INELEGANT DECLINE
By Carrington Vanston - March 3, 2004
http://www.carringtonvanston.net/archives/inelegant

With at least one person having been smote while watching the movie The Passion Of The Christ, you probably think I won't be able to resist making this week's column into a gentle poke at religion. And you'd be right.

Residents of Ohio, are you embarrassed? I think you should be. Recently you announced to the world (well, your State Board of Education announced on your behalf) that you'd be adding Intelligent Design to your high school curriculum.

For those who haven't heard of it yet, Intelligent Design is the latest spin on Creationism. It's the new boy on the "we didn't evolve from no damn monkeys" block. Have you ever noticed that people who don't believe in evolution seem to be living examples of their own arguments?

The basic difference between Intelligent Design and Creationism is this: Creationism says "The Christian God created the world in 6 days about 6,000 years ago" while Intelligent Design says "God--probably the Christian one but we're not saying that or else you won't let us teach this in schools but really we all know which God we mean wink wink--created the world, and since He's a God it probably took oh let's call it roughly a week, and maybe it was a little longer than 6,000 years ago but let's just say for now that God did it and we'll sneak the rest in later."

And like the Creationists, the Intelligent Design proponents claim that this is science instead of religion. Why? Because, and be sure to pay close attention here because I'm about to take a running leap, they claim that "there must be intelligent design in the face of irreducible complexity."

What does that mean? Simply this: since science cannot currently explain everything about how all life works, we must therefore conclude there is a God. Hey, I warned you I'd be leaping.

Let's look at that again, shall we? Run run run run run...we cannot at the present time explain absolutely everything...run run run...about absolutely everything...run run run...to do with life in all forms...and LEAP...so therefore God exists.

What kind of school board would seriously consider adding "if we don't know it now, it can never be known" to a science curriculum? That's not science. It's not even remotely science. It doesn't even get to visit science on alternate weekends.

So what is science? Well, a big part of it is "the application of theories that are falsifiable." A theory that is not falsifiable is not a scientific theory by definition, because the most basic and essential process of science is the attempt to disprove theories.

Science requires that we supply means by which our theories may be disproved, and so if we want to include "God exists" as part of a theory we must supply a means by which God can be proven to not exist. If I cannot supply a means by which one could prove that God doesn't exist, then "God exists" is simply not part of science. It doesn't mean it's true or false, it's just outside of science. And things that are outside of science should stay outside of science classrooms.

And usually they do, unless you live in a state that elects a bunch of Creationists to your State Board of Education. Creationists who go on to Create a lesson plan that's derived in part directly from the seminal text in Intelligent Design (Jonathan Wells's Icons Of Evolution) while swearing up and down that the lesson plan doesn't actually include Intelligent Design.

And then after nobody believed them, do you know how they solved the problem?

They removed the Wells book from the bibliography.

Seriously. That's it. They didn't change the plan itself, oh no. They just deleted the Intelligent Design source book from the lesson plan's bibliography. They left in the Intelligent Design material, and turned their own school lesson plan into a work of plagiarism.

If you can still read this article clearly, you're not shaking your head in disgust nearly as hard as this deserves. Of course you'd probably have to wedge your noggin in a paint mixer to get the kind of shake this one calls for, but do your best.

I suspect the biggest stumbling block for some people to accept the fact of biological evolution (yes, it's a demonstrable fact not a "theory" in the way the general public uses the term) is that most people don't understand "evolution" as a scientific term. And that's not their fault at all since the general public is presented with many, varied, and generally inaccurate definitions of what evolution is.

Most dictionaries and Fox television news reporters define evolution as "the gradual process by which plants and animals arose from earlier more primitive organisms." Sounds about right, huh? If you went door to door and showed that definition to a hundred people, ninety-seven of them would agree that's what evolution is. (Two of the others were out at a movie, and the third pretended not to be home when you knocked because Final Jeopardy was coming on.)

There's only one problem with that definition, though: it's totally inaccurate. That's not what "evolution" means at all, at least not to scientists.

Evolution is actually just the process that results in heritable changes in a population over multiple generations. Or as Curtis and Barnes put it in Biology: "In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next." But that doesn't roll of the tongue too easily, does it? It's so much easier to say "gradual changes from monkey to man."

But biological evolution has nothing to do with a "gradual" process. It is, on the other hand, a straightforward and easily demonstrated one. It is a theory, but it is also a fact. In science, facts are the observable data we collect about the world, theories are collections of statements to explain and interpret those facts, and nerds are the people who do the collecting. Wait, scratch that last one. What I meant to say was that biological evolution is a fact in that we can observe it in action today and its historical evidence is overwhelming.

There is another aspect, the theory of evolution, which takes the fact of biological evolution and theorizes the specific mechanisms by which it operates. Creationists love to pounce on the word "theory" and claim that even scientists themselves are unsure about the existence of evolution. Naughty word-twisting Creationists. Tsk tsk.

The truth is, biological evolution has been accepted as a fact by all non-bigoted scientists for well over a century. Darwin himself always took pains to separate his two accomplishments: one, discovering the fact of biological evolution, and two, proposing natural selection as a theory to explain the specific mechanisms of that fact. He always separated the two, and this was a guy who didn't even separate his cottons from his delicates when he did the laundry.

Gravity is a fact. We know this because things fall down. Things like apples and Humpty Dumpty. But gravity is also a theory which explains why things fall down (because all the cool apples were doing it, and because he was drunk, respectively). Newton's theory of gravitation was replaced by Einstein's, but while the new textbooks were being printed at no point did things stop falling down. Not even a little bit. Just ask all the king's horses and all the king's men, who will tell you I'm correct right after they finish their omelets. The fact of gravity was not affected by improvements to the theory of gravitation any more than the fact of evolution is affected by improvements to the theory of evolution. Saying you don't believe in evolution is like saying you don't believe in gravity or you don't believe that Avril Lavigne can't sing. Scientists might debate precisely how evolution works or how gravity works or how to best stop that Napanee warbler, but they agree about the facts.

God and evolution are not contradictory things. Evolution is how organisms change between generations, and so if there is one or more gods pulling our strings then He or She or It or They set up our world to work this way. I simply don't understand why anybody but the most close-minded, dogmatic fundamentalists would be afraid of teaching rational methodology and observation in school.

I'm more concerned about the theory that some almighty being created and buried millions of dinosaur fossils just to feck with our heads. Now that's something to keep you up at night.

Carrington Vanston
carrington@carringtonvanston.net

[This article is released to the public domain.]