Yet Another ID Rant (YAIDR)

Posted by Johnny at 9:56 p.m.

Haha, it seems like this is a touchy subject for me. Nothing like Intelligent Design to get the blood boiling.

Read this article if you have the time. If not, don't worry, because I'll be quoting it.

Jeopardy!
A: The US Congressional Record indicates that this person was quoted as saying that the Columbine school shootings happened "because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud."

Q: Who is Tom DeLay?

That is correct. Tom DeLay, who actually holds a degree in biology, attributed the Columbine shootings to the teaching of evolution. WHA?? It's a good thing this "biologist" has done such a good job as a congressman, otherwise people would question his intelligence (and the validity of his degree).

Now, the article makes an interesting point:

Meanwhile, public policy regarding Intelligent Design has been defined by people like President George W. Bush. Talking about evolution versus Intelligent Design, Bush recently declared that "Both sides ought to be properly taught so people can understand what the debate is about." The sentence represents a clear misunderstanding, because it assumes that there are two "sides" and that there is a debate.

This is something that I never actually thought about before. I was buying into the ID hype as much as any idiot, believing that ID was the other (wrong) side to the theory of evolution. I was forgetting something very important: science is not a system of beliefs.

Let me repeat: SCIENCE IS NOT A SYSTEM OF BELIEFS.

When you teach science, you teach the currently accepted theories, and in high school textbooks, these theories are typically about 40 years behind current research. This means that when you teach the origin of life in a science classroom, you teach the Theory of Evolution. This is the theory that is widely accepted by scientists across the world, and one that has been proved scientifically many times ([1], [2], [3], to cite but a few fairly credible sources).

Now, Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. It is basically a rejection of evolution on the basis that anything that doesn't include God is immoral, thus evolution is immoral and should not be taught. "But we can't teach nothing in science class, nor can we teach pure Creationism in science class because of that stupid First Amendment (burn the witch!), therefore, let's just pretend that evolution was meticulously pre-planned by God. There. Now that's science."

Most people don't know about the method for getting scientific theories accepted, but in short, it's long and arduous. Here's a nice summary:

Consider how real-world science gets done. Suppose you have a novel scientific claim. You do some research on it, either theoretical or experimental, which you then attempt to publish. You submit an article to journals, and the journals send it out to idiots called peer reviewers, and those idiots tell you why you’re wrong, and then you have to fight with them and tell them why they’re idiots, and it goes on and on. If you’re lucky, you get published. What happens next? If your work is interesting, other people will begin to look at it and do follow-up research. If it’s really interesting, you’ll build a scientific consensus, which may take ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years. Only then does your work get mentioned in high-school textbooks. In my own field of physics, the material in today’s textbooks is easily thirty to forty years out of date—as it should be, because that’s how science works.

Now, you would think that if the ID proponents wanted their "theory" to be published in high school textbooks, they would have been going through this process of journal articles, idiot peer reviewers, follow-up research (or any research), etc.... This is not so:

Demonstrating that the ID strategy is dishonest requires a somewhat longer argument. The dishonesty of ID lies in its proponents pointing to a controversy when there really is no controversy. A friend of mine did an informal survey of more than ten million articles in major science journals during the past twelve years. Searching for the key word evolution pulled up 115,000 articles, most pertaining to biological evolution. Searching for Intelligent Design yielded eighty-eight articles. All but eleven of those were in engineering journals, where, of course, we hope there is discussion of intelligent [engineering] design [practices]! Of the eleven articles, eight were critical of the scientific basis for Intelligent Design theory and the remaining three turned out to be articles in conference proceedings, not peer-reviewed research journals. So that’s the extent of the "controversy" in the scientific literature. There is none.

Well, there you have it. A big fucking goose-egg for the number of ID theories published in scientific journals, waiting for peer review (or having completed peer review).

I challenge the proponents to answer me this: If you want to challenge an accepted scientific theory, why aren't you using science?! Putting this lame "theory" on an unfair fast-track into high school textbooks is not going to help anyone, especially the students. Here are some shocking statistics about the United States:

In a 2001 National Science Foundation (NSF) survey of scientific literacy, 53 percent of American adults were unaware that the last dinosaur died before the first human arose.

Ok, this is somewhat believable. In fact, I was just having a conversation with someone (who shall remain nameless) the other day about her beliefs. I asked her if she was a Young-Earth Creationist. Not knowing what I meant, I asked her how old she believed the world to be. Still not getting it I gave her some options: 4.5 billion years, or less than ten thousand. "Oh! Haha, it's not billions of years old! Hahaha," was her reply.

"But what about the dinosaurs? They died out a couple hundred million years ago. You don't honestly think that humans crafted and planted dinosaur fossils to make everyone question the age of the earth, do you?"

"No.. I always thought humans and dinosaurs lived together."

Most of that was paraphrasing, but you get the idea. Here is the most disturbing statistic I've heard.... well, in a very long time:

Just 50 percent of American adults knew that the earth orbits the sun and takes a year to do it. When I first saw that finding, I thought there had been a trick question whose wording might have thrown respondents off track. So I went back to the original survey and looked at the question. It read: "The Earth orbits the sun and takes a year to do it. True or false?" That seems clear enough. And yet half of the American public got it wrong.

WHAT FUCKING CENTURY IS THIS? This reminds me of a Simpsons episode I saw today:

(On Television, Principal Skinner tied to a stake with a crowd of townsfolk surrounding him, some carrying torches)

     Skinner: I'm telling you people, the earth revolves around the sun!
 Abe Simpson: Burn him!  [lights the pyre]
Photographer: What a story!  [takes a photo]
 Abe Simpson: [chasing photographer] You've stolen my soul!

I mean, FUCK. I thought we solved this problem in the 16th/17th century. But I digress...

As I near the end of this rant, I want to make sure my point is clear:

• There is only one scientific theory that can explain the origin of life on Earth, and that is Evolution. This is not a point of contention in the scientific community and there is no controversy.
• A scientific theory cannot be replaced by a non-scientific theory, nor can they be taught as alternate theories. The non-scientific theory is just that: Not Science.

So what can I conclude from these two points? Intelligent Design is not scientific (see above rant for proof), and thus it cannot be taught alongside or in place of evolution in a science classroom.

If you want your children to be instilled with religious beliefs, make them go to Church!

End of discussion, end of "controversy."