Who the fuck cares what religious leaders think about evolution?
Seriously, are we allowing artists or literary theorists dictate our
science curricula? These atavistic, knuckle-dragging morons
are the last people who should be determining what gets
taught in a science class. If they need to control some aspect
of the curriculum, give them phys. ed.—that's about the right
level for their intellects.
For some bizarre reason, neo-Creationists (and that's what the
"Intelligent Design" advocates are, whatever they say) just love
to use the second law of thermodynamics as an argument against
random mutations leading to greater complexity. Hey, you might not
have noticed, but there's this big, yellow, glowing thing
in the sky an average of twelve hours every day, and it makes
things hot. The second law applies to closed systems. That
means no outside source (or sink) of energy. It also applies
to entropy on the whole. There's absolutely no inconsistency
between the second law of thermodynamics and a piece of a closed
system becoming more ordered, as long as the order of the system
taken as a whole decreases.
Oh, and the "scientific debate" over evolution? Yeah, just when the
blue and red monkey-birds speciated is the lynch-pin of evolution. If
biologists can't agree on that, the whole thing must be wrong. Or whether
new features evolve only when there's an open niche due to extinctions or
whether they evolve constantly and rarely provide sufficient advantage to
oust the current niche-holder (or other members of their own species).
That's another major debate by which evolution must stand or fall.
People who claim that evolution (random mutations, competition for resources)
can't explain the variety or complexity of life are lacking in imagination.
Just because they can't see how it could happen doesn't mean it
couldn't happen. So their intellectual laziness should trump the
work of people who have spent years studying and understanding
evolution? Does anything else in life work this way?
Do evolutionary biologists understand every aspect of how every current
species (or really any current species) came to be? No, of
course not. The fossil record is necessarily incomplete, since fossilization
is so rare. Is this a problem? If you're trying to trace a complete
lineage (whatever that might mean, given evolutionary changes are extremely
slow), then sure, it's a problem, or rather an obstacle. If you're trying
to explain the origin of species more generally, then no, it's no problem
at all. Any particular lineage might be spotty, but there are so many
examples of gradual changes within large groups of species, and so many
observable examples of micro-evolution in the lab today, that the general
framework of the theory holds up very well.
Let's put this in perspective. Darwin's theory of evolution has held up better
than Newton's theory of classical mechanics. You know, that whole "F=ma" thing?
What they use to plot the trajectories of inter-planetary spacecraft?
Evolution has perhaps required a few tweaks over the years, as we learn more (and
isn't that what science is all about?) (unless, apparently, if you live in Kansas)
(OK, the 60% of Kansas that voted to appoint blithering idiots to the school board).
Mechanics required a substantial re-writing in 1905 when Einstein realized that there
was a fundamental limit to how fast things can go. Oh yeah, and then there was
the 1920's, when another group of physicists discovered that when things get
really small, you have to throw a whole bunch of the theory away and
replace it with something really weird (and I say this as someone who
holds a PhD in physics).
Intelligent Design is fundamentally intellectually dishonest. It's authors and
supporters shouldn't be telling others what to teach in science class, they should
take the class themselves. Who knows? They might even learn something.
