Access Research NetworkEngineer Joe White ought to know an intelligent design when he sees one. By day, on the job at Boeing, White has worked on some of the world's best-built airplanes: the F-15, the F-18, and these days, the C-17 cargo jet.
By night, White looks for designs on a vastly different scale.
>From his St. Charles home and at meetings of the Missouri Association for Creation, White has been preparing for years to convince the state that biological life itself shows evidence of an intelligent design. Now he wants to pass a law requiring Missouri teachers to teach the idea to public school students.
As chairman of a St. Charles group called Missourians for Excellence in Science Education, White is part of the latest wave of grass-roots efforts across the nation challenging curriculum that includes evolution.
Battles in Minnesota and Ohio are under way over how the subject should be handled. A number of states, including Missouri and Illinois, lack mention of the word "evolution" in their science standards; Georgia's school superintendent has said that the state government is considering removing the word. The bill that White wrote over the past three years would not replace evolution with God. Rather, it would mandate that curriculums add the teaching of intelligent design, a relatively new concept that amounts to an intellectual critique of evolution. Missouri's science standards are extremely general and do not mention evolution. Local school districts decide their own curriculums.
In White's mind, molecular wonders such as DNA could not have occurred through the natural processes of evolution.
"Here we have a complexity that is screaming intelligence," said White, 57, a slight man with neatly parted hair. Biological life and its complicated details, he said, "could not have come about by accident."
White faces an uphill battle. Missouri House Speaker Catherine Hanaway, R-Warson Woods, has been vague about when she plans to give a committee hearing for the legislation, House Bill 911. It's possible the legislation could be tacked on as an 11th-hour amendment, but White and bill sponsor Dr. Robert Wayne Cooper, R-Camdenton, say they want a full debate. Even the nonprofit Discovery Institute in Seattle, which has supported challenges to evolution curriculums elsewhere, opposes legislation on intelligent design specifically.
Cooper, who introduced the legislation in December, acknowledges the long odds of the bill passing this year. He said he plans to continue to make the issue a priority for the future. He intends to survey teachers to get more input and could introduce a revised bill next term.
"We're looking at this for five years and 10 years," White said.
Cooper and White met last year after two other lawmakers, including White's own representative Tom Dempsey, R-St.Charles, declined to sponsor the bill.
Mainstream science vehemently opposes White and his allies. In 2002, the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that intelligent design had been shown to include "conceptual flaws in its formulation, a lack of credible scientific evidence, and misrepresentations of scientific facts." About 300 Missouri scientists signed a letter last month declaring that intelligent design "isn't science," adding that evolution was consistently shown through "observations of the contemporary and ancient natural world."
Thinkers through the ages, including Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, have argued that an examination of the universe suggests a plan or sentient creator. Theologian William Paley wrote in 1803 that in nature, "the marks of design are too strong not to point to an agent who planned and created life."
Central to Darwin's theory of evolution, first published comprehensively in 1859, was the concept that small changes to an organism could lead to intricate new structures through the force of natural selection. Intelligent design challenges the idea that such a natural process on its own could lead to the complex details of biology. Proponents of the idea update Paley's argument with modern molecular biology, arguing that the high-turbo motor that makes the tails on sperm cells spin, and the maze of neurons that comprise the brain could not be the results of natural selection.
More than a dozen proteins, for instance, make up the complex process of clotting blood. Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe says that system is too complex to have developed by evolution.
That's because organisms that have only partially evolved - say, with one or two clotting proteins in place - cannot compete with those that have not evolved at all, Behe argues.
One can only imply the "guidance of an intelligent agent," Behe wrote in 1996.
University of Missouri biochemist Frank Schmidt believes Behe is missing the evolutionary clues.
"In fact there are organisms that have partial blood clotting (processes) and they seem to clot their blood OK," Schmidt said.
Additionally, intelligent design thinkers question science's reliance on material evidence. White argues that astronomers search for intelligence in outer space - why not look for intelligence here on Earth?
"What intelligent design reduces to is 'Is there a God?'" said Washington University anthropologist Richard Smith. "That is not a scientific question."
As such, only a few scientists worldwide have published articles on intelligent design, none in long-standing biology journals with rigid publication standards.
"In a science class it's our obligation to teach what has been recognized by the science community," said Rebecca Litherland, former president of the Science Teachers of Missouri.
White says he just wants science education to "be more accurate and truthful."
In Missouri, White knows his opposition well. After beginning to study the intelligent design movement about five years ago, he consulted with engineers, constitutional lawyers and science teachers. Last summer he e-mailed a draft of the bill to a handful of the state's most prominent scientists for comments.
The researchers became suspicious fast. White was trying to "use the name of the university," Washington University physicist William Dickhoff said in an interview. "He just wanted to say he had input from evolutionary biologists," said Washington University biologist Allan Larson. "It was clear the whole thing was a hoax," he said. In one e-mail to the group, White complained of "mudslinging."
White incorporated few of the scientists' critiques in the final bill. But, he said of the exchange recently, "it's good to have negative input."
In addition to hostility from the academics, the proponents of the bill face the accusation that they are motivated by religion.
White won't comment on his religious convictions, or whether he believes that the Earth is older than 10,000 years. For two years he's been a dues-paying member of the Missouri Association for Creation.
"This bill is about science," said Dr. Cooper, who serves as president of Graceland Ministries in Camdenton. In an earlier interview, he said: "It's not that I don't believe in creationism."
According to the book, "Creationism's Trojan Horse," published this year by Oxford University press, many figures in the intelligent design movement have strong religious ties. Mathematician William A. Dembski, a leading philosopher in the movement, has invoked Christ and the New Testament in speeches. The Discovery Institute calls itself a "secular think tank." But an institute fund-raising document discovered in 1999 said it wanted to foster "science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."
The institute has received funding from a number of religious groups, including the evangelist McClellan Foundation in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"Is this an effort to bring creationism into the schools? I think it is," said Litherland, the science teacher.
"I find it obnoxious that people's religious view should impugn their specific arguments," said Jay Richards, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
If the bill passes, though, courts may not agree. In Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 case considered a precedent on the issue, the Supreme Court found that a Louisiana law called the Creationism Act did not have a "secular purpose," largely because the court felt it was advancing a "particular religious doctrine."
White believes that HB911 would survive such scrutiny. He points out that the bill does not identify a creator behind the intelligent design found in biology. But Florida State University law professor Steven G. Gey warned that if legislators are shown to be communicating with a religious group, courts could rule that the bill had a nonsecular purpose.
Missouri House Bill 911 at a glance
Teachers would teach intelligent design: "The origin of life on earth is inferred to be the result of intelligence directed design and construction."
Science would be taught "in a truthful and objective manner about the physical universe without any preconceived philosophical demands concerning origins or destiny."
Events "previous to written history" would be taught as "theory or hypothesis."
The state commissioner of education would include intelligent design in standardized tests and develop supplemental material on the subject.
Source: Missouri House Bill 911
File Date: 3.04.04
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