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Clyde F. "Kip" Herreid is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, College of �rts and Sciences.
What is the theory of intelligent design? How does it differ from
Darwin's theory of evolution?
The theory of intelligent design
is not a theory in the scientific sense; it is simply a speculation.
The claim is that the world and the organisms in it must have had an
intelligent designer because how else can we explain it? Two hundred
years ago, the British clergyman William Paley popularized this idea.
He argued that if you were to find a watch on the ground and had never
seen one before, that you only had to examine the intricate workings of
its gears to recognize that it was designed, and it must have had a
designer. Similarly, one had only to look at the beautiful intricacies
of organisms to recognize they were not a random collection of body
parts, but were like an intricate machine; they must have been designed
and thus must have had a designer. This designer was God and the designs
were perfect. The designer argument made sense to a young Charles
Darwin. Only later did he come to realize its many flaws. He was to
eventually recognize that yes, organisms were designed, but that the
designer was the force of nature: natural selection. Some organisms are
more likely to survive than others. They had slight variations that were
improvements over others in the population (today we know these are due
to mutations). Those individuals that survive pass their traits along to
the next generation. Those with flaws die. This idea of the "survival of
the fittest" has become a true scientific theory—that is, it has
been tested thousands of times and it has great explanatory power. It is
not a theory in the sense that a layman uses the word—merely a
guess—it is one of the core explanatory systems in science
comparable to the atomic theory, or the theory of plate tectonics. The
theory of evolution—that organisms change through time—is so
well-established that we say it is a fact.
Is the term "intelligent design" another name for creationism?
Yes, although the promoters of this idea try to disguise it.
Creationism endorses the idea that 10,000 years ago, God created the
universe, earth and all of its organisms, just as we see them today.
Clearly, this idea is easily rejected by modern astronomy, chemistry,
physics, biology and anthropology. We can date the origin of the
universe to be about 13 billion years old; the earth is 4.6 billion
years old. Tens of thousands of fossils show the changes in organisms
through time with more and more "missing links" being discovered all of
the time. God may have created the universe and all that is in it, but
S/he didn't do it 10,000 years ago and S/he didn't do it all at once.
The universe is evolving and life along with it. This is the real
miracle. Life is a work in progress.
Intelligent design has received a lot of national attention
recently with the push in Kansas and Pennsylvania to teach the "theory"
in public schools. What are its origins?
Since the Scopes Trial
in Tennessee in 1925, school boards or governmental bodies periodically
try to impose their religious beliefs on the science classroom. The
attempt to introduce creationism into the science classrooms in the
Louisiana public schools was rejected as religious dogma by the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1986. In the past 10 years, the creationists have
shifted tactics and have been using the term "intelligent design" to
push their religious agenda. They assiduously try to avoid using the
word "God" in their argument, as they know they will run afoul of the
U.S. Constitution. When questioned about the identity of the "grand
designer," they fall silent.
What are some of the problems with the intelligent design argument?
There are dozens:
If an "intelligent designer" designed the world, then why are there so many unintelligent designs? For example, most of the people in the world have imperfect eyes; they either wear glasses or corrective lenses. This is not intelligent design. Another example: people often get food stuck in their windpipe because the trachea and the esophagus cross in the throat region instead of remaining separate. This is not intelligent design. Or this: the tube leading from the urinary bladder in a man passes through the prostate on its way out of the body. As a result, when the prostate swells, as it does for large numbers of older men, it causes pain and discomfort. This is a poor design. The tube should have passed next to the organ, not through it.
Then there are vestigial organs; these are organs that have no earthly function in the body. For example, many cave animals are blind, but still have vestiges of eyes that cannot see. Snakes have one nonfunctioning lung and birds have one shriveled ovary. An evolutionist has no trouble explaining why these structures are present because the ancestors had them. But a creationist can't explain them at all.
There are embryological peculiarities. For instance, whale embryos have nostrils at the end of their snout but as time goes on, the nostrils migrate to the top of their head to form a blowhole. Whale embryos have fur and they have teeth, even though many species lose them before they are born. If a designer wanted a whale with a blowhole and one without teeth or fur, why not make them that way in the first place? The same question can be asked about human embryos who make tails and blood vessels for gills, and then lose them before we are born. The "Intelligent Design" argument is basically defeatist. Creationists criticize scientists because they may not be able to explain something. What is novel about that? At one time we couldn't explain how the planets moved or what was on the moon. We knew nothing about atoms or why volcanoes erupted or hurricanes appeared. Today, we don't know what causes black holes, and there is much that we don't know about evolution. But the creationists would have us throw our hands in the air and claim it was all a miracle, that an unknown designer had done it.
Some critics claim intelligent design is religion masquerading as
science. Do you agree?
Absolutely. And it is a particular brand
of religion promulgated by a fundamentalist sect of Christianity. In
contrast, the Catholic Church's Pope John Paul, in his address to the
Pontifical Academy in 1996, accepts evolution as an effectively proven
fact. Nor do most Protestant religions, Hindus or Buddhists find the
theory of evolution an anathema.
Does intelligent design have any place in the science
classroom?
Perhaps. ID clearly is not an idea that is in step
with modern science, and so science teachers could easily dismiss it as
not relevant. Yet, archaic ideas often are mentioned in passing as
historical curiosities in the science classroom. I, for example, in my
Evolutionary Biology class, find it useful to go over a few of the
fundamental problems with intelligent design before pushing on to modern
science. But what school boards are trying to do is to force the
teaching of ID as an alternative to evolution. They see this as a
fairness issue—and Americans are all in favor of fairness.
President Bush has even weighed in on the issue by saying "both sides
ought to be properly taught." It is hard to know what to make of such a
comment. There really aren't two sides; scientists don't argue about
this anymore. In fact, I really don't know what anyone would teach under
the heading of "intelligent design" except to say that it was a
miracle.
Does religion in general have any place in science?
Science attempts to understand how the world works and how it came
to be. It does this by using physical explanations that are testable.
Religion is generally a faith-based system. Many people argue that its
approach is fundamentally incompatible with science and is
superstitious. This quote of George Bernard Shaw is apropos. When asked,
"Do you believe in God?" he responded: "Which God? The Hindu God, the
Christian God,....." Some people argue religion and science are two
different ways of knowing the world; they are content to keep those
worlds separate. How an individual deals with these issues is clearly a
personal matter. It is important to emphasize that for many scientists,
evolution is clearly compatible with their religious views; they see God
as setting the rules of the universe and that natural selection is one
of them.