Scientific support for 'intelligent design' disputed (MSM Gay Agenda alert)

At the heart of the argument over teaching evolution in the classroom is the claim that some scientists, not just religious believers, support the concept of "intelligent design."

Advocates of intelligent design argue that living things are too complex to be explained by natural forces alone. Therefore, they say, only a higher power - God or an unnamed "designer" - could create life and empower it to evolve into the myriad species of organisms on Earth today.

The vast majority of working scientists contend that biological evolution is an established fact supported by overwhelming evidence. They say that evolution's mechanism is well explained by the process of random mutation and natural selection that Charles Darwin described 147 years ago. Darwin's theory - updated and confirmed by recent genetic discoveries - eventually will answer all or most questions about the origin and history of life, they say.

Nevertheless, polls repeatedly have found that a majority of Americans accept the concept of intelligent design and want it to be taught in schools along with evolution. President Bush waded into the debate in August, saying that schools should teach both.

Several school districts across the country want design to be taught along with evolution in science classes. A federal judge in Harrisburg, Pa., this week began hearing a lawsuit against the Dover, Pa., school board, which voted last fall to require students to learn about intelligent design.

The passionate public disputes over teaching design have focused attention on vigorous debates among scientists over specific pieces of evolutionary theory, which until now were largely confined to learned books and journals.

For example, scientists know how atoms and molecules combine to form larger structures and how primitive microbes evolved into fish, flowers, birds and people. But they admit that they don't understand the origin of life itself, the crucial step when a lifeless molecule became a living cell. There are many hypotheses, but no proven natural process.

"The big problem is making life," Edward Peltzer, an oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, told the Kansas Board of Education during a dispute over intelligent design in May.

One argument for intelligent design comes from Robert Kaita, a physicist at the Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. He noted that the world depends on a delicate balance among the precise properties of the universe, such as gravity, electromagnetic radiation and the forces inside the atom. The slightest change in the fine-tuning of these quantities would make life as we know it impossible.

Mainstream scientists contend that there's no positive scientific evidence for intelligent design. They say the case for a supernatural designer is purely negative - an unjustified leap into theology to explain holes and uncertainties in evolutionary theory.

"The only evidence that intelligent design is able to muster is the observation that science has not yet explained everything, and therefore design must be kept around as a default explanation for what is left," said Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

"There is exactly zero evidence for intelligent design," agreed Douglas Futuyma, a biologist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. "Design advocates argue by claiming flaws or gaps in evolutionary knowledge or theory, not by any positive evidence whatever for their theory."

Nevertheless, supporters of intelligent design argue that their position is based on science, not just religious faith.

"We are challenging the philosophy of scientific materialism, not science itself," says a policy statement from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the headquarters of the design movement.

Carl Koval, a chemist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, called intelligent design "a scientific objection" to the Darwinian theory of evolution. "There is nothing unscientific about saying that a theory doesn't fit with the observations," Koval said.

The design movement asserts that Darwinism is unable to explain not only the origin of life, but also gaps in the fossil record, the vast variety of modern body shapes, the complexity of a cell or the genetic information contained in DNA.

Intelligent design leaders take pains to distinguish their position from "creationism" - the belief, based on the biblical book of Genesis, that God created the Earth and its inhabitants in six days 6,000 years ago. Instead, design backers accept that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and that life is at least 3 billion years old.

They admit that evolution works on a small scale, "micro-evolution" within a single species, but assert that it cannot form entirely new species, known as "macro-evolution."

To buttress its case, the Discovery Institute has collected about 400 signatures on a statement labeled "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." About 80 of the signers are biologists; the rest are mostly philosophers, mathematicians, chemists, computer scientists, historians and lawyers.

The statement of dissent, however, doesn't even mention intelligent design. Instead, it simply raises doubts about the present state of evolutionary theory. In its entirety, the statement reads:

"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

"That statement is one that most scientists can or should be able to sign," said Martin Poenie, a cell biologist at the University of Texas in Austin, one of the signers.

Some who signed the statement of dissent said that doesn't mean they support intelligent design.

One signer, Stanley Salthe, a zoologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, replied "absolutely not" when he was asked if he agrees that there must have been a supernatural designer.

David Berlinski, a mathematician and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and a sharp critic of neo-Darwinism, also signed the statement of dissent. But in an e-mail message, Berlinski declared, "I have never endorsed intelligent design."

Asked to cite scientific evidence for supernatural design, John Marburger, President Bush's science adviser, replied: "There isn't any. ... Intelligent design is not a scientific concept."

Following are three of the reasons some scientists offer for intelligent design:

A basic text of the intelligent design movement is "Darwin's Black Box," published in 1996 by Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Behe argues that living cells are far too complex to be explained by Darwinian evolution.

He calls this the problem of "irreducible complexity" and says it led him to conclude that cells must have been designed by an intelligent agent. He leaves it to his readers to decide whether the designer is God.

"Many systems in the cell show signs of purposeful intelligent design," Behe told the Kansas Board of Education in May. "What science has discovered in the cell in the past 50 years is poorly explained by a gradual theory such as Darwin's."

Besides cells, Behe says many other biological systems are too complex to evolve naturally - for example, the little propellers (flagella) that enable bacteria to swim, the blood-clotting mechanism and the immune system.

"Not all things can occur by tiny, tiny changes ... leading to more complex systems," as neo-Darwinism proposes, he says.

"The notion of irreducible complexity is nonsense," Miller, the Brown University biologist, responded in his 1999 book, "Finding Darwin's God."

"The mechanism of evolution is real, is observable and is more than adequate to the task," Miller said. "Evolution tinkers, improvises and cobbles together new organs out of old parts."

For example, he said, bacterial flagella evolved from simple tubes used by microbes to inject poisons into other cells. Jawless fish had a primitive blood-clotting system that grew more complicated in fish with jaws and still more complicated in advanced land animals.

"An irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts, which, while initially just advantageous, become essential," said Allen Orr, a biologist at Rochester University in Rochester, N.Y.

A key argument from the intelligent design camp is that Darwinian evolution can't explain the so-called Cambrian Explosion, an astounding blossoming of animal life around 530 million years ago.

The event is sometimes known as "Evolution's Big Bang," when major new groups of animals - including shellfish, insects and creatures with spinal cords, the ancestors of fish, reptiles and mammals - spread rapidly over the Earth.

"The Cambrian explosion occurred within an exceedingly narrow window of geologic time, lasting no more than 5 million years," said Stephen Meyer, a philosopher of science and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute.

Intelligent design advocates say the sudden appearance of so many new major body types (called phyla), couldn't have arisen by slow, gradual steps, as Darwin's theory assumes. They say the fossil record lacks transitional stages connecting complex Cambrian creatures with older, simpler living forms.

"The Cambrian fossil record contradicts" the Darwinists' expectations, Meyer said.

"To suddenly appear in the Cambrian must remain inexplicable," said Jonathan Wells, another senior fellow at the Discovery Institute who holds doctorates in religion and biology. "Clearly, Darwin's theory of life does not fit the fossil evidence for the origin of the major groups of animals."

Mainstream biologists, however, insist that Darwinian evolution can explain the rise of new phyla and species. They say the Cambrian explosion wasn't as abrupt or as inexplicable as the design movement contends.

New evidence shows that relatively complex animals existed as many as 125 million years before the Cambrian period. Fossil embryos 40 million to 55 million years before the Cambrian have recently been discovered in southern China.

Recent studies of DNA sequences in well-dated fossils "set the divergences of these major groups to a time well before the Cambrian," Andrew Cameron, a biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, reported in the journal Science last year.

"As the fossil record becomes more complete, it sometimes provides the very intermediate forms the nonexistence of which the creationists were willing to predict," Miller said. "Even their favorite gaps are filling up, and the historical record of evolution becomes more compelling with each passing season."

Scientists associated with the design movement claim support for their theory from the fact that mainstream Darwinists cannot tell how life began. There are many hypotheses, but no consensus, on how lifeless molecules became living cells.

Every laboratory experiment to "produce some of the simplest chemicals of life has completely failed," said William Harris, a biochemist at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. "The information carried in DNA cannot be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry."

In response, Robert Hazen, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said, "We don't have all the answers right now, but there is no evidence that the origin of life is other than a natural process."

In his new book, "Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin," Hazen recounted a host of experiments that attempt to show how chemical evolution might have produced a primitive "proto-cell" from complex organic molecules that were readily available on the early Earth. After that beginning, he said, the cells could have gradually evolved into the enormous range of organisms inhabiting the planet.

Although no one has created life in the laboratory yet, Hazen predicted that someone is likely to succeed in the next 10 to 20 years. That may not be the way it actually happened, but such an experiment would show that life could be created without divine intervention.

You know, the way Darwinists react to a competing theory is kind of like the way Democrats react to George Bush. Its all hate and slander. You would think that a true scientist would be eager to take on any argument against his chosen theory, if only to prove it wrong. These guys, though, resort to silly retorts like you just described, and more often, flat-out refusal to admit they are being challenged at all. Then they start name calling. Just look over some of the threads on this forum...

What is funny is that there are a lot of positive arguments for ID, but the folks on the other side always respond with some trite bs about "giving up" and resorting to explaining things by God. The normal response of the Darwinist leads me to believe they have made it more personal than the ID folks have. They have reasons beyond scientific inquiry for their faith in Darwin. I'm like the previous poster who said something along the lines of "conduct and experiment and shut up about the rest."

[I actually trust high school and college students to do the reading and come to conclusions on what does and does not represent "errors in logic". You seem to have already determined that for them.]

Formal logic and related scientific methodology are not something that students can just pick up on their own, they require literally years of instruction to master.

In a way, this is similar to the amount of time and devotion that is required to master Christian philosophy. You wouldn't expect someone who had no religious background to just pick up the Bible and begin reading and within a few weeks come to the correct conclusions about what does and does not represent Christian thought. Think about all the instruction that's needed for a student to understand the nuances of each of the Ten Commandments, for example, or what lessons are to be learned from the two persons executed alongside Jesus, or the significance of Thomas the apostle's failure to believe that Jesus had returned.

[...how much reading have you personally done regarding theory?]

Three years of university level physics and engineering courses (which includes scientific methodology) and I've continued to read large amounts of material related to or based upon scientific methodology for the last 20+ years.

Hi Spinestein. Two thoughts.

To your point about how long it takes to master something: mastery is one thing. Basic understanding at a high school or even college level is another. I agree that you can spend years delving into the complexities of Christianity. On the other hand, the essentials of the faith are fairly easy to explain and can and have been grasped by people quite quickly on a common sense intuitive level. Same thing for the origins of life. I believe that most people have an intuitive understanding that one realistic possibility is that organic life is complex and was created by an intelligent agent with a purpose. The essentials of both sides could be grasped and argued in an entry level survey course. Interested parties could then go into it deeper.

Sorry about the typo on my question about how much study you've done. We have roughly similar backgrounds, and I respect your study.

The question I intended to ask was: how much of ID theory have you read about from the proponents of ID? I ask, because as I watch these thread arguments it doesn't seem to me that the ID opponents have read source material on the topic. One of the excellent essays that I read recently on the topic was William Dembski's essay on "What ID isn't". I'd recommend it as starting point reading on actual ID theory.

N J, Thanks for your thoughtful response.

It's true that many, perhaps most, of the anti ID folks simply lump ID in with creationism and that is unfortunate for the purposes of honest debate. However, I have a good understanding of the distinction between the two and have read a great deal about ID from the perspective of it's proponents. If I didn't, I wouldn't feel right commenting here about it. I've also had a pretty thorough Christian education and maintain a respect for the honest faith of it's adherents.

The fact is, I don't disagree with the basic assumptions of ID as a matter of Faith. It's just that ID is simply not a scientific theory, according to the basic definition of a theory as described by science. As such it has no place being taught in a science class as a scientifically valid alternative to accepted genuine scientific theories such as evolution.

I know that there is a disbelief among the anti evolutionists that evolution is a valid scientific theory. That also, is unfortunate. Many, or most, believe that it is simply a bias towards secularism that lures otherwise intelligent scientists to toss away objectivity, and blindly accept evolution for philosophical reasons rather than for scientific ones, but that just isn't the case. Evolutionary theory is as valid as gravitational theory, and I know a lot about both.

I agree with you that learning about either religious faith or the complexity of life can be done at a basic level first to give a primary understanding, and then added to in order to increase one's knowledge. But I contend that this strategy does not apply to the scientific method itself to the extent that it's used to understand and evaluate evolution. It's not intuitive, and the complexities are enough that even many scientists within the field often misunderstand and misuse the scientific methodology as it applies to evolution. But this is often the case with any area of science and only serves to illustrate the inherent difficulty of typically human thinking trying to adapt to the intensely disciplined constraints of scientific methodology.

Consider that whenever (on these crevo threads) someone asks for evidence that evolution happens, or evidence that evolution is even a scientific theory, the requester is told to link to one or more of the voluminous piles of articles or sources, such as from FReeper "Patrick Henry", which will provide that information. Reading all that information is just barely enough to scratch the surface, but is more than most casual inquisitors can handle and they simply refuse to believe it without gaining an understanding of the what's being presented. But unfortunately, there is no substitute for the huge amounts of time and effort required, which I went through both in high school and college, and even more so, on my own in the time since.

Some may say that this attitude is arrogant and elitist, sort of like "You don't understand this and I do, because I'm smarter than you." The answer to this criticism which I've found out for myself is; if any person is truly motivated to find out whether evolution is valid or not (and anyone can), they must first pay their dues.

I would say the same thing to anyone wanting to find out whether religious faith is valid or simply a superstition or a dangerous diversion from reality, they also must first pay their dues.

spinestein,

You're welcome. I'm enjoying the conversation, as opposed to an argument.

Interesting thought on "paying your dues". I guess my question would be at what point on the road of paying your dues do you get introduced to challenges to Darwinism. Reasonable challenges to theories are, to me, in the scope of scientific learning and investigation. Is that what "falsifiable" hinges on? Challenges. Granted, I think most Darwinists believe they have successfully ruled ID out as a failed challenge. I think not. I think as it develops and gets more robust it will be a serious challenge.

I'm interested in your allowance the evolution is "not intuitive". There could be a whole discussion there.

As I've said, I re-immersing myself in the debate and doing a lot of reading on my own time as well. I'll be working out my thoughts on my blog, mixed in with my posts on my political thoughts and ramblings. Here's a link to a sample post. You have to geek-slog your way through it:

http://partisannewsjunkie.blogspot.com/2005/09/evolution-vs-intelligent-design-false.html

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