Scientific Establishment response to "intelligent design" debate: parody, ridicule... and retaliation

Theory of Intelligent Design: A Debate Evolves
By: Linda Shaw
The Seattle Times (March 30, 2005)

Three years ago, the Ohio Board of Education invited a small but influential Seattle think tank to debate the way evolution is taught in Ohio schools. It was an opportunity for the Discovery Institute to promote its notion of intelligent design, the controversial idea that parts of life are so complex, they must have been designed by some intelligent agent.

Instead, leaders of the institute's Center for Science and Culture decided on what they consider a compromise. Forget intelligent design, they argued, with its theological implications. Just require teachers to discuss evidence that refutes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, as well as what supports it. They called it "teach the controversy," and that's become the institute's rallying cry as a leader in the latest efforts to raise doubts about Darwin in school.

Evolution controversies are brewing in eight school districts, half a dozen state legislatures, and three state boards of education, including the one in Kansas, which wrestled with the issue in 1999 as well.

Dr. Stephen Meyer, Director, Center for Science & Culture, The Discovery Institute

"Why fight when you can have a fun discussion?" asks Stephen Meyer, the center's director. The teach-the-controversy approach, he says, avoids "unnecessary constitutional fights" over the separation of church and state, yet also avoids teaching Darwin's theories as dogma. But what the center calls a compromise, most scientists call a creationist agenda that's couched in the language of science. There is no significant controversy to teach, they say.

"You're lying to students if you tell them that scientists are debating whether evolution took place," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group that defends teaching of evolution in school. The Discovery Institute, she said, is leading a public-relations campaign, not a scientific endeavor. The Discovery Institute is one of the leading organizations working nationally to change how evolution is taught. It works as an adviser, resource and sometimes a critic with those who have similar views.

"There are a hundred ways to get this wrong," says Meyer. "And only a few to get them right." Ohio got it right, he says, when its state Board of Education voted in 2002 to require students to learn that scientists "continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory."

Scott says it was a small victory at most for intelligent-design supporters, but Meyer considers it a significant one — a model other states should follow. Minnesota has adopted similar language. The School Board in Dover, Pa., however, got it wrong, Meyer said, when it required instruction in intelligent design. (The matter is now in court.)

Intelligent design isn't established enough yet for that, Meyer says. He also criticizes the Georgia school board that put stickers on biology textbooks with a surgeon-general-like warning that evolution is "a theory not a fact." The stickers were a "dumb idea," he says bluntly. (A Georgia court ruled they were illegal, and the case is under appeal.)

In Wisconsin, the institute hopes it helped the School Board in the small town of Grantsburg switch to a teach-the-controversy approach. In each place, the institute says it responds to requests for help, although it's working to become more proactive, too. Some critics suspect the ties are even closer.

Center's beginnings

The Center for Science and Culture opened in 1996 as a part of the already-established Discovery Institute, which also studies more earthbound topics such as transportation, economics, technology, bioethics. Founder Bruce Chapman — who has worked as an official in the Reagan administration, head of the U.S. Census Bureau and Washington's secretary of state — became interested in intelligent design after reading a piece Meyer wrote for The Wall Street Journal.

Meyer, then a philosophy professor at Whitworth College in Spokane, was defending a California professor in trouble for talking about intelligent design in biology class. To Chapman, it was an issue of academic freedom. He invited Meyer to come speak at the institute. The more they talked, the more Chapman and others at the institute became interested in offering a home to Meyer and others interested in intelligent design. Intelligent design appealed to their view that life isn't really as unplanned or unguided as Darwin's theories can make it seem.

"It interested me because it seemed so different than the reductionist science that came out of the 19th century ... that everything could be reduced to chemistry," said John West, a political scientist and center associate director.

The private institute has an annual budget of about $3.2 million, and plans to spend about $1.3 million on the intelligent-design work, Chapman says, mostly to support the work of about three dozen fellows. The Fieldstead Charitable Trust, run by Christian conservative Henry Ahmanson and his wife, is one of the largest donors to that effort. Chapman declines to name more.

Meyer, the center's director, is a tall, friendly man who has undergraduate degrees in geology and physics and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, where he wrote his doctorate on the origins of life. He says he's no creationist. He doesn't, for example, believe in a literal reading of the Bible, which would mean the Earth is about 6,000 years old. He doesn't dispute that natural selection played a role in evolution, he just doesn't think it explains everything. He often points to the Cambrian Period, a time more than 500 million years ago when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record.

Meyer and other Discovery Institute fellows say those groups show up too fast, geologically speaking, to have come about through natural selection. That's one of what they see as controversies they want taught in school.

Scientists, however, say the Cambrian Period may not be completely understood, but that doesn't mean the theory of evolution is in trouble.

"They harp and harp on natural selection, as if natural selection is the only thing that evolutionary biologists deal with," says Scott. "Who knows whether natural selection explains the Cambrian body plans. ... So what?"

Scientists consider Meyer a creationist because he maintains that some unnamed intelligence — and Meyer says he personally thinks it is God — has an active hand in creating some complex parts of life.

"I don't know what else to call it other than creationism," said Michael Zimmerman, a critic and dean at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Meyer, however, says he's a scientist, who starts with scientific evidence, not the Bible. His goal — a big one — is to change the very definition of science so that it doesn't rule out the possibility that an intelligent designer is actively at work.

"Science should be open to whatever cause ... can best explain the data," Meyer says. That would be a major change for science, which limits itself to the natural world.

Scott says it would be a "science stopper." "Once you allow yourself to say God did it, you stop looking for naturalistic explanations. If you stop looking, you won't find them," she says. Scott says science isn't an atheistic world view. In science, she says, "It is equally inappropriate to say God did it, or God had nothing to do with it."

The institute's call to "teach the controversy" meets strong resistance. "There's no controversy about whether living things have common ancestors," Scott said. "There's no controversy about whether natural selection is very important in creating the variety of organisms we have today."

While the institute touts its list of 370 scientists who've signed a statement saying they have some doubts about Darwin's theory of natural selection, Scott's organization, in a parody of that effort, has a list of 500 names limited to scientists named Steve or Stephanie, in honor of the late Stephen Jay Gould, a well-known biologist who once wrote that evolution is "one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science."

Public opinion is mixed. Many Christian denominations, including Catholics, see no contradiction between evolution and their faith, but a Gallup Poll last November found that only about a third of the respondents think Darwin's theory of evolution is well supported by scientific evidence.

Meyer hopes the Kansas Board of Education will invite the center to speak at its hearings in May. Speakers will be asked to address the issue the center wants to highlight: whether Kansas' science curriculum helps students understand debate over controversial topics such as evolution. Kansas Citizens for Science, however, has urged a boycott of the hearings, saying the proposals have been "rejected by the science community at large."

Urbane Analysis: Too bad Darwin himself is not around these days to explain why his "Theory of Evolution" should no longer have to stand to the scientific method. Intelligent Design does not replace Darwin's theory, in my view, it merely helps make sense of the enormous gaps of time (and knowledge) for which Darwin's theory simply cannot even begin to offer explanation. Intelligent Design is a great moniker. I tend to think of it as "Purpose Driven Evolution." And I'd like very much to have a fun conversation about it with you.

Chuck Darwin: just looking for answers, not seeking deification

A "Letter to the Editor" is practically compulsory when reading a news story like that above. Here's mine:

The way I understand the position of Seattle’s Discovery Institute (“Theory of Intelligent Design: A debate evolves” Times, March 31), Charles Darwin’s scientific work should still be considered a theory – not a law or constant such as thermodynamics or gravity. Discovery is standing up for scientists with an open mind, who have stated “(w)e are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” It seems to me these scientists are saying, at the root of it all, they are awed by what they find through science – and through that find evidence for a creator.

In response, the National Center for Science Education (“NCSE”) parodies their efforts, using the memory of the late Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard biologist who actually taught Darwin’s theory in its appropriate context – as a theory utilizing scientific method. Comparing the two organizations, clearly Discovery is on the academic high ground here.

As far as the “Project Steve” parody in support of immutability status for Darwin’s theory, can NCSE really say that eminent Cambridge theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is on their side when he wrote in “A Brief History of Time” that “(t)he usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe… If we find the answer to that (a complete theory of the universe), it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.”

From that statement alone, Stephen Hawking belongs on the Discovery Institute’s “complexity of life” list, not engaged in goofy parody. I am proud of the Discovery Institute for standing up to the neo-flat earth academic establishment, and for injecting life into principles of academic freedom.

Post Script: Those brave enough to even raise a fully scientific peer-review discussion about intelligent design risk retaliation (and career destruction - and notice the victim here is NOT an ID supporter, but merely the editor of a periodical) from the "culture" of the atheistic "scientific establishment" - as outlined in this report from the Wall Street Journal:

The Branding of a Heretic: Are religious scientists unwelcome at the Smithsonian?

BY DAVID KLINGHOFFER
Friday, January 28, 2005

The question of whether Intelligent Design (ID) may be presented to public-school students alongside neo-Darwinian evolution has roiled parents and teachers in various communities lately. Whether ID may be presented to adult scientific professionals is another question altogether but also controversial. It is now roiling the government-supported Smithsonian Institution, where one scientist has had his career all but ruined over it.

The scientist is Richard Sternberg, a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The holder of two Ph.D.s in biology, Mr. Sternberg was until recently the managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, where he exercised final editorial authority. The August issue included typical articles on taxonomical topics--e.g., on a new species of hermit crab. It also included an atypical article, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories."

Here was trouble. The piece happened to be the first peer-reviewed article to appear in a technical biology journal laying out the evidential case for Intelligent Design. According to ID theory, certain features of living organisms--such as the miniature machines and complex circuits within cells--are better explained by an unspecified designing intelligence than by an undirected natural process like random mutation and natural selection.

Mr. Sternberg's editorship has since expired, as it was scheduled to anyway, but his future as a researcher is in jeopardy--and that he had not planned on at all. He has been penalized by the museum's Department of Zoology, his religious and political beliefs questioned. He now rests his hope for vindication on his complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) that he was subjected to discrimination on the basis of perceived religious beliefs. A museum spokesman confirms that the OSC is investigating. Says Mr. Sternberg: "I'm spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career."

The offending review-essay was written by Stephen Meyer, who holds a Cambridge University doctorate in the philosophy of biology. In the article, he cites biologists and paleontologists critical of certain aspects of Darwinism--mainstream scientists at places like the University of Chicago, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford.

Mr. Meyer gathers the threads of their comments to make his own case. He points, for example, to the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, when between 19 and 34 animal phyla (body plans) sprang into existence. He argues that, relying on only the Darwinian mechanism, there was not enough time for the necessary genetic "information" to be generated.

ID, he believes, offers a better explanation.

Whatever the article's ultimate merits--beyond the judgment of a layman--it was indeed subject to peer review, the gold standard of academic science. Not that such review saved Mr. Sternberg from infamy. Soon after the article appeared, Hans Sues--the museum's No. 2 senior scientist--denounced it to colleagues and then sent a widely forwarded e-mail calling it "unscientific garbage."

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Zoology Department, Jonathan Coddington, called Mr. Sternberg's supervisor. According to Mr. Sternberg's OSC complaint: "First, he asked whether Sternberg was a religious fundamentalist. She told him no. Coddington then asked if Sternberg was affiliated with or belonged to any religious organization. . . . He then asked where Sternberg stood politically; . . . he asked, 'Is he a right-winger? What is his political affiliation?'

" The supervisor (who did not return my phone messages) recounted the conversation to Mr. Sternberg, who also quotes her observing: "There are Christians here, but they keep their heads down."

Worries about being perceived as "religious" spread at the museum. One curator, who generally confirmed the conversation when I spoke to him, told Mr. Sternberg about a gathering where he offered a Jewish prayer for a colleague about to retire. The curator fretted: "So now they're going to think that I'm a religious person, and that's not a good thing at the museum."

In October, as the OSC complaint recounts, Mr. Coddington told Mr. Sternberg to give up his office and turn in his keys to the departmental floor, thus denying him access to the specimen collections he needs. Mr. Sternberg was also assigned to the close oversight of a curator with whom he had professional disagreements unrelated to evolution. "I'm going to be straightforward with you," said Mr. Coddington, according to the complaint. "Yes, you are being singled out." Neither Mr. Coddington nor Mr. Sues returned repeated phone messages asking for their version of events.

Mr. Sternberg begged a friendly curator for alternative research space, and he still works at the museum. But many colleagues now ignore him when he greets them in the hall, and his office sits empty as "unclaimed space." Old colleagues at other institutions now refuse to work with him on publication projects, citing the Meyer episode. The Biological Society of Washington released a vaguely ecclesiastical statement regretting its association with the article. It did not address its arguments but denied its orthodoxy, citing a resolution of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that defined ID as, by its very nature, unscientific.

It may or may not be, but surely the matter can be debated on scientific grounds, responded to with argument instead of invective and stigma. Note the circularity: Critics of ID have long argued that the theory was unscientific because it had not been put forward in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Now that it has, they argue that it shouldn't have been because it's unscientific. They banish certain ideas from certain venues as if by holy writ, and brand heretics too. In any case, the heretic here is Mr. Meyer, a fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, not Mr. Sternberg, who isn't himself an advocate of Intelligent Design.
According to the OSC complaint, one museum specialist chided him by saying: "I think you are a religiously motivated person and you have dragged down the Proceedings because of your religiously motivated agenda." Definitely not, says Mr. Sternberg. He is a Catholic who attends Mass but notes: "I would call myself a believer with a lot of questions, about everything. I'm in the postmodern predicament."

Intelligent Design, in any event, is hardly a made-to-order prop for any particular religion. When the British atheist philosopher Antony Flew made news this winter by declaring that he had become a deist--a believer in an unbiblical "god of the philosophers" who takes no notice of our lives--he pointed to the plausibility of ID theory.

Darwinism, by contrast, is an essential ingredient in secularism, that aggressive, quasi-religious faith without a deity. The Sternberg case seems, in many ways, an instance of one religion persecuting a rival, demanding loyalty from anyone who enters one of its churches--like the National Museum of Natural History.