Intelligent design - coming to a school near you

The New Zealand Herald ^ | August 27, 2005 | Chris Barton

[snarks_when_bored]

Intelligent design - coming to a school near you

 

David Jensen says the evolutionists' perspective relies on unproven scientific facts and theories. Picture / Greg Bowker

 

27.08.05

 

By Chris Barton

 

Science teachers say it has no place in the classroom. Christian educators say children shouldn't be denied alternative views.

Science teachers retaliate that it's not science, it's religion behind a mask and they don't want a bar of it. Christian educators argue they can teach it alongside traditional science, so what are science teachers so afraid of?

Science teachers' blood begins to boil. "It's not science."' they fume.

"It" is "intelligent design" - a challenge to the theory of evolution described by some as creationism in disguise. But it's a challenge that's garnering support from high places.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," United States President George W. Bush said this month. "If you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

The topic is also the subject of court action in Pennsylvania, taken after the Dover Area School Board decided to revamp its biology curriculum to include intelligent design.

In December, 11 parents sued the district and its board members, claiming they were bringing God into the science class. The case is being watched closely by 21 states across America facing controversies over how evolution is taught to high school students.

The debate also has been simmering in New Zealand. Chief proponents of intelligent design here include Investigate magazine editor Ian Wishart and Auckland University School of Engineering associate professor Neil Broom, author of How Blind Is a Watchmaker?

The argument was rekindled last week when 500 New Zealand schools received unsolicited DVDs and workbooks from the Christian-based Focus on the Family organisation.

The material comes via the Centre for Science and Culture (CSC), a division of the Discovery Institute, a religion-based conservative think-tank in Seattle. It criticises Darwinism and promotes the idea of an "intelligent designer" outside the laws of nature to explain the intricate complexity of living organisms.

"Intelligent design people will tell you it doesn't mean there was a God. It just means something intelligent designed it. I'm much more comfortable saying God's there and he made it," says Michael Drake.

The principal of Carey College looks pleased with his answer. It avows his faith. Drake exudes the unshakeable rightness, some might say smugness, of a committed Christian.

The private school in Panmure teaches a literal interpretation of creation found in Genesis alongside the teaching of evolution. Drake believes in a young Earth - one that's about 6000 to 10,000 years old because that's what you get if you add up all the begats in the Bible.

Questions of carbon dating are not a problem. "It's perfectly possible to say God created the world at a point in time and at that point in time it [the Earth] was fixed with so many carbon 14 and so many ordinary carbon molecules - why not? God is God."

It's the sort of statement (given ample evidence that the world is at least 4.6 billion years old) that gets science teachers spluttering into their coffee.

"There are no geologists I am aware of who think the world is only 10,000 years old. That's the most fatuous idea one has ever come across," says Martin Hanson, a science teacher of 40 years and author of nine textbooks including Apes and Ancestors II.

Drake is unbowed, pointing to the swag of science awards the school has won. "Our kids will leave this school understanding evolutionary theory and creation theory and being able to work with both right through the science syllabus."

David Jensen, principal of Immanuel Christian School, holds a similar view.

"People have to see that evolution is as much a religious faith-based position as is creationism. Our creationist beliefs rest on faith in God as creator. An evolutionist perspective is just as religious.

"It relies on unproven scientific facts and theories - that's why it's called a theory of evolution. It's not the fact of evolution - it's called a theory for good reason. No one can prove it."

Science teachers splutter in unison with incredulity. "These people talk about evolution as a theory in crisis - they don't understand the word theory," says Alan Munro, head of science at Southland Boys' High.

"In layman's terms a theory is just a guess or something unproven, but in science a theory implies something that has been proven and generally accepted as true."

Hanson agrees, pointing to atomic theory. "No chemist has the slightest doubt about the existence of atoms. They're using theory in quite a different sense - it's a framework of knowledge and ideas which has great predicative value and is solidly based."

Jensen's faith is also unshakeable. "At the very least it's intellectually honest to give a reasonable amount of attention to the deficiencies of the theory of evolution as well as having a look at other competing theories, creationism being one."

Jensen is not as hard-line as Drake in terms of the age of the Earth. He's comfortable putting that aside as "a bit of a grey area". He claims evolutionists are fixated on the Earth being millions of years old because that is what evolution requires.

His main problem with evolution lies with its notions of chance mutations and accidental events creating complex forms of life. He rejects more figurative interpretations of the Bible which allow some Christians to see evolution as part of God's plan.

"It makes no sense. Why would God use a process of death and random events to create when he can create things as good?" And he sees it as inconsistent that "a good God" used millions of years of death and suffering.

For Jensen such an idea doesn't fit with Genesis, where it says, "God created and it was good." And with the description of the Garden of Eden - "an amazing place where animals were not ripping each other apart and devouring each other".

The intelligent design argument is more sophisticated. It doesn't retreat to a belief in the Bible as its founding truth. And it doesn't directly refer to God. But it shares with creationists the same difficulty in accepting the role of chance, accident or randomness in explaining the origin of life.

Drake sums up the problem for all. "Evolutionary theory says if there is a God, then he has not made things by means of design, purpose or, in the creationist point of view, with immediacy."

Hanson is scathing. "Intelligent design people are nice people, but they have difficulty in confronting complex realities - they need simple truths. There are a tiny number of biologists who do have problems with evolution, but they are such a minute, microscopic rump that they are hardly worth considering."

The Privileged Planet, one of a set of three DVDs distributed by Focus on the Family, sets out to show through maths and astronomy that purpose and design are everywhere.

The Earth, rather than being an inconsequential, chance speck in a vast universe, is the perfect viewing platform from which to appreciate God's handiwork. Similarly it's hard to accept that humans might not be the special objects of God's creation but simply a product of natural selection brought about by "numerous successive slight modifications".

Enter Icons of Evolution to cast doubt on the formulation of Charles Darwin's theory. Munro, who has assessed some of the DVDs, is annoyed by its bias and use of outdated information. "They say 'here was an error that was made back in the 1860s' and, therefore, because of this error the whole of evolution is wrong."

He points out the nature of science is to test theories for validity and be prepared to accept the theory can be proved false. "You come up with a theory and later evidence changes the story and we have to do a rethink, but we've never found anything which totally disproves evolution."

The material, Munro thinks, should probably be returned to sender. But he's toying with the idea of using some of it in a lesson on testing whether evidence is valid. "If it was going to go to the library, I'd file it under something like fairytales and fables - it's not scientific."

Intelligent design's king hit argument against evolution is found in the third DVD Unlocking The Mystery of Life. It claims to have found a scientific principle ("irreducible complexity") which proves certain structures could not have been produced by evolution.

The argument asserts that structures like the bacterial flagellum (a whip-like motor found in single cell organisms) and the human eye are so enormously complex that if you take them down into their constituent parts, the simpler bits and pieces don't have a function.

Take one part away and the eye or the flagellum doesn't work. In other words, it's irreducibly complex and must have been designed.

While evolution doesn't have a clear explanation for the development of the eye or the flagellum, biologists say they can show that both are not irreducibly complex.

"As soon as you look at bacterial flagellum and find that the various structures that go to make it up do have a function, and look at the complexity of the camera eye and find that there are much simpler versions available, the argument gets pulled to pieces," says Alison Campbell, a former secondary school science teacher and now senior lecturer in biology at Waikato University.

Campbell, who helps run the Evolution for Teaching website, points to a paper - The Flagellum Unspun - which claims to undo some of the probability equations used to make the irreducible complexity case.

Intelligent design may not be in our science curriculum, but it's not exactly out, either. The Ministry of Education's national administration guidelines don't place any restrictions on its teaching. Nor do they specifically restrict the teaching of young Earth creation or theistic evolution. So does the science curriculum allow for alternative theories to evolution to be taught?

"Schools and teachers have a responsibility to select theories widely accepted by the scientific community," says the ministry's curriculum manager Mary Chamberlain. "A full exploration of these theories should include a consideration of challenges that have been made to them."

Even if the challenges are non-scientific? "We are not suggesting that teachers teach it as accepted science," says Chamberlain. "We are suggesting that challenges to accepted scientific understandings should be considered in science lessons" - such as in the "Making sense of the nature of science" strand.

Southland High's Munro rejects the interpretation of the syllabus. "A science controversy has to have science on both sides."

Campbell is not impressed, either: "It's a non-controversy as far as the wider scientific community is concerned." There is only one theory - evolution - and to suggest otherwise is to fall into the trap of misunderstanding what a scientific theory is.

She says neither young Earth creationism nor intelligent design offer any reasonable challenge to evolutionary thinking.

"It's the thin edge of the wedge - as soon as you introduce intelligent design into the classroom in any guise, then it's in the classroom and it gives it some legitimacy and I don't think that legitimacy is warranted. It's not science."

[ml1954]

You're going to have to be patient. I've been asking for three weeks what ID advocated would teach if they ran the science classes.

Saying that Darwinism doesn't have everything explained makes a rather short lesson plan.

What is it they would teach?

I'll keep trying and let you know if I ever get a coherent response.

This notion that TOE is not good science but that Creationism and/or ID should be taught alongside TOE in a science class is absurd.

That ID should be taught in place of TOE in science classes is the only logical position if you think ID is good science. But as you ask...what exactly would be taught? I'd like someone to tell how ID would be taught in place of TOE so I can have an opportunity to question ID theory as taught.

[snarks_when_bored]

We're not talking about the same thing, I guess. I'm not talking about making atoms from scratch (I'll leave that up to Big Bangs and supernovae and the like). I'm talking about taking chemicals (amino acids, etc.) and assembling them into artificial organisms. I'm sure that at first such organisms will be quite rudimentary. However, perhaps we'll figure out a way to encourage a kind of hyper-evolution to take place in the lab, thus producing hardier and more varied sorts of organisms. As for an artificial man, that's for the more distant future.

...molecule-to-man is an assumption and does not address how to create the molecules they are tinkering with.

If you read the article I linked to, you'll note that the lab guys are talking about constructing organisms molecule by molecule. They're not talking about making molecules from scratch. Why would they be? There's no need to do that. Nor was there any need to do that when the Earth was young; there appears to have been a wide array of molecules of many sorts available in the early soup from which life arose.

[PatrickHenry]

I'd like someone to tell how ID would be taught in place of TOE so I can have an opportunity to question ID theory as taught.

ID biology would use a book listing various species, probably with pretty pictures. They'd be arranged in alphabetical order, because that makes as much sense (to an ID-devotee) as other kind of arrangement. And under each pic would be a caption saying, more or less: "Toad, yet another special creation of the Designer." Tests would require being able to identify the pictures correctly.

Someone in an old thread said that without the theory of evolution, biology is little more than birdwatching.

[snarks_when_bored]

In the Year 2005--just one little sliver of time in the existence of the universe--one observes the "foolishness" and arrogance of human beings who, limited by the human brain's capacity for assimilating and incorporating adequate data for rational evaluation and understanding of profound questions about the origins of their universe, deem themselves "keepers" of the gate for the minds of rising generations.

You seem to be saying that humans are arrogant and foolish to assume that they know anything at all about the origins of our cosmos worthy of being taught to their children. If I'm interpreting you correctly, this seems silly. Would you suggest that we don't teach our children what we currently think will best prepare them to understand the world they inhabit (understanding always that what we teach them may be subject to revision as we learn more)? I hope not.

[snarks_when_bored]

Besides, stoical skepticism will never be as popular as the notions of the likes of Sixpak Chopra and Pat 'Hitman' Robertson.

(laughing) Yeah, them boys tell a good tale...

[ml1954]

ID biology would use a book listing various species, probably with pretty pictures. They'd be arranged in alphabetical order....Tests would require being able to identify the pictures correctly.

I see. So ID biology could be taught in first grade with no further instruction required after that.

Think of the instruction time that will free up in grade school and high school. This instruction time can then be devoted to really important things like the pseudo-social sciences, minority culture/ethnic group studies, popular film/music studies, and sensitivity training.

[Dimensio]

Oh, the foolishness of the wise!

Do you have an actual argument based upon logic and rationality, or do you just specialize in argument by pointless ridicule?

[snarks_when_bored]

Researchers Creating Life From Scratch.

Huh?????

Oh, the foolishness of the wise!

Pooh-pooh the idea if you wish, but I'd advise you to go ahead and buy some stock in any Venter company that decides to do an IPO! Better rich than sorry.

[js1138]

Pebble counting placemarker.

[dread78645]

So...what were they eating? Purina Dinosaur Chow?

"No thanks, I'm doing Atkins"

[silverleaf]

there appears to have been a wide array of molecules of many sorts available in the early soup from which life arose.

sigh....and what (or who) made the soup? Again, my point is...make a manmade molecule or a computer progam that shows how to make a molecule. From....? Perhaps this is why cosmology has struggled sooner and is struggling harder than biology, against an inference of design. Evolutionary biologists are mixing and stirring the primordial soup and hoping to say "A-ha!"...while many cosmologists seem uncomfortable in discussing, scientifically, where the soup came from and why the ingredients have (by chance) proven to have been able to produce such stunning recipes (dna codes).

So just belittle the request for science to build a molecule as being "unnecessary" to prove the point that the simplest building blocks of life as we observe it...are beyond the "design" (that word again) of any known science. Or are molecules ...... too irreducibly complex to create, especially from scientific facts about conditions that pre-date the "soup"?

Oh, and returning to the infinitely large empty playroom we will allow our hypothetical super-intelligent children to exist in while they figure out how to create themselves some building blocks (matter) so they can prove it didn't take an Architect to build the Golden Gate Bridge (or a Chef to make soup)...... that playroom should be without light or the dimension of time. The kids will also have to figure out whether they need light or time and how to create them and in what sequence, along with matter.

[snarks_when_bored]

sigh....and what (or who) made the soup?

That's not a question for an evolutionary biologist, is it? We're discussing (among other things) whether molecules which were undeniably present in large numbers on the early Earth are capable of having ultimately combined on their own in a way that led to self-replicative structures that over billions of years developed into the vast variety of organisms that we currently observe. Evolutionists maintain that that's what happened, and they're engaged in the huge task of trying to understand as completely as possible how that happened. Intelligent Design proponents maintain (as far as I can tell) that a deity somehow whipped up all of the vast variety of life in a jiffy and made it seem as if it really took billions of years. Mostly, they spend their time trying to think up ways to discredit the work of evolutionary biologists and at the same time avoid tricky questions about the 'young Earth' and stuff like that.

And as for this:

Or are molecules ...... too irreducibly complex to create, especially from scientific facts about conditions that pre-date the "soup"?

Organic chemists regularly construct complex molecules by a variety of processes, for example, polymerization. And in a few years, our nanotechnologists are going to be much better at putting together all sorts of materials, one atom at a time. And, lest you try to push the question back further, transmutation of one atom into another is rather straightforward to accomplish in particle accelerators and the like. And, yes, particles can be produced out of pure energy. But do we produce the energy itself, you ask? That's not the question we're discussing, I say! (smile)

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[longshadow]

***** sigh....and what (or who) made the soup? *****

That's not a question for an evolutionary biologist, is it?

This is the same old worn-out rhetoric we repeatedly see from the anti-science know-nothings: that Evolution is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of the raw materials (first living cells).

This is equivalent to standing on a soap-box and screaming that Hydrology is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of water, or that Gravitational Theory is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of mass.

"Hydrology -- a theory in crisis!"

[dynoman]

So when will they claim The Origin-of-Life Prize ®?

[Vive ut Vivas]

That loud noise you're hearing is the lovely sound of shifting goalposts.

[dynoman]

This is equivalent to standing on a soap-box and screaming that Hydrology is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of water, or that Gravitational Theory is bunk because it doesn't explain the origin of mass.

No it's not like that at all.

Gravitational Theory and Hydrology really don't include the phenomenon of change, but the phenomenon of change is the core of evolutional theory. Since the phenomenon of change is at the very core of evolutionary theory it begs the question, exactly when and how did evolution start?

Evolutionists should not blow off that question as they normally do with "the same old worn-out rhetoric we repeatedly see" like, "you do not have the proper understanding of evolution", "evolution is not meant to explain the origin of raw materials" etc.

This is what makes the The Origin of Life Prize® so interesting, there are some honest evolutionists who know the origin of life question has to be answered and that so far they have no answers.

[dynoman]

I have to post this from the The Origin-of-Life Prize ® site.

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Clarification of what the Foundation is looking for. We are primarily interested in how certain linear digital sequences of monomers acquired three-dimensional dynamic function. The Prize offer is designed to stimulate focused research on the origin of initial genetic instructions themselves. So much of life origin work centers around biochemical factors. But biopolymers catalyzed by clay surfaces, for example, do not necessarily contain any functional (prescriptive) information. How does an algorithmically complex sequence of codons arise in nature which finds phenotypic usefulness only after translation into a completely different language (AA sequence)? How did natural process produce so indirectly the hundreds of needed three-dimensional protein catalysts for life to begin?

Mathematically, it is impossible to go backwards from 20 AA to 64 codons. There is no way to know which of four or six codons, for example, coded a given AA when one tries to go backwards against the "Central Dogma." Prescriptive Information has been lost. Various models of code origin often pursue primordial codon systems of only two nitrogen bases rather than three. At some point, such a two-base codon system must evolve into a three-base codon system. But catastrophic problems such as global frame shifts would have resulted from such a change midstream in the evolution of genetic code.

Environmental selection, if existent at all in a prebiotic environment, is nothing more than after-the-fact differential survivability/reproduction of certain stochastic ensembles in certain environments. How did initial genetic code-certain sequences of codons-come to specify only certain three-dimensional sequences of amino acid strings that "work"?

The winning submission will likely provide both a novel and cardinal conceptual contribution to current biological science and information theory.

The Foundation welcomes theoretical models of a more direct primordial instruction system (one that might have preceded codon transcription and translation) provided the model provides explanation of continuous transition (abiding by the "continuity principle") to current prokaryotic and eukaryotic empirical life.

Inanimate stepping stones of abiotic evolution are essential components to any natural process theory of the molecular evolution of life. Full reign must be given to the exploration of spontaneously forming complexity and to self-ordering inanimate systems. But reductionistic attempts to provide models of life development must not sacrifice the very property of "life" that biology seeks to explain. Coacervates, micelles, vesicles, and various primordial quasimembrane models, for example, may resemble membrane equivalents and merit considerable ongoing research, but should not be confused with the active transport membranes of the simplest known free-living organisms.

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[dynoman]

The Origin-of-Life Prize ® definition of life;

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e. By sustained, free-living "life," the Foundation means any system which from its own inherent set of biological instructions can perform all nine of the following functions:

1. Delineate itself from its environment through the production and maintenance of a membrane equivalent, most probably a rudimentary or quasi-active-transport membrane necessary for selective absorption of nutrients, excretion of wastes, and overcoming osmotic and toxic gradients,

2. Write, store, and pass along into progeny prescriptive information (instruction) needed for organization; provide instructions for energy derivation and for needed metabolite production and function; symbolically encode and communicate functional message through a transmission channel to a receiver/decoder/destination/effector mechanism; integrate past, present and future time into its biological prescriptive information (instruction) content,

3. Bring to pass the above recipe instructions into the production or acquisition of actual catalysts, coenzymes, cofactors, etc.; physically orchestrate the biochemical processes/pathways of metabolic reality; manufacture and maintain physical cellular architecture; establish and operate a semiotic system using "signal molecules"

4. Capture, transduce, store, and call up energy for utilization (work),

5. Actively self-replicate and eventually reproduce, not just passively polymerize or crystallize; pass along the apparatus and "know-how" for homeostatic metabolism and reproduction into progeny,

6. Self-monitor and repair its constantly deteriorating physical matrix of bioinstruction retention/transmission, and of architecture,

7. Develop and grow from immaturity to reproductive maturity,

8. Productively react to environmental stimuli. Respond in an efficacious manner that is supportive of survival, development, growth, and reproduction, and

9. Possess relative genetic stability, yet sufficient diversity to allow for adaptation and potential evolution.

All classes of archaea, bacteria, and every other known free-living organism, meet all nine of the above criteria. Eliminate any one of the above nine requirements, and it remains to be demonstrated whether that system could remain "alive."

RNA strands, DNA strands, prions, viroids, and viruses shall not be considered free-living organisms, since they fail to meet many of the above well-recognized characteristics of independent "life."

Even in historical science, there must be some degree of empirical accountability to our theories. Proposing a mechanism that explains the origin of life must not consist of "defining down" the meaning and essence of the observable phenomenon of "life" to include "nonlife" in order to make our theories "work." Any scientific life-origins theory must connect with "life" as we observe it (the "continuity principle"). Science will never be able to abandon its empirical roots in favor of purely theoretical conjecture. On the other hand, science must constantly guard itself against Kuhnian paradigm ruts. We must be open-minded to the possibility that life has not always taken the form that we currently observe. We must take into consideration the problems inherent in any historical science where the observation of past realities is impossible.

Biophysicist Hubert P. Yockey makes the unique observation that "there is nothing in the physico-chemical world [apart from life] that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences. The existence of a genome and the genetic code divides living organisms from non-living matter." (Computers and Chemistry, 24 (2000) 105-123). This may well constitute the most concise and parsimonious dichotomization of animacy from inanimacy available in the literature. We must remember, however, that the full compliment of nucleic acid code, ribozymes, and protein enzymes are still present immediately after cell death. Life, therefore, would appear not to be reducible to coded prescriptive information (instruction) alone. Life is also not "a bag of enzymes." "Life" is characterized by ongoing homeostatic metabolic process and algorithmic function, including development, growth, and reproductive potential. The inability of mules to reproduce has no relevance to discussions of protocellular viability.

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Would the discussion here on this thread be out of place in a public school classroom?

[longshadow]

Since the phenomenon of change is at the very core of evolutionary theory it begs the question, exactly when and how did evolution start?

But the theory of evolution is NOT contingent upon the answer to that question. That's the point. Hydrology isn't contingent upon where water came from; gravitation isn't contingent upon where matter came from. They are all compatible with ANY explanation of how the raw materials got here.