Chimps with everything: a ridiculous war

By Cristina Odone in The Times

It sounds so innocuous. Of Pandas and People has a whimsical, almost Disneyesque ring to it, a soft-toy tome for children curious about the rich variety of species found in nature. To its critics, though, Pandas, the result of a collaboration between the American authors Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, is the wrong-headed and downright wicked textbook of intelligent design (ID) theory. ID claims that organisms are the products of an “intelligent design” conceived by a nameless “intelligent agent”. There is no mention of the G-word in ID, and, unlike creationism, it does not teach that our world is divine in origin, or even created in seven days; but for scientists and most educationists, Pandas and its counterparts are guilty of trying to tear up the principles of biology and drag scientific inquiry back to the Dark Ages.

When a US federal court ruled recently that Pandas and other ID works do not belong in the science curriculum of publicly funded schools, it delivered a Christmas present to cheer the Scroogiest of scientists. Corks popped in labs from Seattle to Saratoga. Yet the argument about ID is a strange one. For a start, there is plenty of room for intelligent design outside the science curriculum, as part of the study of philosophy, religion or the history of ideas.

But ID’s supporters aren’t satisfied with their theory being studied as an interesting intellectual blind alley; they want it taught as a scientific alternative. Evolution, they say, is just a theory, so let’s consider other theories too. That fundamentally misunderstands scientific language: evolution was a theory when Darwin first posited it; now it is as well rooted as, say, quantum physics. Further elaboration of it is desirable and necessary; but trying to think up a new theory is likely to be futile, and certainly not worth wasting science lessons on. Intelligent design offers little comfort to the strongest opponents of evolution: the many Americans who believe that the Bible is literally true. God (or someone) may have nudged the evolutionary process, ID argues, but it does not support the claim that He created the world in a week. Moreover, ID is a very selective nibble at the scientific worldview. For a Christian who believes in the literal truth of the Bible, cosmology is just as threatening as evolution, showing beyond all reasonable doubt (albeit not to unreasonable doubters) that the Universe is billions of years old, not created in 4,004BC.

It is easy to feel smug about this over here, where we resolved this issue (we think) more than a century ago. In this country, the compartmentalisation of God and faith has a longer history and has been far more strictly enforced than in America. The price for such secularism is that believers often feel like pariahs; the prize, that no child in a state school will ever learn that the world was made in six days and that woman came from man’s rib.

And yet . . . Christian evangelicals may not be as numerous here as in America, but they are rich and well organised. Like their American counterparts, they are determined to proclaim the truth of the Bible, and to contest what they see as the humiliating evolutionary theory that connects humans, made in God’s own image, to a chimp or, further back, a slimeball. So believers here too are choosing, unwisely, to stand their ground on evolution, largely in protest against the idea that the Bible and faith have nothing to say in explaining the world and its ways.

Ultimately, intelligent design’s attempt to rewrite the principles of biology is as futile as an attempt to create Christian mathematics, or Islamic physics. It would be far better for believers to pitch their tents on a battlefield where the enemy is on weak ground: to take a seasonal example, what, for example, is meant by “peace on earth and goodwill to all men”. Believers, of all stripes, have an answer. The secularists struggle.