Hidden Agenda of Intelligent Design

Arjendu K. Pattanayak is an India-born physicist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He considers his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter pretty convincing proof of the role of chaos in human evolution.

We cannot take a functioning, educated, secular society for granted no matter where we live, and that this intersection of ‘abstract science’ with social convention will happen repeatedly in the future. We owe it to our children to be informed about the issues, to get involved, if at all possible, get onto school boards, and influence their intellectual growth.

As anyone who has ever flattened his nose against an aquarium window will testify, there is a wonderful range of weird and remarkable creatures on Earth. Where did this diversity come from? Evolution is the theory that addresses this, stating compactly that it is due to random genetic mutation and competition. Individual creatures pass on their genes to their offspring almost exactly, except for a few ‘random errors.’ When combined with the genes of the other parent, the next generation has a broad array of variations on the successful genes of the previous generation.

Few of the changes make any difference, and only some of the differences are useful. But as Darwinian natural selection points out, creatures produce more offspring than their habitats can sustain, and inevitably, only some are successful. These successful ones are most likely to produce successful progeny. In turn, these offspring will pass on their genes to successive generations, and eventually the helpful genes will dominate, changing the population.

As this process is repeated over and over, and various, different successful tracks are followed by genes, different species with different characteristics are created. The theory of evolution is a relatively simple and clear argument that is one of the most powerful ideas of modern science.

However, the teaching of evolutionary theory is currently a matter of far-ranging controversy in the United States. President George W. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Dr. Bill Frist support the idea that ‘intelligent design’ (ID) should be taught alongside evolutionary theory so that “students can make up their own minds” about the respective merits. ID states that it is difficult to imagine that the beautiful intricacies of various biological objects and processes, such as vision, could have evolved through random mutations and competitive pressure. This difficulty is considered evidence for a planned or ‘intelligent’ design of creatures. It introduces the idea of an intelligence behind species, and has been rightly labeled a backdoor way of introducing a creator into science classrooms. In the month that Hurricane Katrina vividly demonstrated the fine line separating the U.S. from the Third World, how does one react to the debate?

It does stretch the mind to appreciate that something as complicated as mammals, let alone human consciousness, evolved ‘by itself’ from simple single-celled matter. But as even first-year students in my seminar on the dynamics of chaotic and and complex systems quickly learn, this is because we don’t fully appreciate that simple rules, if nonlinear, and if iterated often enough, can achieve remarkable things. Computer scientists have, in fact, stolen this trick through the method known as genetic algorithms, where the best of randomly altered programs are ‘bred’, resulting in superior programs. This doesn’t mean that everything is crystal clear, but the basic argument, tweak slightly, mix and match, and keep the best, is valid, with no fundamental flaws, even though there are several tricky issues to resolve.

ID amounts to a complaint – “Your argument seems too far-fetched!” with nothing to test or falsify. Also, despite our intuitive feel that biology is nearly perfect, as design, it’s not always ‘intelligent.’ The human eye, held up as being something that cannot be easily explained through evolution, has a huge blind spot, where the optic nerves plunge through the retina on the way to the brain. An IIT engineer proposing this design for an optical system would be failed. There are many such examples, and plenty of evidence in the fossil record for ‘dead-end’ designs that did not evolve further. It is therefore as bad science, and as religion masquerading as bad science, that scientists disagree with ID being taught in science classes.

Science is enriched by debates, and some of the controversy is because of the technical difficulty. But there are no public debates about the decades of difficulties physicists have had in finding a quantum version of gravity, and no arguments for ‘intelligent falling’ as well as gravity (except from the wonderful parodists at The Onion magazine). This is not a scientific issue, in short, but a political one. This ‘modification’ of science by politics always happens, but has intensified recently in the U.S.: Note the brouhaha about editing EPA reports about global climate change, stem-cell research, and politically inspired medical diagnoses made during the Terri Schiavo controversy, for example. The science-politics ‘clash’ is particularly vehement when religion is involved, which is proving far more significant in U.S. politics than I had imagined before I came here.

I’ll guess that you think, as most scientists do, that science and religion have separate but all-embracing realms. That science is about questions of fact and material issues, while religion concerns itself with questions of ultimate meaning, moral value, and of ultimate cause. But the dominant U.S. religions have beliefs based on assertions of fact; namely, that Moses literally parted the Red Sea; that Jesus was literally resurrected from death; and that Mohammed literally ascended to Heaven on his horse, all of which are about material issues. And some of these are accepted as fact by more Americans than one can readily fathom. As it is, it is hard to accept the polls consistently showing that X% of Americans believe Y scientific fallacy. Which is why this messy debate is going on.

Mythologies and creation myths, in particular, are an enormously valuable part of our intellectual world; the best of human creativity resides in these, as it does in science. Both result from an engagement with the mysterious heart of being. As for reconciling faith with science, we each have our way; some choose to understand the mechanisms of science, and evolution in particular, as an expression of a creator’s wishes. In particular, evolution is not concerned with the ultimate causes behind biology, but only the mechanism of speciation. As such, ID’s rejection of evolution can be understood as a rejection of chance, and an expression of the need to feel meaningful and purposefully brought into this world. But it is another case where intuition fails us in science, as it does so many students in introductory physics. As someone who works with probability professionally, it is also interesting to think about the role chance is accorded in various traditions (think, for example, of the dramatic dice-game played by the Pandavas and the Kauravas in the Mahabharata).

Issues of this sort exist everywhere. In India, the divide between the policy-making elite and the bulk of the population has insulated the system from these discussions, although not from religion affecting governance and civil laws. One society where evolution was attacked in recent times was Stalin’s USSR. Lead by Trofim Lysenko, and for political reasons, the Soviets propounded a version of Lamarckism: one could change the characteristics of future generations by changing those of the current generation (a simple thought experiment about circumcision in generations of Jewish and Muslim men shows that this doesn’t work very well). This set Russian biology back by generations.

I leave you with the thought that we cannot take a functioning, educated, secular society for granted no matter where we live, and that this intersection of ‘abstract science’ with social convention will happen repeatedly in the future. We owe it to our children to be informed about the issues, to get involved, if at all possible, get onto school boards, and influence their intellectual growth. To paraphrase Plato, “One of the penalties for thinking you are above the politics of education is that your children’s textbooks end up being written by those you think are below you.”