TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - The Kansas school board's hearings on evolution weren't limited to how the theory should be taught in public schools. The board is considering redefining science itself. Advocates of "intelligent design" are pushing the board to reject a definition limiting science to natural explanations for what's observed in the world.
Instead, they want to define it as "a systematic method of continuing investigation," without specifying what kind of answer is being sought. The definition would appear in the introduction to the state's science standards.
[...]
Stephen Meyer, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design, said changing the schools' definition of science would avoid freezing out questions about how life arose and developed on Earth.
The current definition is "not innocuous," Meyer said. "It's not neutral. It's actually taking sides."
It seems as though the Kansas school board is intent upon fostering job security for the nation's undergraduate biology professors for years to come. If an entire state starts producing high school graduates with the bent and lack of scientific rigor that will be the result of the current proposed changes, major universities will be forced to work their biology professors harder and longer -- perhaps even introducing a mandatory introductory course entitled "Undoing High School Biology" -- to counter the literal retardation that every Kansan secondary school graduate will undergo.
Or maybe the universities will just stop accepting Kansan applicants.
Stephen Meyer is wrong. Current, normal, acceptable, boring old science standards are not "taking sides". There are no sides. Science is science. The only thing it seeks to undermine is ignorance and irrationality. Meyer wins the second he convinces anybody that there are actually two "sides" that exist.
In the April 28th
Nature, there was an
article about the Intelligent Design creationist movement on college campuses. The article is good for several reasons, but the most striking thing to me was the way ID creationism is consistently characterized as being solely in opposition to something. The
Nature article is just one example, but articles always seem to mention the things that ID creationism
doesn't do and things that it
objects to and things in biology that it
takes issue with.
So what
does it do?
Nothing. The major reason biologists don't pay anything but derisive attention to ID creationism is that
it doesn't offer anything to the scientific community. It obfuscates, makes absurd, meaningless definitions and then claims victory when biology doesn't offer an "explanation" for the "definition" it just made up.
I can do this too:
The current accepted models of cosmology are limited because they don't offer a single cogent explanation for the astronomical phenomenon of Complicated Particular Infradominance (CPI). CPI is the common phenomenon associated with Doppler redshifting, especially in the increasingly important frammistan band. As more and more research demonstrates, the frammistan band is largely time independent, which leads directly to Blingwad Saturation in the quantum EPR Copenhagen interpretation sense. Since Blingwad Saturation hovers roughly at (rho-lambda)~7, current cosmological models have no hope of accounting for these increasingly common observations.
Some of us read these things and rightly have no idea what the speaker is talking about. Absent further explanation (or in the presence of further obfuscatory, meaningless exposition), we rightly conclude that the speaker is talking about the non-existent.
The snag is that the speaker's implication, of course, is that God did it. This is my favorite part. The speaker never makes explicit the creationist claim that the Christian deity is responsible for all things, but this is in fact the only chance he has for consistency and even a vague respectability. If he would only come out and say it, he would have some chance at honesty and legitimacy. His undetectable deity is potentially responsible for an infinite number of non-existent things. A crazy person talking about the non-existent makes sense to the rest of us. I
expect the clinically insane to discuss things that don't exist.
This is why old-school, young-earth creationists actually appear noble these days. They don't mince words. The Christian god did everything. Biology is evil. The young-earther is understandable and largely benign. The anti-science liars and frauds of ID creationism are potentially dangerous.
It's not the content of their writings and speeches (which, again, are not correct but are meaningless). It's the dishonesty, stupid.
And Kansas is on the verge of irrelevance.
