“The Dispute Over Darwin: Academic Freedom and the ID Movement”

I wrote an essay for the Academic Freedom Day Essay/Video contest, and here it is, if you want to read it. It’s also up on the Young Australian Skeptics website as well. It explores the nature of intelligent design, the evolution controversy and whether or not Academic Freedom should be applied to the whole situation.

For those not knowledgeable about the contest, it was organised by the Discovery Institute, and will be judged by five of some of its high-profile fellows, including Michael Behe and Phillip Johnson. I intend, with this essay, to give them a side of the dispute they may not see while reading and judging the other entries: reality. And yes, it intends to be all deceptive, being neutral at the start and getting slowly more and more aggressive as you approach the end. Aren’t I evil?

Essay after the jump.

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The Dispute Over Darwin: Academic Freedom and the ID Movement

By Jack Scanlan

In 1859, a middle-aged naturalist named Charles Darwin published a book titled On the Origin of Species, and started a revolution in modern biology. In it, he argued that the differing species of organisms that people saw living around them could have been formed by a natural process, a process that very few had considered to be important in the diversification of life on Earth: natural selection. 150 years since the injection of this revolutionary idea into the public and scientific arenas, natural selection-based evolution is still going strong and is the dominant theory for the development of life on Earth. But should it be this way? Should Darwinian thought maintain its grip on the question of biological diversity, and should school children learn about other possible alternatives that have arisen since On the Origin of Species was published? These are the questions of Academic Freedom.

Evolutionary theory is taught in nearly every university and high school on the planet as part of their biology courses, and most teachers go along with this curriculum without fuss or criticism. However, sometimes a teacher may feel that their students are not seeing both sides of the question, as they see it: their students are not being exposed to the theory of intelligent design (ID), an alternative to the traditional biological principle of evolution by natural selection. The scientific and academic community has widely shunned this push for what these teachers call their “right of academic freedom”, and bills promoting the right for teachers to teach intelligent design have been continuously shot down throughout the United States by school boards and courts who reject it as a legitimate scientific endeavor. Many people see this as an unfair attack upon what they consider a much-needed break from the dogmatism of Darwin’s ideas, and so they have banded together to form many different groups and organizations to help promote the teaching of intelligent design, the strengths and weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory and the overall nature of Academic Freedom. One such organization is the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (CSC), which is comprised of more than 40 scientists, philosophers, historians and legal experts from many varying fields of expertise. The CSC leads the charge in promoting ID awareness in the public consciousness, supporting the introduction of evolutionary criticism into public schools and lending a hand to scientists and researchers working on further developing the theory of intelligent design. It could be easily said that the CSC is the most important association in the modern ID movement.

But what is intelligent design, and why are there so many people on either side of the debate? Intelligent design as a concept has been around since the ancient Greeks, but it was first given its modern name in Of Pandas and People, a high school textbook written by Dean H. Kenyon and Percival Davis in 1989. The exact definition of intelligent design has been left basically unchanged since the first edition of Pandas, and intelligentdesign.org, a sister site to the CSC’s web page, defines ‘intelligent design’ as follows:

“Intelligent design refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”

To rephrase what intelligentdesign.org is saying, intelligent design is a path of scientific inquiry into the origins of various things in the Universe, including biological systems, which includes intelligence as a primary cause for their existence. It is the definition of “intelligence” that is the source of most of the controversy surrounding intelligent design, because many critics of the theory claim that this is a reference to a specific supernatural deity, usually the Christian God. If this is true, they say, intelligent design is little more than creationism in a “cheap tuxedo”. Supporters of intelligent design reject this however, and say that the theory cannot pinpoint the identity of the intelligent agent.

The reason the question of whether intelligent design is religiously based matters so much is because of the implications of whether or not it is a form of creationism. If it were creationism, public schools in the United States could not, by law, teach it as an alternative to a scientific theory, as that would be a governmental establishment of religion: something that is prohibited by the US Constitution. Intelligent design proponents, especially fellows from the CSC, have spoken out against such a portrayal of intelligent design, and argued for its existence as a secular, scientific idea. Many articles with this theme can be found on the CSC’s website.

It starts to get hazy when the question of intelligent design’s nature is answered. On one hand, the CSC tries its best to remain as secular as possible, and does not promote any one ideology over another, even though its constituent members have varied theological beliefs: Paul Nelson is a young earth creationist, while Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic, but both are CSC fellows. However, a document leaked from the Discovery Institute in 1999, entitled “The Wedge”, tells a different story. The document, outlining an overall plan for the organization’s actions in the future, specifically mentions “God” in the context of a creative force, and the goal to seek “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its legacies”. These sentiments were mirrored on an early version of the CSC’s website, unavailable now except through web archive services. The site has since been changed to reflect their now-secular public image, and the Discovery Institute has vigorously denied the importance of the document.

One must feel at least slightly skeptical of the CSC’s motives, especially since the co-founder of the Discovery Institute and father of the ID movement, Phillip E. Johnson, has spoken out against “materialism” in science (basically evolutionary theory), defining it as something that brings people away from God, something that The Wedge and the original CSC mission statement also condemned. If this is something that the co-founder of the movement is doing, you could easily reach the conclusion that the inclusion of intelligent design in high school science classrooms by individual school boards could also be done for not-so secular purposes, opposite to the values of ‘academic freedom’ that the CSC promote. School boards could easily be introducing ID to replace the “materialistic” theory of evolution and replace it with something that leaves open the possibility for the personal religious beliefs of the student to be true. While that doesn’t necessarily dirty the CSC’s current aim for a secular ID movement, it could stain the motives of any supporters outside the Discovery Institute.
Intelligent design proponents, such as the fellows of the CSC, have long claimed in their definition of ID that it is a scientific theory. This is what intelligentdesign.org has to say about ID’s scientific basis:

“The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.”

Does this make intelligent design scientific? Unfortunately not. Irreducible complexity is a possible marker for intelligent causation in the history of a particular biological system, but it is not incompatible with evolutionary theory, as the systems did not have to have a certain functionality goal in mind as they evolved towards it, and may have taken up many different functions before they arrived at the current function where they were defined as ‘irreducibly complex’. As such, irreducible complexity within a system is not sufficient to conclude that that system was designed. Irreducibly complex systems that could not be explained by evolutionary theory would seem to be evidence for ID only, but this is an argument from ignorance, and is no way to base a supposedly scientific theory. Complex and specified information can also arise through the natural process of evolution: for example, gene duplications can produce copies of genes that can then be altered by mutation and natural selection, forming entirely new information within the genome of an organism that fits the role it evolved to fill. If the evidence for intelligent design is completely compatible with evolutionary theory, then why do we need to invoke it at all?

But we can forget all that for now. Let’s just assume for this moment that intelligent design is scientific. Should it, given that it is legitimate science, be taught in high schools? If so, Academic Freedom is a genuine movement that nobody who supports education should oppose. But if not, Academic Freedom could be a pernicious strategy to get the pet theory of a few scientists into the public school system. The question really revolves around whether or not science classrooms should accept and teach a theory that is not the mainstream theory in science and has little support. If a theory is still in the stages of being verified and tested by the scientific community, it could easily be argued that students should not learn about it as an ‘alternative’ to the mainstream theory, because at any moment the newcomer may be falsified and the students would learn obsolete knowledge and time in the classroom would be wasted. Intelligent design is not at the level, given that it is scientific, which is thoroughly questionable, that it can challenge evolutionary theory as the main scientific theory of the development and diversity of life on Earth. The ID community needs to get papers published, they need to convince other scientists and they need to act like an unbiased community of researchers. Injecting their views into school classrooms is not the way to go about it.

A quote that the CSC loves to use in support of Academic Freedom is one taken from On the Origin, pg. 2:

“A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question”

This quote is used to support the push for Academic Freedom in high schools and universities, but on closer inspection, especially after considering the points made above, it cannot be applied to it. It is describing the process of the scientific community: Darwin was trying to persuade the scientists of his time that his theory was correct. Controversies in science are not settled by students weighing up evidence in their heads, they are settled through furious debate and analysis by the people who really know the topics at hand: the scientists researching in those fields. This quotation from On the Origin should not be used to justify the Academic Freedom movement.

So what have we learnt? The intelligent design movement had a dark history of anti-materialism, a sentiment that still exists today; the label of “scientific theory” should perhaps not apply to the “theory of intelligent design”, due to its lines of evidence being inclusive and consistent with evolutionary theory; and Academic Freedom is being misapplied to a scientific controversy, one that may not even exist. What does this leave in support of intelligent design? The ID movement needs to re-evaluate what it wants and how it plans to get there.

The push for Academic Freedom should not steal the thunder from the thing we should be celebrating on February 12th, the life and works of one of history’s greatest scientists: Charles Darwin.