How Intelligent Design Hurts Conservatives (By making us look like crackpots)

The appeal of "intelligent design" to the American right is obvious. For religious conservatives, the theory promises to uncover God's fingerprints on the building blocks of life. For conservative intellectuals in general, it offers hope that Darwinism will yet join Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of pseudoscience. And for politicians like George W. Bush, there's little to be lost in expressing a skepticism about evolution that's shared by millions.

In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.

And intelligent design will run out of steam--a victim of its own grand ambitions. What began as a critique of Darwinian theory, pointing out aspects of biological life that modification-through-natural-selection has difficulty explaining, is now foolishly proposed as an alternative to Darwinism. On this front, intelligent design fails conspicuously--as even defenders like Rick Santorum are beginning to realize--because it can't offer a consistent, coherent, and testable story of how life developed. The "design inference" is a philosophical point, not a scientific theory: Even if the existence of a designer is a reasonable inference to draw from the complexity of, say, a bacterial flagellum, one would still need to explain how the flagellum moved from design to actuality.

And unless George W. Bush imposes intelligent design on American schools by fiat and orders the scientific establishment to recant its support for Darwin, intelligent design will eventually collapse--like other assaults on evolution that failed to offer an alternative--under the weight of its own overreaching.

If liberals play their cards right, this collapse could provide them with a powerful rhetorical bludgeon. Take the stem-cell debate, where the great questions are moral, not scientific--whether embryonic human life should be created and destroyed to prolong adult human life. Liberals might win that argument on the merits, but it's by no means a sure thing. The conservative embrace of intelligent design, however, reshapes the ideological battlefield. It helps liberals cast the debate as an argument about science, rather than morality, and paint their enemies as a collection of book-burning, Galileo-silencing fanatics.

This would be the liberal line of argument anyway, even without the controversy surrounding intelligent design. "The president is trapped between religion and science over stem cells," declared a Newsweek cover story last year; "Religion shouldn't undercut new science," the San Francisco Chronicle insisted; "Leadership in 'therapeutic cloning' has shifted abroad," the New York Times warned, because American scientists have been "hamstrung" by "religious opposition"--and so on and so forth. But liberalism's science-versus-religion rhetoric is only likely to grow more effective if conservatives continue to play into the stereotype by lining up to take potshots at Darwin.

Already, savvy liberal pundits are linking bioethics to the intelligent design debate. "In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs," Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote last week, "can the U.S. afford--ethically or economically--to raise our children on fraudulent biology?" (Message: If you're for Darwin, you're automatically for unfettered cloning research.) Or again, this week's TNR makes the pretty-much-airtight "case against intelligent design"; last week, the magazine called opponents of embryo-destroying stem cell research "flat-earthers." The suggested parallel is obvious: "Science" is on the side of evolution and on the side of embryo-killing.

Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable way, summed up the liberal argument earlier this year:

Terri Schiavo, sex education, stem cell research--on any issue that remotely touches on science, a GOP that's obsessed with downing Darwin will be easily tagged as medieval, reactionary, theocratic. And this formula can be applied to every new bioethical dilemma that comes down the pike. Earlier this year, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued ethical guidelines for research cloning, which blessed the creation of human-animal "chimeras"--animals seeded with human cells. New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade, writing on the guidelines, declared that popular repugnance at the idea of such creatures is based on "the pre-Darwinian notion that species are fixed and penalties [for cross-breeding] are severe." In other words, if you're opposed to creating pig-men--carefully, of course, with safeguards in place (the NAS guidelines suggested that chimeric animals be forbidden from mating)--you're probably stuck back in the pre-Darwinian ooze with Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.

There's an odd reversal-of-roles at work here. In the past, it was often the right that tried to draw societal implications from Darwinism, and the left that stood against them. And for understandable reasons: When people draw political conclusions from Darwin's theory, they're nearly always inegalitarian conclusions. Hence social Darwinism, hence scientific racism, hence eugenics.

Which is why however useful intelligent design may be as a rhetorical ploy, liberals eager to claim the mantle of science in the bioethics battle should beware. The left often thinks of modern science as a child of liberalism, but if anything, the reverse is true. And what scientific thought helped to forge--the belief that all human beings are equal--scientific thought can undermine as well. Conservatives may be wrong about evolution, but they aren't necessarily wrong about the dangers of using Darwin, or the National Academy of Sciences, as a guide to political and moral order.

.... you have totally ignored my response.

Oh?? Methinks you are in error. here is the complete list of replies, after I jumped in to comment on a Scripter post:

To: scripter

That's an excellent point to ponder.
While you ponder, science rolls on. To bad you missed the train.
819 posted on 08/20/2005 8:00:14 PM CDT by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 816 |

To: WildTurkey

To bad you missed the train.
Better than missing something more important.
826 posted on 08/20/2005 8:07:29 PM CDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 819 |

To: Elsie

Better than missing something more important.
I see that you missed responding to my post in an educated manner. Or, was it that I just blew you out of the water with that post

830 posted on 08/20/2005 8:10:12 PM CDT by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 826 |

To: WildTurkey

I see that you missed responding to my post in an educated manner.
Oh?
This is a requirement from you??
HMmmm....... I had assumed, from reading your stuff.....
Oh, well; God made me do it; right?
879 posted on 08/21/2005 6:47:36 AM CDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 830 |

To: Elsie

You posed what you thought was an unanserable question and I answered it. You ignored my response. You lose.

889 posted on 08/21/2005 9:44:20 AM CDT by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 879 |

To: WildTurkey

You posed what you thought was an unanserable question...
I did?
But YOU answered wrongly.
But then, God made you do that, so I guess that you really don't get that scored against you.

910 posted on 08/22/2005 8:28:41 AM CDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 889 |

To: Elsie

But YOU answered wrongly. I must have answered correctly since you have totally ignored my response.

924 posted on 08/22/2005 6:47:37 PM CDT by WildTurkey (When will CBS Retract and Apologize?)

[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 910 |

It amazing how your response shifts with each reply, and then I get blamed for it!

God must really have a weird agenda for you to follow.

(I'm again pinging the other people who've been involved in this discussion, and a couple others who I think might find this interesting. Feel free to let me know if my pings are unwelcome!)

Part I

OK, the remaining questions deal with sociopolitical arrangements, and in particular resource distribution (economic arrangements). As a reminder, these were the four questions as framed:

Will the progeny just off their elders out of frustration for power after waiting in the wings for a hundred years or so?
Just how productive will 500 year olds be?
If not very productive, how will they be supported?
What are the consequences of a society dominated by geezers, with very few "young" folks relatively speaking?

To begin with, let's just cut to the chase. The most rational solution to all these questions is en masse whole person emulation in a virtual world simulation on a sprawling quantum computing network - with redundant hardware, power supplies, and automated service techs scattered across the solar system and remote monitoring/operating capability from inside the VR. For all practical intents and purposes resources would then be limitless, and lifespans would be interminable, unless the virtual world were programmed otherwise. At the very least one could live until the death of the sun, if not beyond. What one would do with all that time is an excellent question, but I suppose one could opt to have the ability to sense boredom removed from one's personality.

I don't express this often (in order to conceal just how 'out there' I really am) but this seems to be the obvious outcome of civilization, and a quite viable explanation for why we don't see others galavanting around the galaxy. In a sense, it is the ultimate end of history, except of course that without dramatic psychological modification, which I think implausible (people wouldn't agree to be uploaded), novel threats and conflicts would surely emerge within the system. Hypothetically, we might be living in such a reality already; of course, if that's the case, then our programmers were obviously either deeply incompetent or quite malevolent, or this might be the aftermath of a dreadful hacking, or we may just be an artefact of a system designed to create randomized settings to be discovered far away from the home milieu of the original builders. Or we might be a virus. Who knows?!

There's no way to know, unless there were glitches in the system, and those would just be perceived as paranormal events in any case (if they were common enough, they'd likely be perceptually incorporated into the 'rules' of the system). My point is that a virtual system complex enough to simulate all the phenomena of the real world (assuming our world is 'the real world') or a close enough approximation would be indistinguishable from the real world, but if programmed accordingly would provide anything we wanted it to provide, including immortality and unlimited resources.

Anyhow, leaving all that aside, the first notion that we should dispense with is that physically 'aged' people in a society of perpetual youth (under our previous, more mundane scenario) will be socially 'old' people as we perceive them to be. For one thing, they won't technically even be aged in the sense that this conveys in present usage. A 500 year old will be potentially as productive as a twenty year old, unless we are dealing with issues of 'neural entropy' as we discussed before. In the event that we simply eliminated aging as we know it without any further rejuvenative intervention, you would also have progressive DNA structure deterioration (through random errors), and that would be a serious concern, but every scenario that I'm aware of that's been proposed for longevity also provides ready solutions to this problem (sequence the person's DNA at the outset and routinely correct errors).

So, getting back to the point, 500 year olds should be no less productive than they are required to be; in other words, they should be as autonomous and vigorous as a 25 year old, because physically and mentally they will be a 25 year old, just with a whole lot more stored in memory. We cannot predict what the effect would be of 'neural entropy' because we simply don't know how it would manifest, and it should not manifest until at least after a couple millennia under our current physiology. If people do become unproductive enough at about that stage that they must be supported by others, the support base should be more than adequate to support them under much the same arrangement as is currently in place, because 'attrition' should keep this population below around a quarter of the total.

Odds are that unless we are missing some critical factor this will be a non-issue. Moreover, a key part of the equation is just how much productivity is actually required of an individual. The more likely concern, due to increased automation and nanosynthesis, will be that there won't be enough productivity demanded of people. We are already seeing this unfold in 'post-industrial' society; we are already for political reasons artificially elevating the degree of productivity required of workers as a whole (though hardly anyone frames it that way). In short, the overall trajectory of technological advance suggests that our lifestyles will become dominated by leisure rather than industry. What we will do with all that, who knows? A lot of people 'don't know' how to do much of anything else. I guess they'll just have to find lots of hobbies..

Which brings us to the fourth question above. There are two things to be said to that:

(a) While I think society is likely to stratify based on length of life lived, from a physical standpoint everyone would be a coequal of everyone else. In other words, it would be as if the world were filled with twenty-somethings, just some of the twenty-somethings had been around a whole lot longer than others. Past the first century, they'd be all but indistinguishable; our 700 year olds could pass as 100 year olds just as easily. This assumes no further social compartmentation, which is a very dubious assumption to say the least (it'll happen). But, to the extent that that will happen, it will be because that's what people as a whole want to have happen, not because it must happen.

(b) In contemporary society most of our lives are governed by the demands of child raising (contrary to popular opinion, this wasn't always the case, especially for men, but that's another discussion altogether). This would obviously change. My view is that self-indulgence would naturally become much more of a priority - to the great consternation of the more Puritan-minded among us.. I guess people would do with that whatever they felt would make them happy. I know I could happily spend at least a couple hundred years moving around the world myself. The final answer to your question though is that a "society dominated by geezers" in this case would hardly be a massive nursing home as the phrasing suggests, but more like an extended yuppie happy hour. =)

People have always managed to find things to occupy their time, and ennui is hardly a more awful prospect than drudgery, which humanity seems to deal with well enough when need be..

Going back to the first question, it's not entirely clear what kind of power you're referring to: political, social, economic? Historically, people have wanted power because it leads to prosperity - fame and fortune - and also the often unstated reason (frequently unacknowledged by the 'powerful' even to themselves) of sexual mastery over oneself and (perhaps more importantly) over others. It's unclear how much of a motivator this will be in a future society; the benefits of power have already broken down and are breaking down further in Western society. Modern civilization is in the idealized sense a civilization of universal empowerment. All of our sociopolitical institutions are oriented in that direction, and to the extent that they fall short, it is due to resource limitations. At the very least one would expect that the urgency of securing power would be reduced in a society of millennial lifespans.

One obvious solution, if this is actually a problem, is term limits, and term limits can be implemented across an array of endeavors if necessary (not just the political sphere). So, by example, in another hundred years, you might be told that you've been a lawyer long enough, and it's time to actually go find something positive to do with your life! ;^) But, I don't really think it'll come to anything like that myself. By comparison to the present, the future will likely be both socialist and individualized. That's just the way it's likely to be. All of this is determined by resource limitations, and as practical limitations are steadily reduced, the outcome seems inevitable over the long run.

I think I'll just stop here for now and see whether I've adequately responded to the issues you've raised. BTW, the most difficult question of all, that you did not raise, is what if longevity is expensive, and not universally available. That is a whole 'nother can o' whoopass there..

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