When Politicians Push Questionable Curricula
Kenneth Wagner, Radford University

Remember when that Democratic President promoted the silly works of Jacque Derrida to be taught in our educational system? Or that liberal senator who pushed for Social Text type anti-science (the laws of physics are merely “social constructions”) to become part of Goals 2000? Neither do I. Yet last week the Republican President, George W. Bush, advocated something just as silly when he promoted teaching “intelligent design” theory to school children.

Here at NAS we fight a lot of silly leftist ideas concerning education (e.g., that racial discrimination disguised as “diversity” makes our educational system better; that there are no measurable differences among gender, racial, or ethnic groups and even if there were, it would be politically incorrect to study them; that the United States is always in the wrong in history and world politics). But we need to be frank that right now the most urgent assault on rational education comes from the Right. When the President of the United States starts to back an idea that the vast majority of experts in that particular field think is astoundingly wrong and silly, that is a much more serious matter than the concoctions of a few tweed-coat-wearing literature professors at an Ivy League school.

The problem with intelligent design is not so much its entanglement with religion (after all, if I teach in a class that the Kingdom of Israel occupied Canaan at some point in the past, the fact that some religions echo that sentiment in their sacred texts does not make it unacceptable in public schools). It is instead that it is spectacularly wrong and unscientific to boot.

In my NAS affiliate (the Virginia Association of Scholars) several people would attack evolution and defend intelligent design. Interestingly these folks were almost always not natural scientists. In fact most of the leaders in the ID field are simply not natural scientists at all (they are usually a hodgepodge of philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, theologians, and political scientists). These people, quite literally, “know not whereof they speak.” I have not seen actual figures, but I would guess that the percentage of tenured biology and geology professionals that believe ID over evolutionary theory to be very similar to the fraction of historians that deny the Holocaust. Neither is a vast conspiracy.

The fact that most of these people are not natural scientists (indeed, many of the social scientists that defend ID do not believe that there is any “science” to the social sciences) is telling in their stunning ignorance of the scientific method. They often are hyper-rationalists: they prefer how Plato or Aristotle reasoned to things. Did you know Aristotle proved an unmoved mover without ever producing any observable evidence of said Being? Neither did I, nor most scientists. The reason is that science contains an empirical component: if your fancy reasoning does not jibe with actual observations and methods (read: the real world) scientists can’t accept it as science.

Evolution meets this empirical test. Evolution predicts a changing fossil record, with transitional forms. Evolution predicts certain patterns from comparative physiology. Evolution predicts certain genetic links and affinities between certain species. Evolution predicts that in certain lab experiments certain things will happen. Guess what? It's all been confirmed.

Intelligent design sadly does not jibe with the evidence. It has great trouble dealing with extinctions, or with signs of clearly bad design (see Stephen Jay Gould’s The Panda’s Thumb and other writings on this subject). It has no observable, replicable evidence of the supposed “Designer.” It doesn’t say how or when the design was translated into creation. But this is only the beginning of its problems. Far worse is that it is not scientific, that is, it does not provide us with observable evidence. It is worse than a “fill in the gaps” theory; it is a “gaps are our proof” theory! It reminds one of the old Sid Harris cartoon with the two white-coated scientists looking at a board full of equations that does not quite add up. One simply puts in a variable and says “and then a miracle happened.” Imagine the state of modern physics, medicine, and the like if we took this method for more than a test spin!

In the face of growing evidence that leftists dominate academe, liberals have fallen on a new explanation (the old one was to deny they dominated at all): that conservative politicians foster an anti-scientific and anti-intellectual atmosphere. Well, Bush and some others in the conservative movement are providing good reasons to believe this, and it is for conservative scholars and scientists to stand up and let them know how silly their thinking is.

NAS9:44 PM