Teaching the Controversy


What would "teaching the controversy" actually entail?

ID proponents have come up with yet another strategy to sneak Creationism into the classroom. Now, instead of outright replacing neodarwinian evolution with "Intelligent Design," they're merely asking that both "theories" be taught side by side, in an effort to "teach the controversy."

But I'm curious to know exactly what "controversy" they'd like to be taught. After all, there are lots of issues in neodarwinian evolution that are controversial. For example, does all life currently existing on earth have a Last Universal Common Ancestor ? Or was there a lot of horizontal gene transfer (between and among species) early in life's evolution? Is it true that Archae and Eukaryotes (two of the three major divisions of life on earth) are more closely related to each other than either is to bacteria? Did all existing phyla first appear during the "Cambrian Explosion," or do they merely first appear in the fossil record at that time? Are viruses ancestral to more complex forms of life, or are they a more recent development?

But somehow, I don't think these are the kinds of "controversies" Intelligent Design supporters want taught in biology classes. Based on what I've read by leaders of the movement (William Dembski, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, et. al.), what they really want taught is, "well, here's a phenomenon neodarwinian evolution can't explain, so therefore an Intelligent Designer must have created life!"

Generally, if a scientist is skeptical of a given theory, or disagrees with it, he or she is expected to propose an alternative theory or hypothesis. For example, scientists who doubted Hubbell's law of the recession of cosmological bodies, which states that the red shift of cosmological objects increases in direct proportion to the distance those objects are from earth, were expected to come up with an alternative explanation for the redshift. Perhaps it was "tired light," which had shifted in frequency during its long journey. Perhaps it was reddened by passage through uncounted light-years of dust. Maybe the laws of physics were different in other areas of the universe. In any case, various theories were proposed, which made certain predictions. Those predictions didn't pan out, and now virtually all astronomers accept the proposition that cosmological redshifts are caused by increasing recession velocities with increasing distance.

But for reasons best known to themselves, Intelligent Design proponents don't seem to think they're required to advance an alternative hypothesis for the diversity of life, other than the claim that some supernatural entity did it through unknown means. Doesn't seem like much of a hypothesis, does it?

Because Intelligent Design, like other forms of creationism, isn't really a theory of anything (it's a theory against evolution), it's difficult to imagine what about ID would actually be taught in a high school biology course. I guess it could be taught that there are areas of biology that cannot (yet, at least) be explained in terms of neodarwinian evolution. I don't think any science education advocate would object to such a statement. But that's not the same thing as saying that Intelligent Design actually explains anything. Unless you think that claiming some unknown designer, using unknown techniques, created life for unknown reasons, with an unknown purpose, actually explains something.

Posted: Wed - August 31, 2005 at 08:23 PM          

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