ID BS in NYT

No, I'm not talking about the bullshit articles on the "scientific controversy" over Intelligent Design published a week or so ago. Here the initials stand for Intelligent Design BitchSlapped in New York Times, (by Op-Ed contributor Daniel Dennett.) Dennett is one of many guys writing intelligently about Darwin (Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life ), and he elegantly exposes the ID scam in this essay.

Intelligent design is a hoax, he says, and it exploits common human fraillties just like every other scam.

The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists. ...Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more unpacking.

A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:

Test Two

Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]
...

The idea, of course, is to promote the "whoa, wait, how could all this design have happened by accident?" reaction.

It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.

Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.

Dennett explains an important case, the evolution of the eye, in some detail, but his larger point is that ID doesn't really have a theory - there is no science in it.

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

ID does nothing like this - if it could it would be science, and produce lots of peer reviewed articles.

So how does the scam work? How would you suck in, say, a couple of gullible NYT reporters?

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

The scam is perfect, since the con man isn't presenting any content. ID isn't a theory, it's a smokescreen.

Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection.

The peculiar thing is that even the proponents concede this point.

For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it is: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content."

Dennett does have an idea for teaching about Intelligent Design in the schools though.

Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?