What is Intelligent Design (ID), and does it have a legitimate place in the high school science curriculum?
ID parallels but is not identical to creation science, the view that there is scientific evidence to support the Genesis account of the creation of the earth and of life. ID and creation science share the belief that the mainstream scientific discipline of evolution is largely incorrect. Both involve an intervening deity, but ID is more vague about what happened and when. Indeed, ID proponents are tactically silent on an alternative to common descent. Teachers exhorted to teach ID, then, are left with little to teach other than “evolution didn’t happen.” An ID high school textbook, Of Pandas and People, mentions “creationism” only once, but this text is recognized by teachers and scientists as being very similar in content to creation science. Since Pandas was published in 1986, the two major innovations in ID have been Michael Behe’s concept of “irreducible complexity,” presented in Darwin’s Black Box in 1996, and William Dembski’s “design inference,” presented in Intelligent Design:
