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February 7, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Design for Living
By MICHAEL J. BEHE
ethlehem, Pa. � IN the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design. As one of the scientists who have proposed design as an explanation for biological systems, I have found widespread confusion about what intelligent design is and what it is not.
First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments. For example, a critic recently caricatured intelligent design as the belief that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. That's misleading. Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.
Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.
Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed. Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.
For example, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, once wrote that biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved. (Imagine a scientist repeating through clenched teeth: "It wasn't really designed. Not really.")
The resemblance of parts of life to engineered mechanisms like a watch is enormously stronger than what Reverend Paley imagined. In the past 50 years modern science has shown that the cell, the very foundation of life, is run by machines made of molecules. There are little molecular trucks in the cell to ferry supplies, little outboard motors to push a cell through liquid.
In 1998 an issue of the journal Cell was devoted to molecular machines, with articles like "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines" and "Mechanical Devices of the Spliceosome: Motors, Clocks, Springs and Things." Referring to his student days in the 1960's, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that "the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered." In fact, Dr. Alberts remarked, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory with an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. He emphasized that the term machine was not some fuzzy analogy; it was meant literally.
The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.
Scientists skeptical of Darwinian claims include many who have no truck with ideas of intelligent design, like those who advocate an idea called complexity theory, which envisions life self-organizing in roughly the same way that a hurricane does, and ones who think organisms in some sense can design themselves.
The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.
The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.
Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore. Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed. And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design.
Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University and a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, is the author of "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution."
ps: It is unfortunate that the author failed to acknowledge that Paley's notion of intelligent design (actuall it had been around before him, but that is another story) was quashed by Darwin.
A recent reply to Paley, is the delightfully well-written The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins. The book is still very much around, and the paperback is quite inexpensive (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc. A good review is located at:
And another is given below
WE ARE ALL CONTRAPTIONS
Date:
December 14, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 18, Column 2; Book Review Desk
Byline:BY MICHAEL T. GHISELIN; Michael T. Ghiselin is tha author of ''The Triumph of the Darwinian Method,'' and ''The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex''
Lead:THE BLIND WATCHMAKER By Richard Dawkins. Illustrated. 332 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $18.95.
EARLY in the 19th century it was intellectually respectable to justify one's belief in God by arguing from design. The theologian William Paley presented one version of that argument in his ''Natural Theology'': Suppose we find a watch. We cannot imagine a watch arising without a watchmaker. And because organisms are vastly more complicated than watches, it is even harder to imagine them arising without an organism-maker.
The young Charles Darwin, when he was preparing to become a clergyman, occupied what were said to have been Paley's rooms in Christ's College, Cambridge. He later remarked that he had greatly admired Paley's works, though he had failed to pay much attention to the validity of the premises. In ''The Origin of Species'' (1859), Darwin revealed to the world that the so-called watchmaker is actually a purely natural process.
Text:Darwin's next book, published in 1862, was entitled ''On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing.'' This was a deliberate attack on the argument from design, and indeed on the notion of purpose in the world in general. Even the title was ironic, for Paley had said that there can be no ''contrivance without a contriver.'' Darwin managed to achieve two major goals. He showed how complex and remarkably effective adaptations could in fact be built up by small steps through natural selection. And he turned the argument from design on its head: Nature produces what we might call contraptions rather than contrivances. In other words, natural selection predicts both adaptation and maladaptation. The latter makes no sense as a deduction from the creative action of an omniscient and omnipotent being. Carried to its logical conclusion, the argument from design gives rise to the argument from inc ompetent design, hence to an argument for atheism.
The Harvard botanist Asa Gray was one of Darwin's ablest supporters, but the book on orchids was a bit much for Gray's religious sensibilities. He devised a theory that John Dewey later called ''design on the installment plan'': God works by natural selection but includes a dose of providence by guiding variation along definite lines. Darwin replied that a deity who did that would have to foresee everything in evolutionary history, leading to a very heterodox theology.
All this ought to be common knowledge, but it is not. Special creation - the watchmaker's work -was decisively refuted over a century ago, and evolution soon became as well established as the circulation of the blood. But people keep reinventing the same old arguments, sometimes with minor variations. Richard Dawkins is no exception. He never mentions Darwin's book on orchids. He attributes the argument from imperfect design to Stephen Jay Gould, and something like design on the installment plan to the Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore.
Be this as it may, in ''The Blind Watchmaker,'' Mr. Dawkins succeeds admirably in showing how natural selection allows biologists to dispense with such notions as purpose and design, and he does so in a manner readily intelligible to the modern reader. Science and technology have advanced a great deal since Darwin's day, and Mr. Dawkins takes ad-vantage of opportunities to explain difficult concepts by means of some modern analogies. He has programmed his personal computer to show how complex patterns can be built up in small steps through processes much like natural selection. He further shows how such processes as the development of embryos can be elucidated by comparison with computers.
Such analogies have their limitations, but at least they make it easier for somebody with just a little familiarity with computers to understand how evolution works. Many errors about evolution are due to thinking about genes as if they formed blueprints or pictures of an entire organism. When we conceive of the genetic material as a program that controls development, we should not expect that material to look anything like the organism itself. If we understand that, we find it less puzzling that a string of chemicals can specify the structure of anything so complicated as the human brain. NOT content with rebutting creationists, Mr. Dawkins presses his arguments against those who claim to have invented serious alternatives to the generally accepted ''neo-Darwinian'' view. The theory of punctuated equilibria, for example, proposes that the rate of evolutionary change varies, so that sometimes change is rapid, sometimes none occurs at all. Evolution by jerks, or rapid steps , has been confused with evolution by saltations, or leaps, in which major change would occur in a single generation. Mr. Dawkins accuses Mr. Gould, the leading propagandist of the puctuational view, of misleading people by using ''saltation'' to describe two very different processes. Orthodox theory rules out leaps, but emending it to allow for a lot of rapid steps means only a change in emphasis.
Some critics of what is purported to be neo-Darwinism have claimed that evolution is due to variations constrained by the kinds of changes that can occur in the course of embryological development. This is supposed to be something other than the ''random mutations'' of neo-Darwinism. But traditional evolutionary theory has never asserted that variation is random in the sense that one change is as probable as another. Darwin wrote a whole book, ''The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication,'' explaining how embryology affects evolution. Again, Mr. Dawkins does not discuss that book - nor do the authors against whom he argues so well.
As Mr. Dawkins points out, the arguments presented against evolution by creationists turn out to be addressed to the incredulity of the ignorant. If you cannot imagine something, then it cannot be true. If something seems out of line with ordinary experience, it must be attributed to supernatural influences. Such are the thought habits of uncultivated intellects - children, savages and simpletons. The existence of primitive thought habits makes a great deal of sense in terms of evolutionary biology. Our brains are here because they helped our ancestors to get through the day and to outreproduce their neighbors. They are good enough for us to learn to think in a disciplined and rigorous manner, but it takes much effort and some talent to master the principles of probability theory and the subtleties of celestial mechanics or population genetics. So we should only expect that anthropomorphism, teleology and other inadequate ways of thinking should persist in everyday life an d even - as something like vestigial organs - in learned discourse. AS a friendly observer of American life, Mr. Dawkins, who teaches at the University of Oxford, expresses concern about the political activities of creationists. His book may provide assistance for those attempting to defend science from sectarian attacks. However, those to whom the creationists appeal for support are those who are least qualified to judge the issues. The average high school graduate knows virtually nothing about evolution because there is a long tradition of watering it down, placing it at the end of the textbook or even deleting it altogether from the curriculum.
Evolution has been muted or suppressed at even the highest levels of instruction, and not just in the United States. Mr. Dawkins says that when he was an undergraduate, some of Darwin's theories about sex were not taken seriously by biologists. One reason why they are now taken very seriously is that a few actually read what Darwin wrote. When eminent biologists at universities like Oxford and Harvard, who write books about evolution for the general public, overlook so much of Darwin's contribution, one wonders all the more about their colleagues and their students.
An old story has it that a proper Victorian lady responded to the idea of our kinship with the apes by saying it might or might not be true, but that if it were, she hoped that it would not become generally known. Although widely known, our humble ancestry has been handled like any other matter deemed inappropriate for polite conversation or apt to corrupt our inferiors. Treating evolutionary biology as a topic to be discussed only among academic specialists becomes increasingly difficult as research continues to give so many impressive results. Many people are fascinated by evolution, and they want to learn more about it. And many such people would love to read about matters that others would conceal from them. ''The Blind Watchmaker'' fills such needs perfectly. Readers who are not outraged will be delighted.
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