1) Discuss the remarks made by president Tilghman.

President Tilghman said that proponents of intelligent design do not prove prove their work using the scientific method and are hence not valid as a opposing theory to evolution and does not discount the evolution theory in anyway. she feels that since the Darwinian theory is "one of the two monumental pillars on which modern biology rests", any challenge to the theory has to at least have "the substance of a scientific theory". This is true as intelligent design is often thought as a religious view and less of a scientific theory hence it is often scoffed by scientists. However, till there is prove against intelligent design, we cannot say for sure that evolution is more true and scientific than intelligent design.

2) Do you agree/disagree with her views? Why?

We feel that it is true that intelligent design may not undermine the theory of evolution at all but there is no prove that the theory of intelligent design is wrong hence it cannot be dismissed as an alternative to the theory. although there are little scientific evidence for the theory of intelligent design, it can be said to be due to the difficulty in conducting experiments to prove this theory as there is no way to go back to the beginning of time and it will be hard to reconstruct this in the present. As the theory of evidence is discussed in biology classes, the theory of intelligent design should also be discussed together as an alternative and not only taught in social science classes or philosophy classes as biology students would also need to know the arguments, which may or may not be scientifically proven, against evolution.

3) Would teachers be undermining science by teaching intelligent creation?

Teachers will not be undermining science, but merely opening up another possibility other than evolution, to explain the origin of the humankind. Science is about questioning hypotheses and formulating new ideas, while discarding old ones. Intelligent creation poses new frontiers other than evolution, and is not undermining science. While it is true that evolution and intelligent creation is conflicting in their ideas on how humans were created (one postulating the idea that humans were evolved over millions of years, and another one in 6 days with the involvement of a supernatural being), teachers will definitely not be undermining science by introducing intelligent creation to the students, and will not be wrong to do so since there is no right answer to the question of our origins. Even the theory of evolution, which has been tested and researched on, cannot provide a good explanation on how living things were first created, and can only explain how we were evolved through natural selection. Therefore, we should not only limit our knowledge solely to the theory of evolution.

Li Min, Rachel, Shi Min, Yi Yue 09S03K