"The Columbus Dispatch"
Wednesday, January 2, 2002

Steve Edinger
Why intelligent design doesn't resemble science


Dr. Robert Lattimer is wrong when he claims that keeping intelligent design
out of Ohio's new science standards is censorship (letter, Dec. 27). As a
member of the Ohio Academy of Science focus group that recently reviewed the
life-science standards, let me explain the exclusion of intelligent design.
It is not science, in spite of Lattimer's claim that it is "the principal
scientific alternative to Darwinism.''

For intelligent design to be science, its proponents must state testable
ideas about how it works and conduct experiments or make systematic
observations to test their hypotheses. If the data support the hypotheses,
then you have a science. Proponents of intelligent design have never done
this.

Scientists normally write or tell people about the hypothesis they tested,
the methods they used to test it and the data they collected supporting or
rejecting their hypothesis. The way intelligent design works, as practiced
by proponents such as Michael Behe, is to look at part of a plant or animal
and say, "I don't know how this could have evolved naturally; therefore, a
supernatural creator must have made it.''

But notice that Behe has not demonstrated the action of a supernatural
creator. All he has done is admit he can't figure it out. Although
proponents claim censorship, Behe has written a book, Darwin's Black Box,
which is available at many local bookstores and online. How is that
censorship?

Intelligent design is excluded from the life-science standards for the same
reason geocentrism, the belief the sun circles the Earth, is excluded from
the standards: It is not science. Geocentrists also think their beliefs
should be taught in schools, also claim they are being censored by
mainstream scientists and also have Web pages. Just because a group has a
Web page doesn't mean its contents are scientific or correct.

Steve Edinger
Physiology lab instructor
Department of Biological Sciences
Ohio University
Athens

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Joseph Poulshock
A letter to "The Columbus Dispatch"

From: josephpoulshock@mac.com
Date: Thu Jan 03, 2002 10:29:59 Asia/Tokyo
To: letters@dispatch.com
Subject: Popular Misconceptions about Intelligent Design

Dear Editors:
Please be advised that Steve Edinger's January 2nd opinion piece 
promotes a number of popular misconceptions about intelligent design. 
I'll mention a couple.

First, he claims that biochemist Michael Behe infers intelligent design 
(ID) from biological machines through ignorance or lack of knowledge. 
But this is *exactly* what ID is not. It is not from ignorance that I 
*know* that only intelligence can make my favorite laptop and operating 
system. The design inference takes this intuition and makes it 
rigorous. Edinger needs to see Dembski's "Design Inference" (Cambridge 
University Press) before he makes this mistake again.

Second, the comparison between ID and geocentrism is fully 
unwarranted. Geocentrism, whatever it is, generates no real scientific 
questions or debate. ID, however, asks this most crucial question: can 
the mechanism of natural selection alone produce the exquisite 
complexity of information rich biological structures, or can only 
intelligence do that?

Hence, at the root, ID provides a critique and alternative to 
neo-Darwinism that tests the real limits of the mechanism of natural 
selection, and it is much more rigorous and scientifically circumspect 
than Edinger's blithe dismissal implies. Even some of ID's biggest 
critics admit this. So perhaps Edinger should read Dembski's latest 
book "No Free Lunch" (Rowman & Littlefield) before he writes again.

Joseph Poulshock
Doctoral Student in Language Evolution
University of Edinburgh
www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~naphtali/
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Associate Professor
Tokyo Christian University
www.tci.ac.jp/~naphtali
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Fellow, Discovery Institute
www.discovery.org/crsc/fellows
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