By JASON ROSENHOUSE - SCIENCE BLOGS
Added: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:10:53 UTC

I just spent the last week working out of my New Jersey office, which is to say I was visiting the family for Thanksgiving. Before that I was spending a lot of time going over the page proofs and compiling the index for the BECB (the big evolution/creationism book, for those not up on the local slang). So it's nice to see that particular project work its way down the home stretch.

It was probably sometime during 2006 when I first started thinking seriously about writing a book about my experiences at creationist conferences. When I first started mentally outlining the book I honestly thought ID would be the focus. That's not how things worked out. Among the five major sections of the book only one is devoted exclusively to ID. Once I started writing, it simply became clear that ID just isn't that isn't that interesting anymore.

When I first became aware of ID in the late nineties, I worried that evolution might have met its match. Not because of ID's scientific merits, of course. Even as a novice creationism-fighter first learning the relevant science it was clear to me that the ID arguments didn't hold up at all. Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity were logically fallacious, something that is clear even before you peruse the professional literature and discover that Behe's summaries of it were inaccurate. Dembski's probabilistic arguments were an even bigger disaster, since your average freshman math major could tell you there is no reasonable way of calculating the probability of evolving a flagellum or whatnot.

No, I worried because ID seemed to be providing something that a lot of people wanted. You see, many folks just flat don't like evolution. They have some vague notion that it's hostile to religion, and it does seem to lower the status of humanity within The Big Picture. But for many of those same people, YEC is just a bridge too far. They're not going to take their Bible literally or dismiss out of hand huge swaths of modern science.

Then here comes ID to provide what seems like a scientifically plausible form of anti-evolutionism. You could apparently oppose evolution without descending into outright religious obscurantism. I worried that people would find that sufficiently appealing to avoid looking too carefully at the details, rather like it's easier to just enjoy a chocolate covered Oreo than it is to think about what it's doing to your innards.

But that's not what happened. Even leaving aside the blow of Dover v. Kitzmiller, ID has simply collapsed under the weight of its own vacuity. In the nineties and early 2000s, ID seemed to be producing one novel argument after another. They were variations on familiar themes, of course, but books like Darwin on Trial, Darwin's Black Box, No Free Lunch and even Icons of Evolution, written by people with serious credentials and written with far more skill than the YEC's could muster, seemed to advance the discussion in original ways. These books attracted enormous interest among scientists, if only in the sense that they were promoting bad ideas that needed be countered. Many books were written to counter the ID's pretensions, and major science periodicals took notice of them.

Not so today. Consider the two biggest ID books of recent years. Michael Behe's follow-up book, The Edge of Evolution, dropped like a stone. It got a few perfunctory reviews written by scientists who perked up just long enough to note its many errors, and then everyone ignored it. Frankly, even the ID folks don't seem to talk about it very much. Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell was likewise met with crickets. It briefly seemed like a big deal, a big book released by a mainstream publisher, but scientists gave it a scan, saw nothing remotely new, and yawned.
Read more

Jason Rosenhouse received his PhD in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2000. He subsequently spent three years as a post-doc at Kansas State University. Observing the machinations of the Kansas Board of Education led to his unhealthy obsession with issues related to evolution and creationism. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, VA.

TAGGED: CREATIONISM, EVOLUTION