Shouldn't We be Teaching ID in Science Class?

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
So, based on snippets of a television show, you wish to add Intelligent Design to the already complicated science program our children have to go through, even after it has been pointed out that the program actually came out against it?
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Yes. To expand, I’ll provide this cite

How are you going to properly educate the American public on the error of ID unless you confront it in the class room with scientific facts. So far, if the Gallup poll I cited has any validity, The American education system is doing a piss poor job from coast to coast.

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I don’t think introducing piss poor excuses for scientific theories and wasting valuable educational time refuting them is going to help in the long run. We’d soon be overrun with even more piss poor “theories” to refute, instead of actually teaching.

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[QUOTE=John Mace]
This was an excellent show and they did an excellent job getting at the nuts and bolts.
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I have to disagree with that. The show was a surprising suspenseful account of the trial, but it did not present the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the evidence supporting evolution; it did not even present a compelling case against ‘irreducible complexity’.

“This 37 sub-unit cellular structure is too complex to have arisen spontaneously, and therefore is evidence of Intelligent Design.”

“Ah-ha! Here is a cellular structure with 33 of those very same sub-units! [twirls moustache] What say you now?”

“I am vanguished!” [back of hand to forehead]

Spare me.

The show presented compelling evidence of deception on the part of the textbook authors and publishers, but an hour long tv show can not show the nuts and bolts of a process that takes millions of years, the evidence of which crosses at least three, and more probably four, major scientific disciplines.

I am a scientist, and I love Nova, but it is not a peer-reviewed article with multiple cross-disciplinary references in a highly respected journal. It’s a tv show geared toward non-scientists.

I realize that the Dutchman used flamboyant language in the title of his post, but he has not supported Intelligent Design in any post. He has asked for a better response to the argument of IC than a broken mouse trap; he has a point.

He is just a little more aware than the rest of us, that people are buying into this, and we have to know the enemy’s tactics.

If I were not a guest here and afraid of being banned before I even join, I would argue that whenever evolution/ID is the topic, some of the people here demonstrate as much intellectual rigor as Creationists (and even less verbal comprehension).

ID doesn’t deserve an intellectual debate? I’m more concerned that it doesn’t deserve our children’s minds. We have to know their arguments, and we have to be prepared demonstrate the fallacies and inaccuracies in those arguments.

And we have to prepare the children to face those arguments.

In case it has escaped any-one’s notice, religion is being used to justify a hell of a lot of ignorance; are we to sit back with our smug little smirks, sneering at the oh-so-ignorant, goaded to action only to attack a sincere post by some one who takes the banner seriously?.

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Maybe you should consider watching it again.
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We should all watch that show again, and challenge every scientific point made. Then we should imagine every misrepresentation imaginable of every scientific point. Those are the arguments that we will be forced to refute in detail, and snorting, ‘Read a book’ will not suffice.

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[QUOTE=j666]
ID doesn’t deserve an intellectual debate? I’m more concerned that it doesn’t deserve our children’s minds. We have to know their arguments, and we have to be prepared demonstrate the fallacies and inaccuracies in those arguments.
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But anyone with an adequate education in the sciences should be able to identify the fallacies and inaccuracies in these arguments. I feel that any time that we devote towards countering a specific fallacious argument, is time that could be better spent elsewhere.
LilShieste

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[QUOTE=LilShieste]
But anyone with an adequate education in the sciences should be able to identify the fallacies and inaccuracies in these arguments.
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True enough. You’re forgetting the fact that most people do not have an adequate education in the sciences, but instead learn some facts or “facts” to regurgitate on tests.

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[QUOTE=Frank]
True enough. You’re forgetting the fact that most people do not have an adequate education in the sciences, but instead learn some facts or “facts” to regurgitate on tests.
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That is a good point. Should we continually change curriculums to match these arguments, though? (i.e., What happens when ID falls out of favor, and is replaced by a completely different [inaccurate] argument?)
LilShieste

67

Dutchman didn’t say he thought ID was a prblem for evolutionary theory but for America. I think he does have a point that public school science curricula should be more aggressive in responding to ID, not because it has any validity but because it is widely believed to have validity. When I was in high school, I can remember learning about Lamarckism and about why it was discarded. I think that ID and IRC can be addressed in the same vein. Popperian falsifiability should better taught as well. It’s alarming how many people don’t even know what the word “science” means any more.

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[QUOTE=LilShieste]
That is a good point. Should we continually change curriculums to match these arguments, though? (i.e., What happens when ID falls out of favor, and is replaced by a completely different [inaccurate] argument?)

[/QUOTE]

Frankly, I dunno. And, again frankly, I’m not sure I care. As long as humanity in general continues to advance, it doesn’t much matter to me who does it. If the U.S. is determined to allow religious and political reasons to destroy and end its 150 year record of excellence and leadership in both theoretical and practical science, someone else will pick it up. I hope. I fear that we are the cusp of a new Dark Age.

69

The problem with responding to ID is that there is nothing to respond to. There is no “theory” to test or dispute-it is nothing but an unending series of unintelligent attacks on actual science, and you could spend years trying to put out all the little fires such an approach would cause.

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[QUOTE=LilShieste]
But anyone with an adequate education in the sciences should be able to identify the fallacies and inaccuracies in these arguments. I feel that any time that we devote towards countering a specific fallacious argument, is time that could be better spent elsewhere.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t see how you can have an adequate education on how to identify and refute fallacies and inaccuracies unless you have actually studied the types that generally occur. Isn’t the whole point of the Straight Dope and things like Snopes to battle common ignorance? And isn’t the point of the scientific method that theories should be falsifiable and challenged so that we can discover what is true? If we don’t “waste time” teaching others what is wrong about common misconceptions, then those others will waste a much longer time staying ignorant.

71

[QUOTE=j666]
Of course; the children should be taught how to evaluate theories and their presentation with intellectual rigor. (Editor’s note: and many other wise things left out to preserve the hamsters)
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I don’t know why the religious folks don’t just say, “God wrote the rules and this is what happened, though it took a very long time. Isn’t it magnificent?” It works to [del]shut up[/del] cause my friends at church, who are not in a mood to sit through a lecture on “The Big Bang Followed by Several Billion Years of Shit Sorting Itself Out,” during a discussion of The Gospel According to The Simpsons, to look at the universe from a different point of view. Though it appeared last week that the wife of the moderator was as much a Closeted Atheist as I am. (FTR, I finally “came out” to the pastor a couple weeks ago, explaining my continued presence as, “I like being around you people. You do good things and I like that.”)

72

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Dutchman didn’t say he thought ID was a prblem for evolutionary theory but for America. I think he does have a point that public school science curricula should be more aggressive in responding to ID, not because it has any validity but because it is widely believed to have validity. When I was in high school, I can remember learning about Lamarckism and about why it was discarded. I think that ID and IRC can be addressed in the same vein. Popperian falsifiability should better taught as well. It’s alarming how many people don’t even know what the word “science” means any more.
[/QUOTE]

When I was in high school, I learned about Lamarckism, phlogiston, and creationism of the 18th century variety. The difference in teaching about that version and our current one is that the old creationism was a reasonable hypothesis given what was known at the time, and disproven as more evidence accumulated. Modern creationism, and ID, wasn’t a reasonable hypothesis from square one. You can teach the old one in the context of the knowledge of the time, but I don’t know how you’d teach the reason for the current version without getting into its origin in religious nutjobbery. It’s politics and sociology these days, not even close to science.

73

[QUOTE=tomndebb]

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.

[/QUOTE]

Behe isn’t an asshole because he got it wrong, or even because he’s holding on to a pet hypothesis long after the evidence against it is overwhelming. Plenty of scientists do both, including Hoyle, and while it is sad, it’s not worth the accusation of assholery.
Behe is an asshole because he acts the creationist cheerleader in front of creationist gatherings, and acts the controversial scientist in the NY Times. If he told the creationist gathering that while he believes god intervened directly, the earth is billions of years old and evolution does happen, I’d have great respect for him. He’d be poor, he’d be attacked by the nuts, but he would be able to look at himself in the mirror without cringing.

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I believe that the universe WAS created by an intelligent designer,the Entity that we know as the Easter Bunny but E.B. didn’t actually handcraft every plant,animal and insect but actually constructed the physical laws of the universe,put energy,space and time in place and let the program build life,the universe and everything as we now know it by itself.

Any god that worked on such an unambitious scale as to construct one planet and everything on it as it is now in six days would appear to be pretty small potatoes compared to E.B.

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[QUOTE=j666]
I have to disagree with that. The show was a surprising suspenseful account of the trial, but it did not present the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the evidence supporting evolution; it did not even present a compelling case against ‘irreducible complexity’.
[/quote]

Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree here. Was it a perfect show that presented all the evidence? Of course not. But the presented compelling fossil evidence, and explained a few very good examples.

I’m a scientist, too, and you’re not going to get a peer-reviewed TV program. They do not dumb things down like many such shows.

Where did I say it didn’t deserve a debate? It got one such debate on this TV show. I said it didn’t deserve being taught in schools, either as a good hypothesis or a bad one. It is simply one crackpot hypothesis out there and deserves no special attention by our schools. It is not a scientific hypothesis, and it makes no positive assertions that can be taught. The only attention it deserves is what it’s getting most of the time-- a smack-down in the courts when someone tries to slip it into the curriculum.

76

[QUOTE=LilShieste]
But anyone with an adequate education in the sciences should be able to identify the fallacies and inaccuracies in these arguments. I feel that any time that we devote towards countering a specific fallacious argument, is time that could be better spent elsewhere.

LilShieste (emphasis mine)
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I agree with you completely; I just think very few people have an adequate education in the sciences, or in the structure of a logical argument, for that matter.

77

We have enough of a challenge just teaching the actual core science-y science bits. There isn’t enough resources, room, expertise or time to teach even a modest bit of the actual science.

Even if there were, somehow, the fact is that ID is not science, and does not belong in a science classroom anyway.

Let’s burn through the actual, clearly unambiguously science-y bits before we start teaching ID or showing TAPS/Ghost Hunter re-runs in the classroom.

We can have a class called Politically-expedient Crap the Fucktard Parent/PTA/Schoolboard Weenies want Taught - make it audit-only, and elective, so that the legitimate students can opt out and take something useful instead…

We can’t prevent these idiotic abuses, but perhaps we can contain and clearly label them.

78

I completely agree. I think that people should learn about the types that generally occur, just without focusing too much on any specific one. (Kind of like the difference between teaching someone the fundamentals of bowling, and teaching someone the fundamentals of picking up a 7-10 split.)

Agreed on those points, as well.
LilShieste

79

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Also. If you seriously want to see ID taught in schools, you’re going to have to develop something you can actually teach. What is that going to be?
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Indeed, ID proponents are pretty vague as to how ID fits in with the rest of the science of natural history. What is the sequence of events?

ID seems to say to students, “Reject whichever aspects of science you disagree with and replace them with whatever ytou prefer to believe.”

It’s just a big smokescreen.

80

[QUOTE=cerberus]
We have enough of a challenge just teaching the actual core science-y science bits. There isn’t enough resources, room, expertise or time to teach even a modest bit of the actual science.
[/QUOTE]

Sometimes I wonder if science (and some other disciplines as well) shouldn’t be taught historically. Learning about how science has changed, the personalities and politics involved, the specific myths and ignorance and pitfalls that has to be overcome, and of course, the specific experiments that led to enlightenment. Just memorizing the end result of this incredible process seems to be denying it the rich context that puts it into perspective and give is meaning.