"The evolution wars" in Time [Time Magazine's cover story]

National Center for Science Education ^ | 11 August 2005 | Staff

[PatrickHenry]

The cover story of the August 15, 2005, issue of Time magazine is Claudia Wallis's "The evolution wars" -- the first cover story on the creationism/evolution controversy in a major national newsweekly in recent memory.

With "When Bush joined the fray last week, the question grew hotter: Is 'intelligent design' a real science? And should it be taught in schools?" as its subhead, the article, in the space of over 3000 words, reviews the current situation in detail. Highlights of the article include:

• A photomontage -- available only in the print edition -- on p. 26 and half of p. 27, with the elderly Darwin at the center, orbited by images of Pepper Hamilton's Eric Rothschild (a lead litigator in Kitzmiller v. Dover) brandishing a copy of Of Pandas and People, students in a biology classroom in Kansas, President Bush, the Cobb County disclaimer, and so forth.

• A comment from Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, on President Bush's remarks on "intelligent design": "It sends a signal to other countries because they're rushing to gain scientific and technological leadership while we're getting distracted with a pseudoscience issue ... If I were China, I'd be happy."

• A map, compiled from data provided by NCSE, showing antievolution proposals considered by state legislatures and boards of education since 2001 and antievolution proposals considered by local schools or panels in 2005. As members of NCSE and regular visitors to its website will have guessed, the map is crowded.

• A pair of definitions from Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine's Biology textbook on the one hand and Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon's Of Pandas and People on the other hand. According to the latter, "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact."

• A brief history of the development of creationist tactics from the Scopes era to the post-Edwards era, under the heading "A subtler assault," which quotes NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott as quipping, "You have to hand it to the creationists. They have evolved."

• A paragraph explaining the significance of state science standards as a new venue for creationists. NCSE's Glenn Branch told Time, "The decision-making bodies involved in approving state science standards tend to be small, not particularly knowledgeable and, above all, elected, so it's a good opportunity for political pressure to be applied."

• A recognition of the disparity between President Bush's seeming endorsement of teaching "intelligent design" and the Discovery Institute's recent distancing of itself from such proposals, with Connie Morris (a conservative Republican on the Kansas state board of education), and Senator Rick Santorum seeming "to be reading from the same script."

• A section in which scientists -- primarily the Oxford zoologist and popular expositor Richard Dawkins, as well as the Harvard mathematician and evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak -- castigate "intelligent design" as resting on misconceptions and mischaracterizations of bology.

• A pithy diagnosis of the "teach the controversy" strategy by David Thomas, the president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason: "The intelligent-design people are trying to mislead people into thinking that the reference to science as an ongoing critical inquiry permits them to teach I.D. crap in the schools."

• A sidebar asking four prominent figures -- the National Human Genome Research Institute's Francis Collins, Harvard's Steven Pinker, the Discovery Institute's Michael Behe, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's Albert Mohler -- "Can you believe in God and evolution?"

While Wallis's article is inevitably not as scientifically detailed as, for example, H. Allen Orr's recent article in The New Yorker, or as politically astute as, for example, Chris Mooney's recent article in The American Prospect, overall it accomplishes the important goal of informing the general reader that antievolutionism -- whether it takes the form of creation science, "intelligent design," or calls to "teach the controversy" -- is scientifically unwarranted, pedagogically irresponsible, and constitutionally problematic.

[js1138]

I would settle for a feature on FR that simply allowed you to not see posts from selected people. Like an email blacklist.

[PatrickHenry]

At LibertyPost they have such a feature. I think they refer to it as a "bozo filter." People you don't want to ever hear from are "bozoed." It's the implementation of our "virtual ignore." John Robinson once said it's something he has on his long list of features to add to this website's software.

[Fester Chugabrew]

I would settle for a feature on FR that simply allowed you to not see posts from selected people.

Blinders? Yeah. That's the ticket. Wouldn't want to be troubled by any ideas different that my own and those with whom I agree.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your reply!

At best, A-Girl, what you've got there is a list of interesting research projects for PhD candidates to work on. I don't see anything that even remotely contradicts evolution. But this thread is way too long, and no one is likely to jump in at this stage, so we should save it for another thread. Perhaps after this Bush/Frist/ID mess calms down, if it ever does. I'm not up to getting into anything serious at the present.

I agree with waiting for a different kind of thread to get into the discussion!

Items on the "laundry list" are offered as comparables to the deficiency of the standard model to explain matter. Supersymmetry and geometric physics don't replace the standard model, they subsume it.

For Lurkers: the point of the sidebar is the difference in how the two disciplines prioritize and deal with problematic evidence. Physics revisits the theory, biology follows the evidence.

[betty boop]

The reason people find materialistic answers is because the experiments are set up to find materialistic answers. That is the phenomenon Whitehead coined "scientific materialism". But it does not - in fact, cannot - tell us anything substantive about "all that there is" simply because it does not look at "all that there is".

This certainly bears repeating! Talk about "tunnel vision...."

Thank you so very much, A-G for your excellent insights!

[b_sharp]

"Answer your own question. What in the way of direct observation would convince you beyond any shadow of a doubt that an Almighty Creator made the universe and sustains it to this very moment?

I have no idea. The only times I have asked any creationist to provide evidence of a God is when the creationist stubbornly refuses to believe evolutionary science has any evidence and I'm attempting to impress upon him the irony inherent in his stance.

Personally, I don't care if there is a God or not, I live my life as I see fit.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the encouragement!!!

[VadeRetro]

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree here. I'll say it one last time anyway and let it go. The study of visions, drug trips, religious ecstasies, etc. belongs to something called abnormal psychology and/or psychopharmacology.

The study of the paranormal has thus far produced two kinds of results: fraudulent and null.

Science has to be about lawful behaviors of nature because it has no methods for isolating utterly unlawful and supernatural things. For most of us, there's no evidence that large aspects of existence are being skipped by this shortcoming, however.

[js1138]

Blinders? Yeah. That's the ticket. Wouldn't want to be troubled by any ideas different that my own and those with whom I agree.

Do you watch all 900 channels of TV? Do you visit porn sites?

I'm sure dome of them have ideas with which you disagree. At least I would guess they do.

Lately, these threads have been littered with foul language and raging stupidity.

By comparision, you are an ideal debate opponent.

[js1138]

The reason people find materialistic answers is because the experiments are set up to find materialistic answers. That is the phenomenon Whitehead coined "scientific materialism". But it does not - in fact, cannot - tell us anything substantive about "all that there is" simply because it does not look at "all that there is".

There's certainly no law against alternative research, and not much cost involved in proposing alternative research.

How much did it cost Einstein to write his three 1905 papers? Surely in the two hundred years since William Paley, ID could at least propose something.

[Alamo-Girl]

Indeed. We shall have to agree to disagree.

One final point from my end: rather than sweeping the "supernatural" off the table of science, the orthodoxy of biological sciences sweeps away non-corporeals also: qualia, semiosis, information, mathematical structures, geometry and so on.

Fortunately, physics is epistemologically zealous and will always see when other disciplines refuse even to look.

[PatrickHenry]

Fortunately, physics is epistemologically zealous and will always see when other disciplines refuse even to look.

We too must agree to disagree. I think you'll find that when math is called for, or even [gasp!] geometry, biology employs those tools. These are a few examples that I found in about 30 seconds:
Protein folding.
Mechanical properties of DNA.
On The Computational Power of DNA.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

Again I assert that the intelligent design hypothesis which simply states that "certain features of the universe and life are best explained by intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection" is already being investigated by mathematicians and physicists - albeit not under the banner of intelligent design.

The mathematicians and physicists were invited to the table:

If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.
— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986.

Investigations concerning biological life which explore self-organizing complexity and cellular automata (the von Neumann challenge), functional complexity, information theory (successful communication), autonomy (Kauffman's focus), semiosis (especially biosemiotics), intelligence (including swarm intelligence) all are relevant to the intelligent design hypothesis.

IOW, if the investigations show that intelligence is a causative factor for "certain features" of biological life, then the ID hypothesis is vindicated. Since intelligence is commonly seen as an emergent property of self-organizing complexity and animals are known to choose their mates - that conclusion, IMHO, is soon forthcoming.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply and the links!

However, all you have shown is that biology uses mathematics as a tool. So do cashiers and brick-layers.

Epistemology in physics and mathematics is another matter. In those fields, presuppositions are formulated as axioms and postulates relevant to the investigation at hand - not orthodoxy.

[PatrickHenry]

Well, we don't agree. But I don't want to get into it until I've calmed down from this Bill Frist fiasco. I'm just not in the mood right now.

[js1138]

IOW, if the investigations show that intelligence is a causative factor for "certain features" of biological life, then the ID hypothesis is vindicated. Since intelligence is commonly seen as an emergent property of self-organizing complexity and animals are known to choose their mates - that conclusion, IMHO, is soon forthcoming.

Since female choice is a concept discovered and written about by Darwin, I suppose you will have to accept him as the first great ID thinker. He was, of course, opposed for many years on this.

Mate selection has, since Darwin, always been a key part of evolution theory, and since selection is seen as the designer in mainstream biology, I suppose there has always been an element of intelligent design embedded in mainstream biology.

I rather doubt this is what you have in mind.

[Alamo-Girl]

That'll be fine with me! Here's a hug and *smooch* for you - we can get back into the debate on the actual issues on some later date and thread.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

Mate selection has, since Darwin, always been a key part of evolution theory, and since selection is seen as the designer in mainstream biology, I suppose there has always been an element of intelligent design embedded in mainstream biology. I rather doubt this is what you have in mind.

Not at all. This is exactly what I have in mind. It goes to the point that ID neither denies nor replaces evolution theory - ID supplements it by bringing "intelligent cause" front and center to explain "certain features".

After all, the objective of the ID movement was always (and still is) about getting methodological naturalism removed as a presupposition where it forces the orthodoxy of happenstance on science. As Reagan might have said: tear down the walls!

[Tribune7]

Time, Time, Time is on your side. Yes it is.

Of course it was on Kerry's side too.

[aft_lizard]

First off let me apoligize for my actions last night, my carbamazepine was wearing off and it wasnt time to take it again and therefore, I get a little grumpy and muddy headed.

Evolution says that the world started with fire>>

Evolution says no such thing.

Evolution says no Global flood>>

Evolution once again does not make such a claim. You are confusing geology and other such fields with evolution.

Evolution in fact doesnt delve into anything about how this world was created or any earth altering events like the great flood.

If you remember what that article about catholicism and darwinism says is they dont have any arguments with the claim that species and organisms evolve. Thats evident in the fact that humans are taller than they have ever been, on average, microbes and bacteria have developed resistance to drugs etc.

The core argument against Darwinism, and the evolution is that certain aspects of it are unexplainable. Such as species making evolutionary jumps, from ape to man for example.

Like I said ID steps into say, the only p[ossible answer until proven otherwise is that an intelligence did all that.