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from the December 2005 AN
Nature and Design
Andrew J Petto
U Wisconsin–Milwaukee
South Africa’s national science curriculum requires studying “indigenous knowledge systems” (IKS) to help students appreciate how modern science is connected to cultural traditions of observing and interacting with nature. This standard may alarm those struggling to keep evolutionary theory in North American science education, but to those trained in anthropology it offers a creative and productive approach to understanding the persistent rejection of evolution in the US. The IKS approach recognizes that IKS are not scientific “knowledge systems” just because they make observations about some aspects of the natural world, and at the same time underscores the nature of scientific inquiry.
Claims to Science
“Intelligent Design” (ID) is the most recent IKS “alternative to evolution” claiming scientific status. In essence, ID claims that so-called “Darwinian” processes are insufficient to explain the diversity and complexity of life. However, its chief appeal seems to be that it lends a scientific veneer to an IKS that is primarily a biblical explanatory narrative. ID has its roots in old-style “creation science,” and its derivation is evident both in the pre-ID affiliations of its promoters and in the nature of the “arguments against evolution” it uses. These arguments—violation of laws of thermodynamics or probability, the complexity of living things, the insufficiency of non-directed processes, etc—fill the literature of overtly biblical “scientific creationism,” and reappear in secular terms in ID literature to give the appearance of a competing scientific program.
The division of the Discovery Institute (DI) most active in promoting ID was originally called “The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.” The meaning of “renewal” to the CRSC was laid out in a strategic planning document briefly posted on the CRSC website:
Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature. The Center awards fellowships for original research, holds conferences, and briefs policymakers about the opportunities for life after materialism (www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html).
This “Wedge” document disappeared at least from the public pages of the DI’s website shortly after it was posted, and the CRSC changed its name to “Center for Science and Culture” (CSC) in 2002.
Complaint Is about Meaning
Anthropology gives us a valuable window into this cultural movement. The ID campaign uses the language of science, but its objections are not about scientific methods or theories or facts; its complaint is about meaning. The attack on materialism, of course, is about meaning. The main thrust of contemporary anti-evolutionism (particularly in North America) holds that the meaning of life is in the acceptance of and adherence to a worldview that places human existence in the context of a larger cosmic spiritual perspective that manifests a universal order imposed by a non-corporeal higher power. To be complete, ID argues, we must incorporate the action of this higher power into our “scientific” explanations. This position unites contemporary ID promoters with old-style “creation scientists,” though the former will resist public declarations that their “intelligent designer” is any particular deity (a cause for some conflict with many religious anti-evolutionists). The new twist is that ID claims to have a scientific means to detect the actions of the unnamed “intelligent agent” in the history of life on earth—and, thus, a scientific means to affirm this religious world view as superior to naturalistic science, as well as to other IKS world views.
Anthropology Needed
What perhaps most frustrates the efforts of the scientific community is its own failure to apply an anthropological analysis to this IKS. ID resonates with the US public not because of its productive research program—since it has gone over 15 years without a single peer-reviewed original research article—but because of its resonance with their IKS worldview: that order and complexity cannot arise without an agent to do the ordering and assembly. This is not a new idea, of course, but it is one that is deeply embedded in anti-evolutionism because scientific explanations for order and complexity are limited to the normal operation of natural processes behaving in lawful ways—and these appear too simple and haphazard to do the job of producing us.
Almost 150 years after Darwin and 80 years after the Scopes Trial, nearly half of Americans polled by Gallup still insist that living things were created 6,000–10,000 years ago, much in the same form as they exist today. Over two decades of efforts by scientists have barely dented that proportion. So, maybe it is time for the natural sciences to use a little anthropology. The commitment of anthropological practice, of course, is to understand cultural constructs in their own contexts, and understanding anti-evolutionism in its IKS context is the first step. These systems order observations about the natural world within the context of broader cultural narratives about the meaning of human existence. Further, as our South African colleagues have suggested, acknowledging the IKS context of anti-evolutionism may indeed improve general scientific literacy, particularly in the area of the nature of scientific inquiry as students learn to appreciate what makes an observation about nature scientific. It may not change the IKS-based commitment to religious creationism, but it could put an end to claims that such views have any scientific validity. And that would be a giant step forward.
Andrew J Petto is a bioanthropologist who teaches anatomy and physiology in the biosciences department at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; he is editor of Reports of the National Center for Science Education, and co-editor with Laurie Godfrey of the forthcoming Scientists Confront Creationism, revised edition.
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