The God of small things

November 14, 2005

Scientists consider intelligent design - which finds God in the gaps that evolution struggles to explain - as easy to refute as a flat earth, but they differ on how best to counter its growing appeal, writes Deborah Smith.

Breaking ranks … Professor Michael Behe, a leading US advocate
for intelligent design, cites a bacterium's whiplike flagellum as a
good example of the concept.

Breaking ranks … Professor Michael Behe, a leading US advocate for intelligent design, cites a bacterium's whiplike flagellum as a good example of the concept.
Photo: AP

If there is an intelligent designer, the box jellyfish was surely one of his weirdest ideas. This deadly sea creature has 24 eyes, four rudimentary brains and 60 anuses.

On top of its bizarre form, it also provides new evidence that refutes a popular argument for the existence of a clever cosmic creator: that some body parts, like an eye, or the natural "outboard motors" on bacteria, are too complex to have evolved gradually, step by step, through natural selection, and so must have been designed.

Sixteen of the box jellyfish's tiny eyes are simple collectors of light. The other eight, however, have evolved lenses that produce a blurred image, Swedish researchers found earlier this year. They are a good example of the kind of eyes Darwin predicted and always hoped he would get to see - ones of intermediate complexity, a step away from sophisticated vision.

The argument that God is an intelligent designer of eyes and other complex aspects of life was first raised in 1802 by an English theologian, William Paley, with his famous watchmaker analogy - that it would be obvious to anyone who found a watch in a field that it had been designed, rather than produced by blind natural processes.

More than 200 years later, intelligent design is again being heavily promoted by fundamentalist Christians in the United States and Australia.

A leading advocate of the theory, Professor Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, insists it is a scientific theory that sheds no light on who the intelligent designer is, although he believes it is God, he told a US court last month.

The main marketing tool here, aimed at schoolchildren, is a DVD called Unlocking the Mystery of Life: the Case for Intelligent Design, which has the convincing style of a natural history documentary. More than 100 schools are already teaching intelligent design in science classes.

Yet most scientists in Australia dismiss the concept as an unproveable assertion masquerading as science. It meets none of the tests for a scientific theory, says Professor Sue Serjeantson, the executive secretary of the Australian Academy of Science.

"It is not a scientific idea," she says. "It is an article of religious faith. It's creationism by another name."

Opinions vary, however, on how best to handle this attack on science, its possible influence on science students, and why a 200-year-old idea is in the ascendancy. A leading Christian thinker and scientist, Professor Charles Birch, believes lengthy discussions about intelligent design only play into its proponents' hands. "I think it would be much better to ignore it," he says.

"It only gives them publicity, which is what they want."

Intelligent design should not be taught in schools because, he says, "there's nothing to teach".

"It's a simple sort of notion that can be knocked on the head pretty easily."

Birch, a former professor of biology at the University of Sydney and a winner of the international Templeton Prize for progress in religion, was one of the scientists who helped persuade Pope John Paul II a decade ago of the strength of evidence for evolution.

He says it is dishonest of the intelligent design movement to present its ideas as science, rather than religion.

As a believer in a God of "purpose" rather than a blueprint-wielding designer, Birch is also not drawn to the idea of a deity who is invoked to explain away any scientific mysteries.

"It's the old God of the gaps," he says. "This God gets smaller and smaller as science gets bigger and bigger."

The Australian Nobel laureate Professor Peter Doherty says "anyone who doubts Darwinian evolution can see it constantly at work in both flu viruses and HIV/AIDS". It meets the test thousands of times a day in laboratories around the world.

He says intelligent design is a "less toxic" version of creationism (which claims the world is only 6000 years old), and does not criticise people for believing in God as an intelligent designer. "But it's not science," he says.

His own area of specialty, immunology, refutes intelligent design. The human immune system resembles a street person in hand-me-down clothes, rather than a socialite in an Armani outfit, he says. "There's nothing elegant about it."

The Melbourne physiologist Professor Derek Denton pointed out recently that the "knowledge of gravity has not been a strong point in the repertoire of the intelligent designer".

The drainage holes at the top of our sinuses and the way our guts are attached by a membrane to the backbone are good examples. Both designs are fine for four-legged creatures, but now we have evolved to walk upright, they lead to clogged sinuses and hernias, he says.

Intelligent design poses no testable predictions, which is the hallmark of science, says Monash University philosopher, Professor Graham Oppy. "As a field of genuine scientific inquiry it is completely sterile."

If research reveals an evolutionary explanation for one complex part of life, intelligent design advocates can simply change the goalposts, and point to another poorly researched area of complexity.

Serjeantson says she is gravely concerned about intelligent design being taught as science in schools because it will crowd out real science. Unlike some educators in the US, however, she is not worried that teaching it would increase distrust of science, and turn students off scientific careers.

On the other hand, Professor David Symington and Professor Russell Tytler, of Deakin University's faculty of education, believe that discussing it in science classes, not as science but as a controversial idea, could help students engage more with science. Seeing that science does not exist in a moral and social vacuum might help reverse a drift away from the subject, they argue.

But "where would you stop?" asks the Monash University philosopher Professor John Bigelow. There are so many fascinating failed theories to consider, he says, such as "phlogiston, alchemy, the Greek theories of planetary spheres".

Intelligent design "no more belongs in a science class than the stork theory in sex education", says an Oxford University biologist, Professor Richard Dawkins.

Better education about evolution would help, he says. Evolution is often mistakenly called random when natural selection takes away any element of chance. To enhance understanding of evolution, the Australian Academy of Science is planning a public lecture series next year on the contribution of Australia's flora and fauna to Darwin's theory.

Bigelow says it is ironic that the rise of anti-evolution fundamentalism in the US comes at a time when science is vital to both the discovery of oil and development of weapons, two key issues for that nation. He cautions scientists against being too aggressive in their opposition to intelligent design.

"It can encourage people to be counter-suggestible, in the same way some of the anti-terror measures are very good for recruitment. Categorising the opposition as being irrational also seems to me to be a strategic error."

Belief systems are tied up with loyalty to a group, he says, and many religious people see no reason to trust the view of scientists rather than their minister. The point is to change minds without demeaning people.

Birch says intelligent design is gaining ground because it "has a simplicity about it that appeals to people".

Humans also appear to be hard-wired to yearn for new realms beyond the reach of our senses, says Professor Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Many physicists studying string theory look for an underlying mathematical beauty to the universe and speculate about the existence of extra dimensions, some of which could even house other universes.

Like advocates of intelligent design, they do so "without a shred of empirical evidence", he wrote last week in The New York Times. The difference is that scientists know that without evidence to vindicate their claims their scientific theories will eventually wither and die.

The intelligent design movement, on the other hand, is very well funded, says Oppy. "The proponents in the US are so powerful that it is inevitable we will keep getting bombarded with it for years."
