Bill's Comments

A few years ago there was a furor over the attempts by some Christians to introduce the teaching of Intelligent Design in the schools science curriculum. It went so far as a suit in Pennsylvania to force the teaching. The issue has since died out, but from my perspective it was handled extremely poorly by both sides, and a genuine teaching opportunity was lost. The press, being on against Intelligent Design (ID) from the start, failed to show the real issues underneath, and while everyone was pointing fingers at ID as being religious and a version of Creationism, no one pointed out that the arguments and positions of the other side were equally non-rational being Evolutionism. I think it is instructive to look at this in more detail, because it is another version of the kinds of arguments that have been going on throughout history.

Biblical literalists, that believe the world was created complete as we know it approximately 6000 years ago spend great amounts of energy, physical, emotional, and mental, trying to fit all that is known into their belief. They call it a theory of creation, and if they were willing to actually test its conclusions and inputs against known information honestly, they could indeed call it a theory, however poorly it does its job of explanation, and how invalid it is against any tests based on current knowledge. Because it is not subjected to external challenge, and is defended by ad hoc assumptions to keep the belief, it is an ideology and is most appropriately named Creationism. In fact there is a museum that purports to show and demonstrate the history of the earth in these terms in Petersburg, Kentucky, just Southwest of Cincinnati, Ohio.

One step more reasonable is Intelligent Design. The concept is based on an analogy to finding a watch, seeing its complexity, order, and functioning, and from that hypothesizing a watch maker. In this case, proponents of ID accept pretty much all of the factual basis of modern science, but then interpret it quite differently. Two of the most common arguments for a “watch maker” or “Universe Maker” or God, are the flagellum of some bacteria and a misapplication of probability to chemistry. In the case of a flagellum, because it consists of a dozen very specific proteins, any one of which when removed, renders the flagellum immobile, the analogy is drawn that like a watch, take out any one gear and it fails to function, and the watch is designed, so then is also the bacterial flagellum. What is missing is the idea that the flagellum might have started very imperfectly and over millions and billions of years changed and became perfected. In fact the ignoring of the element of time is one of the most glaring errors in ID.
The other “argument” is a gross misapplication of the concepts of statistics, an ignoring of the principles of chemical dynamics, and a refusal to think in the proper time scales. Essentially the argument is that given the number of atoms in a living being, the probability of them coming together in that configuration is so small as to be impossible, therefore they had to be guided, by God. First of all, one cannot validly calculate such a probability, since that isn’t how it happened. Probability must be calculated on the pathways to the result. Second, of all, if one looks at the chemistry of the universe, one finds that everywhere, the first small molecules of life are found. It is actually more probable that such compounds as amino acids, simple sugars, and even the polycyclic members of nucleic acid, will form than the atoms of matter will stay separated. Those compounds give off energy when they form, thus making them more stable than their separated components. When such compounds are then concentrated, they in turn form other stable, larger molecules, and so forth. Finally, given the amount of time that the universe appears to have been in existence, even relatively low probability events have had opportunities to occur.

Where the ID proponents really come into battle though is with evolution. They simply look at the complexity of living organisms and do not conceive of them occurring by chance or without direction. The eye has been used as an example of this, but interestingly enough, there were some simulated evolution studies that showed that given an increased sensitivity to light in a few cells on the surface of a multi-cellular organism, something functioning as an eye will form. For that matter one can see so-called convergent evolution in the eye of an octopus vs. the eye of chordates. The evolutionary path between them split off long before there was anything considered as a precursor to an eye, but both have amazingly similar eyes.

There is a subset of the ID proponents that will allow continuing evolution, but refuse to grant evolution of all living things from simple precursor organisms. Their constant refrain is, “Show me an transition form.” However, what this really means is, “Show me every possible link between the evolution from one predecessor to the final version that you claim.” There is an absolute refusal to accept any inferred links. However, I have also seen them reject actual transition forms because they don’t show the next step in the process.

For anyone fairly well educated in the basic sciences, it is easy to beat up on the Creationists and ID’ers. However, that is not to say that evolution gets a free pass. Regardless of how well corroborated, evolution is a theory not a fact. It is an interpretation of the facts that appears to fit them the best of other possible interpretations, but it has its own difficulties that are often ignored. The biggest one is, what is the jump from a collection of chemicals to a living organism? One can find all sorts of pieces in the literature. There are little hollow spheres of protein called coacervates that can form non-biotically, but yet in some ways behave like organisms. One can trap enzymes inside them a have them seem to metabolize, drawing in a sugar or similar compound and breaking it into two or more pieces. The pre-biotic chemists have done all sorts of things since the first Stanley Muller experiments that converted a hypothesized primordial gas mixture into a soup of biological molecules simply through constant electrical discharges and boiling the condensate to recycle the monomers and atoms. They have found all sorts of ways to create the precursors of DNA and ATP, two of the fundamental bases of life.
Or another question is how did DNA become the code? For that matter how did RNA become the translator? But still more fundamental, what defines life? We seem to know it when we see it, but have a very hard time properly defining it so that we will know definitively when we create it. Additionally, we still argue over the actual evolutionary pathways given that they exist. And there are many wonders in the biological world that are rarely discussed. We take it for granted now that mitochondria have DNA, and in fact that is being used as a marker in human evolution. But how did it get there in the first place? Most likely mitochondria and their plant analog, chloroplasts, were once independent organisms that became ingested but not digested, and formed a mutual supportive system. The metabolic traces are there, with very primitive anaerobic metabolism in the cytoplasm but the real energy-yielding reactions in the included chloroplasts or mitochondria.

What has happened in the school systems is that science has come to be taught as a collection of facts, not as a way of gathering, organizing, and using facts about the world around us. This is most evident in teaching evolution. It is taught as established fact, not well-corroborated theory. As such it should be labeled Evolutionism, not Theory of Evolution. It is well beyond the scope of this essay, but I think the teaching of science to the point of its being Scientism fits other agenda.

In fighting the introduction of ID into the classroom, teachers avoided having to actually show how science works. They would have had to understand the material well enough to explain its strengths and weaknesses and be able to analyze the fallacies of ID. There were many reasons and excuses given, not the least of which was the ad hominum attack of it was religious and non-intellectual.

From my perspective neither side was being honest. The ID’ers wanted their ideas presented as valid theory to be discussed, actually as an alternative to evolution, and the teachers and did not want any challenge to their intellectual hegemony. Rather than ID being given the necessary exposure to show it for what it was, and ideology, it was suppressed for other reasons. And classroom science became even more entrenched as a collection of facts rather than a system of knowledge acquisition and analysis. It is all reminiscent of the same debates with slightly different foci throughout history from the Middle Ages to the present.