Darwin Daze

The New York Times ran a front-pager yesterday attacking Discovery Institute's advocacy of allowing schools discretion to include "Intelligent Design" in school curricula, and a follow-up piece this morning on questions about evolution.  But the Times misses the point.  What matters is less what is taught than how it is taught.  When "creation science" was proposed as as an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution, critics were right in saying that Creationism--which holds that the world was created by a Supreme Being in 4004 B.C.--is dogma, not science.  But they were wrong in asserting that Darwin's theory was beyond question.  Neither does Intelligent Design seem to me to be science.  Its advocates believe it is, but most scientists today do not agree.

What makes science "science" (from Latin for "knowledge") is, as the philosopher Karl Popper put it, that it is falsifiable.  It proceeds by deduction and empirical observation, with consequent repeated confirmation.  Science is always open to subsequent modification or refutation.  Thus Isaac Newton's elegant, predictable, mechanical universe reigned supreme for over two centuries.  Along came Planck, Einstein and others and within a quarter-century (1900-1927) unveiled a new micro-world, one disorderly, probabilistic, affected by our observation of it and just plain weird.  Crossing the street we are best advised to observe Newton's Laws, as quantum effects in the macro-world are infinitesimal.  (Newton's Laws trump man-made traffic laws--if the light says cross but a truck is coming do you cross, or follow Sir Isaac and wait?)  A "unified field theory" of physics, Einstein's dream, remains unrealized.  (Einstein, who like many great scientists believed in God, once complained to Niels Bohr, in protesting against the quantum world he was central in discovering, that "God does not play with dice."  To which Bohr replied that he, Einstein, was not to tell God what to do.)

Which brings us back to Darwin.  Teaching his brainchild as irrefutable, as truth that cannot be questioned, is to teach science as dogma.  Teaching science as dogma is just as wrong as teaching dogma as science.  Dogma is beyond question; science never is.  Scientific truth, by its very nature and unlike dogma, is open to subsequent refutation.  We even teach certain theories known now to be false as part of a good education.  Study the ancients and you will (one hopes) learn about the Ptolemaic view of the Heavens, the "phlogiston" theory of the chemical elements, and so on.  And learn what replaced them.  (Stand, as I have, at 80 degrees north and 80 degrees south, well within the polar circles, and in summer time see the sun revolve around the sky, always in sight, and Copernicus is not intuitive. albeit he is right.)

The Times today notes that ID cites things arguably not fully explained by Darwin's elegant theory (the Times cites ID's questions about complexity, pace of change, information theory); ID posits that science does not explain everything in our universe.  Which manifestly it cannot.  If the universe began with a Big Bang from a "singularity," how did the singularity get there?  Is ours the only universe?  ID points to many narrow ranges that must exist, else there would be no us, and says that design is the most likely explanation for their concatenation.  Is our world too improbable to happen by chance?  Or are we one of a quadrillion alternate universes?

To state such is not the same as agreeing with ID theories; because ID seems to me not to be falsifiable it does not appear to me to be science.  So long as some residual uncertainty exists it is possible to posit ID as an explanation, and thus one can never disprove ID for all possible cases.  Immunity to definitive refutation removes ID from the ambit of falsifiability.

Teaching science as revealed truth beyond all question is wrong and fearful.  Be not afraid to acknowledge science's inability to explain all.  At the same time, trust that builders of airplanes follow scientific principles in their work.  In a century, Darwin's universe may, like, Newton's, be overthrown or merely shoved aside to make room for a new one.  Or it may not.  Turning every attempt to question science into a replay of the 1925 Scopes Trial may be good political--and media--theater.  It is not helping education.  Science presumes that our minds are honest, open, modest in asserting what we know and that we accept that our knowledge is contingent at best, with certitude about all likely to elude us.  Whether to teach ID or not I leave to educators to debate.  But either way, they should teach science as science, not as dogma.
NY Times: The Evolution Debate