The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design

Mime Narrator writes "An article over at Kuro5hin discusses the controvery over the Intelligent Design movement. The Dover, Pennsylvania school board recently adopted a policy requiring that high school science teachers teaching evolution tell their students that evolutionary theory, a theory that has been shown to explain the origins of life time and time again, is flawed, and that intelligent design is a valid alternative. The ACLU, along with the AUSCS (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State), and 11 parents, are suing the school board, accusing the board of violating the separation of church and state. "

Comments

Re:European school

[papik]

Actually the Vatican is starting to acknowledge Evolution. "La civiltà cattolica", a jesuitic journal, "censored"/"approved" by the Vatican, recently (april 2nd) issued an article pro evolution. Here is the summary:

L'ORIGINE DELL'UOMO. Evoluzione e creazione - Giuseppe De Rosa S.I.

L'articolo rileva che l'apparizione dell'uomo sulla Terra è avvenuta lentamente e per successive modificazioni. Quindi l'ominizzazione è avvenuta per evoluzione, che può considerarsi oggi non più una semplice ipotesi, ma una vera e propria teoria, anche se taluni aspetti di essa restano ancora oscuri. Di questo processo evolutivo, l'articolo presenta le linee essenziali, mostrando che con l'Homo sapiens sapiens si è certamente raggiunta la soglia umana: egli, infatti, pensa, progetta il futuro, parla, ha senso artistico e religioso. Ma il raggiungimento della soglia umana è stato reso possibile dall'infusione, da parte di Dio creatore, dell'anima umana in una materia disposta a riceverla. L'azione di Dio però non sopprime la contingenza, il fortuito e il caso, ma nella sua provvidenza li dirige al fine.

It is more or less saying that evolution is a fact, but it's God that drove evolution to man and gave him the soul.

Re:intelegant design != God

[Sique]

ID has no merits other than being non-Darwinist. There is no evidence supporting a designer being active to generate creatures (interestingly though we still call individual lifeforms 'creatures' even when we claim that they don't have been created by a creator ;) ), there is no conclusion we can draw out of ID that helps us deal with a problem we have with a single or a group of lifeforms.

We all know the problem with antibiotics: If you use them, and you are not reaching every single lifeform you want to wipe out with a deadly dose, some of the lifeforms might survive long enough to have offspring, which in turn might survive the antibiotics too. They even might be able to survive a low dose of antibiotics without any harm, so if you use the antibiotic again, they survive all competing lifeforms, which die due to the antibiotic, making the field free for a growing population of the slightly antibiotic resistant lifeforms.
In the end your antibiotic is not able anymore to harm the resistant lifeform, and all that happens if you use it: You increase the growing of the species, because the antibiotic helps battling all those other lifeforms once competing.
This is evolution at work, and there are enough antibiotics which are not effective anymore, because there are lifeforms resistant to them.

It does not only work for bacterias and other single cell organisms: Exactly those evolutative mechanisms were at work when coca plants grew resistant to RoundUp: The spraying of RoundUp on Columbian coca plantages had a strange effect: Because spraying from an airplane is quite incorrect, and you can't make sure that all plants you want to hit are hit with a full dose, and the one's you don't want to hit aren't, the coca growing pawns in Columbia faced a strange problem after a spraying attack: Most of their crops, coca and other crops, died. Most tomatos, most corn, most vegetables and fruit, and most coca plants.
But some survived, having only got a low dose and were able to survive.

Coca plants are mostly multiplied by the pawns by cutting small twigs and planting them into the earth rather than sowing the coca seeds. After a spraying attack almost the complete plantage of a pawn is destroyed, and only the coca plants which have survived can be used to plant anew, just cut some twigs and regrow your crops. Most cultural plants need to be grown again from seeds, and you have to wait until the RoundUp is washed out of the earth. In the end the whole coca plantages once attacked were replanted with twigs from coca plants that survived a RoundUp attack. And they were growing faster than before because the weed normally growing with the coca plants was suppressed by the RoundUp remains in the soil.

Within four years a coca plant was covering large areas which was completely immune against RoundUp. No genetic engineering (a.k.a. intelligent design) was necessary to outwith the DEA and Monsanto: Just having evolution go its way and taking the survivors of RoundUp attacks and replant the field with them.

You might love or hate Darwinism. But evolution is all around you every day.