Intelligent Design is For ‘Fraidy Cats

Scaredy Cats (Image by Paparutzi)

Some scientists just love to look for a biological explanation for everything. A recent blog posting Death, Science And Intelligent Design, by Jonathan Parkinson, looks at why people are so wedded to Intelligent Design (ID), despite the overwhelming lack of evidence.

Parkinson writes about a recent study in PLoSOne that argues that ID's popularity in some cases is partly due to peoples’ anxiety about their own mortality. Here is the experimental design: 122 undergraduate students were asked to think about and then write about either their own death or a painful visit to the dentist (the control group). Then they read a 174-word passage by evolutionary biologist (and anti-religion activist) Richard Dawkins which summarized the evidence for evolution, followed by a passage by Michael Behe, also 174 words long, summarizing the arguments in favor of ID. Students then rated the authors on a 9-point scale and ranked their own religious beliefs on a 10-point scale. The researchers repeated the experiment with several other groups, including 832 randomly selected Americans.


The results were intriguing. In four of the groups, students who were asked to imagine their own deaths had a statistically significant higher appreciation for Behe's arguments and ID compared to the control group, even after controlling for religiosity. However, for the one group of natural science students, appreciation for Behe/ID declined after imagining their own deaths.

Okay, now let’s discuss the problems with this study. First, the sample size was small for most of the groups studied and the effects, while statistically significant were also pretty small for some of the groups. Choosing a painful dental experience as the control treatment doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. Why not have the control group simply read the passages without writing the essay on death? The order in which they read the articles may also have created a bias. Perhaps if they read Dawkins last, they would have been more predisposed to his ideas. There are also a variety of variables that were not controlled (e.g., socioeconomic status, ethnicity, health status) that might have influenced either the subjects’ belief in ID or their receptiveness to it. And lastly, Dawkins was probably not the best author to have them read, considering that he is antagonistic to religiosity.

The conclusion of the authors is that support for ID is fueled by "existential anxiety," and that it offers them a sense of meaning and purpose while evolution does not. (Life science students ostensibly have found purpose and meaning in their search for rational explanations of natural phenomena). This brings up another problem with the study: why should existential anxiety over death draw one toward ID, but not anxiety over pain, especially when we consider that death puts an end to pain, whereas dental pain could continue long after the experience and include pain in the pocketbook and the loss of the ability to enjoy one’s meals? Of course this is too rational and the anxiety is really more about people’s lack of experience with death and their fear of the unknown.

Parkinson finds the study’s conclusions plausible, but insufficient, arguing that there are likely two additional factors that influence belief in ID. First, many people believe that the theory of evolution is incompatible with religious belief. Thus, if they are forced to choose between the two, the majority will choose the religion. Parkinson’s other factor is related to the limited imagination of humans and our tendency to use metaphors to understand complex phenomena. There aren’t really any good metaphors for evolution, nor is it easy to understand it based on everyday experiences, whereas ID is based on the anthropomorphic metaphor that life is too complex to have arisen spontaneously and must have been coordinated by an intelligent being.

While Parkinson may be correct, neither of his hypotheses really explains the results of the PLOS study. Why would thinking about death make some people (but not life scientists) more predisposed to ID than thinking about pain or dentistry? It is important to consider other possible explanations for these results. For example, perhaps life science students already have a predisposition against ID and perhaps they also have less existential anxiety about their own mortality. Perhaps they are just less fearful, in general, or have different coping mechanisms for dealing with their fears. Also, Parkinson’s last factor, that evolution is just plain difficult to understand, may be exacerbated by existential fear, at least for those who are susceptible to existential fear and who don’t already have a good grasp of evolution. There is also the question of whether existential anxiety predisposes people to religion in general, and not just religious explanations for the origins of life.

Few High School Biology Teachers Accurately Teach Evolution

I hate to bag on my own colleagues, but the evidence is overwhelming: most high school biology teachers either do not teach evolution or undermine their own teaching by giving nods and winks to creationist ideas. (See Most high school biology teachers don’t endorse evolution, by Valerie Strauss.)

 

Tom Schmal

The result is that few U.S. high school students are really being taught evolution in an accurate or comprehensible way. Not only is this unfair to students who graduate believing they have mastered biology, when many have not, but it is a violation of teachers’ responsibility to accurately teach the content standards, including the scientific process (how scientists obtain data, analyze it and determine the validity of their hypotheses).  

Here are some of the details from Strauss’ article:

• Only 28% of biology teachers consistently teach the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) recommended evolution curriculum,
• Around 13% of biology teachers explicitly include creationism or intelligent design for at least part of their curriculum
• The remaining 60% either fail to explain the scientific process sufficiently, undermine the authority of evolution experts, or legitimize creationist arguments
• Many teach evolutionary biology as if it is only applicable to molecular processes, but not to populations or the process of speciation.
• Many tell students that they don’t have to “believe in evolution, but they have to know it for tests, which, for many students, implies that it is just one of many explanations that may or may not be true.
• Others tell students to decide for themselves what to believe, even though scientists are as certain of the validity of evolution as they are about any other scientific fact. We would not tell students to decide for themselves if the Holocaust or slavery occurred (although I wonder, based on the evolution data, if there are many biology teachers who are also climate deniers).

This is Not Simply a Problem of Religious Teachers Refusing to Do Their Jobs

Just like a Christian pharmacist should be required to sell all legal drugs, including birth control, a Christian biology teacher should be required to teach the content standards, including evolution. However, the problem is not just an issue of religious activists deliberately refusing to do their jobs. For some teachers, the last two examples above (e.g., “you don’t have to believe; just know it for tests” and “you decide what to believe”) may result more from a desire to respect their students’ cultural and religious beliefs and not insult or alienate them, than from their own religious biases or activism. I regularly have students tell me that they don’t have to learn evolution because it’s against their religion. My response is, “Well, actually you do. It is an important part of biology and it is in the content standards. Furthermore, it is impossible to understand other parts of biology without a foundation in evolution. Evolution helps scientists to develop new medicines, understand certain diseases and even make predictions about climate change.”

My response is not insulting or demeaning, nor does it undermine the science by implying that evolution is just one of many explanations that one can choose to believe, or not. On the contrary, it emphasizes that evolution is a lynchpin of biology, not just a stand-alone branch of the discipline. It is important to emphasize that evolution can be taught and misconceptions about it can be corrected, without engaging in the kind of hostile and insulting discourse expressed by people like Richard Dawkins. This sort of behavior probably does more to shut down students’ curiosity and openness to new ideas than to dispel their faith-based misconceptions.

In order to correct misconceptions is important to clarify the scientific process, particularly the meaning of the word “theory,” which many people misuse to mean “belief” or “opinion,” rather than its actual scientific meaning: “fact, based on a collection of related hypotheses that have been repeatedly verified.” Also, before I even get into the nuts and bolts of evolution, I emphasize the distinction between the scientific process, which is evidence-based, and faith-based thinking, where one believes without (or despite) evidence. I even go so far as to tell students that in certain circumstances faith-based thought is sometimes the most effective way to think (for example, having faith in oneself can help one remain motivated and focused during sports or academic challenges), but that in science, evidence is required, lots of it, and it must be verifiable by independent researchers using controlled experiments. Faith that a scientific hypothesis is right (without evidence) can lead to deadly consequences.

Another problem is that many science teachers have little or no experience doing “bench” science, having earned a degree in biology and then a teaching credential without having worked in a lab. As a result, they sometimes do not fully understand the scientific process themselves. For example, many cannot explain why a randomized, double blind, controlled study is more compelling than anecdotal evidence. Even doctors sometimes have this problem. Consider all the times you have heard doctors give advice based on their anecdotal experience with other patients.

Many Americans (including some biology teachers) do not truly understand evolution, making it difficult to believe and even harder to teach. This is due in part to the considerable misunderstandings and oversimplifications that are perpetuated in our culture (e.g., “we came from monkeys,” which implies that monkeys gave birth to humans or had sex with humans; in contrast to the idea that we share a common ancestor).

Even without the misconceptions, evolution is not an easy theory to understand. For example, the idea that an organ as complex as the human eye could be the result of random mutations and natural selection seems really far-fetched, until one realizes that the rudiments of vision, proteins that sense and respond to light, have existed for millions of years and have been utilized in sensory organs of animals that existed long before the evolution of the modern eye. It is also difficult to really get a handle on the slow rate of random mutations and how they can accrue in organisms without some background in biochemistry. For example, I don’t think that most biology teachers understand or teach that human DNA polymerase, the enzyme that builds new DNA molecules during replication, has a natural mutation rate of about 10^-8.

Of course none of this is to say that there aren’t creationist biology teachers who deliberately try to undermine the teaching of evolution. A recent Gallop poll shows that 40% of Americans believe in young Earth creationism (i.e., the Earth and all its life were created by God 10,000 years ago), while another 38% believe in a form of evolution with God playing a role in it. No doubt some of these folks have made it into biology classrooms as teachers.