On Monday Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times reported that 11 parents from Dover, Penn. are suing their school board for allowing intelligent design into the ninth grade biology curriculum. Intelligent design (ID) is an argument that says life is too "irreducibly complex" to have arisen from natural processes and can only have been created with the assistance of a higher being a.k.a. God. Conversely, evolutionary theory argues that life as we know it arose from a series of genetic changes resultant of natural selective forces.
Supporters argue that intelligent design deserves to be taught in a high school from the standpoint of academic freedom - that students have a right to hear competing theories for life origins. But in a public high school, students don't really have a say in their education and often don't know any better. It is mandatory for students to attend class and be tested on what their instructors are teaching them.
To provide a point of contrast, universities are businesses in the academia and students are customers with choices. If a biology professor decides it is best to teach intelligent design as a scientific theory and rail evolution, students can drop the course and file a complaint that has repercussions. The result of this accountability is that instructors teach the most viable and current theory for life origins: the theory of evolution.
So when the minds of the youth are at stake in the form of school curriculum, confrontations like the one surrounding Dover arise between K-12 educators, parents, and school officials. The great hubbub about an argument like intelligent design is that it is touted as scientific theory when in fact there is very little science about it. This forms the basis for confrontation - does an argument that is essentially religious in nature belong in a science classroom?
Many inteligent design proponents like to describe evolution as "just" a theory. The problem with this logic is that the scientific sense of the word is misconstrued. In science, a theory is a repeatedly tested hypothesis or idea that is strongly supported by evidence. Examples: atomic theory. Wave theory. Relativity. And so on. Moreover, theories are falsifiable; if there is proficient evidence challenging the theory, new ones are drafted that incorporate all pre-existing evidence.
In the case of evolution, more than 130 years of evidence supporting it has been compiled. Intelligent design, on the contrary, has essentially no evidence that is peer-reviewed, or tested in a forum of expert scientists. Intelligent design is a strategic movement founded by Phillip E. Johnson to alter public policy, education, and opinion to favor conservative viewpoints. To refine my previous question: does a religious argument and political strategy belong in a public school science classroom?
Letters to me may overload OSU servers for printing this, but I believe the answer is invariably "no." If an argument is not scientific, it does not belong in a science classroom. Intelligent design belongs in a theology course or a science issues course, but it does not belong in a course dedicated to teaching hard science.
So until a falsifiable scientific theory with irrefutable evidence is formed by its advocates, intelligent design will remain what it has been from the beginning: nothing scientific.
Dave Mosher is a senior in Biology and Journalism at OSU. He may be reached for comment at mosher.46@osu.edu.
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