by Lenny Flank
(c) copyright 2006
Of all the goals and aims listed in the Wedge Document, the most important for Design "theory" is:
"Phase I is the essential component of everything that comes afterward. Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade. A lesson we have learned from the history of science is that it is unnecessary to outnumber the opposing establishment. Scientific revolutions are usually staged by an initially small and relatively young group of scientists who are not blinded by the prevailing prejudices and who are able to do creative work at the pressure points, that is, on those critical issues upon which whole systems of thought hinge. So, in Phase I we are supporting vital witting and research at the sites most likely to crack the materialist edifice." (Wedge Document)
While the public-relations and political efforts of the Wedge strategy were spectacular successes for the ID movement, the effort to publish scientific articles in peer-reviewed science journals supportive of ID has been an utter failure. Only one ID article has ever appeared in any peer-reviewed science journal, and it did more harm for ID than good.
In their 2003 book Darwinism, Design and Public Education, DI Fellows Stephen Meyer and John Angus Campbell devoted an entire chapter to what they called "The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang". In it, they repeated, almost word for word, all of the "Cambrian explosion" arguments that had been made thirty years earlier by the creation "scientists":
Organisms such as trilobites (phylum Arthropoda), with their articulated body plans, intricate nervous systems, and compound eyes, first appear fully formed at the beginning of the Cambrian explosion along with many other phyla of equal complexity.
To say that the fauna of the Cambrian period appeared in a geologically sudden manner also implies the absence of clear transitional intermediates connecting the complex Cambrian animals with those simpler living forms found in lower strata. Indeed, in almost all cases, the body plans and structures present in Cambrian period animals have no clear morphological antecedents in earlier strata.
A third feature of the Cambrian explosion (as well as the subsequent fossil record) bears mentioning. The major body plans that arise in the Cambrian period exhibit considerable morphological isolation from one another (or “disparity”) and then subsequent “stasis.” Though all Cambrian and subsequent animals fall clearly within one of a limited number of basic body plans, each of these body plans exhibits clear morphological differences (and thus disparity) from the others.17 The animal body plans (as represented in the fossil record) do not grade imperceptibly one into another, either at a specific time in geological history or over the course of geologicalhistory. Instead, the body plans of the animals characterizing the separate phyla maintain their distinctive morphological and organizational features and thus their isolation from one another, over time.
Not only have expected transitional forms not turned up, but the pattern of the sudden appearance of novel structure has become more
pronounced. Massive new fossil discoveries in the rocks of the Burgess Shale in Canada and in the Yuanshan Formation near Chengjiang, China, have documented many previously unknown Cambrian phyla, thus only increasing the number of expected and missing transitional intermediates required on a Darwinian account of the emergence of new living forms.We have argued that the two most widely held materialistic mechanisms for generating biological form are not causally adequate to produce the discrete increases of specified complexity or information that would have been necessary to produce the new Cambrian animals.
What natural selection lacks, intelligent selection—that is, design— provides. Agents can arrange matter with distant goals in mind. In their use of language, intelligent human agents also routinely “find” highly isolated and improbable functional sequences within a vast space of combinatorial possibilities. Analysis of the problem of the origin of biological information exposes a deficiency in the causal powers of natural selection that corresponds precisely to powers that agents are uniquely known to possess. Agents do have foresight. Agents can also select functional goals before they exist. They can devise or select material means to meet those goals from among an array of other possible states and then actualize those goals in accord with a preconceived design and independent set of functional requirements. The causal powers that natural selection lacks— almost by definition—are associated with the attributes of consciousness, rationality, and purposive intelligence. Thus, by invoking intelligent design to explain the origin of new information, design theorists are not positing an arbitrary explanatory element unmotivated by a consideration of the evidence. Instead, they are positing an entity with precisely the attributes and causal powers that the phenomenon in question requires as a condition of its production and explanation.
A year later, this ID tract reappeared in shortened form as a peer-reviewed article in The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scientific journal that normally devoted itself to routine taxonomic descriptions. The article, by Stephen Meyer, was entitled, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories", and it repeated most of the chapter from Darwinism, Design and Public Education, and added a few other standard ID arguments:
Is a new and specifically causal theory needed to explain the origination of biological form?
This review will address these questions. It will do so by analyzing the problem of the origination of organismal form (and the corresponding emergence of higher taxa) from a particular theoretical standpoint. Specifically, it will treat the problem of the origination of the higher taxonomic groups as a manifestation of a deeper problem, namely, the problem of the origin of the information (whether genetic or epigenetic) that, as it will be argued, is necessary to generate morphological novelty.
During the Cambrian, many novel animal forms and body plans (representing new phyla, subphyla and classes) arose in a geologically brief period of time. The following information-based analysis of the Cambrian explosion will support the claim of recent authors such as Muller and Newman that the mechanism of selection and genetic mutation does not constitute an adequate causal explanation of the origination of biological form in the higher taxonomic groups. It will also suggest the need to explore other possible causal factors for the origin of form and information during the evolution of life and will examine some other possibilities that have been proposed.
The Cambrian explosion thus marked a major episode of morphogenesis in which many new and disparate organismal forms arose in a geologically brief period of time.
To say that the fauna of the Cambrian period appeared in a geologically sudden manner also implies the absence of clear transitional intermediate forms connecting Cambrian animals with simpler pre-Cambrian forms. And, indeed, in almost all cases, the Cambrian animals have no clear morphological antecedents in earlier Vendian or Precambrian fauna
The Cambrian explosion represents a remarkable jump in the specified complexity or “complex specified information” (CSI) of the biological world.
First, the possibility of design as an explanation follows logically from a consideration of the deficiencies of neo-Darwinism and other current theories as explanations for some of the more striking “appearances of design” in biological systems.
But does neo-Darwinism, or any other fully materialistic model, explain all appearances of design in biology, including the body plans and information that characterize living systems? Arguably, biological forms--such as the structure of a chambered nautilus, the organization of a trilobite, the functional integration of parts in an eye or molecular machine--attract our attention in part because the organized complexity of such systems seems reminiscent of our own designs. Yet, this review has argued that neo-Darwinism does not adequately account for the origin of all appearances of design, especially if one considers animal body plans, and the information necessary to construct them, as especially striking examples of the appearance of design in living systems.
An experience-based analysis of the causal powers of various explanatory hypotheses suggests purposive or intelligent design as a causally adequate--and perhaps the most causally adequate--explanation for the origin of the complex specified information required to build the Cambrian animals and the novel forms they represent. For this reason, recent scientific interest in the design hypothesis is unlikely to abate as biologists continue to wrestle with the problem of the origination of biological form and the higher taxa. (Meyer, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 2004, pp 213 - 239)
The article provoked a storm of protest from scientists, who flooded the journal with letters pointing out that Meyer's piece was not only inaccurate and mistaken, but also simply repeated the same arguments that had been made decades before by creation "scientists". As it turned out, the paper had been accepted for publication by editor Richard von Sternberg, who was himelf on the editorial board of a creation "scientist" organization called the Baraminology Study Group at Bryan College in Tennessee. As we have already seen, "baramin" is the term that creation "scientists" use for "created kind" when they want to sound nice and scientific.
In the very next issue of the journal, Meyer's paper was withdrawn:
STATEMENT FROM THE COUNCIL OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON
The paper by Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," in vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239 of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was published at the discretion of the former editor, Richard v. Sternberg. Contrary to typical editorial practices, the paper was published without review by any associate editor; Sternberg handled the entire review process. The Council, which includes officers, elected councilors, and past presidents, and the associate editors would have deemed the paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings because the subject matter represents such a significant departure from the nearly purely systematic content for which this journal has been known throughout its 122-year history. For the same reason, the journal will not publish a rebuttal to the thesis of the paper, the superiority of intelligent design (ID) over evolution as an explanation of the emergence of Cambrian body-plan diversity. The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2002/1106id2.shtml), which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity. Accordingly, the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.
We have reviewed and revised editorial policies to ensure that the goals of the Society, as reflected in its journal, are clearly understood by all. Through a web presence (http://www.biolsocwash.org) and improvements in the journal, the Society hopes not only to continue but to increase its service to the world community of systematic biologists.