On Being Taken for a Stroll Down the Garden Path

I was talking to a friend in the lab yesterday while we were waiting on a couple of experiments to finish and the conversation turned to politics and science, which in this climate means religion and science, since Bush is seemingly incapable of making a decision (in general but especially with respect to his education and science agenda) without referring to his trusty Magic 8 Ball, and we got to talking about the Intelligent Design debate.

There's a lot of things that bug me about this idea, but probably not the ones you think. Its not the idea that there's some omniscient designer out there twiddling the strings and ultimately guiding the process that we call evolution. I'm scientifically agnostic as there's no evidence one way or the other, but personally atheist, as I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe in a higher power. I won't usually fault someone for believing that, however, unless they make an argument based on that belief that's so idiotic I have to say something--which is what ID'ers do on a daily basis.

Here's the thing that gets me about ID: they spend all their time trying to tear down the idea of evolution, despite mountains of evidence for it, and lacking a single piece of valid evidence for their own point of view, and try to tell the world that you can't believe in God and in evolution at the same time. God and evolution are not mutually exclusive, people!!! There's nothing in the theory of evolution that denies the existence of God at all. Yeah, there's this idea called "random mutation" that is the ultimate driver of mutation and speciation, but how damn stupid do you have to be to fail to see that if there's this omniscient power out there that he could just as easily be the "random" in "random mutation"? Back when I still believed in God this was exactly what I believed. Most scientists who are religious believe this as well.

ID'ers, on the other hand, truly are creationists in disguise. They spend all their time and energy trying to create the illusion that there are "holes" in evolution, that there is some kind of long-running controversey among scientists regarding it, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Every time I hear someone say "Teach the controversy" I want to pull my hair out--there is no controversy among scientists about evolution! Nobody in the science community is arguing over whether macroevolution or microevolution occurred. Sure, we debate over the finer details--whether this family of animals evolved from one kind of ancestor or another, or whether archeabacteria are the forerunners of eukaryotes or a separate line divergent from the kingdom Bacteria, or whether introns exist in bacterial chromosomes. That's a far cry from debating over whether evolution itself is a flawed theory.

Are there gaps in the fossil record? Sure--its not like there's some big fossil library buried somewhere that has a copy of every organism that ever existed. We have to find these things. But find them we do, and this is an important point: the theory of evolution makes many predictions, some of which are testable in the lab and some that aren't. How do we know those that aren't testable in the lab are correct? Because we eventually find the fossils that prove them. Its like being a detective at a murder scene. You've got a dead body with a bullet hole right between the eyes and a big hole in the back of the head. You don't have to have been present at the crime to go ahead and make two educated guesses: there's a bullet in a wall somewhere behind where the guy was shot, and there's a gun somewhere that shot the bullet.

Hopefully among the four or five people that read this blog I'm preaching to the choir.