A New Day, Some New Science

Move over, Darwin. Intelligent Design has arrived, and it's time to welcome the new kid to town.

"In the future, everyone will be entitled to 15 minutes of fame." artist Andy Warhol.

Darwinism - the notion that all species of plants and animals evolved from earlier forms, and that a blind process, natural selection, determines which forms survive - has had a grip on intellectual culture for 150 years.

Now advocates of a relatively new way of thinking about the origins of life say it's long past the time for the dead Charles Darwin (and adherents of his dying theory) to realize their 15 minutes are up and welcome a new kid to town. It's called Intelligent Design (ID) - the idea that the intricacies of life are too complex to have merely happened randomly. To coin a bromide - "ID is a theory whose time has finally come."

Indeed, you can tell ID has "arrived" because, in the last couple of years, the theory has made a major splash as state and local school boards have debated whether to allow students to learn about ID and other alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution.

You can also tell because some top academics are publishing articles in top scientific journals about it.

But perhaps the best sign that ID has "made the big time" - pro-ID videos are being shown on television. Even public television.

Since May, "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" has aired on more than a dozen major PBS affiliates. Publicly funded TV stations in Miami, Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, have shown thousands of viewers the Focus on the Family/Illustra Media video, which makes a positive case for Intelligent Design theory.

It's a milestone, according to Dr. Mark Hartwig, worldview analyst at Focus on the Family. It's almost a miracle that the film, which explores the discovery of some of the amazingly intricate complexities that are present in the cell, even made it to public TV.

"Evolution has basically been the official religion of PBS," Hartwig said. "To see them allowing 'heretics' in the 'pulpit' is a remarkable thing."

For Dr. Stephen Meyer, director and senior fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle's Discovery Institute, the TV airings are signs of a larger trend - the growing acceptance of Intelligent Design as a scientific theory at the same time serious cracks in the edifice of Darwinism are beginning to show up.

"We've been really delighted by this development, because PBS reflects the consensus in the scientific world," Meyer said. "For many, many years, it has aired mainly programs that promote a Darwinian evolutionary point of view."

Added Hartwig: "What I'm hoping is that this is a sign that the people are beginning to take what I call a 'truly liberal attitude' towards ID, and that is: 'If there's a substantive case to be made here (against evolutionism), let's air it.' "

The case against Darwinism - and for ID - is substantive and substantial. Hartwig and Meyer say academic philosophers and scientists are beginning to publish books with major academic publishers and articles in major scientific journals questioning some of the presuppositions of Darwinism.

"The debate about Darwinism - and the debate about Intelligent Design - is being validated at a very high level of academic discourse, and it's getting very difficult to ignore," Meyer said. "Most biologists have defended Darwinism as a 'well-supported theory,' and many of the scientists who are a part of the Intelligent Design movement are challenging that idea, and in fact many who aren't a part of the movement are critiquing various elements of Darwinian theory."

Hartwig and Meyer are reluctant to publicize the names of pro-ID scientists and the academic journals publishing their research, for fear that Darwinists may exert pressure to try to squelch the studies.

There is absolutely no doubt, however, that ID is making inroads in local and state school districts where, Hartwig maintains, it is blowing Darwinism "out of the water."

Credit belongs not only to the openness of school board members, but to the compelling messages contained in "Unlocking the Mystery of Life," and a companion video called "Icons of Evolution."

Jim Fitzgerald, president of Coldwater Media, which produced "Icons" in association with Focus on the Family, said thanks to the passage of the No Child Left Behind education reform law, every state will have an opportunity to reevaluate its science standards over the next four or five years.

• In Ohio, a decision was made last December by a nearly unanimous vote of the Ohio Board of Education to require students to critically analyze key aspects of criticism of Darwinian theory.

"Additionally, though the state board did not mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design, many of the board members made it clear they understood that there was a local option for individual teachers to discuss with their students alternative theories to Darwinism," Meyer said.

• In the Cobb County (Ga.) school district, which encompasses greater Atlanta, the school board passed a "Teach the Controversy" proposal recognizing that there are scientists on both sides of the evolution issue, and students need to know the arguments from both the perspective that favors Darwinism and the critique of it, as well.

"Icons of Evolution," by the way, was broadcast on local commercial TV stations in Ohio before the state school board voted.

"We have also had a number of people approach their local cable companies asking them to show the video," Fitzgerald said. "One (unidentified) gentleman in Georgia got the video into 350,000 homes. And he bought radio advertising time to let people know when it was going to be shown."

What's the science behind ID's momentum? According to Meyer, "New discoveries in fields like palentology and molecular and cell biology are putting Darwinism under such intense pressure, it will not survive."

"In fact, we've learned a lot about biology since the Civil War - that's really how long it's been since the theory came into being," Meyer said. "I don't think much of biology fits with Darwinian theory. We're learning that life is much more complex than people imagined when Darwinian theory was first being formulated. That has created challenges to the Darwinian explanation of where we came from."

Perhaps the best way to understand the complexity argument is to consider DNA, the building block of human life, which ID adherents say could not have simply "developed" randomly.

"Bill Gates, the computer guru behind Microsoft, has compared DNA to a computer program," Meyer said, "only much more complex than anything we've ever created. We ask people to reflect about that. Bill Gates hires computer programmers to design his software. If there is, effectively, software in the cell, that is powerfully suggestive evidence that there must have been a 'programmer' - an intelligent designer of life itself."

In the end, the job is simply to boldly go where no non-Darwinist theory has ever gone before. The idea that their case is finding listeners and people willing to consider the truth about origins - whether from television, academic discussions or in public school classrooms - simply delights ID adherents.

"Darwinism still has sway in some quarters, but that won't always be the case," Hartwig said, "It's basically a new day. It may still be morning, but it's definitely a new day."

FOR MORE INFORMATION
1. The two videos "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" and "Icons of Evolution" are available from Focus on the Family as part of a video set, "The Evolution Set."

2. For information on Intelligent Design, please see the Discovery Institute Web site.

3. The video "Icons of Evolution" is available for placement on local cable TV systems, or local broadcast stations," free of charges - if you meet certain modest restrictions. Jim Fitzgerald, president of Coldwater Media, producer of "Icons of Evolution," said he anyone interested only needs to call (719) 488-8670 to obtain advance permission and let him know of their plans.

But perhaps the best sign that ID has "made the big time" - pro-ID videos are being shown on television. Even public television.
Since May, "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" has aired on more than a dozen major PBS affiliates. Publicly funded TV stations in Miami, Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, have shown thousands of viewers the Focus on the Family/Illustra Media video, which makes a positive case for Intelligent Design theory.
It's a milestone, according to Dr. Mark Hartwig, worldview analyst at Focus on the Family. It's almost a miracle that the film, which explores the discovery of some of the amazingly intricate complexities that are present in the cell, even made it to public TV.
"Evolution has basically been the official religion of PBS," Hartwig said. "To see them allowing 'heretics' in the 'pulpit' is a remarkable thing."
For Dr. Stephen Meyer, director and senior fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle's Discovery Institute, the TV airings are signs of a larger trend - the growing acceptance of Intelligent Design as a scientific theory at the same time serious cracks in the edifice of Darwinism are beginning to show up.
"We've been really delighted by this development, because PBS reflects the consensus in the scientific world," Meyer said. "For many, many years, it has aired mainly programs that promote a Darwinian evolutionary point of view."

Yeah, right. PBS has a satellite channel where many programs from independent producers are uploaded, and any PBS affiliate can download & air if they want. The channel includes lots of programming that didn't make it into the official PBS feed. That's hardly a case of PBS putting its "consensus in the scientific world" imprimatur on the video.

Here's a critique of "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" by an asst. prof. of Medicine, Microbiology and Imunology, Oncology:

Unlocking the Mystery of Life -- More omissions than facts
The source:
"Unlocking the Mystery of Life" is the first and only production of an entity called "IllustraMedia". In fact, "IllustraMedia" is one and the same with "Discovery Media Productions"¹. Discovery Media is a production company whose previous videos are devoted to evangelical topics, such as "Heaven and Hell" and "The End Times"². While there is nothing wrong with an evangelical video company producing a science documentary, the fact that to do so it was felt necessary to create a "shell" production outfit highlights the aura of ambiguity that pervades the entire enterprise (more examples to follow). Furthermore, the purpose of the video as a propagandistic and religious, rather than scientific/educational tool is underscored by how UML is being publicized within fundamentalist circles. For instance, Mission Frontiers, the Bulletin of the evangelical U.S. Center for World Missions, hails it as "the most impressive evangelistic tool ever made"³.
The contents:
As a documentary, UML is a skillful and sophisticated production, showing some well-made computer animations of cellular processes at the molecular level. In discussing such mechanisms, the video claims that the scientific evidence points to insurmountable difficulties for standard evolutionary theory, and supports instead the hypothesis that a superior intelligence directly intervened to create and/or diversify life (hence the name "Intelligent Design", or ID, Creationism⁴). The video discusses such purported evidence and devotes much of its time to the historical origins and philosophical underpinnings of the ID movement.
The fundamental question is whether ULM conforms to basic scientific standards of adherence to evidence and facts. In this, it fails at several levels. First of all, throughout the documentary mainstream scientific views, supported by the overwhelming majority of scientists, are not even independently presented. Instead, oversimplified, sometime downright scornful presentations of mainstream scientific theories and hypotheses are provided by supporters of ID (as a counterexample, the recent PBS "Evolution" series, though clearly favoring a scientific view, featured the opinions of several prominent representatives of Creationism). In UML, therefore, the viewers are treated to descriptions of scientific evidence and theories that have little connection with what is in fact going on in the science world. For reasons of space, I'll just mention a few examples.
The most glaring omission deals with UML's discussion of Origins of Life (OoL) science. The only non ID-based views on OoL discussed in the video are those proposed, in the late '60s, by one of the current ID proponents, Dr. Dean Kenyon. According to UML, those models have been later shown by Kenyon and colleagues to be insufficient to explain key aspects of early molecular and cellular evolution. In fact, most of Kenyon's original views have long been superseded by more thorough, and better empirically supported, scientific hypotheses -- indeed, it was those hypotheses and evidence that led to the demise of Kenyon's ideas in scientific circles long before ID Creationism appeared on the scene. Alas, what is arguably the current (and has been for more than a decade now) favored hypothesis about OoL, the so-called "RNA World" model⁵, finds no mention whatsoever in UML. This is not surprising, perhaps, since the objections raised in UML by ID proponents to Kenyon's original theory would not stand against this new model. Thus, the viewer is given the false impression that the current scientific choice is between ID Creationism and its outright miraculous Origin of Life, or Dr. Kenyon's outdated 1960's theory. Of course, our understanding of OoL is still very limited, and highly speculative. Nevertheless, it is far more advanced and scientifically solid than the UML parody would want its audience to believe.
Other mistakes in UML include an equally superficial, almost mockingly simplified discussion of cooption, a crucial evolutionary mechanism for which in fact significance evidence exists in the biological world. UML's "experts" even commit a basic error regarding the role of nucleic acids in the cell, which are presented as uniquely involved in genetic information storage and transfer, while it is now well known that they are directly active in crucial molecular processes functionally comparable to those carried out by protein enzymes -- a key piece of evidence in favor of the "RNA World" hypothesis mentioned above (and the possible reason why it also went unmentioned).
The crucial argument underlying the whole ID philosophy, widely discussed in the video, is the concept of "irreducibly complex" systems, and the purported impossibility of conventional evolutionary mechanisms to generate them. Although it was quickly rejected by biologists on theoretical and empirical grounds⁶, "irreducible complexity" has remained the main staple of ID Creationism. Ironically, this argument was just recently delivered a fatal blow in the prestigious science journal Nature, where a computer simulation based entirely on evolutionary principles (undirected random mutation and selection) was shown to be able to generate "irreducibly complex" outputs⁷. While of course the video cannot be faulted for not predicting the results of future scientific research, this episode serves as a good example of the shaky grounds on which ID reasoning is built. Indeed, not only does scientific evidence continue to accumulate contradicting the ID arguments, but even more damningly, in over 10 years from the onset of the "movement", no single scientific result supporting ID has been published in the scientific literature, despite its supporters continuing claims of the existence of such results. Indeed, even the ID advocates' own journal, the electronically published Progress in Complexity, Information and Design, has failed to publish any experimental result supporting ID⁸.
In short, despite the appeals by ID advocates to "let the evidence speak for itself", there is in fact no positive scientific evidence in support of ID, and on the contrary the theoretical arguments of its advocates are constantly being proven erroneous in the professional literature. To avoid facing this lack of evidence, UML resorts instead to systematic distortions of mainstream science theories and omissions of key ideas and pieces of evidence.
The people:
The experts interviewed for UML, and ID advocates in general, are fond to present themselves as "scientists", often accompanied by the qualifier "a small but growing number of". In fact, most ID advocates are not scientists by any meaningful definition of the term, and their numbers (for which "small" is an overstatement) are anything but growing.
Of the experts who appear in UML, 4 can in fact qualify as bona fide scientists: Michael Behe, Scott Minnich, Dean Kenyon, and Jed Macosko. The first two hold tenured positions in Biochemistry and Microbiology, respectively, at mainstream universities, but despite their own research experience and active labs, as discussed above they have failed to produce any evidence in support of the ideas they so eloquently argue for. Dean Kenyon was scientifically active until the mid-'70s, after which he has not published further in the scientific literature (however, he has since co-authored the notorious Creationist school textbook "Of Pandas and People"⁹). (Note added July 8, 2003: Since this letter appeared on the web, Dr. Kenyon kindly and quickly informed me that he has in fact one scientific publication later than the mid-'70s: "A Comparison of Proteinoid and Aldocyanoin Microsystems as Models of the Primordial Protocell", in Molecular Evolution and Protobiology [K. Matsuno, K. Dose, K. Harada, and D. L. Rohlfing, eds.], pp. 163-188, Plenum Press, 1984. My original statement was based on a search of the main scientific literature databases available: Pubmed, BasicBIOSIS, CSA Biological Sciences, and the Institute for Scientific Information's "Web of Science" Science Citation Index. The book article in question does not seem to appear in any of these databases, nor has it apparently ever been referenced by any other later publication also in the database. Nevertheless, for the record, the existence of Dr. Kenyon's 1984 paper should be noted.)
Jed Macosko, whose image is accompanied in UML by the qualifier "Molecular Biologist, UC Berkeley", although a Berkeley graduate and former postdoctoral trainee, in fact is not, or has ever been, on the Berkeley faculty, as that title could suggest. Indeed, Dr. Macosko is apparently not even affiliated with UC Berkeley anymore; if he was at the time of interview, he certainly was there as a junior postdoc trainee, hardly an "expert" in the field by any standards. Currently, Dr. Macosko is listed on some ID web sites as teaching chemistry at the religious La Sierra University in Riverside, CA¹⁰, although he does not appear on the faculty list there either¹¹. Such "generous" use of credentials is not unique in the documentary. One of the leading proponents of ID, William Dembski, is labeled as a "mathematician -- Baylor University" in UML, although he is affiliated with Baylor's Institute for Faith and Learning, which focuses on theology and philosophy¹². Indeed, almost the entirety of Dr. Dembski's vast published opus, with the exception of a mathematics paper in 1990, is about various aspects of theology, apologetics and philosophy¹³ (Dr. Dembski holds PhDs in Mathematics and Philosophy, and a M.Div. in Theology). Finally, Jonathan Wells, presented as "biologist" in UML, does hold a PhD in Developmental Biology from UC Berkeley. By his own words, however, he entered the program not based on any genuine interest in science and biology, but following the direction of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, with the expressed goal to "devote his life to destroying Darwinism"¹⁴. Not surprisingly, there is no record of Dr. Wells performing any meaningful research work after his training at Berkeley, and he has since entirely dedicated himself to anti-evolutionist propaganda (including the book "Icons of Evolution", some editions of which even contained stickers for students to deface biology textbooks¹⁵).
Thus, the definitions of professional background and academic affiliation used throughout UML are at the very least ambiguous, and clearly result in an inflation of the apparent academic clout and relevant expertise of the participants.
In summary, "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" is a depiction of a fringe, at best semi-scientific philosophical movement very close, ideologically and organizationally, to religious Creationism. The documentary misrepresents itself, its goals, the existing scientific evidence and its own experts in several significant ways. While it is your prerogative to air the programs that you believe best suit your audience's needs and interests, it is equally important that your viewers be provided with information that may help them put this product's contents and purpose in the appropriate context. This is necessary not only in the spirit of openness and full disclosure, but also to avoid that your broadcast of the documentary appear as an implicit endorsement of this new form of "stealth" Creationism by one of the largest Departments of Education in the country.
Added 08/13/03: William Dembski has argued that my critique above makes a misleading use of references. He is wrong: see my response posted at talkdesign.org and talkreason.org.
Notes
¹ Verifiable by a "WHOIS" search for the domain name "illustramedia.com": http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?STRING=illustramedia.com&SearchType=do Accessed 6/30/03
² http://www.discoverymedia.org/dm_products_page.htm Accessed 6/29/03
³ http://www.missionfrontiers.org/2002/06/PDFs/Unlocking_Mystery.pdf Accessed 6/28/03
⁴ For an in-depth discussion of ID Creationism, see "Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics", Robert T. Pennock, ed, MIT Press, 2001, ISBN 0-262-16204-0; review in http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~cheathwo/Phil100/nytimes.html Accessed 6/30/03
⁵ http://www.lawrenceroberge.com/RNAWORLD.htm Accessed 6/30/03
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/21438?fulltext=true Accessed 6/30/03
⁶ see for instance several articles by Dr. Ken Miller, Brown University: http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/ Accessed 6/30/03
⁷ Lenski RE, Ofria C, Pennock RT, Adami C. "The evolutionary origin of complex features." Nature. May 8 2003; 423 (6936):139-44
⁸ http://www.iscid.org/pcid.php Accessed 6/29/03
⁹ http://63.74.14.138/page/001/PROD/BOFPA1, reviewed at the National Association of Biology Teachers web site
http://www.nabt.org/sub/evolution/panda1.asp Both accessed 6/30/03.
¹⁰ http://www.iscid.org/jed-macosko.php; http://www.lasierra.edu/ Both accessed 6/30/03
¹¹ http://www.lasierra.edu/resources/phonelists/phonename_m-s.html Accessed 6/30/03
¹² http://www3.baylor.edu/IFL/ Accessed 6/28/03
¹³ http://www.designinference.com/documents/05.02.CV.htm Accessed 6/30/03
¹⁴ http://www.tparents.org/library/unification/talks/wells/DARWIN.htm Accessed 6/30/03
¹⁵ Links to reviews of Icons of Evolution can be found at the National Center of Science Education's web site http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/9855_reviews_of_icons_of_evolution_10_31_2002.asp Accessed 6/30/03

July 8, 2003

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