Part One
Intelligent Design Creationism, or IDC, is a stealth form of narrow Biblical literalism which rejects common descent, often the age of the universe, and ridicules science in general. IDC attempts to bypass the Separation Clause in the Constitution by refraining from making explicitly religious claims, using a creative array of clever soundbites, and a grass roots campaign built on deception and pseudoscience, to enlist local communities in their antiscientific cause. Instructions are provided in the methods of bringing intense political pressure on local School Boards, or how to simply take them over, and discredit the bed rock foundation of all of biology, by appealing to religious bias and scientific illiteracy. And if you think your own field of interest is safe from The Discovery Institute, the antiscience forces openly state that evolution is just the thin edge of a WEDGE they plan to use in destroying all science.
By haphazardly throwing around terms like theory, evolution, Big Bang, abiogenesis, common descent, or guess, to all mean more or less the same thing, it's easy to keep someone in the dark about the precise scientific meaning of those words. This is how people become wed to the oldie but goodie, "Evolution is Only a theory". Or "evolution hasn't been proven". This is how Kent Hovind gets away with claiming that the evolution is impossible, because it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
"Help, help! I'm being repressed!" -Monty Python and The Holy Grail
This technique is the bread and butter of Phil Johnson, the grand old man of Intelligent Design. Rather than argue using facts, data, and making testable predictions, which Creationism inconveniently lacks, simply attack science itself. Because science doesn't take magic into account! The goal of this insidious irrationality is to persuade the faithful to view anyone whose initial premise is that facts should carry weight in a scientific debate, with derision. Worse still, the IDCists will pound the table with the false talking point that science is inherently atheistic, unfairly excluding supernatural phenomena, because it relies on methodological naturalism. Naturalism, also sometimes called Materialism to give it that an unpleasant innuendo of decadence, is conflated with the term "Darwinism". This gives the listener the idea that evolution is not a science, but an ideology. An evil, despicable, ideology, which is responsible for every ill mankind has suffered with. Often Communism, Stalinism, or Nazism, is linked to evolutionary biology in this manner. The message that comes through loud and clear to the victims these shysters prey on, is that accepting evolution means embracing atheism and every undesirable ism known. Nazism is an excellent segue for the creationists next stunt: comparing "Darwinists" to Fascist 'thought police' who will not give Intelligent Design a fair shot, and who ruthlessly repress dissenters among their own ranks with some kind of vague, never spelled out, threat. Which we jokingly refer to as the Darwinian Mafia. (No one expects the Darwinian Mafia!)
Needless to say, none of these attacks have any place in the legitimate conduct of scientific investigation. They have produced nothing of scientific value, they provide no understanding, they do not contribute to the corpus of science in any way. They're soundbites and slogans. These are workhorses of the PR and Advertising industries. They're carefully crafted ploys of nonsense and hyperbole, designed to push emotional buttons and leave the clumsy facility of rationale long behind. You won't find such underhanded tactics in real science. And this is born out by researching any bona fide scientific controversy.
When reading through the resources DR Currie and DR Horner were gracious enough to make available to me for this article, I didn't find a single example of one of them telling the other "That's only a theory". I didn't see a single instance in which DR Currie accused DR Horner of being a materialistic atheist who could not let go of his false faith in Scavengerism. At no point did one accuse the other of having an a priori commitment to rejecting the supernatural possibility that T. rex was an immaterial demon of Satan, who didn't need to eat in the first place. Neither DR Currie nor DR Horner make their case from the pulpit of local churches to unsuspecting laypeople, who are unfamiliar with the lexicon of dinosaur morphology. They do not hand out pamphlets at Sunday School urging the congregation to pressure their local school boards to teach the evidence against T. rexism. To the best of my knowledge, neither gentlemen was compared to Nazis, or presented as a Stalinist, by the other. No one got blamed for holding an ideology that led to the Jewish Holocaust in WW2. And I'd be willing to bet they don't make paid appearances to religious retreats where they preach their respective views on T. rex couched, in metaphorical religious parables. None of their students have come away from lectures shaken to the core, after being told if they buy into Predatorism, their souls will be damned to eternal hellfire, or exalted in the Halls of Heaven. What I did see was lots of hard data, hypothesis, counter hypothesis, and scientific challenges, with each openly stating they could be wrong, and daring the other to take the next step, unearth the next clue, and clear the next hurdle. It's a fascinating discussion to follow. One made all the more interesting, because dinosaurs were truly a unique and diverse group of living creatures. There are no parallel living analogues to study. There is nothing living today with which to directly compare dinosaurs with. They could run like an ostrich, but rest like a lizard. And with no common extant point of reference, comes possible confusion and error. With only a few, precious, relatively intact skeletons to go by, we may never know for certain if T. rex was a pure predator, a pure scavenger, or something in between. We're not even sure how fast it could move.
It's not important in the grand scheme of science who is right and who is wrong concerning T. rex, as interesting as that issue is. What's important for us as a species, is the process of science. The process which DR Currie and DR Horner adhere to when skirmishing with one another over T-rex's eating habits. The process that The Discovery Institute and scores of home grown creationist evangelists wish to bring down forever.
Back in our Cretaceous drama, the deluxe-sized Troodons of 65 million years ago had no way to know that their world was drawing to an abrupt and violent end. The last of them to ever walk the earth in the final days, could not comprehend the portent of the brilliant meteor showers lighting the last Cretaceous night skies. They were smart, adaptive, social, wide spread, and extraordinarily successful. Troodons were dinosaur divas. These graceful animals could well have given rise over time to a race of technical beings not terribly unlike ourselves, at least in their capacity to understand their place in the universe. The intellectual legacy that flickered behind their haunting eyes might have been the progenitor of a species that would now be scouring the earth, looking at the ancient bones of T. rex, and arguing over what it all means. They might have built great cities, crossed the oceans, launched ships into space, and maybe even studied mammals, imagining what might have been ... They never got that chance. It was not their destiny.
As intelligent as they may have been, they couldn't fathom the cosmic visitor that was hurtling towards a devastating rendevouz with their lush, green, world. On that final evening, as the Mesozoic sun set in the West throwing fiery rays through layers of volcanic dust, they had no idea that by dawn their forests and plains would be ablaze. The doomed raptors would not have understood that tomorrow, the sky would rage blood-red from a global barrage of incandescent ejecta burning its way back in, after arcing skyward from a glowing, boiling, wound, in the Tethys Sea. The bones of the Edmontasaurus, the hulking foul scavengers, the armored ankylasaurs, the herds of Anatotitans, the gracile velicoraptors, the exquisitely feathered ovaraptors adorned with iridescent beaks, the marine reptiles lurking in the ocean depths, the beautiful spiral shelled ammonoids suspended in the pelagic blue, the exotic ferns; 70% of all animal species, and 90% of all leaf bearing plants would be swept away. First with fire, then with pelting acidic rain, and finally, with toxic snow and ice. The lucky ones died quickly. The unfortunate may have lingered on the ragged edge of starvation for years. In the end, the only dinosaurs to survive the apocalypse would be the birds. If not for science, we would never know of the rest.
What wonders has science wrought! It was through the lifelong work of dedicated men and women of science, that these fascinating, extinct animals are recreated to stir our sense of wonder, and wet our appetite for more. Legions of paleontologists and volunteers, many laboring for the simple joy of being part and parcel to the grand enterprise of enlightenment, worked under horrid conditions to tease the remains out of the stubborn earth. The fossil bones were muscled out of the ground, cast in plaster, wrapped in foil, shipped thousands of miles, and meticulously cleaned down to the last tiny detail with dental picks. The bones were x-rayed, CAT Scanned, shot full of positrons, and those images were beamed around the globe. More researchers spent years lovingly reconstructing entire skeletons, filling in missing pieces with educated guess work and careful inference. The entire process, from discovery to Museum mount, can consume a career. Paleontologists then comb through that evidence, construct theories of how they moved, what they ate, or how they mated and reared their young. Illustrators and animators draw on that vast body of knowledge, and breathe virtual life into these ancient creatures for our benefit, for all of mankind. They do it not for vast wealth, or political power; it is passion that drives them, understanding they thirst for, and the modest currency of knowledge is their paycheck. Through this one narrow branch of science, focused solely on scrutinizing fossil scraps most of us wouldn't even recognize, vanished giants are brought back from the dead. And today, thanks to the countless, nameless individuals who made it all possible, the whole family can sit down with their evening meal, turn on the television, and go Walking With Dinosaurs.
I write this in my home/office, a few scant miles from the Kennedy Space Center, home to Launch Pad 39-B. There, the mighty Saturn V rocket shot a tiny capsule called Apollo 11, 240,000 miles into the void. I have watched Shuttles and Space Probes hurled to the stars from my porch. I've seen the rich harvest they convey through the trackless depths of empty space, displayed on my home screen. Science has given us pictures from the beginning of time; accelerators that peer into the heart of matter and energy; robotic machines that reveal the mysterious hidden surface of Titan and other breathtakingly beautiful, exotic worlds; the miracles of medicine and the double helix of life; the electronic devices that allow you to read my thoughts on this screen; clean water, safe food, and reliable crops. Our lives, our nation, our very civilization, is critically dependent for continued survival and well being on the applications of science. It is science that does those things and so much more; not superstition, not creationism, not Intelligent Design, not dowsing, not astrology. It is the legitimate practice of science itself which is precious, and it is that process which must be nurtured and preserved. Science, is humanity's candle in the dark (Carl Sagan, RIP).
Just to know a little about the life and times of the cast of Cretaceous characters, a couple of which I've dramatized, science pays for itself. Just to be able to imagine those long dead raptors, allosaurs, therizanoids, ankylosaurs, cerotopsians, soaring pterosaurs, mosasaurs, and the astonishingly rich array of prehistoric life on the precipice of the K-T Boundary, it's worth it.
Had those myopic imbeciles from the Creationist ranks been calling the shots all these years, the dinos might still be in the ground, their existence concealed. They might have been obscured for all the ages, and we would never suspect these elegant beasts once wove their way through the tapestry of life.
Can you imagine not knowing of them? Can you envision the loss? Without the careful, painstaking, scientific effort of teams led by DR Jack Horner and DR Phil Currie, and the toil of thousands upon thousands of committed men and women I cannot thank by name, we could never know of these bygone animals. They left us volumes of information which quietly speak to us from ancient graves of stone and mud, across oceans of time. They tell us of their lives and reveal to us their secrets. But only those fluent in the language of science can read their subtle words, echoing faintly within the vestiges of rock and mineral they left behind. The message is simple: We Were Here, they tell us. And mankind is all the richer for our knowledge of those resplendent creatures, we call dinosaurs.
What further marvels await our discovery? What other secrets are murmuring faintly in the invective of science that they, too, are here? What unimaginable treasures will we coax out of nature, that will enrich our lives, and broaden our appreciation of the Cosmos? Based on past experience, we have just scratched the surface of the splendors waiting for us; provided we do not lose the light of reason to the forces of ignorance. Should the callow menagerie of theocratic hopefuls have their way, we may be forced away from the promise of future discovery. The whispers will fade away into the mist of time, lost forever, unrequited. One only has to look to the wretchedly repressive Islamic Nations, to get a chilling taste of what a world controlled by a clerical leadership, beholden to the rigid protocol of fundamentalism, might be like. If the Discovery Institute and others like them succeed with their openly stated goal, science will once again be imprisoned under the lock and key of religious oligarchy and anti-intellectualism; as ugly as anything the Nazi's started out doing in the early 1930s.
In that grim world, there would be no free scientific debates. No evolutionary biology, no prehistoric beasts brought back to virtual life. Only religiously 'approved' science would be tolerated. There would be no discussion of predation Vs scavenging from the likes of DR Horner or DR Currie. In their stead could be a Neo-Christian Taliban, decreeing a Fatwa that Tyrannosaurus rex was a plant-eater. A gentle herbivore who lived side-by-side with Adam and Eve, Flinstones style, up until the Fall of Man from the mythological Garden of Eden. And, if history is any guide, that won't be a paradise: but it sure could resemble hell.
Postscript: There are a group of active webloggers who have banned together to thwart the attacks on science. If you would like to learn more about the issues, how you can help, or just drop them a line and say thanks, please mark and visit the following: The Panda's Thumb and Contributors, Real Climate, Pharyngula, Ed Brayton, and many, many, more.
