<html><body>Science Wars Should Schools Teach Intelligent Design? October 21, 2005 (Unedited transcript prepared from audio recordings.) <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>8:30 a.m.</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Registration</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>8:45</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Breakfast</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>9:00 </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Welcome:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Sally Satel, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>9:10</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Panel I: Science, Religion, and Intelligent Design </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Discussants:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Paul Nelson, Discovery Institute</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Kenneth Miller, Brown University</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Moderator: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Sally Satel, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>10:15</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Break</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>10:30</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Morning Keynote:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Father George Coyne, Vatican Observatory</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>11:00</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Discussant:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Michael Novak, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>11:30</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Panel II: Should We Teach the Controversy </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Discussants:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>John Calvert, Intelligent Design Network</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Barbara Forrest, Southeastern Louisiana University </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Moderator:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Frederick M. Hess, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>12:30 p.m.</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Luncheon Keynote:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Lawrence Krauss, Case Western Reserve University</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>2:00</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Panel III: The Dover, Pa., Case and Beyond: Legal and Public Policy Implications of the ID Controversy</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Discussants:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Steven Gey, Florida State University</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Richard Thompson, Thomas More Law Center</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Mark Ryland, Discovery Institute</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Moderator:</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Jon Entine, AEI</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>3:30</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MS. SATEL:  Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute.  My name is Sally Satel.  I'm a resident scholar here, and this is our conference on the question of whether intelligent design should be taught in schools. As we meet here today, a trial is going on in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the Third District Court.  Eleven parents of the Dover area school district are charging the School Board there with violation of the separation of church and state.  Last year the parents filed this suit after the Dover School Board voted to require that high school biology teachers read to students a short statement casting doubt on Darwin's theory of evolution and proposing as a scientific alternative the theory of intelligent design. As you know, the trial has gotten enormous attention.  It pits accepted scientific principles of Darwinian evolution, such as common ancestry and natural selection, against the idea that a designer--presumably God, although not everyone endorses that--but that some kind of intelligent designer is responsible for the complexity of life on Earth. Today our conference will focus on the pedagogic and legal implications of teaching intelligent design in the classroom, and we have some of the most estimable thinkers and teachers in these domains, including two who have served within the last few weeks as expert witnesses in the Dover trial. To begin, though, it is vital that we understand the fundamental ideas on both sides, those of the intelligent design proponents on one side and the champions of neo-Darwinian evolution on the other, and that's what our first panel will discuss today.  Professor Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute will argue that intelligent design theory does meet the requirements of scientific inquiry; and Professor Ken Miller of Brown will seek to establish that it fails that test and, therefore, is not a legitimate alternative to evolution and, thus, should not be taught in science classes.  Professor Nelson will talk first for about 15 to 20 minutes, then Professor Miller, then Dr. Nelson can respond to Dr. Miller and vice versa, and then the audience will--we'll take questions from the audience. So, I'll introduce Dr. Nelson.  He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1998.  He is currently a fellow of the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, and an adjunct professor in the master's of arts program in science and religion at Biola University.  His forthcoming monograph on common descent critically evaluates that theory.  Mr. Nelson's research interests include the relationship between developmental biology and the history of life, intelligent design, and the interaction of theology and science. Dr. Nelson. DR. NELSON:  I'd like to thank AEI for hosting this daylong seminar.  This is a topic of incredible richness because it ramifies not only into science, but into philosophy, theology, and with Kitzmiller v. Dover into the constitutional realm as well.  So, it's a topic with literally hundreds of facets. My title, the title in your program, is:   "If Darwin explained design, what's design?"  And I'm going to argue, if I can get this slide to advance, that it doesn't really matter what happens in Kitzmiller v. Dover, and I say this with due apologies to Barb Forrest, Ken Miller, Richard Thompson, those people here in the room who have either testified in the trial, are litigating it currently, or have worked very hard in what's going on up there in Harrisburg.  But in my view of this, it doesn't really matter what happens because the intelligent design debate is here to stay. You know, I was on a recent speaking trip in California at Stanford and U.C. Santa Cruz, and en route from Stanford down to Santa Cruz, I was reading Cicero on the nature of gods, on the nature of the gods, written in 60 B.C.  Not a Christian on the scene.  In fact, that book is a debate between Greek philosophies, current at the time, about whether there was design in the world or no design, a debate between a design view  with some kind of transcendent action or a kind of deterministic view that an atomist might hold. These questions are as old as humankind, and we should not think that our particular constitutional dust-ups are going to stop them.  In fact, they'll continue on into the future.  The design debate is here to stay. Ken, I have to tell you, this is a little--here we go.  Sorry. The issues raised by intelligent design are built into evolutionary theory itself, and they've been present right from the beginning of evolutionary theory.  I want to give you three facts to consider.  The first is--I'll come to this throughout my presentation--the test that Darwin proposed for evolution requires logically that design be a genuine empirical possibility.  Secondly, the theological content of evolutionary theory since the origin itself entails--entails that students will need to discuss theology.  Lastly, critics of design have brought the idea into the scientific literature, and I'll give you several examples of that at the end. To assess these three things, to weigh their merits, we must discuss design pro and con.  It's unavoidable.  Unavoidable. Fact one:  the test that Darwin proposed for evolution requires logically that design be a genuine empirical possibility.  Ken's an ump, so I'm offering this example in honor of his hobby.  He became a professional this year, he told me.  He's now a paid ump, not just a volunteer.  This is a picture that many of you have seen from the American League pennant.  This is game two, the infamous point near the end of the game when the Sox catcher Pierzynski missed on the third strike, but the ball seemed like it might have hit the ground, so he ran to first, and you know the rest of the story. Now, the existence of the strike zone here, that boundary implies something.  It implies that a ball within that zone is a strike, a ball outside it is a ball, and the very existence of the boundary, the possibility of one outcome or another means that the ump has got to be objective.  As I'll show you in a moment, the strike zone can't be huge, and it can't be tiny either.  The logical point is, there are two possibilities for any pitch thrown from the pitcher's mound. Well, the same is the case with evolution.  Now, here's what Darwin said on what would test the theory.  If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed that could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.  And he proposes this fairly early in the origin.  And it's a test that has come to have a great significance in our current debate. Now, his two main claims are:  One, that a pathway of material continuity links all organisms on Earth in one giant tree; secondly, that every step in that pathway occurred by undirected natural causes only.  Now, both of these might turn out to be false.  In fact, the logic of the test requires that that possibility exist, that both of them could be false, otherwise we're assuming evolution as an a priori or as a given.  It's got to be at least possible that both of those claims can tested and turn out to be false in order for theory to be empirical. Now, if they are false, we have a situation like this.  No material continuity, let's say, or if the second claim is false--because you could have material continuity and yet have design--that's what Asa Gray, the great Harvard botanist believed--you have teleological mechanisms operating. Now, it's essential that you realize that the--testing either of these implies this and that there is a logical symmetry here.  There's nothing spooky about this.  It's just the testability of evolution requires that these other possibilities be on the table as live possibilities, even if they're not the case. Now, typically, this is what we see again in baseball.  You've got a strike zone, you've got strikes and balls.  The existence of the boundary entails multiple outcomes, possible outcomes.  Now, here's a case that could turn out to be one such example that falsifies evolution. You know.  The eye and the bacterial motor get lots of attention.  This is an interesting case.  It's a lowly digestive enzyme, very powerful, but rather lowly.  Pepsin.  The active site here.  It's a proteolytic enzyme.  Works in your stomach.  Now, when this enzyme is produced by your stomach, it's actually not produced in this form because if it were, it would begin to digest the very cell in which it was synthesized.  When it's produced, it's produced in a form called a zymogen, which is inactive, and that green portion there is a 44 amino acid sequence that is snipped out after the pepsinogen, the form that's produced in the cell, is secreted into the stomach.  And you could see why you would want this.  You don't want a digestive enzyme chewing up the very cell that produces it.  So, natural selection has got somehow to produce first an enzyme that actually is not functional as a digestive enzyme and then find a way of activating it later, an interesting kind of puzzle for evolution, the sort of thing that you can say well, maybe that's the kind of example that would cause us to question the adequacy of the Darwinian mechanism here and raise this as a real possibility. But then a funny thing happens, and it happens not because of the logic here, but it happens because of the constitutional structure of our country and because of the First Amendment.  People say, "Hey, that's creationism."  Well, that's a name for it, certainly, but it doesn't really matter.  That is what is implied by our strike zone.  If our strike zone has this proportion--in other words, no matter what we observe, it's consistent with evolution.  Evolution is no longer an empirical theory that can be tested.  If our strike zone looks like this, again we have the same problem.  The possibility of testing evolution entails logically that other outcomes, namely the one on the bottom, are live empirical candidates.  Logical symmetry here in inescapable.  Point one. Point two or fact two.  The theological content of evolution itself since the origin requires that students discuss theology.  I was in a debate in Philadelphia a few months ago with Neil Shanks (ph) on National Public Radio, and I asked Neil--he's a philosopher who's written a book on this topic, "Skeptic of Design"--I said, "Neil, in a high school biology class, public school biology class in the United States, could students read "The Origin of Species"?  And he said no.  So, I asked him about two other books.  One was his own and the other was Stephen Gould's "The Panda's Thumb."  He said no to each.  And finally Margo Adler, the host from NPR, spun in her chair to face him, and she said, "What are you saying?" Well, I knew from previous correspondence with Neil that his view of science was such that theological content was not part of science.  Well, if you open "The Origin," it chock full of theology.  Here's one example.  This is a view very close to the view that Ken holds.  Ken and I are both Christians, theists, believe that God is real, that He acts in the history of the world.  Darwin at the time of the writing of "The Origin" probably was himself a theist if not a Christian.  At the end of the book he says:  "You know, it makes more sense that God should have built the world using his natural laws rather than acting directly." Now, I'm a high school biology teacher.  I assign "The Origin" to my students.  They come to this passage, and they want to evaluate this argument.  They come back into class, and they say, "Now, Darwin makes this claim about what God should have done.  I disagree with him.  Can we talk about that?" Now, the teacher has a choice.  She can either say no and bowdlerize "The Origin," pretend that that passage is not there, or she can say yes and risk getting a call from the ACLU because the theological content of evolution is considerable. Here's an example from the recent literature--sorry, I'm having a little trouble with this.  This is George Williams, who is a professor at SUNY Stonybrook, a leading evolutionary theorist, and this is one of his works from 1992 in a technical monograph series published by Oxford, a work intended for his colleagues professionally.  And he says in there, "The vertebrate eye is not the work of a wise designer.  As many of you know, the photo receptors in the vertebrate retina are oriented away from incoming photons.  As a consequence of that, when the nerve bundle comes together at the back of the retina, it creates a blind spot because all the wiring comes out here and has to go towards the brain there.   Cephalopod eye, the eyes of squid, for instance, are wired differently.  The photo receptors there face towards the light." Now, Williams goes on.  He says:  "There would be no blind spot if the vertebrate eye were really intelligently designed.  In fact, it is stupidly designed."  Now, this is, he says, the eye is not the sort of thing that a wise designer would make. Now, a student comes in in an AP biology class with that book and they say to the teacher, "I want to evaluate the merits of this argument.  I think there are good reasons for the vertebrate photo receptors to be oriented as they are, and I want to question Williams' theology. " Again, that teacher has a choice.  She can say  no, despite the fact that this is in the literature, we can't talk about it, or she can say yes, it's an interesting question, let's debate it and risk a call from a Civil Liberties attorney. The problem of choking is another example that Williams raises.  In the human airway and throat there's a point of intersection here at the epiglottis where you run the risk of choking if your epiglottis doesn't function properly, and Williams says this is evidence of evolution.  Why?  Because a wise designer wouldn't have done it that way.  And, in fact, in a alter work he puts it this way.  This is a book published by Basic Books in their science series.  It is a science book.  It was a QH call number, which puts it right smack in the middle of evolutionary theory in a library, Library of Congress classification system.  How are we going to talk about that without bringing up things that are constitutionally dangerous? It's often held that the Darwinian revolution purged the last traces of theology from biology.  Well, actually what happened was much more interesting, and I'll show you that.  Theology never went away.  Rather, its content changed, and it's still there.  Ken, I'm just going to ask you to advance the slides for me. This is how these arguments work.  We don't need a detailed logical analysis.  Here God is putting two calories into a carrot and 1,250 into an eclair.  And those of you who have bellied up to the breakfast bar this morning know exactly what I'm talking about. Next slide, please. Fact three--and this is I think the most interesting.  Critics of design have now brought the idea into the literature itself. Next slide. Last night Mark Ryland, who will be speaking this afternoon, and I and a couple of other people went to the AAAS, not  very far from here, to hear a talk by Chris Adami, who is the last author on this paper in "Nature. " Can you click through. And it was a wonderful talk.  And Chris in that presentation said:  "The reason I and my co-authors wrote this paper and published it in "Nature" was to refute Michael Behe's view of irreducible complexity.  And this has been videotaped, so you'll be able to see the tape of this and his discussion of Behe in the context of this paper in "Nature." Oh, back please. A longstanding challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it could explain the origin of complex organismal features.  Now, who raises that challenge?  Well, design theorists do.  So, what you have here is one half of the debate, one half.  You can critique design in the scientific literature.  You just can't advocate for it. Well, students are shrewd.  I have a 13-year-old daughter.  She's very shrewd.  She's naive in some senses, very shrewd in others.  And she knows that if she's only hearing half the story that she's only getting half the story.  So, it's possible to critique design, as this paper does specifically as Adami explained at the AAAS last night to challenge Michael Behe's view, why can't Behe do the same thing?  And why can't students talk about it? Next slide. What Adami was saying was this logic exists.  If those top two claims of evolution are false, the bottom is entailed logically by their falsity.  The bottom might be the case, so it's important to adjudicate the dispute in terms of evidence, and students know this whether they're allowed to talk about it or not. Next slide. Here's another paper--click through, please--by Scott Gilbert at Swarthmore from "Nature Reviews Genetics,"  an answer to Mike Behe.  Mike Behe raises challenges for evolutionary theory.  Here are my replies. Next slide. This is an interesting paper from "The Journal of Theoretic Biology" a couple of years ago--can you click once more, please.  Thanks--where they're saying now we need to be able to test our fundamental evolutionary hypotheses, like material continuity, common descent, and so forth.  One possibility, they say, among the range of other possibilities is intelligent design, and there's a section of the paper dealing with intelligent design and how it can be tested.  Now, again I pose my hypothetical.  You're a student.  You know about this paper.  You bring it in.  You want to talk about it in your public high school biology class.  What's going to be the outcome? Next slide. Books are even more interesting. One more click, please. Ken has written a book on this topic, but I noticed in his Dover testimony he said it's not science.  Well, each of these books is.  Sean Carroll,  "Endless Forms," most beautiful, wonderful book published last year by Norton; Hubert Yakki (ph)--this is a book from Cambridge published last year, and this book that I'm actually reading right now just published by Yale by Kirschner and Gerhart called "The Plausibility of Life:   Resolving Darwin's Dilemma,"  each of these goes into great detail about intelligent design.  In fact, this book has a whole chapter on the topic saying does evolution need an intelligent designer weighing the evidence pro and con.  The book by Gerhart and Kirschner as you read through the first couple of chapters, they say evolutionary theory has come to a point of crisis.  Most of the American public does not accept it.  Strong arguments have been raised against its cogency, the cogency in particular of natural selection.  With this book, they say, we now can provide one of the pieces necessary to reply to these critiques. So, let's go back to my hypothetical high school biology student.  She brings this book into class.  Can we talk about it?  Here's this idea, intelligent design.  They say that they have evidence that answers the critique.  Is this constitutionally admissible?  Now, a high school kid wouldn't say that.  They would just show up with the book and put it on their teacher's desk and say why can't I talk about this?  If the teacher says no, the consequence is the student knows that the strike zone is either very large or very small, but it's not objective. Next slide please. Because kids are shrewd.  Kids are shrewd.  They know that this is possible--in fact, Darwin argued for it in "The Origin"--but if either of these claims turns out to be false, the bottom might be the case; that's a live empirical possibility.  In fact, the very logic of testing evolution requires that the bottom be a live possibility. Next slide.  If you click all the way through all three. So, I go back to my three facts.  Even if nothing ever happened in a single school board across this country, even if Kitzmiller v. Dover was never brought as a suit, intelligent design would still be present in high school biology classrooms and in our daily life as a live issue because evolutionary theory itself is, let's say, entangled with these questions.  So, it doesn't really matter what happens at Kitzmiller v. Dover. Last slide, please. It's already there.  It's already there.  And good educational practice will not censor these issues.  They will give students the freedom to debate them and to debate them from both perspectives. Well, I think I'm done.  Thanks. [Applause.] MS. SATEL:  Next, Dr. Ken Miller, Professor of Biology at Brown University.  Dr. Miller is co-author, speaking of textbooks, with Joseph Levine of three high school and college biology textbooks among the most popular used in higher education.  His recent book, "Finding Darwin's God:  A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution," addresses the scientific status of evolutionary theory and its relationship to religious views of nature.  Dr. Miller. DR. MILLER:   Paul, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to push the buttons. [Laughter.] DR. MILLER:  I was going to say just hit forward button, if you will. Dr. Nelson asked us that we consider design, and in part of his abstract he said if intelligent design did not exist, then evolutionary biologists would need to invent it.  And we heard the word "design" several times in the first talk, but we didn't hear exactly what design was, and I thought we can't talk about anything without understanding what it means. Next slide, please. In biology we indeed speak of design all the time, but not the way Dr. Nelson used it.  We talk about design as the correlation between structure and function in living systems.  For example, when we look at a complex protein, this is the muscle protein actin, we see how its structure is suited to its function.  That doesn't imply a designer.  That's a correlation of structure and function.  Next slide, please. Intelligent design, which Dr. Nelson advocates, it something else.  It is the claim specifically that objects in the living world were designed, and advocates of that view point to things like the bacterial flagellum or Mount Rushmore as examples of natural objects they think were designed.  Next side, please. And I wonder, and I wonder how many of you wonder when you hear this, why are they saying design rather than create.   Advance the slide, please. In particular let's take a designed object like Mount Rushmore.  The only reason we know that there was a design for Mount Rushmore is because somebody created Mount Rushmore, and creating it is a material act.   Advance the slide, please. And that means a designed object only exists if, in fact, it was created.  Next slide.  Next side, please. The creator of Mount Rushmore, the designer I should say, was the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, and here's a picture of him working on his design.  Next slide, please. However, that design wouldn't exist unless creators, sculptors had been around.   Next slide. And therefore, it was an act of creation to actually put Mount Rushmore together.  And I choose Mount Rushmore because the Discovery Institute, who Dr. Nelson represents, uses Mount Rushmore as an example of design.   Next slide, please. And what that means is that every single object, structure, protein, or organism to which design is attributed was actually created in an act of special creation.  These things were created or we wouldn't know they were there.  Next slide, please. And what that means is these creation events didn't happen in isolation or in theoretical space.  They had to happen at specific times.   Next slide. So, how do we work this out?  Next slide. I'm going to make a list here of things the designer did, according to Paul and the Discovery Institute.  Created life had occurred way long time ago in the geological record.  Also, the bacterial flagellum, eucaryotic cell, and so forth.  These occurred a little bit later.   Next slide, please. Then the appearance of major animal groups, many of which--next slide, please--occurred in the Cambrian, and therefore we have a whole set of post-Cambrian origins of fish, amphibians, reptiles, and so forth.  Next slide, please. And what that means is that when we talk about design, we're actually talking about a series of progressive creation events.  Next slide. And therefore, the creative activity of this unnamed designer took place again and again and again and again over billions of years of natural history.   Next slide. What that means in simple language--next slide--is in a very straightforward way design means progressive creation.   Next slide. And therefore it's not unreasonable--in fact, it is accurate to say that design is creationism.  Now, that doesn't mean it's wrong.  That simply means let's call it by its name, which is progressive creationism.  Next slide. Now, not all advocates of intelligent design are progressive creationists who argue the designer was active again and again.  Some intelligent design advocates are classic young Earth creationists who argue that this planet is less than 10,000 years old.  You might wonder who that might be.  Next slide. One of those is Dr. Paul Nelson, and I don't know if Dr. Nelson will advocate the young Earth view today.  I think he would if he wanted to give us a full exposition of his views; but, in fact, at the Skeptic Society meeting in Los Angeles, where I was present three years ago, he came right out and said that he is, in fact--he, in fact, does hold a young Earth view, and it would be interesting to hear him defend that view in scientific terms today.   Next slide, please. Now, is there evidence of the designer?  You might have noticed there was a lot of talk about the rhetoric of design and evolution in the last talk, but not a single piece of scientific evidence showing the fingerprint, the footprint, or the handiwork of the designer.  And intelligent design itself says there can be no evidence of a designer-creator.  So, if there can be no evidence because we can't know who the creator is or how he worked, how does it advance its ideas?   Next slide, please. And that is, lacking authentic evidence, intelligent design contrives a dualism, and they put their nebulous notion of design in contravention with Darwin, and you saw that again and again in the previous slide, and they basically then jump to the proposition that anything that theory A cannot explain today is prima facie evidence for theory B.  If we argued in science this way, you could argue that the moon is made of green cheese if you weren't sure that it was made of granite.  We don't oppose two theories in science and simply say these are the only conceivable theories.  Apparently there is no theory C or D or E or F, and , in fact,  there are many such theories that are conceivable.  Next slide, please. Therefore, any argument that can be raised against evolution is taken as evidence for design.  And because of this--and you probably noticed it in the last talk--all so-called evidence against evolution, all evidence in favor of design, is actually negative evidence against evolution.  Next slide. Now, what are the most prominent negative arguments that are raised because negative arguments are all there are by the intelligent design advocates?   Here are two of them.  One is that evolution cannot produce new biological information.  Therefore, only a designer could do it.  Second argument:  Evolution cannot produce the complex structures of the living cell which are irreducibly complex.  Let's see how these hold up.   Next slide. And we'll take argument number one, which is that evolution, natural processes cannot produce the biological information that evolution requires.  Is that true?  Next slide. Well, this argument hasn't impressed people very much in the scientific community for this obvious reason.  The literature is filled with examples of the ability of evolution to produce new biological information.  Example:  I put the first page of a paper describing the evolution of an entirely new enzyme.  The enzyme is called nylonase.  Next slide, please. And a few years ago Japanese researchers discovered bacteria growing in a chemical waste dump outside of a plastics plant, and the bacteria, as far as they could tell, were growing on nylon.  Now, nylon is not supposed to be biodegradable, but it turns out that in a little less than 60 years, since nylon was first synthesized, bacteria have evolved, an entirely new enzyme with all of the biological information required to do that to digest nylon.  Is an intelligent designer responsible for that?  Well, only if he wants to put runs in your stockings.  The reality is that evolution is what has done it.   Next slide, please. Now, that's not the only example.  2,4-dinitrotoluene is a chemical relative of TNT.  It was first synthesized also in the 1930s.  Is there a chemical pathway to break it down?   Next slide, please. You betcha.  This is a genuinely complex pathway with seven different enzymes.  Where did this pathway come from?  Clearly it wasn't designed in the primordial earth because this compound didn't exist.   Next slide. It turns out evolution produced this compound, and it did so by evolving and duplicating enzymes from three different biochemical pathways combining them and then thereby producing the complex information required to do this.  Now, when you look at all this if you skeptical--and you should be skeptical of everything in science--you might say gee, I wonder what left-wing, pinko think tank, what secular humanist group produced this research.  Maybe somebody at Harvard, maybe somebody at Berkeley, and so forth.  Well, I want to let you know who did this work.   Next slide, please. And this was done at the United States Air Force research laboratory in Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.  And I don't know how the members of the audience feel, but my feeling is that if evolution is good enough for the United States Air Force, it's good enough for me. [Laughter.] Next slide, please. Second argument.  Living cells can't contain irreducibly complex structures that evolution couldn't have produced.   Next slide. The classic example of this is the bacterial flagellum.  And Michael Behe paraphrasing the very words of Charles Darwin that you heard just a few minutes ago said, "A system like this of multiple parts cannot be produced by numerous, successive slight modifications of a precursor system... "--look at the highlighted words-- "...because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional." Thank you, Paul.  Next slide. Well, here's the bacterial flagellum.  It is literally the poster child for intelligent design.  It has about 50 different protein parts, and the argument is that it is irreducibly complex, meaning all those parts are without function until we snap them all together.  Since evolution can only put structures together a few parts at a time, allegedly it could never have produced such a structure; therefore, it must have been created or designed.   Next slide. Well, is that true?  A graphic version of this argument is shown here.  A complex biochemical machine has many parts.  It has a function that natural selection can favor, but the individual parts, according to Dr. Nelson and Dr. Behe, have no function , and therefore, natural selection cannot shape them. How does evolution explain the origin of complex structures?   Next slide. Very simple.  What evolution says is this idea that these parts have no function unless the machine is assembled, that idea is wrong.  And it's wrong because new functions emerge from combinations of parts, and the components of these complex machines originate with different functions. Next slide. Now, the cool thing about this--I'm sorry,  I grew up in the sixties.  I still speak in words like cool--is that this makes a testable prediction, and that is if intelligent design is right--advance the slide, please--what should happen is the parts of these complex machines should have no functions on their own.  But if evolution is right, then, next slide, the parts of the machines should have functions.  So, all we have to do is grab the flagellum and see if its parts are functionless or if there are subsets within them that have a function.   Next slide. So, we're going to do that experiment.  Let's take away 40 of the 50 parts of the flagellum.   Next slide. Watch how this happens.  They're all gone.  We've taken those parts away leaving only 10 parts.   Next slide. And these are the parts that span the membrane.  We've taken away not one part, not two, we've taken away 80 percent of the parts of this machine.  Therefore, what is left behind if design is right should be nonfunctional.   Next slide. But if you'll pardon the double negative, it's not nonfunctional.   Next slide. What is left behind is, in fact, perfectly functional.  Those 10 proteins are equivalent to something called the type 3 secretory system, and I know everyone in the audience is saying, oh, of course, the type 3 secretory system.  The type 3 secretory system is a molecular syringe that certain bacteria use to inject poison into our cells.  If you're infected with a bacterium that is a type 3 secretor, you should be very afraid.  Bubonic plague is a type 3 secretor.   Next slide. Remember that statement.  Any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.  This guy is missing 40 parts.  Is it by definition nonfunctional?  Uh-uh.  It is perfectly functional.  That statement is the heart and soul of the molecular argument for intelligent design.  And what does this example show?   Next slide please. This example shows that that argument is wrong.  There is no other word for it.   Next slide. In fact, the bacterial flagellum contains a lot of parts that are homologous to other systems, next slide, please, besides the type 3 secretory system, and I've given four other examples in this slide.   Next slide. So, if we summarize what I've said about the flagellum, when we actually look at it, and this shows an example of the intelligent design crowd, next slide.  The parts of that system actually match evolutionary theory and not the design-creation model.  Can we test evolution?  Yes.  It passes it.  Can we test design?  Yes.  It fails it.   Next slide. Now, let me test evolution a little further.  And in particular, let's test one of those hypotheses that Dr. Nelson implied would be illegal to test in the public schools.  That's a bogus argument, of course.  Let's test the hypothesis of common ancestry. Evolution from fossil physiology and anatomy tells us that we share a common ancestor with the great apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and so forth.  But there's a problem if we really share a common ancestor with these critters.  We have 46 chromosomes.  Each of them has 48.  Where did the other chromosome go?   Next slide, please. There's our 46 chromosomes, so we are you and I and Dr. Nelson are missing a pair of chromosomes.  Where did it go?   Next slide. We can make, therefore, a testable prediction to test evolution.  If, in fact, we really do share a common ancestor, that common ancestor had to have 48 chromosomes.  So, where did it go?  Did we lose it?  You couldn't lose a whole primate chromosome.  Too many important genes.  There's only one place it could have gone, and that is somewhere on our ancestry two primate chromosomes must have been fused together to form one of ours.  So, you can make a testable prediction.   Next slide. And that testable prediction is that one of our chromosomes must result from the ancestral fusion of two other chromosomes.   Next slide. And at the fusion point DNA sequences called telomeres should show up right in the middle of the chromosome where they don't belong, and those should mark the fusion point.   Next slide. And we should even inactivate one of the two centromeres in the chromosomes. So, we have to look at our genome.  And if we don't find that one of our chromosomes is formed by the fusion of two others, evolution, common descent could be falsified.  So, let's put it to the test.   With the human genome project we can do that.  Last year a detailed annotation of two human chromosomes was published in "Nature."  Guess what.  It's chromosome number two.   Advance the slide, please. And it turns out human chromosome number two shows the exact place at which these two chromosomes were pasted together.  It's like two torn pieces of paper with Scotch tape holding them together.  Read the excerpt from the paper.  Chromosome two is unique to the human lineage having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusions of two other chromosomes that remain separate in other primates.  We test evolution, and it's a test it passes.   Next slide, please. Now, you're going to hear a lot today about intelligent design in being religion and not being science.  I think I've shown you why it's not science because it fails every scientific test we can put up for it.  How did we ever get the idea that it's religion?  Is that just a prejudice that secular humanists and the scientific community have and so forth?  It certainly is not something that I'd be at home with.  Well, the Discovery Institute's logo looks perfectly secular, and it's intended to do that.  But a few years ago, next slide, the logo of the Discovery Institute was quite different.  And I show this in part because I like the art of Michelangelo, and I wish the Discovery Institute would go back to this because this really what intelligent design is all about.   Next slide. But maybe that's a little unfair.  Maybe looking at logos is not how you decide religion.  Let's look at what people write and what they say. Phillip Johnson, the acknowledged leader of the intelligent design movement, laid it on the line a couple of years ago when he said that the objective of his strategy isn't to advance science.  It's to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic.  That, Johnson said, is going to shift the debate from creation versus evolution to the existence of God versus the nonexistence of God.  That's a debate he thinks they can win.  From there we can introduce people to the truth of the Bible and the question of sin and finally introduce to Jesus.  I'm a Christian.  I want to introduce people to Jesus.  I just don't  want to do it in the science classroom, and in the long run that's the difference between scientists who are believers, like myself, and intelligent design advocates.   Next slide, please. But finally, this case in Dover.  Doesn't the Board of Education in Dover, aren't they trying to do something that's purely intellectual, open inquiry and so forth?  They purchased this wonderful textbook called "Pandas and People" and put it in the library in Dover, a donor gave it to them.  Isn't that strictly a science textbook?   Next slide. Well, it kind of sounds like a science textbook.  Here's a passage there mentions intelligent design.  Design means the various forms of life began abruptly and so forth.  Sounds very scientific, the way that Dr. Nelson's talk sounded scientific.   Next slide. But it turns out that Pandas appeared in an earlier version with a different title, and in the earlier version in the different title called I Princi Bilirat (ph).  I would not for a second would I think that you were trying to sabotage it.  I mean that because I've known Paul for a long time.  He's a very honorable guy. You'll notice there are words about creation here.  Now I want to point out where these come from.  Next slide. Where did this book actually come from?  What's its history?  This is the textbook on intelligent design.   Next slide, please. You'll notice that you have a passage here saying Darwinists object to intelligent design.  Doesn't give a natural cause, doesn't sound very religious.  Next slide. But look at the earlier version.  It's the same paragraph except naturalistic has been replaced by natural cause.  Intelligent design replaces creation.  Creation means the various forms of life.  Intelligent design means the various forms of life.  The conversion of a textbook on creationism to a textbook on intelligent design is accomplished by a series of global word processor changes.  This is clearly a wolf trying to put on the clothing of sheep.  Sorry, it didn't work.  We can still see the wolf. What are we leading to here?  And this is where I will conclude.  Next slide, please.  The question today is what should be in the science classroom, and you may wonder.  Where would intelligent design take the science classroom, and this, I think, is that question that is the public question that people should be interested in. In the trial in Harrisburg this week we got a very, very good answer as to where intelligent design would take the science classroom.  Next slide. Michael Behe, the star witness for the intelligent design, said, "I told the courtroom that astrology would qualify as a scientific theory if it is judged by exactly the same criteria that Dr. Behe uses to say that intelligent design is a scientific theory.  And what that means by any stretch of logic is that Dr. Behe, who believes that intelligent design belongs in the science classroom, has to admit that if those are the criteria that are used, astrology goes in the science classroom as well. Advance the slide, please.  And if you would pull just one more time, later on in the same article new scientists pointed out that again, the problem is that stretching the definition of science, when you stretch that strike zone to slip intelligent design in here, astrology's coming in, witchcraft is coming in, and just about every other form of pseudoscience you can think of.  As you'll note, Behe agreed with these assertions and this elicited laughter from the courtroom.  I'd like to think that the inclusion of intelligent design and astrology in science classrooms would be a laughing matter, and indeed, it looks pretty silly.  But when these both make their entrance into the classrooms of your son or your daughter, you may not be so amused.  The reaction against intelligent design is not a reaction to suppress dissent.  It's a reaction to keep science genuine, authentic, and in effect to support scientific education in the United States.  Anything else would be a tremendous disservice to this country and to our children.  Thank you. [Applause.] MS. SATEL:  Dr. Nelson, I want you to respond, but I can't help but get in my own question.  It seemed that you spent a lot of time saying that this wasn't a legitimate debate in classrooms.  I think I disagree with that.  It may be too sophisticated for the high school room, but in any case, I think teachers like Professor Miller would welcome students asking about some of the supposed gaps or some of the processes that weren't obvious to them and could be explained other ways, so that I would challenge. But I would like you to, in addition to addressing what he said, could you also touch on maybe what the testable predictions of intelligent design would be and how you would respond, for example, to the example about the flagellum and the clotting cascade, those kind of things.  Thank you. DR. NELSON:   Right.  Well, let me begin with the flagellum. Ken left out a very important part of that story, and that is that the type 3 secretory apparatus is viewed by many biologists with no stake in this particular debate as actually an offspring of the motor.  In other words, the motor is Aboriginal.  The motor came first, and the type 3 secretory apparatus is derived from it by a kind of process of loss of parts.  And I know that Ken's aware of this literature, and it's an active debate right now in biology.  In fact, upcoming testimony at Dover by a colleague of mine, Scot Minnich, will treat this question. So--I'm sorry, my microphone seems to be coming in and out.  So, I think that Ken actually misrepresents what Mike had to say about the motor.   Mike did not say that parts were individually useless.  In fact, he doesn't believe that.  What Mike said was the motor itself is irreducible in the sense of its particular function of providing locomotion, providing a means of moving bacteria through the watery medium in which it resides, and that is certainly true and is testable.  So, I think that Ken misrepresents Mike's position about that and, in fact, I would ask Ken does he regard the type 3 secretory apparatus as ancestral to the bacterial motor. Can I get back to you after he responds to that?  I want to talk about-- DR. MILLER:  I'll keep this right on point.  The answer is I don't know.  And what I just put up on the screen is the most recent paper in this field by Goffman (ph), et al., and this paper says exactly the opposite of what Dr. Nelson just said.  This is a careful analysis of the type 3 secretory system that says it didn't evolve from the flagellum; but rather, it and the flagellum shared a common ancestry, and this is based on the latest genetic data. So, when he said I didn't tell-- DR. NELSON:  I-- DR. MILLER:  --excuse me, you'll get a chance.  Basically that's an open question.  But here's the point.  He accused me of misrepresenting what Michael Behe said.  I didn't misrepresent.  I quoted him.  It was an exact quote.  Any irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. Now, the type 3 system doesn't have the function of flagellar motility, but intelligent design people use this idea of irreducible complexity to explain why these machines couldn't evolve.  If you say well, this system only does protein secretion and that system only does surface recognition and this system only does signal transduction, do you know what you're doing?  You're giving away the store because you're explaining these systems could evolve because first we evolve this part, then we evolve another part, then we evolve a third part, and the whole function comes from the totality of parts.  But if you agree that there are functional units within the bacterial flagellum, then the whole idea of irreducible complexity--remember it's irreducible--has been destroyed.  Do you agree with that? DR. NELSON:  No, I don't, because what Mike said was that he isolated a particular function, and he said that function, motility for that motor is lost if you take parts away, and that is the case. And let me go back to Goffman paper.  This is actually not, in fact, the most recent publication on the question.  There's one from last year by Robert Sayre (ph) where he points out that the evidence still favors an Aboriginal motor and a derived type 3 system, not common ancestry.  He disagrees with these authors.  The point is it's a live debate and to say that the type 3 secretory apparatus is ancestral to or even shares common ancestry with the motor is something that people with no stake in this design debate would question. DR. MILLER:  Yes.  But the point is, it doesn't matter if it's ancestral or not because the whole quote evidence for design is based on the unevolvability, the supposed unevolvability of the flagellum.  And once you show that parts of this do have selectable function, that's the pathway to evolution.  I don't have to show how it evolved.  I'm answering the argument as to why it's unevolvable, and that argument has, in fact, fallen apart. DR. NELSON:  But, Ken, homologies among proteins is not a functioning motor, and the fact is you do not present and as far as I know you never have presented an actual testable scenario for the origin of the motor.   Going from the type 3 system to the motor is a huge leap, and it make much more sense--in fact I think the data are strongly supportive of this--to see the type 3 system as derived from the motor, and this will be something actually that will come up in Harrisburg. I wanted to respond to your question about testable predictions.  When I was an undergraduate, I was concerned that I was setting the bar too high for evolution and consequently not high enough at all for intelligent designs.  So, I made myself a list of predictions or observational expectations that if they were fulfilled would challenge my view of biology.  I'll give you just one of those for the sake of time.  RNA.  Every living thing on Earth at the heart of its biochemistry has a nucleic acid RNA.  It's an essential part of all of our biochemistry, all living things. Now, it turns out that RNA is an exceedingly fragile molecule, exceedingly fragile.  In fact, when you look at the literature on the formation of RNA, many of the people who work on the problem say this is exactly the kind of molecule that would never arise from its constituents on the early Earth because of its fragility.  That kind of reality that inside every living thing is a molecule like a Lladro crystal, piece of Lladro crystal, incredibly fragile yet there it is, design would predict that those sorts of features of living things cannot be derived from their constituents by any plausible natural pathway.  That's testable.  In fact, the claim that there's no natural pathway to RNA is exquisitely vulnerable to refutation.  It's a universal, universally quantified proposition that means that a single counter example would knock it down. Everything we know about RNA tells us on the plausible early Earth it would never form naturally.  And I have a long list of other predictions like that that flow from design, not from evolution.  So, I think design is eminently testable, and in fact much of Ken's book on this topic, chapters of it, are dedicated to testing the propositions of intelligent design.  The paper by Lensky (ph),  et al., was testing the claim that Michael Behe made about irreducible complexity.  So, of course, it's testable.  There are whole books dedicated to testing it. DR. MILLER:  I hope everyone listened very carefully to everything Dr. Nelson just said because when he said design is testable, the test he proposed is to show that you can evolve RNA.  Or Michael Behe when he says design is testable, the test he proposes is going to a laboratory and evolve a flagellum from scratch.  Those aren't tests of design.  Those are tests of evolution. My original point, which is that all so-called evidence for design is negative, has degenerated into sort of the demonstration of that exactly here.  Dr. Nelson hasn't shown a fingerprint of the design or hasn't shown a footprint, hasn't shown any evidence for design.  He has simply said the test of design is to show that evolution can produce every single thing.  On the day that we have a detailed Darwinian step-by-step pathway for the evolution of RNA, the evolution of DNA, the evolution of the ribosome, the evolution of the bacterial flagellum, the evolution of every structure in the cell, it will be time to close every single department of biology, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology in the world because all questions will be answered. The argument from design--and I think Dr. Nelson has illustrated this eloquently--the argument from design depends upon basically saying you haven't answered every question.  Well, guess what.  Science is not going to answer every question.  But I gave you two examples of the way--I gave you three examples of the way in which evolution can in two of the examples generate new biological information, which design theorists say it cannot, and the way in which we can test common ancestry in our own genomes attest that evolution passes.  And what I would love to hear Dr. Nelson explain in front of this audience once again is why he thinks the Earth is 10,000 years old, which is again part and parcel of his view of origins.   Not saying when these events took place would be like discussing the American Revolution without realizing what century it took place in. DR. NELSON:  Ken, you know me pretty well.  We've debated twice previously.  You know my writings pretty well.  Have I ever, to your knowledge, advocated my theological views about how I interpret scripture in a public scientific setting? DR. MILLER:  No, as far as I know. DR. NELSON:  Let me tell you what happened in Burbank two or three years ago.  There were four Christians on the panel:  Ken, Leslie Ellsbury (ph), Bill Dempsky (ph), and me, and 600 atheists in the audience--it's very strange--arguing about design versus evolution. DR. MILLER:  I think they might have snuck a Unitarian or two in there. DR. NELSON:  All right.  Okay.  So, we're debating intelligent design, and Ken is desperate, desperate to get my theological views--and that's what they are, and that's how I defend them, I don't defend them as a matter of science--onto the table.  So, he kept pressing me, and you'll remember the exchange.  And finally, after about ten minutes of badgering me, I said, well, the quote that you saw on the slide, and then Ken said, "Now, was that so hard to say?" The fact is I had not put that up as something I wanted to argue for.  It's something that I have as a theological view.  I do not defend it scientifically.  Ken knows this.  So for him to say--and by the way, I've never put a date on the Earth.  When I say young Earth, that refers to how I understand the internal relations in scripture.  I've never defended that.  So, it's really a red herring to bring that in, and it's not something I've ever advocated for.  I'm sorry.  And frankly, my views are neither here nor there. DR. MILLER:  Yeah, and I'll answer this very quickly.  I didn't ask.  I didn't desperately beg Paul for a theological-- DR. NELSON:  Oh, baloney.  You pressed me. DR. MILLER:  Hang on, hang on. MS. SATEL:  I have to be the umpire. DR. MILLER:  I asked him for the answer to a scientific question, how old is the Earth.  That is a scientific question.  You gave me the answer. MS. SATEL:  I am going to open it to the audience.  And in the course of responding to people, you know, you went to the University of Chicago, I went to the University of Chicago.  I know how hard it is to get a Ph.D. there, and I know how brilliant you must be, but it just--it seems to me-- DR. NELSON:  Tell my wife that. MS. SATEL:  Well, Dr. Miller has pointed this out sort of arguing from the negative, you know, the negative argument standpoint, is that it's a form of intellectual surrender.  If there are questions that there aren't answers to, then you postulate a divine origin. DR. NELSON:  May I respond to that? MS. SATEL:  Yes, and then I will ask folks. DR. NELSON:  The fact is science comes at the end of avenues of inquiry all the time.  All the time.  The French Academy in the 18th century stopped accepting proposals for perpetual motion machines because they realized that they didn't work long before the science of thermodynamics gave a reason why they don't work. Ken thinks that there is a natural pathway to RNA.  He fully expects that to be discovered.  I do not.  On that point there is a clear difference, and my view is much more testable than Ken's, much more, because it is vulnerable to refutation where he can always hold out hope at some indefinite point in the future that a molecule that we have good reason now to think would never form naturally because of its fragility, somewhere down the road theory from the future will explain how this happens.  The fact is right now, October 2005, there is no natural pathway to RNA, and there's no reason ever to expect one.  So, I'm sorry, that's testable.  If Ken wants to call it negative, you know, that's attaching blame to a very good prediction. MS. SATEL:  I think Ken wants to test  it.  But let me open this to the audience now.  Gentlemen. Could you please say where you're from, what your name is, and please ask a question. MR. NELSNER:  My name is Alf Nelsner (ph).  I'm from Reuters.  My question is this.  We're told that we have a scientific crisis in this country.  We're not producing enough science graduates and Ph.D.'s.  We also have a shortage of priests, I understand, especially in the Catholic Church. Do you see biology in high school as addressing one or both of these shortages? DR. MILLER:  I'm not going to work on the shortage of priests.  I'm sorry to disappoint you there. In terms of the shortage of scientists in this country, I think the rhetoric of the anti-evolution movement, which has been around in this country for decades, intelligent design is not a new idea.  It is a reformulation of a very old idea of evolutionary insufficiency. The rhetoric of this design--of this debate has the effect of alienating young people from science.  It basically, and you're going to hear Dr. Nelson say it, it basically says that the scientific community is not to be trusted, that it suppresses dissent, that science is a discipline into which young people if they go must abandon their faith.  Most Americans are religious, and therefore, this debate basically tends to tell people you tell young kids you might find science interesting, but you'll have to abandon your convictions of faith.  That certainly is not the case, but it is part of the rhetoric of intelligent design.  And I think basically what this debate is really in the process of doing is driving Phillip Johnson's wedge between the young people, the educational institutions of this country, and our scientific future. There's a cartoon that I sometimes show that a friend of mine sent me, and it shows a young man working at a laboratory bench, obviously a student in India, and the caption of the cartoon says, "Surprisingly, the movement to teach intelligent design creationism in U.S. schools was supported by India and China."  And the young man at the bench says, "Yes, America, we would like it very much if you would teach religious dogma instead of science in your schools to your young people.  We'd like their jobs."  And therefore, I think that's exactly what's at stake. MS. SATEL:  Sir. MR. DOMBROWSKI:  Mack Dombrowski , Computer Sciences Corporation and the Space Telescope Science Institute, and in full disclosure I'll say I also teach a science class part-time at the University of Maryland University College. When I think about how we decide what gets taught in classes, in history class, say, who would know better than historians?  In a mathematics class, well, I have to leave it to the mathematicians.  They know best.  You know, we can't give the students all the little tidbits, all the little axioms, theorems of mathematics and ask them to make sense of it.  We have to rely on experts to do that, and that happens in science as well.  We rely on the scientific community to understand what's good science and what's not.  But what I hear suggested is introducing something into the science classroom that is not accepted by the science community, and I guess I'd like to ask both of you what you feel the criteria should be for what gets included into the science classroom or any subject in the classroom given that students don't have the ability or the time to take all the facts and put it together themselves. DR. NELSON:  I'm not sure I have a quick answer for that, but it seems to me that the science I know most intimately, evolutionary biology, began in its modern form with Darwin's "Origin of Species." I was really struck in this debate in Philly on National Public Radio when Neil Shanks said, "When I put the question to him directly, would he let students read "The Origin of Species,"  he said no.  And the reason he said no is because of the very considerable theological content of that book. Here's a little experiment you can do.  Go and search the on-line editions with the key word Creator, capital C, and you'll get lots of hits.  Many of those passages Darwin will be saying here's what the theory of creation predicts, here's what my theory predicts.  Here's my view of God, you know, here's a creationist view of God. Now, is it reasonable to ask a student to evaluate those kinds of arguments only critically.  In other words, all the student can do is say I'm going to criticize creation, but if they try to make a positive case or give a different conception of the creator, then a piece of duct tape is put over their mouth constitutionally.  I'm sorry.  I just find that completely unreasonable. DR. MILLER:  Well, with all due respect, I'm not sure Paul answered the question.  He gave a speech about teaching "The Origin of Species."  I'm not aware of a single school district in which the introduction of passages from "The Origin of Species" has been the object of a lawsuit, so I don't know where people clamp down on this.  I'm aware actually of dozens of high schools around the country who actually use my book, "Finding Darwin's God," despite the fact that Dr. Nelson assured us that it couldn't be used in public school.  So, this is a surprise to me.  I'd love to see "The Origin of Species" even though, despite the fact that it has references to the creator taught in the classroom. There are parts of it that include Darwin's theological and philosophical speculations.  They're not taught as science.  They're taught as theological and philosophical speculations, which are often part of what goes on in a science classroom.  How do you decide what goes on in a science classroom?  I think the answer to that is simple.  It's the scientific consensus.  How do you decide what you tell students is unsolved, uncertain, mysterious.  The answer again is the scientific consensus. The July 1st issue of "Science" magazine had the headline:  "125 Unsolved Questions in Science."  We have to tell students what those unsolved questions are.  But whether we appeared here by instantaneous appearance in creation or whether by a biological process of evolution, that's not an unsolved question.  It's the biological process of evolution that brought us here. Intelligent design advocates are fond of pointing to the big bang hypothesis as a radical hypothesis that was rejected by science and eventually came around and is now accepted in the scientific community.  If they wanted to treat their ideas in the same way that Arno Penzias treated the big bang, I'd say that's terrific because what they did was to try to gather scientific support, win the scientific consensus, which they did over several decades, and once you win the scientific consensus, quite automatically you wind up in curriculum, college courses, and eventually in high school and grade school classes.  Intelligent design has been either unable or unwilling to win the scientific consensus, so what you see now is an end run around the scientific process to use political means, state boards of education, curriculum development to inject this into the classroom without winning the scientific consensus, and I think that's bad policy. DR. NELSON:  Quick clarification.  I am on record as opposing requiring the teaching of intelligent design in any public school classroom.  That's a consistent position of mine, one reason I could never be a witness at Dover, and so I agree with Ken that design will find its way into public high school classrooms via the long, painful process that he just described.  That's a separate question from what I presented in my talk, though, which is that evolutionary theory itself, as it is already being taught, raises issues that involve design, and it's constitutionally wrong to hinder students and teachers from discussing those issues. MS. SATEL:  Gentlemen. MR. NOTTURNO:  Mark Notturno.  I'm with Interactivity Foundation. I also used to work closely with the late philosopher Sir Karl Popper, edited several of his books, and I'm struck with Ken Miller saying repeatedly that there are no or no positive arguments for intelligent design because one of the ways in which I read the literature is that is not simply an argument for ignorance; that pointing out difficulties with evolution is one thing, but then there's another move, and the move is something like this.  He says, well, there are these cellular machines that we're seeing.  We don't know the plausible way that you get it from evolution, but we do know of a force that creates such machines; namely, intelligence, human intelligence for example.  And I'm wondering how you would respond to that because another strange thing that I've been wondering about is that would you agree that we ourselves are now in the process through such things as biogenetic engineering of trying to intelligently design life forms? People talk about the Cambrian explosion and the appearance of life forms on Earth.  Would you agree that the Department of Defense is actively thinking of trying to inject life forms onto Mars? DR. MILLER:  You mean a new defense weapon would be a device called the Cambrian explosive? MR. NOTTURNO:  No, that we are thinking of seeding Mars and trying to grow an atmosphere there.  And so--I'm not thinking of this as being an argument for or against intelligent design, but it strikes me that these are sort of blind spots in the ways in which people respond to the intelligent design argument.  It doesn't seem to be simply an argument from ignorance.  There's another move.  The move is we do know of forces, mainly human intelligence.  We create such machines. I was thinking of writing a paper that would begin with the question aren't scientific theories intelligently designed because we design scientific theories, and we do so intelligently.  We do it with our intelligence, so why do we have to immediately jump to the creator or to the God question?  It would seem to me that, you know, it may not answer all of our big questions, but if we were to find out tomorrow that the Earth was seeded by intelligent designers from extraterrestrial, I think we'd all be interested, and I think that it would also perhaps have some implications for how we think about our religious beliefs. MS. SATEL:  Thank you. DR. MILLER:  It would have some implications, yes.  Make a hell of a TV show plot, for one thing. You basically in your question overlooked a fundamental point, and the fundamental point that you overlook is you say the cell is filled with these machines.  We know that human beings design machines--not machines like these, of course, not in self-replicating things, but human beings design machines, so couldn't they have been designed?  Well, the answer is yes.  And you know what?  Just about any historical event whether it's the Cambrian explosion, the appearance of the bacterial flagellum, the first appearance of the ribosome, or the Red Sox victory in the World Series in 2004 could be the result of outside supernatural intelligent intervention.  In fact, I live in New England.  You'd be surprised how many people in my part of the country think of divine intervention when they think of the baseball playoffs last year.  And a lot of people think that's true.  So, these kinds of theories might be right.  The North may very well have prevailed in the battle of Gettysburg precisely because of an outside intelligent designer or force, but it's not testable and it's not science.  And I would apply the same thing to that. The machines that you speak of, the main argument, the only argument I ever see for why they had to be created/designed is because of the claim that evolution can't produce them.  Therefore that, once again, is the negative argument, and even your own description of this is essentially a question based on negative argument:  if evolution couldn't have produced it, then the possibility is design.  I was surprised when--not surprised, but I was sort of bemused when Paul said he's not in favor of the teaching of intelligent design in school.  Presumably he's just in favor of teaching the "evidence against evolution."  There isn't anything to intelligent design except the "evidence against evolution," and therefore that amounts to the same thing. DR. NELSON:  If I could respond to that very quickly, Ken keeps coming back to this idea of negative arguments as somehow flawed or inherently weaker than other kinds of arguments.  The fact is these kinds of laws called universal negative proscriptions are widespread in science.  If I gave you a proposal that I could have realtime communication between me here on Earth and someone on Mars just the way I would pick up a phone and call them, you would give me a negative argument.  What you would say is, the propagation of the speed of light through space is--there's a speed limit on that.  You will never, as far as we know from current physics, talk in realtime to someone on Mars. Now, I say, well, you just rejected my research problem.  That's a negative argument.  I'm sorry,  that's the way the world works.  So, I think Ken is not being entirely fair to the real strength of these kinds of arguments in science. VOICE:  I want to see if you're going to give me lots of time? MS. SATEL:  Oh, you're getting lots of time.  The lady behind you, please.  Ma'am. MS. PAPANOS:  Dolores Papanos (ph), Smithsonian Institution.  The Discovery Institute produced a movie that pretty much said Earth was a unique, special place because it had an intelligent designer.  Should life be found on Mars or maybe one of Saturn's moons or should Mars be found to have an atmosphere two billions years ago that was very much like Earth's now, are those planetary bodies going to need their own intelligent designers?  Will it be the same one?  What would that say about Earth's uniqueness in terms of supporting life? DR. MILLER:  I think it means there'll be more movies at the Smithsonian. DR. NELSON:  That's an interesting question.  You know, if we did find life on Mars, which I don't expect to happen, or on one of the moons of Jupiter, again I think they're probably quite sterile, it would be a fascinating question to look at its molecular composition, and the one thing I would predict:  it will be no less complex than life here on Earth.  As far as we know right now, though, what you've proposed is strictly counterfactual.  There is no life on Mars or on any other body in the solar system other than Earth. MS. PAPANOS:  A quick follow-up.  I'm wondering, with all due respect, how you can dismiss the possibility when we haven't even gone there with the proper tools or with the most  robust tools and investigated those questions. DR. NELSON:  No, I don't dismiss the possibility.  It's a live possibility.  What I'm saying is at this moment the best indication is that there is nothing up there. MS. HOLDEN:  Constance Holden, Science magazine.  I'd like to ask Dr. Nelson about the timing of intelligent design.  Was everything designed at the beginning of the universe and then left to run out like clockwork or is there continuous process of design or did it go on for a while and then stop 10,000 years ago or what?  Because Dr. Behe said you could make, you could falsify design by trying to grow flagella on bacteria for a few years, 10,000 generations, and then if they grew flagella, that would falsify design, but he didn't explain how he kept design out of the lab during that period.  So, I'd really like some clarification on the timing. DR. NELSON:  Well, under the design umbrella--after all, design is a very modest claim that one can detect the action of intelligence in the universe--under that umbrella you can find a whole range of views.  In fact, one of Ken's criticisms of design is that there's no unanimity about, for instance, these questions of timing and so forth.  But I really regard those as secondary to the question is it possible to detect the action of intelligence?  And certainly we know that we can do this.  Every human being does it every day.  Design, to be a scientific theory, must make testable predictions.  I think that it does.  I think that Mike's proposal about the limits of variation in bacteria is testable.  In fact, Mike is working on a project right now carrying that out. If you conceive design in a kind of whimsical way as well, you know, a transcendent being can do whatever he pleases, that can't be tested, but that's not what's on the table.  There are specific concrete proposals that can be tested.  In fact, as I said, Ken's written a book trying to do that.   DR. MILLER:  What Ken has written a book doing is looking at the arguments against evolution, which are all that design has, and showing that they're wrong.  I don't think it would be too forward of me to observe that Dr. Nelson did not answer the question, and the nature of the question was if design happened, and I tried very hard at the beginning of my talk to show that design is equivalent to creation.  You really mean the flagellum was created.  You really mean the animals in the Cambrian explosion were created.  You really mean the eukaryotic cilia, RNA, the first cell were created at a particular point in the Earth's authentic natural history.  If that's true--might be true.  If that's true, it's only reasonable to ask when did this happen?  Did all this creative activity occur in a single period of time?  Has it occurred over time?  Or if you accept the geologic time scale, has the creator to do little here--the designer, sorry--a little here, little there, little more, tinker a little more and finally say okay, it's time to tinker with the human genome?  And if so, is he doing anything today?  In other words, is he going into the laboratory and doing things? These are important questions because if you take the intelligent design critique of evolution seriously, if you take it as an intellectual idea--and I do take it seriously--then you subject it to that kind of analysis.  If these organisms were created, if they appeared at a certain time, we got to know what that time is.  And what you just saw from Dr. Nelson is an example not of a scientific answer, but of a political strategy to say there's a variety of views, and this keeps the biblical literalists, the young Earth creationists, the progressive creationists all under the same political tent in opposition to evolution, but it doesn't go a smidge towards answering an authentic and important scientific question. MS. SATEL:  Time for one more question.  The gentleman standing up. MR. KLINE:  Thank you.  Mal Kline, Accuracy in Academia. Dr. Miller, you mentioned the footprints of the creator.  Speaking of footprints, what is the fossil record that supports evolution? DR. MILLER:  The fossil record that supports evolution, sir, is the fossil record itself, and that is a series of basically progressive events that shows the origin of a whole variety of species.  I'd be glad to show you slides documenting the human fossil record, the fossil record of the elephant, the fossil record of the transition of terrestrial mammals into whales.  Many people in the intelligent design community about ten or 15 years ago were busy ridiculing the idea, for example, that one could ever find any fossil forms that would document how the first swimming whales actually showed up on the Earth.  That was until paleontologists began to dig them up and began to dig up one after another after another.  So, the documentation of what happened in the Earth's natural history is rich and gets richer every year with every paleontological find. DR. NELSON:  I think Ken again is only giving you part of the story.  Darwin knew all about the Cambrian explosion.  He dedicated a very large portion of "The Origin" to the problem.  I would say that today in 2005, that problem of the origin of the basic groups of animals is, if anything, more severe now than when Darwin wrote, and most of the record is of marine invertebrates, and that record strongly points against any kind of evolutionary tree or gradualistic scenario.  So, the paleontological findings that we have are more considerably now than they were in 1859, but the overwhelming signal from the record is one of discontinuity, not of a single Darwinian tree. DR. MILLER:  And what Dr. Nelson completely overlooks is the discovery of small bilaterian animals of metazoan fossils in the area before the pre-Cambrian, the discovery of an extensive pre-Cambrian fauna which wasn't known in Darwin's time and adds immensely to our understand of life before it, and most importantly, most critically, the molecular evidence, and that is when metazoans, when animals appear in the Cambrian explosion.  Cambrian explosion, by the way, was not one month, one year or even a million years, but a period of time stretching over about 35 million years, which is a long time by anybody's stretch, in which most but not all of the major animal phyla appeared. The important point about this is the animal phyla that emerged all have in them the same basic molecular tools for building the body parts.  And what clearly happened in the Cambria is that these parts that build the bodies of various animals became widespread, they diversified into a large number of body plans, which gave rise to the phyla today.  The commonality of these body plans shows very clearly that the animals of the Cambrian have roots in common ancestry.  The molecular evidence reviewed in Shawn Carroll's book, which Dr. Nelson plugged, is incontrovertible and is very clear, and it adds a richness and a dimension to the understanding of this that simply would not have been known in Darwin's time. MS. SATEL:  We have to end here.  Thank you for such an illuminating debate.  We're going to continue again at 10:30 with Father Coyne, so we'll see you then.  Thank you so much. [Applause.] [Recess.] MR. ENTINE:  I want to welcome everyone back to our conference on teaching intelligent design in the classrooms.  My name is Jon Entine.  I'm an adjunct scholar, adjunct fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute, and along with Sally and Rick Hess organized this conference. Last July Christof Schoenborn, an influential Cardinal from Vienna, claimed in a widely circulated op ed piece in the New York Times that random evolution is incompatible with the Catholic Church's belief in a creator God.  He wrote:  "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense, an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection, is not.  Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." He added that evolution should be taught as just one of the many theories of human origins. This statement appeared to mark a shift in the perceived view of the church represented in prior statement by Pope John Paul II, that natural selection is compatible with Catholic doctrine.  Needless to say, these comments caused quite a stir among both scientists and theologians. Well, today we are privileged enough to have with us both the scientists and a theologian to discuss the controversy and the relationship of God and science.  Father George Coyne was gracious enough to fly in just yesterday from Rome, where he is the Director of the Vatican Observatory headquartered at Castel Gandolfo, a position he's held since 1978.  Dr. Coyne obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy from Georgetown University in 1962 and the licentiate in theology from Woodstock College in Maryland in 1966.  Since 1966 he has been associated with the astronomy programs at the University of Arizona, which has a research branch linked to the Vatican Observatory. His research interests have ranged from the study of the lunar surface to the birth of stars.  Parallel to his scientific research he has developed an interest in the history and philosophy of science and in the relationship between science and religion.   After Father Coyne's talk, Michael Novak, a theologian and historian who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at AEI, will have some comments as well. Father Coyne. FATHER COYNE:  You'll have to pardon me if I go like this a lot, but I haven't practiced my backhand for a long time.  But I have to use two instruments here, so we'll see how it goes. First of all, I'd like to make clear everything that Jon said happened in the last millennium, you know, so we have to move forward into the present. I am a Catholic and a priest, but at least for the first two thirds of my talk, I'm talking to you as a scientists.  Do I have to take this off?  It's a little harder to get back on, but I can loosen it.  I'm talking now as a scientist really.  There will be some theological insertions, but at the end I'll try and draw from my best knowledge of theology.  I'm not a theologian so that Michael knows very well, I'm Catholic priest who has studied some theology. You'll have to excuse a bit the repetition from the previous setting here, but it will be a repetition with sort of a Catholic point of view.  I would essentially like to share with you two convictions.  One, that the intelligent design movement I'll call it while evoking a God of power and might, a designer God, actually belittles God and makes him or her too small and paltry. Number two.  I'm putting it right out there, okay, that our scientific understanding of the universe untainted by religious considerations provides for those who do believe in God a marvelous opportunity to reflect upon those beliefs.  Please note carefully that I distinguish and will continue to do so in this presentation between science and religion, which to me are totally separate human pursuits.  Science is completely neutral with respect to theistic or atheistic--I've just come from Italy--implications which may be drawn from scientific results. The current situation in the evolution debate is better understood, to my mind, if we review a few significant episodes in the history of the debate from a catholic point of view.  In 1669 Neil Stenson (ph), a Danish scientist and Catholic priest, discovered in the mountains of Tuscany, Italy, the fossil of a whale's tooth almost identical to that of a whale caught off the coast of Leghorn, Italy, the previous day.  He intuited that Tuscany must have been inundated in geological times by an ocean. He identified three different geological strata, and for the first time proposed a temporal sequence for the formation of the Earth's crust.  For the first time, also, the biblical flood was considered as a source of these inundations.  From then on, the mistaken attempt to employ the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge would unduly complicate the debate over evolution. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, John-Baptiste Lemarque (ph) introduced the evolution of species and claimed that there was no clear distinction biologically between closely allied species.  Until the time of Lemarque evolutionary biologists spoke of a chain of nature, a linear progression in the evolution of species.  He introduced, Lemarque introduced, the concept not of a chain, but of an evolutionary tree and also that of natural selection.  But the geological findings of Stenson and the evolutionary biology of Lemarque required times much longer than those deduced from the Bible.  Billions of years instead of thousands of years. Despite what it commonly thought, it was not Charles Darwin who caused problems for theologians with the implications that might be drawn from the theory of evolution.  About 100 years before Darwin, the College de Sorbonne in Paris, a kind of French holy office or inquisition, condemned the great French naturalist George Buffon for having proposed from both the cooling rate and the sequence of geological strata that it took billions of years to form the crust of the earth.  Darwin's great contribution to the growing scientific evidence for evolution was not so much evolution as such, but rather the adaptation of living organisms to their environment , only one of the two great pillars of evolutionary theory which are, to my mind, internal mutations in an organism followed by natural selection. Controversy from religious believers immediately showed its foreboding head.  The mistaken thinking, which continues somewhat to our day, was essentially that if we human beings are descended from the apes, then we are only apes.  Furthermore, religious thinkers, not Darwin himself, thought mistakenly that evolution was dominated by chance, and therefore not under God's dominion.  It is not dominated by chance, as I will soon show. The great British intellectual and Roman Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman stated in 1868, "The theory of Darwin, true or not, is not necessarily atheistic.  On the contrary, it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of divine providence and skill." What a marvelous intuition and one which we shall see fits very well the implications to be drawn from our scientific knowledge of an evolutionary universe. This brief survey of some historical incident shows the ups and downs of the view of the churches and especially the Catholic church with respect to Darwinian evolution.  However, one half century after Darwin, research on evolution by Catholic scholars was a veritable minefield.  Many saw coming a Galileo affair.  Nonetheless, in 1966 in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul, II, declared that, "New scientific knowledge has led us to the conclusion that the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis." The new scientific knowledge has also led to what is now called neo-Darwinian evolution, for the most part in continuity with Darwin, but obviously progressing beyond his science.  The most recent episode cited by John in the relationship of the Catholic church to science, a tragic one as I see it, is the affirmation by Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn in his article in the New York Times of 7 July 2005, that neo-Darwinian evolution is not compatible with Catholic doctrine, and he opts obviously for intelligent design.  To my estimation, the Cardinal is in error.  Here I am a humble priest saying a Cardinal is in error, but the truth neither respects democracy nor hierarchy.  The truth is the truth.  If I speak the truth, so help me, God. [Laughter.] He is in error on at least five fundamental issues, and I wish you would carefully listen to each.  The scientific theory of evolution, as all scientific theories, as I have said before, is completely neutral with respect to religious thinking.  The Cardinal does not accept that. Second, the message of John Paul, II, to which I have just referred and which is dismissed by the Cardinal as, I quote, "rather vague and unimportant,"--would that John Paul, II, were alive at that time--is a fundamental church teaching, this letter of John Paul, II, which significantly advances the evolution debate. Three, neo-Darwinian evolution is not, in the words of the Cardinal, and I quote, "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection."  I think Ken has already well established that. Four, the apparent directionality, apparent directionality seen by science and the evolutionary process does not require a designer. Five, intelligent design is not science, despite the Cardinal's statement that, I quote again, "neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis"--he's also bringing in cosmology and I'll have a chance to address that--the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology were invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science."  "Purpose and design found in modern science said the Cardinal."  He is wrong. I would like now to address some of these issues by demonstrating with a series of slides of the best modern scientific view of the universe and evolution, physical, chemical, and biological.  Chemists and biologists will pardon me.  I'm an astrophysicist/cosmologist; so, though I bring in those things, I bring them in only against that background and with a degree of personal ignorance, so pardon me on those issues. As a Christian believer at the end of the slides I would like them to draw some implications.  I'll put my collar back on for the science presented.  The following text I have given the people some copies of the text.  I'm not going to read this text now.  I'm simply going to use it to show this series of slides. I talk about the dance of the fertile universe; that chance destiny, necessity if you will, and fertility are three fundamental concepts to our understanding the evolutionary universe.  Once I get this going, maybe it will work.  No, I'm going to have to ask someone to forward.  John could or, Joe, could you?  Here we go.  So, my question is chance or necessity and if it's one or the other, is God required? I would like to do a few sort of fundamental little things at first.  I call it the fertility of the human versus the fertility of the universe, and fertility is a snare word.  I don't know what it means in either of these two contexts, as you'll see, but I like to present the numbers.  Biologists correct me, but of about 30,000 human genes, okay, about 2,000 vary from one individual to the other.  If that's so, then the replica from one individual to another would therefore vary by two to the power of 2,010.  That number is fairly large.  It's 10 to the 605th.  That means that each of us as an individual has the capacity to produce genetically different eggs or sperm to a total of 10 to the 600th.  That's a number. In the visible universe there are 10 to the 76 atoms.  Comparing those two numbers, I don't know what it means.  I'd like just to show you them.  It proposes a question to me.  How out of 10 to the 76 atoms did we generate living beings who have that capacity?  It's a marvelous thing that we have just comparing those two numbers.  Sometime, Ken, you and I should discuss that. I would also like to present you a calendar of the universe as best we know it today empirically, and I'll do it, because these are big numbers, by shrinking down the whole age of the universe to one Earth year.  Okay?  I've changed the scale on you.  If I do that, then it's obvious.  Whoops.  Let's not jump again too fast.  No.  Yeah.  Obviously, 1 January, the big bang.  We come down to dinosaurs only live five days, but they had the good fortune of being born on Christmas Day, et cetera. [Laughter.] If we look at the last day of the year as the most interesting, then we see the following.  Jesus Christ was born two seconds before the end.  Galileo one second, if I'm reading this correctly.  And we're at midnight today. Now, this can say many things.  Oh, it shrinks down so that we can get a feeling for these time scales.  What it says to me is let's go cautiously about these very major problems.  Science, if we date it from Galileo, has only been going on for two seconds.  Give us a little more time.  I mean, we're only at the beginning, as I think Ken and Dr. Nelson in their debate continue to go back and forth on this, we're ignorant.  There's a lot more to learn.  You can draw the conclusions, but I like to draw my own ignorance from this, okay.  As a scientist I've only been working for two seconds, and I've enjoyed every second of it. [Laughter.] This is the heart of the Orion nebula, which is a nebula up in the sky.  I put it here to ask why are there incandescent regions here?  Now I have to get my back hand going.  No, I don't.  Sorry to waste your time on this.  Laser menu.  Think I'll not use that since I haven't learned it enough. If you blow this up by a Hubble space telescope picture, this is what you see.  I'm just going to ask a simple question.  It's cropped a bit, but you will notice that off to the left, your left, is the red region and off to your right is the blue region.  Why are there such a good separation between blue gas and red gas?  Because, very brief terms.  In the red gas, young stars, the most energetic stars, have already been born.  They're irradiating the gas.  The energy is being absorbed and re-radiated, and the H Alpha line of hydrogen, which is in the red region of the spectrum.  The blue gas is too far from the stellar womb, so to speak, so it's reflecting rather than absorbing and re-emitting, and that's why it's blue.  That's why the sky is blue, if you come to Arizona.  I don't doubt you see a blue sky too often in the Chesapeake Bay area, but when you do, it's blue.  And for the same reason that the reflection nebula here is blue.  Although I've said it's occurring in a galaxy like our own, just to remind you, this object here is the Andromeda galaxy, contains 10 billion stars, 10 billion.  Okay?  That's 10 to power 11.  And it measures across the hundred thousand light years.  So that if you're at one end and your friend is at the other and you light a match, he's going to have to wait 100,000 years to see it.  If you'll pardon me, I can say this because I don't have a mother-in-law, but it would make a nice conversation with your mother-in-law.  You stand here and look across the galaxy.  You say, "Mom, how are you doing?"  "Well, my knee is not"--but it takes 200,000 to learn about your mother-in-law's knee. Well, let's get on more seriously here.  This is the equatorial plane of our galaxy.  I'm building up to something.  I'm not just giving you a course in cosmology.  This is a mosaic of photos taken from within our galaxy, obviously.  We can't get outside our galaxy to look in, but a galaxy typically is a very flat system.  It's like a table top.  It's 200 times longer than it is thick, and we're in the plane of the galaxy, so it's very hard to construct the structure of the galaxy because we're in it and in the gas and dust that's concentrated to the disk. But my question is, why are there these incandescent gas zones, the red zones?  What's that all about?  Well, let's look in optical light.  This is an infrared light.  If you look in optical light, you see this, a little piece of the previous slide, which has myriads of stars, but it shows also these dark areas.  What are those dark areas about?  Well, they're like the North American nebula.  This is a marvelous thing.  A designer, God, did a great job here in creating North America in the sky.  Okay?  There's the Florida peninsula, poor folks expecting another hurricane, the Yucatan peninsula, okay, Chesapeake Bay area up there, greatest bay in the world.  I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, by the way, and California and Arizona were not discovered yet. [Laughter.] No, seriously, why this dark area here between Florida and Mexico and all those other stars?  Is that a lack of stars?  Absolutely not.  It's far from it.  There's a veil of gas and dust hanging down that are hiding the stars that are on the other side of that screen, much more distant than the universe, and those stars are embedded in this gas and dust.  That dark area there, the Gulf of Mexico is it, yeah, the Gulf of Mexico is a stellar womb.  It's giving birth to myriads and myriads of stars.  This is how a star is born. This is a gas cloud that contains about, oh, maybe a thousand times the mass of our sun.  It fragments, the fragments collapse, and they form stars because as a fragment about 200 stars if not more are going to form from this cloud eventually, some have already formed.  Okay.  As that gas collapses, like any gas, it heats ups.  In this case because it's the mass of the sun or greater, it heats up to millions of degrees and starts a thermonuclear furnace converting hydrogen to helium to carbon to nitrogen to oxygen up to iron.  So, every star that's born begins immediately to convert lighter elements to heavier elements.  What happens is it dies after--the sun after 10 to 12 billion years will become this kind of object, okay.  The star at the middle is the dead star.  It no longer radiates.  It's collapsed and so it no longer radiates.  It had no more thermonuclear fuel.  It's thrown out to the universe this ring of gas. A star that's much more massive than the sun will die, but on a much more agonizing way.  This is the Crab Nebula.  The star at the middle, which you don't see because it's buried in there, is a neutron star.  Okay?  A very dense star.  And it's thrown out this gas to the universe. Now, why am I talking about star birth and death?  Because if this were not happening--well, first of all, this is what will happen to this object after several hundred million years.  How do I know that?  I haven't been around and I look in a hundred billion years or so or a million, but we know from reconstructing the evolution of the universe a simple fact.  We never see anything as it is.  Light travels at a finite velocity, so I don't see Joe as he is, but as he was a milli, milli, milli, milli, milli, millisecond ago, and I don't see the people in the back as they are but as they were a milli, milli, millisecond ago.  I don't see the moon as it is, but as it was eight seconds ago, and the sun as it was eight minutes ago.  As we look further out in the universe, we're looking back in time.  The galaxy I shared you we see as it was two million years ago, and the most distant galaxies in the universe seen by space telescope we see as they were 10 to 12 billion years ago. So, we can reconstruct by looking at different distances, seeing different epochs in the evolution of the expanding universe and kind of piece together what's happening.  Okay? The important thing, however, is from this material left over from the death of stars, we are born.  If this were not happening, that is the generation of heavier elements through the birth and death of stars, we would not be here.  That's a scientific fact.  The only way you can get the abundance of carbon to make a toenail or an earlobe is through the birth and death of three generations of stars.  The sun is a third generation star.  Finally, with the sun, a generation is born from this.  It dies.  It spews out even heavier chemistry, et cetera, et cetera.  After three generations we had enough chemical abundance to make a human being.  Well, what happened is around at least one star this happened.  We have a planetary system and an Earth.  Now, this is a grain of sand from what I've said physically speaking.  This is a little grain of sand around a bigger grain of sand called the sun in a universe that has 10 to 22nd stars.  That's one with 22 zeros behind it stars.  Take away a few hundred million here or there.  I'm not counting them like that, but we know how many galaxies, we know on the average how many stars are in a galaxy, so that's a good number to work with.  Okay?  10 to 22nd stars.  This was born around one of those stars.  So, the obvious question:   Are there the physical conditions for life elsewhere in the universe arise, and that's a separate issue from today's discussion. What I want to talk about is the fact that we don't marvel at enough; that through modern science we've been able to put the universe in our heads.  Through the laws of physics, chemistry, biology we can analyze the universe by putting it in our heads in a very real sense, through modern science. Well, let's review what happened.  Distances.  As the universe got older from the left to the right of the screen, okay, distances got larger.  That's what we mean by the expanding universe.  But what I want to draw attention to are several of the things that happened.  The first stars form, first microscopic life forms, then finally male.  Now is actually 13.7 billion years rather than 15.  I haven't been able to come to the new time scale for the age of the universe, but it doesn't matter for our discussion. Now, what I want to do now, okay, I'm talking as an amateur theologian, is draw some conclusions from this, and the first thing I do is do a very simple thing that scientists do, so I'm still half scientist here, is measure the mass of something, how much does it weigh, against how big it is.  Okay? So I weigh 160 pounds and I'm 5'11" high.  I measure myself and put myself on there.  Well, if you do this from the proton all the way up to the visible universe, you see a marvelous relationship.  There's nothing to the left or right of that more or less crooked straight line.  But we're in the thick of it.  In fact, all living human beings are in the thick of this progression to higher massive objects.  Well, this is by no means a proof, but it sure is a strong indication to be further evaluated that you hear human beings are nothing else--I'm talking as a scientist--now than an object that has come out of the evolving, expanding universe.  We fit right into the picture. There's proof that our fitting into the picture has been through biological evolution.  Though this may look complicated, all it is is the numbers are a measure of the number of mutations that have occurred in the same identical protein that makes up part of DNA.  Okay?  Ken could tell you a lot more about it, I'm sure.  But you see, if you go along the breaking up the branches here, you see that the mutations go on; you have to add them up along each branch until you come to the human being.  And this from molecular evolutionary biology is extremely convincing; that the progression in the species is related very clearly in this branching to the number of mutations that have occurred in the same identical protein that everything from the neospora all the way up to man, the same protein that all of us, associating myself with all those other creatures, have. Another indication of evolution, biological evolution, is look at a chemical table like this.  Now, I don't know enough chemistry to know what this is all about except I see NCNNO repeating themselves continuously in always more complicated organisms, molecules.  And so with chemical complexity--now I'm jumping over a big bridge which we can all discuss sometime--through chemical complexity we have come out.  Okay? Now, have we come out by chance or necessity?  Well, here's a very funny kind of tree.  It's a tree of the whole universe.  Everything that's ever happened, chance happenings, necessary happenings, all of that, are conserved here.  No dry leaves or branches have fallen off.  Okay?  Now, if you blow a quiet breeze through this tree, what do you see?  Inevitably--I did not say necessarily, I chose the word inevitably--you'd see something like this.  Now, this is a caricature of our modern knowledge.  Our modern knowledge is more sophisticated and even more sophisticated than this, but I'm going to use this for--can I have another minute, Joe--to draw some implications.  Is this kind of directionality here in this trunk of this tree towards the human being, does that require a designer God?  Absolutely not.  That's a scientific result that's interpreted for what it is.  Why is the human being at the top of the tree?  Because we don't know what else to put at the top of the tree.  The human brain is the most complicated machine we know, so that's why it's there.  If you have a more complicated machine, put it there. It is clear that evolution is an intrinsic and proper characteristic of the universe as a whole.  Neither the universe as a whole nor any of its ingredients can be understood except in terms of evolution, and evolution is a daily happening.  We, for instance, constantly exchange atoms with the total reservoir of atoms in the universe.  Each year 98 percent of the atoms in our bodies are renewed.  Each time we breathe, we take in billions and billions of atoms, recycled by other breathing organisms during the past few weeks.  Nothing in my genes was present a year ago.  It is all new, regenerated from the available energy and matter in the universe.  My skin is renewed each month, thank God, and my liver each six weeks.  In brief, human beings are among the most recycled beings in the universe. How are we to interpret the scientific picture of life's origins in terms of religious belief?  Do we need God to explain this?  Very succinctly, my answer is no.  In fact, to need God would be a very denial of God.  God is not the response to a need, and now I'm more than a theologian, I'm going to preach. God is brought in as the God of the gaps.  I have never come to believe in God, nor do I think anyone has come to believe in God by proving God's existence through anything like a scientific process.  God is not found as a conclusion of a rational process.  I believe in God because God gave himself to me. It does make sense that there is a personal God who deals with me and loves me and who has given himself to me.  That makes sense.  I can't prove it, but it's not contradictory.  But I've never come to love God or God to love me because of these reasoning processes.  I've come to love God because I've accepted the fact that He or She made the first move towards me, a great tradition in St. Augustin of God was searching me while I was searching Him, and I didn't realize that He was searching me until it finally struck me. But the personal God I've described in very brief preaching words is also God, the creator of the universe.  It is unfortunate, but especially here in America, I spend half my life overseas, and they would never organize a top because it's not topical for Europeans, okay?  But especially here in America that creationism has come to mean some fundamentalistic, literal, scientific interpretation of Genesis. Judeo-Christian faith is radically creationist, but in a totally different sense.  It is rooted in a belief that everything depends upon God or, better, all is a gift of God.  The universe is not God, and it cannot exist independently of God.  Neither pantheism or naturalism are true. And now I conclude and open up for discussion. If we take the results of modern science seriously, then what science tells us of God must be very different from God as seen by the medieval philosophers and theologians.  For the religious believer, modern science reveals a God who made a universe that has within it a certain venomism and that participates in the very creativity of God.  Such a view of creation can be found in early Christian writings. Perhaps God, according to what modern science provides us to think about, perhaps God should be seen more as a parent or as one who speaks encouraging and sustaining words.  Scripture is very rich in these thoughts.  It presents indeed anthropomorphically a God who gets angry, who disciplines, a God who nurtures the universe.  God is working with the universe.  The universe has a certain vitality of its own, like a child does.  It has the ability to respond to endearment and encouragement. It is for reasons of this description that I've just given you that I claim that intelligent design diminishes God.  It does not make God the great God that He or She is.  It rather makes Him a designer rather than a lover.  These are all very weak images, but how else do we speak of God? God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution.  He does not intervene, but rather allows, participates, and loves the universe. Thank you.  Sorry to have gone beyond my time.  Thank you. [Applause.] MR. ENTINE:  Thank you, Father Coyne.  As promised, Michael Novak, the Director of Social and Political Studies at AEI is on hand as a discussant.  He, too, is a theologian and also an author and a prolific writer and a former U.S. Ambassador.  Mr. Novak has written some 25 books in the philosophy and theology of culture, including most recently in 2004, "The Universal Hunger for Liberty."  Michael. MR. NOVAK:  Thank you very much.  Thank you, Father, for truly a beautiful and spectacular half hour.  I think you're a very lucky man.  You share the best of two worlds in two different senses.  One, you share in the vital life of science and of religion, two of the most powerful dynamisms of our time and the subject of our talk today, and second you also share in two of the most heavenly places on Earth, your work at the Vatican in Rome and in Tucson.  Not a bad life at all. FATHER COYNE:  Anybody want to sign up? MR. NOVAK:  I also thought it would be useful to begin by venturing an answer to the question about the timing of the universe and the work of the designer, and I do this in honor of Lady Thatcher's 80th birthday the other day. When she first had her first meeting at the G7, as I recall it, President Mitterand ignored her for a while and then finally recognizing her said, "We are very fortunate to have with us for the first time Mrs. Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.  I'm sure, as the Bible says, she will be a marvelous helpmate to us in our work."  Well, a black cloud formed over Mrs. Thatcher's head and lasted until she got to speak, and she thanked Mr. Mitterand for the introduction, but she said, "We in Britain must read the Bible a little differently because the way we read it, it says that God created Adam first and then having learned from his mistakes, he created Eve."  So, you see the designer in this account learns from time.  The design is going on all the time in this account. I want to propose that actually the introduction of if not intelligent design, something like it is crucial for American public schools.  Two of the great vital dynamisms of American life are science and religion, as the question from Reuters exposed in the last session.  And to have an antagonism between them is crazy.  I don't understand why in the public schools we cannot have a day or two of discussion about the relative roles of science and of religion, at least that much of a question. If intelligent design is a scientific theory and those who propose it at least in very good part are trying very hard to propose it as that, let that be discussed and its argument against it marshaled and show why it isn't if it isn't and why it is if it is.  But it's an interesting--I think an interesting dimension of what's happening in modern science today. I happen to be a winner of the Templeton prize, and one of the pleasures of it is to meet the other Templeton prize winners, and two of them--two or three of them have been first class astrophysicists, astronomers, physicists, and they have pointed out in their work what they refer to, sometimes dismissively, sometimes with some favor, as the amtropic principle.  That is, when you look at that tree, particularly the tree of the descent from the galaxies and so forth, how many chances were there the proper physical conditions existed that human life and consciousness could emerge?  There were so many roads that the road taken the other way would have made life impossible, human life impossible.  And at every opportunity the road making us possible was taken.  There is in that sense, whatever sense it is, some direction in it towards more complexity, and that's interesting.  That's puzzling.  That's less than random. And it's not in that field alone.  In the psychological sciences I know when I was at Harvard 40 years ago, 50 years ago almost, "Future of an Illusion" was the book, and those of us who are religious were regarded as neurotic.  And now I see studies coming out from Harvard about the fact that religious people tend to heal faster, tend to be better balanced, et cetera.  It's purely empirical for them saying it's not true, then it's not true, but I'm reporting what I read as empirical studies, and it's puzzling to psychiatrists.  How can that be?  It's not what they were taught when they were younger.  And here in chemistry and in biology science is not in the position it was 400 years ago is one of the points I want to establish.  And it would be interesting to talk about that.  There must be a way to do it front of high school kids and a more complicated way in front of university students. Now, what is science?  There is a view of science that science has replaced religion, superstition, magic, myth, and you can say that in a way that causes laughter.  It's happened in the courtroom in Harrisburg, apparently, and today, actually.  You can make fun of religion.  Science is a means by way of making fun of religion, brushing it into the dustbin.  That's one view of science.  And by golly, it's practiced in a lot of classrooms.  I'm willing to bet E-mails would show lots and lots of students across America who have had that. Another way of viewing science is that it's the only evidence produced physically counts as evidence.  In other words, is that it's the only evidence produced physically counts as evidence.  In other words, it's not just science, it's science plus.  It's science plus a metaphysic, a metaphysic of materialism.  I believe that there are only material things in the world, mental processes are an illusion, should be eliminated,   (?)  my teacher at Harvard, W.V. Quine, certainly had that view in philosophy. That's another view of science, and I think that's not the one in play in this room, but it is a view that is very common.  It was certainly very common at Harvard when I was there. And a third way of viewing science is that science is a method compatible with other methods in the human mind.  It's compatible with the kind of particular knowledge that is in poetry so that one can call a paper by the lovely title of the "Dance of the Fertile Universe," and one could even find some verses from Shakespeare I think to embellish it, not just embellish it but add to it.  And there's a form of knowing in Shakespeare that's different from other forms of knowing, but worth registering among the habits of the human mind. And among those habits in the mind, at least in the Catholic tradition, there is believed to be religion of two kinds, a religion which comes merely through the use of reason alone, seeing those magnificent reminders of what the universe is, and its sheer beauty and the sheer fire of its intelligence, and gaining from that a wonderment about is there an intelligence firing it and what might it be like, far beyond our capacity to know.  We don't know.  Another question to ask, "What other worlds might be beyond this?"  We have no idea what is the greatness of the intelligence, if there is one, that fired that.  But that's purely reasonable.  That's not relying on any revelation or anything like that. But a lot of folks in history have found by very serious reflection false ways of thinking about those things and true ways, and think they discovered a science of mind that is a science of theology that is natural theology.  It used to be a requirement for graduating from the ivy league colleges at the time of the American founding, courses in natural theology. But there's another kind of theology which Father Coyne spoke about at the end, which comes through the revelation, particularly in our context here, judaism and christianity. Now, two scholars in recent years have written books about creativity.  Dan Boorsten was one, The Creators, and he at one point talked to me about that, and I said--asked me about creativity and theology, and I said:  Dan, you're going to think I'm crazy but I have a little hypothesis I'd like to give you.  I think you're going to find that the great inspiration for invention and discovery and history is the story of the creation in Genesis and the idea that combined with it in the same chapters in Genesis, the idea that humans are made in the image of God.  Women and men are made to be creators.  It's our vocation to create.  It's our vocation to use our minds and not just use them to find out there, but to push beyond and make new things, to continue the creation if you want.  And that's a tremendous impulse. Alfred North Whitehead said that--now I'm talking about the role of religion in science and actual history.  Alfred North Whitehead said that without 5,500 years of teaching, that there is an intelligence who understands everything that is made, no matter how complex, problematic, chancy, whatever it is, there is an intelligence that does that.  There wouldn't have been the energy in scientific investigators over the centuries to keep doing the impossible and the arduous, and the difficult, and failing, and failing again, with the sense that someday they will succeed.  They had profound beliefs that they would succeed because the world is intelligible some way or other. And when they discovered it's not intelligible by direct design, by an object, they discover probabilities.  There are other ways to break through and to deal with chance and with chaos, and chaos theory.  The mind is fertile.  It does do a dance in the ways of intelligence.  We haven't exhausted the ways of intelligence. And finally, not just the creativity and not just the sense that even if we don't know it, everything is intelligible, and let's keep keeping. But finally, the teaching of the habits that you need if you're going to be a good investigator, humility, cooperation, a sense of law, perseverance, a sense of sacrificing for the common good, asceticism.  All these things a certain kind of religion helps.  It's not an accident that so many of the great scientific inventors, as Father Coyne said, at the beginning of our era were all religious.  It's not an accident.  It's not an accident that in the United States today a majority of scientists are religious.  And why don't we encourage students, religious students to come to the vocation of science?  There are so many others who are doing it and it's a terrific vocation for Christians and Jews.  Embrace it.  Pursue it for all it's worth. I think that would be a big help to the country, so it's crazy to keep these things in separate compartments, afraid of each other, scientists afraid of religious people, religious people afraid of scientists.  It doesn't make any sense historically or today. And finally, let me conclude on this note.  I once heard when I was very young a very good proposition.  It's in Catholic circles to be sure, but it goes like this: look, both reason and faith come from the same God if they're true, both science and faith.  And therefore, if your science contradicts your faith or your faith contradicts your science, go back to your drawing boards.  You're wrong about one of them.  Reconsider the argument.  You might have phrased it badly.  You might have only been partially understanding it.  Go back to the evidence. You don't have to have one do the job or the other.  I mean the Catholic Church made a terrible mistake in the Galileo affair because it moved into a field of science it didn't have to pronounce in. And last I'm just going to disagree with Father Coyne on a couple little things.  One is I don't think--I love the statement of John Paul II in 1996--I love John Paul II for a million reasons--but I love that statement.  I thought it was very strong, very much in the tradition, very needed at the time, but I think it could be expanded upon a lot and deepened and made much more serious.  I'm not sure I want that to happen.  Maybe that's enough for now. And I think that what Cardinal Schonborn was pointing to is that science plus.  Science is terrific, but there is a science plus going on.  Let's not be afraid to criticize that too, I mean the materialism going along with the science. Anyway, I think the two, and all those ranchers and those cowboys can be friends-- [Laughter.] MR. NOVAK:  So I think we ought to try to make that possible.  Thank you very much. [Applause.] MODERATOR:  Thank you very much, Michael, for a provocative response. Father Coyne has one or two reflections, and then we'll open it up to some questions from the audience. FATHER COYNE:  Thanks again, John. Although I spent half my life in California, I'm not a cowboy.  I've never been on a horse.  I drink a little bit of scotch, but I don't have two pistols either, like John Wayne. To be more serious, I back up to the last statement.  Certainly we should expand upon John Paul II's view of evolution, very carefully enunciated.  In fact, he expands a bit on it himself, Michael, if you may notice towards the end of his message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.  He stops talking about soul.  He discussed the dualism that was intrinsic to Pope Pius XII, in that God intervenes to create the human soul, whatever, an individual human being.  He advances beyond that by no longer talking about the soul, but the spirit, and he wonders whether from the continuity, the empirical continuity seen in scientific views of evolution, whether the spirit itself could not emerge from the material.  Now that sounds like heresy, but a Pope opened himself--he's a dead Pope--but he did open himself to that possibility. Teilhard deChardin was not condemned, but he was terribly suspected for that very same concept of could the spirit, in the continuous evolutionary process, emerge from the material?  Obviously, science could never see that because science--and now let me say what I think a scientist does. A scientist works with material.  That does not make him or her materialistic.  And science works with material in an empirical way.  That does not make the scientist a strict empiricist or reductionist.  Okay?  I mean that should be clear to anybody who either does science or knows what scientists do.  Consequently--not following up on my talk by getting a word in to this morning's discussion--surely intelligent design should be discussed, invited, but not in science classes. I think that's the critical point.  And despite citing all kinds of authorities of Darwin and Williams and God himself about evolution, necessarily brings in theological considerations, as was cited this morning by Dr. Nelson from Darwin's own writing in The Origin of the Species.  We've come a long way since then.  We have universities that clearly distinguish various disciplines, but a university means that those disciplines talk to one another, and some universities better than others. So if it had a 13-year-old daughter came to me, I'd say, "Sure, read The Origin of Species, and if you have questions about the theological implications, take a course, okay, in comparative religions, or philosophy or theology."  But don't teach it in science classes because the risk, as Ken has brought out, our students will no longer what science is all about.  And science is not God Almighty.  Science has severe limitations, but methodologically it's a very disciplined discipline. MODERATOR:  Father Coyne, let's open it up to some questions. FATHER COYNE:  Let's open it up. MODERATOR:  From the audience.  And if you can, again, identify yourself and organization that you might be from.  Yes, sir?  Wait till you get a microphone. QUESTIONER:  I'm   (?)   from the University of Virginia.  Michael Novak has raised the interesting issue of intelligent life in the universe.  It reminds me of the question that was raised by Enrico   (?)  who asked, "Where are they?"  Obviously, if there is intelligent life in the universe, it is very unlikely that they would be at the same stage that we're at, and so they should have either come here by now or they don't exist anywhere near the level that we have reached. You have seen the graph put up by Dr. Coyne, and you know that only in the last second of the last year do we have a level of technology where such investigations are possible. Anyway, what is possible, however, and I think within this century-- MODERATOR:  Excuse me.  Could you just pose a question for us? QUESTIONER:  --is discovery of life on Mars, and this raises the question of intelligent design.  Life on Mars almost certainly will exist either in crypto-form or in paleo-form-- MODERATOR:  Seriously, what is the question? QUESTIONER:  Is the development of life on Mars deterministic or stochastic?  That's a question I would like to put to the proponents of intelligent design, or would like to know whether they believe that the steps that life went through on Mars from the beginning of the replicating, self-replicating molecules to whatever level that was reached, would these steps resemble what has happened on earth or are they different?  This is a scientific question which I think can be tackled and probably will be tackled during this century. MODERATOR:  Either one of you want to take a-- FATHER COYNE:  I'll say a word to the--the real question I think was, did life come about wherever?  Whether it's elsewhere or not, did life come about on the earth or anyplace else by chance or necessity?  And that's essentially the subject of the talk which I never got to emphasize.  The question is wrong, so any answer will be wrong.  It's not chance or necessity, it's both chance and necessity, and opportunity or fertility.  And let me explain very briefly. Two atoms meet in the early universe.  By necessity they want to make a hydrogen molecule, but the pressure and temperature conditions at that time are not right so they go wandering around the universe.  They meet millions and billions and billions of times.  There are billions of atoms doing this.  What's to surprise us if 3 times or 100 times a million times in a 14 billion year old universe with 10 to the 22nd stars spewing out chemistry, that they make a hydrogen molecule?  And once that's made, hydrogen meets an oxygen.  By necessity it wants to make water, but it doesn't because the temperature and-- So you repeat these processes through an aging universe until,frankly--I'm jumping over a lot of gaps undoubtedly--until, frankly, you come to the human brain.  Now that's the best scientific explanation we have of both physical, chemical and biological evolution in the universe. So to answer your question, wherever life is, it didn't happen sheerly by chance or by necessity, but by chance and necessity together with a   (?)   scientific knowledge in the universe, namely, that it's very fertile. MODERATOR:  Michael, you have something? MR. NOVAK:  Well, I wanted to say that I'm not a proponent of intelligent design.  I don't know enough to deal with the questions involved.  I do think the discussion is a very crucial one for our culture for the reasons that I said. But I do want to issue a warning.  If one finds signs of intelligence and directionality, design is not quite the right word for it--there I sort of yield to Father Coyne--but that's not God.  I mean I would be loathe--that's simply another scientific theory. And one of the crucial impacts of the meaning of creation, that God is the Creator, not--he's separate from the creatures.  It's not like pantheism where He's a little force in the universe or anything like that.  The Jewish-Christian God is really separate and different.  One of the impacts of that is it desupernaturalizes all the things in the universe.  They're not magic, they are not sacred, they are not God.  God is God.  And that's what frees the intellect to deal with all these things. So if we find directionality in our scientific investigations and in the direction of evolution, but always leading toward intelligence, that's not necessarily God.  It's interesting that science is doing that.  It would stimulate people and religion a lot I think, but it's not a matter of faith.  How all that happens doesn't touch the fact that this God created everything, but how we don't know.  How is for science to tell us. And even if intelligent design finds out some of it, and points out some directionality in it and some meaning of design through chance and probabilities and everything else, that's interesting, but it's science. I do think it's important to keep distinct in our minds the one from the other so that we don't intrude or over-cross one another's borders.  They have impact on one another as clearly we see in the fights that we have, but they are not the same thing.  And here is where I strongly agree with Father Coyne and with the Pope's statement.  There are some things about evolution that are so well-founded it would be absolutely pointless to oppose, and it's not a matter of doctrine anyway, one way or the other, but you might as well notice when they're there.  And there are other questions that are open.  Let the scientists decide them. MODERATOR:  Time for, unfortunately, just for one more question.  Gentleman in the back. QUESTIONER:  Alan  (?)  from Reuters.  I just wonder, Mr. Novak, how much time you've spent in high schools recently?  I've had two kids go through high school.  They get one year of physics in the 9th grade, chemistry in the 10th, biology in the 11th.  You could switch the order.  And then if they're interested, one AP or possible two APs in the 12th.  They have to pass a lot of tests.  There's a lot of material.  Do we have time to waste on this stuff when we're not producing enough science graduates? When you look at universities, the PhD programs are full of people from India and China.  Our kids are not going into science.  My kids' peers, virtually none of them have gone into science.  So there's a lot of material.  There's very little time. MODERATOR:  Question, is there enough time in the curriculum for-- QUESTIONER:  Yeah.  Is there enough time to waste on this stuff? MR. NOVAK:  Well, I would say by your own evidence, there is.  That is, your kids have had 4 years of science and they're not motivated.  Let's talk about some things that may motivate a lot of people in the United States.  Let's talk about science and religion.  Religion is one of the great motivators.  And let's talk about how important science is to religion, and how many religious reasons there are to pursue, if I may put it in religious terms, the handiwork of God, and find out where it goes, and pursue the minds that God gave us, push them as hard as they can. I think it would only help with vocations to the scientific life.  I can't believe that making fun of religion on the one hand and making science appear a threat to it is going to motivate a very great percentage of Americans. MODERATOR:  Father Coyne? FATHER COYNE:  Just so you know where I stand on this issue, in case you don't know already, just in case you don't know where I stand on this issue, if you don't know already, this is where I stand.  I'm one of those two scientists.  If you're asking about purpose in the universe as a scientist, you get zero. MODERATOR:  "There's no doubt about it, Ellington, we've mathematically expressed the purpose of the universe.  Gad, how I love the thrill of scientific discovery." Well, thank you both for a very illuminating discussion. [Applause.] MODERATOR:  We're now going to move into the next phase of our conference, and Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute will be the moderator for that. [Pause.] MR. HESS:  We're going to go ahead and get started.  If you'd be kind enough to take your seats, please. I'm Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at--excuse me, please, go ahead and get seated.  Thank you so much. I'm Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.  This is our second full panel on the day.  The topic is "Science Wars:  Should Schools Teach Intelligent Design?"  Those of you who were with us for the previous panel notice that we're at a natural segue here from the conversation that we just had with Michael Novak and Mr. Coyne. We are pleased to have two panelists with us.  For those of you who don't follow these debates, the intelligent debate, particularly this fall, has really taken a central place in discussions about school curriculum, particularly in light of the Dover Area School District's decision to go to court this fall in Pennsylvania over the requirement that teachers read a brief statement about intelligent design to students before classes in evolution.  This has really been the most visible and the most widely discussed development.  A number of districts, really dozens across the country though have in the last two years chosen to bring discussion of intelligent design in some fashion or other into science classes. And for those of you, just to give a bit of context on public opinion, a CBS poll taken about a year ago, November 2004, found that 65 percent of Americans favor teaching creationism as well as evolution in schools, and 37 percent wanted creationism taught instead of evolution.  So for what it's worth, that's a bit of context. I'm delighted to have with us the two panelists who were able to join us today.  To my immediate right is Dr. Barbara Forrest.  She is a Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University.  She is coauthor of Creationism's Trojan Horse, The Wedge of Intelligent Design, and was award the Friend of Darwin Award by the National Center for Science Education in 1998.  She has testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the case to which I just alluded. Also with us is John Calvert, Managing Director of the Intelligent Design Network.  Before joining the Intelligent Design Network, Mr. Calvert practiced law for more than 30 years with the midwestern firm of Lathrop & Gage.  He is also coauthor of Intelligent Design, the Scientific Alternative to Evolution. Each of our panelists is going to speak for 15 to 20 minutes on the issues that crop up in terms of intelligent design and K-12 instruction.  At that point we are going to open it up for questions and conversation with the audience. With that, Barbara, would you please get us started? MS. FORREST:  I don't have any pretty pictures to look at today, so you're stuck with looking up here. The topic for today that we have is: teach the controversy?  And I want to point out a number of things that we know to show that the answer to that question is no. "Teach the controversy" is a slogan coined by the intelligent design proponents at the Discovery Institute, and Dr. Stephen Meyer explained in a March 2005 op-ed in the Baltimore Sun what that means.  It means to teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, which is a code word for teaching creationism.  It means to teach the evidence against evolution, another code term.  And it also means to teach alternative theories like Michael Behe's Theory of Intelligent Design. But this is something that we've been hearing for 30 years.  This is not a new message.  Duane Gish, who is a well-known young earth creationist, said pretty much the same thing in 1973.  This is an old creationist strategy. So intelligent design is actually a non-theory.  And how do we know?  Well, the Discovery Institute likes lists, and they've put together a list which it took several years I think to compile, of 400 scientists who dissent from Darwinism.  I read about a couple of other lists in the last couple of days, and if lists mean anything--in science they mean nothing--but if they mean anything at all, then we have a couple that are powerful statements to testify to the fact that there is no debate within mainstream science, there is no controversy within mainstream science about the status of evolutionary theory. Contrary to something that I heard Dr. Nelson say earlier today, evolution is not in a state of crisis.  So a couple of lists.  70,000 Australian scientists and science teachers have recently signed an open letter stating that intelligent design is not a science, and it should not be taught.  One of the signatories was the Australian Academy of Science.  Another was the Australian Science Teachers Association.  I just read about these last night. An American list.  R. Joe Brandon, who is an archeologist, put together in a matter of days a list of 7,700 signatories.  Half of them are scientists with PhDs, rejecting intelligent design as a scientific theory. So if lists mean anything, these lists are powerful statements that we don't have a genuine controversy on our hands here.  So the burden of proof in this debate has never rested on evolution.  Evolution has met every burden of proof it had to bear for the last 150 years.  The burden of proof rests squarely on intelligent design proponents, and I don't think people should waste any more time debating the science with people who have not yet produced any. So given what we know about intelligent design, about this controversy, it's unlikely that there will be any science produced from the intelligent design movement, and we have this from a very reliable source.  We have it from the leaders of the movement themselves.  No science has been done to support the claims of intelligent design proponents.  One of those leaders is William Dembski, who in 2002, before the audience of intelligent design supporters--and exclusively an audience of intelligent design supporters, because dissidents were not permitted to come--said that, you know, "We've made great cultural progress in intelligent design, but because of that great cultural progress the science is lagging behind." As recently as August 2004 in Touchstone Magazine, Dr. Nelson himself made quite a definitive statement of the scientific failure of intelligent design, and I'm going to quote directly.  "Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community, the intelligent design community, is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design.  We don't have such a theory right now, and that's a real problem.  Without a theory it's very hard to know where to direct your research focus.  Right now we've got a bag of powerful intuitions and a handful of notions such as irreducible complexity and specified complexity, but as yet no general theory of biological design." Well, irreducible complexity and specified complexity are the two most important planks in the intelligent design platform, and Dr. Nelson characterizes them here as intuitions and notions. He ended his section of the interview in this magazine by saying, "We ain't seen nothing yet," and he got that exactly right. [Laughter.] MS. FORREST:  Intelligent design is not likely to produce such a theory.  And how do we know that?  Again, we know that by what the intelligent design leaders themselves have told us, the way they have defined it.  Phillip Johnson has defined intelligent design as--the statement that is the defining concept of the movement, which is what he calls it--God is objectively real as Creator, and the reality of God is tangibly recorded in scientific evidence, especially in biology. Dr. William Dembski has also defined intelligent design very succinctly and very significantly.  "Intelligent design is the logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."  This is an important statement.  Philosophers pay a lot of attention to how people say things to precision.  And notice that he says it is a theology.  It is the theology, "the logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."  What that means is, the logos theology is foundational to intelligent design, it forms its foundation.  And not only is that a religious foundation, it is a specifically Christian foundation because it's rooted in the New Testament.  So intelligent design is just as biblically based as young earth creationism, except it has moved from the Book of Genesis to the Book of John.  And we have that from the movement's own leaders. So we know that intelligent design is in its essence, in its essence, not in its implications, a religious idea.  It is not science. So since intelligent design is religion, and contrary to something that Mr. Novak said a few minutes ago, I don't know of anybody on this side of the issue, the side that I represent, who is making fun of religion.  And speaking for myself, I have the utmost respect for the religious views of the supporters of intelligent design.  I just want them to be honest that what they're talking about are these religious views.  I think they do a disservice to their own views by classifying them as science. So we know that intelligent design is religion.  It is beyond the reach of science.  Now, this is to the advantage of intelligent design as a religious belief.  It works to the advantage of it.  Indeed, the fact that religion is beyond the reach of science works to the advantage of all religious belief. And so this brings us to something else that we know, and I am echoing Father Coyne here.  Science is not a threat to religious belief.  Evolution is not a threat to religious belief.  It's only a threat to a very rigid understanding of religion.  It's a threat to biblical literalism.  That engenders all kinds of problems.  But it's not a threat to meaningful religious belief, and we have evidence in the form of millions of religious believers who can accept the findings of modern science and still maintain meaningful religious commitments, and we have representatives of that view seated all over this room.  So that's demonstrable evidence that science is not a threat to religious belief. It's not a threat for two reasons.  First, there is the historical fact that religion itself has evolved.  It has changed over time.  And I mean that in no disrespectful way.  That is the source of its vitality.  That is what has enabled religion to withstand all of the pressures it has experienced, and it's what has enabled it to remain the vibrant institution that it still is.  So it's a historical fact that in order to survive, religion itself has changed, and I think that's a very positive thing. The second reason is that the naturalistic methodology of science is limited in its reach.  This is the second reason that it works to the advantage of religion, that religion is beyond the reach of scientific method.  And one of the terms that's been used a great deal in this debate is the term "methodological naturalism."  So what is that?  Methodological naturalism is a fancy name for scientific method.  It's not distinct from scientific method, it is scientific method.  It is the naturalistic methodology that scientists employ.  And what does that mean?  It means, very simply, that scientists look for natural explanations for natural phenomena. It is neither arbitrary nor is it a priori.  "Arbitrary" means that scientists just pull it off the seat of their pants and pick some method and use it, regardless of, you know, whether there's any good reason to do it.  It's not "a priori."  Now, that's a fancy philosophical Latin term, but it means something very simple.  If it were a priori, it would mean that the naturalistic methodology of science was developed completely independent of experience.  That makes no sense.  It was developed out of centuries of experience, trial and error, and it used not because it's a priori, which it's not, it's used not because it's arbitrary.  There's no a priori rule requiring the use of any particular methodology.  It's used because it works, and nothing else does.  We don't have a methodology that works besides the naturalistic one.  It works and nothing else does. So the charge that methodological naturalism is arbitrary is a false charge.  It is used because of pragmatic necessity. Something else.  Methodological naturalism is limited in its reach because human cognitive faculties are limited in their reach.  This is what both requires and enables people to make commitments of religious faith.  It is what makes these commitments meaningful, that it requires something of you.  If all of these questions were answered scientifically, no effort would be required, and as I understand religious commitment, religious faith, it's meaningful because of the effort that one must expend in order to maintain it. Another misconception is that methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism are the same thing. Thank you, I'm almost done. [Laughter.] MS. FORREST:  They're not the same thing.  Methodological naturalism is a procedural protocol.  It is a regulative principle.  It means let's understand the natural world for purposes of science as though there were nothing else.  It doesn't say there is nothing else.  That's philosophical naturalism, and that is a metaphysical view that is not entailed by methodological naturalism.  And again, proof of that is the fact that we have sincere religious people today who use naturalistic methodology in their work, and yet maintain meaningful religious commitments. So methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism are distinct.  Methodological naturalism leaves open a door for faith. So in concluding, in light of these considerations, there is no reason to teach a controversy that does not exist.  There is no controversy of the kind that the Discovery Institute alleges.  So I propose that any pretense of this be completely dropped. Intelligent design proponents are very fond of pointing out that we often--that we may lose the moral standards that evolution is damaging to, but I think we could set a very fine moral example by teaching science as it should be taught, and that's because we would be teaching the truth. Thank you. [Applause.] MR. HESS:  Okay.  Thank you so much, Barbara. And, John, would you, please, take it away?  I think we're having a momentary technical issue here.  Here we go. MR. CALVERT:  Hopefully this thing will work. I want to thank the Institute for this wonderful opportunity to discuss an issue that is enormously important to the culture.  It's a real honor to be here. In the science wars I come to speak to you from the trenches.  I've been there for the last six years.  The question I thought I was to address for this conference was whether schools should, quote "teach the controversy."  However, as I prepared the talk I noticed that the actual question on the program was "Should schools teach the controversy over intelligent design beliefs?"  This is a different question that I believe is inappropriate.  The question has a very obvious answer.  It raises a straw man and contains an implicit false assumption. Science education is not about teaching beliefs.  It's about equipping students to make informed and reasoned decisions.  The question also raises a straw man.  A straw man is an issue that is not an issue at all.  It is raised to avoid discussion of the real issue.  The real issue is not about requiring the teaching of ID.  It is about permitting teachings that might weaken evolutionary theory.  Should we allow that? The battle in Kansas and around the country is not about any required teaching of intelligent design.  It is about allowing teachers to adequately inform students about evolution, teaching the story honestly.  Presently schools and biology teachers are discouraged from doing anything that would tend to weaken evolutionary theory.  If they break that rule, they're shunned by their peers, reprimanded, reassigned, and encouraged to leave public education. The question is also based on a false assumption.  As Paul points out, it suggests that ID is not currently a subject of discussion in the classroom.  Actually, the argument against design is the center of that discussion.  In a letter recently issued by 38 Nobel laureates to the Kansas Board of Education, evolution was defined as the result of unguided, unplanned process of random mutation and natural selection.  This is what is being taught in public schools today.  Notice what is being taught is an argument against design, a process that is unguided and unplanned, that's driven by random mutation, I'm sorry, is not designed.  As explained by an agnostic philosopher of science who testified at the Kansas science hearings, James Barhan [ph], the mechanistic consensus of modern biology is that design is not objectively real, but merely an optical illusion like the rising and the setting of the sun. On this view, living matter is nothing special, it is just chemistry shaped by natural selection.  What is intelligent design?  Ideas merely in disagreement with the scientific disagreement with the claim of illusion.  Ideas in disagreement with the claim of evolution that life is not designed.  So the issues is whether schools should officially suppress scientific data and analysis that supports this disagreement. So I believe the proper question is this, should public schools permit teachers to adequately inform students about evolution and the claim that life is not designed?  This is the better question, and not a straw man.  Teachers are now permitted to show students only the positive case for materialistic origin stories and none of the data and science that casts doubt on those stories.  The question is whether that one-sided formula is educationally and legally appropriate. This question is a straw man if the question that I pose here is a straw man if there is no real controversy to teach.  You've heard the mantra there is no scientific controversy about evolution.  Hence, there is no controversy to teach.  I believe Dr. Nelson and Dr. Miller have demonstrated there is a scientific controversy.  So the claim that there is none in my mind is nothing more than a slogan.  It's not a truth supported by the data, rather, it's just a slogan.  There is no controversy. Evolution is inherently controversial because it seeks to explain the history of life rather than how life operates.  As explained by the late evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biology is an historical science, a science that seeks to use historical narratives, storytelling, rather than experimentation to absolutely confirm its case. Storytelling is necessary because the cause of singular events occurring millions and billions of years ago were not observed and cannot be observed in the laboratory.  What caused the eye of the trilobite 530 million years ago?  Any explanation is in the nature of a story, not a confirmed scientific fact.  Storytelling uses imagination and guesswork that is inherently subjective and will always be controversial. The evolution story is inherently controversial.  The controversy is implicit in this story used to defend Darwinism that recently appeared in Time magazine.  Note the multiple uses of the word imagine and might have and could have.  The subject is also inherently controversial because it rests upon key assumptions that have extremely weak of nonexistent evidentiary bases. The changes to the Kansas science standards were drafted by a group of eight scientists and educators, three having doctoral degrees in the life sciences.  The group was led by William S. Harris, Ph.D., a biochemist who has a C.V. 26 pages long in 10 point type.  He has described evolution and the proposed changes to the Kansas standards using this image of evolution.  I think I'm just going to deliver my talk from the--this is the way Dr. Harris describes evolution and the changes to the Kansas science standards, evolution is an historical narrative that a stool rests on three legs, three key stories.  Microevolution argues that random mutation and natural selection work within the species and perhaps even across species.  This story is generally not disputed, and students should be thoroughly grounded in the theory. The second story is that microevolution can be extrapolated to explain macroevolution.  Macroevolution seeks to explain all of the other diversity of life including the production new body plants and new systems that appear to be irreducibly complex.  During the hearings in Kansas, four Ph.D. biochemists, five Ph.D. molecular biologists, a Ph.D. geneticist who invented the gene gun, a Ph.D. quantum physicist explained why this story is scientifically controversial and why students should be exposed to both sides of that controversy. The third story is that life arose via chemical evolution through a purely naturalistic process.  Three Ph.D. chemists, two being experts in chemical evolution, one of whom worked with Miller and Uri [ph] explained why this story is at best a wild speculation.  It has no evidentiary basis and lacks even a coherent theory as to who it might have happened. So after the testimony of these experts, it still looks like this.  There is a controversy.  Twenty-three expert witnesses, 18 holding doctoral degrees in biochemistry, biology, physics, genetics and the philosophy of science, education and the law, testified as to the scientific validity and the educational propriety of the changes offered by Dr. Harris and his colleagues.  Those changes will simply introduce students to both sides of these real scientific controversies. Prestigious institutions of science were provided a 3-day opportunity all expenses paid by the state to dispute that testimony.  They declined the opportunity.  Why?  There are at least two reasons.  First, the testimony of our witnesses was in fact scientifically solid.  This suggests that they knew they could win this debate at the hearings on the merits.  Remember, in my mind this is not the key reason why they didn't show up.  The key reason is that evolution is based upon a third unseen, little understood, irrefutable assumption that requires belief in evolution and, therefore, renders it not debatable.  If they had participated in the hearings, they would have thrown that assumption out the window by subjecting evolution to a scientific debate.  That's why they didn't come to the hearings.  It's because of methodological naturalism that doesn't allow the discussion.  You see evolution as not really propped up by the data, as you can see here, rather, it is propped up by stories that cannot be rebutted because of methodological naturalism. If you ask the question what is the origin of life and its diversity and then allow only material causes, then you have answered that question before you have even asked it.  This effectively converts evolution as a legitimate theory into an ideology, a dogma that chemical and Darwinian evolution are true. If students were shown this picture, then at least we would be honest with them.  However, this is not what is explained to them.  This is what is shown to them.  So when the advocates of materialistic evolution use a strategy that boycotts and substantive discussion of their origin story, then how do they publicly support that story?  If they're not going to engage the debate on the science, then how do they oppose those who want to open the debate? The strategy for opposition was revealed in a memo that was accidentally published in February by the media and public relations officer of Kansas Citizens for Science, the organization that has cloned itself around the country and that works very closely with the National Center for Science Education.  Their strategy is the same as it was in 1999, notify the national and local media about what's going on and portray them in the harshest light possible as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies.  There may be no way to head off another science standards debacle, but we can sure make them look like asses as they do what they do.  Our target is the moderates who are that well informed most of whom are probably theistic evolutionists.  There is no way to convert the creationists.  I didn't know science was about conversion. The boycott was an implementation of this strategy.  It is a strategy that seeks to demean rather than to discuss.  It seeks to portray anyone who would question Darwin as ignoramuses and idiots, when in fact our witnesses are brilliant, courageous, and the members of the Kansas Board of Education are well-meaning policy makers who strive to make public education an enterprise that informs rather than indoctrinates. The intimidation and coercion does not stop at name calling.  It also includes loss of jobs, loss of academic status, denial of advancement, plain old job discrimination.  We had two teachers testify about how they lost their jobs because they were just teaching Darwin honestly.  A third teacher who testified went back to Ohio to defend his Ph.D. dissertation, and a science wolf pack jumped on him and they've done all he can to make sure he does not get his Ph.D. Jo Gonzalez, a science teacher, testified about her frustration in not knowing how to teach this subject honestly.  She doesn't know how to handle the inevitable questions brought to her by her students who know what's going on. I personally listened to those in academia who are incredibly frustrated because they have to get their sciences degrees in silence knowing that if they expressed their reservations about Darwin they will not go far in biology.  They are double conflicted because they worry that their science itself is unethical.  The claim there is no controversy is just a slogan, a slogan supported by intimidation, coercion and misinformation. This brings us back to the central question, should we permit teachers to teach this real scientific controversy or should public school officials give in to the coercion and intimidation and officially suppress it?  That's the issue, is whether we should officially suppress an open discussion of evolution. I believe there are scientific, educational, ethical and legal reasons why official suppression is inappropriate.  Suppose you are the principal of a high school and I am a biology teacher and I come to you and I say to you, today I am going to teach children about evolution.  Evolution postulates that life is not the result of any design, even though it looks designed.  I have in this hand the stuff you would find in textbooks about finch beaks and peppered moths and Haeckel's embryos.  All this data supports the theory of evolution. Now in my other hand I have two kinds of data, data that provides positive evidence of design. MR. HESS:  John, if you could wrap up it would be great, please. MR. CALVERT:  And simply challenges the inadequacy of random mutation and natural selection to explain the origin of life and its diversity. I'm here because my teacher's association has told me that I should not do anything to weaken evolution.  I also have heard about teachers that have been reassigned or lost their jobs because they broke the rule just be teaching weaknesses in the theory.  I need you to tell me can I show them the evidence in both hands or should I hide the evidence in this hand?  How do you respond from a scientific perspective?  Aren't all scientific theories necessarily open to criticism?  If you officially suppress criticisms of evolution, aren't you converting that theory into an ideology?  Wouldn't that violate the rules of science?  Evolution can never be falsified if it can't be criticized. MR. HESS:  John, could you wrap up, please? MR. CALVERT:  So what do you say to the teacher?  If the teacher says if I suppress this evidence, this evidence happens to support nonatheistic beliefs, secular humanism, agnosticism.  This evidence happens to support theism.  From a legalistic perspective, can you tell the teacher just put this evidence behind your back and show only this evidence?  I think the case of Epperson v. Arkansas says you can't do that. MR. HESS:  Let's take it to the audience at this point.  I'm sure we have some questions. [Applause.] MR. HESS:  Please identify yourself when Joe comes around to you, and please do us all a favor and not speechify.  Please actually ask real questions. MS. CHOW:  Ida Chow [ph] with the Society for Development of Biology.  I would like to ask Mr. Calvert what is the methodology that I.D. uses to demonstrate its hypothesis and where are the experiments to provide the evidence? MR. CALVERT:  I think the I.D. hypothesis rests first on the fact that when we go into DNA we find messages, and we actually see these messages being translated into operational, functional systems that operate in three spatial dimensions and a time dimension. The second piece of evidence that I.D. looks at is the fact that there is no physical or chemical laws that dictate the sequence of that message. Then the third piece of evidence is an issue of statistics, an issue of chance, can chance explain these messages.  And that in my mind is the core issue, is whether all mutations are random or whether those mutations may somehow be directed.  And what is fascinating is that science is now beginning to believe, some of the new data that is coming out suggests that all mutations are not random, they're actually being directed. There is a biologist at Chicago University that argues that the biological system rather than being driven by random mutation and natural selection is being by a process that he refers to as natural genetic engineering because they're finding that all the data is suggesting that mutations are not random, not all of them, sure, some of them are. I think that to make a case for design you need the same evidence and the same data that you have to have to make a case for evolution.  You need information with respect to geology, paleontology, statistics, physics, chemistry and so forth.  It all gets back to an historical question, what is the cause of say, the trilobite's eye?  How do you answer that question?  You simply collect data that tends to support your Darwinian hypothesis and at the same time you have to rule out the design claim.  The design guy does the very same thing, he collects data that tends to support this idea and that tends to rule out this one. It is an historical claim in either case and it will never be established completely one way or the other, and the answer essentially because you're in an historical area, you're simply reaching an inference to the best current explanation, and that inference is going to be constantly changing. MS. FORREST:  Could I give a little bit of additional response to that?  I think in response to what is the methodology, your question is, what is the methodology and what is the evidence, you heard Mr. Calvert give the classic response, arguments against evolution.  Science doesn't consist of arguments against anything.  At some point you have to produce some data, and this is what the intelligent design people have not done. In the wedge strategy document which you can read about that document in my book, it spells out what the Discovery Institute sees as its plan of operation for 20 years, they name two scientists who they charge with their paleontology program and their molecular biology program.  One of them is Dr. Paul Chin who has no credentials in paleontology, and he's supposed to head up their paleontology.  I'm sure he's a very good marine biologist, but he's not a paleontologist. The other is Dr. Douglas Axe who is a molecular biologist but has produced no data that supports intelligent design.  He declines to say that about his own work, and he was at one time a Fellow of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.  The latest information I have is in an article by Kenneth Chang in The New York Times is that Dr. Axe is setting up an intelligent design research center called the Biologic Institute, but I can't find any information about it. And the most telling piece of evidence that raises a question about it is that the Discovery Institute has not announced the existence of this biologic institute on its own website.  Believe me, if they had revolutionary scientific evidence, it would be on the website, and it's not there. MR. LABROSKY:  My name is Mack Labrosky [ph].  My question is about how many people it takes to make you think there's a controversy.  There are people who believe that the Earth is at the center of the solar system and not the Sun, and one reason they believe that is because the Bible says that the Earth is fixed and does not move.  It actually says that literally in the Bible.  So there are people who don't think that the Earth moves around the Sun. We could get one of those people here and someone who knows that the Sun is at the center and have a debate.  Do you think we should teach that controversy? MR. CALVERT:  That's really an interesting question. [Laughter.] MR. CALVERT:  What it reminds me of is the argument that was made a long time ago that the Sun travels around the Earth, and we have demonstrated by examining the data that that is just an illusion and there's no rational basis to believe that.  So when you see the Sun setting, it's not really setting, it's an illusion. The question is, are the messages in DNA that are not ordered by any chemical or physical law and that appear incredibly statistically improbable, in fact, you don't have enough probability resources in the entire universe to create some of those messages, is that an illusion?  I don't think that it's been demonstrated to be an illusion.  I think that that is the big issue, is that design an illusion?  Darwin argues that it is, but the argues are based I suggest necessarily on the data, it's based upon two things, an assumption that only permits material causes to explain.  That's not a data-based conclusion.  And because you use that assumption, you essentially lock in any historical imagination that you can come up.  So I think that the claim of illusion is not supported by the data. MR. NATERNO:  Mark Naterno [ph], Interactivity Foundation.  I'm interested in a couple of things.  One thing that I'm interested in is what you mean by science when you say that it is or it isn't science?  Because looking at the philosophy of science, there seem to be several different competing notions about what makes up science.  Some people conceive of science as body of knowledge, some people think of science as a method of inquiry, as a group of questions.  Other people think of science as a social group.  I'm thinking of Thomas Koon, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, thought of science as a community of inquirers who are converted or committed to a paradigm.  So that's one question that I'd like to know because it seems to me that it may be the case that what we're seeing here may be a fallout between competing notions of science. Another question that I'm interested in, and I guess this would be going to Barbara because several times with the idea that there is no dispute or there is no evidence going, no science discussion here between evolution and intelligent design, why wouldn't it be of scientific interest and a scientific question, a critical question, to point to phenomena that would be contrary to evolutionary theory?  I'm thinking in particular of the allegedly irreducibly complex organisms. MR. HESS:  Let's go ahead with that.  Barbara? MR. FORREST:  If you're referring to irreducible complexities, Michael Behe has presented it as evidence against evolution it's just not, and Professor Miller went through that quite carefully today.  As far as what constitutes science, intelligent design creationists like to appeal to the demarkation problem, that there is a blurry line between understandings of science, and it's blurry enough so that it can permit intelligent design.  That's a bogus argument because whatever science is, we know what it's not.  It's not an appeal to the supernatural, and that's what intelligent design is. Intelligent design is the attempt to explain natural phenomena by an appeal to the supernatural.  How do we know that?  Because one constant characteristic of intelligent design and all earlier forms of creationism is the rejection of naturalism in any form.  And once you reject naturalism either methodological or philosophical, it doesn't matter, you have only one alternative, and that's the supernatural, and that's why intelligent design can never qualify as science, until someone finds a methodology and an epistemology that enable us to test for the supernatural.  So far no one has. MR. CALVERT:  I'd like to respond to Barbara's comment.  Barbara's comment suggests that there is only one kind of religion, theistic.  But there are two kinds of religions, there's theistic and nonatheistic religions.  The problem we have right now is that science has become religious and it's become religious because of methodological naturalism.  That is a philosophical construct which provides the foundational basis for secular humanism and atheism. So what you've done when you say that science cannot consider the argument for design and you say only material causes are allowed, you have created a religious aspect of science, you made science religious, it's just not a theistic religion, it's a nonatheistic religion. So the way to get science back on the right track with the issue of origins in particular, with respect to the issue of origins, science needs to be scrupulously objective and it needs to allow the evidence to dictate explanation rather than a religious or philosophical preconception.  The problem we have right now with science is that it is not irreligious, it is religious, it just happens to be a different kind of religion. MS. SULLIVAN:  Constance Sullivan, Science magazine.  Could Mr. Calvert please explain briefly what is the difference between teaching intelligent design and teaching the controversy? MR. CALVERT:  First of all, that's a good question.  What I believe the public schools should do is to give teachers the freedom to discuss all the evidence I just mentioned to you.  The positive evidence for design, the scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory, teachers should be permitted to do that.  They should not be censored if they happen to engage students with that discussion.  So that is essentially what I believe should happen. We're at an infant stage in the program or the paradigm of teaching evolution.  We're at the infancy of it.  Because we're at the infancy of it we should go very gradually, very carefully, but the first step is to simply give the teachers academic freedom that they don't have now. Students hear about these conferences we're having now, and in fact, I guess they will be on C-SPAN, and they're going to go into their classrooms.  What are we going to tell the teachers?  I think you need to tell the teachers they're permitted to have that discussion.  And by the way, that discussion cannot just be confined to a religion class.  There are no religion classes in high school.  You cannot bifurcate this discussion. One of the witnesses at the Kansas hearing was Warren Nord, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina.  He said regardless whether you consider design science or not science, it is incredibly relevant, it is incredibly relevant, to the discussion of origins, and the only place to have that discussion is in the room where it's first raised in a negative way.  So he believes that the students should be shown both sides of that issue and not only one side because if you do that then essentially you're not being neutral or nonideological, you're being ideological. MS. SULLIVAN:  But what's the difference between intelligent design [off mike]. MR. CALVERT:  I think the idea of design is a purely scientific theory and it's based upon a scientific disagreement with Darwin's claim that life is not designed and it essentially is a design detection methodology that it issues.  Teaching the controversy is I think probably some sort of a way of--it itself is a slogan, but it's a slogan designed to essentially open up the academic freedom of teachers, and I think that's a good idea. MR. PARKER:  Abraham Parker, and with the American Institute of Biological Sciences.  Intelligent design theory is something that at the moment is sort of outside of the scientific mainstream.  My question is, if indeed it does become part of public school curricula, could that not lead to a slippery slope of other groups pushing for alternative explanations such as just teaching whatever in public schools such as historical revisionists pushing for Holocaust denial in public schools, and what would the implications for public education be? MR. HESS:  Let's try to keep our responses brief.  We're running out of time. MR. CALVERT:  I think that's why you have school boards and that's why I think the idea of opening up the academic freedom of teachers, obviously design theory is simply a discussion of irreducible complexity, statistics and things like that. From a purely scientific standpoint, your explanations are limited to the data.  So when you look at DNA you don't see a copyright notice, you don't see a signature or anything of that nature.  So a teacher can limit the discussion with respect to a Darwinian claim and a challenge to that claim of an I.D. scientist without getting into a discussion of religion. MS. FORREST:  Mr. Calvert just said that intelligent design is limited to a discussion of the data.  The problem is that intelligent design creationists discuss data that they did not produce.  What they do is to take the data produced by legitimate scientists, one of whom was mentioned by Dr. Nelson today, Scott Gilbert, and misrepresent it.  Then those scientists respond and then you've got a controversy, apparently, and so far that's about the only sense in which the controversy exists and that explanation was very well put by Daniel Dennett recently, the only controversy we have is what has been engendered by the attempt by intelligent design proponents to reinterpret the data produced by people like evolutionary biologists. MR. HESS:  With that we're going to take a break for lunch so we can continue these conversations.  I'd like to ask you to join me in thanking the panelists. [Applause.] MR. HESS:  We will pick up again at what time, John?  Lunch starts immediately, and at 12:50 we will reconvene.  We'll see you then. [Luncheon recess.] LUNCHEON KEYNOTE SPEAKER MR.           :  I'd like to get everyone's attention, please.  We're going to--excuse me, please.  Could I have everyone's attention? We're now going to have the luncheon keynote.  We're pleased to have with us Lawrence M. Krauss.  As you'll hear in his talk, he's a very intriguing person.  He's a very important voice in the debate over religion and science, far beyond the intelligent design issue.  Scientific American has profiled him as a public intellectual, and his long list of accomplishments more than justify that accolade. Dr. Krauss is a physics and astronomy professor at Case Western Reserve University.  He also directs two centers at Case Western--the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics, and the Office of Science, Public Policy, and Biotechnology in the School of Medicine.  He is a prolific author.  His seventh popular book, "Hiding in the Mirror:  The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions from Plato to String Theory and Beyond," actually came out today.  So fortuitous timing. Perhaps more than any other subject, Dr. Krauss has devoted himself to examining the intersection of science and public policy and defending the teaching of science in public schools.  He has been involved in the debate in the Ohio schools, which, along with Kansas and Dover, has been the focus of controversy over the issue of intelligent design.  He has been actively involved in the national level with articles in the New York Times and elsewhere, actually in some ways helping to touch off the debate this year, earlier this year, with a piece in the Times, and also involving himself in the controversy over the Catholic Church's apparent reversal of their position on the separation of evolution and science. I welcome Dr. Krauss. [Applause.] DR. KRAUSS:  Thank you.  Thanks a lot. If I stand and talk, does this work?  Can you hear me if I stand and talk, or do I have to sit?  I guess I have to get close.  Okay, I'll sit.  I can use the podium, but then I can't see the people over there.  So I like this better. Okay.  Well, so I was asked to talk in some sense about public policy issues.  I'm going to try--I had to anticipate what my friends and colleagues would say this morning, and I'm going to try not to repeat much of it.  Some of it is inevitable based on what I've already heard from when I arrived. So the title of my talk is "Facing Reality:  Public Policy, Science, Education, and the Emperor's New Clothes," and I want to talk about the public policy issues associated with this social controversy of whether one should teach intelligent design in the classroom. Since we are at the American Enterprise Institute, I thought I would start with the Wealth of Nations and point out that part of the social controversy--I was amused when a friend of mine just arrived back from England--where, of course, Darwin is on the ten-pound note, and in the United States we have this weird thing.  And maybe that's the source of some of the public policy problems we have here.  I'm not sure. But when we talk about public policy, this is a real issue, and I will quote President Bush on this, who said most recently--and it touched off a storm of newspaper reports.  Referring to intelligent design and evolution, he said, "Both sides ought to be properly taught so people can understand what the debate is about." That itself is not an unreasonable statement.  What it does represent, of course, is a misunderstanding of the issue, and it reaches all the way to the White House, and, therefore, it is not surprising that we are here and that I have to go around the country often and talk about this when I would rather be talking about how interesting science is. I want to talk about the context of this, and the context of this current debate is that it is happening in a society in which scientific ignorance pervades almost every aspect of our society, and I will try and present some data that makes that clear, although we have heard some arguments that make that clear, at least since I've been here. But one thing that has been in the news recently is clearly that our public schools are not effectively teaching science.  A recent example is that U.S. 12th graders performed well below the international average for 21 countries in math and science.  And there's tons of statistics like that. To compare us to other societies with whom we are ultimately competing in the 21st century, 66 percent of undergraduates go into science and engineering in Japan, 59 percent into science and engineering in China, 32 percent in the United States.  All these things I think reflect or are useful to try and understand the context of this current supposed controversy. The National Academy of Science has gotten worried about this and recently published a set of proposals, which, again, have received a lot of attention in the press, suggesting that funds be set aside to create 10,000 new qualified science teachers each year because we desperately need them in this country and to strengthen the math and science skills of an additional 250,000 teachers using new after-school programs for the teachers. When we talk about the teaching of intelligent design, we have to remember it is in the context of a school system that is largely broken in terms of mathematics and science, where the teachers have a very difficult time teaching evolution as it is, because most of them don't have a background in science at all.  And as they said at the end of their proposals, without a renewed effort to bolster the foundations of our competitiveness, we can expect to lose our privileged position.  And I think that's the context that we have to understand all of this in because, really, we're spending an inordinate amount of time debating what many of us think is a non-issue, when instead what we should be doing, which is trying to prove science education in the classrooms, what we desperately need to do if this country is to remain competitive and to maintain the quality of living that we now have. And that's really what I wanted to underscore in my presentation, that as a policy issue what we really have to worry about is improving science quality and not getting sidetracked any more--well, any more than--okay, I won't--I was going to say something else, but maybe I shouldn't here--well, no, any more than it was a good use of the Congress' time to come back regarding Terry Schiavo, which, when there's incredible problems in the country, to get sidetracked on a side issue like that is very similar in my mind to getting sidetracked on this issue. Now, there's a sociological context that I want to talk about as well.  Science is not--these are not good times for scientists, science, and as someone who goes around trying to make an effort to improve people's understanding of science, it's clear to me--and, in fact, in Europe, where I think there's much less distrust of science, even there a recent survey found that the number of people who felt the benefits of science outweigh the risks dropped.  And so people are distrustful of science and that's of some concern. Now, to get a sense of where we're at, I'd like to pick out figures at random, and I hear some figures that I've picked out that should depress you.  The fraction of school children believing astrology rose from 40 percent to 59 percent between 1978 and 1984.  That's the last time I could find data.  That, of course, given Michael Behe's recent statement that intelligent design is like astrology as far as on a par would suggest that maybe we should be teaching astrology in the schools. But here's more damaging and more worrisome data.  Every year the National Science Foundation does a survey of scientific literacy, and it takes a few years to compile the data, and undoubtedly the 2002 data is out.  I haven't gotten it yet.  The 2001 data I have.  And here are some examples. In that survey, 53 percent of American adults were unaware that the last dinosaur died before the first human arose.  Okay.  Maybe that's not too surprising. The next one always amazes me.  Fifty percent of American adults knew that the Earth orbits the Sun and takes a year to do it.  Fifty percent. Now, when I first saw that, I thought that that was a trick question.  So I went to the survey and the survey said:  "The Earth orbits the Sun and takes a year to do it.  True or false."  Okay?  And every year since they've done that survey, every single year since they've done that survey, half of the American public gets it wrong. This was also viewed to be a great landmark because it was the first time in the history of that survey that more than 50 percent of American adults claimed to know that human beings as we know them today developed from earlier species and animals.  So the first time over 50 percent. It was a short-lived blip, of course, and, in fact, there are many surveys, and I'll show you some more that are even worse than what you heard quoted earlier.  This is one, for example, that 45 percent of American adults surveyed in November 2004 stated their belief that God created humans in their present form less than 10,000 years ago--45 percent of American adults. This is the context, the scientific understanding that this whole debate is being carried out on a social basis. At the same time, I have to say--and I know there are journalists here, and I have great respect for journalists.  Let me say that right off. [Laughter.] DR. KRAUSS:  But at the same time, I think it's fair to say that among the general journalistic community, there is a great hesitancy on scientific matters to make pronouncements.  I think any scientist who has been interviewed and talks to journalists recognizes that. There are issues behind that, and one could go into them.  I know that many journalists have told me if it were not for a physics class, at some point they would be doing something else.  But I think the key point--there's a fundamental tension in the reporting of science that's important here, and that is that journalism is generally based on the notion that there are always two sides to every story.  And every time I've been involved in a scientific story, usually the journalists try and find other people to at least provide a balance, because that's the way journalism is done. But the thing that makes it difficult to cover science is often, very often, there is only one side.  What I mean by that is often one side is simply wrong, and that, in fact, is what makes science unique and wonderful, because you can unambiguously talk about what's wrong. The biggest misunderstanding about science in the general public in my opinion is people think science tells us what's true.  Science doesn't do that.  It tells us what's false.  That's all science can do, is falsify things.  And you falsify things, and hopefully, like Sherlock Holmes, if you keep falsifying stuff, then the stuff that isn't falsified probably has some remnant of truth in it. But it's not a literary criticism question or a opinion or a belief.  Something is wrong if it doesn't agree with the data.  That's it.  End of story.  It doesn't matter how beautiful it is, how elegant it is, how wonderful it is.  It's wrong.  Okay?  And that makes science--that's why we have progress, because we can get rid of unproductive ideas. At the same time, it's important to realize that the whole scientific issue is being politicized, and I want to just point out some changes in the last decade.  Here's a quotation, which is a wonderful quote given by the President of the United States to the National Academy of Sciences:  "Science, like any field of endeavor, relies on freedom of inquiry, and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity.  Now, more than ever, on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research to genetic engineering to food additives, government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance." That is a good statement about science, and it was made by President George H.W. Bush to the National Academy of Sciences a little over a decade ago, about 15 years ago now. Now, that's to be compared with what we're hearing about science from the political arena now, and this was a statement from the current administration, for example.  "This administration looks at the facts and reviews the best available science based on what's right for the American people." Now, there's a difference in those two statements, and that political context, again, is important to recognize when we talk about this.  There's a lot of issues, not just intelligent design, where science and politics are coming into conflict.  And, in fact, we've seen religions and science colliding in lots of different places, and a place where it's happened politically again, in the political arena, is a quote from former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay--who himself, by the way, has a degree in biology--who made the famous statement introduced in the Congressional Record that the Columbine shootings occurred in part "because our school systems teach our children that they're nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud." That's the general political context in which this debate is occurring. Now, we've seen a lot of discussions about intelligent design, and I want to gloss over this because I know you've talked about it.  The point is it has a lot of different definitions, and there's a reason why it has a lot of different definitions, because, in fact, I would argue it hasn't been subjected to the same kind of peer review and scrutiny that most--that, say, Darwinian evolution has.  It's got many different definitions, but I think what we have seen and what is most important to understand about this is that intelligent design is primarily opposed to evolution.  And Barbara I think alluded to that.  That is the one unifying theme, I think, between most of the different people that are discussing intelligent design in different contexts. And I think it's important to talk about why that is, and I will get to that.  Okay?  That's a real question:  Why are people opposed to evolution?  And is the opposition scientific? The key opposition--and I think John Calvert really demonstrated that, that the real opposition is not so much to evolution as to science itself, science as it's traditionally carried out by scientists.  That is the concern, that somehow science is not only non-theistic, according to John, and others, but basically immoral for that reason. In Ohio, for example, when there was a debate about science standards, which I'll talk about in a while, which I got heavily involved with, there was a group that was produced called Science Excellence for All Ohioans, which was an interesting organization associated with James Dobson.  And they said science standards use a little-known rule to censor the evidence of design, in fact, as John said.  The rule, which is usually unstated, is often referred to as methodological naturalism. Now, as Barbara pointed out, we have another name for it in the scientific community.  We call it the "scientific method."  And basically the key thing to realize is that this is really primarily not an attack on evolution.  Evolution, it's home because it's personal, it's about us as human beings, but the broader question is:  What is science all about?  And that is what many people find offensive, that science is based on the scientific method. And as I'll talk about in a moment, it still amazes me that even if you're offended by that, that the way you go out and try to change that is in the high schools, but we'll get to that. Barbara alluded to wedge strategy, and many of you have heard of this, but this was a document then--it was associated with the Center for--what was then called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.  That was a too emotionally charged term for the Discovery Institute, so the "renewal" has been removed.  But this is an important statement.  This is a group that primarily says we are only interested in the science and evolution is scientifically suspect. But what does the document say?  It says the proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.  This cardinal idea came under wholesale attack drawing on the discoveries of modern science.  Science is the villain.  Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.  Science is bad. Now, there has been a campaign and there really has been a very effective campaign--in fact, the public relations campaign, the public relations battle has certainly been won by the Discovery Institute, I would argue.  And, in fact, it's very interesting to see that campaign and how well orchestrated it is.  The governing goals that were described in 1998 were to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies.  Again, not just that scientific material is flawed philosophically, but it's bad morally, culturally, and politically. And to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God, that's the a priori goal of a group that I remind you says, well, we find flaws in evolution scientifically.  And among the five-year goals--well, this one is an interesting one; I haven't seen it yet; but this one I find particularly interesting--is to begin attacking science teaching in the public schools.  In 2002 and 2003, in Ohio, that's exactly what began to happen in a very concerted, effective way. Now, I want to talk a little bit, as I was asked, about the Ohio experience, because it's interesting, and we're going to hear from people who are much more expert in law than I about the legal history of the battle of evolution.  And I want to just remind you of the recent developments that are important here, and that was the very important McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education federal court ruling that creation science is, in fact, religion, which was reaffirmed by the very important Supreme Court decision in 1987.  But as you know, a dissenting opinion by someone who was not the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court now, Scalia, raised the idea of evidence against evolution, which is perfectly reasonable.  It's perfectly appropriate to talk about evidence against evolution, if there is such evidence. But that then became the rallying cry for a concerted effort to take away from--instead of trying to teach creation science, to teach that evolution is suspect, because that is what the Court sort of motivated. In 2002, the Ohio Board of Education began developing a new science curriculum.  A huge debate began to occur, and promoted by a variety of well-supported and well-funded groups, to include intelligent design in that debate.  And, in fact, Professor Miller and I were part of a debate in Columbus, with two members of the Discovery Institute, on that very issue. I believe at that debate was the first time that this term came out.  I think.  Stephen Meyer, who everyone had expected to argue that intelligent design should be taught in the classroom, made a beautiful public relations move.  He said, You know what?  We don't want to argue that anymore.  We want to compromise.  We just want to teach the controversy. That's a compromise.  And that sounds eminently reasonable.  It's a brilliant move because, of course, it suggests that, A, it's a compromise and, B, that there's a controversy.  It presumes both of those things, and, in fact, that tack was very effective in Ohio; and I think we've seen it's very effective nationally, and that's why it's continually being used, as if it's a compromise. Now, the compromise resulted in the following in the Ohio Board of Education standards.  First of all, it was a great success.  After great effort, for the first time in seven years the word "evolution" was introduced in the state science standards in Ohio, due to a lot of effort of a lot--of a number of scientists, at least.  So that's a great success.  But the following words were attached to the science standards, which on their own sound innocuous.  They suggested that students learn "how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." What could be wrong with that?  Well, a number of us at the time argued that that was completely inappropriate.  Why?  Because those sentences--that sentence should, in fact, appear at the beginning of the science standards, and it should say, "Students should learn how scientists are continuing to investigate and critically examine every scientific theory."  Because that's how science is done.  But by singling out evolution, it makes it appear suspect. People said, No, no, that won't happen. Well, what happened?  In 2004, the Board of Education Curriculum Committee, which developed a curriculum based on the science standards that were passed, in fact, did exactly what we said would happen.  Instead of producing a lesson plan that suggested that students learn how scientists are continuing to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory, they produced a lesson plan that was critical of evolutionary theory.  And, in fact, the lesson plan was full of factual errors, and, in fact, the only major references were, in fact, to the religious literature on the Web. A group of scientists produced a lesson plan, in fact, that talked about the real controversies that are happening in biology and said you should teach this.  And, in fact, it was so bad that we got the President of the National Academy of Sciences to write a letter saying this is an abysmally bad bit of science. Well, the lesson plan was passed in Ohio.  One of the reasons it was passed--and, again, this is the context in which we are dealing--is that--I tried to understand why they did not listen to the President of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences letter on this, and I learned that at that time the President of the Ohio State School Board informed me that she had never heard of the National Academy of Sciences--okay?--thought it was a lobbying group and, therefore, ignored that group. Now, that effectively produced a little wedge in the State of Ohio.  Now, what was said by the people who were trying to effectively use a strategy state by state to build this apparent suspect nature of evolution into state science standards? Well, Stephen Meyer immediately said that, of course, the state science standards were now a victory for the principle of teaching the controversy, in spite of the fact that in the science standards it specifically said that in no way should this be construed as any support for teaching, for example, intelligent design in the classroom. Phillip Johnson, who always has much better quotes, said, "Ohio is not a minor state.  Kansas is a marginal state, not one the Eastern establishment pays much attention to.  Ohio's decision is a victory in the battle to free science classes from the grip of Charles Darwin." So that's how we see that what happened with a small wedge gets, in fact, turned into an apparent controversy. Now, let's go back.  I want to address the questions that I think policymakers in different states should ask about whether intelligent design should be taught.  And first of all, one of the question is the philosophical rationales for that.  And Barbara just left, she's a philosopher, but I believe when you look at the rationales for a tack that John has mentioned, and others, they come down to some interesting philosophical questions, at least ones that one can ask:  Is science without God incomplete?  That's a question one can certainly ask.  Is science without God immoral?  Philosophically, is there evidence for design? Those are all interesting philosophical questions, I would concede.  But even if you concede that those are interesting philosophical questions and are viable, in no way do they justify changing science high school teaching.  We don't decide how--the key point here is that we don't decide how science is done in the high school science classroom.  That's where students learn how it's done.  If we want to talk about how science is done, it's done in the scientific community, in the scholarly community.  And if you really believe these questions, then you should be going out and doing research to explore those questions, convince the community, and eventually get in the classroom. They are certainly, as I say, perfectly valid questions, and I encourage people who believe in any of these things or who think any of these things are worthy to talk about to explore them and convince their colleagues of these issues.  But to suggest that just because these are interesting philosophical questions that we should change the teaching of genetics in high school science classes is just to me absurd. Now, when presented, as policymakers will be, in each state where the science standards are coming up, there's a strategy to try and get this introduced, and we've seen it here a variety of times.  And this strategy is very effective.  First of all, that all we'd want to do is have an open mind.  Let's just have an open mind.  Why should we decide in advance what's right and wrong?  Let's be honest.  Let's be honest about the fact that a lot of people believe in intelligent design or in something even more extreme.  And let's be fair.  And I think that's the thing that's really hit the scientific community or the popular public the most because the appeal to American fairness, the idea that it's only fair, after all, to have both sides in--and we heard that eloquently, reasonably eloquently presented by John Calvert. Now, I think, on the other hand, what policymakers should see--and this is really important--is that it's exactly the opposite, that the issue is--that, in fact, the whole presentation is closed-minded.  We've seen that.  I have a lot of evidence I could present, but I think that we've seen that in the data from the Wedge Document, that the presumption is that science without God is in some sense immoral, and, therefore, evolution must be wrong because it doesn't explicitly mention God.  That is the ultimate in closed-mindedness. The way science works and the reason I love science so much--and I think every young person should have the experience of having something they profoundly, deeply believe to be true to be shown to be false.  There is nothing more liberating than that.  And there's nothing that any scientist wants to do--people have this X-Files view of science, that scientists are this cadre of people that get together and have this handshake and we want to keep the truth away.  We know what's right and we want everyone to believe that. Well, the point is there's nothing that any scientist would want to do more than prove his or her colleagues wrong.  That is why we do science.  Okay? The point is open-mindedness is forcing ultimately what you believe to be true to be affected by the evidence of the world around you.  It is not requiring the world around you to conform to what you believe to be true a priori, which is exactly what we've heard and seen in things like the Wedge Document.  So it's closed-minded. It's absolutely dishonest because it presumes that there is a scientific controversy--and we've heard it talked about; again, I'm going to give you some different data on this--and there isn't.  And it really is ultimately unfair, as I'll try and show you. So I've talked about the first one.  Let's talk about this controversy.  Here are some data. A colleague of mine did a survey of over 10 million articles and over 20 major science journals during the past 12 years.  Hit the keyword "evolution."  A hundred and fifteen thousand articles used the keyword "evolution."  Most of them referred to biological evolution. Hit the keyword "intelligent design."  Eighty-eight articles.  All but 11 of these were in engineering journals, however, where one hopes there is, in fact, intelligent design.  Okay? Of the remaining 11, it turns out the articles--eight of them were, in fact, critical of the scientific basis of intelligent design, and the remaining three, it turned out, were not in peer-reviewed research journals.  They were in conference proceedings.  So there's no controversy in the scientific literature. Now, when I talk about this, people who disagree will point out that it is very difficult to get things published in the scientific literature and the scientific community is supposedly closed-minded and we keep out things that we disagree with. To those people, I first say, however, the first thing I say is I defy any of them to demonstrate that they have had more articles rejected from scientific journals than I have. [Laughter.] DR. KRAUSS:  And no one has ever proved that to me yet. The second thing, however, they say, well, look, because we can't do this, we go the old-fashioned way.  We produce books.  After all, Darwin produced a book, "Origin of the Species."  They don't point out he also produced a paper for the Royal Society, which was a presentation.  So they said we produce books. So I decided after hearing that to go to another location.  I went to amazon.com a week ago.  I hit the keyword "evolution," found 21,822 books appearing with the keyword "evolution."  I didn't so a systematic survey.  I looked through.  Most of them were about biological evolution. I hit the keyword "intelligent design."  I got 635 hits.  I looked at them.  About half of them, again, were in engineering journals, intelligent design and materials research, et cetera.  Half of them were critical of intelligent design, leaving about 150 books and, it turns out, articles--amazon.com now has articles in their--150 books and articles left over on intelligent design. Just for fun, I hit the keyword "alien abduction."  I hit--which is another thing I sometimes debate with people, by the way, with my Star Trek hat on.  But I found 165 books on alien abduction. So even if you don't talk about the scientific literature, if you talk about the un-peer-reviewed book marketing realm, this is about as abundant as an idea as alien abduction, and if we are going to teach one, we might want to teach the other. Now, the reason it's unfair--and I borrowed this slide from my friend Ken Miller.  It is ultimately unfair because here is how science is done.  First you have an idea.  There's design.  Okay, novel idea.  Then you actually do research.  Now, that research can be experimental or theoretical.  And then after you do the research, you submit it for publication, and it gets sent out to people who are idiots.  They're called peer reviewers.  Okay?  And those idiots tell you why you're wrong.  And then you write to them explaining how ridiculous they are, and you debate, and it takes a long time, and sometimes you get it published.  But, big deal, you get it published.  There's a lot of junk that's published. If it's a good idea, then other scientists start to think about it, and they start to do experiments or theoretical research based on it.  And ultimately, after a long time, it might build scientific consensus, and then 20 or 30 years later, it may make it into the classroom, high school textbooks. In my own field of physics, if you look at high school textbooks, they're easily 30 to 40 years out of date.  Why?  Because that's how long it takes to trickle down there. Now, what does the intelligent design community want to do?  They just want to get rid of the intermediate steps.  Okay?  They want to go directly from the idea to the classroom.  Forget all that pesky intermediate stuff, doing the research, peer review, all that, consensus.  And that is ultimately unfair because if you want to pretend you're doing science, you have got to perform on the same playing field as the rest of the people.  And that is why this is ultimately unfair. Now, another reason it is unfair is the fact, as was pointed out at least once today, I think, we don't have a lot of time, and as a high school teacher in New Mexico pointed out, I need it spelled out that I don't have to address this string of silly alternative theories.  I have 175 classroom days.  That's not much time to teach biology and I don't have time. But it's also important to realize that science just isn't fair.  Like it or not, science is ultimately unfair.  That's what makes it so great.  Not all ideas are treated equally.  I again remind you that certain ideas, which don't satisfy empirical testing, go by the wayside.  And that is truly the greatest legacy.  We don't say this is a beautiful idea, this is a beautiful idea, and I had it, and I find it very elegant, as some of my string theory colleagues would say.  And I would say, well, that's fine, but it doesn't explain anything.  Okay?  And that is why science works.  Ideas are not treated equally. Now, another public policy issue--and a really viable one, I think--is the claim a priori, the claim that at least 50 percent of the U.S. populace doesn't believe in evolution, so aren't we doing a disservice not to introduce it in the classroom--that debate into the classroom? Now, let me give you some data, some figures which are more depressing than any you've heard from the most recent Harris poll.  Here's one that's not too surprising.  Do you believe human beings developed from earlier species or not?  Fifty-four percent said no, 38 percent said yes.  A far bigger plurality than the presidential election, they say they don't believe in evolution. But that is not as depressing as these other ones.  Which of the following do you believe are how humans came to be?  Only 22 percent believe that human beings evolved from earlier species; 64 percent believe they were created directly by God; and about 10 percent believe intelligent design. But the thing that I find most depressing is the following:  Regardless of what you may personally believe, which of these do you believe should be taught in public schools?  Twelve percent, only, said evolution only.  Twice as many--twice as many--said creationism only.  And then only 4 percent, by the way, said intelligent design only.  And 55 percent said why not teach all three. So if that's the case, why not teach all three? Well, the point is we should, first of all, remember a piece of data I gave you earlier.  In that NSF survey--and this alludes to a question that was brought up earlier--50 percent of adults knew that the Earth orbits the Sun and takes a year to do it.  Fifty percent of the American public, therefore, does not know that the Sun is essentially the center of the solar system.  So as was pointed out in that question earlier, but even more strongly, not just a few marginal people but 50 percent of the American public doesn't know this.  So if that's the case, should we not teach Earth-centric cosmology in physics classes?  After all, 50 percent of the public thinks that the Earth is the center of the solar system. Obviously not, and the reason is really quite simple.  The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance, but to overcome it.  And if 54 percent of the people don't know that humans came from earlier species and animals, it doesn't mean we should validate that.  It means we have to do a better job of teaching biology in the classroom.  Just the same as the fact that we have to do a better job of teaching astronomy and physics. What these data represent is not democracy in action but, rather, the fact that we are doing a rotten job of teaching science.  And the fact that people are scientifically illiterate is no motivation for us to just simply give in.  We just have to do a better job. Now, this point was raised for policymakers.  There are PSG(?) scientists who question evolution, and this question of lists was brought up a number of times.  The point is you can find PSG scientists that will say absolutely anything.  The great thing that is not recognized about science, again, is that there are no scientific authorities.  That's an anathema to science--authority.  There are scientific experts, and even they can be wrong.  There are not authorities.  A graduate student can disagree and be right.  And I absolutely agree with John Calvert that that statement of the 48 Nobel laureates, by the way, was a stupid statement.  Nobel laureates can be wrong.  I have a lot of friends who are Nobel laureates, and I can verify that they're wrong a lot. Now, as far as these lists are concerned, here's one of many advertisements that were given to show that there are 100 PSG scientists in that particular poll that didn't believe in Darwinism.  To point out the silliness of this, the National Center for Science Education produced a program called which I call "Bringing in the Steves," but we got--they and I helped them get statements from 500 scientists named Steve, including every Nobel laureate named Steve, who supported evolution, to point out that basically by getting a hundred scientists to say anything doesn't prove anything.  And having a Ph.D. doesn't make you a scientist.  It means you have a Ph.D.  And you can't use that. Now, another argument that's used for public policy is the argument that--and it was stated here, after all, this does encourage critical thinking.  Why not introduce intelligent design in a biology classroom, after all, and then discuss why--as a straw man, why it has its flaws, et cetera.  Won't students learn something? Well, undeniably they will learn something.  I think that's true.  But why introduce a straw man?  Why not talk about real scientific controversies?  If you really are interested in critical thinking, produce real controversies that you can talk to students about.  In my own field of physics, the nature of gravity, there's a lot more scientific papers saying that Newton's wrong than there are saying Darwin's wrong.  Okay.  That's a controversy.  Why is gravity under attack? Quantum mechanics, the basis of modern physics.  I have a friend of mine, again, who's a Nobel laureate, who thinks at a fundamental level quantum mechanisms is wrong.  And I think it's in some ways developing into a minor controversy. In biology, why not talk about natural selection, random mutation, and the issue of how they interact?  And there are controversies from people who believe in the relevant significance of those things.  Those are real controversies.  They're not fake ones.  And if you want students to learn about controversies in science, talk about the controversies that actually exist.  That is much more effective critical thinking.  Okay? Now, I want to hit the last question, I think the last thing I probably want to talk about, is this question of historical science.  It has been pointed out, as we've heard today, that somehow evolution is a historical science.  Well, in fact, here is a wonderful--John Bacon, who was a Kansas State Board member--you probably know him, John--said, "I can't understand what they're squealing about.  Millions or billions of years ago, I wasn't here and neither were they." That policy issue, in fact, of course, doesn't under--totally misrepresents science.  Unlike, in fact, another scientist that you quoted that I completely disagree with, there is no such thing as historical science, or, rather, all science is historical science.  In fact, the National Academy of Sciences said it this way in a document.  They said, "This misses the point about how science tests hypotheses."  We don't see the Earth going around the Sun or atoms that make up matter.  We see their consequences.  Scientists infer that atoms exist and the Earth revolves because they have tested predictions derived from these concepts by extensive observation and experimentation.  All science is historical science.  Every science--physics is historical science.  We base physics on experiments that have been performed in the past or observations that have been made in the past.  But that doesn't make them historical, purely, because the whole point of what makes them science is that you then predict the future.  And evolutionary biology is exactly like other sciences in that sense.  We may make observations that are past, but we then make predictions about observations that have not yet been made.  We predict the future.  Or experiments that have not yet been performed about genetic resemblances and susceptibility to viruses among different species, these are experiments that haven't been performed.  We make predictions about them.  We test them.  And when they agree, that's the science and that's how evolutionary biology has survived for the last 150 years.  So all historical science predicts the future.  If it was just storytelling, it wouldn't be science.  Okay? And, in fact, let me just point out, we do it--you know, one of my--I'm an astrophysicist.  I study, among other things, the Sun.  That's a nice picture of the Sun.  It's historical science.  Okay? When I look at the Sun, does anyone know how long it takes for--the light that's emitted by the Sun coming to you today, does anyone know how long it takes for that light, from the time the energy was emitted--other than George.  The light that's emitted--other than George.  From the center of the Sun, when the energy's released in a nuclear reaction in the center of the Sun, the time it takes to get to the outside, do you have an idea? [Inaudible comments.] DR. KRAUSS:  Okay.  I just heard her say eight minutes.  It's a million years.  It's a million years.  It takes light eight minutes to get from the surface of the Sun to us, but to get from the center of the Sun to the outside of the Sun, it's a random walk that takes a million years. We're doing historical science whenever we look at the Sun, and we infer from what we see about the structure of the Sun and it's historical, but, you know, what we then do is we then measure the structure of the Sun by using seismology.  And, in fact, we can measure--and our predictions about the density profile of the Sun agree exactly with observations.  That's historical science. MR.           :  A million years and eight minutes or-- [Laughter.] DR. KRAUSS:  Well, the eight minutes is at the end.  It's a million years, plus or minus a little bit. The next question is whether there is evidence for design, and if there is, shouldn't we discuss it?  Well, evidence for design is an interesting philosophical question, and it's a very subtle one.  Is there evidence for design in nature?  In science?  In biology? Here are two beautifully apparently designed objects.  What they are are snowflakes, right?  They look like Christmas ornaments.  But if you had to pick something that looked like it would be designed, it would be that.  Of course, we understand how these random laws of physics and chemistry produce crystal structures that produce snowflakes.  Okay?  But, a priori, if you want to look at that and didn't know yet how the laws of physics and chemistry did it, you would say it was evidence for design. What about clear evidence for design, like human structures, like Buckminster Fuller's beautiful geodesic dome?  Clear evidence for design, unless it happens to be nature producing buckminster fullerene, carbon 60, which is naturally produced in soot, and we understand how it's produced, and it's vitally important, becoming in many cases a vitally important tool for modern technology. Again, evidence for design?  In this case, we understand how attractions between molecules can produce a structure that looks identical to the Buckminster Fuller structure. I am sure that Ken talked about evidence against design.  I won't go into it.  The point is there's a lot of evidence against design.  Most probably the strongest one is that almost all species that have ever appeared now are extinct, which says if the design was there, maybe it wasn't such good design.  But I think that debate is aside.  The key point I want to point out is that really science is independent of these questions of purpose. I am on the second to last slide if you are trying to get up.  Okay. Science is independent of these questions of purpose.  Science does not deal with purpose in design.  In fact, one of the things that wasn't said in John's statement is that evolution isn't about the origin of life, it's about the origin of species.  We don't know how life evolved.  And, in fact, if you look at Darwin's book, he says life evolved because God made the first species.  That's what he says in "The Origin of the Species."  But what we're trying to discuss in evolutionary biology is how the diversity of life on Earth arose now.  It's totally different than the origin of  (?)  .  But the key example, in fact, is the one I used--is the example that I used in my piece in the New York Times that caused such a stir with the cardinal. Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, he was the first person to actually show that Einstein's equation produced a Big Bang.  Einstein didn't believe it, and Einstein derided him for it, by the way, until he was proved to be wrong. When he did that, Pope Pius made a statement that science had proved genesis.  Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, wrote to the Pope and said:  Stop saying that.  This is a scientific theory that makes predictions.  The metaphysical or religious implications are aside from the theory.  You can take it to mean that you believe it proves the existence of God.  You can also take it to mean that there's no need for the existence of God.  That is aside from the theory.  And just as that's true for the Big Bang theory, it's precisely true for evolution.  It's independent of your theistic or non-theistic beliefs.  There are devoutly religious biologists like my friend Ken over here.  There are devoutly atheistic biologists like Richard Dawkins.  It doesn't matter.  They both do evolutionary biology. And Jeannie said it well.  She said the first amendment protects against the government establishment of religion, but that doesn't mean it will protect against bad science.  The only way we can predict against bad science is all of us affecting policy. This issue, why should we care?--and I'm adding this last thing because you asked me to say it, John, so that's why I'm saying it.  Why should we scientists get upset about some statement that people are being required to read in a Dover court after all--I mean, a Dover classroom?  Shouldn't we just ignore it?  I mean, it's just a little bit of fluff.  And the point is it isn't, because it's untrue.  And the minute we allow truth to be blurred in one area of schooling or public policy, it is a slippery slope.  And I personally don't care much at all about the fact that this may violate the separation of church and state.  What I care about is we're forcing teachers to lie, and forcing teachers to lie is not a good thing. We are not censoring them, as John said.  No one is saying that teachers should not be allowed to talk about intelligent design.  What we are talking about is should it be mandated that teachers are required to talk about this, and clearly, in a science classroom, the answer is no.  As far as I'm concerned, if they want to bring up this debate as an interesting thing and an aside, it's fine.  In a history class, if they want to bring up the fact that some people don't believe in the Holocaust--I wouldn't do it, but if they want to, that's their prerogative.  But they shouldn't be mandated to do that.  And that's what we're talking about, whether they should be mandated to talk about things that aren't science in a science classroom. Therefore, let me end by saying the universe is a remarkable place without all the junk.  And I believe only when we're willing to accept the universe for what it is without fear will we be able to build a just society.  Science is not a threat to a moral world.  The scientific ethos involves things like honesty, open-mindedness, creativity, egalitarianism, and full disclosure, things that all, if they were in the public arena right now, would make the world a better place. And the bottom line is it works, and that's why we should be teaching it for our students.  We should be teaching it for our students because in lots of areas nowadays we need the students to know about science if they're going to contribute to a technological society.  We owe it to them because science works to teach them of science.  And as the National Academy said, I repeat, since this is American Enterprise Institute, without a renewed effort to bolster the foundations of our competitiveness, we can expect to lose our privileged position. Thank you. [Applause.] MR.           :  Thank you, Lawrence.  That was very, very interesting. I'm sure this has stimulated a lot of thinking among people in the audience here who have questions for Dr. Krauss, and I welcome some questions people may have. DR. KRAUSS:  How can anybody have questions? [Laughter.] MR.           :  Do we have microphones?  Way in the back, the gentleman, if you could just wait until the microphone comes.  And, by the way, I know that some people over in this section have not maybe been shy about asking questions because they thought they couldn't be seen, but I will make an effort to look very there if you have some questions. QUESTIONER:  Thanks.  My name is Danny Horowitz.  From someone who agrees basically with everything you've said, it seems to me there's a big question of how do you communicate with people who--it seems to me you have some who are cynically opposing this.  Basically you have people who are driven by fear that their basic view of the universe, all of their moral underpinning and so forth, are threatened, and even hearing you a talk like yours would probably make them feel threatened because it seems sort of glib.  How do we reach out to those people and make them believe that this really is not a threat to them? DR. KRAUSS:  It's a very good question, and it's a real problem, and yes, you're right, my talk, my presentation here was slightly different than it would be, as it is when I've gone into fundamentalist colleges and talked about that. And you're absolutely right, I believe, that this is driven by fear.  And the fear I don't think is completely misplaced.  I think one has to be honest about it. As my friend, Steve Weinberg, who's a physicist and notably anti-religious, has said, "Science does not make it impossible to believe in God.  It just makes it possible to not believe in God." And that's really important because until we had science, everything was miraculous.  And so science is for some people a threat, and I think what one has to do--and I could have given a different lecture here, and I have the slides, but I am sure John won't want me to do it.  And the most effective I think I've ever been is going into fundamental schools and pointing out, using quotes by Moses Maimonides and St. Augustine and the Pope, that you don't have to be an atheist to believe in evolution.  You don't have to be an atheist.  In fact, all these people say precisely the opposite. And I have found when I've got into those schools, that kids have come up to me and said, "This is a shock because every week in my church I've been told that all my life."  And to see theological authorities talk about that and point out that intelligent design is not just bad science, it's bad theology, is important.  And I think we have to do that. And you really hit the point.  Scientists--we have lost the public relation battle in many ways, and I didn't go into it.  Scientists are particularly bad at public relations in many ways.  But one thing we have to do is become evangelists because people are trying to attack science are evangelists.  And that means not talking just to forums like this or going to high schools, even, but going to churches and going out and pointing out that science is not a threat to your beliefs.  And, in fact, if you feel it is you're ultimately going to result in problems. And so the issue you've raised is very important, I believe. There was someone over there.  I can't see them because of the cameraman. QUESTIONER:  Hi, I'm Peter McMenamin, an economist.  I learned a little bit--can you hear? DR. KRAUSS:  I can hear you. QUESTIONER:  I learned a little while ago that Ken Miller and I were in the same class at Brown, which means we were both beneficiaries of what I suspect was the greatest impetus towards science and math education, which was Sputnik.  Now, maybe we were fighting godless communism, but what do you see?  Is there something on the horizon that will replicate the effects of, you know, being outclassed by the Russians?  We need, you know, another math revolution, another science revolution, and I don't see what's going to bring us there. DR. KRAUSS:  Well, again, that's a good question.  Of course, if I knew what it could be, I would be involved in trying to do it.  But I think actually I alluded to it, and I chose that example specifically because of where we're at right now. Ultimately, I think the reasons will be economic.  The wake-up call that--it is vitally important to recognize that we are as a society where we are today because of fundamental research and science.  Not even applied research.  Fundamental research.  Playing around with quantum mechanics led to transistors, which affected everything. And we require--it is necessary for us, especially in this 21st century world, to be competitive to have our children trained in science and competent and able to compete on the world stage.  And I think ultimately--that was what happened when I put Kansas up there. Kansas, by the way, the first time they removed evolution from the state science curriculum, who opposed it?  The Republican Governor of Kansas.  Why?  Because it was bad for business.  Why?  Because big companies didn't want to move to Kansas if it had a backward high school system. And so I think, you know, there may be a crisis and there may be global warming and maybe some other--maybe the realization that science could have saved New Orleans.  It could be lots of things.  But I ultimately think that economics is going to power the reason for trying, I hope, to improve science education.  And if you look at the National Academy of Sciences report, it was really precisely around that issue. QUESTIONER:  Thank you.  My name is Jim Goodyear.  I had wanted to ask this of all the other people who spoke today-- DR. KRAUSS:  But I get to answer. QUESTIONER:  --but it's the first time I've been called on.  I've been back here.  Somebody got called twice.  But here I am, all pro and con. All of you have spoken of intelligent design versus evolution.  Don't you believe that intelligent design is a method of explaining evolution and, therefore, denying creationism? DR. KRAUSS:  Well-- QUESTIONER:  Well, Lamarck created evolution, and he had a method of explaining it that has been falsified.  Darwin explained evolution. DR. KRAUSS:  Look, you know, I think the issue was whether intelligent design should be taught in the classroom, and not--and I do not think this is--and I will not appear in such a forum that would suggest that there is at this point a viable scientific debate between intelligent design and evolution.  But the key point is I--I should have the quote, which I have later on, from the beginning of "Origin of the Species," where Darwin says, "Into the first forms God breathed life, and from there"--you know, and I'm paraphrasing, as the laws of physics make the world, you know, and gravity make the world go 'round, so, too, have natural laws resulted in this beautiful diversity. So if you want, yeah, sure, Darwin believed in intelligent design.  It doesn't matter.  The issue here is teaching about what we know about the origin of the diversity of species on Earth, their interrelationships, and making predictions that are relevant for curing diseases, for understanding where we came from, and for dealing with the fact that we live in an ecosystem here on Earth that we have to ultimately survive in.  And those are the questions. And so it has never been a discussion of intelligent design versus evolution.  It's trying to understand how we got here.  Not why we got here, but how we got here.  And that's all science deals with. You know, and scientists are often really belligerent and often we get into trouble because we're so snooty about this.  We tend to think that science is everything.  And Richard Dawkins is an example of that, I think.  It isn't.  It's very limited.  And that's the other thing we have to teach our students, is what science isn't.  And if something isn't falsifiable, it isn't science.  And science only deals with the how, it doesn't deal with the why.  If you want to talk about the why, that's fine, but it's not science. MR.           :  Is there anyone back there?  This will be the last question before we break for the afternoon. QUESTIONER:  I'm interested in this red state/blue state phenomenon, where you have increasing division in America not only politically but in what people believe and whether they go to church or they don't go to church.  Can you envisage an America in which on either coast evolution is taught and in the vast red middle of the country they have a different education system which actually kind of intensifies the divisions that are already here? DR. KRAUSS:  Well, yeah, I can envisage that.  I can envisage lots of awful things.  And I think that we are in danger of that or worse. I can envisage a place where the coasts don't teach evolution either.  And I think it's precisely because of envisaging those things that I spend my time here and at other places like this, because it is important.  I believe that science is important for our society, and I believe--I'm an educator, and there's that old statement that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To me, it's all based on education, and all I want to do is teach kids about how the world works, because I think it's incredible.  And if they learn that, the world will be a better place. And so when I envisage a world where students are somehow lied to or material is censored in any form, I object to that, because it's not only an anathema to science to misinform and restrict information, I believe it's the greatest threat to democracy. And that's where I'll end.  Thank you. [Applause.] MR.           :  Thank you, Lawrence. Everyone go grab a cookie.  We'll reconvene in about ten minutes.  The afternoon session is on the legal issues involved in the Dover case, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  I think it will be pretty provocative, so we're looking for in about ten minutes to reconvene. [Recess.] MR. ENTINE:  Eighty years after the Scopes monkey trial, a Federal judge in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania--actually, a Federal judge in the town of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, will decide whether the local school district in Dover violated the boundary between church and state when it required students to hear a statement about intelligent design.  The board voted last year to require that students in ninth grade biology listen to a four-paragraph statement saying that there are gaps and problems with the theory of evolution and that intelligent design is among the alternatives worth considering. The key issue is whether intelligent design is, in fact, religion in disguised, which would make it subject to the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.  In 1987, the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard struck down a Louisiana law that required biology teachers who taught the theory of evolution to also discuss the belief called "creation science." Critics of teaching ID say it's a Trojan horse for teaching creationism and Christian beliefs.  Is it?  Does the teaching of intelligent design violate the Establishment Clause?  Dover is the legal text case and may set precedents that could shape public policy for years to come. To discuss this issue, we have three panelists who represent three different perspectives on the issue.  We're going to start with Steven Gey.  He's an ardent critic of the teaching of ID in the schools, in the science curriculum.  He is a professor of law at the Florida State University College where he teaches Federal constitutional law, Federal court jurisdiction, and civil rights and liberties.  Formerly with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City, he is the author of a case book on religion and the state and has published articles on several First Amendment topics, including free speech, free association, the Establishment Clause, and free exercise issues. MR. GEY:  Well, first of all, the name is actually "Guy," but that's all right.  It's still strange. Thanks to AEI for trying to get me out of the path of yet another hurricane, but the storm slowed down so it didn't work. Let me first start out by setting out the legal background that all these controversies get played out again.  And as Jon says, this is basically First Amendment background.  The First Amendment has various clauses in it.  One of the clauses in the First Amendment is the Establishment Clause.  The amendment is phrased, "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion."  For various historical reasons, that now applies to the states through the 14th Amendment.  And so the question in these controversies is whether teaching ID and, in previous generations of the controversy, teaching creationism violates the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. I think it's easiest to grasp this in terms of the evolution of creationism.  You can think of creationism as actually having gone through three iterations or generations.  This is the third generation.  And every generation we've gotten at least one major ruling, or at least in every previous generation we've gotten at least one major ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court has held that it's unconstitutional to teach this stuff in public schools.  So let me just lay out the background of what the Court has done. The first generation of creationism statutes were the old-fashioned Scopes-style statutes.  These are statutes that were passed in several states, mostly in the South, in the early part of the 20th century, that just flat out banned the teaching of evolution in public schools.  John Scopes was tried under the Tennessee version of that statute.  The case, although it's the most prominent creationism case by far, legally speaking, it really didn't do very much.  Scopes was actually convicted.  He was fined $100.  The $100 fine was reversed on appeal for technical reasons because the judge entered the fine and not the jury.  But the court actually didn't address the legal merits of teaching creationism in public schools and didn't really address in any kind of comprehensive way the constitutional issues that we are concerned with today. Those first generation of statutes really weren't addressed by the Supreme Court until 40 years later, in a case called Epperson v. Arkansas, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Arkansas version of the Tennessee statute, virtually the same statute, and held it was a violation of the First Amendment. Now, the case law that all of these cases come out of is the school prayer case law.  Starting in the early 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a series of cases involving school prayer, again, various manifestations of this.  The first case involved actually a prayer written by the State of New York and taught in all public schools in New York.  A case a year later involved a Pennsylvania statute involving Bible reading in the public schools. In all those cases, the Supreme Court held that it was a violation of the First Amendment to teach this stuff in public schools because it amounted to the State endorsement of religion.  And that's just almost a quintessential violation of the First Amendment.  If you eliminate that basic proposition, you have virtually nothing left of the First Amendment.  So all these cases come out of that case law. In Epperson, what happened is, again, you had the Arkansas version of the Tennessee statute.  As it happens, the Arkansas version of the Tennessee statute was passed by popular referendum.  It was not actually a piece of legislation passed by the legislature, and the reason that's important is because of the way the Court addressed the issue. What the Supreme Court said in Epperson v. Arkansas is that it was a violation of the First Amendment for Arkansas to mandate--or, rather, to prohibit the teaching of evolution in public schools because of the purpose of the legislation.  Actually, three years after Epperson v. Arkansas, the Court formalized the standard, one part of which they used in Epperson and which is currently the standard being used in Dover.  In fact, all parties have stipulated that this is the standard that's relevant in Dover.  And, in fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has reiterated this standard last spring in the Ten Commandments case.  And under this standard, you have a so-called three-pronged analysis.  Lawyers like prongs and parts and subparts.  Well, there are three prongs to this particular analysis called the Lemon three-part test, and it comes out of the case called Lemon v. Kurtzman from 1971. Under Lemon, to pass muster under the Constitution, the government has to show that a piece of legislation or a public policy has a secular purpose, it has a secular effect, and it lacks entanglement between church and state. Well, Epperson was based on what became the first prong of Lemon, the secular purpose analysis.  And what the Court said in Epperson were several things that are relevant actually to current controversies. First of all, it was sort of interesting to see the Court try to get to the point of concluding that there was no secular purpose to the legislation because it was a referendum.  Now, it is one thing to try to assess purpose when you've got a piece of legislation, because you have legislators, you have a finite body of people whose purpose you're trying to assess.  You have legislative history.  You have Senate and House reports.  You had nothing of the sort in Arkansas.  Nevertheless, the Court held that there was an impermissible non-secular purpose motivating the Arkansas referendum because what they looked at is basically the controversy surrounding the adoption of the policy in the referendum.  They looked at letters to the editor in the newspaper.  They looked at billboards supporting the referendum.  They looked at what people said, why they were supporting the referendum. What they said was, you know, in essence, this was a fight about religion, and since the referendum passed, basically religion won.  And the Court said you can't do that and so held--even though, again, they couldn't exactly go around to every single voter in Arkansas and say why did you vote for the legislation, they said, you know, given the cultural matrix, we know why it was passed.  It was passed because it was a religious battle, religion won, can't do that under the First Amendment. That's one thing that's important today because, again, if you look at the trial in Dover right now, what's happening is you're getting a comprehensive assessment of the cultural matrix in Dover, Pennsylvania, that ended up in this piece of legislation. The second thing the did in Epperson that's relevant to the current controversy is the particular kind of purpose they found impermissible.  The Court said:  We do not find that Arkansas is trying to advance a particular religious set of ideas or a particular body of religious doctrine.  What we find instead is that they had the impermissible purpose of trying to protect a range of religious ideas from hostile science.  In other words, it wasn't that they were trying to advance an affirmative case for religion.  It was that they were trying to protect religion from ideas that made some religious adherents uncomfortable.  And the Court said that's just impermissible.  If it makes religious adherents uncomfortable, tough.  From a constitutional perspective, no religion can go to the state and say we want your protection from things that undermine our theological position.  So the statute was held unconstitutional, first generation adapts, evolves. So then you get a second generation of evolution statutes, and the second generation changes in two ways.  The second generation of statutes don't really lose the references to genesis in various details, but they modify it to some extent.  First of all, they make it sound more scientific.  One of the things you get in the period between 1968 when the Court decided Epperson and 1987 when the Court decides its second major creationism case, Edwards v. Aguillard, is the development of a series of institutes devoted to identifying the scientific basis for creationism.  So creationism evolved into creation science.  And, again, the basic details remain the same.  It's just how you explain the details.  You try to explain it in scientific sounding terminology.  That's one change. The second change is that the proponents of the second generation of creationism statutes did not try to ban the teaching of evolution because, among other things, what the Court had talked about in Epperson was a sort of academic freedom notion.  What the Court had said in Epperson is, look, teachers are trying to teach science, and you can't tell them not to teach the truth because that's the science. And so in the second generation of creationism statutes, proponents said, well, okay, you know, that carries a certain--it makes is look bad because it makes us look like censors in the first generation statutes.  So they said, okay, we're not going to do that anymore.  We're not going to prohibit you from teaching evolution.  What we're going to say instead is if you teach evolution, you also have to teach so-called creation science.  And, in fact, they defended the statute.  The statute got litigated.  It was a statute coming out of the Louisiana State Legislature.  They defended that statute as a proposal to advance the cause of academic freedom.  They said we're not decreasing the amount of knowledge put before students, we're actually increasing the amount of knowledge put before students. It's challenged by the ACLU and other groups.  It goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court in 1987--and keep in mind that this is a period when the Supreme Court had already become a very, very conservative place.  In 1987, by a 7-2 vote--Scalia and Rehnquist the only dissenters--the Supreme Court held that statute unconstitutional in a series of very, very strong opinions.  This is not close law, frankly.  And, again, they said several things in that opinion that are relevant to the current controversy. First of all, with regard to the academic freedom rationale, the Court said, you know, this is not academic freedom because the teachers whose academic freedom you're supposedly advancing already have academic freedom to teach whatever valid science is available.  They already have that freedom.  They don't need the Louisiana Legislature to say in addition to this valid science, you can teach this valid science over here.  If it's valid science, it's already there. And so the Court said, in fact, this is contrary to academic freedom because what it involves is a legislature going to teachers who are educated in the doctrine and saying in addition to the doctrine that you're taught by your professors at the universities who taught you, we want you also to teach this other stuff that you weren't taught because, frankly, it may not be valid stuff.  And the Court said that's not academic freedom; that's something completely different.  So the Court rejected out of hand the academic freedom rationale by the Louisiana Legislature.  In fact, a couple of different times in the opinion it used a particular word to describe that asserted secular purpose.  The asserted secular purpose, the Court said, was a sham, we don't believe you.  That's what you're saying, but we just frankly don't believe you. So one of the things you get out of Edwards, again, which is relevant to the current controversies is the ability of the courts to look beneath what asserted purposes legislatures propose to the real purpose, again, based on the assessment of the cultural matrix, the general legislative atmosphere and so forth. And then if you take a look at what the Court did in Edwards to identify the relevant purpose, again, they did things that are relevant to the current controversies.  One of the things they said was, well, we can't really identify the purpose of every single member of the Louisiana Legislature.  So what we're going to look at is the purpose of the people who were most actively proposing this legislation.  And so they looked at the statements of a fellow in Louisiana, a State Senator in Louisiana named Keith, who was the main proponent of the legislation.  They analyzed what he said before the legislature.  They looked to the various experts that the Louisiana Legislature went to to justify their legislation.  And, again, they were primarily creationist institutes. And they said, look, if you look at all the evidence that came before the Louisiana Legislature, again, it was very clear that what was going on here was the Louisiana Legislature was advancing a clearly religious set of ideas, and that's an impermissible purpose under Epperson.  So the second generation goes away. Now, parenthetically, one of the problems from the perspective of the ACLU, Americans United, and various groups supporting the plaintiffs in Dover and these other cases is that the Court in both of these cases did not attack the hard question, which is the secular effect analysis:  Is this really science? In the Supreme Court, it all comes in there, and, in fact, if you look at the opinions in Edwards especially, you will see very clear implications that no one in the majority bought that this was science, but they didn't actually come right out and do the assessment is this science because they didn't have to, because they had such a clear-cut non-secular purpose that they could take the easy route and simply say, look, whatever this is, if done cleanly, it wasn't done cleanly here.  These people were doing this specifically because they were motivated by religious reasons, and that's impermissible under the Constitution. There's another case that was referred to earlier called McLean, a district court case, also involving in Arkansas a situation in which the district court judge did actually try to do that analysis, a very long opinion, very detailed, gets into the philosophy of science and so forth.  But that's really the only opinion that we have focusing on the really hard issue of assessing the science in the legal context and doing all this under the secular effect analysis. So with that as a background, now we have the third generation of creationist statutes, and, again, you have a couple of significant changes.  The first change from Type 2 to Type 3 creationist statutes, the new ID proposals, is that they lose almost all the detail.  There is no reference in most of the ID literature to genesis.  There's no reference to young Earth creationism, no reference to the geological phenomena being produced by catastrophism, none of that stuff.  What you have left is the central core idea of the first two generations of creationism, which is that the world was created essentially in its present form by an intelligent designer, that is, a supreme being, therefore, God, and that's it.  That is the sum total of the proposal, no details go with that.  That's one change. And the second change is that they try to avoid in a much more concerted way than the first two generations of creationists did that God is really in there at all.  Phillip Johnson once famously said to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, "We don't know who the designer is.  It might be UFOs, space aliens.  We don't know who he is.  We don't really care.  It's a designer, and that's all we care about." Now, the theory is this gets them around Epperson and Edwards, and very briefly, to try to keep on track of time, let me give you three legal arguments that have been proposed by proponents of ID and then talk very briefly about Dover, and then we'll pass it on to the next commentator. Three basic arguments for why this survives Epperson, why the current generations of ID statutes survive Epperson and Edwards. The first argument is if we don't identify it as God, it's not religious.  We say an intelligent designer.  We acknowledge that it may be space aliens.  And, therefore, it's not God and, therefore, it's not religious. The problem with this argument is the Court's already rejected it.  Let me just quote to you from Justice Powell's concurrence in Edwards, and, again, for those of you who don't do law, Justice Powell was a Nixon appointee, not exactly a flaming liberal, a Southerner, from Virginia, very conservative guy in almost every way, very conservative especially on religion issues, and yet he was one of the majority opinions in Edwards.  And, in fact, he wrote an opinion that was actually much stronger even in many ways than Brennan's opinion for the rest of the majority. Here's what Justice Powell said in Edwards:  "Concepts concerning God or a supreme being of some sort are manifestly religious.  These concepts do not shed that religiosity merely because they are presented as a philosophy or as science." Any manifestation of a supreme being under the current doctrine in the Supreme Court is religious, inherently, manifestly religious.  And so if a proposal is based on the identification of a supreme being who directly intervenes in the world, that's religion, that's unconstitutional under the Court's current doctrine.  It doesn't matter if you don't call it God. The second set of arguments are really basically free speech arguments, and it's a little bit hard frankly to tell what some of these arguments are because, in all honesty, a lot of the material written in this area is not written by lawyers, and they sometimes, I think, don't quite understand the doctrine.  My general thing is a First Amendment guide more broadly than religion.  I do speech stuff too, and it's incredibly difficult stuff and complicated stuff and internally contradictory stuff. But here's the basic argument, I think, and there are two variations on the theme of free speech.  One is a sort of combination free speech/federalism argument on behalf of school boards, and the argument is school boards have a free speech and federalism right, a sort of states rights right, to incorporate ID into the curriculum basically because they get to choose the curriculum.  They get to choose what to teach.  It's historically a matter of local control in this country, and there's a constitutional ambience to that. Well, the answer to that version of the free speech argument is that the Supreme Court has already rejected definitively that kind of argument if it involves the inculcation of religion through public school curriculum.  That was Engel v. Vitale, the school prayer case.  That's Schempp, the Bible reading case.  That's Edwards.  All of those cases were basically cases about local control, local school boards wanting to inject religion into science classes, and the Supreme Court said in every single one of these cases:  you can't do it, the First Amendment applies to school boards. So the other variation of the free speech theme is really a free speech argument on behalf of teachers, and very often this come up where the school board says don't teach it, that is, ID, and the teachers want to teach it anyway.  And the claim is, well, the teacher has a First Amendment right to teach this stuff in his or her classroom. And the answer to that is really the academic freedom answer.  Academic freedom law is, again, very convoluted and somewhat contradictory stuff in the First Amendment literature.  And, in fact, it may not even exist.  The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals which governs some of the Mid-Atlantic states has held that below the university level, teachers have no academic freedom, which should make all the teachers in the room really unhappy. But to the extent that they do have academic freedom rights, here is the thing about academic freedom.  If you trace academic freedom, the concept of academic freedom back to the American Association of University Professors statement back in the 1920s, which is sort of the lodestar of academic freedom discussions, academic freedom is not really the freedom of an individual to do anything that he or she wants.  It's a freedom of an academic community to define their discipline free of political control. And so you do not have an academic freedom--you don't have an academic freedom as an astronomy professor to walk into a classroom and say, "The Earth is flat."  You can be fired.  It is not a violation of your First Amendment rights or your academic freedom rights to be incompetent.  You have no academic freedom to be incompetent.  And so the question here is whether it's competent as a biologist to walk in and say things that the overwhelming majority of biologists in the field reject out of hand as being inaccurate.  So the free speech arguments don't work. So then finally you get an argument that's sort of related to both of the other two arguments that ID is science, and if it's science, it needs to go in the curriculum.  And one of the problems here--and I suspect this is one of the reasons the courts have steered away from getting into this debate--is because if you go into the philosophy of science literature, there is--if you have 100 philosophers of science, you will have 100 definitions of science that change in slight ways.  They can't agree on lunch. Well, the courts, though, can't adhere to that kind of incoherence.  We're a pragmatic discipline.  Sooner or later we've got to just decide when it gets in and when it doesn't get in. Well, the way we do it in the courts is through evidentiary rules.  What is science for purposes of getting into a trial, expert testimony with regard to scientific evidence?  And there is actually a case on point, as we say in law school, a case called Daubert v. Merrell Pharmaceuticals back in 1993, and here's what the Court says in Daubert.  Three relevant considerations with regard to what is science for purposes of expert testimony:  one, whether a theory can be or has been tested; two, whether the theory or technique has been subjected to peer review and publication; and, three, whether the theory has been generally accepted among people who do this kind of work. Now, if you apply that Daubert analysis to ID, you can--you've already seen from the morning's presentations how it comes out.  There is no basic affirmative proposal other than God created the world.  It can't be tested, hasn't been proposed--there's been no proposal for how it could be tested, so it fails the first analysis, first part of the analysis. Second, peer review and publication, you just saw the numbers, there is none, essentially.  There is virtually no ID literature in the peer-reviewed literature. And, third, general acceptance is just not there.  The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and every other mainstream science group rejects this stuff out of hand.  And if you want an example of such a rejection, look on the biology department website at Lehigh University and see what the biology department says about Michael Behe-- MR. ENTINE:  Steven, we need you to wrap it up. MR. GEY:  Okay.  And so Dover, very quickly, 30 seconds, Dover is the ID folks' worst nightmare.  And the reason it's their worst nightmare is because there's abundant evidence throughout the depositions, throughout the testimony so far of the kind of the impermissible non-secular purpose that the Court found impermissible in Epperson and in Edwards.  And so I think, without giving you the quotes--but I'd be happy to do that, too--the bottom line of Dover, I think, is not whether the plaintiffs will win, it's how big they win, and whether you see in response to that yet a fourth iteration, fourth evolution of creationism into some other thing that's  (?)-ing toward Bethlehem waiting to be born. Thank you. [Applause.] MR. ENTINE:  Thank you, Steven. Richard Thompson is co-founder, president, and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that is defending the school district in the Dover case.  The Law Center writes that it is "dedicated to the defense and promotion of the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values, and the sanctity of human life. Mr. Thompson spent 24 years at the executive level of law enforcement, including eight years as prosecutor in Oakland County, Michigan, where he gained national attention for his prosecution of Jack Kevorkian. Mr. Thompson? x  MR. THOMPSON:  Thank you very much. First of all, I have a couple of introductory comments to make.  As you know, the Dover case is still going on.  We have lawyers there conducting the trial, and so I am somewhat constrained about what we can say about the case.  However, I want to acknowledge one of our worthy opponents here, Richard Kaskey (ph), from the Americans United for Separation of Church and State.  He is also involved in the Dover case.  So, like a quarterback, I'm not going to announce all the plays that our team is going to be involved with. This morning and this afternoon have been very interesting because, as the various speakers talk about their particular viewpoint, I agree with parts of every talk that is involved.  However, I think there are a couple of things that I would want to start off with. The evolutionists are not pristine scientists.  Many of the renowned evolutionists put religion, their particular kind of religion, atheism and secular humanism, as an integral part of Darwin's theory.  Just let me give you a couple of quotes from Darwinists like William Provine, Stephen J. Gould. Here's a following statement by Gould:  "Biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God."  Now, is that a scientific statement? "Before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us."  Is that a scientific statement? "Why do humans exist?  I do not think that any higher answer can be given.  We are the offspring of history and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes, one indifferent to our suffering and, therefore, offering us maximal freedom to thrive or to fail in our own chosen way."  Are these scientific statements or are the religious statements? And then you get into Richard Dawkins and George Gaylord Simpson, the leading neo-Darwinist a generation back, who would claim, "Man is the result of purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.  He was not planned."  Are these scientific statements or are they really religious statements? These are the religious statements that many Darwinists say you cannot separate from the theory of Darwin.  In fact, Ken Miller, who was a witness for the plaintiffs in the Dover case, in his, I think it was, 1998 textbook, had a section entitled "Evolution process is random and undirected and occurs without plan or purpose." Now, when he made that statement and some scientist in the audience cautioned him on that, to his benefit, I think Ken then went back and took that particular part out.  As I recall, that was your testimony. MR.           :  That was not my testimony.  I'll [inaudible]. MR. THOMPSON:  Fine.  Okay.  It was something like that.  But it was in the book, and that book is still being sold by the publisher to various high schools across the country, and Ken still gets royalties from that book. Starting off with the controversy in Dover, I think the devil is in the details, and you have to listen to that one-minute statement that is being read to ninth-grade biology students at the beginning of the section on evolution.  This is the statement that is read.  It is not read by teachers.  It is read by administrators. "The Pennsylvania academic standards require students to learn about Darwin's theory of evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.  Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered.  The theory is not a fact.  Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.  A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.  Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view.  The reference book `Of Pandas and People" is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves. "With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.  The school leaves the discussion of origins of life to individual students and their families.  As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on standards-based assessments." There are a couple of major differences between the Epperson case and the Edwards case and what is happening in Dover.  Of course, the Epperson case talked about prohibiting the teaching of evolution, and the Edwards case talked about this so-called balance treatment where if teachers talked about or taught evolution, then they had to teach creationism as well.  The courts looked at that and said it was a sham secular purpose when they said this was to induce academic freedom because teachers already had that right. But look at what happened here in Dover.  The school board did not prevent the teaching of evolution.  In fact, that is the only theory that is being taught.  That is the only theory upon which students will be taking tests on.  The Dover policy specifically prohibited the teaching of creationism or intelligent design and merely students to a book of pandas and people that was in the library donated by several citizens from the Dover area.  So we don't have the same kind of antievolution that was expressed by the legislature in Epperson and in the Edwards case. So the question becomes does this near one minute statement really violate establish in the clause in a substantive way or it merely a shadow of a violation, and we hope to show that it is only a shadow of the violation. Granted, the vast majority of scientists agree with the theory of evolution.  There is no question about that.  But does that mean we decide scientist on the basis of popular vote?  Throughout the arguments that the other side makes you will see fallacious arguments such as the genetic fallacy where they attempt to tie what Dover did with what the creationists did back in 1925 in the Scopes trial, what the Discovery Institution has written about, what other legislatures have done in the Epperson case.  That's a genetic fallacy.  You look at what the Dover School District did, not tie them into this vast conspiracy stringing out over several decades. The other fallacy you will see is the argument ad hominem, that almost in every case they attack the proponents of intelligent design as junk science or invalid science, as part of the fundamentalist movement.  I love that attack, the fundamentalist movement.  Ken Miller is a devout Roman Catholic, he is certainly not a part of the fundamentalist movement, and of course he supports evolution.  On the other hand, the primary supporter of intelligent design also happens to be a Roman Catholic, Michael Behe, and he supports the theory of intelligent design.  Michael Behe was on the stand for 3 days this past week and he admitted that the theory of intelligent design is not necessary for his religious beliefs.  He admitted that many of the claims of evolution he has no objection to, whether it's gradualism, whether it's the unity of the species.  The only thing that he objects to is the idea that natural selection can explain the complexity of certain complex biological systems such as the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade. In fact, during the trial, and we took copious notes and had the transcript of Ken Miller's testimony who had to testify earlier, and we went through every claim that Ken Miller made during his direct testimony and we asked Michael Behe for his comments.  On some of the things he agreed with, on other things he disagreed with.  One of the things he agreed with was this, that if it could be proven that the concept of irreducible complexity cannot work, that he would withdraw that.  It is not a scientific theory based on Genesis.  It is a scientific based on the empirical data that he is observing like all scientists observe and coming to a different conclusion. So when you get down to what this case is all about, it's about a one minute statement, and what this case is all about is also does that one minute statement violate the First Amendment to the Constitution.  The judge is not going to rule, hopefully he will not rule because it would be a bad precedent, whether one particular scientific theory is valid and the other particular scientific theory is invalid.  That should be left to the scientific community and it should be a matter of argumentation. But like the Big Bang theory that was promoted at the beginning of the century by a Belgian priest who Albert Einstein called a buffoon, and that was later on adopted as the consensus of the scientific community, you start somewhere, you build up the evidence.  Because there is a Big Bang theory and there may be religious implications, the scientists look at the Big Bang theory and they don't have to determine who caused the Big Bang, they know where to stop.  And just like Michael Behe, he does not get to a supernatural designer.  He stops before he gets involved with the characteristics of this designer, whether it be a supernatural creator or whether it is some element that we still have not discovered.  He will say to you quite honestly that it is his teleogical belief that the designer is God, and there's nothing wrong with that.  But he separates his theological belief from his scientific belief. We can get into the motivations of particular people who have promoted intelligent design in the Dover School District, but the vote was 6 to 3 and the other side has picked on one or two of the board members who made religious statements.  But even during that time, the board members themselves disagreed as to what should be the policy, and in fact, one board member told a teacher who was upset with the policy that she thought was going to be in place, don't worry about it.  This particular board member is not the board. And Justice Scalia in his dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard completely destroyed the idea that we have to decide the purpose of a particular policy by the motivations of the people who are adopting that policy because it opening a Pandora's box.  The motivation might be that I want to get elected again, the motivation might be that I'm mad at my wife and I'm going to show her who's boss, the motivation might be that I owe a favor to a member. So if you get involved in motivations and trying to figure out what's in the person's mind when they vote for a policy I think is an issue that the Supreme Court is going to have to address, and we think if this case gets up to the Supreme Court, that is one of the things that is going to be changed.  No longer will the motivation of an individual legislator determine what the purpose of the policy is.  That's an important part of it. And there's where the implications of the Dover case goes.  It is developing to a case that will be presented to the Supreme Court so that they can revisit some of the concepts that were enunciated in Edwards v. Aguillard. I want to leave with this.  When the John Scopes trial went on, the ACLU was defending the right of John Scopes to teach evolution even though it was against the consensus of the community.  At that time the ACLU said that there should be no orthodoxy, no indoctrination in the public school system.  There should be no propaganda.  Not one theory should be taught over any other.  Now that Darwinism has become king, they are ready to strike down any other opposition. I want to stay with this one quote that I think really encapsulates what the Supreme Court is going to say ultimately, and it was a case back in 1943 where it held, "If there is a fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official high or petty can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion."  Thank you. [Applause.] MR. ENTINE:  Thank you very much, Richard.  Mark Ryland  to my right is vice president of the Discovery Institute, and he'll correct me if I'm wrong on this, three I.D. proponents connected to the institute were originally slated to testify on behalf of the Dover School Board but pulled out in a disagreement about whether I.D. should be mandated in science classes which is the position supported by the Thomas More Center. Mr. Ryland is the director of the Discovery Center's Washington, D.C. office.  His interests and background cover a wide range, law and public policy, technology, software, network architecture, technology standardization, science and philosophy, and the philosophy of nature.  And I told Mark that he's welcome to range beyond the specific issues of the Dover case since the Discovery Institute is not specifically involved in that at this time. MR. RYLAND:  Thank you very much.  Thanks everybody for staying through a long day, and I hope an interesting one.  I found it quite interesting. I have the in some ways enviable position of being at the very end and therefore having an opportunity to sort of frame things perhaps and sum up, but it's also a very painful position because there are so many things that have been said today that I would like to comment on, but I don't have time to.  So I'm going to have to step back a little bit but I'm going to talk first a little bit about the kind of conceptual models that have been discussed and hopefully create some framework that's helpful for understanding the conflicts that you've seen and I think some apparent conflicts perhaps that are not as real as they seem at first blush. The second thing is to look a little bit at the constitutional issue abstracting from some of the details of the Dover case and looking at in a more kind of pure way, the sort of per se question about the constitutionality of design arguments. So let's start with the conceptual framework.  As is my tendency, I want to go back in time a little bit, in fact let's go back in time about 2,400 years.  If you read Greek philosophy, you'll find that this exact same argument in almost every detail was going on at that time, Aristotle and then Plato seeing in nature some kind of underlying intelligence inferring from the data of nature to some kind of underlying intelligence which gave rise to the order and the structure that's seen in nature, and their opponents, typically atomists and mechanists, Democritus, Epicurus and so forth, making exactly the opposite inference, believing that nature was in some sense fundamentally an illusion, that what seemed to us to be essences and patterns were actually just constructed by random chance out of atoms which happened to collide and meld and conglomerate with each other in particular arrangements. As Epicurus said, if you imagine a universe that's infinitely old and infinitely large and made up of these atoms, eventually somewhere in some corner of that universe you will see this particular configuration of matter because infinity is a big resource. Let's fast-forward a little bit from that discussion to the birth of modern science.  As many of you know or you should know, philosophy and science were not made distinct essentially until the birth of modern science.  In the philosophical conception of nature, Aristotle famously proposed four kinds of causes, four explanations for the things that could be observed in nature.  This was an accepted model by the Christian, the Jewish, Mohammed and the Islamic philosophers through a period of about 1,600 years.  His four causes were these.  You can think of it this way, he said there's four ways of answering the question why, because, and then you could give an answer, and you could answer these questions simultaneously about the same phenomenon.  They were all parallel and additive and complementary explanations. So what were the four causes?  There was efficient cause which is the simplest for us to understand because normally when think of cause, we think of efficient cause, it's billiard ball causation, it's agent causation, I bang into something and it falls over, I was the efficient cause of that motion. There's the material cause which is the result of what the thing is made of.  Think of it as bottom-up causation.  Some phenomenon, if you make a chair out of wood or you make one out of steel and they have exactly the same shape, they'll have many different properties because the material cause is different in the two chairs.  So far so good.  This is where the modern mind is very comfortable and this is what modern science is all about.  It's all about efficient and material causes. There were two more causes in Aristotle's system.  One cause, the one that we talked about a lot today, is the final cause, purpose, that for which infinity existed, and the thinking was that this was intrinsic to natural beings, that they had an intrinsic purpose.  What was the source of that purpose?  Most people's opinion was that it was an eminent purpose, but there was some sort of transcendent cause, but that wasn't necessarily part of the core philosophy of nature. The fourth cause, the most difficult one for us to understand today is formal cause.  You can think of it as top-down cause.  This is the organizing principle of something that gives rise to its structure, its nature and so forth.  It includes shape and arrangement of parts, but it's more than that. Why am I giving this strange lecture on the history of science?  I think it will help us understand some of the things that we're dealing with here. Modern science began by a self-conscious rejection of formal and final causes.  So Descartes didn't believe they were real, Bacon thought maybe they're real but we can't change, they're givens, but we can manipulate matter and we can manipulate motions, so let's explore nature experimentally, pay no attention to these other causes, and simultaneously more or less with this move was also the recognition of the incredibly beautiful mathematical properties of inanimate nature.  So Galileo begins to develop the laws of motion and Newton perfects these in a very powerful intellectual synthesis.  So you have in some ways actually a little bit of a tension between mechanism, the idea of matter in motion, efficient causes, and mathematical laws governing in this clockwork universe, so you have a mechanistic model of nature. What about Darwinism?  Darwinism was the capstone of mechanization in the history of science.  The problem with biology was that it didn't easily succumb to a mechanistic explanation.  If you look at living things, they seem to be full of purpose, they seem to be full of patterns that are highly organized.  They act for purposes.  Animals act for purposes.  Even plants seem to have purposes.  And moreover, even the parts of those things seem to be very, very purposeful and be attuned towards certain outcomes. Biology was mechanistic by the time of Darwinism, but design was still present and the notion of extrinsicly imposed, the famous image of Pele and the watchmaker, that there was this matter in motion but there must have been something outside kind of putting design into the thing.  Or it was theological from the inside, some eminent design like Mark postulated, for example. So Darwin's genius was to almost fully mechanize biology as a science, bringing it within this kind of Newtonian model, this Newtonian metaphysics.  It was a brilliant move, but there was one problem in a sense in his move.  He did postulate a law, the law of natural selection, but this was very different than other laws of the Newtonian revolution.  It didn't seem to actually have any mathematical tractability or any repeatability or regularity, in fact, it's sort of mysterious what it is and seems to be completely arbitrary depending on the environment which is of course changing all the time.  The other thing that he said was that there's random variation, so he introduces chance as a fundamental explanatory mode. Now there's one little tiny bit of purpose left in Darwin's theory and this is almost always unnoticed.  I learned this in my studies of this question from Dr. Leon Kass, one of your fine scholars here who points out that the problem with this explanation is, why do creatures want to survive?  He quotes Whitehead who says, in fact, life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value.  The other persistence is to be dead.  A rock survives for 800 million years, whereas a tree for a thousand years, et cetera.  The problem set for the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organisms with such deficient survival value or power ever evolved. So what is the explanation?  Each organism struggles for survival.  That's irreducible, so purpose is in Darwinian biology, but all other purposes explain as an epiphenomenon of this core purpose. So what am I getting at here?  First of all, think about design in a slightly different way.  Think about it as this eminent plan or purpose within things as opposed to something extrinsicly imposed.  That's one thing that's important.  And recognize that when we have these different modes of causal explanation, they result in a different way of understanding the problem.  For example, earlier Dr. Miller said that design is inherently a theory of successive creation, and that is absolutely untrue because design can operate as an eminent power of development within the thing.  Just as everyone agrees, an embryo develops by very law-like, a very teleological from a single cell to a complex organism, and many people argue that evolution follows similar law-like patterns.  They further argue that that is evidence of design and purpose of nature, and that's a very anti-Darwinian model of science. So why do we here continue to argue about Darwinism?  Many reasons are put forward for this.  The most common reason is it's against the Book of Genesis, it violates Genesis, we're a religious country.  It's very ironic because there are all these Catholics involved in this argument, and I don't know about you, but I don't take the Book of Genesis literally, so I have no problem with science contradicting the literal text of Genesis. But nevertheless, I do think I can explain why we're here arguing about Darwinism.  Darwinism is the only modern scientific theory that has chance as a fundamental causative claim.  You can shoot me counterexamples, thermal dynamics, quantum theory.  No, no.  The chance in these other theories is beautifully mathematically bounded.  So chance is at the core of the Darwinian hypothesis.  All innovation comes from random variation, all selection is an after effect, it happens after the innovation occurs due to chance. So why is that a problem?  Isn't it possible for design to coexist with chance?  Absolutely.  In fact, I think Professor Krauss made a very interesting claim near the end of his talk which I would really like to hold him to, and that is, he said science is all about, he basically didn't use my terminology, but I'm going to put words in his mouth, it's about mechanism, it's about efficient and material causes.  It can say nothing about design.  It can say nothing about formality.  We'll get back to that in a second. If only science stuck to that position rigorously we would not be sitting here today.  That's my postulate.  The problem is that once you mechanize nature and you understand it, and your method only sees mechanism, inevitably being a human being you slop over into metaphysical or other kinds of claims that go beyond the method, and that happened again in Dr. Krauss's presentation.  Did you notice when he showed the snowflake on the screen? He says, look at the beautiful pattern.  It follows these beautiful chemical properties and laws.  He said, of course those laws are random.  How does he know that?  How does he know that the laws of nature are random?  It's an instinct that comes from the mechanical study of nature. So design is a kind of explanation which will always recur because nature is full of pattern, practice and order.  The question may be then, what does this have to do with science?  You're making this great philosophical argument and maybe I can buy into it, but it does actually impact science. Another deep misunderstanding that's arisen in the course of the day is that design thinking is some sort of--first of all, one mistake is to think that it's a premise from which one then investigates nature.  No.  It's the initial conclusion of an investigation of nature.  The mind moves from the order, the patterning of nature, to a tentative conclusion of design, and from that what flows?  Well, nothing immediately because we're all mechanistic scientists and so we continue to do the same kind of investigation of nature according to the methodological modes that we're accustomed to. So what's the point then?  Is there any difference?  Yes, there are differences.  You can think of design as a metatheory in the same way, by the way, that Darwinism is a metatheory.  In fact, let me just read a famous quite from Karl Popper, I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program, a possible framework for testable scientific theories.  I think it's a very accurate summary of what Darwinism is because there are all kinds of things that would seem to falsify Darwinism, but the metatheory quickly swallows them up, and, yes, in effect you can explain them way.  Originally when there was one universal genetic code discovered, the Darwinists said, of course, natural selection would allow one to survive.  Once it was in place there would never be any development, because how could the organism survive? Well, a little more research found that there are about 20 codes, some of them quite obscure, but, yes, there are different conditions, different ways that genetic information is expressed.  So now the Darwinian says, of course there will be variation.  Naturally.  Natural selection would be able to find all kinds of workable combinations.  Similarly, those kinds of claims are made.  Junk DNA is a great example.  When junk DNA was first noticed, that the genome was very, very large compared to the coding regions for proteins, Crick and others famously said, obviously, Darwinian evolution would be incredibly wasteful and spin off all this junk that's totally unnecessary, so naturally there's going to be waste and disorder and unintelligibility in natural things. We've known now 25 or 30 years later thanks to some scientists who paid no attention to his advice not to look at it that there are all kinds of unintelligibility, all kinds of meaning, purpose and order in the junk part of DNA which affects the organism. So those are examples of how design versus nondesign as a metahypothesis would impact science.  You would still do your mechanical science, but a design theoretic perspective would say I don't assume unintelligibility when I encounter things in nature that I don't understand.  That's a big difference, and it has a big impact over the long haul, although over the short haul I think every design oriented scientist would agree with me that 95 percent of the time or more they go into the lab, they do the exact same kind of science that their colleagues do. Let me give you one more example of scientific work that's motivated by a design concept challenging the Darwinian notion of natural selection.  Michael Behe and one of his graduate students once took seriously the claim that if you have highly, highly conserved proteins across a wide variety of species, there must be a lot of selection pressure on that because that's how you can explain that even though the last common ancestor was hundreds of millions of years ago or maybe more, that protein is essentially unchanged, and there are a number of these, but histone 4 was the one that they studied.  It's almost identical across a wide variety of species. They asked themselves the question, so Darwin's theory would predict that there is a lot of selective pressure and so if you knock out and change the immunoacid structure of this protein things will go badly for the organisms that use it.  So they did the experiment, and as they found, that's not true at all.  Actually, they could change a lot about that protein in a variety of species that they were studying and it worked just fine.  So was Darwinism falsified?  No.  But a design theoretic perspective allowed them to investigate some of the evidence which can then lead to making some conclusions about this. So enough of my framework.  Let me just give you a couple of thought experiments to end my talk, and now we get to law finally.  I hope my colleagues pardon me.  I'm a recovering lawyer.  I haven't practiced law for many years, so I get to have more fun. I'm going to give you two thought experiments.  The first one is a high school course in cosmology.  It's an honors course in cosmology.  There's a 2-month unit on cosmic fine-turning and the anthropic principle.  We've heard about that today, but everyone I think here probably knows that there are many physical constants, thirty or more, or properties of the physical world that are seemingly arbitrary, there's no patterning or ordering amongst them and no underlying explanation other than just sort of their brute facts.  But if you change any of these in the slightest degree.  We're talking about changes in the range of 10-20 or something like that, very, very small fractional changes, then what happens is the universe doesn't configure itself into anything like the cosmos that we have.  It either reclumps quickly after the Big Bang, or if it doesn't, it dissipates, stars don't form, plants don't form, carbon doesn't form.  One of the very first fine-tune constants in nature was discovered because I think it was Fred Hoyle was thinking about the problem, how does carbon form in the heart of a star?  This is a problem because if you just have random collisions of atoms, it's very, very unlikely that carbon or any of these heavier molecules would form. So he predicted that there must be some kind atomic resonance which would significantly increase the probability of successful carbon formation, and that prediction was borne out by experimentation. So here we are in our high school class.  So everyone agrees, unlike biology where there are lots of arguments about the facts, that's why I'm taking that as my second thought experiment, here's a thought experiment that involves no argument about facts.  Everyone agrees that the universe is incredibly fine tuned, and there are only three possible explanations, sheer blind luck, the multiverse hypothesis which is the Darwinian explanation, there's an infinite number of universes and this sort of by natural selection kinds of models and we're here and we're able to enjoy the one that has the right constants, or design, that there was some kind of intelligence which gave rise to this perfect ordering of the physical constants. You're in this high school classroom and you get to the end of the unit and the teacher reaches this point and says there are three explanations.  I can only tell you about two of them.  It would be unconstitutional to talk about the third. New thought experiment.  Now we're closer to home.  This is the Athens School Board.  Athens, Georgia, if you will.  The chairman of the school board is a lifetime agnostic who has always been a big fan of the British analytic philosopher Antony Flew.  What he noticed was about a year and a half ago Antony Flew converted to some very, very vague form of theism, the god of the philosophers.  Flew concluded after a lifetime of atheistic philosophy and paying close to attention to science because as an analytic philosopher he sees his job as a metanarrative on science, he said there are two things about scientific knowledge that we have now that are inexplicable without some kind of intelligence.  One is cosmic fine tuning, the other is the origin of the first life.  So I'll grant you Darwinism because maybe it can do what it claims to do. So this guy, this chairman, for the first in his life he reads Aristotle's Physics because Antony Flew says I am Aristotle again.  I've come to the conclusion after looking at nature that there is a god, a first cause, god with a small G.  I don't believe in the soul, I don't believe in immortality, I don't believe in heaven or hell, I don't believe in Jesus Christ, I don't believe of the accoutrements of your religions, your revealed religions, but as a scientist and a philosopher I think there is an intelligence behind nature. So this school board chairman says there's the Dover case going on, even the AEI is having conferences.  This is a great opportunity to make biology class really, really interesting so I'm going to institute and I get support from my colleagues a new curriculum which should dramatically increase interest in the performance of critical thinking skills in my students and I'm going to give a full version of the evolution curriculum that includes all the known explanations for biological complexity. And there are more than one, by the way.  Part of the confusion today is this notion of design only as a negative case against Darwinism, and the answer partly is yes, in the sense as I just described earlier that Darwinism is an antiteleological theory of science, it's a design denying theory of science, one of the few, the only other one being the multiverse hypothesis.  Have you ever heard a chemist stand up and say, I've proven that there's no design in chemical substances?  No, because their science follows this lawlike or structural patterns and they don't argue about the causative value of chance. Here we are in this Athens School District and they put together a curriculum, a 2-week session, the four basic kinds of explanations for biological complexity, standard Darwinism--as the dominant view it's presented and critiqued, then structuralism and self-organization, teleological evolution, all law-based notions of evolution, which are out there by the way and have been growing all the time, more and more scientists doubting Darwin's theory on the basis of law-based explanations, intelligent design theory as presented by these crazy guys in Seattle, presented and critiqued, and finally in the interests of Dr. Kass and because I happen to, as you may have noticed, like Aristotle, an Aristotelian view of evolution presented in class, the kind that's promoted by Dr. Leon Kass here at the AEI, which is he has a non-Darwinian view of evolution based on Aristotle's philosophy. MR. ENTINE:  Mark, I need you to wrap it up. MR. RYLAND:  So those are the four things that are then proposed.  The central question is this, everyone agrees that there is the appearance of design in biology in the living things that make up the biological world.  The question is, is the appearance real or not, and there are only two answers, actually not really, there are several, but let's say primarily there are two answers, yes or no, and you could also answer maybe, my method doesn't tell me, there are other possible answers.  But my question for you is, would it be a violation of the Establishment Clause to answer the question one way but not a violation of the Establishment Clause to answer the question the other way?  Thank you very much. [Applause.] MR. ENTINE:  Thank you, Mark.  I wanted to invite Ken Miller to sit up with the panel because Ken actually provided some testimony in the Dover case going on, and Richard Cassidy if he wants to weigh in during this as well since you have some interest in the case.  But I'm going to start out with a question and them open it up to some of the panelists and then to the audience as well. I am curious about the Discovery Institute's involvement in the Dover case where originally three people affiliated with the institute were slated to give depositions and then obviously pulled out.  There was some kind of dispute over legal strategy perhaps, and I want you to address that because I think there is some belief at least expressed in various newspaper articles that there was a concern by the Discovery Institute that if this issue is decided on science that intelligent design would be ruled as religion and therefore would fall under the Establishment Clause and therefore would be banned from being taught in science classes. So for fear of that almost inevitability happening, the Discovery Institute repositioned itself for tactical reasons for teaching the controversy perhaps in nonscience settings, and I just wanted you to respond to that. MR. RYLAND:  Sure.  I'd be happy to respond.  Let me back up first and say that the Discovery Institute never set out to have schools get into this issue.  We've never encouraged people to do it, we've never promoted it.  We have unfortunately gotten sucked into it because we have a lot of expertise in the issue that people are interested in. When asked for our opinion we always tell people don't teach intelligent design, there is no curriculum developed for it, your teachers are likely to hostile towards it, there are just all these good reasons why you should not go down that path.  If you want to do anything, you should teach the evidence for and against Darwin's theory.  Teach it dialectically.  And despite all the hoopla you've heard today, there are many, many problems with Darwin's theory in particular the power of natural selection and random variation to do the astounding things that are attributed to them.  The new demonology as one philosopher calls it, the selfish gene can do anything.  So that's the background. What's happened in the foreground was when it came to the Dover School District we advised them not to institute the policy that they advised.  In fact, I personally went in and met with them and actually Richard was there the same day, and they didn't listen to me.  That's fine.  They can do what they want.  I have no power or control over them.  But from the start we just disagreed that this was a good time and place to have this battle which is risky in the sense that there is a potential for rulings that this is somehow unconstitutional.  That's basically from an institutional perspective what I can say and what I know. Now individuals associated with the Discovery Institute got involved in the possibility of becoming expert witnesses in the case, and as far as I know, there was no institutional decision made one way or the other, but I think it was the case that those individuals felt that they had somewhat different legal interests.  It was awkward because they were both expert witnesses, but potentially fact witnesses as well about things like the history of the intelligent design movement.  So they wanted to have their own lawyers involved in depositions and I think there was an argument or disagreement about that, and I think that was the reason why they decided not to participate. MR. THOMPSON:  I think I want to respond to that. MR. ENTINE:  You can respond. MR. THOMPSON:  First of all, Stephen Meyer, who is he?  Is he the president? MR. RYLAND:  He's the Director of the Center for Science and Culture. MR. THOMPSON:  And David DeWolf is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute? MR. RYLAND:  Right. MR. THOMPSON:  They wrote a book entitled Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curriculum.  The conclusion of that book was that, Moreover, as previous discussion demonstrates, school boards have the authority to permit and even encourage teaching about design theory as an alternative to Darwinian evolution, and this includes the use of textbooks such as Pandas and People that present evidence for the theory of intelligent design, and I could go further. But you had Discovery Institute people actually encouraging the teaching of intelligent design in public school systems.  Whether they wanted the school boards to teach intelligent design or to mention it, certainly when you start putting it in writing that writing does have consequences.  In fact, several of the members including Steve Meyer agreed to be expert witnesses, also prepared expert witness reports.  Then all at once decided that they weren't going to become expert witnesses at a time after the closure of the time we could add new expert witnesses.  So it did have a strategic impact on the way we could present the cases because they backed out when the court no longer allowed us to add new expert witnesses which we could have done. Stephen Meyer wanted his attorney there.  We said because he was an officer of the Discovery Institute he certainly could have his attorney there.  But the other experts wanted to have attorneys that they were going to consult with as objections were made and not with us, and no other expert that was in the Dover case, and I'm talking about the Plaintiffs, had any attorney representing them.  So that caused us some concern about exactly where was the heart of the Discovery Institute, was it really something of a tactical decision, was it the strategy that they've been using in I guess Ohio and other places where they pushed school boards to go in with intelligent design, and as soon as there's a controversy they back out for the compromise.  I think what was victimized by this strategy was the Dover School Board because we could not present the expert testimony we thought we were going to present. MR. RYLAND:  May I just say one thing? MR. ENTINE:  No, I want to have Ken have his shot and then you can come back. MR. RYLAND:  Okay. MR. MILLER:  Do we have to?  I'm really enjoying this. MR. ENTINE:  Sure.  Yeah. MR. MILLER:  That is the most fascinating discussion I've heard all day. [Laughter.] MR. MILLER:  I would also point out that the witnesses for the Plaintiffs, all of whom were serving without compensation looked in great envy at the expert witnesses for the other side who were making a hundred bucks an hour or something like that.  I found it absolutely astonishing that people would file expert statements formally, big ones, supporting one side, and they would file rebuttal reports and they would participate actively in the case and at a point when one side could no longer replace them, they would suddenly withdraw.  My feeling is a promise and I promise, and therefore I was there. The sort of disinformation regarding the reasons behind the withdrawal of the Dover case that you just heard from the representative of the Discovery Institute saying we have never advocated, I think it's exactly what he said, never advocated the teaching of intelligent design in the school, and I noticed Mr. Thompson then held up the booklet in which they explain how to teach intelligent design in the school, is very indicative of the rhetoric that comes out of this institution. You heard the Discovery Institute representative mention Antony Flew, a well-known British atheist who suddenly has decided that he sort of believes in God, and you might have heard the implication that Antony Flew is now a fan of intelligent design.  In fact, Antony Flew is specifically against the version of intelligent design that is peddled by the Discovery Institute and has gone so far as to specifically endorse my own dismantling of intelligent design arguments in my book of a few years ago and saying that he finds this dissection compelling and scientifically convincing.  So as I say, those of us who have worked with you might say or around the Discovery Institute over the years have come to expect this, and I think we've seen it again today. Like Mr. Thompson, I really can't comment specifically on the trial.  The trial is still ongoing.  I doubt very much I'll be recalled to Harrisburg, but all witnesses I think are legally subject to recall.  And I wouldn't want to characterize exactly what was going on in the courtroom, how the judge is leaning, and I certainly am not going to discuss legal issues with the distinguished colleagues who are off to my left. But one of the things that I did want to remark about is we've heard a lot of rhetoric today about allowing discussion and keeping Darwinism from being made a dogma and don't we have the right to challenge it and so forth and so on.  It strikes me that this sort of rhetoric has a fundamental disconnect with reality because what actually happened in Dover, and all you have to do is read the papers, is after the Board of Education instructed first its teachers to read the statement about intelligent design, the teachers refused and they deserve I think awards for courage, and they gave as their reason the Pennsylvania Teacher Code of Ethics which they all had to sign to become teachers in the State of Pennsylvania, one provision of which is, I will never knowingly present false information to a student.  If the issue here is academic freedom, how about the academic freedom of a teacher not to present false information, and in a sense, that's what the case is about. Near the end of my own testimony on direct examination I was actually asked by the counsel for the Plaintiffs pretty much the rhetorical question that Mr. Thompson asked which is just a one minute statement, what's the big deal?  My first reaction to that statement was to turn it around, which if it's really what's the big deal, then why is the Board of Education fighting this case all the way through if it's not a big deal, saying it's not a big deal, we'll read it, no problem.  School Boards do that all the time to get pesky parents off their backs. I think the reason is self-evident.  They thought that statement is important.  They thought that statement means something.  And it has four paragraphs, and I think Mr. Thompson read the whole statement, and when you break down what the four paragraphs really sound like to a 14 year old, and believe me, kids listen to this, it's pretty interesting. The first paragraph basically says evolution, we got to teach it whether we like it or not because it's in the standards.  Evolutionary is not a fact.  It's full of gaps and holes, not reliable.  But there's this other really good theory and we got books about it.  In fact, not just a book, we got two classroom sets and they're in the library.  Go study up.  Not a single word about gaps or holes in this other theory.  Then finally it basically says we are a standards driven district, we got to test you on this whether we want to or not. So it basically is a statement that is systematically designed to undermine students' confidence in mainstream science, not just the theory of evolution, but in the whole validity of the scientific process and the scientific method.  It basically tells them you can't trust science, and I think that's one of the reasons why the teachers didn't like this at all. Then the last point is an observation that I've made before, but I heard the Big Bang again so I want to make the observation again.  That is advocates of intelligent design like to paint themselves as the lone heroes fighting against scientific dogma.  They got a really revolutionary idea and they're going to convince everybody in science, give them a couple decades.  You know what?  Maybe they will.  Maybe they will. And they cite the Big Bang as an example of an idea that was once regarded with suspicion or as heresy and gradually won over.  But the interesting thing is not the question as to whether or not revolutionary ideas occasionally win out in science, the interesting question is how do revolutionary ideas win out, and the Big Bang won out because of scientific research because Arno Penzius found the background radiation to the Big Bang.  They completed the theory.  They stitched it together.  It was a predictive theory that says you ought to go out and find this in nature. The curious thing is the advocates of that theory did not try to get themselves injected into curriculum.  They didn't produce pamphlets on how you can get the Big Bang taught in your school district and avoid constitutional questions.  They did research, the won the scientific battle.  That's how science actually works, and for all the high-minded statements about design, about the philosophy of Aristotle and about fairness and about the implicit theological assumptions of evolution, the straightforward and simple matter as Dr. Krauss said is science works and it is particularly good at detecting stuff that isn't true.  If intelligent design has the facts of nature on its side, it'll win out, and I don't see any particular reason to fight this legal route unless the battle you are fighting is primarily political, cultural, social and religious and not scientific.  And in this case, to use a nice lawyer term these guys will understand, res ipse locutor, the facts speak for themselves.  Thanks. MR. ENTINE:  I want to have Mark have a chance to respond, and then I have a question for Stephen. MR. RYLAND:  I just wanted to say a couple of things very quickly.  One is I won't get into a tit-for-tat about whether Discovery's employees were behaving properly or not.  I will say that just to be clear, we are convinced that if the question before the court is the per se constitutionality of teaching design then it's very clear when I was arguing using my thought experiments that there's really only one reasonable answer.  That however is not necessarily the court's decision that we face in Dover since there are all these other complicating factors of actual motive, purpose and so forth and so on.  I'll leave it at that. MR. ENTINE:  I have a question Stephen, and then I'm going to open it up to the audience.  Stephen, I'm wondering is there a one, two, three, four paragraph statement that could have been designed that you think would pass muster that would mandate the thinking about intelligent design in the context of a science curriculum, again, that would pass constitutional muster, or is it the very fact that the concept evokes God in a broader manifest sense and suggests that you couldn't design one? MR. MEYER:  Yes, I don't think you could have any kind of statement that politically mandates the inclusion into a science class of religious ideas.  Everything is going to turn on the nature of the ideas.  If the court decides that the ideas themselves are religious in nature, that's frankly the end of the analysis under the current doctrine. MR. ENTINE:  I want to open this up. MR. RYLAND:  May I just say one thing about that? MR. ENTINE:  Let's just go to the audience at this point. MR. MIASOV:  My name is Mike Miasov [ph].  I have a short question for Mr. Ryland. MR. ENTINE:  What organization are you with?  I'm sorry. MR. MIASOV:  I'm a student of U.S. foreign policy, and I have a short question for Mr. Ryland.  Do you know of any believer in the design theory who does not believe in God, a Christian God? MR. RYLAND:  Yes.  I've already named several.  Antony Flew, Aristotle, Plato.  David Berlinski is a critic of Darwin's theory, although he doesn't endorse alternative theories at this point.  Definitely they're around. MR. MILLER:  And I would note that every single person who was just named specifically would not endorse the biological version of intelligent design which the Discovery Institute advances.  These people are philosophically intelligent designers in the sense they believe in meaning, order and purpose to the universe, and for what it's worth, so do I.  But that's quite different from this biological theory of intelligent design. MR. RYLAND:  So if we can interject, so you would permit this discussion in a cosmology class but not a biology class? MR. MILLER:  But Mark, I don't go around pronouncing what I would permit or what I would not permit. MR. RYLAND:  Why not?  You've been doing a lot of that today. MR. MILLER:  Because actually I can't recall even once that I have said I would not permit this, I would not allow this and so forth and so on. MR. LESARD:  Dick Lesard [ph].  I'm not representing any organization.  My question is for Mr. Moore.  If I understood you right, you were critical of the Plaintiffs for engaging in ad hominem attacks directed against supporters of intelligent design.  Didn't you rather partially engage in something very similar to ad hominem attacks particularly directed at Dr. Forrest in pretrial arguments and in cross-examination? MR. THOMPSON:  The name is Richard Thompson from the Thomas More Law Center.  I don't know that I in cross-examination--I asked the questions, but I didn't attack her on the basis of ad hominem attacks.  Basically I got into the position that she was a member of the ACLU since 1971, that she was on their board of directors, that she was also on the National Advisory Commission for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, that she was a member of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Society, but those were not ad hominem attacks.  Those were going to her motivation and bias as a witness for an organization that was actually bringing the lawsuit. MS. HOLDEN:  Constance Holden from Science.  Mark Ryland, you have what sounds like a very sophisticated concept of design, talking about eminent design opposed as something imposed from the heavens.  I don't know about self-organizing systems and complexity, but isn't that all part of a piece of that stuff?  And in another forum, you mentioned as Stuart Kaufmann as someone who had alternative views, but there's a statement on the AAAS website that has quote from him saying that he still believes in Darwin's theory. So it seems to me that the way you're presenting design, it could very well fit within what people talk about who believe in Darwinian evolution. MR. RYLAND:  That's a good question.  It's certainly true that people who have a design perspective accept Darwinism as a partial explanation for the phenomenon that we see.  There's no question about that.  The question is it an absolutely complete explanation. For example, Simon Conway Morris a teleological evolutionist famously has written a book about this.  He accepts Darwin's theory to a certain extent, but he also postulates that there are laws of development in evolution much as there are laws in the development of individual organisms which give rise again and again to recurring structures which wouldn't happen if it was only being driven by random variation and natural selection. He doesn't reject the whole Darwinian paradigm, but he's in one core sense an anti-Darwinian biologist.  He is called a creationist and attacked as a nut case by the ultra-Darwinists because he's dissenting from one of their core ideas.  But there are many scientists out there like that out there way outside the bounds of what this kind of standard debate it. And there's another whole thing which I didn't get into because I didn't have time is which is the rediscovery of formal cause in systems biology and complexity theory.  There you find real hierarchy in nature being rediscovered that, no, biological things are not just matter in motion where every level can be explained as simply an epiphenomenon of lower levels.  There is something about the whole that is inexplicable purely in terms of the parts.  That's the rediscovery of formal cause which is another kind of traditional idea which gives rise to a much more complete and less reductionist understanding of what nature really is. MR.          :  I just want to interject to paraphrase somebody else.  I know Simon Conway Morris.  Simon Conway Morris is a friend of mine.  Simon Conway Morris is on the scientific side of this debate, not on the design side. MS. SPARKS:  Sara Sparks with Education Daily.  I was just wondering if any of the panelists can mention any other example of an alternate scientific theory in any other branch of science that you know of there being a move to include in a science classroom that was not related to a design--any other thing that was early in the mainstream. MR.          :  No, and it's because Darwinism is anti-theological.  It's very simple. MR. ENTINE:  You're saying outside of Darwinism, perhaps.  In the science curriculum in general. MR.         :  No. MR.         :  My answer isn't no, it's, yes, but maybe I'm thinking about this in an entirely different way.  Science is built around theories which are strongly supported by factual evidence.  The Theory of Evolution is a theory just like the germ theory of disease or the atomic theory of matter.  I'm involved occasionally in writing textbooks which are used in schools and colleges, mostly in high schools, and there are many places in these textbooks where we point out unsolved problems in biology, alternate scientific theories, that compete. We also point out surprising discoveries, the discovery of a phenomenon called RNA interference only 5 years ago has completely revolutionized the field of molecular biology and cell biology. If you wanted to you could hold up the phenomenon of RNA interference or small interfering RNAs, you could hold that up as a violation of something that scientists jokingly call the central dogma which is that information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins because the RNA interference is going to completely revolutionize that.  Is that an alternative scientific theory?  Well, I guess so, but the point about science is that science is open to this sort of stuff and it's open all the time.  This is a door through which the advocates of intelligent design always try to slip by saying we're an alternate scientific theory, too, but Lawrence when he showed that slide of mine I think had it exactly right, science is open to alternate theories all the time.  The question is can they produce the evidence, can they win the scientific consensus, and if they can do that which is what science actually does, they end up in the classroom and the textbook automatically without acts of state legislatures or boards of education. MS. BROWN:  Lauri Litman Brown [ph], Secular Coalition for America.  Mr. Thompson I think is the second speaker today who attempted to equate secularism with religion.  My question is, since the scientific method is naturalistic, wouldn't equating the two mean teaching no science or, for that matter, grammar or history or any other subject in public school? MR. THOMPSON:  First of all, I'm not sure I understand the question, but Michael Behe when he testified was testifying that his theories were deducted, I guess inducted would be the appropriate term, from his empirical observations and a scientific method.  He does not attack the scientific method.  He uses the scientific method. MR. ENTINE:  We'll take a couple of more questions.  This will be it. MS. KLEIN:  Mel Klein [ph], Accuracy in Academia.  Professor Gey, you said, and let me make sure I've got this right, academic freedom is not the freedom of the individual to teach what he wants but of the academic community to set its own standards free from political interference. MR. GEY:  Yes.  If you look at how the cases came up, they were almost all political interference cases.  They were almost all cases, many of them in fact in the 1950s and 1960s involving communists where state legislatures would mandate that communists not be allowed to teach economics, for example, or be fired from state university faculties.  In the Supreme Court cases which considered those claims, to the extent that they defined a First Amendment right of academic freedom at all at the university level, it was defined in that way, that is, a right of a university community to decide what was relevant to a particular discipline and not relevant to a particular discipline immune from political control from outside. Again, if you trace that back to the American Association of University Professors statement in the early 1920s which is where all this stuff really comes from as a theoretical matter, that's exactly what the AEUP statement states. Again, it's common sense, really.  You do not have an academic freedom right to come in and teach that 1 plus 2 equals 3 in a math class.  That just kind of stands to reason I think.  So, yes, that's right. MR. MONROE:  I'm Neil Monroe, the National Journal.  It's common in this town for scientists to routinely use scientific claims to justify political goals.  Arguably here we have some religiously motivated people using scientific claims for political goals.  To some extent, to what extent is this a political battle and why should the courts intervene in this? MR.          :  It's a political battle because the organization that is developing the curriculum is an elected body and we are in a representative democracy where these kinds of issues are debated in the public forum.  That's why it's a political battle. The other reason why it is a political battle and it may be a religious and a philosophical is that everyone understands that we are not merely talking about a particular theory, we are talking about a particular world view, and so that's why a lot of people in these various communities are really concerned about bringing into the biology class this aspect of secular humanism.  And the Supreme Court has said very clearly that it is appropriate for school boards to accommodate the religious sensibilities of his community, that's why you have elected school boards, as long as they don't violate the Constitution of the United States. Ultimately we had the President of the United States weigh in on this particular issue where he said that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution.  You're not going to avoid it in a democracy.  Almost any issue can become a political battle.  In fact, one of the experts for the Plaintiffs, John Hawk who is a theologian, used to be a professor at Georgetown University, said that every scientific theory has religious implications. MR.          :  Let me give you another take on that.  It's not a political battle and the reason it's not a political battle because it's not entirely a political country.  The Constitution takes off the table certain kinds of issues, it takes off the political table certain kinds of issues, and one of those issues is religion.  You cannot have a vote to decide what the country's religion is going to be, and this is just a subset of that larger point. MR.          :  Except the Supreme Court nominee right now is going through a political battle as far as whether she is going to be appointed or not.  People understand even the courts are involved in a political kind of issue. MR. ENTINE:  Ken or Mark, any final comments? MR.          :  Only one, and that is I want to make a comment for those of you who have been here all day agreeing with Paul Nelson to end on a note of harmony, and that is his first slide said it doesn't matter what's decided in Kitzmiller v. Dover, this battle will go on, and I think Paul is right about that. MR. ENTINE:  Thank you all.  This was an extremely illuminating panel and I think a fascinating day for all of us.  I also wanted to thank the people who were involved at AEI in bringing this conference to you particularly Lauren Campbell, Courtney Meyers, Joe Menzari and the entire staff at AEI who makes these things, Elizabeth Owen, we want to give everyone a big hand. [Applause.] MR. ENTINE:  And thank you all for coming.  I hope you found it as stimulating as we all did. </body></html>