Kansas, Intelligent Design, and Pseudoscience
CBS News reports:
[T]he latest version of the science standards says the board isn’t advocating intelligent design — which says some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent cause because they’re well-ordered and complex — as an alternative to the theory of evolution. But the language favored by the board comes from intelligent design advocates who challenge the theory of evolution.
“These are public schools funded by public dollars, and public children attend them, and so I think this debate does belong here,” Bacon said.
Will they be debating whether the Holocaust should be taught, based on how popular the subject is?
The National Center for Science Education has made it perfectly clear what the relative status of Intelligent Design and evolution are:
ID has been called an “argument from ignorance,” as it relies upon a lack of knowledge for its conclusion: Lacking a natural explanation, we assume intelligent cause. Most scientists would reply that unexplained is not unexplainable, and that “we don’t know yet” is a more appropriate response than invoking a cause outside of science.
ID proponents may argue that a neutral-sounding “intelligence” is responsible for design, but it is clear from the “cultural renewal” aspect of ID that a deity -– in particular, God as He is conceived of by certain conservative Christians -– is envisioned as the agent of design. While schools can take no position on this view as religion, it cannot be regarded as science.
Philip Johnson, originator of the Intelligent Design movement, has always made it clear that the purpose behind his efforts is to bring people to Christianity, not to promote science:
Johnson remains certain that intelligent design will ultimately draw people to Jesus. “The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the nonexistence of God,” he wrote in a 1999 article. “From there, people are introduced to ‘the truth’ of the Bible and then ‘the question of sin’ and finally ‘introduced to Jesus. ‘“
Actually, ID proponents don't always keep their language god-neutral. Orac quotes from an article written by William Dembski, a leading advocate of Intelligent Design, in which he lets the mask slip:
There is a long tradition in Christian theology that sees God’s revelation as coming through “two books”: the Book of Nature, which is God’s general revelation to all people; and the Book of Scripture, which is God’s special revelation to the redeemed.
Accordingly, intelligent design should be understood as the evidence that God has placed in nature to show that the physical world is the product of intelligence and not simply the result of mindless material forces. This evidence is available to all apart from the special revelation of God in salvation history as recounted in Scripture.
And:
Precisely because intelligent design does not turn the study of biological origins into a Bible science controversy, intelligent design is a position around which Christians of all stripes can unite. And, indeed, there are creationists who also call themselves design theorists (e.g., Paul Nelson). To be sure, creationists who support intelligent design think it does not go far enough in elucidating the Christian understanding of creation. And they are right!
And:
Even so, there is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution.
Most people focus on this “immediate” payoff to Intelligent Design; more should keep in mind what the long-term payoff is: destroying the “atheistic” legacy of all of modern science. As Kevin Drum so aptly puts it:
Look, this controversy isn’t really about ID vs. evolution. It’s about who gets to decide what’s science and what isn’t — and in that sense the radical Christian right understands the stakes better than much of the evolution crowd. After all, once you concede that the revealed wisdom of a millennia-old text is a legitimate substitute for empirically based science, creationism is only the start. The book of Genesis expresses opinions on much more than simply the creation of Adam and Eve.
Unfortunately, the modern media helps the efforts of pseudoscientists behind Intelligent Design by refusing to engage in the least bit of critical journalism. The recent issue of Time magazine does a cover story on the debate over evolution, and PZ Myers comments on it:
Here’s what damns Claudia Wallis’s journalism: she doesn’t even try to answer the freaking question she asked. [Is “intelligent design” a real science? And should it be taught in the schools?] It’s just Advocate for Side A vs. Advocate for Side B every step of the way, with absolutely no attempt to evaluate the truth of anyone’s claims. It’s lazy dueling quotes, the stuff a trained monkey could probably do.
Chris Mooney comments on it:
Claudia Wallis, bent over backwards to avoid explicitly telling people the truth about the ID movement--that it’s a religious phenomenon. There was no mention of the Wedge document, for instance. Instead, we get the silly and false rote statement about the ID movement: “They are also careful not to bring God into the discussion...preferring to keep primarily to the language of science.”
Basically, the Time magazine article was lousy reporting and inept journalism no matter how you look at it. Either the standards of Time have fallen below that of a high school newspaper, or they are deliberately dumbing down their articles in order to appeal to the most ignorant of American readers.
Paul Krugman comments on the ability of advocates of pseudoscience to confuse matters and undermine real science:
[N]onscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it’s got numbers and charts in it, doesn’t that make it science?
Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, “Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth.” The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.
Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they’re elitists who think they’re smarter than the rest of us.
Krugman was referencing a variety of issues — not just Intelligent Design, but also supply-side economics and opposition to global warming research. It is probably no coincidence that critics of evolutionary theory are also critical of global warming. Roy W. Spencer writes:
True evolution, in the macro-sense, has never been observed, only inferred. A population of moths that changes from light to dark based upon environmental pressures is not evolution -- they are still moths. A population of bacteria that become resistant to antibiotics does not illustrate evolution -- they are still bacteria. In the biological realm, natural selection (which is operating in these examples) is supposedly the mechanism by which evolution advances, and intelligent design theory certainly does not deny its existence. While natural selection can indeed preserve the stronger and more resilient members of a gene pool, intelligent design maintains that it cannot explain entirely new kinds of life -- and that is what evolution is.
Secular Blasphemy comments on just how monumentally ignorant Spencer is:
[R]eal evolution is precisely what is being observed continuously, both in the wild and in laboratories. What Spencer means, is that “real” evolution is the part he doesn’t like, and the part he asserts has not been observed. It speaks volumes about Spencer’s ignorance of biology that he says “they are still bacteria,” apparently oblivious that bacteria is not one species, not even a family, or a phylum, but an entire kingdom (with varying classifications) of life forms. That is equivalent to discounting evidence for evolution from reptiles to mammals by saying “they are still animals.” ...
[I]t is simply dishonest to pretend that we can’t know what is not directly observed. Nobody has observed the ancient city of Carthage, but I don’t think any sane and educated person will deny that it did exist. Nobody has seen a live dinosaur, obviously, but not even creationists pretend they never existed, as that would be too much a leap of faith, given that anyone can observe their fossils in museums.
Ed Brayton comments on Spencer’s nonsense:
Spencer is a serious and respected scientist, even if not in this particular field. There are really only two choices here. Either Spencer has taken the time to research Gould’s views on this subject, in which case he is lying about it; or he hasn’t bothered to take the time to do so and he is representing the work of a fellow scientist without doing what any reputable scientist should do, which is insure that they are not distorting those views. This is the sort of thing that can kill a scientific career, and for good reason. Present a paper at a scientific conference that so blatantly distorts the work of another scientist and you may well find yourself thrown out of the group. And for good reason.
Perhaps the best of the most recent commentary on Intelligent Design comes from Kung Fu Monkey:
Here you are, Tsui or Sanjay, looking at a new century. A century in which the exponential curve of technology’s rise becomes a sheer cliff. In which only the most intellectually nimble countries, best able to master new information technologies and couple them with manufacturing bases with high levels of technical training, will survive.
And you’re looking at that big bastard across the ocean, the US of A. First to build the Bomb. First to master the secrets of the atom. First to build the semiconductor. First and only tribe of humans who actually put men on the GODDAM MOON, to have stepped on another rock in space. Decoders of the human genome, the VERY BOOK OF LIFE !!! How will we ever stop --
Wow, they forfeit. Cool.
And:
When the leader of your party turns his back on science, the product of God’s 2nd greatest gift to us, reason,* when he turns from the very process which brought so much progress and prosperity to this land and encourages those would so eagerly toss aside rational thought itself ... gah, never mind voting Democrat: if my choice were between these cowards who would turn back the Enlightenment and anal-probing yet intellectually honest Martians, I would grit my teeth, vote for the Martians and learn to visualize my Happy Place during my Probe-Center appointments.
By undermining the principles behind science, the principles behind critical thinking, and the very nature of skepticism, religious conservatives are also undermining the ability of anyone to criticize what they are doing. Religious conservatives don’t like modern science because it functions as the ultimate ideological acid: scientific thinking demands that all ideas submit to rigorous skepticism, testing, and debate. Some ideologies are up to this; most are not.
Religious conservatives, I believe, fear that their ideologies are not able to stand up to the skeptical demands of modern science and scientific thinking. They are probably right.
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