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Scott LaFee, "Intelligent discussion: Local scientists, doctors and professors talk about 'intelligent design'" (2005)
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Scott LaFee, "Intelligent discussion: Local scientists, doctors and professors talk about 'intelligent design'" (2005)
"San Diego Union-Tribune" June 8, 2005; http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20050608-9999-lz1c08intel.html
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> <font> > <font> Local scientists, doctors and professors talk about 'intelligent design'By Scott LaFee> <font>UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER June 8, 2005
The new challenge comes from proponents of "intelligent design," which argues that there are things in the world – namely, life – that defy scientific explanation and can only be attributed to the handiwork of an unidentified, supernatural creator. In more than 20 states, proposals supporting intelligent design are being considered, most notably by the Kansas State Board of Education, which may decide this month whether to include intelligent design lessons in its new science curriculum standards and encourage school teachers to more aggressively challenge the precepts of Darwinism. Supporters of intelligent design say it is a science-based alternative to evolutionary theory. We asked local scientists who conduct the business of science every day for their opinions. QUESTION: How do you define science? Is intelligent design science? Science is a mental activity consisting of observation and experimentation, synthesized by interpretation. The interpretation consists of developing a story that is consistent with the results of observation and experimentation. The key concept that distinguishes science from nonscience is that if new observations and experiments contradict the story, the story must be changed to accommodate them.
A story does not become science just because some authority or committee tells it or says it is science. It doesn't matter who makes the observation or runs the experiment, if others observe the same thing or get the same result from the experiment, the story must be consistent with those results. "Intelligent design" is science only if it's a story that can be tested by observation and experimentation. Is there any observation we can make or experiment we can do whose results would be one way if "intelligent design" is true, another way if it is false? I don't know of any, but maybe somebody can. If so, that person has not yet come forth. In any case, even if God – or someone claiming to be God – were to emerge in a puff of smoke on the floor of the Senate and claim to have created the universe, that story would not be science unless there were some independent means of testing that claim through observation and experimentation. –Phil Unitt, ornithologist, Think of Einstein's theory of general relativity, a wonderful hypothesis with huge implications. Hundreds of tests have been proposed, and many of them have been carried out, sometimes at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. So far, Einstein's theory has stood up, but physicists are all convinced that his remarkable insight will eventually form only a part of a larger theory, and that this larger theory will be a better fit to the observations. Intelligent design is not science, because it only goes partway through this process and leaves out the most important part. Advocates of intelligent design have observed the world, and have proposed the hypothesis that some vast intelligence must have created it because the world (or at least some portion of it) is too complicated to have arisen through natural processes. This is their hypothesis, and it is in principle testable. For example, one could look for messages or other evidence for the existence of a vast intelligence (see Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" for a fictional example). Or, in the case of evolution, one could search for sudden discontinuities in the history of life, in which a new structure or function has arisen without any previous history and no relationship to structures or functions in other related organisms. (Such new structures have not yet been found, by the way.) But the intelligent designers have proposed no such experiments. Their hypothesis is therefore not subject to modification, much less eventual abandonment. As a consequence, intelligent design and its parent belief, creationism, are not science. –Christopher Wills, (Intelligent design) postulates the existence of a hypothetical and abstract entity, lacking any physical concrete presence, unobservable and impossible to experiment with in order to explain biological structures and processes whose origin can be perfectly explained by the simple rules of natural selection. It is based on the acceptance of the existence of a completely unnecessary conjecture – that of a supernatural "intelligent designer" – and violates one of the most basic principles of scientific philosophy, the principle of parsimony, which states that natural effects should be explained through natural causes and that unnecessary hypotheses should be discarded when trying to understand the way the natural world works. –Exequiel Ezcurra,
If proponents of intelligent design (ID) wish their hypothesis to be treated as a science, then they must be prepared to generate experiments that will prove ID incorrect and teach their students how to disprove ID. If an "intelligent designer" is equated with "God," then, if they are true scientists, they must now spend their time trying to disprove the existence of God. I am not sure if the proponents of ID are prepared to go down that route – training a classroom of students to design experiments that rule out the existence of God. Yet, if they wish to add ID to the scientific curriculum, that is precisely what they must be prepared to do. Those experiments would then take their place with all the other experiments designed to rule out any hypothesis, in other words, to show that the null hypothesis (the idea that events and phenomena are dictated solely by chance) cannot be rejected. –Dr. Evan Snyder,
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QUESTION: A central tenet of intelligent design is that some aspects of life are "irreducibly complex." That is, certain biological systems are so complicated that they could not have evolved incrementally through random mutation and natural selection. Your response. One cited example, among many, is how life began on Earth. Although we still do not fully understand the origin of life from a scientific point-of-view, research continues to provide vital information about the possible processes that may or may not have been involved. There is optimism that science will eventually provide an understanding of at least the basic processes. Intelligent design claims that the processes involved are scientifically unknowable and thus must be explained by a supernatural or extraterrestrial creator. This is akin to the widely held 19th century theory of panspermia that life on Earth began from a spore or seed from outer space. Scientific research subsequently demonstrated that panaspermia was not a testable and verifiable scientific theory and the same applies to intelligent design today. –Jeffrey Bada,
> How can anyone say that something is irreducibly complex, thus evolution impossible? How do they know? Could it not just escape our present state of understanding? Weren't phenomena such as how inheritance takes place thought to be unfathomable not long ago? <p> <p> These days, we are whittling away quite blissfully at the complexity of biology. For example, we have learned that "horizontal" transmission of whole packets of genes between species happened before and happens now. This means that evolution doesn't depend just on the accumulation of single mutations but that organisms can change wholesale. An example is the plague bacillus, which appears to have arisen by such a mechanism some 100,000 years ago. It makes simple sense: How would you build a highly complex vehicle that can be driven, flown and navigated underwater? Would you start from scratch with some steel ingots, or would you use parts from existing cars, planes and submarines? –Moselio Schaechter,
A very simple experiment performed decades ago showed that when a mixture of simple chemicals was placed in a closed chamber and energy was added, the building blocks of life (amino acids) spontaneously formed. The conditions of this experiment mimicked the state of the primordial planet billions of years ago. Thus, the building blocks of life can easily be made through natural processes, and have been available for hundreds of millions to billions of years. It is not hard to conceive that, over this extended time, chance events and selective environmental pressure would create the remarkable and beautifully diverse forms of life we have today. –Dr. Mark Tuszynski,
Infectious diseases have been a selective pressure on our species ever since people originated in Africa. The best understood example of this pressure is malaria. Malaria is transmitted by the bite of a mosquito that injects a parasite into the blood and the parasite lives inside the host's red blood cells. Amazingly, we have made adaptations that make the red blood cells less hospitable to malaria parasites. These changes in our proteins generally have a cost to us, but when they keep people alive long enough to procreate in the midst of a malarial environment, then the mutations are preserved in nature. This accounts for most of the variants in hemoglobin structure. If malaria in a tropical environment was the selective force that led to the prevalence of sickle cell anemia and thalessemia, are we to conclude that the intelligent designer used malaria for that purpose or that the designer overlooked malaria as a problem and there had to be a post-hoc fix to change the structure of red blood cells? –Dr. Joshua Fierer,
QUESTION: Many mainstream scientists have chosen to ignore or avoid the debate over intelligent design. Why? Years ago, it was claimed that the Earth was the center of the universe. It was also claimed that the Earth was flat. Many scientists were persecuted and even killed because they presented evidence against these faith-based positions. Debating intelligent design would be like debating someone who still insists that the Earth is flat, or that it is at the center of the universe, simply because he has not gone up in space in person and viewed the Earth and the solar system in person. Since such positions would be based strictly on faith, there is little point in discussing them, let alone giving them undeserved legitimacy. –Dr. Ajit P. Varki,
One should never debate such lunacy. It implies that there is something to debate. It only gives it legitimacy it does not deserve. The cry that teaching intelligent design in the science classroom should be permitted because of intellectual freedom is a red herring. We don't teach alchemy, astrology and witchcraft in the science classroom, because like intelligent design, they are not science. By the same token, all Americans, not just scientists, should speak out and complain when their schools are forced to allow such intellectual drivel into their schools. –J. David Archibald,
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QUESTION: One key principle of intelligent design is the belief that there are questions about life and the universe that science cannot answer, now or in the future. Your response. I have to admit that it is not that clear to me just what constitutes ID. Since I could find no research papers published in peer-reviewed scientific publications on the subject, I have had to rely on Internet sources. Most ID Web sites mention something about complexity, design and purpose and, using some form of legalese argumentation, conclude that because the natural world is so complex, it must have been created by an intelligent designer. However, this is like resignedly saying, "I don't know!" Do we really want our children to just accept that the natural world is too complex to understand, and that the idea of an intelligent designer is sufficient to satisfy our curiosity about such things as the structure and function of DNA, genes, cells and organisms? Do we also want our future scientists to be reluctant to tenaciously investigate the natural world no matter what discoveries and conclusions they reach and no matter what philosophical ideas of design and purpose are rejected? If we as a society answer "Yes," to these questions, then I suppose we are also willing to accept Faith Healing 101 as a legitimate course in medical schools. –Tom Demere,
I don't know of any working scientist who is ready to throw in the towel on any question regarding the life sciences or physical sciences. Certainly, historical events that were not witnessed can never be understood with absolute certainty, but that doesn't mean we can't study them, test hypotheses or construct the most likely interpretation of them. Breakthroughs may not occur during one's lifetime, but the explosive rate of technological advances gives us hope that we will always progress in our understanding of life and existence. –Michael Mayer, associate
I believe this is basically a religious or faith question. It seems to me that many who support this notion of intelligent design are doing so to bolster their own religious beliefs, specifically that there is a God, a divine creator. They are disturbed and angry and frightened that what is central in their lives is not generally taught or even mentioned in public schools, and they might view science in general (and evolutionary theory specifically) as a threat, e.g., to a particular set of religious beliefs. I do respect those who are searching for something beyond themselves, something meaningful in their lives. This is part of the human quest, to seek the mystery of existence. It is a noble and worthy goal. But, it is also important to have clear and critical thinking, a means of checking ourselves, detecting bias against preconceived notions. There is a great deal of hokum out there. A few hundred years ago, the majority of people in the Western world believed in demons and regularly used them and other superstitious beliefs to justify their behavior and power over others. I think it is possible to be both spiritual and a critical thinker: To use one's mind (the scientific method and common sense) in evaluating specific beliefs or claims or ideas, and yet to also seek that question of existence and continually embrace the wonder and awesome mystery of this world. –Michael Simpson, |
