Intelligent Design Is Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo

My deliberately provocative title is borrowed from Leonard Krishtalka, who directs the Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. Hired-gun "design theorists" in cheap tuxedos have met with some success in getting close to their target: public science education. I hope to convince you that this threat is worth paying attention to. As I write, intelligent design (ID) is a hot issue in the states of Washington and Ohio (see Physics Today, May 2002, page 31*). Evolutionary biology is ID's primary target, but geology and physics are within its blast zone.

Creationism evolves. As in biological evolution, old forms persist alongside new. After the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, creationists tried to get public schools to teach biblical accounts of the origin and diversity of life. Various courts ruled the strategy unconstitutional. Next came the invention of "creation science," which was intended to bypass constitutional protections. It, too, was recognized by the courts as religion. Despite adverse court rulings, creationists persist in reapplying these old strategies locally. In many places, the pressure keeps public school biology teachers intimidated and evolution quietly minimized.

However, a new strategy, based on so-called ID theory, is now at the cutting edge of creationism. ID is different from its forebears. It does a better job of disguising its sectarian intent. It is well funded and nationally coordinated. To appeal to a wider range of people, biblical literalism, Earth's age, and other awkward issues are swept under the rug. Indeed, ID obfuscates sufficiently well that some educated people with little background in the relevant science have been taken in by it. Among ID's diverse adherents are engineers, doctors--and even physicists.

ID advocates can't accept the inability of science to deal with supernatural hypotheses, and they see this limitation as a sacrilegious denial of God's work and presence. Desperately in need of affirmation, they invent "theistic science" in which the design of the Creator is manifest. Perhaps because their religious faith is rather weak, they need to bolster their beliefs every way they can--including hijacking science to save souls and prove the existence of God.

William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher at Baylor University and one of ID's chief advocates, asserts that: " . . . any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient."1 Whether or not they agree with Dembski on this point, most Americans hold some form of religious belief. Using what they call the Wedge Strategy,2 ID advocates seek to pry Americans away from "naturalistic science" by forcing them to choose between science and religion. ID advocates know that science will lose. They portray science as we know it as innately antireligious, thereby blurring the distinction between science and how science may be interpreted.

When presenting their views before the public, ID advocates generally disguise their religious intent. In academic venues, they avoid any direct reference to the Designer. They portray ID as merely an exercise in detecting design, citing examples from archaeology, the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project, and other enterprises. Cambridge University Press has published one ID book,3 which, the ID advocates repeatedly proclaim, constitutes evidence that their case has real scientific merit. ID creationist publications are nearly absent from refereed journals, and this state of affairs is presented as evidence of censorship.

This censorship, ID advocates argue, justifies the exploitation of public schools and the children in them to circumvent established scientific procedures. In tort law, expert scientific testimony must agree with the consensus of experts in a given field. No such limitation exists with respect to public education. ID advocates can snow the public and school boards with pseudoscientific presentations. As represented by ID advocates, biological evolution is a theory in crisis, fraught with numerous plausible-sounding failures, most of which are recycled from overt creationists. It is "only fair," the ID case continues, to present alternatives so that children can make up their own minds. Yesterday's alternative was "Flood geology." Today's is "design theory."

Fairness, open discussion, and democracy are core American values and often problematic. Unfortunately, journalists routinely present controversies where none exist, or they present political controversies as scientific controversies. Stories on conflicts gain readers, and advertising follows. This bias toward reporting conflicts, along with journalists' inability to evaluate scientific content and their unwillingness to do accuracy checks (with notable exceptions), are among the greatest challenges to the broad public understanding of science.

ID creationism is largely content-free rhetoric. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University and an ID proponent, argues that many biochemical and biophysical mechanisms are "irreducibly complex."4 He means that, if partially dismembered, they would not work, so they could not have evolved. This line of argument ignores the large number of biological functions that look irreducibly complex, but for which intermediates have been found. One response to Behe's claims consists of the tedious task of demonstrating functions in a possible evolutionary path to the claimed irreducibly complex state. When presented with these paths, Behe typically ignores them and moves on. I admire the people who are willing to spend the time to put together the detailed refutations.5

The position of an ID creationist can be summarized as: "I can't understand how this complex outcome could have arisen, so it must be a miracle." In an inversion of the usual procedure in science, the null hypothesis is taken to be the thing Dembski, Behe, and their cohorts want to prove, albeit with considerable window-dressing. Dembski classifies all phenomena as resulting from necessity, chance, or design. In ruling out necessity, he means approximately that one could not predict the detailed structures and information we see in biological systems from the laws of physics. His reference to chance is essentially equivalent to the creationist use of one of the red herrings introduced by Fred Hoyle:

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?6 Having dispensed with necessity and chance, Dembski concludes that design has been detected on the grounds that nothing else can explain the phenomenon--at least according to him.

Of course, design has no predictive power. ID is not a scientific theory. If we had previously attributed the unexplainable to design, we would still be using Thor's hammer to explain thunder. Nor does ID have any technological applications. It can be fun to ask ID advocates about the practical applications of their work. Evolution has numerous practical technological applications, including vaccine development. ID has none.

As organisms evolve, they become more complex, but evolution doesn't contravene the second law of thermodynamics. Dembski, like his creationist predecessors, misuses thermodynamics. To support the case for ID, he has presented arguments based on a supposed Law of Conservation of Information, an axiomatic law that applies only to closed systems with very restricted assumptions.7 Organisms, of course, are not closed systems.

ID's reach extends beyond biology to physics and cosmology. One interesting discussion concerns the fundamental constants. There is a well-known point of view that our existence depends on a number of constants lying within a narrow range. As one might expect, the religious community has generally viewed this coincidence as evidence in favor of--or at least as a plausibility argument for--their beliefs. The ID creationist community has adopted the fundamental constants as additional evidence for their Designer of Life--apparently not realizing that many fine-tuning arguments are based on physical constants allowing evolution to proceed. Physical cosmology is largely absent from school science standards. Where present, as in Kansas, it is likely to come under ID attack.

I have only scratched the surface here. Don't assume everything is fine in your school system even if it seems free of conflict. Peace may mean that evolution, the core concept of biology, is minimized. No region of the country is immune. Watch out for the guys in tuxedos--they don't have violins in those cases.

Adrian Melott is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is also a founding board member of Kansas Citizens for Science.

Letters are encouraged and should be sent to Letters, Physics Today, American Center for Physics, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3842 or by e-mail to ptletter@aip.org (using your surname as "Subject"). Please include your affiliation, mailing address, and daytime phone number. We reserve the right to edit.

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References 1. W. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Ill. (1999), p. 206. 2. See http://rnaworld.bio.ukans.edu/id-intro/sect3.html. Another source is http://www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs/JCCC/05%20Wedge_edited.html 3. W. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities, Cambridge U. Press, New York (1998). For a review by W. Elsberry, see http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html. 4. M. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Free Press, New York (1996). 5. See http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/catalano/box/behe.htm. See also http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/behe.html 6. F. Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York (1983), p. 18. 7. W. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md. (2002).

Evolution is genetic variation and natural selection over time. Those are obvious facts of reality.

No. Genetic variation has nothing to do with evolution. Every species has a wide genetic pool. That is why we are all different. Selecting, emphasizing some of those genetic traits does not create anything new. All you are doing is reducing the genetic pool. Evolution requires addition, the process you describe is essentially subtraction. For proof you can talk about dogs. Dogs are 'thorougbred' wolves. They still can produce progeny with each other even after the tremendous selection that has gone on to derive the many different breeds and their isolation from each other for countless numbers of years.

How big is your family? Mine is four. 50% of four is 2. If my dad had a neutral mutation, he would have passed it on to two of us on average. What was in one, is now in two.

As I have been pointing out, family size does not matter so long as it is the same as the average family size of the species. You can use any number you like and you will see that the new trait will dissappear. Since you like big numbers we shall use ten children each generation in a rather small species of only 1000 individuals:

Generation 1:    1 mutant and        999 non-mutants
Generation 2:    5 mutants and       9995 non-mutants
Generation 3: 25 mutants and    99975 non-mutants
Generation 4: 125 mutants and 999875 non-mutants
Generation 5: 625 mutants and 9999375 non-mutants

We started with mutants as .1% of the population, we ended with mutants as .0625% of the population. So obviously the mutation is losing ground, not gaining it as evolution would require.

From Adrian Desmond's "Hot Blooded Dinosaurs:

"It would be a grave understatement to say that, as a flying creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed, there were sound reasons for believing that it was the largest animal that ever could become airborne. With each increase in size, and therefore also weight, a flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper and to hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is supplied by muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure.-- The larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately weightier it grows by the addition of its own power supply. There comes a point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine to remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power suggested that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about 50 lb.: Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were therefore thought to be the largest flying animals."

I'm not sure why you picked this passage, as it was outdated (as you know) by the discovery of Quetzalcoatlus Northropi in 1972. Perhaps it was because of the weight/size comments.

It would be a grave understatement to say that, as a flying creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed, there were sound reasons for believing that it was the largest animal that ever could become airborne. With each increase in size, and therefore also weight, a flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper and to hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is supplied by muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure.

The weight of a flying body is meaningless without a wing loading computation. Since these creatures were mostly wing when airborne, the estimated weights given (190 pounds for Q. Northropi) would produce extremely light wing loadings.

If the Pteradon in question had a wing area of 190 square feet, a weight of 190 pounds would give it a one-pound wing loading. In a 15-meter sailplane weighing upwards of 600 pounds before I get in, a typical wing loading might be six or seven pounds per square foot.

I can stay aloft until my bladder brings me down with such a configuration. Of course, I can choose the conditions under which I'll fly, but so can the Pteradon.

Now I don't have to hold my arms out when I fly like the Pteradon does, but modern soaring birds have trick joints that lock their wings in place -- perhaps Pteradon had a similar mechanism.

The argentinian teratorn was a 200-lb eagle. That is known to be impossible in our present world. The biggest eagle you will ever see in our present world would be one of the largest berkuts, such as Atlanta, seen here with Sam Barnes:

Barnes is a big man, around 6-7 or so, 300 lbs., and you can judge for yourself Atlanta's size from the picture. A Kirghis khan gave Atlanta to Barnes around 1970 because she had flounce, for which no cure existed in the CCCP, and would have died shortly. Barnes had meds for that back in England.

Atlanta at 24 lbs. or thereabouts is as big as berkuts ever get. The khan told Barnes that they only got one or two that size every fifty years or so and that a bird that size if healthy, would be worth more than a dozen of the most beautiful women in Kirghiz. They raise berkuts in Kirghiz partly to kill wolves and while, a wolf would be just a day at the office for Atlanta, it's a major undertaking for a more normal sized berkut at 14 - 17 lbs, and the wolf sometimes wins. Therefore it would be a huge advantage if they could breed them to an AVERAGE of 24 lbs., i.e. have a small one be 20 lbs. and a big one be 35 lbs., but it cannot be done. When they get past 25 lbs, they start to have insurmountable problems with takeoffs and landings.

That's in our gravity of course. The Argentinian teratorn did not have that problem.

When they get past 25 lbs, they start to have insurmountable problems with takeoffs and landings.

By the way, I have wild turkeys in my neighborhood. I don't know how much they weigh (books say up to 30 pounds, but I haven't weighed the locals), but they can fly very well. I've seen an entire flock (10-20 birds) take off at once -- no running, just flap, flap, gone.

So, you're claiming your "200 pound" Argentine Teratorn actually weighed 25 pounds or less during its life, and that this is due to gravity not being as strong as it is today, right?

This implies one-eighth of our current gravity. Mars has about one-third of our gravity and has surface air pressures of about 7+ millibars (compare to 1014 on Earth). Drop Earth gravity by a factor of eight and what's this bird going to fly in?

There's also a problem with breathing at low air pressures. You can fly a sailplane to about 40,000 feet if you're breathing 100% oxygen. After that, the pressure is too low for the oxygen molecules to pass through the semi-permeable membranes in your lungs. With one-eighth gravity, there's not enough air pressure to breathe.

An atmosphere held together mainly by electrostatic forces rather than gravity. As to turkeys, albatrosses etc., yeah, they can get a bit bigger than eagles because they are built more along the lines of a sailplane while an eagle is more like a fighter plane built for maneuver. For that reason eagles can't get quite as big as an albatross and still fly.

The point of this is that God's existence is a certainty. It is impossible for us to be here by accident.
Besides the mathematical proof here's a legal argument you might consider Simon Greenleaf

Wow, if there's a mathematical proof that it's impossible for us to be here by chance, I'd be really interested in seeing it.

An atmosphere held together mainly by electrostatic forces rather than gravity.

You're proposing that Hydrogen Van Der Waals bonding interactions were strong enough to create atmospheric pressure that allowed the Teratorn to fly (and breathe)?

I'm not sure what actual effects would be apparent under such (global, pervasive) conditions, but its not obvious that high pressure would be among them. Lumps, maybe. ;)

Given that such a thing were possible (perhaps caused by friction in the upper atmosphere due to contact with the orbiting moon), then it would seem that gravity is not necessary to keep an atmosphere together.

Naaahhhh...

You'd have to have a different kind of solar system than the one we have now. Nonetheless, that is precisely what the evidence indicates. Two slightly different versions of that sort of thing (system-wide or multi-planet atmosphere) can be found at kronia.com and grazian-archive.com.

Evidence for a former biplanetary civilization can be seen on bearfabrique and also on Tom Van Flandern's Metaresearch site. Tom is a former director of the Naval observatory.

Now you need to take into account that an advantageous mutation is going to increase the odds of the mutated individuals surviving and reproducing over the non-mutated individuals.

Yes, indeed it would. However, the problem for evolution is that to make an entirely new gene from the ground up, mutation by mutation it would have to go through this almost impossible process without any selective advantage. If on the other hand you had a duplicated gene, you would not have a selective advantage either right away (and there is also the problem of gene expression). So you would have this problem in case of duplicated genes also.

Genetic variation has nothing to do with evolution... -me-

Bizarro quote of the day placemarker.

It is only bizarre to those who do not think. You cannot create something new by emphasizing the traits already present in the gene pool. This is the ridiculous (or should one say dishonest? certainly those who publish it know better though those who parrot their statements probably do not) claim of evolutionists when they say that evolution is 'the change in allele frequency in a population'. The numerous breeds of dogs have been created by purposely 'changing the allele frequency in a population' and guess what, they are still dogs. The same goes for the breeding of numerous plants and animals, it is 'the change in allele frequency in a population' that accomplishes it. No new species come out, nothing new arises that was not in the gene pool, hence no evolution.

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