Kansas, what hallucinogenic drugs have you been taking recently? I’ve recently heard in some depressing news that Kansas has decided to teach not only evolution but also the “alternative view”: intelligent design.

Like many others, I feel that intelligent design is merely creationism dressed up as pseudo-science. From what I can tell, Kansas has opted to ‘teach the controversy’, a phrase taken from an article I read. As far as I have ever heard, there is essentially no controversy among the scientists studying evolution - they nearly all concede that it happened, but the details are still being worked out. There are a few things I’ve noticed in reading about it that have really irked me:

Apparently, the claim that humans share a common ancestor with apes (the ABC article I linked to incorrectly implies that monkeys are our closest relatives - they are not) seems to be hard to swallow for those supporting intelligent design. Why? If evolution happened at all then we must share a common ancestor with modern day apes unless you are willing to say that humans and apes developed along completely different branches of evolution and just happened to converge on very similar body plans.

This sort of thing has happened before, many times actually. It’s called convergent evolution, and a good example of it is with eyes - human eyes and octopus eyes developed along distinct lines of evolution. They are designed (of course I don’t mean this in the literal sense, but as shorthand for ‘appear as if designed’) for the same purpose - seeing - yet they are very different in structure. They are different solutions to the same problem. As it turns out, octopus eyes are actually much better designed (remember the shorthand) than ours are.

The point of my convergent evolution example is to illustrate that, while it’s possible that the resemblance of apes’ and our heads, eyes, arms, and behaviors are the result of convergent evolution, it is extremely unlikely because of the evidence that we share huge portions of DNA in common with them as relates to our common features. The chance that the variety of problems needing to be solved by apes and humans were solved in almost the same way, with almost the same genetic code, with almost the same historical baggage (e.g. post-anal tail), and without sharing a common history is so small as to, in my mind, make it a possibility not worth considering without significant evidence to support it.

Why the hesitation to admit that humans could have shared a common ancestor with apes? I believe it is a problem of dignity which the intelligent design community has inherited from the creationist movement. For more information on the plausability of evolution and a well-written account about it, see Richard Dawkins (also this paper about ID).

In all, I see it as shameful that fundamentalist Christian groups are using the political process to further their aims at the expense of science and reasonable Christians. I’ll be writing more about this later, I think.