Design for Confusion

Krugman in the Times Op Ed section (see below) takes on the religious right on evolution. He no doubt has a point about right wing strategies on evolution, but the problem here is that liberal thought has let this one get away. No use blaming Kristol for one's troubles on this score. Why do secular liberals need the Bible Belt to help them out on Darwin's theory? And this has nothing to do with the question of design, which, ironically, will prove the equal and opposite undoing of this challenge to Darwin. Kristol et al. may well be manipulating behind the scenes, I wouldn't be a bit surprised, but it is hardly the case that he is the father of intelligent design. Design speculations, like Darwin's theory of natural selection, are quite ancient by now and metaphysical exploitation in action. In the generation of Paley's natural theology, Darwin made the historic mistake of thinking his theory resolved the design question.
Both takes serve an agenda. How did it happen that the ID faction managed to hijack criticism of Darwin's theory? The idea that anyone who criticizes Darwin is some sort of religious nut is apparently the way the scientific community enforces orthodoxy, but that has backfired, because now it seems as though the Bible Belt got straight the problem with Darwinism while the whole slew of rocket scientists can't figure it out.
Darwin's theory has severe flaws, many scientists have always said so, and most of the criticisms of Darwinism spring from such scientists. Soren Lovtrup in Darwinism: Refutation of a Myth, for example, exposed the whole game a while back. I was just corresponding on a complex systems listserve (CHAOPSYC@LIST.UVM.EDU) in a long thread, 'Why is modern science stuck on Darwinism' (http://list.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0506&L=chaopsyc). I mention it because the notion that scientists all agree on Darwin's theory is pure poppycock. Kevin Kelley in Out of Control discusses this reticence of many research scientists on evolution. The question has never changed from the time of the first reviewers of Darwin's book: the fact of evolution was a great discovery, the theory of natural selection is another question, a theory open to many objections.

The usual nonsense, highly promoted by the Darwin propaganda orgs, that peer reviewed science is in working order on the issue of evolution is getting tiresome. Almost all the boilerplate in the media is canned talking points put out by Big Science organizations. Most dissenters in science are too intimidated to speak out. This goes on and on. The claims for Darwinism have been so hyped for so long that mainstream intellectuals are systematically misinformed about the real problems, and issues, handing the right a golden opportunity in what has become an absurdly politicized debate. Injecting design into this context of valid Darwin critique is the worst possible confusion, no doubt about it. It comes as a surprise then that the position of evolutionary biologists on natural selection, but not evolution, is a very weak one, and that has nothing whatever to do with design questions. The concern here should be that non-specialists, who support a secular and liberal politics, have been set up to fail by this strategy. And Darwinian fundamentalism will fail sooner or later because it was always bad science. So much for peer review.
Peer review doesn't work on the subject of evolution, for the same reason it doesn't work in Krugman's field, mathematical economics, and in fact the testimony of hard scientists here is a complete puzzle. Or maybe not, as with mathematical economics, ideology reigns, and it reigns in the name of science, with the bogus math models dangled in front of uncomprehending outsiders to keep them confused. If peer review really worked on evolution we would have had a sensible policy a long time ago, essentially withdrawing the absurdly exaggerated claims for Darwin's theory of natural selection. Such claims make dissent inevitable.
If the scientific community were honest about the question of evolution the right's exploitation of this issue would collapse. But the momentum of Darwinian true believers is so strong that no discussion is really possible, and we get to watch the Bible Belt make an historic course correction where Big Science failed. Thanks a lot, guys. It's proof that Nobel Prize types can be real Boobs.
The right's abuse of this situation is of course very real. But, after all, fair is fair, before ID we had such works as Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, or Darwin on Trial. Whatever else is true, like it or not, they did take the criticisms of many scientists and present them to the public. The scientific community failed to do this. Any serious peer review would have performed this service. And it didn't do that. Noone is under any scientific obligation to take Darwinian claims as properly established. It is worth looking at S. J. Gould's review of Darwin on Trial. He was very cranky, perhaps because he had the whole critique himself twenty years before, but couldn't bring himself to cut loose, and speak plainly. He called the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis effectively dead, but look what happened. Trying to save the paradigm was a lost opportunity. The handwriting was on the wall a long time before Dawkins reprogrammed a whole generation to defend a new form of Darwinian hype. We should note than another conservative agenda prospers in the field of sociobiology and its successors. That's two conservative agendas on both sides of the issue, with liberals unable to grasp what hit them.
The conservative agenda of the ID group matches that of the Darwinists, and vitiates their case also, whatever mischief they can get away with in the meantime. The design argument has a long history of philosophic critique and these politicos on the right are betting the general public will never read, say, Kant on the subject. This phenomenon of the double agenda keeps the public in the dark even better than some one-sided approach, it seems no accident both sides of the debate are really conservative factions. The left/liberal world was fooled by this conservatized evolutionism from the beginning. This is rapidly succeeding in handing victory on the issue to the Bible Belt. Fact: the public has no objective or impartial source of information on the subject of evolution, and the scientific community has failed on this score.
Since not all critics of Darwin are rightists, Creationists or proponents of ID, it is pointless to politicize this issue, and insulting that a horde of Darwin groupies are creating a new inquisition on the subject, driving out some common sense on an issue that is not likely to yield to good science anytime soon. Once that's clear neither side can get away with anything, and the question of evolution will actually start to get more sensible treatment. And the idea one should knuckle under to the peer review set here was once a funny joke, but not so funny anymore, because the credibility of science is on the line, and on the edge. It gets tiresome to deal with mainstream scientists insinuating that they have a monopoly of truth on this question, when in fact they have been virtually brainwashed by bad science education. Nothing in liberal or secular culture requires this obsessive embrace of Darwinism. A new approach is needed.
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Design for Confusion
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 5, 2005
I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right.

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit.""Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com