John Derbyshire, the National Review's token evolution advocate, has written a response to George Gilder's pro-ID article in that same magazine last week. Gilder is the founder of the Discovery Institute. In his response, Derbyshire uses a perfect metaphor for dealing with creationists:
It's a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can't be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn't actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It's boring.
It would be less boring if they'd come up with a new argument once in a while, but they never do. I've been engaging with Creationists for a couple of years now, and I have yet to hear an argument younger than I am. (I am not young.) All Creationist arguments have been whacked down a thousand times, but they keep popping up again. Nowadays I just refer argumentative e-mailers to the TalkOrigins website, where any argument you are ever going to hear from a Creationist is whacked down several times over. Don't think it'll stop 'em, though.
Anyone who has spent any time arguing with creationists can certainly relate to that. Indeed, one of the most interesting things about the ID movement is that every single argument they make is recycled from old-fashioned creationism. You can find antecedents to every single one of them in the creationist literature, sometimes written by the same people - but don't you dare accuse them of being creationists or they'll have a fit and fall in it, as my father used to say.
One of the ironies that Derbyshire points out is that, in contrast to the constant pronouncements from creationists that evolution is "in crisis" or "dying", this is in fact a time of immense growth in our understanding of evolution. The new tools of genome sequencing are giving us vast insight into evolutionary relationships and patterns and filling in a lot of the gaps in our understanding of how life evolved. Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project and a devout Christian himself, says that this is the most exciting time perhaps in the whole history of science for the things that we are learning from being able to sequence and compare genomes. And he says that it provides immense support for evolution:
As somebody who has watched our own D.N.A. sequence emerge, our own instruction book over the course of the last few years, all three billion letters of our code, and watched how it compares with that of other species, the evidence that comes out of that kind of analysis is overwhelmingly in favor of a single origin of life from which various forms were then derived by a process which seems entirely consistent with Darwin's view of natural selection.
Collins also argues, quite correctly, that ID is a god of the gaps argument that is bound to fail as new information fills in the gaps in our understanding, just as has always happened with such arguments in the past. And as Derbyshire points out, the ID movement has produced nothing in terms of actual research that supports their position:
That brings us to the second problem that scientists have with George's system: After being around for many years, it has not produced any science. George's own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science? In all those years, not a single paper of scientific standing has come out of (nor even, to the best of my knowledge, been submitted by) the DI or the CSC. I am certainly willing to be corrected here. If the DI or CSC have any papers of scientific standing -- published or not -- I shall post links to them to NRO for qualified readers to scrutinize.
Scientists discover things. That's what they do. In fast-growing fields like genomics, they discover new things almost daily -- look into any issue of Science or Nature. What has the Discovery Institute discovered this past 16 years? To stretch my simile further: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, never having flown or designed any planes themselves. Are they really surprised that they get a brusque reception?...
Creationists respond to this by telling us that they can't get a hearing in the defensive, closed-minded, "invested" world of professional science. Creationist ideas are too revolutionary, they say. The impenetrably reactionary nature of established science is a staple of Creationist talk. They seem not to have noticed that twentieth-century science is a veritable catalog of revolutionary ideas that got accepted, from quantum theory to plate tectonics, from relativity to dark matter, from cosmic expansion to the pathogen theory of ulcers. Creationism has been around far, far longer than the "not yet accepted" phase of any of those theories. Why is the proportion of scientists willing to accept it still stuck below (well below, as best I can estimate) one percent? The only answer you can get from a Creationist involves a conspiracy theory that makes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion look positively rational.
I am in the process of preparing a presentation on the track record of ID in terms of actual science it claims to have produced. The bottom line is that there are only a few articles that they even claim support ID in the scientific literature. And when you examine them closely, you find that not only do they not support ID, they actually support evolution. The fiasco that greeted Michael Behe in trying to defend his paper on binding sites with Snoke at the Dover trial is an excellent example. His paper with Snoke not only doesn't support ID, it positively supports evolution.
Derbyshire also goes on to discuss the history of new ideas in science that were initially rejected by the scientific community. Contrary to the absurd claims of the ID crowd, science routinely recognizes the validity of ideas that it initially finds far-fetched:
In George's example the original thinker was Max Planck, whose first publication on his revolutionary quantum theory of radiation was in 1900. Poor Max Planck was so thoroughly shunned and ostracized by that glowering, starched-collar Panel of Peers for daring to present ideas that violated their settled convictions, that five years later they made him president of the German Physical Society, and in 1918 gave him the Nobel Prize for Physics! Those mean, blinkered scientific establishmentarians!...
What gets the attention of scientists is science. Scientists do not shun Creationism because it is revolutionary; they shun it because Creationists don't do any science. They started out by promising to. The original plan for the CSC (then CRSC) back in 1992 had phase I listed as: "Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity." The CSC has certainly been energetic in writing and publicity, but if they have done any scientific research, I missed it.
One can point to lots of ideas that were initially rejected when they were proposed but later came to be accepted. Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift is one example. Behe brought up another, big bang cosmology, on the witness stand in Dover as an example about a hundred times, but he left out the important distinction between those who proposed the big bang and those who propose ID. Gamow did not respond to the non-acceptance of his idea by hiring a PR firm to promote his ideas. Wegener did not react to the initial rejection he faced by lobbying state legislatures to "teach the controversy". Lemaitre didn't write popular articles calling for the teaching of the "arguments against the steady state theory" in science classrooms. Hubble didn't line up lists of scientists who "dissented from Einstein's static universe theory." Instead, they simply got to work. They refined their models, inferred testable hypotheses from them and proposed ways to test those suppositions. And in every case, once those hypotheses were confirmed with solid data the scientific community rapidly accepted them.
Bruce Gordon, now the Director of Research at the DI's Center for Science and Culture, recognized this failure in a 2001 article. He wrote at the time that "inclusion of design theory as part of the standard discourse of the scientific community, if it ever happens, will be the result of a long and difficult process of quality research and publication. It also will be the result of overcoming the stigma that has become attached to design research because of the anti-evolutionary diatribes of some of its proponents on the one hand and its appropriation for the purpose of Christian apologetics on the other." In the intervening 5 years, those anti-evolutionary diatribes have continued at a breathless pace, but not a single research paper supporting ID has been published. And this, not all the conspiracy theories about the Stalinist Priesthood of Darwinism, is the reason why it has gained no ground in the scientific community.
- Log in to post comments
Ed writes:
We should note that sometimes an idea may stall when the originator can't produce a compelling model, but that others may pick up the gauntlet later in the light of new evidence and fresh eyes. This is what happened to Wegener, who failed to formulate a convincing explanation as to how continents could possibly move. He invoked centrifugal forces and gravitational forces, both of which were completely unsuitable for the task at hand. However one of his many ideas, that of mantle convection, was picked up by other scientists in the 60's, and with the discovery of mid-ocean ridges and geomagnetic striping among others, sealed the deal.
Yes, after Hubble did the science to support the expansion of the universe, Einstein said that adjusting his equations to make the universe a steady state one was his bigggest mistake. The path is clear for ID proponents, they just don't do the work. Maybe because they know it's not correct, and the research they do will only support evolution. I mean could they just be lieing about ID to get big donations from those zany Christians. Naw, that couldn't be it.
Not to mention that Einstein himself became fameous for propsing a theory of physics that defied the Newtonian laws.
Its important to note however, that Einstein's theorys were important -- but they still have little or no effect on how high school physics of motion is taught.
Another good example is when J Harlan Bretz proposed a mechanism for the origin of the Channeled Scablands. To many geologists, it seemed as preposterous as the Noachan Deluge. But after it was shown that the breakout of glacial Lake Missoula could provide an adequate source of water, the mechanism was accepted. This case differs from ID in a few ways--notably, examination of the evidence pointed to catastrophic flooding, the physics of which are well-known even if such flooding rarely occurs. And, of course, Bretz and others had to "get to work" finding confirming evidence and did not spend their funds on public-relations firms or lobbying state legislatures and school boards.
"The path is clear for ID proponents, they just don't do the work. Maybe because they know it's not correct, and the research they do will only support evolution. I mean could they just be lieing about ID to get big donations from those zany Christians. Naw, that couldn't be it."
Oh, they do the work -- just not the type of work you're thinking of. If ID were a scientific theory, the clear path that you are talking about would be the correct path to take. But ID is not a scientific theory (or even a religious one, really). It's a political movement through and through.
If it were a scientific theory then the work would be in the lab and in the field -- making hypotheses, testing those hypotheses and looking for things to confirm AND things to disprove these hypotheses. If it were a political movement then the work would be in the streets, getting folks to mobilize, pressuring legislators to pass laws, and getting folks who side with their point of view to give money and put pressure on their legislators. Which do you see the ID advocates focusing their efforts on? Which do the evolutionary biologists focus on?
The ID vs. evolutionary biology "debate" is a non-starter precisely because of this -- you might as well have a debate about Women's Sufferage vs. theoretical physics. Excoriating the ID folks because they don't do science isn't going to change things because they don't care about the science -- they care about their political agenda. A brush of science and scientific terminology may be a nice bit of color that they use to make their political arguments, but fundamentally they are involved in a political battle, not a scientific inquery.
The arguments of creationism have not changed since the nineteenth century because the nineteenth century was the last time that creationism was credible scientifically. Darwinism eclipsed creationism in the 1860s. Any serious-minded and intellectually honest person since then has not denied the theory of evolution put forward by Darwin in its most basic form. Anyone who argues against the notion that living forms change over geologic timescales nowadays is either ignorant, stupid, dishonest, or crazed. Ignorance can be cured through argumentation - as for the other proponents of creationism, we should simply ignore them.
Perfect! We just need a bot that uses case-based reasoning to identify the the creationist argument from keyword patterns (e.g. "second law of thermodynamics" or "transitional fossils") then it would identify the appropriate talk.origins page to display as a rebuttal. It sounds no more difficult than setting up an automatic customer support center.
On that note, a less technologically risky approach would be to offshore the process to a support center in India where people could read the creationist complaints and point them to the solution. We'd have to pay salaries, but it might turn out to be affordable if we distributed the cost among overworked biologists.
Gilder admits:
"I've never taken a biology course"
His education would seem to accurately describe his biological knowledge.
That'll be the shortest presentation of all time. Blink and you'll miss it.
The path is clear for ID proponents, they just don't do the work
This might be a good time to publish an aphorism that I coined last night, for what it's worth...
"Saying 'God did it' instead of doing the hard science, is like saying 'My dog ate it' instead of doing the homework assignment."
Very, very good article. You summed it up very nicely.
Ed wrote:
This I am looking forward to. I can see a poster similar to that famous one comparing the scientific achievements of science vs. the Bible where the science column ran the length of the poster while the Bible column was empty, Evolution vs. Intelligent Design.
One thing I'd like to know: has Derbyshire heard an argument younger than the nymphettes he finds attractive?
"Bruce Gordon, now the Director of Research at the DI's Center for Science and Culture..."
I don't think so. My understanding is that he left the CRSC/CSC about the time he wrote the article you quoted above, in the wake of the Polanyi Institute (Baylor) debacle.
Richard-
He just issued a statement on the DI blog two weeks ago as their research director. That surprised me too. I think he left as a fellow back in 2000, but remained at Baylor. Now apparently he is actually working for the DI.
That's very interesting, Ed. It seems that the burst of integrity which he experienced back in 2001 has since worn off.
By the way, here's a link to the statement you mentioned. It's sad to see Gordon employing a simplistic and demonstrably fallacious version of the argument from irreducibile complexity, a version which even Behe has dropped.