August 8 , 2005

Dear Colleague,

         I have written on intelligent design before, but feel the urge to do so again, for the question is still very much in the news. President Bush, for example, has jumped into the fray and has urged in Texas that intelligent design be taught along with evolution. Despite the rising flood of literature on the subject, the real issue, "What do we mean by intelligence? Is there such a thing?" never comes up.

         Let me say, first of all, that design does not imply that an intelligence is at work. Again I draw your attention to the classic example of the snowflake. Under a microscope, it shows design of the most extraordinary beauty and complexity, yet no one—not even the most ardent creationist—claims that someone intelligent has designed it. The universe is so made that order is embedded in chaos, or, to put it another way, chaos can generate order. This phenomenon is well known to mathematicians. At the simplest level, a random number, if it is large enough, can contain within it such orderly sequences as l,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, or 6,6,6,6,6,6. A creationist may well take them to be evidence of human intelligence, but it is nothing of the sort. In one of Paul Erdos's greatest achievements, he showed that beneath the apparent regularities of integers, chaos lurked. God was a sort of Clown who created regularity in integers to fool his wishful thinking humans (My Mind Is Open, 1998). Einstein, by contrast, saw God as a serious fellow who did not play dice. Einstein may be said to believe in intelligent design, for he did not allow the universe to be essentially a messy stew capable of description and analysis only in probabilistic/statistical terms, and not in terms of cause and effect.

         Is the human body a product of evolution or of clever design? Creationists wax eloquent over the body's beautiful design. Evolutionists, by contrast, see it as a product of blind processes if only because--well--it is so poorly made. It is no compliment to God to say that he made the human body. "Even a first-year engineering student would be embarrassed to have designed your lower back with the extreme bend that allows you to stand erect even though your pelvis slants forward for knuckle-dragging like all our near relatives. You probably have had braces of wisdom teeth extracted because there are too many teeth for the size of your mouth. Then there are your sinuses, with a flawed drainage system that would provoke laughter from a plumber" (Donald Wise, Science, vol. 309, 22 July, 2005, p. 557).

         So, to my way of thinking, the real debate ought to be over the nature of intelligence--whether it differs from the rest of our biological make-up, whether it merits special standing--and not over intelligent design. Does this "Dear Colleague," for example, show evidence of intelligence, or is it, ultimately, just a product of natural selection, mutation, and chance? If it is just the latter, why bother to read it, much less to refute it? Moreover, how can you refute it since your refutation is itself, ultimately, just a play of necessity and random events? Intelligence, I argue, should be studied in schools and colleges where it falls between science and philosophy. We need more philosophy in the curriculum, the sort of philosophy that underlies and illuminates both science and religion.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu