Are Darwinists Chickens?
Tristan Abbey

Let’s suppose you hold two Ph.D.s in evolutionary and theoretical biology. You edit the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. You’ve had dozens of articles published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Morphology and the Journal of Biological Systems. You’ve lectured, spoken, or taught at universities across the United States , from Northern Michigan University to the University of South Carolina . You are not a proponent of intelligent design, but your research has led you to conclude neo-Darwinian mechanisms are not sufficient to account for the complexity of life. As you prepare to resign as scheduled from the Proceedings, you also approve publication of a scientific paper written by a Cambridge-trained philosopher of science theorizing that an intelligent designer played a role in the origin of animal body plans. What happens?

You’re asked if you’re a “right-winger,” accused of being a “creationist,” and prevented from continuing research. The Biological Society of Washington quickly does damage control and publicly explains that the paper was an “inappropriate” mistake, discounting the fact that you pursued the peer-review process. Your career as a scientist hangs in the balance.

Believe it or not, this actually happened to a researcher named Rick Sternberg. The paper in question was “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories” by Stephen C. Meyer. This is a classic, and scary, case of censorship by orthodox Darwinians, who are afraid of any sort of critique of their sacred methodological naturalism, the philosophical bias permeating much of the scientific community that prevents any non-natural explanation from being considered. No controversy exists, they tell us.

But what of the facts? Darwinists have failed to explain how animal body plans arose, where the precursors to the Cambrian phyla are, how cooptation actually worked to produce irreducibly complex systems, and countless other problems with standard theory. Hundreds of scientists have signed petitions and letters criticizing neo-Darwinism, asserting that it cannot explain everything it pretends to. Many have written books pointing out where Darwinian mechanisms have failed to explain some aspects of biology. The peer-reviewed literature is bursting with examples of papers written by scientists who do not endorse intelligent design, but nonetheless critique aspects of evolutionary theory. If this is not a scientific controversy, what is?

The attraction of intelligent design is its broad scope. Astrophysicists, for example, have explored the fine-tuning of the universe and of the Earth, theorizing that because so many aspects had to be just right that an intelligent designer is responsible. Origins of life researchers, on the other hand, can point to the decades of failures that have not shown that life can originate spontaneously by purely natural processes. Geneticists can look at “junk” DNA, ask what it does, and discover various functions for allegedly useless sequences. Development biologists can observe embryological development and conclude that generative entrenchment suggests body plans didn’t evolve from a universal common ancestor. Molecular biologists can determine various biological systems are irreducibly complex. And on, and on…

This is not to say that intelligent design is necessarily the truth. Years from now intelligent design may indeed be a laughable idea and its proponents relegated to the dustbin of crackpot theories, alongside the Flat Earth and Marxist-Leninist “science.” But let’s wait and see.

It is regrettable that so much of the work in intelligent design is kept hush-hush. There are many scientists, professors, and biology students who keep that aspect of their lives a secret, for fear of ruining their careers with a careless phrase or foolish affiliation with a controversial organization like the Discovery Institute. The cases of Rick Sternberg, Roger DeHart, Jonathan Wells, and others seem to indicate that their careers would, indeed, be at the very least adversely affected were they to come out of the closet.

Which brings us to a very simple question: If the evidence is so strongly in favor of evolution, and if intelligent design is so clearly wrong, what is the Darwinian establishment afraid of?

Tristan Abbey is the director of the Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center (www.idurc.org)

The Dogmatists' New Clothes
Paul Laddis

Creationism is an example of what Richard Dawkins calls a “virus of the mind,” a cultural parasite which spreads simply because it is good at spreading, not because it benefits its host. Just last month editorials in Science and Nature warned of a newer, more insidious strain called “Intelligent Design.”

Why do the editors of Nature consider ID “a threat to the very core of scientific reason?” (Nature 434; 1053) ID is nothing but creationism dressed up as science. But this disguise makes it alarmingly effective in slipping past Americans’ defenses in sound bytes and presentations like Michael Behe’s recent lectures, which were part of the “Veritas Forum at Stanford,” and causes considerable confusion about the nature of science. Strip away the rhetoric, and ID is completely devoid of scientific merit. Behe’s argument may be summarized as follows:

1. Everyone agrees that living things appear designed.

2. There are “structural obstacles” to the evolution of biological systems.

3. Therefore, the best explanation is that these systems were in fact designed by an intelligent being.

The “structural obstacles” refer to Behe’s infamous notion of “irreducible complexity.” A structure is irreducibly complex if removing one component causes it to stop functioning completely. If the structure minus one component does nothing, it could not have evolved, or so the argument goes. After all, natural selection can only favor intermediate forms if they confer some sort of advantage. Otherwise, the whole structure would have to come into being fully-formed, which as just about any scientist will tell you, is absurdly improbable. Darwin himself acknowledged that his theory could not account for any structure that could not be produced by a series of “small successive changes” to existing components, but could find no such example.

Behe presented as his sole example a bacterial flagellum. Flagella are whiplike complexes of thirty-odd proteins which function like outboard molecular motors. However, he neglected to point out the large number of published examples of homologous structures, or proto-flagella, which show that small subsets of the proteins that make up the flagellum could have a selectable function. Any doubt that Behe is aware of this fact was erased when students brought up a prominent example, the Type Three Secretory System, after the lecture. Basically, the TTSS is the same as the mechanism used to export flagellar components to the exterior of the cell, but it is part of another pathway that secretes bacterial toxins.

Even if the flagellum were “irreducibly complex,” it could still have evolved. In treating the protein components of the flagellum as irreducible black boxes, Behe once again conveniently omits basic facts of which he is obviously aware. These include Darwin ’s reason for believing all biological structures can be produced by gradual change: evolution co-opts existing structures for new purposes.

It may be improbable that a protein component would suddenly arise ex nihilo. But the structure of proteins and the way they function together often changes gradually, e.g. through comparatively small “point mutations.” The ancestral form of the complex could very well have done its job with fewer components.

To visualize how this works, imagine a simpler system consisting of a protein A which performs some function, and a protein B which makes A more effective. Over evolutionary time, this system undergoes a series of “small, successive changes,” i.e. point mutations: A becomes A2, B becomes B2, A2 becomes A3, and so on. It is quite possible for natural selection to favor such stepwise improvements in the system, even if A becomes increasingly dependent on B, to the point where An and Bn have no selectable function individually.

There are also many mechanisms for the addition of new components. For example, gene duplications are quite common, and redundant copies of A will tend to diverge into specialized forms. In many cases this also explains the origin of B. Far from being impossible in principle, we should expect that many of Behe’s “irreducibly complex” structures evolved from just one protein!

Stripped of its main premise, Behe’s argument goes nowhere. However, a more fundamental problem for the “theory” of ID is that it mostly consists of pointing to things that evolution supposedly can’t explain. This tends to draw attention away from the fact that ID can’t explain anything.

What I mean is this: any scientific theory must be testable. Since Behe has not put forward any model of the “designer,” his “theory” makes no predictions, only ad hoc suppositions. In short, ID is not science. True, evolutionary theory has yet to produce a complete, detailed account of the history of life (hence, it continues to be a productive area of research.) By presenting ID as a viable alternative, Behe propagates an absurd double-standard of proof which undermines real scientific understanding. Ostensibly, the purpose of the Veritas Forum was to discuss religious issues. I would be the last person to advocate “censoring” anyone’s personal beliefs, although private Universities have that right. However, I wish the organizers had chosen speakers who know where belief ends and scientific fact begins. University policy dictates that Stanford’s resources be used to further its basic mission of producing and disseminating knowledge. Why have those resources been used to elevate pseudoscience? The Stanford community deserves an explanation.