Pseudoscience Would Waste Teaching Time

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Pseudoscience would waste teaching time
by Paul Z. Myers
Published April 24, 2005

Intelligent design (ID) has failed to meet even the minimal
standards of evidence and scholarship we should expect of
the science we teach our children. Teaching it steals time
from more vital subjects in which our kids should be grounded.

Science is a conservative process. Most college-level
introductory textbooks contain only material that has stood
the test of time and has been confirmed independently.

ID proponents have not only failed to provide any evidence
for their thesis, they aren't even trying. There are no labs
doing research on this subject; all the papers the Discovery
Institute has tried to publish are exercises in spin, in
which they try to distort biology researchers' work to fit
their preconceptions.

With no established body of results, no current work and no
promising prospects for future research, why should ID be
supported? It's a dead end. It is absurd to propose that our
kids learn about a subject that no legitimate scientists are
pursuing and that has no utility.

With no track record to earn the respect of scientists and
educators, ID is attempting to circumvent the accepted
standards of testing and validation to sneak into our
schoolrooms -- it's cheating.

It takes a great deal of hard work and persistence and time
and evidence to establish a scientific idea, work that
should not be shirked by taking the easy route and asking
the government to legislate a concept into the schoolrooms.

Yet this is exactly the strategy ID proponents are
following: spreading propaganda to persuade school boards
and state education departments to insert the ideological
dogma of ID into classrooms.

Contrast ID with how legitimate scientific work gets into
the curriculum. There is an active ferment of new ideas, new
experiments, and new evidence constantly bubbling up in the
scientific literature. Many controversies work themselves
out in the pages of Nature or Science or other journals, and
prompt hypothesis testing and the gathering of new evidence.

If an idea is well-supported by the evidence, it gains wider
currency within the scientific community, and eventually
works its way into the science textbooks. Biology books are
written by biologists, not by the hodge-podge of lawyers,
philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians and rare scientists
willing to abandon scientific principles found in the ID
movement.

Textbook content should accurately reflect the general
opinion of the scientists who do real work in a field.

And what is the state of modern evolutionary biology?
Thriving, growing and more productive than ever. In
paleontology within the last year, we've had the amazing
discoveries of Homo floresiensis, the Indonesian "hobbit,"
and remarkable finds from Dmanisi, Georgia.

The human genome project, and genome projects analyzing
other organisms, has been yielding research dividends. We
are beginning to tease apart the genetic differences that
make human brains different from those of chimpanzees.

Molecular studies of protists are revealing the roots of
multicellularity. We study oncogenes, genes that when
damaged can cause cancers in humans. Epidemiologists study
looming disease threats, such as bird flu and the Marburg
virus, using evolutionary principles.

My own discipline of developmental biology has been
revolutionized in the last few decades as we've embraced
evolution more fully than before; new papers in the rapidly
growing field of evo-devo, or evolutionary developmental
biology, pile up on my desk faster than I can read them.

This is a genuinely exciting time to be studying biology.
When students ask me about the hot fields that promise great
careers, I steer them toward evo-devo (and developmental
biology in general), bioinformatics, proteomics and
genomics, all fields in which knowledge of evolution is
indispensable.

Note that I do not and cannot recommend anything to do with
ID, whose proponents spend their time lobbying school
boards, producing nothing new, and with no promise of new
ideas for the future.

I want my incoming students to be well versed in the
fundamentals of biology, which includes evolution but not
the pseudoscience of ID, so that we can move to the real
excitement of modern biology . . . which is almost entirely
informed by the concepts of evolution.

Paul Z. Myers is an associate professor of biology at the
University of Minnesota-Morris. He also operates a
science-oriented blog, http://pharyngula.org

--
Dan Clore

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