Unintelligent designs

Should you base your opinions or beliefs on what intelligent people think? Generally speaking, the answer is Yes. None of us has the time or the ability to explore everything for ourselves. Therefore, on complex matters which we want to understand, we must turn to experts. In doing so, we are forced to adopt a method which the experts themselves do not: rely on majority opinion. But, in science, this is usually safe. While it does not work in relation to hypotheses like string theory, it is quite reliable in a matter like evolutionary theory, on which the experts do not disagree. This is one reason why an argument proffered by Sunday Newsday columnist Winford James last Sunday is entirely without merit. James asserted that, in the debate about teaching Intelligent Design and evolutionary theory, “there are thousands of highly educated supporters of both theories (hypotheses, in the case of ID?) who advance pretty decent arguments, which shows that knowing ‘the truth’ is not a straightforward matter.”

This argument would reveal shoddy thinking no matter who offered it, but it is appallingly shoddy given that it comes from an individual who teaches at UWI’s School of Education. In the first place, being highly educated is no guarantee that someone will not lie. Indeed, one might excuse a person of average intelligence for believing in ID or rejecting evolutionary theory. But when people with real PhDs, such as philosopher William Dembski and cell biologist Michael Behe, claim that evolution doesn’t account for “irreducible complexity,” it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are being deliberately dishonest. In the second place, the division between “highly educated people” is not as even-handed as James implies. Most of the PhDs who support ID and a literal interpretation of the Bible (because ID is just Genesis in fancy dress) are not biologists. But, in any case, people who accept evolutionary theory are more likely to be highly educated than those who reject it. Educated people usually accept the theory because the evidence in favour of evolution is overwhelming, and because there is no other theory that better fits the observed facts.

Yet James writes, “If the evolutionary hypothesis is that life evolves and sustains itself through chance and something called natural selection over bewilderingly long stretches of time, and if by ‘evolution’ we mean either that a species gets more and more biologically complex or that a new species is created from a pre-existing one in survivalist reaction to environmental demands, then there is no observation or experiment, as far as I know, that has shown either of these things to be the case.” The only thing this paragraph proves is that a School of Education lecturer can be comfortable writing about a topic without doing any research to reduce his scientific illiteracy. For instance, species do not react to environmental pressures as James thinks — that is not how adaptation works. Species form because slight mutations confer a survival advantage in a particular environment. If, for example, size provided such an advantage, a creature the size of a mouse, if its offspring gained one percent in mass in every five-year generation, would become the size of an elephant in 100,000 years. That is an eye-blink in geological time.

Then there is the matter of “chance”. The biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, explains: “The true explanation for the existence of life must embody the very antithesis of chance. The antithesis of chance is non-random survival, properly understood...Cumulative selection, by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life’s complex design.” As for observation, just last month, the journal Science picked “Evolution in Action” for its annual breakthrough award. Three different projects — the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome; the human haplotype map that catalogues the pattern of genetic variability among human beings; and three studies into the formation of new species — had this common theme.

But, long before that, fossils, palaeontology, anatomy, biology and genetics had provided ample proof for the validity of Darwinian evolution. Yet James, by his own admission, is quite ignorant of all this. That is bad enough, but he also misrepresents the premise on which his column was based. This was the recent decision by a US federal judge that Intelligent Design could not be presented as an alternative to evolutionary theory in schools, since it was not a scientific theory. James questions “the credibility of judges to arbitrate in matters of knowledge and ideas”, writing that he would like his children to be exposed to both ID and evolution. He says, “...we need as much information as possible to make the best decisions but, paradoxically, the more we come to know, the more we realise how little we know, so complex is this thing called life.”

Which is all well and good, except that the judge didn’t rule that ID couldn’t be taught. He ruled that it could not be taught as if it were a  scientific theory. In any case, ID does not provide information at all. So it makes as much sense to teach ID in a science class as it would to teach faith healing in medical school. It is legitimate to ask, however, if any of this changes the price of gas. That is, does it really matter if a significant section of the populace disbelieves in a fundamental scientific theory like evolution? I believe it does.

I believe that acceptance of evolution, and science in general, reflects a basic mindset of rationality which is essential to creating an ordered society. And I even have a little bit of evidence to back up my belief: a cross-national survey by scientist Gregory S. Paul, which measured levels of social dysfunction using criteria such as homicide, mortality, STDs, youth pregnancy and domestic violence. In his summary, Paul concludes, “No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health.” I presume, though, that James will change his opinions after reading this column. After all, that is one of the tests of a truly educated mind: to abandon a belief when confronted by a superior argument.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh