Unspeak

by Steven Poole

  There was, in short, no controversy. The vast majority of scientists, including those whose work was studied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and those on a review panel of the National Academy of Sciences set up by Bush himself and including ‘some well-known sceptics’, agreed that the earth was warming significantly and that most of the effect was man-made.23 A review of 928 articles on the subject published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 showed that ‘None of the papers disagreed with the consensus position’.24 Announcing proof of the warming of the oceans in 2005, Scripps Institution of Oceanography member Tim Barnett declared: ‘The debate over whether or not there is a global warming signal is now over, at least for rational people.’25

  Sir David King, chief science adviser to the British government, summed up the matter succinctly in 2004: ‘The current state of climate science is that it’s now accepted that we have global warming. It’s now accepted that this is largely due to anthropogenic effects. That part of it is not up for argument any more.’26 By then the phrase ‘global warming’ seemed to carry a spark of illicit thrill, because it took a clear position on scientific fact. The effect of the long hegemony of the studiedly neutral ‘climate change’, indeed, was eventually to make the more honest alternative seem almost biased. This phenomenon added great rhetorical force to a 2004 article by John Browne, group chief executive of BP, which freely acknowledged the fact of ‘global warming’ and discussed how best to tackle it.27 If the head of one of the largest oil companies in the world was talking about global warming, perhaps there was something to it after all.

  Politicians, however, continued to prefer the usefully vague ‘climate change’. Tony Blair, for example, used the phrase even while dismissing the notion of a controversy about the facts. ‘It would be false to suggest that scientific opinion is equally split,’ Blair wrote in 2005. ‘It is not. The overwhelming view of experts is that climate change, to a greater or lesser extent, is manmade and, without action, will get worse.’28 Blair, who had ratified the Kyoto treaty and taken a relatively enlightened stance on the issue, was right; but the situation was already even graver. Global warming was going to get worse even if action was taken: even if all global emissions were cut to zero overnight, the earth was already ‘committed’ to another ‘30–40 years of global warming based on existing levels of greenhouse gases’.29 Perhaps Blair thought it impolitic to mention this because it would smack of defeatism: and indeed it was still urgently necessary to cut emissions so as to mitigate as far as possible future disasters. Unfortunately, however, Blair failed to persuade George W. Bush to commit to any concrete measures on global warming at the 2005 G8 summit.30

  The Republican strategy of claiming that there was a controversy was cunning, because it took a grain of truth before falsifying it. There were differences among scientists – but they consisted mainly of differing projections about the scale of the coming catastrophe. Owing to the extreme difficulty of predicting the interaction of climate systems decades in advance, there were different forecasts as to how much sea levels would rise, which coastal cities would be destroyed, and how much of the earth’s surface would be rendered uninhabitable. Those who favoured taking no remedial action would point at such disagreement and claim that it applied to the subject as a whole: extrapolating from areas of uncertainty in the science to an argument that all of the science was uncertain.

  In a technical sense, the science of global warming was uncertain, in that all science is provisional and able to be overturned by new evidence. As one writer put it: ‘If it wasn’t uncertain, it wouldn’t be science.’31 But this did not mean that the main facts about global warming were up for grabs. There was also considerable uncertainty among physicists as to how the theory of gravity could be reconciled with quantum mechanics. But this did not give anyone reason to doubt that if you dropped an apple it would fall to the ground.

  Intelligent design

  In August 2005, George W. Bush gave his official imprimatur to a similarly cooked-up ‘controversy’, which centred on the teaching of biology in US high schools. It represented a miraculous victory for those who opposed the science of evolution, and who now called their alternative scheme ‘intelligent design’ (ID). The idea behind ID, familiar from the mid-nineteenth-century arguments over Darwin, was that some biological structures were so complex that they could not have occurred through evolutionary processes, and must instead have been ‘designed’ by an ‘intelligence’. This kind of argument used to go by the name of ‘natural theology’. Its most famous early exponent was the theologian William Paley, who argued in this way: if we see a watch, we infer the existence of a watchmaker; so when we see complex life, we should infer the existence of a God.32

  ID kept the same creationist argument, but changed the angle of attack by substituting vocabulary. Gone was any explicit mention of theology or God, replaced by the usefully vague ‘intelligent’. That adjective also had a secondary use: when one hears the phrase ‘intelligent design theorists’, it is perhaps tempting to understand ‘intelligent’ as referring to the theorists themselves, as well as to the design. By contrast, IDers tended to refer to their opponents – that is, biologists – as ‘neo-Darwinists’, as though scientists around the world were desperately clinging on to an old and unfashionable idea. This appellation handily ignored the existence of the twentieth-century revolution in the genetic understanding of evolution, and also imputed to scientists an idolatrous reliance on one man, Darwin, as though he were the false god of an ‘evolutionist’ religion.

  The phrase ‘intelligent design’ itself was first popularised in a notorious 1987 American biology textbook called Of Pandas and People, earlier drafts of which had referred approvingly instead to ‘creationism’ and ‘creationists’ before the new jargon was simply dropped in.33 The term was quickly adopted by religious sympathisers, and gradually gained traction through the 1990s. Its cheerleaders creatively employed many tricks of language-twisting and code-phrases to gain ever more publicity for their cause, culminating in two major trials in 2005, in Kansas and Pennsylvania, that hinged on the question of whether ID should be taught alongside evolutionary theory in high-school biology classes.

  When addressing audiences of fellow believers, proponents of ID were quite frank about their motivations. ‘Intelligent design’ was engineered as a weapon in the war between Christianity and godlessness. The famous 1999 ‘Wedge Document’ that was leaked from the carefully named pro-ID organisation the Discovery Institute, set it out explicitly. ‘Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.’34 One of ID’s founders, Phillip Johnson, expressed the essentially religious nature of the concept thus: ‘There’s a difference of opinion about how important this debate is. What I always say is that it’s not just scientific theory. The question is best understood as: Is God real or imaginary?’35 Another ID advocate, William Dembski, wrote: ‘Any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.’36 ID’s proponents were motivated to criticise evolution not for its scientific content, but because they believed the view of life as having arisen from natural processes robbed the world of meaning. ‘Intelligent design theory’ would rectify this catastrophe by basing school discussions of biology firmly on Christian principles.

  However, there was the pesky obstacle of the US Constitution to contend with, particularly the Establishment Clause that prohibited the government from promoting religion, and which had led the Supreme Court to strike down previous attempts at teaching creationism in science classes. ID’s novel approach to this problem was to deny that it was religious, and instead to claim for itself the status of science, so that it should be taught alongside evolutionary biology.

  ID’s claim to be science was implicit in its self-description as a ‘theory’. In the parlance of science, a ‘theory’ is not just a casual guess, b
ut a well-established understanding that accords with the present evidence and reliably explains or predicts features of the natural world. On the other hand, IDers regularly referred to evolution as ‘just a theory’, appealing to the ordinary-language sense of ‘theory’ as meaning a mere guess: in this way, you might have a theory about why your friend acted the way she did last Thursday; or you might even sarcastically deride another friend’s opinion by saying ‘That’s just your theory’. So ID carefully worked the same word in two directions: appropriating the technical sense of ‘theory’ for itself, and demoting it to the casual sense for the enemy.

  Evolution makes predictions – for example, about what kinds of fossils should be expected to be found at different strata of rock, including intermediary forms such as the winged dinosaur archaeopteryx; or about the results of genetic experiments in the laboratory, including the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria – and they are repeatedly confirmed by observation. Evolution also has majestic explanatory force, in accounting for the features of current life on the planet. It can inspire awe; but IDers felt that awe was their turf. So for ID, evolution was ‘just a theory’. ‘Intelligent design’, on the other hand, was purportedly a ‘theory’ in the sense of a robust, scientific theory, and yet, weirdly, it did not do much explaining or predicting. Officially, for example, it did not hold even a view as to who the mysterious designer was. All of its proponents believed that the designer was the Christian God, but since to admit this would be to admit that ID was disguised religion, and so unfit to be taught in science lessons, they preferred to leave the official theory vague.

  Michael Behe, author of one of the celebrated ur-texts of popular ID, Darwin’s Black Box,37 was asked to confirm this at the Dover Area School District trial in Pennsylvania during October and November 2005, where a group of parents were suing to overturn the district’s decision to use the ID bible, Of Pandas and People, in biology class. Their counsel, Eric J. Rothschild, asked Behe: ‘You believe [the designer is] God, but it’s not part of your scientific argument?’ Behe responded: ‘That’s correct.’38 In other words, ID as a ‘theory’ observed some biological feature and said: this must have been designed, but we have no idea who designed it, and we are not even interested in finding out. Actually, they were certain they knew.

  As well as pretending ignorance as to the identity of the designer, ID also had nothing to say about how the purported design actually happened. What were the physical mechanisms by which the designer fiddled with molecules so as to produce his desired animals? ID offered no answers, not even any hypotheses. In Dover, Michael Behe defended this odd reticence by comparing it to astrophysics. Rothschild asked Behe to confirm the statement that ‘intelligent design does not describe how the design occurred’. Behe responded: ‘That’s correct, just like the Big Bang theory does not describe what caused the Big Bang.’ The comparison was vastly erroneous. Big Bang theory describes what caused the universe as it appears to us now, offers a massively detailed description of what happened during the Big Bang itself, and does indeed have ideas about what caused it.39

  As it happens, the theory of the Big Bang was first proposed by a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who wrote that his idea remained ‘entirely outside of any metaphysical or religious question’.40 The Vatican, indeed, officially took the view that God was the ‘cause of causes’, setting the universe in motion to operate according to natural laws, and that religion was therefore compatible with robust scientific theories, including evolution.41 The fundamentalists of ID, on the other hand, hated what they saw as the ideological consequences of evolution too much to adopt such a view. Yet their competing ‘theory’ of ‘intelligent design’ was completely silent on what happened during the hypothesised design, or even when it happened. It just must have happened, right? Don’t ask me how.

  In general, for a ‘scientific theory’, ID was curiously reluctant to answer scientific questions. Why did, for example, the mysterious Intelligent Designer give vertebrates, including humans, a flawed eye with a blind spot, but bless the humble squid with a different type of eye that suffered no such problem? ID studiously avoided the question. Why did the Intelligent Designer give humans an organ, the appendix, which resembles a withered version of that for digesting plant matter in other animals but serves no function in people except occasionally to poison them? What principle of intelligent design causes five-month-old human foetuses to grow a thin coat of fur all over their bodies while still in the womb, where it is not cold, and then lose it before they are born into the world, where it might well be cold?42 Don’t ask.

  ID’s strategy was instead to focus on unanswered problems. As with any scientific field, areas of evolutionary biology are incompletely understood. To scientists, these areas suggested new research, experiments, and hypotheses. To IDers, they represented a chance to claim that these questions would never be answered by science. We cannot currently explain how this part of a bacterium evolved, they would reason, so it must have been created by an intelligent entity. This type of argument had for centuries been known as the ‘God of the gaps’. It is easy to do: you simply find a gap in current understanding and claim that it can only be filled by positing God.

  Modern IDers used exactly the same idea, only now dressed up in pseudo-scientific terminology. William Dembski coined the phrase ‘complex specified information’ to denote information – such as that encoded by the human genome – that in his view could in principle not have come about through natural causes. (Sometimes he described it as ‘souped-up information’, though the flavour of the soup remained obscure.)43 Michael Behe, meanwhile, promoted the notion of ‘irreducible complexity’, according to which some biological systems could not in principle have evolved, since if you remove any one part they no longer work.44 Both phrases amount to the logical fallacy of proof by definition. I make up a technical-sounding phrase that really means ‘designed’. I say that some biological feature can be described by this phrase, and then try to argue that therefore, that feature must have been designed. But this is only an illusion of logic: the inference follows directly from the way I have carefully stacked the linguistic decks. In fact, in their a priori ruling-out of scientific explanation, the phrases ‘complex specified information’ and ‘irreducibly complex’ are both just rhetorical appeals to ignorance.

  In Behe’s case, this was dramatically illustrated during the Dover trial. One of his favoured examples of ‘irreducible complexity’ at the time was the immune system of vertebrate animals, so Eric J. Rothschild stacked in front of Behe a pile of books he had previously lent him, that Rothschild claimed represented the leading research into the topic, with titles such as Evolution of Immune Reactions, Origin and Evolution of the Vertebrate Immune System, The Natural History of the Major Histocompatibility Complex, and so on. Behe had not read any of them. ‘I am quite skeptical,’ he opined, ‘although I haven’t read them, that in fact they present detailed rigorous models for the evolution of the immune system by random mutation and natural selection.’ Rothschild was incredulous. ‘You haven’t read the books that I gave you?’ he asked. ‘No,’ Behe replied. ‘I haven’t.’45 Apparently, it is not necessary to know everything the enemy thinks. It suffices to insist that whatever they think must be wrong. ID’s inbuilt prejudice against any type of naturalistic explanation for its favoured talking-points, and so its inescapable religiosity, could not have been more clearly demonstrated.

  Vacuous though they were, ID’s jargon-phrases of ‘complex specified information’ and ‘irreducible complexity’ did have the undeniable virtue of sounding sort-of-scientific. And in this way they could function as stealthy stalking-horses for the prime idea of ID itself. Following similarly farcical court hearings in May 2005, the Kansas State Board of Education drafted a new version of its Science Standards, which claimed in its prefatory ‘Rationale’ that it did not include ‘Intelligent Design’. However, attentive reading revealed the following passage later on: ‘Whether microevolution
(change within a species) can be extrapolated to explain macroevolutionary changes (such as new complex organs or body plans and new biochemical systems which appear irreducibly complex) is controversial.’46 See that little ‘irreducibly complex’ smuggled in there? That, as noted, is code. It is used by no one except proponents of ID. What it really means is ‘intelligently designed’. What is more, the terms ‘microevolution’ and ‘macroevolution’ themselves are ID fictions, expressing the strategy of accepting some parts of evolutionary science because the evidence is so overwhelming, and focusing highly selectively on a few examples. Kansas education functionaries had once again become the laughing stock of the civilised world during the trial. Perhaps it would be more politically efficient to adopt ID by stealth, using its special code-language to reassure the initiated.