Just some random notes from the Intelligent Design debate yesterday, mainly intended for the future reference of any science-friendly readers or colleagues who may be up against I.D.-ers in future debates.

(A) John West was lucid, practiced, and well-informed, but he leaned a little too hard on eugenics, I thought, bringing it out as a scare word at every opportunity, with the implication that it is a synonym for “murdering or sterilizing people the state regards as imperfect.”

While that meaning is certainly within the scope of “eugenics,” there is a great deal more to be said than that. Larry Arnhart said some of it, noting that when he went to get a marriage certificate from the State of Illinois recently, he was subjected to a long questionnaire of obviously eugenic intent, concerned with whether there was any blood relationship between himself and his fiance.

In fact, the word “eugenics” covers a lot of ground, from our private preferences in mate selection all the way up to state-imposed mass murder. You can be friendly to its meanings at one end of the spectrum–as the legislators of Illinois obviously are–while being hostile to those at the other.

The role of the state is a key point in discussing eugenics. As the Illinois case (and I presume other states have laws against brothers & sisters marrying) shows, it’s hard to maintain a position that the state has no eugenic role to play at all, though I guess a keen libertarian could come up with some kind of argument.

Most of the interesting debates, however, are about private eugenics.

If I carefully make a choice of mate with the idea of having kids who will be like THIS, rather than like THIS, I can’t see that that is anyone’s business but mine (and my mate’s), though it is surely eugenic. But then, what if I have private-sector access to genetic interventions that might improve the odds? (The odds, that is, of my kids being like THIS, not like THIS.) That’s where real debate starts.

My own view is that such access should be widely allowed.

(Prohibitions will, in any case–though this is not a complete argument–be widely flouted, since a person who can’t get his genetic intervention in Seattle will fly to Taipei for it…) Will there be calamities? Yes, probably. We shall have to weather them, that’s all. Calamities arise from private gun ownership, but we weather them in the interest of liberty and constitutionalism.

(B) John was a bit too free with “reductio ad Hitlerum” arguments, and other kinds of guilt-by-association. (A favorite with I.D.-ers is to yoke Darwin with Marx and Freud–since they were wrong, he must have been too! Yes, this is thin stuff, but it’ll get you out of a corner in debate.)

I warned John in the debate that this could backfire, since an opponent–in this case me–could start telling the audience about some of the people who cleave passionately to Intelligent Design–Islamic fundamentalists, for example. Me: “I’ll trade your Adolf Hitler card for my Osama bin Laden card…”

(C) Creationists play all the angles they can with the kinds of misconceptions that occur when ideas from science are taken up by public figures who don’t really understand them. John used Woodrow Wilson’s daft argument about the U.S. Constitution being a Darwinian document. All this proves is that science is too important NOT to be left to the scientists. (And yes, of course, there is more to be said about that, too…) Larry Arnhart responded, in a light-hearted spirit, with a call for separation of science and state.

This kind of thing is very common. Paul Johnson’s fine book MODERN TIMES is marred by an opening argument that Einstein’s Theories of Relativity unleashed moral relativism on the 20th century, which is nonsense. (And Einstein didn’t replace the Absolute with the Relative anyway. He replaced two Absolutes–Absolute Space, Absolute Time–with one: Absolute Spacetime.)

As a footnote to that, here is a quote from my last book UNKNOWN QUANTITY (in paperback this month! ), p. 334:

No conscientious novelist of the 1990s thought his book was complete unless it included a reference to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which Heisenberg first stated in 1927.

It so happens that I have just been reading the current (5/7/07) issue of Newsweek. The book review section covers Nathan Englander’s new novel, about which it has the following to say, inter alia:

Would a 1,500-page novel that linked, oh, say, Bobby Thomson’s home run, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mason and Dixon, Joseph of Aramathea and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle–all narrated by a hermaphrodite–be enough to impress…?

Q.E.D.