| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
31 Aug 2005 03:03:12 AM |
| Object: |
Creationist liars and fascist kooks |
From The New York Times, 8/28/05:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/opinion/28dennett.html
By DANIEL C. DENNETT
Blue Hill, Me.
PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching
about "intelligent design" in the schools, said, "I think that part of
education is to expose people to different schools of thought."
A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the
Republican leader, made the same point.
Teaching both intelligent design and evolution "doesn't force any
particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said.
"I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about
education and training people for the future."
Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought?
Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of
the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science?
Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible?
No.
Here's how it has been done.
First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers
to shake the world's confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is!
- or Einsteinian relativity.
In spite of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists,
few people ever really get their heads around the concepts involved.
Most people eventually cobble together a justification for accepting
the assurances of the experts:
"Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and they claim that it
is their understanding of these strange topics that allows them to
harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and lasers, which
certainly do work..."
Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful motivation for such a
band of mischief-makers to form.
They don't have to spend much time persuading people that quantum
physics and Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond
all reasonable doubt.
With evolution, however, it is different.
The fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is
not just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God's
traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and
small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for
believing in God.
So there is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the
biologists.
Nobody is immune to wishful thinking.
It takes scientific discipline to protect ourselves from our own
credulity, but we've also found ingenious ways to fool ourselves and
others.
Some of the methods used to exploit these urges are easy to analyze;
others take a little more unpacking.
A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page
in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionnaire:
Test Two
Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [YES] [NO]
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [YES] [NO]
If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:
Take that, you Darwinians!
The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task
perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they
confront Darwin's great idea.
It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs
without designers, any such creations without a creator.
Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has
demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt:
that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities
must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament
of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge
- has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.
Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite
challenges of creationists.
How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a
series of small, unplanned steps?
Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant
arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a
light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in
a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send
megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years
on end.
But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved,
and how they work - all the way back to their predecessor genes in the
sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a
half-billion years ago - we can begin to tell the story of how
photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters
that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then
gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering
capacities all the while.
We can't yet say what all the details of this process were, but real
eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found,
dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models
to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory
says.
All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation
that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it
have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an
opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by
one mindless step.
And since these lucky improvements accumulate - this was Darwin's
insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better,
without any intelligent designer.
Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a
tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out.
The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones
(which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge
through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the
blind spot.
No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a
camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in
evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical
process.
If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion
that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about
everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the
power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply
counterintuitive.
Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once jokingly credited
his colleague Leslie Orgel with "Orgel's Second Rule":
Evolution is cleverer than you are.
Evolutionary biologists are often startled by the power of natural
selection to "discover" an "ingenious" solution to a design problem
posed in the lab.
This observation lets us address a slightly more sophisticated version
of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two.
When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process
of natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design.
The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the
process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in
intelligence of its own.
Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between
process and product that is built into the word "design."
For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for
instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process.
But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has
shown to be mistaken.
Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the
natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves
without purposes and without intelligence.
This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in
the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and
that heat is not made of tiny hot things.
The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something
else:
genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound.
In just about every field there are challenges to one established
theory or another.
The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an
alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by
the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains
something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that
unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the
currently accepted view.
To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced
anything like that.
No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological
understanding.
No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or
comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.
Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works
something like this.
First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work.
Then you get an angry rebuttal.
Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you
cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.
Note that the trick is content-free.
You can use it on any topic.
"Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat,"
you say, misrepresenting Smith's work.
When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work,
you respond, saying something like:
"See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked
in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the
classrooms."
And here is the delicious part:
you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own
advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the
difficult details.
William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent
design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a
response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that
could only look ridiculous to outsider observers."
What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr.
Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous
hair-splitting.
In short, no science.
Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a
rival explanation of any biological phenomenon.
This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design
competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by
natural selection.
But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't
explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis.
Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that
perplexes biologists.
But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.
To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the
trenches and offer details that have testable implications.
So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped
that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about
who or what the intelligent designer might be.
To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of
intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on
this planet:
About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from
another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more
interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming
species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically
re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged
frontal lobes for planning and reflection.
It worked.
If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and
why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would
disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being
pursued.
We'd still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers
came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that
complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest
shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.
But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to
discuss:
no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it.
In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable
in principle:
we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for
unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from
another galaxy.
Finding some sort of user's manual neatly embedded in the apparently
functionless "junk DNA" that makes up most of the human genome would
be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if
they are looking at all, they haven't come up with anything to report.
It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive
scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks
or the classrooms.
The scientific participants in these arguments vie for acceptance
among the relevant expert communities in peer-reviewed journals, and
the writers and editors of textbooks grapple with judgments about
which findings have risen to the level of acceptance - not yet truth -
to make them worth serious consideration by undergraduates and high
school students.
SO get in line, intelligent designers.
Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was
blown here by a cosmic impact.
Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of
language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language,
to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively
defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.
The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped
to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face
hostility from the established scientific journals.
But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent
design.
If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come,
young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the
Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any
significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.
Remember cold fusion?
The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but
scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to
explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to
be true.
Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books
and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts,
the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed
electronic journal.
This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image:
the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment.
For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George
Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it
is:
"Intelligent design itself does not have any content."
Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in
biology class.
But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events
and politics:
Is intelligent design a hoax?
And if so, how was it perpetrated?
---
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