Original: Where exactly can I find this controversy again?, Matt Brauer, posted on March 24, 2004 03:35 PM.

The battle-cry of the IDists, "teach the controversy!" strongly presupposes that there is a controversy worthy of teaching. It is true that there is a controversy in evolutionary biology, in the political sense. But this is not what legal scholars DeWolf (et al.) mean when they use the term. They would like to convince the majority of citizens (or the minority that sit on school boards) that this is an issue of fairness. According to the truism there are two sides to every coin, why not "teach the controversy" and let the students make reasoned opinions for themselves? Why not use "the controversy" to teach about the process of science?

The best reason not to teach the "origins controversy" is that it simply is nowhere to be found. Genuine scientific controversies -- the important and useful ones -- take up a huge volume of space in the scientific literature. Even the controversies sparked by wrong ideas can be tracked as they generate discussion among the members of the scientific community. If no-one is talking about it, it's not controversial.

Ian F. Musgrave, Steve Reuland, and Reed A. Cartwright examine the claims of the Michael Behe and David Snoke paper published in Protein Science in 2004. While the goal of the Behe and Snoke paper is to generate impressive-looking improbabilities for the evolutionary development of a class of biochemical features, it turns out that use of biologically realistic numbers in their model shows that evolution is almost certain to develop them.

Matt Inlay responds to the immunity chapter, Chapter 6, of Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box.

Pete Dunkelberg's essay will prove helpful to educators, boards of education, legislators and members of the press who may be wondering about "Irreducible Complexity".

Nick Matzke provides a brief article covering some of the background information needed to understand arguments made about bacterial flagella and Michael Behe's claims of 'irreducible complexity' for that organelle.