In 2005, while a post doc at the University of Chicago I read a op-ed piece by John Angus Campbell and Stephen Meyer in USA Today titled Evolution: Debate it.

I felt sufficiently outraged by their argument to send a letter to the paper, here printed in full. I would like to thank my friend Kelli Birdsall for reminding me of this letter.

Politics, not science, at center of debate

The writers' argument displays a basic misunderstanding about how the scientific process yields understanding of the material world. Scientific knowledge is gathered by evaluating logically coherent, testable hypotheses by careful and repeated experiments or comparisons. The process operates very much like a detective does: Possibilities are evaluated and eliminated if disproved. But because intelligent design does not make predictions that can be evaluated scientifically, i.e. are not testable, there is no scientific controversy. A real scientific debate on evolution would unfold in peer-reviewed journals because scientists like very much to prove each other wrong.

Instead, the current debate is social and political in nature. Politicians are exploiting many Christians' religious convictions for political gain. But, however popular such politicians are in polls or elections, they cannot alter the fundamental discoveries of science — such as gravity, or the fact that life on this planet has shared ancestry and continues to evolve.

This confusion about the scientific process is a severe handicap to our society and calls for reform of the science curriculum. We should teach the scientific method and the testable scientific theories that we have been unable to refute — meaning Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and not intelligent design.

Arnar Palsson, Ph.D., Chicago