And from the world of scientific illiteracy and boneheadedness, we have this exciting new development in the realm of Intelligent Design:
We're getting signs that the Discovery Institute is going to be shifting their strategy a little bit.
Um ... no, it's not just "a little bit." Read on:
[The Discovery Institute's] Stephen Meyer has an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News today. This is the Stephen Meyer who claims to be one of the "architects of Intelligent Design", Stephen Meyer the Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, the Stephen Meyer who, when asked whether he accepted the principle of common descent, said:
I won't answer that question as a yes or no. I accept the idea of limited common descent. I am skeptical about universal common descent. I do not take it as a principle; it is a theory. And I think the evidence supporting the theory of universal common descent is weak.
Today, though, Meyer declares that ID has no complaint with common ancestry.
The theory [of ID] does not challenge the idea of evolution defined as change over time, or even common ancestry, but it does dispute Darwin's idea that the cause of biological change is wholly blind and undirected.
Holy. Crap.
In plain English, what the Discovery Institute's Stephen Meyer is saying is that he no longer has any gripe with the fact that biological evolution and common ancestry has occurred -- he's just going to nitpick over the details and mechanism. Let me explain why this is a huge development.
First, some of you will recognize the corner the folks at the DI have painted themselves into -- it's little more than an updated version of the "God of the Gaps" in which the devout saw the workings of God in damned near everything until science started explaining it quite nicely, thank you very much. ("Yes, Reverend, I understand that things fall down. It's called 'gravity'.") And so the devout had to content themselves with finding an increasingly-reduced role for God to play.
One would think that the devout might have learned something from that but, no, along comes the Discovery Institute, making grandiose claims for "irreducible complexity" and so on, and now having to back off on those same claims, leaving themselves with smaller and smaller gaps into which they can try to cram a requirement for ID. And I think we all know how that story ends. But that's not the best part.
At this point, any discussion regarding ID should open with an explanation that Intelligent Design fully accepts an ancient Earth and the fact of biological evolution via common descent. If you plan on writing a letter to the editor or having an extended discussion or even getting into a formal debate, you absolutely have to set the stage by making this clear.
It's a fact that most supporters of ID (being scientific morons) have this bizarre idea that ID is in direct conflict with biological evolution and, perhaps, even supports the idea of strict, young-earth creationism. The instant you explain Meyer's new position, you'll literally see the air go out of those people.
And if you get involved in a debate, not only do you have to make all of this clear right up front, but you have to watch for the inevitable back-pedaling on the part of ID supporters as they try to misrepresent this new definition of ID. And you have to call them on it instantly. I guarantee that nothing will deflate an audience of the religiously ignorant faster than being forced to listen to a supporter of ID admit that biological evolution is not just a theory, but that it has in fact happened, and the disagreement is purely pedantic.
If you get a chance to try this, by all means, let me know how it turns out.
2 comments:
Amusing as it will be to watch DI begin to alienate its base, I'm guessing ID supporters will just put the following spin on it : "It's healthy for 'scientists' within a discipline to have minor disagreements."
And as long as they make the winky face where the word god goes, they'll get away with it.
For a while.
Is this really back-pedaling? As I understand it, Intelligent Design (pathetically vague though that 'hypothesis' is) has always left those sorts of possibilities open. Michael Behe, for instance -- one of the Discovery Institute’s big stars -- has long maintained that the earth is billions of years old and that evolution took place just as most contemporary biologists claim... other than the development of a few important biological (and mostly microbiological) structures that are 'irreducibly complex'. Have a look at Kenneth R. Miller's chapter on Behe in Finding Darwin's God for more details on this. Behe was, almost indubitably, just trying to find a yet smaller gap into which to place God (for obvious reasons, there's a little more gappiness in microbiological structures, where there just isn't the fossil evidence on which to build one's case) than elsewhere. Granted, Behe's views are nonetheless a) not science; b) riddled with problems; c) based on claims like that of the 'irreducible complexity' of flagella or the mechanisms for blood-clotting, inter alia, which have been clearly shown not to be irreducibly complex (and there’s more evidence behind evolutionary theory than the fossil record, after all); and d) for that reason betray Behe's complete ignorance (probably willful) of thousands of scientific articles on a topic he has claimed to be a complete mystery. Nonetheless, Behe was not (as far as I have seen at least) denying universal common descent.
All this is a lead-up to my larger point: I don't think this is evidence that Meyer has actually changed his position. In the first passage you quote, Meyer expresses _doubts_ regarding _universal_ common descent. He also blatantly accepts the idea of _limited_ common descent. Even the old-time creationists of 20 years ago had to accept what they called 'micro-evolution' (a term that never seemed to make clear whether it was limited to evolution within species or within genera, thanks to the ambiguity of the Biblical term ‘kind’), so the old-time creationists too could find ways of accounting for the evolution of new species of housefly, etc. during our lifetimes. What they rejected was 'macroevolution', used as they (typically vaguely) understood the term.
So even ‘70s-and-‘80s-style creationists could claim to accept 'limited common descent'. Now, with people like Behe kicking around the offices of the Discovery Institute, they are being more inclusive (as could be seen in the _earlier_ quote by Meyer), saying that they are only 'skeptical' about universal common descent and that the evidence for it is 'weak', but not that it didn’t take place. And in the earlier quote, Meyer blatantly admitted the existence of “limited common descent”.
So what is different in the later quote? Not much, as I see it. Meyer says that ID "does not challenge the idea of evolution defined as change over time" -- but neither did earlier creationists. Even Young-Earth creationists accept (as far as I have seen) the breeding of dogs. That counts as 'change over time', but is not what they would have called 'macroevolution'. Meyer goes on to say that ID does not challenge "even common ancestry". But please note the qualifiers to 'common descent' in the earlier passage quoted: there is universal common descent and limited common descent, and ID accepts the latter wholeheartedly but seems to reserve judgment about the former (for Behe’s sake, presumably). So I presume that when Meyer speaks of 'common ancestry' in the latter quote, he is referring to 'limited common ancestry' (like the ability of two breeds of dog to trace back their lineage to a common stock) -- which is, again, entirely compatible with his earlier statement and even with Young Earth Creationism. Not only that, but – as Meyer goes on to say in the later quote – ID disputes the claim that such “biological change” is _wholly_ “blind and undirected”
So sadly, I don't think he has conceded anything that he didn't concede before or that just about any creationist/IDer would concede also.
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