Teach What Controversy?

The New York Times has been running a series about evolution and intelligent design. The series suffers from the usual "he-said-she-said" approach to science, which gives equal weight to the opinions of politically-motivated anti-science hacks and the consensus judgment of the scientific community, but overall it's not a bad series. And occasionally, you get moments of remarkable clarity from the hack side:

Dr. [John G.] West, who leads the [Discovery Institute's] science center's public policy efforts, said it did not support mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory was not yet developed enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.

First the context: The Discovery Institute is the biggest player pushing Intelligent Design. And Ohio has chosen a "teach the controversy" approach, which is supposed to highlight the challenges that Intelligent Design has for evolutionary theory without teaching ID itself as science.

But here's what gets me — how can there be a controversy if there is not a "developed enough" scientific alternative?

If you want the detailed answer to this question, you need to be reading Chris Mooney's site on a regular basis. But the short of it is that the Discovery Institute, while mostly successful in pushing ID in the political realm, has been considerably less successful in garnering credibility in the scientific community because ID isn't science. It has successfully created its own PR controversy, but when the chips are down, the Discovery Institute can't back up its own assertions with hard science.

And so, in the end, ID turns out to be just what its critics have accused it of being all along — a thinly-veiled attempt to get religion into the schools under the guise of science. And when pressed, it appears that the Discovery Institute agrees.