www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050530fa_fact
Issue of 2005-05-30 Posted 2005-05-23 If you are in ninth grade and live in Dover, Pennsylvania, you are learni ng things in your biology class that differ considerably from what your peers just a few miles away are learning. In particular, you are learnin g that Darwins theory of evolution provides just one possible explanati on of life, and that another is provided by something called intelligent design. You are being taught this not because of a recent breakthrough in some scientists laboratory but because the Dover Area School Distric ts board mandates it. In October, 2004, the board decreed that student s will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwins theory and of other th eories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. While the events in Dover have received a good deal of attention as a sig n of the political times, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the science thats said to underlie the theory of intelligent design, often called ID Many scientists avoid discussing ID for strategic r easons. If a scientific claim can be loosely defined as one that scienti sts take seriously enough to debate, then engaging the intelligent-desig n movement on scientific grounds, they worry, cedes what it most desires : recognition that its claims are legitimate scientific ones. Meanwhile, proposals hostile to evolution are being considered in more th an twenty states; earlier this month, a bill was introduced into the New York State Assembly calling for instruction in intelligent design for a ll public-school students. The Kansas State Board of Education is weighi ng new standards, drafted by supporters of intelligent design, that woul d encourage schoolteachers to challenge Darwinism. Senator Rick Santorum , a Pennsylvania Republican, has argued that intelligent design is a le gitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes. An ID-friendly amendment that he sponsored to the No Child Left Behind A ctrequiring public schools to help students understand why evolution g enerates so much continuing controversywas overwhelmingly approved in the Senate. Clearly, a policy of limited scientific engagement has failed. First of all, intelligent design is not what people often assume it is. Unlike earlier generation s of creationiststhe so-called Young Earthers and scientific creationis tsproponents of intelligent design do not believe that the universe was created in six days, that Earth is ten thousand years old, or that the fossil record was deposited during Noahs flood. Although the movement is loosely allied with, and heavily funded by, various conservative Christian groupsand althou gh ID plainly maintains that life was createdit is generally silent a bout the identity of the creator. The movements main positive claim is that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to int elligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natur alor, more precisely, by any mindlessprocess. Instead, the design inhe rent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart. Darwins theory of e volution was meant to show how the fantastically complex features of org anismseyes, beaks, brainscould arise without the intervention of a des igning mind. According to Darwinism, evolution largely reflects the comb ined action of random mutation and natural selection. A random mutation in an organism, like a random change in any finely tuned machine, is alm ost always bad. Thats why you dont, screwdriver in hand, make arbitrar y changes to the insides of your television. But, once in a great while, a random mutation in the DNA that makes up an organisms genes slightly improves the function of some organ and thus the survival of the organi sm. In a species whose eye amounts to nothing more than a primitive patc h of light-sensitive cells, a mutation that causes this patch to fold in to a cup shape might have a survival advantage. While the old type of or ganism can tell only if the lights are on, the new type can detect the d irection of any source of light or shadow. Since shadows sometimes mean predators, that can be valuable information. The new, improved type of o rganism will, therefore, be more common in the next generation. Repeated over billions of years, this process of incre mental improvement should allow for the gradual emergence of organisms t hat are exquisitely adapted to their environments and that look for all the world as though they were designed. By 1870, about a decade after T he Origin of Species was published, nearly all biologists agreed that l ife had evolved, and by 1940 or so most agreed that natural selection wa s a key force driving this evolution. Advocates of intelligent design point to two developments that in their v iew undermine Darwinism. The first is the molecular revolution in biolog y Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, molecular biologists revealed a st aggering and unsuspected degree of complexity within the cells that make up all life. s defenders argue, lies beyond the a bilities of Darwinism to explain. Second, they claim that new mathematic al findings cast doubt on the power of natural selection. Selection may play a role in evolution, but it cannot accomplish what biologists suppo se it can. These claims have been championed by a tireless group of writers, most of them associated with the Center for Science and Culture at the Discover y Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that sponsors projects in scienc e, religion, and national defense, among other areas. The centers fello ws and advisersincluding the emeritus law professor Phillip E Johnson, the philosopher Stephen C Meyer, and the biologist Jonathan Wellshave published an astonishing number of articles and books that decry the os tensibly sad state of Darwinism and extoll the virtues of the design alt ernative. But Johnson, Meyer, and Wells, while highly visible, are mainl y strategists and popularizers. The scientific leaders of the design mov ement are two scholars, one a biochemist and the other a mathematician. To assess intelligent design is to assess their arguments. Michael J Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University (and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute), is a biochemist who wr ites technical papers on the structure of DNA. He is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known. His book Darwins Black Box (199 6) was a surprise best-seller and was named by National Review as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Fifty years ago, he says, any biologist could tell stories like the one about the eyes evolution. But such stories, Behe notes, invariably bega n with cells, whose own evolutionary origins were essentially left unexp lained. This was harmless enough as long as cells werent qualitatively more complex than the larger, more visible aspects of the eye. Yet when biochemists began to dissect the inner workings of the cell, what they f ound floored them. A cell is packed full of exceedingly complex structur eshundreds of microscopic machines, each performing a specific job. The Give me a cell and Ill give you an eye story told by Darwinists, he says, began to seem suspect: starting with a cell was starting ninety pe r cent of the way to the finish line. Behes main claim is that cells are complex not just in degree but in kin d Cells contain structures that are irreducibly complex. This means t hat if you remove any single part from such a structure, the structure n o longer functions. Behe offers a simple, nonbiological example of an ir reducibly complex object: the mousetrap. A mousetrap has several partsp latform, spring, catch, hammer, and hold-down barand all of them have t o be in place for the trap to work. If you remove the spring from a mous etrap, it isnt slightly worse at killing mice; This flagellum is a tiny propeller attached to the back of some bacteria. The flagellum comprises r...
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