Why intelligent design is wrong

As Sarkar notes, there is no easily definable demarcation criteria to deem ID science or non-science without further consideration. Separating science from non-science has traditionally been a very thorny problem, and sometimes definitions are proposed that allow obviously non-scientific claims while booting out clearly scientific ones. What we might think of as scientific ideas at the beginning of their development, especially, may somewhat resemble what we deride as non-science during political posturing.

There is indeed a difference between science and non-science, but it is doctrines that lie near the boundary claims that trade in the language of science, at least which can be difficult to classify.

Only after we consider what intelligent design claims to explain can we more fully assess whether it can be considered science or not. The problem is that intelligent design advocates have done a slipshod job of explaining what ID is all about. Words like "design", "complexity", "intelligence", etc. The meanings of these terms are left for the audience to interpret, and this is consistent with both the theological underpinnings of the modern ID movement and the aims of that movement to acquire adherents through popular channels.

An evangelical Christian i. When this article first went to press in , the Ohio Board of Education was debating whether to mandate such a change. Prominent antievolutionists of the day, such as Philip E. The good news is that in the landmark legal case Kitzmiller v. Dover in Harrisburg, Pa. The bad news is that in response, creationists have reinvented their movement and pressed on. Consequently, besieged teachers and others are still likely to find themselves on the spot to defend evolution and refute creationism, by whatever name.

Creationists' arguments are typically specious and based on misunderstandings of or outright lies about evolution. Nevertheless, even if their objections are flimsy, the number and diversity of the objections can put even well-informed people at a disadvantage. It also directs readers to further sources for information and explains why creation science has no place in the classroom. These answers by themselves probably will not change the minds of those set against evolution.

But they may help inform those who are genuinely open to argument, and they can aid anyone who wants to engage constructively in this important struggle for the scientific integrity of our civilization.

Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty—above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution—or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter—they are not expressing reservations about its truth.

In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling. All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers.

The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances.

Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources.

Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In pioneering studies of finches on the Galpagos Islands, Peter Grant and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild. The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances.

Evolution is unscientific because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created. This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time—changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change.

Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related. These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies and in the field as in the Grants' studies of evolving beak shapes among Galpagos finches. Natural selection and other mechanisms—such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization—can drive profound changes in populations over time.

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation.

Yet in the historical sciences which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology , hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest known ancestors of humans roughly five million years old and the appearance of anatomically modern humans about , years ago , one should find a succession of hominin creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows.

But one should not—and does not—find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period 65 million years ago. Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way.

If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on Earth or even particular species , the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence. New species evolve by diverging away from established ones and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the s.

More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor. No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.

Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mids George W. Gilchrist, then at the University of Washington, surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none.

Krauss, now at Arizona State University, were similarly fruitless. Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature , Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult which no one disputes.

In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.

Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science.

Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology. Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the disagreements.

Darwin himself admitted that if an example of irreducible complexity were ever found, his theory of natural selection would crumble. Yet no true examples of irreducible complexity have ever been found. The concept is rejected by the majority of the scientific community.

To understand why, it is important to remember that Behe's main argument is that in an irreducibly complex system, every part is vital to the system's overall operation. A necessary — and often unstated — flipside to this is that if an irreducibly complex system contains within it a smaller set of parts that could be used for some other function, then the system was never really irreducibly complex to begin with.

It's like saying in physics that atoms are the fundamental building blocks of matter only to discover, as physicists have, that atoms are themselves made up of even smaller and more fundamental components.

This flipside makes the concept of irreducible complexity testable, giving it a scientific virtue that other aspects of ID lack.

Viewed this way, all of the systems that Behe claims to be irreducibly complex really aren't. A subset of the bacterial flagellum proteins, for example, are used by other bacteria to inject toxins into other cells and several of the proteins in the human blood-clotting system are believed to be modified forms of proteins found in the digestive system.

Specified complexity The second major argument for intelligent design comes from William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher affiliated with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based Christian think tank that serves as the nerve center for the ID movement.

Dembski argues that nature is rife with examples of non-random patterns of information that he calls "complex specified information," or CSI for short. To qualify as CSI, the information must be both complex and specified. The letter "A," for example, is specific but not complex. A string of random letters such as "slfkjwer," on the other hand, is complex but not necessarily specific.

A Shakespearean sonnet, however, is both complex and specific. An example of CSI from nature is DNA, the molecule found in all cells that contains the genetic instructions for life. Intelligent Design: Is it scientific?

Intelligent Design has been defined by its proponents as the idea that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause. Despite this, some have tried to portray Intelligent Design as a fledgling scientific theory , almost ready to be embraced by mainstream science. Detractors have argued that Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in disguise.

Use the Science Checklist to see how Intelligent Design differs from science:. Bacterium E. Aims to explain the natural world? For example, Intelligent Design explains the existence of one type of bacterial flagellum with the action of an Intelligent Designer, but fails to offer any information on how the designer might have constructed the flagellum or on who that designer might be.