Science and Culture Today | Page 1467 | Discovering Design in Nature

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.

A writer for the newspaper of record in Liberal, Kansas (yes, there is a town with that name in Kansas) endorses the truly liberal policy of teaching the scientific controversy over evolution. He argues: (opponents of teaching the controversy) should come up with a good argument on why teaching only the evolution theory does not violate the state education science mission statement to make all students lifelong learners who can use science to make reasoned decisions. Presenting only one life science theory in classes without alternatives breeds ignorance and violates the mission statement. The author of the essay is wrong to suggest that the Kansas Board of Education is considering adding intelligent design to the Kansas state science standards. In Read More ›

John Derbyshire is on The Corner arguing that we can never safely infer that certain biological structures were designed. To a reader who asserted that organizational complexity cannot arise from impersonal processes, Derbyshire replies, “How do you know it can’t? It is true that the genesis of organizational complexity is not currently well understood; but to leap from that to telling me we shall NEVER be able to find a natural-law explanation for it is just dogma.”

Derbyshire’s argument is worth confronting because it represents the opinion of leading Darwinists. Biologist Kenneth Miller, for instance, routinely makes just such an argument. Design theorist William Dembski responds thus:

Miller claims that the problem with anti-evolutionists like Michael Behe and me is a failure of imagination — that we personally cannot “imagine how evolutionary mechanisms might have produced a certain species, organ, or structure.” He then emphasizes that such claims are “personal,” merely pointing up the limitations of those who make them. Let’s get real. The problem is not that we in the intelligent design community, whom Miller incorrectly calls “anti-evolutionists,” just can’t imagine how those systems arose.

The problem is that Ken Miller and the entire biological community haven’t figured out how those systems arose. It’s not a question of personal incredulity but of global disciplinary failure (the discipline here being biology) and gross theoretical inadequacy (the theory here being Darwin’s).

The particular mechanism Miller has in view here is the bacterial flagellum. Click here and scroll down for a good, brief description and animation of the bacterial flagellum, and here for an enlarged view with its parts labeled. Biochemist Michael Behe made this little engine that could famous by showing that it was irreducibly complex, like a mouse trap: “If any one of the components of the mousetrap (the base, hammer, spring, catch, or holding bar) is removed, then the trap does not function.” With even four of these parts, it’s utterly useless. The mousetrap is irreducibly complex.

BY KEITH PENNOCK Some school boards seem to have confused their role with that of the FDA, placing warning labels on textbooks as though they were a package of cigarettes that should be kept out of the hands of minors. Fortunately, there’s a better way. Rather than noting the scientific controversy over Darwinism by placing stickers on textbooks, we advise that school boards attempt to teach the controversy by augmenting their curriculum using supplemental materials. Ohio and Minnesota followed this approach, and now students there can learn both the strengths and weaknesses in Darwin’s theory. And neither state has been drawn into a legal flap. Smart.

John Derbyshire of The Corner, and Darwinists on every street corner, insist that we should never cram God into the gaps of our scientific knowledge.

As if detecting design meant cramming the designer into the work itself: Imagine Leonardo da Vinci trapped inside the Mona Lisa.

Derbyshire proceeds apace: “History shows that these puzzles always get resolved sooner or later in a natural way, … sending the ‘God of the Gaps’ traipsing off to find a new place where he can hang his starry cloak for a while.”

Bracket off for the moment that this particular history of modern science is an urban legend.

Derbyshire’s argument falls apart all by itself, apart from the historical record. Because more and more things have been explained with reference to impersonal causes, Derbyshire argues, we can never assume that something in nature cannot be explained thus.

That simply doesn’t follow. Consider an analogy.

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.

Secondhand Smoke is the new weblog operated by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith. His voice is a welcome addition to the blogosphere and his new blog is well worth the visit. An author, attorney and leading voice on many bioethics’ issues, Smith’s work does not involve intelligent design — though he does kindly mention ID and Michael Behe’s recent New York Times op-ed “Design for Living,” in a blog post (here). So while Smith’s work is not the subject of this blog, many readers may be interested in his analysis and commentary on many science-related issues. He has some important and timely articles this week at National Review Online and Daily Standard.

In a recent post at The Corner, John Derbyshire wrote that “we are actually quite close to a point where we CAN do evolution in the lab.” To make his point, Derbyshire cited an article by Carl Zimmer in the February, 2005, issue of *Discover* Magazine: “Testing Darwin: Scientists at Michigan State University Prove Evolution Works.”

We don’t buy it. Discovery fellow (and Ph.D. biologist) Jonathan Wells found the claims in Zimmer’s article laughable, and he was moved to write a satirical review that we are posting here. Although the tone is tongue-in-cheek, the quotes from Zimmer’s article are real, as is the force of Wells’ argument.

Darwinists at Michigan State University Prove Computers Work by Jonathan Wells

For centuries breeders have been modifying existing species by selecting desirable variations, yet this procedure has never produced a new species. Still less has it produced new organs or body plans. In 1859, however, Charles Darwin wrote that variation and selection explain the origin of species and all of life’s diversity, and his faithful followers are still looking for evidence that he was right.

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: