For the Rock Record: Geologists on Intelligent Design

eight · On the Origin of Species andthe Limits of Science

141 e i g h t · On the Origin of Species and the Limits of Science david w. goldsmith Currently the United States is home to a small but mobilized grassroots effort to have the model of intelligent design (ID) integrated into public school science curricula. What might seem strange is that many of the leading advocates for ID are well aware that by most current definitions, ID does not qualify as science (CSC Top Questions). Many ID advocates admit that their methods and conclusions go beyond what are conventionally accepted as the limits of appropriate scienti fic explanations; but this, they claim, betrays a flaw in our current conceptions of science. Truth, they say, lies beyond the arbitrary rules of scientific orthodoxy, and only by pushing those boundaries can we find the true nature of the universe. Unfortunately for its proponents, ID makes no compelling claims as to why its methods should be admitted into the fold of legitimate science. In this essay, a comparison of ID with natural selection, a theory that in fact broke new methodological ground in the past, will demonstrate that the exclusion of ID from proper science is due not to some shortsightedness on the part of the scientific community, but to ID’s own implicit weaknesses. ID is not the first theory that has challenged the scientific community to rethink the limits of the scientific method. In some cases, revolutionary discoveries have required scientists to discard everything they previously thought about a subject or its proper method of study. When Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species, many of his critics seized on his methods just as fiercely as they did on his conclusions. The resulting debate among the scientific community helped to 142 · d a v i d w . g o l d s m i t h expand the toolbox of scientific investigation. Darwin’s book literally changed what it meant for a theory to be considered scientific (Ellegård 1957). In the case of ID, however, the conflict between theory and scientific norms reflects not a need to expand our definition of science but rather a need to clarify the boundaries of science. A comparison of the intellectual contexts in which natural selection and modern ID were first proposed makes apparent the important differences in their relationships with contemporary scientific thought. Darwin was an integral part of a wider intellectual movement. Victorian philosophers of science, including William Whewell (1840) and John Stuart Mill (1843), were already arguing for a broader range of acceptable scientific methodologies. Darwin was then an exemplar of how these new methodologies could be used to explore nature. ID advocates, on the other hand, offer no independent justification for an expansion of scientific norms beyond promoting their own arguments. The few attempts that have been made to broaden state science standards to include ID are not reflective of a broader intellectual movement. Instead, they are a type of special pleading designed purely for the purpose of legitimizing ID after the fact. Taken to their logical conclusions, the type of pseudoscientific methods that ID adherents advocate would actually weaken the ability of all scientists to posit any acceptable explanations. ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES AND ITS INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Perhaps appropriately, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection did not originate fully formed. The idea that human life may have originated from some earlier ancestral species can be traced all the way back to the Greek philosopher Anaximander in the sixth century BCE. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries , these notions of transformational biology were even experiencing a mild revival through the works of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin. What made Charles Darwin’s work controversial was not simply the ideas that he proposed, but how he defended those ideas. In publishing On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin not only immersed himself in the scientific debate over life’s history, the pattern of diversification of life after its origin from one or a few original forms. He also was engrossed in the philosophical debate over the limits of science. Prior to the Victorian Age, British o r i g i n o f s p e c i e s a n d l i...