Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

May 3 , 2005

Dear Colleague,

Knud Rasmussen was a Danish explorer and anthropologist who studied the culture of the Inuits in the 1920s. He asked an Inuit, "What brought about the ice ridges on the coast, which prevent you from hunting?" The Inuit replied that they were brought about by strong wind off the sea. "But what caused the strong wind?" The Inuit gave another causal answer. Rasmussen kept asking how and why until finally the Inuit replied that, well, it was the will of the Spirits. This exchange, which impressed me by its rationality when I first read it, came back to me as I watched a public-television show on creationism in American schools. A teacher who struggled to present the complex materials on biological evolution could be stopped short by the confident student assertion, "But the Bible tells us that God created the animals and the human beings." End of any need to consult the book of nature! And end of any need to study the textbook that draws on that consultation! Creationism is intellectual laziness. In theological language, it commits the sin of sloth. Note how the Inuit struggled to avoid laziness. He continued to offer rational causes until his intellect was defeated, and he finally had to sign off with God or the Spirits.

A recent editorial in Science (vol. 308, 8 April 2005) has the dramatic title, "Twilight for the Enlightenment"? The answer is not quite, or not quite yet. But we are getting there fast on the backs of galloping creationism and intelligent design. Intelligent design? Is the notion of intelligent design a mere trick of making creationism more respectable, an underhanded way of getting God back in business? Or do we have here a serious issue that establishment science, through intellectual laziness, refuses to countenance? To think about the issue, I find it helpful to separate "design" from "intelligence." Does design--even an extraordinarily complex and beautiful design--imply the existence of a guiding intelligence? Surely not, if we think of the snowflake. Its beauty puts Belgian lace to shame. Yet it is a product of what could seem chaotic physical forces. The eye used to make Darwin shudder, but he needn't have, for given a combination of the processes of natural selection and chance mutation, operating through aeons of time, it could have emerged without a designer. "Could have" is the problem. What is the statistical probability of even the simplest micro-organic unit (say, the bacterial flagellum) emerging from purely causal and random processes? To those who favor some kind of intelligent design--mostly mathematicians and physical scientists--the probability is extremely low. To refute their statistical arguments, biologists themselves have to be statistically sophisticated. They have to be good at math as well as at biology. Anything wrong with that?

And now to human intelligence. Is it also an exclusive product of biological evolution? Let's say it is. But if it is, why bother to read a "Dear Colleague" letter or any letter? And why, when you don't like what it says, are you tempted to refute it--to refute what is, after all, an effect of necessity and chance--with rational arguments? Questions of this kind are philosophical, but they are not merely philosophical, and are certainly not anti-science. From this excursus, I conclude that a sound biology course is of necessity extremely demanding, for it requires the student to be well versed not on in evolution theory, but also in the higher mathematics and in a philosophical tradition that runs from Plato to Roger Penrose. Is it any wonder that creationism, with its pat answers, is so popular in our schools?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu