Wednesday, March 09, 2005
The Dover Sole; an Intelligent Design?

Every sphere of American public life is democratised; what schools teach in class included. Recently, a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, succeeded in getting ‘Intelligent Design’ taught in the school curriculum – not as part of religious instruction, but in the science labs.

Intelligent Design maintains that only an unspecified superior intellect could have created the complexity of life forms. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, bringing about the evolution of one species into another, is explicitly rejected.

Bacterial flagella, the eye and DNA are all a result of the musings of a supreme intellect. Intelligent Design only differs from Christian Creationism in that the supreme being is not specified as ‘God’. Let's just hope that this God had the day off when the Dover Sole came off the drawing board - why design a flatfish squashed sideways? Not very intelligent!

Science groups are outraged, no doubt Professor Richard Dawkins choked on his breakfast, but supporters of the move claim it is merely reflecting the community’s wishes – 64% of the residents either supported the move or were ambivalent. Ominously, community support becomes self-reinforcing in small town USA; the kids grow up and leave school, safe in the knowledge that Creationism now has an air of credibility.

Clearly some streams of Christianity feel the need to validate their beliefs in empiricism. While many worshipers are content to let faith guide their daily lives and not unduly worry themselves about how much of a hand God had in creating their world, the aggressive Christian Right seeks to take on science on scientific terms. This is a monumental error.

The goings on at this Dover school reminded me of a cassette tape lent to me by a devout Christain friend a few years ago. It was recording of a presentation by a ‘scientific Creationist’ who spent two hours disputing 140 years of evolutionary scientific corpus, whilst presenting the most ludicrous of evidence to support his view the world was made just a few thousand years ago by a god.

What do you call a fish with no eyes?

He gave a smattering of examples, which - he claimed - did not support evolution, but refuted it. Why do humans have such a small appendix that no longer appears to have a use? Why have species of cave fish lost their eyes? Why cannot ostriches fly? How is it that evolution has allowed these species to become more simple, rather than more complex?

Unfortunately, what led him to conclude that they were created like this was not so much his faith but his fundamental misunderstanding of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Complexity is not some kind of evolutionary mea culpa for an organism, but it is often a product of evolutionary pressure. However, adaptive improvement is what natural selection is all about.

An alternate explanation gives a far more plausible – and testable – explanation for why these fish have no eyes. The loss of an eye in an organism which no longer requires them, would seem quite a beneficial adaptation which natural selection would favour: individual fish that definitively will not suffer from an eye infection seem more likely to survive in a habitat devoid of light. (In fact, these species have not ‘lost’ their eyes; they are simply not observable on the outside.)

A fsh (no 'i's)

But further gems stemmed not from his poor understanding of the subtleties of Darwinian theory, but more from a whimsical and somewhat endearing ignorance of geology. Why is human folklore so full of legends of dragons and exotic beasts? Well, a few thousand years ago, man actually shared the planet with the dinosaurs! Dragons are merely the manifestations of stories of ‘man meets T.Rex’ which have been passed down through the generations.

It wasn’t that he believed in an unchanging world, as he admitted that dogs have been bred into different shapes in a human lifetime, but he was sure that one species could never have evolved into another. The world is in a state of flux, but on a much shorter time scale. Fossils were not the devil’s work, placed in sedimentary beds to confound fallible humans, as some non-sceintific Creationists would claim, but were truly the remains of ancient creatures which had became buried in rock as a result of the biblical floods some 5-6 thousand years ago.

Unfortunately, no one thought to quiz him on why Moses did not feel he need to save a couple of Brachiosaurus or Gomphos elkema alongside the pairs of elephants and doves when he herded all of God’s creations two by two into his Ark. Granted, a couple of 30-ton dinosaurs would have presented a few logistical problems, but surely he could have squeezed in an extra cage for the Gomphos?

Disturbingly, this charlatan was taken at face value by the audience. His scientific qualifications lended him an air of credibility missing on vocal TV evangelists with bright orange fake-tans. But despite his ‘degree in Earth Sciences’ and his work as a petroleum geologist, his grasp of fairly basic geological concepts, such as over-folded beds (which appear to reverse fossil sequences) and deposition rates was akin to a 3rd grader.

I am sure that given enough intellectual leeway he could devise some immensely enjoyable explanations on why the sea is salty or why the hobbit-like hominoid found in Indonesia is no longer with us.

The school in Dover, is correct in affirming that Darwin’s theory of evolution is just a ‘theory’ – and so by definition, is not ‘fact’. But the governors are dangerously wrong to assert that Creationism and its new stable-mate “Intelligent Design” are ideas of similar stature to Charles Darwin's.

Notwithstanding the socialising influences of conventionalism (see Thomas Kuhn) which cajoles scientific thought into working within established paradigms and suppresses recalcitrant opinions, each new piece of evidence fails to refute evolution as an explanatory theory. The fossil record is wafer thin, but even the preservation of a minuscule proportion of every organism that ever lived has revealed some startling sequences of ‘evolution in action’.

And contemporary research with fast breeding fruit flies and even the modern changes in morphology of the Australian red-bellied black snake (in response to the introduction of the Cane Toad) have shown organisms rapidly evolving to new forms.

The defenders of Intelligent Design, as an alternative and secular explanation for the diversity of life, claim they are victimised as the troublsome heretics of the scientific establishment for daring to question the perceived wisdom. They assert that science advances through dispute, yet they bemoan that their own ‘evidence’ is laughably dismissed; they are accused of being compromised by their theological underpinning.

But in a reversal of roles, the scientific pariahs of Creationism have turned the tables on their antagonists through people-power (actually, probably 'god-power', or something) at schools and the teachers at Dover have been obliged to ‘sign-off’ on a statement recognising equal prominance of all theories of life:

"Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view."

Many teachers held their ground and refused to sign.

Yet read the statement carefully. It does not explicitly define ‘Intelligent Design’ as a theory that should be rigorously tested by scientific method and so, as such, implies that Intelligent Design and evolution are not of the same ilk. However, as the school governors are pushing Intelligent Design to be taught in the biology classroom rather than in religious education, then clearly they consider it should be.

Yet they may find that, as ‘theories’, Creationism and Intelligent Design do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. That ‘the eye is too complex to have evolved’ is strictly speaking a valid scientific hypothesis, but them to not bother testing it simply because it just seems too difficult, is applying insufficient rigour. For the Creationist-Intelligent Design axis, that the eye was 'designed' should remain a matter of believing.

Just how fruitful would exploring the Bible in scientific terms be? One can only imagine Genesis Chapter 1 subject to peer review. For most Christians it is better to interpret Genesis as a myth, in the context of story telling amongst 2,000-year-old nomadic tribes. But for the Religious Right, Genesis is fact, based on evidence.

But Creationists and their brethren of the Intelligent Design school of thought base their ideas on species development on Christian theology and little else. But why one book - the Bible - written by semi-literate nomads, 2,000 years ago, should be considered a more plausible historical explanation than, say this month’s edition of Nature magazine is difficult to understand.

How does an egotist change a lightbulb?

The Religious Right’s ambition to get theological narrative taught in school science labs as fact would be pitiful but harmless, if it were not for the regressive attitudes towards nature that this encourages.

Evolution will never be part of the pious Right’s belief system because of the central tenet for which Charles Darwin himself was personally criticised: that humans are related to apes. As a result, we are just one of millions of species which inhabit the planet.

Bill Bryson, in his "Short History of Nearly Everything", lucidly articulates the Christian world’s growing understanding of the natural world as being a slow descent into natural humility. Christendom first had to come to terms with the fact that Europe was not afterall the centre of the world. Then it had to accept that the Earth was not the centre of the Solar System and then that the Solar System was not even the centre of the universe. At the same time Charles Darwin proceeded to suggest that Christians were simply just another species of animal, related to apes. As Bryson often reminds us: we are not here for any particular purpose, we are just here.

Creationism and Intelligent Design attempt to regress society and to redefine human existence as being once again the central pillar of the universe’s meaning. In believing that a ‘higher-being’ designed (or at least helped design) every living and non-living natural object infers that she/he/it saw fit to choose the human species to be at the pinnacle of its creation. As a result, the planet and all its resources, plants and animals are here for our sole personal use.

He puts the bulb to the scoket and the world revolves around him

Unfortunately, this anthropocentric arrogance lies at the heart of the ecological deterioration of the planet. I have little doubt that humans, in the short to medium term, and in the wealthy Christian world at least, have the ingenuity to survive massive habitat destruction and global warming. Alas, much else will be laid to rest.

But if we are as reliant on ecological systems, natural cycles and biodiversity as many ecologists are beginning to think, the Creationist dogma, which places humans existence above all else, will be our undoing. (See Murray Bookchin for a comprehensive exploration of radical social ecology.)

Are we in the midst of a new culture war between 'secular humanism' and 'Christian morality'? Like it or loathe it, you cannot ignore America. The American Christian Right is arguably at its most powerful in decades – politically, educationally, financially and culturally - precisely as the US is at its most powerful geopolitically. This has allowed belief systems such as Creationism and Intelligent Design to garner a global willing audience: the world is watching what America does like never before.

In Australia too, the Religious Right is on the rise. It even has a political wing in the form of the Family First Party. While it has nothing like the stranglehold the Religious Right has on US policy, it certainly has the ear of the PM, keen to break into new constituencies and the PM-elect but one, Tony Abbot, is a vociferous Christian campaigner.

'Fair and Balanced'

Journalists often fall over themselves in an attempting to be seen to present a balanced view. On the whole, where they fail, it is fairly obvious and an article or op-ed piece can be easily seen for what it is: propaganda. However, presenting a ‘balanced view’ of scientific debate is problematic and often leads to the majority consensus being accredited equal weight as a minority crack-pot few, when clearly this does not reflect reality. In these culture wars, journalists will again be our scientific filters. They will have to tread carefully.

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