shift?
When Kansas school officials restored the theory of evolution
to statewide education standards a few weeks ago, biologists
might have been inclined to declare victory over creationism.
Instead, some evolutionists say, the latter stages of the battle
in Kansas, along with new efforts in Michigan and
Pennsylvania as well as in a number of universities and even
in Washington, suggest that the issue is far from settled.
This time, though, the evolutionists find themselves arrayed
not against traditional creationism, with its roots in biblical
literalism, but against a more sophisticated idea: the
intelligent-design theory.
Proponents of this theory, led by a group of academics and
intellectuals and including some biblical creationists, accept
that the earth is billions of years old, not the thousands of
years suggested by a literal reading of the Bible.
But they dispute the idea that natural selection -- the force
that Darwin suggested drove evolution -- is enough to explain
the complexity of the Earth's plants and animals. That
complexity, they say, must be the work of an intelligent
designer.
This designer may be much like the biblical God, proponents
say, but they are open to other explanations, like the
proposition that life was seeded by a meteorite from
elsewhere in the cosmos or the new-age philosophy that the
universe is suffused with a mysterious but inanimate life
force.
In recent months, the proponents of intelligent design have
advanced their case on several fronts.
* In Kansas, after the backlash against the traditional biblical
creationism, proponents of the design theory have become
the dominant anti- evolution force, though they lost an effort
to have theories like intelligent design considered on an equal
basis with evolution in school curriculums.
* In Michigan, nine legislators in the House of
Representatives have introduced legislation to amend state
education standards to put intelligent design on an equal basis
with evolution.
* In Pennsylvania, where biblical creationists and design
theorists have operated in concert, state officials are close to
adopting educational standards that would allow the teaching
of theories on the origin of life other than evolution.
* Backers of intelligent design organized
university-sanctioned conferences at Yale and Baylor last
year, and the movement has spawned at least one university
student organization -- called Intelligent Design and Evolution
Awareness, or the IDEA club -- at the University of
California at San Diego.
* The Discovery Institute, a research institute in Seattle that
promotes conservative causes, organized a briefing on
intelligent design last year on Capitol Hill for prominent
members of Congress.
"They are skilled in analyzing evidence and ideas," said Rep.
Tom Petri, R- Wis., one of several members of Congress
who were hosts at the session in a congressional hearing
room. "They are making a determined effort to attempt to
present the intelligent-design theory, and ask that it be judged
by normal scientific criteria."
Polls show that about 45 percent of Americans say they
believe in creationism. George W. Bush took the position in
the presidential campaign that children should be exposed to
the theories of both creationism and evolution in school.
Supporters of Darwin see the intelligent-design theory as
more insidious than creationism, especially given that many
of its advocates have mainstream scientific credentials, which
creationists often lack.
"The most striking thing about the intelligent-design folks is
their potential to really make anti-evolutionism intellectually
respectable," said Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the
National Center for Science Education in Oakland, which
promotes the teaching of evolution.
Dr. Adrian Melott, a professor of physics and astronomy at
the University of Kansas in Lawrence and a member of
Kansas Citizens for Science, a group that helped win the
restoration of evolution to the state education standards, said
the design theory was finding adherents among doctors,
engineers and people with degrees in the humanities.
Intelligent design is "the language that the creationists among
the student body tend to use now," Melott said.
One of the first arguments for the design theory was set out
in "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution" (Simon & Schuster, 1996), by Dr. Michael J.
Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in
Pennsylvania. Behe argued that various biochemical
structures in cells could not have been built in a stepwise
Darwinian fashion.
Since then, the movement has gained support among a few
scientists in other disciplines, most of them conservative
Christians.
"I'm very impressed with the level of scientific work and the
level of scientific dialogue among the leaders of the design
movement," said Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer at
the University of Washington in Seattle. The theory
"warrants further research," Gonzalez said.
Leaders of the design movement also look for flaws in
evolutionist thinking and its presentation, and they have
scored heavily by publicizing embarrassing mistakes in
prominent biology textbooks.
"There is a legitimate intellectual project here," said Dr.
William Dembski,
a leading proponent of intelligent design who has a doctorate
in mathematics from the University of Chicago and who is on
the faculty at Baylor, which receives a small part of its
financing from the Texas Baptist Convention. "It is not
creationism. There's not a commitment to Genesis literalism."
Dembski conceded that his interest in alternatives to
Darwinian theory was partly brought on by the fact that he is
an evangelical Christian, but he said intelligent design can
withstand strict scientific scrutiny.
"The religious conviction played a role," he said. But he
added, "As far as making me compromise in my work, that's
the last thing I want to do."
Evolutionary biologists maintain that the arguments of
intelligent design do not survive scrutiny, but they concede
that a specialist's knowledge of particular mathematical or
biological disciplines is often needed to clinch the point.
"I would use the words 'devilishly clever,' " said Dr. Jerry
Coyne, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University
of Chicago, speaking of the way the theory is constructed. "It
has an appeal to intellectuals who don't know anything about
evolutionary biology, first of all because the proponents have
PhDs and second of all because it's not written in the sort of
populist, folksy, anti-intellectual style. It's written in the argot
of academia."
Despite that gloss, Dr. Leonard Krishtalka, a biologist and
director of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum
and Biodiversity Research Center, said recently, "Intelligent
design is nothing more than creationism dressed in a cheap
tuxedo."
Dembski said his rather vague doubts about Darwinism did
not take scientific shape until he attended an academic
conference in 1988, just after finishing his doctoral thesis.
The conference explored the difficulty of preparing perfectly
random strings of numbers, which are important in
cryptography, computer science and statistics.
One problem is that seemingly random strings often contain
patterns discernible only with mathematical tests. Dembski
wondered whether he could devise a way to find evidence of
related patterns in the randomness of nature.
Dembski eventually developed what he called a mathematical
"explanatory filter" that he asserted can distinguish
randomness from complexity designed by an intelligent agent.
He explained this idea in "The Design Inference" (Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Dembski has applied his explanatory filter to the biochemical
structures in cells -- and concluded that blind natural selection
could not have created them.
But in a detailed critique of Dembski's filter theory, published
in the current issue of the magazine the Skeptical Inquirer,
Dr. Taner Edis, a physicist at Truman State University in
Kirksville, Mo., said that while Dembski's mathematics were
impressive, his analysis was probably detecting only the
complexity that evolution itself would normally produce.
"They have come up with something genuinely interesting in
the information- theory arguments," Edis said of
intelligent-design theorists. "At least they make an effort to
get rid of some of the blatantly fundamentalist elements of
creationism."
Mike Lee, MA
Dept of Psychology
University of Manitoba
Winnipeg, MB Canada
"Our situation on this Earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntarily,
and uninvited, for a short stay without knowing why. To me it is enough to wonder at the secrets."
-- Albert Einstein
"Men are probably nearer the central truth in their superstitions than in
their science." --Henry David Thoreau
