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Intelligent Design Challenge Any ID creationist organization, such as the "Discovery Institute," which has yet to live up to its name, often asks questions about evolutionary theory that are difficult to answer in sound-bites. Yet the grand questions of evolution require research, not mere obfuscation. Should the "designists" wish to enter the scientific arena, perhaps they should answer the following 10 questions. The first 5 are scientific challenges. The second 5 questions are of a social and political nature. Each is intelligibly designed to be answerable. |
| 1. The designists have touted "hypotheses" that have been "inspired" by ID "theory." But scientific hypotheses are often inspired by unrelated events or observations. State one testable hypothesis that USES Intelligent Design toward a practical purpose, e.g. the proliferation of bacterial resistant to antibiotics, that does NOT involve an element of chance. |
| 2. The fossil record of the early earth shows a clear sequence from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to muliticellular organisms, over billions of years. What "Intelligent Design" hypothesis explains that, and how can the hypothesis be tested? |
| 3. The fossil record of human evolution is arguable in detail, but not in generalities. Starting from over 4 million years ago, there is a clear sequence from Australopithecines, the earliest known anatomically bipedal primates, to early Homo to Homo erectus, to other transient beings, to Homo sapiens. Evolutionary theory fully explains this progression. What is the alternative hypothesis from ID to account for the fossil sequence? |
| 4. The human brain cannot survive and function without the circulatory system, respiratory system, and digestive system, yet the brain runs those systems. Is this a case of an irreducibly complex machine? Why or why not? |
| 5. Evidence of Design implies an "Intelligent Designer." Should the nature of the proposed "Intelligent Designer" not be a legitimate, and indeed important, focus of scientific enquiry? Or, put in another way, couched in the terms of "origins science," shouldn't science investigate the origin of the Intelligent Designer? |
| 6. When you insist that k-12 science educators "teach the controversy," should that include the "controversy" between "Young Earth Creationists" and "Old Earth Creationists?" |
| 7. It has been stated by ID proponents that the "scientific theory of Intelligent Design" is not ready for the science classroom. If so, how can one justify calling it a "theory" in the formal, scientific sense? |
| 8. Why do ID proponents object to ID being taught in such school venues as philosophy, comparative religions, social studies, or political science, when each of those venues is deemed appropriate by many scientists and educators? |
| 9. The so-called "evidence against evolution" differs only in detail rather than concept from the old "scientific creationism." As examples, we still hear about the peppered moths and the "Cambrian explosion," while Duane Gish's complexity of butterfly development gets changed to Behe's biochemical black box. Other than the age of the earth, how does "Intelligent Design" differ from "scientific Creationism?" |
| 10. It is one thing to convince the public of the potential of Intelligent Design research, and another to convince the scientific community. What kind of evidence-based research do you plan in order to legitimize your movement to the scientific community? (n.b. Citing the handful of scientists, engineers, and medical doctors who support you movement is not a sufficient answer.) |
If any individual or organization can honestly answer these questions within a truly scientific framework, I'll join them and help get their ideas published in the scientific literature ... even if I disagree in detail. There is nothing more exciting in science than a paradigm shift, and I'll support anybody who is up to the task. Meanwhile, science education should stick to the best science we have. At this time, as since 1858, when Darwin and Wallace proposed what has since become the theory of evolution through natural selection, the scientific mainstream remains behind evolutionary biology.