Here We Go Again

Whatever the judge decides in the Dover trial it's clear that Intelligent Design won't be going away any time soon. Here's a couple of excerpts from an article on the mischief ID subversives are up to in Kansas:

TOPEKA, Kan., Nov. 8 -- The Kansas Board of Education voted Tuesday that students will be expected to study doubts about modern Darwinian theory, a move that defied the nation's scientific establishment even as it gave voice to religious conservatives and others who question the theory of evolution.

By a 6 to 4 vote that supporters cheered as a victory for free speech and opponents denounced as shabby politics and worse science, the board said high school students should be told that aspects of widely accepted evolutionary theory are controversial. Among other points, the standards allege a "lack of adequate natural explanations for the genetic code."

One of the more peculiar comments in the WaPo's article was this from Francisco Ayala, an evolutionary biologist:

Intelligent design "does not provide any natural explanation that can be tested," said Ayala ....He said the Kansas standards "are an insult to science, an insult to education and an insult to the American Constitution."

Well, of course ID doesn't provide a natural explanation if "natural" is defined as excluding intelligence as a causal factor. Ayala's claim that ID can't be tested is also odd since critics of ID have worked arduously to explain how complex structures like bio-machines could have emerged solely by non-purposive mechanisms. Every time they come up with such an explanation they're attempting to falsify one of the basic claims of ID, the claim that there are no plausible mechanistic pathways for such an evolution.

Moreover, Ayala's hyperventilations about the insults suffered by science, education, and the Constitution are a bit melodramatic. ID is no more an insult to science than is string theory, but it is indeed an offense against the materialistic metaphysics which is presupposed by many scientists. Nor is it an insult to education to expect students to know what some of the shortcomings of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory are, and it is certainly not an insult to the document which enshrines free speech in this country to extend that cherished principle to challenges to accepted dogmas that are otherwise insulated from criticism by our public schools.

Here's a question: If, as the defenders of the status quo insist, the evidence for their position is overwhelming, and if ID is such a weak competitor, then what on earth are the defenders of Darwinism afraid of? We would think that they would relish the thought of having ID scrutinized in the classroom so that it can be thoroughly and definitively trounced by the massive might of Darwinian orthodoxy. Yet the establishment types act as if letting a little skepticism in the door would signal the collapse of their beloved theory, so like church censors they protect the fragile flower as though it were a sacred belief that no one dare question. It's as if they fear that in the competition for survival their view would be found to be less fit in the new environment than the more vigorous and attractive interloper. There's a certain justice in that.