junk design

let's go into a little more detail than in the posting "don't look now" (below).

i think it's good to have public debate over whether intelligent design (ID) should be taught in schools. it's informative. the people need to be as informed as possible. a lot of misinformation gets thrown around in defense of ID, including nonsensical misquotes of jefferson and einstein as well as darwin.

advocates of ID claim it's a theory and that darwinian evolution is also "just a theory" or "a theory, not a fact."

like many words, "theory" has more than one sense. it's commonly used to refer to conjecture, which is little more than a guess, since it's based on incomplete evidence. the next level of explanation is hypothesis, which accounts for some facts but is tentative and needs testing. in the scientific sense of the word, theory is the highest achievement of science. it not only explains causal relationships between phenomena, it also makes testable predictions and is thus falsifiable.

perhaps ID proponents should say germ theory, atomic theory, and the theory of gravity are "just theories."

ID doesn't belong in science classes because it's not theory in the scientific sense. it only tries to refute darwin's theory, particularly the idea that evolution is not guided by intelligence. it doesn't propose a testable alternative. its basis is a claim that nothing can happen by chance.

that would surprise a lot of folk in monte carlo, las vegas, atlantic city, and a bunch of amerindian tribes who would've gone bankrupt long ago if nothing happened by chance.

it would also mean your computer wouldn't work, nor your cell phone, nor your microwave, nor your tv, nor even your electric lights and your car, because if the universe didn't operate according to randomness and chance at the fundamental particle level, quantum mechanics would be untrue—and quantum mechanics, the most successful theory in the history of science [it's passed every test so far!], must be true for all those devices to work.

one night a few months before 9/11 i stood on bleecker street talking to my friend charlie, an artist who sells his work on the sidewalk there. a guy walking toward us got our attention. he beamed blissfully and held his arms out to the sides with his palms up. he met our eyes and said "how can anyone think all this splendor and perfect order came to be without an all-knowing creator?"

across 6 avenue behind him, an electric sign over a travel agency had some letters lit, some unlit. above our heads air conditioners dripped on those passersby that failed to skip around the puddles. blaring car horns made me turn my head to check out a traffic jam at the corner of macdougal.

i looked back from the chaos to the man.

"how, indeed?" i said.