By David Frenkel/ Guest columnist
Thursday, June 23, 2005
The purveyors of so-called "Intelligent Design" are serving up just one more flavor of creationism. It is "Divine Design" cloaked in pseudo-science.
Hucksterism is alive and well.
Intelligent design is the idea that the world is too complex and sophisticated to have been an accident of fate, and therefore must have been designed by some higher power.
Did this notion come built upon a platform of tangible evidence and scientific research? No.
It originated with Phillip Johnson, a Berkeley law professor who became a born-again Christian after a bitter divorce in the 1980s and had an epiphany about creation. Johnson's intelligent design assertion (presented as a "theory") has a home and a movement based at the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle, Wash. The founders developed a plan known as the "wedge strategy" to drive a wedge into the theory of evolution and destroy it, replacing it with intelligent design. The movement is a public relations campaign based on fundamentalist Christian dogma. To support its assertion, the center offers no data, no papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and the scientists involved have no credentials relevant to a rigorous testing of the theory of evolution.
If one is going to come up with an alternative hypothesis to evolution, why stop at only two theories, evolution vs. divine design? Why not unintelligent design, or perhaps chaotic, committee, perverse, malevolent, or sadistic design? All could be supported with some evidence, provided one is prepared to ignore contradictory evidence.
Selective presentation of evidence and spin-meistering seem to pervade today's America at the political and religious level. What seems to be losing out here is rational evidence-based science and we shall all rue the day this started to spin out of control.
Were Charles Darwin to be alive today, as a scientist he would welcome new evidence that repudiated his theory or helped it to evolve (no pun intended). He would be thrilled to know more about the genome and molecular biology. He did the best he could with what could be observed then. Today our knowledge is vastly expanded. His theory, though modified by new discoveries, still stands up.
The proponents of "Intelligent Design" point to the beauty and symmetry in the universe as proof of a divine designer, while selectively ignoring the flaws of cancer and toxins and mutations, not to mention the vast societal flaws of bigotry, violence, and genocide.
One is tempted to believe all this talk of a higher intelligent power is an avoidance of personal responsibility to take action and make a difference when things do not measure up to our moral values. Sharing a moral code of behavior embodied in law and is uniformly taught and enforced seems to be more important to peaceful, prosperous and moral coexistence. More so than the historically divisive array of brands of religions that provide another factor to encourage xenophobia.
The pocketbook issue this raises is the decline of American competitiveness that will surely follow a decline in our ability to attract and retain top scientists because they feel religion and faith have no place in the laboratory or classroom. I wonder how much damage people will tolerate to their material standard of living before they recognize the elegant sanity that the founding father's brought to the United States with their unique constitution.
So far America is holding its own versus Europe because stem cell research there has also been hampered. But schools in Europe are not being attacked for teaching evolution and biology teachers are not being intimidated for daring to teach it. That is where we run the danger of frightening away people who believe in scientific method. Intelligent design advocates are merely a second wave of creationists cloaked in the guise of science intended to muddy the waters of analysis.
David Frenkel lives on Spruce Street.
http://www2.townonline.com/winchester/opinion/view.bg?articleid=271948&format=text
This is an excellent and accurate assessment of the threat presented by the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. Scientists are already "teaching the controversy" and those of us who do research in evolutionary biology are challenging old ideas and proposing new ones all the time. This is how science progresses. What we are NOT doing is throwing up our hands everytime we come across a difficult or complex problem (e.g. the suppossed Irreducible Complexity argument). To do so would be Intellectual Laziness and those who promote ID might better refer to themselves as "IL."
We are also not telling our students that it is OK to answer every scientific question with the answer "A powerful but unknown force in the universe is responsible for creating everything that we observe." To allow ID theology into our science classrooms opens the door for just this sort of response. It will eventually lead to the stifling of all scientific curiosity and it will have serious long term negative impacts on this nation and our economy.
This issue and the philosophy behind it are much more destructive than many people realize and just as the laws of Muslim clerics in the 16th century destroyed Islamic science and intellectualism we stand on the precipice of doing the same thing to ourselves.