The message that intelligent design proponents hoped would come out of last week’s testimony in Topeka is that there is a controversy between scientists over the validity evolutionary theory.
“There is a genuine scientific controversy,” insisted John Calvert, the intelligent design attorney, somewhat plaintively as the hearings came to a close Saturday.
The false notion that scientists are divided is key to the intelligent design movement’s strategy to convince school districts around the country to “teach the controversy” over evolution.
That, of course, is only the first step on the road to their ultimate goal of replacing religiously neutral science with a science consonant with their own narrow Christian and theistic convictions.
That strategy was dealt a body blow by the refusal of science organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Kansas Academy of Science, Kansas Association for Biology Teachers, Kansas Association of the Teachers of Science to participate in the hearings.
The knockout punch came when Science Coalition attorney Pedro Irigonegaray compelled the intelligent design witnesses to confess, during a series of withering cross-examinations, that they hadn’t bothered to read the science standards draft written by the majority on the curriculum committee before coming to Kansas at taxpayer expense.
The rightwing, Christian fundamentalist school board members who are running the hearings compounded the blow by admitting that they too hadn’t read the draft “word for word” that they so oppose.
"That wasn't the news," board member Connie Morris complained somewhat lamely as the hearings unwound last week.
But, of course it was, and like Humpty Dumpty nothing the witnesses, board members, or the Discovery Institute did could put the controversy fiction back together again.
The fact is, that almost everyone who read about the hearings in the papers or watched them on the television news knew that thousands of dollars were spent bringing witnesses to Kansas from all around the world who hadn’t done their homework.
The barnstorming brotherhood of bible college biologists came, they saw, they did not conquer.
The final act in the hearings will play out this Thursday when Pedro Irigonegaray sums up the case for the pro-science side, and Red State Rabble will be there to cover it.
Credit for this victory goes primarily to Kansas Citizens for Science, in particular Harry McDonald and the indefatigable Jack Krebs. Pedro Irigonegaray also played an enormously important part in exposing the feeble claims of the intelligent design witnesses, and the one-sidedness of the board. Science faculty from the University of Kansas and Kansas State University did not testify, but they monitored the hearings and made themselves available to the media to debunk the pseudoscience presented during testimony.
The KCFS strategy was high risk, but it has paid off handsomely. The defense of science is in good hands in Kansas.
The victory last week will not prevent the board from approving the intelligent design minority draft later this summer, but the public awareness coming out of the hearings will deny the board the political cover they hoped to gain from them.
Next year, half the state school board will be up for election. Then, citizens will be able to decide whether they want to be represented by zealots, or people who will act in the best interests of Kansas schoolchildren.
Red State Rabble has received an enormous amount of e-mail since the hearings began (sorry about the longer than ususal wait for a response) asking about how to help. Here are a few suggestions:
Join KCFS and support their work.
Sign the Science Coalition statement – even if you live outside Kansas. It will let people know that the eyes of the world are on this battle.
Get active in the defense of science, reason, and separation of church and state where you live. The barnstorming brotherhood may be coming soon to a school near you.
Pat,
ReplyDeleteYour coverage of the hearings, and the entire attack on science education in Kansas hasa been excellent. I have greatly enjoyed your writting.
Gary Hurd
I have made Red State Rabble my FIRST Stop for Updates on the Kansas Kangaroo Court!
ReplyDeleteMany thanks, Dave Thomas
New Mexicans for Science and REason
http://www.nmsr.org
It's undoubtedly true that the majority of scientists support macro evolution. Does that make the theory unassailable?
ReplyDeleteIf I recall history correctly, in the early 17th century, in the dispute between Aristole's Physics and Galileo's challenge,the majority of philosophers sided with Aristotle.
Not all criticism emmanates from Bible colleges. Below are three examples of such criticism. I'm not sure about Leighigh University, but the other two can hardly be labled Bible colleges:
* * *
A common, old fashioned mouse trap is “an irreducibly complex machine”. It’s composed of five essential parts which include the small board or base that supports the system. The base and other four parts are essential because if any one of them is missing, the other four cannot somehow make up the difference. The mouse trap simply won’t work. The flagellum motor described above is, like the mouse trap, an irreducibly complex machine, except that it has forty essential parts instead of just five.
It’s here that the concept of irreducible complexity intersects the validity of Darwinian evolution.
The principle guiding force that blindly selects for improvement in organisms according to Darwin’s theory is “survival of the fittest”. But how do you construct an irreducibly complex machine by a natural selection process? The individual part or group of parts, of such a machine, could provide no advantage to that organism until every part was present and functioning. In fact it can be argued that if a part did show up before a complete machine was ready, it would likely be treated by the cell as a handicap and normal cell behavior would eliminate it.
Critics of the irreducible complexity argument have proposed a counter system called co-option. In that theory parts from simpler, previously existing machines could have combined to create the propulsion device.
Scott Minnich a molecular biologist at the University of Idaho has been studying the flagellum motor for nearly twenty years and disagrees with the co-option theory. According to him, co-option could at best account for ten parts, and so far, no one has yet explained the source of the other thirty.
Formidable as that is, according to Minnich, it is less of a problem than to explain sequence. The motor cannot be built just any old way. It must be assembled in a sequence, from the inside out.
The idea of irreducible complexity is not new. Early critics argued that natural selection in its slow step by step method was incapable of producing a complicated structure such as a bird-wing’s flight feather or the complexity of the eye. Major components such as these, they argued, could provide no advantage until they were complete and functional. But their arguments could not gain traction. The evolutionary jugernaught simply ignored them.
* * *
Dr. Dean H. Kenyon, biology professor emeritus, at San Francisco State University is an unlikely iconoclast. He was solidly in the camp of naturalism, and “believed he had solved one of the enduring puzzles of science--- how life on earth began. In 1969, a book he co-author with Gary Steinman gained wide recognition and became, in the next twenty years, a best selling textbook”, its title, Biochemical Predestination. In it they enlarged on an idea earlier proposed by the Russian biochemist, Alexander Oparin. Kenyon wrote:
“Life might have been bio-chemically predestined
by the properties of attraction that exists between
its chemical parts. . . Particularly between amino
acids in proteins.”
‘He theorized, that because of the chemical properties, which cause amino acids to be attracted to each other, the formation of life was not only likely but that it was inevitable or predestined.
However, within five years Kenyon began to doubt his own theory.’ “Research showed that amino acid chains were connected in ways that were not explainable by natural attraction. Then one of his students asked a question that he finally concluded, he couldn’t answer: How could the first proteins have formed without instructions provided by DNA?”
As noted before, genetic information is stored in the cross bars between the helical strands of DNA. The bits of information are contained in four entities which are labeled with the letters A,T,G,& C. These letters can be arranged in any sequence and it is the information encoded by the sequence that determines which one of the 30,000 proteins is to be produced. It’s worth noting that the genetic code for a protein in the simplest cell, if written-out, would require hundreds of pages of printed text, and that is not the end. The structure of DNA itself is as complicated as that of protein. It’s made up of nucleic acids and the sequence of these units is just as demanding as that of the amino acids in protein.
Kenyon understood that to answer his students question, “He would either have to explain how a protein could self assemble or explain where the information contained in the DNA came from. In the end he realized he could do neither. Within ten years he had given up on his theory completely.”
* * *
Michael Behe professor of biochemistry at Leighigh University is another example of a scholar, firmly in the Darwinian camp, who has rebelled. ‘Through school, college and post graduate studies he had never doubted that Darwin’s theory explained biology. He had not carefully examined the theory himself because he accepted his teacher’s and professor’s assertions that it was true. ‘But after reading, Evolution a Theory in Crisis, written by Australian biochemist Michael Denton, Behe realized there were solid arguments, which opposed orthodoxy. He became angry when he realized that through his entire education none of these arguments had been presented.’ In his own words, “He felt he had been lead down a primrose path”. In his book, Darwin’s Black Box, he developed the ideas surrounding the expression “irreducible complexity”. He points out that not only are DNA and RNA irreducibly complex, but the arrangement or timing of the information they contain is also irreducibly complex.---- The timing of production of various proteins is significant. In other words, in terms of building a house, it’s essential to build the basement before you try putting shingles on the roof.
To conclude the matter: “Darwin’s theory could not start working until a living cell capable of reproducing itself came into existence.” That nature could accomplish the task of producing a living cell received great encouragement during the last half of the 20th century. In controlled laboratory experiments a number of amino acids where spontaneously produced. The feat was accomplished by electrically energizing a combination of chemicals in a controlled atmosphere.
Interesting as that is, knowing now what is required for even the simplest protein, one can be excused for suspecting that biology still has a ways to go until it discovers the equivalent of Newton’s universal law of gravitation.
Don White
Very nice summary - thank you.
ReplyDeleteI found Don White's comments very interesting. I don't think anyone has ever said that evolution is in a state to explain every aspect of biochemistry and cell biology. Of course there are features of cells that the current theories cannot explain. However, evolution does a far better job of explaining the evidence than any rival theory and has withstood about 150 years of testing to date.
The idea of irreducible complexity has been a stumbling block for evolution, but the theorists have not ignored the critics. The evolution of the eye is a classic example. Initially, the eye was thought to be too subtle and complex to come about in a stepwise fashion. Now, it is used as an example of how a complex structure can evolve step by step, and I believe fossils have been discovered in the last decade or so that have shed light on how eyes evolved in different phyla and at different times. Similarly, newly-discovered fossils have shed light on the evolution of the flight feather (it probably started as a simple filament: a set of these provides both insulation and control to a predator that hunts by jumping from trees onto its prey). Just because the key clues have not yet been found does not invalidate the potential for an evolutionary explanation for any structure.
The problems encountered by Dean H. Kenyon seem to me to be a little out of date, given that they precede the discovery of catalytic RNA. A popular theory at the moment posits that the DNA-RNA-protein world in which we live was preceded by an RNA-only world, in which RNA both encoded information and carried out chemical catalysis.
Be that as it may, evolution does not really claim to explain how life began - merely to explain the process of sceciation. Also, it is false to suggest that the gene for a single protein would require "hundreds of pages of text" - gene sequences are routinely printed out on just four or five pages (including space for translation of all six possible reading frames). Additionally, the structure of DNA is far less complex than that of even a small protein (such as insulin, which contains about 50 amino-acid residues). DNA's structure is rigidly defined (the sugar-phosphate backbone supporting the stacked purine and pyrimidine bases) and can be exemplified by as few as 11 base pairs of sequence (i.e. slightly more than one turn of the helix). By contrast, protein structure is immensely more complex: the sequence of 20 different amino acids is just the start (the primary structure); there are certain types of protein structure that occur in many different proteins, and these are termed secondary structure (specifically, alpha-helix and beta-sheet); the real flesh-and-bones of a protein, that defines its function, is its tertiary structure, that is, the way the whole molecule folds upon itself. There is another layer - quaternary structure, defining how a protein binds to other molecules to become active (some proteins are active as monomers, while others form dimers, trimers, tetramers and so on).
In conclusion, although these arguments are valid points to raise, they have been answered. Evolution can account for the development of complex structures, it cannot explain how life began, but situations can be envisaged in which the beginning of life required molecules significantly simpler than those employed by living organisms today.
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