Stop whining about intelligent design

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Serious medicine can't ignore evolution
State anti-evolution statues proliferated after the Scopes trial until a 1969 Supreme Court decision held them unconstitutional because they served a religious purpose.

Evolution’s opponents returned with creation science. Several states and school districts mandated it to be taught at least along with evolution as an alternative explanation for the origin and variety of life. In 1986 the Supreme Court held it to be a thinly-disguised religious interpretation.

Now we have intelligent design, the well-funded doctrine that holds that some things in nature are so complex they can be explained only by some designer. ID’s backers insist they offer a genuine scientific alternative to Darwinism.

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Federal district Judge John Johns III in his decision last December about the Dover school board said intelligent design, too, is religious belief masquerading as science. Many scientists have been gloating in the wake of Judge Jones’ decision, but that will serve their purpose no better than did the ridicule of Bryan and his followers more than 80 years ago.

This debate is not about to end.

Science is something very specific. It is a means of understanding the world around us by posing hypotheses that can be tested with experiments or observations. But science can never help us make moral or value judgments like those the new physicians will face.

Serious efforts in biology and medicine can no more ignore evolution than airplane designers can ignore gravity.

It is hard to believe that — whatever the outcome in the many evolution battles — we will stop worrying that the H5N1 bird flu virus might evolve into something easily transmissible among humans.

It is far more difficult to know what moral values should guide our decisions, and perhaps we should put more effort into helping students grasp that reality.

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