by Daryl Domning
Howard UniversityCollege of Medicine 520 W Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20059 USA Maryland Public Television 11767 Owings Mills Blvd. Owings Mills, MD | 11 June 2003 |
Sirs: I watched "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" on 10 June 2003, and am sorry to say I was disappointed. Although this program was presented as a science documentary, in fact it was no more than an elaborate infomercial for "intelligent design" creationism (ID). By failing to make clear that ID is currently rejected as pseudoscience by the vast majority of evolutionary biologists, it seriously misinformed the public about the present state of thinking in this field. There is certainly nothing wrong with making minority views in science known to the public. Minority views, however, bear the burden of proof; and truth in advertising requires that they be identified as such. Instead, this program was subtly designed to mislead. Some specifics: Near the end of the program, the narrator noted correctly that "intelligent design has sparked intense debate." If so, then why was this debate not reflected in the program itself? No opposing views were aired, despite the ready availability of prominent and articulate spokesmen for the Darwinian view, who have published extensive and detailed refutations of the contentions of ID proponents. An honest portrayal of this "intense debate" would have made for a more informative as well as more dramatic program - and would have revealed that the arguments for ID are simplistic and specious. As has often been said, extraordinary claims in science demand extraordinary evidence. ID makes claims that most scientists consider unfounded and that have so far failed to survive critical scrutiny. Worse, ID offers no testable alternative to the well-tested Darwinian explanations of biological complexity and adaptation. For this reason, ID is recognized by mainstream biologists as junk science - specifically, as merely the latest incarnation of the religiously-motivated "creation science" that our courts have justly banned from public-school science classrooms. The religious subtext of this controversy was kept almost entirely out of sight in the program itself, but the religious motivations of many of the ID proponents is clear in some of their writings and other statements. As a practicing Christian myself, I take offense at their misguided, under-the-table attempts to further Christianity by means of such flawed arguments. No cause is well served by bad science. Neither is public education, or public-interest broadcasting. | |
Sincerely, Daryl P. Domning, Ph.D. Professor of Anatomy Research Associate, Dept. of Paleobiology, Smithsonian Institution |
Reprinted with permission.