Spinning Yarns

This is hardly a new topic, but I wanted to stake out my position. A group of parents in Dover, York Co., Pennsylvania have gone to court against the Dover Area School Board, to prevent the teaching of “Intelligent Design” as an alternative to the theory of evolution in their local schools. The school board recently required teachers to read the following statement their students, despite a fairly strong opposition among members of the community:

“Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”

Up to the last sentence, I have no real objections to the wording of this statement. Their definition of “theory” is informal, yet reasonable, and it corresponds well to the definition given by the careful lexicographers of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I paraphrase here:

theory, n.: A system of ideas or statements held as an explanation of a group of phenomena; a hypothesis that has been established and confirmed by observation or experiment, and is accepted as accounting for the known facts.*

They are correct to distinguish theory from fact, and have quite reasonably pointed out that evolution—like all scientific theories—continues to be tested by observation. I’m not aware of any specific predictions made by the theory of evolution that are not borne out by fact, but I will not quarrel with the possibility that “gaps [exist] in the theory,” even though such a claim would be much more believable if they gave some concrete examples.

Where it all goes to hell (so to speak) is on the last sentence: “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”

The modern theory of evolution is based upon the hypothesis that living systems change by a slow process of random mutation and natural selection. Occasionally, in the normal course of events, small mutations appear in the genetic machinery of a creature; some are harmless, some harmful, and some beneficial, to the extent that the creature’s ability to survive and reproduce are affected by them. Through the ordinary process of genetic replication, these mutations are transmitted to subsequent generations, and over many generations, an accumulation of such mutations will result in observable variation among otherwise similar creatures. As a theory, evolution provides a simple and practical explanation for both the diversity and the similarity of living organisms.

Insofar as the term “Intelligent Design” has any definition at all, it hangs upon the conceit that certain aspects of the universe—and particularly of living systems—are so complicated that they could only have occurred by means of intentional decisions, and further that these decisions must have been made by an intelligent entity possessing the power to influence the structure of the universe. In other words, ID proponents claim that the accretion of random changes could not possibly account for life as we now know it, and propose that the simplest reasonable explanation is some unknowable intellect, making all the hard choices. That’s an “explanation of the origin of life” in the same way that “the Devil made me do it” is an “explanation for criminal behaviour.”

I actually don’t object to the content of this final sentence, however (although I do disagree with its premises). My chief complaint is that it has been juxtaposed with the remainder of the paragraph. This adjunction gives the final sentence an unwarranted glamour of relevancy to the remainder of the statement, and as a consequence, the whole paragraph becomes logically disingenuous. You might think I’m nit-picking, but this is an important point: By adding one sentence to the end of an otherwise-reasonable paragraph, the Dover Area School Board has turned a simple statement about scientific principles into an official endorsement of a fundamentally religious viewpoint.

Maybe the problem will be clearer if we look at a less politically charged example, such as the following:

“Because a ham and cheese sandwich is a sandwich, it varies as new condiments are added. There is no unique way to make a ham and cheese sandwich. Sandwiches exist which contain no ham, and no cheese. A sandwich is defined as a collection of one or more different foodstuffs layered atop a slice of bread. A liver and black olive sandwich is a kind of sandwich that differs from a ham and cheese sandwich.”

See the problem? Nobody would deny that “a liver and black olive sandwich is a kind of sandwich that differs from a ham and cheese sandwich,” but the fact that this statement just happened to focus on liver and black olive sandwiches was no accident—the olive magnate who wrote it (whose brother-in-law happens to own the largest chain of liver packing plants in North America) had a vested personal interest in highlighting this particular kind of sandwich. Attaching it to a fair and balanced paragraph about the rôle of ham and cheese sandwiches in the Sandwich Pantheon makes it seem merely exemplary—perhaps even accidental. But don’t be fooled!

By analogy, those who wrote the evolution statement for the Dover Area School Board did not cite Intelligent Design simply as an “alternative to evolution,” rather, they did so because they have a vested personal interest in promoting Intelligent Design. Maybe they’re closet Creationists, trying to avoid being lumped in with the Flat Earth Society and other intellectual laughingstocks. I don’t know what their motives are, but if they feel the need to hide them in such a subtle guise, you can rest assured I’m suspicious about them.

Another problem I have with the Dover board’s statement is the unwritten yet strongly-implied use of the word “merely” in the first sentence: “Because Darwin’s Theory is [merely] a theory, etc.” The implication seems to be that theories are just random guesses that somebody makes up while drunk, and that they have no real connexion to reality. I’ll be the first to admit that there are a few theories matching the latter description, but for the most part, scientists do not just come up with this stuff out of thin air. An idea like the theory of evolution takes untold years of very careful observations and clever insights to develop. New theories are usually not obvious, and are often difficult to believe at first. Once a theory is propounded, it will be tested by innumerable painstaking experiments, conducted by highly skeptical scientists whose entire careers could be made by finding compelling evidence against the theory.

And then some wag comes along and says, “Oh, evolution is just a theory.” It’s as if somebody came up with a faster-than-light starship, and a few years later they’re saying, “Oh, it’s just a way to get from Point A to Point B.” Sure, that’s true, but it’s a really good way to get from Point A to Point B, and one hell of a lot better than anything else we’ve come up with so far. To say it’s “merely a theory” belittles an enormous array of significant contributions to human knowledge that were built around that theory.

Anyway, it may be stretching the analogy a bit, but I think suggesting Intelligent Design as an alternative to the theory of evolution is a lot like saying, “Well, your faster-than-light starship is pretty neat, but have you considered replacing that solar hydrogen ramjet with a horse-drawn capstan drive? We can’t believe ramjets could possibly work the way you say, but we’re pretty comfortable with horses.”

I was going to talk about how you can convert any finite string of symbols over a fixed alphabet into another finite string of symbols over the same alphabet using a finite sequence of point-mutation operations (i.e., replace one symbol with another, insert a new symbol, or delete an existing symbol), and use that to shoot down the idea that there could be genetic states unreachable from any initial configuration, but this is already getting rather long, so I will leave that for another posting. Suffice it to say that, for the moment, I think the only way Intelligent Design can argue its way out of that little trap is to argue that there’s something more to a living organism than is expressed in its genes, or the genes of its mitochondria. At that point, we’re back to faith, and that’s where I get off the bus.

* This is my gentle redaction of sense 4a. of “theory” from the OED2 online.

** This article from Natural History magazine has some good background discussion of ID.

Addendum, 30-Sep-2005:
This article from slate.com by William Saletan provides a nice response to the basic intellectual insolvency of Intelligent Design. Mr. Saletan highlights some important points, and does so more clearly than I did in this posting.

Addendum, 8-Nov-2005:
This “Open Letter to Kansas School Board” from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster provides another humorous yet sardonic response to some of the recent efforts on the part of the Intelligent Design folks.

Filed by Michael at 21:24 under Diatribe, Philosophical, Political
9 Comments

Before you read any further, you might want to see some statistics on crude oil production and the products made from it, since in a moment, I’m going to start throwing around numbers as I talk about the incredible dependency of the industrialized world on petroleum.

The fact that the United States is addicted to petroleum should not come as a surprise to anybody. Of the approximately 84.2 million barrels of crude oil pumped out of the ground by the world’s oil producers each day, the United States consumes about 20.63 million, or around 25.6 percent. Incidentally, for those of you unaccustomed to thinking in “barrels,” that 20.63 million barrels translates into approximately 866.46 million gallons, or 3.279 billion liters.* Even China, which has 1.306 billion people (approximately 4.4 times the 295.7 million population of the United States) consumes only 6.83 million barrels per day, about one third the amount the U.S. uses.**

As of 2003, the highway demand for refined gasoline in the United States was about 30.6 million gallons per day, more than 96 percent of our total gasoline demand during that year. Given the prevalence of SUV’s on America’s highways, I doubt that has decreased over the intervening two years. Given that a barrel of oil can yield approximately 21 gallons of finished gasoline, that means we are driving our way through 1.45 million barrels of crude oil a day. Yikes! That’s enough to fill more than 46 Olympic-size swimming pools with gasoline each day. And that’s just what we drive — that doesn’t even begin to cover the fuel needed for agriculture, aviation, manufacturing, and power generation, nor the petroleum required for plastics manufacturing, industrial lubricants and solvents.

Enough with the statistics, already: The point I’m trying to make here is that although we are wealthy, powerful, and technologically sophisticated, and we pride ourselves on being a highly advanced society, we have an enormous exposed jugular vein. In the past week, Mother Nature (acting through her liaison, Hurricane Katrina) gave us a little reminder of our fragile condition: Katrina cut a swath across Louisiana and Mississippi that will not soon be forgotten, and forced the total evacuation of the city of New Orleans. The whole damned city. Now, I don’t know about you, but prior to this event, the need to evacuate an entire city was something that happened to other nations, not the U.S.A. Today, I know that we have a harder time getting food and water to our own people in New Orleans than we do feeding starving children in Africa. The power is out. There are corpses festering in the streets. Armed looters are roaming the streets, in one case shooting a police officer in the head. Common working folks have seen their homes blown down, their livelihood destroyed, and their friends and relatives starving. Meanwhile, hateful and unscrupulous persons are trying to use this tragedy to bilk a few bucks out of charitable citizens. Gasoline prices have skyrocketed nationwide ($5.89 per gallon in Atlanta, $3.29 in New Hampshire).

It’s been said that no civilization is more then three meals away from becoming a mindless mob, but I’d never really recognized just how painfully true that is until this week.

I have drawn several conclusions from this week’s events. One is that such a powerful addictive dependency upon petroleum is more dangerous than any of the bombs and chemical weapons we spend billions of dollars each year to protect ourselves from. Maybe biological weapons are potentially more dangerous, but if a tropical storm we knew was coming can disrupt an entire city this thoroughly, and send aftershocks throughout the rest of the nation along the blood-vessels of our highways, perhaps it’s time we started thinking about national defense in terms beyond troops and tactics and terrorism. I’m not saying we should get rid of the military—that would be stupid. But our greatest threats today are things the military alone cannot protect us from, and if we’re going to spend that much of our taxes on national defense, then I would damned well like to see us doing something better than building missile defense systems while we kick sand in the faces of our dope dealers in the Middle East and play endless asinine political games with the World Trade Organization.

Furthermore, national security has gained virtually nothing from the dangerous erosion of civil liberties we saw in the wake of September 11, 2001. All that money we’ve been spending on “domestic preparedness” does not seem to have prevented us from falling on our faces, and in this case, we knew the storm was coming. Perhaps it’s time we stopped playing games with our civil liberties and started thinking like the highly-educated people we are always claiming to be.

* That’s an American billion, which is a thousand-million for any British folks who might be reading this.

** Well, I say “only” 6.83 million barrels, but that’s still a significant quantity of petroleum.

Update: If you want an insider’s perspective on what’s happening down in Mississippi and New Orleans, along with some excellent advice for anybody who might be considering going in after friends or relatives, I recommend you check out some of the recent postings on my friend Mark’s blog.

Filed by Michael at 18:45 under Diatribe, Miscellaneous, Political, Social
Comments Off