I’ve spoken at Scripps (and many other bioscience research places), and I doubt that researchers there would welcome ID in the schools, regardless of any personal beliefs.

My father was a devout Christian, Deacon of the local church, and a 20-year President/VP of the local public school board. He would have been rather scornful of ID, but for reasons of both science and faith. As an educated farmer, he perfectly well knew that evolution worked, having studied genetics, plant & animal breeding.

Regarding faith, he’d say: “God gave us brains to think with, and the parable of the talents says we’d better use them. If someone’s faith is so weak they need to distort the evidence of science to maintain their faith, they might want to think about their faith some more.” Our schools had fine science programs, no trace of creationism. I don’t know if anyone ever tried to introduce it, but it certainly didn’t get very far.

Too bad Dad wasn’t leading the Dover effort, in place of William Buckingham, who seemed to have read the Bible rather selectively. He seems to have missed the ninth commandment (not bearing false witness), an unwise move in a videotape era.

Many people (most in the Scientific community) who believe in ID believe that God created many if not all things via evolution. The thing that I find most offensive about only teaching evoluation is only when its done in a way to exclude faith in God. Evolutionist cannot explain ultimate orgins and so it’s fair to at least acknowledge the possibility if not the necessity of a higher power at some point in the process.

Though science is not a religion, religion is politics, and religionists treat any challenge to their absolutist dogma as a political equivalent and rival. The context and motivation of the current confrontation is politically congruent with that of the historical former. As long as scientists delude themselves that the ‘man on the street’ can be swayed by logical argument, they fight a losing battle. Who, then, is to save the world from another ‘Dark Ages’ of inane mysticism?

Name one example of research in which ID ‘theory’ has played a pivotal role in generating new knowledge, technology, or productive lines of inquiry. What, if anything, is reproducible in any sort of lab which ID propounds?

ID is simply a game of “give up searching for a natural explanation, and just believe God used supernatural power” there will never be useful scientific outcomes or lines of investigation leading from it.

Scientists who pray and believe in God don’t pray, let’s just find that God did it and give up and go home. They pray for new insight into the operations and laws of Nature. They pray for the insight to penetrate the natural mystery and to understand the mechanims and processes at work. They hope to find the formulas and math that describes the processes. They hope to find the experiments which disproves or supports a hypothesis. They may care about a hypothesis, but they expect to find improved and better ones as the scientific efforts by many smart, disciplined people progress.

For starters, can you name an alternative scientific theory regarding the diversity of species? I’m a biologist, and i sure can’t. If there was one that was supported by any scientific evidence, we’d know about it by now (as described above, Intelligent Design is not scientific). Given the absence of scientific alternatives, there is nothing to teach other than evolution in science classes.

Incidentally, if you doubt that the generation of new species has been observed, and for more detail on the above, i recommend you check out http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/. You should be able to see that it’s all pretty scientific, and very little faith is involved.

2) Students need to understand, not just memorize theories, but they have to to understand the current state of scientific knowledge. A theory is a model or approximation to reality. A new theory may replace the old one if it 1) is consistent with existing data, 2) fits the data better than the old theory, and often 3) makes predictions that are confirmed by observations made later. And if you’re lucky, the theory has practical applications that are beneficial. A theory makes predictions that can be falsified by evidence, but if evidence continues to pile up in its favor, it remains the best current explanation.

ID is not a falsifiable theory, and it does none of these. If one believes in ID, a non-hypocritical position would be to eschew any food or drugs based on biology-based-on-evolution, and use only those of biology-based-on-ID. Of course, about the only food that hasn’t evolved strongly in the last 10,000 years is wild fish and game, and since there are no drugs based on ID research, there being no useful ID research results, going without most food or modern medicine might be awkward.

3) For any theory, there are always arguments amongst scientists around the edges of the theory, even if they absolutely agree on the basics. Any student who wants to work in science or engineering has a huge amount to learn. One can waste plenty of time teaching non-science, or trying to take students to the edge of debates by experts, before they’ve learned the basics.

For example, people once believed the world was flat, and the Flat-Earth Society may well still exist. [In fact, Flat-Earth was actually a theory, although wrong, but ID isn’t even a theory, in the scientific use of the term (not the day-to-day use).] Then, they believed the world was a sphere, and the Sun and planets revolved around the Earth in circles, but that didn’t fit the observations, so they added circles onto circles, or “epicycles” to fit better. (Of course, the Earth is better described as an “oblate spheroid”, but it took a while to know that.) Eventually, they realized all planets revolved around the Sun, but it still took a while to understand that orbits were elliptical, not just circular. Newton’s Laws helped explain why, and were a great approximation, and are still good enough for many Earthly uses. Einstein’s Relativity gave an even better approximation, made terrific predictions verified decades later: for GPS satellites to work, you need Einstein, not just Newton. But, Relativity doesn’t explain everything, and people till search for a grand unification of relativity and quantum theory, and there are all sorts of hypotheses (not yet supported theories) flying around. NOBODY prefaces a a first exposure to Relativity by saying “there are all sorts of unexplained gaps” and then pointing people at random other ideas that have zero scientific evidence.

The Web is full of people who claim that Relativity is Wrong. Most physicists think it is a very good approximation, and it would take a really powerful theory to replace it. Then, the first people could claim there was a “controversy”, and every textbook should have a sticker to show their reservations. This doesn’t seem to happen with any well-accepted theory other than evolution.

ID is like *really* wanting to go back to the flat-Earth model, by saying there are arguments within modern physics (there are always arguments at the leading edge), and therefore modern physics isn’t right. The history makes it clear that the main ID textbook was edited to convert creationism to ID.

4) You may have noticed that the world standing of US students in science is not high. From firsthand experience there are a lot of smart, hardworking students in Asia who badly want good jobs in science, and would rather those jobs be *there*, not here. Do you think they teach ID in Singapore? or Japan? or Korea? or China? or India? (I doubt it) Do you think they teach probability and statistics? (yes) The USA has done very well by inward brain drain, but nothing guarantees that will last forever, or even very long. We *can* guarantee American kids won’t get those jobs, that biotech companies won’t be formed here, and that we’ll need to buy the resulting products from other countries. Some school boards are trying hard to achieve this.

Here in California, UC Berkeley has many more applicants than it can accept. It is being sued because it doesn’t accept ID-oriented biology courses for credit. Of course, California is generally high-tech, and very strong in biosciences, so I don’t expect UCB to change.

5) Many thoughtful people believe that both science and religion have their own domains, but mixing them is bad for both. My father was a devout Christian, but as an educated farmer, knew evolution worked, and as a 20-year President/VP of the school board, would have been appalled at the thought of teaching ID in our schools. He would also have wondered about the quality of faith that required being shored up by distortion of science.

The problem with this is that there is no scientifically valid measurement for the probability of life. It’s an interesting question, and one that’s fine to discuss, but not one that belongs in a science class until we know more - science currently has nothing to say about it. In a similar way, there is absolutely no scientific evidence for intelligent design, leading many of those arguing for it to distort or mislead about actual scientific knowledge. Many of its assumptions (some unidentified designer has intervened in life using methods we cannot understand) are also profoundly unscientific. As a biologist, i mostly object to it being called scientific, and the distortions of its proponents.

Incidentally, if i sent Carl Zimmer back to his text book, i think i owe him an apology, rather than him owing me thanks. I’d just covered gene regulation in a class i’m teaching, though, so even if i didn’t work on this stuff, i wouldn’t have been able to help myself.