Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Of Pandas and People is apparently the "official" go-to source for ID. To say it's receiving bad reviews from those in the scientific community is putting it lightly.

The best review I've read is by Jerry Coyne, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. Some segments:
To teach that a scientific theory is equivalent to a “guess” or a “hunch” is deeply misleading, and to assert that “evolution is a theory, not a fact” is simply false. And why should evolution, alone among scientific theories, be singled out with the caveat “This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered”? Why haven’t school boards put similar warnings in physics textbooks, noting that gravity and electrons are only theories, not facts, and should be critically considered? After all, nobody has ever seen gravity or an electron. The reason that evolution stands alone is clear: other scientific theories do not offend religious sensibilities.
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Intelligent design is simply the third attempt of creationists to proselytize our children at the expense of good science and clear thinking. Having failed to ban evolution from schools, and later to get equal classroom time for scientific creationism, they have made a few adjustments designed to sneak Christian cosmogony past the First Amendment.
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IDers have duped many people by further removing God from the picture, or at least hiding him behind the frame. No longer do creationists mention a deity, or even a creator, but simply a neutral-sounding “intelligent designer,” as if it were not the same thing. This designer could in principle be Brahma, or the Taoist P’an Ku, or even a space alien; but ID creationists, as will be evident to anybody who attends to all that they say, mean only one entity: the biblical God.
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Jon Buell, president of the FTE, is equally frank about his goals: "We have to inundate them [the young] with a rational, defensible, well-argued Judeo-Christian world view. FTE’s carefully-researched books do just that."
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Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again? Why did the designer give tiny, non-functional wings to kiwi birds? Or useless eyes to cave animals? Or a transitory coat of hair to a human fetus? Or an appendix, an injurious organ that just happens to resemble a vestigial version of a digestive pouch in related organisms?
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It is clear, then, that intelligent design did not arise because of some long-standing problems with evolutionary theory, or because new facts have called neo-Darwinism into question. ID is here for only one reason—to act as a Trojan horse poised before the public schools: a seemingly secular vessel ready to inject its religious message into the science curriculum.The contents of Pandas, and of the other writings of IDers, are simply a cunning pedagogical ploy to circumvent legal restrictions against religious creationism.
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The fear that if evolution is true, then we are no different from other animals, not the special objects of God’s creation but a contingent product of natural selection, and so we lack real purpose, and our morality is just the law of the jungle. Tom DeLay furnished a colorful example of this view on the floor of the House of Representatives on June 16, 1999. Explaining the causes of the massacre at Columbine High School, he read a sarcastic letter in a Texas newspaper that suggested that “it couldn’t have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.”

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