A More Intelligent Design

I saw this article yesterday and thought it was an interesting read. It deals with the Intelligent Design movement and their future efforts.

One of the things that I hadn’t really thought about until I read the article is how quiet the ID movement has been lately. A year or so ago the movement was front and center with stories coming out of Kansas and Pennsylvania public school systems. Eventually (and fortunately) ID lost its foothold in both Kansas and Pennsylvania and I haven’t heard much about it since.

I guess I should just come out and explicitly admit that I think the Intelligent Design is not science. Personally I have no problem with the concept; I just have a problem with it being passed off as science. I think you could probably find a place for it to be mentioned in public school, but if you have to change the definition of science in order to include it (I’m looking at you Kansas) it definitely does not belong in a science class. I’m intentionally avoiding writing a blog railing on ID, it would be all too easy and serve no real purpose (not that my blog really serve any purpose anyways). What interests me here is the reported change in strategy of the ID movement.

With the initial attempt to cloak itself in scientific jargon and pass itself off as science failed; ID has taken a step back and rethought its efforts. According to the Ars Technica article, ID has learned from its failings and constructed a strategy to avoid its previous obstacles. Supposedly they are working on a two prong attacked.

The first prong, once again, deals with public schools. Instead of introducing ID as a competing theory to evolution they are now just going to focus strictly on evolution. Namely they want to highlight how shaky the theory of evolution is (or failing that just invent crazy ass stuff and attribute it to evolution and claim it’s shaky….sorry I couldn’t resist). The primary force behind this prong is a new textbook produced by the Discovery Institute that is specially designed to reveal weaknesses in the theory of evolution. I’ve read a bit about evolution (I know my creeps and jerks) but to be honest it’s not my branch of science so I’m relying on the analysis of the Ars Techinica author who says what there are actual holes in the theory of evolution that scientist are still trying to fill in….but the book doesn’t focus on those. According to Ars Technica:

“There is clearly controversy within evolutionary studies—I've covered a number of them at Nobel Intent in the past—but these have nothing to do with the supposed issues brought up in this text[book], such as whether natural selection is important and the supposed existence of "molecular machines." Neither of these topics are the least bit controversial within the scientific community, and the book's promotional material can only be described as stretching the truth past its breaking point when it claims, "Explore Evolution brings to the classroom data and debates that already are raised regularly by scientists in their science journals."”

We could dwell on the scientific merit of ‘Explore Evolution’… but let’s not. I mainly wanted to highlight the fact that instead of introducing ID in high school the strategy has changed to undermining evolution.

The second prong of the attack is at the college level. This prong focuses on getting ID included as an academic freedom issue. ID proponents are trying to build a case that ID not being included in university curriculums is an issue of censorship (instead of an issue of it’s not science). This is a clever approach. Setting the argument up so that if you don’t agree with them you are pro-censorship is sneaky. It creates morasses of trying to separate “we don’t teach bad science” from censorship. The flagship tool for this effort is a video hosted by Ben Stein (say it ain’t so Ben). Supposedly the video “presents those who seek to mix the supernatural with science as being viciously suppressed by the scientific community, rather than simply rejected for not practicing science. By presenting these radically different situations as essentially equivalent, the promotional material feels justified in concluding that academic liberty and freedom of inquiry have been curtailed by the academic science community.”

It will be interesting to see if any of the predictions that the article makes comes to pass. The approach is clever because it essentially removes the religious component from the high school prong…which is what got them in trouble the last time around. Now I get to play the fun game of checking to see if any rumblings from the ID front fall into one of the two predicted strategies. Not that I’m looking forward to the game. Listening to people get upset because I won’t take their faith as science always ends up making my head hurt.