12.22.05
No quotation marks? Unconstitutional!
Welcome to post-ID challenges to Darwin. In a way, it is a relief to have the ruling over Dover challenge the ID steamroller. The ID gang has provoked their own defeat, but that doesn’t change the deeper issue.
The decision, which was much too strong, might clear the air for the Darwin debate. But the decision is, in a way, incoherent, inevitable in such a confused debate. The possible absurdity of the Dover ruling can be seen if consider a passage from the Introduction to Ridley’s well-known text Evolution. Note the use of the term ‘design’ in quotation marks.
Adaptation is another of evolutionary theory’s crucial concepts. Indeed, one of the main aims of modem evolutionary biology is to explain the forms of adaptation that we find in the living world. Adaptation refers to “design” in life-to those properties of living things that enable them to survive and reproduce in nature. The concept is easiest to understand by example. Many of the attributes of a living organism could be used to illustrate the concept of adaptation, because many details of the structure, metabolism, and behavior of an organism are well designed for life. Darwin’s favorite particular example was the woodpecker. The woodpecker’s most obvious adaptation is its powerful characteristically shaped beak. It enables the woodpecker to excavate holes in trees. They can thus feed on the year-round food supply of insects that live under bark, insects that bore into the wood, and the sap of the tree itself. Tree-holes also make safe sites to build a nest. Woodpeckers have many other design features as well as their beaks. Within the beak is a long, probing tongue, which is well adapted to extract insects from inside a tree-hole, They have a stiff tail that is used as a brace, short legs, and their feet have long curved toes for gripping onto the bark; they even have a special type of molting in which the strong central ‘pair of tail-feathers (which are crucial in bracing) are retained and molted last. The beak and body design of the woodpecker is adaptive, The woodpecker is more likely to survive, in its natural habitat, by possessing them.
Apparently, now, if you remove the quotation marks, this passage becomes unconstitutional. Or perhaps if you add the word ‘intelligent’ you cross the line. Courts can’t micromanage such a semantic boundary. The ruling comes close saying that it is unconstitutional to dissent on Darwinism and the claims for adaptation. Darwinists don’t under any circumstances deserve such legitimation of a controversial question. The case of the woodpecker is standard Darwin fare, but misleading, and must be open to challenge. Problem, problem.
The problem is that scientists use ‘design’ arguments all the time, if only in a kind of Kantian ‘as if’ sense. They will change their terminology and conceal it.
The court has essentially micromanaged the semantics of the term, a hopeless quagmire.