Intelligent Design: Answers and Questions

I am somewhat weary of the Intelligent Design discussion, because I find the whole subject irrelevant to the major problems that face US education. As to the truth of falsity of the purely mechanical, random selection hypothesis, most of the discussion I have seen hasn’t been very relevant.

What concerns me is the vehemence with which opponents of ID argue for exclusion of any mention of ID from any school district anywhere. People who pretend to be conservative or libertarian and opposed to central direction of people’s lives by experts seem to have no problem whatever with central control of school curricula if that’s what it takes to keep the Intelligent Design hypothesis out of every school in the land.

As far as I can see, if every school district in the land that wanted to put Intelligent Design as an alternative to the Dawkins theory that an undifferentiated cloud of gas would inevitably turn into creatures that write Dante’s Inferno, perform Swan Lake, devise both the Newtonian and Relativistic theories, and write Darwin’s Origin of Species, there might be as many as a hundred who would actually do that. One may speculate as to the practical effect this might have; I suspect it wouldn’t have much effect at all. Most students in today’s schools have no training in or love of science and its tools of logic and mathematics, and whether they believe in Dawkinsism or Intelligent Design won’t matter a hill of beans in their or anyone else’s lives. Actually, there might be a positive benefit: the discussion might get them thinking about the subject.

Meanwhile, the central control of curriculum has been remarkably successful in keeping any alternative to Human Caused Global Warming out of the classroom, and suppressing any teaching of Global Warming Denial; and that, I submit, does have real consequences, not only for the students but for every one of you. I don’t know of any effects on the economy that inevitably result from having beliefs in Intelligent Design as opposed to Dawkinsism; but I know of many disastrous economic effects that inevitably result from belief in the Al Gore inconvenient truth hypothesis. Alternatives to Goreism are pretty well restricted from the classroom.

Why suppress Global Warming Denial? Because there is this enormous consensus that Global Warming is TRUE, and anyone who is a Global Warming Denier is either an idiot or in the pay of oil companies and probably ought to be jailed; just as there is this enormous consensus that Intelligent Design is TRIVIALLY FALSE, and anyone who believes in it is either an idiot or in the pay of some sinister forces and probably ought to be jailed. The principle that anything against the consensus must be excluded from every classroom in the land is so important that central control of curricula must trump local control.

And that, to me, is the importance of the Intelligent Design debates. (JUNE 16 2008)

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A chap who believes it great fun to point out that I am an idiot sends (among other things) this:

We’ve already made new species

You write:

<< No one who ever lived on a farm ever thought that evolution doesn’t work, or that if directed by a farmer or animal breeder it doesn’t work better. We still don’t have new species as a result, although St, Bernard and Yorkie cross breeds are pretty rare… >>

How about the dog itself? Or try maize. Both prehistoric, yes, but there’s plenty of archaeological and paleontological evidence that we did it; and they are definitely new species.

To the best of my knowledge, dogs can interbreed with both wolves and coyotes. We can of course quibble over the definition of species, but it’s pretty clear that natural selection refers to something other than selective breeding. Dogs, according to the latest evidence I have seen, tamed themselves; people allowed them to do it, and somewhere in the course of human evolution the entity ‘villages with dogs’ gained some superiority over the entity ‘villages without dogs’. Human evolution seems to have proceeded by groups more than individuals. Was this intelligent design or natural selection?

One of my cocktail party theories — that is, a theory I will vigorously defend in a cocktail party but have not tried to write up for a serious journal — is that a long time ago humans made a pact with dogs. They retain a sense of smell. We use that part of our brain to get smart. The same forebrain areas seem to be used for both. Dogs stayed loyal to humans and allowed us to become humans with smarts. Thus we owe them, big time. A little like Robert Adams’s pact between the Horse Clans and the big prairie cats.

But are we modern humans are a different species from those descended from villages that didn’t allow tame dogs amongst them? (Not sure we can find any, of course; but then it’s hard to find humans that didn’t find villages preferable to solitary life.) All this is worth discussion, I suppose, but first we need some definition of “new species.”

One of the arguments used by Darwinists is that there are species of birds that differ in a spectrum. Any two birds close together on this spectrum can interbreed, but those from the far ends cannot. How does this fit into the notion of species? Wherever you divide this spectrum into two species, there will be elements of each that can interbreed with the other.

A major problem in trying to discuss these matters is political correctness. A Cocker Spaniel and an Australian Shepherd are clearly the same species. They can interbreed. (Clearly: about 50 years ago our Cocker Spaniel gave birth to a litter that included a pit bull and an Australian Shepherd. We kept the Aussie, and Rascal was a very interesting dog.) Their temperaments are quite different. We call those breeds of dog. We used to speak of the breeds of man, but that is now considered racist, as it is politically incorrect to speak of races of dogs or cats. The notion that people might have inbred temperamental differences isn’t one that science can investigate now.

Perhaps we are learning. One of the astonishing things about DNA is just how much DNA we have in common with the chimpanzee, and how much both we and the chimpanzee have with an ear of corn. Perhaps a proper analysis of gene sequencing will get us past the whole tricky notion of Linnaean taxonomy, which was useful in its day but now seems to get in the way as much as it helps.

My point in my original statement was that we have not unambiguously observed the creation of a new species, but we have certainly shown how that might happen. It is also very clear that intelligent intervention — on the part of, say, a sheep herder — will move us toward new species of sheep faster than natural selection. It’s fairly easy to observe evolution in action over long periods of time — or at least we think it is. But the devil is in the details, and if we’re not careful we resort to Just So stories to explain that last little jump.

Note that I am hardly arguing for either natural selection or intelligent design: we think we have seen both at work in historical times. I am arguing for rational discussion. (JUNE 19, 2008)

Jerry Pournelle is an American Science Fiction writer, essayist and journalist. Visit his website: http://jerrypournelle.com. The above essays were originally published in Chaos Manor. Republished on MensNewsDaily.com by permission of the author.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Analysis, Current Events, Intelligent Design, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 249 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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