YOUR VIEWS: Column reveals ignorance about intelligent design lecture

Column reveals ignorance about intelligent design lecture

After reading Zac Smith’s Feb. 24 column “Intelligent design lecture an embarrassment” I started to wonder if he was even at the lecture. He completely ignored most of the major points and then played down the few he mentioned with an appeal to the majority.

Smith said, “The bulk of (John) West’s talk was an endless recitation of pro-intelligent design quotes attached to credentialed names. (Apparently Thomas Jefferson saw design in nature. Impressed yet?)”

This was merely a portion of one of West’s seven points. He illustrated intelligent design was at least 2200 years old and not religiously motivated.

Smith also wrote, “Intelligent design is an idea that explains nothing, makes no predictions, has led to no discoveries…”

ID explains, based on positive evidence, “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” This is discovered through research illustrated with bacterial flagellum (prediction). Researchers take a flagellum and remove all 35 of the genes one at a time to see if the organism can operate with 34 in some way or another (test). If the BF cannot be reduced genetically, then how can we hypothesize that it came from a simpler organism (discovery)? Is that a religious claim?

I could have formulated Smith’s article without being there. It would have been simple. Just repeat the mantra, “ID is not science, it is religion, warmed over creationism, and an attempt of fundamentalists to get religion back into the classroom.”

He didn’t answer any of the issues that were brought up on Friday. He took a few issues and distorted them to slander those that say evolution isn’t a sufficient explanation for the specified complexity found in biological systems.

- Grant Keeter, letters sophomore