… Mr. Berlinski, perhaps you could say something about your attitude toward both the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design movement itself. What you’ve said in print always seems – to me at least – to be rather evasive …

Well, I don’t really think my attitude toward the Discovery Institute has been evasive. I’m all for the place …

… But you are on record as someone who does not support intelligent design – or any creation arguments for that matter …

I agree with some things that my buddies over there at the DI advocate – giving Darwinism a remarkably swift kick in the pants, for example, and I disagree with other things. Why not? The DI is a think tank – the only private institution in the world, I suspect, that has had the nerve to take on the entire Darwinian establishment. Why shouldn’t members of a think tank be allowed to think, especially for themselves? Nobody over there is telling me what to write or say. Why should they? I don’t give them much advice either. Why should I? In any case, I am always exhilarated by the David and Goliath impression that the DI has so wonderfully cultivated. The sheer chutzpah of the thing …

…Chutzpah? …

… Sorry, it’s from the New Testament Greek chuspaidaon, it means nervy or provocative …

… I see …

… no more than a handful of scholars, really, Steve Meyer, Mike Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, me – of course, I count for three – taking on the entire American scientific establishment, and more or less holding its own, too, against the most solemn anathemas and grimly voiced objurgations that any number of perfumed tonsils can devise. Of course it helps to be financed by secret Christian oligarchs …

… You’re not serious …

Of course not. If the DI had the kind of money that its critics suppose, do you think I would allow Steve Meyer or Bruce Chapman to appear in public in those frumpy suits of theirs? It’s the opposition that is well-funded. I happen to know that Talk Reason maintains a secret account at Smalto’s in Paris. Word is that Wesley Elsberry has just ordered suiting in a mink-worsted blend …

And that’s just the opposition’s high road.

… I am certain you are going to tell us about the low road too …

Oh sure. I am in that regard always amused by the celerity with which certain primitives, all jungle hoot and simian grunt, have designated me as the DI’s Jew or even as its Jewish shill, perhaps under the impression that at the DI a widespread commitment to the ubiquity of the Body of Christ prevails. I imagine that when that tactic elicits a certain degree of countervailing criticism – one of the DI’s founders was Jewish, after all – some member of the Panda’s Thumb will inculpate me in plans to use the blood of Christian children for religious purposes. A familiar enough claim, of course, but very much exaggerated. We Jews hardly need much Christian blood for the High Holidays – a few teaspoonfuls, maybe just a cup.

…I am going to just ignore that remark, Mr. Berlinski …

Sometimes the truth just hurts.

…Getting back to the point. The DI is officially supportive of intelligent design. You would not expect a dedicated Marxist to be a member of the Heritage Foundation …

Sure I would. If the DI had the money, I would urge them to put the smartest Darwinian biologists right on the payroll; the best journalists, too. Of course, given the current climate of opinion, it would have to be like putting someone in the Federal Witness Protection Program – a deal for life. But for the moment, that is neither possible nor desirable simply because the cards are stacked so heavily against the DI. When university departments of biology start advertising for biologists interested in design-theoretic issues, that will be the time for the DI to start looking for Darwinian biologists. I believe the moment will be roughly coterminous with the advent of the Rapture.

… But perhaps you could say something more about your attitude toward intelligent design itself?

My attitude is pretty much what it has always been: warm but distant. It’s the same attitude that I display in public toward my ex-wives. I have been a published critic of various design-theoretic arguments, but unlike other critics, I have never suggested that the Enlightenment would come to an end were they to be widely accepted. I have no scruples about the inference to design as an argument form. We use it all the time. My criticisms are specific, precise, and technical. I think Mike Behe and William Dembski have in irreducible complexity and complex specified information re-introduced two provocative ideas to the discussion – provocative, but not entirely adequate. And I must stress that they have re-introduced these ideas, since in one form or another they have long been a part of the world’s skeptical doubts about Darwin. I wrote about complex specified information as long ago as 1986, in Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck. You’ve read it, of course? …

… Actually, no …

Pity. It’s a wonderful book. Available now in paperback, I might add.

… I must say, Mr. Berlinski, that you do not appear to have a great deal of shame when it comes to self-promotion …

None whatsoever. But look whose talking. You’ve already managed to get everyone interested in yourself by persuading the DI to run this interview – this “Jewish agnostic living in Paris.” No, no, I’m not laughing with you, I’m laughing at you.

… Je m’en veux, I’m sure, but let us return to Intelligent Design, shall we ? …

Sure, sure. The question that interests me is really not intelligent design itself, but rather the white-hot rage it evokes. I wish I understood it better.

… Why does that surprise you, Mr. Berlinski? There is real concern in the United States about the forces of Christian fundamentalism …

You think? I can understand a concern about fundamentalism, but I am mystified that so many people party to the discussion of Darwinism fail properly to identify its source. American Christians are not, after all, chopping off heads, blowing up skyscrapers, threatening fatwas, or demanding a prompt return to the middle ages. The indecent hysteria about the religious right in the United States seems to be a textbook example of what Freud very accurately called displaced anxiety. Look, there are a number of petitions circulating on the Internet in support of Danish editors and cartoonists. Signatories have already been threatened with death. Curiously enough, no one from The Panda’s Thumb or Talk Reason seems to have signed any of them. And no wonder. No one over there wants to be caught on some grainy video babbling inanely in an effort to preserve his life. I’ve certainly not noticed that PZ Myers is eager to leap to the canon’s mouth.

… And have you signed them? ...

Yes. The terrorists can line up right behind my creditors. They’ll be there for years.

… I see. Very courageous of you, I’m sure. But getting back to the point at issue, if you are not persuaded that opposition to design arguments is sincerely based on anxiety about fundamentalism, on what is it based?...

I wish I knew; I wish I understood it better. And I’ve tried. There is, in fact, a good deal of heterodoxy on the margins of the scientific world. You look at Tom van Flandern’s web page and the blog that he’s got up and running, it’s just full of attacks on relativity, reports of forgotten experiments, clever little thought experiments, that sort of thing; and oddly enough, a lot of it is quite plausible. Note what I am not saying. I’m not saying it’s true. Just plausible.

… And thus? …

But no one pays it any attention. And this is so of a good many other scientific issues. Two very smart mathematicians have gotten themselves interested in Krishna, a lot of weird stuff, and have published an immense book on forbidden archeology. Extraordinarily interesting claims, lots of data. I would not have the slightest idea whether there’s anything there. But ditto for attacks on Big Bang cosmology, and these are sometimes undertaken by physicists with terrific credentials. In all these cases, and you can just multiply them endlessly, the queer point is that no one cares. You get a high-school physics teacher arguing that Big Bang cosmology is seriously flawed, no one says boo, certainly not the ACLU. Why have attacks on Darwinian theories become a flash point?

… Are you saying, then, that you have no idea? Surely not …

I don’t think the issue can be analyzed in terms of its manifest content. For a better sense of what’s going on, you really must go to the blogs, and not the newspapers. The newspaper columnists do little more than express prevailing pieties of thought, and most of them are too busy sniffling at Brokeback Mountain to have anything interesting to say about Darwin. The blogs are another matter. I follow two of them: Talk Reason and The Panda’s Thumb, and I must say, I find them fascinating. Talk Reason is upscale and sober, and it gets good people to write for it: Mark Perakh, for example, or Andreas Bottrero. They make an effort to be fair. And yet the overwhelming impression conveyed by Talk Reason is a kind of insecure disgruntlement. It is the impression conveyed by men who suspect that the opinions they reject might just prove persuasive to men less intelligent than themselves, rather like a group of cigarette company executives complaining to one another about the irresponsible allegations that smoking is involved in the onset of various diseases. One of their listings is entitled The Art of ID Stuntmen. An interesting title, don’t you think? A stunt is, after all, something requiring a certain skill, and stunts are designed to fool those who view them. These five words convey an entire system of anxiety.

The Panda’s Thumb, on the other hand, is entirely low-market; the men who contribute to the blog all have some vague technical background – computer sales, sound mixing, low-level programming, print-shops or copy centers; they are semi-literate; their posts convey that characteristic combination of pustules and gonorrhea that one would otherwise associate with high-school toughs, with even the names – Sir Toejam, The Reverend Lenny Flank – suggesting nothing so much as a group of guys spending a great deal of time hanging around their basements running video games, eating pizzas, and jeering at various leggy but inaccessible young women.

Now if Talk Reason conveys an attitude of insecure and even worried superiority, The Panda’s Thumb conveys something quite different, and that is a deep, almost incoherent anger.

When you look at Talk Reason, you see a lot of smart but lazy and shallow people defending what they take to be important issues of principle in a way guaranteed to make their defense a perfect irrelevance. When you look at the Panda’s Thumb, you see an entire overlooked class demanding its right to be heard, and when given that right by the blog itself, having nothing whatsoever to say beyond a very touching demand that that right be accommodated.

I don’t have any trouble understanding Talk Reason; but why Darwinism has been able to provoke this new class into existence is something more interesting, and probably more troubling.
So I come back to my original point: Why ID and why Darwinism?

… Yes, why? …

My guess it that ID has become a flashpoint as a form of what Marxists used to call left deviationism. I’ll explain in a minute, but you’ve got to remember that there is also something taking place that could be called right deviationism. Figures like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins are profoundly embarrassing the scientific establishment, and by that I mean the top biology departments, the editors of Nature and Science, the senior bureaucrats at the NSF and NIH, by going on and on about atheism, selfish genes, evolutionary psychology, stuff that everyone with their heads screwed on tight knows has absolutely nothing to do with any of the serious sciences. And I do mean absolutely, and I do mean nothing. And yet no one much cares. The ACLU is not up in arms about anything these guys say. Put Dawkins on a high school reading list with his claims about being a fulfilled atheist – that’s fine, no problems there. Everyone quite understands that Daniel Dennett is lacking a little in the top story, but he makes the most of his handicap, God Bless. And, again, no one cares what he says.

On the other hand, there is creationism and especially Young Earth Creationism. It might not exist for all the real criticism it provokes. A few years ago, I got some sharp intelligent comments from someone writing to Talk Reason. I’ll call him Mr. X, to preserve his privacy. We corresponded and by and by he showed me a manuscript on which he had been working. It comprised the most detailed, thorough, intelligent and striking critique of old-fashioned creationist ideas that I had ever seen, just tore into Henry Morris, Duane Gish, young earth creationists, Philip Johnson. I tried to get it published. I did my best. I wrote to people at Talk Reason, telling them that this is one of your own. No response, not even from Paul Gross. I sent the manuscript to the MIT press – I’m an MIT author after all. Nothing. The Princeton University Press – nothing. In the end I finally understood. The creationists did not count. The moment that anyone plumped for biblical inerrancy, he was regarded by the scientific establishment like a Czarist in Lenin’s Russia.

Ah, but ID, now that is a different matter. What makes the challenge so potent is that the ID movement has been shrewd enough to discover that it has a natural ally beyond the scientific establishment itself in the American – no the world – public at large. So what you have is a massively potent form of left-deviationism, and just as one might have expected, the prospect scares the daylights out of the biologists. It is intolerable.

The ID movement in its attack on Darwinism has simply articulated what many people instinctively feel. Darwin’s theory is plain nuts. It is not supported by the evidence; it has no organizing principles; it is incoherent on its face; it flies against all common experience, and it is poisonous in its implications.

And another thing. It is easy to understand. Anyone can become an evolutionary biologist in an afternoon. Just read a book. Most of them are half illustrations anyway. It’s not like studying mathematics or physics, lot of head splitting stuff there.

It is thus infinitely droll to see evolutionary biologists restrain themselves from debating the issue on the grounds that the public is apt to get confused. And God Knows, there’s no need to confuse the public so long as they keep those swell funding checks coming.

It won’t work, it can’t work and it shouldn’t work.

…To be continued …