As school boards in Kansas and Pennsylvania weigh the merits of teaching intelligent design in addition to evolution in public schools, Northwestern University will debut a brand-new evolution minor this semester.
NU professor Teresa Horton, the director of the program she referred to as "the minor in the study of evolutionary processes," said the program is in no way intended as a statement or a response to the controversy over intelligent design and evolution.
"It's purely coincidental that we decided to hold off on announcing the program until this fall," Horton said. "It's definitely not a reaction to recent events."
Horton said the program will focus on what is "appropriate in a science curriculum" and therefore will not formally include intelligent design or creationism.
"The way we handle it in the curriculum is by talking about what is science and what distinguishes science as a mechanism for gaining knowledge," Horton said. "When you look at what science is, intelligent design is a religious philosophy and it is not scientific."
The Institute for Creation Research Executive Director John Morris said neither evolution nor intelligent design belong in a science curriculum, however, and to teach one rather than the other is intellectually dishonest.
"If it's a science course, I'm not sure any of them should be [taught]," Morris said. "Evolution is a historical idea with religious overtones. It's not science in the sense of observation, [but] a spin you put on the evidence."
Morris, whose organization asserts the "scientific bankruptcy" of evolution and states on its website they "believe God has raised up ICR to spearhead Biblical Christianity's defense against the godless and compromising dogma of evolutionary humanism," said evolution is the religion of naturalism and thus should not be favored by the government.
"We have two competing religions. One of them is censored [and] one of them is tax supported, and that ought not to be," Morris said. "We have not taken one dime of public money and we are a Christian school. We teach Christian thinking, [and] if evolutionists want to teach, they have their own right to start their own naturalism school."
Though NU is a private institution, Morris said a "great deal" of government money goes to the university.
University of Wisconsin history of science professor Ronald Numbers, however, said evolution — and not intelligent design — is the legitimate science.
"They want to change one of the fundamental ground rules for playing the game of science, which is you can't use the supernatural," Numbers said. "There's no evidence [for intelligent design]. What they've found is what we'd well expect — very complex organisms."
Numbers also expressed his concern over the state of evolution education at UW and American universities in general, and noted the lacking curricula results in some graduates not adequately understanding evolutionary theory.
"I think that by and large, American universities do a terrible job of educating [general education] students on the issue of evolution," Numbers said.
Horton said three core departments — anthropology, geological sciences and biological sciences — currently account for most of the courses offered in the minor and noted the program is geared toward a number of different disciplines and will be accessible to non-science majors.
"You don't have to suffer through organic chemistry to do this minor," she said.
