Would Darwin Censor Intelligent Design?
July 11, 2008
Some people are fanatics. I thought those opposed to “teaching evolution” were fanatics when I was in high school in Tennessee where the Scopes Law was still on the books and there was periodic agitation to enforce it again. I encountered anti-evolutionists from time to time during my academic career, including offers of grants if I would oppose the teaching of evolution.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to those: but now I find that the desire to censor any teaching of Intelligent Design or any other alternative to orthodox Darwinism comes with about the same arguments I used to hear about teaching evolution. The horror! Someone questions the consensus! And of course censorship means some national means of controlling local schools.
I say that having national censorship of topics to be taught in local schools is a cure far worse than the supposed disease of having “Intelligent Design nonsense” taught in at most a few score school districts across the country — and usually taught by its opponents at that. I have more faith in rational discussion than I do in censorship as a means of enforcing correct opinions. Suppose Darwinism is as right as rain and Intelligent Design is worthless and indefensible: then why must Darwinism use censorship rather than rational discussion?
I do not find that there is much interest among American students in the whole question of scientific method and rational argument. I do not see that many teachers are given much instruction in the subject, and I do not see much of it taught.
If in fact the arguments for ID are ludicrous, I do not see why there is so much pressure for censorship and suppression. Either one believes in rational discussion or one does not. If ID is easy to refute, then refute it. Who knows, the ID people may give up, or refine their arguments; and the refutation should be instructive.
If 100 mostly mid-western school districts required that alternatives to Darwinism be taught in school, would the Republic come to an end? Would that be worse than centralized control of subject matter? And where does the central control end? With jail for Global Warming Denial?
* * *
I weary of the Intelligent Design in Schools argument, because apparently there is a small number of apparently intelligent and articulate people who simply do not understand what they are saying. No, they say, we don’t want central control of curricula in all the public schools through the nation. But the Intelligent Design advocates are so stupid, their arguments so vapid, that we simply cannot afford to allow them to be presented in the hundred or so school districts that would mandate ID to be taught along with Darwinism, lest America lose her soul.
If that sounds like a very unfair summary of what the “keep the ID people out of our schools!” people are saying, I fear it is an accurate one, and after a dozen exchanges of email I find that I cannot get across the real point: that central control of curricula is a cure far worse than the disease; that if anything is a contest for the soul of America it is the central control of what is taught in the public schools.
What is the purpose of public schools? One looks in vain for guidance in the Constitution of the US, or in the early constitutions of most states. Education didn’t become a right until well after the Civil War, and didn’t become a federal right until fairly recently.
The main arguments for tax financed compulsory public education are (1) it is an investment in the future, for the pupils will learn skills that will allow them to take part in the national economy, support themselves, and not be a burden on the public; and (2) public education gives a common background for most pupils, and they can be taught the principles of citizenship; they learn the national saga and their state history, and gain a sense of pride in their country, and become imbued with patriotism.
Alas, today’s public schools do not seem to accomplish either goal, nor indeed do they even try to; and many “professional educators” reject both premises. Leslie Fish has an anarchist song called “Teacher, Teacher” in which she decries the school boards because they want the teachers to teach the children to be just like their parents. Of course that is precisely what most parents think their schools ought to be doing only better: that is, make the kids think like us, but make them smarter and more capable and able to earn more money. Why this is despicable is not known to me. Why the parents ought to be forced to pay intellectuals to make their children despise their parents is even less obvious.
How the schools are to make the children like their parents only better isn’t known to the school board, but it’s generally the goal, and when Professional Educators interview for positions they generally pretend to accept that goal and pretend to know how to accomplish it. The results are usually something else.
Let’s look at one example of what amounted to central control of curriculum: Freudianism. The psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud were once the “consensus” view of most of the US intellectual establishment. They had heavy duty social implications, and justified really drastic changes in society. Adorno and Frenkel-Brunswick and others produced theories about “the authoritarian personality” and various theories of the proper relationship between children and parents, men and women, citizens and societies.
And the whole theory was and is nonsense. The clinical effectiveness of the very expensive Freudian analysis was no greater than that of far cheaper techniques including not only Carl Rogers and his permissiveness but also L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. Freud postulated all kinds of structures like Ego, and Id, and Super-Ego that not only have no discoverable neurological counterparts but contradict much of what is known about brain structure. His interpretation of dreams ended up with Immanuel Velikovsky writing a book about Freud’s dreams. Velikovsky also had a theory of cosmology that had about as much evidence in hard data as Freud’s theories of human behavior. One can argue that this is hardly coincidence: Freud didn’t teach his disciples to pay attention to data (he knew that people often lied to their therapists as well as to themselves). Freud did not explicitly reject the scientific method, but he may as well have.
Indeed, Hubbard’s Dianetics paid at least as much attention to evidence as Freud did. Of course both Freud and Hubbard made up many of their cases: think of the cases as illustrative scenarios because most of them had no basis in fact. Hubbard built Dianetics as a synthesis of Jung’s variant of Freud and the General Semantics theories of Alfred Count Korzybski. Incidentally, Korzybski’s book Science and Sanity is worth reading to this day, although it should not be taken as holy writ; and Wendell Johnson and Sam Hayakawa, both followers of Korzybski, wrote valuable books as well. Hubbard of course did not encourage the use of scientific method to test his theories of the human psyche, but he did insist that Dianetics was a science: “The modern science of mental health.” It was pretty popular too, and Dianetics practitioners could truthfully report that they got better results than Freudian analysis, and far cheaper, with less expensive training for the practitioners. As a practical matter, Dianetics was more useful than Freud.
Of course Freud had the intellectual cachet and the approval of the intelligentsia, who simultaneously insisted that Freud be taught as truth, while Dianetics had to be suppressed. Much of that suppression came about as accusations of practicing medicine without a license, which caused Hubbard to incorporate Dianetics into Scientology, and to proclaim Scientology as a religion and thus protected by the First Amendment.
Freudianism is not so widely taught as it was when I was a youth, but if a teacher wants to present Freudian theories in school, there will be many to defend his right to do so.
Surely my point is obvious?
Intelligent Design
There are many schools of “Intelligent Design”, some of them very theological, and some very silly (not mutually exclusive categories). At its simplest one theory of ID asserts that while the mechanism of evolution may have looked very like Darwinian natural selection and survival of the fittest, it is simply absurd to assert that the Big Bang Mess inevitably moved to produce Carl Sagan, perform Swan Lake, and write Shakespeare’s plays; the vast drama of the universe has some purpose even if we cannot discern it, and there is a goal toward which all this moves.
Many people find this obvious, and don’t think the blind workings of chance could have produced what we have today. I don’t know of any way to frame falsifiable hypotheses to test that assumption.
One can then add or subtract hypotheses. Sir Fred Hoyle, for instance, postulated that certain evolutionary steps were so improbable as to be ruled out; and that some of the evolutionary steps came about through the deliberate introduction of organic materials. Sir Fred’s theory does generate testable hypotheses: for one it predicts that we will find proteins and other organics in outer space, in comets and perhaps asteroids; another prediction is that life will exist wherever it is possible for it to exist, and moreover, wherever we find life it will have a number of similar characteristics. We can’t make strict tests of those hypotheses, but to the extent that we have evidence it seems so far to be consistent with Hoyle’s view. Whether Hoyle is right or wrong is irrelevant here: all I am asserting is that it is hardly “unscientific” because “untestable.”
Breeds of Dogs
Most breeds of dog have come about by intelligent design: the intelligence was supplied by a dog breeder who had some notion of what kind of dog he was trying to produce.
Dogs themselves seem to be the product of deliberate action on the part of some wolves: dogs seem to have tamed themselves, and the act of living as tame wolves brought about some changes in the physiology of the dog. It might be a neat debate: are dogs smart enough that they have come about by intelligent design? Or was the taming of the dog, which had a profound effect on human evolution, pure accident? Or was that too Intelligent Design (leaving out the nature of the Designer)? Villages that have dogs have a much better survival rate than villages that don’t; and if one has dogs then one is free to devote some of the forebrain usually devoted to smell to the development of intelligence. Of course no one I know of says that humans deliberately made that choice.
Gradualism and Catastrophism
Older readers will remember just how violently the scientific consensus rejected the notion of catastrophes in evolutionary history. The reason for this is obvious: some evolutionary steps are so outrageously improbable that it must have taken a very great deal of time for that to happen, and even more for the changes to register in terms of being more ‘fit’ for survival. Remember: in Darwinian theory you cannot know the end point of the evolutionary steps. Just because a step makes it more likely, over a long enough time, for the organism to evolve a socketed eye (and we can all agree that having that eye is very much a survival advantage) does not mean a thing: the STEP ITSELF has to give an advantage, or at least must not place too great a burden on the organism.
One Intelligent Design argument would be that here is the place where a miracle happens: there is a mutation that itself does not increase the chances of survival of the organism and offspring, but which leads to something that does. The miracle is that this step is preserved. Of course this is mere speculation, a Just So story, and in no way testable; but from what I have seen, the Darwinists assert that there must have been a survival advantage even though they haven’t figured it out yet is just as untestable and just as much an act of faith. Let me remind you that by definition ‘miracles’ are so rare that statistical evidence is generally impossible to obtain. Miracles are a matter of faith, not science — by definition.
In any event I can guarantee you that the “consensus” against catastrophes in history was a damned dangerous view, and had some real effects on funding for asteroid watches and Project Safeguard. For those who don’t think there is any danger from space, I invite you to have a look at “Apocalypse Then. Next One, When?” and pay close attention to the animated display. Those who hate the whole idea of Intelligent Design say that if ID were taught in 100 school districts in accord with the wishes of the local school boards this would result in the loss of America’s soul.
I don’t think so: but I do know that if we don’t take the possibility of catastrophe seriously, that puts the lot of us in danger of losing, not only our souls, but everything else as well.
Now I am sure there are many wiser than me. I know that many think they are; and among them are those who are absolutely certain that we must have central control of curricula all across the country, lest someone sneak in Intelligent Design theory and it will be so persuasive that we will all lose our souls. My own view is that central control of damned near anything is usually a disaster, and the more we can have local control — over education, abortion laws, marriage laws, and much of the law that affects our daily lives — the better off we will all be. If opponents of ID want to persuade their own local school boards not to allow ID in the school, they have that opportunity (but hardly the necessity in most cases). If they want to persuade the school board in Resume Speed, Kansas, not to allow ID in the classroom they can certainly argue that they ought to be heard, although I do not think they have any right to have their expenses paid. But: if they want to use the power of the state to dictate, from Columbia University or wherever they happen to reside, what the Resume Speed school board must forbid in local classrooms, they are power seekers.
See also:
Gods, Earthlings, and Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design: Answers and Questions
Dr. Jerry Pournelle is an American Science Fiction writer, essayist and journalist. Visit his website: http://jerrypournelle.com
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