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INTELLIGENT DESIGN by PAUL RUDNICK Issue of 2005-09-26 Posted 2005-09-19

Day No. 1: And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?” “I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.” “You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.

Day No. 2: “Today,” the Lord God said, “let’s do land.” And lo, there was land. “Well, it’s really not just land,” noted Vishnu. “You’ve got mountains and valleys and—is that lava?” “It’s not a single statement,” said the Lord God. “I want it to say, ‘Yes, this is land, but it’s not afraid to ooze.’ ” “It’s really a backdrop, a sort of blank canvas,” put in Apollo. “It’s, like, minimalism, only with scale.” “But—brown?” Buddha asked. “Brown with infinite variations,” said the Lord God. “Taupe, ochre, burnt umber—they’re called earth tones.” “I wasn’t criticizing,” said Buddha. “I was just noticing.”

Day No. 3: “Just to make everyone happy,” said the Lord God, “today I’m thinking oceans, for contrast.” “It’s wet, it’s deep, yet it’s frothy; it’s design without dogma,” said Buddha, approvingly. “Now, there’s movement,” agreed Allah. “It’s not just ‘Hi, I’m a planet—no splashing.’ ” “But are those ice caps?” inquired Thor. “Is this a coherent vision, or a highball?” “I can do ice caps if I want to,” sniffed the Lord God. “It’s about a mood,” said the Angel Moroni, supportively. “Thank you,” said the Lord God.

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Day No. 4: “One word,” said the Lord God. “Landscaping. But I want it to look natural, as if it all somehow just happened.” “Do rain forests,” suggested a primitive tribal god, who was known only as a clicking noise. “Rain forests here,” decreed the Lord God. “And deserts there. For a spa feeling.” “Which is fresh, but let’s give it glow,” said Buddha. “Polished stones and bamboo, with a soothing trickle of something.” “I know where you’re going,” said the Lord God. “But why am I seeing scented candles and a signature body wash?” “Shut up,” said Buddha. “You shut up,” said the Lord God. “It’s all about the mix,” Allah declared in a calming voice. “Now let’s look at some swatches.”

Day No. 5: “I’d like to design some creatures of the sea,” the Lord God said. “Sleek but not slick.” “Yes, yes, and more yes—it’s a total gills moment,” said Apollo. “But what if you added wings?” “Fussy,” whispered Buddha to Zeus. “Why not epaulets and a sash?” “Legs,” said Allah. “Now let’s do legs.” “Are we already doing dining-room tables?” asked the Lord God, confused. “No, design some creatures with legs,” said Allah. So the Lord God, nodding, designed an ostrich. “First draft,” everyone agreed, and so the Lord God designed an alligator. “There’s gonna be a waiting list,” Zeus murmured appreciatively. “Now do puppies!” pleaded Vishnu. “And kitties!” “Ooooo!” all the gods cooed. Then, feeling a bit embarrassed, Zeus ventured, “Design something more practical, like a horse or a mule.” “What about a koala?” asked the Lord God. “Much better,” Zeus declared, cuddling the furry little animal. “I’m going to call him Buttons.”

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Day No. 6: “Today I’m really going out there,” said the Lord God. “And I know it won’t be popular at first, and you’re all gonna be saying, ‘Earth to Lord God,’ but in a few million years it’s going to be timeless. I’m going to design a man.” And everyone looked upon the man that the Lord God designed. “It has your eyes,” Zeus told the Lord God. “Does it stack?” inquired Allah. “It has a naïve, folk-artsy, I-made-it-myself vibe,” said Buddha. The Inca sun god, however, only scoffed. “Been there. Evolution,” he said. “It’s called a shaved monkey.” “I like it,” protested Buddha. “But it can’t work a strapless dress.” Everyone agreed on this point, so the Lord God announced, “Well, what if I give it nice round breasts and lose the penis?” “Yes,” the gods said immediately. “Now it’s intelligent,” said Aphrodite. “But what if I made it blond?” giggled the Lord God. “And what if I made you a booming offscreen voice in a lot of bad movies?” asked Aphrodite.

Day No. 7: “You know, I’m really feeling good about this whole intelligent-design deal,” said the Lord God. “But do you think that I could redo it, keeping the quality but making it at a price point we could all live with?” “I’m not sure,” said Buddha. “You mean, what if you designed a really basic, no-frills planet? Like, do the man and the woman really need all those toes?” “Hello!” said the Lord God. “Clean lines, no moving parts, functional but fun. Three bright, happy, wash ’n’ go colors.” “Swedish meets Japanese, with maybe a Platinum Collector’s Edition for the geeks,” Buddha decided. “Done,” said the Lord God. “Now let’s start thinking about Pluto. What if everything on Pluto was brushed aluminum?” “You mean, let’s do Neptune again?” said Buddha. February 20, 2005

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW Unintelligent Design

By JIM HOLT

ecently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth- grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not Richard Barnes, Courtesy of Henry reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent Urbach Architecture designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ''The first question they will ask is: 'Well, who's the designer? Do you mean God?'''

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.

But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

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Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one- third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the DARWINIAN POLITICS doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the Which Statements reflect your views on stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. the origin of human beings? That is why, according to traditional theology, 1) We evolved from less advanced life unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all forms over millions of years, and God eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would did not directly guide this process. 2) We evolved from less advanced life seem that the population of limbo must be at least forms over millions of years, but twice that of heaven and hell combined. God guided this process. 3) God created us in our present form. It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer DEMOCRATS REPUBLICANS ALL responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait -- benevolence or Evolved omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three. But w/o God 16% 9% 13% what if the designer did not style each species Guided individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the by God 28% 23% 27% primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and Created intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has by God 51% 66% 55% suggested. Behe says that the little protein machines Unsure 5% 2% 5% in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation -- an opinion that his scientific peers Source: CBS News / New York Times overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is Poll, Nov. 18-21, 2004 correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind chance.

One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, ''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.'' But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ''proven true'' and that Intelligent design satire & critique 6 of 6

''truth cannot contradict truth.'' If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail -- endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm that progressively teased complexity out of chaos -- then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.

Of course proponents of intelligent design are careful not to use the G-word, because, as they claim, theirs is not a religiously based theory. So biology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they're told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence -- extraterrestrial scientists, say. The important thing, as the Pennsylvania school administrator reminded them, is ''to keep an open mind.''

Jim Holt is a frequent contributor to the magazine.