Deceptive designs

When people speak to one another, they are engaging in a feat of immense complexity. Consider even the simplest exchange. Michelle: “UWI fete next week?” Vishnu: “I find the price kinda hot.” In order for the listener to respond appropriately, he has to understand the meanings of the words, the structure of the sentence, what kind of response the speaker wants, and the cultural context in which the words are used. In the above two sentences, Vishnu must know that “UWI fete” refers to the all-inclusive annual Carnival party, while Michelle must understand that the response does not mean “No,” it means “I am hesitant for financial reasons, but may go.” And all that is separate from the purely technical requirements of understanding language itself.

The parsing required to keep track of the meaning of a sentence is incredibly complex: a person has to identify subjects, verbs, objects, group words into phrases, determine which phrase is the subject of which group, and so on. On top of that, people speak in fragments, backtrack, use indefinite pronouns and a thousand other things. So, until a half-century ago, linguists could only conclude that, despite the ease with which people routinely solve these problems, human communication was well-nigh impossible. Then, in 1957, the philosopher Paul Grice came up with a suggestion that pointed researchers in fruitful directions. Grice pointed out that the act of communicating relies on a mutual expectation of cooperation between speaker and listener. A speaker implicitly guarantees that what he is saying is relevant, contains new information, and fits in with what the listener is already thinking so the latter can make logical inferences. The listener therefore expects the speaker to be informative, truthful, relevant, unambiguous, brief, and orderly.

Sunday Newsday columnist and School of Education lecturer Winford James transgresses almost all of these criteria in his five-part (so far) series titled “Intelligent Evolution?”. If a person writes at such length arguing that a creationist belief system titled ‘Intelligent Design’ should be taught in science classrooms alongside evolutionary theory, then the reader can reasonably conclude that James is making a case for Intelligent Design and attempting to undermine evolutionary theory, or is simply ignorant. But, in response to my taking him to task for this, James claims that I have, in deliberately dishonest fashion, misrepresented his views. James’s technique is revealing. According to him, I wrongly describe him as saying that a US judge ruled that ID could not be taught at all, whereas what the judge really said was that ID could not be taught in science classrooms. To prove his point, James quotes himself as writing that the judge said that it was unconstitutional for schools “to present ID as an alternative to evolution in state high school biology courses.” 

But James carefully didn’t quote my exact words to prove that I had misrepresented him. What I actually wrote was specifically in response to James questioning “the credibility of judges to arbitrate in matters of knowledge and ideas” and writing that he would like his children to be exposed to both ID and evolution. I then said: “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.” So I was actually rebutting two things: first, James’s segue from science classes to the general statement that he would like his children to be taught ID; and, second, his implication that ID had some scientific basis. So James commits the double duplicity of not quoting me, and not quoting me out of context.

He therefore violated Grice’s requirements of unambiguity, relevance, and truthfulness. He also refuses to be informative, since at no point in his five-part series does he actually explain what ID is. Not a word about “irreducible complexity,” for example, even though this is a central tenet of ID. Its proponents claim that, at a molecular level, evolution cannot explain the processes that allow an organism to function. But this is merely a more technical variation on the standard creationist canard that the human eye is too complex to have evolved by chance.

However, evolution doesn’t work by chance. It works through natural and sexual selection and genetic mutations. And biologists have long demonstrated the steps through which a complex eye can evolve from light-sensitive pigments to a pinhole camera structure to a proto-lens and so on. Ironically enough, the human eye is actually a good argument against intelligent design, since the retina is so made that the light-sensitive cells point away from the light instead of towards it. This is why we have a blind spot, and any human engineer — well, maybe not Stephan Gift — would have done a better job. But evolutionary processes, since they take place in small steps, probably had to work with whatever structures were already there. So molecular biologists have discovered families of genes, descended from a single DNA sequence, which now perform various functions (eg globins affect muscle movement and oxygen exchange in the blood).

It is for all these reasons that I accept evolution as a fact. But since, unlike James, I am upfront about my views, he describes me as having “apparently unshakeable certitudes about evolution.” This is pretty much the same as saying that someone has apparently unshakeable certitudes that the Earth is round. But James is clearly ignorant of the most basic tenets of science, including the requirements of a good scientific theory: (1) guided by natural law; (2) explanatory by reference to natural law; (3) testable against the empirical world; (4) falsifiable — ie which allow the introduction of counter-evidence. ID fails on all these grounds. Evolutionary theory fulfils them all. And, since science classrooms are for teaching science, ID has no place there. But none of this will convince James, Gift, and others of that ilk to change their uninformed views on organic evolution. I just hope there aren’t any moves afoot to have ID introduced in science courses at UWI or elsewhere.

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