Having Fun With Intelligent Design

By David Morris, AlterNet. Posted May 23, 2005.

I have just three words for biology teachers who are wringing their hands as school boards from Kansas to Pennsylvania force them to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution: Get over it.

Here's what I think. Science teachers can comply with the requirement and still offer their students a first-rate education. If done with imagination, the new curriculum could end up stimulating more learning and excitement than their traditional explication of Darwinian theory.

I wouldn't have made this argument 20 years ago. At that time, school boards' interventions were far more restrictive. Science teachers were obliged to inform their students that the story of Genesis was literally true. But in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to that by declaring the teaching of creationism in the classroom a violation of the Constitutional insistence on the separation of church and state.

The Court decision spawned a more nuanced and sophisticated approach by anti-evolutionists: intelligent design. Intelligent design is not creationism per se. It holds that higher forms of life are so complex they must have been created by an unspecified higher power. The key word here is "unspecified." Many school board members who support an intelligent design mandate believe that higher power is Jesus. But they aren't forcing anyone to teach that in schools.

What they do require is that teachers offer a critique of evolution and suggest alternative theories about the origins of life. How might a good science teacher comply with these new directives without compromising their principles or their dignity? Or to put it slightly more aggressively, how might a biology teacher educate his or her students while at the same time teach meddling school board members a lesson?

All teachers know that their first and hardest job is to gain the student's attention and interest. What subject best attracts a teenager's undivided attention? Sex. Happily, when it comes to evolution, sex is central.

I recommend that biology teachers begin by discussing Elisabeth A. Lloyd's decidedly scientific book, The Case of the Female Orgasm. No school board member should complain. The book's subtitle, "Bias in the Science of Evolution," clearly fits with the new requirement that teachers critique evolutionary theory.

Darwinians can explain the male orgasm. After all, the male ejaculation is necessary for the survival and perpetuation of the species, and if giving the male great pleasure while doing so promotes that, then natural selection would eventually endow the male orgasm with that characteristic.

When it comes to the human female orgasm, however, evolutionists are stumped. No other female of the animal kingdom experiences an orgasm. Professor Lloyd examines 21 evolution-based explanations for the female orgasm, and demolishes every one of them.

Here the biology teacher might offer the class the alternative explanation of intelligent design. Is the intelligent power simply leveling the playing field between the sexes? Or is Professor Lloyd right that the female orgasm is "just for fun," and the intelligent power is female?

Then there's the question of male homosexuality. From a Darwinian perspective, it's a puzzle. The theory of natural selection should guarantee the disappearance of males that don't reproduce. But they keep hanging around, in considerable numbers, in every culture and every era.

Evolutionists have their theories. Psychologist Louis A. Berman argues that it has to do with embryonic development. Medical doctor Lorne Warneke suggests that homosexuality actually offers a natural advantage. Homosexuals instill a more cooperative impulse that helps perpetuate the kinship group and tribe.

A good science teacher will follow the school board's guidance and propose intelligent design as an alternative explanation for male homosexuality. Could there be an intelligent power that has created and nurtured male homosexuality? Does that mean God is gay?

School boards require science teachers to offer alternative explanations about how life began. That presents still another opportunity for creative educators.

Evolutionists argue that life evolved over tens of millions of years via natural selection. Intelligent design advocates believe the creation of life was overseen and guided by an intelligent power.

David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minnnesota and director of its New Rules project.

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