spook of the ozarks

unapologetic liberal

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Intelligent design

It's pretty esoteric, but Richard Dawkins and another scientist demolish this nonsense, and the corollary that it should be taught as science, in today's Guardian. An exerpt:

Intelligent design ... is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
... If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill
peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect.

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