Epilogue: Evolutionary Biology and Intelligent Design

Reiss, John O.

doi:10.1525/california/9780520258938.003.0014

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Epilogue: Evolutionary Biology and Intelligent Design

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https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520258938.003.0014

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355–356

Published:

October 2009

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When I planned this book, I had thought to leave “intelligent design” out of it. After all, this is a book about science, not about politics, and the intelligent design debate is a political debate. Yet the issues touched on in this book are indeed central to the debate over intelligent design, and some explicit comments are in order, if only so there should be no chance of misunderstanding my position. Rather than attempting to debunk the arguments used in favor of intelligent design, a simple and yet necessary exercise already well executed by numerous authors (Forrest and Gross 2003; Perakh 2004; Shanks 2004; Scott 2005; Brown and Alton 2007; Isaak 2007), here I’d like to comment on some aspects of the debate that look somewhat different from my perspective.

As noted in the introduction, Darwinians, by accepting the premise of the argument to design (i.e., the premise that “apparent design” must have some historical explanation), have left the door wide open for the intelligent design enthusiasts. Darwin’s intellectual ancestor is Paley, not Lucretius, and from this perspective it does become a somewhat tricky matter distinguishing the Darwinian view from that of design. Yet it was Darwin himself who noted, “If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection” (1859, 201). As has been discussed by many authors, what makes the theory of natural selection (in the broadest sense) useful as a scientific hypothesis, and the theory of “intelligent design” not, is that the theory of natural selection tells us what sorts of organisms and what sorts of features we should expect to find in the world; namely, we should expect to find organisms and features that can satisfy their conditions for existence. We have some well-established theories, such as theories of sex-ratio evolution, that do a pretty good job predicting just what these features will be (e.g., Herre, Machado, and West 2001).

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