I was tempted to call “Intelligent Thought” at Edge a “special edition”, but there’s nothing special about smart people thinking intelligently in support of science. In this regard, Edge is initiating an ongoing feature called “Intelligent Thought at Edge”, that will give members of the Edge community an opportunity to present their writings on evolutionary science to each other and to our readers.
www.edge.org is a wonderful place to exercise whichever portion of your mind deals with science. It gives me a 2-step into the meat of the discussion. Edge > Dawkins & Coyne.
Of the three essays in this initial collection, I feel this is the best. First published in the GUARDIAN.
ONE SIDE CAN BE WRONG
by Richard Dawkins & Jerry CoyneIt sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach “both sides” and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.” At first hearing, everything about the phrase “both sides” warms the hearts of educators like ourselves.
One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students’ weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.”
Among the controversies that students of evolution commonly face, these are genuinely challenging and of great educational value: neutralism versus selectionism in molecular evolution; adaptationism; group selection; punctuated equilibrium; cladism; “evo-devo”; the “Cambrian Explosion”; mass extinctions; interspecies competition; sympatric speciation; sexual selection; the evolution of sex itself; evolutionary psychology; Darwinian medicine and so on. The point is that all these controversies, and many more, provide fodder for fascinating and lively argument, not just in essays but for student discussions late at night.
Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for “both theories” would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?
The seductive “let’s teach the controversy” language still conveys the false, and highly pernicious, idea that there really are two sides. This would distract students from the genuinely important and interesting controversies that enliven evolutionary discourse. Worse, it would hand creationism the only victory it realistically aspires to. Without needing to make a single good point in any argument, it would have won the right for a form of supernaturalism to be recognised as an authentic part of science. And that would be the end of science education in America.
The good thing about building an education system that teaches both side of an argument is that it raises a generation that “knows”:
2+2 = 5 (if argued more convincingly than 2+2=4)
water flows uphill (must have been a mandatory course for the man running FEMA)
and all sorts of other nonsense.
This in turn builds a highly competive workforce that can stand toe-to-toe with those people in Canada, Europe, India, China and other places that the flat-earth geography courses missed.
If this continues, you Americans will need to have a visa program to bring in people to help you tie your shoes.
There is no controversy about evolution. What we have in the U.S. are a bunch of people of who refuse to accept evolution despite all the evidence supporting it. To believe something without evidence is to define yourself as a moron.
One of the most important functions of religion is to promote ignorance whenever possible. How else are you going to convince people that an invisible, and undetectable being created over 100 Billion galaxies on a whim. Much better to have a populace that has no idea of what a galaxy or universe is. Our religions in the west are as barbaric as any of the others we like to scoff at. Our advantage is that on average our citizens don’t follow the rules of our religions. If they did we would be undistinguishable from The Muslim fanatics.
What I don’t understand is that if your religion is important to you, why would you want it taught to your children by their high school science teacher? Wouldn’t it be a tad better if your kids learned religion from, I don’t know, your Church? What if the science teacher is Budist, Babtist, Jewish, or some other flavor that doesn’t quite match your own?
“When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.”
I wish that American journalists would get this pounded into their heads too.
I totally agree. I went to a moderately religious college and took a class in philosophy. I was the only athiest in the room when we started in on religious proofs for the existence of god and I destroyed anyone in the class who took me on in the debate. They simply had no ground to stand on and inevitably had to resort to saying “its just something that I feel in my soul” or some other nonsense that has no place in a land of structured proof like the philosopy classroom. But really, I thought that it was an insane thing to be debating in the first place. Why not debate the existance or non-existance of pink elephants on some distant asteroid. I guess my point is that teaching evolution in the classroom can offer little beyond bolstering the morale of the intellectual thinkers in the room and perhaps saddening them as they realize that these days of scientific achievement are tenuous and could easilly slip away and leave us back in another dark age.
Sure, one side can be wrong. In particular, that would be the side that feels justified in teaching that ANY scientific theory is so unassailable that it is beyond question even by other scientists. Talk about people who put on the blinders and scream, “Don’t confuse me with facts, I’ve made up my mind.”
The reason that the evolution-only crowd is so desperate to block even the tiniest vestige of discussion or thought that might raise contrary questions about their creation story, is that the more intelligent ones understand that this theory is necessary to undergird their PHILOSOPHICAL world view of materialism (now called–rather awkwardly–“physicalism” in some circles).
Undermine evolutionary theory in any way (for instance, by stripping it of its enforced monopoly in the public schools), and you open up a whole range of possibilities for alternate discussions about how we got here, and whether there may be more to existence than atoms and molecules.
It’s funny, you don’t see other scientists, and people in general, all up in arms about other aspects of scientific theory, say general relativity or the Big Bang for instance. Oh sure, you can always find a fringe who will believe almost anything–there are still serious people who think the U.S. moon landings were a hoax. But in general, you don’t see large crowds of people, and other scientists, protesting the teaching of general relativity, or many other scientific theories and laws, in schools. At some point, you have to ask why is that. I think it is because a lot of intelligent people are starting to grasp that there are two major problems with evolutionary theory:
1. They see that it is rife with problems. Evolution is more of a historical concept, some will claim they can see it happening in the laboratory, but only by applying an almost infinitely flexible definition of the word evolution. No one has ever seen a cell evolve through multiple stages to become a whale. Nor has such a scenario ever been contructed even hypothetically. How could it be? People get this, they see that while it’s clear there are adaptations and changes of form that take place, there are also obvious limits to those changes.
2. People also get that evolution really ISN’T all about science, it’s also a philosophy of life or a world view surreptitiously slipped in under the guise of science. Think how often all these wonderfuly objective evolutionary evangelists, like Dawkins, make these awkard, abrupt leaps in logic, from blathering on in almost religious rapture about the wondrous work of evolution’s invisible hand, to sudden statements about the non-existence of God or of anything that is not physical in nature. Can you say, non sequitur? People understand that there is a close linkage between naturalistic evolution and philosophical materialism, read atheism. Note that Jamie above makes the close connection between the two, he admits it openly, and so do leading writers in the field like Daniel Dennet. People understand that evolution is NOT really all about science, it’s also an attempt to slip a world view in through the back door, and they’re fed up with doing that at taxpayer expense.