A Response to J. Gorman's "Why We Should Be Teaching Intelligent Design to High School Students"

First, let me invite you to read Mr. Gorman's short article here:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/101255/why_we_should_be_teaching_intelligent.html
so you do not come into this discussion blind. Or, if you do not feel the need to read it (I scarcely did, but having done so, I feel compelled by my moral scruples to give reply to this editor's pick), let me offer you an abstract.

Children should not be sheltered from ideas that challenge our traditional values. Evolution was rejected in its own day, and Intelligent Design is rejected today. Therefore we should teach Intelligent Design.

The fish have been released into the barrel.

Let us take the first argument listed above and approach it as politely and calmly as our rational minds allow, and apply its reasoning consistently.

Because we have neither qualifying evidence for or against, but because the idea is highly controversial, history classes should teach high school students that the Holocaust never happened. It is highly controversial, yes, but people certainly do argue both sides of the issue. And of course, Holocaust denial is being rejected by the West, but so was Darwinian evolution in its day, so because they were both rejected, they are of equal value. Also because they both question common conceptions of the world, they should both be taught.

One time in a dream, a pink unicorn told me that the Creature from the Black Lagoon generated the entire universe and everything in it in a single instant roughly 25,000 years ago. This, of course, offends the secular liberal atheist Godless communist homosexual feminist anti-God anti-man anti-capitalist anti-thought anti-life anti-love anti-humanity Illuminati Freemason Neo-Nazi CIA Bilderburg Vatican conspirators who work daily to drive God from the minds of our young children, and because it is so offensive, it should be taught. Because we can't disprove it rationally, the idea must be taught. Otherwise, we would ourselves be guilty of brainwashing our children with these atheistic liberal values.

Because there are holes in string theory, we should teach the possible alternative theory that the universe is bound by The Force, into which a small number of individuals, genetically predisposed to have a high Metichlorion count, can tap into and use to manipulate matter with their thoughts. You certainly can't disprove it, I bet there are plenty of pimply basement-dwellers who believe in it heart and soul, and because it offends the aforementioned gargantuan global conspiracy network (another theory I advise we inject into our history curriculums nationwide, lest we be victims of its mighty talons), it and evolution are equally valuable.

Never mind that we demand evidence. Never mind that we demand rationality in, of all places, schools. Never mind that the 2006 Dover, PY trial roundly and effectively disproved every single claim of "irreducible complexity" put forth by the creation science Discovery Institute ("irreducible complexity" is the theory that certain organs or structures in living creatures are too complicated to have evolved by natural selection, and so must have been artificially engineered). Never mind that the premise of the ID movement is that God exists, and he proved it by making the rear elbows of the Brazilian tree frog contain one tendon too many to have evolved from the Brazilian tropical frog.

Dare we teach the absurd and astounding idea to children that they ought to critically examine bad ideas? Intelligent Design is such an idea. Intelligent Design has been roundly disproved by even modestly intelligent biologists and biochemists around the world. Shall we tell the amusing anecdote of how, when the Kanses schools instituted the change to their curriculums that required teachers to read a warning that evolution is "just a theory," no teacher would read it for fear of violating that part of their oath of employment in which it is said that they, on fear of losing their jobs, can NOT knowingly teach false information? Or how about the equally amusing anecdote in which, at the Dover trial, where ID was systematically and roundly deconstructed by expert testimony, the leading pro-creationism witness was faced with nine books and hundreds of articles and chapters from books showing that the immune system could easily have evolved by natural seleection, refuting one of his points, to which he said "that's just not good enough?"

What we gain by granting even the slightest credence to the Intelligent Design movement is a civilization of ignorance. If we teach children to listen to a fringe minority who refuse to examine the evidence, then the next generation will be filled with Flat Earthers, Young Earth creationists, Holocaust deniers, Illuminati-fearing idiots who burn doctors and scientists at the stake. This ought to be terrifying: that people like J. Gorman find themselves on the cover page of associatedcontent is a warning klaxon blaring directly beside our ears.

So, because he clearly is confused, let me pose him three questions, in two series:

1. Do you believe that it is the tendency of organisms to reproduce?
2. Do you believe that DNA exists?

Mr. Gorman, if you answered yes to both questions, then I hate to break it to you, but you believe heart and soul in evolution. Any denial, no matter how stringent, simply results from your apparent failure to understand the nature of DNA. The process that causes mutation is called DNA recombination, and it mostly happens as a product of a chemical called DNA helicase, which is an enzyme much like DNA polymerase. It is a helpless automaton: it has no idea what it does. All it does, all day and all night, is chill out in your cells and copy, copy, copy. It takes a strand of DNA, is pulled up against its component chemicals, and just duplicates.

This processes, as a matter of statistical inevitability, has errors. These errors are called 'mutations.' Mutations typically cause extremely minor changes in offspring (for example, in humans, nearly 100% of everyone ever born has been born with some statistically improbable mutation; by and large they are either benign or extremely minor). Those offspring with changes that make them at least slightly better adapted to their environment are that much more likely to reproduce and pass on that transcription error, and those errors, if exagerrated again by statistical improbability, find those features exagerrated in the offspring until, after only a few million generations, bam, you have a bacterial flagellar motor or an opposable thumb or a working eye.

That is evolution. Congratulations, if you understand the previous three paragraphs, you no longer believe in Intelligent Design.

Here is the third question:

3. Do you believe in gravity?

Why? Oh, sure we can infer that gravity exists. But, we can also infer evolution just from the fossil record, and from all the of many and varied findings of the branch of science known as "molecular biology," but inference clearly just isn't good enough for you. Sure we have a gravitational constant, but we also have a complete human genome, which is more than 97% identical to the DNA of the creatures that Darwin himself predicted we would find the closest similarities with decades before DNA was ever discovered, so facts clearly just aren't good enough, either. We have observed no particle cause for gravity, and can explain its behavior only through mathematically sound yet unobservable ideas like string theory and quantum electrodynamics (even though we can, and have, observed both evolution and speciation, see www.talkorigins.org), so, why believe in it?

Oughtn't we be weary of any suspiscious pseudo-science taught in our atheistic public schools that indoctrinates our children against the notion of God's Great and Holy Falling Machines in the Center of the Earth? Shouldn't we teach both ideas? Teach the controversy? School is for learning, not for sheltering.

If we take the logic of controversy-teaching, non-sheltering schools to its logical extent, we will be dropping Poseidon into the water cycle lessons and Allah's fury into lessons about 9/11.

We don't teach controversies in public schools unless they have this funny little thing called "merit." If Intelligent Desing had even the slightest merit at all, we would teach it, pure and simple. You show that evolution was once argued about, and so is ID, so lets just go out and teach ID. Good point. You know, people once argued about whether the Earth was a flat square or a flat circle, so, lets teach both sides of the controversy. St. Augustine once said that the Earth is flat, but even if it were round, the opposite side would be uninhabited because Scripture makes no allowance for such creatures. So, there's another dumb idea for us to teach.

Secretary of Schools J. Gorman's public school system would be a disaster. Children would be chewing off their feet, believing that aliens and dwarves live in their toes because hey, who's to say that they aren't? Why teach Pythagorean theory if we haven't observed every possible triangle in the universe?

Such is the reasoning of idiots. Madmen and fame-seekers have pushed this stupid, stupid idea called Intelligent Design for decades, and never has it gained even a jot of ground in the academic community. The Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute have dangled fortunes in front of scientists willing to convert to the natural sciences of the Middle Ages, and only the greediest, most intellectually corrupt of them, such as the likes of M.J. Behe and Kent Hovind, have taken the bait. Unfortunately for them, reason is winning.

But of course Mr. Gorman wouldn't be upset at my tone... didn't God (/the aliens /Allah /Poseidon /Baphomet /The Invisible Pink Unicorn) design me this way?