The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying ‘intelligent design’ is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only creates confusion. The article in Tuesday’s editions of L’Osservatore Romano was the latest in a series of interventions by Vatican officials – including the pope – on the issue that has dominated headlines in the United States. The author, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution ‘represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth.’ He lamented that certain American ‘creationists’ had brought the debate back to the ‘dogmatic’ 1800s, and said their arguments weren’t science but ideology. ‘This isn’t how science is done,’ he wrote. ‘If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it’s not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science.’ Intelligent design ‘doesn’t belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin’s explanation is unjustified,’ he wrote. […]