Friday, September 02, 2005

Dawkins and Coyne on ID


Several people have already linked to this Guardian piece by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. It's really great. Here is the key paragraph:

Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?

P.Z. Myers offers a short commentary on the article here. The Wikipedia entry on Richard Dawkins is here.

0 Comments: