Thu, June 9, 2005
Intelligent Design Theory
The related links add a lot to the discussion – click 'em and read 'em.
There are many problems with the intelligent design idea. Chiefly: it's conjecture, not science; it's political grandstanding masked as intellectual inquiry; it's a cheap way to dress up creationism and try to pass it off as something worth teaching in schools. The one that really bugs me is that every intelligent design argument hinges on the assertion that the evolution/natural selection path is just too unlikely. The entire ID idea results from people saying, "this is way too complicated for me to fathom an explanation; the only cause is some unseen, all-powerful force." But isn't that the same as the Greeks thinking the sun was transported across the sky by a guy in a winged golden chariot every day? They looked at their world, found something they couldn't explain with their current understanding of nature, and ascribed it to a deity. It seems quaint in retrospect, because modern science has allowed us to see more of the solar system – but just because modern science is an improvement over ancient Greece doesn't mean we know everything. What seems impossibly complex now may seem quaint to our distant descendants.
Science itself is evolving – an ongoing endeavor to describe the world around us. It consists of multitudes of theories which are constantly being proposed, tested, rejected, modified, and proposed again. Science isn't the operator's manual for the universe – it's just our best guess at reverse engineering it by applying and testing these theories, narrowing in on the closest answer we can get. Just because we can't show each and every step in an eon or two of evolution from a patch of light-sensitive cells into an eyeball doesn't mean it couldn't have happened. Looking at something so intricate and declaring that it couldn't be the result of random mutation is so catastrophically narrow-minded: it ignores all the possibilities we didn't get, and assumes that the one we got is the best possible outcome. Natural selection wasn't working towards one outcome – it was just gradually (very, very gradually) improving, and this is the outcome we got. To disregard all the others is an affront to the intricate and immense majesty of the system.
Besides, sure evolution is a theory, but its widespread acceptance over a century and a half is an indication that it's withstood its share of legitimate scientific inquiry. If a more refined theory comes along, great; but intelligent design isn't that. It proposes no science that can be studied, tested, or experimented upon. It predicts no results that can be verified. It's not science; it's throwing up your hands and saying, "Beats me!" I respect that some of the biologists and researchers who are pursuing intelligent design do so earnestly and with interest in exploring as many pathways to the truth as they can – but they're in the minority amidst a sea of opportunists who want to use intelligent design's serious-sounding name to drive a political wedge between educators and reality. I'm all for exposing our schoolchildren to rigorous analytical debate and critical thinking – but lobbing half-baked attacks at evolution theory isn't that.
If you believe in God, that's great. (Although, try not to talk to me about it while I'm eating.) My question is: why must God, as a designer, design every living organism? Couldn't he have designed the system we've laid out – a system that's so complex and nuanced that it unfolds over millennia and results in a vast panoply of such intricate and wondrous things as the eye/photosynthesis/Mary-Kate? To me, science does its best to describe the universe we find ourselves in. Faith doesn't have to come into conflict with that. (Biblical literalism might, but that's a whole other story.) Disagree over what came before the Big Bang – we're all stumped on that one. But evolution is a nice, airtight explanation for what we see. I know it's hard to think of billions and billions of years. These days, we can fast-forward through the commercials – 30 minutes is a longer span of time than we can fathom. Just because it's inconceivably vast doesn't mean it isn't possible. If you think about it, that just makes it more impressive. Would you rather have a God who threw a bunch of stuff together over a long weekend, or one who set in motion a course of events that would result in a slimy prehistoric eel turning into people, kitties, and T. rex? The very fact that it's difficult to get your head around it just tells you how magnificently special it all is.
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Joe Mulder — Thu, 6/9/05 6:36pm
If I may say so, I think this article:
Teaching Darwin
is indidspensible in the debate. Particularly interesting is the comparison in the final paragraphs of astronomy to evolutionary biology; Galileo's observations, the author says, were accurate enough, but the explanations awaited an Isaac Newton. Darwin is Galileo, apparently, and Newton hasn't shown up yet. This isn't a pro-intelligent-design article, either; it just spells out the reasons why evolution remains a theory – the prevailing scientific theory, to be sure – but a theory with nearly as many problems as when Darwin first proposed it a century-and-a-half ago. Basically, the point is that, as the president was brutally excoriated for correctly suggesting, "the jury is still out on evolution," and that you can hardly claim that it is, as our kind Onebee.com host said, a "nice, airtight explanation for what we see" (now, I don't mean to be mean; it's my guess that Jameson the writer wrote that passage, not Jameson the scientist; if he reads the article and still believes Darwin's theories are nice and airtight, then... fuck me, I suppose).
That being said, if evolution is the prevailing scientific theory, I can't imagine why you'd want to teach anything else in a science classroom.
THAT being said, I also can't imagine what sort of intolerant anti-religious bigot would object to science textbooks that tell kids that evolution is indeed, at this point, a theory (the prevailing theory, to be sure) with some holes that need plugging (and hey, Junior, if you want to be a renowned scientist, you could plug one of those holes one day! Here's where the holes are: they – What? What's that, sir? Oh, no, uh, I certainly wasn't going to call any of Lord Darwin's precious theories into question in front of the students, sir. I would never dispute the agreed-upon-from-above idea of The Way Things Are. Nothing to worry about here. Go on about your daily business, Principal Stalin, sir.).
[Sorry. Just put on my Lileks hat for a minute there. I'm better now. Ignore the preceding paragraph]
What gets me most of all, though, are the religious people who are threatened by science (not the scientific people who are intolerant of religion; I've learned not to expect any better from them). If your religion is based on strong personal faith (as it is my understanding that religion ought to be), it's not like science can prove there's no God. Science can (easily) prove a Biblical literalist wrong, but not someone who simply has faith in a higher power. So what are you so worried about, God Boy?
Anyway, read the article if you're interested. The guy's a behavioral scientist, not an evolutionary biologist, but I get the sense that he's actually read Darwin – and maybe the Bible, too – which saves me, for one, the trouble of having to.
Bee Boy — Thu, 6/9/05 7:47pm
Dammit – I knew I'd catch hell for using "airtight." Even as I typed it, I visualized it quoted by Joe in the comments. Should've known better, but it seemed like a good time not to equivocate. As I wrote elsewhere in the piece, evolution/Darwinism/natural selection is absolutely a theory – as is anything in science. In my view, it won't be overturned so much as refined (which, not having read it yet, I'd assume is how the Galileo/Newton comparison plays out in McHugh's article).
I wouldn't go so far as to say the "jury's out" (to me that implies that the whole thing might just be bogus), but I'll happily switch out "airtight" for "effective" or "useful."
As far as science teachers mentioning that Darwinism is a theory: I fully support it, because it's true. I wrote, "I'm all for exposing our schoolchildren to rigorous analytical debate and critical thinking" – and I mean it. But the stickers that single out evolution for this scorn are preposterous: all of science is a work in progress, the only thing we know is that we don't know. I believe science teachers should stress this point early and often. Let there be a lively debate – but including intelligent design in a science curriculum isn't a valid compromise. It's a capitulation to political pressure and it serves only to confuse young minds for the purpose of appeasing older, narrower ones. Intelligent design's proposals are antithetical to the tenets of scientific inquiry: there's a difference between telling kids evolution is a theory and telling kids intelligent design is science.
And I couldn't agree with you more about God Boy. It was the hardest part of my column to write, but the part I'm proudest of. (Although, I probably could've worked harder to achieve a gentler tone.) In general, I think I likely qualify as one of those "scientific people who are intolerant of religion," and in truth I guess that's exactly who I want to be. But I felt it was important, given the current charged debate over evolution, to convey a sense of understanding – and as I wrote and rewrote (and rewrote) that paragraph, I realized why it meant so much to me. In a way, science is like my religion, and I'm sad that there are people out there who are looking for a deeper meaning but also fearful of science. When I read Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan (or Douglas Adams), I'm deeply moved by considering the vast, elaborate structure of our universe and its history. It's overwhelming, to be sure, but I think it should be a source of comfort, not terror.
Bee Boy — Thu, 6/9/05 9:26pm
Okay, McHugh's article is decent – and he's absolutely right that Darwinism should be taught as a theory, like all of science, not incontrovertible ("airtight") fact – but his argument and examples are deeply flawed. His Galileo/Darwin connection is a tenuous one. The "gravity gap" in the path from Galileo to Newton (to Einstein, in fact) is significantly larger than the "fossil record gap" in the path from Darwin to the present day. And the incomplete fossil record (nobody's fault, by the way) is the only legitimate claim McHugh levels against Darwinism. Like any scientific theory, Darwinism should be exposed to rigorous testing and verification – but attempting to undercut it with malformed attacks not only insults the intelligence of the reader, it devalues the practice of legitimate scientific inquiry.
He states (as Darwin's critics often do) that the well known peppered moth story from our textbooks doesn't show evidence of evolution because the moths don't change enough. True, peppered moths don't show species differentiation in front of our eyes, but they absolutely show natural selection. Why is it that a species must observably turn into a new species in front of us in order to satisfy Darwin's detractors? McHugh brings this up, as did the original Theory of Evolution: Just a Theory? post that touched off so much furor by demanding that cats turn into raccoons. Is nobody aware of how many lifetimes fit into a billion years? Besides, we've documented speciation. Complaining that the current examples in our scientific literature are not drastic enough is as ludicrous as declaring: "If God exists, show me proof. Let's see a miracle right now." This is the evidence we've got. If it's not enough, why isn't it enough?
The biochemical challenge is an interesting proposal (chimp DNA is only 1% different from man DNA, but Bubbles looks more than 1% different from Jacko), but there are too many variables involved for it to poke holes in Darwinism. We're still gradually making our way through the sequencing of the human genome – our understanding of everything that DNA does remains limited. At this point, we really can't say that a certain number of genes should code for a certain amount of observable physical characteristics. Our best guess right now is that genes work together to express traits. That is, a combination of genes – not just one – code for any physical feature, the way in Batman the Joker killed with combinations of chemicals that were harmless on their own. The number of possible combinations among 25,000 genes is too high for my computer to calculate. Changing 1% of the genes changes a lot more than 1% of those combinations.
McHugh's other big math challenge to Darwinism is the calculation stating that the universe hasn't been around long enough to account for all the changes necessary to create the cell and evolve from that into multicellular organisms with as much variety as we have. This problem is being worked on by people far, far smarter than I – but again it strikes me as a theory with too many variables. How old is the universe? We think we know, but we're not sure. Has evolution progressed at a steady pace? Doubtful; theories predict that our planet was particularly fertile for mutation during its infancy, due to increased exposure to radiation before our atmosphere formed to protect us from the sun, as well as other volatile chemical mixtures which are no longer around (in such high concentration) to speed the change in genetic makeup from one generation to the next. NUMB3RS is cool, but we have to remember that when Krumholtz assigns an arbitrary numeric value to a serial killer's propensity to strike near his house, we're suspending disbelief a little.
In the end, McHugh's article slips into the usual intelligent design mainstays. He's not arguing in favor of ID, but he sounds a lot like people who do. "Something seems missing" to McHugh. Just as the ID apologists cry that, gosh, it sure does seem unlikely for all of this to have occurred by random mutation.
Again, this narcissistically assumes that the current result is the best result. And it falsely implies that Darwinism means organisms only get better as they evolve. Darwinism says stronger organisms in a population produce more offspring and weaker organisms produce fewer. From a human point of view, it's tempting to believe that nature is selecting for complexity and higher thought, because we have those things and we think we're pretty great. But perhaps nature and our current environment simply aren't selecting against any of the vulnerabilities that we have. The species prospers not because it's stronger, but because its weaknesses haven't encountered any direct opposition (or, the opposition has been withstood via technological and pharmaceutical innovation). We're not in a "come what may" situation any more, the way things were 65 million years ago. These days, people exert control over the environment and have developed ways of protecting our squishy, fragile bodies from the elements and predators that would do us in. In a "come what may" scenario, we're fucked. The cockroaches survive the nuclear holocaust (or comet impact), not us. Just because we've had an okay go of it for 200,000 years or so doesn't mean we're the end result of all of natural selection. The dinosaurs were the dominant race on the planet, once.
Of course, this is all just my theory. Feel free to slap a sticker on me.
Joe Mulder — Mon, 6/13/05 11:35am
Yeah, I was interested to see what sort of rebuttals to the McHugh article I could get. It's always interesting when this comes up. I'm a) not particularly observant, religion-wise, and b) not someone who disbelieves in evolution or Darwinism. But argue that it's a theory these days, and you may as well just go blow up an abortion clinic while you're at it.
That's the whole thing, as far as I'm concerned; preposterous, maybe, but unconstitutional? Just because an idea is unpopular with the intellectual elite doesn't mean it's unconstitutional (I mean, it is now, because the courts say it is, but, the courts said that crippled guy had to be allowed to use a cart on the PGA Tour. The courts are sometimes dead wrong).
Anyway, I don't disagree with evolution or Darwinism, but I'm always interested (to the extent that I'm interested in anything to do with science at all) in hearing any new (new to me, anyway) information or theories regarding the origin of intelligent life (for instance, I wasn't aware that we'd documented speciation until Jameson pointed it out; fascinating stuff).
It seems to me that our conception of how intelligent life arose on this planet is, at this point in human history, slightly less complete than, say, our conception of how the circulatory system works, or what the physical laws of the solar system are. That might not be true, but, that's the way it seems to me.
Again, though, what a religious person has to fear from science is completely lost on me, and what is unconstitutional about calling evolution a theory is lost on me as well.
Finally, thanks for the informative and interesting response to the McHugh article. Now, to read all the "Star Wars" stuff.
Bee Boy — Mon, 6/13/05 11:46am
I hope I didn't give that impression. (I don't think that's what you meant, but just to be safe. Wouldn't want to piss you off – I like my abortion clinics nice and unbombed.)
I thought parts of McHugh's critique were well formed, but other parts seemed fishy. At the very least, they too were "just theories" – which I think is fair. I'm certainly not against anyone reminding us that Darwinism is just a theory, but I'm against people using that fact to prop up really dumb attacks on it, or to imply that it's not a particularly good theory. Because it is.
I'd put our understanding of evolution on par with the physical laws of the solar system – shaky, but decent. The main thing we know in both cases is that we've got a lot left to learn.
Joe Mulder — Mon, 6/13/05 3:32pm
Oh, I certainly wouldn't put you in the category that would equate questioning Darwinism with blowing anything up (or anyone else, really; that was just a silly exaggeration).
And again, maybe I'm wrong about this, but, I still think there are some things we know for sure, and some things we don't (like exactly how intelligent life began, or what's really the deal with electrons). I'm interested to learn about what our best guesses are, though, and I appreciate people (present company most certainly included) with whom pleasant back-and-forth discussion is possible.
And I'm really glad I didn't bother to see Star Wars.
Bee Boy — Mon, 6/13/05 3:47pm
Right back at ya. I took a bullet for you since you did the same for me in the case of The Aviator.