Intelligent debate

When you think of adjectives to describe a "scientist" what sort of words first come to mind? Chances are you wouldn't place "emotional," "exaggerating" or "closed-minded" at the top of your list. In fact, you would probably come up with near antonyms: words like "calm," "cautious" and "inquisitive."

However, if you just mention the words "Intelligent Design in the classroom" around some scientists here at Penn, you'll find that their pulses quickly rise, their faces rouge and before you know it they have moved from your "cool and collected" column to "fiery and flushed." They may even begin to use their own set of adjectives and adverbs: emphatic ones, in phrases like "extremely inappropriate," "extraordinarily misleading," "seriously compromised" and "tremendous disservice."

In fact, scientists here have recently used all of these emotionally-charged phrases in reference to Intelligent Design education and the supposed negative impact that it will have on students. By the language used, you'd never know that these men and women are researchers. On the contrary, you might assume they are clergy or politicians.

Unfortunately, that's how the Intelligent Design debate rages on; there is typically a surfeit of emotive rhetoric on both sides and a paucity of well-thought out argument in either camp.

For example, two of the above quotations were taken from an open letter to the Dover (Pa.) Area School Board from faculty members within Penn's Departments of Biology, Philosophy and Physics. The letter strongly condemns the school board's decision to mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design in addition to evolution, calling it "propped up by bias" and saying that students should be taught the "method and content of real science" instead.

While our faculty members may be correct, nowhere in their letter is evidence of this "bias" presented or the actual "method and content" of genuine science specified. Perhaps they assume the people reading their letter are impervious to reason. But if that's the assumption, why write the letter in the first place?

The two other emphatic phrases were taken directly from comments by Drs. Paul Sniegowski and Michael Weisberg, of the Biology and Philosophy Departments respectively, in a DP article equally devoid of substantive dialogue.

Similarly, I have listened in on many heated anti-"evolution" conversations in religious circles where leaders and lay people have spoken with assumed authority about a topic they do not understand.

It's time for all of us to put an end to our unfair generalizations that all "evolution" is either the devil's tool or the gospel truth and engage in an intelligent conversation about Intelligent Design.

Those of us in research professions do indeed need to be reminded what science really is. At its core, science is firmly based on what can be repeatedly observed in the present. Without observation, there is no science. We do, however, make predictions about things we cannot see, such as the future, or in this case the past, based on things that we can see here-and-now.

But we should realize that science can neither unquestionably predict the future nor absolutely illuminate the past. It merely provides us with observations of present reality on which we can make educated assumptions.

This is especially true when it comes to the question of human origin. While we do have a lot of good observable evidence that humans do evolve -- through so-called "micro-" evolution -- we have at least an equal number of assumptions that need to be made before we can reach the conclusion that all living organisms had a common biological ancestor.

Among these is the major supposition that evolution on a micro scale not only can, but did facilitate larger "macro" changes over millions of years, an event that we can observe indirectly at best.

The theory of Intelligent Design, which provides an alternative explanation of the observed data, is equally founded on its own set of inferences, as many scientists here have been eager to point out.

Unfortunately, many of those same researchers hold the unfounded notion that the accompaniment of Intelligent Design education with Darwinian curriculum is detrimental. They imply, as the open letter to Dover does, that Intelligent Design theory entirely excludes and opposes all "evolution," when in fact it does not. Additionally, they cite research fields, such as genomics and bioinformatics, as fundamentally dependent on a Darwinian view of the origin of species. In reality, what these fields rely on is an understanding of homology between species, similarity which could alternatively be the result of a common creative origin.

If we're going to talk about Intelligent Design, let's be honest and fair. We should define what we mean by "evolution" and approach the subject as scientists: calmly, cautiously and with open-minds.

Andrew Rennekamp is a first-year Biomedical Ph.D. student from East Stroudsburg, Pa. Any Ice Today Lady? appears on Tuesdays.

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