Faith healers and physicians--teaching pseudoscience by mandate.

In the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, Frank Morgan plays five roles. In one of them, he is a flimflam hawker of trivia traveling across the plains of Kansas in a horse-drawn wagon. In another, he is the wizard who, concealed by a curtain, manipulates a machine that controls all of Oz. Now, more than 65 years later, another pitchman is rolling across Kansas, but unlike Morgan’s bumbling peddler of trinkets and dreams, the new one has no interest in such trifles. It is an articulate and sophisticated anti-evolution movement called “intelligent design.” At its core is the idea that a supernatural being — a hidden wizard — has a hidden hand in shaping the living world. The intelligent design movement has attracted support from U.S. politicians at every level of government, from the Dutch minister of education, and from the Roman Catholic archbishop of Vienna, who has determined that the theory of evolution is inconsistent with the teachings of his church. In his objection to evolution, the cardinal joins Joseph Stalin, who forbade its teaching in the Soviet Union. More important than approval from highprofile national and international leaders, however, is the determination by members of public school boards in at least 20 states that intelligent design should be taught in school beginning in the ninth grade. It has been 80 years since the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, which made the teaching of evolution a misdemeanor, and 80 years since John Scopes, a high school science teacher and football coach, was found guilty of violating that law. In the Scopes trial, Clarence Darrow argued, “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.” Darrow lost his case, and despite all the ensuing decades of science education, the movement to teach intelligent design has spread from school houses to college campuses and university postgraduate programs. I fear that it will soon reach medical schools. The debate has been prominent in the press and major scientific journals, but it has not been featured in medical journals, nor has it been discussed publicly by leaders of academic medicine or professional medical societies. Some might ask why physicians should care about how we educate our children, and what difference it would make to medicine if we taught children intelligent design as a counterweight to evolution — which, according to the proponents of intelligent design, is a mere theory. But acquiescing to this anti-science movement would have far-reaching consequences for the development of future generations of physicians, for the likelihood of discovering new therapies, and for understanding health and disease. To understand why intelligent design constitutes an insidious menace to medicine, it is helpful to trace its roots. In part, it evolved from creationism, which takes the Genesis story of creation literally. Creationism has been discredited, however, by indisputable physical evidence — carbon dating, for example. In 1987, the teaching of creationism in public schools was forbidden by the U.S. Supreme Court (Edwards v. Aguillard). Still, a large part of the public believes in creationism and yearns for a return to God in public schools. Opinion pollsters tell us that the public admires scientists but fears godless science that has no place for a Creator. It is mistrust of the very basis of science — especially the biologic sciences — that fuels enthusiasm for a “hidden hand” in the workings of the living world. Detractors of the theory of evolution contend that there are too many holes in it: it is inconsistent with the fossil record, they say, and it fails to fully account for what we see today in the living world. Worse, it cannot tell us about the meaning of life. At its root, intelligent design is a medieval theological proposition that is based on faith, not logic, and certainly not science. It is theology dressed up as science, but it cannot be easily dismissed. The clever twist is that its proponents do not use such words as “God” or “deity” in public or in their literature, nor do they draw on the Bible to buttress their case. This omission, they believe, permits them to deny that