Excellent
texte sur l’inutilité d’enseigner l’ID (trouvé dans le
Skeptic’s Refuge de R.T. Carroll), soulignant la stérilité de cette thèse :
« Why ID is not part of the biology curriculum
1. Scientific achievement: ID has achieved nothing so far, and is unlikely to achieve anything of interest to science in the future. It has not aroused the interest of scientists actively doing research in biology. In short, we don't want to waste your time.
[ndJF : L’ID - comme le créationnisme - est particulièrement stérile sur le plan scientifique (et même contre-nature humaine) car il demande un arrêt de la curiosité. Cela parce qu’il pose comme axiome que des structures ne peuvent être le produit d’une évolution naturelle mais ont été intelligemment conçues sans donner aucun moyen, autre qu’arbitraire, de reconnaître comment cette supposée Intelligence se manifeste (qu’elles sont ses caractéristiques, ses limites, etc. ? Questions auxquelles il est impossible de répondre). La manière de régler les questions scientifiques revient, si l’on suit l’ID (ou le créationnisme, qui est seulement moins élaboré), à choisir la facilité: on peut pas savoir donc c'est "IDesigné". De plus, l’ID suppose que des mécanismes inconnus et hors de la portée humaine ont servi à la création de ces structures, l’acquisition de connaissances véritables serait donc utopique. Ce n’est évidemment pas ce à quoi la science - celle qui fonctionne pas celle dont on usurpe le nom - nous a habitué.]
2. Other achievements of ID: ID has created much confusion among politicians, the media, and the general public by repeatedly asserting the lie that evolution is a theory in crisis. Repeatedly asserting a lie is an old political ploy and should be of interest to political scientists but is not of interest to biologists. If you want ID as part of the curriculum, we suggest that you demand that the school board require political science classes to teach the politics of ID.
3. Conclusion: ID claims that some biological mechanisms are irreducibly complex and could not have evolved part by part. In short, the only thing that can explain some things is that a miracle happened. If we could know the ID claim is true, this would be valuable because it would save us a lot of time and money that we might otherwise waste in doing research or in thinking about how each part of a complex mechanism like an eye, a wing, a flagellum, or a modern honey bee dance might have evolved. But, we can't know the ID claim is true. At best, one making the ID argument can truthfully say: I don't see how this mechanism could have evolved part by part, so I can't see how any naturalistic mechanism like natural selection could account for it's evolution. However, the ID arguer asserts something quite different, namely: I don't see how this mechanism could have evolved part by part, so it didn't and no naturalistic mechanism like natural selection could account for it's evolution. Richard Dawkins calls this kind of thinking "the Argument from Personal Incredulity" (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Basic Books, 1995, pp. 70, 77, 90-91). Personal incredulity is a hindrance to scientific inquiry. It should be obvious why we do not want to teach the methods of the ID folks to our science students. We want to encourage our students to think and to explore nature, not to throw up their hands every time they can't believe there is naturalistic explanation for some phenomenon and declare it therefore must be due to a miracle like ID. If you want to appeal to miracles to explain things, we suggest you join a religion. If you want to learn about harmful or useless or fallacious methods of scientific investigation, we suggest you take a course in logic that emphasizes fallacies or a course in the philosophy of science.
4. Postscript: By the way, when in biology we don't know how some mechanism evolved, we say we don't know how it evolved....yet. Students are free to draw their own conclusions from this. Some might give a nodding wink to each other and see this as supporting their religious convictions. Such students stop thinking about the issue except to remind themselves of God's miracles. Others might see this as a scientific challenge and set to work trying to fill another gap in our knowledge. Which kind of student do you think is likely to make a contribution to science? »
Jean-François
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