In an institution of higher learning, the most valuable thing we can teach our students, whether in the arts, the humanities or the sciences, is critical thinking. Critical thinking, the unwillingness to accept as true that which is unsupported by observation or experimentation, seems to be on the retreat, given the innumerable, often antagonistic "-isms" competing for the intellectual affections of students and faculty at UGA and every other campus in this country and abroad. Being able to tell the difference between what is fallacy and what is not is growing more and more difficult as time goes by, yet becomes every day more essential.
On Feb. 26, I attended a lecture, given before an overwhelmingly religious audience, by Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He has written a book, Darwin's Black Box, in which he claims that the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection cannot explain, at the molecular level, certain irreducibly complex structures and processes, and is therefore invalid.
He explains irreducible complexity by using a mousetrap metaphor: the mousetrap has a certain number of parts which work together towards an end: catching and killing mice. If any one part is disabled or removed, the mousetrap ceases to be a mousetrap. He applies that analogy to certain molecular systems within the living cell: those processes demand as a sine qua non very complex, specific chains of molecular exchanges and reactions, whereby any missing step or element renders the entire process inoperative. He concludes that he cannot see how such processes could have evolved from simpler ones, involving fewer steps or molecules. Therefore, he bows to the existence of an Intelligent Designer, outside of nature, who brought these systems and processes into existence in one divine step. In other words, Behe purports to offer "scientific proof" of the existence of a Deity.
His well-articulated albeit somewhat glib lecture was favorably received by the audience. At the end, however, several young people, presumably most of whom were students in the life sciences, stood up to ask questions. I was gratified to see that critical thinking and rationality, far from having become obsolete and unfashionable in academic circles, were alive and well. All these young men were invariably gracious and formulated their questions with both clarity and courtesy. On more than one occasion, Behe either had to admit that he hadn't given any thought to the issue raised by the questioner, or offered an answer that touched only marginally upon the question directed to him.
Listing all the arguments against the fallacies Behe presented as truths would be too long and tedious. His arguments against a naturalistic cause for the evolution of life on Earth by natural selection ignore volumes of evidence to the contrary, from the realms of anatomy, physiology, genetics, ecology, paleontology and probably a host of other scientific domains I am not even aware of, being merely one of those "literary types" he lightly dismisses as unable to comprehend a number raised to any really high power.
Behe's thesis is the same threadbare argument from design discredited by Hume and Voltaire in the 18th century, but which creationists insist on resurrecting. His mousetrap is only a slight variation of the Designists' infamous watch and watchmaker. Creationists used to cite the bird wing and vertebrate eye in their arguments for biological design, but having lost that ground to modern molecular and developmental biology, they now retreat to the subcellular level. The argument doesn't carry any weight down there either.
The temptation to present his work as sheer intellectual sleight-of-hand is strong, but would be unfair. After all, Behe is a biochemist with academic credentials. The only problem that those students and I saw with his perspective is that it illustrates a well-known item of Murphy's Law: to every problem, no matter how complex and daunting, there will come eventually a simple, elegant, wrong solution. Behe's "solution" is wrong because it is not falsifiable, i.e., not open to being disproven, a must for any theory that calls itself "scientific."
He lends it credence by the common ploy that many young-Earth creationists use: if evolution can be discredited, then their own interpretation is ipso facto validated. But that is not critical thinking, which demands, particularly in the sciences, that one continue to investigate a problem or a phenomenon when a natural cause cannot be ascertained at first. The Intelligent Designer claim precludes the need for any such significant research, any critical thinking, and, in the end, shows itself to be intellectually sterile.
Several times during his lecture, Behe said, "We must follow the data where it takes us." I saw him following mostly his metaphysical predispositions and received ideas, precisely the kind of anti-intellectualism we must teach our students to reject. I was deeply gratified, however, to see that Behe's proposition was countered with the true weapons of intelligence: rationalism, and the will to question conclusions that seem too good to be true.
Fortunately, critical thinking can be cultivated and even taught. Several Web sites, including one run by the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University, provide Internet resources on the subject. UGA now has a rationalism organization of our own, tentatively named the Sagan Society, to foster critical thinking, rationalism and student-faculty interactions.
Here is the Sonoma State Web site: http://www.sonoma.edu/cthink/University/default.html. Other critical thinking resources are listed at http://www.infoseek.com/Titles?qt=critical_thinking&oq;=&sv;=FR&lk;=noframes&col;=WW%2Ccat_RES&nh;=10.
--Francis Assaf is professor of French in the department of Romance languages.
