News-Letter

In the eyes of certain scientists, politicians and swaths of the American public, intelligent design -- the belief that select developments in natural history point to the existence of a higher power -- just might be the breakthrough biological discovery of the new century.

I find this theory somewhat hard to believe. After several weeks of research, I have been unable to locate a single scientific experiment that might be used to validate, or even test, the theory of intelligent design. Yet at a number of universities and institutions, professors continue to promote this bogus, unscientific theory.

The conservative Discovery Institute is considered one of the leading centers for the study of intelligent design. According to Michael Behe, a fellow at the Discovery Institute and professor at Lehigh University, superficial resemblances and very, very select historical examples are enough to point to the hand of a higher power in biological development.

When I called the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, intelligent design's intellectual home base, nobody -- not the researchers, not public relations, not the front desk -- could so much as outline an experiment pertaining to the explanations their organization has promoted since 1996.

One would hope that, at least, intelligent design theory would revolve around a consistent, well-considered concept of the "higher power" central to its postulates. Not a chance. Instead of a unified community of minds, intelligent design enthusiasts represent a mishmash of theologies and philosophies -- which include everything from traditional Christianity to the doctrines of the Raelians, who believe that aliens guided several aspects of human evolution. I'm not making this up.

So why, then, has intelligent design gained so much traction, though everything about it spits in the face of the scientific method? As in the case of many other spurious dogmas, the key to success lies in the sales pitch, not the product. Even in the liberal-moderate media, like Time magazine and the New York Times, the adherents of intelligent design have succeeded in casting their agenda as a quest for academic freedom. To organizations like the Discovery Institute, this is not a battle between science and superstition, but a struggle between intelligent design iconoclasts and their "Darwinian fundamentalist" adversaries. Think of it as the Scopes Trial turned inside-out.

The downtrodden revolutionary status that intelligent design's disciples love to claim is sketchy at best. After all, few scientific martyrs have been openly supported by the president of the United States, the Senate majority leader and cardinals from the Catholic Church. Yet the airwaves have been ringing with horror stories of college professors who have lost their jobs and persecuted high school biology teachers who dared to "teach the controversy."

But what do actual, respectable scientists have to say about this? Professor Kyle Cunningham of the Hopkins biology department, when asked if the battle over intelligent design was a free speech issue, gave me a one-word answer: "Ridiculous." He noted, "They seem to think that this is the leading edge in evolutionary theory." Since he learned that schools in his Pennsylvania hometown would be teaching it, Cunningham has challenged intelligent design in public forums and letters to local newspapers. To him, "the movement is actually regressive, an offshoot of creationism centered around a rigid, religious agenda."

Unfortunately, the intelligent design avant garde has found a way to distort well-considered and worthwhile academic free speech policies, such as those endorsed by Johns Hopkins, to its advantage. The Hopkins Provost's Office stated recently that "the administration would not play any role in determining what the professor might choose to say about this [intelligent design] controversy."

Such a measured declaration, along with the Provost's statement that intelligent design is suitable for biology course discussions, could be quickly skewed by intelligent design's disciples as endorsements of their theories.

Yet, the "teach the controversy" approach -- the idea that intelligent design deserves classroom treatment as a valid challenge to Darwinism -- is actually a perversion of such eminently reasonable policies. Protections on academic freedom assume an adherence to progressive and well-founded intellectual subject matter. Those are criteria that intelligent design's quack explanations, experiment or no experiment, will never fulfill.

So will intelligent design go down in scientific history along with such other learned fields as sorcery, astrology and voodoo ritual? In my next column in this series, I will delve deeper into the ideological climate that spawned the latest challenge to Darwinism and how -- politically and philosophically -- it has found a home with the American public. Still, intelligent design is not without value. According to Cunningham, studying intelligent design has one important function in the classroom: it is the perfect demonstration of what a scientific theory is not.

--Patrick Kennedy is a sophomore chemistry and political science major from Watchung, NJ.

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