The Panda's Black Box: Opening up the Intelligent Design Controversy

1 Introduction: The Panda’s Black Box

When the topic of the Intelligent Design controversy comes up, my biologist-friends often shrug and laugh, “What controversy?” This remark illustrates two key themes. First, among biologists, there is no controversy over Intelligent Design. There are real controversies within evolutionary biology, such as over the role and importance of neutral evolution versus natural selection and over the relative importance of molecular and fossil data. But ID is not one of them. Biologists—whether atheist, animist, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, or Jewish—simply do not take Intelligent Design seriously as an evolutionary mechanism. Second, the remark reflects a contempt for the larger controversy of which Intelligent Design is only a part. Science has been the dominant cultural enterprise of the twentieth century, and biology is now the queen of the sciences. The basic claims of biology—the evolution of life, the role of genes in heredity, the material basis of mind—are as well supported as the claim that the earth revolves around the sun. As a consequence, it has become easy to believe that biology can explain anything about any living thing. In recent years, we have seen biological explanations seep into such unlikely venues as international relations, literature, and even religion itself. The biological worldview is so well supported by eviIntroduction The Panda’s Black Box nathaniel c. comfort 1 dence, so coherent theoretically, so compelling to anyone not dogmatically mystical, that many of those insulated by ivy-covered laboratory walls find it inconceivable that anyone would challenge it. Yet challenge it they do, and when the scientific community dismisses the challengers as either ignorant or stupid, the public—many of whom accept science’s authority in matters of nature but not of morals—tends to see the disingenuous design proponents as paragons of intellectual honesty and integrity. Religion and science may be reconcilable philosophically, but they are locked in a war for cultural authority. To be sure, science has its activists—bright, worldly, politically sophisticated observers and spokesmen—and they are deeply, perhaps rightly, concerned about the status of science. But they are a minority. Most scientists prefer to practice their politics in the circumscribed worlds of the department, university, and funding agencies and committees, rather than on the public stage. “Teach the controversy,” say the design proponents. They claim only to want fair, open-minded discussion of the alternatives to Darwinian evolution in public biology classrooms. Their principal tool for teaching the controversy is the “supplemental” textbook Of Pandas and People. The panda became the emblem of Intelligent Design in 2005, after Mike Argento, a columnist for the York, Pennsylvania, Daily Record, dubbed the Intelligent Design trial in Dover the “Panda trial.” Yet teaching the controversy in biology class puts the panda in a black box. It deliberately misconstrues “the controversy” as being about the biological evidence and so masks the larger cultural and political debate with scientific language. By all means, let us teach the controversy—but not in biology class. We need the tools of the humanities to peel away the rhetoric and the politics, to see what the controversy is really about. We must open the panda’s black box. Let us begin by recognizing the controversy as a debate between anti-Darwinists and anti-creationists, rather than creationists and evolutionists. Not all creationists are anti-Darwinists and not all evolutionists are anticreationists. The debate is between a small, highly vocal subset of the populations 2 Nathaniel C. Comfort each side claims to represent. Recalling this is the first step in resolving the apparent paradox of how such an antiscientific movement could garner so much attention at a historical moment when the life sciences have achieved unprecedented status and power. One point on which anti-Darwinists and anticreationists agree is that this is a pitched battle between dogmatic religious fanatics on the one hand, and rigorous, fair-minded scientists on the other. However, which side is which depends on who you read. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the philosopher and ardent anticreationist Daniel Dennett wrote that there were “no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism” and followed with a discussion of the creation scientists’ campaign to have creation science taught alongside evolution in schools. But Dennett himself has been called a fundamentalist—and by no less than the distinguished evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould. Reviewing The Devil’s Chaplain by the...