THE BELL CURVE:

Some of life’s issues that affect all of us in varying degrees are as predictably repetitive as they are seemingly insoluble. The 3-2 votes of the Costa Mesa City Council, for example. The steadily increasing noise over our homes of departing flights from John Wayne Airport. The rising price of parking at Dodger Stadium. And the cyclical debates between science and fundamentalist thinking.

We have just experienced the annual visit of two of these latter issues, and we will experience them again. And again. This would be Darwinism vs. intelligent design and the recurrent objections to fluoridating our public water.

At various other times during the year, similarly based factions are almost certain to reprise the arguments against using live tissue in stem-cell research, the validity and degree of danger of global warming, and the biological roots of homosexuality — among a number of less visible issues.

In between the two sides in these confrontations is the vast majority of us who have no firsthand technical knowledge to support either position and are therefore reduced to choosing up sides on the basis of the evidence offered and the validity of the people presenting that evidence.

If choice by association seems a terribly unscientific way to reach a personal conclusion, it is nevertheless probably the best means available to us. Maybe a kind of science for dummies.

If so, the best place I can imagine to start is a new book called “The Canon” by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier. The depth and breadth of her research and the accessibility of her prose make for delightful reading.

And she isn’t just a shill for science.

“Science,” she writes, “is uncertain because scientists can’t prove anything irrefutably and beyond a neutrino of a doubt, and they don’t even try.”

Fundamentalists gratefully drive a wedge into this type of honesty by demanding equal time for dubiously supported contrary scientific theories. But by attacking science on its own turf, they open themselves to scientific debate they can mostly only lose. And should.

Michael Duff, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan, told Angier: “Science is not a collection of rigid dogmas, and what we call scientific truth is constantly being revised, challenged and refined. It’s irritating to hear people who hold fundamentalist views accuse scientists of being the inflexible, rigid ones when usually it is the other way around.”

Creationism, which has morphed into intelligent design and was recently debated in these pages, is a case in point.

By accepting the reality of evolution, intelligent design has attracted some scientific support — but only a small fraction of the scientific community.

Where intelligent design parts company with the overwhelming majority of scientists is over the “irreducible complexity” of the molecular assemblage that becomes, for example, the human eye and can only be explained satisfactorily, intelligent design supporters contend, by an intelligent designer.

They are careful to avoid the word “God” or otherwise identify the designer and regard the complexity as beyond the reach of science.

Efforts to get intelligent design into science classes in public schools on an equal footing with Darwinism have consistently failed, most recently in Dover, Pa., where Superior Court Judge John E. Jones III ruled that such an effort by the Dover School Board was unconstitutional.

In his ruling, Judge Jones stated that “ID is not science. (It) fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science.”

He then added: “Although proponents of ID occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed.” Which collides head-on with the constitutional separation of church and state.

Of course, none of this is going to deter the subject coming up in Newport-Mesa again next year and the year after that. Or convince Wendy Leece to abandon ID.

But on the hope that some open minds on the subject are still out there, I urge a reading of “The Canon” and a hard look at the numbers and the stature of the scientists who take strong positions on these issues.

I wonder what on earth the citizens of Newport Beach will do to occupy themselves once a site for the new city hall is decided. Perhaps Iraq and the real estate crash will swim into vision again.

Fewer than three weeks to the election year, it’s hard to tell whether the presidential primary will create more city hall voters or vice versa.

In all the talk and mailers and signs, one element has been missing entirely. That is the legitimacy of the election itself.

I’m not talking legality here. Hiring workers with little or no interest in the issue to collect petition signatures to get on the ballot is perfectly legal.

The legitimacy I’m talking about is using the election process to make decisions that should clearly be made by people elected for that purpose.

There is a growing tendency in California at every level of government for well-heeled special interest groups to rent the electoral process in order to change decisions they don’t like. That’s why we’re voting on the location of City Hall.

This whole dreary process that has been going on for almost three years represents a substantial waste of time and money and lack of spine by the people who should have had the final say a long time ago.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.