In my last post, I noted that the accusation that intelligent design is a science stopper is one that misrepresents both intelligent design and science. In this post I want to look at some research that would continue to occur under a paradigm of intelligent design, doomsday prophesies of Ken Miller and others not withstanding.
In the February 28th edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists (PNAS), a paper concerning speciation ran with the title, “Ecological divergence exhibits consistently positive associations with reproductive isolation across disparate taxa.” In this study Funk, et al. show that the ecological traits of habitat, diet, and size are correlated with reproductive isolation. This is important, because reproductive isolation is the first step in speciation (the formation of new species). Amazingly this had not previously been demonstrated across a wide range of taxa in the one hundred fifty years since Darwin suggested it as a fundamental part of evolution.
A week or so later, in the March 10th Science, Elizabeth Pennisi authored a news piece concerning the mounting evidence for sympatric speciation called, “Speciation Standing in Place.” Speciation is typically thought of as occurring when some physical barrier creates reproductive isolation, say a mountain range, or even a man made wall. This is known as allopatry. However, some biologists have claimed that speciation can sometimes occur even when there is no physical barrier. This is called sympatry. Whether sympatry really occurs has been hotly debated in the evolutionary community for many years. According to Pennisi’s article however, it appears the sympatry sympathizers now have a good deal of evidence to stand on. Studies of fish that appear to have speciated despite living together in the same lake and birds that are developing “races” because their young are raised hearing different calls and songs are two of the stories that are lending credence to sympatry among evolutionary biologists.
To hear Ken Miller or Barbara Forest tell it, one would think that research like that above would never be allowed in a world that accepted design as a live possibility (see here and here for discussions of their respective doomsday prophecies). In fact, these studies are good examples of appropriate evolutionary research. What is inappropriate is when studies such as these, which elucidate the means of speciation, or similar work that throws light upon the action of microevolutionary forces, are used to argue that the whole of the Darwinian hypothesis is well supported. I remember seeing the cichlid fish example used in just this way in a debate over creationism several years ago. It is only the assumptions of the paradigm of naturalism that allow such stretches to seem plausible to anyone. Those assumptions most certainly would not survive a shift to the design paradigm.
