In 2006, in the wake of a U.S. court case that rejected the argument that intelligent design (ID) had a place in American public-school science classrooms, the debate between ID proponents and its critics in the scientific community stood in high relief. In one sense ID was a concept that argued for the presence of an “intelligent designer” to help understand the development of life on Earth, but in practice it served as the basis for a movement that sought to overthrow the standard approach of science, termed “methodological naturalism,” which by definition excludes consideration of supernatural explanation for scientific phenomena.
The ID movement took shape in the early 1990s with the work of Phillip Johnson, a legal scholar, and first came to national attention in 1996, when Michael Behe, a molecular biologist, published Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (2nd revised ed., 2006). Behe enunciated the precepts for the debate over ID, primarily his assertion that “irreducible complexity” in biological organisms could not have arisen through standard Darwinian mechanisms of evolution. There was a complementary debate on what constitutes science and who makes that decision. The extent to which ID could be characterized as science was the primary legal issue in the litigation concerning the teaching of ID in public schools.
The work of ID theorists drew upon reasoning that was popularized by William Paley (1743–1805). In his Natural Theology (1802), Paley described what he saw as the obvious design in the parts of humans and other organisms, concluding that such design required the existence of a designer. Paley’s work expounded what was then called “the argument from design,” in which design in nature was taken as a proof of God’s existence. Species of living things were observed to display “perfect adaptation” to their environments, another proof of God’s action on Earth. Ironically, pious naturalists who documented “perfect adaptation” were collecting evidence in the exact form that Darwin used later to hypothesize natural selection. Because the selective processes (“the struggle for existence”) were, according to Darwin, natural, his theory has been described as a “theology without religion.” It leaves perfect adaptation and design intact and substitutes a natural process—the selection of traits that enhance a population’s chances for survival in a given niche—for a designer.
Both friends and foes of the ID movement perceived it to be allied with scientific creationism (the notion that scientific facts can be adduced in support of special creation—that is, the divine creation of the various forms of life). The leading proponents of ID maintained, however, that ID took no position on creation and was unconcerned with biblical literalism. Consequently, it did not contest the prevailing scientific view on the age of the Earth, nor did it dispute the occurrence of small evolutionary changes, which are amply observed and seemingly work by natural selection. Behe cautioned, nevertheless, that even though the functioning of complex molecular processes is understood, no one had been able to say how such highly complex systems originate.
Irreducible versus Redundant Complexity
The heart of the ID critique of evolution is the existence of what Behe identified as irreducibly complex systems. Such a system, according to Behe, is one that is “composed of several, well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” Behe proffered three major examples in the area of biochemistry: (1) the bacterial flagellum, used for locomotion, (2) the cascade of molecular reactions that occur in blood clotting, and (3) the immune system. Like Behe’s basic example of a mousetrap, these systems cannot function if any one part is removed. Behe argued that the necessity for interdependent parts in an irreducibly complex system could best be explained as the intentional product of design and not one that arose from slight changes in component parts through random mutation and natural selection.
In the years since ID was first proposed as a coherent alternative to evolution, the grounds of debate have shifted owing to conceptual advances in molecular biology that shed light on how seemingly irreducible complexity can be achieved. Possible approaches that evolutionary biologists have provided to explain Behe’s three examples of complexity and other antievolutionist targets such as the intricacy of the human eye include (1) the self-organizing nature of biochemical systems, (2) the built-in redundancy of complex organic structures (if one crucial step is absent, other processes can achieve the same result), and (3) the role of versatile exploratory processes that, in the course of their normal physiological functioning, can help give rise to useful new structures of the body. At the same time, ID has been incapable of generating a scientific research program, which inevitably broadens the gap between it and the established norms of science.
Both ID theorists and traditional Darwinian evolutionists have commonly relied on an overly simplified definition of mutation, which feeds the abhorrence of randomness that religious antievolutionists typically display. In fact, the selection of mutations is limited by the adaptability of the organism. Mutation is not a “random walk” but is constrained by the requirement that it fit in with a preexisting organic system (or that it stabilize adaptation to a niche already under way).
Litigation in Teaching ID
The place of ID in American public schools has been the subject of litigation, as it was previously for scientific creationism. The strategy was to write statutes that mandated or permitted the teaching of alternative hypotheses to evolution in public-school science classes. In part, these court cases have hinged, therefore, on how science is defined. Those who advocate allotting equal time for the alternative hypotheses assert that the standard approach to science is excessively narrow because it restricts research to only what can be established empirically. Those who oppose such statutes argue that science can deal with any proposal so long as it is testable, or “falsifiable.” What is not testable cannot fall within the domain of science, because science deals only with empirical facts.
In the 1982 case of McLean v. Arkansas, concerning the teaching of creationism, the state argued that evolution was not falsifiable. The trial judge, William R. Overton, ruled against the state’s equal-time statute, asserting that creationism by definition was not falsifiable. This trial and a few others like it formed the immediate context in which equal time for ID was litigated in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in late 2005. The school board of the district, which includes Dover, Pa., had sought to introduce ID in local public schools as an alternative view of biology. Behe, testifying for the defense, summarized ID’s view that complex biological systems could not have arisen under Darwin’s supposition of gradual, incremental change over long periods of time. The plaintiffs, in turn, called as a witness a molecular biologist who offered natural explanations for Behe’s three biochemical puzzlers. The decision of Judge John E. Jones III did not, however, turn on the substance of Behe’s objection to evolution. Rather it followed the logic set in McLean v. Arkansas. Stating that the plaintiffs were unable to draw a clear distinction between ID and special creationism, Jones ruled that the introduction of ID into a public-school curriculum would contravene the U.S. Constitution’s clause that prohibits the establishment of religion.
That matters of science, philosophy, or theology are litigated in the first place suggests a clash of cultures that cannot be resolved through rational debate. While admitting that the methodological rationalism of conventional science has been fabulously successful, ID advocates argued that its axiomatic exclusion of the supernatural was restrictive, and they suggested that more could be known if only the boundaries of science were enlarged (to include what one ID theorist calls “theistic realism”). Although Behe’s own research as a molecular biologist is methodologically rational, his target may well be metaphysical naturalism, which is about meaning rather than method.