Time flies! It’s hard to believe that it was 30 years ago that Darwin’s Black Box was published and the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) was founded. As we discussed last week, Darwin’s Black Box was released on August 2, 1996, and its arguments have won out in all sorts of ways. Meanwhile the CSC was founded on the 10th day of that same month: in other words, exactly a three decades ago today at a conference at Seattle Pacific University. With that in mind, it seems like a good time to take stock of how the scientific evidence has fared for intelligent design (ID) since then. Spoiler alert: There’s far more to talk about than I have time or space to cover, but we’re all extremely pleased!
First, a Little Background
In Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe fundamentally changed the debate over origins. He coined the term “irreducibly complex” to describe molecular machines and biochemical pathways that require a certain core number of components or else they cannot function. Behe argued that these pathways pose a major challenge to Darwinian evolution, and instead, that their purposeful arrangement of parts indicates intelligent design.
I read the book the summer after my freshman year of college in 1997, and it was my first real introduction to ID. Behe put into words ideas that had been floating around inside my undergraduate head, and set me on a course that I’m still on today, pursuing the scientific evidence showing design in nature.
The Center for Science and Culture is a program at Discovery Institute that serves as the institutional home of intelligent design. It was founded in 1996 by Stephen Meyer and John West, with the enthusiastic support of Discovery Institute founder Bruce Chapman, originally as the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. The name was later shortened for convenience to the Center for Science and Culture, or CSC. Many leading lights of ID’s early days are its longtime affiliates, as well as many others who have joined us along the way. We recently hosted an Insiders Briefing conference in Seattle, and my presentation highlighted 15 young researchers who represent the “next generation” of ID.
From the beginning, the CSC has been driven by science, reflecting long-held convictions in the ID movement that the evidence is what matters most, because in the long term, it alone will decide the debate. As an early document for the CSC explained, “Phase I” of the CSC’s work focused on “research, writing and publication” which represent “the essential component of everything that comes afterward. Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade.” Thus, CSC goals set very early on included, “To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory” and “To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences.”
Nothing ever goes exactly according to schedule. But what I can say is that 30 years later, ID’s growing research program and the scientific community in general are already meeting or moving directly towards meeting all of these goals. In these areas, scientific evidence continues to be discovered in favor of intelligent design. Not only are older ID arguments still going strong, with ID’s longstanding predictions being vindicated, but ID is also helping us to predict and understand new developments in the biological sciences. Let’s review!
Third Way: “Teleology” and “Purpose” in Biology
One of the most interesting and exciting developments in the scientific community over the past decade or two is the ascendancy of the “Third Way” evolutionary view, often associated with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). These biologists don’t support ID. However, they have become disillusioned with the standard neo-Darwinian paradigm because it has failed to solve a key evolutionary question: the origin of new complex biological features. In 2016 the Royal Society held a meeting, “New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives,” to discuss this problem. In the opening lecture, Austrian biologist Gerd Müller explained that the modern synthesis “does not explain” things like “complex levels of evolution” such as “the origin of these body plans,” as well as “complex behaviors, complex physiology, development.” He explained that “the standard theory is focused on characters that exist already and their variation and maintenance across populations, but not on how they originate.”
As I said, Third Way and EES proponents do not support intelligent design as an alternative to neo-Darwinism and ultimately their models focus on material causes. But ID has influenced their thinking. As a leading Third Way proponent, University of Chicago biologist James Shapiro, acknowledged: “The ID argument has a valid point with regard to the explanatory limits of neo-Darwinism.” In another instance, leading EES proponents admitted in Nature that the field of evolutionary biology basically circles the wagons around neo-Darwinism simply to keep intelligent design at bay:
The mere mention of the EES often evokes an emotional, even hostile, reaction among evolutionary biologists. Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation. Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science.
Yet Third Way evolution proponents display a refreshingly courageous boldness in critiquing standard evolutionary models within the mainstream scientific community. As a leading light of the Third Way, Oxford University physiologist Denis Noble, has put it in recent years, “Neo-Darwinism is dead.”
In the Direction of Intelligent Design
In addition to showing that the reigning paradigm of biological evolution, neo-Darwinism, is on the backfoot, Third Way and EES thinking shows that mainstream science is moving on a compass heading that is right in the direction of intelligent design — even if it isn’t there yet. That’s because Third Way and EES readily acknowledge and even embrace that there is evidence of “purpose” and “teleology” in biology. Denis Noble has frequently said there’s a place for “agency” and “purpose” in biology. But the thesis statement of Third Way thinking is nicely summarized in the first sentence of the preface to a 2023 MIT Press book, Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems: “Although it is now widely accepted that living systems exhibit an internal teleology, or teleonomy, the full implications of this distinctive biological property have not been sufficiently explored.” Other chapters say things like “Purposefulness, or teleology … is universal in the living world,” frequently citing the “goal-directed” nature of living systems:
The term teleonomy was originally coined by the biologist Colin Pittendrigh in connection with the landmark 1957 conference on behavior in evolution. Pittendrigh was seeking to draw a contrast between an “external” teleology (Aristotelian or religious) and the “internal” purposiveness and goal-directedness of living systems, which are products of the evolutionary process and of natural selection.
Note the internal tensions in their view: purpose is somehow created by a purposeless “evolutionary process,” agency is somehow created by an agentless “evolutionary process,” and goal-directedness is somehow created by a goal-less “evolutionary process.” So this isn’t the modern theory of intelligent design, and it probably represents a middle ground, a tertium quid that is unsustainable in the long term. But it testifies to unmistakable progress in the right direction. Once we acknowledge the reality of agency, purpose, goal-directedness, and even teleology in living systems — and all you need to see these things is to remove the blindfolds of neo-Darwinism and open your eyes — we’re taking crucial steps along a pathway that leads directly to the affirmation of intelligent design in biology. More on that tomorrow.
Tomorrow, “Thirty Years of Intelligent Design Predicting the Unexpected Genome.”