Rather, my fable was meant to remind people, on all sides of the debate, about what matters. What does not matter is marking a ballot. So, congratulations to those (like Josh) who put in long hours to win the Kansas vote. Here's the bad news: winning will make very little difference in the long run.

That's not sour grapes. That's cold realism. The debate about design vs. no design has been going on since antiquity. Where it counts, in the minds of those one really wants to persuade, like my hypothetical bright 15 year old, school board elections (!) just aren't meaningful or relevant. At all.

Unfortunately, much of the ID movement seems to think that they are. More legal, legislative, or public policy action, they say, is the route to pursue, and the most important goal of all is to affect the public school science curriculum.

I disagree, strongly. What can be won by a vote can be lost by a vote. And science -- the gaining of knowledge -- is not, and never will be, a matter of ballot boxes, lobbying, commercials, billboards, clever campaigns, or any of the rest of the apparatus of political persuasion or force.

Name a single fact or piece of knowledge you know that came from a VOTE. Election results themselves don't count.

Nor is the public school science curriculum nearly as important as many ID advocates, or ID critics, think. The worst thing that could happen to the infant science of ID would be for it to be taught by teachers who neither understand nor accept it, forced to do so by administrators who know even less, to students who (as a result) "learn" a hopeless mishmash of this and that about "intelligent design" -- just enough to make them forever skeptical of the ideas.

That is exactly what has happened to the theory of evolution in American public schools. Do I want to subject the young ideas I love to the same distortion? No way.

Wisdom from a Shrewd Observer

A senior scientist whom I greatly respect communicated the following to me (and many others) today. I won't name him, to spare him the hassles, but he gave me permission to post what he had to say. He makes the point I want to communicate with wonderful clarity:

The problem today for Intelligent Design (ID) is not that of getting out its message. It is getting to where there is a message that justifies the proposed policy of teaching about ID along with Darwinian evolutionary theory in biology classes. The problem is the historical accident that ID came on the scene just as the problems with Darwinian evolutionary theory were becoming evident through modern biology. If there were no ID, then the problems with evolutionary theory could be brought up in classrooms with little opposition from the evolutionists. Biologists after all acknowledge and live with these problems every day.

But ID came up and was heavily promoted through non-scientific channels. Usually, when the issue of "teach the controversy" about evolutionary theory in biology classrooms was proposed, ID was there in the forefront. As a result many scientists who would otherwise favor "teach the controversy" (they actually do so after all in their more advanced courses) had to come out against the proposal, because ID had not shown that it can make a meaningful contribution to biology. So, unfortunately the effort to highlight the very real problems with Darwinian evolutionary theory became intertwined with the effort to teach about ID in biology classes. You may remember that this was the initial proposal in Ohio, for example, which the Discovery Institute and its representatives backed off when the hearings took place. The situation today in effect precludes making it official policy to teach about the problems in evolutionary theory at the high school level because of the close association with ID.

It seems to me that that the best thing today is to stop all the public promotion of viewpoints about evolutionary theory and put the money into research. If only this had been done from the start, a) ID would not be associated in the public mind with teaching the controversies in evolutionary theory; and b) the research might have moved ID to the point where it could contribute to biology.

The situation is ideal today for ID to show that it can contribute. The new technologies are producing masses of biological data that are extraordinarily hard to analyze using existing concepts. Just three examples:

-- Ten years ago the gene sequencing capacity worldwide was in the range of a few hundred million base pairs per year. This year worldwide capacity is a thousand times that. Yet interpreting the data lags far behind. Earlier this year one expert lamented that at the current pace it would take years just to fully annotate the E. coli genome. And likely a hundred or more complete genomes will be sequenced this year.

-- Ten years ago proteomics (simplified, this is the comprehensive study of the distribution of amounts of proteins in cells as a function of medical or environmental conditions or stresses) was just coming into being. The development of the key technologies (electrospray and MALDI mass spectrometry, microarrays, etc.) only began in the late 1980s. Today there are dozens of new proteomics studies published every month. The Journal of Proteome Research began publication only in 2002, now publishes every month, and has released online 20 papers just in the last week. Proteomic data are far more complex than genomic data and the interpretation is much more difficult.

-- Cellular imaging has progressed greatly, too. The whole electromagnetic spectrum can be used to study processes in cells. Three dimensional images can be obtained routinely that provide extraordinary amounts of information to be interpreted and understood.

This exponential growth in capabilities, combined with an increasing use by biologists of a systems biology approach, offers an extraordinary opportunity for ID to make a fresh start to address mainstream biology. ID will in fact be a viable contributor to biology if the major concepts (Irreducible Complexity and Complex Specified Information) can be shown to help biologists in their work. This has not happened yet, but biologists will welcome ID if it does happen. Then the stigma of ID will disappear and "teaching the controversy" will not arouse the opposition from the scientific community that it does now.

So the twin defeats (in the courts in Dover and the elections in Kansas) should in my opinion refocus those interested in ID into proving its value through biological research. We should focus on understanding the science (in the areas outlined above, for example) and not pay attention to what the evolutionists are saying about ID.