Bush
comes out tepidly in favor of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools, you know the ones, the ones that are funded by taxpayer dollars? The ones that are under legal obligation to maintain a separation of church and state? Yeah, those.
As the article says, Bush didn't seem eager to talk about the topic." No shit, huh? On the one hand, he's basically saying, "even though I have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, I'm going to go on record as espousing the teaching of a non-scientific, Christian-theology-based 'alternative' to evolution" and on the other hand, I'm going to piss off all the fundamentalist nutbags that believe that the earth is 6000 years old. No wonder he's "not eager". But if only this would be the straw, you know the one....
PZ Myers is on the case, and on it hard, but this is still a pretty good example of preaching to the choir; most people don't really have a well-formed opinion on the theory of evolution, and it's not because they're stupid, it's because it hasn't EVER been prominently taught in public schools; I was very much interested in biology all through school, took AP Biology, was a Biology major at JHU, and while evolution was always underpinning everything as sort of a given, we never really talked about it at all. Everything I really know about evolution I have learned on my own, with perhaps a slightly too heavy reliance on
Richard Dawkins (although he's widely held to be one of the
two greatest writers on the subject). Intelligent Design, therefore, sounds like a neat idea, a helpful compromise between evolution, which is so overwhelmingly supported by reality that learning about it is a continuous series of "well duh" moments, and most people's vague desire to be good and believe in God because otherwise they have to have uncomfortable conversations with their older relatives. And as long as you don't delve into it, that's that. You can say you think ID sounds neat without comment from most people (it certainly sounds INTERESTING, but that doesn't make it science) and for the most part, people will either not want to contest your beliefs, thinly-held though they might be, or they'll be in exactly the same boat. Probably the only people that would really bother arguing with you on the subject are
raving atheists who like to debate anything for any reason whatsoever, or diehard fundamentalists, who can usually be spotted by all the snakes they're handling.
In short, no way is this going to become a massive issue, because then everyone would have to pick sides, and to do that honestly, they'd have to examine the issues, and to do that, they'd have to read a lot of mostly dry technical stuff that might STILL sound good for pages and pages and pages; I've tried several times to read the
ID Bible, but I just can't do it. It's not so much that it's awful, it's just that I know it's completely wrong-headed and proceeds from a belief in a Creator, so I spend all my time looking for signs of impending foolishness, and I can't concentrate (to be honest, I can't read Stephen Jay Gould effectively because his writing is so florid that I can't concentrate on his premises). And I'm actually deeply committed to knowing both sides of this issue, because, while actual scientists won't debate ID proponents for fear of legitimizing them, I will, gleefully, because the ones I come across have only a very casual opinion on the matter, and if I can convince anyone even to CONSIDER that they're on the wrong side of evolution, I feel like I've accomplished something. However, it's more than a little beyond me to expect people that don't really care about the issue to slog through hundreds of pages of non-fiction
Several years ago, when I worked in DC, I had a series of conversations with a very bright young intern who had gone to Frostburg, and who didn't believe in evolution. He said a couple of well-reasoned things about why he didn't believe in it, most of which were of the intuitive "it just doesn't sound right" variety, and I started there. He was under the very-widely held misapprehensions that:
a) Darwin and evolutionists say that humans are descended from monkeys
b) evolution is a process that drives towards increasing organismal complexity
c) if evolution were true, there would only be one perfect creature all over the world
d) there are no missing links, cats can't give birth to kangaroos, etc.
To start with the most widely held (a), evolution says that all life (bacteria, fungi, plants, AND animals) has evolved over millions of years from the earliest single-celled organisms, branching like a tree, some branches ending in extinction, some branches branching again and again, even occasional examples of branches reconverging. While mammals all share a distant source branch, cats and dogs and rodents and cows and primates all have separate, later branches, as lions and housecats and ocelots have, as apes and monkeys and humans have. While we share more earlier branches with apes than with mice (especially with chimpanzees and baboons), we end up on very different branches at the present, having diverged before cro-magnon, before neanderthal*, before australopithecus, etc.
Which brings me to (b); complexity is not necessarily rewarded by evolution. A highly specialized form, say, a bird with a long curved beak that is great for eating a particular sort of larvae, will perish if that larvae dies out. Meanwhile, alligators and horseshoe crabs and so on have not changed significantly in millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of years, because there has been no need. Humans are more complex than insects or sponges, but they are not necessarily more successful; it all depends on how you measure "success"; what I explained to my coworker is that the only way evolution measures success is "not extinct" which means that every organism alive today is EXACTLY as successful as every other.
c) this is actually very thoughtful; if you assume that "survival of the fittest" is all that evolution means, then you can logically proceed to the idea that evolution is a sort of finite contest in which one organism will beat every other in a Final-Four-like tournament, until eventually one will emerge as the bestest animal ever, and then "evolution will be over". However, what evolution really says is almost a tautology; the fittest could be defined as "the one that survives, regardless of reason, which means that it's actually "the survival of the one that survives"... what this means is that, you can have this great fucking animal that would totally sweep all the other animals, but then a meteorite hits and somehow this animal is more susceptible to that than all the other mediocre animals. Guess who survives? Not the Animal Of The Future, but the one that DOESN'T DIE. People understand this instinctively; why else would everyone joke about how, after the nuclear apocalypse, nothing will survive except Keith Richards and cockroaches? Cockroaches have never built the Parthenon, but they sure as fuck are hard to exterminate. The human mind, however, is taught that "success" is something that one can be proud of, not just a hardscrabble seat-of-pants squeaker victory that might not even be deserved. Evolution is an amoral process; it doesn't care who SHOULD win, it doesn't care about ANYTHING. This is actually my biggest problem with ID; how can you support a system in which the Designer decides who lives and dies, and this is what we end up with?
And finally, (d); there are PLENTY of missing links, there are PLENTY of present-day examples of beneficial mutations, there are PLENTY of examples of speciation and NO ONE ever said, not even saltationists, that evolution occurred in cat-to-kangaroo intervals. I am, however, too lazy to find examples of all these things, so I will merely direct the interested
here and leave it at that.
In the end, I don't know if I convinced him of anything one way or another, but I did expose him to some ideas that he wouldn't've been exposed to otherwise, and he did think about them, and who knows? Maybe he did some reading on his own. I'll probably never see him again.
While I am completely against teaching ID in public schools, there IS a need for evolution and ID to become part of the public dialog, because then people will talk about them and come to their own conclusions. Some of those conclusions will be wrong, on both sides, but that's OK. No one said it was going to be easy, and no one said that we'd wake up and everything would be perfect overnight. But imagine a world in which mankind questions his superiority over every other living thing. Imagine what a difference a real understanding of all the implications of that might make. I can think of nothing finer.
* who are still held as possibly not even quite being Homo Sapiens
