Commentary: The Big Picture: Intelligent Design Revisited

Summary

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I wrote about Intelligent Design theory here in May of 2004. In that column, I said, in essence, that Intelligent Design ("ID") seemed good enough science to receive some consideration in the curriculum, and that critics who insisted on equating it with Creationism (obviously not science at all) were missing the point. In December 2005, Judge John Jones of the Middle District of Pennsylvania issued a encyclopedic ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F.Supp.2d 707, which addressed almost every conceivable issue about ID, including the ones I had raised. The case arose from the efforts of a school district to require biology teachers to read a statement expressing skepticism towards pure natural selection and encouraging consideration of ID. Jones struck that effort on First Amendment grounds.

I've been wanting to revisit the subject in light of Kitzmiller ever since, though as my readers know, I've been kind of busy with other questions. But my desk is now cleared.

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Commentary: The Big Picture: Intelligent Design Revisited

Turns out some of the things I thought were open issues really weren't, most notably the extent to which ID was passable science. ID, in case you've tuned in late, is the theory that we can best account for "irreducible complexities" that appear in the course of evolution by inferring the activity of an intelligent designer, most likely ...

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