On October 21st, the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a forum on the issue of teaching Intelligent Design in the public schools. C-Span has Real Media videos of all three sessions available to view online at least through the first or second week of November. I haven’t watched them all yet as they total about 5 hours of video but I have heard it was a good event for supporters of Evolution.
Category: Anti-science
The cross examination of Behe highlights what is so wrong about Intelligent Design and the zeal of its supporters to get it wedged into school curriculums. They simply dismiss anything that doesn’t support their conclusions or they cry about being victims of politics.
Further on in testimony the discussion talked about one of the main charges ID’ers make against Evolution – that Evolution can’t be observed. ID’ers point out you can observe the “design”.
Michael Behe was asked if intelligent design is observable. Behe said it is. But when asked if he had witnessed newly designed structures appearing in the past five years. Behe said the designed structures that he’s written about are much older.
First up was Michael Behe, a Lehigh University biochemistry professor and author of “Darwin’s Black Box,” who is considered an expert on Intelligent Design (ID). He has written that “intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose,” but when asked to name the driving force behind the concept, Behe could not.
Contrast that with Evolution. Darwin named “natural selection” as its driving force.
Evolution is the scientific concept describing adaptation of organisms and how that leads to changes. Those organisms that don’t adapt or adapt incorrectly go extinct. It really says nothing about “how life begins”. That charge is simply a strawman created by religionists. The changes that evolution describes is backed up with evidence and hundreds of years of research. ID is not being kept from the table, it just hasn’t presented itself properly.
The most interesting bit from Barbara Forrest’s time on the stand was the introduction of an early draft of the text book “Of Pandas and People” that the Dover district included as a reference in their disclaimer about Evolution. The early drafts show that all the publisher did was replace all instances of the word “creationism” with the phrase “Intelligent Design”.