Saving Us froID DarlMin1.

It is no secret that science and religion,once allied in homage to divinelycrafted harmonies, have long beengrowing apart. As the scientific world-view has become more authoritativeand self-sufficient, it-has loosed a cas-cade of appalling fears: that the humansoul, insofar as it can be said to exist,may be a mortal and broadly compre-hensible product of material forces;that the immanent, caring God ofthe Western monotheisms may neverhave been more than a fiction devisedby members of a species that self-indulgently denies its continuity withthe rest of nature; and that our uni-verse may lack any discernible purpose,moral character, or special relation toourselves. But as those intimationshave spread, the retrenchment known'as creationism has also gained instrength and has widened its appeal,acquiring recruits and sympathizersamong intellectual sophisticates, hard-headed pragmatists, and even somescientists. And so formidable a politi-cal influence is this wave of resistancethat some Darwinian thinkers whostand quite apart from it neverthelessfeel obliged to placate it with tactfulsophistries, lest the cause of evolution-ism itself be swept away.

As everyone knows, it was the publi-cation of The Origin of Species in 1859that set off the counterrevolution thateventually congealed into creationism.It isn't immediately obvious, however,why Darwin and not, say, Copernicus,Galileo, or Newton should have beenjudged the most menacing of would-bedeicides. After all, the subsiding of faithmight have been foreseeable as soonas the newly remapped sky left noplausible site for heaven. But peopleare good at living with contradictions,just so long as their self-importanceisn't directly insulted. That shock wasdelivered when Darwin dropped hishint that, as the natural selection ofevery other species gradually provesits cogency, "much light will be thrownon the origin of man and his history."

By rendering force and motion de-ducible from laws of physics withoutreference to the exercise of will, lead-ing scientists of the Renaissance andEnlightenment started to force theactivist lord of the universe into earlyretirement. They did so, however, withreverence for his initial wisdom andbenevolence as an engineer. Not soDarwin, who saw at close range thecruelty, the flawed designs, and theprodigal wastefulness of life, cappedfor him by the death of his daughterAnnie. He decided that he wouldrather forsake his Christian faith thanlay all that carnage at God's door.That is why he could apply CharlesLyell's geological uniformitarianismmore consistently than did Lyell him-self, who still wanted to reserve somescope for intervention from above.And it is also why he was quick toextrapolate fruitfully from Malthus'stheory of human population dynamics,for he was already determined to re-gard all species as subject to the sameimplacable laws. Indeed, one of his cri-

24

Frederick Crews

"-BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW

The Wedge of Truth: Splittingthe Foundations of Naturalismby Phillip E. Johnson.InterVarsity Press, 192 pp., $17.99

Icons of Evolution: Science orMyth? Why Much of What WeTeach About Evolution Is Wrongby Jonathan Wells.Regnery, 338 pp., $27.95

Darwin's Black Box: TheBiochemical Challenge to Evolutionby Michael J. Behe.Touchstone, 307 pp., $13.00 (paper)

Mere Creation: Science,Faith and Intelligent Designedited by William A. Dembski.InterVarsity Press,475 pp., $24.99 (paper)

Intelligent Design:The Bridge Between Scienceand Theologyby William A. Dembski.InterVarsity Press,312 pp., $21.99

Tower of Babel:The Evidence Againstthe New Creationismby Robert T. Pennock.Bradford/MIT Press,429 pp., $18.95 (paper)

Finding Darwin's God:A Scientist's Searchfor Common GroundBetween God and Evolutionby Kenneth R. Miller.Cliff Street Books/HarperCollins,338 pp., $14.00 (paper)

teria for a sound hypothesis was that itmust leave no room for the supernatu-ral. As he wrote to Lyell in 1859, "Iwould give absolutely nothing for thetheory of Natural Selection, if it re-quires miraculous additions at anyonestage of descent."

Darwin's contemporaries saw atonce what a heavy blow he was strik-ing against piety. His theory entailedthe inference that we are here todaynot because God reciprocates ourlove, forgives our sins, and attends toour entreaties but because each of ouroceanic and terrestrial foremotherswas lucky enough to elude its preda-tors long enough to reproduce. Theundignified emergence of humanityfrom primordial ooze and from a lineof apes could hardly be reconciledwith the unique creation of man, a fallfrom grace, and redemption by a per-son of the godhead dispatched toEarth for that end. If Darwin was

right, revealed truth of every kindmust be unsanctioned. "With me thehorrid doubt always arises," he con-fessed in a letter. "whether the convic-tions of man's mind, which has beendeveloped from the mind of the loweranimals, are of any value or at all trust-worthy. Would anyone trust in theconvictions of a monkey's mind ... ?"

In a sentence that is often miscon-strued and treated as a scandal, Rich-ard Dawkins has asserted that "Dar-win made it possible to be an intellec-tually fulfilled atheist. ,,' What he meantwas not that Darwinism requires us todisbelieve in God. Rather, if we are al-ready inclined to apprehend the uni-verse in strictly physical terms, the ex-planatory power of natural selectionremoves the last obstacle to our doing'The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evi-dence of Evolution Reveals a UniverseWithout Design (revised edition; Nor-ton, 1996), p. 6.

so. That obstacle was the seeminglyirrefutable "argument from design"most famously embodied in WilliamPaley's Natural Theology of 1802. Byshowing in principle that order couldarise without an artificer who is morecomplex than his artifacts, Darwinrobbed Paley's argument of its scien-tific inevitability.

With the subsequent and continu-ally swelling flood of evidence favor-ing Darwin's paradigm, evolutionismhas acquired implications that Darwinhimself anticipated but was reluctantto champion. Daniel C. Dennett hastrenchantly shown that the Darwinianoutlook is potentially a "universalacid" penetrating "all the way down"to the origin of life on Earth and "allthe way up" to a satisfyingly material-istic reduction of mind and soul.' Trueenough, natural selection can't tell ushow certain organic molecules first af-fixed themselves to templates for self-duplication and performed their mo-mentous feat. But the theory's successat every later stage has tipped the ex-planatory balance toward some natural-istic account of life's beginning. So, too,competitive pressures now form a moreplausible framework than divine ac-tion for guessing how the human braincould have acquired consciousness andfacilitated cultural productions, notexcepting religion itself. It is thismarch toward successfully explainingthe higher by the lower that rendersDarwinian science a threat to theologi-cal dogma of all but the blandest kind.

2.That threat has been felt most keenlyby Christian fundamentalists, whoseinsistence on biblical literalism guar-antees them a head-on collision withscience. They are the faction responsi-ble for creationism as most peopleunderstand the term: the movementto exclude evolution from the publicschool curriculum and to put "creationscience" in its place. The goal of such"young-Earthers" is to convince stu-dents that the Bible has been provenexactly right: our planet and its sur-rounding universe are just six thou-sand years old, every species was fash-ioned by God in six literal days, anda worldwide flood later drowned allcreatures (even the swimmers) exceptone mating pair of each kind.

Creation science enjoyed some po-litical success in the 1980s and 1990s,packing a number of school boardsand state. legislatures with loyalistswho then passed anti-Darwinian mea-sures. Clearly, though, the movementis headed nowhere. Its problem isn'tthe absurdity of its claims but rathertheir patently question-begging char-acter. "Findings" that derive fromScripture can never pass muster asgenuine science, and once their sectar-ian intent is exposed, they inevitablyrun up against the constitutional banon established religion.

But the ludicrous spectacle of young-Earth creation science masks the ac-tual strength of creationism in less'Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Danger-ous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings

. of Life (Touchstone, 1995), p. 63.

The New York Review

•

doctrinaire guises ..According to a re-cent poll, only 44 percent of our fellowcitizens agree with the proposition"Human beings, as we know themtoday, developed from earlier speciesof animals." One of the dissenters maybe our current president, who went onrecord, during the Kansas State Boardof Education controversy of August1999, as favoring a curricular balancebetween Darwinian and creationistideas. His administration, moreover, ispartial to charter schools, public fund-ing of private academies, and a maxi-mum degree of autonomy for localboards. If creationism were to shed itsDogpatch image and take a subtlertack, laying its emphasis not on thedeity's purposes and blueprints butsimply on the unlikelihood that naturalselection alone could have generatedlife in its present ingenious variety, it

. could multiply its influence many fold.

Precisely such a makeover has beenin the works since 1990 or so. The newcatchword is "intelligent design" (ID),whose chief propagators are Phillip E.Johnson, Michael J. Behe, MichaelDenton, William A. Dembski, Jona-than Wells, Nancy Pearcey, and StephenC. Meyer. Armed with Ph.D.'s in as-sorted fields, attuned to every quarrelwithin the Darwinian establishment,and pooling their efforts through thecoordination of a well-funded organiz-ation, Seattle's Discovery Institute,these are shrewd and media-savvypeople. They are very busy turning out'popular books, holding press confer-ences and briefings, working the Inter-net, wooing legislators, lecturing onsecular as well as religious campuses,and even, in one instance, securing anon-campus institute all to themselves.'

The IDers intend to outflank Darwinby accepting his vision in key respects,thereby lending weight to their one keyreservation. Yes, most of them con-cede, our planet has been in orbit forbillions of years. No, Earth's ten millionspecies probably weren't crammed intoEden together. And yes, the extinctionof some 99 percent of those speciesthrough eons preceding our own tardyappearance is an undeniable fact. Eventhe development, through natural se-lection, of adaptive variation within agiven species is a sacrificed pawn. Thenew creationists draw the line only atthe descent of whole species from oneanother. If those major transitions canbe made to look implausible as naturaloutcomes, they can be credited to theJudeo-Christian God, making it a littlemore thinkable that he could also, ifhe chose, fulfill prophecies, answerprayers, and raise the dead.

This is, on its face, a highly precari-ous strategy. According to the prem-ises that intelligent design freely al-lows, speciation isn't very hard toexplain. If natural selection can pro-'I refer to Baylor University's MichaelPolanyi Center, whose founding direc-tor was William Dembski. Despite itsBaptist affiliation, however, Baylor hasnot proved quite ready for intelligentdesign. Soon after the center was estab-lished without faculty consultation,scientists on the campus called for itsdissolution. Though it remains in exis-tence, the openly evangelizing Demb-ski was relieved of his directorship inOctober 2000. The new director, BruceGordon, has been at pains to charac-terize intelligent design as a researchparadigm, not an established fact.

26

duce variations without miraculoushelp, there is every reason to supposethat it can yield more fundamentaltypes as well. Indeed,. Darwin be-lieved, and many contemporary biolo-gists agree, that the very distinctionbetween variation and speciation isvacuous. One species can be distin-guished from its closest kin only retro-spectively, when it is found that thetwo can no longer interbreed. Thecause of that splitting can be some-thing as mundane as a geographicalbarrier erected between two group-ings of the same population, whosereproductive systems or routines thendevelop slight but fateful differences.And if one of those sets then goes ex-tinct without leaving traces that cometo the notice of paleontologists, the sur-viving set may not be considered a newspecies after all, since no discontinuityin breeding will have come to light. Thewhole business requires a bookkeeper,perhaps, but surely not a God.

In effect, then, the intelligent designteam has handed argumentative vic-tory to its opponents before the debatehas even begun. As the movement'sacknowledged leader, the emeritus uc-Berkeley law professor Phillip John-son, concedes in his latest book, TheWedge of Truth, "If nature is all there is,and matter had to do its own creating,then there is every reason to believethat the Darwinian model is the bestmodel we will ever have of how the jobmight have been done." Such a weakhand prompts Johnson and others to re-treat to the Bible for "proof' that na-ture is subordinate to God. If scientistscan't perceive this all-important truth;it's because their "methodological nat-uralism" partakes of a more sweeping"metaphysical naturalism"-that is, abuilt-in atheism. Once this blindnessto spiritual factors becomes generallyrecognized, the persuasiveness of Dar-winism will supposedly vanish.

While awaiting this unlikely out-come: however, lD theorists also makean appeal to consensual empiricism.The rhetorically adept Johnson, forexample, highlights every disagree-ment within the evolutionary camp sothat Darwinism as a whole will appearto be moribund. There are many suchareas of dispute, having to do withmorphological versus genetic trees ofrelationship; with convergent evolu-tion versus common descent; with in-dividual versus group selection; with"punctuated equilibria" versus rela-tively steady change; with sociobiolog-ical versus cultural explanations ofmodern human traits; and with theweight that should be assigned to nat-ural selection vis-a-vis sexual selec-tion, symbiosis, genetic drift, geneflow between populations, pleiotropy(multiple effects from single genes),structural constraints on development,and principles of self-organizing order.But Johnson misportrays healthy de-bate as irreparable damage to the evo-lutionary model-to which, as heknows, all of the contending factional-

'We can be quite sure that science willnever become spiritual in Johnson'ssense-not because scientists are com-mitted atheists but because their job isto test theories against the real-worldconsequences that those theories en-tail. An immaterial factor such asGod's will can't figure in a successfulempirical argument, because it is com-patible with every physical state ofaffairs.

ists comfortably subscribe.The Wedge of Truth adds nothing of

substance to Johnson's four previousvolumes in the same vein. By now,though, his cause has been taken upby younger theorists whose training inscience affords them a chance to makethe same case with a more imposingtechnical air. In Icons of Evolution: Sci-ence or Myth?, for example, JonathanWells mines the standard evolutionarytextbooks for exaggerated claims andmisleading examples, which he countsas marks against evolution itself. Hisgoal, of course, is not to improve thenext editions of those books but to getthem replaced by lD counterparts.'More broadly, he calls for a taxpayerrevolt against research funding for"dogmatic Darwinists" and for the uni-versities that house their "massive in-doctrination campaign." What he can-nily refrains from saying is that a priorreligious commitment, not a concernfor scientific accuracy, governs his cri-Charles Darwin

tique. One must open the links onWells's Web site to learn that, afterconsulting God in his prayers and at-tending to the direct personal urging ofthe Reverend Sun Myung Moon, whomhe calls "the second coming of Christ,"he decided that he should "devote [his]life to destroying Darwinism."

W hat is truly distinctive about theintelligent design movement is itsprofessional-looking attack on evolu-tion at the molecular level. Darwinhad famously dared his critics to find"any complex organ ... which couldnot possibly have been formed bynumerous, successive, slight modifica-tions." Having failed to unearth anysuch organ, anti-evolutionists haverecently turned to the self-replicatingcell, with its myriad types of proteinsand its many interdependent functions.In Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemi-cal Challenge to Evolution (1996), theCatholic biochemist Michael J. Behehas asked whether such amazing ma-chinery could have come into existenceby means of "slight modifications."His answer is no: God's interventionwithin the cell can be demonstratedthrough the elimination of every pos-sibility other than conscious design.Without waiting to learn what his

'One such book, cleverly crafted topass constitutional review, alreadyexists: Percival Davis and Dean H.Kenyon, Of Pandas and People (Haugh-ton, 1993). The educational strategyfor getting similar works into the class-room is set forth in David K. DeWolf,Stephen C. Meyer, and Mark E. De-Forrest, Intelligent Design in PublicSchool Science Curricula: A LegalGuidebook (Foundation for Thoughtand Ethics, 1999).

fellow biochemists think of this break-through (they have scoffed at it), Behegenerously ascribed it to them andcalled it "one of the greatest achieve-ments in the history of science."

The heart of Behe's case is his no-tion of irreducible complexity. Anymechanical or biological system-amousetrap, say, or a bacterial flagel-lum-is irreducibly complex if each ofits elements is indispensable to itsfunctioning. How could one irre-ducibly complex system ever evolveinto another? According to Behe, anystepwise mutation that altered theoriginal would have rendered it not justclumsy but useless and thus incapableof survival. To maintain otherwise, heurges, would be like saying that a bicy-cle could grow into a motorcycle byhaving its parts traded, one by one, fora heavy chassis, a gearbox, spark plugs,and so on, while never ceasing to con-stitute a maximally efficient vehicle.Since that is impossible, Behe declares,"the assertion of Darwinian molecularevolution is merely bluster."

The IDers have closed ranks behindBehe as their David to the DarwinianGoliath. His inspiration pervades theirmanifesto anthology, Mere Creation:Science, Faith and Intelligent Desig""n,a triumphalist volume in which theimpending collapse of evolutionism istreated as a settled matter. In the viewof the editor, William Dembski, Dar-winism is already so far gone, and theprospect of reverse-engineering God'sworks to learn his tricks is so appeal-ing, that "in the next five years intelli-gent design will be sufficiently devel-oped to deserve funding from tbeNational Science Foundation."

Dembski himself is the author of twobooks, The Design Inference: Elimi-nating Chance Through Small Prob-abilities (1998) and Intelligent Design:The Bridge Between Science and The-ology (1999), that put the case for irre-ducible complexity on more generalgrounds than Behe's. The' key ques-tion about Darwinism, Dembski hasperceived, is the one that Paley wouldhave asked: whether natural selectioncan result in organs and organismswhose high degree of order associatestbem with made objects (a compass,say) rather than with found objectssuch as a rock. By applying an algo-rithmic "explanatory filter," Dembskibelieves, we can make this discrimina-tion with great reliability. Design mustbe inferred wherever we find contin-gency (the object can't be fully ex-plained as an outcome of automaticprocesses), complexity (it can't havebeen produced by chance alone), andspecification (it shows a pattern that wecommonly associate with intelligence).Since living forms display all three ofthese properties, says Dembski, theymust have been intelligently designed.

Working evolutioni~ts, once they no-tice that Behe's and Dembski's "find-ings" haven't been underwritten by asingle peer-reviewed paper, are disin-clined to waste their time refuting .••them. Until recently, even those writ-ers who do conscientiously alert thebroad public to the fallacies of cre-ationism have allowed intelligent de-sign to go unchallenged. But thatdeficit has now been handsomely re-paired by two critiques: Robert T.Pennock's comprehensive and consis-tently rational Tower of Babel, the bestbook opposing creationism in all of its

The New York Review

guises, and Kenneth R. Miller's Find-ing Darwin's God, whose brilliant firsthalf reveals in bracing detail that intel-ligent design is out of touch with re-cent research.

As Pennock shows, Behe's analogi-cal rhetoric is gravely misleading. Hemakes it seem that one exemplar of amolecular structure faces impossibleodds against transforming itself intoone quite different form while remain-ing highly adaptive. But evolutionarychange, especially at the level ofmolecules and cells, occurs in vastpopulations, all but a few of whosemembers can be sacrificed to newlyhostile conditions and dead-end mu-tations. Antibiotic resistance amongbacteria and the rapid evolution of theHIV virus are two common examplesthat carry more weight than any num-ber of mousetraps and bicycles.

Both Pennock and Miller demon-strate that evolution is not a designerbut a scavenger that makes do withjury-rigged solutions and then im-proves them as opportunities andemergencies present themselves. Typ-ically, the new mechanism will havediscarded "scaffolding" elements thatwere no longer needed. And con-versely, a part that may have been onlymildly beneficial in one machine canbecome essential to its successor, whichmay serve a quite different end. Thischain of makeshift solutions is no lesstrue of cilia and flagella than it is of thereptilian jaw that eventually lent twobones to the mammalian middle ear."

"Miller's best example is a sequence ofexperiments run by Barry Hall in 1982.By tinkering with genes, Hall dis-

As for Dembski, his explanatoryfilter assumes what it is supposed toprove, that natural causes can't havebrought about the "complex specifiedinformation" characteristic of lifeforms. Dembski fails to grasp thatDarwinism posits neither chance nornecessity as an absolute explainer ofthose forms. Rather, it envisions a con-tinual, novelty-generating disequilib-rium between the two, with aleatoryprocesses (mutation, sexual recombi-nation, migratory mixing) and theelimination of the unfit operating instaggered tandem over time. Declar-ing this to be impossible by referenceto information theory, as Dembskidoes with mathematical sleight-of-hand, is just a way of foreclosing thesolid evidence in its favor.'

rupted the mechanism that enablesbacteria to make use of lactose as food,whereupon the handicapped cells werechallenged to find a way of growing onlactose after all. Before long, and with-out acts of selection by the experi-menter, the bacteria had hijacked an-other, previously indifferent, gene toserve the missing function, and the en-tire system then responded with stillfurther adaptations. The result lookedas irreducibly complex as Behe couldhave wished, but neither Hall nor Godcan be regarded as its author.'Dembski reasons that informationcan only diminish when acted uponby chance processes. But he has con-founded two notions, "Shannon infor-mation," or reduction of uncertainty,and complexity proper. For an accountof his error, see David Roche, "A BitConfused: Creationism and Informa-tion Theory," The Skeptical Inquirer,MarchiApril2001, pp. 40-42.

By denying that natural selectioncan generate specified complexity,theorists like Dembski and Behe sad-dle themselves with the task of de-termining when the divine designerinfused that complexity into his crea-tures. Did he do it (as Behe believes)all at once at the outset, programmingthe very first cells with the entirerepertoire of genes needed for everysuccessor species? Or did he (Demb-ski's preference) opt for "discrete in-sertions over time," molding here aVelociraptor, there a violet, and else-where a hominid according to his in-scrutable will? Miller and Pennockshow that both models entail a host ofintractable problems.

The proper way to assess any theoryis to weigh its explanatory advantagesagainst those of every extant rival.Neo-Darwinian natural selection isendlessly fruitful, enjoying corrobora-tion from an imposing array of disci-plines, including paleontology, genet-ics, systematics, embryology, anatomy,biogeography, biochemistry, cell biol-ogy, molecular biology, physical an-thropology, and ethology. By contrast,intelligent design lacks any naturalis-tic causal hypotheses and thus enjoysno consilience with any branch of sci-ence. Its one unvarying conclusion-"God must have made this thing"-would preempt further investigationand place biological science in thethrall of theology.

Even the theology, moreover, wouldbe hobbled by contradictions. Intelli-gent design awkwardly embraces twoclashing deities-c-one a glutton forpraise and a dispenser of wrath, abso-

lution, and grace, the other a curi-ously inept cobbler of species thatneed to be periodically revised andthat keep getting snuffed out by thevery conditions he provided for them.Why, we must wonder, would theshaper of the universe have fritteredaway thirteen billion years, turningout quadrillions of useless stars, be-fore getting around to the one thinghe really cared about, seeing to it thata minuscule minority of earthling ver-tebrates' are washed clean of sin andguaranteed an. eternal place in hiscompany? And should the God oflove and mercy be given credit for theanopheles mosquito, the schistosomi-asis parasite, anthrax,' smallpox, bu-bonic plague ... ? By purporting to de-tect the divine signature on everymolecule while nevertheless' conced-ing that natural selection does ac-count for variations, the champions ofintelligent design have made a con-ceptual mess that leaves the ancientdilemmas of theodicy harder than everto resolve.

A conceptual mess can persist indef-initely, however, if its very muddle al-lows cherished illusions to be retained.As we will see in a second essay, intel-ligent design is thriving not just amongprogrammatic creationists but also incultural circles where illogic and self-indulgence are usually condemned. Andeven stronger evidence that the Dar-winian revolution remains incompletecan be found within the evolutionaryestablishment itself, where Darwin's vi-sion is often prettified to make it safefor doctrines that he himself was sadlycompelled to leave behind. 0

- This is the first of two articles.

Pretend gammer g /)1ol Over~