After reading Professor Paul Sherman's "proof" against intelligent design in the article "Intelligent design? No smart engineer designed our bodies," and President Rawlings' battle cry against it in his recent address, I cannot help but hear echoes of the Catholic Church against Galileo. In this case, roles are reversed.

Science must be based in fact not rhetoric. So why is the scientific community unable to move beyond rhetoric when it comes to Intelligent Design? Bring out proof and end the controversy once and for all!

In writing his article, Professor Sherman showed his failure to consult the engineering departments. Engineering design, while based on scientific principles, includes a measure of art and subjectivity. As a chemical engineer, I have designed many chemical and biotechnology facilities and know that a flawless design is an efficient design. The use of one pipe for two functions is engineering elegance, not a design flaw. An extra pipe would be an unnecessary one. Further, natural selection itself tells us the system is not flawed. Flaws select against a species, and the human race is still here. In fact, one choking in 100,000 is highly efficient. No way is this system an example of an engineering design flaw.

But the subjectivity in our arguments causes us both to miss the silver bullet in the intelligent design debate. Irreducible complexity, which is at the heart of intelligent design, is best found on the biochemical and not the anatomic scale. The idea, in short, is that it is chemically impossible to make the very basic proteins required for life from the "primordial soup" of early earth. Surely the conditions are not hard to replicate -- and grad students the world over for the last 50 years have tried -- but still without the evolution of a simple single cell. Why? Well accordingly to Michael Behe of Lehigh University and the leading proponent of intelligent design, it is chemically impossible.

President Rawlings, when you say "I.D. is not valid as science," please have your departments roll out the science. Show us that it is chemically possible to create life from the primordial soup. Make life in a test tube, and the controversy goes away. Until then, promoting science with pictures of professors with skull bones does nothing more than continue the controversial rhetoric.

-- Barry Schutter '94 
B.S. in Chemical Engineering