A Stitch in Haste

One of the all-important mysteries of the universe has been solved:

Anyone who has built sandcastles learns they hold up best if a little water is mixed with the building material. But until now scientists couldn't agree why.

Water holds grains of sand together by forming "liquid-bridges" between the contact points of the grains, a new study finds. The tension forces of the bridges creates an attractive force between the grains that is absent in dry sand.
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Understanding the interactions between dry grains and liquids is vital not just for building sandcastles, but for industries ranging from mining to pharmaceutical development.

Sand research has some interesting analogies to the debate over whether "intelligent design" is science worthy of inclusion in a school curriculum.

If you're walking along the beach and you see a sandcastle, then you know, you know, that -- for a variety of physical and metaphysical reasons -- the sandcastle was intelligently designed.

But the question of sand cohesion in dry versus wet sand is an altogether different topic. For however long a period of time, scientists had yet to explain wet-sand cohesion. It wasn't that they could never explain it, they just hadn't yet.

Now suppose that an "intelligent sandcastle design" advocate had, prior to this discovery, asserted that, because there had not yet been an explanation for wet-sand cohesion, there could never be an explanation. Furthermore, since sandcastles are such a wonderful thing, the "inexplicable" fact of wet-sand cohesion could only be the result of a sandcastle-loving intelligence.

Such an argument is deceptively subtle. The "intelligent sandcastle design" advocate starts with a wholly sensible premise (i.e., "sandcastles are intelligently designed"), but then sneaks in an invalid progression -- that every yet-to-be-answered question about the underlying nature of sandcastles must also be the result of intelligent sandcastle design.

Would you take someone seriously who said "let's not study wet-sand cohesion and just say some supernatural force is responsible"? Would you allow such a person to call himself a "scientist"? Would you want such a person putting stickers in your children's textbooks?

Yet this is exactly what ID proposes -- when in doubt, just stop inquiring, assert that no further discovery is possible and label it "intelligent design."

There can be no such thing as the "science of just give up." It is an insolent contradiction in terms that destroys all objective meaning of the word "science."

Such an educational agenda can have one and only one constituency: those who are anti-science. They are not advocating "another theory" -- they are anti-theory. They are not for "teaching the controversy" -- there is no controversy to teach.

There is only science and anti-science.

And those who suggest that anti-science has any role in a science education are not only anti-science, they are also anti-education.

And if they win, then don't expect today's students to do much intelligent designing of anything after they graduate.

[POST SCRIPT: In case you're wondering -- according to the article, for sandcastle builders, "the best mix, it turns out, is one pail of water for every eight pails of sand."]