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I certainly agree with Penny Higgins that ID is not science, and should not be taught as science. However, in some contexts, I think it is worthwhile for students to consider more broadly how we form our beliefs so they can see clearly why it is that ID is not science. I think that this context, if carefully structured, could include college science courses (see my example below). I would not go so far as to advocate this for high school science courses in general, because I don't have enough confidence that the appropriate conclusions would be reached.

I am planning a college course called Evolution, Adaptation, and the Origin of Species. Will I include discussion of intelligent design? Yes. And,yes, my goal will be to promote the students’ critical thinking skills. But no, it would be an affront to their intelligence to ask them to believe that intelligent design and evolution can be directly compared and evaluated scientifically as explanations for phenomena in the natural world--this is precisely why ID should not be taught as science. Instead we will discuss the different ways in which we form our personal beliefs, including rational inference (science for example) as well as acceptance of ideas that have a religious or supernatural basis (divine revelation). The students will decide for themselves how they wish to construct their own belief systems, but I think they will conclude that evolution is the only reasonable inference based on the scientific facts, while intelligent design is an entirely different kind of belief, with no factual or scientific basis. Nevertheless, I think it is important for students in my course to understand this distinction in detail.

Posted by: Anne Houde / Lake Forest College on March 13, 2006 10:16 AM

I certainly agree with Dr. Pennilyn (Penny) Higgins' argument against the teaching of intelligent design and appreciate her very detailed explanation of what a theory actually is.

However, I think a more accurate explanation of theory is as follows. A hypothesis is an explanation for an observation. When that hypothesis stands that test of time and supstantial experimental evidence is generated in support of it, then it becomes a theory. Thus, evolution is not a theory at all, but an observation. The theory in question that we as scientists use to explain the observation of elvolution (or change) is the theory of Natural Selection.

Lastly, using the terms "prove" or "disporve" when speaking about science are inappropriate because you cannot prove or disprove anything in science. Proving/disproving requires facts (which are objective), and in science all of our knowledge and information comes from on interpretations of experiments (which are subjective), not facts.

Posted by: Trevor Cardinal/University of Arizona on March 17, 2006 11:58 AM

Dear Penny,
Nice article recently posted to the Stanford Teaching listserv. You have excellently hit upon all the points I think are relevant to the discussion. The whole ID movement bothers the heck out of me, I'm a strongly religious person, but also an engineering scientist, and see no contradiction between the two!

As it were, Philip Gingerich, a paleontologist here at Michigan, is a good friend, his two sons and my son are in the same grade at school, and I joke with him about children's toys that have cavemen attacking dinosaurs.

One note about a point in your article I would address. You state:

...the Theory of Evolution, which posits that all organisms on this planet are related through a common ancestor, and that it is gradual change over extreme spans of time that accounts for the diversity of species today.

However, I recently had opportunity to talk with Jonathan Weiner, the author of The Beak of the Finch. His book describes research which fairly strongly points out the visible evidence of evolution occurring in much smaller time-scales than you imply. Just a point of potential relevence.

Thanks again for writing the article!
Best regards, John

Posted by: John Norton / University of Michigan on March 17, 2006 12:08 PM

"ID is not science" is too narrow in its argument. It ignores the value of critical disourse in the classroom.

Critical Disourse
Traditional schooling treats students as mere receptors of answers. However, the type of students we need in our information-rich world, are those who can think critically about their learning. Discussions like these are hugely important in developing student's own critical consiouness.

Bridging the gulf, benefiting Society
There is a gulf of understanding between the two camps -- ID and Evolution. The author states that intelligent design is, "only observable by a chosen few." Science could also be perceived as closed, where a chosen few can participate. I don't believe either statement is true.

What if both camps worked together to improve each other's ideas and as a result accelerated what we know as a society? I would love to see a time where both sides invite each other to participate and challenge one another’s theories. There would be an exchange in vocabulary and concepts that would minimize the gulf and improve the quality of our debates.

Let's observe some data
I would be curious to see the result of Anne Houde's, "Evolution, Adaptation, and the Origin" course and other like courses. (See previous poster.) I believe students will come away with deeper knowledge of scientific thinking.

Call to action
When we look one layer above the actual arguments and observe what is happening, we see amazing opportunities to increase discourse in the classroom and within our institutions. Fundamentally, I would like to see our role as educators shift from traditional to critical-consciousness teaching. Teaching should shift from telling students what to know to facilliating how they learn. Teachers best serve as models to show how they personally continue to learn and grapple with the democracy of ideas.

All the best to you.

Posted by: Angel Inokon Master's Student Stanford on March 17, 2006 12:57 PM

Dr. Penny Higgins posted: "Scientists approach their work by asking testable questions (hypotheses), running the tests (experiments), and by always providing within the hypothesis some means by which the hypothesis can be unequivocally disproved."

Trevor Cardinal, U of AZ responded: "A hypothesis is an explanation for an observation. When that hypothesis stands that test of time and supstantial experimental evidence is generated in support of it, then it becomes a theory."
--------
Although many textbooks indicate that science only advances through controlled experiemnts, if this were true, we would not have an immense amount of natural science--certainly no plate tectonics, not much evolution and little environmental science. The late Stephen Jay Gould made the point that hypotheses can indeed be tested without experiments through what he often referred to as the method of historical sciences--a concept elaborated upon much earlier by T. C. Chamberlin as the method of multiple working hypotheses.

Students who are not taught that science progresses, not simply through controlled experiments, but also through elimination of weaker hypotheses that are shown to be weak through accumulation of increasing amounts of field evidence, leave a science course without actually understanding science.

Science is indeed based upon hypotheses--testable statements about the physical world that involve the realm of matter, energy, and change through time. Intelligent Design simply fails the first qualification by invoking a deity, which excludes the statement from the realm of being testable. If a teacher doesn't understand the qualification of "testable" one may as well consider that extinctions happened because a Creator had a bad attitude and include that in a college course on science.

Posted by: Idaho State University on March 17, 2006 01:00 PM

Dr. Higgins has done an admirable job in explaining the scientific method, and how ID and/or CS fail every sceince 'test'. But I have a quibble that may reveal why much of the public fails to grasp the essence of science and its methods. Dr. Higgins refers to the traditional definition of theory. viz:

"If a hypothesis is subjected to test after test over many years and by many different people and does not fail, it will most likely be elevated to the level of 'Theory.' The term "Theory" is science-ese for 'we are pretty darn sure this is absolutely true, but since absolute proof is impossible by the nature of science, we'll just call it something besides 'absolute truth.'" .

The problem is that there is much science for which 'we are pretty darn sure of its truth', and not nearly as many theories. There is many a well tested hypothesis that we should call theory according to its traditional definition. For example I cite the "Signal Hypothesis", a patently well understood process by which cells package and secrete proteins. While details remain to be discovered, none is likely to alter the 'truth' of the hypothesis, and yet we have not elevated it to a theory. I could cite dozens more.

Two obstacles mitigate against more general application theory to 'facts' (or near-facts) of science. One is common usage - outside science (and therefore percieved by the layperson as in science as well), theories are seen as a guess; I fear that we are stuck with this non-scientific confusion of theory with hypothesis. The other is that we have reserved the term theory for grand concepts that have stood the test of time (i.e., numerous tests). Theories are thus unifyng expressions of big truths. Let's bear in mind that even when a great idea was prematurely called a theory by its originator, it did not rise to its true status until after time and independent testing. "

Thinking about this, I conclude that we need a new term, lying between hypothesis (educated guess) and theory (unifying many differnt tested hypotheses). Maybe theopothesis... or hypotheory? BTW, if a theory is science that we are pretty darned sure is absolutely true, then what is a Law? - science that we are pretty 'damned' sure is absolutely true?

Posted by: Gearld Bergtrom, Univ. of Wiscoonsin-Milwaukee on March 17, 2006 03:16 PM

RE: 707 WHY "INTELLIGENT DESIGN" (ID) IS NOT SCIENCE

Although Dr. Higgins makes many good points, she misses a crucial one and
misstates another.

Missed: Scientific observation and logic can be turned against ID. I read
this one in a newspaper article by, I think, Daniel Dennett. Just find
something in the design of an organism which makes no sense as an instance
of "intelligent" design in the usual sense of the word intelligent, but does
make sense if evolutionary theory's processes give rise to organisms'
structure. Dennett's example was something about how the nerve bundles
exit the retina. An intelligent designer would have them exit out the back
so the bundle itself would not get in the way of any receptors. But that's
not how it is structured. The evolutionary sequence that led to the modern
eye structure could explain it, however.

Misstatement: That hypotheses give rise to theories. Actually theories
give rise to hypotheses; hypotheses are statements of what should be
observed under specified conditions, if the theory is true. Then if those
predictions are supported, confidence increases in the theory. The posting
told a story about observation, hypothesis, and theory that I also learned,
more or less, in high school, but which interfered with my understanding of
science for some time. I realize the original point of the article was to
communicate with laypeople...

Again, very interesting posting nonetheless. The blog replies, so far,
have been of interest as well. Thank you all.

=========================================================
John L. Michela, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
University of Waterloo
200 University Ave, W.
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1
Canada
=========================================================

Posted by: John Michela on March 19, 2006 02:23 PM

Dr. Higgins makes the same point that teachers of the theory of evolution have been making ever since the first theistic criticisms of the theory surfaced many years ago. While the bulk of her statements are right on target, I would like to introduce a (potentially confusing) twist on the topic.

From my reading, it seems that most proponents of intelligent design are not interested in debating the observation of adaptation (sometimes called microevolution) in the natural world. Significant changes in physical characteristics take place in populations over even short spans of time, and this has been documented in several cases. As with all "good" science, this has also been successfully tested by experimentation and has been demonstrated to be a sound model for what is observed in nature.

Where they differ with proponents of evolutionary theory is with speciation (sometimes called macroevolution). Even Darwin himself saw difficulty in this - we are forced to rely on a necessarily incomplete fossil record to piece together the history of organisms as we observe them. Without an inordinately long stretch of time, it cannot be tested. Never has a human being observed directly the transition from a common ancestor into two distinct species. Proponents of evolution create the hypothesis that this took place in a similar fashion to adaptation (microevolution), and call the package the Theory of Evolution (similar to the "theory of everything" in physics). Proponents of intelligent design say that this is not a valid hypothesis and state that all observations made until now support the hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

Until someone demonstrates directly the phenomenon of speciation, both "theories" are equally valid. This is the point that both "Evolutionists" and "Creationists" seem to miss...

Posted by: Jason Powell (Ferrum College) on March 20, 2006 09:01 AM

Previous posters have made the excellent point that ID should be incorporated into course material as a way to promote critical/dialectical thinking about the issues, and the original article and commentaries have raised excellent points about the scientific/logical fallacies of ID. I would like to add a slightly different take on another one of its logical fallacies.
It seems clear that the theory of intelligent design is being promoted almost exclusively by conservative Christians to bolster an unstated assumption, namely that it proves the existence of God. Evolutionary theory is anathema to them because it is consistent with a essentially random species-change: Species will evolve, to any extent possible, to what ever environmental changes confront them. Thus, a land mammal became a whale. To a conservative/fundamentalist Christian, this randomness violates the conception of a God who created the universe by fiat, with everything in its rightful (and therefore unchanging) place.
The problem is that the exact same argument could be applied (equally unscientifically, because it is equally unfalsifiable) to the theory of evolution: Only God could cause such astounding complexity to arise from a mechanism as simple as natural selection.

Joe Melcher, Psychology, St. Cloud State University

Posted by: Joseph Melcher/St. Cloud state University on March 21, 2006 11:47 AM

Good Lord!!

This problem has already been solved in well run religious schools (at the high school level also) that are able to teach the proper balance between dogma, belief, and observable fact.

The problem is not in ID or Evolution per se but where and how they are being taught. The biggest problem is in the public schools who are incapable by their structure to discuss or teach to the differences.

Actually I find this to be a wonderful example of why government run education is incapable of full and complete educaton of the stuident but that is another blog entry.

Look folks, go take courses in the Philosophy, Theology, and hard science departments before you write more P&T drivel on ID. You are complaining about a solved problem.

VJM

Posted by: Vincent Marchionni, semi-retired on March 22, 2006 08:39 AM

Dear Dr. Pennilyn Higgins,

I read the text entitled “Why Intelligent Design Is Not Science� written by you, and about that text I would like to write the following lines:

1. As I see, ID actually points to the possibility of the existence of a designer. It does not hinder the progress of science. But in some cases science may point to a designer. I would like to ask you to consider the following example: consider that you are driving along some dunes, and you see clearly the word “LOVE� on the dune. By observing it, I would guess that everybody would conclude that someone wrote that word, instead of concluding that that word was formed by chance. Of course, one cannot prove that someone wrote the word “LOVE�, since there were no witnesses, but the probability that someone wrote it is greater than the probability that it was formed by chance.

2. I would not argue about saying that the Theory of Evolution should be taught at schools, or Intelligent Design should be taught at schools. What I think is that unbiased science should be taught at schools, whether it points to the Theory of Evolution or Intelligent Design.

Kindest regards,

Dr. Joao C. E. Ferreira
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
Departamento de Engenharia Mecanica
Brazil

Posted by: Joao C. Ferreira on March 25, 2006 10:20 PM

The ID controversy provides a good teaching moment. The appearance of design in nature is genuine. The point to elucidate is that it is literally unimaginable that any single entity, no matter how infinite and ubiquitous, could have produced it. The scope and redundancy of nature is orders of magnitude beyond what anyone has dreamed as divinity or described as intelligence. On a lappier level, you can say, if you like ID, you'll love the Stalinist command economy. Oh wait, did that collapse? My bad. For the smarter students you can say, no problem--just think of logical system that is complete and consistent and you've got an Intelligence up to the task. Get back to me when you find it.

Posted by: David McCullough on May 27, 2007 09:45 AM

The ID controversy provides a good teaching moment. The appearance of design in nature is genuine. The point to elucidate is that it is literally unimaginable that any single entity, no matter how infinite and ubiquitous, could have produced it. The scope and redundancy of nature is orders of magnitude beyond what anyone has dreamed as divinity or described as intelligence. On a lappier level, you can say, if you like ID, you'll love the Stalinist command economy. Oh wait, did that collapse? My bad. For the smarter students you can say, no problem--just think of logical system that is complete and consistent and you've got an Intelligence up to the task. Get back to me when you find it.

Posted by: David McCullough on May 27, 2007 09:54 AM