Four Stakes in the Heart of Intelligent Design
(By CHARLES MCGRATH, New York Times Books Section, January 4, 2009)
Next month is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, who by an odd quirk of history was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln, and to commemorate the occasion there are almost as many Darwin books jamming the conveyor belt as there are new books about Abe. These recent additions to the already vast Darwin literature include biographies, encyclopedias, defenses of evolution and reconsiderations of “The Origin of Species,” which came out 150 years ago, another milestone worth remarking.
But in this country at least, Darwin is not nearly as beloved as Lincoln, and in the struggle for bookstore supremacy he will most likely fall short. Polls repeatedly suggest that at least half of all Americans regard as fundamentally erroneous Darwin’s conclusion that human beings are descended from earlier species, and Kenneth R. Miller in his new book “Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul” points out that among industrialized nations we rank next to last, above only Turkey, in our acceptance of evolution and its principles.
As recent court cases in Kansas, Georgia and Pennsylvania demonstrate, we are still, more than 80 years after the so-called Scopes monkey trial, suing one another over whether evolution ought to be taught in the schools, and for those who are opposed, it’s not just an idle matter. While still a congressman, Tom DeLay linked the teaching of evolution directly to the school shootings at Columbine.
“Teach the controversy” is the watchword of those who want to smuggle the notion of intelligent design into the school curriculum. Expose students to both sides. This position has been endorsed even by President Bush, who has himself wobbled on whether he believes in evolution. In his retirement he might want to look into “Why Evolution Is True,” being published later this month, which goes over the evidence, some of it brand new. The writer, Jerry A. Coyne, is not as eloquent as Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould, probably the two most famous defenders of evolutionary theory, but in some ways he’s more informative about the basics, and he makes an unassailable case.
Like most evolutionary scientists, he contends that there is no controversy to teach, because intelligent design, which is really creationism in a new garment, is simply not a legitimate scientific theory. But if there is no controversy there is certainly an issue " one that might profitably be studied not in biology class but in history or civics. It reveals a lot about the great American tradition of anti-intellectualism, which seems to be getting stronger, not weaker, even as the country supposedly becomes better educated, and about the strange way we’re turning the court system, of all places, into a referee on scientific principles.
A good place to start such a class might be Lauri Lebo’s “Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America,” which is a history of the latest such court case, stemming from a lawsuit filed in Dover, Pa., in 2004 by 11 parents seeking to block the local board of education from making intelligent design part of the ninth-grade biology curriculum. Ms. Lebo was the education reporter on the local paper, The York Daily Record, and her account is both well informed and at times deeply (almost embarrassingly) personal: the whole time she was reporting the story, she was struggling with her own beliefs and also locked in argument with her father, who owned a fundamentalist Christian radio station.
The case cleaved the community in much the same way, especially after it turned out that several of the school board members, who were basically clueless about both evolution and intelligent design, had lied when they claimed religious considerations were not behind their wish to introduce intelligent design. The judge, ruling for the plaintiffs, accused the Dover Board of Education of “breathtaking inanity,” which brought down such a hail of denunciation from anti-evolutionists that for a while federal marshals had to guard his house and family. And when the town of Dover, weary of the whole mess, eventually voted out the old school board, the televangelist Pat Robertson delivered his own verdict: if a disaster were by any chance to hit the town, the citizens shouldn’t look to God for help.
The lead witness for the plaintiffs in the Dover case was Mr. Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and the author of “Only a Theory,” and from his book you can easily see why he was so effective. He is clear and incisive and knows how to make things like the bacterial flagellum comprehensible to the layman. The flagellum, a little rotor-like mechanism that propels bacteria in the digestive system, so closely resembles what we would call an engine of human design that proponents of intelligent design have concluded it must be the work of a master designer.
In a few concise chapters Mr. Miller pretty much dismantles all the claims, such as they are, for the intelligent design movement. The flagellum, he says, far from being a custom design, so to speak, made from parts expressly created for that purpose, is, like so much else in nature, a jury-rigged device made from bits cobbled together from the cellular spare-parts bin.
Mr. Miller also adds an impassioned argument for why the rest of us shouldn’t just turn our heads and let a few benighted school systems teach whatever they want. Good students will eventually see the light, one argument goes, and as for the others " well, they probably weren’t going to be biologists anyway. But Mr. Miller believes that our very scientific soul is at stake and that the argument for intelligent design is just the first step in an attempt to redefine science itself and make it consonant not with scientific truth but with whatever you want to believe.
The reason the anti-Darwinians are willing to go so far is that they see themselves in a life-and-death struggle to keep society from being secularized and traditional values from being undermined. In fact, evolutionary theory contains no moral component whatsoever, but the gap between religious fundamentalists and those who want to preserve the principle of free scientific inquiry may be unbridgeable. Ms. Lebo concludes sadly, “We’re never going to fix this.”
In “Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity From Darwin to Intelligent Design,” first published last year and due out in paperback in April, Peter J. Bowler points out that extreme biblical literalism " of the sort that insists that creation took place as Genesis depicts it " may be more widespread now even than in 1859, when “The Origin of Species” was published.
There was a great 19th-century tradition of clergymen scientists who studied the natural word and especially the fossil record for evidence of the divine plan, and many of them embraced Darwin’s discoveries or at least the possibility that the biblical account might be metaphorical. Only in the 1950s, Mr. Bowler says, did strict biblical literalism become the foundation for mainstream creationism. His book also documents a long history of liberal compromise in which theologians tried to reconcile evolution with Christian belief.
To a large degree, though, these compromises depended on a misunderstanding of Darwinism, clinging to a notion of progress and purposefulness that is not really supported by evolutionary theory. Darwinism, strictly interpreted, describes a world that is random, haphazard and mostly unpredictable. Other compromisers have posited a creator who doesn’t bear much resemblance to the benevolent, all-powerful God of the biblical accounts and doesn’t guarantee much in the way of meaning to life.
There is a middle way, theologians and even some scientists like Mr. Miller keep insisting, but it’s not easily arrived at. The trouble with many of the new philosophies, like Mr. Miller’s idea of “evolutionary cosmology,” which sees our existence in the world as an inherent part of nature itself, is that they lack the clarity, simplicity and emotional satisfaction of traditional religion; and even what Stephen Jay Gould used to call the “cold bath” of Darwinism, when we finally get over thinking of ourselves as the pinnacle of life’s purpose, is in its own wayjust as powerful and arresting. Mr. Bowler thinks that if we understand the history of the debate better we might be able to depolarize it, but that may be too much to hope. Most of us are in the blissful position of having already made up our minds without bothering to think about it.
