The columnist Paul Krugman has a famous joke about the limits of media objectivity. He writes that “if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: ‘Shape of Earth — Views Differ.’ Then they’d quote some Democrats saying that it was round.”
Krugman’s jibe came to life in the pages of his very own newspaper last week, as The New York Times devoted three long articles over three days to what it calls “A Debate Over Darwin: Evolution or Design?”
The Times is always fending off charges of bias, but the series on “intelligent design” demonstrates the drawbacks of the cult of objectivity. In the second installment, reporter Kenneth Chang provides a back and forth between “mainstream scientists” and “intelligent design proponents.”
It looks like a balanced hearing from both sides until you realize the enormous imbalance at play here. True, Chang refers to the “vast majority” of scientists who accept evolution, but that phrase doesn’t begin to capture how outside the mainstream are the proponents of intelligent design.
As the Times noted in the previous installment, most of the neo-creationists are associated with a handful of conservative think-tanks, most notably the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute tells the Times that it has “404 scientists, including 70 biologists,” who have signed a petition saying they are skeptical of Darwinism.
Never mind that there is no way of knowing how many of the 334 non-biologists have any qualifications whatsoever to back up their skepticism. Seventy biologists is a blip when you consider that even a regional group like the North Carolina-based Association of Southeastern Biologists (ASB), which comes out squarely against teaching intelligent design in the science classroom, has more than 1,500 members.
But it is not just a numbers game here. By weighing the claims of mainstream biologists against those of intelligent design proponents, articles like the one in the Times seem to suggest that they are employing similar methods.
It is the kind of confusion that has led President George W. Bush, and now Majority Leader Bill Frist, to refer to evolution and intelligent design as “two schools of thought.” Bush is right, sort of. They are two schools — science and religion — and they belong in completely separate buildings.
Stifling research
The aims of science, the ASB reminds us, “are to make observations and develop questions to explain natural phenomena, to design tests of those hypotheses, and then to either accept or reject those hypotheses, based on a fair and objective evaluation of the evidence accumulated.”
Intelligent design meets none of these criteria, and the evidence its proponents do provide asks the rest of us to prove a negative. According to their notion of “information theory,” for example, if something appears too complex to be accounted for by the present materialist understanding of evolution, then it must be. Ergo, the hand of a designer must be behind whatever phenomenon is under scrutiny.
This is a religious leap, not a scientific one. Before the last century the best a doctor could do for an infectious disease was to treat a patient with bleeding and vacuum cups (my father remembers quacks applying “bankes” to aging relatives).
Since the great scientific minds had not discovered a cause for infectious illness, the field was open to religious philosophers to suggest that the ill were cursed, or possessed.
Germ theory offered a materialist explanation of illness that had the added benefit of being true, and it drove the priests, rabbis, and witch doctors out of the hospital room.
Forgetting what biologists have accomplished in the past 50 years alone, including unlocking the mysteries of DNA, intelligent design claims that what we don’t understand today is beyond understanding. In that, intelligent design is not just unscientific — it is anti-scientific. Its proponents sound like the Reverend Lovejoy in The Simpsons: “Science has faltered once again in the face of overwhelming religious evidence.”
So while actual scientists humbly acknowledge gaps in their understanding of natural processes, anti-science religious opportunists fill in those gaps with explanations drawn from scripture, as opposed to careful observation and experimentation. It is like asking English majors to critique global warming because they think “greenhouse effect” is a trite metaphor.
Conflating these “two schools of thought” hurts both religion and science. Religious folk, who are looking for ultimate meaning and ethical guideposts, are made to look foolish and defeatist.
Their clergy will be sucked into scientific debates for which they are not qualified; meanwhile, biology teachers will be asked to teach religious ideas in a laboratory setting. And whose religious ideas? The Catholics’? The Protestants’? The Hindus’? The Hopis’?
As for science — well, I’ll have to quote another bastion of liberal media bias, The Wall Street Journal. In her regular column, science correspondent Sharon Begley writes:
“Allowing a minority opinion to stifle research is only one symptom of politics undermining science. Some appointees to federal scientific advisory panels have been chosen for their ideology rather than their expertise; staffers with no research credentials alter the scientific (not only the policy) content of reports on climate change. Politicians’ attacks on the science of evolution continue, even though ‘intelligent design’ may make a fascinating lesson for a philosophy class, but is not biology.”
Begley goes on to quote New Jersey neuroscientist Ira Black. “This anti-scientism couldn’t be more damaging to young people contemplating devoting their life to research,” says Black. “The sense of opportunity that was always predominant in the U.S. now lies elsewhere.”
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor in chief of the New Jersey Jewish News.
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