New theory enters evolution debate
KATE BEEM

"The Kansas City Star", 01/12/2001, Page B1
JOHNSON COUNTY
(Copyright 2001)

Evolution might be returning to Kansas' science standards in the next
month, but its critics aren't going away.

In fact, the debate over what Kansas students should learn in science
class has evolved, moving from a simple discussion of whether life was
created by God or the random natural process called evolution to a third
choice, "intelligent design."

Kansas Board of Education members said Tuesday they hoped to vote on new
standards at their February meeting. They expect to approve a document
that expands references to evolutionary biology and returns items on the
age of the Earth and the big-bang theory on the origin of the universe. If
the 27-member committee of science teachers and professors that wrote the
standards has any say, the document won't include intelligent design, the
theory that everything in the universe was designed, not the result of
natural processes.  It's a theory that has gained ground during the past
decade. Its adherents seek to overturn the view taken by modern science
that only natural explanations for scientific phenomena are acceptable.

According to intelligent design supporters, naturalism requires that life
developed only from natural processes and not from design. Excluding
design excludes the designer, they say. They welcome the chance to be part
of any discussion about the origins of life, said Michael Behe, a Lehigh
University biochemist and author of a popular intelligent design book,
Darwin's Black Box.

"I think (intelligent design is) making a lot of progress in the sense that
it's now an active topic of conversation," Behe said. Not in true
scientific circles, said John Staver, a Kansas State University professor
and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the new Kansas science
standards. "It is a fringe idea at the moment, and it is not one being
discussed all that much in the science community," Staver told state board
members Tuesday.

Intelligent design theorists say they're motivated by the search for
truth, not religion. When they examine evidence gleaned through the
scientific method, they see not a natural explanation of why things are,
but fingerprints of a designer. "When you are addressing one question, and
that question is 'What causes life?,' there are only two answers," said
John Calvert of Lake Quivira, co-founder of the Intelligent Design
Network, a local group that formed in 1999. "You cannot eliminate one
answer to start with."

Scientists counter that science deals only with things that can be
observed and measured, such as evolution. Design can't be measured, said
Leonard Krishtalka, a biologist and director of the University of Kansas
Museum of Natural History. "That's a religious belief, and science has no
comment on that," he said. Since the early 1990s, intelligent design has
received more attention than creation science, whose practitioners search
for scientific evidence proving the literal truth of the Bible. The two
ideas share the common goal of overthrowing naturalism and often use the
same strategy: questioning specific pieces of evidence that undergird
Darwinian evolution.

The increase in the public's awareness of intelligent design is due mostly
to its promotion by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank, and its
offshoot, the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. The center is
the hub of the intelligent design community. It sponsors intelligent
design conferences, and its fellows, some holding prestigious academic
posts, write many articles and books. Intelligent design theorists have
their own journals and some - notably University of California-Berkeley
law professor Phillip Johnson and Jonathan Wells, who holds doctorates
from Berkeley and Yale University - have written popular books on
intelligent design. But their articles generally aren't published in
established scientific peer-review journals, such as Science and Nature.
Intelligent design theorists say their work is immediately discounted
because it oversteps the bounds set by naturalism.

Scientists counter that intelligent design proponents would rather try
their theory in the court of public opinion. The call for a fair trial for
intelligent design appeals to the American tendency toward balance, said
Steve Lopes of Lawrence, president of the pro-evolution group Kansas
Citizens for Science. With evolution supporters now controlling the Kansas
Board of Education, intelligent design adherents are looking to local
school boards to gain access to science classrooms. In November, the
Pratt, Kan., school board approved a science curriculum stipulating that
10th-grade biology students will understand that there are different views
of how life on Earth began. The curriculum also urges students to compare
evidence for and against the views.

Evolution supporters protested that the change opened the door for
intelligent design. Intelligent design theorists don't dispute that. "If
the state is to be neutral, it needs to let a fair competition exist
between these two ideas," Calvert said.

Nothing new.

Intelligent design isn't a new idea. In the 1700s, philosopher William
Paley described a "watchmaker" who designed the universe with intricately
working parts.

Indeed, until the publication in 1859 of naturalist Charles Darwin's On
the Origin of Species, the conventional Western wisdom was that the
universe was specially created by God. In his book, Darwin described a
world driven by random processes such as natural selection. By the turn of
the 20th century, many in the scientific community had accepted Darwin's
theory and had amassed evidence supporting it. Most scientists today
accept evolution - they just disagree about how it occurs.  One of the
intelligent design supporters' main criticisms of Darwinian evolution is
that the process can't be observed happening. It's historical science, and
so is intelligent design, Calvert said.

In modern intelligent design theory, adherents use science to find
evidence of design, or intelligence. That evidence comes in the form of
repeatable patterns that aren't caused by chance. But unlike creationists,
intelligent design theorists don't affix a name to the designer, and some
even support the idea that Earth was seeded by extraterrestrials. The
identity of the designer doesn't matter, said Mark Edwards, a Discovery
Institute spokesman.

'The Wedge Strategy'

The 10-year-old Discovery Institute and the Center for Renewal of Science
and Culture, started in 1996, are at the center of the intelligent design
movement. The leading design theorists are fellows at the institute or
affiliated with it.

While intelligent design supporters deny a religious rationale for their
studies, the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture does not hide its
mission. The center aims to drive a "wedge" between the pursuit of science
as the search for truth and as the search for natural answers. According
to "The Wedge Strategy," which circulated in 1999 on the Internet and
which the center acknowledges is valid, one of the center's goals is "to
replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that
nature and human beings are created by God." And design theorists are
overwhelmingly Christian, but Edwards attributes that to a hospitable
environment for people who believe God created the universe.

Behe, a senior fellow, has a doctorate from the University of
Pennsylvania. His experiments have led him to pronounce the simple cell to
be irreducibly  complex, or so elaborate that it can't be broken down into
a simpler form. He finds evolution an inadequate explanation for the
development of such a complex system. But other scientists say nothing in
biology is too complex to comprehend. "Just because it is complex does not
mean it has to be the result of intelligent design," Krishtalka said. "The
absence of knowledge does not mean the answer is a supernatural creator."

A belief in evolution does not preclude a belief in God. According to a
study published in Nature in 1999, 40 percent of scientists believe in
God, but 100 percent of those same scientists accept evolution. Yet some
Christians fear that accepting evolution undermines their faith in God,
and for them, intelligent design is attractive, said Michael Shermer,
editor of Skeptic magazine and the author of Why People Believe Weird
Things.

The theory also capitalizes on the scientific illiteracy of many
Americans, Shermer said. It's one thing to believe the Earth is old, but 4
billion years - the age many scientists accept - is a long time. "The time
scale in which evolution occurs is so far beyond the human time scale,
it's hard to comprehend on a gut level," Shermer said.

- To reach Kate Beem, education reporter, call (816) 234-7734 or send
e-mail to kbeem@kcstar.com