Sand Dunes and Science

Part of what has angered me so much about the “Intelligent Design” (nee Creationism) movement, is their willful and ruthless exploitation of the general public’s weak or non-existent scientific literacy. There is plenty of blame to go around why this strategy can be effective, not least the somewhat careless and historically established jargon scientists use (a common thread revolving around the meaning of the term “theory”, which is baldly misrepresented by IDers, but also not as clean as some of the scientist rebuttals suggest), but that is not the purpose of this comment. Rather, it has occurred to me that the idea of scientific principles (laws, theories) and their relationships with data, experiments, and observations desperately needs an analogy that frames for the scientifically illiterate the nature of the critiques that that are mounted by the IDers against the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

The analogy of the type of scientific theory represented by TENS that occurs to me is a sand dune. Just as a sand dune is composed of many grains of sand, so TENS is a broad structure composed of a vast array of data, experiments, applications, observations, confirmed predictions, and dependent relationships with other well established branches of science. Just as moving, or removing a few grains of sand among the million billion that compose a sand dune does not change its fundamental nature, so changing our understanding or interpretations of some of the data (a fossil here, a species there) or, pointing out one circumstance (a flagellum, for instance) that is not yet contained in the framework of TENS does not even remotely suggest the imminent collapse of the entire structure.

If I might, the analogy goes further: Scientific theories of the form represented by TENS can shift their shape over long periods of time as very large amounts of data are amassed, just as sand dunes can grow or shrink as wind adds and steals sand. And over long periods of time, grain by grain, dunes can merge to become larger structures just as theories can be subsumed by those that are more fundamental (A real sore point with me is the gross misrepresentation of the Relativity/Quantum Mechanics revolution at the beginning of the 20th century – these new scientific theories emphatically did not cause the abandonment of the physical theories of Newton, Maxwell and Boltzmann. Rather, those older theories were subsumed as special cases of the new more fundamental theories, as they had to be because they had been so well established with an array of data, experiments, applications, observations, and confirmed predictions) . But such a massive structure is persistent in the landscape, just as TENS must persist because of its extraordinary ability to organize our understanding of living systems.

Taking a teaspoon of sand from the side of a sand dune and flinging it into the wind doesn’t change the fundamental nature of a sand dune, and pointing out the biochemical complexity of the flagellum in a small class of organisms does not change the fundamental structure that organizes a profound understanding of living systems. It’s important to point out the scale of the critique ID has mounted to TENS and the sand dune analogy does that: they are picking out one or two grains of sand and ignoring the sand dune looming on their horizon. That’s not science.