Intelligent design vs. evolution

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Do read the Guilder piece at the end as well as the first piece if you are
interested in this subject djf


------ Forwarded Message
From: Mladen Zagorac <mladen () mail ljudmila org>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 12:33:55 +0100
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: Intelligent design vs. evolution

Hello,

below you will find a couple of articles on intelligent design vs.
evolution that were published in October 2004 issue of Wired Magazine and
presented the feature theme titled on the cover The Plot to Kill Evolution.
You and other IP'ers might find them interesting.

Kind regards,

Mladen



The Crusade Against Evolution
In the beginning there was Darwin. And then there was intelligent design.
How the next generation of "creation science" is invading America's
classrooms.
By Evan Ratliff
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/evolution_pr.html

On a spring day two years ago, in a downtown Columbus auditorium, the Ohio
State Board of Education took up the question of how to teach the theory of
evolution in public schools. A panel of four experts - two who believe in
evolution, two who question it - debated whether an antievolution theory
known as intelligent design should be allowed into the classroom.

This is an issue, of course, that was supposed to have been settled long
ago. But 140 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, 75
years after John Scopes taught natural selection to a biology class in
Tennessee, and 15 years after the US Supreme Court ruled against a
Louisiana law mandating equal time for creationism, the question of how to
teach the theory of evolution was being reopened here in Ohio. The two-hour
forum drew chanting protesters and a police escort for the school board
members. Two scientists, biologist Ken Miller from Brown University and
physicist Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University two hours
north in Cleveland, defended evolution. On the other side of the dais were
two representatives from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the main
sponsor and promoter of intelligent design: Stephen Meyer, a professor at
Palm Beach Atlantic University's School of Ministry and director of the
Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and Jonathan Wells, a
biologist, Discovery fellow, and author of Icons of Evolution, a 2000 book
castigating textbook treatments of evolution. Krauss and Miller
methodically presented their case against ID. "By no definition of any
modern scientist is intelligent design science," Krauss concluded, "and
it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it."

Meyer and Wells took the typical intelligent design line: Biological life
contains elements so complex - the mammalian blood-clotting mechanism, the
bacterial flagellum - that they cannot be explained by natural selection.
And so, the theory goes, we must be products of an intelligent designer.
Creationists call that creator God, but proponents of intelligent design
studiously avoid the G-word - and never point to the Bible for answers.
Instead, ID believers speak the language of science to argue that Darwinian
evolution is crumbling.

The debate's two-on-two format, with its appearance of equal sides, played
right into the ID strategy - create the impression that this very
complicated issue could be seen from two entirely rational yet opposing
views. "This is a controversial subject," Meyer told the audience. "When
two groups of experts disagree about a controversial subject that
intersects with the public-school science curriculum, the students should
be permitted to learn about both perspectives. We call this the 'teach the
controversy' approach."

Since the debate, "teach the controversy" has become the rallying cry of
the national intelligent-design movement, and Ohio has become the leading
battleground. Several months after the debate, the Ohio school board voted
to change state science standards, mandating that biology teachers
"critically analyze" evolutionary theory. This fall, teachers will adjust
their lesson plans and begin doing just that. In some cases, that means
introducing the basic tenets of intelligent design. One of the state's
sample lessons looks as though it were lifted from an ID textbook. It's the
biggest victory so far for the Discovery Institute. "Our opponents would
say that these are a bunch of know-nothing people on a state board," says
Meyer. "We think it shows that our Darwinist colleagues have a real problem
now."

But scientists aren't buying it. What Meyer calls "biology for the
information age," they call creationism in a lab coat. ID's core scientific
principles - laid out in the mid-1990s by a biochemist and a mathematician
- have been thoroughly dismissed on the grounds that Darwin's theories can
account for complexity, that ID relies on misunderstandings of evolution
and flimsy probability calculations, and that it proposes no testable
explanations.

As the Ohio debate revealed, however, the Discovery Institute doesn't need
the favor of the scientific establishment to prevail in the public arena.
Over the past decade, Discovery has gained ground in schools, op-ed pages,
talk radio, and congressional resolutions as a "legitimate" alternative to
evolution. ID is playing a central role in biology curricula and textbook
controversies around the country. The institute and its supporters have
taken the "teach the controversy" message to Alabama, Arizona, Minnesota,
Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, and Texas.

The ID movement's rhetorical strategy - better to appear scientific than
holy - has turned the evolution debate upside down. ID proponents quote
Darwin, cite the Scopes monkey trial, talk of "scientific objectivity,"
then in the same breath declare that extraterrestrials might have designed
life on Earth. It may seem counterintuitive, but the strategy is
meticulously premeditated, and it's working as planned. The debate over
Darwin is back, and coming to a 10th-grade biology class near you.

At its heart, intelligent design is a revival of an argument made by
British philosopher William Paley in 1802. In Natural Theology, the
Anglican archdeacon suggested that the complexity of biological structures
defied any explanation but a designer: God. Paley imagined finding a stone
and a watch in a field. The watch, unlike the stone, appears to have been
purposely assembled and wouldn't function without its precise combination
of parts. "The inference," he wrote, "is inevitable, that the watch must
have a maker." The same logic, he concluded, applied to biological
structures like the vertebrate eye. Its complexity implied design.

Fifty years later, Darwin directly answered Paley's "argument to
complexity." Evolution by natural selection, he argued in Origin of
Species, could create the appearance of design. Darwin - and 100-plus years
of evolutionary science after him - seemed to knock Paley into the dustbin
of history.

In the American public arena, Paley's design argument has long been
supplanted by biblical creationism. In the 1970s and 1980s, that movement
recast the Bible version in the language of scientific inquiry - as
"creation science" - and won legislative victories requiring "equal time"
in some states. That is, until 1987, when the Supreme Court struck down
Louisiana's law. Because creation science relies on biblical texts, the
court reasoned, it "lacked a clear secular purpose" and violated the First
Amendment clause prohibiting the establishment of religion. Since then,
evolution has been the law of the land in US schools - if not always the
local choice.

Paley re-emerged in the mid-1990s, however, when a pair of scientists
reconstituted his ideas in an area beyond Darwin's ken: molecular biology.
In his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, Lehigh University biochemist Michael
Behe contended that natural selection can't explain the "irreducible
complexity" of molecular mechanisms like the bacterial flagellum, because
its integrated parts offer no selective advantages on their own. Two years
later, in The Design Inference, William Dembski, a philosopher and
mathematician at Baylor University, proposed that any biological system
exhibiting "information" that is both "complex" (highly improbable) and
"specified" (serving a particular function) cannot be a product of chance
or natural law. The only remaining option is an intelligent designer -
whether God or an alien life force. These ideas became the cornerstones of
ID, and Behe proclaimed the evidence for design to be "one of the greatest
achievements in the history of science."

The scientific rationale behind intelligent design was being developed just
as antievolution sentiment seemed to be bubbling up. In 1991, UC Berkeley
law professor Phillip Johnson published Darwin On Trial, an influential
antievolution book that dispensed with biblical creation accounts while
uniting antievolutionists under a single, secular-sounding banner:
intelligent design. In subsequent books, Johnson presents not just
antievolution arguments but a broader opposition to the "philosophy of
scientific materialism" - the assumption (known to scientists as
"methodological materialism") that all events have material, rather than
supernatural, explanations. To defeat it, he offers a strategy that would
be familiar in the divisive world of politics, called "the wedge." Like a
wedge inserted into a tree trunk, cracks in Darwinian theory can be used to
"split the trunk," eventually overturning scientific materialism itself.

That's where Discovery comes in. The institute was founded as a
conservative think tank in 1990 by longtime friends and former Harvard
roommates Bruce Chapman - director of the census bureau during the Reagan
administration - and technofuturist author George Gilder. "The institute is
futurist and rebellious, and it's prophetic," says Gilder. "It has a
science and technology orientation in a contrarian spirit" (see "Biocosm,"
facing page). In 1994, Discovery added ID to its list of contrarian causes,
which included everything from transportation to bioethics. Chapman hired
Meyer, who studied origin-of-life issues at Cambridge University, and the
institute signed Johnson - whom Chapman calls "the real godfather of the
intelligent design movement" - as an adviser and adopted the wedge.

For Discovery, the "thin end" of the wedge - according to a fundraising
document leaked on the Web in 1999 - is the scientific work of Johnson,
Behe, Dembski, and others. The next step involves "publicity and
opinion-making." The final goals: "a direct confrontation with the
advocates of material science" and "possible legal assistance in response
to integration of design theory into public school science curricula."

Step one has made almost no headway with evolutionists - the near-universal
majority of scientists with an opinion on the matter. But that, say
Discovery's critics, is not the goal. "Ultimately, they have an evangelical
Christian message that they want to push," says Michael Ruse, a philosopher
of science at Florida State. "Intelligent design is the hook."

It's a lot easier to skip straight to steps two and three, and sound
scientific in a public forum, than to deal with the rigor of the scientific
community. "It starts with education," Johnson told me, referring to high
school curricula. "That's where the public can have a voice. The
universities and the scientific world do not recognize freedom of
expression on this issue." Meanwhile, like any champion of a heretical
scientific idea, ID's supporters see themselves as renegades, storming the
gates of orthodoxy. "We all have a deep sense of indignation," says Meyer,
"that the wool is being pulled over the public's eyes."

The buzz phrase most often heard in the institute's offices is academic
freedom. "My hackles go up on the academic freedom issue," Chapman says.
"You should be allowed in the sciences to ask questions and posit
alternative theories."

None of this impresses the majority of the science world. "They have not
been able to convince even a tiny amount of the scientific community," says
Ken Miller. "They have not been able to win the marketplace of ideas."

And yet, the Discovery Institute's appeals to academic freedom create a
kind of catch-22. If scientists ignore the ID movement, their silence is
offered as further evidence of a conspiracy. If they join in, they risk
reinforcing the perception of a battle between equal sides. Most scientists
choose to remain silent. "Where the scientific community has been at
fault," says Krauss, "is in assuming that these people are harmless, like
flat-earthers. They don't realize that they are well organized, and that
they have a political agenda."

Taped to the wall of Eugenie Scott's windowless office at the National
Center for Science Education on the outskirts of Oakland, California, is a
chart titled "Current Flare-Ups." It's a list of places where the teaching
of evolution is under attack, from California to Georgia to Rio de Janeiro.
As director of the center, which defends evolution in teaching
controversies around the country, Scott has watched creationism up close
for 30 years. ID, in her view, is the most highly evolved form of
creationism to date. "They've been enormously effective compared to the
more traditional creationists, who have greater numbers and much larger
budgets," she says.

Scott credits the blueprint laid out by Johnson, who realized that to win
in the court of public opinion, ID needed only to cast reasonable doubt on
evolution. "He said, 'Don't get involved in details, don't get involved in
fact claims,'" says Scott. "'Forget about the age of Earth, forget about
the flood, don't mention the Bible.'" The goal, she says, is "to focus on
the big idea that evolution is inadequate. Intelligent design doesn't
really explain anything. It says that evolution can't explain things.
Everything else is hand-waving."

The movement's first test of Johnson's strategies began in 1999, when the
Kansas Board of Education voted to remove evolution from the state's
science standards. The decision, backed by traditional creationists,
touched off a fiery debate, and the board eventually reversed itself after
several antievolution members lost reelection bids. ID proponents used the
melee as cover to launch their own initiative. A Kansas group called IDNet
nearly pushed through its own textbook in a local school district.

Two years later, the Discovery Institute earned its first major political
victory when US senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) inserted language
written by Johnson into the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The clause,
eventually cut from the bill and placed in a nonbinding report, called for
school curricula to "help students understand the full range of scientific
views" on topics "that may generate controversy (such as biological
evolution)."

As the institute was demonstrating its Beltway clout, a pro-ID group called
Science Excellence for All Ohioans fueled a brewing local controversy. SEAO
- consisting of a few part-time activists, a Web site, and a mailing list -
began agitating to have ID inserted into Ohio's 10th-grade-biology
standards. In the process, they attracted the attention of a few receptive
school board members.

When the board proposed the two-on-two debate and invited Discovery, Meyer
and company jumped at the opportunity. Meyer, whom Gilder calls the
institute's resident "polymath," came armed with the Santorum amendment,
which he read aloud for the school board. He was bringing a message from
Washington: Teach the controversy. "We framed the issue quite differently
than our supporters," says Meyer. The approach put pro-ID Ohioans on firmer
rhetorical ground: Evolution should of course be taught, but "objectively."
Hearing Meyer's suggestion, says Doug Rudy, a software engineer and SEAO's
director, "we all sat back and said, Yeah, that's the way to go."

Back in Seattle, around the corner from the Discovery Institute, Meyer
offers some peer-reviewed evidence that there truly is a controversy that
must be taught. "The Darwinists are bluffing," he says over a plate of
oysters at a downtown seafood restaurant. "They have the science of the
steam engine era, and it's not keeping up with the biology of the
information age."

Meyer hands me a recent issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews
with an article by Carl Woese, an eminent microbiologist at the University
of Illinois. In it, Woese decries the failure of reductionist biology - the
tendency to look at systems as merely the sum of their parts - to keep up
with the developments of molecular biology. Meyer says the conclusion of
Woese's argument is that the Darwinian emperor has no clothes.

It's a page out of the antievolution playbook: using evolutionary biology's
own literature against it, selectively quoting from the likes of Stephen
Jay Gould to illustrate natural selection's downfalls. The institute
marshals journal articles discussing evolution to provide policymakers with
evidence of the raging controversy surrounding the issue.

Woese scoffs at Meyer's claim when I call to ask him about the paper. "To
say that my criticism of Darwinists says that evolutionists have no
clothes," Woese says, "is like saying that Einstein is criticizing Newton,
therefore Newtonian physics is wrong." Debates about evolution's
mechanisms, he continues, don't amount to challenges to the theory. And
intelligent design "is not science. It makes no predictions and doesn't
offer any explanation whatsoever, except for 'God did it.'"

Of course Meyer happily acknowledges that Woese is an ardent evolutionist.
The institute doesn't need to impress Woese or his peers; it can simply
co-opt the vocabulary of science - "academic freedom," "scientific
objectivity," "teach the controversy" - and redirect it to a public trying
to reconcile what appear to be two contradictory scientific views. By
appealing to a sense of fairness, ID finds a place at the political table,
and by merely entering the debate it can claim victory. "We don't need to
win every argument to be a success," Meyer says. "We're trying to validate
a discussion that's been long suppressed."

This is precisely what happened in Ohio. "I'm not a PhD in biology," says
board member Michael Cochran. "But when I have X number of PhD experts
telling me this, and X number telling me the opposite, the answer is
probably somewhere between the two."

An exasperated Krauss claims that a truly representative debate would have
had 10,000 pro-evolution scientists against two Discovery executives. "What
these people want is for there to be a debate," says Krauss. "People in the
audience say, Hey, these people sound reasonable. They argue, 'People have
different opinions, we should present those opinions in school.' That is
nonsense. Some people have opinions that the Holocaust never happened, but
we don't teach that in history."

Eventually, the Ohio board approved a standard mandating that students
learn to "describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically
analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." Proclaiming victory, Johnson
barnstormed Ohio churches soon after notifying congregations of a new,
ID-friendly standard. In response, anxious board members added a clause
stating that the standard "does not mandate the teaching or testing of
intelligent design." Both sides claimed victory. A press release from IDNet
trumpeted the mere inclusion of the phrase intelligent design, saying that
"the implication of the statement is that the 'teaching or testing of
intelligent design' is permitted." Some pro-evolution scientists,
meanwhile, say there's nothing wrong with teaching students how to
scrutinize theory. "I don't have a problem with that," says Patricia
Princehouse, a professor at Case Western Reserve and an outspoken opponent
of ID. "Critical analysis is exactly what scientists do."

The good feelings didn't last long. Early this year, a board-appointed
committee unveiled sample lessons that laid out the kind of evolution
questions students should debate. The models appeared to lift their
examples from Wells' book Icons of Evolution. "When I first saw it, I was
speechless," says Princehouse.

With a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley, Wells has the
kind of cred that intelligent design proponents love to cite. But, as ID
opponents enjoy pointing out, he's also a follower of Sun Myung Moon and
once declared that Moon's prayers "convinced me that I should devote my
life to destroying Darwinism." Icons attempts to discredit commonly used
examples of evolution, like Darwin's finches and peppered moths. Writing in
Nature, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne called Icons stealth creationism
that "strives to debunk Darwinism using the familiar rhetoric of biblical
creationists, including scientific quotations out of context, incomplete
summaries of research, and muddled arguments."

After months of uproar, the most obvious Icons-inspired lessons were
removed. But scientists remain furious. "The ones they left in are still
arguments for special creation - but you'd have to know the literature to
understand what they are saying. They've used so much technical jargon that
anybody who doesn't know a whole lot of evolutionary biology looks at it
and says 'It sounds scientific to me, what's the matter with it?'" says
Princehouse. "As a friend of mine said, it takes a half a second for a baby
to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean."

As Ohio teachers prepare their lessons for the coming year, the question
must be asked: Why the fuss over an optional lesson plan or two? After all,
both sides agree that the new biology standards - in which 10 evolution
lessons replace standards that failed to mention evolution at all - are a
vast improvement. The answer: In an era when the government is pouring
billions into biology, and when stem cells and genetically modified food
are front-page news, spending even a small part of the curriculum on bogus
criticisms of evolution is arguably more detrimental now than any time in
history. Ironically, says Ohio State University biology professor Steve
Rissing, the education debate coincides with Ohio's efforts to lure biotech
companies. "How can we do that when our high school biology is failing us?"
he says. "Our cornfields are gleaming with GMO corn. There's a fundamental
disconnect there."

Intelligent design advocates say that teaching students to "critically
analyze" evolution will help give them the skills to "see both sides" of
all scientific issues. And if the Discovery Institute execs have their way,
those skills will be used to reconsider the philosophy of modern science
itself - which they blame for everything from divorce to abortion to the
insanity defense. "Our culture has been deeply influenced by materialist
thought," says Meyer. "We think it's deeply destructive, and we think it's
false. And we mean to overturn it."

It's mid-July, and the Ohio school board is about to hold its final meeting
before classes start this year. There's nothing about intelligent design on
the agenda. The debate was settled months ago. And yet, Princehouse,
Rissing, and two other scientists rise to speak during the "non-agenda"
public testimony portion.

One by one, the scientists recite their litany of objections: The model
lesson plan is still based on concepts from ID literature; the ACLU is
considering to sue to stop it; the National Academy of Sciences opposes it
as unscientific. "This is my last time," says Rissing, "as someone who has
studied science and the process of evolution for 25 years, to say I
perceive that my children and I are suffering injuries based on a flawed
lesson plan that this board has passed."

During a heated question-and-answer session, one board member accuses the
scientists of posturing for me, the only reporter in the audience. Michael
Cochran challenges the scientists to cite any testimony that the board
hadn't already heard "ad infinitum." Another board member, Deborah
Owens-Fink, declares the issue already closed. "We've listened to experts
on both sides of this for three years," she says. "Ultimately, the question
of what students should learn "is decided in a democracy, not by any one
group of experts."

The notion is noble enough: In a democracy, every idea gets heard. But in
science, not all theories are equal. Those that survive decades - centuries
- of scientific scrutiny end up in classrooms, and those that don't are
discarded. The intelligent design movement is using scientific rhetoric to
bypass scientific scrutiny. And when science education is decided by charm
and stage presence, the Discovery Institute wins.
Contributing editor Evan Ratliff (eratliff () atavistic org) wrote about sugar
substitutes in Wired 11.11. He is the coauthor of Safe, a book on the
science and technology of antiterrorism, to be published next year.


Biocosm
The technogeek guru of bandwidth utopia defends intelligent design and
explains why he is a believer.
By George Gilder

Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar in the world -
especially in math and science. Our biology classes, in particular, espouse
anti-industrial propaganda about global warming and the impact of DDT on
the eggshells of eagles while telling just-so stories about the random
progression from primordial soup to Britney Spears. In a self-refuting
materialist superstition, teachers deny the role of ideas and purposes in
evolution and hence implicitly in their own thought.

The Darwinist materialist paradigm, however, is about to face the same
revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago. Just as physicists
discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but
a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are
biologists coming to understand that the cell is not a simple lump of
protoplasm, as Charles Darwin believed. It's a complex
information-processing machine comprising tens of thousands of proteins
arranged in fabulously intricate algorithms of communication and synthesis.
The human body contains some 60 trillion cells. Each one stores information
in DNA codes, processes and replicates it in three forms of RNA and
thousands of supporting enzymes, exquisitely supplies the system with
energy, and seals it in semipermeable phospholipid membranes. It is a
process subject to the mathematical theory of information, which shows that
even mutations occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and
selected at the rate of a Google search couldn't beget the intricate
interwoven fabric of structure and function of a human being in such a
short amount of time. Natural selection should be taught for its important
role in the adaption of species, but Darwinian materialism is an
embarrassing cartoon of modern science.

What is the alternative? Intelligent design at least asks the right
questions. In a world of science that still falls short of a rigorous
theory of human consciousness or of the big bang, intelligent design theory
begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is
hierarchical and precedes its embodiment. The concept precedes the
concrete. The contrary notion that the world of mind, including science
itself, bubbled up randomly from a prebiotic brew has inspired all the
reductionist futilities of the 20th century, from Marx's obtuse materialism
to environmental weather panic to zero-sum Malthusian fears over
population. In biology classes, our students are not learning the largely
mathematical facts of 21st-century science; they're imbibing the
consolations of a faith-driven 19th-century materialist myth.

George Gilder publishes the Gilder Technology Report and is a senior fellow
at the Discovery Institute.


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