Just a round-up of points from the ID folder.

First, a general remark. I like a good knock-down argument as much as the

next person, but I must say, ID-ers are low-grade opponents, at least if a bulk of my e-mails are any indication. They are still

banging away with the arguments I first heard when the whole thing first

surfaced 10-15 yrs ago. “What use is half an eye?” “The odds against this

are a trillion to one!” etc. etc. There is nothing new here. I understand

why biologists get angry and frustrated with ID-ers. All the ID arguments

have been patiently refuted many times over. The ID-ers response is to come

back with… the same arguments.

Anyway, here are a few of the commonest things I hear.

(1) “The fossil record is incomplete.” Well, duh. Fossilization only

happens under extraordinary circumstances. The chance that any particular

organism — me, for instance — will be recovered as a fossil eons hence is

microscopically small. To add to the incompleteness, soft body parts hardly

ever get fossilized. We are working from a pretty scanty data set here.

Hard to see how it could be otherwise.

(2) “…Therefore you have no right to go constructing theories, given that

the data set is so sparse.” Scientists build theories from much worse data

sets than this. Try stopping them. The forthcoming (I think) issue of

National Review contains a review by me of Simon Singh’s new book THE BIG

BANG, about the history of scientific cosmology. The data set in cosmology

is so hard to gather that even very basic questions like “is the overall

structure of the universe static or dynamic?” were not resolved until very

recently. Science does what it can with the data it can gather. A good

scientific theory fits the data better than a poor theory. (“God makes it

happen!” is, by the way, not a scientific theory, though it may be a

metaphysical one.)

(3) “Evolution isn’t scientific because you can’t test it in a lab.” For

heaven’s sake. That criterion would invalidate most of science. The theory

of continental drift, for example — how are you going to get Eurasia in

through the lab door? We have excellent theories to account for the

behavior of stars, but you can’t put a star in your lab, nor even duplicate

star-stuff in small quantitites. As I said, this is low-grade

argumentation. (And, see below, we are actually quite close to a point

where we CAN do evolution in the lab.)

(4) “Organizational complexity cannot arise from simplicity by natural

processes.” How do you know it can’t? It is true that the genesis of

organizational complexity is not currently well understood; but to leap from

that to telling me we shall NEVER be able to find a natural-law explanation

for it is just dogma. At any point in history, all sorts of thing are not

well understood. Science is “open,” working from the ground assumption that

natural phenomena have natural explanations that can be formulated

mathematically. To declare that such and such a phenomenon will NEVER yield

to this kind of inquiry is absurd, not to mention offensively arrogant.

Perhaps, indeed, it won’t; perhaps some phenomena that science assumes to be

natural — the phenomenon of human consciousness, for instance — may turn

out to be not susceptible to the scientific method. I would not myself rule

that out. However, to say you KNOW this, because… you just KNOW, is

silly. Remember Comte, who in 1842 declared that “We can never know

anything of the chemical or mineralogical structure” of the stars. He was

hardly cold in his grave before the spectrograph was invented, and now we

know all about that structure.

And as a matter of fact some interesting work is being done on the origins

of organizational complexity by computer scientists. There is a good

article about this in the current (Feb 05) issue of DISCOVER magazine.

Basically, we simulate evolution using little computer viruses, setting them

up so that they can do simple arithmetic operations, “feeding” them numbers,

establishing rules for reproduction, mutation, cooperation, and resource

competition, and letting them run for a few ten thousand generations (which

takes only a few minutes). The results are surprising. Complex arithmetic

algorithms, with as many as 19 steps, each of which has to be in exactly the

right place in relation to others, crop up out of nowhere…. and actually

crop up more frequently if you tighten up the “food supply”!

(5) “There is no such thing as half an eye/wing/lung etc.” Yes there is,

all over the place, as biologists have been pointing out till they are blue

in the face. The common scallop has little light-sensitive patches all

round its mouth, for instance. An entire menagerie of animals — frogs,

squirrels, even snakes — has rudimentary gliding webs of various levels of

sophistication — half wings.

(6) “Evidence of design is all around us. How can you not see it?” You

might just as well, with equiponderant plausibility, say the opposite thing:

“Evidence of perfect cold randomness is all around us…” Consider the

recent terrible tsunami in south Asia, for instance, in connection with

which, several people HAVE said the latter thing. These matters are in the

eye of the beholder. I myself feel that there IS design in the cosmos at

some level, but certainly not at the “God of the Gaps” level promoted by

ID-ers. In any case, statements like those I just made (BOTH OF THEM) are

not scientific, since they generate no hypotheses that can be mathematically

modeled. They are expressions of instinctual feeling, like the one I myself

just made. Essentially, I think, they are expressions of personal

temperament. Nothing wrong with that, but it ain’t science.

(7) “The odds against the universe being the way it is are trillions

trillions trillions to one!” So they are. The odds of ANY particular event

are exceedingly small. SOMETHING has to happen, though. I met my wife in a

remote town in northeast China. What, from the point of view of my

working-class English mother contemplating me as a newborn, were the odds of

THAT? I was bound to marry somebody, though. The odds of it being any

particular person — let alone a person on the other side of the world –

were infinitesimal… but SOMETHING HAS TO HAPPEN.

I am selling this point short. It is, in fact, the only one that I find at

all interesting. WHY does something have to happen? Or, as Stephen Hawking

put it: Why is there something rather than nothing? Scientists like their

theories to be parsimonious — to explain the data as succinctly as

possible. Well, the most parsimonious state of affairs is… utter

nothingness. So why isn’t the universe like THAT? Now there’s a

metaphysical question worth pondering. That, personally, is the zone where

I go looking for God, when I feel that impertinent. The notion of the

ID-ers, that you can find Him by staring hard at the gaps in our current

scientific understanding, seems to me to be a sort of comic-book

metaphysics, betraying a dire lack of imagination, and an utter waste of

time.