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Further to the Discovery Institute’s recent letter to BSU President Dr. Jo Ann Gora (pictured above), protesting the university’s “violation of academic freedom with regard to faculty discussions of intelligent design,” I’d like to ask readers what they think of the following passages, which are taken from a leading best-seller written by a prominent evolutionary biologist, in defense of Darwinian evolution:
Natural selection is not a master engineer, but a tinkerer. It doesn’t produce the absolute perfection achievable by a designer starting from scratch, but merely the best it can do with what it has to work with. (p. 12)
A conscientious designer might have given the turtles an extra pair of limbs, with retractable shovel-like appendages, but turtles, like all reptiles, are stuck with a developmental plan that limits their limbs to four. (p. 13)
We men, for example, would be better off if our testes formed directly outside the body, where the cooler temperature is better for sperm. The testes, however, begin development in the abdomen. When the fetus is six or seven months old, they migrate down into the scrotum through two channels called the inguinal canals, removing them from the damaging heat of the rest of the body. Those canals leave weak spots in the body wall that make men prone to inguinal hernias. These hernias are bad: they can obstruct the intestine, and sometimes caused death in the years before surgery. No intelligent designer would have given us this tortuous testicular journey. (p. 13)
There is no reason why a celestial designer, fashioning organisms from scratch like an architect designs buildings, should make new species by remodeling the features of existing ones. Each species could be constructed from the ground up. (p. 57)
What I mean by “bad design” is the notion that if organisms were
built from scratch by a designer — one who used the biological building blocks of nerves, muscles, bone, and so on—they would not have such imperfections. Perfect design would truly be the sign of a skilled and intelligent designer. Imperfect design is the mark of evolution; in fact it’s precisely what we expect from evolution. (p. 86)A smart designer wouldn’t put a collapsible tube through an organ prone to infection and swelling. (p. 90)
And would an intelligent designer have created the small gap between the human ovary and Fallopian tube, so that an egg must cross this gap before it can travel though the tube and implant in the uterus? (p. 90)
Some creationists respond that poor design is not an argument for
evolution — that a supernatural intelligent designer could nevertheless have created imperfect features. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, the ID proponent Michael Behe claims that “features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the Designer for a reason — for artistic reasons, for variety, to show off, for some as-yet-undetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason — or they might not.” But this misses the point. Yes, a designer may have motives that are unfathomable. But the particular bad designs that we see make sense only if they evolved from features of earlier ancestors. If a designer did have discernible motives when creating species, one of them must surely have been to fool biologists by making organisms look as though they evolved. (p. 91)Since ID itself makes no testable scientific claims, but offers only halfbaked criticisms of Darwinism, its credibility slowly melts away with each advance in our understanding. Furthermore, ID’s own explanation for complex features — the whim of a supernatural designer — can explain any conceivable observation about nature. It may even have been the creator’s whim to make life look as though it evolved (apparently many creationists believe this, though few admit it). But if you can’t think of an observation that could disprove a theory, that theory simply isn’t scientific. (p. 149)
Before Darwin, sexual dimorphism was a mystery. Creationists then — as now — could not explain why a supernatural designer should produce features in one sex, and only one sex, that harms its survival. As the great explainer of nature’s diversity, Darwin was naturally anxious to understand how these seemingly pointless traits evolved. He finally noticed the key to their explanation: if traits differ between males and females of a species, the elaborate behaviors, structures, and ornaments are nearly always restricted to males. (p. 161)
The author of the best-selling book on evolution has also written gloatingly of a reader’s successful efforts to get Amazon Canada to move Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt, from the science section to the religion section. According to this author, Meyer’s book is “not science,” but “god-of-the-gaps natural theology.”
I haven’t yet read Darwin’s Doubt, although it’s high on my shopping list. However, the point I’d like to make here is that if arguing for an Intelligent Designer on the basis of empirical evidence is not science but “natural theology,” then by the same token, arguing against an Intelligent Designer on the basis of empirical evidence is not science but “natural anti-theology,” if you like. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
The author in question is, of course, Professor Jerry Coyne, and the quotes cited above were taken from his best-seller, Why Evolution is True (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Here’s my point. Professor Coyne’s book is widely used on American college campuses in science classrooms, as the following quote by a (mostly friendly but occasionally critical) non-religious reviewer illustrates:
Most of the courses you take in college solely use textbooks for content and assignments. When I was a teaching assistant for a Duke genetics class, the professors also assigned the non-fiction book Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne. During the evolution part of the course, students were assigned chapters in the book to read as homework. In class discussions would then focus on what Coyne discussed in each chapter, giving the students and professors a springboard to starting a conversation on what evolution is and what is the evidence for it.
The President of Ball State University, Dr. Jo Ann Gora, has recently banned discussions of intelligent design in BSU science classes, on the grounds that it is a religious idea. But if the arguments for Intelligent Design are by their very nature religious, then surely arguments such as those which appear in Professor Coyne’s book, Why Evolution Is True, criticizing Intelligent Design by appealing to considerations relating to what an Intelligent Designer would and wouldn’t do, are equally religious in nature, and should be banned from BSU science classrooms. In that case, will President Jo Ann Gora issue a directive banning the use of Why Evolution Is True as a science textbook at BSU? And will other books of a similar ilk be similarly banned? Come to think of it, what about banning Darwin’s Origin of Species, too, as it repeatedly makes arguments of the kind put forward by Coyne in his book?
Personally, I’m all for free discussion of issues relating to origins. I think that anti-design arguments (such as those put forward in Coyne’s book) should be taken seriously and debated freely in science classes, and I also believe that the Intelligent Design should be treated as a scientific hypothesis – particularly in view of Professor Jerry Coyne’s admission, in a November 8, 2010 post entitled, Shermer and I disagree on the supernatural, that science is not committed to methodological naturalism and that in principle, there could be scientific evidence for God. Given such an admission, it is hard to understand Coyne’s applauding of recent efforts to have Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt, moved out of the science section at Amazon Canada.
It will be interesting to see how (and whether) BSU President Jo Ann Gora responds to the Discovery Institute’s September 10 letter in protest against her recent efforts to censor speech by BSU faculty members who support intelligent design – a letter which Professor Coyne has already commented on. One thing I do know: President Gora has painted herself into a corner. If Intelligent Design is “natural theology,” then so are Darwinistic arguments that ridicule it, by appealing to what a truly intelligent Designer would and wouldn’t do.
And now, over to my readers. What do you think?