Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement by John Broc

Description: Intelligent Thought by John Brockman In reverence to the force of scientific truth, join fifteen preeminent thinkers whose clear, accessible, and passionate essays reveal the fact and power of evolution, and the beauty of the scientific endeavor. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Evolutionary science lies at the heart of a modern understanding of the natural world. Darwins 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 Darwins theory, and the beauty of the scientific quest to understand our world. Author Biography John Brockman is a writer, agent, and publisher of Edge, the "Third Culture" website , 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. Table of Contents John Brockman IntroductionJerry A. Coyne Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its NameLeonard Susskind The Good FightDaniel C. Dennett The Hoax of Intelligent Design and How It Was PerpetuatedNicholas Humphrey Consciousness: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not QuiteTim D. White Human Evolution: The EvidenceNeil H. Shubin The "Great" TransformationRichard Dawkins Intelligent AliensFrank J. Sulloway Why Darwin Rejected Intelligent DesignScott Atran Unintelligent DesignSteven Pinker Evolution and EthicsLee Smolin Darwinism All the Way DownStuart A. Kauffman Intelligent Design, Science or Not?Seth Lloyd How Smart Is the Universe?Lisa Randall Designing WordsMarc D. Hauser Parental Guidance RequiredScott D. Sampson EvoliteracyAppendix Excerpt from the Memorandum Opinion of The United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, December 20, 2005 Review "Evolutionary biology certainly hasnt explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasnt yet tried to explain anything at all." –Daniel C. Dennett, Philosopher"Natural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity." –Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist"An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one." –Steven Pinker, PsychologistNot 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. –Jerry A. Coyne, evolutionary biologistThe geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously declared, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." One might add that nothing in biology makes sense in the light of intelligent design. –Jerry A. Coyne, evolutionary biologistEvolutionary biology certainly hasnt explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasnt yet tried to explain anything at all. —Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientistA denial of evolution–however motivated–is a denial of evidence, a retreat from reason to ignorance. —Tim D. White, paleontologistNatural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity. —Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologistThe supernatural explanation fails to explain because it ducks the responsibility to explain itself.—Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologistNothing indicates that people who believe that life arose by chance also believe that morality is haphazard. —Scott Atran, anthropologist and psychologistAn evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one. —Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist To state that a given organ is so improbable that it requires design is just ill founded. The argument uses standard probability, which does not apply to the evolution of the biosphere. —Stuart A. Kauffman, theoretical biologist We dont have an intelligent designer (ID), we have a bungling consistent evolver (BCE). Or maybe an adaptive changer (AC). In fact, what we have in the most economical interpretation is, of course, evolution. —Lisa Randall, physicistWhat counts as a controversy must be delineated with care, as we want students to distinguish between scientific challenges and sociopolitical ones. —Marc D. Hauser, evolutionary psychologistIncredulity doesnt count as an alternative position or critique. —Marc D. Hauser, evolutionary psychologistRather than removing meaning from life, an evolutionary perspective can and should fill us with a sense of wonder at the rich sequence of natural systems that gave us birth and continues to sustain us. —Scott D. Sampson, paleontologist Review Quote "Evolutionary biology certainly hasnt explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasnt yet tried to explain anything at all." Daniel C. Dennett, Philosopher "Natural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity." Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist "An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one." Steven Pinker, Psychologist 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. Jerry A. Coyne, evolutionary biologist The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously declared, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." One might add that nothing in biology makes sense in the light of intelligent design. Jerry A. Coyne, evolutionary biologist Evolutionary biology certainly hasnt explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasnt yet tried to explain anything at all. -Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist A denial of evolutionhowever motivatedis a denial of evidence, a retreat from reason to ignorance. -Tim D. White, paleontologist Natural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity. -Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist The supernatural explanation fails to explain because it ducks the responsibility to explain itself.-Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist Nothing indicates that people who believe that life arose by chance also believe that morality is haphazard. -Scott Atran, anthropologist and psychologist An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one. -Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist To state that a given organ is so improbable that it requires design is just ill founded. The argument uses standard probability, which does not apply to the evolution of the biosphere. -Stuart A. Kauffman, theoretical biologist We dont have an intelligent designer (ID), we have a bungling consistent evolver (BCE). Or maybe an adaptive changer (AC). In fact, what we have in the most economical interpretation is, of course, evolution. -Lisa Randall, physicist What counts as a controversy must be delineated with care, as we want students to distinguish between scientific challenges and sociopolitical ones. -Marc D. Hauser, evolutionary psychologist Incredulity doesnt count as an alternative position or critique. -Marc D. Hauser, evolutionary psychologist Rather than removing meaning from life, an evolutionary perspective can and should fill us with a sense of wonder at the rich sequence of natural systems that gave us birth and continues to sustain us. -Scott D. Sampson, paleontologist From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpt from Book 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 wont 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 isnt 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. Einsteins 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 cant be tested or falsified, it is not a scientific theory. The theory that God caused the Big Bang, for example, isnt 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 its highly unlikely. So, how do Darwinism and ID compare when judged against these criteria? Lets 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 dont necessarily stand or fall together. Nevertheless, evidence supporting all four began to accumulate starting with Darwins 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 Earths flora and fauna. Lets start with the obvious place to look, the fossil record. Even in Darwins 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 ancestry. The appendix is a familiar example. Less well known is the bad design of the recurrent laryngeal nerve-a nerve that runs from the brain to the larynx, helping us speak and swallow. In mammals, this nerve doesnt take a direct route but descends into the chest, loops around the aorta near the heart, and then runs back up to the larynx. It is several times longer than it needs to be; in the giraffe the nerve has to traverse the neck twice and so is fifteen feet long-fourteen feet longer than necessary! The added length makes the nerve more susceptible to injury, and its tortuous path makes sense only in light of evolution. We inherited our developmental pathway from that of ancestral fish, in which the precursor of the recurrent laryngeal nerve attached to the sixth of the gill arches, embryonic bars of muscle, nerves, and blood vessels that developed into gills. During the evolution of land animals, some of the ancestral vessels disappeared, while others were rearranged into a new circulatory system. The blood vessel in the sixth gill arch moved backward into the chest, becoming the aorta. As it did so, the nerve that looped around it was constrained to move backward in tandem. Natural selection could not create the most efficient configuration because that would have required breaking the nerve and leaving the larynx without innervation. Look deeper and you find evidence for evolution buried in our DNA. Our genome is a veritable farrago of nonfunctional DNA, including many inactive "pseudogenes" that were functional in our ancestors. Why do humans, unlike most mammals, require vitamin C in their diet? Because primates cannot synthesize this essential nutrient from simpler chemicals. Yet we still carry all the genes for synthesizing vitamin C. The gene used for the last step in this pathway was inactivated by mutations 40 million years ago, probably because it was unnecessary in fruit-eating primates. Is this really the best an "intelligent" designer can do? IDers claim that arguments for evolution based on inefficiencies or Details ISBN0307277224 Short Title INTELLIGENT THOUGHT Language English ISBN-10 0307277224 ISBN-13 9780307277220 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2006 Author John Brockman Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Edited by John Brockman Birth 1941 Series Vintage Original DOI 10.1604/9780307277220 AU Release Date 2006-05-09 NZ Release Date 2006-05-09 US Release Date 2006-05-09 UK Release Date 2006-05-09 Pages 272 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2006-05-09 Imprint Random House Inc Subtitle Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement DEWEY 231.7652 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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