Hello all: Apologies in advance for such a long email, but this is a fascinating subject. It is very hard today to find a way to accommodate both spiritual and scientific views of the world, and to allow that each one has their power. I am very aware that for a large majority of people, for a large majority of human history, people have lived by non-scientific or religious explanations. And I am reluctant to take a teleological view of human knowledge, saying that we have gotten smarter over time, or that we secular scientific types have more access to truth than the rest of humanity. The best I can do with this is...if you want to predict how nature is going to act, you pretty much want to use the scientific method, religion has a terrible track record with prediction. If you want to comfort a dying friend, that might be a good time to look to the spiritual/religious side, as the scientific approach is not very comforting. That said, in the world of science there is an accepted set of practices. In that world, Intelligent Design does not make it. It is not a testable theory. But it is an altogether understandable human urge. Last week, there was an email going around with pictures of fish washed up ashore by the Tsunami. It was a hoax (thanks Snopes.com!), the incredibly odd and varied fish were actually collected by scientists over the past several years. My colleagues at the science center and I were looking at these pictures, and we all had comments like: "Whoever made these had a sense of humor" I think that it is almost impossible to look at the variety of nature and not project the idea of an intelligence at work. And for most people, that is really fine. They are not deluded, they simply don't have the same stringent requirements that scientists have. But if you are a scientist, it seems to me you need to be pretty rigorous about following scientific principles and practices. Therefore, a scientist who advocated ID as part of their work is likely to find themselves ostracized just as if a journalist decided to make things up. It is fine for a novelist to make things up, but once you accept the rules of a profession, it is predictable that you will be ostracized for breaking those rules. A couple of other things. A friend of mine, a biologist, has been studying a subtle and interesting aspect of this debate. He has been asking teachers and students if they understand the distinction between "evolution" and "natural selection." "Evolution" is a phenomenon, like the refraction of light. Defined as change, it happens to everything at rates that can be well predicted by the understanding of physics, chemistry, and systems. "Natural selection" is a theory, in the scientific sense of the term. It is the mechanism that drives evolution in biological systems. Predictably, everyone conflates the phenomenon "evolution" with the mechanism "natural selection. Finally, the Hall of Science is planning a travelling exhibition on evolution that will be led by Dr. Martin Weiss, our VP of Science. He is working with people around the country to try to find a way that such an exhibition could travel into geographic areas where there are people who are adamantly and disruptively anti-science in this context. It is a challenging project, more challenging than I could have imagined. Eric Siegel Executive VP Programs and Planning New York Hall of Science 47-01 111th Street Queens, NY 11368 [log in to unmask] www.nyscience.org ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).