The evolving clash of Darwinists and doubters
By Kenneth Chang The New York Times
TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2005
NEW YORK At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this
question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the
actions of an unseen higher being?
The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have
argued should be taught alongside evolution, say that the complexity and
diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain.
Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little
spinning motors that propel bacteria, the cascade of proteins that cause blood
to clot, they say, clearly point to the hand of a higher being at work in the
world.
In one often-cited argument, Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at
Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a leading theorist of intelligent design,
compared complex biological phenomena like blood clotting to a mousetrap: Take
away any one piece - the spring, the baseboard, the metal piece that snags the
mouse - and the mousetrap stops functioning.
Similarly, Behe argues, if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved
in blood clotting is missing or deficient - as happens in hemophilia, for
instance - clots will not form properly.
Such all-or-none systems, Behe and other proponents of intelligent design
say, could not have arisen through the incremental changes that, according to
evolution, allowed life to progress from primitive bacteria to the
sophisticated abilities of humans.
These complex systems are "always associated with design," said Behe, who
is the author of "Darwin's Black Box."
"We find such systems in biology, and since we know of no other way that
these things can be produced, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, then we are
rational to conclude they were indeed designed," he said.
It is an argument that appeals to many people of faith.
But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run
counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive
power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from
fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science.
"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas
Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental
presumption of what we do."
That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But
they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with
nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live.
And in that quest, they say, there is no need to resort to otherworldly
explanations. So much evidence has been provided by evolutionary studies that
biologists are able to explain even the most complex natural phenomena and to
fill in whatever blanks remain with solid theories.
For example, while Behe and other leading design proponents see the blood
clotting system as a product of design, mainstream scientists see it as a
result of a coherent sequence of evolutionary events.
Early vertebrates like jawless fish are thought to have had a simple
clotting system involving a few proteins that made blood stick together, said
Russell Doolittle, a professor of molecular biology at the University of
California at San Diego.
One hypothesis is that at some point, a mistake during the copying of DNA
resulted in the duplication of a gene, increasing the amount of protein
produced by that cell.
Most often, such a change would be useless. But in this case the extra
protein helped blood clot, and animals with the extra protein were more likely
to survive and reproduce. Over time, other proteins joined the system; several
proteins involved in blood clotting appear to have started as digestive
enzymes.
By studying the evolutionary tree and the genetics and biochemistry of
organisms, Doolittle said, scientists have largely been able to determine the
order in which different proteins became involved in helping blood clot,
eventually producing the sophisticated clotting mechanisms of humans and other
higher animals. The sequencing of animal genomes has provided evidence to
support this view.
For example, scientists had predicted that more primitive animals like
fish would be missing certain clotting proteins. In fact, the recent sequencing
of the fish genome has shown just this.
"The evidence is rock solid," Doolittle said.
Unlike creationists, proponents of intelligent design accept many of the
conclusions of modern science. They agree with cosmologists that the age of the
universe is 13.6 billion years, not fewer than 10,000 years, as a literal
reading of the Bible would suggest. They accept that mutation and natural
selection - the central mechanisms of evolution - have acted in small ways,
such as leading to the decay of eyes in certain salamanders that live
underground.
Some advocates of intelligent design even accept the notion that all
species come from a common ancestor, a central tenet of evolution.
Although the vast majority of scientists accept evolution, the Discovery
Institute, a research center in Seattle that has emerged as a clearinghouse for
the intelligent design movement, said that 404 scientists, including 70
biologists, had signed a petition declaring that they were skeptical of
Darwinism.
Nonetheless, many scientists regard intelligent design as little more
than creationism. Despite its use of scientific language, they say, the
approach offers only philosophical objections to evolution, not any positive
evidence for the intervention of a designer.
But mainstream scientists, design proponents say, are unwilling to look
beyond the material world when it comes to explaining things like the
construction of an eye or the spinning motors that propel bacteria. Design
proponents question why scientists, who are presumably seeking answers, would
exclude one explanation.
"If we've defined science such that it cannot get to the true answer,
we've got a pretty lame definition of science," said Douglas Axe, a molecular
biologist and the director of research at the Biologic Institute, a research
center in Seattle that looks at the organization of biological systems
including intelligent design issues. He would not name the source of financing
for the institute.
Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the
Discovery Institute, compared the design approach to archaeologists
investigating an ancient civilization.
"Imagine you're an archaeologist and you're looking at an inscription,
and you say, 'Well, sorry, that looks like it's intelligent, but we can't
invoke an intelligent cause because, as a matter of method, we have to limit
ourselves to materialistic processes,"' Meyer said. "That would be nuts.
"The fact remains that the materialistic view is a truncated view of
reality."
Mainstream scientists say the scientific method is indeed restricted to
the material world, because it is trying to find out how it works. Saying, "it
must have been designed," they say, is simply a way of not tackling the hardest
problems. Meanwhile, there is no scientific evidence to suggest a designer's
presence.
Darwin's theory, in contrast, has over the past century yielded so many
solid findings that no mainstream biologist today doubts its basic tenets.
The theory has unlocked many of the mysteries of the natural world. By
studying the skeletons of whales, evolutionary scientists traced the history of
the whales' descent from small-hoofed land mammals. They made predictions about
what the earliest water-dwelling whales might look like. In 1994,
paleontologists reported discovering two such species, with many of the
anatomical features that scientists had predicted.
Proponents of intelligent design say they are doing the mathematical work
and biology experiments needed to put their ideas on firm scientific ground.
William Dembski, who headed a short-lived intelligent design institute at
Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Texas, has worked on algorithms
that purport to tell the difference between objects that were designed and
those that occurred naturally.
Meanwhile, Axe has studied a protein, called penicillinase, that gives
bacteria the ability to survive antibiotic penicillin. Meyer has referred to
Axe's work in arguing that working proteins are so rare that evolution cannot
by chance discover them. Axe looked at the probability that a protein with this
ability could exist in a universe of all possible proteins.
Penicillinase is made up of a strand of chemicals called amino acids
folded into a shape that binds to penicillin and thus disables it. Whether the
protein folds up in the right way determines whether it works or not.
Axe calculated that of the plausible amino acid sequences, only one in
100,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion - a number
written as 1 followed by 77 zeroes - would provide resistance to penicillin.
Axe's research appeared last year in The Journal of Molecular Biology, a
peer-reviewed scientific publication.
Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University in Rhode
Island and a frequent sparring partner of design proponents, said that Axe's
study did not look at penicillinase "the way evolution looks at the protein."
Natural selection, he said, is not random. A small number of mutations
can change the function of a protein, allowing it to diverge along new
evolutionary paths and eventually form a new shape.
It is unreasonable, mainstream scientists say, for design advocates to
demand that every tiny detail of evolution be filled in before they accept it.
Behe said he might find the mainstream scientists' argument compelling if
they were to observe evolutionary leaps in the laboratory. He pointed to an
experiment by Richard Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan
State University, who has been observing the evolution of E. coli bacteria for
more than 15 years. "If anything cool came out of that," Behe said, "that would
be one way to convince me."
Behe said that if he was correct, then the E. coli in Lenski's lab would
evolve in small ways, but would never change in such a way that the bacteria
would develop entirely new abilities.
In fact, that is what appears to have happened. Lenski said his
experiment was not intended to explore this aspect of evolution, but "we have
recently discovered a pretty dramatic exception, one where a new and surprising
function has evolved," he said.
Lenski declined to give any details until the research is published. But,
he said, "If anyone is resting his or her faith in God on the outcome that our
experiment will not produce some major biological innovation, then I humbly
suggest they should rethink the distinction between science and religion."
Behe said, "I'll wait and see."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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