Deconstructing Derbyshire by design

John Derbyshire of National Review wrote in a recent column that President Bush was wrong to endorse the teaching of Intelligent Design alongside the teaching of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Derbyshire further claimed that the president’s attempt at evenhandedness in answer to a reporter’s question was an example of “Bush at his muddle-headed worst,” because Oval Office notice gives undeserved authority to “pseudoscience” and “comic-book metaphysics” on par with a collection of fads that includes astrology, reflexology, and the hollow-earth theory.

Derbyshire has taken the whip to this horse before, in peevish essays that seldom manage to win, place, or show. Intelligent Design (I.D.) irritates him almost as much as religious devotion and Irish combativeness do. The former embarrasses a columnist who by his own admission goes looking for God “when I feel impertinent;” his scorn for the latter is a residue of his English upbringing.

But Derbyshire considers science his home ground, and as he wrote in an online diary entry posted August 31st, “the I.D. people get up my nose.”

Perhaps surprisingly for a pundit and amateur mathematician, Derbyshire misunderstands the object of his pique. He summarizes Intelligent Design as “the theory that life on earth has developed by a series of supernatural miracles performed by the God of the Christian Bible, for which it is pointless to seek any naturalistic explanation.”

One problem with that formulation is that leading proponents of Intelligent Design, whatever their personal theological views, never claim that their theory depends on Christian conceptions of God, not least because some of them are Jewish and all of them are more rigorous thinkers than Derbyshire himself. For example, mathematician/philosopher William Dembski, author of the influential 1999 book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, is careful to distinguish between I.D. and the kind of “theistic evolution” that so bugs Derbyshire. From a theological point of view, the most that can be said for Intelligent Design is that it’s compatible with Christian belief.

Had Derbyshire actually read Dembski, or perused white papers at the web sites of think tanks like the Discovery Institute, he might be less willing to don the uniforms of the Washington Generals or New York Nationals in exhibition games against the Harlem Globetrotters. Instead, he persists in thinking of any given I.D. theorist the way Elmer Fudd thought of Bugs Bunny: as a “wascally wabbit” trying to pull one over on the rest (west?) of us.

Reality is a little different. Jay Richards of the aforementioned Discovery Institute defined I.D. --with a nod toward Ockham’s (sometimes rendered Occam's) Razor-- as “simply the argument that certain features of the natural world are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause.” To anyone at the Discovery Institute who wonders whether Derbyshire is listening, the answer is, sadly, no.

After reading Derbyshire’s manifestly inattentive yet all-too-frequent comments on Intelligent Design, one is tempted to cuff him lightly on the head, eject the copy of Inherit the Wind from his DVD player, and shout “This is not your father’s creationism, man!”

As nuclear physicist David Heddle said in dismissing Derbyshire’s attempt to mend an increasingly tattered coat: “1. It is not very good 2. It has all been said before, and more eloquently 3. It is wrong 4. It is bizarrely narcissistic.”

Heddle faults Derbyshire for rehashing a none-too-original argument ad absurdum, echoing the wry exasperation first voiced by Jonathan Witt: “if Derbyshire likes ‘a good knock-down argument,’” Witt wondered, “Why is he arguing with his inbox instead of with the best design arguments?”

Given his hostility toward actual research in I.D., this might be the best Derbyshire can do. Broadway devotees and bible readers alike will remember that it was Joseph who had the coat of many colors. Charles Darwin’s coat is monochromatic—if only because, as biochemist Michael Behe famously put it, Darwin and his acolytes have a problem with “irreducible complexity.”

Anyone familiar with the hypothetical about a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters would likewise conclude that a pundit who claims, as Derbyshire does, that “Darwinism is the essential foundation for all of modern biology and genomics” won’t typically profit from the instruction of a chemist who debunks that idea by observing that Darwinian theory was utterly superfluous to such modern scientific triumphs as “the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome” and “the mapping of genomes,” not to mention “research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries” and other breakthroughs.

Creation and evolution are two different things, but Derbyshire and his allies -– most of whom would be discomfited by the fact that theology was once regarded as the “Queen of the Sciences”-- try frequently to shift the debate over Intelligent Design back to Scopes trial territory. By conjuring up William Jennings Bryan and the ghost of southern Christian ignorance, doctrinaire Darwinists can then duck questions about, for example, the inconvenient lack of transitional species heralding that amazingly crowded geologic period known to paleontologists as the “Cambrian explosion.”

Another favorite Darwinist tactic dismisses I.D. as a “God of the Gaps” argument. Derbyshire, normally a competent rhetorician, seems not to have noticed that he’s in thrall to the same criticism that he heaps on opponents, except that the god filling Darwinian gaps –- in the fossil record, in probability theory, in understanding the prerequisites for cellular motility, and elsewhere -- isn’t an Unmoved Mover or a Jewish carpenter but the Victorian-era deity called “scientific materialism” that already duped people like Karl Marx to tragic effect.

One can only hope that Derbyshire’s arguments against Intelligent Design evolve over time into something more coherent. Public discourse would be richer for it.

UPDATE: Timothy Birdnow has more on Darwinian desperation, including the surprising difficulty that macro-evolution has with Isaac Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics.