an act such as the remains of a homo sapiens sapiens carbon-dating to a time when hominids are not thought to occur to disprove evolution. If life is so elegant and complex, he notes, then the designer much be that much more elegant and complex. And if this is so, Dawkins asks, then who designed the designer? It becomes an infinite question.
Intelligent design, for all its pretensions to science, is not science. There are no experiments, no studies backing up its conclusions. It has not even been able to poke holes in methodology. All it can do is disagree with conclusions because they disagree with the basic hypothesis based on nothing more than conviction. Intelligent design should not be taught in science class because it is not science. However, the main problem for intelligent design's adherents is that it has all been tried before.
In the 1920s, a science teacher named Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a Tennessee classroom. The trial soon became a three-ring circus, with Clarence Darrow defending Mr. Scopes, the evangelical populist William Jennings Bryan arriving to prosecute, and even the irascible H.L. Mencken providing commentary. The Scopes Monkey Trial (named after Tennessee's Monkey Law) became a forum on evolution, and set the stage for a later U.S. Supreme Court decision in another case directly challenging the Monkey Law in 1965 that would overturn the teaching of creationism in science class. Darrow rather brilliantly defended evolution and attacked creationism, but Scopes still had to pay $100. Bryan, reeling on the ropes and on the defensive, went so far as to hold up pictures of monkeys and extrapolations of human ancestors and pointed to their similarities. These, he contended, were so similar that only an intelligent hand could have guided their creation, an intelligent designer.
As you can see, then, the argument that intelligent design and creationism are separate is nonsense. Oh, they say, we only want our students to learn to critically analyze evolution. Well, that shouldn't be a problem if the students are actually learning anything in science class, since their first lessons should have been in critical analysis. Or, they could just do some reading beforehand. In "On the Origin of Species," Charles Darwin made it very clear that he was not speculating on the origin of life, but rather on how evironment and natural selection create variation in species.
Are parents in Kansas so insecure in their religious teachings that they must shield their children from contrary data? Scientists welcome contrary data because it means they must reevaluate where they stand, must decide whether their hypothesis was right, wrong, or is in need of revision. These so-called intelligent design adherents do not want to teach critical analysis, because this is what they fear. If their children are exposed to contrary ideas and taught to actually think about information they are exposed to, they might just start questioning creationism. And if they can question creationism, then they may just start questioning their religion. That is what evolution's opponents are afraid of.
-Jim
[Update] Corrected an inaccuracy pointed out below. Also the piece is now cross-posted at Los Punditos.