To a large audience of about seventy-one, Anya Plutynski PhD spoke about "Why Intelligent Design Fails." Remarking this would be the only joke in her presentation, she said, "After George Bush's recent comments to the press concerning the teaching of intelligent design, no one can deny that one of the values most promoted by the current administration is diversity."

Of course, true democracy means having freedom to express and debate a diversity of opinions in public forums like the media, senate floor, coffeehouse, or church. However, Plutynski said, a science class is not a public forum, just as medicine, biology, or engineering is not. The reason is that these fields operate under the scientific method--that of acquiring knowledge scientifically by formulating a question, collecting data through observation and experiment, and then testing a hypothetical answer.

In other words, scientists look to experience and do what works. Thus, not every conceivable hypothesis is given equal hearing by the scientific community, and not every theory deserves equal time in the classroom. If our high school students are to become educated citizens and part of the international scientific community to be able to compete in a global market, they need a foundation in those scientific theories that have the strongest empirical support. Evolution is such a theory. Intelligent design is not.

Plutynski pointed out five arguments that proponents of intelligent design give against evolutionists.

The first is the demarcation argument, or what she called, "T'ain't science!" This argument holds there are conditions for something to count as a science, and evolution fails to meet these conditions.

Several problems exist with this argument. To begin, no one has been able to agree what these conditions are. Every time a demarcation criterion has been proposed, it has had various logical flaws or empirical consequences that no one is willing to accept. It turns out that the criteria are either too permissive or too restrictive so that we end up either including astrology or excluding Newton's physics.

Philosophers of science have known this for about seventy-five years. However, just because we cannot draw a hard and fast line between science and pseudoscience doesn't mean there are not many identifying marks of successful scientific research programs or there are no clues when something is bogus.

A successful theory has to inspire a research program. In other words, it has to suggest new experiments or new empirical ways of investigating the world. A good scientific theory never will suggest that the enterprise of inquiry should stop, or that our understanding of how the world works must end at some specified juncture.

A successful theory will also make connections between, systematize, or unify disparate phenomena in some domain. For example, Newton's theory unified celestial and terrestrial mechanics; he showed that the same laws account for the motions of the planets and the motions of apples here on earth.

Evolution has done both of these things. Intelligent design has not.

The second argument is one of personal incredulity that goes something like this--I don't understand how it works, and this seems impossible to me; therefore, it is impossible. One readily sees serious logical flaws with this argument.

On the other hand, addressing this argument is one of the most difficult challenges for evolutionists because this forces evolutionary biologists to make accessible to the public the most complex details of their science in what is often just a sound byte. As a result, biologists have been forced to become adept at making complex facts look simpler than they are. Thus, a byproduct of such reductive reporting is people often conclude that evolutionary biology is not a very sophisticated science--a grave mistake.

The third argument is what Plutynski called "gee whiz mathematics," which goes something like this: There are so many gazillion bits of information in the universe that it'is mathematically impossible that these bits of information could have arisen from random and/or natural processes. Therefore, evolution is impossible.

Similar to the second argument, this one appeals to more sophisticated concepts that few people understand, and so it sounds more compelling. However, this argument is also flawed. First, there is no agreement on a natural measure of information. In other words, it is not clear how we ought to count up the bits. Second, this argument is often just reducible to arguments either from ignorance or incredulity, cloaked in vague "gee-whiz mathematics."

The fourth is what Plutynski called the "incompleteness argument" or the "Look, you can't explain this!" argument where one looks for controversy, gap, or incompleteness in some science, and then concludes that that science is not very good. The problem here is every science is incomplete, and any good active research program will involve controversy. Scientists have not finished explaining everything; if they claim otherwise, we should be suspicious of their claim to doing science.

Plutynski cited three reasons why so many Americans are in favor of teaching intelligent design. First is ignorance. Most Americans do not understand Darwin's theory and what natural selection is. Hence, the incredulity argument.

Second, many Americans believe that it is more "democratic" to teach a variety of theories. Yet the sciences are not, strictly speaking, a public forum where any and all opinions on any question should be heard. Just as we should not teach that we live in an earth-centered universe in the name of diversity, so too we should not teach intelligent design. Several hundred years of successful research has established the success of a sun-centered cosmology. Likewise, over 100 years of research has supported Darwin's theory.

Third, many Americans fear that teaching Darwin's theory is morally corrupting; Darwin's views have been identified with moral relativism and nihilism. By placing humans among the other animals, many feel that Darwin has stolen God's agency in nature, and thereby nullified morality and human dignity. This seems to be the greatest perceived threat of Darwin's theory: what are our grounds of moral obligation if we are but animals? What is to prevent us from acting as animals?

Accepting Darwin's theory does not suggest moral nihilism, the embrace of atheism, or the adherence to any particular political or social philosophy. A little attention to history shows that Darwin's theory has been used to support a range of moral and political philosophies from Herbert Spencer to Carnegie, from Proudhon to Kropotkin.

In conclusion, Plutynski believes that evolution should, and intelligent design should not, be taught in the science classroom. If we want our children to become scientifically literate citizens, and if we wish them to compete in the global market, they need to be aware of the main principles of and evidence for evolution. If students wish to learn about intelligent design, philosophy classes or courses in the history of religion or of science would be the appropriate place.

--Sarah Smith

Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism, edited by Matt Young and Taner Edis

Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism, by Philip Kitcher.