Microcosm_ E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer [77]
This sort of argument swayed some state legislatures to pass laws requiring that creation science be taught alongside evolution. But the Supreme Court struck the laws down in the 1980s because they, in effect, endorsed religion. The Court declared creation science no science at all.
Creationists repackaged their old claims once more. They stripped away all mention of creationism, creation, and a creator. They argued instead that life shows signs of something they called intelligent design. DNA and proteins and molecular machines are simply too complex to have evolved by natural selection, they argued. These molecules were purposefully arranged, and that purpose reveals an intelligent designer at work. Just what or who that designer is they would not say, at least not publicly.
One of the most striking examples of this makeover was the transformation of a textbook originally called Creation Biology. A Texas publishing house had started work on the manuscript in the early 1980s, but in the wake of the Supreme Court’s rulings its editors began to replace the words creationism with intelligent design, creator with intelligent designer, and creationist with design adherent. Otherwise, they barely changed the language. In 1989, the textbook was published. Instead of Creation Biology, its publishers named it Of Pandas and People.
The evidence for creation—including the flagellum—now became the evidence of intelligent design. Richard Lumsden of the Institute for Creation Research waxed rhapsodic about it in a 1994 article published in the journal of the Creation Research Society, a “young-Earth creationism” organization: “In terms of biophysical complexity, the bacterial rotor-flagellum is without precedent in the living world,” Lumsden wrote. “To the micromechanicians of industrial research and development operations, it has become an inspirational, albeit formidable challenge to the best efforts of current technology, but one ripe with potential for profitable application. To evolutionists, the system presents an enigma; to creationists, it offers clear and compelling evidence of purposeful intelligent design.”
While some proponents of intelligent design continued to call themselves creationists, others noisily rejected the name. They claimed that intelligent design is only the scientific search for evidence of design in nature. And for them E. coli’s flagellum was also a favorite example. William Dembski, a philosopher at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, put it on the cover of his book No Free Lunch. He presented a calculation of the probability that E. coli’s flagellum had come together by chance. The number he came up with was spectacularly tiny, which Dembski took as evidence that it must have been produced by a designer. Biologists and mathematicians alike reject Dembski’s argument because it is supremely irrelevant. Mutations may be random—at least insofar as they don’t produce only variations an organism actually needs—but natural selection is not a matter of chance.
Dembski and other proponents of intelligent design claimed that the designer might be an alien or a time traveler. But personally they believed the designer to be God. Dembski wrote that intelligent design is essentially the theology of John’s Gospel in the Christian scriptures. And all the talk of aliens and time travelers did not scare off conservative religious organizations. Instead, they embraced intelligent design. Focus on the Family, for example, a large American evangelical organization, urged its members to demand that Of Pandas and People be used in schools whenever evolution was taught. In 2002, Focus on the Family’s magazine ran an article by Mark Hartwig extolling intelligent design. More than twenty years after Bliss’s lecture in Arkansas, creationists were still picking out E. coli