Sometimes, I’m embarassed of some of my colleagues in chemistry. I’m talking about the small subset of chemists who want to turn back the clock a few hundred years in the science of biology. The ACS has come out in favor of biology, but there’s still some chemists who don’t see the light.
I was looking in the October 24, 2005 edition of C&E News to find a letter to the editor about chemical technicians, since I’m working on a training program for chem techs. The letter immediately above the one about chem techs caught my eye. Unfortunately, the letters section of C&E News online is subscriber only, but I’ll quote the relevant bits here. It’s from pages 8 and 10 of the print edition.
Regarding the issue of intelligent design, I am disappointed that you seem to ignore the point of teaching different schools of thought.
It sounds like your idea is to teach only one view as long as it’s your view. If intelligent design were the prevailing theory taught in public schools and you wanted evolution taught, you would be crying for equal time, intellectual freedom, and a liberal education to expose students to a variety of ideas.
I’d like to apologize at this point for this guy. He doesn’t represent all of us chemists. (Neither does Mike Behe.) Really. Some of us are quite reasonable if you get to know us.
I’m getting really tired of this “All viewpoints are equal and should be taught” mentality. It might be appropriate in a philosophy course, or perhaps a course involving the interpretation of poetry – but in science, some views are correct and some aren’t. Some theories are well-supported and others aren’t. And we shouldn’t waste time is a high school level science course with theories that are poorly formulated and that lack any empirical support.
Intelligent design is a poorly-formulated hypothesis with no real research backing it up. That means no intelligent design in high school. Sorry, but that’s life.
I’m sure that this guy wouldn’t recommend that alchemy be taught in the schools instead of chemistry. How about homeopathy instead of medicine? (It’d sure save us a bundle not having to buy any real chemicals for drugs. It’d be a bad deal for pharma companies, though.)
How about taking half the time we spend talking about chemical reactions in intro chemistry and replacing it with phlogiston theory taught as if it were current science.
What is the matter – are you afraid evolution won’t hold up if students are exposed to other ideas?
Shouldn’t these intelligent design “scientists” get their work published in scientific journals before trying to inject it into the minds of high-schoolers who are learning how to do science (and who aren’t scientists already). What is the matter – are you afraid that intelligent design won’t hold up if presented to scientists who already know how science works?
Where is your cry to have students learn how to think rather than being taught what to think?
You know, I can almost agree with this. Presenting intelligent design in class would be a good idea if it were used to illustrate the difference between real science and fake science. You could talk about intelligent design and make the point that it’s fake science because it doesn’t explain anything, it doesn’t predict anything, and it’s unsupported by evidence. Put it right up there with perpetual motion machines, astrology, and alchemy.
But I somehow doubt that’s what this guy means.
Our science can, within reason, explain changes within species, but there are some big scientific problems in trying to make evolutionary theory be the only explanation for different species.
He doesn’t go on to say what those problems are, but I’d be safe betting that he’s got nothing that biologists haven’t heard of already. If he didm he’d be publishing in Nature rather than writing a letter to the editor in C&E News.
This elitist attitude within ACS about origin-of-life edication – which extends to cutting off discussion of or exploration into other ideas – is one reason why I am seriously considering resigning from this organization after more than 35 years of membership.
You know what they say – “Don’ t let the door hit ya on the way out!”
Seriously, though, it sounds like this guy buys into the evil elitist evolutionist consiracy theories that are going around some of the more fundamentalist churches these days.
It’s not about being “elitist”. It’s about using the very limited time kids have in high school science classes to expose them to the best and most important scientific theories available.
It’s not about “cutting off exploration”. It’s that intelligent design gives kids nothing to explore, and in fact actively discourages exploration by not wanting to tackle the characteristics of the designer(s) or the process by which the designs were done.
In short, it’s about teaching science – not bull.