Thursday 30 September 2004

ID: Irredeemably Dumb

Wired Magazine (is that thing still going?) look at an attempt to get Intelligent Design taught in Biology classes.

Intelligent Design is the idea that living things are so complex that there's absolutely no way this could have happened at random and therefore must have been designed. As Science this is useless, it predicts nothing and explains only by adding a layer of extra complication: "Who designed the designers".

The articles starts:
A panel of four experts - two who believe in evolution, two who question it - debated whether an antievolution theory known as intelligent design should be allowed into the classroom.

Which is a problem right there. Of course, if you are debating this the first person to shout "Fuck no!" should win but it shouldn't even be debated in the first place. Debate gives ID legitimacy that it doesn't deserve and a larger platform than it would normally receive. The Catch-22 here is that if the scientists don't debate they will be protrayed as running scared.

As the article points out:
"By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science," Krauss concluded, "and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it."

The real problem is that politics and religion have, again, been brought into the science classroom. I wonder what would happen if it were the other way around. What if people demand equal time in religious studies to point out the factual inaccuracies of the Bible?

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