Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Kenneth Chang Edition)

Kenneth Chang of the New York Times writes:

Kenneth Chang: I can understand that you don't like the article, and I won't suggest that you're a horrible reader for not liking it. If I left you the impression of a raging scientific controversy, then the article failed at some level.

Chang is correct. His article is a catastrophic failure.

Here are the lead paragraphs of Chang's article:

In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash: At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being? The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain. Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world.

In one often-cited argument, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a leading design theorist, compares complex biological phenomena like blood clotting to a mousetrap: Take away any one piece - the spring, the baseboard, the metal piece that snags the mouse - and the mousetrap stops being able to catch mice. Similarly, Dr. Behe argues, if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly.

Such all-or-none systems, Dr. Behe and other design proponents say, could not have arisen through the incremental changes that evolution says allowed life to progress to the big brains and the sophisticated abilities of humans from primitive bacteria. These complex systems are "always associated with design," Dr. Behe, the author of the 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box," said in an interview. "We find such systems in biology, and since we know of no other way that these things can be produced, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, then we are rational to conclude they were indeed designed."

If you keep reading down Chang does actually quote some scientists. Here's the first such quote, in context:

But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific.

"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."

That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live...

If I set out to write a weak refutation of the scientific claims of ID, I could do no better--that is, no worse--than Chang has managed to do in these three paragraphs.

Comments

[bakho]

Dump the NYT and pick up the CSM. Better writing and they get to the point:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0822/p01s03-usec.html?s=hns

[trotsky]

Dear Professor,

I agree with you about the (lack of) merits of ID, but it is in fact a matter of public debate -- philosophical if not scientific -- and it is not the place of a daily newspaper's news reporters to write, as might please you and me, "60 percent of Americans, including the president of the United States, are superstitious fools who would sooner settle disputes by examining chicken bones than listen to the enlightened reason of our university science departments." That's what the letters to the editor are for.

[Jonathan W. King]

Brad DeLong:

I'm glad you've decided that your readers are entitled to hear both sides of the debate on whether we need a better press corps.

Next, maybe you'll present both sides of the question concerning whether we are ruled by "these idiots".

:-)

[Jonathan W. King]

Ooh! Fafblog just weighed in on this issue:

http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/different-strokes-for-different-folks.html

I think it is safe to say that there should be no dispute that Fafblog is a national treasure.

[Brad DeLong]

But it is the place of a daily newspaper's news reporter to follow the sentence: "Dr. Behe argues [that] if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly." with: "Early vertebrates like jawless fish had a simple clotting system, scientists believe, involving a few proteins that made blood stick together, said Russell F. Doolittle. Scientists have largely been able to determine the order in which different proteins became involved in helping blood clot, eventually producing the sophisticated clotting mechanisms of humans and other higher animals. The sequencing of animal genomes has provided evidence to support this view." Chang stuffs ten paragraphs in between Behe's claim and its refutation--meaning that anyone who stops reading never gets to the refutation.

The lead is the most important part of the story, as we all know. To turn the lead into a soapbox for ID is grossly unprofessional.

[bakho]

The better press corps is here: A discussion of moral hazard cannot be ignored!

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050829fa_fact

[Gina]

http://www.venganza.org/

Side splitting funny. I'd like to know how the proponants of ID theory would react to this.

[monkyboy]

While I have little sympathy for the ID crowd, I think it's important to remember that much of what students are taught these days is as unprovable as ID.

History, Astronomy, Economics, etc. are full of "theories" that are only "true" because people say they are true. Maybe now is a good time to clean house in every branch of learning...

[knzn]

Oh, come on, Brad. You start with the big news, then get into the details. The fact that ID is wrong is not news to readers of the New York Times. (Is it news on the west coast?) The reasons why it is wrong are details. The news is that a few (very few, admittedly) scientists take it seriously, and readers want to know why.

[Robert Waldmann]

When the New York Times publishes a page 1 story on economic theory and puts the refutation after the jump, I will complain (I confess I have contributed to very orthodox economic theory and not to ID).

Brad, your main point is usually the same. People who just read page 1 get a totally distorted report. Consider for example a certain very eminent MD biologist who I happen to know. He hates hype and has a very negative view of scientists who over state the practical applications of their work. He is also very busy. The same day the NYT gave equal time and better placement to ID, the post declared (on page A1) that further embryonic cell lines were not needed and (after the jump) explained that the claim that closed the page A1 section of the story was absolutely totally false. This lead the eminent MD biologist who I happen to know to believe something totally false, since he was too busy to read more than page A1 of the paper. Details at my blog.

Now you can get reporters to respond to your e-mails. I would ask them if they read their stories as printed, and if, in particular, they read only the part on the first page. They must know that most people don't read to the end of newspaper articles, but do they deliberately use this fact to spread confusion or are they incompetent ?

[rea]

It's been a long time since I took any courses in journalism, and I only took the one, but my recollection is that, as a matter of elementary principle, people who write newspaper articles are supposed to assume that many readers will not read more than the first paragraph, and most will not read past the jump to a later page.

When you see an article like this one, in which a false claim is in the lede, and the refutation is past the jump--well, the author is either ignorant or mendacious.

[Maynard Handley]

cf "Similarly, the public grew increasingly skeptical of the news media's efforts, with 61 percent of Americans saying that the media keep them well informed on military and national security issues, down from 79 percent in 1999."
(http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/8/23/231646/684)

Yeah, it's newspaper reporting on a different subject, but it's all of a piece --- the newspapers' bizarre obsession with an "objectivity" that does nothing to serve its readers but has to be satisfied because, uh, well, uh, because that's the way we do things.

[Roger Albin]

Sorry, but I think most of you are over-reacting. The NYT isn't an academic forum or a niche journal for people of a particular ideological persuasion (whatever the Right says), its a wide circulation newspaper with highly varied readership. The reporting is solid and the article made it clear that ID is regarded as a fringe movement by the scientific community. The NYT series has made the following points clear; the ID movement is increasingly influential, the ID movement is being advanced by marketing and lobbying - not peer-reviewed science, the ID movement is funded largely by evangelical and conservative groups as a tool, and finally, ID is not a mainstream scientific idea. These are all important, inarguable points. Within the limitations of newspaper articles, this is pretty good. The recurrent point about how the article is structured is a good one, but I'd be surprised to find any wide circulation newspaper doing better. Indeed, despite its problems, science reporting in the NYT is much better than the great majority of wide circulation papers.

[kharris]

We must consider the possibility that, in today's journalistic world, Chang simply has no needed to absorb the sort of objective standards that Brad sets forward here. There is also the possibility that Chang's understanding of scientific argumentation and method are too shallow for him to realize that ID is far, far from mounting a legitimate critique of evolutionary theory. Or maybe he just thought a bad article would win more brownie points, on this particular issue, than a good one. Some such explanation is needed, because the article fails at many levels, and most of those failures were completely unnecessary. Structure matters. Substance matters. For heave sake, content matters.

Beware any statement which begins "Oh, come on…" Unsupported personal opinion is likely to follow. Context matters, sure enough, but to argue that the readership's (presumed) views on an issue are sufficient context in themselves to allow an article which is unbalanced on its face to pass muster amounts to special pleading.

Arguments about perceived weaknesses of social sciences don't excuse bad biology or bad journalism. There is also the risk of wandering into the same sort of argumentation offered by the ID crowd. History cannot offer pat, done-for-all-times explanations, so history must be "wrong" in the same way that evolutionary theory is wrong? No. No to both. It is the constant questioning and overturning of explanations which don't pan out that is a main strength of science, hard and social. Those who have neither the patience nor skill to participate needn't slip into the anti-intellectual mire, mistaking the normal give and take of inquiry for a failure of that inquiry.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/opinion/l24evolution.html

August 24, 2005

Can Science and Religion Co-Exist?

To the Editor:

You quote Steven Weinberg, a physicist and Nobel laureate, as saying, "I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion."

This statement is yet another example of how modern scientists hurt their cause of rational exploration into natural phenomena by their unequivocal attacks on belief in God.

Dr. Weinberg and his fellow scientists would find that if they did not strive to push an agenda of unfettered atheism into all aspects of education, believers would feel less need to combat reasonable instruction of generally accepted scientific theory.

The overriding attempt by scientists to surmount human beings' deeply felt and perhaps wholly rational devotion to God could have the unintended consequence of weakening science's aura in our society, much to the detriment of believers and nonbelievers alike.

Theodore Oberman

Brooklyn, Aug. 23, 2005

To the Editor:

As a working scientist, I thought that "Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science" seemed to pit science and religion in adversarial positions. But science is a tool for furthering human understanding of the natural world, and as such can co-exist with religion.

As scientists in the field of biomedicine, we are required to make public any conflict of interest we may have. Are we now going to have to declare our faith, too? John S. Torday

Los Angeles, Aug. 23, 2005

The writer is the director of the Henry L. Guenther Laboratory for Cell/Molecular Research, Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center.

To the Editor:

Re "Politicized Scientists Put Evolution on the Defensive" ("A Debate Over Darwin" series, front page, Aug. 21):

While the headline proclaims that evolutionists are on the defensive, scientists with a sense of public responsibility are properly resisting the efforts of the creationists of whatever stripe to subvert the scientific education of Americans.

It is entirely possible that with a sufficient expenditure of money, the country can be set back several centuries in its scientific education and made the laughingstock of the rest of the world.

Dangerous ideologies sometimes win for a while; witness Germany in the 1930's. Unfortunately, the evolution of ideas is not as well understood and is much more difficult to study than the evolution of life forms.

Those of us with faith in science and human intelligence will continue to speak out against attempts to destroy scientific education in the public schools. Leon T. Rosenberg

Stanford, Calif., Aug. 21, 2005

The writer is emeritus professor of microbiology and immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine.

To the Editor:

The conflict between intelligent design and evolutionary biology is based on the misplaced fear that science and evolution have eroded our faith in God, resulting in the decline of our morals. It fails to recognize that a large number of evolutionary scientists are also believers.

The world is not random. God created mechanisms that form populations with their characteristic gene pools. The forces of natural selection, mutations, genetic drift and gene flow can change the relative frequencies of genes over time. Hence evolution.

People who do not accept evolution demand to "see" evolution the same way as they can see the chick coming out of the hatching egg. Science cannot compress evolution this way.

God has given us senses and the ability to comprehend microevolution without the necessity of "seeing" a direct transformation of one species into one or more different species. Khwaja A. Hasan

Terre Haute, Ind., Aug. 22, 2005

The writer is emeritus professor of anthropology, Indiana State University.

To the Editor:

The Aug. 21 front-page article in the "Debate Over Darwin" series says, "As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences."

Intelligent design is not a scientific hypothesis. It is not testable. It is reasoning from incredulity.

None of the "scholars" promoting intelligent design have produced a scintilla of evidence to back up their claims. It is only the woeful lack of scientific literacy in this country that gives this false "controversy" any legs at all. Judith Buhrman

Seminole Fla., Aug. 21, 2005

To the Editor:

For a personal belief to grow, it needs privacy, introspection, thought and prayer, not a display on the chalkboard next to a mathematics assignment.

Darwin may be superseded at some time by the norms of science, but I pray that it will not be by the curious notion of "intelligent design."

If this strange conservative idea becomes a part of the curriculum, I foresee another curious result: a didactic notion of God will be in the classroom, but the churches will be empty, as has occurred in Europe. When oppressive religion pervades the culture, there is always revolt.

A theory that forces one's idea of God to be thought of in human terms is based on lowering God to a kind of human. If we think of God in these human terms, then that God is responsible not only for the beautiful world we inhabit but also for tsunamis and plagues.

Dorean Marguerite Koenig

Haslett, Mich., Aug. 21, 2005

[ken melvin]

In the beginning there was essence and from this essence came space and time and all within space and time including force, matter, energy, life, and perhaps other things that we don't yet know about. One could see this essence as god, a god that spread itself to become everything and is thus a part of everything.

[anne]

The New York Times is an intellectual treasure, and I know of no comparable newspaper. Beyond that, argue with every article and column for we learn more in so arguing. I always read the letters for the wisps of supporting and countering arguments. The styles of writing through the paper are a wonderful model for any of us.

As for the series of articles and columns on evolution, I am well pleased with what amounts to a clear explanation of where the basis of biology resides, where the basis of biology as a science must reside.

[MarcinGomulka]

"But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live..."

This is the first thing that I learned on the differences between science and religion. Science is studying HOW a stone falls, while religion is answering WHY it falls. The rest is commentary.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/opinion/23tue3.html?ex=1282449600&en=55ae46551ab20405&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

August 23, 2005

Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old - some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far. Those kinds of numbers are always a little daunting. Ever since I was a boy in a public elementary school in Iowa, I've been learning to face the eons and eons that are embedded in the universe around us....

Humans began to understand the true scale of geological time in the early 19th century. The probable depth of cosmological time and the extent of the history of the human species have come to light only within our own lifetimes.

That is a lot to absorb and, not surprisingly, many people refuse to absorb it. Nearly every attack on evolution - whether it is called intelligent design or plain creationism, synonyms for the same faith-based rejection of evolution - ultimately requires a foreshortening of cosmological, geological and biological time.

Humans feel much more content imagining a world of more human proportions, with a shorter time scale and a simple narrative sense of cause and effect. But what we prefer to believe makes no difference. The fact that life on Earth has arrived at a point where it is possible for humans to have beliefs is due to the steady ticking away of eons and the trial and error of natural selection.

Evolution is a robust theory, in the scientific sense, that has been tested and confirmed again and again. Intelligent design is not a theory at all, as scientists understand the word, but a well-financed political and religious campaign to muddy science. Its basic proposition - the intervention of a designer, a k a God - cannot be tested. It has no evidence to offer, and its assumptions that humans were divinely created are the same as its conclusions. Its objections to evolution are based on syllogistic reasoning and a highly selective treatment of the physical evidence.

Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education.

The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that failure. To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation.

The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life.

[Paul Callahan]

I think that on balance, the NYT series did a service. It's not news that evolution is uncontroversial among biologists, so maybe it's not the job of the NYT to repeat that point, as much as it bears repeating.

It is news to me that Mellon Scaife funding is going to think tanks, and that they're on the verge of a new offensive. It's not news to the keepers of the talk.origins archive, but not everyone can be so dedicated.

I now have some new google keywords such as Behe, Dembski, and "irreducible complexity" and will be able to keep track of these guys.

I already posted this on the previous thread, but after commenting that artificial life ought to be able to generate examples of "irreducible complexity" in silico without relying on design, it only took some searching to find the the Avida ALife platform made just this claim almost two years ago! http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000062.html
I wasn't paying attention, but the IDers have been.

The only thing that keeps the "mathematical IDers" going is the fact that they have not given a sufficiently rigorous definition of their concepts to form a falsifiable hypothesis. So they can either claim a lack of irreducible complexity, or claim that design was implicit in the computer simulation.

[dilbert dogbert]

The big watchmaker built the thing, wownd it up then released it in a marvelous big bang. Hiding his face behind the event horizon and saying "Have fun mates" and is now through with us.
Now I want to close this thread by bringing up my thoughts as I read these comments about how Germany in the thirties tried to cleanse German science of "Jewish science". I think they had some glass breaking and book burning partys too. That did not turn out well.
Now back to "ER".

[fouroboros]

Why oh why, indeed.

"if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly."

Leaving aside the implications that faulty mitosis or a fallen souffle is now cause to wonder "Have I offended The Noodly One in the sky in some way?", why is a linear progression or aggregation of variables resulting in a "success" of some sort a sign of divine intervention?

[Jonathan W. King]

Paul Callahan writes:
> I think that on balance, the NYT series did a service. It's not news that evolution is
> uncontroversial among biologists, so maybe it's not the job of the NYT to repeat
> that point, as much as it bears repeating.

YES IT IS NEWS. Look at the polls: a pretty large majority of the people in the US now believe we should be teaching ID in the schools, and there's no way they would support that if they really and truly realized just how incredibly uncontroversial evolution is among biologists.

You can argue that this *shouldn't* be news, and maybe it's not a big surprise to as much of the NYTimes audience as to the general public. But ID supporters won big in this whole fiasco, because a lot of people will shrug and say that if the ideas of ID are good enough to be debated on the front page of the Times, what's the big deal about teaching them in high school? The only way this could have been helpful is if the articles had been meticulous and clear take-downs of the arguments made by ID supporters. So this headline:

ID argument about blood coagulation shown to be faulty

might have done some good. Or, at least, they wouldn't have done harm.

[PaulC]

"if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly."

I said this in a previous thread, but the more I consider it, the more I feel it deserves emphasis.

A biologist who publishes a pathway on the "proteins involved in blood clotting" doesn't include the ones that aren't needed (*). So "irreducible complexity" more or less follows tautologically from the definition of "process".

(*) OK, my weak background in biology tells me that some pathways may include alternative mechanisms (e.g. different ways to produce ATP). Of course, if the alternatives are not all needed, that contradicts the "irreducible" bit, so its reasonable to assume that less efficient redundant processes *are* needed (e.g. anaerobic ATP production is useful during physical exertion).

But let's look at vitamin D production. You can get it from diet or from sunshine, and you could survive reasonably well from either source exclusively. If these are considered together as "the vitamin D pathway" it is not irreducibly complex. If these are considered separately, then the irreducibility will enter in the process of separating them. Hence, my guess is that "irreducible complexity" is almost entirely an artifact of the way we study biological systems.

[linnen]

The Professor is right to focus on this. This kind of 'journalism' that leads with Report X and buries the refutation in A13 is too common now. Remember some of the stories given out by anonymous administrative sources during the run-up to the War in Iraq?

The NYT has polished this technique to a high gloss.

[PaulC]

> YES IT IS NEWS.

Depends on what you mean by news. There is a lot that people don't understand, but I still wouldn't call it news. For instance, nearly everyone is aware that shuttle astronauts are weightless in orbit, but many people have an incorrect understanding of why. I.e. it may surprise some people to learn that at 200 miles up, the acceleration of gravity is still about 90% of that on earth's surface; weightlessness is a consequence of being in free fall--there is no "floor" to push against because it's falling at the same rate you are. If you could get yourself in orbit at earth's surface (hard to do without hitting something) you would also be weightless. Getting people to grasp something like this ought to be easier than nearly anything to do with biology, which is a very complicated subject.

I expect facts like this to be repeated somewhere: kid's books, popularizations for curious grownups, and (gasp!) science class. But it's not the NYT's job to set the record straight.

That said, I'm not going to defend Chang as a great journalist. I just think that Brad is setting expectations a little high.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/opinion/07schonborn.html?ex=1278388800&en=95804819e49f4832&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

July 7, 2005

Finding Design in Nature
By CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN

Vienna

EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general audience that represents his robust teaching on nature:

"All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator." ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/national/20beliefs.html

August 20, 2005

A Catholic Professor on Evolution and Theology: To Understand One, It Helps to Understand the Other
By PETER STEINFELS

John F. Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian who, in a long series of learned, eloquent books and essays, has explored the religious significance of the contemporary understanding of evolution.

On July 7, Professor Haught was dismayed to find in The New York Times an Op-Ed article by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna flatly declaring this understanding to be false, followed two days later by a front-page article suggesting that the cardinal's stance might signal that the apparent peace treaty between Catholicism and evolutionary theory was about to be renounced.

Professor Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown University, was by no means alone. Sir Martin Rees, a leading British astrophysicist, expressed hope that the Pontifical Academy of Science, to which he belongs, would dissociate itself from Cardinal Schönborn's sentiments. The Aug. 6 issue of The Tablet, an international Catholic weekly published in London, carried an article by the Rev. George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and director of the Vatican Observatory, rebutting the cardinal's view. Numerous scientists and nonscientists, Catholics and non-Catholics, raised similar protests.

"Does Schönborn's essay mean that the church has changed its position on evolution?" Professor Haught asks in the current issue of Commonweal. "In a word, no." Nonetheless, he says, "it is a setback in the dialogue of religion and science."

"Today most Catholic theologians and philosophers agree that it is not the job of science to make any reference to God, purpose, or intelligent design," Professor Haught insists. "If some scientists go on to maintain that evolution is therefore conclusive evidence of a godless, purposeless universe, this is a leap into ideology, not a scientifically verifiable truth."

Cardinal Schönborn "has every reason to defend Catholicism against materialist philosophy, since these are indeed incompatible," Professor Haught continues. But when the cardinal "fails to distinguish neo-Darwinian biology from the materialist spin that many scientists and philosophers place on evolutionary discoveries," he "does no service to the nuances of Catholic thought."

And to claim, Professor Haught adds, that science itself can demonstrate divine design is only to fall into a mirror version of "the same conceptual mix-up." ...

[gary lammert]

Limited

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
answers: "Omaha."

Kindly visit the Economic Fractalist http://www.economicfractalist.com/

[JRossi]

Please, Professor DeLong, enough with the evolution and ID stuff. How about some economics?

[PaulC]

> But ID supporters won big in this whole fiasco,

Maybe I'm overoptimistic, but my hunch is that IDers are about to lose big if they start along the dead-end path proposed by Behe and Dembski. Any mathematical formula purporting to identify "design" in a pattern is going to be demolished readily. I have a strong enough intuition about self-organizing systems to state that with confidence. They'd have been better off sticking to the planted dinosaur bones story.

> because a lot of people will shrug and say that if the ideas of ID are good enough to be debated on the front page of the Times, what's the big deal about teaching them in high school?

I think if they're good enough to be debated in the NYT, they're good enough to be debated in a high school current events elective. But our high school science curriculum should not be based on what's in the newspapers. It should provide some background on the way scientists think, and grading should be based entirely on your grasp of the way science is done whether you agree with it or not.

Does anyone think that French class should be used to "teach the controversy" over pronouncing final consonants. I would argue that there is an entire school of thought--suppressed by a conspiracy of language instructors--that French orthography is a cruel hoax.

[trotsky]

Most newspaper articles can be improved, but my sympathy goes out to the poor writer trying to distill the true essence of a philosophical controversy into the 4 column inches that will appear before the jump. It's simply not a 5 W's storyIf you can't be bothered to read the article, just move on to the news of the Iraqi constitution and Pataki's latest proposal. Your life will go on.

[pebird]

"Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?"

Ha ha ha - can you falsify an "unseen" entity?

Lets redefine science.

What a moron.

[David Billington]

Fundamentalists conflate the hypothesis of an ordering principle in nature with the hypothesis of an intelligent author of nature. One does not necessarily imply the other.

Scientists on the other hand have their own problem, namely the relation of mind to matter. If consciousness could be shown in a reproducible way to have some disembodied existence, the exclusion of at least part of religion (the notion of a soul or immaterial self) from science would become highly problematical. So far no one has demonstrated the disembodied existence of consciousness in a way convincing to most scientists. But science is open to the possibility, which is why no scientist can maintain that the supernatural is a priori unprovable.

[PaulC]

> the exclusion of at least part of religion (the notion of a soul or immaterial self) from science would become highly problematical.

Huh? The exclusion of *science* from science doesn't even pose a problem. You can still write papers on classical dynamics for instance without anyone accusing you of "excluding" quantum effects. And unless you are analyzing a system in which non-classical effects are significant, it would be inappropriate to try to derive your result using quantum theory.

By the same token, even if someone were to discover "mind over matter" effects, it would still be scientific to analyze systems not altered by these effects in a significant way. If such effects exist and are measurable, they will become part of science. If they exist and remain "supernatural" in some unspecified way, this will not discredit the scientific method any more than plumbing would be discredited by the fact that my house also has electrical wiring. The scientific method has already proved itself useful; the main thing to guard against are those who claim to be doing it when they're not.

[David Billington]

Pebird: "can you falsify an "unseen" entity?"

Didn't see your post before I posted above. Something is unfalsifiable if it is defined tautologically as untestable, which is how creationism defines God.

[John]

I agree with Brad's criticism of Kenneth Chang's article. And Chang's response does not convince me. It is as if he and/or the NYT are conniving at blessing Intelligent Design. Then, it is as if, in stricken conscience, he/they try to make it good by burying real science objections deep in the story.

FWIW I learned long ago to read through to the bottom because the ending paragraphs sometimes give the complete lie to the headline.

I can't read the story as anything else but appeasement of some stupid politicians (Mr Bush and coterie) and their playing to our mullahs. Does Mr. Chang or the NYT think they can escape being bashed as "lib'rul" by this arrangement of paragraphs?

John

[David Billington]

PaulC: "By the same token, even if someone were to discover "mind over matter" effects, it would still be scientific to analyze systems not altered by these effects in a significant way. If such effects exist and are measurable, they will become part of science. If they exist and remain "supernatural" in some unspecified way, this will not discredit the scientific method any more than plumbing would be discredited by the fact that my house also has electrical wiring."

Yes of course. I didn't mean to imply that such a finding would make the rest of science problematical. But modern science really depends on the psychokinetic isolation of subject from object (observer-dependence doesn't break this). While it is true that selective breaking would not necessarily change anything else that is known to science and would certainly not validate any denominational religious understanding, I don't think science could be quite as sure of its metaphysical underpinnings nor religion of its own.

[Roger Bigod]

"While it is true that selective breaking would not necessarily change anything else that is known to science and would certainly not validate any denominational religious understanding, I don't think science could be quite as sure of its metaphysical underpinnings nor religion of its own."

This whole line of argument sounds irritatingly like a variant of the Creationist taunt "Scientists are just as dogmatic in excluding the supernatural as we are in believing in it, and they claim to be objective, but they're really more bigoted and intoloerant than we are, so there!"

This is wrong, in the sense that if I were to levitate down the corridors of a university Physics department, the faculty wouldn't nudge each other and say "Pay no attention to that man. What he's doing is against the rules." They'd be more likely to rummage through the lab cupboards for strain gauges, spectrophotometers, etc. Nobody has adduced evidence for that kind of happening, or any other example of the supernatural that can be checked by normal scientific epistemology (controls, multiple observers, reproducibility, sharing of primary evidence, etc.)

But in a basic sense, science is far more rigid than religion. If the laws of nature are the same everywhere and at all times (a form of symmetry), the fundamental conservation laws follow. I'm not sure if the reverse holds, but the conservation laws have been verified to extreme accuracy in many different situations. So as an administrative matter, my levitation might merit a footnote in discussions of gravity, it would be a problem for our fundamental understanding of nature. Demonstration that some religious miracle has a naturalistic explanation would make no difference to theology or the faith of most religious adherents.

[David Billington]

Roger: "This whole line of argument sounds irritatingly like a variant of the Creationist taunt "Scientists are just as dogmatic in excluding the supernatural as we are in believing in it..."

Sorry to give that impression. In fact, science is open to possibilities that might call into question its currently fundamental notions, while religion, as you point out, is not. I am simply adding that the notions to which science is open to testing and change could include the distinction of subject from object. The practical question of actually doing this is of course a separate matter.

[Kenneth Chang]

Hmm, "catastrophic failure." And I didn't even say something like "evolution is just a theory." :)

Below are the pro-evolution sections of the article, some 1,400 words. I don't think anyone giving a fair reading of them will think, "Wow, what a raging scientific controversy" or "The New York Times blesses intelligent design."

[I don't think that the Discovery Institute would be elated or the assembled scientists of the world would be distressed if Kenneth Chang had led with his 1400 "pro-evolution" section. He didn't.]

I don't think anyone reading just the first eight paragraphs would come to that conclusion, either, but anyone who was only interested enough to read eight paragraphs probably wasn't going to be swayed one way or the other no matter what I wrote.

[Well that's the lamest thing I've heard on this.]

[Let's put the 1400 pro-evolution words in context: let's print the whole article:]

In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash

By KENNETH CHANG
At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?

The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain.

Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world.

In one often-cited argument, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a leading design theorist, compares complex biological phenomena like blood clotting to a mousetrap: Take away any one piece - the spring, the baseboard, the metal piece that snags the mouse - and the mousetrap stops being able to catch mice.

Similarly, Dr. Behe argues, if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly.

Such all-or-none systems, Dr. Behe and other design proponents say, could not have arisen through the incremental changes that evolution says allowed life to progress to the big brains and the sophisticated abilities of humans from primitive bacteria.

These complex systems are "always associated with design," Dr. Behe, the author of the 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box," said in an interview. "We find such systems in biology, and since we know of no other way that these things can be produced, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, then we are rational to conclude they were indeed designed."

It is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith.

But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific.

"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."

That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live.

And in that quest, they say, there is no need to resort to otherworldly explanations. So much evidence has been provided by evolutionary studies that biologists are able to explain even the most complex natural phenomena and to fill in whatever blanks remain with solid theories.

This is possible, in large part, because evolution leaves tracks like the fossil remains of early animals or the chemical footprints in DNA that have been revealed by genetic research.

For example, while Dr. Behe and other leading design proponents see the blood clotting system as a product of design, mainstream scientists see it as a result of a coherent sequence of evolutionary events.

Early vertebrates like jawless fish had a simple clotting system, scientists believe, involving a few proteins that made blood stick together, said Russell F. Doolittle, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego.

Scientists hypothesize that at some point, a mistake during the copying of DNA resulted in the duplication of a gene, increasing the amount of protein produced by cells.

Most often, such a change would be useless. But in this case the extra protein helped blood clot, and animals with the extra protein were more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, as higher-order species evolved, other proteins joined the clotting system. For instance, several proteins involved in the clotting of blood appear to have started as digestive enzymes.

By studying the evolutionary tree and the genetics and biochemistry of living organisms, Dr. Doolittle said, scientists have largely been able to determine the order in which different proteins became involved in helping blood clot, eventually producing the sophisticated clotting mechanisms of humans and other higher animals. The sequencing of animal genomes has provided evidence to support this view.

For example, scientists had predicted that more primitive animals such as fish would be missing certain blood-clotting proteins. In fact, the recent sequencing of the fish genome has shown just this.

"The evidence is rock solid," Dr. Doolittle said.

Intelligent design proponents have advanced their views in books for popular audiences and in a few scientific articles. Some have developed mathematical formulas intended to tell whether something was designed or formed by natural processes.

Mainstream scientists say that intelligent design represents a more sophisticated - and thus more seductive - attack on evolution. Unlike creationists, design proponents accept many of the conclusions of modern science. They agree with cosmologists that the age of the universe is 13.6 billion years, not fewer than 10,000 years, as a literal reading of the Bible would suggest. They accept that mutation and natural selection, the central mechanisms of evolution, have acted on the natural world in small ways, for example, leading to the decay of eyes in certain salamanders that live underground.

Some intelligent design advocates even accept common descent, the notion that all species came from a common ancestor, a central tenet of evolution.

Although a vast majority of scientists accept evolution, the Discovery Institute, a research group in Seattle that has emerged as a clearinghouse for the intelligent design movement, says that 404 scientists, including 70 biologists, have signed a petition saying they are skeptical of Darwinism.

Nonetheless, many scientists regard intelligent design as little more than creationism dressed up in pseudoscientific clothing. Despite its use of scientific language and the fact that some design advocates are scientists, they say, the design approach has so far offered only philosophical objections to evolution, not any positive evidence for the intervention of a designer.

'Truncated View of Reality'

If Dr. Behe's mousetrap is one of the most familiar arguments for design, another is the idea that intelligence is obvious in what it creates. Read a novel by Hemingway, gaze at the pyramids, and a designer's hand is manifest, design proponents say.

But mainstream scientists, design proponents say, are unwilling to look beyond the material world when it comes to explaining things like the construction of an eye or the spinning motors that propel bacteria. What is wrong, they ask, with entertaining the idea that what looks like it was designed was actually designed?

"If we've defined science such that it cannot get to the true answer, we've got a pretty lame definition of science," said Douglas D. Axe, a molecular biologist and the director of research at the Biologic Institute, a new research center in Seattle that looks at the organization of biological systems, including intelligent design issues. Dr. Axe said he had received "significant" financing from the Discovery Institute, but he declined to give any other details about the institute or its financing.

Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, compares the design approach to the work of archaeologists investigating an ancient civilization.

"Imagine you're an archaeologist and you're looking at an inscription, and you say, 'Well, sorry, that looks like it's intelligent but we can't invoke an intelligent cause because, as a matter of method, we have to limit ourselves to materialistic processes,' " Dr. Meyer said. "That would be nuts."

He added, "Call it miracle, call it some other pejorative term, but the fact remains that the materialistic view is a truncated view of reality."

William Paley, an Anglican priest, made a similar argument in the early 19th century. Someone who finds a rock can easily imagine how wind and rain shaped it, he reasoned. But someone who finds a pocket watch lying on the ground instantly knows that it was not formed by natural processes.

With living organisms so much more complicated than watches, he wrote, "The marks of design are too strong to be got over."

Mainstream scientists say that the scientific method is indeed restricted to the material world, because it is trying to find out how it works. Simply saying, "it must have been designed," they say, is simply a way of not tackling the hardest problems.

They say they have no disagreement with studying phenomena for which there are, as yet, no explanations.

It is the presumption of a designer that mainstream scientists dispute, because there are no artifacts or biological signs - no scientific evidence, in other words - to suggest a designer's presence.

Darwin's theory, in contrast, has over the last century yielded so many solid findings that no mainstream biologist today doubts its basic tenets, though they may argue about particulars.

The theory has unlocked many of the mysteries of the natural world. For example, by studying the skeletons of whales, evolutionary scientists have been able to trace the history of their descent from small-hoofed land mammals. They made predictions about what the earliest water-dwelling whales might look like. And, in 1994, paleontologists reported discovering two such species, with many of the anatomical features that scientists had predicted.

Darwin's Finches

Nowhere has evolution been more powerful than in its prediction that there must be a means to pass on information from one generation to another. Darwin did not know the biological mechanism of inheritance, but the theory of evolution required one.

The discovery of DNA, the sequencing of the human genome, the pinpointing of genetic diseases and the discovery that a continuum of life from a single cell to a human brain can be detected in DNA are all a result of evolutionary theory.

Darwin may have been the classic scientific observer. He observed that individuals in a given species varied considerably, variations now known to be caused by mutations in their genetic code. He also realized that constraints of food and habitat sharply limited population growth; not every individual could survive and reproduce.

This competition, he hypothesized, meant that those individuals with helpful traits multiplied, passing on those traits to their numerous offspring. Negative or useless traits did not help individuals reproduce, and those traits faded away, a process that Darwin called natural selection.

The finches that Darwin observed in the Galápagos Islands provide the most famous example of this process. The species of finch that originally found its way to the Galápagos from South America had a beak shaped in a way that was ideal for eating seeds. But once arrived on the islands, that finch eventually diversified into 13 species. The various Galápagos finches have differently shaped beaks, each fine-tuned to take advantage of a particular food, like fruit, grubs, buds or seeds.

Such small adaptations can arise within a few generations. Darwin surmised that over millions of years, these small changes would accumulate, giving rise to the myriad of species seen today.

The number of organisms that, in those long periods, ended up being preserved as fossils is infinitesimal. As a result, the evolutionary record - the fossils of long-extinct organisms found preserved in rock - is necessarily incomplete, and some species appear to burst out of nowhere.

Some supporters of intelligent design have argued that such gaps undermine the evidence for evolution.

For instance, during the Cambrian explosion a half a billion years ago, life diversified to shapes with limbs and shells from jellyfish-like blobs, over a geologically brief span of 30 million years.

Dr. Meyer sees design at work in these large leaps, which signified the appearance of most modern forms of life. He argues that genetic mutations do not have the power to create new shapes of animals.

But molecular biologists have found genes that control the function of other genes, switching them on and off. Small mutations in these controller genes could produce new species. In addition, new fossils are being found and scientists now know that many changes occurred in the era before the Cambrian - a period that may have lasted 100 million years - providing more time for change.

The Cambrian explosion, said David J. Bottjer, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California and president of the Paleontological Society, is "a wonderful mystery in that we don't know everything yet."

"I think it will be just a matter of time before smart people will be able to figure a lot more of this out," Dr. Bottjer said. "Like any good scientific problem."

Purposeful Patterns

Intelligent design proponents have been stung by claims that, in contrast to mainstream scientists, they do not form their own theories or conduct original research. They say they are doing the mathematical work and biological experiments needed to put their ideas on firm scientific ground.

For example, William A. Dembski, a mathematician who drew attention when he headed a short-lived intelligent design institute at Baylor University, has worked on mathematical algorithms that purport to tell the difference between objects that were designed and those that occurred naturally.

Dr. Dembski says designed objects, like Mount Rushmore, show complex, purposeful patterns that evince the existence of intelligence. Mathematical calculations like those he has developed, he argues, could detect those patterns, for example, distinguishing Mount Rushmore from Mount St. Helens.

But other mathematicians have said that Dr. Dembski's calculations do not work and cannot be applied in the real world.

Other studies that intelligent design theorists cite in support of their views have been done by Dr. Axe of the Biologic Institute.

In one such study, Dr. Axe looked at a protein, called penicillinase, that gives bacteria the ability to survive treatment with the antibiotic penicillin. Dr. Meyer, of the Discovery Institute, has referred to Dr. Axe's work in arguing that working proteins are so rare that evolution cannot by chance discover them.

What was the probability, Dr. Axe asked in his study, of a protein with this ability existing in the universe of all possible proteins?

Penicillinase is made up of a strand of chemicals called amino acids folded into a shape that binds to penicillin and thus disables it. Whether the protein folds up in the right way determines whether it works or not.

Dr. Axe calculated that of the plausible amino acid sequences, only one in 100,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion - a number written as 1 followed by 77 zeroes - would provide resistance to penicillin.

In other words, the probability was essentially zero.

Dr. Axe's research appeared last year in The Journal of Molecular Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific publication.

Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a frequent sparring partner of design proponents, said that in his study, Dr. Axe did not look at penicillinase "the way evolution looks at the protein."

Natural selection, he said, is not random. A small number of mutations, sometimes just one, can change the function of a protein, allowing it to diverge along new evolutionary paths and eventually form a new shape or fold.

One Shot or a Continual Act

Intelligent design proponents are careful to say that they cannot identify the designer at work in the world, although most readily concede that God is the most likely possibility. And they offer varied opinions on when and how often a designer intervened.

Dr. Behe, for example, said he could imagine that, like an elaborate billiards shot, the design was set up when the Big Bang occurred 13.6 billion years ago. "It could have all been programmed into the universe as far as I'm concerned," he said.

But it was also possible, Dr. Behe added, that a designer acted continually throughout the history of life.

Mainstream scientists say this fuzziness about when and how design supposedly occurred makes the claims impossible to disprove. It is unreasonable, they say, for design advocates to demand that every detail of evolution be filled in.

Dr. Behe, however, said he might find it compelling if scientists were to observe evolutionary leaps in the laboratory. He pointed to an experiment by Richard E. Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University, who has been observing the evolution of E. coli bacteria for more than 15 years. "If anything cool came out of that," Dr. Behe said, "that would be one way to convince me."

Dr. Behe said that if he was correct, then the E. coli in Dr. Lenski's lab would evolve in small ways but never change in such a way that the bacteria would develop entirely new abilities.

In fact, such an ability seems to have developed. Dr. Lenski said his experiment was not intended to explore this aspect of evolution, but nonetheless, "We have recently discovered a pretty dramatic exception, one where a new and surprising function has evolved," he said.

Dr. Lenski declined to give any details until the research is published. But, he said, "If anyone is resting his or her faith in God on the outcome that our experiment will not produce some major biological innovation, then I humbly suggest they should rethink the distinction between science and religion."

Dr. Behe said, "I'll wait and see."

[Roger Bigod]

It isn't that the presentation of science was weak and perfunctory. There is a sophisticated, well-executed PR effort to make Intelligent Design appear to be a respectable scientific position. The promoters know that serious scientists never be convinced, so they don't really try. The aim is to convince people who lave little interest in the subject that it's scientific. The Chang piece might have been copied from a DI press release. In the first few sentences we learn that there is a "debate", that Behe's argument is "often-cited", that there is a "school of thought".

The summary of evidence for evolution is off-putting, when it isn't wrong. The passage abut the Galapagos finches reads like a science report like a bored sixth-grader. And it's highly questionable that "the discovery of DNA" was inspired by evolution. Biochemists would have been curious about the contents of the cell nucleus no matter what explanations for speciation were current. If what is meant is "the discovery of the biological role of DNA", that's dubious as well. The more influential movement in the early Twentieth Century was the demolition of Vitalism as a respectable part of biology. Crick said that was the reason he worked on the structure of DNA. But Vitalism is quite compatible with evolution. It sounds like the author thinks evolution is so shaky that it has to be given the consolation prize of inspiring something the reader might have heard of. That the consolation prize is bogus may be part of the game.

I note in passing the pejorative use of "mainstream". In some contexts, like popular music, it suggests boring conformity, the kind of stuff that conformists listen to while the cool kids are getting into the avant garde wave of the future stuff.

On balance, the Times should be encouraged to print more on this issue. It has the merit that it doesn't endorse unnecessary wars.

[joeg]

Calling Behe a "design theorist" and the Discovery Institute a "research group" give ID a cloak of specious scientific respectability. Chang might restrict his coverage to physics, which he studied.

[joeg]

"On balance, the Times should be encouraged to print more on this issue. It has the merit that it doesn't endorse unnecessary wars."

Maybe Kenneth Chang could interview Judy Miller about intelligence design.