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Against intelligent design

Seth Shostak

America's academics have joined the battle to stop a creationist takeover of outer space.

FOR ME, the battle over teaching creationism in U.S. schools has become achingly personal. Groups seeking to oust the theory of evolution from biology class — or at least hint to students that Darwin's ideas are suspect — are invoking my research to support their crusade. I work with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), an effort to find sentient beings in space by using massively large antennas to troll for alien radio signals. Any technologically adroit society will be capable of broadcasting to listeners light years away. If there is cosmic company in our galaxy, a radio antenna might just be the way to find it.

Seti sounds quixotic, but it is solid science. Academics differ in estimating when, if ever, we might tease out a faint radio whistle from the cacophony of the cosmos, but they are nearly all of one voice in saying that Seti makes sense.

Few scientists give a thumbs-up to creationism or its subtler variant, intelligent design (ID). The basis of ID is that nature is too intricate to have been built by natural processes. The meandering course of Darwinian evolution could not produce a microbe's flagellum, a DNA molecule, or a human eye, say ID's adherents. They proclaim the complexity of these constructions as proof of deliberate blueprinting by a creator, presumably from outside the universe itself.

It is here that they get personal. They say: "If you Seti researchers receive a complex radio signal from space, you'll claim it as proof of intelligent, alien life. Thus your methodology is completely analogous to ours — complexity implying intelligence and deliberate design." And Seti, they pointedly add, enjoys widespread scientific acceptance.

In fact, we are not looking for complex signals, but simple ones (such as a pure radio tone).

And we seek this type of signal in places where we suspect planets might exist. It is universally acknowledged that planets don't produce such radio tones; only transmitters do. The analogy with Seti is a poor tactic for defending ID.

Last year, ID adherents released a one-hour film, Privileged Planet, that caused a minor brouhaha when plans were announced to screen it at Washington's Smithsonian Institution, a few blocks from the Capitol. To my chagrin, I appear in the film, though I say nothing about design, intelligent or otherwise; I simply describe my own research — spliced in, presumably, for the modicum of credibility I bring.

Unlike many Europeans, who find this whole debate faintly farcical, I am not amused.

I was heartened, therefore, to learn that the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society, is finally urging scientists to push back on ID. The stand taken to forestall the demotion of Darwin in the classroom and defend the modest claim that 150 years of research has actually taught us something is braver than it might seem. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

(Seth Shostak is senior astronomer at the Seti Institute in California.)

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