No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Bu Purchased Without Intelligence

 How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer's purpose. In the case of human designers, this four-part design process is uncontroversial. Baking a cake, driving a car, embezzling funds, and building a supercomputer each presuppose it. Not only do we repeatedly engage in this four-part design process, but we have witnessed other people engage in it countless times. Given a sufficiently detailed causal history, we are able to track this process from start to finish.

But suppose a detailed causal history is lacking and we are not able to track the design process. Suppose instead that all we have is an object, and we must decide whether it emerged from such a design process. In that case, how do we decide whether the object is in fact designed? If the object in question is sufficiently like other objects that we know were designed, then there may be no difficulty inferring design. For instance, if we find a scrap of paper with writing on it, we infer a human author even if we know nothing about the paper's causal history. We are all familiar with humans writing on scraps of paper, and there is no reason to suppose that this scrap of paper requires a different type of causal story.

Nevertheless, when it comes to living things, the biological community holds that a very different type of causal story is required. To be sure, the biological community admits that biological systems appear to be designed. For instance, Richard Dawkins writes, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."i Likewise, Francis Crick writes, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved."' Or consider the title of Renato Dulbecco's biology text: The Design of Life.' The term "design" is everywhere in the biological literature. Even so, its use is carefully regulated. According to the biological community, the appearance of design in biology is misleading. This is not to deny that biology is filled with marvelous contrivances. Biologists readily admit as much. Yet as far as the biological community is concerned, living things are not the result of the four-part design process described above.

But how does the biological community know that living things are only apparently and not actually designed? According to Francisco Ayala, Charles Darwin provided the answer: "The functional design of organisms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin's greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent. The origin and adaptation of organisms in their profusion and wondrous variations were thus brought into the realm of science."4 Is it really the case, however, that the directive organization of living beings can be explained without recourse to a designer? And would employing a designer in biological explanations necessarily take us out of the realm of science? The purpose of this book is to answer these two questions.

The title of this book, No Free Lunch, refers to a collection of mathematical theorems proved in the past five years about evolutionary algorithms. The upshot of these theorems is that evolutionary algorithms, far from being universal problem solvers, are in fact quite limited problem solvers that depend crucially on additional information not inherent in the algorithms before they are able to solve any interesting problems. This additional information needs to be carefully specified and fine-tuned, and such specification and fine-tuning is always thoroughly teleological. Consequently, evolutionary algorithms are incapable of providing a computational justification for the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation as the primary creative force in biology. The subtitle, Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, refers to that form of information, known as specified complexity or complex specified information, that is increas ingly coming to be regarded as a reliable empirical marker of purpose, intelligence, and design.

What is specified complexity? An object, event, or structure exhibits specified complexity if it is both complex (i.e., one of many live possibilities) and specified (i.e., displays an independently given pattern). A long sequence of randomly strewn Scrabble pieces is complex without being specified. A short sequence spelling the word "the" is specified without being complex. A sequence corresponding to a Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified. In The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities,5 I argued that specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligence. Nevertheless, critics of my argument have claimed that evolutionary algorithms, and the Darwinian mechanism in particular, can deliver specified complexity apart from intelligence.6 I anticipated this criticism in The Design Inference but did not address it there in detail. Filling in the details is the task of the present volume.

The Design Inference laid the groundwork. This book demonstrates the inadequacy of the Darwinian mechanism to generate specified complexity. Darwinists themselves have made possible such a refutation. By assimilating the Darwinian mechanism to evolutionary algorithms, they have invited a mathematical assessment of the power of the Darwinian mechanism to generate life's diversity. Such an assessment, begun with the No Free Lunch theorems of David Wolpert and William Macready (see section 4.6), will in this book be taken to its logical conclusion. The conclusion is that Darwinian mechanisms of any kind, whether in nature or in silico, are in principle incapable of generating specified complexity. Coupled with the growing evidence in cosmology and biology that nature is chock-full of specified complexity (cf. the fine-tuning of cosmological constants and the irreducible complexity of biochemical systems), this conclusion implies that naturalistic explanations are incomplete and that design constitutes a legitimate and fundamental mode of scientific explanation.

In arguing that naturalistic explanations are incomplete or, equivalently, that natural causes cannot account for all the features of the natural world, I am placing natural causes in contradistinction to intelligent causes. The scientific community has itself drawn this distinction in its use of these twin categories of causation. Thus, in the quote earlier by Francisco Ayala, "Darwin's greatest accomplishment [was] to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent."7 Natural causes, as the scientific community understands them, are causes that operate according to deterministic and nondeterministic laws and that can be characterized in terms of chance, necessity, or their combination (cf. Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity).8 To be sure, if one is more liberal about what one means by natural causes and includes among natural causes telic processes that are not reducible to chance and necessity (as the ancient Stoics did by endowing nature with immanent teleology), then my claim that natural causes are incomplete dissolves. But that is not how the scientific community by and large understands natural causes.

The distinction between natural and intelligent causes now raises an interesting question when it comes to embodied intelligences like ourselves, who are at once physical systems and intelligent agents: Are embodied intelligences natural causes? Even if the actions of an embodied intelligence proceed solely by natural causes, being determined entirely by the constitution and dynamics of the physical system that embodies it, that does not mean the origin of that system can be explained by reference solely to natural causes. Such systems could exhibit derived intentionality in which the underlying source of intentionality is irreducible to natural causes (cf. a digital computer). I will argue that intelligent agency, even when conditioned by a physical system that embodies it, cannot be reduced to natural causes without remainder. Moreover, I will argue that specified complexity is precisely the remainder that remains unaccounted for. Indeed, I will argue that the defining feature of intelligent causes is their ability to create novel information and, in particular, specified complexity.

Design has had a turbulent intellectual history. The chief difficulty with design to date has consisted in discovering a conceptually powerful formulation of it that will fruitfully advance science. While I fully grant that the history of design arguments warrants misgivings, they do not apply to the present project. The theory of design I envision is not an atavistic return to the design arguments of William Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises. William Paley was in no position to formulate the conceptual framework for design that I will be developing in this book. This new framework depends on advances in probability theory, computer science, the concept of information, molecular biology, and the philosophy of science-to name but a few. Within this framework design promises to become an effective conceptual tool for investigating and understanding the world.

Increased philosophical and scientific sophistication, however, is not alone in separating my approach to design from Paley's. Paley's approach was closely linked to his prior religious and metaphysical commitments. Mine is not. Paley's designer was nothing short of the triune God of Christianity, a transcendent, personal, moral being with all the perfections commonly attributed to this God. On the other hand, the designer that emerges from a theory of intelligent design is an intelligence capable of originating the complexity and specificity that we find throughout the cosmos and especially in biological systems. Persons with theological commitments can co-opt this designer and identify this designer with the object of their worship. But this move is strictly optional as far as the actual science of intelligent design is concerned.

The crucial question for science is whether design helps us understand the world, and especially the biological world, better than we do now when we systematically eschew teleological notions from our scientific theorizing. Thus, a scientist may view design and its appeal to a designer as simply a fruitful device for understanding the world, not attaching any significance to questions such as whether a theory of design is in some ultimate sense true or whether the designer actually exists. Philosophers of science would call this a constructive empiricist approach to design. Scientists in the business of manufacturing theoretical entities like quarks, strings, and cold dark matter could therefore view the designer as just one more theoretical entity to be added to the list. I follow here Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote, "What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view."9 If design cannot be made into a fertile new point of view that inspires exciting new areas of scientific investigation, then it deserves to wither and die. Yet before that happens, it deserves a fair chance to succeed.

One of my main motivations in writing this book is to free science from arbitrary constraints that, in my view, stifle inquiry, undermine education, turn scientists into a secular priesthood, and in the end prevent intelligent design from receiving a fair hearing. The subtitle of Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker reads Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Dawkins may be right that design is absent from the universe. But science needs to address not only the evidence that reveals the universe to be without design but also the evidence that reveals the universe to be with design. Evidence is a two-edged sword: claims capable of being refuted by evidence are also capable of being supported by evidence. Even if design ends up being rejected as an unfruitful explanatory tool for science, such a negative outcome for design needs to result from the evidence for and against design being fairly considered. Darwin himself would have agreed: "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."" Consequently, any rejection of design must not result from imposing arbitrary constraints on science that rule out design prior to any consideration of evidence.

Two main constraints have historically been used to keep design outside the natural sciences: methodological naturalism and dysteleology. According to methodological naturalism, in explaining any natural phenomenon, the natural sciences are properly permitted to invoke only natural causes to the exclusion of intelligent causes. On the other hand, dysteleology refers to inferior design-typically design that is either evil or incompetent. Dysteleology rules out design from the natural sciences on account of the inferior design that nature is said to exhibit. In this book, I will address methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is a regulative principle that purports to keep science on the straight and narrow by limiting science to natural causes. I intend to show that it does nothing of the sort but instead constitutes a straitjacket that actively impedes the progress of science.

On the other hand, I will not have anything to say about dysteleology. Dysteleology might present a problem if all design in nature were wicked or incompetent and continually flouted our moral and aesthetic yardsticks. But that is not the case. To be sure, there are microbes that seem designed to do a number on the mammalian nervous system and biological structures that look cobbled together by a long trial-and-error evolutionary process. But there are also biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have concocted or entertain hopes of concocting. Dysteleology is primarily a theological problem." To exclude design from biology simply because not all examples of biological design live up to our expectations of what a designer should or should not have done is an evasion. The problem of design in biology is real and pervasive, and needs to be addressed head on and not sidestepped because our presuppositions about design happen to rule out imperfect design. Nature is a mixed bag. It is not William Paley's happy world of everything in delicate harmony and balance. It is not the widely caricatured Darwinian world of nature red in tooth and claw. Nature contains evil design, jerry-built design, and exquisite design. Science needs to come to terms with design as such and not dismiss it in the name of dysteleology.

A possible terminological confusion over the phrase "intelligent design" needs to be cleared up. The confusion centers on what the adjective "intelligent" is doing in the phrase "intelligent design." "Intelligent" can mean nothing more than being the result of an intelligent agent, even one who acts stupidly. On the other hand, it can mean that an intelligent agent acted with consummate skill and mastery. Critics of intelligent design often understand the "intelligent" in intelligent design in the latter sense and thus presume that intelligent design must entail optimal design. The intelligent design community, on the other hand, understands the "intelligent" in intelligent design simply to refer to intelligent agency (irrespective of skill, mas tery, or cleverness) and thus separates intelligent design from optimality of design. But why then place the adjective intelligent in front of the noun design? Does not design already include the idea of intelligent agency, so that juxtaposing the two becomes redundant? Redundancy is avoided because intelligent design needs also to be distinguished from apparent design. Because design in biology so often connotes apparent design, putting intelligent in front of design ensures that the design we are talking about is not merely apparent but also actual. Whether that intelligence acts cleverly or stupidly, wisely or unwisely, optimally or suboptimally are separate questions.

Who will want to read No Free Lunch? The audience includes anyone interested in seriously exploring the scope and validity of Darwinism as well as in learning how the emerging theory of intelligent design promises to supersede it. Napoleon III remarked that one never destroys a thing until one has replaced it. Similarly, Thomas Kuhn, in the language of paradigms and paradigm shifts, claimed that for a paradigm to shift, there has to be a new paradigm in place ready to be shifted into. Throughout my work, I have not been content merely to critique existing theory but have instead striven to provide a positive more-encompassing framework within which to reconceptualize phenomena inadequately explained by existing theory. Much of No Free Lunch will be accessible to an educated lay audience. Many of the ideas have been presented in published articles and public lectures. I have seen how the ideas in this book have played themselves out under fire. The chapters are therefore tailored to questions people are actually asking. The virtue of this book is filling in the details. And the devil is in the details.

I have tried to keep technical discussions to a minimum. I am no fan of notation-heavy prose and avoid it whenever possible. A book of this sort, however, poses a peculiar challenge. Forms of thinking that turn biological complexity into a free lunch pervade science and are deeply entrenched. It does no good therefore to speak in generalities or point to certain obvious tensions (e.g., how can intelligence arise out of an inherently unintelligent Darwinian process? or how can we have any confidence in the reliability of our cognitive faculties if we are the result of a brute natural process for which survival and reproduction is everything and truth-seeking is incidental?). Make the book too obvious, and no one will pay it any mind. Make it too technical, and no one will read it. My strategy in writing this book, therefore, has been to include just enough technical discussion so that experts can fill in the details as well as sufficient elaboration of the technical discussion so that nonexperts feel the force of the design inference. Whether I have been successful is for others to judge.

No Free Lunch has the following logical structure. Chapter 1 presents a nontechnical summary of my work on inferring design and makes the connection between my previous work and Darwinism explicit. Chapter 2 rebuts critics who argue that specified complexity is not a well-defined concept and cannot form the basis for a compelling design inference. In particular, I offer there a simplified account of specification. Chapter 3 translates the designinferential framework of chapters 1 and 2 into a more powerful informationtheoretic framework. Chapter 4 shows how this information-theoretic approach to design withstands and then overturns the challenge of evolutionary algorithms. In particular, I show that evolutionary algorithms cannot generate specified complexity. Chapter 5 then shows how the theoretical apparatus developed in the previous chapters can be applied to actual biological systems. Finally, chapter 6 examines what intelligent design means for science.

What follows is a chapter by chapter summary of the book.

Chapter 1: The Third Mode of Explanation. How is design empirically detectable and thus distinguishable from the two generally accepted modes of scientific explanation, chance and necessity? To detect design, two features must be present: complexity and specification. Complexity guarantees that the object in question is not so simple that it can readily be attributed to chance. Specification guarantees that the object exhibits the right sort of pattern associated with intelligent causes. Specified complexity thus becomes a criterion for detecting design empirically. Having proposed a theoretical apparatus for detecting design, I next consider the challenge that Darwin posed to design historically and indicate why his challenge is viewed among many scientists as counting decisively against design. Essentially, Darwin opposed to design the joint action of chance and necessity and therewith promised to explain the complex ordered structures in biology that prior to him were attributed to design.

Chapter 2: Another Way to Detect Design? Many in the scientific and philosophical community have staked their hopes on explaining specified complexity by means of evolutionary algorithms. Yet even without evolutionary algorithms to explain specified complexity, few are prepared to embrace design. One approach, now increasingly championed by the philosopher of science Elliott Sober, is to attack specified complexity headon and claim that it is a spurious concept, incapable of rendering design testable in the case of natural objects, and that a precise probabilistic and complexity-theoretic analysis of specified complexity vitiates the concept entirely. In critiquing my approach to detecting design, Sober has tied himself to a likelihood framework for probability that is itself highly problematic. This chapter demonstrates that specified complexity is a well-defined con cept and that it readily withstands the criticisms raised by Sober and his colleagues.

Chapter 3: Specified Complexity as Information. Intelligent design can be formulated as a theory of information. Within such a theory, specified complexity becomes a form of information that reliably signals design. As a form of information specified complexity also becomes a proper object for scientific investigation. This chapter takes the ideas of chapters 1 and 2 and translates them into an information-theoretic framework. This reframing of intelligent design within information theory powerfully extends the designinferential framework developed in chapter 1 and makes it possible accurately to assess the power (or lack thereof) of the Darwinian mechanism. The upshot of this chapter is a conservation law governing the origin and flow of information. From this law it follows that specified complexity is not reducible to natural causes and that the origin of specified complexity is best sought in intelligent causes. Intelligent design thereby becomes a theory for detecting and measuring information, explaining its origin, and tracing its flow.

Chapter 4: Evolutionary Algorithms. This chapter is the climax of the book. Here I examine evolutionary algorithms, which constitute the mathematical underpinnings of Darwinism. I show that evolutionary algorithms are in principle incapable of generating specified complexity. Whereas this result follows immediately from the conservation of information law in chapter 3, this law involves a high level of abstraction, so that simply applying the law does not make clear just how limited evolutionary algorithms really are. In this chapter I therefore examine the nuts and bolts of the evolutionary algorithms: phase spaces, fitness landscapes, and optimization algorithms. An elementary combinatorial analysis shows that evolutionary algorithms can no more generate specified complexity than can five letters fill ten mailboxes.

Chapter 5: The Emergence of Irreducibly Complex Systems. Specified complexity as a reliable empirical marker of intelligence is all fine and well, but if there are no complex specified systems in nature, what then? The previous chapters establish that specified complexity reliably signals design, not that specified complexity is actualized in any concrete physical system. This chapter examines how we determine whether a physical system exhibits specified complexity. The key to this determination, at least in biology, is Michael Behe's notion of irreducible complexity. Irreducibly complex biological systems exhibit specified complexity. Irreducible complexity is therefore a special case of specified complexity. Because specified complexity is a probabilistic notion, determining whether a physical system exhibits speci- fled complexity requires being able to calculate probabilities. One of the objections to intelligent design becoming a viable scientific research program is that one cannot calculate the probabilities needed to confirm specified complexity for actual systems in nature. This chapter shows that even though precise calculations may not always be possible, setting bounds for the relevant probabilities is possible, and that this is adequate for establishing specified complexity in practice.

Chapter 6: Design as a Scientific Research Program. Having shown that specified complexity is a reliable empirical marker of intelligence and having overturned the main scientific objections raised against it, I conclude this book by examining what science will look like once design is readmitted to full scientific status. The worry is that attributing design to natural systems will stultify science in the sense that once a scientist concedes that some natural system is designed, all the scientist's work is over. But this is not the case. Design raises a host of novel and interesting research questions that it does not make sense to ask within a strictly Darwinian or naturalistic framework. One such question is teasing apart the effects of natural and intelligent causation. For instance, a rusted old Cadillac is clearly designed but also shows the effects of natural causes (i.e., weathering). Intelligent design is capable of accommodating the legitimate insights of Darwinian theory. In particular, intelligent design admits a place for the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation. But as a framework for doing science, intelligent design offers additional tools for investigating nature that render it conceptually more powerful than Darwinism.

Ideally, this book should be read from start to finish. Nevertheless, because this is not always possible, let me offer the following suggestions for reading the book. Chapter 1 is the most accessible chapter in the book and is prerequisite for everything that follows. This material needs to be under the reader's belt. Sections 1.1 to 1.7 present a nontechnical summary of my previous work on inferring design, and readers familiar with it can skip these sections without loss. On the other hand, sections 1.8 to 1.10 are new and make explicit the connection between my previous work and Darwinism. Readers definitely need to read these sections. Chapter 2 is primarily directed at critics. This is the most technical chapter, and readers persuaded by my previous work may want to skip it on their initial reading. Chapters 3 and 4 translate the design-theoretic framework of chapters 1 and 2 into an information-theoretic framework. Chapter 3 presents the general theory whereas chapter 4 looks specifically at evolutionary algorithms. For nontechnical readers, I recommend a light perusal of chapter 3 and then a careful examination of chapter 4. Chapter 5 brings theory in contact with biological real ity. This is where most of the current controversy lies, and readers will not want to miss this chapter. Chapter 6, on the other hand, looks at the broader implications of intelligent design for science and can be read at leisure.

There are nontechnical readers who can comfortably wade past technical mathematical discussions without being intimidated; and then there are math phobics whose eyes glaze over and brains shut down at the sight of technical mathematical discussions. This book can also be read with profit by math phobics. I suggest reading sections 1.1-1.10, 5.1-5.7, 5.9, and 6.1- 6.10 in order. The only thing one needs to know about mathematics to read these sections is that powers of ten count the number of zeroes following a one. Thus 103 is 1,000 (a thousand has three zeroes after the initial one), 106 is 1,000,000 (a million has six zeroes after the initial one), etc. Reading these sections will provide a good overview of the current debate regarding intelligent design, particularly as it relates to Michael Behe's work on irreducibly complex molecular machines. Math phobics who then want to see why evolutionary algorithms cannot do the design work that Darwinists regularly attribute to these algorithms can read sections 4.1-4.2 and 4.7-4.9.

One final caution: Even though much in this book will look familiar to readers acquainted with my previous work, this familiarity can be deceiving. I have already noted that sections 1.1 to 1.7 present a nontechnical summary of my work on inferring design and that readers familiar with it can skip these sections without loss. But other sections, though apparently covering old ground, in fact differ markedly from previous work. For instance, two of my running examples in The Design Inference were the Caputo case (an instance of apparent ballot-line fraud) and algorithmic information theory. The case studies in sections 2.3 and 2.4 re-examine these examples in light of criticisms brought against them. Except for chapter 1, arguments and topics revisited are in almost every instance reworked or beefed up.

My debts to friends, foes, colleagues, and institutions are many. Let me begin with the Templeton Foundation. In the fall of 1999 1 received one of seven book awards from the Templeton Foundation to write a book titled Being as Communion: The Science and Metaphysics of Information. After making the proposal and receiving the award, it became clear to me that the science of information (and specifically the science of complex specified information) required a book of its own. Indeed, before one can take seriously the metaphysics of information one must take seriously the science of information (perhaps this is why editions of Aristotle's work always list his Physics before his Metaphysics). I therefore decided to divide this project in two, handling the science of information in the present volume and the metaphysics of information in a subsequent volume, to be titled Being as Communion: The Metaphysics of Information.

William A. Dembski

No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Bu Purchased Without Intelligence 

Why do evolutionary biologists think Michael Behe's work on irreducible complexity has been discredited?

 

GET ON THE INTERNET AND READ SOME of the criticisms of Michael Behe's work, and you'll think he is a crank, a fraud and a knave. His work, we are told, has been "thoroughly discredited," "completely demolished" and "utterly destroyed." Critics reluctantly concede that his discussions of biochemistry (Behe's field of expertise) are unobjectionable. But when it comes to his definition and use of irreducible complexity, critics regard him as misguided and safely to be ignored. Critics contend that the biological community has carefully considered Behe's work, found it deeply flawed and therefore rejected it. But in fact the biological community is still coming to terms with Behe's work. Behe has focused attention on a major conceptual problem in evolutionary biology. The problem was noted before, but not in so stark a form.

Behe's challenge has been so unsettling that many in the biological community find it easier to pretend his work has been discredited than actually to engage it. The biology department at one well-regarded evangelical Christian institution is a surprising case in point. Its biology faculty, by last report, remain adamantly opposed to Behe and intelligent design but at the same time have explicitly refused even to read his work lest they dignify it with their time and attention. And so a convenient fiction has emerged in which biologists continually reassure each other that Behe has been refuted but either fail to provide an actual refutation or attack a caricature of Behe's case against Darwinian evolution. Yet to a dispassionate outsider, it's clear that something significant is afoot. If the worst humiliation is not to be taken seriously, then Behe is being taken all too seriously.

Indeed, Behe has attracted a band of vocal and passionate critics who engage him at length. The controversy centers on a book that Behe published in 1996, Darwin's Black Box. This widely influential book opened a great many ideas, central among them the concept of irreducible complexity. As Behe defines it, an integrated multipart functional system is irreducibly complex if removing any of its parts destroys the system's function. Critics have interpreted Behe's use of this concept in one of two ways, neither of which does justice to Behe's project. Thus critics see Behe as making either a purely logical or a purely empirical point. The logical point is this: Certain structures are provably inaccessible to a Darwinian mechanism. They have property P (i.e., irreducible complexity). But certain biological structures also have property P, so they, too, must be inaccessible to a Darwinian mechanism. The empirical point is this: Certain biological structures are awfully complicated. There is not even a suggestion in the literature concerning how the Darwinian mechanism might construct them. So chances are that something beyond natural selection was responsible for their creation.

So stated, these are fundamentally different points and involve very different questions. If Behe seeks to make a purely logical point, then his model needs to be rigorous and mathematical after the fashion of Noam Chomsky's demonstration that, for example, finite state automata are incapable of generating certain languages. If he wishes to make a purely empirical point, then he wastes his time bringing in the notion of irreducible complexity when what he really means is simply that the evolutionary pathways of certain biological objects have yet to be adequately explained. According to critics, the conflation of these two different theses, the logical and the empirical, works rhetorically, but for a bad reason: it suggests in virtue of the sonority of the words irreducible complexity that something rigorous or well-defined is at issue when what is really at issue, provided Behe has abjured the logical point, is what has always been at issue between Darwinists and their critics-the idea that life is simply too complicated to result from a blind, undirected, hit-or-miss, trial-and-error Darwinian process.

According to Darwinists, neither the logical point nor the empirical point nor a conflation of the two poses any challenge to their theory. Let's consider these options in turn. As for the logical point, irreducible complexity clearly cannot close off all logically possible avenues of Darwinian evolution. What irreducible complexity says is that all parts of a system are indispensable in the sense that if you remove a part and don't alter the other parts, you cannot recover the original function of the system. But that leaves the possibility of removing parts and modifying others to recover the original function. Also it leaves the possibility of removing parts and isolating subsystems that serve some other function (a function that could conceivably be subject to selection pressure). Irreducible complexity, treated as a logical restriction, therefore leaves some loopholes for the Darwinian mechanism. (Critics sometimes portray Behe as denying this point, but in fact Behe never denied such logically possible loopholes.)

As for the empirical point, it seems merely to commit the standard fallacy of arguing from ignorance. So what if certain biological systems are incredibly complicated and we haven't figured out how they originated? That doesn't mean the Darwinian mechanism or some other material mechanism didn't do it. It may just mean that we haven't figured out how those mechanisms did it quite yet. And as for conflating the logical and empirical points, that's the most disreputable option of all, for it makes Behe and fellow design theorists guilty of equivocation, of using irreducible complexity to make a logical or empirical point as expedience dictates.

But this is too easy. In fact, Behe's project is more subtle than any of these criticisms suggests. Behe's project is properly conceived as making three key points: a logical, an empirical and an explanatory point. What's more, he conflates none of them. The logical point is this: Certain artificial structures are provably inaccessible to a direct Darwinian pathway because they have property P (i.e., irreducible complexity). But certain biological structures also have property P, so they, too, must be inaccessible to a direct Darwinian pathway. This formulation looks similar to the previous logical point, but it differs in one crucial respect. In the previous formulation, inaccessibility was with respect to the Darwinian mechanism in toto and therefore with respect to all Darwinian pathways whatsoever, both direct and indirect. Here, the restriction is only on direct Darwinian pathways.

A direct Darwinian pathway is one in which a system evolves by natural selection, incrementally enhancing a given function. As the system evolves, the function does not. Thus we might imagine that in the evolution of the heart, its function from the start was to pump blood. In that case a direct Darwinian pathway might account for it. On the other hand, we might imagine that in the evolution of the heart its function was initially to make loud thumping sounds to ward off predators and that only later did it take on the function of pumping blood. In that case an indirect Darwinian pathway would be needed to account for it. Here the pathway is indirect because not only does the system evolve but so does the system's function. Now, as a logical point, Behe was only concerned with direct Darwinian pathways. This becomes immediately evident from reading Darwin's Black Box since in his definition of irreducible complexity, the function of the system in question always stays put.

Does Behe's definition of irreducible complexity render certain structures provably inaccessible to direct Darwinian pathways? As laid out in Darwin's Black Box, Behe's definition actually needed a little fine-tuning. The problem is that Behe didn't address systems that could retain their function by removing parts and then modifying the other parts that remained. (Behe considered only removal, not modification.) But there's a quick fix here, which I describe in chapter five of No Free Lunch, and that is simply to strengthen the concept of irreducible complexity to include a minimal complexity condition. Essentially this condition says that the system cannot be simplified and still retain the level of function needed for selective advantage. With this proviso, irreducible complexity logically rules out direct Darwinian pathways. Note that many of the irreducibly complex systems Behe considers (notably the bacterial flagellum) satisfy this proviso.

In ruling out direct Darwinian pathways to irreducibly complex systems, Behe isn't saying it's logically impossible for the Darwinian mechanism to attain such systems. It's logically possible for just about anything to attain any other thing via a vastly improbable or fortuitous event. For instance, it's logically possible that with my very limited chess ability I might defeat the reigning world champion, Vladimir Kramnik, in ten straight games. But if I do so, it will be despite my limited chess ability and not because of it. Likewise, if the Darwinian mechanism is the means by which a direct Darwinian pathway leads to an irreducibly complex biochemical system, then it is despite the intrinsic properties or capacities of that mechanism. Thus, in saying that irreducibly complex biochemical systems are provably inaccessible to direct Darwinian pathways, design proponents are saying that the Darwinian mechanism has no intrinsic capacity for generating such systems except as vastly improbable or fortuitous events. Accordingly, to attribute irreducible complexity to a direct Darwinian pathway is like attributing Mount Rushmore to wind and erosion. There's a sheer possibility that wind and erosion could sculpt Mount Rushmore, but not a realistic one.

With direct Darwinian pathways ruled out, that leaves indirect Darwinian pathways. Here Behe's point is no longer logical but empirical. The fact is that for irreducibly complex biochemical systems, no indirect Darwinian pathways are known. At best, biologists have been able to isolate subsystems of such systems that perform other functions. But any reasonably complicated machine always includes subsystems that perform functions distinct from the original machine. So the mere occurrence or identification of subsystems that could perform some function on their own is no evidence for an indirect Darwinian pathway leading to the system. What's needed is a seamless Darwinian account that's both detailed and testable of how subsystems undergoing coevolution could gradually transform into an irreducibly complex system. No such accounts are available or forthcoming. Indeed, if such accounts were available, critics would merely need to cite them, and intelligent design would be finished.

Critics of Behe are at this point quick to throw the argument-from-ignorance objection his way, but this criticism can't be justified. A common way to formulate this criticism is to say, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But as with so many overused expressions, this one requires nuancing. Certainly this dictum appropriately characterizes many everyday circumstances. Imagine, for instance, someone feverishly hunting about the house for a missing set of car keys, searching under every object, casing the house, bringing in reinforcements and then, the next morning, when all hope is gone, finding them on top of the car outside. In this case the absence of evidence prior to finding the car keys was not evidence of absence. Yet with the car keys there was independent evidence of their existence in the first place.

But what if we weren't sure that there even were any car keys? The situation in evolutionary biology is even more extreme than that. One might not be sure our hypothetical set of car keys exist, but at least one has the reassurance that car keys exist generally. Indirect Darwinian pathways are more like the supposed leprechauns that Johnny is certain are hiding in his room. Imagine this child were so ardent and convincing that he set all of Scotland Yard, indeed some of the best minds of the age, onto the task of searching meticulously, tirelessly, decade after decade, for these supposed leprechauns, for any solid evidence at all of their prior habitation of the bedroom. And then imagine that in all those decades, the detectives, driven by gold fever for the leprechaun's treasure, let's say, never flagged in searching out and postulating new ways of catching a glimpse of a leprechaun, a leprechaun hair, a leprechaun fingerprint, any solid clue at all. After these many decades, with not a single solid clue to show for all that work, what should one say to the aging parents of the now aging boy if these parents decided there were no leprechauns in the boy's room? Would it be logical to shake your finger at the parents and tell them, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Step aside and let the experts get back to work." That would be absurd. And yet that, essentially, is what evolutionary biologists are telling us concerning that utterly fruitless search for credible indirect Darwinian pathways to account for irreducible complexity.

If after repeated attempts you don't find what you expect to find after looking in all the right places and if you never had any evidence that the thing you were looking for existed in the first place, then you have reason to think that the thing you are looking for doesn't exist at all. That's precisely Behe's point about indirect Darwinian pathways. (See his chapter in Darwin's Black Box titled "Publish or Perish.") It's not just that we don't know of such a pathway for, say, the bacterial flagellum (the irreducibly complex biochemical machine that has become the mascot of the intelligent design movement). It's that we don't know of such pathways for any such systems. The absence here is pervasive and systemic. That's why critics of Darwinism like Franklin Harold and James Shapiro (neither of which is an intelligent design supporter) argue that positing as-yet-undiscovered indirect Darwinian pathways for such systems constitute "wishful speculations."

Behe's logical point is that irreducible complexity renders biological structures provably inaccessible to direct Darwinian pathways. Behe's empirical point is that the failure of evolutionary biology to discover indirect Darwinian pathways leading to irreducibly complex biological structures is pervasive and systemic, and that such a failure is reason to doubt that indirect Darwinian pathways are the answer to irreducible complexity. The logical and empirical points together constitute a devastating indictment of the Darwinian mechanism, which has routinely been touted as capable of solving all problems of biological complexity once an initial life form is on the scene. Even so, the logical and empirical points together don't answer how one gets from the failure of Darwinism to account for irreducibly complex systems to the legitimacy of employing design to account for them.

This is where the third main point of Behe's project-Behe's explanatory point-comes in. Scientific explanations come in many forms and guises, but the one thing they cannot afford to be without is causal adequacy. A scientific explanation needs to invoke causal powers sufficient to explain the effect in question. Otherwise, the effect is unexplained. The effect in question for Behe is the irreducible complexity of certain biochem ical machines. How did such systems come about? Not by a direct Darwinian pathway, for irreducible complexity rules that out on logical grounds. And apparently not by indirect Darwinian pathways either, for the absence of scientific evidence here is complete. (Critics who claim otherwise are bluffing.) What's more, appealing to unknown material mechanisms is even more tenuous.

Thus, when it comes to irreducibly complex biochemical systems, there's no evidence that material mechanisms are causally adequate to bring them about. But what about intelligence? It is well known that intelligence produces irreducibly complex systems. (For example, humans regularly produce machines that exhibit irreducible complexity.) Intelligence is thus known to be causally adequate to bring about irreducible complexity. Behe's explanatory point, therefore, is that on the basis of causal adequacy, intelligent design is a better scientific explanation than Darwinism for the irreducible complexity of biochemical systems.

Behe's logical and empirical points are mainly negative: they focus on limitations of the Darwinian mechanism. Behe's explanatory point, by contrast, is positive: it provides positive grounds for thinking that irreducibly complex biochemical systems are in fact designed. One question about these points is now likely to remain. Behe uses the logical point to rule out direct Darwinian pathways and the empirical point to rule out indirect Darwinian pathways to irreducible complexity. But the absence of empirical evidence for direct Darwinian pathways leading to irreducible complexity is as complete as for indirect Darwinian pathways. It might seem, then, that the logical point is superfluous inasmuch as the empirical point dispenses with both types of Darwinian pathways. But in fact the logical point helps tighten the noose around Darwinism in a way that the empirical point can't.

If you look at the best confirmed examples of Darwinian evolution in the literature (from Darwin to the present), what you find is natural selection steadily improving a given feature that is performing a given function in a given way. Indeed, the very notion of "improvement" (which plays such an important role in Darwin's Origin of Species) typically connotes that a given thing is getting better in a given respect. Improvement in this sense corresponds to a direct Darwinian pathway. By contrast, an indirect Darwinian pathway (where one function gives way to another function and thus can no longer improve because it no longer exists), though often inferred by evolutionary biologists from fossil or molecular data, tends to be much more difficult to establish rigorously.

The reason is not hard to see: By definition natural selection selects for preexisting function. It cannot select for future function. Once a novel function is realized, the Darwinian mechanism can select for it as well. But making this transition is the hard part. How does one evolve from a system exhibiting a preexisting selectable function to a new system exhibiting a novel selectable function? Natural selection is no help here, and all the weight is on random variation to come up with the right and needed modifications during the crucial transition time when functions are changing (or, as Darwin put it in his Origin of Species, "unless profitable variations do occur, natural selection can do nothing"). The actual evidence that random variation can produce the successive modifications needed to evolve irreducible complexity is nil.

Behe's logical point about irreducible complexity ruling out direct Darwinian pathways therefore rules out the form of Darwinian evolution that is best confirmed. What's more, it rules out the only form of Darwinian evolution that is open to logical analysis. Indirect Darwinian pathways, by contrast, are so open-ended that no logical analysis is capable of constraining them. (Almost invariably they are left unspecified, thus rendering them neither falsifiable nor testable.) Behe's logical point therefore takes logic as far as it can in constraining the Darwinian mechanism and leaves empirical considerations to rule out what remains. And since logical inferences are inherently stronger than empirical inferences, Behe has made his critique of the Darwinian mechanism as strong and tight as possible. It's not just that certain biological systems are so complex that we can't imagine how they evolved by Darwinian pathways. Rather, we can show conclusively that they could not have evolved by direct Darwinian pathways and that indirect Darwinian pathways, which have always been on much less stable ground, are utterly without empirical support.

To sum up, Behe is significant in the debate between intelligent design and Darwinism because he has taught us how to evaluate the relative merits of each. He has done this by giving us the concept of irreducible complexity and by showing us how to employ it. By carefully analyzing and disentangling the logical, the empirical and the explanatory implications of irreducible complexity for the Darwinian mechanism, Behe has demonstrated that intelligent design is at the very least a viable contender in any attempt to explain the irreducible complexity of biochemical systems. What's more, he has shown how to bridge the scientific theory of design with our commonsense intuitions about design. In media reports on intelligent design, one often hears the following sound bite: "Life is too com plicated to have arisen by natural forces, so it must have been designed." This sound bite captures many people's intuitions about intelligent design, but it is too simplistic for scientific purposes. Behe has shown us how to interpret this claim, substituting the rigorously defined phrase irreducibly complex for the vague and undefined phrase too complicated, and he has shown us how to reason our way properly from the inadequacy of undirected natural forces to design.

THE DESIGN REVOLUTION

ANSWERING THE TOUGHEST QUESTIONS ABOUT INTELLIGENT DESIGN

William A. Dembski

Dembski on modern scepticism

 One of skepticism's patron saints, H. L. Mencken, remarked, "For every problem, there is a neat, simple solution, and it is always wrong." Yet in writing about Darwin's theory, Stephen Jay Gould remarked, "No great theory ever boasted such a simple structure" (quoted from Gould's introduction to Carl Zimmer's Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea). Intelligent design claims that Mencken's insight applies to evolutionary biology, overturning not just mechanistic accounts of evolution but skepticism itself.

Skepticism, to be true to its principles, must be willing to turn the light of scrutiny on anything. And yet that is precisely what it cannot afford to do in the controversy over evolution and intelligent design. The problem with skepticism is that it is not a pure skepticism. Rather, it is a selective skepticism that desires a neat and sanitized world which science can in principle fully characterize in terms of unbroken natural laws.

Indeed, why is the premier skeptic organization in the world known as CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal? (They sponsored the conference mentioned above.) Though I'm assured that the "COP" in CSICOP is purely coincidental, it is nonetheless singularly fitting. CSICOP is in the business of policing claims about the paranormal. The paranormal, by being other than normal, threatens the tidy world issuing from skepticism's materialistic conception of science.

No other conception of science will do for skepticism. The normal is what is describable by a materialistic science. The paranormal is what's not. Given the skeptic's faith that everything is ultimately normal, any claims about the paranormal must ultimately be bogus. And since intelligent design claims that an intelligence not ultimately reducible to material mechanisms might be responsible for the world and various things we find in the world (not least ourselves), it too is guilty of transgressing the normal and must be relegated to the paranormal.

There is an irony here. The skeptic's world, in which intelligence is not fundamental and the world is not designed, is a rational world because it proceeds by unbroken natural law: cause precedes effect with inviolable regularity. In short, everything proceeds "normally." On the other hand, the design theorist's world, in which intelligence is fundamental and the world is designed, is not a rational world because intelligence can do things that are unexpected. In short, it is a world in which some things proceed "paranormally."

To allow an unevolved intelligence a place in the world is, according to skepticism, to send the world into a tailspin. It is to exchange unbroken natural law for caprice and thereby to destroy science. And yet it is only by means of our intelligence that science is possible and that we understand the world. Thus, for the skeptic, the world is intelligible only if it starts off without intelligence and then evolves intelligence. If it starts out with intelligence and evolves intelligence because of a prior intelligence, then, for the skeptic, the world becomes unintelligible.

The logic here is flawed, but once in its grip, there is no way to escape its momentum. That is why evolution is a nonnegotiable for skepticism. For instance, on two occasions I offered to join the editorial advisory board of Michael Shermer's Skeptic magazine to be its resident skeptic regarding evolution. Though Shermer and I are quite friendly, he never took me up on my offer. Indeed, he can't afford to. To do so is to allow that an intelligence outside the world might have influence in the world. That would destroy the world's autonomy and render effectively impossible the global rejection of the paranormal that skepticism requires. It's no accident that the photo of Shermer which appears in his books shows him smiling with a bust of Darwin and a collection of writings by or about Darwin behind him.

Skepticism therefore faces a curious tension. On the one hand, to maintain credibility it must be willing to shine the light of scrutiny everywhere and thus, in principle, even on evolution. On the other hand, to be the scourge with which to destroy superstition and whip a gullible public into line, it must commit itself to a materialistic conception of science and thus cannot afford to question evolution. Intelligent design exploits this tension and thereby turns the tables on skepticism.

What, then, are skepticism's prospects for unseating intelligent design? To answer this question, let's review what intelligent design has going for it:

1. A method for design detection. There's much discussion about the validity of specified complexity as a method for design detection, but judging by the response it has elicited over the last five years, this method is not going away. Some scholars (such as Elliott Sober) think it merely codifies an argument from ignorance. Others (such as Paul Davies) think that it's onto something important. The point is that there are major players who are not intelligent design proponents who disagree. Such disagreement indicates that issues of real intellectual merit need to be decided and that we're not dealing with a crank theory.

2. Irreducibly complex biochemical systems. There exist systems like the bacterial flagellum. These exhibit specified complexity. Moreover, the biological community does not have a clue how they emerged by material mechanisms. The great promise of Darwinian and other naturalistic accounts of evolution was to show how known material mechanisms operating in known ways could produce all of biological complexity. That promise is now increasingly recognized as unfulfilled and even unfulfillable. Franklin Harold (who is not a design proponent), in his most recent book for Oxford University Press, The Way of the Cell, states, "There are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." Intelligent design contends that our ignorance here indicates not minor gaps in our knowledge of biological systems that promise readily to submit to tried-and-true mechanistic models but rather vast conceptual lacunae that are bridgeable only by radical ideas like design.

3. Challenge to the status quo. Let's face it, in educated circles Darwinism and other mechanistic accounts of evolution are utterly status quo. That has advantages and disadvantages for its proponents. On the one hand, it means that the full resources of the scientific and educational establishment are behind the evolutionary naturalists, which they can use to squelch dissent and push their agenda. On the other hand, it means that they are in danger of alienating the younger generation-especially to the extent that they are heavy-handed in enforcing materialist orthodoxy (and they've been exceedingly heavy-handed to date)-which thrives on rebellion against the status quo. Intelligent design appeals to the rebelliousness of youth.

4. The disconnect between high and mass culture. The educated elite love mechanistic evolution and the materialist science it helps to underwrite. On the other hand, the masses are by and large convinced of intelligent design. What's more, the masses ultimately hold the purse strings for the educated elite (in the form of educational funding, research funding, scholarships, etc.). This disconnect can be exploited. The advantage that mechanistic evolution has had thus far is providing a theoretical framework, however empirically inadequate, to account for the emergence of biological complexity. The disadvantage facing the intelligent-design-supporting masses is that they've had to rely almost exclusively on pretheoretic design intuitions. Intelligent design offers to replace those pretheoretic intuitions with a rigorous design-theoretic framework that underwrites those intuitions, thus allowing it to go toe-to-toe with standard evolutionary theory.

5. An emerging research community. Intelligent design is attracting bright young scholars who are totally committed to developing intelligent design as a research program. We're still thin on the ground, but the signs I see are very promising indeed. It's not enough merely to detect design, for once it's detected, it must be shown how design leads to fruitful biological insights that could not have been obtained by taking a purely materialist outlook. I'm beginning to see glimmers of such a thriving designtheoretic research program.

What's a skeptic to do against this onslaught, especially when there's a whole political dimension to the debate in which a public tired of being bullied by an intellectual elite finds in intelligent design a tool for liberation? Let me suggest to the skeptic the following action points:

1. Establish the right rhetorical tone. Emphasize science as a great force for enlightenment and contrast it sharply with fanatical religious fundamentalism. Then stress that intelligent design is essentially a religious movement. Generously use the "C-word" to confuse intelligent design with creationism, and emphasize the similarity of creationism with astrology, belief in a flat earth and holocaust denial. Once guilt by association is in place, play on the theme that intelligent design is "deeply flawed" and that the evidence for evolution is "overwhelming." Think of the phrases deeply flawed and overwhelming evidence not as actual criticisms or argu ments but as slogans that evoke the appropriate emotional response. (Compare them to "Don't leave home without it," "This Bud's for you," and "Just do it!") For the record, I own the domain names <www.deeply- flawed.com> and <www.overwhelmingevidence.com> (as well as <www.underwhelmingevidence.com>).

2. Argue for the superfluity of design. This action point is getting increasingly difficult to implement simply on the basis of empirical evidence, but by artificially defining science as an enterprise limited solely to material mechanisms, one conveniently eliminates design from scientific discussion. Thus, any gap in our knowledge of how material mechanisms brought about some biological system does not reflect an absence of material mechanisms in nature to produce the system or a requirement for design to account for the system, but only a gap in our knowledge that's readily filled by carrying on as science has been carrying on.

3. Play the suboptimality card. For most people the designer is a benevolent, wise God. This allows for the exploitation of cognitive dissonance by pointing to cases of incompetent or wicked design in nature. Intelligent design has good answers to this objection, but the problem of evil is wonderfully adept at clouding intellects. This is one place where skepticism does well exploiting emotional responses.

4. Achieve a scientific breakthrough. Provide detailed testable models of how irreducibly complex biochemical systems like the bacterial flagellum could have emerged by material mechanisms. I don't give this possibility much hope, but if skeptics could pull this off, intelligent design would have a lot of backpedaling to do.

5. Paint a more appealing world picture. Skepticism is at heart an austere enterprise. It works by negation. It makes a profession of shooting things down. This doesn't set well with a public that delights in novel possibilities. In his Art of Persuasion, Blaise Pascal wrote, "People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive." Poll after poll indicates that for most people a mechanistic form of evolution does not provide a compelling vision of life and the world. Providing such a vision is, in my view, skepticism's overriding task if it is to unseat intelligent design. Skeptics have my very best wishes for success in this enterprise.

William Dembski 

The Design Revolution 

Uncommon Dissent Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing

 John Wilson

  FOREWORD

For years now, the New York Review of Books has been sending a direct-mail letter that asks—in bright red letters—“Are you an intellectual?” I was glad to see that the subtitle of Uncommon Dissent is Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing. “Intellectual” is a perfectly good noun that has fallen on hard times, particularly among conservatives, where it is almost always used pejoratively.

An intellectual may be, but is not necessarily, a specialist. Not all academics are intellectuals; not all intellectuals are academics. To be an intellectual is to possess a hungry mind and a willingness to question received opinion. But, contrary to a fashionable perversion of the intellectual’s calling, intellectual is not a synonym for skeptic. Healthy skepticism is indeed essential to the intellectual life, but it must not become an end in itself. There is a reality to which we are all accountable, a reality that invites our understanding.

Since you have picked up Uncommon Dissent, there’s a good chance that you would have to answer yes to the NYRB’s question. And you may already know that the book you’re holding is dangerous; it may get you into trouble. By questioning Darwinism, you place yourself in the company of all the cranks who have violated the taboos enforced by our current opinion-makers.

 In many settings, the contempt of the enlightened won’t affect you. If, however, you are teaching at a college or university, the costs may be considerable. (False dramatics? Not at all. The art of blackballing is practiced with great skill and ruthlessness in academia.)

Of course, the ferocity of resistance merely underlines the need for informed dissent. The almost comically hyperbolic arrogance of the Darwinian establishment, well documented in William Dembski’s introduction  to this volume, is representative of a larger malaise. As Steve Fuller observes in his new book, Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science,

Popper’s view that a non-scientist might criticize science for failing to abide by its own publicly avowed standards is rarely found inside academia today. For those who have inherited Kuhn’s Cold War belief that normal science is a bulwark in a volatile world, it comes as no surprise that philosophers today would sooner criticize creationists for violating evolutionary strictures than evolutionists for violating more general scientific norms—an activity for which Popper had been notorious.

But there’s another, subtler danger to which almost every reader of this book is potentially vulnerable. The role of dissenter can be costly, but it can also be powerfully seductive. How easy it is, after reading a book such as this, to puff oneself up with pride, to wax dogmatic about the “crumbling edifice of evolutionary theory,” and to fall into the very arrogance that is characteristic of Darwinism at its worst.

If you really are an intellectual, and not what Solzhenitsyn calls a “smatterer,” you will finish this book with more questions than answers. You won’t simply accept the assertions of the authors gathered here, themselves a very diverse bunch; you’ll subject them to the same sort of searching critique they have brought to bear on Darwinism.

You will wonder, for starters, what precisely is meant by “Darwinism”—or “evolution,” for that matter, a notoriously slippery word. Is it the notion that life is merely a cosmic accident, the product of chance and natural selection? If so—and that is an essential aspect of the doctrine of some of the most visible proponents of Darwinism—there’s no reason not to toss it overboard.

But what about common descent? “Evolution,” Richard Dawkins writes in his introduction to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003, “is one of the most securely established facts in all science. The knowledge that we are cousins to apes, kangaroos, and bacteria is beyond all educated doubt.” Isn’t there abundant evidence that—in this limited but hardly insignificant sense—evolution is real, however open to dispute the adequacy of natural selection as its engine may be? (Even Richard Dawkins is right once in a while.)

What about scientists like Simon Conway Morris, the distinguished Cambridge paleobiologist whose book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans  in a Lonely Universe argues that the evolution of life reveals a pattern, an underlying direction, in which he finds “the richness of a Creation”? Nothing of this “complexity and beauty,” he adds, “presupposes, let alone proves, the existence of God, but all is congruent.” Is he right? If so, why? If not, why not? Part of your job as a reader of Uncommon Dissent is to read it in dialogue with books such as Life’s Solution or Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, a newly published collection of essays edited by Keith B. Miller.

Since I have given you the beginnings of a reading list, let me conclude with one of my favorite books on Darwinism—one that is unfairly neglected in the literature. It is a small children’s book, Yellow and Pink, written and illustrated by William Steig, who died in the fall of 2003 at the age of ninety-five. Steig, whose cartoons appeared in the New Yorker from 1930 on, was best known for his children’s books (including Shrek!, the basis for the hit movie).

Yellow and Pink was first published in 1984 and was reissued in 2003 just a few months before Steig’s death. It is the story, as the opening lines tell us, of “two small figures made of wood, … lying out in the sun one day on an old newspaper. One was short, fat, and painted pink; the other was tall, thin, and painted yellow.” They are wondering how they came to be there—indeed, how they came to exist in the first place.

Pink looks at his companion—“He found Yellow’s color, his well-chiseled head, his whole form, admirable”—and he decides: “Someone must have made us.”

Not so, counters Yellow: “I say we’re an accident, somehow or other we just happened.” And they begin a debate, each forcefully pressing his case.

I don’t want to reveal the rest of the plot and spoil it for you. But I will say this: on the issue at stake, Steig’s little fable is far more penetrating than whole stacks of books that have accumulated in my study. I hope you will put it on your own bookshelf, not far from Uncommon Dissent. 

(...)

Because of the myth of invincibility that now surrounds it, Darwinism has become monopolistic and imperialistic. Though often associated with “liberalism,” Darwinism as practiced today knows nothing of the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill. The proponents of “Darwinian liberalism” tolerate no dissent and regard all criticism of Darwinism’s fundamental tenets as false and reprehensible.

Yet according to Mill, “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” Mill expanded:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground,  and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.5Charles Darwin was Mill’s contemporary and fully accepted Mill’s classical liberalism. In the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”6

By contrast, many of Darwin’s contemporary disciples have turned stifling dissent into an art form. Because the myth of invincibility must be preserved at all costs, it is not acceptable to place doubts about Darwinism on the table for vigorous discussion. Rather, the doubts must be disqualified and repressed. To see this, consider the response by Darwinists to Senator Rick Santorum’s “Sense of the Senate” amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:

It is the sense of the Senate that (1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and (2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject.7An eminently reasonable amendment, no doubt. Indeed, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly for it (91-8). Even Senator Ted Kennedy, rarely an ally of Santorum’s, voted for it. What’s more, by merely reflecting the “sense of the Senate,” this amendment was nonbinding. And yet, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Center for Science Education, and the American Civil Liberties Union (to name but a few) were up in arms over this amendment. Why? Because evolution was singled out for special treatment and opened to critical scrutiny. Why, detractors of the amendment demanded, wasn’t general relativity or the atomic theory of matter singled out for similar treatment?

Comparisons of evolutionary theory with well-established theories of physics and chemistry display wishful thinking. The reason those theories were not singled out for critical scrutiny is, of course, because they are well established and evolutionary theory is not. This book will detail the weaknesses of Darwinian evolutionary theory and, going even further, argue that the preponderance of evidence goes against Darwinism.  Regardless of one’s point of view, it’s actually quite easy to see that Darwinism is not in the same league as the hard sciences. For instance, Darwinists will often compare their theory favorably to Einsteinian physics, claiming that Darwinism is just as well established as general relativity. Yet how many physicists, while arguing for the truth of Einsteinian physics, will claim that general relativity is as well established as Darwin’s theory? Zero.

Once Darwinism becomes a target for critical scrutiny, its proponents change the target. Thus, when David Berlinski criticized Darwinism in his December 2002 article in Commentary (titled “Has Darwin Met His Match?”), biologist Paul Gross took him to task for making “Darwinism” the topic of controversy. According to Gross, only “those who do not know much evolutionary biology” refer to something called “Darwinism.”8 Evolutionary biology, we are assured, is far richer than the caricature of it called Darwinism.

Despite such protestations, Darwinism is in fact the right target. It is no accident that in debates over biological evolution Darwin’s name keeps coming up. Repeated references to Darwin and Darwinism are not made simply out of respect for the history of the subject, as though evolutionary biology needed constantly to be reminded of its founder. Darwin’s theory constitutes the very core of evolutionary biology; he therefore looms larger than life in the study of biological origins. Indeed, nothing in evolutionary biology makes sense apart from Darwinism.

To see this, we need to understand Darwinism’s role in evolutionary biology. Darwinism is really two claims. The less crucial claim is that all organisms trace their lineage back to a universal common ancestor. Any two organisms are n-th cousins k-times removed where n and k depend on the two organisms in question. This claim is referred to as “common descent.” Although evolutionary biology is committed to common descent, that is not its central claim.

Rather, the central claim of evolutionary biology is that an unguided physical process can account for the emergence of all biological complexity and diversity. Filling in the details of that process remains a matter for debate among evolutionary biologists. Yet it is an in-house debate, and one essentially about details. In broad strokes, however, any unguided physical process capable of producing biological complexity must have three components: (1) hereditary transmission, (2) incidental change, and (3) natural selection.

Think of it this way: We start with some organism. It incurs some change. The change is incidental in the sense that it doesn’t anticipate  future changes that subsequent generations of organisms may experience (neo-Darwinism, for instance, treats such changes as random mutations or errors in genetic material). What’s more, incidental change is heritable and therefore can be transmitted to the next generation. Whether it actually is transmitted to the next generation and then preferentially preserved in subsequent generations, however, depends on whether the change is in some sense beneficial to the organism. If so, then natural selection will be likely to preserve organisms exhibiting that change.

This picture is perfectly general. As I already noted, it can accommodate neo-Darwinism. It can also accommodate Lamarckian evolution, whose incidental changes occur as organisms, simply by putting to use existing structures, enhance or modify the functionalities of those structures. It can accommodate Lynn Margulis’s idea of symbiogenetic evolution, whose incidental changes occur as different types of organisms come together to form a new, hybrid organism. And it can also accommodate other forms of incidental change, including genetic drift, lateral gene transfer, and the activity of regulatory genes in development.

Evolutionary biologists debate the precise role and extent of hereditary transmission and incidental change. The debate can even be quite sharp at times. But evolutionary biology leaves unchallenged Darwinism’s holy of holies—natural selection. Darwin himself was unclear about the mechanisms of hereditary transmission and incidental change. But whatever form they took, Darwin was convinced that natural selection was the key to harnessing them. The same is true for contemporary evolutionary biologists. That’s why to this day we hear repeated references to Darwin’s theory of natural selection but not to Darwin’s theory of variation or Darwin’s theory of inheritance.

Apart from design or teleology, what could coordinate the incidental changes that hereditary transmission passes from one generation to the next? To perform such coordination, evolution requires a substitute for a designer. Darwin’s claim to fame was to propose natural selection as a designer substitute. But natural selection is no substitute for intelligent coordination. All natural selection does is narrow the variability of incidental change by weeding out the less fit. What’s more, it acts on the spur of the moment, based solely on what the environment at present deems fit, and thus without any foresight of future possibilities. And yet this blind process, when coupled with another blind process (incidental change), is supposed to produce designs that exceed the capacities of any designers in our experience.

 Leaving aside small-scale evolutionary changes, such as insects developing insecticide resistance (which no one disputes), where is the evidence that natural selection can accomplish the intricacies of bioengineering that are manifest throughout the living world (such as producing insects in the first place)? Where is the evidence that the sorts of incidental changes required for large-scale evolution ever occur? The evidence simply isn’t there. Robert Koons (chapter 1) helps us appreciate what’s at stake by imagining what would happen to the germ theory of disease if scientists never found any microorganisms or viruses that produced diseases. That’s the problem with Darwinism: In place of detailed, testable accounts of how a complex biological system could realistically have emerged, Darwinism offers just-so stories about how such systems might have emerged in some idealized conceptual space far removed from biological reality.

Why, then, does Darwinism continue to garner such a huge following, especially among the intellectual elite? There are two reasons: (1) It provides a materialistic creation story that dispenses with any need for design, purpose, or God (which is convenient for those who want to escape the demands of religion, morality, and conscience). (2) The promise of getting design without a designer is incredibly seductive—it’s the ultimate free lunch. No wonder Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, credits Darwin with “the single best idea anyone has ever had.”9 Getting design without a designer is a good trick indeed.

But all good tricks need some sleight of hand to deflect critical scrutiny. With Darwinism, that sleight of hand takes the form of myths. Darwinism depends on several subsidiary myths to prop its primary myth—the myth of invincibility. Artfully invoked and applied, these subsidiary myths have been enormously successful at censoring all doubts about Darwinism. Altogether, there are four subsidiary myths, and it is instructive to see how they work in detail:

(1) The myth of fundamentalist intransigence. According to this myth, only religious fanatics oppose Darwinism. What else could prevent the immediate and cheerful acceptance of Darwinism except fundamentalist intransigence? Darwinism, to the convinced Darwinist, is a self-evident truth. Biologist Paul Ewald, for instance, writes: “You have heritable variation, and you’ve got differences in survival and reproduction among the variants. That’s the beauty of it. It has to be true—it’s like arithmetic. And if there is life on other planets, natural selection has to be the fundamental organizing principle there, too.”10 If Darwin’s theory is as sure as arithmetic, what could prevent people from seeing its truth?

 Perhaps the failure of people to accept Darwinian evolution is a failure of education. One frequently gets this sense from reading publications by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, and the National Association of Biology Teachers. If only people could be made to understand Darwin’s theory properly, they would readily sign off on it. But since Darwinists hold a monopoly on biology education in America, something else must be hindering Darwinism’s acceptance. Accordingly, a mindless fundamentalism must reign over the minds of a vast majority of Americans, leading them to dig in their heels and resist Darwinism’s truth, which otherwise would be plain for all to see.

Thus, what many Darwinists desire is not just more talented communicators to promote Darwinism in America’s biology classrooms, but an enforced educational and cultural policy for total worldview reprogramming, one that is sufficiently aggressive to capture and convert to Darwinism even the most recalcitrant among “religiously programmed” youth. That’s why Darwinists like Daniel Dennett, to all appearances a participant in and advocate of democracy, fantasize about quarantining religious parents. It seems ridiculous to convinced Darwinists like Dennett that the fault might lie with their theory and that the public might be picking up on faults inherent in that theory.

For the Darwinist, the myth of fundamentalist intransigence justifies all forms of character assassination, ad hominem attacks, guilt by association, and demonization. An increasing cultural groundswell against Darwinism has meant that Darwinists are no longer able to simply ignore their critics. Instead, they routinely begin their responses to critics by labeling them as creationists, which in the current intellectual climate is equivalent to being called a holocaust denier, a flat-earther, or a believer in horoscopes. Creationism, properly speaking, refers to a literal interpretation of Genesis in which God through special acts of creation brings the biophysical universe into existence in six literal twentyfour-hour days, somewhere in the last several thousand years. When Richard Dawkins replies to David Berlinski’s criticisms of Darwinism (see chapter 14), he will call Berlinski, who is a secular Jew, a “creationist.” This is not only name-calling, it is also incorrect. Recently Berlinski remarked: “I have no creationist agenda whatsoever and, beyond respecting the injunction to have a good time all the time, no religious principles, either.”11 If Berlinski can be branded a creationist, then woe to those who actually have religious convictions and oppose Darwinism.

(2) The Myth of Prometheus. This myth is the flipside of the previous one. If only religious crazies oppose Darwinism, then it is only  the intelligent and courageous who embrace Darwinism and fully accept its consequences. In the original myth, Prometheus brought fire to humanity and thus gave human beings control over nature (a power previously reserved to the gods). Prometheus did this at great personal cost, incurring the wrath of the gods, who chained him to a mountaintop and decreed that birds of prey should forever tear and consume his liver. By opposing arbitrary limitations that the gods imposed on humanity, Prometheus symbolized liberation from ignorance and superstition. In place of comforting myths that assure us of a special place in the great scheme of things, Prometheus teaches us to spurn the gods and stare the ultimate meaninglessness of reality in the eye without flinching.

Darwinists enjoy styling themselves as Prometheus’s heirs. Accordingly, they are humanity’s benefactors, conferring scientific insights that tell us the grim truth about our biological origins and thereby liberate us from our benighted fundamentalist past. Darwinism views the organic world as a great competition for life in which all living forms are ultimately destined for extinction. This is a bitter pill, but it is the best medicine we have. Fundamentalism, by contrast, is an opiate that causes us to sleepwalk through life, accepting fairy tales about our biological origins as well as fairy tales about any life beyond death. (Conflating the language of fairy tales with the language of ordinary religious belief is a favorite among more extreme Darwinists such as Steven Weinberg.)

The myth of Prometheus has been a public relations bonanza for Darwinists, helping them to score some of their best propaganda points. Take, for instance, the movie Inherit the Wind, a fictional portrayal of the Scopes monkey trial in which the forces of reason in the guise of Darwinism struggle against the mindless fundamentalism of a backwater town. The movie portrays Darwinism as the defender of scientific truth and intellectual honesty and also as the great liberator from religious bigotry. Given only this movie, who in their right mind would not support Darwinism? Notwithstanding, the actual Scopes trial, as Edward Sisson recounts in chapter 5 of this book, provided a quite different picture. Clarence Darrow, the Darwinist attorney who defended Scopes, carefully arranged the trial so that Darwinism was never subjected to cross-examination.

Although the myth of Prometheus has lofty pretensions, for many Darwinists it provides an excuse for elitism and snobbery. Accordingly, they divide the world into the moronic masses who reject Darwinism and its consequences, and the smart people (themselves) who believe it. Take Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett’s latest attempt to make atheism more alluring to the wider culture. They propose the word “bright”  to serve the same role with respect to atheism as the word “gay” serves with respect to homosexuality. Dawkins writes:

Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, of Sacramento, California, have set out to coin a new word, a new “gay.” Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy.… Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright. Bright? Yes, bright. Bright is the word, the new noun. I am a bright. You are a bright. She is a bright. We are the brights. Isn’t it about time you came out as a bright? Is he a bright? I can’t imagine falling for a woman who was not a bright. The website www.celeb-atheists.com suggests numerous intellectuals and other famous people are brights.… A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic world view.… You can sign on as a bright at www.the-brights.net.12Since an atheistic worldview is best nourished on Darwinism (it was Dawkins, after all, who said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist), it follows that “brights” are also Darwinists. Perhaps in the future we shall see articles and books about “Darwin’s Bright Idea.”

(3) The myth of victory past. A scene in the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup illustrates this myth. Groucho Marx, president of Freedonia, presides over a meeting of the cabinet. The following exchange ensues between Groucho and one of Freedonia’s ministers:

Groucho: “And now, members of the Cabinet, we’ll take up old business.”

Minister: “I wish to discuss the Tariff!”

Groucho: “Sit down, that’s new business! No old business? Very well—then we’ll take up new business”

Minister: “Now about that Tariff …”

Groucho: “Too late—that’s old business already!”

This exchange epitomizes Darwinism’s handling of criticism. When a valid criticism of Darwinism is first proposed, it is dismissed without an adequate response, either on a technicality or with some irrelevant point, or is simply ignored. As time passes, people forget that Darwinists never adequately met the criticism. But Darwinism is still calling the shots. Since the criticism failed to dislodge Darwinism, the criticism itself  must have been discredited or refuted somewhere. Thereafter the criticism becomes known as “that discredited criticism that was refuted a long time ago.” And, after that, even to raise the criticism betrays an outdated conception of evolutionary theory. In this way, the criticism, though entirely valid, simply vanishes into oblivion. With the internet and an emerging intellectual community that refuses to be cowed by Darwinist bullying, that scenario is beginning to change, but historically that is how Darwinists have handled criticism.

Michael Behe’s challenge to Darwinian evolution provides a recent case study in the myth of victory past. Certain biochemical systems are molecular machines of great sophistication and intricacy whose parts are each indispensable to the system’s function. Such systems are, as Behe defines them in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, irreducibly complex. What’s more, as Behe also notes, such systems resist Darwinian explanations. Indeed, the biological community has no detailed, testable proposals for how irreducibly complex systems might have arisen through Darwinian means, only a variety of wishful speculations. Biologists like James Shapiro and Franklin Harold, who have no “creationist” or “intelligent design” agenda, admit that this is so.13 Nevertheless, it is routine among Darwinists to declare that Behe’s ideas have been decisively refuted and even to provide references to the biological literature in which Behe’s ideas are supposed to have been refuted.But what happens when one tracks down those references in the biological literature that are said to have refuted Behe? David Ray Griffin, a philosopher with no animus against Darwinism or sympathy for Behe’s intelligent design perspective, remarks:

The response I have received from repeating Behe’s claim [that the evolutionary literature fails to account for irreducible complexity] is that I obviously have not read the right books. There are, I am assured, evolutionists who have described how the transitions in question could have occurred [i.e., how, contra Behe, Darwinian pathways could lead to irreducibly complex biochemical systems]. When I ask in which books I can find these discussions, however, I either get no answer or else some titles that, upon examination, do not in fact contain the promised accounts. That such accounts exist seems to be something that is widely known, but I have yet to encounter someone who knows where they exist.

(...)

As this book shows, the public is right to remain unconvinced. This book divides into four parts. The first part shows why Darwinism faces a growing crisis of confidence. Robert Koons starts the ball rolling with his chapter “The Check Is in the Mail.” In this chapter Koons details how Darwinism substitutes theft for honest labor by insulating Darwinian theories from all possible criticism. Koons argues that the real motivation for Darwinism is to be found in a thoroughgoing metaphysical attack on the idea of agency, both human and divine, that has been ongoing for two hundred years. He also suggests that by undermining the idea of reasonable and responsible agency, Darwinism helped prepare the way for a variety of destructive experiments in social engineering.  Next comes Phillip Johnson’s well-known essay “Darwinism as Dogma,” which originally appeared back in 1990 in First Things. This essay masterfully disentangles Darwinism’s interweaving with materialist philosophy. And finally, there is Marcel-Paul Schützenberger’s 1996 interview with La Recherche, conducted shortly before his death, in which he recapitulates his ideas about functional complexity and the challenge this feature of biological systems poses to Darwinism. The original interview was in French and was translated into English by David Berlinski for the journal Origins & Design. It has been further edited here for style and clarity.

Part two focuses on Darwinism’s cultural inroads. Nancy Pearcey starts things off with a sweeping overview. The effect of reading her essay is dizzying as she documents how Darwinism has inveigled itself into one academic discipline after another. Next comes Edward Sisson’s brilliant analysis of how the professionalization of science has rendered science incapable of correcting itself in the case of Darwinism. Essentially, the critic of Darwinism faces a prisoner’s dilemma in which perpetuating Darwinian falsehoods, either by actively promoting them or by silent complicity, is the best strategy for advancing one’s career. J. Budziszewski’s chapter on natural law is a much needed corrective to an emerging literature that seeks to combat postmodern ethical relativism with a distorted version of natural law based on Darwinism. And finally, Frank Tipler’s chapter on refereed journals shows how the peerreview process increasingly stifles scientific creativity and enforces orthodoxies like Darwinism. Although the chapter was specifically commissioned for this volume, Tipler’s analysis has such huge public policy implications for the practice and funding of science that his chapter has now also appeared as an article on the web.25Part three examines the dynamics of converting to and deconverting from Darwinism. Often, in the writings of Darwinists (e.g., Ronald Numbers’s book The Creationists), one gets the impression that the more educated people become, the more reasonable Darwinism seems. Part three shows that this is not the case. Michael Behe, raised as a Roman Catholic and trained as a biologist, accepted Darwinism as he began his scientific career. Only later, as he reflected on what he had been taught about evolution, did his doubts about Darwinism arise and finally lead to a full deconversion from Darwinism. Michael Denton, by contrast, never accepted Darwinism. Though early in his life he rejected Darwinism because of his religious faith, Denton continued to reject Darwinism even after he had shed his religious faith and learned an awful lot of biology. James Barham began as Christian fundamentalist, turned to a  hardcore atheistic brand of Darwinism, and then, after thinking deeply about the nature of biological function, turned to a naturalized form of teleology at odds with both fundamentalism and Darwinism.

Finally, part four examines the nitty-gritty of why Darwinism is a failed intellectual project. After reviewing and overturning many of the key evidences used to prop Darwinism, Cornelius Hunter shows why Darwinism should properly be regarded not as a positive scientific research program but as a reactionary metaphysical program whose justification depends intrinsically on naive assumptions about what God would and would not have done in designing biological systems. Next Roland Hirsch overviews many of the recent advances in molecular biology and biochemistry, showing how Darwinism has failed either to anticipate or to explain them. After that, Christopher Langan carefully examines the nature of causality and shows how Darwinism depends on a superficial analysis of causality to hide its fundamental conceptual problems. Finally, we come to the chapter that inspired this book, David Berlinski’s June 1996 Commentary essay, “The Deniable Darwin.” In exposing Darwinism’s failure to resolve biology’s information problem, this essay provoked an enormous response (over thirty published letters pro and con). In addition to the essay, this chapter includes some of the key letters by Darwinists critical of Berlinski’s essay. It also includes Berlinski’s replies to these critics.

In commending this volume to the reader, I wish to leave Darwinists with this closing thought: You’ve had it way too easy until now. It is no longer credible to conflate informed criticism of Darwinism with ignorance, stupidity, insanity, wickedness, or brainwashing. Informed critiques of Darwinism have consistently appeared ever since Darwin published his Origin of Species (cf. the work of Louis Agassiz, St. George Mivart, Richard Goldschmidt, Pierre Grassé, Gerald Kerkut, and Michael Polanyi). Unfortunately, because Darwinism’s myths are so entrenched, such critiques have until now been unable to reach a critical mass and actually overthrow Darwinism. That is now changing. We’ll know that a critical mass has been achieved when it becomes widely acceptable among intellectuals to challenge Darwinism. When that happens—when it becomes acceptable to say that the emperor has no clothes—Darwin’s actual theory will assume the modest role in science that it deserves and Darwinism’s grandiose pretensions will become dissertation fodder for nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history. In other words, Darwinism will be history.