Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement - Softcover

 
9780307277220: Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307277224 ISBN 13: 9780307277220
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Evolutionary science lies at the heart of a modern understanding of the natural world. Darwin’s theory has withstood 150 years of scientific scrutiny, and today it not only explains the origin and design of living things, but highlights the importance of a scientific understanding in our culture and in our lives.

Recently the movement known as “Intelligent Design” has attracted the attention of journalists, educators, and legislators. The scientific community is puzzled and saddened by this trend–not only because it distorts modern biology, but also because it diverts people from the truly fascinating ideas emerging from the real science of evolution. Here, join fifteen of our preeminent thinkers whose clear, accessible, and passionate essays reveal the fact and power of Darwin’s theory, and the beauty of the scientific quest to understand our world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Brockman is a writer, agent, and publisher of Edge, the "Third Culture" website (www.edge.org), the forum for leading scientists and thinkers to share their research with the general public. He is the author of By The Late John Brockman and The Third Culture and has edited several previous anthologies including The Next Fifty Years, Curious Minds, and My Einstein. He lives in New York City.

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Jerry A. Coyne

Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Intelligent design is not an evangelic Christian thing, or a generally Christian thing or even a generically theistic thing. . . . Intelligent design is an emerging scientific research program. Design theorists attempt to demonstrate its merits fair and square in the scientific world-without appealing to religious authority.

-William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution (2004)

[A]ny view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient. . . . [T]he conceptual soundness of a scientific theory cannot be maintained apart from Christ.

-William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999)

Well, which is it? Is intelligent design (ID) merely a sophisticated form of biblical creationism, as most biologists claim, or is it science-an alternative to Darwinism that deserves discussion in the science classroom? As the two quotations above imply, you won't find the answers in the writings of the leading advocates of ID.

The ambiguity is deliberate, for ID is a theory that must appeal to two distinct constituencies. To the secular public, ID proponents present their theory as pure science. This, after all, is their justification for a slick public-relations campaign promoting the teaching of ID in the public schools. But as is clear from the infamous "Wedge Document" of the Discovery Institute, a right-wing think tank in Seattle and the center for ID propaganda, intelligent design is part of a cunning effort to dethrone materialism from society and science and replace it with theism.1 ID is simply biblical creationism updated and disguised to sneak evangelical Christianity past the First Amendment and open the classroom door to Jesus. The advocates of ID will admit this, but only to their second constituency, the sympathetic audience of evangelical Christians on whose support they rely.

Nevertheless, let us give the ID movement the benefit of the doubt. Let us suppose that ID might indeed be an alternative and superior scientific theory-one that explains the natural world better than Darwinian evolution does. Can such an argument stand up to scrutiny? Is it time for Darwinian evolution to go the way of Newtonian mechanics, as a theory good for its time but ripe for replacement by a new paradigm? No. Not only is ID markedly inferior to Darwinism at explaining and understanding nature but in many ways it does not even fulfill the requirements of a scientific theory.

What are those requirements? A scientific theory isn't just a guess or speculation, it is a convincing explanatory framework for a body of evidence about the real world. A good scientific theory makes sense of wide-ranging data that were previously unexplained. In addition, a scientific theory must make testable predictions and be vulnerable to falsification. Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, received a definitive test (and confirmation) by measurements of the bending of starlight by the sun during a solar eclipse. If a theory can't be tested or falsified, it is not a scientific theory. The theory that God caused the Big Bang, for example, isn't a scientific theory, because (while it may be true) there are no observations we can make to disprove it. When a theory has withstood many tests and made many correct predictions, it becomes a scientific fact, which we can understand as a theory having such strong support that all rational people would accept it. The theories of atoms and of chemical bonds, for example, have graduated from theory to fact. Both could conceivably be shown to be wrong-all the data supporting the existence of atoms might have been deceptive-but it's highly unlikely.

So, how do Darwinism and ID compare when judged against these criteria? Let's start by looking at Darwinism. The modern theory of evolution, called neo-Darwinism in light of 150 years of post-Darwin research, has four parts. Put simply, these are as follows:

First, evolution occurs; that is, living species are descendants of other species that lived in the past.

Second, evolutionary change occurs through the gradual genetic transformation of populations of individuals over thousands or millions of years.

Third, new forms of life arise from the splitting of a single lineage into two, a process known as speciation. This continual splitting leads to a nested genealogy of species-a "tree of life" whose root was the first species to arise and whose twigs are the millions of species living today. Trace back any pair of twigs from modern species through the branches and you will find that they share a common ancestor, represented by the node at which the branches meet.

And fourth, much of evolution occurs through natural selection. Individuals carrying genes better suited to the current environment leave more offspring, causing genetic change in populations over time which improves the "fit" of the organism to the environment. It is this improving fit that gives organisms the appearance of having been well designed for their lifestyles.

These claims don't necessarily stand or fall together. Nevertheless, evidence supporting all four began to accumulate starting with Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species and continues to inundate us today. Every bit of information we have gathered about nature is consonant with the theory of evolution, and there is not one whit of evidence contradicting it. Neo-Darwinism, like the theory of chemical bonds, has graduated from theory to fact.

What is this evidence? It is immense, so I will just touch upon what Darwin himself presented, though he had only a fraction of the evidence available today. It came from the fossil record, from curious remnants persisting in the anatomy and development of living species, and from biogeography-the geographical distribution of Earth's flora and fauna.

Let's start with the obvious place to look, the fossil record. Even in Darwin's time, there was evidence here supporting evolution, in the sequence of organisms laid down in the rocks. The deepest and oldest sediments show marine invertebrates; fish appear much later, and amphibians, reptiles, and mammals later still. Why should divine creation follow such a path, from the simple to the complex? Yet it is what we would expect with evolution. Darwin also observed that the species inhabiting any region-the living marsupials of Australia, for instance-closely resemble fossils found in the same place. This suggests that the former descended from the latter. We can trace evolutionary changes in lineages through the record: Diatoms grow larger, clamshells get ribbier, horses become larger and toothier, and the human lineage evolves bigger brains, smaller teeth, and greater proficiency at walking on two legs. There are transitional forms, too-but more on those later.

Leaving behind the dead, we also find ample evidence of evolution among the living-relics that the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould dubbed "the senseless signs of history." They are many: The tooth buds developed in the embryonic stage by birds and anteaters-buds that are later aborted and never erupt-are remnants of their toothed ancestors. The tiny vestigial wings hidden under the feathers of the flightless kiwi attest to its ancestors' ability to fly. Some cave-dwelling animals have rudimentary eyes that cannot see, degenerate remnants of their ancestors' sighted ones. What creator, or guiding intelligence, would give animals such useless tooth buds, wings, or eyes?

Our bodies, too, are a palimpsest of our...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307277224
ISBN 13 
9780307277220
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Herausgeber
Brockman John
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