An intelligent discussion about life

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Thursday, April 17, 2008

An intelligent discussion about life

By Bruce Chapman

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is a trenchant new film by

actor/economist Ben Stein, the man first made famous in "Ferris Bueller's

Day Off." He's now tackling with humorous dudgeon the classic example of

ideological science, Darwinian evolution. Stein shows Darwinists insistently

misrepresenting the scientific case against their theory. Where facts and

reason might fail to persuade, personal attacks are employed, sometimes even

by organizations supposedly committed to civil discourse.

When I was taught Darwin's theory in college more than four decades ago, it

was represented as unassailable. But I also was taught in those days to

respect academic freedom, which is a good standard to apply in any field. In

the 1990s, before intelligent design was added to the ideas studied at

Discovery Institute, I learned about an assault on the academic freedom of

Dean Kenyon, a biologist and author at San Francisco State University who

had come to view Darwin's theory as flawed. At first, the effort to restrain

him from teaching seemed like just another skirmish over political

correctness.

Then, following the Kenyon case, I began to examine the account of life's

development that I once had been taught so dogmatically. One after another

of the demonstrations of the theory that supposedly were "certain" and

"conclusive" when I was a student - such as Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings

that showed various animals looking almost identical in the earliest stages

of life - have been abandoned or replaced. What has not changed is the

dogmatism.

I soon came to realize that differences over the development of life, unlike

other disputes, spark so much controversy because the collateral stakes are

higher than they seem. Where you stand on the origins question often

influences your worldview on issues of human life, ranging from cloning to

euthanasia. Are we ultimately the product of purpose and design? If so, we

would seem to be heirs to a more-or-less settled moral reality. Or, is man

the unguided "result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have

him in mind," as Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson wrote? In

that case, perhaps we can conceive our own values.

Public discussion on evolution is complicated further by confusion over

words that lack any constant and agreed meaning. Terms like "evolve" and

"theory" have different definitions in science than they do in everyday

speech. Even among scientists, they are subject to varying understandings.

People frequently use the word "evolve" as a genteel way of saying "change,"

as in, "The Toyota Camry has not evolved much this year." But that makes no

sense as a scientific expression. Cars don't "evolve" in the way most

Darwinists mean - an undirected process of small, incremental mutations

acted on by natural selection to produce new species. Cars are designed.

Intelligence is involved. Auto designs - like ideas or fashions or cities -

don't "evolve." My own ideas on evolution didn't evolve; I changed my mind.

Unfortunately, people sometimes are told that Darwinian evolution simply

demonstrates "changes over time." If that were so, how could any sensible

person object to it? Even ardent critics of Darwinism accept

"microevolution" - change over time within species. Animal and plant

breeding, after all, are kinds of human-guided microevolution. Nature, too,

plainly conducts microevolution.

But classical Darwinists such as Francisco Ayala and Richard Dawkins assert

much more. Dawkins, for example, acknowledges that living organisms "give

the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." But, he argues that

this appearance of design is completely misleading because undirected

Darwinian processes - random mutations and natural selection - can produce

the features of living systems that look designed. In Ayala's words, natural

selection produces "design without a designer."

Advocates of the theory of intelligent design see things differently. They

think there are discernible features of living systems and the universe that

are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process like

natural selection. They don't dispute that life changes over time; they

dispute that undirected processes produced all of that change. They see

evidence of actual, not just illusory, design.

For example, my colleague, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, argues that

digital code stored in the DNA molecule points to intelligent design. He

notes that DNA stores information using sequences of chemicals that

"function just like alphabetic characters in a written text or binary digits

in a software code." This discovery has profound implications.

As he explains, "Whenever we trace information back to its source - whether

we are looking at an ancient hieroglyphic, a headline in a newspaper or

software code in a computer program, we always come to an intelligent

agent - to a mind, not a material process. So when we find information in

life in the form of the digital code in DNA, the most likely explanation is

that DNA also had an intelligent source." In a forthcoming book Meyer shows

that the theory is scientifically testable.

Still, many Darwinists charge that intelligent design, or ID, is

"creationism in disguise." But the case for ID is based on scientific

evidence, not Scripture. Indeed, some creationists attack ID for not making

a case based on the Bible and for employing evidence that shows the Earth is

billions of years old.

None of this is to say that intelligent design doesn't have larger

implications. Arguably, ID is friendly to theism, just as Darwinism is

friendly to atheism. That is what upsets the fervent atheist Richard

Dawkins, who in "Expelled" says he can consider intelligent design as an

explanation for the origin of life if it means space aliens brought life to

Earth, but could not allow any possibility that God might have had a role in

design.

Of course, you don't have to be religious to support ID. The British

philosopher and longtime atheist, Antony Flew, for example, has embraced

intelligent design. On the other hand, you don't have to be an atheist to

accept Darwinism; a few churches even celebrate "Darwin Day." Most ID

scientists (but not all) do believe in God and most Darwinists (but not all)

do not. A 2003 Cornell University survey of leading evolutionary biologists

showed that 87 percent rejected the existence of God.

Scholars seeking a compromise that brings religion directly into the

scientific discussion have offered the comforting possibility that God did

the creating, but did it through Darwinian evolution. Guidance of an

unguided process is the idea. But this vague proposition contradicts what

almost all leading Darwinist scientists, including Dawkins, emphatically

contend. In Darwin's universe, natural selection is blind, mutations are

undirected and humanity is an unintended outcome. If the evolutionary

process is guided, then it no longer is Darwinian. And if the evolutionary

process is unguided, it allows no room for God. Logically, not even God can

guide an unguided process.

The public hasn't been told most of what I have just described. Many in the

media typically define ID as a proposition that "life is so complex it must

have been the product of a supernatural power." But that mixes a scientific

proposition with its philosophical implications. ID scientists don't do

that.

Media also typically greet reports of evolutionary success with uncritical

acclaim, while growing scientific dissent from Darwinism (more than 700

scientists have signed a "Dissent from Darwin" statement) and production of

peer-reviewed science publications by pro-ID scientists are ignored. Even a

federal judge in Pennsylvania copied a false American Civil Liberties Union

and Darwinist canard that there are no such peer-reviewed publications

friendly to ID.

Some of the misinformation is purposeful, such as the effort to disallow ID

by misdefinition, while some is due to ignorance and a bland assumption that

one can understand a complex scientific dispute easily. We even read of

politicians who profess to agree with ID, but misstate what it is. (Save us

from our friends.)

On the other hand, you don't have to be a genius to grasp the evidence for

and against Darwin's theory. We teach evolution in 10th grade, after all.

With all this in mind, you would think that people could agree that

differences over matters of evidence on issue of life's origins can best be

resolved if different sides are asked to face off with their best spokesmen

and their best arguments.

But instead of following such a policy, most Darwinists have avoided

debates, and in universities have stooped to denial of academic tenure,

promotions and even graduate-student status to dissenters. They either

ignore the case against Darwin'stheory or debunk a straw-man version of it.

The film "Expelled" explores a number of cases of academic persecution,

making clear that what is taught in high school, however important in the

public eye, probably matters less to the future of science than whether

dissenting scientists are able to teach and conduct research in

universities.

Precisely because the majority in science has been wrong on note-worthy

occasions, progress often does depend on courageous dissenters. The

principle is clear: "A fair result can be obtained only by fully balancing

the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." So wrote Charles

Darwin.