DAVID L. RECTOR -- Community Commentary

In her rebuttal to Eleanor Egan (“Educators should be able to

challenge evolutionary theory,” Jan. 11), Wendy Leece has once more

muddied the waters of public discourse with unverifiable statements and

religious buzzwords.

She ends her rebuttal by calling for more religion in public schools,

even though that is neither permitted under the Constitution nor

desirable in a pluralistic society -- especially because belief in a

conflict between evolution and religion is peculiar to America and a

conservative fraction of American Protestants.

The substantive point of Leece’s article is to argue for intelligent

design. She needs to understand better what she is talking about: What

intelligent design is and is not, and the nature of the evidence

presented to the public by the source she references. She is correct that

the source, the Discovery Institute, https://www.discovery.org, is not the

usual crackpot creationist organization. The organization is searching

for the Holy Grail of anti-evolutionists, an irreducibly complex

structure.

An irreducibly complex structure is a structure that would be useless

if it were any simpler. For example, an insect wing would be

aerodynamically useless if it were smaller than a certain size. Such a

structure could not evolve (so it is said) by the small changes required

by natural selection. Darwin proposed a solution for the problem of

evolution of such structures. He suggested that a structure like a wing,

but smaller, might be good for something else, say heat exchange. The

general reader can find an excellent account of these issues in “Not

Necessarily a Wing,” by Stephen J. Gould, in his collection, “Bully For

Brontosaurus.”

Those searching for irreducibly complex structures further assert that

such a structure would argue for intelligent design. Here they are

treading on quicksand. They think of intelligence as a free lunch. I am a

mathematician; I create complex structures for a living and teach others

to do so. It’s hard work, much of it trial and error. Great leaps of

intuition come from training intuition by working example after example

and by using analogies from existing complex structures. Indeed, the

process works much like evolution.

If a structure is sufficiently complex and has no simpler analogues

that are interesting, then the problem facing someone trying to invent it

is insurmountable. There is no way to build up to solving the problem, no

baby steps. No intelligent being is ever going to think of such a

structure. Anti-evolutionists can argue that irreducibly complex

structures imply intelligent design only because they never bother to

define their terms.

Of course Leece will answer my objection by saying God can do

anything. But such a reply would immediately disqualify her from

recommending the content of a science class. It is permissible, even

admirable, in a science class to say that we do not have an explanation

for a phenomenon. It is reprehensible to give a facile non-explanation

that satisfies merely because it is familiar or emotionally appealing. It

is possible that natural selection may not account for all of the facts

of biology. If so, we must simply say we do not know some of the answers

until someone comes up with a systematic theory with testable hypotheses.

Finally, natural selection is an intelligent system, or if you prefer,

a computation system. It is fashionable among anti-evolutionists to speak

of natural selection as random. It isn’t, it’s algorithmic and operates

like one of the standard forms of artificial intelligence -- indeed, like

a chess machine. It has a memory, DNA, a variation principle that creates

new designs of organisms, and a selection principle that selects among

the designs and which conserves certain kinds of information. A chess

machine built on similar principles beat World Chess Champion Gary

Kasparov. There is certainly some sort of intelligence at work. Natural

selection exhibits many of the properties of intelligence, including

intuitive leaps. (See “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” by Daniel C. Dennett for

an extensive discussion.)

Religion doesn’t belong in science classes, however disguised. Science

requires careful definition of terms, repeatable experimental evidence

and public examination of arguments. There is no received revelation in

science. Science is not about the dead past, but the living present. The

theory of natural selection is important for what it predicts about the

future. For instance, we are locked in a struggle for survival with

disease-causing microbes. Because viruses, bacteria and other microbes

reproduce and mutate rapidly, they compute solutions to survival problems

rapidly. Are they smarter or are we? At the moment, the smart money is on

the microbes. (See “The Coming Plague,” by Laurie Garrett for a

fascinating story.)

* DAVID L. RECTOR is a Costa Mesa resident and an associate professor

of mathematics at UC Irvine.

* Editor’s note: This will be the last installment of Community Forum

pieces on the current debate over the place of creationism in public

schools.