Why should ID be taught in science classes...

...when there are many other fringe-scientific theories and ideas that have been pushed for far longer than ID. Surely, if science teaching is going to open to multiple opinions, we should give them first crack before ID?For example, back around 1990, a researcher from the Maharishi's university produced work showing how all divine principles and their interconnections with our chakras were manifestly portrayed by the Lagrangian of N=8 SuperGravity (a potential theory of everything at the time). I still have the paper. If true, this would have a profound effect on our view of spirituality and would lead to the possibility of making actual calculations of our spititual condition.When not teaching the conventional science syllabus, how much time should be apportioned to ID and how much to the Maharishi's work? On what basis would you make these apportions?{First appeared here: Message 191, but is rather off-topic. Education and Creation/Evolution?}

Not really. The point regarding seniority was merely to counter claims of pre-eminance of ID. However, you actually make this claim by equating ID with classic "design arguments", something with which the major proponents of ID would take issue.Now hopefully you wil forgive my unfamiliarity with US educational and legal history (I'm only really interested in what is taught NOW), but the only court case of which I am aware is the Scopes Trial, under which Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution. Was Nebraska Man ever mentioned? And what effect did it have?Anyway, even if ID was being taught as the standard back in the early 1900s, it had almost certainly replaced the teaching of Biblical creationism at some point. Why did that occur? What evidence led to Biblical creationism being rejected in favour of ID?And let's not forget that the Scopes Trial was actually defending Biblical creationism, not ID, from evolution. ID, as its major proponents at the Discovery Institute testify, is simply an injection of a detectable intelligent agent into the wokrings of common descent. No douby if Scopes had been teaching ID, he would have been found similarly guilty.

That's fine, but we are talking about should be taught in science classes. The overwhelming majority of scientists on the planet believe the Theory of Evolution to be best theory (and actually not far off the only theory) we have to explain the origin of species on the planet. There are a relatively microscopic number of scientist adherents to ID. So why should ID get some special treatment to be taught alongside the Theory of Evolution as some sort of equal possibility? As I mentioned in my opening, there are many fringe concepts in science and a very crowded school curriculum (in the US as well as the UK). Why should ID qualify for special status? If you think that this constitutes the basis (or in fact any part) of evidence for the Theory of Evolution, you have a couple of years' reading ahead of you!