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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Khaleej Times Online
Intelligent Design?
BY NOAM CHOMSKY
6 November 2005

PRESIDENT George W. Bush favours teaching both evolution and
"Intelligent Design" in schools, "so people can know what
the debate is about." To proponents, Intelligent Design is
the notion that the universe is too complex to have
developed without a nudge from a higher power than evolution
or natural selection.

To detractors, Intelligent Design is creationism -- the
literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis -- in a thin
guise, or simply vacuous, about as interesting as "I don't
understand," as has always been true in the sciences before
understanding is reached. Accordingly, there cannot be a
"debate."

The teaching of evolution has long been difficult in the
United States. Now a national movement has emerged to
promote the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools.

The issue has famously surfaced in a courtroom in Dover,
Pa., where a school board is requiring students to hear a
statement about Intelligent Design in a biology class -- and
parents mindful of the Constitution's church/state
separation have sued the board.

In the interest of fairness, perhaps the president's
speechwriters should take him seriously when they have him
say that schools should be open-minded and teach all points
of view. So far, however, the curriculum has not encompassed
one obvious point of view: Malignant Design.

Unlike Intelligent Design, for which the evidence is zero,
malignant design has tons of empirical evidence, much more
than Darwinian evolution, by some criteria: the world's
cruelty. Be that as it may, the background of the current
evolution/intelligent design controversy is the widespread
rejection of science, a phenomenon with deep roots in
American history that has been cynically exploited for
narrow political gain during the last quarter-century.
Intelligent Design raises the question whether it is
intelligent to disregard scientific evidence about matters
of supreme importance to the nation and world -- like global
warming.

An old-fashioned conservative would believe in the value of
Enlightenment ideals -- rationality, critical analysis,
freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry -- and would try to
adapt them to a modern society. The Founding Fathers,
children of the Enlightenment, championed those ideals and
took pains to create a Constitution that espoused religious
freedom yet separated church and state. The United States,
despite the occasional messianism of its leaders, isn't a
theocracy.

In our time, the Bush administration's hostility to
scientific inquiry puts the world at risk. Environmental
catastrophe, whether you think the world has been developing
only since Genesis or for eons, is far too serious to
ignore. In preparation for the G8 summit this past summer,
the scientific academies of all G8 nations (including the US
National Academy of Sciences), joined by those of China,
India and Brazil, called on the leaders of the rich
countries to take urgent action to head off global warming.

"The scientific understanding of climate change is now
sufficiently clear to justify prompt action," their
statement said. "It is vital that all nations identify
cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute
to substantial and long-term reduction in net global
greenhouse gas emissions."

In its lead editorial, The Financial Times endorsed this
"clarion call," while observing: "There is, however, one
holdout, and unfortunately it is to be found in the White
House where George W. Bush insists we still do not know
enough about this literally world-changing phenomenon."

Dismissal of scientific evidence on matters of survival, in
keeping with Bush's scientific judgment, is routine. A few
months earlier, at the 2005 annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, leading US
climate researchers released "the most compelling evidence
yet" that human activities are responsible for global
warming, according to The Financial Times. They predicted
major climatic effects, including severe reductions in water
supplies in regions that rely on rivers fed by melting snow
and glaciers.

Other prominent researchers at the same session reported
evidence that the melting of Arctic and Greenland ice sheets
is causing changes in the sea's salinity balance that
threaten "to shut down the Ocean Conveyor Belt, which
transfers heat from the tropics toward the polar regions
through currents such as the Gulf Stream." Such changes
might bring significant temperature reduction to northern
Europe.

Like the statement of the National Academies for the G8
summit, the release of "the most compelling evidence yet"
received scant notice in the United States, despite the
attention given in the same days to the implementation of
the Kyoto protocols, with the most important government
refusing to take part.

It is important to stress "government." The standard report
that the United States stands almost alone in rejecting the
Kyoto protocols is correct only if the phrase "United
States" excludes its population, which strongly favours the
Kyoto pact (73 per cent, according to a July poll by the
Program on International Policy Attitudes).

Perhaps only the word "malignant" could describe a failure
to acknowledge, much less address, the all-too-scientific
issue of climate change. Thus the "moral clarity" of the
Bush administration extends to its cavalier attitude toward
the fate of our grandchildren.

Noam Chomsky, the eminent US intellectual and author, most
recently, of Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the
Post-9/11 World, is a professor of linguistics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
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Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"

PRESIDENT George W. Bush favours teaching both evolution and
"Intelligent Design" in schools, "so people can know what
the debate is about." To proponents, Intelligent Design is
the notion that the universe is too complex to have
developed without a nudge from a higher power than evolution
or natural selection.

To detractors, Intelligent Design is creationism -- the
literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis -- in a thin
guise, or simply vacuous, about as interesting as "I don't
understand," as has always been true in the sciences before
understanding is reached. Accordingly, there cannot be a
"debate.

The teaching of evolution has long been difficult in the
United States. Now a national movement has emerged to
promote the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools.

In the interest of fairness, perhaps the president's
speechwriters should take him seriously when they have him
say that schools should be open-minded and teach all points
of view. So far, however, the curriculum has not encompassed
one obvious point of view: Malignant Design.

Ulike Intelligent Design, for which the evidence is zero,