Wall Street Journal Editorial
“Faith in Theory”
Why “intelligent design” simply isn’t science.
BY JAMES Q. WILSON
Monday, December 26, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
When a federal judge in Pennsylvania struck down the efforts of a local school board to teach “intelligent design,” he rightly criticized the wholly unscientific nature of that enterprise. Some people will disagree with his view, arguing that evolution is a “theory” and intelligent design is a “theory,” so students should look at both theories.
But this view confuses the meaning of the word “theory.” In science, a theory states a relationship between two or more things (scientists like to call them “variables”) that can be tested by factual observations. We have a “theory of gravity” that predicts the speed at which two objects will fall toward one another, the path on which a satellite must travel if it is to maintain a constant distance from the earth, and the position that a moon will keep with respect to its associated planet.
This theory has been tested rigorously, so much so that we can now launch a satellite and know exactly where it must be in space in order to keep it rotating around the earth. It was not always that way. From classical times to the Middle Ages, many important thinkers thought that the speed with which an object falls toward the earth will depend on its weight. We now know that this view is false. In a vacuum, the two objects will fall at the same speed and, thanks to Newton, we know the formula with which to calculate that speed.
The other meaning of theory is the popular and not the scientific one. People use “theory” when they mean a guess, a faith or an idea. A theory in this sense does not state a testable relationship between two or more things. It is a belief that may be true, but its truth cannot be tested by scientific inquiry. One such theory is that God exists and intervenes in human life in ways that affect the outcome of human life. God may well exist, and He may well help people overcome problems or even (if we believe certain athletes) determine the outcome of a game. But that theory cannot be tested. There is no way anyone has found that we can prove empirically that God exists or that His action has affected some human life. If such a test could be found, the scientist who executed it would overnight become a hero.
Evolution is a theory in the scientific sense. It has been tested repeatedly by examining the remains of now-extinct creatures to see how one species has emerged to replace another. Even today we can see some kinds of evolution at work, as when scholars watch how birds on the Galapagos Islands adapt their beak size from generation to generation to the food supplies they encounter.
The theory of evolution has not been proved as fully as the theory of gravity. There are many gaps in what we know about prehistoric creatures. But all that we have learned is consistent with the view that the creatures we encounter today had ancestors from which they evolved. This view, which is literally the only scientific defensible theory of the origin of species, does not by any means rule out the idea that God exists.
What existed before the Big Bang created the universe? Is there an afterlife of heaven (or hell) that awaits us after we die? Can a faith in God change our lives because of how God acts toward us? There are religious scientists who believe that God exists and operates on us today and there are scientists who reject the idea of God and his benign interventions.
Isaac Newton was a deeply religious man. No doubt he thought that the Newtonian laws he discovered existed because of God’s handiwork. Charles Darwin, though he started his adult life as a deep believer and a student intending to enter the ministry, abandoned any belief that God has created animal species and replaced that view with his extraordinary, and largely correct, theory of evolution.
Proponents of intelligent design respond by saying that there are some things in the natural world that are so complex that they could not have been created by “accident.” They often use the mousetrap as a simile. We can have all of the parts of a trap–a board, a spring, a clamp–but it will not be a mousetrap unless someone assembles it. The assembler is the “intelligent designer.”
But since mousetraps are not created by nature but are manufactured by people, we must ask them what part of natural life is so irreducibly complex that it could not have evolved? Some have suggested that the human eye is an example. But the eye has been studied for decades in ways strongly suggesting that it has evolved. At first there were light-sensitive plates in prehistoric creatures that enabled them to move toward and away from illumination. For a few animals, these light-sensitive plates were more precise. This was the result of genetic differences: Just as a (very) few people today can see a baseball as well as Ted Williams could, so then some creatures were able not only to detect light but to see shapes or colors in the light.
When those talented creatures lived in a world that rewarded such precision, they reproduced and untalented creatures died out. Maybe the talented ones were better able to find food or avoid being eaten and the untalented ones could not. These first steps were followed, over millions of years, by more adaptations so that genetic accidents that made it possible for some creatures to see very tiny objects or see at great distances had an evolutionary advantage over ones that could not do these things.
But if an intelligent designer had created the human eye, He (or She) made some big mistakes. The eye has a blind spot in the middle that reduces the eye’s capacity to see. Other creatures, more dependent on sharp eyesight than are we, do not have this blind spot. Some people are colorblind and others must start wearing glasses when they are small children. All of these variations and shortcomings are consistent with evolution. None is consistent with the view that the eye was designed by an intelligent being.
What schools should do is teach evolution emphasizing both its successes and its still unexplained limitations. Evolution, like almost every scientific theory, has some problems. But they are not the kinds of problems that can be solved by assuming that an intelligent designer (whom ID advocates will tell you privately is God) created life. There is not a shred of evidence to support this theory, one that has been around since the critics of Darwin began writing in the 19th century.
Some people worry that if evolution is a useful (and, so far, correct) theory, we should still see it at work all around us. We don’t. But we can see it if we take a long enough time frame. Mankind has been on this earth for about 100,000 years. In that time there have been changes in how people appear, but they have occurred very slowly. After all, 1,000 centuries is just a blink in geological time.
Besides, the modern world has created an environment by means of public health measures, the reduction in crime rates, and improved levels of diet that have sharply reduced the environmental variation that is necessary to reward some genetic mutations and penalize others. But 100,000 years from now, will the environment change so much that people who now have quirky oddities will become the dominant group in society? Maybe.
Mr. Wilson has taught at Harvard, UCLA and Pepperdine, and is the author, among other books, of “The Moral Sense” (Free Press, 1997).
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