Richard Dawkins on intelligent design

Found this slightly old (05/2005) piece from Richard Dawkins warning against creationism in the wake of Kansas school board's attempt to throttle the teaching of evolution in that state.

Intelligent design is a new theory that claims that nature is so complex that it could not have evolved simply by natural selection, and in effect should in fact have been created by some form of external intelligence. The theory banks on "gaps" or "mysteries" that they claim Darwins evolutionary theory cannot explain. Since such "intelligence" is a transparent reference to God, this new theory has found significant funding and favor from the religious right. However, it has not found much purchase among the scientific community.

In his essay, Dawkins warns against such political interference in science:

Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself.


This piece also documents some out of context quotes that have been latched on to by the Intelligent Design (ID) crowd to claim that even eminent scientists support their theory.

The distinguished Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is widely quoted as saying that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed”. Again, this was a rhetorical preliminary to explaining how the powerful illusion of design actually comes about by natural selection.


And finally, Dawkins concludes by seeking to expose the underlying forces behind the theory.

The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God.


There has been significant attempts by the Religious interests to turn this into a Believers vs Atheists argument. I hope more people of impeccable religious credential step forward to defend science against this barbarity. This has nothing to do with God, and it may not even be in the interests of Religion to politisize this issue. Everyone knows that the scopes monkey trial was in fact a setback to religion.

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