In the Monday New York Times, William Safire discusses the history of the term “intelligent design” and the growing controversy over the theory. Safire concludes with the advice of neuroscientist Leon Cooper, a Nobel laureate at Brown University:
If we could all lighten up a bit perhaps, we could have some fun in the classroom discussing the evidence and the proposed explanations — just as we do at scientific conferences.
Excellent advice. Now cue up the Darwin-Only tape about how, next thing you know, we’ll have to teach the controversy over the geocentric model of the earth, or give the flat earthers a place at the table. Do the Darwin-Only lobbyists think they’re speaking to anyone but the choir when they make such analogies?
In addition to more than 400 Ph.D. scientists openly skeptical of Darwin’s theory, Q. 7 of a recent poll found that some 60 percent of medical doctors doubt the Darwinian account of human origins and, instead, consider some form of design as the preferred explanation.
Do these doctors moonlight as flat-earthers? Perhaps in the Flatland of philosophical materialism they do, but in the real world, where design is a settled or potential explanation for things like computer software and the software we find in living cells, these medical doctors actually know a thing or two about science, and more than a thing or two about the sophisticated machinery of the human body.