Intelligent Design theory

[undyingking]

I've been musing about this interesting 'theory' just lately. Essentially it claims that there are some things about life (in the biological sense) that are just too complicated to have evolved by natural selection, and so instead they must have been designed by some more powerful agent.

It's been claimed that this is just creationism in pseudo-respectable guise, and certainly it's seems to have been treated that way in the Kansas State Board of Education. But I guess we can do the proponents the politeness of taking at face value their claim that the Christian God is not a necessary component.

My interest is in the actual structure of the argument. It's actually very old (Thomas Aquinas I believe put it forward) and so presumably has a lasting appeal, but it seems to me to be impossibly weak. The weakness is that it seems to take the arguer's own paowers of imagination / reasoning as axiomatic of the system. It's saying "I can't imagine how this could have arisen by non-designed means, therefore it can't have." You would think it could automatically be refuted by someone else saying "Well, I can quite easily imagine it, so boo sucks to you." Although a philosopher would probably put that more elegantly.

In the 19th century opponents of Darwinism cited the eye as an example -- saying that part of an eye provided no benefit, therefore natural selection could not have evolved it gradually towards its current form as Darwinists suggested. This was quite easily shot down by showing that just by looking around the animal kingdom of today we can identify a whole spectrum of optical structures which are less complex than our own eyes but which provide benefit to their users.

Today's intelligent design advocates use things like the bombardier beetle, the blood clotting sequence, and the bacterial flagellum as examples of things which only work at all when fully realized. I don't know enough biology to be able to counter these examples, but presumably it can be done?

The more practical question though is about whether ID should be taught in schools. Richard Dawkins has said that this would be equivalent to teaching flat earth theory, and of course Flying Spaghetti Monsterism also has its advocates. However it seems to me that it would be useful if schools gave a bit of perspective on how science arose and the intellectual battles it had to fight, rather than just handing it down on stone tablets. The Victorians were presented with Darwinism as an alternative to the prevailing creationist theory, and they were intelligent enough to (mostly) see that Darwinism was more likely to be right. Won't our children understand natural selection better if they work out for themselves why it's superior to what came before, rather than just being told that it's right because the syllabus says so?

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I think Holocaust denial absolutely should be discussed in schools. Otherwise you get the situation where they find out about it as adults and are (in some sad cases) more likely then to believe it, as "there's a big conspiracy to hush it up".

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Without wishing to bang on about it, I can't get my head around this view. We have photographs, physical evidence, witness accounts, and so on, of the holocaust. A historian should certainly learn that these things are the tools of a proper historian. When they learn about a historical event they should learn about the evidence that it happened. But having shown a student all these pieces of evidence that unerringly indicate that the holocaust did happen - only to say "but some people think it didn't" - surely that undermines the sceptical, scientific mindset that you want to encourage?

The fact is that you can't teach every crackpot theory there is. So there will always be ideas that people only encounter when they reach adulthood, and if they are sufficiently gullible, they will swallow whole, and spout such phrases as "there's a big conspiracy to hush it up". The only way to protect against this is to teach scepticism and scientific method - not to teach theories that are in fact discredited by these very methods.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I'm no expert on Holocause denial, but I know its proponents cite 'evidence' of their own, and have arguments to rebut the conventional viewpoint. Presumably their eivdence and arguments can easily be dismissed, but I'd rather the child see that for themselves, rather than just being told that it's the case.

Although you can't cover every crackpot theory there is, I think Holocaust denial is one of the more important ones to talk about, from the point of view of its impact on quite large sectors of society.

(Also, note I'm not saying that we should "teach theories that are in fact discredited", but that we should "teach about theories that are in fact discredited".)

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

you can't teach every crackpot theory there is

Don't you oppress me!