New Quaker Notebook

You gotta accessorize. The US refused to enter into meaningful dialogue on the issue of nuclear proliferation, enabling the five-year UN review of the 1970 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to end in utter disarray.[1] Bickering began over the agenda when the conference started on May 2 and what genuine discussions took place after that were scattered sometimes over nonproliferation, sometimes over disarmament. The US wanted to discuss Iran and North Korea; everybody else wanted to talk about changing America's commitment to its militant nuclear policies. Said a spokesman for the US mission to the UN: "We have discussed disarmament, made commitments and are proud of our record. But a credible US nuclear deterrent is an important statement that will always be there."[2] It was clear from the outset that the US considered the treaty review to be a perfunctory and generally uninteresting irrelevancy (sort of like the Busheviks consider the UN itself) and sent only mid-level US diplomats to the 2005 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is just too busy this month.

While the US marches around the world swinging its big nuclear stick, laboring as it does to fight the "war on terror" and to "end tyranny in our world," it still can't free itself from the addiction of weapons sales, even when faced with selling to undemocratic countries with long records of human rights abuses. A special report by the World Policy Institute reveals that in 2003 the US "transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts" in the world, and that 13 of the top 25 recipients of these arms transfers were defined as "undemocratic" by our own State Department:

"When countries designated by the State Department?s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 US arms clients in the developing world in 2003—a full 80%—were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses."[3]

War is big business and the US has well positioned itself to be the world's biggest broker of war and war paraphernalia.

The Whiz Bang. The evolution debate in Kansas is being shrouded in the gas of competing motivations. On May 5, 6, and 7 the Kansas Board of Education brought in numerous experts to debate its science standards and whether Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection ought to have exclusivity as the standard explanation for the origin of species. Prominent among those called to testify were several proponents of "intelligent design" (ID), which argues that "certain features of the natural world—from miniature machines and digital information found in living cells, to the fine-tuning of physical constants—are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause."[1]

In 1999 the Kansas board deleted from its science standards most references to evolution, but then in the following year (with a new elected board) the evolution-friendly standards were allowed back in. Conservatives again recaptured the board's majority in 2004, and so the issue comes full circle and the cycle perhaps continues.[2] Fellows of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, WA, where most ID research is focused, were invited to testify, as was the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which declined to attend "out of concern that rather than contribute to science education, it will most likely serve to confuse the public about the nature of the scientific enterprise."[3]

I think the Discovery Institute's aims are surely legitimate, but opponents of ID as a scientific strategy continue to cast it as a reincarnation of Creationism, and in many ways ID really is starting to look like its idiot cousin. ID advocates now want the Kansas school board to blur the distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" by defining science as "a systematic method of continuing investigation."[4] Now of course science is a systematic method of continuing investigation, but then so is ghost hunting—and phrenology, UFO investigations, and all those inquiries the US military now has to make into detainee abuse in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq (not to mention prisoner renditions and the queer paparazzi who are stalking the imprisoned Saddam Hussein in his underpants).[5] The real problem with ID is not that it can't be a legitimate explanatory tool for biologists and other life scientists, but rather that it's still a conceptual problem for scientists who are wedded to a methodology that favors nonpurposive explanations. For them, it's a Hobson's Choice, an all or nothing, science versus everything else, and it's what ID proponents are trying to help them get past. But the problem that was brought to Kansas isn't a mere methodological issue anymore. It's a philosophical problem and so extends far beyond mere teacher affection for Darwin, natural selection, and/or evolution.

Solomon's solution here should be to accept that evolution is the prevailing scientific theory, for it is.[6] It's plainly a fact that evolutionary theory is the dogma of modern life science. It's taught uncritically in nearly all public schools in the US and it's taught uncritically in most public colleges and universities within US borders. Ignoring it will stunt the intellectual and cultural development of students in the Kansas public school system. But the bigotry door swings the other way if competing theories can't have a place at the table here. William Dembski has pointed out that Darwin and his circle not only put forth a theory of speciation, "but they also insulated that theory within a positivistic cocoon that henceforth would admit only those theories that proposed to account for life in terms of naturalistic mechanisms."[7] If, as ID theorists argue, the explanatory capabilities of naturalistic mechanisms are exhausted when faced with the irreducible complexity of living organisms, accounting for the existence and diversity of living organisms is an issue that certainly has a place in the science classroom of the 21st century, as are alternative solutions that respected scientists now debate. Science always begins with the observable. Design is observable: that's a fact which just won't go away. Not bringing ID into the Kansas public school system will end up confirming that evolutionary theory really is just another religious creed.

1. This is Jay Richards' definition at Beliefnet.com; the article is also archived at the Discovery Institute website.
2. See Red Nova News, May 15, 2005.
3. See the April 11 letter[.pdf] from AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner to the Kansas State Department of Education. Leshner shows wisdom in remarking: "The fundamental structure of the hearing suggests that the theory of evolution may be debated. It implies that scientific conclusions are based on expert opinion rather than on data. The concept of evolution is well-supported by extensive evidence and accepted by virtually every scientist. Moreover, we see no purpose in debating interpretations of Genesis and 'intelligent design' which are a matter of faith, not facts." For another perspective on the Kansas proceedings, read Stan Cox's "monkey trial" overview at AlterNet, May 19, 2005.
4. Red Nova News.
5. On this I am reminded of Moliere's 1673 play Le Malade Imaginaire and the response his character Argan gives to the question as to why opium induces sleep: "I am asked by the learned doctor for the cause and the reason why opium causes sleep. To which I reply, because there is in it a soporific virtue that induces sleep."
6. In his 1981 essay Evolution as Fact and Theory, Steven Jay Gould wrote: "Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts."
7. Dembski, Intelligent Design, InterVarsity Press (1999), p. 85.