“Intelligent Thought”
Starting with Daniel C. Dennett's "Show Me the
Science" and Scott Atran's "Unintelligent Design", the Edgies have been busy
writing OpEds and articles in leading newspapers and magazines bringing
"intelligent thought" to bear on the issues of the day.
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 a humanist view of science. Here's 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 Coyne
It 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.
Posted: Sat - September 10, 2005 at 05:00 AM