[asa] Chronicle of Higher education on ID

This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an editorial on ID, a
provocative piece arguing for greater tolerance toward this particular type
of academic dissent. I like much of this and thought some here would find it
interesting.

Ted

Full text is at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i20/20b02001.htm

POINT OF VIEW
Why Can't We Discuss Intelligent Design?
By J. SCOTT TURNER
I'd never had a heckler before. Usually, when I'm asked to give a
talk, I discuss my research on termites and the remarkable structures
they build. Usually, I'm glad just to have an audience. x But what
I'd learned from termites had got me thinking about broader issues,
among them the question of design in biology: Why are living things
built so well for the functions they perform? So I wrote a book
called The Tinkerer's Accomplice, which was my topic that day.
The trouble started almost as soon as I stepped up to the podium:
intrusive "questions" and demands for "clarifications," really
intended not to illuminate but to disrupt and distract. In
exasperation, I finally had to ask the heckler to give me a chance to
make my argument and my audience a chance to hear it, after which he
could ask all the questions he wished.
He was not interested in that approach, of course, and left as soon
as question time began. I found out later that he'd complained at his
next faculty meeting that the departmental speaker's program should
never be used as a forum for advancing - what precisely? That was
never quite clear, either to me or to my embarrassed host.
I think what stirred up the heckler had something to do with the word
"design." Unless clearly linked to the process of natural selection,
"design" can be a bit of a red flag for modern biologists. The reason
is not hard to fathom. Most people, when they contemplate the living
world, get an overwhelming sense that it is a designed place, replete
with marvelous and ingenious contrivances: the beak of a hummingbird
curved like the nectaries it feeds from, bones shaped to the loads
they must bear, feathers that could teach new tricks to an
aeronautical engineer, the nearly unfathomable complexity of a brain
that can see - all built as if someone had designed them.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. Say "design," and you imply
that a designer has been at work, with all the attributes implied by
that word: forward-looking, purposeful, intelligent, and intentional.
For many centuries, most people drew precisely that conclusion from
the designs they thought they saw everywhere in nature.
Charles Darwin was supposed to have put paid to that idea, of course,
and ever since his day biologists have considered it gauche to speak
of design, or even to hint at purposefulness in nature. Doing so in
polite company usually earns you what I call The Pause, the awkward
silence that typically follows a faux pas.
If just one freighted word like "design" can evoke The Pause,
combining two - as in the phrase "intelligent design" - seems to make
otherwise sane people slip their moorings. If you enjoy irony, as I
do, the spectacle can provide hours of entertainment. I wonder, for
example, what demon had gripped a past president of Cornell
University when he singled out intelligent design as a unique threat
to academic and civil discourse. Aren't universities supposed to be a
place for dangerous ideas?
Also amusing is the spectacle of independent-minded scientists'
running to college administrators or the courts for help in defining
what is science and what is permissible discourse in their
classrooms. And I find it hard to suppress a chuckle at the sheer
brass of books like Richard Dawkins's recent The God Delusion
(Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which seem untroubled by traditional
boundaries between religion and science as long as the intrusion is
going their way.
Faced with all that hue and cry, I almost want to say: "Friends,
intelligent design is just an idea." You might believe (as I do) that
it is a wrongheaded idea, but it's hard to see how that alone should
disqualify it from academic discourse. Academe is full of wrongheaded
ideas, and always has been - not because academe itself is
wrongheaded, but because to discuss such ideas is its very function.
Even bad ideas can contain kernels of truth, and it is academe's role
to find them. That can be done only in the sunlight and fresh air of
normal academic discourse. Expelling an idea is the surest way to
allow falsehood to survive.
A critic of intelligent design could reasonably reply: "That's all
true, but there are limits to how much tolerance should be extended
to wrongheadedness. Once falsehood is exposed as such, it needs to be
shown the door." It's worth remembering, though, that we have been
here before. Intelligent design is just the latest eruption of a
longstanding strain of anti-Darwinist thought, which includes the
Scopes "monkey" trial of the 1920s, the "creation science"
controversies of the 1970s, and many other skirmishes, large and small.
The strain's very persistence invites the obvious question: If Darwin
settled the issue once and for all, why does it keep coming back?
Perhaps the fault lies with Darwin's supporters. Rather than debate
the strain on its merits, we scramble to the courts or the political
ramparts to expel it from our classrooms and our students' minds.
That is a pity because at the core of intelligent design is a
question worth pondering: Is evolution shaped in any way by
purposefulness or intentionality? Darwinism is clear in its answer -
no way, no how - and that is not mere obstinacy, as some might
charge. The banishment of purpose from evolution is Darwinism's sine
qua non, which Darwin himself fought hard to establish, and which his
descendants have defended stoutly ever since.
Most of the challenges to Darwinism over the years, including
intelligent design, have arisen over what most people see as a self-
evident link between design and purpose in the living world. A
Darwinist would say that the purpose is only apparent, that what we
believe to be design is actually the accumulated product of an
unintentional process of "tinkering," using materials at hand to
cobble together solutions to immediate problems - keeping those that
work, discarding those that do not, but proceeding with no view of
the future, only with the legacy of the past.
But what if evolution really is purposeful in some way? In fact
Darwin dethroned only one type of purposefulness, the Platonic
idealism that had previously underscored the concept of the species.
There's more to purpose than Plato, however, and it remains an open
question how other forms of purposefulness might inform our thinking
about evolution. What might purposeful evolution look like? Is design
its signature? Can it be reconciled with Darwinism? If so, how? If
not, why not?
It's hard to see a threat in asking such questions. Indeed, it's hard
to see how asking them could do anything but enrich our understanding
about evolution and how we teach it.
Here is where I have to give the proponents of intelligent design
their (limited) due. Their intellectual pedigree might be suspect,
their thinking might be wrong, but at least they are asking an
interesting question: What is the meaning of design of the living world?
In our readiness to proscribe intelligent design, we Darwinists are
telling the world not only that we are unwilling to ask such
questions ourselves, but that we don't want others to ask them
either. No wonder the war on Darwin won't go away.
J. Scott Turner is an associate professor of biology at the State
University of New York's College of Environmental Science and
Forestry. His latest book, The Tinkerer's Accomplice: How Design
Emerges From Life Itself, was published by Harvard University Press
this month.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 20, Page B20

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Received on Mon Jan 29 18:45:08 2007