I had promised myself and the Lawrence Journal-World that I would not write another column on evolution and creation. For one, I thought that Kansans had spoken overwhelmingly in 2000 when they voted out of office those Kansas Board of Education members who favored teaching creationism as science. For another, I thought everything that could be written about the issue had been said many times in print and in debates. Essentially, creationism was religion, not science and not meant for the science classroom. And scientific knowledge was not up for referendum, even if some people found the knowledge uncomfortable.

I was wrong. Nevertheless, I’ll keep my promise and won’t mention the words “evolution” or “creationism” from here on. As reported in the Oct. 15 Journal-World, at a recent public forum on education in Lawrence, two KBOE candidates debated whether “intelligent design” should be taught in the science classroom. The term “intelligent design” would make Orwell proud. It is a pernicious example of doublespeak; it used to masquerade as “creation-science.” It would also make William Paley proud, because intelligent design is an old notion resurrected from his book “Natural Theology,” published 202 years ago.

Paley was an Anglican priest and teacher at Christ College, Cambridge, England. The natural world, he said, revealed God. Nature was exceedingly complex, much like a watch. Watches hadn’t sprung from the brow of Jove; they were intelligently designed by watchmakers. Therefore, he said, the natural world and its intricacies were created by God, the intelligent designer.

As reported, modern day proponents of Paley’s intelligent design “believe that science can provide evidence that Earth’s biological complexity could not have come to exist without the intervention of a higher being.” More doublespeak.

First, merely including the word “science” in the belief doesn’t transform intelligent design from a religious parable into scientific principle. Believing that a “catalyst” will turn lead into gold won’t make it so. Second, science, by definition, does not seek supernatural explanations for natural phenomena, whether it is life on Earth, the motion of the planets, the drifting of continents, human disease, or a change in the weather. That’s a one sentence history of the Enlightenment.

Third — and the heart of the matter — is the focus of intelligent design proponents on “biological complexity.” Why aren’t their efforts to rewrite science standards and curricula focused on Earth’s chemical, physical or geological complexity, or the complexity of oceans and climate change? Earth’s chemical systems are as complex as many of its biological systems, beginning with the Periodic Table of the Elements.

Earth’s geological complexity is profound, from the ripping apart of continents to the flipping of the planet’s magnetic field from south to north and back again hundreds of times. Ocean circulation plays complex havoc with climate, from a minor El Nino event to 10,000-year ice ages over Kansas. What about sub-atomic physics-all those muons, gluons, quarks, and black holes? For the folks pushing intelligent design, science somehow doesn’t need to invoke an intelligent designer to study and understand these complexities of nature.

So why is biological complexity singled out for intelligent design? One reason: vanity over human origins. Once past the rhetoric, the crux of the matter for intelligent design proponents is retaining humans as nature’s breed apart, the center of life on Earth, the special product of a scriptural creator.

The same vanity put us in the center of the universe and the center of the solar system until Copernicus and Galileo took care of that. Two hundred years later, Darwin humbled us again with the news that humans were merely one branch on Earth’s ancient tree of life; our origins were as naturally genetic and geologic as that of all other plants, animals and microbes. But for proponents of intelligent design, vanity continues to trump knowledge.

Unfortunately, too much of the biological world, including humans, is dreadfully designed, not intelligently designed. There are birds and insects with wings that can’t fly, genomic codes that create mutant monsters, museums filled with thousands of extinct plants and animals that were too poorly designed to survive. And men with nipples. Do intelligent design proponents really want to debate how intelligent the intelligent designer was? In posing as knowledge, intelligent design insults how science is based on reason. In posing as theology, it insults how religion is based on faith.

Saddest of all, perhaps, the implied dogma of intelligent design is that only a belief in scriptural origins renders humans special. No thanks. Our sense of place and purpose in nature deserves better. We are indeed a breed apart. In four billion years of life on earth, only we have inherited the biosphere and the contract to sustain it. It’s a contract that calls for the best science of our planet and the best science education for today and tomorrow.

Leonard Krishtalka is director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center.