ID and its Discontents [Updated]

Not to be the last one at the party, but the buzz over Intelligent Design and its discontents is increasing in intensity.  Just last week in the New Yorker we had Hendrik Hertzberg's assessment of ID and its relation to the Bush administration, following on the President's recent suggestion that "both sides ought to be properly taught".  Hertzberg's anger is palpable, and his indictment is dead-on:

From the beginning, the Bush White House has treated science as a nuisance and scientists as an interest group—one that, because it lies outside the governing conservative coalition, need not be indulged. That's why the White House-sometimes in the service of political Christianism or ideological fetishism, more often in obeisance to baser interests like the petroleum, pharmaceutical, and defense industries-has altered, suppressed, or overridden scientific findings on global warming; missile defense; H.I.V./ AIDS; pollution from industrial farming and oil drilling; forest management and endangered species; environmental health, including lead and mercury poisoning in children and safety standards for drinking water; and non-abstinence methods of birth control and sexually-transmitted-disease prevention. It has grossly misled the public on the number of stem-cell lines available for research. It has appointed unqualified ideologues to scientific advisory committees and has forced out scientists who persist in pointing out inconvenient facts. All this and more has been amply documented in reports from congressional Democrats and the Union of Concerned Scientists, in such leading scientific publications as Nature, Scientific American, Science, and The Lancet, and in a new book, “The Republican War on Science,” by the science journalist Chris Mooney.

Of course, for a lighter take on the same issue, we also have this funny piece in the Onion.  Funny as in "chilling" of course.  Finally, the New York Times has started a whole section covering this issue.

But when you Google around to see who links to these things, one bumps up against some very well-organized groups, using tools developed by scientists (e.g. the web) to advocate their positions and monitor the opposition, like the so-called "Access Research Network".   The threat to scientific method is real, and seems to be making inroads.

Now obviously, I'd be the last guy to say that we shouldn't always be questioning our fundamental beliefs, and challenging our current conceptions of the world.  Scientific "consensus" has been wrong before so it's often healthy to remind ourselves about why we believe well-tested hypotheses like Darwin's evolution, and to push the envelope of its predictive power.  But it's an enormous leap between an open-minded, critical scientific debate, and boldly asserting "if we don't understand it yet, it might as well be divine intervention".  Far too many phenomena have revealed their mysteries under persistent scrutiny -- based on empirical methods, not religious faith -- to give up that easily.

So to rebut Bob Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man, there is certainly something happening here, and I think Hertzberg has pointed quite clearly at what it is.  And we better keep our eyes on it.

(Thanks to Alex, Dick, and Jamie for drawing my attention to various articles, and for some fun discussions.)

[Update: this really is on everyone's minds these days.  Gordon has a post on it, referring to the Cosmic Variance discussion...]

Comments

[Corey]

Of course, the most frustrating thing about all this is that there is no "debate" to be taught. But the more noise that the ID idiots make, the less clear that becomes.

I couldn't say it any better than these guys did:

http://www.randi.org/jr/081205another.html#15

http://genesis1.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/17comm2.html

http://genesis1.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/newsciart.htm

[Dennis]

If intelligent design is true, then God must be a squid! (or at least love them more than humans) After all, the squid eye is designed much more intelligently than the mammalian one, since the nerves and blood vessels aren't positioned in front of the receptors.

[Gordon Stangler]

It's the Flying Spagetti Monster!!!!!!!

Bow before His Noodly-ness.
RAmen