Intelligent design
Please post your comments and suggestions for this article.
Comment by Lemke on June 8th, 2010 at 11:59 am
I found your articles on ID (Intelligent Design) and Ernst Haeckel to be fair and unbiased. You are now my encyclopedia of choice. The bias within Wikipedia has finally reached a point that I have lost trust in the enterprise as a whole.
Comment by kgreen on June 10th, 2010 at 5:23 pm
The article on Intelligent Design is an example of poor scholarship. You might as well just put a link to Discovery Institute’s own version of what they are, even though they have been shown to be dishonest. Do your articles on North Korea show happy children and well-fed adults toasting the Dear Leader?
Comment by Rosemary king on November 11th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Thank you for the unbiased articles on ID. New ways are often bashed and swepted under the rug. I feel the resistance
to at least explore both Darwinism and other possibilities in school, tying the hands of future scientists.
If we are to only teach, and made to believe a narrow, and sometimes, ‘rush to prove’, theory, why don’t we still believe the world is flat? Because people were allowed to explore further, with open minds.
Comment by thabani south africa on February 17th, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Now I feel I’m adequately informed in the ID theory and I am proud to say the presentation is fair, unbiased and not appealing to judgement. I think the reason why most scientists decide to side with Darwin’s theory is because there hasn’t been another discovery after the evolution theory and now that great discoveries are emerging, they oppose them only because the center of the conclusion thereof has an independant intelligent agent who is most assuredly a God (regarding the supernaturality charecteristic of the agent\designer).
Comment by Mary Jacobs on November 18th, 2011 at 9:04 pm
Unfortunately, I fear that there is a severe misunderstanding of the process of natural selection. The definition provided by this page is “Intelligent design (ID) is the view that it is possible to infer from empirical evidence that ‘certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.'” The main issue is found within the statement of “‘ an undirected process such as natural selection.'” To my knowledge, natural selection is the direct opposite of random and “undirected” for it acts upon favorable traits. The environment an organism is in is a vicious battle, for only the individuals with the most fitness survive this battlefield, and can then reproduce and pass on those successful genes. Those individuals who have a genotype and phenotype with less fitness are unable to survive in the environment, and therefore are incapable to reproduce and pass on detrimental genes to the population. This being said, mutations are and can occur spontaneously, thus being “undirected.” However, those mutations are then acted upon by the environment they are in. Evolution is often described as, “the non-random survival of random variants;” the “non-random survival” being the active process of natural selection.
Intelligent Design is a present theory. However, I struggle to see where it can be expanded upon. Where is the investigation? The theory establishes and recognizes an Intelligent Designer, and that seems to be where the bread crumbs end. The answer is already there. Through myopic and specious statements about natural selection, the Intelligent Design Theory loses credibility. Please, I welcome criticism and commentary. Let’s not partake in petulant stabs, and maintain professionalism. I do not have a biological background.
Comment by Rick Swarts on November 20th, 2011 at 12:54 pm
Thank you, Mary, for your cogent observations. You have a valid point regarding the presentation of natural selection as an “undirected process.” I would like to add, however, the good overview of this issue by eminent evolutionist Ernst Mayr, in his book titled “What Evolution Is” (2001). He presents natural selection as a two-step process, with both chance and non-chance elements. The first step is the processes giving rise to the new variation, and “chance rules supreme at this step.” The second step, as you have noted, is the nonrandom aspects related to survival and reproduction. Mayr specifically states: “At the first step, that of the production of genetic variation, everything is a matter of chance. However, chance plays a much smaller role at the second step, that of differential survival and reproduction.” (He does note that even for the second step, “there are also many chance elimination factors… Natural catastrophes, like flood, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, lightning, and blizzards, may kill otherwise highly fit individuals. Furthermore, in small populations superior genes may be lost owing to sampling errors.”
Thus, one could make a case for natural selection having both an undirected and a directed component, unless one is limiting the definition of natural selection specifically to the second part in the two-step process. (I myself favor this limitation of the term, because of its precision, but as you can see, some, including perhaps the main authors of this ID article, use a broader definition). However, it would be incorrect to call natural selection a purely undirected process. I do not believe the authors intend such.
Comment by Joshua Landry on July 1st, 2013 at 9:41 am
This article is far from unbiased. It has been proven by the movements own literature that the ID is literally creationism relabeled. This was show by comparing drafts of the textbook “Of Pandas and People” http://ncse.com/creationism/legal/cdesign-proponentsists
Science is not an opinion and your article should not be presenting it as such. This is a blatant misrepresentation, not a balanced article.
Comment by Eddy del Rio on September 1st, 2013 at 8:58 am
Factually correct and lacking all the politics and ideology found elsewhere! Way to go!
The Pro-ID Books section is pointedly and arguably lacking the two most important tomes of recent years: Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, and Darwin’s Doubt. Please someone add.
Comment by Evan Finkelstein on February 17th, 2015 at 4:34 pm
I found this article to be fair-minded and balanced on the various sides of the issue. In my view, those who objected to it, claiming the article to be inaccurate and biased, are possibly revealing lack of knowledge of the subtlety, breadth and depth of the subject, and a narrowness of vision likely resulting from a strong personal bias that disallows genuine, open-minded, scientific inquiry and analysis. I have found that ignorance can often exist without arrogance, but that arrogance can never exist without ignorance. It is commonly accepted within the scientific community that there are various opinions and perspectives that can be derived from the same body of data generated via well-executed scientific methodologies. One’s own perspective on or interpretation of that data does not constitute a “scientific fact.” It does not serve science well when one conflates a perspective on data with the data itself. I think that when this occurs, personal interpretation is mistaken for scientific fact and all those who disagree with the interpretation are considered to be anti-science. Can there be anything more unscientific than that? Let us pray to the completely closed system of the materialistic universe that nature may select for us a bit more humility and clearer thinking. Thank you for your excellent article on this topic. I learned a lot from it.
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