My deliberately provocative title is borrowed from Leonard Krishtalka, who directs the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. Hired-gun "design theorists" in cheap tuxedos have met with some success in getting close to their target: public science education. I hope to convince you that this threat is worth paying attention to. As I write, intelligent design (ID) is a hot issue in the states of Washington and Ohio (see Physics Today, May 2002, page 31). Evolutionary biology is ID's primary target, but geology and physics are within its blast zone.
Creationism
evolves. As in biological evolution, old forms persist alongside
new. After the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, creationists tried
to get public schools to teach biblical accounts of the origin and
diversity of life. Various courts ruled the strategy unconstitutional.
Next came the invention of "creation science," which was intended
to bypass constitutional protections. It, too, was recognized by
the courts as religion. Despite adverse court rulings, creationists
persist in reapplying these old strategies locally. In many places,
the pressure keeps public school biology teachers intimidated and
evolution quietly minimized.
However, a new strategy, based on so-called ID theory, is now
at the cutting edge of creationism. ID is different from its forebears.
It does a better job of disguising its sectarian intent. It is well
funded and nationally coordinated. To appeal to a wider range of
people, biblical literalism, Earth's age, and other awkward issues
are swept under the rug. Indeed, ID obfuscates sufficiently well
that some educated people with little background in the relevant
science have been taken in by it. Among ID's diverse adherents are
engineers, doctors--and even physicists.
ID advocates can't accept the inability of science to deal with
supernatural hypotheses, and they see this limitation as a sacrilegious
denial of God's work and presence. Desperately in need of affirmation,
they invent "theistic science" in which the design of the Creator
is manifest. Perhaps because their religious faith is rather weak,
they need to bolster their beliefs every way they can--including
hijacking science to save souls and prove the existence of God.
William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher at Baylor University
and one of ID's chief advocates, asserts that: " . . . any view
of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen
as fundamentally deficient."1 Whether
or not they agree with Dembski on this point, most Americans hold
some form of religious belief. Using what they call the Wedge Strategy,2
ID advocates seek to pry Americans away from "naturalistic science"
by forcing them to choose between science and religion. ID advocates
know that science will lose. They portray science as we know it
as innately antireligious, thereby blurring the distinction between
science and how science may be interpreted.
When presenting their views before the public, ID advocates generally
disguise their religious intent. In academic venues, they avoid
any direct reference to the Designer. They portray ID as merely
an exercise in detecting design, citing examples from archaeology,
the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project, and
other enterprises. Cambridge University Press has published one
ID book,3 which, the ID advocates repeatedly
proclaim, constitutes evidence that their case has real scientific
merit. ID creationist publications are nearly absent from refereed
journals, and this state of affairs is presented as evidence of
censorship.
This censorship, ID advocates argue, justifies the exploitation
of public schools and the children in them to circumvent established
scientific procedures. In tort law, expert scientific testimony
must agree with the consensus of experts in a given field. No such
limitation exists with respect to public education. ID advocates
can snow the public and school boards with pseudoscientific presentations.
As represented by ID advocates, biological evolution is a theory
in crisis, fraught with numerous plausible-sounding failures, most
of which are recycled from overt creationists. It is "only fair,"
the ID case continues, to present alternatives so that children
can make up their own minds. Yesterday's alternative was "Flood
geology." Today's is "design theory."
Fairness, open discussion, and democracy are core American values
and often problematic. Unfortunately, journalists routinely present
controversies where none exist, or they present political controversies
as scientific controversies. Stories on conflicts gain readers,
and advertising follows. This bias toward reporting conflicts, along
with journalists' inability to evaluate scientific content and their
unwillingness to do accuracy checks (with notable exceptions), are
among the greatest challenges to the broad public understanding
of science.
ID creationism is largely content-free rhetoric. Michael Behe,
a biochemist at Lehigh University and an ID proponent, argues that
many biochemical and biophysical mechanisms are "irreducibly complex."4
He means that, if partially dismembered, they would not work, so
they could not have evolved. This line of argument ignores the large
number of biological functions that look irreducibly complex, but
for which intermediates have been found. One response to Behe's
claims consists of the tedious task of demonstrating functions in
a possible evolutionary path to the claimed irreducibly complex
state. When presented with these paths, Behe typically ignores them
and moves on. I admire the people who are willing to spend the time
to put together the detailed refutations.5
The position of an ID creationist can be summarized as: "I can't
understand how this complex outcome could have arisen, so it must
be a miracle." In an inversion of the usual procedure in science,
the null hypothesis is taken to be the thing Dembski, Behe, and
their cohorts want to prove, albeit with considerable window-dressing.
Dembski classifies all phenomena as resulting from necessity, chance,
or design. In ruling out necessity, he means approximately that
one could not predict the detailed structures and information we
see in biological systems from the laws of physics. His reference
to chance is essentially equivalent to the creationist use of one
of the red herrings introduced by Fred Hoyle:
A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing
747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through
the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled
747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?6
Having dispensed with necessity and chance, Dembski concludes
that design has been detected on the grounds that nothing else can
explain the phenomenon--at least according to him.
Of course, design has no predictive power. ID is not a scientific
theory. If we had previously attributed the unexplainable to design,
we would still be using Thor's hammer to explain thunder. Nor does
ID have any technological applications. It can be fun to ask ID
advocates about the practical applications of their work. Evolution
has numerous practical technological applications, including vaccine
development. ID has none.
As organisms evolve, they become more complex, but evolution doesn't
contravene the second law of thermodynamics. Dembski, like his creationist
predecessors, misuses thermodynamics. To support the case for ID,
he has presented arguments based on a supposed Law of Conservation
of Information, an axiomatic law that applies only to closed systems
with very restricted assumptions.7 Organisms,
of course, are not closed systems.
ID's reach extends beyond biology to physics and cosmology. One
interesting discussion concerns the fundamental constants. There
is a well-known point of view that our existence depends on a number
of constants lying within a narrow range. As one might expect, the
religious community has generally viewed this coincidence as evidence
in favor of--or at least as a plausibility argument for--their beliefs.
The ID creationist community has adopted the fundamental constants
as additional evidence for their Designer of Life--apparently not
realizing that many fine-tuning arguments are based on physical
constants allowing evolution to proceed. Physical cosmology is largely
absent from school science standards. Where present, as in Kansas,
it is likely to come under ID attack.
I have only scratched the surface here. Don't assume everything
is fine in your school system even if it seems free of conflict.
Peace may mean that evolution, the core concept of biology, is minimized.
No region of the country is immune. Watch out for the guys in tuxedos--they
don't have violins in those cases.
Adrian Melott is a professor
of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
He is also a founding board member of Kansas Citizens for Science.
Publications of value in dealing with ID: R. T. Pennock, Tower
of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1999). R. T. Pennock, ed. Intelligent
Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological,
and Scientific Perspectives, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
(2001). See also the review of the book by K. Padian in the
29 March 2002 issue of Science. An excellent collection
of short position statements by ID advocates and critics appears
in the April 2002 issue of Natural History, which is
also available at http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html.
On the relation of religion to some ID issues: K. R. Miller,
Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground
between God and Evolution, Cliff Street Books, New York
(1999). R. Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton, New
York (1994). S. Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural
Adversaries, Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, Mass. (2001).
http://www.natcenscied.org/article.asp?category=11
(Congregational guide to the PBS TV series Evolution)
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Creationism
evolves. As in biological evolution, old forms persist alongside
new. After the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, creationists tried
to get public schools to teach biblical accounts of the origin and
diversity of life. Various courts ruled the strategy unconstitutional.
Next came the invention of "creation science," which was intended
to bypass constitutional protections. It, too, was recognized by
the courts as religion. Despite adverse court rulings, creationists
persist in reapplying these old strategies locally. In many places,
the pressure keeps public school biology teachers intimidated and
evolution quietly minimized.
