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The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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counterpoints in science Design for Ignorance The creationists’ latest attack on evolution and the First Amendment hides behind the name “intelligent design.” First articulated by clergyman William Paley in 1802, years before the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution, intelligent design posits that just as the existence of a watch implies the expert hand of a watchmaker, our complex universe could only have been created by an all-knowing being, namely God. This new wave of creationists (or Neo-Creos, as philosopher Philip Kitcher calls them), insists that intelligent design should be taught in schools as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. They have recruited to their cause two prominent faith-based leaders, George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI—which bodes ill for our traditional separation of church and state and for coming generations of students. When I was growing up in the small Southern town of Danville, Virginia, it seemed there was a church on nearly every street corner. One sported a sign out front that read “God is the answer.” One day, I noticed these words scrawled underneath: “What was the question?” This little dialogue pithily summarizes thousands of volumes of discourse between true believers and skeptical scientists. To put it in watchmaking terms, believers look at the timepiece and wonder: who made it? Scientists want to know: how does it work? Both are seeking answers, but to different questions. My parents were orthodox Jews, and I attended religious school in addition to public school. In one, I studied the Old Testament in the original Hebrew; in the other, I became intensely interested in science. In the book of Genesis, I read that God created the Earth on the third day and the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day. My science books explained that the stars existed long before the formation of the Earth. Oops! Here was a serious conflict. Was I to believe the words of the Holy Book or the Book of Nature? For me, it was no contest. I chose to go with science, which tries to unravel the physical expressions of nature, rather than the just-so story conceived by my ancestors about 2,500 years ago and handed down more or less unchanged since then. My reasons were many. For one thing, science is flexible—it absorbs and accommodates new information. The body of scientific knowledge has increased enormously even in the past century. The wise men of 25 centuries ago knew nothing of heliocentric theory, gravitational theory, atomic theory, relativity theory, quantum theory, or evolutionary theory. These are all “just theories,” according to the creationists, but without them modern space travel, airplane flight, nuclear power, and biotechnology would not exist. For another, the scientific attitude was more convincing. The findings of science rest on rational impartiality and on a strict regard for accuracy and controlled experiment. Science does not accept authority or religious dogma at face value, but instead searches for evidence based on observation and experiment. What scientists do is make observations, form hypotheses, and publish their results so that other scientists can either verify or invalidate these ideas with new observations and experiments. Thus the body of knowledge is always changing in response to new discoveries and theories. Creationism, masquerading now as “intelligent design,” does not incorporate either of these elements. It is not a growing body of knowledge but a fixed corpus of received writings. It is not impartial but directs all its efforts to proving the truth of these writings. It makes no original observations and devises no experiments. Its activities opposing science and evolution are based on faith in sectarian doctrine. To paraphrase nineteenth-century writer Ambrose Bierce, this is belief without evidence in reports without knowledge of events without parallel. It is not surprising that President George W. Bush advocates teaching intelligent design alongside Darwinian evolution in public schools, since he has supported so many other faith-based initiatives in public life. The Bush White House is perceived in scientific circles as the most anti-science administration in memory. As Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the August 22, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, the Bush administration “has altered, suppressed, or overridden scientific findings on global warming; missile defense; H.I.V. AIDS; pollution from industrial farming and oil drilling; forest management and endangered species; environmental health, including lead and mercury poisoning in children and safety standards for drinking water; and non-abstinence methods of birth control and sexually-transmitted disease prevention. It has grossly misled the public on the number of stem-cell lines available for research. It has appointed ideologues to scientific advisory committees and has forced out scientists who persist in pointing out inconvenient facts.” I’m equally disappointed that the new Pope, by supporting creationism (a.k.a. intelligent design), contradicts the more enlightened position of his late predecessor, Pope John Paul II, on the origins of the universe. In an article in the July 7 New York Times, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna, claiming to speak for his close friend Pope Benedict XVI, wrote that “the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things,” and criticized “neo-Darwinian” scientists who see “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.” In 1982, I was one of twelve scientists invited to a conference on primate evolution at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The Pontifical Academy is the oldest scientific organization in Europe. Founded in 1603, it got off to a rocky start by condemning Galileo for writing that the Earth goes around the sun rather than vice versa. Pope John Paul II apologized to Galileo some four centuries after the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his support of Copernican theory. The Pope accepted and published our conference’s report stating that “masses of evidence render the applications of the concept of evolution to man and other primates beyond serious dispute.” However, in a speech at Parma, Italy, on March 15, 1990, Pope Benedict XVI-to-be Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated, “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.” Several science journals, including New Scientist, Science, and Nature, report that many Catholic scientists are publicly disagreeing with the Pope’s stated positions. Nations ruled by governments that replace science with ideology have not fared well during the past century. Stalin destroyed Soviet agriculture and genetics by appointing Trofim Lysenko, an anti-Darwinian amateur, as czar of crop management. Mao Zedong led China in a great leap backwards by unleashing the Cultural Revolution, a radical sociopolitical movement characterized by military rule, terrorism, purges, and educational restructuring, which eliminated science and banished most academics and educated people to hard labor in the countryside. Millions starved and industrial output ground to a halt. Only recently has China begun a remarkable recovery by educating a new generation in science-based skills and methods. Ironically, in their efforts to replace science with superstition in public schools, creationists are harming their own children. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on August 29, 2005, that the Association of Christian Schools International is suing the University of California. This 800-school group accuses the University of discriminating against high schools that teach creationism and other conservative Christian viewpoints. If these children are less likely to be admitted to top-notch universities, their future opportunities for learning and employment will be stifled. A UC spokeswoman responded that the university had a right to set course requirements and to ensure that students are fully prepared with broad knowledge and the critical thinking skills necessary to succeed. Perhaps the university should make a deal with the creationists. Admissions directors doubtless will view parochial schools more kindly if they teach Darwinian evolution alongside Genesis, just as the creationists are demanding of public schools. Let the children decide, as I did, whether the story of our universe being created in six days a few thousand years ago holds up against the discovery of galaxies that must have formed billions of years ago, radioactive isotope dates that age the Earth at 4.6 billion years, a fossil record showing vast changes in Earth’s species over long periods of time, and molecular biology’s revelation of the close relationship between humans and chimpanzees. Of course, there’s no way the fundamentalists, who cry how unfair it is that evolution and creationism are not presented side by side in the public schools, will let the dangerous evolutionary heresy into their own hermetic world, where it might blow away their design for ignorance. In his 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, linguist H.W. Fowler discusses the word expectorate. His research indicates the word was coined by prudish Americans seeking to avoid saying the word spit. Since then, he writes, expectorate “has outgrown its gentility & become instead the plain rude word for the plain thing; it must be discouraging to have to begin the search for decent obscurity all over again—with so promising a failure behind one, too.” The Neo-Creos must feel the same way. While the name “evolution” has remained the same for 150 years, accommodating even rapid advances in the physical and biological sciences, the fundamentalists are on their third version of the term. It’s as though they were ashamed of it, or had something to hide. First there was creationism. When the general public began equating that word with the belief in a flat Earth, the name was modified to “creation-science.” This self-canceling term also failed to sell the product. And now we have intelligent design, which concedes that the Earth isn’t flat and wasn’t made in a day, but insists that evolution is “only a theory” and God is the Answer to all biological questions. Everyone now knows that intelligent design is really creationism-lite, an old-fashioned elixir for getting schoolchildren high on religion. The label changes, but what’s in the bottle remains the same. Now the Neo-Creos’ cover has been blown yet again, so they will have to dream up a new label in the unceasing effort to sneak this moonshine past the First Amendment, which forbids the teaching of religious doctrine in public schools. If the creationists succeed in their latest assault
on public education, here are some likely exam questions and answers for
the Intelligent Design course: Jerold M. Lowenstein is professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. jlowen@itsa.ucsf.edu |