This has already been brought up at The Panda's Thumb, but this open letter from UPenn faculty to the Dover school board deserves even wider distribution. I like it as a short, simple statement of why we shouldn't be peddling Intelligent Design creationism in classrooms.

5 January 2005

Dover Area School Board
2 School Lane
Dover, PA 17315

An Open Letter to the Dover Area School Board:

As scientists, scholars, and teachers, we are compelled to point out that the quality of science education in your schools has been seriously compromised by the decision to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design” along with evolution. Science education should be based on ideas that are well supported by evidence. Intelligent design does not meet this criterion: It is a form of creationism propped up by a biased and selective view of the evidence.

In contrast, evolution is based on and supported by an immense and diverse array of evidence and is continually being tested and reaffirmed by new discoveries from many scientific fields. The evidence for evolution is so strong that important new areas of biological research are confidently and successfully based on the reality of evolution. For example, evolution is fundamental to genomics and bioinformatics, new fields which hold the promise of great medical discoveries.

According to the York Daily Record (November 23, 2004), you issued a statement claiming that “Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.” This is extraordinarily misleading. While one can refer to the general body of modern evolutionary knowledge as “theory,” the same is true of all other scientific knowledge, such as the theory of relativity or the theory of continental drift. It is one of the hallmarks of scientific inquiry that all such ideas are open to testing and reinterpretation. That theories are open to testing, however, does not mean that they are wrong. Evolution has been subject to well over a century of continual testing. The result: Its reality is no more in dispute among biologists than, for example, the existence of atoms and molecules is among chemists.

Our students need to be taught the method and content of real science. We urge you to alter the misguided policy of teaching intelligent design creationism in your high school science curriculum. Instead, empower students with real, dependable scientific knowledge. They need this knowledge to understand the world around them, to compete for admission to colleges and universities, and to compete for good jobs. They deserve nothing less.

Sincerely,

Paul Sniegowski
Associate Professor
Department of Biology

Michael Weisberg
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy

Members of the Departments of Biology and Philosophy:

Prof. Edwin Abel
Prof. Andrew Binns
Prof. Anthony Cashmore
Prof. Brenda Casper
Prof. Dorothy Cheney
Prof. Karen Detlefsen
Prof. Zoltan Domotor
Prof. Arthur Dunham
Prof. Samuel Freeman
Prof. Warren Ewens
Prof. Steven Gross
Prof. Greg Guild
Prof. Paul Guyer
Prof. Gary Hatfield
Prof. Michael Hippler
Prof. Daniel Janzen
Prof. Peter Petraitis
Prof. Scott Poethig
Prof. Philip Rea
Prof. Dejian Ren
Prof. Marc Schmidt
Prof. Paul Schmidt
Prof. Richard Schultz
Prof. Tatanya Svitkina
Prof. Kok-Chor Tan
Prof. Lewis Tilney
Prof. Doris Wagner
Prof. Eric Weinberg
Prof. Scott Weinstein
Prof. Sally Zigmond

Associate Dean David Balamuth (Natural Sciences), Department of Physics

Contacts:

Paul Sniegowski
Department of Biology
University of Pennsylvania
Leidy Laboratories
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Michael Weisberg
Department of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania
433 Logan Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304

Just to pluck a few key bits out of it and expand on them…

"Science education should be based on ideas that are well supported by evidence." This is really the bottom line. We've got a lot to teach and relatively little time to do it in, so it's counterproductive to start throwing dubious ideas with no evidence for them at the little tykes. While it's also important to teach them critical thinking and to avoid dogma, it would be better to do so by discussing real issues in science, not these manufactured controversies designed to promote a religious dogma.

"The evidence for evolution is so strong that important new areas of biological research are confidently and successfully based on the reality of evolution." I know, this is one I hammer on quite a bit here. Scientists are ultimately rather pragmatic people who want ideas that get them results, fuel a research program, and as a crude measure of success, earn them grants and publications. Evolution has been an incredibly successful framework for guiding research. Intelligent Design creationism is not. Seriously—if Behe or Dembski or any of the other leading lights of modern creationism had offered me a useful tool to evaluate hypotheses in my lab, I'd jump on it. I've got a sabbatical coming up in a few years, and I fantasize a bit about some new research perspectives I could get, and the Discovery Institute has no appeal to me at all…but I've got a mental list of a half-dozen projects, all focused on evolution, that I'd love to pursue.

"Its reality is no more in dispute among biologists than, for example, the existence of atoms and molecules is among chemists." This can't be emphasized enough. Creationists claim that biologists are jumping ship in increasing numbers, that there's growing concern within the discipline about "flaws" in evolution, but it's simply an outright lie. Evolution as a theory has been so well confirmed by a century and a half of research that it is ridiculous to argue that biologists are abandoning it. Without exception, all of the people who have made this argument have been lacking in understanding of biology. This most recent letter from a creationist claiming evolution was irrelevant to biology was an excellent example of biological ignorance.

Now I'm thinking of annoying my colleagues here at UMM a little bit and asking them to approve putting a short statement disavowing Intelligent Design creationism on our discipline's web site^*, or if nothing else, at least a sentence agreeing with the AAAS Board Resolution on Intelligent Design Theory. I say "annoying" because if there is anything that is irrelevant and redundant, it is asking a modern biologist to endorse evolution. But maybe it's past time we all got a bit more assertive and squelched this nonsense more officially, even if we do find it hard to believe that anyone would take creationism seriously.

If you're looking for an official copy of the above letter on a site at U Penn, here is the pdf from Weisberg.