The annotated budak

Indecent decisions

Ok, here's a Supreme Court judgement that is worth thinking about. No, it's not the one by Mr Jones, but by his peers across the border, in that Godless, unChristian, intolerably tolerant, one-foot-in-amoral-socialism country inhabited by hockey-loving poutine eaters and non-American cowboys. I am sure many here in this righteous land would find much to whinge about Judge McLachlin's view that "as members of a diverse society, we must be prepared to tolerate conduct of which we disapprove, short of conduct that can be objectively shown beyond a reasonable doubt to interfere with the proper functioning of society.

"Bad taste, violation of religious or moral standards or even public disgust aren't by themselves enough to make something indecent."

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Sex clubs legal, top court rules

John Ward, Canada Press

OTTAWA -- Swingers clubs which feature consenting adults cavorting in twosomes, threesomes and moresomes, are legal, the Supreme Court of Canada said Wednesday.

In a major decision, the court re-wrote the definition of indecency to use harm, rather than community standards, as the key yardstick.

The 7-2 majority ruling, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, said indecent acts must be shown to be harmful to the point where they ``interfere with the proper functioning of society.''

Public sex would meet the test of indecency, but orgies and partner swapping among like-minded adults in private don't, McLachlin wrote.

A sternly worded dissent from Justices Michel Bastarache and Louis LeBel said the majority decision goes too far.

"It constitutes an unwarranted break with the most important principles of our past decisions regarding indecency,'' the dissenters wrote.

The ruling dealt with two Montreal cases in which swingers club operators were charged with keeping a bawdy house. James Kouri and Jean-Paul Labaye were both convicted, but in separate Court of Appeal rulings, Labaye's conviction was sustained and Kouri's was overturned.

The high court threw out Labaye's conviction and affirmed the Kouri decision.

Writing on Labaye, McLachlin noted: "Entry to the club and participation in the activities were voluntary. No one was forced to do anything or watch anything. No one was paid for sex.''

Defining indecency has always been difficult, McLachlin wrote.

"Over time, courts increasingly came to recognize that morals and taste were subjective, arbitrary and unworkable in the criminal context and that a diverse society would function only with a generous measure of tolerance for minority mores and practices.''

The courts have gradually moved from subjective considerations to objective standards, focused on the harm caused by the acts.

"The threshold is high,'' McLachlin wrote. "It proclaims that, as members of a diverse society, we must be prepared to tolerate conduct of which we disapprove, short of conduct that can be objectively shown beyond a reasonable doubt to interfere with the proper functioning of society.''

Bad taste, violation of religious or moral standards or even public disgust aren't by themselves enough to make something indecent.

Conduct that confronts the public, which predisposes others to anti-social behaviour or actually harms those taking part, would meet the test, McLachlin wrote.

The sex acts cited in the Kouri and Labaye cases didn't come close to being harmful enough to be criminal.

The dissent said the key question should be whether the conduct in question offends "the standard of tolerance of the contemporary Canadian community.''

Bastarache and LeBel wrote that harm should not be the main ingredient in determining indecency.

"We are convinced that this new approach strips of all relevance the social values that the Canadian community as a whole believes should be protected.''

Kota Tinggi part 3 – Where's Tom's fish?

Our next stop after checking out the unknown cryptocoryne was a tributary of Sungei Mupor, on the road from Kota Tinggi to Mersing. The region is still relatively rich in peat swamp habitats, with streams stained with tannin and waterlogged pools that languish like liquid islands between flowing waters and incredibly dense undergrowth.

Mr Tree was seeking Betta tomi, a species in the Betta waseri group endemic to these parts. This species was also once found in Singapore, but following the clearing of its habitat in Mandai, is presumed extinct locally. The main rivulet, as pictured below, flows through a substrate rich in peat, which gives the water a tea-like colour and a very low pH of 4-5, or even less. Few fishes can be caught in the actual stream, though. Instead, the fishes are to be found in shallow pools that lie close to the brook, near enough to receive a regular inflow of water but sufficiently spread-out to offer calm environments with abundant shelter and leaf litter for foraging and fleeing. 

Betta tomi, described only in 1994 by Peter Ng and Maurice Kottelat of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, belongs to a group of largish and brownish bettas distinguished by unique markings on their lower lips. Betta tomi is characteised by a distorted pi (π) on its lower lip and throat. All 7-8 species in the waseri group are peat swamp fish and mouthbrooders. The origins of mouthbrooding in the genus Betta is an underexplored subject (most researcher have focused on African cichlids), but it would certainly be interesting to know how this trait has evolved in certain betta groups and the role played by both genetic contingencies and the fish's extended phenotype. For those who enjoy ploughing through such subjects, this paper suggests a correlation between betta parental strategies and offspring size, rather than habitat and egg size, has others have hypothesized. Photos of the paratype and holotype of Betta tomi can be seen in Ng and Kottelat's paper.

The three fish hunters scoured the surrounding pools, though far enough to escape the sound of passing lorries from the road. There was no way of telling how far the pools extended into the forest, but it seems the desired quarry lay much further within the protective crown of thorny vines and soft, stumbly mud that hinders clumsy naked apes from smooth and speedy motion through a jungle that still preserves many of its secrets. In the end, one Betta pugnax was snared, along with some Trichogaster trichopterus, Rasbora einthovenii, juvenile Systomus banksi (pictured above), a Channa melanosoma and a couple of small loaches. My duck, though bedecked in long sleeves and rubber boots against biting insects and sucking worms, did not venture as deep as the rest, preferring to observe in situ the denizens of a sun-specked pool, where tiny rasbora fry could be seen hovering daintily over the still bottom.

When they finally emerged from the undergrowth, Azmi stripped down to his boxers to clean up, while everybody checked their booty to ensure no annelids were giving bloody blowjobs to sensitive organs. A few cuts and leeches were encountered, and despite my precautions, one worm evidently found its way to my side, leaving behind a chorus of bloody stains. On the other side of the road, the stream flows into a treeless plot cleared of much of its original vegetation. Here, it degrads into a broad and murky expanse that lies exposed to the sun, bereft of cool shade. But even in this inhospitable habitat, a blade of grass flung onto the water draws swift sorties by unidentified piscines. And growing lushly in sporadic patches were clumps of Blyxa aubertii, leaves browned with aquatic rust and limp in passive resistance to the befouled tide that has forgotten its source.

Evolution and The Economist

The proper study of mankind

Dec 20th 2005
From The Economist print edition

SEVEN hundred and forty centuries ago, give or take a few, the skies darkened and the Earth caught a cold. Toba, a volcano in Sumatra, had exploded with the sort of eruptive force that convulses the planet only once every few million years. The skies stayed dark for six years, so much dust did the eruption throw into the atmosphere. It was a dismal time to be alive and, if Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois is right, the chances were you would be dead soon. In particular, the population of one species, known to modern science as Homo sapiens, plummeted to perhaps 2,000 individuals.

The proverbial Martian, looking at that darkened Earth, would probably have given long odds against these peculiar apes making much impact on the future. True, they had mastered the art of tool-making, but so had several of their contemporaries. True, too, their curious grunts allowed them to collaborate in surprisingly sophisticated ways. But those advantages came at a huge price, for their brains were voracious consumers of energy—a mere 2% of the body's tissue absorbing 20% of its food intake. An interesting evolutionary experiment, then, but surely a blind alley.

This survey will attempt to explain why that mythical Martian would have been wrong. It will ask how these apes not only survived but prospered, until the time came when one of them could weave together strands of evidence from fields as disparate as geology and genetics, and conclude that his ancestors had gone through a genetic bottleneck caused by a geological catastrophe.

Not all of his contemporaries agree with Dr Ambrose about Toba's effect on humanity. The eruption certainly happened, but there is less consensus about his suggestion that it helped form the basis for what are now known as humanity's racial divisions, by breaking Homo sapiens into small groups whose random physical quirks were preserved in different places. The idea is not, however, absurd. It is based on a piece of evolutionary theory called the founder effect, which shows how the isolation of small populations from larger ones can accelerate evolutionary change, because a small population's average characteristics are likely to differ from those of the larger group from which it is drawn. Like much evolutionary theory, this is just applied common sense. But only recently has such common sense been applied systematically to areas of anthropology that have traditionally ignored it and sometimes resisted it. The result, when combined with new techniques of genetic analysis, has been a revolution in the understanding of humanity's past.

And anthropology is not the only human science to have been infused with evolutionary theory. Psychology, too, is undergoing a makeover and the result is a second revolution, this time in the understanding of humanity's present. Such understanding has been of two types, which often get confused. One is the realisation that many human activities, not all of them savoury, happen for exactly the same reasons as in other species. For example, altruistic behaviour towards relatives, infidelity, rape and murder are all widespread in the animal kingdom. All have their own evolutionary logic. No one argues that they are anything other than evolutionarily driven in species other than man. Yet it would be extraordinary if they were not so driven in man, because it would mean that natural selection had somehow contrived to wipe out their genetic underpinnings, only for them to re-emerge as culturally determined phenomena.

Understanding this shared evolutionary history with other species is important; much foolishness has flowed from its denial. But what is far more intriguing is the progress made in understanding what makes humanity different from other species: friendship with non-relatives; the ability to conceive of what others are thinking, and act accordingly; the creation of an almost unimaginably diverse range of artefacts, some useful, some merely decorative; and perhaps most importantly, the use of language, which allows collaboration on a scale denied to other creatures.

There are, of course, gaps in both sets of explanations. And this field of research being a self-examination, there are also many controversies, not all driven by strictly scientific motives. But the outlines of a science of human evolution that can explain humanity's success, and also its continuing failings, are now in place. It is just a question of filling in the canvas—or the cave wall.

It all started in Africa
OUT of Africa, always something new”, wrote Caius Plinius Secundus, a Roman polymath who helped to invent the field of natural history. Pliny wrote more truly than he could possibly have realised. For one fine day, somewhere between 85,000 and 60,000 years before he penned those words, something did put its foot over the line that modern geographers draw to separate Africa from Asia. And that something—or, rather, somebody—did indeed start something new, namely the peopling of the world.

Writing the story of the spread of humanity is one of the triumphs of modern science, not least because the ink used to do it was so unexpected. Like students of other past life forms, researchers into humanity's prehistoric past started by looking in the rocks. The first fossilised human to be recognised as such was unearthed in 1856 in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf in Germany. Neanderthal man, as this skeleton and its kin became known, is now seen as a cousin of modern humans rather than an ancestor, and subsequent digging has revealed a branching tree of humanity whose root can be traced back more than 4m years.

Searching for human fossils, though, is a frustrating exercise. For most of their existence, people were marginal creatures. Bones from periods prior to the invention of agriculture are therefore excedingly rare. The resulting data vacuum was filled by speculation scarcely worthy of the name of theory, which seemed to change with every new discovery. Then, in the 1980s, a geneticist called Allan Wilson decided to redefine the meaning of the word “fossil”. He did so in a way that instantly revealed another 6 billion specimens, for Wilson's method made a fossil out of every human alive.

In retrospect, Wilson's insight, like many of the best, is blindingly obvious. He knew, as any biologist would, that an organism's DNA carries a record of its evolutionary past. In principle, looking at similarities and differences in the DNA sequences of living organisms should allow a researcher to reconstruct the family tree linking those organisms. In practice, the sexual mixing that happens with each generation makes this tedious even with today's DNA-analysis techniques. With those available in the 1980s it would have been impossible. Wilson, however, realised he could cut through the problem by concentrating on an unusual type of DNA called mitochondrial DNA.     

Mitochondria are the parts of a cell that convert energy stored in sugar into a form that the rest of the cell can use. Most of a cell's genes are in its nucleus, but mitochondria, which are the descendants of bacteria that linked up with one of humanity's unicellular ancestors some 2 billion years ago, retain a few genes of their own. Mitochondrial genomes are easy to study for three reasons. First, they are small, which makes them simple to analyse. Second, mitochondria reproduce asexually, so any changes between the generations are caused by mutation rather than sexual mixing. Third, in humans at least, mitochondria are inherited only from the mother.

In 1987, Rebecca Cann, one of Wilson's students, applied his insight to a series of specimens taken from people whose ancestors came from different parts of the world. By analysing the mutational differences that had accumulated since their mitochondria shared a common ancestor, she was able to construct a matriline (or, perhaps more accurately, a matritree) connecting them.

The result was a revelation. Whichever way you drew the tree (statistics not being an exact science, there was more than one solution), its root was in Africa. Homo sapiens was thus unveiled as an African species. But Dr Cann went further. Using estimates of how often mutations appear in mitochondrial DNA (the so-called molecular clock), she and Wilson did some matridendrochronology. The result suggests that all the lines converge on the ovaries of a single woman who lived some 150,000 years ago.

There was much excited reporting at the time about the discovery and dating of this African “Eve”. She was not, to be clear, the first female Homo sapiens. Fossil evidence suggests the species is at least 200,000 years old, and may be older than that. And you can now do a similar trick for the patriline using part of the male (Y) chromosome in the cell nucleus, because this passes only from father to son. Unfortunately for romantics, the most recent common ancestor of the Y-chromosome is a lot more recent than its mitochondrial equivalent. African Adam was born 60,000-90,000 years ago, and so could not have met African Eve. Nevertheless, these two pieces of DNA as they have weaved their ways down the generations have filled in, in surprising detail, the highways and byways of human migration across the face of the planet.

Detail, however is not the same as consensus, and there are two schools of thought about how people left Africa in the first place. Appropriately, some of their main protagonists are at the rival English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Oxford school, championed by Stephen Oppenheimer, believes that the descendants of a single emigration some 85,000 years ago, across the strait of Bab el Mandeb at the southern end of the Red Sea, are responsible for populating the rest of the world. The Cambridge school, championed by Robert Foley and Marta Mirazón Lahr, agrees that there was, indeed, a migration across this strait, though probably nearer to 60,000 years ago. However, it argues that many non-Africans are the descendants of at least one subsequent exodus.

Both schools agree that the Bab el Mandebites spread rapidly along the coast of southern Arabia and thence along the south coast of Asia to Australia, though Dr Oppenheimer has them turning inland, too, once they crossed the strait of Hormuz. But it is in describing what happened next that the two versions really part company, for it is here that the descendants of the Oxford migration run into the eruption of Toba.

That Toba devastated South and South-East Asia is not in doubt. Thick layers of ash from the eruption have been found as far afield as northern Pakistan. The question is whether there were people in Asia at the time. One of the most important pieces of evidence for Dr Oppenheimer's version of events is some stone tools in the ash layer in Malaysia, which he thinks were made by Homo sapiens. Molecular clocks have a regrettable margin of error, but radioactive dating is a lot more accurate. If he is right, modern humans must have left Africa before the eruption. The tools might, however, have been crafted by an earlier species of human that lived there before Homo sapiens.

For Dr Oppenheimer, the eruption was a crucial event, dividing the nascent human population of Asia into two disconnected parts, which then recolonised the intermediate ground. In the Cambridge version, Homo sapiens was still confined to Africa 74,000 years ago, and would merely have suffered the equivalent of a nuclear winter, not an ash-fall of up to five metres—though Dr Ambrose and his colleagues think even that would have done the population no good.

The Cambridge version is far more gentle. The descendants of its subsequent exodus expanded north-eastwards into central Asia, and thence scattered north, south, east and west—though in a spirit of open-mindedness, Sacha Jones, a research student in Dr Foley's department, is looking in the ash layer in India to see what she can find there.

Which version is correct should eventually be determined by the Genographic Project, a huge DNA-sampling study organised by Spencer Wells, a geneticist, at the behest of America's National Geographic Society and IBM. But both already have a lot in common. Both, for example, agree that the Americas seem to have been colonised by at least two groups. The Cambridge school, though, argues that one of these is derived ultimately from the first Bab el Mandeb crossing while the other is descended from the later migrants.

Both also agree that Europe received two waves of migration. The ancestors of the bulk of modern Europeans came via central Asia about 35,000 years ago, though some people in the Balkans and other parts of southern Europe trace their lines back to an earlier migration from the Middle East. But the spread of agriculture from its Middle Eastern cradle into the farthest reaches of Europe does not, as some researchers once thought, seem to have been accompanied by a mass movement of Middle Eastern farmers.

The coming together of two groups of humans can be seen in modern India, too. In the south of the subcontinent, people have Y-chromosomes derived almost exclusively from what the Cambridge school would interpret as being northern folk (and the Oxford school as the western survivors of Toba). However, more than 20% of their mitochondria arrived in Asia with the first migration from Africa (or, according to taste, clung on along the south-eastern fringes of the ash plume).

That discovery speaks volumes about what happened when the two groups met. It suggests that many modern south Indians are descended from southern-fringe women, but few from southern-fringe men—implying a comprehensive conquest of the southerners by the northerners, who won extra southern wives.

This observation, in turn, helps explain why Y-chromosome Adam lived so much more recently than mitochondrial Eve. Displacement by conquest is one example of a more general phenomenon—that the number of offspring sired by individual males is more variable than the number born by individual females. This means that more males than females end up with no offspring at all. Male gene lines therefore die out faster than female ones, so those remaining are more likely, statistically, to converge in the recent past.

Successful male gene lines, though, can be very successful indeed. Students of animal behaviour refer to the top male in a group as the “alpha”. Such dominant animals keep the others under control and father a large proportion, if not all, of the group's offspring. One of the curiosities of modern life is that voters tend to elect alpha males to high office, and then affect surprise when they behave like alphas outside politics too. But in the days when alphas had to fight rather than scheme their way to the top, they tended to enjoy the sexual spoils more openly. And there were few males more alpha in their behaviour than Genghis Khan, a man reported to have had about 500 wives and concubines, not to mention the sexual opportunities that come with conquest. It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that one man in every 12 of those who live within the frontiers of what was once the Mongol empire (and, indeed, one in 200 of all men alive today) have a stretch of DNA on their Y-chromosomes that dates back to the time and birthplace of the great Khan.

A large and diverse family
WHEN Homo sapiens emerged as a species, he was not alone. The world he entered was already peopled by giants and dwarfs, elves, trolls and pixies—in other words, creatures that looked humanlike, but were not the genuine article. Or, at least, not as genuine as Homo sapiens has come to believe himself to be.

Like the story of Homo sapiens himself, the story of the whole human family begins in Africa. About 4.5m years ago, probably in response to a drying of the climate that caused forest cover in that continent to shrink, one species of great ape found itself pushed out into the savannah, an ecological niche not normally occupied by apes. Over the next 300,000 years these apes evolved an upright stance. No one know for sure why, but one plausible explanation, advanced by Peter Wheeler of John Moores University in Liverpool, is that standing upright reduces exposure to sunlight. To an animal adapted to the forest's shade, the remorseless noonday sun of the savannah would have been a threat. Dr Wheeler's calculations suggest that walking upright decreases exposure at noon by a third compared with going on all fours, since less of the body's surface faces the overhead sun. Humanity, in the form of Australopithecus anamensis, had arrived.

Australopithecines of various species lasted for over 3m years. But half-way through that period something interesting happened. One of them begat a species known to science variously as Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilis. All modern great apes make tools out of sticks and leaves to help them earn their living, and there is no reason to believe that this was not true of australopithecines. But, aided by hands that no longer needed to double as part-time feet, Homo habilis began to exploit a new and potent material that needs both precision and strength to work—stone. This provided its immediate descendants with a powerful technology, but also gave its distant descendants in human palaeontology laboratories an additional way of tracing their ancestry, for stone tools often survive where bones do not.

Homo habilis's successor species, Homo erectus, did not bestride the globe in the way that his eventual descendant Homo sapiens did, but he certainly stuck his nose out of Africa. Indeed, the first fossil erectus discovered was in Java, in 1891, and the second one, several decades later, turned up in China, near Beijing. It was not until 1960 that erectus bones were found in Africa.

Homo erectus is a frustrating species. His tools are found all over the southern half of Eurasia, as well as in Africa. But China and Java aside, his bones are scarce outside Africa. There are two skullcaps from Georgia and half of one from India. He did, however, leave lots of descendants.

Naming fossils is a game that beautifully illustrates Henry Kissinger's witticism about academic disputes being so bitter because the stakes are so low. The best definition of a species that biologists have been able to come up with is “a group of creatures capable of fertile interbreeding, given the chance”, which clearly makes it hard to determine what species a particular fossil belongs to. Researchers therefore have to fall back on the physical characteristics of the bones they find. That allows endless scope for argument between so-called splitters, who seem to want to give a new name to every skull discovered, and lumpers, who like to be as inclusive as possible.

Some splitters, for example, argue that the African version of Homo erectus should be called Homo ergaster. Whatever the niceties, it is clear that by 500,000 years ago, if not before, Homo erectus was breaking up into anatomically different populations. Splitters would like to turn the Georgia fossils, an early twig of the erectus tree, into Homo georgicus. There is also Homo rhodesiensis, found in southern Africa, Homo heidelbergensis from Europe, and a whole drawer's-worth of specimens known to some as Homo helmei and to others as archaic Homo sapiens.

How little is really known, though, was thrown into sharp relief by the announcement just over a year ago that yet another species, Homo floresiensis, had been found. It was discovered on Java's nearish neighbour island, Flores. Finding a new species of human is always exciting, but what is particularly intriguing about Homo floresiensis is how small it was—barely a metre tall when fully grown. Perhaps inevitably, though to the disgust of its discoverers, Homo floresiensis became known to journalists as the hobbit, after J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional humanoid. Homo neanderthalensis, the descendant of Homo heidelbergensis, by contrast, was if not a giant then at least a troll. Though he stood five or ten centimetres shorter than a modern European Homo sapiens, the thickness of his bones suggests he was a lot heavier.

Both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis were certainly around when Homo sapiens left Africa—whichever version of that story turns out to be the correct one. There may also have been some lingering populations of other hominid species. That raises the intriguing question of what happened when these residents met the sapiens wave.

Some researchers believe there was interbreeding, echoing the ideas of an older school of palaeoanthropology called multiregionalism. The multiregionalists thought either that pre-sapiens hominids were all a vast, interbreeding species that gradually evolved into sapiens everywhere, or, against all Darwinian logic, that Homo sapiens arose independently in several places by some unknown process of parallel evolution.

As recently as 2002, Alan Templeton, then at the University of Washington at St Louis, claimed to have found a number of genetic trees whose roots were 400,000-800,000 years old, and yet which included non-Africans. That, if confirmed, would support multiregionalism. Meanwhile, John Relethford, of the State University of New York's campus at Oneonta, has criticised the conclusions of studies on mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones of Neanderthals. This does not resemble DNA from any known modern humans, which led the authors of the work to conclude there was no interbreeding. Dr Relethford points out that Neanderthal DNA brought into the sapiens population by interbreeding could subsequently have been lost by chance in the lottery of who does and who does not reproduce. Similar losses are known to have happened in Australia, where mitochondrial DNA from human fossils is absent from modern Australians.

Most students of the field, though, think there was no interbreeding, full stop. Either Homo sapiens persecuted his cousins into extinction or, with his superior technology, he outhunted, outgathered and outbred them. The next question is where that technology—or, rather, the brainpower to invent and make it—came from.

Why it pays to be brainy
THANKS to Dr Cann and her successors, the story of how Homo sapiens spread throughout the world is getting clearer by the day. But why did it happen? What was it that gave the species its edge, and where did it come from? Here, the picture blurs.

Until recently, it was common to speak of an Upper Palaeolithic revolution in human affairs—what Jared Diamond, of the University of California at Los Angeles, called the Great Leap Forward. Around 40,000 years ago, so the argument ran, humanity underwent a mental step-change. The main evidence for this was the luxuriant cave art that appeared in Europe shortly after this time. Palaeopsychologists see this art as evidence that the artists could manipulate abstract mental symbols—and so they surely could. But it is a false conclusion (though it was widely drawn before Dr Cann's work) that this mental power actually evolved in Europe. Since all humans can paint (some, admittedly, better than others), the mental ability to do so, if not the actual technique, must have emerged in Africa before the first emigrants left. Indeed, evidence of early artistic leanings in that continent has now turned up in the form of drilled beads made of shells and coral, and—more controversially—of stones that have abstract patterns scratched on to them and bear traces of pigment.

That certainly pushes the revolution back a few tens of millennia. The oldest beads seem to date from 75,000 years ago, and an inspired piece of lateral thinking suggests that clothing appeared at about the same time. Mark Stoneking and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, applied the molecular-clock technique to human lice. They showed that head lice and body lice diverged 75,000 years ago. Since body lice live in clothing, and most other species of mammal support only one species of louse, the inference is that body lice evolved at the same time as clothes.

That is an interesting coincidence, and some think it doubly interesting that it coincides with the eruption of Toba. It may be evidence of a shift of thought patterns of the sort that the Upper Palaeolithic revolutionaries propose. On the other hand, there are also signs of intellectual shifts predating this period. Sally McBrearty, of the University of Connecticut, and Alison Brooks, of George Washington University, have identified 14 traits, from making stone blades to painting images, which they think represent important conceptual advances. Ten of them, including fishing, mining, engaging in long-distance trade and making bone tools, as well as painting and making beads, seem to be unique to modern Homo sapiens. However, four, including grinding pigments (for what purpose remains unknown, but probably body painting), stretch back into the debatable past of Homo helmei.

Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence from Africa, which has not been explored with the same sort of archaeological fine-tooth comb as Europe, the speed of the emergence of modern behaviour is still debatable. One thing, however, that clearly played no part in distinguishing Homo sapiens from his hominid contemporaries was a bigger brain.

Modern people do, indeed, have exceedingly large brains, measuring about 1,300 cm³. Other mammals that weigh roughly the same as human beings—sheep, for example—have brains with an average volume of 180cm³. In general, there is a well-established relationship between body size and brain size that people very much do not fit. But as Dr Oppenheimer shows (see chart 2), most of this brain expansion happened early in human evolutionary history, in Homo habilis and Homo erectus. The brains of modern people are only about 6% larger than those of their immediate African predecessors. Perhaps more surprisingly, they are smaller than those of Neanderthals. There is no doubt that this early brain growth set the scene for what subsequently happened to Homo sapiens, but it does not explain the whole story, otherwise Homo erectus would have built cities and flown to the moon.

Flying to the moon may, in fact, be an apt analogy. Just as a space rocket needs several stages to lift it into orbit, so the growth of human intelligence was probably a multi-stage process, with each booster having its own cause or causes. What those causes were, and when they operated, remains a matter of vehement academic dispute. But there are several plausible hypotheses.

The most obvious idea—that being clever helps people to survive by learning about their surroundings and being able to solve practical problems—is actually the least favoured explanation, at least as the cause of the Great Leap Forward. But it was probably how intelligence got going in the pre-human primate past, and thus represented the first stage of the rocket.

Many primates, monkeys in particular, are fruit-eaters. Eating fruit is mentally taxing in two ways. The first is that fruiting trees are patchily distributed in both space and time (though in the tropics, where almost all monkeys live, there are always trees in fruit somewhere). An individual tree will provide a bonanza, but you have to find it at the right moment. Animals with a good memory for which trees are where, and when they last came into fruit, are likely to do better than those who rely on chance. Also, fruit (which are a rare example of something that actually wants to be eaten, so that the seeds inside will be scattered) signal to their consumers when they are ready to munch by changing colour. It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that primates have better colour vision than most other mammals. But that, too, is heavy on the brain. The size of the visual cortex in a monkey brain helps to explain why monkeys have larger brains than their weight seems to warrant.

The intelligence rocket's second stage was almost certainly a way of dealing with the groups that fruit-eating brought into existence. Because trees in the tropics come into fruit at random, an animal needs a lot of fruit trees in its range if it is to avoid starving. Such a large range is difficult for a lone animal to defend. On the other hand, a tree in fruit can feed a whole troop. For both these reasons, fruit-eating primates tend to live in groups.

But if you have to live in a group, you might as well make the most of it. That means avoiding conflict with your rivals and collaborating with your friends—which, in turn, means keeping track of your fellow critters to know who is your enemy and who your ally. That, in turn, demands a lot of brain power.

One of the leading proponents of this sort of explanation for intelligent minds is Robin Dunbar, of Liverpool University in England. A few years ago, he showed that the size of a primate's brain, adjusted for the size of its body, is directly related to the size of group it lives in. (Subsequent work has shown that the same relationship holds true for other social mammals, such as wolves and their kin.) Humans, with the biggest brain/body ratio of all, tend to live in groups of about 150. That is the size of a clan of hunter-gathers. Although the members of such a clan meet only from time to time, since individual families forage separately, they all agree on who they are. Indeed, as Dr Dunbar and several other researchers have noticed, many organisations in the modern world, such as villages and infantry companies, are about this size.

Living in collaborative groups certainly brings advantages, and those may well offset the expense of growing and maintaining a large brain. But even more advantage can be gained if an animal can manipulate the behaviour of others, a phenomenon dubbed Machiavellian intelligence by Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne, of the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Monkeys and apes manage this to a certain extent. They seem to have a limited “theory of mind”—the ability to work out what others are thinking—which is an obvious prerequisite for the would-be simian politician. They also engage in behaviour which, to the cynical human zoologist, looks suspiciously like lying. But it is those two words, “cynical” and “suspiciously”, that give the game away. For it is humans themselves, with their ability to ponder not only what others are thinking, but also what those others are thinking about them, who are the past masters of such manipulation.

And it is here that the question of language enters the equation. Truly Machiavellian manipulation is impossible without it. And despite claims for talking chimpanzees, parrots and dolphins, real language—the sort with complex grammar and syntax—is unique to Homo sapiens.

Dr Dunbar's hypothesis is that language arose as a substitute for the physical grooming that other group-living primates use to maintain bonds of friendship. Conversation—or gossip, as he refers to it—certainly does seem to have the same bond-forming role as grooming. And, crucially for the theory, groups rather than just pairs can “groom” each other this way. Dr Dunbar sees the 150-strong group size of Homo sapiens as both a consequence and a cause of verbal grooming, with large groups stimulating the emergence of language, and language then permitting the emergence of larger groups still. Language, therefore, is the result of a process of positive feedback.

Once established, it can be deployed for secondary purposes. Furthering the Machiavellian ends outlined by Dr Whiten and Dr Byrne would be one such purpose, and this would drive other feedback loops as people evolve more and more elaborate theories of mind in order to manipulate and avoid manipulation. But language would also promote collaborative activities such as trade and the construction of sophisticated artefacts by allowing specialisation and division of labour.

Not everyone agrees with the details of this thesis, but the idea that the evolution of mental powers such as language has been driven by two-way feedback loops rather than one-way responses to the environment is a powerful one. Terrence Deacon, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, thinks that language evolved in a feedback loop with the complex culture that it allowed humans to create. Changes in culture alter and complicate the environment. Natural selection causes evolutionary changes that give people the means to exploit their new, more complex circumstances. That makes the cultural environment still more complicated. And so on. Dr Deacon believes this process has driven the capacity for abstract thought that accounts for much of what is referred to as intelligence. He sees it building up gradually in early hominids, and then taking off spectacularly in Homo sapiens.

Perhaps the most intriguing hypothesis about the last stage of the mental-evolution rocket, though, is an idea dreamed up by Geoffrey Miller, of the University of New Mexico. He thinks that the human mind is like a peacock's tail, a luxuriant demonstration of its owner's genetic fitness.

At first sight this idea seems extraordinary, but closer examination suggests it is disturbingly plausible. Lots of features displayed by animals are there to show off to the opposite sex. Again, this involves a feedback loop. As the feature becomes more pronounced, the judge becomes more demanding until the cost to the displayer balances the average reproductive benefit.

Frequently, only one sex (usually the male) does the showing off. That makes the sexually selected feature obvious, because it is absent in the other sex. Dr Miller, though, argues that biologists have underplayed the extent to which females show off to males, particularly in species such as songbirds where the male plays a big part in raising the young, and so needs to be choosy about whom he sets up home with. Like male birds, male humans are heavily involved in childrearing, so if the mind is an organ for showing off, both sexes would be expected to possess it—and be attracted by it—in more or less equal measure.

Dr Miller suggests that many human mental attributes evolved this way—rather too many, according to some of his critics, who think that he has taken an interesting idea to implausible extremes. But sexual selection does provide a satisfying explanation for such otherwise perplexing activities as painting, carving, singing and dancing. On the surface, all of these things look like useless dissipations of energy. All, however, serve to demonstrate physical and mental prowess in ways that are easy to see and hard to fake—precisely the properties, in fact, that are characteristic of sexually selected features. Indeed, a little introspection may suggest to the reader that he or she has, from time to time, done some of these things to show off to a desirable sexual partner.

Crucially, language, too, may have been driven by sexual selection. No doubt Machiavelli played his part: rhetoric is a powerful political skill. But seduction relies on language as well, and encourages some of the most florid speech of all. Nor, in Dr Miller's view of the world, is the ability to make useful things exempt from sexual selection. Well-made artefacts as much as artful decorations indicate good hand-eye co-ordination and imagination.

Whether Dr Miller's mental peacock tails have an underlying unity is unclear. It could be the ability to process symbols; or it could be that several different abilities have evolved independently under a single evolutionary pressure—the scrutiny of the opposite sex. Or it could be that sexual selection is not the reason after all, or at least not the main part of it. But it provides a plausible explanation for modern humanity's failure to interbreed with its Neanderthal contemporaries, whether or not such unions would have been fertile: they just didn't fancy them.

Evolution and the modern world
THE eruption of Toba marked the beginning rather than the end of hostilities between Homo sapiens and the climate. Views differ about whether the eruption was the trigger, but it is clear that an ice age started shortly afterwards. Though the species spread throughout Asia, Australia and Europe (the populating of the Americas is believed by most researchers to have happened after the ice began to retreat, although not everybody agrees), it was constrained by ecological circumstances in much the same way as any other animal. The world's population 10,000 years ago was probably about 5m—a long way from the imperial 6-billion-strong species that bestrides the globe today.

The killer application that led to humanity's rise is easy to identify. It is agriculture. When the glaciers began to melt and the climate to improve, several groups learned how to grow crops and domesticate animals. Once they had done that, there was no going back. Agriculture enabled man to shape his environment in a way no species had done before.

In truth, agriculture turned out to be a Faustian bargain. Both modern and fossil evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers led longer, healthier and more leisured lives than did farmers until less than a century ago. But farmers have numbers on their side. And numbers beget numbers, which in turn beget cities. The path from Catalhoyuk in Anatolia, the oldest known town, to the streets of Manhattan is but a short one, and the lives of people today, no matter how urbane and civilised, are shaped in large measure by the necessities of their evolutionary past.

That fact has, however, only recently begun to be widely recognised. For many years, psychology, like anthropology, operated in a strange intellectual vacuum. Psychologists did not deny man's evolutionary past, but they did not truly acknowledge it, either. Many in the field seemed to feel that humanity had somehow transcended evolution. Indeed, those of a Marxist inclination more or less required that to be true. How else could people be perfectible? Dissenters were usually treated with disdain. But, at about the time that Dr Cann was publishing the work that would expose the fallacy of multiregionalism, a group who dubbed themselves “evolutionary psychologists” began to stick their heads above the academic parapets.

Studying the behaviour of humans is more difficult than studying that of other animals, for two reasons. One is that the students come from the same species as the studied, which both reduces their objectivity and causes them to take certain things for granted, or even fail to notice them altogether. The other is that human culture is, indeed, far more complex than the cultures of other species. There is nothing wrong with studying that culture, of course. It is endlessly fascinating. But it is wrong to assume that it is the cause of human nature, rather than a consequence; that is akin to mistaking the decorative finishes of a building for the underlying civil engineering. The aim of evolutionary psychology is to try to detect the Darwinian fabric through the cultural decoration, by asking basic questions.

Many of those questions, naturally, address sensitive issues of sex and violence—another reason evolutionary psychologists are not universally popular. David Buss, of the University of Texas, demonstrated experimentally what most people know intuitively—that women value high status in a mate in a way that men do not. Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University, has dissected the evolutionary factors that cause marriages to succeed or fail. She thinks, for example, that the tendency of females to prefer high-status mates is at odds with the increasing economic independence of women in the modern world. Laura Betzig, of the University of Michigan, put an explicitly Darwinian spin on the tendency of powerful men to accumulate harems.

Randy Thornhill, of the University of New Mexico, has shown that physical beauty is far from being in the eye of the beholder. In fact, those features rated beautiful, most notably bodily symmetry, are good predictors of healthy, desirable attributes such as strong immune systems—in other words, aesthetic sensibilities have evolutionary roots.

Karl Grammer, of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Urban Ethology, in Vienna, has shown that body odour, too, is correlated with symmetry and linked to immunological strength. Dr Thornhill, meanwhile, has raised quite a few hackles by arguing that a propensity to rape is an evolved characteristic of men rather than a pathology. Even murder has not escaped the attention of the evolutionary psychologists. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, showed that adults are far more likely to kill their stepchildren than their biological children—a fact that had escaped both police forces and sociologists around the world. They then dared to propose a Darwinian explanation for this, namely that step-parents have no direct interest (in the evolutionary sense) in the welfare of stepchildren.

However, something similar to this list of human behaviours that have yielded to evolutionary psychology could be found in many species. Indeed, it was often comparisons with other species that sparked the investigations in the first place. The males of many other species gather harems, but females rarely do so; female swallows prefer their mates to have symmetrical tails and they are also more faithful to high-status males; both male lions and male baboons kill the infants of females in groups they have just taken over; and so on. Where evolutionary explanations of behaviour become really interesting is when they home in on what is unique to humanity.

One uniquely human characteristic is the playing of games with formal rules. Evolutionary psychology has not yet sought to explain this, but it has exploited it extensively to develop and test its ideas. In their different ways, the games devised by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Robert Axelrod, of the University of Michigan, have underpinned that part of evolutionary psychology devoted to uniquely human behaviour. For not all games are about competition. Many also require trust, a sense of justice and sometimes self-denial.

Cases of animals apparently making sacrifices, occasionally of their own lives, to help others are not rare in nature, but at first sight they are surprising. What is in it for the sacrificer? The usual answer, worked out in the 1960s by William Hamilton, is that the beneficiary is a relative whose reproductive output serves to carry genes found in the sacrificer into the next generation, albeit at one remove. Translated into human terms, this is good old-fashioned nepotism. In a few species, though—mankind being the most obvious—people will make sacrifices for non-relatives, or “friends”. The assumption is that the favour will be paid back at some time in the future. The question is, how can the sacrificer be sure that will happen?

Dr Axelrod used a branch of maths called game theory to come up with at least part of the answer. He showed mathematically that as long as you can recognise and remember your fellow creatures, it makes sense to follow the proverb “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” and trust them provided they don't cheat you. (Sometimes in science it is necessary to prove the obvious before you go on to the less obvious.) Dr Cosmides and Dr Tooby used a different sort of game to show that humans are thus, as Dr Axelrod's model suggests they should be, acutely sensitive to unfair treatment. They did this by presenting some problems of formal logic to their experimental subjects as a card game. When the problems were presented using cards with letters and numbers on opposite faces, and the subjects had to work out which cards needed to be turned over to yield the required answers, people found them hard to do and more often than not got them wrong. However, when the problems were presented in a form that required the subjects to decide whether people were being treated fairly or not, they found them really easy. The researchers' conclusion is that humans are hard-wired not for logic but for detecting injustice.

Trust, and the detection and punishment of injustice, lie at the heart of human society. They are so important that people will actually harm their own short-term interests to punish those they regard as behaving unfairly. Another game, for example, involves two people dividing a sum of money ($100, say). One makes the division and the other accepts or rejects it. If it is rejected, neither player gets any money. On the face of it, even a 99:1 division should be accepted, since the second player will be one dollar better off. In practice, though, few people will accept less than a 70:30 split. They will prefer to punish the divider's greed rather than take a small benefit themselves.

This makes no sense in a one-off transaction, but makes every sense if the two participants are likely to deal with each other repeatedly. And that, before the agricultural population boom (and also, for the most part, after it) was the normal state of affairs. The people an individual dealt with routinely would have been the members of his circle of 150. Strangers would have been admitted to this circle only after prolonged vetting. Such bonds of trust, described by Matt Ridley, a science writer, as “the origins of virtue” in his book of that name, underlie the exchanges of goods and services that are the basis of economics. They may also, though, underlie another sensitive subject that social scientists do not like biologists treading on: race.

Robert Kurzban, a colleague of Dr Cosmides and Dr Tooby, took the racial bull by the horns by reversing the old saw about beauty. Dr Thornhill's work overturned the folk wisdom that beauty is in the beholder's eye by showing that universal standards of beauty have evolved, and there are good reasons for them. Dr Kurzban, by contrast, thinks he has shown that race really does exist only in the eye—or, rather, the mind—of the beholder, not the biology of the person being beheld, and does so for good Darwinian reasons.

Dr Kurzban observes that the three criteria on which people routinely, and often prejudicially, assess each other are sex, age and race. Judgments based on sex and age make Darwinian sense, because people have evolved in a context where these things matter. But until long-distance transport was invented, few people would have come across members of other races. Dr Kurzban believes that perceptions of racial difference are caused by the overstimulation of what might be called an “otherness detector” in the human mind. This is there to sort genuine strangers, who will need to work hard to prove they are trustworthy, from those who are merely unfamiliar members of the clan. It will latch on to anything unusual and obvious—and there is little that is more obvious than skin colour. But other things, such as an odd accent, will do equally well. Indeed, Dr Dunbar thinks that the speed with which accents evolve demonstrates that they are used in precisely this sort of way.

If Dr Kurzban is right (and experiments he has done suggest that assessments of allegiance are easily “rebadged” away from skin colour by recognisable tokens such as coloured T-shirts, as any sports fan could probably have told him), it explains why race-perception is such a powerful social force, even though geneticists have failed to find anything in humans that would pass muster as geographical races in any other species. In fact, one of the striking things about Homo sapiens compared with, say, the chimpanzee is the genetic uniformity of the species. The only “racial” difference that has a well-established function is skin colour. This balances the need to protect the skin from damage by ultraviolet light (which requires melanin, the pigment that makes skin dark) and the need to make vitamin D (which results from the action of sunlight on a chemical in the skin). This explains dark, opaque skins in the tropics and light, transparent ones nearer the poles. The test is that dark-skinned arctic dwellers, such as the Inuit of North America, have diets rich in vitamin D, and so do not need to make it internally. As to other physical differences, they may be the result of founder effects, as described by Dr Ambrose, or possibly of sexual selection, which can sometimes pick up and amplify arbitrary features.

Darwinian thinking can lead in other unexpected directions, too. Pursue Dr Buss's observation about women preferring high-status males to its logical conclusion, and you have a plausible explanation for the open-endedness of economic growth. Psychologists of a non-evolutionary bent sometimes profess themselves puzzled by the fact that once societies leave penury behind (the cited income level varies, but $10,000 per person per year seems about the mark), they do not seem to get happier as they get richer.

That may be because incomes above a certain level are as much about status as about material well-being. Particularly if you are a man, status buys the best mates, and frequently more of them. But status is always relative. It does not matter how much you earn if the rest of your clan earn more. People (and men, in particular) are always looking for ways to enhance their status—and a good income is an excellent way of doing so. Aristotle Onassis, a man who knew a thing or two about both wealth and women, once said: “If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” Perhaps the founding father of economics is not really Adam Smith, who merely explained how to get rich, but Charles Darwin, who helped to explain why.

Evolution is still continuing
WHAT, then, of the future? Sitting in the comfort of the concrete savannah, has humanity stopped evolving?

To help answer that question, it is instructive to look at a paper published earlier this year by Gregory Cochran. Dr Cochran, a scientist who, in the tradition of Darwin himself, works independently of an academic institution, looked at the unusual neurological illnesses commonly suffered by Ashkenazi Jews. Traditional wisdom has it that these diseases, which are caused by faulty genes, are a consequence of inbreeding in a small, closed population. The fact that they persist is said to show that human evolution has stopped in our ever more mollycoddled and medicalised world. Dr Cochran begged not only to differ, but to draw precisely the opposite conclusion. He sees these diseases as evidence of very recent evolution.

Until a century or two ago, the Ashkenazim—the Jews of Europe—were often restricted by local laws to professions such as banking, which happened to require high intelligence. This is the sort of culturally created pressure that might drive one of Dr Deacon's feedback loops for mental abilities (though it must be said that Dr Deacon himself is sceptical about this example). Dr Cochran, however, suspects that this is exactly what happened. He thinks the changes in the brain brought about by the genes in question will be shown to enhance intelligence when only one copy of a given disease gene is present (you generally need two copies, one from each parent, to suffer the adverse symptoms). Indeed, in the case of Gaucher's disease, which is not necessarily lethal, there is evidence that sufferers are more intelligent than average. If Ashkenazi Jews need to be more intelligent than others, such genes will spread, even if they sometimes cause disease.

The fact is, you can't stop evolution. Those who argue the opposite, pointing to the survival thanks to modern medicine of people who would previously have died, are guilty of more than just gross insensitivity. They have tumbled into an intellectual pitfall that has claimed many victims since Darwin first published his theory. Evolution is not about progress. It is about adaptation. Sometimes adaptation and progress are the same. Sometimes they are the opposite. (Ask a tapeworm, which has “degenerated” into a mere egg-laying machine by a very successful process of adaptation.) If a mutation provides a better adaptation, as Dr Cochran thinks these disease genes did in financiers, it will spread. Given the changes that humanity has created in its own habitat, it seems unlikely that natural selection has come to a halt. If Dr Deacon is right, it may even be accelerating as cultural change speeds up, although the current rapid growth in the human population will disguise that for a while, because selection works best in a static population.

Evolution, then, has not stopped. Indeed, it might be about to get an artificial helping hand in the form of genetic engineering. For the fallacy of evolutionary progress has deep psychological roots, and those roots lie in Dr Miller's peacock-tail version of events. The ultimate driver of sexual selection is the need to produce offspring who will be better than the competition, and will thus be selected by desirable sexual partners. Parents know what traits are required. They include high intelligence and a handful of physical characteristics, some of which are universal and some of which vary according to race. That is why, once the idea of eliminating disease genes has been aired, every popular discussion on genetic engineering and cloning seems to get bogged down in intelligence, height and (in the West) fair hair and blue eyes.                     

This search for genetic perfection has an old and dishonourable history, of course, starting with the eugenic movement of the 19th century and ending in the Nazi concentration camps of the 20th, where millions of the confrères of Dr Cochran's subjects were sent to their deaths. With luck, the self-knowledge that understanding humanity's evolution brings will help avert such perversions in the future. And if genetic engineering can be done in a way that does not harm the recipient, it would not make sense to ban it in a liberal society. But the impulse behind it will not go away because, progressive or not, it is certainly adaptive. Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of genetics, once said that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. And that is true even of humanity's desire to take control of the process itself.

The author would like to acknowledge the help of the numerous researchers named in the text. The following books and website may be of interest to readers who wish to learn more about the subject.

“Out of Eden”, by Stephen Oppenheimer (Constable and Robinson, paperback)

“The Journey of Man”, by Spencer Wells (Penguin, paperback)

“From Lucy to Language”, by Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

“Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”, by Robin Dunbar (Faber and Faber, paperback)

“The Symbolic Species”, by Terrence Deacon (W.W. Norton)

“The Mating Mind”, by Geoffrey Miller (William Heinemann)

“The Origins of Virtue”, by Matt Ridley (Penguin, paperback)

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic                     

It's Dover

Those who know me will know that I ahbor triumphalism. But ad hominem accusations of activist judges and scientific prejudice notwithstanding, it's always good to have a sober, non-partisan opinion clearing the air on the ground rules that mark credible scientific endeavour from veiled attempts at imposing a narrow theistic worldview. Saletan's op-ed below also adds a note of caution against a different duality, one that could prevent the equally vital mission of divorcing evolution from its unjustified association with amorality and aprobity.

Is Creationism Destructible? Where to go from Dover.

By William Saletan

In his 139-page ruling on the Dover, Pennsylvania, "intelligent design" case, federal district Judge John E. Jones sets out to kill ID's scientific pretensions once and for all.

"After a six-week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area," he writes. Jones proceeds to tear ID limb from limb "in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial" on the same question.

Scientifically, Jones settles the issue. Culturally, he fails. And until we learn the difference, the fight over creationism in schools and courts will go on. The decisive assumption in Jones' opinion is the definitions of science proposed by the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

First, scientific explanations must be natural, not supernatural. Second, they must be testable. These criteria instantly kill ID as science. Its explicit aspiration was to defeat "methodological naturalism." Once you accept naturalism, as Jones does, you guarantee his conclusion that supernatural theories are a "science stopper."

To get around this problem, some folks have argued that ID is testable. Michael Behe, the chief scientific witness for ID in the Dover trial, says you could watch a bunch of bacteria in a lab to see whether, through evolution, they produced a flagellum. If they did, it would show that natural causes can account for the flagellum. If they didn't, it would show that natural causes can't account for it, so the cause must be supernatural.

Three months ago, when the trial was getting started, I said this testability claim was a ruse. Here's my argument: The theory that's being tested in the flagellum experiment is evolution. If it fails, ID would be vindicated only to the extent that ID consists of saying evolution would fail. That doesn't make ID an explanatory theory.

Jones makes the same point. "ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed," he writes. He cites a 1982 court ruling that shredded this "contrived dualism"—the bogus assumption that "all scientific evidence which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism."

He notes that another scientist who testified for ID in the Dover case admitted this: Irreducible complexity, the problem posed by the flagellum, "is not a test of intelligent design; it's a test of evolution."

The "contrived dualism" objection pretty much captures what's wrong with ID. But it also captures what's wrong with Jones' opinion. "Since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the [Dover] ID policy is the advancement of religion," he writes.

The effect of the policy, in which the Dover school board instructed ninth-grade biology teachers to criticize evolution and mention ID, "was to impose a religious view of biological origins into the biology course, in violation of the Establishment Clause."

Note the dualism. ID theorists assume evidence against evolution is evidence for ID; Jones assumes any unscientific theory is religious and therefore forbidden. Jones acts like it's no big deal to declare ID unscientific, since science is just one kind of learning.

"Supernatural explanations may be important and have merit," he says. "ID arguments may be true," could have "veracity," and possibly "should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed." But if unscientific theories are religious, and religion can't be taught, it's unclear how notions related to ID could be debated in schools, or how their truth or merit could be entertained. And that's bad news for science, because it offers people with creationist sympathies—roughly half the American public—no outlet in the public education system outside of the science classroom. As Jones makes clear, the Dover case is lousy with evidence of explicit religious motivation on the part of local ID proponents.

But is ID, by virtue of being unscientific, wholly and inherently religious—or is there, contrary to the judge's dualism, a third category? The answer is inadvertently sprinkled throughout his opinion. Statements by ID leaders "reveal ID's religious, philosophical, and cultural content," he writes. A strategy document developed by the "Center for Renewal of Science and Culture" is full of "cultural and religious goals, as opposed to scientific ones." Proponents of ID fear "evolution's threat to culture and society," and the Dover board's collaborators have "demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions."

Cultural, cultural, cultural. Not scientific, not necessarily religious, but cultural. Is the pseudo-science of creationism ultimately being driven by religion? Or is this brand of religion, in turn, being driven by cultural anxieties? Is it possible to open a conversation with these folks and their kids, not in biology class but in, say, social studies? According to Jones, the founder of the ID movement has written that evolution contradicts "every word in the Bible." Every word? You mean, including the part about not killing or stealing? No wonder so many people cling to creationism. And no wonder scientists and judges can't make it go away.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

ID in the courtroom

Some selected excerpts from a rambling legal opinion on a petty little case in Dover, Pennsylvania (my bold type for notable quotes and comments in italics). If some regard these thoughts as an ad hominem attack on certain people, I heartily agree, for what other terms should liars and snakes who stoop so low as to deny their religious motivations whilst proposing a veneer of science be referred to? But still, it's rather sad that it has to come to the point where courts, hardly the ideal avenue for life's key decisions, have to weigh in on the fallacies propagated by people who, deep down, cannot accept that faith (and perhaps that interesting little notion called love) can conquer all things, even an individual's acceptance of evolution as a result of overwhelming evidence for it, and despite the insistence of some who demand a hyper literal reading of Genesis.

On the judicial history of creation vs. evolution teaching in schools:

In 1968, a radical change occurred in the legal landscape when in Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968), the Supreme Court struck down Arkansas’s statutory prohibition against teaching evolution. Religious proponents of evolution thereafter championed “balanced treatment” statutes requiring public-school teachers who taught evolution to devote equal time to teaching the biblical view of creation; however, courts realized this tactic to be another attempt to establish the Biblical version of the creation of man. Daniel v. Waters, 515 F.2d 485 (6th Cir. 1975).

Fundamentalist opponents of evolution responded with a new tactic suggested by Daniel’s reasoning which was ultimately found to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment, namely, to utilize scientific-sounding language to describe religious beliefs and then to require that schools teach the resulting “creation science” or “scientific creationism” as an alternative to evolution.

In Edwards v. Arkansas, 482 U.S. 578 (1987), five years after McLean, the Supreme Court held that a requirement that public schools teach “creation science” along with evolution violated the Establishment Clause. The import of Edwards is that the Supreme Court turned the proscription against teaching creation science in the public school system into a national prohibition.....

.... The endorsement test recognizes that when government transgresses the limits of neutrality and acts in ways that show religious favoritism or sponsorship, it violates the Establishment Clause ... the central issue in this case is whether [the government] has endorsed [religion] by its [actions]. To answer that question, we must examine both what [the government] intended to communicate . . . and what message [its conduct] actually conveyed....

.... We must now ascertain whether the ID Policy “in fact conveys a message of endorsement or disapproval” of religion, with the reasonable, objective observer being the hypothetical construct to consider this issue.

..... In 1982, the district court in McLean reviewed Arkansas’s balanced-treatment law and evaluated creation science in light of Scopes, Epperson, and the long history of Fundamentalism’s attack on the scientific theory of evolution, as well as the statute’s legislative history and historical context. The court found that creation science organizations were fundamentalist religious entities that “consider[ed] the introduction of creation science into the public schools part of their ministry.” 

The court in McLean stated that creation science rested on a “contrived dualism” that recognized only two possible explanations for life, the scientific theory of evolution and biblical creationism, treated the two as mutually exclusive such that “one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution,” and accordingly viewed any critiques of evolution as evidence that necessarily supported biblical creationism.

The court concluded that creation science “is simply not science” because it depends upon “supernatural intervention,” which cannot be explained by natural causes, or be proven through empirical investigation, and is therefore neither testable nor falsifiable. Accordingly, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas deemed creation science as merely biblical creationism in a new guise and held that Arkansas’ balanced-treatment statute could have no valid secular purpose or effect, served only to advance religion, and violated the First Amendment.

Five years after McLean was decided, in 1987, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s balanced-treatment law in Edwards for similar reasons. After a thorough analysis of the history of fundamentalist attacks against evolution, as well as the applicable legislative history including statements made by the statute’s sponsor, and taking the character of organizations advocating for creation science into consideration, the Supreme Court held that the state violated the Establishment Clause by “restructur[ing] the science curriculum to conform with a particular religious viewpoint.”  Edwards, 482 U.S. at 593.   

Among other reasons, the Supreme Court in Edwards concluded that the challenged statute did not serve the legislature’s professed purposes of encouraging academic freedom and making the science curriculum more comprehensive by “teaching all of the evidence” regarding origins of life because: the state law already allowed schools to teach any scientific theory, which responded to the alleged purpose of academic freedom; and if the legislature really had intended to make science education more comprehensive, “it would have encouraged the teaching of all scientific theories about the origins of humankind” rather than permitting schools to forego teaching evolution, but mandating that schools that teach evolution must also teach creation science, an inherently religious view. 

The Supreme Court further held that the belief that a supernatural creator was responsible for the creation of human kind is a religious viewpoint and that the Act at issue “advances a religious doctrine by requiring either the banishment of the theory of evolution from public school classrooms or the presentation of a religious viewpoint that rejects evolution in its entirety.”

On the evolution of intelligent design:

The concept of intelligent design (hereinafter “ID”), in its current form, came into existence after the Edwards case was decided in 1987.  For the reasons that follow, we conclude that the religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child.           

We initially note that John Haught, a theologian who testified as an expert witness for Plaintiffs and who has written extensively on the subject of evolution and religion, succinctly explained to the Court that the argument for ID is not a new scientific argument, but is rather an old religious argument for the existence of God. 

He traced this argument back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the 13 th century, who framed the argument as a syllogism: Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer.

Dr. Haught testified that Aquinas was explicit that this intelligent designer “everyone understands to be God.” The syllogism described by Dr. Haught is essentially the same argument for ID as presented by defense expert witnesses Professors Behe and Minnich who employ the phrase “purposeful arrangement of parts.”   

Dr. Haught testified that this argument for the existence of God was advanced early in the 19th century by Reverend Paley and defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich admitted that their argument for ID based on the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is the same one that Paley made for design.

The only apparent difference between the argument made by Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID’s “official position” does not acknowledge that the designer is God. 

However, as Dr. Haught testified, anyone familiar with Western religious thought would immediately make the association that the tactically unnamed designer is God, as the description of the designer in Of Pandas and People (hereinafter “Pandas”) is a “master intellect,” strongly suggesting a supernatural deity as opposed to any intelligent actor known to exist in the natural world. 

Moreover, it is notable that both Professors Behe and Minnich admitted their personal view is that the designer is God and Professor Minnich testified that he understands many leading advocates of ID to believe the designer to be God.   

Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including Defendants’ expert witnesses. In fact, an explicit concession that the intelligent designer works outside the laws of nature and science and a direct reference to religion is Pandas’ rhetorical statement, “what kind of intelligent agent was it [the designer]” and answer: “On its own science cannot answer this question. It must leave it to religion and philosophy.” [this would sound awfully familiar to those belaboured few who enjoy ad infinitum replies]

A significant aspect of the IDM is that despite Defendants’ protestations to the contrary, it describes ID as a religious argument. In that vein, the writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity. 

Dr. Barbara Forrest, one of Plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, is the author of the book Creationism’s Trojan Horse. She has thoroughly and exhaustively chronicled the history of ID in her book and other writings for her testimony in this case. Her testimony, and the exhibits which were admitted with it, provide a wealth of statements by ID leaders that reveal ID’s religious, philosophical, and cultural content. The following is a representative grouping of such statements made by prominent ID proponents.   

Phillip Johnson, considered to be the father of the IDM, developer of ID’s “Wedge Strategy,” which will be discussed below, and author of the 1991 book entitled Darwin on Trial, has written that “theistic realism” or “mere creation” are defining concepts of the IDM. This means “that God is objectively real as Creator and recorded in the biological evidence . . .”  (

In addition, Phillip Johnson states that the “Darwinian theory of evolution contradicts not just the Book of Genesis, but every word in the Bible from beginning to end. It contradicts the idea that we are here because a creator brought about our existence for a purpose.”

ID proponents Johnson, William Dembski, and Charles Thaxton, one of the editors of Pandas, situate ID in the Book of John in the New Testament of the Bible, which begins, “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” [Wow, that's incredibly scientific – I had never heard such an intepretation, even over countless pulpits of this verse!] Dembski has written that ID is a “ground clearing operation” to allow Christianity to receive serious consideration, and “Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory but always a completion.”

Moreover, in turning to Defendants’ lead expert, Professor Behe, his testimony at trial indicated that ID is only a scientific, as opposed to a religious, project for him; however, considerable evidence was introduced to refute this claim. 

Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. As no evidence in the record indicates that any other scientific proposition’s validity rests on belief in God, nor is the Court aware of any such scientific propositions, Professor Behe’s assertion constitutes substantial evidence that in his view, as is commensurate with other prominent ID leaders, ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition.   

Dramatic evidence of ID’s religious nature and aspirations is found in what is referred to as the “Wedge Document.” The Wedge Document, developed by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (hereinafter “CRSC”), represents from an institutional standpoint, the IDM’s goals and objectives, much as writings from the Institute for Creation Research did for the earlier creation-science movement, as discussed in McLean.

The Wedge Document states in its “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary” that the IDM’s goal is to replace science as currently practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” As posited in the Wedge Document, the IDM’s “Governing Goals” are to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

The CSRC expressly announces, in the Wedge Document, a program of Christian apologetics to promote ID. A careful review of the Wedge Document’s goals and language throughout the document reveals cultural and religious goals, as opposed to scientific ones. 

ID aspires to change the ground rules of science to make room for religion, specifically, beliefs consonant with a particular version of Christianity. In addition to the IDM itself describing ID as a religious argument, ID’s religious nature is evident because it involves a supernatural designer. The courts in Edwards and McLean expressly found that this characteristic removed creationism from the realm of science and made it a religious proposition.

Prominent ID proponents have made abundantly clear that the designer is supernatural. [Now, where's the distinction between mere deducible intelligence and a supernatural deity?] Defendants’ expert witness ID proponents confirmed that the existence of a supernatural designer is a hallmark of ID. First, Professor Behe has written that by ID he means “not designed by the laws of nature,” and that it is “implausible that the designer is a natural entity.” Second, Professor Minnich testified that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened so that supernatural forces can be considered. Third, Professor Steven William Fuller testified that it is ID’s project to change the ground rules of science to include the supernatural. 

Turning from defense expert witnesses to leading ID proponents, Johnson has concluded that science must be redefined to include the supernatural if religious challenges to evolution are to get a hearing. Additionally, Dembski agrees that science is ruled by methodological naturalism and argues that this rule must be overturned if ID is to prosper.

Further support for the proposition that ID requires supernatural creation is found in the book Pandas, to which students in Dover’s ninth grade biology class are directed. Pandas indicates that there are two kinds of causes, natural and intelligent, which demonstrate that intelligent causes are beyond nature.

Professor Haught, who as noted was the only theologian to testify in this case, explained that in Western intellectual tradition, non-natural causes occupy a space reserved for ultimate religious explanations. Robert Pennock, Plaintiffs’ expert in the philosophy of science, concurred with Professor Haught and concluded that because its basic proposition is that the features of the natural world are produced by a transcendent, immaterial, non-natural being, ID is a religious proposition regardless of whether that religious proposition is given a recognized religious label.

It is notable that not one defense expert was able to explain how the supernatural action suggested by ID could be anything other than an inherently religious proposition. Accordingly, we find that ID’s religious nature would be further evident to our objective observer because it directly involves a supernatural designer.   

A “hypothetical reasonable observer,” adult or child, who is “aware of the history and context of the community and forum” is also presumed to know that ID is a form of creationism. The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism.

What is likely the strongest evidence supporting the finding of ID’s creationist nature is the history and historical pedigree of the book to which students in Dover’s ninth grade biology class are referred, Pandas. Pandas is published by an organization called FTE, as noted, whose articles of incorporation and filings with the Internal Revenue Service describe it as a religious, Christian organization. Pandas was written by Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis, both acknowledged creationists, and Nancy Pearcey, a Young Earth Creationist, contributed to the work.

As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards, which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science.

By comparing the pre and post Edwards drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge:
(1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID;
(2) cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and
(3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards. 

This word substitution is telling, significant, and reveals that a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content, which directly refutes FTE’s argument that by merely disregarding the words “creation” and “creationism,” FTE expressly rejected creationism in Pandas. 

In early preEdwards drafts of Pandas, the term “creation” was defined as “various forms of life that began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive featuresi ntact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc,” the very same way in which ID is defined in the subsequent published versions. 

This definition was described by many witnesses for both parties, notably including defense experts Minnich and Fuller, as “special creation” of kinds of animals, an inherently religious and creationist concept. 

Professor Behe’s assertion that this passage was merely a description of appearances in the fossil record is illogical and defies the weight of the evidence that the passage is a conclusion about how life began based upon an interpretation of the fossil record, which is reinforced by the content of drafts of Pandas.   

The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates, as noted, that the systemic change from “creation” to “intelligent design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision. This compelling evidence strongly supports Plaintiffs’ assertion that ID is creationism re-labeled.

Importantly, the objective observer, whether adult or child, would conclude from the fact that Pandas posits a master intellect that the intelligent designer is God.      

Further evidence in support of the conclusion that a reasonable observer, adult or child, who is “aware of the history and context of the community and forum” is presumed to know that ID is a form of creationism concerns the fact that ID uses the same, or exceedingly similar arguments as were posited in support of creationism. 

One significant difference is that the words “God,” “creationism,” and “Genesis” have been systematically purged from ID explanations, and replaced by an unnamed “designer.” Dr. Forrest testified and sponsored exhibits showing six arguments common to creationists.

Demonstrative charts introduced through Dr. Forrest show parallel arguments relating to the rejection of naturalism, evolution’s threat to culture and society, “abrupt appearance” implying divine creation, the exploitation of the same alleged gaps in the fossil record, the alleged inability of science to explain complex biological information like DNA, as well as the theme that proponents of each version of creationism merely aim to teach a scientific alternative to evolution to show its “strengths and weaknesses,” and to alert students to a supposed “controversy” in the scientific community.

In addition, creationists made the same argument that the complexity of the bacterial flagellum supported creationism as Professors Behe and Minnich now make for ID. The IDM openly welcomes adherents to creationism into its “Big Tent,” urging them to postpone biblical disputes like the age of the earth. [Now, can anybody tell me how young earth creationism can be reconciled with old earth IDism that claims an intelligence is behind the progressive appearance of species in the fossil record? How unliteral is that?]

Moreover and as previously stated, there is hardly better evidence of ID’s relationship with creationism than an explicit statement by defense expert Fuller that ID is a form of creationism. Although contrary to Fuller, defense experts Professors Behe and Minnich testified that ID is not creationism, their testimony was primarily by way of bare assertion and it failed to directly rebut the creationist history of Pandas or other evidence presented by Plaintiffs showing the commonality between creationism and ID. 

The sole argument Defendants made to distinguish creationism from ID was their assertion that the term “creationism” applies only to arguments based on the Book of Genesis, a young earth, and a catastrophic Noaich flood; however, substantial evidence established that this is only one form of creationism, including the chart that was distributed to the Board Curriculum Committee, as will be described below.    

Having thus provided the social and historical context in which the ID Policy arose of which a reasonable observer, either adult or child would be aware, we will now focus on what the objective student alone would know. We will accordingly determine whether an objective student would view the disclaimer read to the ninth grade biology class as an official endorsement of religion.   

Whether an Objective Student Would View the Disclaimer as a Official Endorsement of Religion

..... After a careful review of the record and for the reasons that follow, we find that an objective student would view the disclaimer as a strong official endorsement of religion. Application of the objective student standard pursuant to the endorsement test reveals that an objective Dover High School ninth grade student will unquestionably perceive the text of the disclaimer, “enlightened by its context and contemporary legislative history,” as conferring a religious concept on “her school’s seal of approval.”

.... We arrive at this conclusion by initially considering the plain language of the disclaimer, paragraph by paragraph. The first paragraph reads as follows:

'The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.'

The evidence in this case reveals that Defendants do not mandate a similar pronouncement about any other aspect of the biology curriculum or the curriculum for any other course, despite the fact that state standards directly address numerous other topics covered in the biology curriculum and the students’ other classes, and despite the fact that standardized tests cover such other topics as well. 

Notably, the unrefuted testimony of Plaintiffs’ science education expert Dr. Alters, the only such expert to testify in the case sub judice explains, and the testimony of Drs. Miller and Padian confirms, the message this paragraph communicates to ninth grade biology students is that: [W]e have to teach this stuff[.] The other stuff we’re just going to teach you, but now this one we have to say the Pennsylvania academic standards require[] students to  . . . eventually take a test.  We’d rather not do it, but Pennsylvania academic standards . . . require students to do this. 

Stated another way, the first paragraph of the disclaimer directly addresses and disavows evolutionary theory by telling students that they have to learn about evolutionary theory because it is required by “Pennsylvania Academic Standards” and it will be tested; however, no similar disclaimer prefacing instruction is conducted regarding any other portion of the biology curriculum nor any other course’s curriculum.    

The second paragraph of the disclaimer reads as follows:

'Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.'

This paragraph singles out evolution from the rest of the science curriculum and informs students that evolution, unlike anything else that they are learning, is “just a theory,” which plays on the “colloquial or popular understanding of the term [‘theory’] and suggest[ing] to the informed, reasonable observer that evolution is only a highly questionable ‘opinion’ or a ‘hunch.’”

Immediately after students are told that “Darwin’s Theory” is a theory and that it continues to be tested, they are told that “gaps” exist within evolutionary theory without any indication that other scientific theories might suffer the same supposed weakness.

As Dr. Alters explained this paragraph is both misleading and creates misconceptions in students about evolutionary theory by misrepresenting the scientific status of evolution and by telling students that they should regard it as singularly unreliable, or on shaky ground.

Additionally and as pointed out by Plaintiffs, it is indeed telling that even defense expert Professor Fuller agreed with this conclusion by stating that in his own expert opinion the disclaimer is misleading ... 

In summary, the second paragraph of the disclaimer undermines students’ education in evolutionary theory and sets the groundwork for presenting students with the District’s favored religious alternative. 

Paragraph three of the disclaimer proceeds to present this alternative and reads as follows:

'Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.'

Students are therefore provided information that contrasts ID with “Darwin’s view” and are directed to consult Pandas as though it were a scientific text that provided a scientific account of, and empirical scientific evidence for, ID. The theory or “view” of evolution, which has been discredited by the District in the student’s eyes, is contrasted with an alternative “explanation,” as opposed to a “theory,” that can be offered without qualification or cautionary note. 

The alternative “explanation” thus receives markedly different treatment from evolutionary “theory.”  In other words, the disclaimer relies upon the very same “contrived dualism” that the court in McLean recognized to be a creationist tactic that has “no scientific factual basis or legitimate educational purpose.” 6   

[Notes to 6: notes on McLean case: The McLean court explained that: The approach to teaching ‘creation science’ and ‘evolution science’ . . . is identical to the two-model approach espoused by the Institute for Creation Research and is taken almost verbatim from ICR writings. It is an extension of Fundamentalists’ view that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution. The two model approach of creationists is simply a contrived dualism which has no scientific factual basis or legitimate educational purpose.  It assumes only two explanations for the origins of life and existence of man, plants and animals: it was either the work of a creator or it was not.  Application of these two models, according to creationists, and the defendants, dictates that all scientific evidence which fails to support the theory of evolution is necessarily scientific evidence in support of creationism and is, therefore, creation science ‘evidence[.]’]

In the fourth and final paragraph of the disclaimer, students are informed of the following:   

'With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.' 

Plaintiffs accurately submit that the disclaimer mimics the one that the Fifth Circuit struck down as unconstitutional in Freiler in two key aspects. First, while encouraging students to keep an open mind and explore alternatives to evolution, it offers no scientific alternative; instead, the only alternative offered is an inherently religious one, namely, ID...

... Whether a student accepts the Board’s invitation to explore Pandas, and reads a creationist text, or follows the Board’s other suggestion and discusses “Origins of Life” with family members, that objective student can reasonably infer that the District’s favored view is a religious one, and that the District is accordingly sponsoring a form of religion. 

Second, by directing students to their families to learn about the “Origins of Life,” the paragraph performs the exact same function as did the Freiler disclaimer: It “reminds school children that they can rightly maintain beliefs taught by their parents on the subject of the origin of life,” thereby stifling the critical thinking that the class’s study of evolutionary theory might otherwise prompt, to protect a religious view from what the Board considers to be a threat... (because disclaimer effectively told students “that evolution as taught in the classroom need not affect what they already know,” it sent a message that was “contrary to an intent to encourage critical thinking, which requires that students approach new concepts with an open mind and willingness to alter and shift existing viewpoints”).   

A thorough review of the disclaimer’s plain language therefore conveys a strong message of religious endorsement to an objective Dover ninth grade student. The classroom presentation of the disclaimer provides further evidence that it conveys a message of religious endorsement. It is important to initially note that as a result of the teachers’ refusal to read the disclaimer, school administrators were forced to make special appearances in the science classrooms to deliver it. No evidence was presented by any witness that the Dover students are presented with a disclaimer of any type in any other topic in the curriculum.  An objective student observer would accordingly be observant of the fact that the message contained in the disclaimer is special and carries special weight....

... Second, the administrators made the remarkable and awkward statement, as part of the disclaimer, that “there will be no other discussion of the issue and your teachers will not answer questions on the issue.” Dr. Alters explained that a reasonable student observer would conclude that ID is a kind of “secret science that students apparently can’t discuss with their science teacher” which he indicated is pedagogically “about as bad as I could possibly think of.” Unlike anything else in the curriculum, students are under the impression that the topic to which they are introduced in the disclaimer, ID, is so sensitive that the students and their teachers are completely barred from asking questions about it or discussing it. 7

[Notes to 7: Throughout the trial and in various submissions to the Court, Defendants vigorously argue that the reading of the statement is not “teaching” ID but instead is merely “making students aware of it.” In fact, one consistency among the Dover School Board members’ testimony, which was marked by selective memories and outright lies under oath, as will be discussed in more detail below, is that they did not think they needed to be knowledgeable about ID because it was not being taught to the students. We disagree. Dr. Alters, the District’s own science teachers, and Plaintiffs Christy Rehm and Steven Stough, who are themselves teachers, all made it abundantly clear by their testimony that an educator reading the disclaimer is engaged in teaching, even if it is colossally bad teaching.... the disclaimer is a “mini-lecture” providing substantive misconceptions about the nature of science, evolution, and ID which “facilitates learning.” In addition, superintendent Nilsen agrees that students “learn” from the statement, regardless of whether it gets labeled as “teaching....” ]

A third important issue concerning the classroom presentation of the disclaimer is the “opt out” feature.  Students who do not wish to be exposed to the disclaimer and students whose parents do not care to have them exposed it, must “opt out” to avoid the unwanted religious message. Dr. Alters testified that the “opt out” feature adds “novelty,” thereby enhancing the importance of the disclaimer in the students’ eyes. Moreover, the stark choice that exists between submitting to state-sponsored religious instruction and leaving the public school classroom presents a clear message to students “who are nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.” Accordingly, we find that the classroom presentation of the disclaimer, including school administrators making a special appearance in the science classrooms to deliver the statement, the complete prohibition on discussion or questioning ID, and the “opt out” feature all convey a strong message of religious endorsement....

In summary, the disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.

Whether an Objective Dover Citizen Would Perceive Defendants’ Conduct to be an Endorsement of Religion

We are in agreement with Plaintiffs that when a governmental practice bearing on religion occurs within view of the entire community, the reasonable observer is an objective, informed adult within the community at large, even if the specific practice is directed at only a subset ofthat community, as courts routinely look beyond the government’s intended audience to the broader listening audience.  Otherwise, government would be free and able to sponsor religious messages simply by declaring that those who share in the beliefs that it is espousing are the message’s only intended recipients.

.... it is notable that the Board sent a newsletter to every household in Dover in February 2005 “produced to help explain the changes in the biology curriculum” and prepared in conjunction with defense counsel, the Thomas More Law Center... although formatted like a typical district newsletter, an objective adult member of the Dover community is presumed to understand this mailing as an aggressive advocacy piece denigrating the scientific theory of evolution while advocating ID. 

Within this newsletter, the initial entry under the heading “Frequently Asked Questions” demeans Plaintiffs for protecting their Constitutional rights as it states, “A small minority of parents have objected to the recent curriculum change by arguing that the Board has acted to impose its own religious beliefs on students.”

Religion is again mentioned in the second “Frequently Asked Question” as it poses the question “Isn’t ID simply religion in disguise?” The newsletter suggests that scientists engage in trickery and doublespeak about the theory of evolution by stating, “The word evolution has several meanings, and those supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution use that confusion in definition to their advantage.”

The newsletter additionally makes the claim that ID is a scientific theory on par with evolution and other scientific theories by explaining, “The theory of intelligent design (ID) is a scientific theory that differs from Darwin’s view, and is endorsed by a growing number of credible scientists.” Evolution is subsequently denigrated and claims that have not been advanced, must less proven in the scientific community, are elaborated upon in the newsletter. “In simple terms, on a molecular level, scientists have discovered a purposeful arrangement of parts, which cannot be explained by Darwin’s theory. In fact, since the 1950s, advances in molecular biology and chemistry have shown us that living cells, the fundamental units of life processes, cannot be explained by chance.” 

The newsletter suggests that evolution has atheistic implications by indicating that “Some have said that before Darwin, ‘we thought a benevolent God had created us. Biology took away our status as made in the image of God’ . . . or ‘Darwinism made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.’” Finally and notably, the newsletter all but admits that ID is religious by quoting Anthony Flew, described as a “world famous atheist who now believes in intelligent design,” as follows: “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence where it leads.”   

... An objective adult member of the Dover community would also be presumed to know that ID and teaching about supposed gaps and problems in evolutionary theory are creationist religious strategies that evolved from earlier forms of creationism, as we previously detailed.... a reasonable observer is presumed to know the social meaning of the theory-not-fact deliberate word choice and would “perceive the School Board to be aligning itself with proponents of religious theories of origin,” thus “communicat[ing] to those who endorse evolution that they are political outsiders, while . . . communicat[ing] to the Christian fundamentalists and creationists who pushed for a disclaimer that they are political insiders.” 

Second, the Dover School Board singles out the scientific theory of evolution, specifically and repeatedly targeting it as a “theory” with “[g]aps,” “problems,” and inadequate empirical support. In singling out the one scientific theory that has historically been opposed by certain religious sects, the Board sent the message that it “believes there is some problem peculiar to evolution,” and “[i]n light of the historical opposition to evolution by Christian fundamentalists and creationists[,] . . . the informed, reasonable observer would infer the School Board’s problem with evolution to be that evolution does not acknowledge a creator.”

Whether ID is Science

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science.  They are:
(1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;
(2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and
(3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.   

Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16 th and 17 th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena. This revolution entailed the rejection of the appeal to authority, and by extension, revelation, in favor of empirical evidence. Since that time period, science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth.

In deliberately omitting theological or “ultimate” explanations for the existence or characteristics of the natural world, science does not consider issues of “meaning” and “purpose” in the world. While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as “methodological naturalism” and is sometimes known as the scientific method. 

Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify. As the National Academy of Sciences (hereinafter “NAS”) was recognized by experts for both parties as the “most prestigious” scientific association in this country, we will accordingly cite to its opinion where appropriate.

NAS is in agreement that science is limited to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data: “Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from the confirmable data – the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based upon empirical evidence are not part of science.” 

This rigorous attachment to “natural” explanations is an essential attribute to science by definition and by convention. We are in agreement with Plaintiffs’ lead expert Dr. Miller, that from a practical perspective, attributing unsolved problems about nature to causes and forces that lie outside the natural world is a “science stopper.”

As Dr. Miller explained, once you attribute a cause to an untestable supernatural force, a proposition that cannot be disproven, there is no reason to continue seeking natural explanations as we have our answer. 

ID is predicated on supernatural causation, as we previously explained and as various expert testimony revealed. ID takes a natural phenomenon and, instead of accepting or seeking a natural explanation, argues that the explanation is supernatural....

Further support for the conclusion that ID is predicated on supernatural causation is found in the ID reference book to which ninth grade biology students are directed, Pandas. Pandas states, in pertinent part, as follows: Darwinists object to the view of intelligent design because it does not give a natural cause explanation of how the various forms of life started in the first place.  Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly, through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.   

Stated another way, ID posits that animals did not evolve naturally through evolutionary means but were created abruptly by a non-natural, or supernatural, designer.  Defendants’ own expert witnesses acknowledged this point... It is notable that defense experts’ own mission, which mirrors that of the IDM itself, is to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world, which the Supreme Court in Edwards and the court in McLean correctly recognized as an inherently religious concept. 

First, defense expert Professor Fuller agreed that ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology. Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich acknowledged that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened to allow consideration of supernatural forces.   

Prominent IDM leaders are in agreement with the opinions expressed by defense expert witnesses that the ground rules of science must be changed for ID to take hold and prosper. William Dembski, for instance, an IDM leader, proclaims that science is ruled by methodological naturalism and argues that this rule must be overturned if ID is to prosper... 

The Discovery Institute, the think tank promoting ID whose CRSC developed the Wedge Document, acknowledges as “Governing Goals” to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies” and “replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” 

In addition, and as previously noted, the Wedge Document states in its “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary” that the IDM’s goal is to replace science as currently practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” The IDM accordingly seeks nothing less than a complete scientific revolution in which ID will supplant evolutionary theory.

Notably, every major scientific association that has taken a position on the issue of whether ID is science has concluded that ID is not, and cannot be considered as such. Initially, we note that NAS, the “most prestigious” scientific association in this country, views ID as follows: Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science. These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief. Documentation offered in support of these claims is typically limited to the special publications of their advocates. These publications do not offer hypotheses subject to change in light of new data, new interpretations, or demonstration of error. This contrasts with science, where any hypothesis or theory always remains subject to the possibility of rejection or modification in the light of new knowledge.

Additionally, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (hereinafter “AAAS”), the largest organization of scientists in this country, has taken a similar position on ID, namely, that it “has not proposed a scientific means of testing its claims” and that “the lack of scientific warrant for so-called ‘intelligent design theory’ makes it improper to include as part of science education . . .” 

Not a single expert witness over the course of the six week trial identified one major scientific association, society or organization that endorsed ID as science. What is more, defense experts concede that ID is not a theory as that term is defined by the NAS and admit that ID is at best “fringe science” which has achieved no acceptance in the scientific community. 

It is therefore readily apparent to the Court that ID fails to meet the essential ground rules that limit science to testable, natural explanations. Science cannot be defined differently for Dover students than it is defined in the scientific community as an affirmative action program, as advocated by Professor Fuller, for a view that has been unable to gain a foothold within the scientific establishment. Although ID’s failure to meet the ground rules of science is sufficient for the Court to conclude that it is not science, out of an abundance of caution and in the exercise of completeness, we will analyze additional arguments advanced regarding the concepts of ID and science.  

ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed. This argument is not brought to this Court anew, and in fact, the same argument, termed “contrived dualism” in McLean, was employed by creationists in the 1980's to support “creation science.” The court in McLean noted the “fallacious pedagogy of the two model approach” and that  “[i]n efforts to establish ‘evidence’ in support of creation science, the defendants relied upon the same false premise as the two model approach . . . all evidence which criticized evolutionary theory was proof in support of creation science.” 

We do not find this false dichotomy any more availing to justify ID today than it was to justify creation science two decades ago. ID proponents primarily argue for design through negative arguments against evolution, as illustrated by Professor Behe’s argument that “irreducibly complex” systems cannot be produced through Darwinian, or any natural, mechanisms.

However, we believe that arguments against evolution are not arguments for design. Expert testimony revealed that just because scientists cannot explain today how biological systems evolved does not mean that they cannot, and will not, be able to explain them tomorrow. As Dr. Padian aptly noted, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” To that end, expert testimony from Drs. Miller and Padian provided multiple examples where Pandas asserted that no natural explanations exist, and in some cases that none could exist, and yet natural explanations have been identified in the intervening years. It also bears mentioning that as Dr. Miller stated, just because scientists cannot explain every evolutionary detail does not undermine its validity as a scientific theory as no theory in science is fully understood.

As referenced, the concept of irreducible complexity is ID’s alleged scientific centerpiece. Irreducible complexity is a negative argument against evolution, not proof of design, a point conceded by defense expert Professor Minnich... Irreducible complexity additionally fails to make a positive scientific case for ID, as will be elaborated upon below.

We initially note that irreducible complexity as defined by Professor Behe in his book Darwin’s Black Box and subsequently modified in his 2001 article entitled “Reply to My Critics,” appears as follows: By irreducibly complex I mean a single system which is composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional . . . Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on.

Professor Behe admitted in “Reply to My Critics” that there was a defect in his view of irreducible complexity because, while it purports to be a challenge to natural selection, it does not actually address “the task facing natural selection.” Professor Behe specifically explained that “[t]he current definition puts the focus on removing a part from an already functioning system,” but “[t]he difficult task facing Darwinian evolution, however, would not be to remove parts from sophisticated pre-existing systems; it would be to bring together components to make a new system in the first place.” In that article, Professor Behe wrote that he hoped to “repair this defect in future work;” however, he has failed to do so even four years after elucidating his defect.  Id.; 22:61-65 (Behe).

In addition to Professor Behe’s admitted failure to properly address the very phenomenon that irreducible complexity purports to place at issue, natural selection, Drs. Miller and Padian testified that Professor Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity depends on ignoring ways in which evolution is known to occur. Although Professor Behe is adamant in his definition of irreducible complexity when he says a precursor “missing a part is by definition nonfunctional,” what he obviously means is that it will not function in the same way the system functions when all the parts are present. For example in the case of the bacterial flagellum, removal of a part may prevent it from acting as a rotary motor. However, Professor Behe excludes, by definition, the possibility that a precursor to the bacterial flagellum functioned not as a rotary motor, but in some other way, for example as a secretory system. As expert testimony revealed, the qualification on what is meant by “irreducible complexity” renders it meaningless as a criticism of evolution. In fact, the theory of evolution proffers exaptation as a well-recognized, well-documented explanation for how systems with multiple parts could have evolved through natural means. Exaptation means that some precursor of the subject system had a different, selectable function before experiencing the change or addition that resulted in the subject system with its present function. For instance, Dr. Padian identified the evolution of the mammalian middle ear bones from what had been jawbones as an example of this process. By defining irreducible complexity in the way that he has, Professor Behe attempts to exclude the phenomenon of exaptation by definitional fiat, ignoring as he does so abundant evidence which refutes his argument. 

Notably, the NAS has rejected Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity by using the following cogent reasoning: [S]tructures and processes that are claimed to be ‘irreducibly’ complex typically are not on closer inspection. For example, it is incorrect to assume that a complex structure or biochemical process can function only if all its components are present and functioning as we see them today. Complex biochemical systems can be built up from simpler systems through natural selection. Thus, the ‘history’ of a protein can be traced through simpler organisms . . . The evolution of complex molecular systems can occur in several ways. Natural selection can bring together parts of a system for one function at one time and then, at a later time, recombine those parts with other systems of components to produce a system that has a different function. Genes can be duplicated, altered, and then amplified through natural selection. The complex biochemical cascade resulting in blood clotting has been explained in this fashion. 

As irreducible complexity is only a negative argument against evolution, it is refutable and accordingly testable, unlike ID, by showing that there are intermediate structures with selectable functions that could have evolved into the allegedly irreducibly complex systems. Importantly, however, the fact that the negative argument of irreducible complexity is testable does not make testable the argument for ID. Professor Behe has applied the concept of irreducible complexity to only a few select systems: (1) the bacterial flagellum; (2) the blood-clotting cascade; and (3) the immune system. Contrary to Professor Behe’s assertions with respect to these few biochemical systems among the myriad existing in nature, however, Dr. Miller presented evidence, based upon peer-reviewed studies, that they are not in fact irreducibly complex.   

First, with regard to the bacterial flagellum, Dr. Miller pointed to peer-reviewed studies that identified a possible precursor to the bacterial flagellum, a subsystem that was fully functional, namely the Type-III Secretory System. Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich admited that there is serious scientific research on the question of whether the bacterial flagellum evolved into the Type-III Secretary System, the Type-III Secretory System into the bacterial flagellum, or whether they both evolved from a common ancestor. None of this research or thinking involves ID. In fact, Professor Minnich testified about his research as follows: “we’re looking at the function of these systems and how they could have been derived one from the other. And it’s a legitimate scientific inquiry.”

Second, with regard to the blood-clotting cascade, Dr. Miller demonstrated that the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade has been disproven by peer-reviewed studies dating back to 1969, which show that dolphins’ and whales’ blood clots despite missing a part of the cascade, a study that was confirmed by molecular testing in 1998. Additionally and more recently, scientists published studies showing that in puffer fish, blood clots despite the cascade missing not only one, but three parts. Accordingly, scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe’s predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade. Moreover, cross-examination revealed that Professor Behe’s redefinition of the blood-clotting system was likely designed to avoid peer-reviewed scientific evidence that falsifies his argument, as it was not a scientifically warranted redefinition.

The immune system is the third system to which Professor Behe has applied the definition of irreducible complexity. Although in Darwin’s Black Box, Professor Behe wrote that not only were there no natural explanations for the immune system at the time, but that natural explanations were impossible regarding its origin. However, Dr. Miller presented peer-reviewed studies refuting Professor Behe’s claim that the immune system was irreducibly complex. Between 1996 and 2002, various studies confirmed each element of the evolutionary hypothesis explaining the origin of the immune system. In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.”

We find that such evidence demonstrates that the ID argument is dependent upon setting a scientifically unreasonable burden of proof for the theory of evolution. As a further example, the test for ID proposed by both Professors Behe and Minnich is to grow the bacterial flagellum in the laboratory; however, no-one inside or outside of the IDM, including those who propose the test, has conducted it. Professor Behe conceded that the proposed test could not approximate real world conditions and even if it could, Professor Minnich admitted that it would merely be a test of evolution, not design. [hmmm.... interesting!]

We therefore find that Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large. Additionally, even if irreducible complexity had not been rejected, it still does not support ID as it is merely a test for evolution, not design.

We will now consider the purportedly “positive argument” for design encompassed in the phrase used numerous times by Professors Behe and Minnich throughout their expert testimony, which is the “purposeful arrangement of parts.” Professor Behe summarized the argument as follows: We infer design when we see parts that appear to be arranged for a purpose. The strength of the inference is quantitative; the more parts that are arranged, the more intricately they interact, the stronger is our confidence in design. The appearance of design in aspects of biology is overwhelming. Since nothing other than an intelligent cause has been demonstrated to be able to yield such a strong appearance of design, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, the conclusion that the design seen in life is real design is rationally justified.

As previously indicated, this argument is merely a restatement of the Reverend William Paley’s argument applied at the cell level. Minnich, Behe, and Paley reach the same conclusion, that complex organisms must have been designed using the same reasoning, except that Professors Behe and Minnich refuse to identify the designer, whereas Paley inferred from the presence of design that it was God.

Expert testimony revealed that this inductive argument is not scientific and as admitted by Professor Behe, can never be ruled out. Indeed, the assertion that design of biological systems can be inferred from the “purposeful arrangement of parts” is based upon an analogy to human design. Because we are able to recognize design of artifacts and objects, according to Professor Behe, that same reasoning can be employed to determine biological design. Professor Behe testified that the strength of the analogy depends upon the degree of similarity entailed in the two propositions; however, if this is the test, ID completely fails. [you mean it's nothing more than an analogy??] 

Unlike biological systems, human artifacts do not live and reproduce over time. They are non-replicable, they do not undergo genetic recombination, and they are not driven by natural selection. For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires.

With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer’s identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems. Professor Behe’s only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies.   

It is readily apparent to the Court that the only attribute of design that biological systems appear to share with human artifacts is their complex appearance, i.e. if it looks complex or designed, it must have been designed. This inference to design based upon the appearance of a “purposeful arrangement of parts” is a completely subjective proposition, determined in the eye of each beholder and his/her viewpoint concerning the complexity of a system. Although both Professors Behe and Minnich assert that there is a quantitative aspect to the inference, on cross-examination they admitted that there is no quantitative criteria for determining the degree of complexity or number of parts that bespeak design, rather than a natural process. As Plaintiffs aptly submit to the Court, throughout the entire trial only one piece of evidence generated by Defendants addressed the strength of the ID inference: the argument is less plausible to those for whom God’s existence is in question, and is much less plausible for those who deny God’s existence.   

Accordingly, the purported positive argument for ID does not satisfy the ground rules of science which require testable hypotheses based upon natural explanations. ID is reliant upon forces acting outside of the natural world, forces that we cannot see, replicate, control or test, which have produced changes in this world. While we take no position on whether such forces exist, they are simply not testable by scientific means and therefore cannot qualify as part of the scientific process or as a scientific theory. 

It is appropriate at this juncture to address ID’s claims against evolution. ID proponents support their assertion that evolutionary theory cannot account for life’s complexity by pointing to real gaps in scientific knowledge, which indisputably exist in all scientific theories, but also by misrepresenting well established scientific propositions....   

... Despite the scientific community’s overwhelming support for evolution, Defendants and ID proponents insist that evolution is unsupported by empirical evidence. Plaintiffs’ science experts, Drs. Miller and Padian, clearly explained how ID proponents generally and Pandas specifically, distort and misrepresent scientific knowledge in making their anti-evolution argument.

In analyzing such distortion, we turn again to Pandas, the book to which students are expressly referred in the disclaimer. Defendants hold out Pandas as representative of ID and Plaintiffs’ experts agree in that regard. A series of arguments against evolutionary theory found in Pandas involve paleontology, which studies the life of the past and the fossil record. Plaintiffs’ expert Professor Padian was the only testifying expert witness with any expertise in paleontology. His testimony therefore remains unrebutted. Dr. Padian’s demonstrative slides, prepared on the basis of peer-reviewing scientific literature, illustrate how Pandas systematically distorts and misrepresents established, important evolutionary principles.   

We will provide several representative examples of this distortion. First, Pandas misrepresents the “dominant form of understanding relationships” between similarities between organisms as “inaccurate and downright false” and explained how Pandas misrepresents basic molecular biology concepts to advance design theory through a series of demonstrative slides.

Consider, for example, that he testified as to how Pandas misinforms readers on the standard evolutionary relationships between different types of animals, a distortion which Professor Behe, a “critical reviewer” of Pandas who wrote a section within the book, affirmed. In addition, Dr. Miller refuted Pandas’ claim that evolution cannot account for new genetic information and pointed to more than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications showing the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes. In summary, Dr. Miller testified that Pandas misrepresents molecular biology and genetic principles, as well as the current state of scientific knowledge in those areas in order to teach readers that common descent and natural selection are not scientifically sound.  (1:139-42 (Miller)).   

Accordingly, the one textbook to which the Dover ID Policy directs students contains outdated concepts and badly flawed science, as recognized by even the defense experts in this case.   

A final indicator of how ID has failed to demonstrate scientific warrant is the complete absence of peer-reviewed publications supporting the theory. Expert testimony revealed that the peer review process is “exquisitely important” in the scientific process. It is a way for scientists to write up their empirical research and to share the work with fellow experts in the field, opening up the hypotheses to study, testing, and criticism.

In fact, defense expert Professor Behe recognizes the importance of the peer review process and has written that science must “publish or perish.” Peer review helps to ensure that research papers are scientifically accurately, meet the standards of the scientific method, and are relevant to other scientists in the field. Moreover, peer review involves scientists submitting a manuscript to a scientific journal in the field, journal editors soliciting critical reviews from other experts in the field and deciding whether the scientist has followed proper research procedures, employed up-to-date methods, considered and cited relevant literature and generally, whether the researcher has employed sound science.   

The evidence presented in this case demonstrates that ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications. Both Drs. Padian and Forrest testified that recent literature reviews of scientific and medical-electronic databases disclosed no studies supporting a biological concept of ID. On cross-examination, Professor Behe admitted that: “There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.” [of course, since for IDists, papers presenting specific problems with evolutionary theory are enough to support their case]

Additionally, Professor Behe conceded that there are no peer-reviewed papers supporting his claims that complex molecular systems, like the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade, and the immune system, were intelligently designed. In that regard, there are no peer-reviewed articles supporting Professor Behe’s argument that certain complex molecular structures are “irreducibly complex.” In addition to failing to produce papers in peer-reviewed journals, ID also features no scientific research or testing. ['No fair!' cry the IDists. 'We would be happy to publish in peer-reviewed journals, IF they accept our definition of science.']

[note: The one article referenced by both Professors Behe and Minnich as supporting ID is an article written by Behe and Snoke entitled “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues.” A review of the article indicates that it does not mention either irreducible complexity or ID. In fact, Professor Behe admitted that the study which forms the basis for the article did not rule out many known evolutionary mechanisms and that the research actually might support evolutionary pathways if a biologically realistic population size were used.]

After this searching and careful review of ID as espoused by its proponents, as elaborated upon in submissions to the Court, and as scrutinized over a six week trial, we find that ID is not science and cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory as it has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community. ID, as noted, is grounded in theology, not science. Accepting for the sake of argument its proponents’, as well as Defendants’ argument that to introduce ID to students will encourage critical thinking, it still has utterly no place in a science curriculum. Moreover, ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

To conclude and reiterate, we express no opinion on the ultimate veracity of ID as a supernatural explanation. However, we commend to the attention of those who are inclined to superficially consider ID to be a true “scientific” alternative to evolution without a true understanding of the concept the foregoing detailed analysis. It is our view that a reasonable, objective observer would, after reviewing both the voluminous record in this case, and our narrative, reach the inescapable conclusion that ID is an interesting theological argument, but that it is not science....

Conclusion

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents. 

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.   

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect.  However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.  With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.   

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

[Congratulations! Now if you want more interesting and endearing stuff, click here and here instead.]

Dolores at fifty

A high fever chilled my bones last night, and mrs budak had to get some panadols to soothe my shivers. My heated immune response forced me to bed early, uncharacteristically so, hastening the descent into a phantasm of muddied paths and deceased memories.

The week is flitting by with the speed of an eider duck and  the haunting hour beckons when I have barely found a footing in the day's tasks. Time has become a precious commodity, intractable and irredeemable, an allotment slivered by commutes and chores into moments of fleeting endearment. This material vessel seems like a mechatron, overseen by a presence that wills its actions and suffers its constraints.

Our earthly abode is already straining, as flat surfaces and dry corners vanish beneath a tide of titles with no theme nor tidiness. mrs budak frowns at my growing archive of acid-free fibres and cloth-bound dissertations that lie in wait of examination and exhumation. A select few enjoy the favour of recent recollections, while the bulk of these volumes endure mere dippings in search of motifs and motivation.

But some tomes, once browsed, are unforgettable, and carve undying narratives in my shifting and sallow mind. Kundera, Grass, Steinbeck, Austen, Coetze, Atwood, Rushdie, Naipaul, Tolstoy, Garcia Marquez, Lorenz, Tolkien, Lewis, Burgess, Conrad, Kafka, Mailer, Allende, Hrabal, Neruda, Poe, Aeschylus, de Saint-Exupery, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Darwin, Wallace, Homer, Fowles, Nin, Capek, Peake, Blake, Wordsworth, Brecht, Bronte, Eco, Doyle, Paton, Greene, Housman, Kipling, and Salinger – I am sure there's more embedded in hidden neuroshelves, but what is bibliophila if not the joy of rediscovery?

Others may have had profound impact beyond the literary world, or explored with immense power the depths of society and wreckage that is mankind, but I dare say the language of Shakespeare and Shaw finds no greater smith than a quiet Russian emigre who embraced the tongue though not the temper of his home-in-exile. Entomologist by day, pensman by calling, the words of Vladimir Nabokov emerge from a chrysalis of sensations that turn taboo into treasure and remould acts of proscriptions into presentiments of unquenchable passion. Fifty years since Humbert unleashed his vulgar nymph unto a world that is still not quite ready for her filthy innocence, how many lovers of languid prose have  plunged into her world of drive-by diners and cheap motels, untroubled and unprejudiced by the foreknowledge of unsanctioned acts, to float on phrases that celebrate body and soul without the constructed distinctions that so often disjoin our senses from salubrity.

Still, she flirts like a butterfly, flees like a bee, leaving a sting in the heart that will not wear away. Dare we, in these days of neo-puritan pursuit, still explore an intrusive exposure into a world of forbidden feminity that wavers between yearning chastity and the full bloom of ravishment?

- - - - - - - - - -

Lolita at 50
Is Novokov's masterpiece still shocking?

By Stephen Metcalf for Slate.com

Every now and again it's probably healthy to crack open the glass, remove a certain world masterpiece from the display case, and in re-reading it recall that—unlike Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, two other novels once deemed obscene by the tribunes of moral upkeep—Lolita is a disgusting book. Furthermore, the day will never come when it is not a disgusting book. By comparison, in fact, it can make Lawrence and Joyce look like a pair of old village bluenoses. For all its arduous recourse to the c-word, Lady Chatterley's Lover places its faith in the sexually fulfilled marriage, a ho-hum piety in the age of divorce. For all its scatological frankness, Ulysses tells the touching story of a surrogate father finding his surrogate son. Lolita, meanwhile, tells the story of a stepfather serially defiling his adolescent stepdaughter.* Public taste was meant to catch up to Lady Chatterley screwing her gamekeeper, to Leopold Bloom sitting on his jakes. Public taste was never meant to catch up to Humbert Humbert.

"I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay," Humbert asks us early on, by way of setting up his description of his first taste of sexual bliss with Lolita, the pre-pubescent daughter of his landlady. (Humbert will eventually marry the landlady; the landlady will eventually die; Humbert will eventually abscond with Lolita. For now, though, he is only their boarder, a debonair European with certain hidden proclivities.) "So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me." This is Nabokov winking out at us. By difficult job, Humbert means: I want to conjure this scene up, with all its strange anatomical circumnavigations, as carefully as possible, to demonstrate to the reader that I am not wholly a monster. (He also means: I had to ejaculate, without letting Lolita know.) By difficult job, Nabokov means: I will indulge Humbert in all his strange circumlocutions, to demonstrate to the reader what a total monster he is. In this respect, Nabokov and Humbert have opposing aims; but in the telling, they become as one. All the comically baroque pleonasms help Humbert shield from himself how repulsively he has acted. They allow Nabokov, meanwhile, to describe a rapine act of frottage without becoming explicitly pornographic. Here is some of what follows:

She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …

And a little later:

With the deep hot sweetness thus established and well on its way to its ultimate convulsion I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow. …

Then finally:

[H]er teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury, almost reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.

Lolita turns 50 this year, and having stayed so perverse, it remains fresh as ever. To fully appreciate its perversity, though, one must first appreciate that it is not obscene. Your run-of-the-mill obscene masterwork—Tropic of Cancer, say—demands that you, enlightened reader, work your way past the sex and excrement to recognize how beautiful it is. But with Lolita, you must work past its beauty to recognize how shocking it is. And for all its beauty, for all its immense ingenuity and humor, one easily forgets how shocking Lolita is. To wit: Later in the narrative, Humbert has settled with Lolita in a small town called Beardsley and set up a semblance of a normal suburban life. Humbert is called into Lolita's private school for a parent-teacher conference, where he is told that she is "antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey" and "obsessed with sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet." In essence, Humbert is being offered an inventory of the damage he has wrought on his stepdaughter, but all he can do is sneer inwardly at the messenger, a psychobabbling crone named Pratt, and then … and then … well, what happens next is so shocking, and yet so calmly and economically detailed, it had somehow absented itself from my memory of the novel. Humbert finds Lolita sitting in a study hall with a sepia print of Reynolds' 'The Age of Innocence' above the chalkboard, and several rows of clumsy-looking pupil desks. "At one of these, my Lolita was reading … and there was another girl with a very naked, porcelain-white neck and wonderful platinum hair, who sat in front reading too, absolutely lost to the world and interminably winding a soft curl around one finger, and I sat beside Dolly [Lolita] just behind that neck and that hair, and unbuttoned my overcoat and for sixty-five cents plus the permission to participate in the school play, had Dolly put her inky, chalky, red-knuckled hand under the desk. Oh, stupid and reckless of me, no doubt, but after the torture I had been subjected to, I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again."

Accustomed to receiving Lolita as evidence of towering genius, we hide a question in plain sight: Why did Nabokov choose to inhabit Humbert Humbert, a pitiable half-mad émigré suffering from acute nympholepsy, in the first place? One clue is hidden in the last part of that last sentence: I simply had to take advantage of a combination that I knew would never occur again. Humbert means: Look, I had to avail myself of that hand-job, because when might the opportunity ever recur? But Nabokov, again winking at us, means: I love the exquisite particularity of that specific instant. The only psychiatrist Nabokov could tolerate was Havelock Ellis, for whom "the individuality of each case is respected and catalogued in the same way that butterflies are carefully classified," as one of Nabokov's biographers has explained. (Nabokov was a famous lepidopterist.) Conversely, Nabokov detested "Freudian voodooism," as he once put it, because he saw in Freud an attempt by psychiatry to corner, appropriate, and submit to generalized principles people's inner lives. And submitting one's inner life—the unique hazard of one's personality, the camera obscura of one's own personal store of memories—to a set of deterministic explanations was for Nabokov an indignity on par with the expropriations of the Bolsheviks.

To inhabit a pedophile—and not just a pedophile, but a European pedophile, on an American soil Nabokov had himself grown to love!—was to torture in extremis his faith in the sanctity of the exquisite inner life. We are clearly meant to regard Humbert as a moral abomination, and even Humbert eventually concedes (it is one of the book's most beautiful and unforgettable passages) that in exploiting Lolita he has gratuitously destroyed another human being. And yet, how close to absolute Nabokov makes Humbert's claim to his own thoughts and feelings! There are two competing accounts in Lolita for why Humbert is a pervert. The first is a bit of personal mythopoeics put forward by Humbert himself, who believes his (entirely natural) love for a young girl named Annabel when he was a young boy, and its brutally abrupt interruption, explains the origin of his adult nympholepsy. Later, Humbert tells us of having once bribed a nurse to show him his psychiatric files, in which he discovered he has been labeled "homosexual." The first explanation is poetic, beautiful, intensely rendered, utterly self-serving, and probably untrue. The second explanation is clinical, dispassionate, probably true, but so neglectful of the intensity of Humbert's own consciousness as to be repulsive to Nabokov.

Nabokov overcame the worst affliction of all, from a writer's point of view: a happy childhood. He was an eldest child who chose to pretend he was an only child. Testimony from acquaintances relates how loath he was even to casually discuss siblings, and one can read dozens of pages of Speak, Memory without ever sensing he had to share his parents' affections. ("There was a sunny quality about the way he talked of his own family," one of his Wellesley students has recalled, "One had the feeling of the much-loved little princeling. Clean linen and hot milk and never a scolding.") That utter primacy, of the little princeling basking in the eyes of his justly revering parents, seems never to have left Nabokov, but as a genius, he understood it both as his burden, and as his unique portal to aesthetic discovery.

Lolita is most commonly remembered as one man's living poem to his own daemonic perversity, and as such, is overpraised by its adherents for its technical virtuosity and hilarity, and misconstrued by its detractors as little more than a frost-encrusted monument to Nabokov's own monumental arrogance. Its real genius is too easily missed. It lies in what Nabokov called the "nerves of the novel," the "secret points, the subliminal coordinates by means of which the book is plotted." In these, Nabokov has hinted at the life that exceeds the perimeter of Humbert's encompassing obsession—at the inner lives of those others who he so casually dismisses or destroys. It cost Nabokov, by his own admission, "a month of work" to write one sentence in which Humbert gets his hair cut by a barber who has never stopped mourning his dead son—a fact that scarcely dents Humbert's exquisite consciousness. And one last detail, hidden by Nabokov in the book's sham preface, rounds the tragedy out: Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, previously Miss Dolores Haze, aka Lolita, died on Christmas day 1952, giving birth to a stillborn baby girl.*

*Correction, Dec. 19, 2005: This article originally and incorrectly stated that Vladimir Nabokov gave his character Dolores Haze, aka Lolita, an IQ of 150. In fact, her IQ was 121. The sentence in question has been removed. The article also may have given the impression that Lolita was 14 years old at the beginning, or for the duration, of the book. In fact, she is 12 at the beginning and 14 when Humbert Humbert settles them in Beardsley.