Sorry Ed, but I’ve gotta go back to what I said about this on CQ when you first reviewed the trailer for this movie.

I love Ben Stein, and he’s a brilliant guy – but he’s picking the wrong fight here. If you want to talk about some of the poor science being bandied about by atheists who don’t really know anything about evolutionary theory, that’s good material. If you want to talk about academic intolerance, look no further than the High Church of Global Warming (and Al Gore is its prophet…). Want to argue the ways in which hardcore atheism has turned itself into a religion? Could be a blockbuster. If you want to discuss the philosophical position of Intelligent Design, by all means, should make for an interesting movie.

But the argument presented in this movie, that Intelligent Design is being unfairly given the academic shaft, just doesn’t work at the most basic level. Intelligent Design is not science – it’s a philosophy you can turn to when the science has temporarily dead-ended, and is therefore at the academic level nothing more than an interesting intellectual exercise… but it should not be confused with science. ID is not a hypothesis that can be modeled or tested until someone can scientifically prove the existence of God.

It’s also more than a little intellectually lazy – instead of taking some of the unexplained/unknown aspects of evolutionary theory (which by definition is open to new evidence and revision) and attempting to backtrack along a scientific path, ID basically drops a brick on scientific inquiry and says, “Nope, we can stop here… this is too complicated, ergo God did it.”

And there are theories (and better ones that Dawkins’) regarding the origin of organic life… and the more evidence we collect, the more possibilities open up.

This is not helped of course by the aforementioned poor understanding of evolutionary theory to begin with, and one that is widely taught in public school science cirriculums. Those misunderstandings lead to people scoffing at the idea of a lightning strike in the primeval ocean miraculously causing “life” to start like a switch flicking on, or that, as one of commenter said above, “a reptile becomes a bird.” For that matter, even the idea of “survival of the fittest” is a terrible oversimplification of Darwin’s ideas, and his were the beginning, not the end, of evolutionary theory.

The truth is that the entire issue is extremely complex. Our very definition of what constitutes “life” is always in flux… biological definitions of what constitutes “life” change almost day to day as we learn more about it. The distinction between “not-life” and “life” is much finer than most people care to realize. We’re also learning that organic compounds are not particularly unique, or difficult to create as originally assumed – we’ve even come to the point where some geologists are making the case that crude oil, once assumed to be the remains of ancient plants, may in fact be a geologic chemical process. Even self-replication can’t be a criteria unless you consider crystal formations and fire to be “alive.” Even our definition of “species” is subject to debate.

And the reptile or dinosaur to bird idea is not so simple. A species of dinosaur did not spontaneously grow wings and decide to fly one day. What you would have seen – over the course of some 240 million years, is a very gradual series of alterations brought about by adaptation to a million and one factors. A member of one species might mutate a scale or flap of skin that provides some advantage… maybe better heat dissipation. A million other mutations would have been useless or actively bad, like albinism in deer (white deer rarely last long in any environment with predators). So the animal with the skin flaps would have been better suited to survival, and over the course of many thousands of years, would dominate the local gene pool. And in succeeding generations, mutations make that flap longer, thinner, or lighter, maybe bring some veins to the surface to better cool the animal. In a million years, you’ve got a very similar animal with what amounts to rudimentary feathers, which could no longer interbreed with the original population. Now that population could still be wiped out – an ice age, new predator, or a big rock smacking into the planet. The history of evolution would be filled with such “dead-ends” – we know of several in our own evolutionary past, the last of which went extinct not long before we developed civilization. So it’s not a dinosaur turning into a bird – but a dinosaur becoming a slightly more birdlike dinosaur. For millions of years. And with no clear dilineation, about ten million years later, you see a descendent of that first scaly creature, and say oh, a primitive bird! There’s no magic slash you can draw between when it stops being a dinosaur and starts being a bird… it just looks that way when you see fossils seperated by fifty million years of time. Probably 99% of the species that ever existed on Earth are not only extinct, but left no fossils (which requires a pretty specific set of circumstances).

The other misunderstanding is that evolution simply “stops.” We hear often repeated hyperbolically on TV and in the news that animals like sharks and crocodiles are “living fossils!” or that ceolocanth was discovered not to have gone extinct after all. The truth is though, that a modern shark is *not* the same shark that swam the oceans 100 million years ago… it’s that shark with 100 million years of evolution behind it. Same with crocodiles and alligators… they aren’t the same animals, although very similar and descended from, animals that lived 200 million years ago.

So evolutionary theory cannot explain everything – but that’s expected. We haven’t learned everything, nor will we ever, likely. But every new thing we do learn allows us to revise the theory to fit the facts.

Intelligent Design fails as a science because it *can’t* be revised to explain the otherwise inexplicable. My favorite is the shape of the human throat, which is actually an evolutionary *goof* designed into all air-breathing vertebrates. But it’s not one that adversely affects our chances for survival (barring some outlandish change in conditions). Namely we all respirate and ingest through the same pipe – which is a poor design, because it allows for aspiration and that old formal dinner favorite, water “going down the wrong pipe.” An intelligent design would be a separate trachea and esophagus… then you can even breathe and eat at the same time (I won’t even comment on the effect that would have on the porn industry :p ). Evolution explains that problem easily – triploblasts developed initially along the simple mechanism of “one orifice in, one orifice out”, and because it was successful and never detrimental, that’s the basic design of our own bodies.

Intelligent Design, faced with such a conundrum of *poor* design, must fall back on “God has a reason.” And that right there disqualifies it as a science. I’m not saying there is no God, nor that he *didn’t* design life according to a plan we don’t comprehend. But that’s a philosophical and religious argument, not a scientific one, and doesn’t deserve to be treated as though it were by academia.

E1701 on April 18, 2008 at 4:14 PM