I’m currently reviewing a history of intelligent design, Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America, by C. W. Howell, published last year by New York University Press. The full series can be found [here], and we’ve already seen some problems with the book. It uses fake evidence, it ignores large volumes of ID work, and it’s in denial about how the evolution debate has itself evolved over the 20+ years since the Dover trial, and how the case for ID has advanced, not retreated. If we look at the scientific evidence, ID is doing superbly well.
Now I want to put the effort in context. One positive aspect: Howell rightly observes that some other would-be histories of ID, especially those by written by critics, are “polemical” and “activist” (p. 7). The abstract for Howell’s PhD thesis, on which his book is based, explains how he sought to distinguish his project from previous attempted histories of ID: “To date, on one hand, full length treatments of ID have been primarily polemical, consisting of either critical refutations or hagiographic defenses.”
As Howell notes, over the years multiple scholars have tried to tell the history of ID. Each attempt has had a different focus and agenda, and the points they include — or omit — tell you much about the pressures that scholars face to fit their narratives into academic preconceptions about what ID is supposed to be. I know a lot about these histories because I had personal interactions with many of the authors. We’ll start with what is unequivocally the worst.
Coming Out Swinging
Some histories of ID, like Creationism’s Trojan Horse, by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, come out swinging with their extremely hostile agendas, seeking to paint ID as a strictly religious movement while ignoring its scientific accomplishments (see here or here for a couple responses). From my personal vantage, that book managed to fit nine inaccurate statements about the IDEA Center, which I founded, into two short paragraphs on that group — any of which could have been cleared up by careful research or simply contacting me to verify that their statements were up to date. Yet contacting ID proponents to get “ID’s side of the story” is the exact opposite of what these authors wanted: It was a hit piece with a one-sided agenda to obsess over ID’s religious connections and ignore its science. This book is so partisan and full of distortions and out-of-context quotations that it can hardly be considered a trustworthy treatment of the subject.
Another highly partisan account was Edward Humes’s Monkey Girl, which like Forrest and Gross’s book, sought to paint ID as a religious idea at the expense of fairness or good scholarship. When the author contacted me privately seeking an interview, he tried to represent himself as objective and non-partisan, despite the red flags that he was misrepresenting himself (he had refused to give me relevant details about his book project). The final product proved that my suspicions were correct: it used name-calling against ID proponents, and included misrepresentations of ID thinking, ID literature, and ID theory, uncritically repeating false claims from the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling. For a lengthy response, please see here.
And then there is another attempted telling of the Dover case, The Devil in Dover, by Lauri Lebo, who at the time was a Dover-area reporter for a local newspaper. It’s a bitter, angry, and uninteresting take on intelligent design, Christianity, and small-town politics, making virtually every common mistake you can imagine. In addition to the fact that she gave her book the ominous title The Devil in Dover, that’s about all you need to know.
Closer to the middle, but still not ID-friendly, is The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything, by Gordy Slack — whom I personally like very much and would consider something of a friend. This book has its weaknesses, but is definitely not the worst of the lot. It’s more of an editorialized portrait of the Dover trial with a personal touch than an attempted history of ID.
Then there are histories from the “pro-ID” side of the aisle, such as Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design (2003) and Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design (2006) — both by Thomas Woodward, a scholar of rhetoric who is also a Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture. These two books are, I’m sure, what Howell has in mind when he refers to “hagiographic defenses.” That said, to my not-unbiased eyes, Tom Woodward’s books are far more objective than most other histories. He covers the development of ID with far more accuracy because he has a lot of firsthand knowledge.
More importantly, Woodward devotes extensive coverage to what ID proponents think their theory is all about: the science. Such appropriate coverage of the science is entirely missing from all the other attempted histories of ID. In addition, Woodward as a scholar was never afraid to dive headfirst into the arguments and objections from the “other side,” such as in this case assertions that ID is creationism or religion.
A Misleading Title and a Low Bar
So how does Howell’s book fit in? With a title like “Designer Science,” you might think that the book would highlight the science of intelligent design. As we saw in my second post in this series, unfortunately, this barely happens in the book. The title is misleading in that regard.
That said, Howell’s book is far from the worst. It might be the best and most comprehensive anti-ID history to date. That’s a low bar to clear, of course. If you’re suspecting Designer Science is missing a lot of accurate, complete, and up-to-date information, you’re quite right. Here’s how I would summarize the basic flaws with the book:
- The book exhibits a peculiar obsession with debating whether ID is “dead” and tracking ID’s Internet popularity over time. This is marked, in his telling, by ID’s alleged peak during the Dover era (ca. 2005), followed by its alleged sharp decline driven to a post-Dover tailoff of ID-oriented media attention. This strange analysis completely misses the reality of ID’s consistent, steady snowball-style growth over time. We’ll come back to that in a future post.
- There’s a major overemphasis upon the import of the Dover ruling, and very badly misplaced trust in the accuracy of Judge Jones’s ruling. The phony quote from Michael Behe, already noted here, is just one illustration, though it forms the linchpin of Howell’s argument purportedly exposing the unscientific nature of ID. A major lesson of Designer Science is that if you treat Judge Jones’s ruling as accurate and without need of fact-checking, then your own scholarship will suffer.
- There’s also a strong predilection for using labels against ID coupled with a near — but not quite 100 percent — practice of dismissing and ignoring the growth and successes of ID’s science research program. The failure to even remotely give adequate coverage to ID’s research program is probably the biggest omission in the book. We’ve already seen the statistic that tells you as much as you need to know: only two of Howell’s approximately 500 bibliographic references (i.e., about 0.4 percent) are to peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific papers, even though we’ve published hundreds.
- In a similar vein, as I’ve also observed, Howell simply ignores the many novel arguments that ID theorists have developed in their books over the past twenty years. Howell tries to paint ID as a stale movement with no new ideas, but that only holds up when you ignore all the new ideas ID has advanced in recent years.
- The book’s main thesis, as we’ve seen, isn’t what you might expect. It entails a bizarre attempt to paint ID as the root of all evil, where in this context evil equals any form of skepticism about the scientific “consensus.” This strange focus seems to be an attempt to make ID look unattractive.
- All of this leads, as I’ve also said, to a final strange aspect of Howell’s book: He himself is religious, but his efforts in trying to make ID look unscientific, his hardline defense of the scientific “consensus,” and his demeaning of those who might occasionally question that consensus, make him look a lot like a defender of Scientism himself.
Altogether, Howell’s thesis is a contrived attempt to make ID look bad by focusing on peculiar data points — like “Google Searches” as an indicator of ID’s growth, or cherry-picking occasional examples where an ID proponent here or there questioned other “consensus” views — and largely ignoring key data points, like the steady growth of ID’s research program, papers, or student interest. That will be the focus of my next post.
The Lesson Learned: Grey stands out against black. Or, to put it another way, even something that’s overall fairly bad stands out as pretty good against a backdrop of the horrible. But everyone probably knew that already. So a more useful lesson here is probably that if someone wants to write something really profound, write a history of ID from an outsider’s perspective that tries to actually be fair, accurate, and complete on both the small things and the big things.
Tomorrow, “Positive and Near-Positive Aspects of Designer Science”