Intelligent Design

24 MB MP3

It might be Creationism in a cheap tuxedo, but a lot of people like the cut of that tuxedo.

Kenneth Miller

More than 20 states are thinking about challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution in biology classes with theories like “intelligent design??? — the idea that organisms are too complicated to be accounted for by natural selection, that our evolution must have been guided by some superior intelligence.

Proponents of I.D. aren’t always explicit about the identity of the intelligent designer, but the subtext is clear: it’s God. And virtually any biologist you ask questions the scientific basis of the I.D. debate. So here’s the question: what’s the political and cultural movement here? And if you believe in God but also in Darwin, is there another way you can imagine mixing religion with biology?

Kenneth Miller

Professor of Biology at Brown University.

Author of Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution and a biology textbook called Biology.

[by ISDN from RI]

Wes McCoy

Head of the Science Department at North Cobb High School in Georgia.

[by phone from Georgia]

Some interesting links:

A recent New Yorker article on intelligent design (written by a professor of biology at the University of Rochester)

A blog (ID the Future) from the Discovery Institute, one of the leading proponents of intelligent design

A blog (Pharyngula) written by a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that argues for Darwin’s theory of evolution

A blog (Salt) written by Episcopal parish priest Father Gawain De Leeuw at St. Bartholomew’s in White Plains, NY. Here’s his post on intelligent design.

Bush says on 1 August that intelligent design should be taught in schools