Shouldn't We be Teaching ID in Science Class?

Great Debates
21

Irreducible complexity can arise piecemeal.

That sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it? Because if the removal of any one component makes the system fail, how can it ever have been in a state where it was partly contructed?

But it can. Consider a natural rock arch such as this one - it’s irreducible in its current form - remove any section of rock from the span and the whole thing will fall down - but that doesn’t mean we should jump to the conclusion that someone put it up that way deliberately - what actually happened is that the arch is the result of reduction from a reducible system.

22

[QUOTE=Dominic Mulligan]

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Thankyou for the link. It was most useful to me to allow myself to accept that the flagellum is reducible. Of course I’m not the only person who needs to be led by the hand in this manner and that is why I suggest ID should be addressed in science classes.

23

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Actually, I think that a day addressing Intelligent Design should be included in biology courses. First spend 25 minutes noting that Michael Behe caused a great stir in the public by publishing a book, Darwin’s Black Box, without peer review, pushing his claims for Irreducible Complexity, then pointing out that nearly every claim he made in his book has been refuted with further investigation or was deliberately false.
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That was accomplished in the program I watched and that I referenced. I know Behe was a deceptive asshole, so what, science has nothing to do with personalities. Tell me how the flagellum is reducible.

24

[QUOTE=The Flying Dutchman]
Thankyou for the link. It was most useful to me to allow myself to accept that the flagellum is reducible. Of course I’m not the only person who needs to be led by the hand in this manner and that is why I suggest ID should be addressed in science classes.
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But things like this are taught. At least, I was taught how things can evolve in cases where apparently one part missing wouldn’t work. That’s just explaining evolution, and I don’t think anyone’s against that. I just don’t see how you’ve gone from “I would like this facet of evolution explained” to “I would like I.D. taught in science lessons”.

25

[QUOTE=Jinx]
Uh, can you start by teaching us…what the heck is “ID”? (Intervention Divine, I wager?) Also, please define irreducible complexity (IC?). Does the latter mean something is too complex to have formed by any other means?

Personally, I think the presence of a superior being is self-evident. Look at what great lengths man must go to in order to build an artificial limb…not to mention the technology it takes in civil engineering to dig a 15-ft hole that won’t collapse in on itself (when dug in wet soil) prior to pouring a [pole] foundation. Even the simplest of projects is a major undertaking. Yet, science class conveniently skips all of those finer details. In short, we should remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the earth was!
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Amazing. Unless we’re being wooshed, you have managed to demonstrate a startling level of ignorance on the subjects of Intelligent Design, irreducible complexity, evolution, prosthetics, civil engineering and astronomy all in a single post.

In the effort to fight ignorance:

Intelligent Design is the belief that lifeforms were planned out and created by some entity, as opposed to simply evolved from component protein molecules over time.

Irreducible complexity is the belief that certain biological systems containing multiple, interacting parts where the removal of any part would cause the system to fail are too complex to have arisen naturally.

It has taken man hundreds or thousands of years to design a artifical limb (depending on how you define artificial limb). Limbs evolved over MILLIONS of years.

I’m not sure how digging a ditch has anything to do with anything.

Clearly the Earth was not built in a day.
If you accept the conventional scientific view that the Earth is around 4 billion years old and that life formed shortly thereafter, that is about all the time in the world to create just about anything by random chance. And it isn’t just random chance. It’s trillions of iterations of trial and error. Those are unimaginably large numbers by human standards.

26

[QUOTE=msmith537]
that is about all the time in the world.
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I like you.

27

[QUOTE=The Flying Dutchman]
I know Behe was a deceptive asshole, so what, science has nothing to do with personalities.
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Actually, I disagree with both of these assertions.

I don’t think that Behe is an asshole. I suspect that he is simply someone who ran into a situation that troubled him, he leaped to a conclusion to which he now has an emotional attachment, and he finds himself in the awkward position of trying to defend his emotional attachment in a forum not conducive to that flawed approach. I am troubled by some of his comments at Creationist gatherings, but even his failure to recognize the work that he criticized other scientists for not performing might have been the result of confirmation bias and sloppy research attempted a couple of years before Google or even Dogpile was available for that research.

And if Stephen J. Gould’s thirty odd years of essays published each month in Natural History should have taught us anything, it is that the personalities of the scientists play an enormous part in their research and in their errors and their abilities to recognize discoveries. Today we teach about the wrong conclusions of Lamarck, Haeckel, and others. Pointing out that even the errors of others are important if for no other reason than to let us avoid those errors is part of the education process.

[QUOTE=The Flying Dutchman]
Tell me how the flagellum is reducible.
[/QUOTE]
Index to Creationist Claims, Claim CB200.1

28

Irreducible complexity only validates intelligent design if the organism found is more complex than God. Otherwise all you’ve done is move things around.

29

Tom, I understand why you advocate for an examination of the damage that ignorance and the ignorant can do to a science class – even if we limited ourselves to the three examples that you have given. I would advocate for them myself if I thought that schools had the money to fight and win the lawsuits, enough security on campus to keep classrooms safe from zealots, and enough time to deal with the commotion and emotion involved.

We would also have teachers who would refuse to teach against Creationism. The atmosphere can become very hostile when certain religious beliefs are concerned. They will see you in hell before they will brook what they see as disrespect for their beliefs.

The more I describe it, the more I realize that the twenty-five year old version of me would actually be spoiling for such a worthy fight again! Let me back in that classroom! I’m on your side after all.

30

Well, I would not advocate teaching them as (willful) ignorance so much as “Here is how anyone can fall into error and here is how good science corrects it.” We should probably be doing a better and more accurate job of teaching Lamarck and Haeckel and Dubois and others, as well. (Gould made a serious point of debunking the errors inherent in the mythology of science history over the course of his many essays.) Since Behe and Dembski have a direct affect on errors propagated by current school boards, their claims require more than the five or ten minutes that Lamarck and Haeckel get (when they get any time at all). However, I realize the pitfalls that such instruction opens up and I am describing an ideal “should” more than a serious description of what I believe can be gotten past the Texan domintion of textbooks or the Ohio or Kansas school boards.

31

Oh, I don’t think their ignorance is any more “willful” than my own. The same is not true of some of those who run for office and use these issues as a calling card.

32

I was not a science teacher, BTW, and these names are not familiar to me. My science education ended with core requirements in college and an occasional pop science magazine.

33

To me, this issue is less about what people choose to believe and more about protecting the constitution. ID is creationism. It is a religious belief. Creationism in science is absurd because, as others point out, it is not science.
Bolstering creationism in public schools should scare anyone who values the very law that protects religious freedom. The recognition of creationism in the public schools is the foundation for an official state religion and religious laws. I don’t think anyone who believes in democracy and the laws designed to protect our most fundamental rights wants to live in a religious state.

A more probable outcome ID advocates may fail to recognize is that once the public school introduces one religious belief it has to introduce all religious beliefs: Christian, Islam, Judaism, Paganism, Taoism, Voodoo, Buddhism, Hinduism, Witchcraft, etc. People of all faiths will be legally entitled to have their religious beliefs instructed or recognized as alternative theories in science class.

Protect religious freedom and the integrity of public education by keeping religious doctrine out of the classroom.

34

Yes, definitely ID should be taught… about. Irreducible complexity and other arguments against evolution should certainly be covered, so it can be shown that they are incorrect. Irreducible complexity is wrong for two reasons: First, because no example of it has been offered that hasn’t eventually been explained. Second, irreducible complexity it’s it’s own argument against ID: if your premise is that something complex must have been designed, and you assume it is God, then you must explain God, which is even more complex and irreducible. IC could theoretically be used as an argument for aliens seeding Earth or for our reality being some kind of simulation, but it can’t be used as an argument for God.

35

I think we should have ID at school it can be right after science class and just befor english class, it can be called “pseudo science”

36

I remember learning about phlogiston theory in science class. No, I’m not that old - we covered it as part of the introduction to the scientific method.

37

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Just to be clear, a theory is never “almost a fact”. A fact is nothing, relatively speaking. A fact is: The first word in my post is “Just”. Or: I am a male. A theory is something that explains a whole series of factual observations. It starts out as a hypothesis, and once it is tested and has proven that it has predictive value, it will be regarded as a “theory”. There is nothing higher than a “theory” unless you are looking for truth (which is outside the realm of science).
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I think you miss the point of the statement you are discussing. By asserting that the theories are taught “almost as fact,” the poster is correctly noting that the theory of evolution of species is taught as if it were The Correct Answer, i.e., the Truth (or, if you will, a factual statement). Indeed, many scientists (as well as people in general) seem to lose their recollection that the theory is just that, a theory, and, in the case of this issue, an unprovable theory (that is, as you noted, something about which the Truth cannot be known, by science anyway). Competing concepts are treated with derision, especially if the concept is unscientific, and therefore not truly a competing concept.

The schools need to emphasize that any theory, no matter how evolved or complex, is just that: an attempt to explain what we see around us, based upon our observations. In the case of many theories, especially those about past pre-historical events, the actual Truth cannot be known, but we try to figure it out (which represents a significant evolution in how humans think (!), a fact which goes unnoted in our classes, unfortunately). If we were to simply fall back on the acceptance of some belief system about deities to answer the questions, we are no more advanced than the Greeks who saw no point to figuring out what the True nature of things was, since after all, they could simply be affected by the gods at a moment’s notice. Thus, science and religion don’t mix; theory and belief (faith) are entirely separate thought processes, and they do not belong side by side in a science classroom.

38

If you want ID to go away, rename it Malicious Design and point out the suffering endured by all living things. Sorta takes the panache out of the ID spin.

39

[QUOTE=Chief Pedant]
If you want ID to go away, rename it Malicious Design and point out the suffering endured by all living things. Sorta takes the panache out of the ID spin.
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Brilliant. :slight_smile:

40

[QUOTE=tonedef]
I think we should have ID at school it can be right after science class and just befor english class, it can be called “pseudo science”
[/QUOTE]

More brilliance.

Week 1. god.

Week 2. The loch ness monster.

week 3. Trickle-down economics