The debate over so-called intelligent design vs. evolution keeps resurfacing in Kansas. We argue here that this is a controversy rooted in the same philosophical debate as the one that raged in Kansas in the 1850's. The ideas are the same. The players are the same, and the stakes are just as high. At stake is not just science, but the whole legacy of the Enlightenment, including its perspective on personal freedoms. This part argues for what science is, how evolution fits into that framework, and why ID is the antithesis of science.
It would have been in the 1850's, when Charles Darwin was still alive, when he still had keen memories of his days aboard the Beagle, when he was still pouring over his great stacks of notes, and when he was contemplating how his thesis about the Origin of the Species might apply to the Descent of Man, that Kansas had become the eye of the hurricane that would become the Civil War. Then, settlers from northern states rushed to Kansas to establish it as a free state; settlers from southern states rushed to Kansas to make it a slave state. Kansas became an emblem of the struggle between slave and free.
The neo-feudal world ruled by religious instititutions and hereditary power was pitted against a new post-enlightenment world in which men had rights that transcend the bounds set by human institutions. And Kansas was seen as the frontier that would change the balance of history.
Today Kansas is at the eye of another hurricane, and the stakes are no less serious. For it is the same conflicting assumptions about what the world looks like that inform today's battle as did the battle then. The question in both cases is about the extent to which man may be considered to exercise reason and judgement and pursue his own interests as opposed to being a thoughtless part in a giant social machine - a clock whose wheels are institutions and whose cogs are men.
Kansas is once again at the hub of a new and ingenious attack on Enlightenment ideals. The attack is levelled at what would be be the weakest point in America; their philosophical basis. To understand the battle, its stakes, and how it ought to be fought, we need to look at the philosophical underpinnings of science.
Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw Newton as the prototypical scientist and his work as the protypical science. Newton was the first man in the history of mankind to succeed on a grand scale in unifying the two views of the universe that had been part of philosophy since at least the time of Plato. Plato envisioned an ideal world of forms. Most of his notions about forms strike one today as fanciful. Especially fanciful is the almost religious zeal with which Plato seems to have believed in the actaual reality of his created ideal. In thinking of Plato it is frequently helpful to imagine an ideal that can be expressed precisely and whose precepts might be perceived by observing the shadows it casts in the real world.
The relationship between the world of ideas and the world of facts is central to science. It is central to human knowledge and to understanding. Descartes and Hume were influenced by Plato and viewed the things we think about, the world of knowledge in a way that built on Plato's vision. Hume's language refers to 'facts' vs 'relationships of ideas.' Facts are things we can observe directly with our senses, a red rock, or that we are hungry, for instance. Relationships of ideas are about mental models we have, particularly those that deal with a formal world, a world of ideas. Descartes speaks of thinking. He follows in a tradition of philosophers who do not trust sense. And it is only in this formal, ideal world where things are certain.Thus the rules of logic belong to this realm. Arithmetic, geometry, trigonomtry, and algebra belong to this world. All philosophical and theological pursuits belong to it, too.
Most of what we call knowledge refers to some correspondence between facts established on the basis of sensory data and abstractions about those facts that live in a kind of ethereal 'world of ideas.' In other words, what we know is a result of a correspondence between models whe have in our brains about the way the world works - (Plato's ideal, Hume's relationships of ideas ) and what we sense with our senses. Science procedes with the practice of finding a theory that is completely consistent with the facts, and using that theory to help us predict and interpret other sensory perceptions. Trial law works in exactly the same way, assuming that if both parties accept a fact it actually has some verity in reality.
Newton's theory of gravitation itself belongs to Plato's ideal world. It belongs to Hume's 'relationships of ideas.' But what is unique about Newton's theory of gravitation is that it has a special connection to empirical data. That is, there is a robust and broad correspondence between what Newton's ideal, invented, imaginary world predicts and what empiricists measure in the real world in which we exist. It predicts the motion of the planets around the sun with remarkable accuracy. It predicts how things fall to the earth with a similar accuracey. And it makes a connection between these seemingly unrelated phenomena. Gravitation is the gold standard of science. It is an almost perfect correspondence between a broad, general, powerful, and usually quantitative model and empirical facts that can be verified in controlled experiements.
In the realm of physics and chemistry science that follows in Newton's footsteps is possible, for experiments are generally not extremely costly to conduct. Quantities are easy to measure. And so on. Cellular biology is following in the same footsteps. But what science lies outside of these endeavors is more tricky to define and evaluate. The defining variables are difficult to describe and the experiemental evidence is difficult to collect.
There are some limited but rather useful predictive models in biology such as Mendeleev's rules of genetic inheritance. Ingenious about these rules is the fact that they accurately predict that chromosomes exist in pairs and that they break apart in the process of constructing gametes. There would be no other way of interpreting his observations. And, in fact, cellular biology can prove that exactly this happens, by 'simple' observation. Medeleev knew nothing about the mechanical nature of chromosomes, but his work predicted their behavior before they even existed. This is the mark of good science. On a more macroscopic scale, the search for explanatory theories has been fruitful, but not all explanatory theories offer the same sorts of quanitative accuracy as does Newtonian physics. Mathematical models exist for the spread of epidemics, the spread of technology, and the population of yeast cells in a closed jar. And these models have considerable predictive power.
Most fields, however have some difficulty in defining primary, fundamental concepts and variables that have the same kind of predictive power as the ones in physics and chemistry. This is where we begin to run into problems. Darwin's work on speciation is an example.
Darwin's work on speciation is almost impossible to refute. It observes that populations of a particular species, when broken into disjoint subpopulations that do not interbreed, and when exposed to materially different environments for very long periods of time tend to drift apart genetically until they reach a point at which they might be considered separate species. Assuming populations of sufficient size in both cases, long periods of time and so on, each sub-population becomes better adapted to some element that is unique to their own environment. This adaptation may or may not make the population more fit for some other environment. Perhaps, in fact, it will make them less fit for one they do not inhabit. That this process of adaptation to the environment happens can be disputed by no serious, sane person who confronts the facts. Nor can this explanation of specialization be dismissed as a cause of speciation. The facts in support of it are too compelling.
Darwin's science has been accused of having a number of potential problems. One is that certain gaps exist in fossil records. The issue of gaps, however, has generally proven more helpful to Darwin's theory than it has proven problemmatic because it has predicted intermediate species that have later been found to exist either in fossil records or alive in the field. In fact, this has happened with a rather remarkable regularity since the Origin of the Species was published more than a hundred fifty years ago.
Another potential problem is that there are particular steps in speciation that seem peculiar - how a new species arises with a new number of chromosomes, for instance. Not being an evolutionary biologist, I am not sure how this problem is handled. But it is a big one. Each time a new species differentiates from an old species via a change in chromosome count, the new species must descend from a single female parent. This problem, though serious is not insuperable.
Darwin's theory suffers from some serious philosophical flaws. The first is that it is not quantitative like Newton's. But this is the least of its problems. What is more problemmatic is that it falls far short of the kind of precision of categorization and language that would make quantification possible. A huge problem is that there is not complete agreement on what constitutes a 'species.' Any theory posed to explain a category or a process that works to form a category but that that has not clearly defined that category must be prepared to face serious challenges. This is not a mere parenthetical issue. If one is to define a theory about X one ought to have a very precise definition of what X is. Biologists have agreed on definitions of particular species, but I am not sure there has been a solid, irrefutable definition of what precisely constitutes a species.
Biologists who would bring the field of evolutionary biology to the same level of predictive utility as physical science will either need to define species in a more rigorous way or frame the central concept of evolution without reference to speciation. Ideally, species will be defined quantitatively in terms of other quantifiable terms as well as in natural language. The great problem is that such a definition would likely turn the whole field of classification and naming on its head. So one cannot be casual in considering the right definitions.
We might bear in mind that it was a kind of conceptual confusion that stopped physics in its tracks for some time. Ideas like weight and mass were confused. Force was not clearly defined, and so on. Worst of all, the governing assumptions about motion were generally false. Once the concepts were defined quantatively, it became possible to make some progress. E.O Wilson in Consilience advocates a similar course in biology.
Another big problem is that there is much disagreement about the meaning of the term "fitness." One might imagine general fitness in one sense. But nature is diverse, so there are places in which fitness to a certain purpose drives evolution. There are tubular flowers, for instance that are shaped in a way that only the tongues of special moths can pollenate them. These moths specialize in pollenating these plants. The co-evolution of tubular flowers and certain moths or birds is one of the phenomena Darwin used to support his thesis of evolution. In this example fitness can be defined in a very narrow sense. But this is a mistake to make fitness be about a single parameter. The number of responses an individual must have to his environment numbers in the tens of thousands, at least. A significant weakness in any one can predispose failure. There are occasions when a single factor overshadows others and forces evolution along a certain single-variable trajectory. But it is a mistake to generalize that this is true all the time, especially to large populations of generalist creatures that cover vast and varied geographic domains.
Some biologists argue that the term fitness applies only to an individual. Darwin, in his discussion of fitness argues that a thin, sleek fox might run faster than a fat fox, and therefore might be considered to be more fit because it can catch its food better. But this argument assumes a number of things. For instance, it neglects to consider how the fat fox got fat in the first place, especially if he was unable to find anyting to eat. And it assumes that the fat fox is not so because he has exhausted the entire supply of rabbits. In which case, running fast is of no competitive advantage to the thin, sleek fox. This might strike one as a curious rebuttal, but the point is that any single notion of a single criterion for fitness in a population is just wrong.
Darwin's own argument about speciation and adaption to multiple environments proves it. Others argue that fitness applies to populations. This is an idea that has fallen out of favor, but it deserves a great deal more attention. Still others have argued that it applies to bits of genetic code - individual genes or groups of them. These three points of view produce about fitness produce profoundly different kinds of biological study. And we learn something different and helpful from each. The problem is more profound than it looks, because some definitions of 'fitness' might equate to 'what causes an individual' to survive others to 'what causes a population to survive.' Still others to 'what causes a gene to survive.'
The very idea of "survival of the fittest," is on shaky philosophical footing as a proposition when fitness is defined in terms of survival: Things survive because they are fit. They are fit because they survive. It's a tautology. There is no science here. Just bad philosophy.
One can dodge the question - and some do - by defining 'fitness' as 'what causes males to successfully reproduce' but this, by definition, leaves out more than half of any population. And there is some legitimate question about whether a biology that does this is accounting for all the things that might be useful for us to learn from the field. In the case of ants, totally ignoring the females would hardly be helpful at all. They do all the heavy lifting.
Still, the tautology looms. Despite its jaw-dropping philosophical weaknesses, the idea that there exists a relationship between fitness, survival, and adaptation is crucially inportant. Even if we have trouble stating it clearly, we know there is something to it. It has extraordinary and explanatory power and quite a bit of predictive power. It is this explanatory and predictive power that makes Darwin's theory 'Scientific.' The philosophical problem still needs to be addressed. And the categories need definition.
And when we get everything clear, we may learn that there are some fundamental ways in which the theory is wrong. By analogy, we know that Newtonian physics is not universally true. At relativistic velocities - those approaching the speed of light - it fails. We know this because we have a mathematical model that predicts it, and we have done experiments with particles that are consistent with the model. Newtonian physics is wrong in a big way in certain partical interactions with each other and with electromagnetic fields. But Newtonian physics is still incredibly useful. We treat it as if it were true.
With this in mind, let us return to Kansas. Here, the general question is "Do we teach evolution? Do we teach 'intelligent design?' Or what?" Fundamentalist Christians want to teach some version informed by religious belief. Everyone else says "No, No, NO! Dawin's theory is correct. We will teach only that."
As a person who grew up as a child of bible-toting, Wednesday night prayer meeting fundamentalist Christians I find the dispute a little amusing. It evidently arises from some tension about what Genesis has to say about man's beginnings. If one reads it symbolically, the Genesis account strikes one as being remarkably like what one would say as a scientist of today if asked to give a two minute account of four billion years of natural history to a six year old. And this seems like an appropriate approach for a book whose purpose is religion, not natural history. In a kind of symbolic way, the facts of evolution and the facts of Genesis correspond remarkably well. It seems to me that if there is any page of the Bible one might view as containing scientific information that no person of Moses' time is likely to know in the absence of divine inspiration, it would be hard to find a better example than the first page of Genesis. No disrespect meant, but the whole thing is incredibly ludicrous. Darwin's theory and the Big Bang are the only two pieces of evidence that the Bible was inspired by someone with more scientific knowledge than the average Kansas first-grader of the 1850's. So I have always been puzzled at why religion could perceive any threat from evolution.
It has always seemed to me that the threats that evolution pose for religion arise not from the way it defines speciation but from the way it ignores the rather profound role of cooperation in society. Condider first how cells in an organism cooperate to create a greater and more successful organism. Then, at a higher level animals in societies cooperate to produce successful societies. And it is here where there appears to be a kind of religious cult of environmental biologists who look only at competition to reproduce - competition within a population - rather than cooperation which is about competition between populations.
Similarly, the Darwinian temptation to assume that Europeans in general and Englishmen in particular are somehow 'better' than other people and that this explains all history since the sinking of the Spanish Armada poses many serious problems. Read Guns, Germs, Steel to get a running start on refuting some of them. Read also the Devils Dictionary Defiled entry on lumber, here. Which argues for the importance of agricultural frontiers. These two arguments taken together serve to refute this Darwinian temptation. Even when it is completely ignored by scientists, what happens to populations is at the heart of evolutionary biology. One can only frame the question of steady change versus punctuated equilibrium in terms of population dynamics.
For example, what if a terrible disease wiped out the human population to the last person. Then all of the land man has adapted to agriculture would return to its previous uses by nature. This would present huge opportunities for several species. Species that are well adapted to these spaces would flourish. It could be assumed that in several places, there might be a micro-blossoming of forms. Lots of new species might fill the gaps - in a way similar to what happened after dinosaurs disappeared. Or when vertibrates first arrived on the earth. Or when animals first were successful on land. If we look at points in time when nature creates forms of life to exploit huge, previously unexploited niches, we always see a huge flowering of variety which recedes when competition resumes.
Such a thing would happen in the seas when extinct man stopped fishing them. An analogous thing happens when men create new technologies. There are lots of little companies that get formed to exploit the new niche, then one or two that are better fit, tend to grow and displace the others. It happened in oil, steel, automobiles, computers, and many other pursuits. The rules that govern how organisms flourish in new niches and how competition between organisms tends to drive higher levels of certain kinds of fitness is powerful stuff in biology and in economics.
These examples suggest that punctuated equilibrium and steady drift may be described as expressions of the same biological system, the same governing rules, under different environmental conditions. It is not as if one theory proves the other wrong.
This is one of the sereral potential difficulties with Darwin's theory that are easy to work around. But there are a lot of people more interested in supporting their own religious prejudices than they are in trying to grasp what good science might be. We speak here not just of fundamentalists in Kansas, but of religious orthodoxy in the field itself.
The great problem comes when people become tempted to attribute what is unexplained in Darwin's theory -or any other theory - to 'God.' The fundamental problem with this is that the act itself: by its very nature it defies science. Not for what it says. Not for the claims it makes. Not for any body of fact. But for what it is. It is an attack on the foundations of science. And it is not an accident that this is where the attack is focussed.
Religious men like Newton and Leibnitz believed that God had imposed an order on the universe and it was their task as good scientists to find that order and describe it. In their view of things, God was a kind of 'Legislator' who wrote the inviolable physical laws of the universe, and the job of the scientist is to discover these laws. This is consistent with the idea of science. Science is an act of creating explanatory models and justifying them against the real world. It is an act of connecting the solid, clear, quantitative models with facts about the world in a way that allows us to collect together and explain a large body of fact with a simple, robust theory or idea.
But when we explain gaps in our understanding in terms of 'GOD' we shred the philosophical fabric from which science is constructed. The sails that propel the ship of science become useless. The bulk of scientific fact gets tossed helplessly at sea and gets dashed upon the rocks. This is not where we wish to go. Live for six years in a world without science, and then you might know. The most unscientific act available to man is to stop questioning. The most destructive act to science is to stop asking how to describe or explain the world better. It is to stop asking good questions. It is to relegate things we do not understand to a factor that St Thomas Aquinas has conveniently proven not to exist.
Regardless of whether God exists, and regardless of what role he plays in the everyday world, the simple act of leaving explanations for things up to God or fate is an act of giving up on knowledge. It is for this reason that 'intelligent design' ought to be taught in classrooms. It ought to be taught in the same chapter of science as the one in which Gallileo is excomunicated for demoting Rome from its position at the center of the universe - the throne of God around which all of His creation revolved. In that case, a few bits of scripture interpreted literally suggested Gallileo was wrong. All that would have been required in that case would have been to re-interpret the scriptures in a very subtly different way and the problem would have gone away.
But instead Gallileo was put under house arrest in the hopes that this would return Rome to the center of the universe. It did not. Nor did it get very far in undermining science. Thank God. ID might be more successful. The dire consequences may have already started.
Relegating biological change to the hand of God has serious public health ramafications. The question of survival, fitness, and so on is not simply an academic question. It is not just a religious question cast in biological terms. One of the very troubling problems in medicine today is that hundreds of thousands of people die each year in the US due to antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. When we reflect on the fact that antibiotics were invented about sixty years ago, that when they were invented, antibiotics worked, that there now exist multiple bacteria that are resistant to almost all forms of antibiotic, we must ask "how did this happen?"
Darwin is ready with an answer. Darwin could have predicted it. His theory says that if, sometimes, antibiotics are administred to people or animals with bacterial infections, and if those antibiotics do not kill every single bacteria of the sort that cause infections, then the ones least affected by the antibiotic will survive and reproduce. The new population of bacteria will be less affected by the antibiotic. Since bacteria reproduce very quickly, even small changes in immunity in a single generation can stack up quickly in terms of effect. Before long, the administration of antibiotics must necessarily breed resistant strains of bacteria.
The argument is a little more complicated when multiple kinds of antibiotics are involved, but it is qualitatively similar. If, in fact, we believe that the theory of evolution is a useful theory, in a scientific sense, then we can be prepared for the problem to eventually overcome our fragile artificial defenses. Or we will have to invent other ways to counteract bacteria. There are several bacteria - the ones responsible for staph infections and the ones responsible for tuberculosis - that just barely remain in control. A Darwinian idea for fighting bacterial infection would be to cultivate strains of bacteria that compete directly with harmful ones.
One example is the case of ciprofloxin-resistant C. dificile. This is a bacterium that has caused tens of thousands of cases of diarrhea in people who took the antibiotic. And it has resulted in many deaths. One biotech company identified the particular genes that produce the toxic effects. They are advocating for the approach of engineering C. difficile bacteria incapable of making these toxins, and introducing them into the guts of to people who take the antibiotics. Lab tests have suggested that these bacteria establish themselves in the guts of lab animals and prevent the toxic C. dificile from rapidly reproducing in a gut absent competing flora. This approach has a kind of zen quality to it, for it uses all of the bacteria's own strengths to prevent it from causing disease. It demonstrates a sound, fundamental grasp of biology and biological systems.
Ants deal with microbiological threats in much the same way. They have practices that support microbes that compete with nasties that threaten their crops of fungus. And they have been successful farmers of fungus more than 20 million years. So there is an evident element of sustainability in their agricultural and medical practices not quite so evident in our own.
Perhaps we ought to consider the ant. What does this have to do with ID? Well, suppose we claim - as does ID - that all of the changes in organisms attributed by scienceto Darwin's ideas about adaptation are instead wrought by the guiding hand of God. And if we believe this, then we have to believe that God has gotten into the business of creating antibiotic resistant bacteria. Well, if God is doing this, then there is no hope. We might as well just lie down and wait for God to kill us all with his new strains of resistant bacteria.
Recall that the bubonic plague killed a third of Europe's people in the fourteenth century. And smallpox is thought to have reduced Indian populations in the New World by as much as 90 percent within decades of the arrival of Europeans. So what we stand to lose by ignoring this threat may not be completely negligible.
If, on the other hand, we imagine that science might be employed in the service of public health (an idea that has had only spotty support in the US since smallpox and polio were wiped out) then we might imagine specific public policies that would slow the course of progress of AR. bacteria. One policy might be to stop feeding antibiotics to livestock. We know that this is partly responsible for the problem. Other practices involve not prescribing certain antibiotics except when particularly difficult infections occur. But we might also work on methods that end-run the problem in a more sustainable way - probiotics, perhaps.
So it really matters what we think. The debate matters. What we believe about Darwin's ideas has real, tangible, rather immediate effect on public health.
The thing that is really dangerous about the debate is that it is framed in a way in which both sides are wrong. Those advocating for ID are simply out to subvert science. Not just Darwin. They intend to subvert science, the whole enchilada. The whole idea that the universe is an ordered place and that if we are intelligent and reflective beings we might discover that order. And that by understanding that order we might make our lives materially better. If instead, we are superstitious and incapable of independent thought we shall be much easier to deal with as subjects. Think 'cattle' with simple reading skills and good eye-hand coordination.
It is not clear that there exists any factual counterargument to ID. In fact, we ought to assume that there is none. It is crafted to work in precisely this way. If one tries to refute ID on the basis of fact, there is some question in my mind about whether one might succeed. I expect that one will fail. It is simply impossible todisprove what role a hypothetical, insubstantial, imaginary being might actually play in the physical world.
If one can resort to fact to refute ID, one will have to resort to esoteric arguments that only specialists can understand. And this will mean that the people who are in most need of understanding it will not do so. This is what is so fiendishly intelligent about its design. Anyone who refutes it on the basis of fact will fall into the trap.
In the end, science is about educated guesses. It is about making models that assist us in predicting the outcomes of our decisions and actions. One cannot prove ID to be factually wrong. If one is to refute it clearly, forcefully, and completely, it must be on the basis of how it will ruin science. It will be on the basis of what science is, what it offers us, what it causes us to be, and what we leave behind when we abandon it. The only hope of burying ID is to uncover it for what it is - an attempt to subvert scientific thought.
It is no accident that ID would show up in America first, since Americans - at least since the time of Tocqueville in 1832 - have shown no interest in philosophy. And science is, at its heart philosophical. Science is not just a collection of fact, it is the explanation of collections of fact in broad, general, robust predictive models. But Americans have no time for philosophy. We are, in our academic pursuits and our work pursuits interested in "Just the Facts." We see science as a collection of facts. But science is just facts in approximately the way a bowling alley is just a bowling ball and some pins. It is the almost ideally smooth surface of the boards on which the ball rolls that allows one to connect the ball with the pins in a reliable manner. We consider it successful to the extent that it is invisible to the whole bowling experience.This is the real job of science, allowing a smooth and useful connection between things of vital importance. And to do it in a clear, simple, elegant, almost invisible way.
The very term 'scientific fact' might be used to describe an observation that appears to have a certain explanation in a normal, observational sense, and a complementary explanation rooted in an established scientific theory of the way things work. Virtually all the great scientists America claims as its own are first or second generation immigrants. Ben Franklin might be an exception. But the Manhattan project was based on science done almost entirely in Europe. The rocket science of the Apollo project was done almost entirely by scientists imported from Europe.
If America is to have any hope of rescuing science from the eternal dark ages we need to teach ID. Intelligent Design ought to be on every high school cirriculum in the United States. Not because it is true. Not because it is science. But because it teaches us that we now have a totally dysfunctional relationship with science. ID is a pretty good example of where we are headed if we fail to make the distinction between religious orthodoxy and science. The very field in question, evolutionary biology, appears to have a body of people who believe certain unproved tenets with a kind of religious zeal.
So in a rather ironic way, if we can show why ID is bad science, there is a tiny hope that we might be able to apply the same lesson in other areas of scientific endeavor, maybe evolutionary biology itself. Maybe we will succeed in opening the area up to other ways of thinking about the same data - scientific ways - that keep us practicing science rather than religious orthodoxy. When it comes to understanding what science is in America we all have a lot to learn, scientists and science educators included. Teach ID. Teach what makes it the antithesis of science. Learn the philosophical mistake it makes. And maybe we will have succeeded in teaching just a little bit of science. Or refute ID using orthodoxy, ban it from the cirriculum. And science - to the extent it can be said to exist in America - is doomed to extinction.
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved