very interesting article on the origins of ID - nothing to do with religion at all:
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051221/NEWS01/512210471/1006/NEWS01
Controversy about intelligent design has generated headlines across the country this year, and Tuesday's federal court ruling isn't expected to calm the debate. But where it originated and who developed it still are not well-understood
Intelligent design is derided by some as junk science and little more than a repackaging of biblical creationism. Others -- including some Indiana lawmakers who have said they are considering adding it to the state's classrooms -- view it as a thought-provoking challenge to evolution.
To hear Stephen Meyer talk, the early days of the intelligent design movement were something like the dawn of a renaissance.
Meyer, a geophysicist who leads a Seattle-based think tank dedicated to intelligent design research, traces the ID movement to the 1970s, when, he said, scientists in a variety of disciplines began to question evolutionary theory.
Chiefly, these scientists believed there seemed to be a purpose in nature that evolution's chancy randomness simply couldn't explain, Meyer said.
To them, life appeared to have been designed by some kind of intelligent designer, possibly God or some other force.
However, it took years before this loose collection of skeptics came together to start sketching out a coherent case for their doubts about evolution, Meyer said.
A critical gathering took place in 1993 when Phillip E. Johnson, a professor emeritus of the law school at the University of California-Berkeley, invited the leading voices of this new skepticism for a get-together at a beach house in Northern California.
"We had people there that were embryologists, paleontologists, molecular cell biologists, philosophers of science and biochemists," Meyer said. "There was a kind of a collective 'Aha' at the event. (Until then,) many of these people thought they were alone in their skepticism about evolution."
Besides Johnson, the meeting included several others who have emerged as the luminaries of today's intelligent design movement. Among them:
William Dembski, a mathematician who has used probability theories to support the intelligent design argument. Dembski started the first think tank devoted to intelligent design at Baylor University. Today, he continues his work at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
Dr. Michael J. Behe, a professor of biosciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, who crafted ID's "irreducible complexity" argument, which holds that certain organisms could not have developed through evolution's stairstep process because, without all of their existing parts, they could not have survived.
Design theorists such as Behe believe that, in its purest form, ID is rooted in science first and foremost. But the ID community also includes people, such as the Rev. Fredrick W. Boyd Jr., who promote intelligent design based on religious beliefs.
Boyd, the leader of Zion Unity Missionary Baptist Church in Downtown Indianapolis, believes God is the intelligent designer. And he says teaching evolution alone leaves children with a sense that they have no more purpose in life than any other animal.
"I'm not clamoring for the elimination of evolution" in education, Boyd said. "I'm clamoring for both sides of the story."
To evolutionists, intelligent design is just an attempt to sneak creationism into public schools.
They point to 1987 -- and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard that said public schools couldn't teach creationism -- as a pivotal year for intelligent design.
"Literally, in the middle of the year after that case was decided, they switched terms from 'creation science' to 'intelligent design,' " said Robert T. Pennock, professor of philosophy of science at Michigan State University.
"The evidence is very clear that this is a new name for the same idea."
Not surprisingly, ID adherents dispute this.
"Pandas"
Long before today's controversy, Greek philosophers such as Aristotle noted that aspects of nature seem to have an uncanny cohesion. But it wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s, a century after Charles Darwin articulated evolutionary theory, that the seeds of the modern ID movement began to take root.
Design theorists say biologists at that point began to better understand the complexity of cells, while physicists began to understand that life would not exist if the speed of light, the pull of gravity and other natural phenomena were altered in the slightest. All of that fostered the belief that some grand design was at work.
Whether ID becomes part of Indiana's school curriculum anytime soon seems unlikely in light of Tuesday's ruling. If it ever does, teachers could end up using a 1989 biology textbook that makes the case for intelligent design, "Of Pandas and People." The use of the book in public schools -- and whether ID can be taught in schools at all -- was at the heart of the case in Dover, Pa., intelligent design's first major court battle.
For pro-evolutionist scholars such as Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University and author of "Creationism's Trojan Horse," the "Pandas" book reveals much about ID adherents.
Forrest said early manuscripts of the book were filled with creation references. But after the high court's Edwards ruling, those references, according to evidence presented in the Dover case, were replaced with words and phrases such as "design" and "intelligent design."
"The creationists had to change their identity a little bit" after the Supreme Court decision, Forrest said. "They had to call themselves something different."
Meyer dismisses that notion, saying any editing of the book likely had more to do with the fact that design theorists were still trying to find a name for their movement about the time the book was being written.
Theories
Behe, for one, was still trying to sort out his thoughts about evolution at this point.
Though he's a Roman Catholic, Behe said, his parochial school teachers had taught him evolution. "We were taught that was how God created life, and that sounded OK with me," he said.
But in the late 1980s, after he read "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," by Australian geneticist Michael Denton, he started a journey that put him firmly in the intelligent design camp. The book asserted that there were holes in Darwin's theory of evolution.
"It really shook me," Behe said.
He said he spent time searching science libraries for papers that explained the evolution of key components of biochemistry -- such as the systems that enable nourishment to move through cells or blood to clot. But he found none.
For a couple of years, he did little with his altered worldview.
"I didn't know what to do," he said. "Mostly I wandered the halls and muttered rude things about evolution to anybody I came across."
By 1996, Behe's thinking had crystallized sufficiently, and he would write one of the few books on intelligent design to reach a mass audience -- "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," which sold 200,000 copies. He also would emerge as a key witness for the defense in this year's trial at Dover.
In a nutshell, Behe's "irreducibly complex" theory holds that removing just one of the proteins found in cells would leave those cells unable to function. As a result, he says, the step-by-step development of cells necessary to explain evolution makes no sense.
Behe's theory was challenged in the Dover courtroom by Kenneth R. Miller, a cell biologist from Brown University who said the organisms Behe claims to be "irreducibly complex" simply aren't so complex, and that science has found their evolutionary ancestors.
Also, biologists note that a protein critical today might have been unnecessary in the early days of a cell's formation.
Dembski, who relied on Behe's book as the basis for his work, is noted for having developed ID's "explanatory filter." The filter, according to Dembski, can isolate related patterns in the randomness of nature. Such patterns support the idea of an intelligent designer, ID adherents say.
Like Behe, Dembski has seen his work dismissed by physicists, geneticists and others scientists. Primarily, critics say, Dembski's filter fails to consider combinations of natural forces that help explain life on the planet.
Johnson, meanwhile, is viewed as the inspirational leader of the intelligent design movement.
Johnson published "Darwin On Trial," a biting critique of evolution, and, along with Meyer, was one of the early figures involved in establishing what has become the hub of the intelligent design movement -- the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, created in 1996.
Johnson, according to ID critics, produced a document that serves as the smoking gun in their quest to reveal intelligent design as nothing more than repackaged creationism.
The 1999 document, intended as a fundraising tool for the Discovery Institute, describes the think tank's two governing goals: the "defeat of scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies; (and) to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
The idea is that intelligent design would act as a "wedge" to dismantle the "materialistic" idea that people are merely "animals and machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces" but instead are "moral and spiritual beings."
Johnson could not be reached for this story. But Meyer, who directs Discovery's Center for Science and Culture, has a quick defense for what came to be known as the "wedge strategy."
Science, he said, mistakenly closes the door to explanations in nature that point to a designer, things such as the digital-like coding of DNA proteins.
So far, the work produced by the researchers affiliated with the Center for Science and Culture -- there are about 100 -- has failed to gain a foothold in the larger scientific community.
The more immediate question now is whether intelligent design supporters, given their loss in Pennsylvania, can expect to gain a foothold in Indiana's classrooms.
