Not-So-Intelligent Design
For my dad.
Let me prefice this by saying that I love my country. Have you ever seen that episode of the Twilight Zone where the little boy had supernatural powers, and he was terrorizing his small town with his tantrums? He'd turn people into macabre Jack-in-the-Boxes if they displeased him, and he'd banish them into the cornfield. That's what America is like. We are the youngest superpower at the Big Kids Table, and baby, it shows. If someone pisses us off, we ruin their shit and banish them to the World Community's cornfield as a warning to others -- and honestly, who's going to put us in a time-out when we get a little too big for our collective britches? England? Germany? France? Russia? Pfft. Bring it, bitches.
Stay with me, I AM going somewhere with this.
Anyway, children have a remarkable capacity for faith and a seriously faulty bullshit meter. They believe in a bazillion and one impossible things -- that a poster-boy for Jenny Craig slides down your chimney once a year to lay gifts on the alter of consumerism, that a winged lady with a serious tooth fetish leaves coins under pillows in exchange for lost bicuspids, that the inside of golf balls contains toxic sludge, that a dime put on a railroad track will derail the next train to pass through, that stepping on a crack will bring bodily harm to one's mother, and that a hasty "circle circle dot dot" will protect one against the more virulent forms of cooties.
By the time you hit adulthood, you realize that gifts at Christmas appear under the tree due to credit cards as opposed to the generosity of a jolly old slave driver, that your parents steal your teeth from under your pillow while you sleep (and if they are especially clumsy you might catch them at it), that golf balls are hollow and one should not borrow daddy's circular saw to discover this, that dimes on railroad tracks just get smooshed, that no amount of crack-stepping will result in back-breakage for one's mater familias, and cooties are small potatoes compared to some of the things you can catch from a boy.
The point is, when kids believe in impossible things, it's cute. When adults believe in impossible things, it's mental illness...or religious faith.
America is pretty evenly divided when it comes to answering the question "where did we come from". Camp 1 believes that God created the Earth, sometimes in 7 days but occasionally over a span of millenia, that we're all descended from the first man and his derivative first woman, and that all events since our creation have been...if not directed, then at least overseen...by this benevolent Creator. Camp 2 says that the progenitors of Homo sapiens split off from chimpanzees roughly 5 million years ago, and went through several evolutionary dead ends (including Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis) before finally settling on Anatomically Modern Humans, who migrated out of Africa roughly 100,000 years ago and replaced more archaic populations in Asia, Europe, and eventually America.
I'm not going to argue the benefits of Camp 1 vs Camp 2...I understand why people gravitate towards religious explanations for our existance. It's incredibly comforting to think that there is someone out there who loves us unconditionally, and has a place reserved for us at His side when we die. Unfortunately, we have this pesky little thing called The Separation of Church and State to contend with.
Evolution is a scientific theory based on 100 years of research, careful analysis, and facts. It's not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it is the most reasonable explanation for our emergence as a species, based on the available facts. Religion is doctrine with no proof to support its tenets -- no facts but suppositions, no logical inference but the tests of faith.
I am not knocking religious faith, here -- people believe in all sorts of things, and that is our government granted right. If you want to believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is responsible for creation, or that the earth rests on the back of an elephant carried by four cosmic turtles, or that Raven shat the world following a great flood...well, that's your perogative. It's when you start imposing your beliefs on someone else that the situation gets sticky.
Evolution is taught in science classes around the Nation because it is a scientific theory. Social conservatives, who have long deplored this Child of Darwin's presence in the schoolroom, have fought for years to remove or replace it with something more palatable to their religious convictions. The flavor-of-the-month is Intelligent Design, which purports to be an alternative scientific theory that challenges Evolution's stranglehold on the classroom.
Okay, quick logic test. If a theory is based on a premise that can neither be proven nor disproven (like, say, the existance of God) does that theory hold up to the Scientific Method?
The answer is: "No." (as any self-respecting graduate of grade-school science fairs can tell you.)
So the question becomes, if Intelligent Design is not a legitimate scientific theory, why on earth should it be taught in a science classroom?
The answer is: "It shouldn't."
until next time...
Let me prefice this by saying that I love my country. Have you ever seen that episode of the Twilight Zone where the little boy had supernatural powers, and he was terrorizing his small town with his tantrums? He'd turn people into macabre Jack-in-the-Boxes if they displeased him, and he'd banish them into the cornfield. That's what America is like. We are the youngest superpower at the Big Kids Table, and baby, it shows. If someone pisses us off, we ruin their shit and banish them to the World Community's cornfield as a warning to others -- and honestly, who's going to put us in a time-out when we get a little too big for our collective britches? England? Germany? France? Russia? Pfft. Bring it, bitches.
Stay with me, I AM going somewhere with this.
Anyway, children have a remarkable capacity for faith and a seriously faulty bullshit meter. They believe in a bazillion and one impossible things -- that a poster-boy for Jenny Craig slides down your chimney once a year to lay gifts on the alter of consumerism, that a winged lady with a serious tooth fetish leaves coins under pillows in exchange for lost bicuspids, that the inside of golf balls contains toxic sludge, that a dime put on a railroad track will derail the next train to pass through, that stepping on a crack will bring bodily harm to one's mother, and that a hasty "circle circle dot dot" will protect one against the more virulent forms of cooties.
By the time you hit adulthood, you realize that gifts at Christmas appear under the tree due to credit cards as opposed to the generosity of a jolly old slave driver, that your parents steal your teeth from under your pillow while you sleep (and if they are especially clumsy you might catch them at it), that golf balls are hollow and one should not borrow daddy's circular saw to discover this, that dimes on railroad tracks just get smooshed, that no amount of crack-stepping will result in back-breakage for one's mater familias, and cooties are small potatoes compared to some of the things you can catch from a boy.
The point is, when kids believe in impossible things, it's cute. When adults believe in impossible things, it's mental illness...or religious faith.
America is pretty evenly divided when it comes to answering the question "where did we come from". Camp 1 believes that God created the Earth, sometimes in 7 days but occasionally over a span of millenia, that we're all descended from the first man and his derivative first woman, and that all events since our creation have been...if not directed, then at least overseen...by this benevolent Creator. Camp 2 says that the progenitors of Homo sapiens split off from chimpanzees roughly 5 million years ago, and went through several evolutionary dead ends (including Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis) before finally settling on Anatomically Modern Humans, who migrated out of Africa roughly 100,000 years ago and replaced more archaic populations in Asia, Europe, and eventually America.
I'm not going to argue the benefits of Camp 1 vs Camp 2...I understand why people gravitate towards religious explanations for our existance. It's incredibly comforting to think that there is someone out there who loves us unconditionally, and has a place reserved for us at His side when we die. Unfortunately, we have this pesky little thing called The Separation of Church and State to contend with.
Evolution is a scientific theory based on 100 years of research, careful analysis, and facts. It's not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it is the most reasonable explanation for our emergence as a species, based on the available facts. Religion is doctrine with no proof to support its tenets -- no facts but suppositions, no logical inference but the tests of faith.
I am not knocking religious faith, here -- people believe in all sorts of things, and that is our government granted right. If you want to believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is responsible for creation, or that the earth rests on the back of an elephant carried by four cosmic turtles, or that Raven shat the world following a great flood...well, that's your perogative. It's when you start imposing your beliefs on someone else that the situation gets sticky.
Evolution is taught in science classes around the Nation because it is a scientific theory. Social conservatives, who have long deplored this Child of Darwin's presence in the schoolroom, have fought for years to remove or replace it with something more palatable to their religious convictions. The flavor-of-the-month is Intelligent Design, which purports to be an alternative scientific theory that challenges Evolution's stranglehold on the classroom.
Okay, quick logic test. If a theory is based on a premise that can neither be proven nor disproven (like, say, the existance of God) does that theory hold up to the Scientific Method?
The answer is: "No." (as any self-respecting graduate of grade-school science fairs can tell you.)
So the question becomes, if Intelligent Design is not a legitimate scientific theory, why on earth should it be taught in a science classroom?
The answer is: "It shouldn't."
until next time...
posted by Sunny @ 2:23 AM
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