The Panda's Black Box: Opening up the Intelligent Design Controversy

3 The Aerodynamics of Flying Carpets: Why Biologists Are Loath to “Teach the Controversy”

The Aerodynamics of Flying Carpets Why Biologists Are Loath to “Teach the Controversy” scott f. gilbert and the Swarthmore College Evolution and Development Seminar 3 These are the notes of a person who majored in both biology and religion and who has profound respect for both. I believe Alfred North Whitehead’s dictum that science and religion are two of the most important forces on this planet and that our future largely depends on how these two great forces interact.1 I see Intelligent Design as a particularly impoverished and dishonest interaction between these two critically important forces. When I “teach the controversy” to my undergraduates, I do so because it falls into the general pedagogical principle used by geneticists and medical educators: if you want to know what’s normal, find the loss-of-function mutant. Imagine science if there were neither controlled experiments nor any demand for materialistic causation . The result would be something like Intelligent Design. I remind the students that science is very good at paring away what is improbable, leaving the probable to be further tested. Indeed, if “recognizing excellence wherever it may be” is one definition of the liberal arts curriculum, I believe that “recognizing nonsense no matter how well it is packaged” is a chief duty of its science curriculum. Even before Intelligent Design, I assigned students to read creation- ist literature, especially Duane Gish’s Evolution: The Fossils Say No!, and find the evidence for or against Gish’s assertions. They were amazed to find the scientific and logical errors in his narrative against evolution, the lack of evidence for the creationist views, and the prevalence of scientific evidence against his views. I find that this is a useful lesson to teach students. In this age of professionally packaged websites, nonsense has never looked better. I am not alone in this judgment that Intelligent Design is well-packaged nonsense . Every course that “teaches the controversy” should have in its syllabus Judge John E. Jones’s 2005 decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (as well as the “Wedge Strategy” document from the Discovery Institute). When I teach evolutionary developmental biology, I try to incorporate this material into laboratory discussions; but I discuss it as sociology, not as science. Indeed, when I was asked to write this article , I gave this assignment to my students in my evolutionary developmental biology seminar as their final exam. The scientific portions of this essay are their work. I teach the controversy, then, because it illustrates several critical features of good scientific practice . As a loss-of-function mutant, ID provides an “experiment” that helps me teach students what science might be if it lost its respect for evidence and controls. when there is no “there” there My field of science, evolutionary developmental biology, is a crucial one for the debate. Design proponents sometimes use it to create the illusion of a rift over evolution within the scientific community. For instance, Intelligent Design advocate Jonathan Wells claims that I and several other evolutionary developmental biologists are against natural selection. He also says, “These people hate it when I quote them; but these are their words, not mine.”2 Actually, I usually don’t mind it at all when he quotes me. For I can use his quotations of me as examples of the “breathtaking inanity”3 of Intelligent Design “scholarship.” Since I’ve published several papers arguing that The Aerodynamics of Flying Carpets 41 Charles Darwin recognized the importance of the embryological approach to evolution, Wells’s calling me an antievolutionist is as absurd as my calling George W. Bush an ecofeminist. So I really don’t get angry when I read these remarks. However, this comment of Wells exposes two notions dear to Intelligent Design proponents. First, they believe that any evidence against what textbooks say evolution is constitutes a victory for Intelligent Design. If evolutionists (or at least those whose ideas get into the textbooks) are wrong, then ID is right. Of course, the followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) know better. The FSM pseudoreligion was invented by Robert Henderson, an engineer who felt that if the Kansas school board should allow nonmaterialistic explanations to be taught in science classes, then the creation of the world by the FSM is as good a story as any other (see www .venganza.org). Second, Wells’s comments...