A More Intelligent Design
Will Saletan was my favorite political writer for a long time, mostly because he liked Edwards before anyone else*, but also because he had a feel for politics that struck me as smart (mostly because it seemed so close to mine, and his was more attentive). He's focusing now almost exclusively on social-conservative issues and the intersection of science and ethics, so I don't care as much and now Matt Bai of the New York Times Magazine is my favorite political writer. But Will Saletan still knows how to write.
He showed his talent again this week with an insightful look at the intelligent-design debate going on in Kansas. He makes two points that I found instructive. First, us liberal elitists should resist the urge to dismiss intelligent design as more wacko bullcrap from the crazies:
Liberals, editorialists, and biologists wonder aloud how people can refuse to see evolution when it's staring them in the face. Maybe they should ask themselves. It's the creationists in Kansas who are evolving. And it's the evolutionists who can't see it.To understand the fight in Kansas, you have to study what evolutionists accuse creationists of neglecting: the historical record. In the Scopes trial, creationists defended a ban on the teaching of evolution. That was the early, authoritarian stage of creationism—the equivalent of Australopithecus, the earliest hominid. Gradually, evolution gained the upper hand. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn't even require equal treatment of evolution and creationism. By 1999, creationists were asking the Kansas board not to rule out their beliefs entirely. This was creationism's more advanced Homo erectus phase: pluralism.
Now, says Saletan, they've evolved their argument to homo sapiens:
The new challenger, ID, differs fundamentally from fundamentalism. Like its creationist forebears, ID is theistic. But unlike them, it abandons Biblical literalism, embraces open-minded inquiry, and accepts falsification, not authority, as the ultimate test. These concessions, sincere or not, define a new species of creationism—Homo sapiens—that fatally undermines its ancestors. Creationists aren't threatening us. They're becoming us.
So that's a frightening prospect: how can defenders of science deal with having the burden of proof shifted upon us? How can you prove there was not an intelligent hand guiding the creation of life? So have creationists backed us into a corner? Not so, says Saletan. Now that creationists have made these concessions, they can't really win:
Essentially, ID proponents are gambling that they can concede evolutionist earth science without conceding evolutionist life science. But they can't. They already acknowledge microevolution—mutation and natural selection within a species. Once you accept conventional fossil dating and four billion years of life, the sequential kinship of species loses its implausibility. You can't fall back on the Bible; you've already admitted it can't always be taken literally. All you're left with is an assortment of gaps in evolutionary theory—how did DNA emerge, what happened between this and that fossil—and the vague default assumption that an "intelligence" might fill in those gaps. Calvert and Harris call this assumption a big tent. But guess what happens to a tent without poles.
Saletan concludes by saying that the liberal and science communities should consider taking creationists up on their challenge: instead of dismissing intelligent design out of hand, let's put it up to the rigors of science, like ID supporters suggest. If we give everyone a fair chance to look at the two theories side by side, people will see ID for what it is: an attempt to explain away scientific questions by waving our arms and saying "magic." If we're going to preach the scientific method, let's have a little faith in it.
* Examples of Saletan's political genius and Edwards support include his
admiration of the Edwards tax plan and his plea for an Edwards surge.