Monday, April 21, 2008

Dancing About Biology

I was thinking about writing something on the current controversy over Ben Stein’s creationist propaganda movie "Expelled" when I saw the following quote in another blog:

"Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is a scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America’s public schools? Yes, let’s do it – not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu idea that the Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle."
-- David Quammen, Author.
His books include The Song of the Dodo and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.

(Thanks to Astronomy Buff who spotted this quote on a Starbucks coffee cup, #220 in their “The Way I See It” series.)

It’s unfortunate that so many people in this country oppose evolution (or the teaching of it) when it is so established and essential in biology and even demonstrated in applications of biology (e.g., to understand and deal with bacteria that evolve drug resistance) and can now be studied directly in the shared DNA of all the life forms on this planet. Part of the problem is that what many people oppose is a cartoon version of evolution. They didn’t evolve from any chimp! Neither did I – humans and chimps both evolved from a long-extinct common ancestor species around 5-8 million years ago. They also don’t seem to understand or accept how closely related we are to all living things on Earth – all plant and animal cells are running “programs” written in the common language of DNA. Closely related species such as chimps and humans have a large percentage of DNA sequences in common (95% or more), but strings of DNA (genes) that code for bioluminescence have been transferred from jellyfish into the genomes of pigs (among other organisms). How is it that there is this great genetic commonality even across widely different species? It’s because evolution produced all the machinery of life from a common beginning.

So of course scientists should exclude ID and its proponents from their scientific journals and conferences – just as they would logically exclude people who would assert that soccer or stamp collecting is part of that scientific discussion. Soccer and stamp collecting are valid subjects of interest, but they aren’t part of biology, and if you submit a paper about soccer or stamp collecting to a biology journal, it will not be published, even if it's a great paper. Just because people assert that they are talking about the same thing doesn’t mean that they are! Evolution explains how life works on this planet as a physical process with physical chains of cause and effect (albeit extremely complex and long-acting chains of cause and effect). ID asserts things based (perhaps) on literary analysis, but it produces no testable hypotheses and it explains nothing in the realm of science. If you take a religious argument and label it as science, it's still a religious argument.

There’s a quote from Elvis Costello, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do." I’m not sure I completely agree with that since I’ve both written music and written about music, and I like listening to music and reading about it too. But ID and creationism are definitely dancing about biology, and they are not bringing anything useful to the party.

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