The controversy over “intelligent design” just won’t disappear from the news. My biologist friends here in Cambridge are upset with George W. Bush, which I find surprising.
The most plausible outcome of teaching intelligent design in public schools is nil. All of the people who are currently advocating intelligent design were themselves taught evolution in public school. They either forgot what they’d been taught, or did not find the unionized civil servant’s (teacher’s) explanation convincing.
You’d expect anyone to be delighted that the President of the United States was paying attention to them or their group. Saddam Hussein loved having his name in the papers and in W’s speeches so much that he was willing to risk war. Imagine the delight of physicists if W said that he was staying awake nights worrying about how muons turn into tau neutrinos. Or of computer scientists if the President were to mention how outraged he was at the syntax of Haskell. The only thing worse than being talked about badly is not being talked about at all.
Most importantly, you’d expect PhD scientists, who, adjusted for IQ and education, probably have America’s worst career prospects, to be delighted that the next generation will be hobbled. Consider a 30-year-old soccer player. What hope can he have of twenty more years of collecting a paycheck unless a Tonya Harding follower comes along to break the knees of all the 15-year-old soccer players? Similarly for biologists. A 35-year-old, $35,000/year postdoc’s best hope for a long-term job is the mental crippling of young people so that they can’t conduct experiments successfully.
I think the people who are outraged simply want the United States to be a more educated–and, hopefully, reasonable–place.
The problem with teaching ID as an alternate theory in science class is that there’s nothing scientific about ID. I’m concerned that letting things into science curriculum that fail the most basic application of scientific methods might open the door to other nonsense like this, so count me among the outraged parties.
Finally: for Christ’s sake, are we really discussing this in the United States of America in late 2005?
For Philip it’s a matter of money and attention — two things he really appreciates. Fair enough.
For many PhDs and others devoted to the endeavor of science, it’s a matter of ideals, a matter of defining science not by majority rule but by core principles, and a matter of doing right by future generations by educating them well.
So where do you, the blog reader here, stand? Attention and money? Or principles, integrity, and giving the next generation the best that we are able?
To analogize with software infrastructure, scientists do better when a critical mass of science consumers have a rough understanding of what science is. Further, given the sad ratio of duds to successes in research leads, many well-trained competitors can increase the chance of the Big Win enough to make competition a better strategy than domination.
The Prez thinking about biology is good, but treating something that does not look like biology as a potential substitute smells of choosing politics over effective action. Not an optimal long-term national strategy.
Eric: The idea that most scientists are noble idealists, unconcerned with their income or reputation, is an inspiring one. However, it doesn’t square with the fanaticism and bitterness that academics evince when it comes to be cited or not. A tire salesman might complain to his wife that he didn’t get a promotion, but a scientist who does not get cited or credited will scream to Heaven. As far as money goes, the academics that I know are much more interested in an extra $10,000 than my friends in the commercial world. If you want to see a group of folks who don’t seem to care about their $10-15/hour salary and the fact that the world pays them no attention, go down to the local flight school and talk to the instructors.
Some conservatives oppose theaching ID in schools.
Read John Derbyshire’s column.
Considering that everything a layperson might want or need to know about evolution can fit in a pamphlet, and that you don’t need evolution to do most if not all of modern biology (the theory of doing biology without wondering about speciation—which few biologists are particularly interested in addressing, anyway—is known more or less as “process structuralism”, if you like to get fancy), I have to wonder what the motivation behind all this bother is.
How about those of us with kids who have to endure this nonsense?
Brent, I disagree that laypeople have no (or limited) concern for evolution.By taking ‘God’ and blanketing that idea over the inner workings of speciation we take the risk of placing DNA into the realm of scripture. Suddenly all genomics are heresy and we end up looking to the preisthood for advice on developments in a wide range of scientific and medical endeavor.Philip, I think that physicists may get a little irked if some theological group attempted to call some arbitrarily large or small item (muons or the big bang) the working of a diety just like I would be offended if somebody suggested that I shouldn’t go mucking around in machine code because it was divinely inspired.
Philip, I think your point of view is backwards.
First, the statement, “All of the people who are currently advocating intelligent design were themselves taught evolution in public school,” is wrong. Very few people in American are taught evolution in public school. Normally, I wouldn’t rely too strongly on my personal experience to make a statement like this, but since I attended public high school in Pennsylvania, a public university in Kentucky and a private graduate school in California, received two degrees in Biology and never received any formal instruction in evolution, I think that it is unlikely that “all of the people who are currently advocating intelligent design were themselves taught evolution in public schools.”
I don’t think much science is taught in public schools in general, but evolution is perceived as contentious and optional, so it isn’t taught. Personally I don’t think you can understand much of biology without evolution, but then I also don’t think that you can understand much of everyday experience without differential equations, so I am clearly in the minority several ways here. People just don’t care much about that kind of understanding.
Second, your analogy is backwards. It’s like you were saying to current major league baseball players, “hey let’s buy up the rights to playgrounds so that no kids learn to play baseball, then we won’t have anyone coming along to take our spots in the roster.” Sure that’s true, but no one will watch baseball, baseball player won’t be paid and that will be the end of baseball. Not a great career move.
There isn’t a requirement that there be any faculty spots for evolutionary biologists at all – there are certainly many universities where there is no serious effort to teach the subject, especially to impressionable undergraduates who might complain the the university was violating their religious rights to believe the God created the world 6000 years ago, or when private citizen are complaining their tax dollar subsidizing about atheist professors.
If I was studying evolution, I think I’d want to encourage the general public’s knowledge of and interest in my field, if only because that would ensure that the funding pipeline stayed wide open.
Myself, I’m in favor of having intelligent design hawked in the public square, but I want to be able to pummel the speakers with a rotten tomato, literally and figuartively.
Philip,
I know many physicist which will be very angry if George Bush took side in their scientific debates. The ones that oppose his point of view would be angry for obvious reasons and the other ones will be angry that an idiot was added to their side making them look worse.
Can you think of a reason why evolutionary biologists shouldn’t be upset by the prospects of competing against the ‘mentally crippled’ for jobs and grants while adjudged by a bureaucracy that can’t distinguish their merits?
For some of us there is also a “this is the final straw” feeling about teaching ID in the schools. The other straws are the generally abysmal level of real literacy in the US, and everything else that’s stupid about our education system, which leaves millions of people unprepared for life. Even though it might make it easier for me to compete if millions of my fellow citizens are uneducated, it’s still upsetting. Consider this quote from an article about Toyota’s decision to build a plant in Canada, instead of the US:
“He said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained – and often illiterate – workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use “pictorials” to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.”
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/cp/business/050630/b0630102.html
Gary: first, you seem to have missed my point about not needing “evolutionary theory” to do modern biology, which is mostly chemistry. Second, what does a layperson need to know about evolution that can’t be learned in an hour on wikipedia?
The way I see it, schools teach some crap here and there already anyway, so what difference does it make? I attended a Christian primary school and we were taught all the same stuff you’d get taught at a normal school—maths, science, etc.—with the difference that God was somehow tacked onto the end of everything, and instead of just being taught “Evolution” we were taught “Creation” and “Evolution is bad for reasons x, y, and z.”
I don’t happen to think that’s a particularly good way to bring up kids, but having said that, I think most of us turned out alright. I can’t see much that’s believable in evolutionary biology, but I haven’t appreciated the way us Christians have handled people that they disagree with. In saying that, I don’t mean to be separating myself from Christians; we’re a people together, even though I realize that we never seem to be able to get along with ourselves or the rest of the world.
In the reading I’ve done on the philosophy of science, it seems pretty clear to me that even the brightest minds of our enlightened century haven’t been able to decide clearly on a definition of science (and what of it should be taught in schools) that is workable and sensible. So perhaps it’s not quite so black-and-white. Personally, I believe God made people to re-create in and study the universe, and so it seems like any science which leaves God out of the picture is a dumb idea. I realize that’s a pretty medieval concept.
In the reading I’ve done on Evolution vs. ID/Creation, while I have to admit the Creationists annoy the hell out of me, and the ID people somewhat less so, (and the Evolutionists somewhere in between, depending on who you get) it seems like both sides are just constantly accusing each other of being “unscientific”, whatever that means or matters. It would be a very good thing if everyone would just have the guts to be humble and admit (gasp!) that they could be wrong.
In the reading I’ve done on the philosophy of science, it seems pretty clear to me that even the brightest minds of our enlightened century haven’t been able to decide clearly on a definition of science (and what of it should be taught in schools) that is workable and sensible.
Nonsense. Any definition of science includes the testing of theories, and that’s where ID/Creation falls short.
I see your point, Dave. I think you could be more charitable to the ID position, though. A common ID approach is to start with information theory. One implication of information theory is that any information (by one of about ten different definitions of “information”) in the universe must have an initial author. Information is conserved, it doesn’t just appear and disappear. So then an ID person will form a theory that, say, The Universe Was Designed, and armed with this law of information, (like a physicist armed with the law of gravity) will test her theory. She finds information in the universe, (DNA, fractal patterns in nature, etc.), and so, by her law of information, QED.
I think that’s a disgusting misapplication of information theory. And anyway, you don’t prove God Exists. He’s more the axiom than the result. But I have to admit, they have tested their theories. That’s not the only approach they take, but it’s an example. I can’t see that it’s any less valid than, say, a psychologist statistically proving that TV is harmful, or a physicist proving empirically that gravity operates by an inverse square law.
I’m thinking out loud here…
Brent,
I am taking your statement that Biology is mainly Chemistry as a reference to DNA…
In that case, Evolutionary Theory plays a strong role in that it allows ‘chemists’ to calculate the point at which species diverged based on the chemical structure of their DNA.
I do not have any problem extending the idea of Intelligent Design into a future that I do not want to live in. Suppose that we were to accept that a ‘Designer’ created life, and that this Intelligent Designer used DNA to do so… Then, their design would be the writings of the Designer, that is the say, the Word of God.
It gets scarey here, suppose that attempts to re-arrange the ‘Word’, (i.e. genetic engineering, etc…), were then outlawed, as, heresy.
It may seem a far cry from our ‘Modern World’, but I’m telling you if you give a fundamentalist and inch, they’ll take everything, just take a look at the Taliban.
It’s odd, but what you mention as scary—that GE might be outlawed as ‘heresy’—is already too close for comfort. There are plenty of people out there who want it outlawed, and they’re being given serious time on the political scene, at least in New Zealand where I live. Ironically, it’s not the ID people, or the religions associated with ID, or the fundies, or any other such group, that want GE banned. It’s the hippies and the greens and the people who believe we shouldn’t mess with evolution; let nature be. Contrary to media opinion, it’s the fundies who seem to be most open-minded about GE.
Bryan,
In the US we have a lot of fundamentalists pecking around the edges of GE, primarily by eliminating federal funding for cloning, stem cell research, effective education…
Here is a quote from an older ethics paper:”Many Christians are wary of the potential of genetic engineering for fundamentally altering God’s sacred creation” (http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/Ethical%20and%20Spiritual%20Issues%20in%20GE.htm)
It is pretty funny to find Greens and Fundi’s, um, In Bed, with each other… But then they both operate at a ‘Stone Age’ level of technology.