David W. New wrote:
I was sad to see the leaders of the intelligent design movement in Pennsylvania lose their seats in yesterday's election. For a long time, the supporters of evolution have been acting like thick headed Neanderthals. They will not tolerate any other view but their own in the public schools. Only their view of science is correct. Only they are right. This is the thinking of evolutionists. Evolutionists have run to the government courts to keep out all competing ideas from the classroom. This is simply nonsense, the opposite of reality. If ID is true, then its advocates need to establish its validity by coming up with an actual theory (they have none, by their own admission, at this point), derive testable hypotheses from it, perform those tests (Behe testified under oath in this case that while his ideas about irreducible complexity are testable, in his opinion, he has no desire to try and test them) and publish the results for the scientific community (not a single piece of research on ID has ever been published in the scientific literature) to evaluate so that some consensus is reached. Then and only then should it even be considered as part of a public school science curriculum. This is truly putting the cart before the horse, as Bruce Gordon, a prominent ID advocate himself, has said: "One of the principle reasons for this resistance and controversy is not far to seek: design-theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement. In particular, the theory has been prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural world." During the trial, ID advocates kept making comparisons between ID and big bang cosmology. What they have missed entirely is that they are asking for something quite different from what happened with the big bang. Yes, big bang cosmology was initially rejected by scientists when it was proposed; so were continental drift theory and many other ideas in science. But how did those ideas get established as valid and come to be the dominant theories in their fields? Not by whining about persecution because their ideas were rejected, but by doing the hard work necessary to establish them. Alfred Wegener didn't scream about the "Stalinist" tactics of the Evil Lyellian Geological Establishment, he continued to do the work of a scientist, gathering data, framing his hypothesis in rigorous and testable ways, proposing ways to test his hypothesis, and presenting his case to his fellow scientists. Within 20 years, the evidence gathered was overwhelming, a mechanism for continental drift was identified and this is now a textbook example of how scientists go about overthrowing the accepted understanding. The ID advocates want none of this. They want to skip over all the hard scientific work and jump right into science classrooms. When they have an actual model that is testable, have proposed tests and carried them out, and have published the results for their peers to evaluate, then - and only then - should it even be considered for the textbooks and classrooms. Until they begin behaving like actual scientists and doing actual science, all this talk of persecution from the Darwinian Priesthood is meaningless blather. Ed Brayton |
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