Darwin – 150 years Later

 

 The Case for Intelligent Design [60:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Original Air Date
2/25/2009 11:00 AM

With guests John Sullivan, producer of the documentary “Expelled”
John West, author of “Darwin Day in America”
and William Dembski, author of “The Design of Life”

Synopsis

On February 25, Avi Davis engaged three proponents of intelligent design, a movement which has come under consistent attack from the scientific community as religion masquerading as science.  This interview seeks to examine the validity of that categorization and to examine the various arguments for intelligent design as a science and the political, social and moral challenges it currently faces to win acceptance as a valid theory.

Introduction

Avi Davis: This is Avi Davis and welcome to Western Word Radio where we discuss issues relevant to the defense and protection of Western values and ideals.

Earlier this month, the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Throughout this year we will also commemorate the 150th anniversary of his most famous work, “The Origin of Species”. Darwinism, or evolutionary theory, has long been the most fashionable scientific explanation for the transformatios of life which led from single celled organisms to the advent of Homo Sapiens. But has Darwinism adequately answered the questions asked by the modern discoveries in molecular biology, astrophysics, quantum mechanics and chemistry? Is the fossil record upon which it relies sufficient to validate the theory of evolution? And if it is insufficient, what should we make of those who propose alternative theories for the origins of species, and the origins of the universe itself?

Today, we are very fortunate to have with us three guests who might begin to answer some of those questions. They include John Sullivan, a partner at Premise Media, and the co-producer of the recent documentary “Expelled”. Welcome, John.

John Sullivan: Thank you.

Avi Davis: William Dembski, the senior fellow at the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, and the author of “The Design of Life”. Welcome, Dr. Dembski.

Dr. Dembski: Good to be with you.

Avi Davis: And we have with us John Wells, who is the Associate Director of the Discovery Institute for Science and Culture, and the author of the excellent “Darwin Day in America”. Dr. Wells, welcome.

Dr. West:  Hi. Actually, it’s John West, but I am author of “Darwin Day in America”…

Avi Davis: Yes, I know that, and your names are very similar, unfortunately and then we got a little bit confused. Anyway, let’s start with William Dembski.  What do you see as the major flaws in evolutionary theory as it is expressed today?

Flaws in Evolutionary Theory

Dr. Dembski: Right, Darwinism rests on two pillars.  One is the claim of common ancestry, that all organisms trace their lineage to a common ancestor. That’s really not so much the controversial claim, I mean, it is controversial, but the really bigger problem is the second pillar; which is that the driving force of evolution, that is that what accounts for the creative potential in life, is a purely material process – which Darwin described as natural selection acting on variations. And it’s this, which is a non-directive process, there’s no end or goal involved in it, so it’s not that natural selection is trying to optimize something in the future, it’s an instant gratification mechanism which just tries to take advantage of things in the moment.

And we know from experience, I mean there are other forms of evolution out there. There’s technological evolution, for instance, where creative insight is needed to guide and really propel the evolutionary process. And what we find is, actually, the best experimental work, both in computer science and in engineering, indicates that this sort of natural selection operating on random variations is a very limited mechanism. It can account for the small scale changes we see in organisms, but not the great creative leaps that we see in life.

Avi Davis: You spend quite some time making difference between macro evolution and micro evolution. What is that difference?

Dr. Dembski: Well, that’s implicit in what I just said. That is a distinction which was invented by Darwinists, so it’s not something we’ve foisted on this debate. The idea with micro-evolution is that there are small scale evolutionary changes which we can observe. I mean, antibiotic resistance in bacteria – that’s something that develops – we can see it; or insecticide resistance with insects. But how do you get insects in the first place? How do bacteria, or bacteria with various molecular machines, various structures inside them, which previous bacteria presumably didn’t have? It’s these creative leaps which we see in biology, which Darwinism has not explained.

And the fact is, cell biologists admit this when they are pressed.  For instance, Franklin Harold, a cell biologist at Colorado State University has said that there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for any of these systems. So this is a pervasive problem; it’s not that we are just isolating a few. It’s a pervasive problem, there are no detailed Darwinian accounts, for any of these systems, and many have only a variety of wishful speculations. So, once we’re at the level of wishful speculations, it seems that alternative views, are in fact, called for.

Avi Davis: Well, let’s talk about one of those alternative views.  The most prominent of them is Intelligent Design. What is “Intelligent Design” and how does it address the flaws in evolutionary theory?

Intelligent Design

Dr. Dembski: Well, Intelligent Design, let’s first give a definition. The one that I prefer, and that’s in the book which you cited by me, is “the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence”.  So, let me say it again, “the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the product of intelligence”. Now, Intelligent Design in that broad sense is already a part of science. I mean, there are special sciences that already devoted to this – everything from forensic science to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, to archeology – which depend on drawing the distinction between what is the result of natural forces, and what’s the result of intelligent causes.

So we need to draw these distinctions.  This is a part of basic human rationality. It gets dicey when you look in biology, because if we are seeing patterns in biology that are the result of intelligence, the question immediately arises well, who or what, could that intelligence be? And the thing is, life hasn’t been around forever, unlike, for Aristotle, he didn’t really need to explain the origin of life, he could explain acorns in terms of oak trees, and oak trees in terms of acorns. We know that life hasn’t existed forever, so where did that creative potential, where did the information for life come from in the first place? What is the intelligence that’s behind life, if life itself requires intelligence? And turns out this could then not be an evolved intelligence.

You see, from an evolutionary perspective, intelligence is an outgrowth of the evolutionary process. Evolution says, and this is the Darwinian sense in which it is used, that life – that everything – starts off simple, and then it becomes more complicated, and then finally we get intelligence at the end of the evolutionary process.

Avi Davis: Well, the argument against Intelligent Design is it’s just a repackaging of creationism. How would you address that criticism?

Intelligent Design vs. Creationism

Dr. Dembski: Well, creation always commits you to a doctrine of creation, which means that there is a creator – God – who gives being to the world. Intelligent Design is agnostic about that.  Design is always about taking pre-existing materials and looking for structure and function in them. So, right there, there’s a big difference. I mean, Aristotle would have been a design theorist; the stoic philosophers would have been design theorists. Many Hindu believers would be very much on the design side. So, design really is not tied to a doctrine of creationism. It points you to an intelligence behind or beyond the world, but the nature of that intelligence it really doesn’t speak to. And creationism, in fact the way it’s usually used, it doesn’t just commit you to a doctrine of creation, it commits you to a whole interpretation of Genesis as well. And again, Intelligent Design, as such, doesn’t speak to that.

Avi Davis: So, it’s quite possible, of course then, to be an agnostic, or even an atheist, in discussing Intelligent Design.

Dr. Dembski: You should have on this program, Brad Monson, a professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, who himself has just written a book, titled “An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design”.

Avi Davis: Well, that’s a very interesting book, and I’ll certainly look into that. But, given the fact that it regards itself as an intellectual movement, is it really a science? Should it be respected by the scientific establishment?

Is Intelligent Design Really a Science?

Dr. Dembski: Well, I think there a two ways to see that it’s a science. For one, Darwin formulated his theory of evolution with Intelligent Design, or some sort of design, as a foil to it.  I mean, you can’t read “The Origin of Species” without seeing design and creation. Creation not conceived as a religious doctrine, but creation as form of where intelligence gets in there and produces living things. You can’t read the book without understanding that as the contrast class. So right there if there’s evidence that can count against Intelligent Design, and for Darwinism, then evidence must be able also to count for Intelligent Design and against Darwinism. I mean, evidence is a two way street. If evidence can only confirm one side of a proposition, then the proposition is a necessary truth; it belongs to something like mathematics or logic, not to science. I think that’s one way to see it.

I think the other thing is just to look at the various methods that intelligent design uses. I mean, I’ve just gotten two papers accepted for publication with information technology and intelligent computing journals, where we’re looking at how information that’s required for the design of these systems gets shuffled around. And so, a lot of Intelligent Design research, I mean, it’s being done, and it belongs to the theory of information. And I think, just my own work, my first book on this topic was “The Design Inference”, it was work on the foundations of probability, and it was published in the Monograph series of Cambridge University press. It belongs, actually, it’s in a philosophical Monograph series, but the Library of Congress actually gives it a QA274 listing, which puts it in the mathematics books. So is mathematics science? Well, I would say it is.

Avi Davis: Well, so let’s go back to this question, because Intelligent Design, if my understanding is correct, presupposes a conclusion, and works backwards from that to basically fill out the picture.

Dr. Dembski: That’s about right.

Avi Davis: Ok.

Dr. Dembski: See, when I wrote “The Design Inference”, actually, there were evolutionists who gave it very good reviews, because what I do is I lay out a methodology for detecting design. I show them various things that we do statistically where we reliably, as it were, triangulate on an intelligent source. And the thing is, I didn’t show the implications for biology in it, and there was one philosopher of biology who just gave it rave reviews. He said, “His treatment of randomness is the most sophisticated in the literature. This puts the design question in a post-Darwinian context. Not since Hume has somebody done something like this.” It’s nice to be put in that sort of company. Then, once it became clear that I was applying this to biology, he said “This is now taking us back to the dark ages”, this is in a blurb for another book, actually, by a philosopher of science, named Sahotra Sarkar. So, the thing is, he changed course.  Why? Because he saw where it was going.

But the thing is, the methodology – and this is the point I wanted to make – the methodology I laid out didn’t require that we find design in biology. It just said there is a reliable method for detecting design, what happens when we apply it to biology? Does it confirm Intelligent Design or not? And that became the subsequent question.  It does seem, in fact, that this method confirms design. So, it’s not that the methods we developed are, as it were, stacking the deck.

Avi Davis: Even if you come to the conclusion that there is an Intelligent Design to the universe, you’re still facing some very gnawing questions about existence.  Does it really answer any questions? Does it really offer any final solutions? Sorry, I don’t mean to use that expression, but…

Does Intelligent Design Answer Ultimate Questions?

Dr. Dembski:  Yeah, quite right (laughs). Well, I would say it is, scientifically, a very ambitious program; but metaphysically, it’s pretty minimalist. And so, if you’ve got problems with evil, or being, you’re going to have to do some good metaphysics or moral philosophy. That’s why I would say Intelligent Design is not natural theology. I mean, natural theology was a whole package deal trying to go from nature to a full blown theology. And intelligent design is not trying to do that. Intelligent design is saying look, there are reliable methods for detecting design, when we apply them to biology, and they give us good evidence for an intelligence being behind this. It’s not saying that there’s no place for evolutionary processes, but there is a requirement also for some intelligence behind any processes that are involved; any processes that brought us and other organisms here.

And the problem of evil, the problem of bad designs, all of these are still problems and we’ll need to deal with them, but the resources are going to have to be philosophical, metaphysical, theological, and that leaves, in a sense, other people employed. We’re not trying to put anybody out of business. We’re not even trying to put the Darwinists out of business. I mean, insofar as the Darwinists can show a process of natural selection can bring about various forms of complexity, we want to know that. You know? In fact, I would cheer them on.

Avi Davis: In other words, you say that Darwinism and Intelligent Design can be compatible.

Dr. Dembski: I think a limited form. What we’re finding is that natural selection cannot be the whole story, and what we resist is this totalizing view of Darwinism that is a complete account of biology. That it presents, essentially, general biology, and we would say no it doesn’t. It gives us a picture, a limited picture, of certain types of evolutionary changes, certain types of adaptations, but if you want to explain, especially, the major innovations, complex body plans, complex organ structures, molecular machines inside the cell, the Darwinian mechanism is inadequate to account for that; and you need something like design.

Avi Davis: Terrific. I’d like to go to John West now. John, are you with us there?

John West: Yes, I am.

Avi Davis:  John West, I want to draw attention to your riveting book, “Darwin Day in America”, a really terrific read.  And I will say that, Dr. Dembski, that your book also equally, a terrific read, very, very powerful. In this book you spend a great deal of time addressing the ways in which evolutionary theory, or materialist reductionism, has penetrated our society and culture, by insinuating such things as the idea that man is not unique, but is on par with other animals, and really is just a function of nervous impulses and bodily needs.

Why don’t you explain a little bit more about that, and what the impetus may be, and of course, you make reference to the fact that the philosophical movement of materialist reductionism has actually been going on for several centuries, and that Darwinism gave it a huge shot in the arm. I’d like you explain to our audience a little bit more about how Darwinist ideology has penetrated our society.

Effect of Darwinism on Modern Society

John West: Ok, sure. I think really the first note is what you’ve already mentioned, is human uniqueness, human dignity, really from the start we saw implications on that. And what surprised me, when I started this sort of research journey more than ten years ago, was when I read Darwin’s own book, “The Descent of Man”. It’s often said today that so-called social Darwinism has nothing to do with Darwin, but if you read “The Descent of Man”, it’s really hard to make that argument. Darwin himself thought that selection, natural selection, provided a good explanation for – for example – the different capacities in his view of different races.

There’s been a lot in the news lately about Darwin being anti-slavery.  That’s right, and we’ve known that for some time; but it’s a little bit odd to focus on the fact that he was against slavery, like many people were in Britain, without pointing out that he also thought that his theory provided, basically, a justification for racial inferiorities. It wasn’t just that he was sort of a racist, like lots of people in the nineteenth century, but his legacy to science was that he thought he found a scientific justification for racism. And in fact in “The Descent of Man”, argued that blacks were one step – were the human beings closest in the evolutionary ladder to apes, and talked about the civilized societies basically exterminating, over time, the lower races. And that had really, tremendously detrimental consequences well into the twentieth century, in sort of spurring people to think that now we have the scientific explanations of race.

Now, he wasn’t the first racist, but his theory of natural selection really did play into that, and you can even find vestiges of it today. People might remember, just about a little over a year ago, Nobel prize-winning scientist James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, got into hot water because he wrote a book making the claim that African blacks were inferior to Europeans because of human evolution. Really, it was the same sort of argument that Darwin himself made. So, you certainly saw that sort of negative toward human dignity and uniqueness on the race question. More recently, where you’re seeing it now, are in sort of the radical animal rights people, like Peter Singer, bio-ethicist at Princeton University, who explicitly says that he’s getting his ideas that Darwin’s big contribution was to show us that there really is nothing fundamentally special about human beings.

Avi Davis: And that’s the genesis of the great ape project, that he sponsors with Jane Goodall, and other animal rights activists.

John West: You’re right, and in his views on killing of handicapped kids, he actually argues that a human baby is of less value than a pig, an adult pig, or a chimp or a dog, and he does that, and that’s speiciest, as opposed to racist, to think that human beings are special. So he is a great one about animal rights, at the same time, especially if you’re a handicapped child, he thinks that it’s morally ok, in fact, maybe morally, the right thing to do is to kill off handicapped children.

Avi Davis: Now of course that is, sorry to interrupt you, but that’s an extension of the eugenics movement of the 1920’s, which was also a platform in the Nazi program.

Eugenics

John West: Well, and in America. In America we force-sterilized people in the name eugenics, 60,000 people. In fact, California was the nation’s leader, 20,000 of the people under eugenics laws in the United States were sterilized in California.  In fact, this year is the centennial, in April, of California’s eugenics forced sterilization law promoted by a group called the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena, that had great relations with their friends in Germany at the time, and it was really horrifying.

And look, Darwin was very kindly. I don’t mean to suggest, I think Darwin would have been horrified by some of the uses to which his theory is put. Having said that, you mentioned eugenics, that is another impact.  Darwin talked about how we were sinning against natural selection - by doing what?: by inoculating people against smallpox, by helping the poor, by treating the sick, and basically, as he said, preserving people in civilized societies that nature would have killed off. And he thought that this was going to lead to the destruction of the human race.

Twisting of Darwin’s Theory

Now, to his credit, he said our natural sense of sympathy won’t allow us do otherwise. But when you’ve just said that we’re going to destroy the human race by, basically, inoculating people against smallpox, and caring for the poor and healing the sick, is it really a twisting of that theory to go and say, well if that’s true, we need to do something about it? I don’t think so. I think its one thing to say that Darwin would have been horrified by certain things, I think it’s another thing to say that the people who took the views that Darwin laid out, that we were destroying our race by doing the things compassionate people do, to say that that’s just a twisting of his theory to try to apply it to society. You know, one other thing today where you see in some of the people the extreme proponents of biodiversity and population control, there is an evolutionary zoologist at University of Texas, Austin named Eric Pianka, who argues that human beings are really no better than bacteria.  And we’re the blight because we’re over producing, and so we need to reduce the human population by up to 90%. And he actually advocates, people can go to his website, he advocates that the government should take away the income, the entire income, of any parent who has more than two children.

Avi Davis: But have these ideas really penetrated into our society? Have they, that particular point of view – as you just pointed out – seems to be rather radical, wouldn’t you say?

John West: That’s a good point. I’d say, in the history of eugenics shows how what today can be considered fringe, in fact, can be the heart of society, because the eugenics movement, both here in America and in places like Germany – but especially here in America – was uniformly, the consensus of view of science. It was promoted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, evolutionary biologists who were members of the National Academy of Sciences, biologists at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and so for about 40 years.  Eugenics, which today is regarded as the fringe, was sort of the consensus view of science. Now, fortunately it is no longer; largely because of the Holocaust and how horrible that was, people had a revulsion against eugenics. Not so much because of the scientific community. Now, today, where do we see these ideas just sort of pervasive? I’d say in the area of abortion and life issues. I was surprised, just in researching for my book…

Avi Davis: Euthanasia as well, I assume you’d add in there.

Euthenasia and Abortion

John West: Oh, and euthanasia…….Surprised at how pervasive among the intellectuals who have been both pushing euthanasia and infanticide, and abortion, how Darwinian arguments were so central; even you found them in some of the legal briefs in Roe v Wade.  And you actually had, as I account in my book, leading geneticists into the 1980’s and 90’s, who were citing the bogus biology of Ernst Haeckel, this idea that we replay the history of evolution in the womb, and  that we go through a fish stage, and all this which is repudiated by even many Darwinian biologists today. This was offered as an argument in testimony before Congress by James Neal, who was a National Academy of Sciences geneticist, to say why we shouldn’t have laws restricting abortion, because it’s just equivalent to getting rid of a fish or something at that state.

So, you’d be surprised at how prevalent among the people actually pushing this, some of these ideas are. One more example from just a couple of years ago: Alexander Sanger, grandson of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote a book in 2003 or 2004, I think it was called “Beyond Choice”, where he basically argues that we need to understand that abortion is not just a tragic sort of necessary evil, it’s a really good thing, and why? Because evolution has programmed it as a way of preserving a fit race. And he’s actually prominent in the modern Planned Parenthood, International Planned Parenthood federation. He’s a leader of that.

And so again, you’d be surprised at how pervasive among the intellectual people pushing these agendas are; if you actually peel away and read their own writings, how prominent it is among people who aren’t on the fringe.

Avi Davis: Well, I was very interested in your description of the Gordon Gekko syndrome from the older film “Wall Street”.  In which natural selection, or survival of the fittest, in business and economics is brandished as a noble theory, a noble course of action. I’d be very interested to hear, in the light of what we’ve recently seen happen on Wall Street, do you think that that psychology has actually taken root?

Survival of the Fittest in Business

John West: Well, you know, that whole idea that sort of Darwinism provided a justification for competition and survival of the fittest in sort of a capitalist system, that’s the one area where most people think, or are willing to concede, that there was some impact of Darwinism.  But what again surprised me, this was something that I learned in the process of researching the book, is that’s one of the areas where Darwinism probably had very little impact. If you actually read the people who were justifying capitalism, and their sort of ideology on that and their principle basis for that, sure they supported the idea of competition, which predates Darwin, but they actually didn’t like Darwinism, they didn’t think it was a good justification, because it portrayed economics as a zero sum game. That some people get ahead on basically walking over the carcass over someone else.

Free Market Economics

And the point of the free market proponent in America in the nineteenth century and certainly today, people like George Gilder and others, is that you actually add value and that properly done, yes, there are bad capitalists, and there are people who will try to do bad things and exploit other people, but properly understood, free market economics benefits both sides. And that in fact, the wealth actually increases for everyone in the system, and you actually don’t get ahead by taking the view of that you’re trying to trash the people you’re trying to serve by creating products and things. And so, they thought Darwinism was tied to, and this is actually true, Thomas Malthus, who wrote the book, “Reverend Thomas Malthus” in the 1700’s.  Basically saying that overpopulation, this is a great danger, and have too many mouths to feed, and Darwin himself was inspired by Malthus to come up with this theory. Darwin actually credits Malthus with giving him insight, and what the free market capitalists say is that is not really what economics are about.

So, I would say – yes certainly – there is lots of selfish behavior that we’ve known about well before Darwin, and you can see that, and exploitive behavior, and sometimes fraudulent behavior, in the business world and in government. But that doesn’t mean that that’s the definition of free market capitalism. And in fact, oddly enough, Darwinism, far from being used to promote capitalism, was probably one of the most successful ways that people on the left have demonized capitalism, because they’ve said that capitalism is nothing more than a brutal law of survival of the fittest. And so they’ve actually used Darwinism to demonize capitalism as nothing but survival of the fittest.

Avi Davis: Hmm. I want to now turn to John Sullivan, who is the producer of the wonderful documentary, “Expelled”.  John, you recently produced this movie which details the struggles of supporters of Intelligent Design to gain academic credibility. Can you tell us a bit about the origins of the movie itself, and what you are trying to achieve with it?

“Expelled”

John Sullivan:  Yeah, the origin of the movie “Expelled” really was just an idea to explore this Intelligent Design debate that had been going on. At the time there was a very public trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, and for me it was something that I thought about a lot about over time, and was just very curious to take a look at. Now, going into the movie with those kinds of thoughts and ideas, what we found was actually more alarming and disturbing, in the sense that we were finding that people were actually being expelled from the academy for holding views of design, like Bill was saying earlier. You know, there’s kind of an initial acceptance, a sense that these guys are benign, they’re ok, you know.  One philosopher read his book, and then once people figured out that this guy really wanted to apply his theory to biology, cosmology, other areas, it soon became far more politicized and these guys found themselves on the wrong end of a power struggle.

Avi Davis: What is the reason for such animus? Why would they have such a visceral response to the discussion of Intelligent Design, particularly as it is being outlined by Bill Dembski?

John Sullivan:  Well, I think that you have to look at design on two levels, and what’s happening there.  The first one is that it’s being put forward in kind of a coin, in the language of science and it’s trying compete on that level. And, as Bill was saying earlier, you know, it’s looking at detecting intelligence in nature, and what are those patterns; and he said we already use in these various areas, forensics uses it already, archeology uses it, you know, SETI which is Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence already use it.

So it’s already being employed, design is already being employed in the sciences, but the other level of this, and what’s kind of been out of the public eye, well, in the public eye – but yet at the same time it’s quietly being trying to be removed – is there is this political nature of science, and people want to see science as just an objective place where ideas freely flow back and forth. What we found was that people are using science as the arbiter of truth; so if you can define what is true or untrue through science, therefore you can then say what is a logical thought or what is not. You can basically apply that down the line. So, what is really happening – what we saw – is that there is really a political struggle, and what we saw was really the materialist often hijack science to such a degree that they’re defining design out of the picture. And they’re doing that for a very specific reason, to control science. And if they’re able to do that, I think they feel that they can then control what is true or not true.

Avi Davis: Well, it goes beyond that doesn’t it? Because there are huge amounts of money involved in this, there’s also research grants, there’s consultancies to big business, doesn’t that also play a role in the way that scientists have created a fence around their discipline?

Money’s Role in Suppressing Design

John Sullivan: Well, absolutely. I guess that’s kind of what I was trying to say there – was the fact that because there is skin in the game for scientists in the sense of creating for themselves, you know like you said, there are research grants that are on the table, there’s future funding grants that are coming, I mean, we just spent 400 million dollars out of the new stimulus bill, or excuse me, 400 million dollars out of the stimulus bill that’s going to be going to global warming. And so, if you can control science in a certain way, you can suddenly get significant government grants for this, and as you said, other businesses in this.

Cultural War

So then, there really is a broader cultural war that is happening over this issue of science. And what I see is a lot of the Intelligent Design, particularly the Discovery Institute has been labeled as having a political agenda, I found that people on the other side have an equal, if not larger, political agenda on this. So they label everybody kind of as religious fundamentalists. If you’re a scientist who believes in design, you get applied with the creationist’s word. And, you know what, if you’re called a creationist within science, and I think Bill can attest to this, that’s like the kiss of death. And your whole credibility is thrown out the window once somebody can kind of demonize you and attack you with this. And even though design has been on the table for centuries as an idea, there’s a reason for people to take it off.

Avi Davis: Well, it’s very interesting to me that, in the film, you interview several subjects in silhouette, you can’t see their faces, you can hear their voices, it makes clear the point that there are many scientists who actually believe that Intelligent Design is a worthy theory to be discussed in the Academy. And in fact, quite amusingly, Ben Stein, in the movie, nails Richard Dawkins, when Dawkins admits that he does believe in some form of Intelligent Design, just not in the kind of design that others believe in. I’d like you address that.

Scientists Afraid to Admit They Believe in Intelligent Design

John Sullivan: Yes, you know the first part there is in the movie, we do have a number of scientists that we blacked out, change their voices for fear of repercussions, what would happen to them. One of the stories I like to tell is we actually had a lot more lined up, at one point, to tell their stories. We were on the road filming, and when this kind of a vein hit, that we suddenly realized, wow, there’s really a movement against anybody that comes out for design. You know, I was able to get in a few people, I’d heard their stories, and they’d initially agreed to be in the film, and then once we got closer to filming, they became so fearful that they actually backed out. Even though we said we’ll black you out, we’ll change your voice, we’ll let you see the cut of the film, whatever it is to get your approval on this, and I had five people in a row, right when we were about to interview them, all back out at the last minute.

And so, it was very real. I mean, these people you know, they make their livelihood, they pay their mortgage, based on their university professor’s job.  They have families to support. These are contributing people to society, and they’re being penalized. The American Dream is being taken away from them. Their freedoms are being infringed upon. And I think it’s a very important message for people to hear that.

Avi Davis: Well, I’m very concerned about dissent in academia; I just want to quote something that you wrote, John West, in your book, “If the history of scientific materialism shows anything, it is that scientific experts are as fallible as anyone else. They are capable of being blinded by their own prejudices and going beyond the evidence in order to promote the policies they favor.” And here you quote Alfred Kinsey’s empirical claims about sexual behavior of the general American public, where you regard them as junk science given his deeply flawed sample population.

And Bill Dembski, you also point out, that scientists tend to come up with a theory and then gravitate towards that theory, and try to find anything that will fit it, which seems to be the general Darwinist approach. I’d like both of you to comment on that, on the scientific establishment: is it honest, can we trust it, in general, is it objective? Why don’t you go first, Bill?

Is the Scientific Establishment Trustworthy & Objective?

Dr. Dembski: (Laughing) Was it Upton Sinclair who said that it’s hard to get a man to understand something if his livelihood depends on not understanding it? There’s tremendous disincentives for taking design seriously.  On the other hand there are tremendous awards for trashing it, and promoting evolutionary theory. I mean, you think of somebody like Judge Jones, who decided the Dover case in favor of the evolution position and against Intelligent Design. I’m told that he’s been given four honorary doctorates.  I mean, there are two that I know he’s gotten so far, but Ron Numbers from the University of Wisconsin was telling me that’s he’s gotten four for that.

On the other hand, people who’ve appeared in that case, and have appeared in “Expelled” and taken the pro- ID side, and argued on behalf of design in that case, have faced reprisals. I mean, Michael Behe, there’s now something – he was the star witness in the Dover Case for the design side – his biology department is posted on the Lehigh University website, they name him, where as they say, we don’t support what he’s doing, but he has the freedom to do it. Well that’s because he’s got tenure; if he didn’t have tenure he’d be out of there.

So there’s this sense that, well, evolutionary biology is this flourishing science. Well, the reason it’s flourishing is that people are putting money on it, and because there’s so much that depends on social control that’s riding on this. I mean, evolutionary theory is giving the secularists their creation story. And they need for social control, it’s absolutely non-negotiable in the educational system because that where everything follows from.

Avi Davis: John West, can you come in on this as well?

John West: Yeah, I think that you raise a very good point, and I don’t think that the scientific community on many issues is necessarily objective.  It’s not that science is so much worse than anything else; it’s that people need to recognize that science is a human enterprise just like anything else.  So the idea of the objective scientist who has a complete gulf between any personal motivations and their science, and has no sense of reputation or to save their own skin, is just nonsense. And if you look at the history of science as a human enterprise, time and again, the so called consensus view of science turned out to be wrong.

In fact, how do we develop and get new science progress? It’s because something turned out to be wrong, and those fights over the dominant paradigm can be very brutal. I mean, going back to the germ theory of disease . . .some of the ideas people initially proposed that had fierce opposition from other doctors, other scientists, who thought they were wrong. The eugenics controversy that we talked about earlier, that today is regarded as junk science, well for forty years in America it was the consensus view pushed by many of the same groups that are pushing blind Darwinian today; like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.
And the people who opposed it were demonized.  For example, those who were Catholic, were claimed as wanting to take us back to the dark ages.  That’s the only reason you’re criticizing eugenic, they said . Well, you turned out to be right. It actually happened to be some of the Catholic critics in the 1920’s and 30’s, and not the leading biologists at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia Universities; or the, sort of, whole push for lobotomies, who saved the day..

I document in my book, and you also mentioned Kinsey – which is great example of something that until just a little over a decade or more ago, when it became more widely known just how much his figures and facts were really justified by his own internal sort of demons, and just how much junk science it was. He had a self selecting sample. He went out and interviewed sex criminals in prison, and then purported that this was an explanation and provided a picture of the average American’s sexuality.

So, I think this is endemic, in anything, as an academic, or as a former academic, someone with a doctorate as a social scientist, I can say that one of the bad things about academia, is that it does instill in you the sort of arrogance that you might have gotten, sort of, in the Middle Ages if you were a theologian; which is that scientists are the new priesthood and that everyone else is stupid. And when you get that, academia breeds that, and it can lead to a sort of cockiness and a dogmatism that far outstrips the evidence; and that can be very hard to get people to recognize that what they’ve done is wrong.

And just leave with one example of this; why is it that more than a century after embryologists knew that embryological development was nothing like Ernst Haeckel’s faked embryo diagrams were they still in all the major textbooks? Why did it take a dissenting scientist like Jonathan Wells, who wrote, “Icons of Revolution”, to shame them to actually start taking them out of textbooks? I mean, you just have to wonder about that.

Avi Davis: Well, it’s very interesting, what you’re saying, because two weeks ago we had Chris Horner, the author of “Red Hot Lies”, and James Taylor of the Heartland Institute on this program, and they were talking about global warming; how scientists have basically bought in, or at least, are leading this crusade, which is anti-capitalist, and anti-industrialist, and anti-free trade, and a host of other things.

And I do want to quote to you, another section from your book which is very interesting, “Unfortunately”, this is your quote, “Unfortunately, a growing course urges that public policy be dictated by the majority of scientific experts without input from anyone else. This bold assertion is made, not just with regard to evolution, but concerning a host of other controversial issues, such as sex education, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, cloning and global warming. Any dissent from the orthodoxy of these experts on these issues allegedly represents a war on science.”

I find that a very interesting assertion. And would any of you like to respond to that, or elaborate further on that?

Dissent From Orthodoxy

John Sullivan: Well, I’ll start on it. I think there definitely is a situation where the scientific clique is saying there’s nobody externally who can evaluate our judgment. That was very true for us in “Expelled”; what we found as we looked at that. And then when you had people within, who were really trying to stand up inside and say, well look, this doesn’t explain the evidence we see, can’t we have a discussion about this, they were being shut down. So, there’s no real internal mechanism and there’s no external mechanism for really kind of having a dialogue about these ideas.

And so, I think science has moved to a point to where it’s really become a clique and it’s become an elitist group that’s trying to dictate back down to people, and it’s not willing to take any input. I think John Horgan’s book, “The End of Science”, is very good about pointing this too, saying that from his point of view there are only two people who have been able to be critics of science in a very positive way, one is Karl Popper, the other Michael Pilansky . And they both kind of did it internally and did it incisively. But I think that there’s been an immunity built up over time that science is becoming more self-selective and not self-reflecting.

Avi Davis: And yet…oh, go ahead.

An Issue for Everyone

John Sullivan: I was going to say, you’re right. This is a much larger issue, even you know, the listeners who may not want to get into the Darwin controversy, they need to realize the overall issue of how should we make decisions in this country.  And are all people created equal in their participation in public life, really addresses this, and it gets into issues like global warming, it gets into a lot of issues and the demand that people claiming the mantle of science should be able to dictate. And what I’d like to say to that is, well, it’s true that scientists should be the ones who are determining scientific theories and things, but when you come to the government and demand funding, or when you’re trying to dictate what happens in taxpayer supported schools, it is no longer just an issue for science. It’s an issue for everyone.

And scientists have to be humble enough that if they’re expecting someone else to pay for what they’re doing, that to be able to answer questions, especially when there are some other scientists raising critical questions. And their claim that legislators, school board members and others shouldn’t have any right to ask questions, really they shouldn’t have the right to decide. Just trust us, is just basically what the clique, the scientific clique that’s claiming to speak in the name of science, well, if they just want to do their own thing, that’s fine, but as soon as they seek government support, and to promote their views through the arm of the government, they have to listen to what other citizens are saying, and answer questions.

Dr.Dembski: I would like to add something. I mean it seems to me though that it’s very easy for scientists to intimidate the public. They have the training, they can put up the equations and whatever, and that’s why dissent is so important in this. That we allow people who have opposing views, and have expertise to present that. And I see, this is just a systematic shutting down of it, certainly in the Intelligent Design debate.  I see it also in the global warming debates, what scientific Americans are there, which is shameful. I mean, putting just a whole panel of people who were going after this fellow, Laumberg, and really allowing no sustained response.

Avi Davis: Well on this same theme, it’s very, very interesting for me to hear one of the interview subjects in John Sullivan’s film, in “Expelled”, say that molecular biology is in crisis today. And it’s clear, the film actually makes it quite clear, because the structure of a cell has been proven to be something on the order of a galaxy unto itself. It’s so complex that it is almost beyond human understanding. And so, do you agree with that? Do all of you agree with that? Well, I should ask the two scientists; do you agree that molecular biology is in crisis today?

Is Molecular Biology in Crisis Today?

Dr. Dembski: I think molecular biology is thriving as never before.  But insofar as one is trying to take the data of molecular biology and apply it to evolution and use it as evidence for Darwinian mechanisms and evolutionary change. I’d say yes, there is a huge crisis. I mean, the evolutionary biologists take Darwin and Darwinism extremely seriously. Theodosius Dobjanski has said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Well, the thing is, now we’re finding the evidence of molecular biology is countering that. So, it’s not making sense of things. This is what you want of at least one; there’s several desiderata for scientific theory, but one thing you want is explanatory power, that it’s going to be able to a whole range of phenomena. And bit by bit, just vast areas of biology are falling by the wayside, which Darwinian processes are not explaining.

And so what’s happening is, I find, that the evolutionists are becoming more and more mystics, because they’re not explaining it anymore, and so they have to wave their hands. And so you’ll find them saying the eye, we’ve explained how the eye has evolved, and what they basically tell is a “Just So” story of how a light sensitive spot cups developed a pinhole camera, got a lens, and then formed into a full fledged eye. They tell a story like that, flesh it out maybe with one paragraph, when the design specs for an eye, a mammalian eye, would require a library. So, there’s this disconnect. So yeah, there’s a crisis; but it’s a crisis because the evidence is no longer overwhelming, even though they keep claiming it. And so they keep inflating the rhetoric, but the reality is, in fact, going in the opposite direction. The evidence is deflating.

Avi Davis: John Sullivan, do have anything to add to that?

John Sullivan: Yeah, from the folks that I’ve talked to that are scientists that have been working in this field, biochemists, other of that ilk just really what Bill had said there, the fact that the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which really combined in dealing genetics with Darwin, and giving us random mutation plus natural selection kind of equals everything we see. Yes, that theory is in crisis. I really do think that is true, because there’s a lot of stuff moving forward, even from people who are not in the intelligent design camp, that are challenging that theory and saying look, this cannot equate to all that we see. It just isn’t a powerful enough solution to be applied here, but yet, it’s been applied in all kinds of ways that it should have been limited, in some respects.

And so, I do think that we are at a place right now, and both what Bill said, I would agree with that; molecular biology is flourishing. We’re discovering so many new things, so many great new things about the cell and how it works, and at the same time, if we keep trying to shove it into this neo-Darwinian synthesis, I think we’re going to fail. And I think that’s more in sending us back to the dark ages, than discussing Intelligent Design and looking at the creativity of what goes on in a cell, and looking at it from a design perspective.

Avi Davis: Well let’s now talk, in the last few minutes remaining to us, let’s talk about some of the solutions to these prevailing problems, and the documentary “Expelled”. It’s an hour and a half long, and it did really, really well, very well in fact, for a documentary. What do you think has been its impact, and what kind of criticism did it receive, and from whom?

The Impact of Expelled

John Sullivan: Well, let me start with the second part there. We received criticism from every kind of major media outlet possible. And people did not engage in the arguments of the film. They did not go and look at what happened to Rick Sternberg at the Smithsonian Institution; what happened to Caroline Crocker; what happened to Bob Marks down at Baylor. All they kind of did was lump us in, and attack us, and say this is right wing, fundamentalist propaganda.  And I would really invite people, one to watch “Expelled”, then go do your own research. Go figure out what is going on here. Our purpose in making the movie was not to provide answers, it was to raise questions. I feel that as a documentary filmmaker, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. And so, we wanted to bring something that we thought very interesting to the public light, and hold it up. So the attack has happened on that side.

However, what I would say – the positive that’s outweighing that – is there’s actually a movement afoot of people who are standing up and letting their voice be heard; and that’s most easily done through what’s called the Academic Freedom Petition. You can actually go online, just Google academicfreedompetition.com, or just put that in, and you can let your voice be heard. And people are standing up and saying, you know what? We’re going to let our voice be heard, and we’re not going to let teachers and students be trampled in high schools or universities, or be bullied anymore. We’re going to let them be able to stand up and talk and present both sides of the case here. We’re not about shutting down Darwinism in any discussion, that’s something too that needs to be heard. We want a free dialogue to happen. That’s what we’re really about, and that’s all we’re trying to get out on the table.

Avi Davis: Gentlemen; John West and Bill Dembski, what is the Discovery Institute doing? Could you give a little synopsis on what it is and what it is attempting to do on this subject?

John West: Sure, (this is John West.) The number one thing that we’ve been doing, actually, in our little more than ten/twelve years that we’ve had our program on Intelligent Design, is try to support the scholars like Richard Sternberg and Steve Meyer and others, and Bill Dembski, who are actually doing the research, and publishing the books, and the Pure View journal articles. And so, that is still the largest part of what we’re doing. But, on the public side, we are trying to be a resource and we help; the sort of persecutions stories that you see in “Expelled” are just the tip of the iceberg and there are so many more that go on that will never hear the light of day, that we help behind the scenes. Because, it wouldn’t be helpful to them to have their story out, but getting them attorneys, helping them through the appeals process, helping to push back when someone tries to shut them down, and sometimes fortunately, we can prevail; sometimes not.

So we try to do that behind the scenes.  We are a resource. Since “Expelled” has come out, seven or more states, actually more than seven states have actually introduced academic freedom bills to help defend the academic freedom on this issue. One state has passed it actually, in Louisiana last year. And so we’ve been active in providing advice and help, and trying to get the word out on that. And then finding other ways; websites like intelligentdesign.org, to try to make the information – really the truth – of what the scientists are working on, to help disseminate that, so you don’t just to have to go through the spin of, say the New York Times, which often doesn’t even bother to interview us (or find our own view) they just kind of put words in our mouth. So we are trying on the web, and elsewhere, to sort of publicly communicate what do the Intelligent Design scientists and theorists, what are they actually saying? And what is the actual evidence for what they are saying?

Avi Davis: Do you feel it’s gaining more traction? Do you think particularly with a film like “Expelled”, which got such exposure, do you think the whole movement is gaining traction?

What Does the American Public Think?

John West: I do. You know we commissioned a survey by the Zogby organization this year – and we’ve done one every few years to sort of see where things are – and we have one particular question that we’ve asked in 2001, a few months after Dover, and 2006, and then just few weeks ago, and it’s whether people favor teaching just the scientific evidence favoring Darwin’s theory, or the scientific evidence for and against. And since 2006, the percentage of people who favor the teaching of both sides has gone up from 69% to 78%. And the number of people who favor only teaching the evidence for Darwin’s theory has gone from 20% down to 14%; statistically significant. This is a thousand person randomly sampled poll. And I think a lot of that has to do with the success of “Expelled” and really getting out the need for people to hear both sides.

Academic Freedom

We also have another question, by the way, about academic freedom, on discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory, and again, overwhelming support. Interestingly, more support among self-described liberals and self-described Democrats, than self-described conservatives and Republicans. I mean, both supported it by strong terms, but you had an even stronger sense of fair play among self-identified Democrats and liberals. And so I think our message of the need for academic freedom on this issue is resonating, and I think that the more the Darwinists, and as a social scientist I understand this, the more they ratchet up the rhetoric, and the more they try to defend themselves – not based on rational arguments, but by threats and intimidation, and calling people four letter words and things – that you actually go on their science blogs, so called science blogs, you get this . . . the more they are actually are losing in the court of public opinion. And in the future generation, the next generation of scientists, where we’re actually putting a lot of effort, we actually have a new summer program that people can come to our website if you’re a college student, or a graduate student in the sciences, to help train the next generation of scientists. And so we’re seeing, among college students, real openness.

Avi Davis: Well, I want to thank you gentlemen, very, very much.  And I want to conclude by saying that “Expelled” certainly opened my eyes and made me far more aware of the situation.  And now having read your wonderful books, I’m becoming even further educated. So, thank you all for your extraordinary efforts.

I want to thank all of you for joining us today as well, and to welcome you back next week when we talk with Diana West, the author of “Death of a Grownup”, about the topic rock n’roll and party culture, and its impact on Western civilization. And we will see you then. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for joining us.