``If you’re going to build a scholarly position, you can’t treat your
ideas as dogma,’’ said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National
Center for Science Education. ``You have to change your ideas in light
of criticism.’’
 

Medford Mail-Tribune
Friday June 29th
4C
Melissa Martin

DESIGN THEORY:  Creationist dogma or evolutionary punk rock?

In the beginning, nature created the heavens and the earth.

For 142 years, scientists have praised natural law and random chance for
giving us life. Charles Darwin’s theory that all living organisms
evolved from a common ancestor through a process known as natural
selection has become the bedrock of biology. But there’s a growing
restlessness among scientists who have done the math and discovered
Darwinism doesn’t add up. These scientists believe in intelligent
design, the theory that all life is not the result of random chance or
natural laws, but some systems - especially in biology - show evidence
of design.

"There is a lot of support for design theory from people who are tired
of the dogmatic, authoritarian, reductionist way of doing science," said
Baylor University research professor William Dembski, 40, who
specializes in the study of probability. The author of "The Design
Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities" (Cambridge
University Press 1998), Dembski holds doctorate degrees in mathematics
and philosophy. ``I think things will change, especially when you have a
younger, new generation of scientists able to look at the lack of
evidence for Darwinism."

Mathematician Wolfgang Smith, a professor emeritus at Oregon State
University, agrees. "The intelligent design theory is the first rigorous
refutation of Darwinism on a scientific and mathematical basis," said
Smith, helped solve the re-entry problem for space flight when he worked
for Bell Aircraft.  "This impresses me as a major, scientific
breakthrough which, hopefully in time, will be recognized by the
scientific community at large," Smith said.

Design theorists call themselves "punk rockers of evolutionary biology"
because they ask tough questions that shake the status quo, said Mark
Edwards, spokesman for the Discovery Institute and Center for the
Renewal of Science & Culture in Seattle.
While naturalists attribute life to chance or law, design theorists
offer a third possibility - design. Edwards explains it like this - a
pile of leaves on the ground likely fell from a tree, while leaf piles
spaced every six feet probably fell out of a rolling barrel. But leaf
piles spelling out, "Welcome to the Jones,' " show evidence of design.

``There is a concern that design can explain everything - it really
can't,’’ Dembski said.  ``Design is not a catch-all or blanket answer.’’

Take the example of a detective encountering two dead men - one with a
knife sticking out of his chest and the words, "Die Frank, die,"
scrawled nearby and the other a 90-year-old who appears to have died in
his sleep. Which case shows evidence of murder? Dembski asks.
"The detective isn't going to increase his work load if there's no
evidence for murder; he'll look for natural causes," Dembski said.

Dembski developed a procedure called the explanatory filter to help
determine how elements occurred in nature. A Stanford mathematician
describes Dembski’s filter as a three-level stone sorter: the course
screen catching events with high probability such as dealing a poker
hand with at least one face card; the finer screen catching events with
intermediate probability such as holding the winner out of 1 million
lottery tickets; and the finest screen catching highly-improbable,
complex events assumed to be the result of design.

One example of such a complex system is bacteria flagellum, a
microscopic motor-like force that gives bacteria the ability to move
>from place to place, spinning at about 15,000 revolutions per minutes.
It's such an efficient motor that some engineers are trying to copy its
design for industrial applications, according to Roger Christianson,
head of Southern Oregon University's biology department.
 "It's a pretty elaborate device, especially for bacteria, which have a
fairly simple kind of cell construction," said Christianson, explaining
the complexity of bacterial flagella. He is not a design theorist. "You
look at something like this and say, 'Where did it come from? There is
really no fossil record showing the fine structure of ancient bacterial
flagella. On one side you've got people who say, 'It evolved over time;
we just don't know the process.' On the other side you've got people who
say, 'It's so complex, it's impossible to imagine how it could have
evolved, therefore that's evidence for design.' "

Like a clerk feeding an original document through a copy machine or a
banker tracking a bad check, design theorists ask what is the origin of
information of such complex systems, Dembski said. "What we find is that
the Darwinian mechanism can't account for how you got the
original information in the first place," Dembski said. "You fill a hole
by digging another, but you haven't gotten rid of the hole. It's not
just
design theorists picking up on this. There are evolutionists , the Santa
Fe Institute, for example, who are becoming quite critical of
Darwinism. They make the same point that Darwinian mechanism is not a
way to generate biologically- relevant information. It can express it,
but it needs to be front-loaded with information."

A Santa Fe Institute professor Stuart Kauffman is such a dissenter. He’s
a medical doctor and executive director of BiosGroup, a scientific  rain
trust that works with Fortune 500 companies in product development and
other areas. In his book, "The Origins of Order:  elf-Organization and
Selection in Evolution" (Oxford University Press 1993),  Kauffman says
natural selection isn't the only source of order - cells also self
organize.

Yet Kauffman is no friend of intelligent design. He believes design
theorists fail to state the criteria they use to distinguish design from
natural selection, random accidents or self organization. "If they do
have such criteria, they'd be on the edge of being able to do
science," Kauffman said.

Design theorists say they have criteria. An object needs to be complex
and specified if scientists are to know that it is designed. The
probabilities involved in showing that something is designed are in some
cases unfathomable, according to Dembski. Such probabilities, for
instance, require looking at all the particles in the known universe.
"It's like flipping a coin and getting 1,000 heads in a row," Dembski
said. "You start asking questions like, 'Is it a double-headed coin?' ‘’

While he has no problem with Dembski’s mathematical equations, Keith
Devlin, executive director of Stanford University’s Center for the Study
of Language and Information, said intelligent design is not a scientific
theory.  `` It is a belief (namely Creationism) dressed up in
scientific-sounding terminology,’’ according to Devlin. He critiqued
Dembski's work in the July/August 2000 publication of the New York
Academy of Sciences.. ``Anyone is entitled to believe in intelligent
design, if they wish. But beliefs should not be passed off as scientific
theory.’’

Santa Fe Institute’s Kauffman doesn’t lump intelligent design with
creationism, but he doesn’t grant it scientific status either. ``In
order to take creation science seriously, you’d have to give up the
foundation of what we know about geology, physics, biology, the solar
system, the age of the universe, the age of the earth…the bulk of
>science,’’ Kauffman said.  ``Our current understanding of how the planet
evolved and how old it is - 4.6 billion years old - how old life is,
knocks the hell out of creation science. I don’t think creation science
is a science at all. It’s reasonably articulate arguments meant to
support the biblical story of creation.’’

Intelligent design seems to teeter on the edge of science and religion.
This past spring, the New York Times sent a science writer to cover
design theory while the Los Angeles Times sent a religion writer,
according to Dembski. And intelligent design is getting lots of
attention from the National Center for Science Education, which promotes
the teaching of evolution. The Oakland-based center has been fighting
what it calls a ``festering problem’’ with a Washington high school
biology teacher’s efforts to include design theory in his lessons about
natural selection.

``If you’re going to build a scholarly position, you can’t treat your
ideas as dogma,’’ said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National
Center for Science Education. ``You have to change your ideas in light
of criticism.’’

Dembski has no plans to change his mind, but he has been fine-tuning and
updating his work. His forthcoming book "No Free Lunch: Why Specified
Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence,' " (Roman and
Littlefield) is listed with Amazon.com. It is due out in September.

`` `No Free Lunch’ applies the theory of `The Design Inference’
specifically to biological systems and shows why design is the only
coherent explanation of biological complexity that is currently
available,’’ Dembski said.

As evolution’s punk rockers, design theorists believe they should share
the stage with the symphony. And the music won’t be too loud for OSU's
Smith. Intelligent design connects with his own theory of ``vertical
causality,’’ the notion that causality can be instantaneous and can act
outside of time. It's described in his book "Quantum Enigma: Finding the
Hidden Key" (Open Court Publishing Co 1995).
"The fact that a new kind of causality has now been documented by
intelligent design is enormously important in many domains," Smith said.

"Intelligent design has enormous implications for the study of man, for
the study of human intelligence and how it acts on the external world."