MOJO-JOJO

"BreakPoint with Charles Colson
Commentary #020314 - 03/14/2002
What Would Darwin Say?: The Ohio Intelligent Design Controversy


What would Darwin have said about the growing intelligent design controversy in Ohio? We can't ask him, of course. He's been dead for 120 years. But there are tantalizing hints in Darwin's writings that he might just have surprised, even shocked, his present-day followers. Darwin was a lot friendlier to intellectual freedom than many neo-Darwinists have been.

Fellows of the Discovery Institute made national headlines this week when they argued in open hearings before the Ohio state board of education for teaching intelligent design alongside evolution. Intelligent design is the scientific theory that natural objects,like organisms,display the hallmarks of a purposeful, deliberate cause -- an intelligent agent -- capable of effects that no natural law or chance process could produce. (hmmmm.....ever seen a snowflake under a microscope, Chuck?)

The response in much of the press against the intelligent design proponents and the board members who favor it has been vicious. Editorial columns of most Ohio newspapers cried, "Nonsense!" "A dangerous and unwise move," warned worried scientists in Ohio and elsewhere. "There's no place in the science classroom even to discuss proposals such as intelligent design [even Baylor University put the brakes on Dembski], which depart from the strict naturalism of modern science" -- or so the alarmed editorials have claimed.

What's fascinating is that not all media observers react so hysterically. Commenting in TIME magazine, for instance, science writer Robert Wright noted that intelligent design advocates "have raised productive doubts -- and, in science, being productively wrong is nearly as valuable as being right." Going further, Wright notes that "no one knows how DNA began to replicate or how the universe got built in such a way that replication was possible. It's not crazy to think that such initial conditions were set by some intelligence for an overarching purpose that is still unfolding." (uhhhh...okay)

Could an Ohio high school biology student bring this TIME magazine article into her science classroom for discussion? More to the point, could she bring in Darwin's classic, the ORIGIN OF SPECIES itself?

And here's where one can't help but wonder what Darwin would have said about the Ohio controversy. Not many people have read more than a few pages of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES, if they've opened the book at all. But on the last page, Darwin says that life itself was "first breathed by the Creator" -- a phrase that would today give fits to civil liberties lawyers. [Okay, so he had a brain fart....]

And there are other passages in the ORIGIN that should worry the Ohio opponents of intelligent design. In fact, the passage I'm about to read should be posted on the wall of every science classroom in the nation, as a motto upholding the principles of intellectual freedom in science. "For I am well aware," Darwin wrote, "that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."

Now that's intellectual fairness: fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of the question. That's what many citizens in Ohio are struggling for -- and what, if he were around today, Darwin himself would tell the school board to do -- sounds good to me."


What do you think???

MrDarwin

I think it matters not one bit what Darwin might have thought. He was not a messiah who gave us the truth for all time.

I'd like to know how "intelligent design" differs from "theistic evolution"; the latter is not permissible in science classes either. I'd like to know what hypotheses ID proposes, and how they can be tested and possibly falsified. But most importantly, I'd like to know why IDers can't even agree among themselves on things as basic as the relative age of the earth (6,000 years vs. billions of years) or on the relative (never mind absolute) ages of fossils.

Kevin

Well, like most IDers and creationists, Colson hasn't the foggiest idea about the subject he's purporting to speak on, namely intellectual freedom.

As stated, Colson's views could open the floodgates to everything in the name of intellectual freedom. If time can go to any group that makes a fair bit of noise and political agitation, then science classes would be swamped by pseudoscientific ideas and not necessarily the ones that Colson likes. The thing that prevents this from happening is the commitment that many science teachers have of only teaching those things argued and generally confirmed in the peer reviewed journals. If we're to allow ID into science classes, it would not only set a precedent which could be used to get all pseudoscientific ideas in, it would also cripple the chances of teaching about the nature of science.

If IDers want to seriously considered, they should define a theory of intelligent design (mere evolution bashing won't do), identify the mechanism of design, how the design occurs, put it to the test and confirm it as a general principle. Playing political games is not a scientific enterprise, and it seems to me as if the IDers want to bypass the hard part of actually defining and testing a scientific theory, and simply teach the same hackneyed "two model" system that the creationists tried to push through, with some revisions. Instead of "Goddidit", it's "AnUnidentifiableIntelligencedidit", with nothing more to support the claim than negative arguments against evolution. If it were true that evolution truly couldn't account for a system (and not simply that no evolutionary accounts have been yet proposed or confirmed for a particular pathway), that absolutely doesn't indicate a different answer as the default. With such a basic misapprehension of the nature of science that the IDers exhibit, I don't think it's at all appropriate to teach ID in a science class, except perhaps a brief mention in a philosophy of science section about how science can be misunderstood.

MOJO-JOJO

I think that Darwin would point out that the theory of intelligent design, divine creation, and a 6,000 year old earth underscores the fact that there was NO intelligence "designed" into humans .

We had to acquire intelligence through thinking, observation, experimentation and analysis.

Daggah

If you become too open-minded, your brains will fall out.

tgamble

uh huh, but that doesn't stop cretinists from making the claim that he was an evil, god hateing, bible bashing atheist who invented evolution to remove responsibility to god blah blah blah.

how is one supposed to teach id anyway. "It's complex, god done it. Test tommorow."?

Mageth

I agree with MrDarwin. Apparently Chuck thinks us evilutionists have The Origin of Species as our bible and Darwin as our Jesus. Science is concerned with the science of Darwin's writings, not the philosophy.

Kevin Dorner

ID'ers don't have a theory (and can't have a theory, as "theory" is defined in a scientific sense.) They just find elements that haven't been completely explained yet (or that the information isn't well-known.)

Dembski's big thing, the ID of his ego (excuse the pun) is the bacterial flagellum. He claims that this is an example of "design" in that it could not have have evolved on its own. Has anyone done a thorough thrashing of this idea?

Heck, I'd like to, but my access to resources (like scientific papers) is limited to the Internet and the local public library. There are a few things that I can think of off the top of my head that would be worth looking into however:

• Many (about half) of bacteria are flagellates or at least motile, though none of the coccal (round) ones as they aren't hydrodynamic enough to be especially motile. This includes many pathogens (though not anthrax.) Why would a loving creator make pathogens more motile, thus more efficient killers?
• There are many varieties of flagellates. There are polar ones, with one flagellum at one end (the "standard" type.) Then there are lophotrichous ones, with more than one at one end, and also peritrichous ones, with flagella all around. If the flagellum is "divine" why wasn't it done perfectly so that there is only one type? Polar bacteria twiddle (spin) and run (go in one direction) so only need one flagellum as they turn. Yet peritrichous bacteria have flagella all around them... that could work against each other! Why a less efficient way of solving the same problem? Clearly a strange "design" at work here if it needed to be done different ways.
• Has anyone done a detailed comparison with the mechanism of the bacterial flagellum with the flagellum of spermatozoans? I know that they differ in several ways. Again, where the dividing line? Why is one designed and one not? How do you (dis)prove this "division?"
• Has anyone done a comparison of the flic flagellin amino acid sequence with the amino acid sequence of ciliar protein(s) to see if the flagellum is an evolved cilium?
• The generation time of some bacteria is twenty minutes. The generation time of humans is about twenty years. That means that for every human generation there will be over half a million bacterial generations, or five hundred thousand times more chances to evolve something that "appears" designed like the flagellal motor.

Any thoughts?

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: Kevin Dorner ]</p>

Nic Tamzek

Hey Kevin,

Careful, you're mixing up the various "swimmy bits" a bit. Not exactly your fault as the #*#@@ microbiologists have yet to standardize terminology.

Clarifications are here:

<a href="http://www.arn.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001688.html" target="_blank">http://www.arn.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001688.html</a>
(see my post under "niiicholas")

nic

hezekiah jones

Hey Chuck, let us know when the "Fellows" make national headlines for actually "Discovering" something halfway worthwhile, instead of simply orchestrating yet another politically motivated publicity stunt.