The Monkeys Are On Trial Again

In the United States, the ugly debate over evolution has erupted again. Parents in Pennsylvania have taken the Dover school district to court over their insertion of intelligent design into the science (specifically biology) curriculum.

The parents claim it's an attempt to reintroduce religion into the schools contrary to the US Supreme Court ruling on separation of church and state.

Proponents of intelligent design (ID) claim that it is simply a “competing scientific theory” of life on earth and therefore is perfectly valid to teach.

Many people make the assumption that evolution means Darwin, but he was only the beginning. Darwin himself admitted that his theory had problems, but we have accumulated a lot of supporting evidence in the century plus since his book On the Origin of the Species was first published.

My intent is not to take up the debate between ID and the theory of evolution. While I will hereby declare up front that I'm firmly in the evolution camp, my intent is to show that ID does not belong in science class. My thanks in advance to the Great Spaghetti Monster for His divine providence and assistance.

The word theory in science has a very specific meaning. It means that someone had a hypothesis, a set of reasoned and logical assumptions that can be tested. A hypothesis can fail testing. A hypothesis becomes a theory when it is tested and the test can be repeated with the same result.

All scientific theories are also open to revision if new data comes along. This has happened countless times in the course of human history. More importantly, it is an open process; the validity of a theory is not shrouded by secrecy, hand waving, a magician’s black box, or smoke and mirrors. If you don’t think a theory is valid, you can go and test it. You are even free to use work that has come before to see how the theory evolved (there’s that nasty loaded word again!)

Therefore, the theory of evolution firmly belongs, right along with the theories of gravity or Newtonian physics say, in science class.

ID on the other hand is a notion immune to empirical study and falsification, a word that in this context means the ability to disprove it. We are simply supposed to accept that some creator waved its noodly appendage and set the world in motion.

That is not science. This is the presentation of an alternative that is de facto immune to empirical study and falsification and trying to get it wedged into the science curriculum.

The theory of evolution does not attempt to explain how the world was created, but rather the mechanism by which change takes place. ID proponents are exhibiting the classic logical fallacy known as the straw man argument, namely "evolution does not adequately explain how the world was created, and we know that the creator waved his noodly appendage and set the world in motion!" That's nice. Evolution isn't about how the world was created.

Science does not claim or attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God or a creator, noodly appendages or no. Therefore, we shouldn’t undermine an entire system of inquiry that serves us well in our human and secular attempts to understand how the world works.

Ideas about how the world came to be belongs firmly in philosophy class where ideas, rhetoric (in the classic rather than pejorative sense), logic, and open debate can be freely exchanged.

Children should be taught about the gaps in evolutionary theory. This might spark intellectual curiosity on their part and perhaps lead some to become scientists who develop satisfactory explanations for those gaps. Maybe some of those gaps cannot be filled with our current level of technology and understanding. There are many things we now know and take for granted that had a mystical belief or explanation in the past.

Either way, students should not be taught it is acceptable science to fill those gaps with mystical supposition.

ID is not a scientific theory, and therefore has no place in a science class.