TNR hates on intelligent design.
I've been reading TNR online religiously for well over a year now. I don't think I've ever seen them post an article longer than three pages or that took me longer than half an hour to read. Until now. Jerry Coyne's six-page broadside against the intelligent designers ("The Faith that Dare not Speak its Name") is also flanked by anti-ID sneers from Leon Wieseltier and The Notebook. TNR has always been a polemic magazine and it loves to takes stands, usually as liberals against liberal orthodoxy. But this really is quite the stand, even for them. They obviously intend this as the be-all and end-all retaliatory salvo against ID and the anti-science crowd on the right. The National Review and the Weekly Standard must be gearing up to scream "elitist!" even as I type.
Coyne is out to take down both the "science" and the real motivations underlying the ID movement. On both scores, he's devastating. Here's a sample of his criticism of the original ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, which the IDers have been hoping to get into science classrooms:
One of these traits is worth examining in detail because it is among the finest examples of an evolutionary transition. This trait is the "chewing" hinge where the jaw meets the skull. In early reptiles (and their modern reptilian descendants), the lower jaw comprises several bones, and the hinge is formed by the quadrate bone of the skull and the articular bone of the jaw. As mammal-like reptiles become more mammalian, these hinge bones become smaller, and ultimately the jaw hinge shifts to a different pair of bones: the dentary (our "jawbone") and the squamosal, another bone of the skull. (The quadrate and articular, much reduced, moved into the middle ear of mammals, forming two of the bones that transmit sounds from the eardrum to the middle ear.) The dentary-squamosal articulation occurs in all modern mammals, the quadrate-articular in modern reptiles; and this difference is often used as the defining feature of these groups.
Like earlier creationist tracts, Pandas simply denies that this evolution of the jaw hinge occurred. It asserts that "there is no fossil record of such an amazing process," and further notes that such a migration would be "extraordinary." This echoes the old creationist argument that an adaptive transition from one type of hinge to another by means of natural selection would be impossible: members of a species could not eat during the evolutionary period when their jaws were being unhinged and then rehinged. (The implication is that the intelligent designer must have done this job instantaneously and miraculously.) But we have long known how this transition happened. It was easily accomplished by natural selection. In 1958, Alfred Crompton described the critical fossil: the mammal-like reptile Diarthrognathus broomi. D. broomi has, in fact, a double jaw joint with two hinges--the reptilian one and the mammalian one! Obviously, this animal could chew. What better "missing link" could we find?
Coyne also traces the religious ties and funding sources behind such ID epicenters as the Discovery Institute. And he catches some of the more eggregious slips in the IDers' efforts to pass themselves off as scientists:
[Phillip] Johnson was even more explicit in 1999 in remarks to a conference on "Reclaiming America for Christ." Rob Boston reported Johnson's remarks in Church & State magazine:
"Johnson calls his movement 'The Wedge.' The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism v. evolution to the existence of God v. the nonexistence of God. From there people are introduced to 'the truth' of the Bible and then 'the question of sin' and finally 'introduced to Jesus.'"
Other major figures in the ID movement have been equally clear about their religious motivations. Here is Dembski:
"But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed."
And here is Jonathan Wells, a member of Reverend Moon's Unification Church:
"Father's [Reverend Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle."
Given their penchant for self-incrimination, Coyne's attack -- which has the added bonus of laying out clearly why scientists are right, and not just reflexively defensive, to be so appalled by the ID movement -- is richly deserved. And it's certainly right up TNR's ally, since it styles and prides itself on not tripping gingerly through the culture war minefields. But, in fact, what I take from Coyne's article is not a sense of the appalling threat of ID as creeping pseudoscience, but rather how genuinely pathetic the ID movement is. Coyne is probably right that "ID is here for only one reason--to act as a Trojan horse poised before the public schools: a seemingly secular vessel ready to inject its religious message into the science curriculum" but if that's its goal, then it is a massive fireball.
First, given Coyne's description of the Scientific Creationists' legal and popular battles over the past half century to get their views into schools and to fight off the marching institutional legitimacy of Darwinism, their adoption of the ID framework strikes me as a major tactical retreat. Whatever sloppy, embarrassing things the IDers say to their partisan Christian audiences about the need to fool the masses with secular-sounding theory, they've clearly succumbed to the basic need for such secular-sounding theory as laid out in half a century of court precedents. Bible-thumping no longer cuts it. And having succumbed to the courts' demands, they'll never be able to go back. Instead, the Dover ruling, which will almost certainly go against them because they weren't subtle enough in hiding God in their theory, will just hit them with one more such precedent. As Coynes suggests, this will in turn force a further tactical retreat toward the language and trappings of secular science.
Second, the IDers' failure to get their theory past the First Amendment might not be such a great loss for them if poor, persecuted ID had simultaneously been able to stir up a popular wave of support: a broad swathe of Americans willing to see it as a middle-ground theory and be offended at the haughty secular liberal rejection of the IDers' compromise position. In essence, ID is a theory pitched squarely at the mushy middle, at scientific swing voters, parents who want their kids to learn some actual science (of which ID and its textbooks offer some since it does not deny minor forms of adaptation and natural selection in nature) without falling too far from grace. But on the questions of who made us, when and how we got here, Americans just aren't that mushy. For instance, a Harris poll taken earlier this summer asked:
"Which of the following do you believe about how human beings came to be? Human beings evolved from earlier species. Human beings were created directly by God. Human beings are so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them."
The results were:
Evolved: 22%
Created Directly: 64%
Powerful Force (closest to intelligent design): 10%
Unsure: 4%
Other polls give varying results depending on the phrasing, but the basic story is the same. Americans have decidedly strong opinions on the issue of human origin. About a fourth accept Darwinian theory out of hand. Roughly a half accept straight Biblical creationism (rejecting the idea of a common ancestry with apes, for instance). And the remaining quarter have views that fall somewhere in between, generally closer to creationism, but which don't look terribly moveable or ambivolent or even curious. Granted, Americans as a whole are broadly supportive of having intelligent design theories taught in the classroom (majorities or pluralities usually tell pollsters they think both evolution and ID should be taught, though it's not generally specified whether they're talking specifically about science class), but neither is there much evidence that Americans are pining for or identifying with ID's third way.
Which, really, makes ID a double-whammy failure. William Jennings Bryan might have been wrong, but he was a populist, was making the masses' argument for them. In their quest for credibility, the ID community has abandonned the populism of Churchish creationism but has failed in its sloppy endeavours to gain the legitimacy of academic science. Which means that, while it's no great popular victory for struggling Darwinism, it's at least safe for TNR to dance on ID's grave.
Coyne is out to take down both the "science" and the real motivations underlying the ID movement. On both scores, he's devastating. Here's a sample of his criticism of the original ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, which the IDers have been hoping to get into science classrooms:
One of these traits is worth examining in detail because it is among the finest examples of an evolutionary transition. This trait is the "chewing" hinge where the jaw meets the skull. In early reptiles (and their modern reptilian descendants), the lower jaw comprises several bones, and the hinge is formed by the quadrate bone of the skull and the articular bone of the jaw. As mammal-like reptiles become more mammalian, these hinge bones become smaller, and ultimately the jaw hinge shifts to a different pair of bones: the dentary (our "jawbone") and the squamosal, another bone of the skull. (The quadrate and articular, much reduced, moved into the middle ear of mammals, forming two of the bones that transmit sounds from the eardrum to the middle ear.) The dentary-squamosal articulation occurs in all modern mammals, the quadrate-articular in modern reptiles; and this difference is often used as the defining feature of these groups.
Like earlier creationist tracts, Pandas simply denies that this evolution of the jaw hinge occurred. It asserts that "there is no fossil record of such an amazing process," and further notes that such a migration would be "extraordinary." This echoes the old creationist argument that an adaptive transition from one type of hinge to another by means of natural selection would be impossible: members of a species could not eat during the evolutionary period when their jaws were being unhinged and then rehinged. (The implication is that the intelligent designer must have done this job instantaneously and miraculously.) But we have long known how this transition happened. It was easily accomplished by natural selection. In 1958, Alfred Crompton described the critical fossil: the mammal-like reptile Diarthrognathus broomi. D. broomi has, in fact, a double jaw joint with two hinges--the reptilian one and the mammalian one! Obviously, this animal could chew. What better "missing link" could we find?
Coyne also traces the religious ties and funding sources behind such ID epicenters as the Discovery Institute. And he catches some of the more eggregious slips in the IDers' efforts to pass themselves off as scientists:
[Phillip] Johnson was even more explicit in 1999 in remarks to a conference on "Reclaiming America for Christ." Rob Boston reported Johnson's remarks in Church & State magazine:
"Johnson calls his movement 'The Wedge.' The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism v. evolution to the existence of God v. the nonexistence of God. From there people are introduced to 'the truth' of the Bible and then 'the question of sin' and finally 'introduced to Jesus.'"
Other major figures in the ID movement have been equally clear about their religious motivations. Here is Dembski:
"But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed."
And here is Jonathan Wells, a member of Reverend Moon's Unification Church:
"Father's [Reverend Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle."
Given their penchant for self-incrimination, Coyne's attack -- which has the added bonus of laying out clearly why scientists are right, and not just reflexively defensive, to be so appalled by the ID movement -- is richly deserved. And it's certainly right up TNR's ally, since it styles and prides itself on not tripping gingerly through the culture war minefields. But, in fact, what I take from Coyne's article is not a sense of the appalling threat of ID as creeping pseudoscience, but rather how genuinely pathetic the ID movement is. Coyne is probably right that "ID is here for only one reason--to act as a Trojan horse poised before the public schools: a seemingly secular vessel ready to inject its religious message into the science curriculum" but if that's its goal, then it is a massive fireball.
First, given Coyne's description of the Scientific Creationists' legal and popular battles over the past half century to get their views into schools and to fight off the marching institutional legitimacy of Darwinism, their adoption of the ID framework strikes me as a major tactical retreat. Whatever sloppy, embarrassing things the IDers say to their partisan Christian audiences about the need to fool the masses with secular-sounding theory, they've clearly succumbed to the basic need for such secular-sounding theory as laid out in half a century of court precedents. Bible-thumping no longer cuts it. And having succumbed to the courts' demands, they'll never be able to go back. Instead, the Dover ruling, which will almost certainly go against them because they weren't subtle enough in hiding God in their theory, will just hit them with one more such precedent. As Coynes suggests, this will in turn force a further tactical retreat toward the language and trappings of secular science.
Second, the IDers' failure to get their theory past the First Amendment might not be such a great loss for them if poor, persecuted ID had simultaneously been able to stir up a popular wave of support: a broad swathe of Americans willing to see it as a middle-ground theory and be offended at the haughty secular liberal rejection of the IDers' compromise position. In essence, ID is a theory pitched squarely at the mushy middle, at scientific swing voters, parents who want their kids to learn some actual science (of which ID and its textbooks offer some since it does not deny minor forms of adaptation and natural selection in nature) without falling too far from grace. But on the questions of who made us, when and how we got here, Americans just aren't that mushy. For instance, a Harris poll taken earlier this summer asked:
"Which of the following do you believe about how human beings came to be? Human beings evolved from earlier species. Human beings were created directly by God. Human beings are so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them."
The results were:
Evolved: 22%
Created Directly: 64%
Powerful Force (closest to intelligent design): 10%
Unsure: 4%
Other polls give varying results depending on the phrasing, but the basic story is the same. Americans have decidedly strong opinions on the issue of human origin. About a fourth accept Darwinian theory out of hand. Roughly a half accept straight Biblical creationism (rejecting the idea of a common ancestry with apes, for instance). And the remaining quarter have views that fall somewhere in between, generally closer to creationism, but which don't look terribly moveable or ambivolent or even curious. Granted, Americans as a whole are broadly supportive of having intelligent design theories taught in the classroom (majorities or pluralities usually tell pollsters they think both evolution and ID should be taught, though it's not generally specified whether they're talking specifically about science class), but neither is there much evidence that Americans are pining for or identifying with ID's third way.
Which, really, makes ID a double-whammy failure. William Jennings Bryan might have been wrong, but he was a populist, was making the masses' argument for them. In their quest for credibility, the ID community has abandonned the populism of Churchish creationism but has failed in its sloppy endeavours to gain the legitimacy of academic science. Which means that, while it's no great popular victory for struggling Darwinism, it's at least safe for TNR to dance on ID's grave.
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