The Sunday letter by Eric Rommen, M.D. (“New discoveries reveal complexities”) contained several misconceptions. The most important is that intelligent design should be taught as part of biology classes. Scientists make hypotheses about how nature behaves based on observation, and then we do experiments to test our hypotheses. Intelligent design makes a hypothesis, but there is no experiment that can be done to determine the validity of the hypothesis. Until there is experimentation to prove or disprove the hypothesis, intelligent design is not a science, and it should not be taught in science classes.
A second misconception is the assumption that because something is complex it must have been designed by a creator. Complexity means that we do not know enough to understand it and nothing more.
A third misconception is the assumption that there are parts of the cell that are irreducibly complex, again implying an intelligent designer. Bacterial flagellum are often used as an example of this because they are complex and this complexity is used as evidence that this is a designed feature. However, it is quite probable that the flagellum did not show up in its current form in one step. It probably had many different forms and different functions in the past, but what we see today is the most successful evolutionary result and it is the one that stays around. It is only irreducibly complex because we do not know all the steps that caused it to come into existence in its current form, not because it was designed.
Charles Ardary
Everett
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