The Grumpy Moderate, Post No. 1: Intelligent Design

I introduce my readers today to a new character: The Grumpy Moderate. The Grumpy Moderate is a guy (apologies to my female readers, but he's a guy) who views the news through a pane of skepticism. He's pretty bright, but thinks that intelligence is overrated. The Grumpy Moderate loves science, though. He likes to parse through the b.s., dislikes dogma and extremism, loathes pretense, likes pragmatism, and is highly suspicious of hoity-toity intellectual musings untethered from the ground of fact.

Today the Grumpy Moderate is going to go off as a result of this story, which reports that Bill Frist (that's Dr. Bill Frist, isn't it?) wants "intelligent design" to be taught in schools alongside the theory of evolution. Now the Grumpy Moderate has heard a lot about this "intelligent design" theory, but never really investigated it. What exactly is "intelligent design?" According to the Intelligent Design Network:

The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is thus a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion.

In a broader sense, Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection -- how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. Design detection is used in a number of scientific fields, including anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such as a death or fire, cryptanalysis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). An inference that certain biological information may be the product of an intelligent cause can be tested or evaluated in the same manner as scientists daily test for design in other sciences.

The science part of the Grumpy Moderate's mind can pretty easily see the flaw in the claim that "intelligent design" is a scientific theory. It's this: The central idea of the theory of evolution is that forms of life that are more suited to prosper in a particular environmental niche will, in fact, prosper more than those that are less well-suited. The mechanisms of this process are, to the Grumpy Moderate's understanding, pretty well understood. But of course, the adaptations that cause a life form to be well-suited to a particular environment look just like the adaptations that a "designer" would "design" to make a life form well-suited to a particular environment. So the theory isn't really testable. The results are the same whether you posit a "designer" or not. Viewed another way, if one does posit a "designer," there is no way to conduct an controlled experiment in which the effects of the "designer" are eliminated from the experiment, to see if the results are the same as under the theory of evolution. If the theory isn't testable, it isn't scientific.

In other words, you have to take intelligent design on faith. The Grumpy Moderate thinks that people ought to be able to believe that some supreme designer is behind all the mechanisms that lead to the formation of our natural world. But to say that such a belief should be taught as scientific alternative to the theory of evolution doesn't cut it. Besides, the Grumpy Moderate thought that faith was supposed to transcend science.

With all due respect to Dr. Frist, of course.

The Grumpy Moderate is really digressing now, but he wants to point out that part of the difficulty with accepting the theory of evolution is that the human mind can't really conceive of the timeframes involved in its working. We can't really get our minds around the immensity of 500 years, of 5,000 years, of 50,000 or 500,000 or 5,000,000 years. The Grumpy Moderate thinks that these timeframes are so very long that it is not surprising that extraordinarily remarkable things have happened over these vast spaces by chance.

The Grumpy Moderate also wonders why this is occupying the time of the Senate Majority Leader. The Grumpy Moderate knows the answer, of course ... Dr. Frist is said to be planning a run for President in '08, and thinks this will endear him to the Right's right wing. But the Grumpy Moderate thinks that this will make most other grumpy moderates wonder if Dr. Frist is to be taken seriously as a presidential material.