Unintelligible Redesign - This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

According to scientists, teachers, and civil libertarians, the Taliban has invaded Ohio. Creationists have devised a theory called "Intelligent Design" (ID) and are trying to get Ohio's Board of Education to make sure it's taught alongside Darwinism. Unlike creationism, ID accepts that the Earth is billions of years old and that species evolve through natural selection. It posits that life has been designed but doesn't specify by whom. Liberals call ID a menace that will sneak religion into public schools. They're exactly wrong. ID is a big nothing. It's non-living, non-breathing proof that religion has surrendered its war against science.

Creationism used to be assertive and powerful. Darwinism wasn't allowed in schools. As Darwin gained the upper hand, conservatives fought to preserve creationism alongside evolution. They lost the war on both fronts. Courts struck down the teaching of creationism on the grounds that it mixed church and state. Meanwhile, scientific evidence discredited the belief that the Earth was created in six days and was only 6,000 years old. Like the Taliban, creationists were washed up. Their only hope was to flee to the mountains, shave their beards, change their clothes, and come back as something else.

What they've come back as is the Intelligent Design movement. Gone are the falsifiable claims of a six-day creation and a 6,000-year-old Earth. Gone is the God of the Bible. In their place, ID enthusiasts speak of questions, mysteries, and possibilities. As to whether God, the Force, or ET created us, ID is agnostic. "We simply ask the question as to whether something can form naturally or if there must have been something more, a designer," Robert Lattimer, an ID proponent in Ohio, told the Columbus Dispatch. "Our main contention is that [evolution-focused curriculum] standards are purely naturalistic and leave no room for the possibility that part of nature can be designed."

This soft-headed agnosticism matches the soft-headed arguments for including it in the curriculum. They're the same arguments leftists have made for ebonics. According to ID proponents, the committee in charge of Ohio's science curriculum is too "homogenous" and lacks "diversity." It marginalizes alternative "points of view" to which students should be "exposed." A conservative state senator says some people "think differently, and all those ideas should be explored." A conservative member of the state education board says Ohioans deserve a science curriculum "they can all be comfortable with."

Behind these pleas for diversity is the kind of educational relativism conservatives normally despise. "Biological evolution, like creationism and design, cannot be proved to be either true or false," writes one ID enthusiast in Ohio. Since evolution is an "unproven theory," says another, "belief in it is just as much an act of faith as is belief in creationism or in the theory of intelligent design."

The response of liberals, teachers, and scientists has been hysterical. They accuse the ID movement of peddling "intolerance," fronting for the Christian right, and trying "to force a narrow religious ideology into our schools." If Ohio lets ID into its curriculum, they prophesy, the state will become an "international laughingstock," triggering a corporate exodus, a decline in property values, and the collapse of Ohio's standard of living. They refuse to acknowledge a difference between ID and creationism. "This is just a new paint job on the same old Edsel," says an Ohio University physiologist.

The analogy is inside out. Creationists haven't repainted their Edsel. They've taken out the engine and the transmission. Without distinctive, measurable claims such as the six-day creation, the 6,000-year-old Earth, and other literal interpretations of the Bible, creationism no longer materially contradicts evolution. The reason not to teach intelligent design isn't that it's full of lies or dogma. The reason is that it's empty.

Advocates of ID do offer interesting criticisms of Darwin's theory of evolution. They argue that natural selection doesn't account for the rise and fall of species, that many biological mechanisms wouldn't make organisms more fit to survive unless those mechanisms appeared all at once, and that the combinations necessary to create life are so complex that it would be statistically impossible to generate them by chance. My colleague Bob Wright answered these criticisms in Slate last year. I don't know whether they stand up to his rebuttal or not. But I do know this: They don't add up to a theory.

A theory isn't just a bunch of criticisms, even if they're valid. A theory ties things together. It explains and predicts. Intelligent design does neither. It doesn't explain why part of our history seems intelligently designed and part of it doesn't. Why are our feet and our back muscles poorly designed for walking? Why are we afflicted by lethal viruses? Why have so many females died in childbirth? ID doesn't explain these things. It just shrugs at them. "Design theory seeks to show, based on scientific evidence, that some features of living things may be designed by a mind or some form of intelligence," says one ID proponent. Some? May? Some? What kind of theory is that?

As Wright explains, Darwinian theory makes predictions that can be tested. It predicts that the average difference in size between males and females will correspond to the degree of polygamy in a species, and that in species in which females can reproduce more often than males, females will be more sexually assertive and less discriminating about their sex partners than males will be. These predictions turn out to be true. Darwin claimed that humans had descended from apes. If fossils unearthed since his death had exhibited no such connection, his theory would have been discredited. What empirical predictions does ID make that, if proven untrue, would discredit the theory?

John Calvert, the country's principal exponent of ID, answered that question in a treatise he presented to the Ohio board. Calvert described the "methods" by which scientists can "detect" design in nature.

That, in a nutshell, is ID. It offers no predictions, scope modifiers, or experimental methods of its own. It's a default answer, a shrug, consisting entirely of problems in Darwinism. Those problems should be taught in school, but there's no reason to call them intelligent design. Intelligent design, as defined by its advocates, means nothing. This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The quote was taken from a presentation at a meeting. The talk was based on the research published in this paper (pdf).

Here's the context for the snippet you posted:

In terms of a 21st Century view of evolution, the major importance of natural genetic engineering is that this capability removes the process of genome restructuring from the stochastic realm of physical-chemical insults to DNA and replication accidents. Instead, cellular systems for DNA change, place the genetic basis for long-term evolutionary adaptation in the context of cell biology where it is subject to cellular control regimes and their computational capabilities.

In other words, Shapiro is talking about removing particular kinds of mutations from the stochastic realm to that of biochemical processes (much like the action of viruses which cause mutations). Note that does not speak to the evolution of these processes.

You've taken them out of context.

Okay, but as I digest the source for portions of the Aug 2001 presentation, consider the conclusion of that presentation.

A 21^ST CENTURY VIEW OF EVOLUTION

Evolution is the history of organisms that have succeeded in adapting to changing circumstances. Over evolutionary time, this means altering the genome — the long-term information storage organelle of all living cells — to provide the functional information needed to survive and reproduce in new conditions. Those organisms that have the most flexible computational capabilities, in particular those that have the best means of altering information stored in the genome, will have an advantage. Thus, it makes sense for organisms to possess crisis-responsive natural genetic engineering functions, and we should not be surprised to find them ubiquitous in contemporary organisms, all of whom are evolutionary winners. Indeed, it is now difficult to imagine how organisms that depend upon gradual accumulation of stochastic mutations could persist in the evolutionary rat race.

The last half century has taught us an astonishing amount about how living organisms function at the molecular level, in particular about how they execute cellular computations through molecular interactions and about the systemic, modular, computation-ready organization of the genome. We have come to realize some of the basic design features that govern genome structure. Combining this knowledge with our understanding of how natural genetic engineering operates, it is possible to formulate the outlines of a new 21^st Century vision of evolutionary engineering that postulates a more regular principle-based process of change than the gradual random walk of 19^th and 20^th Century theories.

The debate between gradualism and punctualism has raged since Darwin's time. Punctualism is gaining ground, especially as particular mechanisms are elucidated which can explain it. The thread about the Ubx genes is another example of that. Non-random "natural genetic engineering" is an example of a deterministic process in evolution.

But, Shapiro's work or words, even while they provide evidence of a mechanistic basis for rapid adaptive change, don't exactly settle the issue between determinism and non-determinism. Instead, they contribute to seeking the balance between the two that many other researchers have concluded is where evolution and life is situated. Shapiro doesn't work in a vacuum and a large body of literature about transposable elements and their role in genome restructuring address both the random and non-random aspects of their effects.

But, Shapiro's work or words, even while they provide evidence of a mechanistic basis for rapid adaptive change, don't exactly settle the issue between determinism and non-determinism.

Exactly. That is why I state "if this analysis is correct". But it appears that the momentum is in the favor of the engineering cell and if it can explain any evolution it potentially explains all evolution (since Darwinians put it all in one basket) with the exception of its own genesis.

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