intelligent design in Nature

[pierre deleporte]

A 14:03 01/11/2005 -0500, John Grehan wrote :
>Intelligent design theory is alive and well as part of modern biology
>according to the article "DNA twists and flips" (Nature 437 p. 1097)
>where it is said that "DNA can shape itself into many forms to achieve
>its purposes in life". With intelligent design apparently already
>accepted in Nature it makes one wonder what all the fuss is about.
>
>John Grehan

Beyond the irony / excess of language (this post may look partly as an 
"anti-darwinian pamphlet"), I think John Grehan points to a real problem.

If extreme floppiness in language is not a sure sign of intelligent design 
thinking (thanks Curtis Clark!), it really gives a handle for ID 
propaganda. Propagandists have just to clip the sentence out of context and 
hence "refer to scientific papers" for their argument toward the lay people 
(they don't argue toward scientists really).
Scientists have a great responsability in using unambiguous formulas, not 
just for "answering" ID arguments, but even for preventing any undue 
interpretation, naive or malicious.

Many neodarwinians seem specialists of awful formulations put around sound 
theories.
An example is "final causes" used in a non-teleological acception (they 
mean "function"!  tricky enough...).
There seems also to be a basic epistemological problem with many 
contemporaneous geneticians. Some talk of "inheritance of information" for 
instance, which makes no material sense (DNA is inherited and modifiable). 
And some seem to reduce individual development to the straight development 
of DNA "program" (challenged by a vision in terms of "population biology of 
cells" for instance).

A recent TV program raised much fuss in France. The documentary program 
developed a teleological vision of human evolution, by a few professional 
scientists (in fact a lobby of avowed neoteilhardians, the French tradition 
in ID thinking). The only problem was that it was presented as sound and 
revolutionary scientific theories (with strictly no scientific argument, 
but the lay people can easily be misled by autoritarianism).
The good point is that the scientific community reacted strongly before the 
diffusion, and the concerned TV channel (apparently rather innocent in the 
affair, and devoted to high quality culture and popular education) 
organised a TV talk just after the program in order to give a scientific 
comment of it (quietly reducing the fake argument to zero). This morning a 
national radio channel program also commented on the affair by visiting 
non-ID propaganding scientific labs.

This is France today... but we are feeling a raising pressure from 
science-religion concordists, hence confusionism. Unambiguous scientific 
formulations are needed more than ever.

Pierre


Pierre Deleporte
CNRS UMR 6552 - Station Biologique de Paimpont
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