William Saletan has a great article on Slate.com on the fallacies of those proposing "Intelligent Design" (ID) as a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution; something being now proposed in Pennsylvania as a mandated part of the Biology curriculum.
The complaint that Darwinism can resort to an "infinite number" of processes misses the key word: processes. What makes Darwinism finite and falsifiable is its commitment to explain processes of evolution. Debunk one process, and Darwinists are forced to propose and test another. (For an excellent review of Darwinism's performance under empirical challenge, see Rick Weiss and David Brown's article in Monday's Washington Post.) What makes ID infinite and unfalsifiable is its refusal to explain intelligent design. You send your kids to biology class to learn by what processes living things evolve. ID doesn't even try to answer that question...
So here's what ID proponents are offering to teach your kids: They won't say how ID works. They won't say how it can be tested, apart from testing Darwinism and inferring that the alternative is ID. They won't concede it has to be falsifiable. All they'll say is that Darwinism hasn't explained some things.
(The full article: http://www.slate.com/id/2127052/)
In other words, ID doesn't belong in a science class! It's an anti-theory that cannot be falsifiable and is therefore by definition not scientific. It should be discussed, but in a Philosophy class not Biology. Of course sadly, few high school students are exposed to even the slightest bit of philosophical reflection; a tragic absense in anyone's education and one that, I think, partly explains what's wrong with the present system: no broader, multi-disciplined environment to discuss and learn to think about broad questions of human knowledge. And so ID continues to find itself more than ever where it does not belong.
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