Living Witness(111)

“That woman I mentioned, Barbara Forrest,” Miss Marbledale said. “She’d be a good place to start to understand why the fuss, as you put it. But let’s start with me. The problem, for me, is just this: that disclaimer is functionally a lie, even though it may technically be true.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means,” Miss Marbledale said, “that it’s true enough that ‘some people’ accept evolution and ‘some people’ reject it for Intelligent Design, or outright Creationism, for that matter, but putting a disclaimer like that in a science textbook implies that the ‘some people’ who reject evolution for Intelligent Design are scientists who have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution.”

“And that’s not true?” Gregor said. “I thought I’d seen scientists who support Intelligent Design.”

“Oh, you have,” Miss Marbledale said. “There aren’t many of them, and the only biologist of any standing is Michael Behe, who’s from Lehigh, not that far up the road here. But he doesn’t prefer Intelligent Design for scientific reasons. He prefers it for religious ones. And the one ‘scientific’ idea he’s come up with to ‘challenge’ evolution is a recycled chestnut that’s been around for a hundred and fifty years.”

“And that is?”

“He calls it irreducible complexity,” Miss Marbledale said. “To put it simply, it says that some organs are so complex, that if you take away even a single one of their parts, they’d cease to function. So natural selection can’t account for those, because in order for those organs to evolve, they would have to come into existence, poof, all at once, with all their parts intact exactly as they are. And that is—and everybody agrees on this—impossible.”

“But you said it is an old chestnut,” Gregor said, “so I assume it’s not impossible.”

“Oh, it’s impossible, all right,” Miss Marbledale said, “but the fact is that nobody is claiming any of that. Certainly evolutionary biologists aren’t. Behe assumes, like the people who have proposed the same idea before him, that each one of those parts has never had any other purpose but the one it has now in the organ in question. But that’s not true. There are plenty of examples of parts of organs that serve purposes now that they didn’t originally—Behe’s big example, for instance, of the flagellum, has been exposed time and again. There’s a good article by Kenneth Miller, if you want it. I have it around here somewhere.”

“Later, maybe,” Gregor said.

“And there’s the eye and the inner ear,” Miss Marbledale said. “We’ve been able to trace prior uses for parts of those organs. The whole concept of ‘irreducible complexity’ depends on the entirely false idea that whatever function an organ or a part of an organ has now is the one it must always have had.”

“And that’s it?” Gregor said. “The entire case for Intelligent Design rests on the work of one man?”

“It rests on nobody’s work,” Miss Marbledale said. “At least, it rests on nobody’s scientific work. There is no scientific work in Intelligent Design. There are no peer-reviewed papers. There are no reproducible experiments. There are no falsifiable predictions. None. The entire movement consists of people sitting around saying, ‘I don’t see how evolution could have made that happen, so God must have done it.’ And that, you see, is the point. They don’t want to advance the cause of science. They don’t want to expand human knowledge. All they want is to make it seem, to the general public, that there’s something wrong with the theory of evolution, that it’s just a guess, that it’s probably not true.”

“And you think it’s true?”

“Of course I think it’s true,” Miss Marbledale said. “If you’re actually willing to look at the evidence, there’s nothing else to think. Evolution is a fact. Virtually everything that book says about it is false. Everything. Evidence in the fossil record? There’s a ton of it, a huge, overwhelming mountain of it. Macroevolution? We can prove it. We have transitional fossils out the wazoo, full transitional sequences between reptiles and birds, for instance, and many more. The only point of that book is to lie and lie and lie again until it gets children so confused they don’t know what’s true, and the purpose of that, in the long run, is to discredit science. It’s science that those people are afraid of.”

“Because science disproves religion?” Gregor asked.