SETI 2?

Is there intelligent life on the left? I wouldn't use that term to the politicization of Bush's comments on teaching intelligent design. What he said was:

"Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about. Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. . . . You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.

In other words, he didn't advocate teaching intelligent design as scientific fact, but as one view of the debate over evolution, so that people know what the debate is about. I don't think it should be taught as a scientific fact, but I would be happy if they just mentioned that not every pronouncement of science in the past has turned out to be correct. In fact many new ideas that have later been accepted were at first denounced as nonsense. Continental drift, for instance. That doesn't strike a lot of Americans as an unreasonable position. I wouldn't go any farther than just pointing out that some people think that random mutations are enough to account for the diversity and complexity of life. Evolution is pretty clear, but the pace and the exact mechanisms by which it operates aren't.

The fossil record supports evolution, but does it justify the idea that it was the result of random mutations in DNA? That's a mathematical problem and when you compound the likelihoods of beneficial mutations among all other possible ones occurring over and over over millions and billions of years, it's pretty difficult to comprehend the numbers involved. Some smart and educated people think the numbers don't add up, and it isn't good enough to dismiss them as religious kooks.

It always strikes me that science programs on television very seldom use the language of random mutation and natural selection to describe evolution. They use terms implying strategy, response to changing conditions, even going so far as to personify nature and evolution as intelligent forces making choices. Indeed as scientists recognize how early in earth history life emerged, they begin to posit ways it could have come from other planets. One thing that impresses everybody is the persistence of life in all kinds of hostile environment, and it's ability to reconstitute itself after devastating mass extinctions. I'm a religious person, but I'm beginning to believe that human beings aren't intended to occupy earth for eons like those in which the dinosaurs thrived. At the very least, one must wonder how civilization would be effected by catastrophes like those which have occurred in the past, such as supervolcanic eruptions, collisions with comets and meteorites, tsunamis thirty times larger than the one last Christmas. We'd do well not to repeat the example of Babel.