The Dallas Morning News, April 22, 2001, Sunday Pg. 5J; LEE CULLUM
HEADLINE: Evolution's foes take new tack
BYLINE: Lee Cullum

     The battle over evolution is taking an unexpected turn as
creationists, armed with the Book of Genesis, are giving way to far more
subtle thinkers who champion "intelligent design" of the universe.
According to the New York Times, these are academics as well as
conservative Christians, and they are mounting arguments that compel
attention because they are accompanied by impressive scientific
credentials.

     As H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of
Rochester, wrote of Lehigh University biochemist Michael J. Behe, Mr. "Behe
is the real thing: a research scientist, someone who does experiments, gets
grants and publishes papers." Mr. Orr went so far as to concede that Mr.
"Behe's work may well represent the most sophisticated and the most
seductive creationist attack on evolution in a quarter-century."

     In his book, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution, Mr. Behe, a Catholic, insists that human cells are so complex
and carefully coordinated that it would have been impossible for some
aspects to mutate in adaptive response to circumstances as Darwinian
thinking asserts.

     Mr. Behe has strong support from William Dembski of Baylor University.
With a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago, Mr. Dembski
has declared that natural selection, so dear to Darwinians, is "an
oxymoron. It attributes the power to choose, which properly belongs only to
intelligent agents, to natural causes, which inherently lack the power to
choose."

     In his book, The Design Inference, Mr. Dembski relied on his own
field, mathematics, to develop an "explanatory filter" that can separate
random occurrences from intelligently designed complex systems. While that
has been refuted by one Darwinist who insists natural complexity can
evolve, it nonetheless offers a fascinating basis for exploring and testing
Darwinian theory.

     I am a Christian who finds no religious difficulty in evolution. Yet I
suspect the complexity thinkers are onto something and merit careful
examination. Natural selection indeed may not be the whole story. It may be
that Santa Fe biologist Stuart Kauffman is right when he suggests that
selection does its work only after deep currents of order and complexity
have presented the forms available for choice. "Not we the accidental," he
concluded, "but we the expected."

     Some states may rule that design theory must be studied alongside
evolution. It seems heavy-handed for the government to issue such a decree,
but there is no reason for teachers not to include intelligent design in
the science curriculum as long as Charles Darwin is given his due. His
thinking, after all, still predominates. But it clearly is up for revision,
and there is no reason this shouldn't be pursued in the nation's schools.

     Lee Cullum is a contributing columnist to Viewpoints. Her e-mail
address is leecullum@hotmail.com.