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The Intelligent Design Trial
Neo-creationists and their embarrassing ancestors.
By Hanna Rosin
Updated Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005, at 10:04 AM ET

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From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Noa's Arc
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 10:14 PM ET

Monday's courtroom drama in Harrisburg, Pa., opens with visuals projected onto a six-foot screen: a picture of a black rectangular box emitting rays of golden light, like the magic briefcase in the final scene of Pulp Fiction (God knows what's in there, but we don't). The image comes from the cover of Darwin's Black Box, a book by Michael Behe, a leading proponent of intelligent design and the star defense witness in the very curious trial unfolding here.
Just over a year ago, the Dover school board voted to require ninth-grade biology teachers to tell students about "problems in Darwin's theory" and to mention intelligent design as an alternative theory of evolution. Eleven parents sued the district in federal court. The case has played out like an adult education class; the plaintiffs have called to the witness stand biologists, paleontologists, textbook writers, and science historians. All have reiterated the plaintiffs' main point: Intelligent design is just creationism hiding behind a lab coat, Genesis posing as science, a Trojan horse of the religious right. But it's obvious from Monday's testimony that this is an oversimplification. Perhaps the old creationists and the ID people share a common ancestor, but the ID folks have undergone so many stages of evolution that they are now a barely recognizable subspecies.
The old creationists make cameos in the court record, and they are a familiar historical type. Stories have surfaced of school board members quoting scripture at meetings, telling fellow members that if they didn't accept Jesus as their personal savior they were "going to hell." One supposedly said at a meeting on the proposed changes: "Someone died on the cross. Can someone take a stand for him?" The ID types are mortified by this un-evolved kind of talk. After it was reported, the Discovery Institute, the main outlet for ID research, pulled two of its scheduled witnesses and declared this a tainted test case. That leaves Behe to go it alone.
If the ID people were looking for a frontman, they could not have cast anyone better. Behe is perfectly professorial, pale and slim with owl glasses and trim gray hair everywhere but on top of his head. (When the theatrical version of the courtroom drama gets made, they can add a top hat and caned umbrella). He likes to be the smartest person in the room, giving a long lecture about, say, isopropyl thiogalactoside, that neither the judge nor the 100 or so spectators are likely to follow (this is not a jury trial). The defense attorney asks him whether it's true that ID is anti-evolution. "That's completely wrong," Behe answers, cutting the cord between him and the Scopes monkey crowd.
Behe is Catholic, and the defense lawyer asks several times whether his religious convictions require him to believe in ID. Always the answer's the same: No. They spend three hours establishing his scientific credentials (he's a biochemist at Lehigh University) and the rest of the day establishing the scientific credentials of ID. Unlike Biblical creationists, Behe does not believe the earth is only a few thousand years old. He accepts many parts of evolutionary theory. He constructs his arguments using scientific principles, from open inquiry to hypothesis testing to falsification. ID is science because it "relies on the physical observation of observable empirical facts," he says.
So far, so good. But when he gets any closer to explaining how one would actually go about proving the existence of intelligent design, Behe starts chasing his tail. Design, he says over and over, is merely the "purposeful arrangement of parts." We can detect it when "separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components." This is a perfectly tautological argument. It is reasonable to infer design, he argues, when something seems well designed. In his writings, Behe argues that the theory can be falsified and suggests an experiment: Place a bacterial species without a flagellum under selective pressure, grow it for 10,000 generations (about two years), and see whether a system as complex as a flagellum is produced. It's a circular experiment, as William Saletan has explained. To that I add: Why wouldn't Mr. Designer, whoever he is, just go to work on that Petri dish? I need look no further than myself for counter-evidence: weak ankles, diabetes, high probability of future death. If there is a designer, she doesn't seem so intelligent.
In his testimony, as in his book, Behe says we can conclude something was designed without knowing the identity of the designer. It could be aliens, an army of fairies, Frank Lloyd Wright directing from the sky. In his writing and speaking, he hardly ever mentions God, much less Jesus. This has turned off some potential evangelical supporters but only the most fundamentalist. Behe's omission is an updated evangelical strategy, perfected by President Bush in his first campaign. Bush didn't have to mention abortion, stem cells, or any of the issues dear to the religious right. He just told a story about how an encounter with Billy Graham led him to stop drinking—a story any evangelical would recognize as a religious testimonial without Bush ever having called it that. Behe sends similar cues, mentioning that certain Darwinians are atheists, using examples familiar to anyone who's read creationist literature. At one point, he says the believer in him thinks the designer is God, but the scientist can't prove that. But that's another old political trick, like the Japanese prime minister saying this week he visited the controversial war shrine only as a "private citizen."
I've met biologists who are strict Biblical literalists. Usually they exhibit a certain humility and reconcile their twin beliefs by admitting that there are many mysteries of creation the tools of science can never explain. Behe utterly lacks that deference. In his book, he writes that ID should be ranked as "one of the greatest achievements in the history of science," rivaling "Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur and Darwin." The evidence of design is all around us, and any honest scientist would embrace that as the obvious Ur-Explanation.
My 4-year-old daughter feels this way, too. She marvels at how a katydid looks exactly like a leaf, or how stars really do twinkle in the sky. But I'm hoping by ninth grade her thinking will have evolved.


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From: Hanna Rosin
Subject: Intelligent Disguise
Updated Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005, at 10:04 PM ET

This must be how a religious conversion happens: You sit still in a windowless room for hours and hours, listening to the voice of a single higher authority. There is no one to contradict him, nothing else to do. Over and over, Michael Behe, the main expert witness, repeats the same mantra: Intelligent Design is science, not religion. By the end of the second morning of his testimony, I am beginning to see my way through to some of the central scientific claims of ID. The attorney asks a series of questions that elicit the same answer—"Creationism is a theological, religious concept; Intelligent Design points to observable physical empirical facts"—and I experience the repetition like a ritual prayer.
The courtroom, it turns out, is a poor place to conduct a science class. Behe runs through specific examples of "irreducible complexity"—his idea that certain biochemical structures are too complex to have evolved in parts: blood clotting cascades, the immune system, cells. He claims his critics have misread crucial bits of data. To a nonscientist such as myself (and presumably the judge), this is like Chinese: I recognize the language, but I have no idea whether the speaker is faking it. I have no context, no deeper knowledge of the relevant literature. The reporter seated next to me has written only four lines of notes for three hours of testimony. The mere fact that the trial is being conducted in such highly technical language means, for the moment, ID is winning.
Thank God for cross-examination. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that states can not require schools to teach creationism alongside evolution. So, the plaintiffs are intent on proving ID is just another form of creationism. To do that, Eric Rothschild, the sharp ACLU attorney, does the courtroom equivalent of This Is Your Life, trotting out all of Behe's more embarrassing friends and relations. To give students a fuller understanding of ID, Dover's ninth-grade biology teachers are now required to read in class a statement referring them to a textbook called Of Pandas and People, which the schools will keep in their libraries. Behe wrote sections of the textbook and has called it an "excellent reference for students." But the book is not nearly as careful as Behe is to avoid the old creationist lingo: "Intelligent Design means that various forms of life began abruptly with distinguishing features already intact: fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings, etc," Rothschild reads out loud from the book. Behe can manage a defense of why that statement is still consistent with certain well-accepted evolutionary principles, but it's a stretch. The passage sounds an awful lot like Genesis.
Rothschild then points to some of Behe's own writing in a magazine called Biology and Philosophy, where Behe mused about the identity of the Great Designer. What if the existence of God is denied at the outset? he asks himself in an article. Well, yes, he admits, for those who deny God's existence, ID is much less plausible. Finally, he gets to what so far counts as the smoking gun in this trial: a 1999 article in "the Wedge," a publication of the Discovery Institute (the main outlet for ID research), where Behe is a fellow. In it, ID theorists plot their "five-year strategic plan" with Behe as the crucial tool to "reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
For the purposes of this trial, these are slip-ups. But as time goes on, the ID people are getting better and better at avoiding overt theism, narrowing their theory to its most unobjectionable form. Of Pandas and People merely replaced the word "creationism" with "intelligent design." There's already an updated textbook in the works called Design of Life, which excises the Genesis-speak and more thoroughly incorporates the principles of ID. The Discovery Institute does not like this case because it involves a requirement that teachers mention ID and because there are too many creationist fingerprints on it. They prefer a model tested in Ohio schools called Critical Analysis of Evolution. In this model, teachers are encouraged to poke holes in evolution and make sure students understand it's just a theory. They can check out ID in their own free time. "They need at least a couple of different perspectives to appreciate the difference between fact and theory," Behe says in his testimony. This is the safest position for ID people to take: What could be more scientific than subjecting a theory to hard scrutiny? But it's also the most disingenuous. This would be teaching 14-year-olds that the truth is relative, that life can be explained by any one of many competing theories. And there is no way Behe believes that.
Hanna Rosin is an editorial page staff writer for the Washington Post.

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