creation science to be religion and not science 9 . In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled the Louisiana law unconstitutional.
About this time, creation science speciated into two main branches, one holding to the more literal biblical picture of a young Earth and another that attempts to use sophisticated arguments that appear, at least to the untutored eye, more consistent with established science. The second group has developed a new stealth creationism called
intelligent design,
which has the common shorthand, “ID.”
The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Learning from the mistakes of the creation scientists, proponents of ID downplay their religious motives in a so far not very successful attempt to steer clear of the constitutional issue. They also have avoided the more egregious scientific errors of the young-Earth creationists, and present this new form of creationism as “pure science.” They claimed that design in nature can be scientifically demonstrated and that the complexity of nature can be
proved
not to have arisen by natural processes alone 10 .
In
Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design,
philosopher Barbara Forrest and biologist Paul Gross detail the story of how the new creationism is fed and watered by a wellfunded conservative Christian organization called the Discovery Institute 11 . The goals of this organization, documented by Forrest and Gross, are to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and to “renew” science and culture along evangelical Christian lines.
Behe’s Irreducible Complexity
None of the claims of intelligent design proponents, especially the work of its primary theorists, biochemist Michael Behe and theologian William Dembski, have stood up under scientific scrutiny. Numerous books and articles have refuted their positions in great detail 12 . Not only have their arguments been shown to be flawed, but also in several instances the factual claims on which they rest have been proven false. None of their work has been published in respected scientific journals 13 .
Behe’s fame rests on his 1996 popular-level book,
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution 14 .
There he introduced the notion of
irreducible complexity,
which occurs when a system is reduced to several parts and can no longer function when any of the parts is removed. Behe argued that the individual parts could not have evolved by natural selection since they no longer have any function on which selection can operate.
Thoroughly refuting Behe’s argument, evolutionary biologists have listed many examples in nature where an organic system changes functions as the system evolves 15 . They have provided plausible natural mechanisms for every example Behe presents, many of which were well known (except to Behe) before Behe ever sat down to write.
The manner in which the parts of living systems change function over the course of evolution is one of those well-established facts of evolution that Behe and other proponents of intelligent design choose to ignore. Biological parts often evolve by natural selection by virtue of one function, and then gradually adapt to other functions as the larger system evolves.
Many examples of organs and biological structures that are understood to have arisen from the modification of preexisting structure rather than the elegance of careful engineering can be found in the biological literature. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould made this point in his wonderful example of the panda’s thumb 16 . The panda appears to have six fingers, but its opposing “thumb” is not a finger at all but a bone in its wrist that has been enlarged to form a stubby protuberance handy for holding a stalk of bamboo shoots, the panda’s only food.
Behe is a biochemist, not an evolutionary biologist, and was unaware when he wrote his book that the mechanisms for the evolution of “irreducibly complex” systems
About this time, creation science speciated into two main branches, one holding to the more literal biblical picture of a young Earth and another that attempts to use sophisticated arguments that appear, at least to the untutored eye, more consistent with established science. The second group has developed a new stealth creationism called
intelligent design,
which has the common shorthand, “ID.”
The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Learning from the mistakes of the creation scientists, proponents of ID downplay their religious motives in a so far not very successful attempt to steer clear of the constitutional issue. They also have avoided the more egregious scientific errors of the young-Earth creationists, and present this new form of creationism as “pure science.” They claimed that design in nature can be scientifically demonstrated and that the complexity of nature can be
proved
not to have arisen by natural processes alone 10 .
In
Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design,
philosopher Barbara Forrest and biologist Paul Gross detail the story of how the new creationism is fed and watered by a wellfunded conservative Christian organization called the Discovery Institute 11 . The goals of this organization, documented by Forrest and Gross, are to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and to “renew” science and culture along evangelical Christian lines.
Behe’s Irreducible Complexity
None of the claims of intelligent design proponents, especially the work of its primary theorists, biochemist Michael Behe and theologian William Dembski, have stood up under scientific scrutiny. Numerous books and articles have refuted their positions in great detail 12 . Not only have their arguments been shown to be flawed, but also in several instances the factual claims on which they rest have been proven false. None of their work has been published in respected scientific journals 13 .
Behe’s fame rests on his 1996 popular-level book,
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution 14 .
There he introduced the notion of
irreducible complexity,
which occurs when a system is reduced to several parts and can no longer function when any of the parts is removed. Behe argued that the individual parts could not have evolved by natural selection since they no longer have any function on which selection can operate.
Thoroughly refuting Behe’s argument, evolutionary biologists have listed many examples in nature where an organic system changes functions as the system evolves 15 . They have provided plausible natural mechanisms for every example Behe presents, many of which were well known (except to Behe) before Behe ever sat down to write.
The manner in which the parts of living systems change function over the course of evolution is one of those well-established facts of evolution that Behe and other proponents of intelligent design choose to ignore. Biological parts often evolve by natural selection by virtue of one function, and then gradually adapt to other functions as the larger system evolves.
Many examples of organs and biological structures that are understood to have arisen from the modification of preexisting structure rather than the elegance of careful engineering can be found in the biological literature. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould made this point in his wonderful example of the panda’s thumb 16 . The panda appears to have six fingers, but its opposing “thumb” is not a finger at all but a bone in its wrist that has been enlarged to form a stubby protuberance handy for holding a stalk of bamboo shoots, the panda’s only food.
Behe is a biochemist, not an evolutionary biologist, and was unaware when he wrote his book that the mechanisms for the evolution of “irreducibly complex” systems
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