TCS: Is Intelligent Design a Bad Scientific Theory or a Non-Scientific Theory?

TCS: Is Intelligent Design a Bad Scientific Theory or a Non-Scientific Theory? (via Glenn Reynolds). Very good article, only I wish he'd applied the same standard to evolution, including natural selection or evolution more generally.

Now, obviously ID is bogus as a scientific theory. However, the types of things its propenents are saying are not useless. For example, if a living system can somehow be proven irredicibly complex, that's important, as are appeals to information or probability theory to show that evolution from the simplest life to more complex life (obviously ignoring the issue of how life arose in the first place) is so astronomically implausible that the idea should be basically rejected out of hand. I think those types of things are at least worth mentioning when discussing evolution in the classroom. (Though in my experience, evolution isn't taught so much as merely assumed in the classroom.)

Teaching ID as a scientific theory of its own is obviously bogus, but mentioning dissent to prevailing "scientific" theory should be part of any scientific curriculum, in any field.

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07:27 (utc-5)
edited: 08:08 (utc-5)