Intelligent design: Who has designs on your students' minds?

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Teaching Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Theory

We go Round and Round, there is nothing new under the sun.
Those who favor intelligent design want to offer it as an
alternative to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution,
critics want to keep the idea out of biology textbooks.
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/newteacherevolution.html
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Kansas revisits the evolution debate
A more conservative State Board of Education will review science standards
Story:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7644056/

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Nature 434, 1062-1065 (28 April 2005) | doi: 10.1038/4341062a
Intelligent design:  Who has designs on your students' minds?
Geoff Brumfiel (Geoff Brumfiel is Nature's Washington physical sciences
correspondent.)

Abstract
The intelligent-design movement is a small but growing force on US
university campuses. For some it bridges the gap between science and faith,
for others it goes beyond the pale. Geoff Brumfiel meets the movement's
vanguard.

For a cold Tuesday night in March, the turnout is surprisingly good. Twenty
or so fresh-faced college students are gathered together in a room in the
student union at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, the state's
largest public university. They are there for the first meeting of Salvador
Cordova's Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) club.

"I have a great deal of respect for the scientific method," Cordova tells
his attentive audience as he outlines the case for intelligent design.
Broadly speaking, he says, the concept is that a divine hand has shaped the
course of evolution. The arguments are familiar ones to both advocates and
opponents of the idea: some biological systems are too complex, periodic
explosions in the fossil record too large, and differences between species
too great to be explained by natural selection alone. Cordova - who holds
three degrees from the university, the most recent one in mathematics -
argues that the development of life on Earth would be described better if an
intelligent creator is added to the mix.

Most scientists overwhelmingly reject the concept of intelligent design. "To
me it doesn't deserve any attention, because it doesn't make any sense,"
says Bruce Alberts, a microbiologist and president of the National Academy
of Sciences. "Its proponents say that scientific knowledge is incomplete and
that there's no way to bridge the gap except for an intelligent designer,
which is sort of saying that science should stop trying to find explanations
for things."

But despite researchers' apparent lack of interest, or perhaps because of
it, the movement is catching on among students on US university campuses.
Much of the interest can be traced to US teenagers, more than three-quarters
of whom believe, before they reach university, that God played some part in
the origin of humans (see graphic). But others are drawn to the idea out of
sheer curiosity.

Full Text at Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7037/full/4341062a.html

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