Not In Kansas Anymore (NIKA)

Another Day, Another NYT Piece on Evolution

It appears that the New York Times has decided to be the "all evolution 'debate' all the time" newspaper. Just one day after its last article about the so-called "debate" over evolution, they have another article today (looking deeper, it looks like they're having a special series on the topic. Yesterday's article was about the politicization of research. Today's article ("In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash" by Kenneth Chang) discusses what I could you would call the philosophy behind the debate.

At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?

The heart of the argument is whether or not I.D. is scientific. It is not:

But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific.

"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."

That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live.

And in that quest, they say, there is no need to resort to otherworldly explanations. So much evidence has been provided by evolutionary studies that biologists are able to explain even the most complex natural phenomena and to fill in whatever blanks remain with solid theories.

While intelligent design advocates claim they're doing science, scientists disagree:

Nonetheless, many scientists regard intelligent design as little more than creationism dressed up in pseudoscientific clothing. Despite its use of scientific language and the fact that some design advocates are scientists, they say, the design approach has so far offered only philosophical objections to evolution, not any positive evidence for the intervention of a designer.

Some arguments put forth by I.D. advocates don't seem to understand the difference between an open and a closed system:

"Imagine you're an archaeologist and you're looking at an inscription, and you say, 'Well, sorry, that looks like it's intelligent but we can't invoke an intelligent cause because, as a matter of method, we have to limit ourselves to materialistic processes,' " Dr. Meyer said. "That would be nuts."

He added, "Call it miracle, call it some other pejorative term, but the fact remains that the materialistic view is a truncated view of reality."

William Paley, an Anglican priest, made a similar argument in the early 19th century. Someone who finds a rock can easily imagine how wind and rain shaped it, he reasoned. But someone who finds a pocket watch lying on the ground instantly knows that it was not formed by natural processes.

They're basically trying to say that "materialistic view" means "no intelligent actors," but they're wrong. "Materialism" refers to the idea that there are no supernatural causes to explain anything. Evolution (along with broader scientific models of the universe) posits that human intelligence arose from a long series of causal events (starting with the beginning of the universe). Human intelligence is contained within the scientific description of the universe (i.e., in my way of describing it, it is a "closed" system), and (as long as you understand that complexity can arise from simpler systems and simple rules) does not require anything external to explain it. Once you have human intelligence, then you can get watches. I.D., on the other hand, is not self-contained; it does nothing to explain the so-called designer. As stated in Wikipedia's article on the Teleological argument, the "intelligent designer" must have its own, higher-complexity, intelligent designer. And so on and so on.

I'm curious to see if the NYT has another article tomorrow. They seem to be staying about as impartial as it's possible to be when discussing the topic.

Posted by Tom Nugent at August 22, 2005 09:26 AM