ID: support from an unlikely quarter

From time to time I stop by Amitai Etzioni's website. And I generally find it most refreshing. Not that I am prepared to sign on to the Communitarian Manifesto, mind you (assuming there is such a thing). I would be hesitant to give Prof. Etzioni free rein to make laws. But I would be very pleased to have him as a neighbour, and even more pleased if a critical mass of people who share his values also lived in the neighbourhood.

But lately I've noticed a disturbing theme. Prof. Etzioni has taken to defending the teaching of 'intelligent design theory' in school science lessons.

UPDATE: In a new post, Prof. Etzioni takes a more nuanced view of ID in the schoolroom. (No permalinks; just go the main page.) He was replying primarily to an, emm, somewhat sharply-phrased post by PZ Myers (who does not suffer fools, or even those who give the appearance of possible foolishness, gladly). As Etzioni now puts it:

I asked why not use the comparison between evolution and intelligent design, in science classes, to show students the difference between a theory supported by scientific facts and those that are not? ... Students should be exposed to theories of both evolution and Intelligent Design and shown which one is scientifically supported. [Emph. supplied.]

That does put rather a different face on things. There's something to be said for showing the tykes the difference between good science and bad science (non-science, really). It's a pity Prof. Etzioni didn't make that clearer in his earlier posts. Still, I think he's wrong. When we teach children about astronomy, it doesn't hurt to mention in passing that people once thought the sun circled the earth. But given the amount of stuff to teach and the limited time in which to teach it, we probably shouldn't spend half the course on a detailed explication of heliogeocentrism [Doh!] before we proceed to dismantle it. One thing, though, is certain: Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski et al. are not going to very happy with including ID material in a school curriculum for the express purpose of its serving as the 'Don't' example. (It occurs to me that, should some American school district succeed in mandating 'equal time' for IDism, a clever teacher could use the lessons to immunise her charges against this and similar pseudoscience. But as I said, the time would better be spent teaching the children some real biology.)

[Original post continues under the fold.]

That's odd, because Prof. Etzioni is not a Christian at all, let alone a fundamentalist protestant or Roman Catholic. The former are traditionally the torchbearers of creationism. They have of late been joined by a number of conservative RCs -- which is strange, given that the RC church has not historically had big problems with the notion of evolution (and its current head has given evolutionary theory about as ringing an endorsement as one may fairly expect from a religious leader). Prof. Etzioni, though, is Jewish. I have no idea whether he is a particularly religious Jew, although the strapline of his website banner does suggest that he is at least more-or-less shomer shabbat. Still, Jews (religious or not) don't usually go in much for creationism. For creationism is the bastard child of literalist biblical fundamentalism, and that is a primarily Christian aberration.

I cannot tell whether Prof. Etzioni himself sees in creation the hand of an Intelligent Designer. Maybe not: to a large extent, his stance in favour of teaching ID seems a matter of wrongheaded fairmindedness: 'teach the controversy', etc. And, at first glance, that does indeed seem fair. After all, if there are two competing scientific ideas about why living things developed as they have done, should we not teach both ideas?

Certainly we should. ID, however, is not a competing scientific theory. It tries very hard to achieve a superficially sciency look-and-feel, but it is not science. I suppose we could call it a philosophical perspective. It rests on two broad principles: the Argument from Design (unsurprisingly enough) and the Argument from Personal Incredulity. The first of these found its classical expression in the work of William Paley, who gave us the evocative image of the Watchmaker. And (as arch-Darwinian Richard Dawkins once noted) it was a cogent argument in Paley's day; but alas for Paley, Darwin's subsequent proposals sapped it of its strength. The second argument essentially says: 'Something must be X, for I cannot for the life of me see how it could be other than X'. And this stance is fundamentally ascientific, indeed antiscientific. When a scientist cannot for the life of him see how something could be, he needs to tell himself, 'Well, I obviously have more work to do.' The IDist simply gives up.

Paley's argument from design has suffered from more than just the arrival of a new and better argument. Even if we leave evolution out of it, as we have learned more about various organisms we are faced with the stark fact that the Designer (assuming arguendo that there be one) is simply not very good at designing things. For evidence, you need look no farther than the nearest mirror. Indeed, you really don't even need a mirror. Especially if you are of a certain age, your back will speak to you eloquently of your imperfect design. Our spines, you see, do an adequate job of supporting our upright stance; but they are not well designed for this. If one accept the ID viewpoint, then one must give the Designer very low marks. But it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. When our remote ancestors decided it was time to stop dragging their knuckles and walk like men, natural selection had only their existing spines to work with; spines that had, till then, been honed over countless generations to do something other than walk upright. (Perhaps, when we have been around for a much, much longer time than we have been to date, our backs will finally have adapted to our lifestyle, and chiropractors and masseurs will be out of business. Until then, we must make do.) And there are more telling examples than our backaches, which are a rather trivial matter in the grand scheme of things. As I've noted before, Ken Miller calls the elephants and their relatives as witnesses against the Designer. These animals demonstrate pretty clearly that the Designer, if he exists, is extraordinarily fickle (and incompetent to boot).

The Argument from Personal Incredulity doesn't fare better. One of its champions is Michael Behe, a working scientist (at least, he used to be a working scientist) who accepts much of evolutionary theory, including the common descent of apes and humans. But he trips up against the notion of 'irreducible complexity'. There are some characters that are complex; if you knock out any of their component elements, they don't do what they are supposed to do. They are, as Behe would have it, 'irreducibly complex' and thus cannot have been shaped by evolution. (And, in a very narrow sense, he's right. Natural selection can't lay in a supply of characters that do nothing -- or are even deleterious -- against the off chance that they may combine with other characters to be evolved at some future date in order to do something worthwhile.) The problem for Behe's argument is that, even if he can't for the life of him see how complex biological characters can have evolved, others can. Once again, Ken Miller had a lot of fun at Behe's expense pointing out how the evolution of one of Behe's purportedly 'irreducibly complex' systems -- the clotting of blood in vertebrates -- was being successfully reduced in complexity even as Behe's book was in galley-proofs. Complexity isn't as irreducible as Behe thinks, it turns out. Let's say an important biological system has ten components, and won't function in the absence of any one of these ten. It's true that natural selection cannot 'plan in advance'. But it doesn't need to. If an organism has nine, or five, or even one of those components and that component does some other important job, it can be selected for. And if, a myriad generations later, another component crops up that can combine with the first to do a new important job, you can end up with a complexity of the sort that Behe cannot explain, but only gawp at in amazement, insisting it must be the work of the Designer. An important lesson of biology is that natural selection is conservative. It doesn't invent a dramatic macromutation where a bit of fine-tuning and jury-rigging will do. And it can only work with the materials that are to hand, so will often come up with new, complex characters that function adequately enough, even if (as your aching back will tell you) sometimes less than ideally.

Up to this point, we have been considering ID merely as an alternative explanation for the development of organisms. We haven't been considering it for what it really is: creationism dressed up in a lab coat. Prof. Etzioni asserts that ID is not creationism. He's wrong. It's true that IDism is nearly as incompatible with biblical-literalist 'young earth' creationism as is evolutionary theory. But if ID's proponents are relatively openminded creationists, they are creationists all the same. Prof. Etzioni might wish to have a look at Forrest & Gross's Creationism's Trojan Horse for a detailed examination of what the ID movement is really about. It is an attempt to inject religious instruction into the science classroom. In the United States, creationists learned long ago that teaching the biblical creation story in state schools as a 'religious truth' is impermissible. So they tarted it up as 'creation science' and started demanding equal time in science lessons. That didn't work either; ID is simply the latest attempt to repackage religious instruction as something else. (And it is interesting to note that this is a heavily American phenomenon. There is very little effort, even by religious conservatives, to see ID taught in European school science lessons. Of course, in many European countries, religious instruction is offered even in state schools. Perhaps European religious conservatives feel that this obviates the need to dilute the science taught in other lessons.)

Prof. Etzioni has, alas, also been taken in by some standard tropes of creationism. The evidence for evolution, he thinks, is 'weak'. On the contrary; evolution is, as a scientific theory, remarkably robust and creative. (And that's 'evolution', BTW, not 'Darwinism', as creationists like to call it. Darwin was a great scientist, but of course he got things wrong, and even missed a huge piece of the evolutionary puzzle. His contribution was great, but all he did was start the ball rolling. He is not a standard of orthodoxy against which all evolutionary theory must be measured; The Origin is not scripture. It is as contentious, and as wrong, to label evolutionary theory 'Darwinism' as it would be to call quantum physics 'Schrödingerism' or astronomy 'Keplerism'.) Etzioni thinks that 'no fact about evolution is the result of an experiment'. I think that by this he means, 'No hypothesis about evolution has been strengthened by experimentation', but even that is wrong. It's true that evolutionary biology is an historical science. We can't replay the Cambrian explosion under slightly altered circumstances to see how things would then turn out. But biologists can, and do, observe the historical record, draw inferences from it and make predictions accordingly. And those predictions can be checked, whether they be that whales once walked on land or that a moth would be found with a very strange proboscis that fits a certain orchid. What's more, given organisms with a sufficiently rapid reproductive cycle, scientists can (and do) run evolutionary experiments in the lab.

It's hard to fault the impulse of fairness that seems to motivate Prof. Etzioni's desire to see both ID and real biology taught in the schoolroom. But his fairness is misplaced. ID simply is not a 'competing scientific explanation'. There'd certainly be a place to consider ID in, say, a course on the history of biology, as an example of one of many wrong roads taken, together with (for example) Lamarckianism. (Of course, Lamarck was a much better and more important scientist than are the ID proponents, who have to date produced no actual scientific work.) But the place for that is not in the basic secondary-school science classroom. And schoolchildren should certainly not be presented with evolution and ID as equally plausible and meritorious theories and then invited to choose for themselves. If we're going to do that, we might as well also invite them to decide for themselves whether two and two make four, or rather five.

If Prof. Etzioni's schedule allows, he might wish to spend some time at The Panda's Thumb. He certainly should learn a bit more about IDism and the political programme of the ID movement before lending it the weight of his name.