Intelligent Design?
The closed minds of California’s education establishment…
[by Ray Haynes] 10/10/05

A new debate has begun over the question of the origin of the species, and our Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O’Connell, has weighed in on the subject. Last week he announced that California schools would never teach the theory of “intelligent design.” No mater what the science says, he proclaimed, California would always teach evolution.

I can understand how anyone who has spent most of his life in government, like O’Connell, would come to the conclusion that creation is an act of pure random chance, since most government action is purely random, and largely unsuccessful. Most government programs spend eternity crashing into peoples’ lives, occasionally ruining them, mostly annoying them, and generally costing them money unnecessarily. There is certainly no intelligent design in government.

Science, however, is beginning to question the origin of the species. The problem with evolution is that, although it purports to be a complete theory about how we came about, it cannot explain some of the things that science is discovering about how we work. Evolution says more complex biological systems “evolved” from less complex systems, so, as we study the more complex systems, we should be able to figure out from which less complex systems the more complex systems evolved.

But we can’t. In fact, some scientists have discovered the problem of “irreducible complexity,” which essentially means that no less complex system can be found from the complex system being studied.

In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn talks about how scientific theory is explained. Most of us are taught from high school that science develops tests to study the facts, comes up with a theory about how those facts relate to each other, and that is how knowledge is developed. Kuhn disputed this explanation. He claimed that science comes up with a theory, which he calls a paradigm, develops tests based on those paradigms to discover the facts to prove the paradigms. When the tests, however, come up with facts that dispute the paradigms, anomalies as he calls them, the paradigm begins to break down, and a “paradigm shift” occurs. Some in academics cling desperately to the old paradigm, but soon, all science begins to reject the old paradigm, and a new “theory” of science replaces the old.

Evolution is reaching the point of a paradigm shift. As scientific and technical knowledge advances, new tests based on evolution are being developed, except these new tests are developing facts that cannot be explained by the theory of evolution. The response of the defenders of evolution in some cases is to attack those who question the theory, rather than seek to develop facts to prove their critics wrong. Evolution, in some quarters, is accepted as an article of faith, and those who don’t accept the faith are figuratively burned at the stake as “scientific” heretics.

I thought we had moved beyond hemlock, prisons, and witch hunts in academia with the passing of Socrates, or the jailing of Galileo. Unfortunately, evolution has become a sacred belief, with Darwin’s writings as the scripture, and those who question the church of evolution are treated as heathens. Shouldn’t science be about discussing and testing alternative theories of nature and natural occurrences? Do we simply reject a fact of nature because it doesn’t fit into our “world view” of how nature is, or should be, organized? Certainly Jack O’Connell thinks so. No longer the Superintendent of Public Instruction, he has chosen to become the High Priest of Darwinian Evolution.

I thought our left wing friends were the chief proponent of an open-minded approach to education. This latest attack on the critics proves them to be exactly what they are, doctrinaire censors of open scientific discourse, true heirs of the collectivist ideology they promote and protect. CRO

Mr. Haynes is a California Assembleyman representing Riverside and Temecula and frequent contributor to CaliforniaRepublic.org.

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