Thanks to Richard Prins for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Why I hate this intelligent design story. It's simply IDiotic, writes Richard Fortey

Scientists have found themselves trapped into appearing to be unreasonable in their pursuit of rationality. A snare has been cleverly set by the proponents of Intelligent Design in their quest to prove that Charles Darwin got it wrong.

The vast majority of scientists feel nothing but distress that the teaching of Intelligent Design has been promoted in a number of our schools, particularly the faith schools apparently beloved by Tony Blair. Fundamentalists of both Islamic and Christian persuasion meet on this rather implausible common ground. Both these groups of religious hard liners deplore Darwin and all his works.

Scientists tend to get angry when confronted by what they see as the gross distortion of truth promulgated by Intelligent Designers. This has come across badly in 'balanced' debates in the media. As was the case with arguments over the MMR vaccine, the scientist when provoked can unwittingly appear to be a fulminating zealot. By contrast, many of the proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) have contrived to appear to be in favour of free speech. Aren't those scientists empurpled with rage and crying "nonsense' the very picture of a threatened Establishment? On this platform the evolutionary scientist rather than the ID enthusiast can seem to be the less reasonable of the two.

The trouble stems from the use of the weasel word "theory". Successive Presidents of the United States have got themselves off the hook with the influential Christian fundamentalist lobby by the deployment of this useful but traitorous word. Ronald Reagan would flash his aw-shucks smile and amiably reiterate: "I guess Evolution is just a theory". This has become a mantra among ID proponents. If evolution is one theory - then ID is another, or so the argument goes. Only a bigot would object to the airing of the alternative explanations.

The crux of ID is that evolution is purposeful, and that an 'invisible hand' has operated at crucial stages to direct the course of life onwards and upwards. The Intelligence of the Designer is manifest at certain critical points - such as the creation of life itself.

On the other hand, the scientific 'theory' of evolution actually breaks into two components. The first part is to assert that descent of all organisms from a common ancestor has, indeed, happened. To deny this is the equivalent of believing that the earth is flat as a pancake, or that the sun goes round it. Both could be described as theories, though nobody has taken them seriously for hundreds of years. Some fundamentalists still believe that creation happened a few thousand years ago. No respectable scientist believes this. Since the unscrambling of the genome has recently been added to evidence from the fossil record, it might be said that descent is simply a fact. We share genes with bananas and bacteria. At this deep level, DNA proves that humans are joined to all other life. This ought to awake nothing but wonder in all of us, but some find the thought of such a brotherhood of life scary.

The other part of Darwinism says that natural selection is the driving force behind evolution. This is where the ID protagonists come in. They accept the long time scale required from what we know of the age of the earth, but substitute supernaturally directed selection at critical points in life's long history. They might say that proteins are too darn complicated to have arisen by natural selection alone. This kind of assertion drives rationalists crazy, because it is impossible to refute by a critical experiment. There will always be another protein, another example of that supposed extra, guiding ingredient.

The problem for scientists is that when this additional design factor is added it serves only to suppress questions - and science is all about tackling questions head-on. Why should we spend money on setting up experiments to simulate the creation of the first living cell if the motive force was a "designer"? No experiment can detect such metaphysical seasoning in the primeval soup.

Science has always been about tackling new areas of knowledge, with theory and experiment interacting creatively . If God's influence is invoked for any breakthrough in life's story, research is simply stopped dead in its tracks: no point in investigating further. ID therefore becomes a brake on discovery, not a way of enriching it.

In my view, God has overly got mixed into the argument. Scientists are often presented as the champions of atheism. This is typified by Richard Dawkins' views of theistic "delusion". Although I might agree with much of what Dawkins has to say, it might be that his almost theological espousal of atheism has served to up the stakes in the ID debate. In fact, there are many world-class scientists who are also believers. But they also believe that God should not be introduced into the explanation of nature. Scientists of my generation remember the meretricious attractions of Tielhard de Chardin and his noosphere, the idea that the end of evolution is a kind of super-consciousness: not one scientific hypothesis of worth was generated from this metaphysical mayhem.

A worthwhile theory always suggests new lines of investigation, and on this criterion Darwinism has passed with flying colours. Field and laboratory studies helping us to understanding how evolution works are beyond counting. The behaviour of Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands has been studied for decades. A million generations of fruit flies have given up their lives to unravel the mysteries of the expression of genes. In the process many debates have opened up - like the relative importance of sex or geography in generating new species. This does not mean that Darwin is in trouble. It just means that the science is still vigorous, that understanding is honed progressively.

So that is why biologists get so mad at the propagation of ID. It wastes time. It suppresses research rather than encouraging it. It's not really a theory, it's a story. It deflects the young from asking the important questions. It serves to kill curiosity rather than encourage it. Sometimes it is right to get angry in the face of unreason. Darwinists are readily labelled. There should be an equivalent term for the proponents of Intelligent Design. May I suggest IDiots?


• Richard Fortey, President Of The Geological Society Of London, will celebrate his Michael Faraday Prize on Tuesday 30th January with a lecture and an event at the Royal Society organised by The Daily Telegraph, the Society and Novartis. The prize is the UK's foremost award for communicating science to public audiences - previous winners include Richard Dawkins, David Attenborough, Susan Greenfield and Robert Winston.

• Richard Fortey's Faraday lecture will be webcast that day at 5:30pm at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/webcasts, from where it will also be available to watch on demand later.