Domning's Letter to Maryland Public Television




• The first person presented onscreen was Philip Johnson, a key figure in the ID movement. The rest of the program featured ID advocates with scientific credentials, and Johnson reappeared toward the end to state his own definition of "science", as though he were himself a leading scientist. Viewers were never told that he is, in fact, a professor of law.
  
  
• The animation sequence of the voyage of HMS "Beagle" gave the clear impression that the expedition touched only at the Galapagos Islands - ignoring the fact that it spent most of its time exploring the coasts of South America and other Pacific and Indian Ocean islands. This inaccuracy planted the subtle and false impression that Darwin's evolutionary views were derived from only a few observations made in only one locale, when in fact they were based on widely-gathered data of many kinds.
  
  
• The lengthy discussion of molecular biology made reference to "a feature of molecular machines known as irreducible complexity" - as though this concept were a standard one accepted by all molecular biologists as a "feature" of the real world. In fact, the term "irreducible complexity" is used only by the handful of ID proponents (Michael Behe in particular), and its validity has been refuted, repeatedly and in detail. It is not used at all in the mainstream scientific literature. No contrary views were noted, however.
  
  
• A major contention of the program was that without DNA there can be no self-replication of molecules, and hence no natural selection. No mention was made of the widely-discussed possibilities that self-replication of RNA or even simpler organic molecules could have preceded the synthesis of DNA.
  
  
• A telling contrast between ID and real science was inadvertently revealed in the quotes from Darwin in which he emphasized testable predictions of his theory - e.g., that no complex organs would be identified that could not have been formed by successive slight modifications of simpler ones. (In fact, no such complex organs have been identified, including the much-ballyhooed bacterial flagellum, whose simpler origins have been outlined by Kenneth Miller and other molecular biologists.) ID, in contrast, has made no testable predictions, on this program or elsewhere, and for this reason it is disregarded by most scientists.