Intelligent Design

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Press Club was the setting today for a Discovery Institute sponsored and hosted debate about evolution and design. Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, CSC director, championed the theory of intelligent design while Dr. William Provine, the Charles Alexander Professor of Biology at Cornell University, stood up for evolution. Of the forty or so people in attendance approximately half were journalists, and the rest of the crowd was comprised of a number of high school students, and various parties interested in the ongoing national debate over evolution. The best parts in my mind were the discussion beforehand between Meyer and Provine, and CSC senior fellow Dr. David Berlinski who attended, and our lunchtime discussion after the event Read More ›

Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews is a courageous man to be sure to write an article (“Who’s Afraid of Intelligent Design?”) that goes against the crusade of his employer.

Specifically, Mathews argues that it would be good for science education to teach the scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolution. This is exactly the approach that CSC has always advocated.

Casey Luskin from the IDEA Center sent the following report on a recent news story that aired on San Diego’s Fox affiliate. Amazingly, the station devoted over four minutes — an eternity in TV news time — to looking at what ID is. An MPEG of the story is available for download from the IDEA Center at www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1298. (newly updated link)

In response to Michael Behe’s case for intelligent design in a recent edition of The New York Times, two letters to the paper’s editor charged design theory with being untestable. Design theory has failed to produce “statements that are susceptible to testing,” wrote Karen Rosenberg. Similarly, Donald Terndrup asserted , “Design will be a real science” when and only when “we have testable answers for these questions.”

But as philosopher of science Stephen Meyer has explained, the methodology used for intelligent design is strikingly similar to that used by Darwinists to argue for common descent. An argument against intelligent design “that appears frequently both in conversation and in print finds expression as follows: ‘Miracles are unscientific because they can not be studied empirically. Design invokes miraculous events; therefore design is unscientific. Moreover, since miraculous events can’t be studied empirically, they can’t be tested. Since scientific theories must be testable, design is, again, not scientific.’

Meyer continues:

From “The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design“
By Stephen Meyer

Unobservables and Testability

[A frequent argument against intelligent design] that appears frequently both in conversation and in print finds expression as follows: “Miracles are unscientific because they can not be studied empirically. Design invokes miraculous events; therefore design is unscientific. Moreover, since miraculous events can’t be studied empirically, they can’t be tested. Since scientific theories must be testable, design is, again, not scientific.” Molecular biologist Fred Grinnell has argued, for example, that intelligent design can’t be a scientific concept because if something “can’t be measured, or counted, or photographed, it can’t be science.”

Gerald Skoog amplifies this concern: “The claim that life is the result of a design created by an intelligent cause can not be tested and is not within the realm of science.” This reasoning was recently invoked at San Francisco State University as a justification for removing Professor Dean Kenyon from his classroom. Kenyon is a biophysicist who has embraced intelligent design after years of work on chemical evolution. Some of his critics at SFSU argued that his theory fails to qualify as scientific because it refers to an unseen Designer that cannot be tested.

The Rev. Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State continues to serve in the Ministry of Dis-Information when it comes to intelligent design theory. A dogmatic opponent of intelligent design, the Rev. Lynn recently authored an op-ed that dismisses ID out of hand — not even bothering to take on any of the empirical, scientific claims made by Dr. Michael Behe or any other ID theorists. Comes now Darrick Dean of Science Watch. Dean gives the Rev. Lynn the full-court press in a very noteworthy blog post. Rev. Lynn wishes to continue playing the motives game instead of assessing the scientific arguments for ID. But as Dean argues, the red herring arguments can cut BOTH ways.

As we saw in Derbyshire II, the pattern of the fossil record doesn’t fit the Darwinian prediction of a gradually branching tree of life, even where punctuated equilibrium is invoked to shoehorn the transitional intermediates into those gaps John Derbyshire puts such faith in.

The problem gets even uglier when Darwinists try to explain away the fossil record leading up to the Cambrian Explosion. What story do these strata tell? Animals didn’t exist; and then they did — not just dozens of species but dozen of phyla. If you want some idea of how large a category phyla is, consider that sharks, mice, humans and otters are all members of the same phylum.

If natural selection working on random genetic mutation built this menagerie of animals, it had to do it one extraordinarily tiny, functional improvement at a time, one generation at a time, over tens and even hundreds of millions of years. If we had even a tiny fraction of a fraction of the Precambrian life forms, we would have so many transitional forms we would be hard-pressed to draw the line between one phylum and another, so thoroughly would they bleed one form into the other. But we find no such fossil pattern in the Precambrian.

Derbyshire suggests that the precursors of the many Cambrian phyla were soft-bodied and so never fossilized: “[S]oft body parts hardly ever get fossilized,” he writes. “We are working from a pretty scanty data set here.”

The problem is, many soft-bodied creatures did fossilize, and they tell a different story from the one Darwin told. Consider this passage in which Meyer et al., marshall evidence from mainstream evolutionists working in paleobiology:

Finding bias in MSM newspapers like the Houston Chronicle is like finding design in nature, not at all hard to do. Sunday, The Chronicle decided to publish Michael Behe’s op-ed that appeared last week in The New York Times.

The headline the Chronicle perched atop Behe’s column nicely illustrates the petty biases of the paper’s editorial board: “Intelligent design: Creation explained or quackery?”

This didn’t surprise me. Two years ago in the midst of the Texas controversy over error-ridden biology textbooks a Chronicle editorial board member sent us one of the tackiest letters we’ve received from the media. We approached the Chronicle and asked them to meet with us to talk about textbooks and challenges to Darwinian evolution — much as other major Texas papers like the Dallas Morning News — did at the time. The editor responded:

Barbara Forrest is at it again. In her latest review of Meyer & Campbell’s Darwinism, Design & Public Education Forrest substitutes strident affirmation for science and scorn for reasoned argumentation. Forrest never chooses to engage the arguments of design theorists but rather questions their qualifications: “John Angus Campbell, who also serves on the journal’s editorial board, is a rhetorician. Stephen C. Meyer is a philosopher.” What pray tell was your Ph.D. in Barbara? And why is it you don’t apply that same standard to Robert Pennock when he deigns himself fit to comment on evolution?

What Forrest more often than not fails to comprehend is that merely asserting that “there is no argument” and “ID is not science” doesn’t settle the issue when the nature of science itself is under question. Like a species of medieval inquisitor, Forrest will brook no debate on this issue. Instead of appeals to evidence or logic, she appeals, ad naseum, to authority. Could it perhaps be because where logic and evidence come into play, and where the game is not rigged, Forrest will lose?

John Derbyshire recently rebutted a series of objections against Darwinism and, in the process, leveled a series of objections against intelligent design. He dismisses design by ignoring the actual arguments of its theorists and shadowboxing with letter writers instead. He shows, thereby, a lack of seriousness on his own part by trivializing and demeaning scholars whose views he apparently has not really bothered to understand.

One problem is that Derbyshire’s objections against design theory often state the positions of leading design theorists–in other words, he agrees with leading design proponents without even realizing it.

For instance, one of his blog visitors tried to refute Darwinism by asserting, “The fossil record is incomplete.” Derbyshire responded, “Well, duh. Fossilization only happens under extraordinary circumstances.” That’s correct.

He then goes on to assert that the fossil record is nevertheless complete enough to make inferences about the origin and history of species. Still agreed.

Then Derbyshire parts company with leading design theorists. He thinks the gaps in the fossil record protect the theory of common descent by natural selection. But the gaps don’t. The fossil record is a growing problem for neo-Darwinism because attempts to explain away the absence of transitional intermediates between phyla and even lower groups have failed.