Unintelligent debate over intelligent design:Public schools wrong place for controversial topic
Just when I thought the fight over evolution couldn’t get any more political, the president of the United States weighs in with an apparent endorsement of teaching “intelligent design” in public schools.
“Both sides ought to be properly taught,” President Bush told a reporter on Aug. 2, “so people can understand what the debate is all about.”
With one offhand remark, the president managed to give intelligent design (the view that the complexity of life can be explained only by the existence of an intelligent designer) a new level of political clout and respectability that no amount of PR can buy.
Politicizing science, of course, is nothing new in America. Beginning with the Scopes trial of 1925, politics and religion — not science — have driven the fight over the teaching of evolution in public schools.
That’s why some textbooks still skim over evolution — and teachers in certain parts of the country look over their shoulders whenever they mention the “e” word. And we wonder why American high school students don’t fare well in science when compared to their international peers.
The president’s comments come at a heady time for the intelligent-design movement. Some 20 states are now considering changing their science standards to ensure “alternative theories” be taught in science classes. Just last week, the Kansas Board of Education voted to include greater criticism of evolution in the state’s science courses.
But just as the conviction of John Scopes turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for creationists (thanks to the withering wit of attorney Clarence Darrow), so this growing political support for ID may well doom the ID movement. Here’s why.
Start with the fact that ID isn’t ready for prime time in the science curriculum. To count as “science” in the public school setting, a theory must be adequately supported by scientific research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. ID has no such support, although ID advocates contend that’s because the mainstream scientific community has frozen them out.
Many of the ground troops pushing ID in local communities don’t know if ID is good science — and they don’t seem to care. They are part of the anything-but-evolution movement that has jumped on ID as the latest Trojan horse to ride into the science classroom. ID isn’t all they want (since it isn’t full-blown creationism), but it does point to God. Best of all, to them, ID isn’t evolution.
At first blush, Bush’s advice to teach “both sides” may strike people as reasonable and fair. But if he’s talking about the science curriculum, are there really two scientific sides in this debate? Evolution is the prevailing scientific theory long accepted by the vast majority of scientists. ID, the proposed “scientific alternative,” is a concept with no substantial research base and no testable hypotheses. No matter how much religious supporters of ID wish it were so, ID isn’t ready to be placed on equal scientific footing with evolutionary theory.
In science, as in a democracy, conflict and debate are healthy and should be welcome. Intelligent-design advocates, some of whom are scientists, have every right to make the case against evolution and for an alternative theory. But that case should be made in research universities and scientific journals.
Public schools aren’t a proving ground for untested theories. And students shouldn’t become guinea pigs (or monkeys, for that matter) in the culture-war debate over evolution. That’s bad for science education — and for the nation.
(Charles C. Haynes is senior scholar at the First Amendment Center. His e-mail is [email protected].)