Don't be distracted by intelligent design

Sunday, May 25, 2008

By ALBERT GAPUD

Special to the Press-Register


Mobile is poised for better economic times ahead. Unfortunately, this has put a spotlight on a public education system in serious need of improvement.


Sadly, Alabama's public education system is ranked close to the bottom among all the states. This is on top of an already distressing nationwide failure in providing science education on a par with other developed nations in the world.


If we want our children to have a shot in the globalized real world, we need to join forces to improve science education in our schools. If we are to do this, however, we should also recognize our own tendencies to inadvertently sabotage our science curricula.


There are well-meaning people among us who support the so-called "intelligent design" movement — a group that has been trying to insert a theory known as intelligent design into science classrooms as an alternative to widely accepted scientific principles on the origin and evolution of species.


This is clear from several letters and essays that have appeared in the Press-Register in support of intelligent design. Discerning readers will notice that none of the authors were scientists or science educators. I am both. Therefore, not only do I feel qualified, I also feel personally and morally bound to respond to misconceptions being actively encouraged by the intelligent-design movement.


I consider myself a devout Roman Catholic Christian. My family and I are deeply religious, as are a great number of scientists across America and around the world who see no conflict between science and religion.


Yes, I believe there is intelligent design to everything in existence. But I also believe there are appropriate venues for discussing intelligent design. This could be at our church seminar with my pastor, or in a religious-studies class, or perhaps philosophy class — but not in a science class.
In other words, intelligent design does not belong in a science classroom simply because intelligent design is not science — as was clearly confirmed in the 2005 Dover, Pa., court case titled Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area Public Schools. This is the case where parents sued their school board for trying to sneak intelligent design into biology classes at Dover High School.


The Dover case decision — made by a conservative judge — can be downloaded in its entirety by going to http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf. It sets a clear judicial precedent that ruled the attempted insertion of intelligent design into a science classroom as illegal.


Therefore, any notion that we in Alabama might have about teaching intelligent design in our public schools would be an act of defiance that would pit us in an unwanted conflict with the federal government. The last thing we need here is another Dover. We have better things to do.
The Dover case brought public attention to the misconceptions that intelligent-design proponents have about science. They make broad statements about the scientific process as being biased — without actually describing what that scientific process is.


As a scientist, I can provide such a description.


How does a scientific principle end up in our science textbooks? Intelligent-design proponents are correct in that it first starts with a proposition, a hypothesis.


After data are collected and analyzed the proposal goes through a rigorous process of "peer review" that I, Darwin, Einstein and all scientists have had to go through. Basically, we make our case to the community of fellow scientists who are experts in the same field.
To make a good case, the proposed model must be something that any of our peers could test through experiment: careful physical, quantitative measurements.


The impartiality of physical data frees any proposed model from human bias. The more such experiments support the model, then the more accepted the model becomes. The standard criterion for such acceptance is the publication of papers about the model and its supporting experiments in peer-reviewed journals.


Depending on the scope of the model, the track record required for such acceptance could involve tens to hundreds of well-cited publications spanning anywhere from a few years to entire generations. Only after such success would a model naturally find itself in school textbooks.
The Dover case brought public humiliation to the intelligent-design proponents' so-called experts who publicly claim that the Darwinian model of the origin of species lacks evidence and validity, that nobody understands the mechanisms of evolution.


The embarrassing irony in such statements becomes painfully apparent when one realizes how our centuries-old understanding of the mechanisms of biological evolution have spawned entire fields of scientific knowledge which revolutionized medicine and agriculture, providing us liberation from plagues and disease, better overall health, a longer life span, a more stable food supply, and so on.


Now, if I wanted to dismiss all of these achievements and still be taken seriously, I would have to literally take down thousands and thousands of books off the shelves in all major university libraries throughout God's good Earth, and then try to explain how every single page of those books is invalid. No intelligent-design proponent has ever tried anything remotely close. Neither should we: We have better things to do.


The intelligent-design movement would also have us believe that the Darwinian model is so full of holes that it ought to be dismantled. That is like proposing to dismantle the American model of democracy just because we made mistakes.


Our Constitution is a work in progress — through the genius of amendments — and so is science, through experiment and exploration. Science is, by definition, open-ended, and even its most valued principles are forever open for scientific testing and re-testing. It is these very "holes" that actually make it possible for our understanding to progress.


When one proposes to scrap entire sciences on the basis of imperfections, but at the same time cannot produce a viable alternative, this is what is known as a "negative argument."


This was the tactic used for many years by the "creation science" movement, whose proponents' attempts to insert their theory into science classes had also been ruled illegal. The Dover case revealed that intelligent-design is, in fact, "creation science" hastily repackaged by its lawyers.
Science cannot claim intelligent design to be "wrong" — remember, it would need experimental data to make such a claim. For the same reason, however, we cannot accept intelligent design as science. It has no peer-reviewed, published experimental data to substantiate its claim as science.


In the end, the Dover case exposed the intelligent-design campaign for what it is: a fringe movement that is not scientific, but political — one that has repeatedly tried but failed to gain legitimacy with educators, the scientific community and our justice system.
(Dr. Albert Gapud of Mobile is a condensed-matter physicist who graduated from the University of Kansas and has worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His e-mail address is aagapud@yahoo.com.)