More on teaching the controversy


You can probably teach all there is to teach about Intelligent Design in 10 seconds.

In an interesting example of synchronicity, Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist par excellence, and Jerry Coyne wrote an article in today's Guardian UK expanding on some of the points I raised yesterday. In the article, they note that there is plenty of legitimate controversy in the field of evolutionary biology, controversy that could easily take up four or five years of post-graduate work just to familiarize oneself with the various opposing views. Even the ten minutes (or ten seconds, if you're quick about it) it would take to explain Intelligent Design's theory of evolution (i.e., "God Did It") takes valuable time out of an otherwise very busy instruction schedule.

Dawkins and Coyne also point out that, whereas evolutionary biology is expected to come up with actual hypotheses as to how things got to be the way they are (gene duplication, transposition, selection pressures, transcription errors), Intelligent Design seems to want to get inserted into the science curriculum on the strength of its opposition to Darwinian evolution alone, without reference to any competing hypothesis. Dawkins has elsewhere referred to the Intelligent Design argument as "argument from personal incredulity." In other words, someone like Michael Behe or William Dembski simply cannot believe that non-directed evolution could account for the complexity of life, and therefore assumes that evolution must have been guided by an intelligent designer.

Sounds to me like ID enthusiasts are basically quitters. They don't have the intellectual energy or discipline to actually go out and do some research to figure out how life got to be the way it is. They just give up, admit defeat, and assume that "god did it."

Posted: Thu - September 1, 2005 at 07:59 PM          

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