arstechnica | Each year, state legislatures play host to a variety of bills that
would interfere with science education. Most of these are variations on a
boilerplate intended to get supplementary materials into classrooms
criticizing evolution and climate change (or to protect teachers who
do). They generally don't mention creationism, but the clear intent is
to sneak religious content into the science classrooms, as evidenced by
previous bills introduced by the same lawmakers. Most of them die in the
legislature (although the opponents of evolution have seen two successes).
The efforts are common enough that we don't generally report on them.
But every now and then a bill comes along that veers off this script.
Late last month, the Missouri House started considering
one that deviates in staggering ways. Instead of being quiet about its
intent, it redefines science, provides a clearer definition of
intelligent design than any of the idea's advocates ever have, and it
mandates equal treatment of the two. In the process, it mangles things
so badly that teachers would be prohibited from discussing Mendel's
Laws.
Although even the Wikipedia entry
for scientific theory includes definitions provided by the world's most
prestigious organizations of scientists, the bill's sponsor Rick Brattin
has seen fit to invent his own definition. And it's a head-scratcher:
"'Scientific theory,' an inferred explanation of incompletely understood
phenomena about the physical universe based on limited knowledge, whose
components are data, logic, and faith-based philosophy." The faith or
philosophy involved remain unspecified.
Brattin also mentions philosophy when he redefines "hypothesis" as "a
scientific theory reflecting a minority of scientific opinion which may
lack acceptance because it is a new idea, contains faulty logic, lacks
supporting data, has significant amounts of conflicting data, or is
philosophically unpopular." The reason for that becomes obvious when he
turns to intelligent design, which he defines as a hypothesis.
Presumably, he thinks it's only a hypothesis because it's
philosophically unpopular, since his bill would ensure it ends up in the
classrooms.
Intelligent design (ID) is roughly the concept that life is so
complex that it requires a designer, but even its most prominent
advocates have often been a bit wary about defining its arguments all
that precisely. Not so with Brattin—he lists 11 concepts that are part
of ID. Some of these are old-fashioned creationist claims, like the
suggestion that mutations lead to "species degradation" and a lack of
transitional fossils. But it also has some distinctive twists, like the
claim that common features, usually used to infer evolutionary
relatedness, are actually a sign of parts re-use by a designer.
