Intelligent Design has been discussed in recent blogs and comments. It is either not science, or, if grudgingly taken as science, is disproved. More importantly, I think, those of us who fear evolution need not do so.

Around the globe, 3 billion of us believe in the Abrahamic God, a billion of us do not believe in God, and some 3 billion of us are members of Eastern Wisdom Traditions. The United States is known to be the most religious among first world nations, perhaps because of the religious backgrounds of our colonies.

A large faction of Americans do not believe in evolution. For those of us who are overwhelmingly convinced of the natural origin of life some 3.7 billion years ago and the gradual evolution of the stunning biosphere, it is deeply important to try to understand the resistance to evolution, and with it, a belief by some in the recently proposed “Intelligent Design” arguments.

Some scholars of biblical history, (I don’t remember who unfortunately), say, interestingly, that before Newton, Christianity often interpreted the Bible as largely allegorical. With Newton and Celestial Mechanics, there seemed nothing for a theistic God to do, and the Deistic God of the 18th Century, who wound up the universe and let it go to follow Newton’s laws, became a new view of God. Others, believers in a theistic God that acts continuously in the universe, came to view the Bible as the literal word of God. If so, then there is the familiar struggle between science and religion where the two disagree. Evolution is a major case.

I suspect the fear of evolution is also based in the view of many that God is the author of our moral laws. Then if the Bible is God’s literal word, and yet evolution is true, the Bible, the very word of God, is false, and our morality falls to the ground. Hence some of us hold to Intelligent Design, the idea that organisms are, as ID proponent Michael Behe wrote, “Irreducibly complex”, and, as ID proponent William Demsky says, vastly improbable, so are signs of Intelligent Design.

But evolution, in fact, is no enemy of morality. I tell of a story written in an Edmonton Alberta newspaper eighteen months ago. A six month baby was outside in a rocker with the family dog. A rattle snake coiled to strike the infant. The dog stepped between the snake and dog and took six strikes. Why? We cannot prove dogs are conscious, although I am convinced, having our dog Winsor, that dogs are conscious. I think this dog knew perfectly well what it was doing, and was trying to save the baby. Happily, the dog survived.

Franz de Waal, in “Good Natured”, writes of a experiment with higher primates: Two were in facing cages, unable to see one another. A third “observer” was in a cage able to see the other two. The experimenter fed one of the two well, and nearly starved the second, and fed the observer well. One day, the experimenter gave the observing primate lots of extra food. What happened? The observer gave the extra food to the starved primate. These, as de Waal says, are signs of the evolution of “prosocial behavior”, presumably due to group selection.

No evolution is not the enemy of morality, but its first source.

What then of Intelligent Design?

Intelligent Design argues that complex traits such as the famous flagellar motor in some bacteria enabling them to swim, are too complex to have evolved. The probabilities of achieving the motor are too remote to have remotely occurred, ID proponents say.

Now, if we take ID to be science, one would think that the next hugely pressing scientific questions would be: who or what is the Designer? And, how does the Designer manage to achieve the designs in organisms? It is no accident that ID proponents do not ask these questions. On the one hand, no one has any idea of a natural mechanism whereby this design and implementation might have occurred. On the other hand, the quiet premise of these ID proponents of what was earlier, as the Dover trial showed, Creation Science, is that the Designer is our theistic God. But to mention God as the Designer would put ID at odds with our separation of Church and State.

How do biologists explain “irreducible complexity” such as the flagellar motor? Largely by our now well discussed Darwinian “exaptations”. Other bacteria have been found, and presented in the Dover trial, that have parts of the flagellar motor. In these other bacteria, the parts of the flagellar motor play entirely different functional roles, unrelated to swimming via the flagellar motor. The transition, we believe, to the flagellar motor arose, like the swim bladder from the lungs of lung fish, via Darwinian exapatations. The flagellar motor was never selected for directly and ab initio. It arose by a succession of exaptations, like the three bones of our middle ears from three adjacent bones of an early fish. Furthermore, as I’ve described before, we can have no probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible, since we do not know all the possibilities, hence we do not know the sample space of the process, so cannot construct a probability measure. Therefore, the calculations of improbability that the ID proponents make are vacuous.

If ID were taken to be a science, it would make one prediction: Darwinian exaptations do not occur, hence cannot offer an explanation for “irreducible complexity”. But exaptations arise in evolution all the time. The one testable prediction of ID that I can think of is false.

So: to all of us, those who believe in God and those who do not: We do not need ID. And to those of us who believe in our theistic God, perhaps the views of those before Newton have merit, the Bible may be partially allegorical, and we need not fear evolution.

Finally, science itself may be transforming. Adam, Frank and I all doubt the reductionist scientific belief that all that happens in the universe is entailed by the fundamental laws of physics. I will be discussing “The Open Universe” in forthcoming posts, trying to show that the becoming of the universe is partially beyond sufficient natural law. If so, we can take the natural creativity in the universe as God, and nature, with all of life, as sacred, to be treasured. And for those of us who believe in a supernatural theistic God, there is room for that God to act in such an open universe, compared to that of Newton. Perhaps a newer science and a sharable sense of the sacred can arise together as a co-evolving ecology of civilizations around the globe forms.

“In the long run, it might be a good thing to have a large spread of people who handle blood sugar differently. However, in today’s environment, people with a propensity to develop high blood sugar are at a disadvantage,” explains Johns Hopkins professor of medicine Andrew Feinberg, M.D., Ph.D., one of the study’s authors.

Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, 12/15.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/jhmi-ssc121109.php

In the past 500 years, there have been many great ideas that have affected human society, yet two stand alone.

The first occurred in 1543 with the publication of “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” by Nicolaus Copernicus. For many years this book, which challenged the accepted idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, was known mostly to scholars. It wasn’t until 1610, when Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei actively championed the idea of heliocentrism, that the average person began to consider the possibility that Earth, like all the other known planets, circled the sun, and together, our solar system is one of many on the outer edges of a great galaxy known as the Milky Way.

Galileo did so in the most elegant of ways, by having people use his telescope and see for themselves how Jupiter’s moons circled the great planet and then extending the concept to our own humble home.

Yet it would take another 75 years, nearly 150 years after Copernicus, for another great mind, Isaac Newton, to provide the final proof in the form of elegant and complex calculations.

Today represents the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” Darwin’s theory of biological evolution rightly has been called the second of these transformative ideas. In its simplest form, the theory states that all life on Earth is connected by way of common ancestry and that over the millennia, natural selection acting on naturally occurring variation has yielded the wondrous display of biological diversity we see today.

Copernican heliocentrism and Darwinian evolution both met with considerable opposition, largely because they challenged us to reconsider mankind’s place in the universe. To many they represent a threat, for to accept either would be to acknowledge that we’d had it wrong for a very long time. The Earth is not the center of the universe and mankind is not the pinnacle of creation. The ideas were revolutionary, even frightening, and were met with an attitude of disbelief and deep suspicion.

Today, only one of these ideas continues to be rejected. Despite the overwhelming amount of supporting evidence produced by geologists, biologists, and others, a great many of us repeat the mantra that there is no “proof” of evolution.

I dare say that every person reading this essay has come to accept that the Earth orbits the sun, and that this knowledge does not diminish our self-worth. I’m equally certain that few among us, myself included, has ever taken the time to carefully observe the movement of the planets, record the measurements, and apply Newtonian calculus to actually prove this to ourselves. Others, who are more talented than we, have done so many, many times. And we accept their conclusions.

So it is with evolution. To accept Darwin’s idea is to acknowledge that we had it wrong. Yet embracing his theory frees us from the prison of ignorance. Like Copernicus, Darwin allows us to travel in space and time and see well beyond our own narrow perspective. Rather than challenging mankind’s place in the universe, these two ideas liberate and enable us to move on to an ever greater understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Through our genes we are connected to every living thing. Through our chemistry we are connected to the Earth. Through our very atoms we are connected to the stars and the universe.

Big ideas indeed, and ones that challenge us to consider our place in the cosmos. These are ideas that should be embraced, not rejected. Ideas that should fill us with wonder and joy, not fear.

• Mark Farmer of Winterville is a professor of cellular biology at the University of Georgia and a spokesman for Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education.

AUSTIN, Tex. — In an evenly split vote, the State Board of Education on Thursday upheld teaching evolution as accepted mainstream science.

But social conservatives on the board, using a series of amendments tailored to particular school subjects, succeeded in requiring teachers to evaluate critically a variety of scientific principles like cell formation and the Big Bang.

The debate over new curriculum requirements, to take effect in 2010, stands to influence educational standards nationwide. Once every decade, major textbook publishers revise their offerings to match the requirements newly set forth by Texas, which is one of their largest bulk customers.

More than 80 years after the biology teacher John Scopes was tried on charges of illegally teaching evolution in Tennessee, the controversy here has played out with more subtlety, involving political code words and efforts to undermine the theory itself.

The debate has centered on a longstanding clause that requires teachers to address the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Teachers quietly ignored the requirements for decades.

The board tentatively decided in January to drop the “strengths and weaknesses” language. On Thursday, Democrats and moderate Republicans on the board blocked a proposal by social conservatives to reinstate it. Even with one moderate board member missing, the measure was blocked with a preliminary 7-to-7 vote.

The full board is set to take a final vote on Friday.

Failing to overhaul the curriculum broadly, conservatives instead attached a series of measures specific to subjects like biology, where teachers would be newly required to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of natural selection to explain the complexity of the cell.”

In the earth-science curriculum, conservatives weakened language concerning “the concept of an expanding universe” to address instead “current theories of the evolution of the universe including estimates for the age of the universe.”

With protesters on both sides of the issue carrying signs outside its meetings, the board has heard impassioned testimony from science teachers, parents and others.

A conservative board member, Bob Craig of Lubbock, expressed satisfaction with the overall changes.

“I personally believe that language is good language,” Mr. Craig said in an interview. “It allows for full discussion of all sides of the issue.”

Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit group that promotes the teaching of evolution, said the vote would not end the debate.

“If they don’t get the political strategy, they’ll go piecemeal,” Mr. Quinn said. “The State Board of Education pretty much slammed the door on ‘strengths and weaknesses,’ but then went around and opened all the windows in the house.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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