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Patience and Absurdity: How to Deal with Intelligent Design
Creationism
A review of Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific
Critique of the New Creationism
Matt Young and Taner Edis (Editors)
By Paul R. Gross
Posted November 7, 2004
Physicists Matt Young and Taner Edis are the editors of a
new volume whose contributors are working scholars in the sciences touched by
the newest expression of "creation science": Intelligent Design (ID) Theory.
Why Intelligent Design Fails is a patient assessment of all the scientific
claims made in connection with ID. The half dozen science-enabled spokesmen for
ID are the indispensable core group of an international neo-creationist big
tent. Goals of the American movement are sweeping: they begin with a highly
visible, well-funded, nationwide effort to demean evolutionary science in
American school (K-12) curricula. ID is offered as a better alternative. The
hoped-for result is the addition of ID to, or even its substitution for, the
teaching of evolution. Which would mean substituting early 19 th-century nature
study for modern biology. The admitted ultimate goal of the ID movement is to
topple natural science (they berate it as "materialism") from its pedestal in
Western culture and to replace it with "theistic science."
For several decades, similarly imperialistic goals of a
coterie of cultural theorists have been achieved in many university departments
of social sciences and humanities, including art history. One well-known art
critic, Roger Kimball, has long been an analyst of their postmodern,
postcolonial, gender-feminist chic. But now he admits to second thoughts about
the value of patient analysis of its gaucheries. Painstaking analysis, applied
to presentist posturing like that which now passes in some parts of the academy
for art history, can be counterproductive. He worries, in a new book, that
careful analysis of wishful absurdities can suggest, to onlookers innocent of
academic high culture, that the absurdities are legitimate alternatives to the
serious study of art -- that the conflict is between equally meritorious
interpretations. "Patient objections to the ludicrous," he writes, "become
ludicrous themselves." [1]
But this is a worry that goes beyond cultural studies, and
it has now become acute in the evolutionary sciences. Patient analysis of
creationist blunders and sham reasoning (definition: ostensible inquiry whose
conclusion is fixed in advance) has as often done harm as good to the life
sciences. Biologists are confronted endlessly with touring companies of
debaters and religious charismatics who present the scripts of "scientific"
creationism. Most evolutionists and other biologists who are aware of these
performances take the easy way out: they ignore all religion-based commentary
on science, justifying indifference by declaring that to argue would dignify
absurdity. Or worse: they shrug off sham reasoning with a glib dismissal:
"Nobody really believes that stuff." The excuse is itself absurd: Vast
numbers -- indeed, a majority -- of our countrymen do believe that stuff, even as
they are ignorant of the real science.
Still, refusal to dignify absurdity has some merit. The
creationist position, especially this newest form of it, is pure Hollywood:
There is No Such Thing As Bad Publicity. That this view is held by the ID
leadership is fully documented in several recent studies of the movement. Thus,
almost any careful examination of ID by qualified scientists, mathematicians,
and philosophers -- especially by those with strong credentials in evolution or
cosmology -- is likely to be advertised by ID publicists as proof of the
scientific importance of ID. Any non-polemical response to it is described to
the mass audience for anti-evolution as showing the revolutionary truth of ID,
the fear and trembling it causes among Darwinists. That a few dedicated
scientists take the trouble to answer ID "theory" in detail is regularly
adduced -- in ID books, editorials, opinion columns, talk shows, dedicated
internet sites, and in a growing numbers of activist student organizations
around the country -- as signaling the collapse of Darwinism.
The contributors to Why Intelligent Design Fails (WIDF)
have risked being so used. But they decided, evidently, to accept this risk.
They decided to examine every supposedly scientific (or mathematical, or
epistemological) claim of ID, patiently, in detail, and to offer only those
conclusions about the value of ID science -- if any -- that emerge clearly in the
individual critiques and from their totality. Whether this risk was justified
will be known only if and when the book is widely read, and then responded to
(as inevitably it will be) at those many creationist web sites, meetings, talk
shows, conferences, and clubs. If they do no more than to denounce the book and
disparage its authors (as they began to do the day it was listed on Amazon.com),
WIDF will have succeeded. If instead they proclaim it evidence for the
scientific muscle of ID theory, the tables will, at least to some extent, have
been turned. But about the quality of the critiques in this book, and of the
totality, there is no doubt. This is honest, technically
competent -- patient -- inquiry; the critique of the newest form of creation science
is devastating.
The Science of ID "Science"
Those scare-quotes on "science" are in ironic honor of
recent and current philosophers and sociologists of science who use them
routinely to sabotage the value of any word they surround. Thus if you are a
relativist, you write about "truth" to signal your discovery that there is no
such thing. If you are convinced that objectivity is made impossible by an
observer's culture or ethnicity, then you write "objectivity." WIDF is about
the scientific claims of ID, not about its background, history, purposes,
politics, and practices. All those are covered in other books and merely
touched upon in the short introduction. The undertaking here is, rather, to
examine and judge only those ID claims that have some original scientific (or
mathematical) content. Therefore the book lacks any discussion of, for example,
one of the iconic books of the movement, Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution,
which offers no science of its own but rather a litany of accusations against
evolutionary biology, mined from the literature of creationism and applied to
quotes dug up from internal arguments in the biological literature. Its burden
is that evolution as taught is wrong or fraudulent, and must therefore not be
presented to children without the strongest disclaimers. Wisely, the
contributors to WIDF have ignored all this. It has already been dismantled,
point by point and claim by claim, in lengthy treatments by scientists who are
experts in all the fields involved. A check at www.ncseweb.org will unearth
them all. There are, on the other hand, purportedly new arguments for ID: and
those are the mainstay of its nationwide campaign. They fall loosely into three
classes:
(1) Primarily biological. The featured argument was offered
by biochemist Michael Behe, who proposed in 1996 that at the sub-cellular level
of molecular machines and chemical reaction pathways, important systems are
"irreducibly complex" (IC). Such systems have multiple working parts, each of
which is essential for function. Absence of any part would destroy the
function. But, his argument goes, non-functioning systems are not subject to
positive natural selection. Therefore complex functioning systems cannot have
evolved gradually by any Darwinian mechanism, which requires that all
intermediate stages have some function. They must have arisen in one fell
swoop. Therefore (sic) they are the product of some designing agency -- of
intelligent design. All recent ID biological claims relate to this one, and the
most widely exposed mathematical claim depends upon it too. A body of other,
very old but regularly updated creationist claims comes along with ID, however.
These are all versions of the young-earth creationist preoccupation: that while
there may be some common descent at a very low level (contemporary species,
perhaps, from the original basic kinds), the world's biota are the products of
God's "kinds," as per Genesis or in separate interventions.
(2) Epistemological-Physical. These arguments challenge the
logic or the formal plausibility of prevailing scientific accounts of universal
origins and of the history of life on Earth. There are several threads of which
these arguments are woven, some very old, some relatively new. The oldest are
creationist canards from thermodynamics, for example: that since the entropy of
a (closed) system either rises or remains constant, and its degree of order
(complexity) must therefore remain constant or fall, the spontaneous (read
"natural") appearance of life-forms (which means increased order and
complexity) is impossible. Something other than nature alone must have done it.
Another class of arguments depends upon heuristic models -- Michael Behe's
mousetrap, for example -- as illustrations of irreducible complexity or the need
for a purposeful designer. The more sophisticated arguments surfacing in ID
ignore these old thermodynamics howlers and focus, instead, on supposed
limitations of self-organizing processes or on the several anthropic principles
("the fine-tuning of the universe for life") as indicators of supra-physical
design in the universe.
(3) Mathematical-Probabilistic-Computational. These are
descendants of the primitive creationist claim of life's improbability, as
calculated. If, that is, the assembly of something necessary to life requires a
coming together, at just the right time and place, of a large number of
individual events or objects, each of which has its own (often low)
probability, then the probability of the assembly occurring by chance is the
product of all those constituent probabilities. If that product is small
enough, then the likelihood of the assembly happening in any real time-interval
is effectively zero. Again, the more sophisticated ID proponents shun this
argument, steering away from the self-evident absurdity of such clearly
inapplicable models. Nevertheless, the flawed basis in equi-probability and
multiplication remains in the fancier versions. The achievement of William
Dembski, the movement's mathematician-theologian-philosopher, is to couple such
arguments with a purely deductive device, an eliminative "design inference," by
which -- he claims (but has never demonstrated) -- the presence of design can be
discovered as the cause of any supposedly natural process. This is to be done
by considering the probabilities of chance and "regularity" (physical law) as
causes, and then by the extent to which the still unexplained event or object
has "specified complexity."
Judging ID Science
WIDF analyses of these ID offerings are provided by a team
of well-qualified contributors. For the biological claims, there are chapters
from paleontologist Alan Gishlick, biologist-engineer Gert Korthof, molecular
pharmacologist Ian Musgrave, and molecular biologist David Ussery. For logic,
epistemology, physics, and cosmology, there are contributions from physicist
(and editor) Taner Edis, taphonomist (the study of fossilization) Gary Hurd,
bio-mathematician Istvan Karsai, physicist-engineer Mark Perakh,
philosopher-biologist Niall Shanks, physicist Victor Stenger, and physicist
(editor) Matt Young. Finally, the mathematical and probabilistic arguments are
examined closely by zoologist-computer scientist Wesley Elsberry, physicist
Mark Perakh, and mathematician-computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit.
Result? Not one of the ID claims is sustained, let alone
proven, in the massive output of ID to date. Most of the claims are shown to be
simply bad science. The expository style of WIDF is for the most part
respectful of the authors and claims analyzed. It is therefore very remarkable
that those presumably qualified ID authors should have committed themselves,
and to some extent their academic careers, to a relentless, public elaboration of
soft claims, bad arguments, and plain mistakes. One can only guess that they
are driven by motivation and sincere feelings other than simple dedication to
doing the best possible science.
A few examples, telegraphically stated, must suffice here.
Irreducible complexity will do for most of the biology. Behe's entire argument
depends upon the implied necessity that every piece of a sub-cellular molecular
machine -- and most such "pieces" are proteins, which are encoded in genes -- be
provided for ab initio. That is, it requires that all the proteins of a
supposedly irreducibly complex system are (or were) provided from the
beginning, or that the genes for them were already there at the beginning but
not necessarily being used. Examples he adduces of such systems are the blood
clotting cascade and the bacterial flagellum, which functions as an outboard
motor for the bacterial cell. But as the biologist-authors of WIDF show, there
is no need for all the parts of any such system to be there, or to have been
there as such, from the beginning. Behe made a simple, but bad, mistake. He
overlooked gene duplication and the independent evolution of copies; and he
forgot that many, perhaps most, proteins have multiple functions. He seems not
to have thought through the startling redundancy of subcellular functions.
Thus, in separate WIDF chapters, Ussery and Musgrave present unshakable
evidence that systems Behe would consider IC have evolved by "Darwinian
mechanisms"; and that relic intermediates for many of the steps in that evolution
survive as the current, simpler version of the system in some contemporary
organism.
Gishlick, in an unexpected way, tops even those no-nonsense
contributions. Taking the definition of IC at face value, he shows that there
must be IC systems at the level of anatomy, as well as of biochemistry. One
well-studied IC system of contemporary animal anatomy is the flight machine of
birds: the wing. Gishlick sets out the special parts of the working wing and
all its auxiliaries, from wrist bones to special, airfoil-producing flight
feathers. He then shows that all those parts appeared during the long course of
Avian evolution over geologic time, and that for most of that long stretch,
those parts functioned usefully (therefore selectably) for somethingother than
flight. Evolution of functional systems is almost always a story of
co-optation, as evolutionists have known for nearly a century. Gishlick's
naming of known fossil species that had those intermediate states of the system
as it evolved, is an overwhelming dismissal of the central claim from IC.
Gert Korthof undertakes the modest job of examining descent
with modification as viewed by the ID leaders. "Descent with modification" was
Darwin's own shorthand for the history of life on Earth, for the facts of
evolution as he gathered them together (even in the absence of a workable idea
about heredity). All the ID
leaders equivocate about this. They do hesitate to state, if not to imply, the
young-earth creationist absurdity that all species are "kinds," and that all
kinds were called into being by God. Biologist Behe, for example, concedes that
descent with modification has occurred; but he indicates that it can't account
for IC, so that intelligent design must be at the heart of real
species-formation -- if and when that happens. Others among the ID leadership
either deny any taxonomically significant descent with modification, or labor
to create complex "alternate" taxonomies that allow species to proliferate, but
only as products of basic families -- the "kinds" of genesis. Korthof's essay is a
compact gem: he shows that none of these jury-rigged schemes can possibly
explain the huge matrix of facts out of which modern evolutionary biology
grows, and that they are severally illogical to boot.
The part-epistemological, part-faux-thermodynamic ID claims
to the effect that information-rich complexity cannot arise spontaneously in
natural systems are addressed by several of these authors. But Shanks and
Karsai describe such spontaneous complexities as the beautiful Benard
(convection) cells that organize themselves in an asymmetrically-heated Petri
dish, and the astonishing, ad hoc shaping of cellular structure in wasp nests,
whose builders have no intelligent-design contingency book for nest structure.
The last resort of ID proponents when defeated, as they have been in arguments
about the need for designer-intervention in such historical processes as
evolution and such contemporary processes as these discussed by Shanks and
Karsai, is to invoke the strong anthropic principle. The universe is
exquisitely fine-tuned, this says, as regards the values of its fundamental
physical constants and the possible structures arising because of
them -- fine-tuned for "life as we know it," for us. Therefore the universe must
have been pre-loaded with the right information -- the "complex specified
information" that William Dembski and Behe and the others argue is the
unfailing diagnostic of an intelligent designer. Victor Stenger, however,
explains here why current theoretical and astro-physics, especially
multiple-universes cosmological theory, is perfectly at home with a
"fine-tuned" universe inhabited by ourselves, and with its having arisen
spontaneously.
Mark Perakh has taken great pains to study and analyze the
claims of Dembski's most influential theoretical book so far. That book
presents an argument based upon certain induction-formalizing, optimizing
theorems discovered by mathematicians David Wolpert and William MacReady in
1997. As Dembski exploits them, these so-called "No Free Lunch" theorems mean
that the "the Darwinian mechanism," taken to mean iterated algorithmic searches
on a (biological) fitness landscape, cannot in general find the kinds of
solution represented in the complexity of biological organisms -- unless necessary
information is incorporated beforehand in the algorithm itself. "Front-loading"
again. But Perakh's study shows that this conclusion results from a
misunderstanding and misapplication of the No Free Lunch theorems. David
Wolpert, co-discoverer of the theorems, dismissed Dembski's prolix argument as
"written in Jello." Elsberry and Shallit, finally, provide a well-named essay,
"Playing Games with Probability: Dembski's Complex Specified Information." In
it they show that this most fundamental (and most obscure) of the formal
elements of Intelligent Design Theory is simply incoherent.
The editors, Young and Edis, contribute strong chapters of
their own on a number of these points and also provide concise but useful
background on the ID movement, on the epistemological issues, and on ID
congeners elsewhere in the religious world (for example in Islam). Gary Hurd
provides a very useful appendix on organizations and websites concerned with ID
(pro and con).
What's Really Happening
Much of this might appear to professional biologists to be
nit-picking; and in a sense it is. But it is nit-picking because the claims of
neo-creationism are mostly nits. They are quote-minings, trivially literal
models such as mousetraps and painted bulls-eyes, or obscure mathematical-probabilistic
arguments based upon unrealistic models of biological phenomena. Biologists who
know what has been going on in evolutionary science the past decade or two can
be, understandably, bemused. They know that there has been an explosion of
progress in study of the central process of evolution: the formation of new
species -- speciation. They are aware of excellent recent books, popular 2 and
professional, 3 recounting that progress, conveying what we know today of at
least some of the real mechanisms by which speciation has occurred in the past
and is happening all around us, now.
They recognize that providing a fully detailed account of
macroevolution is the daunting task yet before us, but that the fruitful
marriage of molecular genetics and developmental evolutionary biology has
already provided plausible answers to the basic question: how the proliferation
of animal body plans happened, at least since they first fossilized well during
the lower Cambrian. The forms demonstrated then heralded the eventual diversity.
Evolutionists know now that the Cambrian "explosion" was not a literal
explosion: that the rapid unfolding of body-plans in the lower Cambrian was
inherited from ancestors: and some of those ancestors have been found. An
ancestral Echinoderm (not yet an Echinoderm) has at last been discovered in the
Chengjiang deposits of China. The Echinoderms did not appear explosively, by
some act of special creation. They evolved. There is no reason to doubt that
the same was true for the other phyla. One of the elusive, predicted, and
long-awaited microscopic ancestors of all bilaterian animals has been found,
fossilized, in the Doushanto formation in China. It dates to some 50 million
years before the Cambrian.
Every reasonably informed biologist knows that there are
big problems in the history of life on Earth still to be solved, and the ways
to their solutions are not transparently clear. But that is the way of all
science; and so far, natural science has delivered testable and daily-confirmed
explanations. No other "science," theistic or otherwise, has. Every one of
those informed and open-minded biologists therefore knows, as well as anything
about the physical world can be known, that organic evolution happened on this
planet. And he or she knows that current evolutionary theory, the product of
145 years of often besieged work, of testing and winnowing, is one of our
surest scientific possessions.
So it seems a trouble for busy scientists to give their
time to truth-squads, examining (scrupulously, as do the WIDF contributors) the
incessant nay-saying of creationists, and now of creationists who use the
language of science and mathematics comfortably. But it must be done. There
will be more anti-evolution, religiously motivated nay-saying, and there must be
more books like WIDF. The stakes are high. Nothing less hangs in the balance
than the hope that some fraction of the next generation -- of our children -- will
get serious education in science, and that they will be capable of speaking
truth not only to power, but to and for all their peers.
Dr. Paul R. Gross is University Professor of Life Sciences,
emeritus, at the University of Virginia. His baccalaureate and doctoral degrees
are from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a developmental and molecular
biologist who has taught at Brown, Rochester, MIT, and the University of
Virginia. He is co-author with Norman Levitt of Higher Superstition (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994), and with Barbara Forrest of Creationism's
Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press, 2003).
References
- Roger Kimball, The Rape of
the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. (San Francisco: Encounter
Books, 2004), 52.
- Menno Schilthuizen, Frogs,
Flies, and Dandelions: The Making of Species (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001).
- Jerry A. Coyne and H. Allen
Orr, Speciation (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, Inc., 2004).
- Why Intelligent Design
Fails is published by Rutgers
University Press, copyright 2004.
First published in e-Skeptic of October 29, 2004 (www.skeptic.com).
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