Intelligent Design for Dummies, Part 1
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
Stephen Jay Gould’s discussion of the panda’s thumb in his essay of the same name, originally published in 1978, is often misrepresented as describing the false thumb of Ailuropoda melanoleuca as ineffective in practice rather than as inelegant in origin. A recent incidence of such misrepresentation prompted Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education to provide his discussion of a similar misrepresentation in a 2000 cartoon presentation of intelligent design, originally published on the Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science website in two parts on August 15 and 16, 2002. The following appears here in conformity with Metanexus’s republication policy and with Branch’s permission. Minor changes, primarily regarding punctuation, have been made invisibly, and a few updates have been included in square brackets. This is part 1 of 2.
Intelligent design, according to Michael Behe,
must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur, and Darwin. The observation of the intelligent design of life is as momentous as the observation that the earth goes around the sun or that disease is caused by bacteria or that radiation is emitted by quanta (Behe 1996: 232–233).
Such a great scientific achievement, of course, deserves a careful exposition in a suitably scholarly format. But instead what it received is What’s Darwin Got to Do With It? (henceforth, for brevity, WDGDWI), Robert C. Newman and John L. Wiester’s cartoon treatment of intelligent design (Newman and Wiester 2000).