Although the UK does not tend to suffer the repeated attempts by biblical literalists to force creationism into the high school biology classes that various US states endure, the disingenuously named
Truth in Science (TiS) organisation exists to promote such efforts in this country. If the recent lecture by TiS's Professor Andrew McIntosh on Intelligent Design and Evolution is anything to go by, we needn't be too worried about their chances of success.
The lecture was promoted by
King's College London's Christian Union. I am pleased to say that the CU rep who introduced Prof McIntosh took pains to point out that the Union did not officially support creationism and that many Christians are not evolution deniers. The lecture evidently attracted a larger crowd than the CU had been expecting: there were probably 60-plus present. It was difficult to tell quite who the audience consisted of but at key points of the argument I glimpsed facial expressions in the audience ranging from nodding agreement to scowling incredulity.
I'm going to try to explain some of McIntosh's arguments and in some cases point out why I think they're false. I have no expertise or even training in biology or thermodynamic or any other relevant field, and everything I do know is picked up from reading pop science books and science blogs. So I may make my own mistakes. But I believe truth trumps credentials.
McIntosh by stating that he did not hold with
NOMA. I think that was the first and last time in the lecture he held a position I agreed with. The next step was to reduce the available positions on the philosophy of science to three: what McIntosh calls 'atheistic humanism' (roughly, the Dawkins position); a 'bottom up' approach allowing for God’s existence (such as that held by Ken Miller); and the 'top down' approach which he espouses: creationism.
Of course, the first two positions are indistinguishable in practice since they both require methodological naturalism. So McIntosh's lecture was aimed at the traditional creationist target of evolutionary biology. And the arguments were the standard creationist arguments, albeit cloaked to an extent in budget evening wear. He wheeled out some examples of complexity in nature - trilobite eyes, ATP motors – and argued because some endogenous retrovirus sequences influence protein folding, 'junk' DNA does not constitute evidence for evolution. As though that was discovered by intelligent design ‘researchers’. In any case, it is
misconcieved. There were some mutually contradictory arguments: he talked about a conspiracy between mainstream journals not to publish research that contradicts evolutionary theory and, later, misrepresented
a published paper about the origins of life as evidence against evolution. He claimed that
mutations are overwhelmingly harmful rather than beneficial; and that
mutations always cause a loss of information and are thus incapable of adding information to the genome. He did not address
gene duplication, which indisputably is capable of adding information to the genome.
McIntosh is a professor of thermodynamics. A standard and absurd creationist argument is that because the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases, evolution cannot have happened because it involves order arising from disorder. This argument has never struck me as making any sense, since it's trivially obvious that equivalent processes happen over much shorter timescales, events we witness all the time like babies developing. However, the
standard rebuttal to the creationist claim is that entropy increases in a closed system (not one which, for instance, is constantly being fed energy by a star). McIntosh acknowledged this, but said that it was irrelevant, citing as evidence the fact that sunlight falling on a dead stick did not prevent it from decaying. McIntosh obviously knows his stuff in that field and it seems curious that he would use such a seemingly absurd argument; I thought at first I must have missed some key step in his logic. But on reflection, I suspect the argument is probably as spurious as it seems on the surface. McIntosh mentioned that he had debated Dawkins and that Dawkins had failed to understand his point.
Dawkins' account tells a different story:
I said, of course, that the chemical bonds in DNA were maintained by energy supplied via the respiratory processes of the cell. McIntosh furiously shouted that that was no answer because there had to be some 'machinery'. I said OF COURSE there is machinery, the cell is riddled with machinery and it has all evolved by natural selection. McIntosh said the existence of machinery implies a designer (which, of course, begs the whole question of what we are arguing about). Then the chairman brought proceedings to a proper conclusion.
So the argument from the second law of thermodynamics, as reinterpreted by McIntosh, ultimately depends on the same old argument from complexity which was rendered worthless by the publication of The Origin of Species. What a shocker.
As a side note, it's widely accepted that what creationists lack in valid scientific arguments they often make up for in rhetorical skills. The format that reveals their worthless, dishonest nonsense in the most unflattering light is written debate. I can't resist linking to two classic examples of creationists being utterly humiliated on their own websites in such exchanges: the first is
an exchange on an ID blog between ID creationists and a neuroscientist explaining her opposition to TiS materials’ being distributed to UK schools (an easier-to-follow duplication of the key parts of the exchange is
here). The second is
Conservapedia's owner being intellectually eviscerated in an email exchange with a scientist whose research had shown bacteria evolving novel behavioural traits.
The Q&A session which followed the lecture was short but amusing. Several questioners brought up clear rebuttals of some other of McIntosh's points such as his misrepresenting information theory. McIntosh repeatedly employed a sort of
broken kettle defence of his position, claiming both that the questioners had misunderstood his point and was wrong, and that it didn't matter if the questioners were right because it didn't affect his overall point.
Finally, McIntosh revealed the identity of the designer he apparently thought his lecture had demonstrated. I won't ruin the ending for anyone who wants to
listen for themselves, but I doubt it will come as a surprise.
