Science Wars
Should Schools Teach Intelligent Design?

October 21, 2005

(Unedited transcript prepared from audio recordings.)

8:30 a.m.	Registration
8:45	Breakfast
9:00	Welcome:	Sally Satel, AEI
9:10	Panel I: Science, Religion, and Intelligent Design
	Discussants:	Paul Nelson, Discovery Institute
		Kenneth Miller, Brown University
	Moderator:	Sally Satel, AEI
10:15	Break
10:30	Morning Keynote:	Father George Coyne, Vatican Observatory
11:00	Discussant:	Michael Novak, AEI
11:30	Panel II: Should We “Teach the Controversy”
	Discussants:	John Calvert, Intelligent Design Network
		Barbara Forrest, Southeastern Louisiana University
	Moderator:	Frederick M. Hess, AEI
12:30 p.m.	Luncheon Keynote:	Lawrence Krauss, Case Western Reserve University
2:00	Panel III: The Dover, Pa., Case and Beyond: Legal and Public Policy Implications of the ID Controversy
	Discussants:	Steven Gey, Florida State University
		Richard Thompson, Thomas More Law Center
		Mark Ryland, Discovery Institute
	Moderator:	Jon Entine, AEI
3:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:
MS. SATEL:  Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute.  My name is Sally Satel.  I'm a resident scholar here, and this is our conference on the question of whether intelligent design should be taught in schools.

As we meet here today, a trial is going on in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the Third District Court.  Eleven parents of the Dover area school district are charging the School Board there with violation of the separation of church and state.  Last year the parents filed this suit after the Dover School Board voted to require that high school biology teachers read to students a short statement casting doubt on Darwin's theory of evolution and proposing as a scientific alternative the theory of intelligent design.

As you know, the trial has gotten enormous attention.  It pits accepted scientific principles of Darwinian evolution, such as common ancestry and natural selection, against the idea that a designer--presumably God, although not everyone endorses that--but that some kind of intelligent designer is responsible for the complexity of life on Earth.

Today our conference will focus on the pedagogic and legal implications of teaching intelligent design in the classroom, and we have some of the most estimable thinkers and teachers in these domains, including two who have served within the last few weeks as expert witnesses in the Dover trial.

To begin, though, it is vital that we understand the fundamental ideas on both sides, those of the intelligent design proponents on one side and the champions of neo-Darwinian evolution on the other, and that's what our first panel will discuss today.  Professor Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute will argue that intelligent design theory does meet the requirements of scientific inquiry; and Professor Ken Miller of Brown will seek to establish that it fails that test and, therefore, is not a legitimate alternative to evolution and, thus, should not be taught in science classes.  Professor Nelson will talk first for about 15 to 20 minutes, then Professor Miller, then Dr. Nelson can respond to Dr. Miller and vice versa, and then the audience will--we'll take questions from the audience.

So, I'll introduce Dr. Nelson.  He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1998.  He is currently a fellow of the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, and an adjunct professor in the master's of arts program in science and religion at Biola University.  His forthcoming monograph on common descent critically evaluates that theory.  Mr. Nelson's research interests include the relationship between developmental biology and the history of life, intelligent design, and the interaction of theology and science.

Dr. Nelson.

DR. NELSON:  I'd like to thank AEI for hosting this daylong seminar.  This is a topic of incredible richness because it ramifies not only into science, but into philosophy, theology, and with Kitzmiller v. Dover into the constitutional realm as well.  So, it's a topic with literally hundreds of facets.

My title, the title in your program, is:   "If Darwin explained design, what's design?"  And I'm going to argue, if I can get this slide to advance, that it doesn't really matter what happens in Kitzmiller v. Dover, and I say this with due apologies to Barb Forrest, Ken Miller, Richard Thompson, those people here in the room who have either testified in the trial, are litigating it currently, or have worked very hard in what's going on up there in Harrisburg.  But in my view of this, it doesn't really matter what happens because the intelligent design debate is here to stay.

You know, I was on a recent speaking trip in California at Stanford and U.C. Santa Cruz, and en route from Stanford down to Santa Cruz, I was reading Cicero on the nature of gods, on the nature of the gods, written in 60 B.C.  Not a Christian on the scene.  In fact, that book is a debate between Greek philosophies, current at the time, about whether there was design in the world or no design, a debate between a design view  with some kind of transcendent action or a kind of deterministic view that an atomist might hold.

These questions are as old as humankind, and we should not think that our particular constitutional dust-ups are going to stop them.  In fact, they'll continue on into the future.  The design debate is here to stay.

Ken, I have to tell you, this is a little--here we go.  Sorry.

The issues raised by intelligent design are built into evolutionary theory itself, and they've been present right from the beginning of evolutionary theory.  I want to give you three facts to consider.  The first is--I'll come to this throughout my presentation--the test that Darwin proposed for evolution requires logically that design be a genuine empirical possibility.  Secondly, the theological content of evolutionary theory since the origin itself entails--entails that students will need to discuss theology.  Lastly, critics of design have brought the idea into the scientific literature, and I'll give you several examples of that at the end.

To assess these three things, to weigh their merits, we must discuss design pro and con.  It's unavoidable.  Unavoidable.

Fact one:  the test that Darwin proposed for evolution requires logically that design be a genuine empirical possibility.  Ken's an ump, so I'm offering this example in honor of his hobby.  He became a professional this year, he told me.  He's now a paid ump, not just a volunteer.  This is a picture that many of you have seen from the American League pennant.  This is game two, the infamous point near the end of the game when the Sox catcher Pierzynski missed on the third strike, but the ball seemed like it might have hit the ground, so he ran to first, and you know the rest of the story.

Now, the existence of the strike zone here, that boundary implies something.  It implies that a ball within that zone is a strike, a ball outside it is a ball, and the very existence of the boundary, the possibility of one outcome or another means that the ump has got to be objective.  As I'll show you in a moment, the strike zone can't be huge, and it can't be tiny either.  The logical point is, there are two possibilities for any pitch thrown from the pitcher's mound.

Well, the same is the case with evolution.  Now, here's what Darwin said on what would test the theory.  If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed that could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.  And he proposes this fairly early in the origin.  And it's a test that has come to have a great significance in our current debate.

Now, his two main claims are:  One, that a pathway of material continuity links all organisms on Earth in one giant tree; secondly, that every step in that pathway occurred by undirected natural causes only.  Now, both of these might turn out to be false.  In fact, the logic of the test requires that that possibility exist, that both of them could be false, otherwise we're assuming evolution as an a priori or as a given.  It's got to be at least possible that both of those claims can tested and turn out to be false in order for theory to be empirical.

Now, if they are false, we have a situation like this.  No material continuity, let's say, or if the second claim is false--because you could have material continuity and yet have design--that's what Asa Gray, the great Harvard botanist believed--you have teleological mechanisms operating.

Now, it's essential that you realize that the--testing either of these implies this and that there is a logical symmetry here.  There's nothing spooky about this.  It's just the testability of evolution requires that these other possibilities be on the table as live possibilities, even if they're not the case.

Now, typically, this is what we see again in baseball.  You've got a strike zone, you've got strikes and balls.  The existence of the boundary entails multiple outcomes, possible outcomes.  Now, here's a case that could turn out to be one such example that falsifies evolution. You know.  The eye and the bacterial motor get lots of attention.  This is an interesting case.  It's a lowly digestive enzyme, very powerful, but rather lowly.  Pepsin.  The active site here.  It's a proteolytic enzyme.  Works in your stomach.  Now, when this enzyme is produced by your stomach, it's actually not produced in this form because if it were, it would begin to digest the very cell in which it was synthesized.  When it's produced, it's produced in a form called a zymogen, which is inactive, and that green portion there is a 44 amino acid sequence that is snipped out after the pepsinogen, the form that's produced in the cell, is secreted into the stomach.  And you could see why you would want this.  You don't want a digestive enzyme chewing up the very cell that produces it.  So, natural selection has got somehow to produce first an enzyme that actually is not functional as a digestive enzyme and then find a way of activating it later, an interesting kind of puzzle for evolution, the sort of thing that you can say well, maybe that's the kind of example that would cause us to question the adequacy of the Darwinian mechanism here and raise this as a real possibility.

But then a funny thing happens, and it happens not because of the logic here, but it happens because of the constitutional structure of our country and because of the First Amendment.  People say, "Hey, that's creationism."  Well, that's a name for it, certainly, but it doesn't really matter.  That is what is implied by our strike zone.  If our strike zone has this proportion--in other words, no matter what we observe, it's consistent with evolution.  Evolution is no longer an empirical theory that can be tested.  If our strike zone looks like this, again we have the same problem.  The possibility of testing evolution entails logically that other outcomes, namely the one on the bottom, are live empirical candidates.  Logical symmetry here in inescapable.  Point one.

Point two or fact two.  The theological content of evolution itself since the origin requires that students discuss theology.  I was in a debate in Philadelphia a few months ago with Neil Shanks (ph) on National Public Radio, and I asked Neil--he's a philosopher who's written a book on this topic, "Skeptic of Design"--I said, "Neil, in a high school biology class, public school biology class in the United States, could students read "The Origin of Species"?  And he said no.  So, I asked him about two other books.  One was his own and the other was Stephen Gould's "The Panda's Thumb."  He said no to each.  And finally Margo Adler, the host from NPR, spun in her chair to face him, and she said, "What are you saying?"

Well, I knew from previous correspondence with Neil that his view of science was such that theological content was not part of science.  Well, if you open "The Origin," it chock full of theology.  Here's one example.  This is a view very close to the view that Ken holds.  Ken and I are both Christians, theists, believe that God is real, that He acts in the history of the world.  Darwin at the time of the writing of "The Origin" probably was himself a theist if not a Christian.  At the end of the book he says:  "You know, it makes more sense that God should have built the world using his natural laws rather than acting directly."

Now, I'm a high school biology teacher.  I assign "The Origin" to my students.  They come to this passage, and they want to evaluate this argument.  They come back into class, and they say, "Now, Darwin makes this claim about what God should have done.  I disagree with him.  Can we talk about that?"

Now, the teacher has a choice.  She can either say no and bowdlerize "The Origin," pretend that that passage is not there, or she can say yes and risk getting a call from the ACLU because the theological content of evolution is considerable.

Here's an example from the recent literature--sorry, I'm having a little trouble with this.  This is George Williams, who is a professor at SUNY Stonybrook, a leading evolutionary theorist, and this is one of his works from 1992 in a technical monograph series published by Oxford, a work intended for his colleagues professionally.  And he says in there, "The vertebrate eye is not the work of a wise designer.  As many of you know, the photo receptors in the vertebrate retina are oriented away from incoming photons.  As a consequence of that, when the nerve bundle comes together at the back of the retina, it creates a blind spot because all the wiring comes out here and has to go towards the brain there.   Cephalopod eye, the eyes of squid, for instance, are wired differently.  The photo receptors there face towards the light."

Now, Williams goes on.  He says:  "There would be no blind spot if the vertebrate eye were really intelligently designed.  In fact, it is stupidly designed."  Now, this is, he says, the eye is not the sort of thing that a wise designer would make.

Now, a student comes in in an AP biology class with that book and they say to the teacher, "I want to evaluate the merits of this argument.  I think there are good reasons for the vertebrate photo receptors to be oriented as they are, and I want to question Williams' theology. " Again, that teacher has a choice.  She can say  no, despite the fact that this is in the literature, we can't talk about it, or she can say yes, it's an interesting question, let's debate it and risk a call from a Civil Liberties attorney.

The problem of choking is another example that Williams raises.  In the human airway and throat there's a point of intersection here at the epiglottis where you run the risk of choking if your epiglottis doesn't function properly, and Williams says this is evidence of evolution.  Why?  Because a wise designer wouldn't have done it that way.  And, in fact, in a alter work he puts it this way.  This is a book published by Basic Books in their science series.  It is a science book.  It was a QH call number, which puts it right smack in the middle of evolutionary theory in a library, Library of Congress classification system.  How are we going to talk about that without bringing up things that are constitutionally dangerous?

It's often held that the Darwinian revolution purged the last traces of theology from biology.  Well, actually what happened was much more interesting, and I'll show you that.  Theology never went away.  Rather, its content changed, and it's still there.

 Ken, I'm just going to ask you to advance the slides for me.

This is how these arguments work.  We don't need a detailed logical analysis.  Here God is putting two calories into a carrot and 1,250 into an eclair.  And those of you who have bellied up to the breakfast bar this morning know exactly what I'm talking about.

Next slide, please.

Fact three--and this is I think the most interesting.  Critics of design have now brought the idea into the literature itself.

Next slide.

Last night Mark Ryland, who will be speaking this afternoon, and I and a couple of other people went to the AAAS, not  very far from here, to hear a talk by Chris Adami, who is the last author on this paper in "Nature. "

Can you click through.

And it was a wonderful talk.  And Chris in that presentation said:  "The reason I and my co-authors wrote this paper and published it in "Nature" was to refute Michael Behe's view of irreducible complexity.  And this has been videotaped, so you'll be able to see the tape of this and his discussion of Behe in the context of this paper in "Nature."

Oh, back please.

A longstanding challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it could explain the origin of complex organismal features.  Now, who raises that challenge?  Well, design theorists do.  So, what you have here is one half of the debate, one half.  You can critique design in the scientific literature.  You just can't advocate for it.

Well, students are shrewd.  I have a 13-year-old daughter.  She's very shrewd.  She's naive in some senses, very shrewd in others.  And she knows that if she's only hearing half the story that she's only getting half the story.  So, it's possible to critique design, as this paper does specifically as Adami explained at the AAAS last night to challenge Michael Behe's view, why can't Behe do the same thing?  And why can't students talk about it?

Next slide.

What Adami was saying was this logic exists.  If those top two claims of evolution are false, the bottom is entailed logically by their falsity.  The bottom might be the case, so it's important to adjudicate the dispute in terms of evidence, and students know this whether they're allowed to talk about it or not.

Next slide.

Here's another paper--click through, please--by Scott Gilbert at Swarthmore from "Nature Reviews Genetics,"  an answer to Mike Behe.  Mike Behe raises challenges for evolutionary theory.  Here are my replies.

Next slide.

This is an interesting paper from "The Journal of Theoretic Biology" a couple of years ago--can you click once more, please.  Thanks--where they're saying now we need to be able to test our fundamental evolutionary hypotheses, like material continuity, common descent, and so forth.  One possibility, they say, among the range of other possibilities is intelligent design, and there's a section of the paper dealing with intelligent design and how it can be tested.  Now, again I pose my hypothetical.  You're a student.  You know about this paper.  You bring it in.  You want to talk about it in your public high school biology class.  What's going to be the outcome?

Next slide.

Books are even more interesting.

One more click, please.

Ken has written a book on this topic, but I noticed in his Dover testimony he said it's not science.  Well, each of these books is.  Sean Carroll,  "Endless Forms," most beautiful, wonderful book published last year by Norton; Hubert Yakki (ph)--this is a book from Cambridge published last year, and this book that I'm actually reading right now just published by Yale by Kirschner and Gerhart called "The Plausibility of Life:   Resolving Darwin's Dilemma,"  each of these goes into great detail about intelligent design.  In fact, this book has a whole chapter on the topic saying does evolution need an intelligent designer weighing the evidence pro and con.  The book by Gerhart and Kirschner as you read through the first couple of chapters, they say evolutionary theory has come to a point of crisis.  Most of the American public does not accept it.  Strong arguments have been raised against its cogency, the cogency in particular of natural selection.  With this book, they say, we now can provide one of the pieces necessary to reply to these critiques.

So, let's go back to my hypothetical high school biology student.  She brings this book into class.  Can we talk about it?  Here's this idea, intelligent design.  They say that they have evidence that answers the critique.  Is this constitutionally admissible?  Now, a high school kid wouldn't say that.  They would just show up with the book and put it on their teacher's desk and say why can't I talk about this?  If the teacher says no, the consequence is the student knows that the strike zone is either very large or very small, but it's not objective.

Next slide please.

Because kids are shrewd.  Kids are shrewd.  They know that this is possible--in fact, Darwin argued for it in "The Origin"--but if either of these claims turns out to be false, the bottom might be the case; that's a live empirical possibility.  In fact, the very logic of testing evolution requires that the bottom be a live possibility.

Next slide.  If you click all the way through all three.

So, I go back to my three facts.  Even if nothing ever happened in a single school board across this country, even if Kitzmiller v. Dover was never brought as a suit, intelligent design would still be present in high school biology classrooms and in our daily life as a live issue because evolutionary theory itself is, let's say, entangled with these questions.  So, it doesn't really matter what happens at Kitzmiller v. Dover.

Last slide, please.

It's already there.  It's already there.  And good educational practice will not censor these issues.  They will give students the freedom to debate them and to debate them from both perspectives.

Well, I think I'm done.  Thanks.

[Applause.]

MS. SATEL:  Next, Dr. Ken Miller, Professor of Biology at Brown University.  Dr. Miller is co-author, speaking of textbooks, with Joseph Levine of three high school and college biology textbooks among the most popular used in higher education.  His recent book, "Finding Darwin's God:  A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution," addresses the scientific status of evolutionary theory and its relationship to religious views of nature.  Dr. Miller.

DR. MILLER:   Paul, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to push the buttons.

[Laughter.]

DR. MILLER:  I was going to say just hit forward button, if you will.

Dr. Nelson asked us that we consider design, and in part of his abstract he said if intelligent design did not exist, then evolutionary biologists would need to invent it.  And we heard the word "design" several times in the first talk, but we didn't hear exactly what design was, and I thought we can't talk about anything without understanding what it means.

Next slide, please.

In biology we indeed speak of design all the time, but not the way Dr. Nelson used it.  We talk about design as the correlation between structure and function in living systems.  For example, when we look at a complex protein, this is the muscle protein actin, we see how its structure is suited to its function.  That doesn't imply a designer.  That's a correlation of structure and function.  Next slide, please.

Intelligent design, which Dr. Nelson advocates, it something else.  It is the claim specifically that objects in the living world were designed, and advocates of that view point to things like the bacterial flagellum or Mount Rushmore as examples of natural objects they think were designed.  Next side, please.

And I wonder, and I wonder how many of you wonder when you hear this, why are they saying design rather than create.   Advance the slide, please.

In particular let's take a designed object like Mount Rushmore.  The only reason we know that there was a design for Mount Rushmore is because somebody created Mount Rushmore, and creating it is a material act.   Advance the slide, please.

And that means a designed object only exists if, in fact, it was created.  Next slide.  Next side, please.

The creator of Mount Rushmore, the designer I should say, was the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, and here's a picture of him working on his design.  Next slide, please.

However, that design wouldn't exist unless creators, sculptors had been around.   Next slide.

And therefore, it was an act of creation to actually put Mount Rushmore together.  And I choose Mount Rushmore because the Discovery Institute, who Dr. Nelson represents, uses Mount Rushmore as an example of design.   Next slide, please.

And what that means is that every single object, structure, protein, or organism to which design is attributed was actually created in an act of special creation.  These things were created or we wouldn't know they were there.  Next slide, please.

And what that means is these creation events didn't happen in isolation or in theoretical space.  They had to happen at specific times.   Next slide.

So, how do we work this out?  Next slide.

I'm going to make a list here of things the designer did, according to Paul and the Discovery Institute.  Created life had occurred way long time ago in the geological record.  Also, the bacterial flagellum, eucaryotic cell, and so forth.  These occurred a little bit later.   Next slide, please.

Then the appearance of major animal groups, many of which--next slide, please--occurred in the Cambrian, and therefore we have a whole set of post-Cambrian origins of fish, amphibians, reptiles, and so forth.  Next slide, please.

And what that means is that when we talk about design, we're actually talking about a series of progressive creation events.  Next slide.

And therefore, the creative activity of this unnamed designer took place again and again and again and again over billions of years of natural history.   Next slide.

What that means in simple language--next slide--is in a very straightforward way design means progressive creation.   Next slide.

And therefore it's not unreasonable--in fact, it is accurate to say that design is creationism.  Now, that doesn't mean it's wrong.  That simply means let's call it by its name, which is progressive creationism.  Next slide.

Now, not all advocates of intelligent design are progressive creationists who argue the designer was active again and again.  Some intelligent design advocates are classic young Earth creationists who argue that this planet is less than 10,000 years old.  You might wonder who that might be.  Next slide.

One of those is Dr. Paul Nelson, and I don't know if Dr. Nelson will advocate the young Earth view today.  I think he would if he wanted to give us a full exposition of his views; but, in fact, at the Skeptic Society meeting in Los Angeles, where I was present three years ago, he came right out and said that he is, in fact--he, in fact, does hold a young Earth view, and it would be interesting to hear him defend that view in scientific terms today.   Next slide, please.

Now, is there evidence of the designer?  You might have noticed there was a lot of talk about the rhetoric of design and evolution in the last talk, but not a single piece of scientific evidence showing the fingerprint, the footprint, or the handiwork of the designer.  And intelligent design itself says there can be no evidence of a designer-creator.  So, if there can be no evidence because we can't know who the creator is or how he worked, how does it advance its ideas?   Next slide, please.

And that is, lacking authentic evidence, intelligent design contrives a dualism, and they put their nebulous notion of design in contravention with Darwin, and you saw that again and again in the previous slide, and they basically then jump to the proposition that anything that theory A cannot explain today is prima facie evidence for theory B.  If we argued in science this way, you could argue that the moon is made of green cheese if you weren't sure that it was made of granite.  We don't oppose two theories in science and simply say these are the only conceivable theories.  Apparently there is no theory C or D or E or F, and , in fact,  there are many such theories that are conceivable.  Next slide, please.

Therefore, any argument that can be raised against evolution is taken as evidence for design.  And because of this--and you probably noticed it in the last talk--all so-called evidence against evolution, all evidence in favor of design, is actually negative evidence against evolution.  Next slide.

Now, what are the most prominent negative arguments that are raised because negative arguments are all there are by the intelligent design advocates?   Here are two of them.  One is that evolution cannot produce new biological information.  Therefore, only a designer could do it.  Second argument:  Evolution cannot produce the complex structures of the living cell which are irreducibly complex.  Let's see how these hold up.   Next slide.

And we'll take argument number one, which is that evolution, natural processes cannot produce the biological information that evolution requires.  Is that true?  Next slide.

Well, this argument hasn't impressed people very much in the scientific community for this obvious reason.  The literature is filled with examples of the ability of evolution to produce new biological information.  Example:  I put the first page of a paper describing the evolution of an entirely new enzyme.  The enzyme is called nylonase.  Next slide, please.

And a few years ago Japanese researchers discovered bacteria growing in a chemical waste dump outside of a plastics plant, and the bacteria, as far as they could tell, were growing on nylon.  Now, nylon is not supposed to be biodegradable, but it turns out that in a little less than 60 years, since nylon was first synthesized, bacteria have evolved, an entirely new enzyme with all of the biological information required to do that to digest nylon.  Is an intelligent designer responsible for that?  Well, only if he wants to put runs in your stockings.  The reality is that evolution is what has done it.   Next slide, please.

Now, that's not the only example.  2,4-dinitrotoluene is a chemical relative of TNT.  It was first synthesized also in the 1930s.  Is there a chemical pathway to break it down?   Next slide, please.

You betcha.  This is a genuinely complex pathway with seven different enzymes.  Where did this pathway come from?  Clearly it wasn't designed in the primordial earth because this compound didn't exist.   Next slide.

It turns out evolution produced this compound, and it did so by evolving and duplicating enzymes from three different biochemical pathways combining them and then thereby producing the complex information required to do this.  Now, when you look at all this if you skeptical--and you should be skeptical of everything in science--you might say gee, I wonder what left-wing, pinko think tank, what secular humanist group produced this research.  Maybe somebody at Harvard, maybe somebody at Berkeley, and so forth.  Well, I want to let you know who did this work.   Next slide, please.

And this was done at the United States Air Force research laboratory in Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.  And I don't know how the members of the audience feel, but my feeling is that if evolution is good enough for the United States Air Force, it's good enough for me.

[Laughter.]

Next slide, please.

Second argument.  Living cells can't contain irreducibly complex structures that evolution couldn't have produced.   Next slide.

The classic example of this is the bacterial flagellum.  And Michael Behe paraphrasing the very words of Charles Darwin that you heard just a few minutes ago said, "A system like this of multiple parts cannot be produced by numerous, successive slight modifications of a precursor system... "--look at the highlighted words-- "...because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional."

Thank you, Paul.  Next slide.

Well, here's the bacterial flagellum.  It is literally the poster child for intelligent design.  It has about 50 different protein parts, and the argument is that it is irreducibly complex, meaning all those parts are without function until we snap them all together.  Since evolution can only put structures together a few parts at a time, allegedly it could never have produced such a structure; therefore, it must have been created or designed.   Next slide.

Well, is that true?  A graphic version of this argument is shown here.  A complex biochemical machine has many parts.  It has a function that natural selection can favor, but the individual parts, according to Dr. Nelson and Dr. Behe, have no function , and therefore, natural selection cannot shape them.

How does evolution explain the origin of complex structures?   Next slide.

Very simple.  What evolution says is this idea that these parts have no function unless the machine is assembled, that idea is wrong.  And it's wrong because new functions emerge from combinations of parts, and the components of these complex machines originate with different functions.
Next slide.

Now, the cool thing about this--I'm sorry,  I grew up in the sixties.  I still speak in words like cool--is that this makes a testable prediction, and that is if intelligent design is right--advance the slide, please--what should happen is the parts of these complex machines should have no functions on their own.  But if evolution is right, then, next slide, the parts of the machines should have functions.  So, all we have to do is grab the flagellum and see if its parts are functionless or if there are subsets within them that have a function.   Next slide.

So, we're going to do that experiment.  Let's take away 40 of the 50 parts of the flagellum.   Next slide.

Watch how this happens.  They're all gone.  We've taken those parts away leaving only 10 parts.   Next slide.

And these are the parts that span the membrane.  We've taken away not one part, not two, we've taken away 80 percent of the parts of this machine.  Therefore, what is left behind if design is right should be nonfunctional.   Next slide.

But if you'll pardon the double negative, it's not nonfunctional.   Next slide.

What is left behind is, in fact, perfectly functional.  Those 10 proteins are equivalent to something called the type 3 secretory system, and I know everyone in the audience is saying, oh, of course, the type 3 secretory system.  The type 3 secretory system is a molecular syringe that certain bacteria use to inject poison into our cells.  If you're infected with a bacterium that is a type 3 secretor, you should be very afraid.  Bubonic plague is a type 3 secretor.   Next slide.

Remember that statement.  Any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.  This guy is missing 40 parts.  Is it by definition nonfunctional?  Uh-uh.  It is perfectly functional.  That statement is the heart and soul of the molecular argument for intelligent design.  And what does this example show?   Next slide please.

This example shows that that argument is wrong.  There is no other word for it.   Next slide.

In fact, the bacterial flagellum contains a lot of parts that are homologous to other systems, next slide, please, besides the type 3 secretory system, and I've given four other examples in this slide.   Next slide.

So, if we summarize what I've said about the flagellum, when we actually look at it, and this shows an example of the intelligent design crowd, next slide.  The parts of that system actually match evolutionary theory and not the design-creation model.  Can we test evolution?  Yes.  It passes it.  Can we test design?  Yes.  It fails it.   Next slide.

Now, let me test evolution a little further.  And in particular, let's test one of those hypotheses that Dr. Nelson implied would be illegal to test in the public schools.  That's a bogus argument, of course.  Let's test the hypothesis of common ancestry.

Evolution from fossil physiology and anatomy tells us that we share a common ancestor with the great apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and so forth.  But there's a problem if we really share a common ancestor with these critters.  We have 46 chromosomes.  Each of them has 48.  Where did the other chromosome go?   Next slide, please.

There's our 46 chromosomes, so we are you and I and Dr. Nelson are missing a pair of chromosomes.  Where did it go?   Next slide.

We can make, therefore, a testable prediction to test evolution.  If, in fact, we really do share a common ancestor, that common ancestor had to have 48 chromosomes.  So, where did it go?  Did we lose it?  You couldn't lose a whole primate chromosome.  Too many important genes.  There's only one place it could have gone, and that is somewhere on our ancestry two primate chromosomes must have been fused together to form one of ours.  So, you can make a testable prediction.   Next slide.

And that testable prediction is that one of our chromosomes must result from the ancestral fusion of two other chromosomes.   Next slide.

And at the fusion point DNA sequences called telomeres should show up right in the middle of the chromosome where they don't belong, and those should mark the fusion point.   Next slide.

And we should even inactivate one of the two centromeres in the chromosomes. So, we have to look at our genome.  And if we don't find that one of our chromosomes is formed by the fusion of two others, evolution, common descent could be falsified.  So, let's put it to the test.   With the human genome project we can do that.  Last year a detailed annotation of two human chromosomes was published in "Nature."  Guess what.  It's chromosome number two.   Advance the slide, please.

And it turns out human chromosome number two shows the exact place at which these two chromosomes were pasted together.  It's like two torn pieces of paper with Scotch tape holding them together.  Read the excerpt from the paper.  Chromosome two is unique to the human lineage having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusions of two other chromosomes that remain separate in other primates.  We test evolution, and it's a test it passes.   Next slide, please.

Now, you're going to hear a lot today about intelligent design in being religion and not being science.  I think I've shown you why it's not science because it fails every scientific test we can put up for it.  How did we ever get the idea that it's religion?  Is that just a prejudice that secular humanists and the scientific community have and so forth?  It certainly is not something that I'd be at home with.  Well, the Discovery Institute's logo looks perfectly secular, and it's intended to do that.  But a few years ago, next slide, the logo of the Discovery Institute was quite different.  And I show this in part because I like the art of Michelangelo, and I wish the Discovery Institute would go back to this because this really what intelligent design is all about.   Next slide.

But maybe that's a little unfair.  Maybe looking at logos is not how you decide religion.  Let's look at what people write and what they say.

Phillip Johnson, the acknowledged leader of the intelligent design movement, laid it on the line a couple of years ago when he said that the objective of his strategy isn't to advance science.  It's to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic.  That, Johnson said, is going to shift the debate from creation versus evolution to the existence of God versus the nonexistence of God.  That's a debate he thinks they can win.  From there we can introduce people to the truth of the Bible and the question of sin and finally introduce to Jesus.  I'm a Christian.  I want to introduce people to Jesus.  I just don't  want to do it in the science classroom, and in the long run that's the difference between scientists who are believers, like myself, and intelligent design advocates.   Next slide, please.

But finally, this case in Dover.  Doesn't the Board of Education in Dover, aren't they trying to do something that's purely intellectual, open inquiry and so forth?  They purchased this wonderful textbook called "Pandas and People" and put it in the library in Dover, a donor gave it to them.  Isn't that strictly a science textbook?   Next slide.

Well, it kind of sounds like a science textbook.  Here's a passage there mentions intelligent design.  Design means the various forms of life began abruptly and so forth.  Sounds very scientific, the way that Dr. Nelson's talk sounded scientific.   Next slide.

But it turns out that Pandas appeared in an earlier version with a different title, and in the earlier version in the different title called I Princi Bilirat (ph).  I would not for a second would I think that you were trying to sabotage it.  I mean that because I've known Paul for a long time.  He's a very honorable guy.

You'll notice there are words about creation here.  Now I want to point out where these come from.  Next slide.

Where did this book actually come from?  What's its history?  This is the textbook on intelligent design.   Next slide, please.

You'll notice that you have a passage here saying Darwinists object to intelligent design.  Doesn't give a natural cause, doesn't sound very religious.  Next slide.

But look at the earlier version.  It's the same paragraph except naturalistic has been replaced by natural cause.  Intelligent design replaces creation.  Creation means the various forms of life.  Intelligent design means the various forms of life.  The conversion of a textbook on creationism to a textbook on intelligent design is accomplished by a series of global word processor changes.  This is clearly a wolf trying to put on the clothing of sheep.  Sorry, it didn't work.  We can still see the wolf.

What are we leading to here?  And this is where I will conclude.  Next slide, please.  The question today is what should be in the science classroom, and you may wonder.  Where would intelligent design take the science classroom, and this, I think, is that question that is the public question that people should be interested in.

In the trial in Harrisburg this week we got a very, very good answer as to where intelligent design would take the science classroom.  Next slide.

Michael Behe, the star witness for the intelligent design, said, "I told the courtroom that astrology would qualify as a scientific theory if it is judged by exactly the same criteria that Dr. Behe uses to say that intelligent design is a scientific theory.  And what that means by any stretch of logic is that Dr. Behe, who believes that intelligent design belongs in the science classroom, has to admit that if those are the criteria that are used, astrology goes in the science classroom as well.

Advance the slide, please.  And if you would pull just one more time, later on in the same article new scientists pointed out that again, the problem is that stretching the definition of science, when you stretch that strike zone to slip intelligent design in here, astrology's coming in, witchcraft is coming in, and just about every other form of pseudoscience you can think of.  As you'll note, Behe agreed with these assertions and this elicited laughter from the courtroom.  I'd like to think that the inclusion of intelligent design and astrology in science classrooms would be a laughing matter, and indeed, it looks pretty silly.  But when these both make their entrance into the classrooms of your son or your daughter, you may not be so amused.  The reaction against intelligent design is not a reaction to suppress dissent.  It's a reaction to keep science genuine, authentic, and in effect to support scientific education in the United States.  Anything else would be a tremendous disservice to this country and to our children.  Thank you.

[Applause.]

MS. SATEL:  Dr. Nelson, I want you to respond, but I can't help but get in my own question.  It seemed that you spent a lot of time saying that this wasn't a legitimate debate in classrooms.  I think I disagree with that.  It may be too sophisticated for the high school room, but in any case, I think teachers like Professor Miller would welcome students asking about some of the supposed gaps or some of the processes that weren't obvious to them and could be explained other ways, so that I would challenge.

But I would like you to, in addition to addressing what he said, could you also touch on maybe what the testable predictions of intelligent design would be and how you would respond, for example, to the example about the flagellum and the clotting cascade, those kind of things.  Thank you.

DR. NELSON:   Right.  Well, let me begin with the flagellum.

Ken left out a very important part of that story, and that is that the type 3 secretory apparatus is viewed by many biologists with no stake in this particular debate as actually an offspring of the motor.  In other words, the motor is Aboriginal.  The motor came first, and the type 3 secretory apparatus is derived from it by a kind of process of loss of parts.  And I know that Ken's aware of this literature, and it's an active debate right now in biology.  In fact, upcoming testimony at Dover by a colleague of mine, Scot Minnich, will treat this question.

So--I'm sorry, my microphone seems to be coming in and out.  So, I think that Ken actually misrepresents what Mike had to say about the motor.   Mike did not say that parts were individually useless.  In fact, he doesn't believe that.  What Mike said was the motor itself is irreducible in the sense of its particular function of providing locomotion, providing a means of moving bacteria through the watery medium in which it resides, and that is certainly true and is testable.  So, I think that Ken misrepresents Mike's position about that and, in fact, I would ask Ken does he regard the type 3 secretory apparatus as ancestral to the bacterial motor.

Can I get back to you after he responds to that?  I want to talk about--

DR. MILLER:  I'll keep this right on point.  The answer is I don't know.  And what I just put up on the screen is the most recent paper in this field by Goffman (ph), et al., and this paper says exactly the opposite of what Dr. Nelson just said.  This is a careful analysis of the type 3 secretory system that says it didn't evolve from the flagellum; but rather, it and the flagellum shared a common ancestry, and this is based on the latest genetic data. So, when he said I didn't tell--

DR. NELSON:  I--

DR. MILLER:  --excuse me, you'll get a chance.  Basically that's an open question.  But here's the point.  He accused me of misrepresenting what Michael Behe said.  I didn't misrepresent.  I quoted him.  It was an exact quote.  Any irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.

Now, the type 3 system doesn't have the function of flagellar motility, but intelligent design people use this idea of irreducible complexity to explain why these machines couldn't evolve.  If you say well, this system only does protein secretion and that system only does surface recognition and this system only does signal transduction, do you know what you're doing?  You're giving away the store because you're explaining these systems could evolve because first we evolve this part, then we evolve another part, then we evolve a third part, and the whole function comes from the totality of parts.  But if you agree that there are functional units within the bacterial flagellum, then the whole idea of irreducible complexity--remember it's irreducible--has been destroyed.  Do you agree with that?

DR. NELSON:  No, I don't, because what Mike said was that he isolated a particular function, and he said that function, motility for that motor is lost if you take parts away, and that is the case.

And let me go back to Goffman paper.  This is actually not, in fact, the most recent publication on the question.  There's one from last year by Robert Sayre (ph) where he points out that the evidence still favors an Aboriginal motor and a derived type 3 system, not common ancestry.  He disagrees with these authors.  The point is it's a live debate and to say that the type 3 secretory apparatus is ancestral to or even shares common ancestry with the motor is something that people with no stake in this design debate would question.

DR. MILLER:  Yes.  But the point is, it doesn't matter if it's ancestral or not because the whole quote evidence for design is based on the unevolvability, the supposed unevolvability of the flagellum.  And once you show that parts of this do have selectable function, that's the pathway to evolution.  I don't have to show how it evolved.  I'm answering the argument as to why it's unevolvable, and that argument has, in fact, fallen apart.

DR. NELSON:  But, Ken, homologies among proteins is not a functioning motor, and the fact is you do not present and as far as I know you never have presented an actual testable scenario for the origin of the motor.   Going from the type 3 system to the motor is a huge leap, and it make much more sense--in fact I think the data are strongly supportive of this--to see the type 3 system as derived from the motor, and this will be something actually that will come up in Harrisburg.

I wanted to respond to your question about testable predictions.  When I was an undergraduate, I was concerned that I was setting the bar too high for evolution and consequently not high enough at all for intelligent designs.  So, I made myself a list of predictions or observational expectations that if they were fulfilled would challenge my view of biology.  I'll give you just one of those for the sake of time.  RNA.  Every living thing on Earth at the heart of its biochemistry has a nucleic acid RNA.  It's an essential part of all of our biochemistry, all living things.

Now, it turns out that RNA is an exceedingly fragile molecule, exceedingly fragile.  In fact, when you look at the literature on the formation of RNA, many of the people who work on the problem say this is exactly the kind of molecule that would never arise from its constituents on the early Earth because of its fragility.  That kind of reality that inside every living thing is a molecule like a Lladro crystal, piece of Lladro crystal, incredibly fragile yet there it is, design would predict that those sorts of features of living things cannot be derived from their constituents by any plausible natural pathway.  That's testable.  In fact, the claim that there's no natural pathway to RNA is exquisitely vulnerable to refutation.  It's a universal, universally quantified proposition that means that a single counter example would knock it down.

Everything we know about RNA tells us on the plausible early Earth it would never form naturally.  And I have a long list of other predictions like that that flow from design, not from evolution.  So, I think design is eminently testable, and in fact much of Ken's book on this topic, chapters of it, are dedicated to testing the propositions of intelligent design.  The paper by Lensky (ph),  et al., was testing the claim that Michael Behe made about irreducible complexity.  So, of course, it's testable.  There are whole books dedicated to testing it.

DR. MILLER:  I hope everyone listened very carefully to everything Dr. Nelson just said because when he said design is testable, the test he proposed is to show that you can evolve RNA.  Or Michael Behe when he says design is testable, the test he proposes is going to a laboratory and evolve a flagellum from scratch.  Those aren't tests of design.  Those are tests of evolution.

My original point, which is that all so-called evidence for design is negative, has degenerated into sort of the demonstration of that exactly here.  Dr. Nelson hasn't shown a fingerprint of the design or hasn't shown a footprint, hasn't shown any evidence for design.  He has simply said the test of design is to show that evolution can produce every single thing.  On the day that we have a detailed Darwinian step-by-step pathway for the evolution of RNA, the evolution of DNA, the evolution of the ribosome, the evolution of the bacterial flagellum, the evolution of every structure in the cell, it will be time to close every single department of biology, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology in the world because all questions will be answered.

The argument from design--and I think Dr. Nelson has illustrated this eloquently--the argument from design depends upon basically saying you haven't answered every question.  Well, guess what.  Science is not going to answer every question.  But I gave you two examples of the way--I gave you three examples of the way in which evolution can in two of the examples generate new biological information, which design theorists say it cannot, and the way in which we can test common ancestry in our own genomes attest that evolution passes.  And what I would love to hear Dr. Nelson explain in front of this audience once again is why he thinks the Earth is 10,000 years old, which is again part and parcel of his view of origins.   Not saying when these events took place would be like discussing the American Revolution without realizing what century it took place in.

DR. NELSON:  Ken, you know me pretty well.  We've debated twice previously.  You know my writings pretty well.  Have I ever, to your knowledge, advocated my theological views about how I interpret scripture in a public scientific setting?

DR. MILLER:  No, as far as I know.

DR. NELSON:  Let me tell you what happened in Burbank two or three years ago.  There were four Christians on the panel:  Ken, Leslie Ellsbury (ph), Bill Dempsky (ph), and me, and 600 atheists in the audience--it's very strange--arguing about design versus evolution.

DR. MILLER:  I think they might have snuck a Unitarian or two in there.

DR. NELSON:  All right.  Okay.  So, we're debating intelligent design, and Ken is desperate, desperate to get my theological views--and that's what they are, and that's how I defend them, I don't defend them as a matter of science--onto the table.  So, he kept pressing me, and you'll remember the exchange.  And finally, after about ten minutes of badgering me, I said, well, the quote that you saw on the slide, and then Ken said, "Now, was that so hard to say?"

The fact is I had not put that up as something I wanted to argue for.  It's something that I have as a theological view.  I do not defend it scientifically.  Ken knows this.  So for him to say--and by the way, I've never put a date on the Earth.  When I say young Earth, that refers to how I understand the internal relations in scripture.  I've never defended that.  So, it's really a red herring to bring that in, and it's not something I've ever advocated for.  I'm sorry.  And frankly, my views are neither here nor there.

DR. MILLER:  Yeah, and I'll answer this very quickly.  I didn't ask.  I didn't desperately beg Paul for a theological--

DR. NELSON:  Oh, baloney.  You pressed me.

DR. MILLER:  Hang on, hang on.

MS. SATEL:  I have to be the umpire.

DR. MILLER:  I asked him for the answer to a scientific question, how old is the Earth.  That is a scientific question.  You gave me the answer.

MS. SATEL:  I am going to open it to the audience.  And in the course of responding to people, you know, you went to the University of Chicago, I went to the University of Chicago.  I know how hard it is to get a Ph.D. there, and I know how brilliant you must be, but it just--it seems to me--

DR. NELSON:  Tell my wife that.

MS. SATEL:  Well, Dr. Miller has pointed this out sort of arguing from the negative, you know, the negative argument standpoint, is that it's a form of intellectual surrender.  If there are questions that there aren't answers to, then you postulate a divine origin.

DR. NELSON:  May I respond to that?

MS. SATEL:  Yes, and then I will ask folks.

DR. NELSON:  The fact is science comes at the end of avenues of inquiry all the time.  All the time.  The French Academy in the 18th century stopped accepting proposals for perpetual motion machines because they realized that they didn't work long before the science of thermodynamics gave a reason why they don't work.

Ken thinks that there is a natural pathway to RNA.  He fully expects that to be discovered.  I do not.  On that point there is a clear difference, and my view is much more testable than Ken's, much more, because it is vulnerable to refutation where he can always hold out hope at some indefinite point in the future that a molecule that we have good reason now to think would never form naturally because of its fragility, somewhere down the road theory from the future will explain how this happens.  The fact is right now, October 2005, there is no natural pathway to RNA, and there's no reason ever to expect one.  So, I'm sorry, that's testable.  If Ken wants to call it negative, you know, that's attaching blame to a very good prediction.

MS. SATEL:  I think Ken wants to test  it.  But let me open this to the audience now.  Gentlemen.

Could you please say where you're from, what your name is, and please ask a question.

MR. NELSNER:  My name is Alf Nelsner (ph).  I'm from Reuters.  My question is this.  We're told that we have a scientific crisis in this country.  We're not producing enough science graduates and Ph.D.'s.  We also have a shortage of priests, I understand, especially in the Catholic Church.

Do you see biology in high school as addressing one or both of these shortages?

DR. MILLER:  I'm not going to work on the shortage of priests.  I'm sorry to disappoint you there.

In terms of the shortage of scientists in this country, I think the rhetoric of the anti-evolution movement, which has been around in this country for decades, intelligent design is not a new idea.  It is a reformulation of a very old idea of evolutionary insufficiency.

The rhetoric of this design--of this debate has the effect of alienating young people from science.  It basically, and you're going to hear Dr. Nelson say it, it basically says that the scientific community is not to be trusted, that it suppresses dissent, that science is a discipline into which young people if they go must abandon their faith.  Most Americans are religious, and therefore, this debate basically tends to tell people you tell young kids you might find science interesting, but you'll have to abandon your convictions of faith.  That certainly is not the case, but it is part of the rhetoric of intelligent design.  And I think basically what this debate is really in the process of doing is driving Phillip Johnson's wedge between the young people, the educational institutions of this country, and our scientific future.

There's a cartoon that I sometimes show that a friend of mine sent me, and it shows a young man working at a laboratory bench, obviously a student in India, and the caption of the cartoon says, "Surprisingly, the movement to teach intelligent design creationism in U.S. schools was supported by India and China."  And the young man at the bench says, "Yes, America, we would like it very much if you would teach religious dogma instead of science in your schools to your young people.  We'd like their jobs."  And therefore, I think that's exactly what's at stake.

MS. SATEL:  Sir.

MR. DOMBROWSKI:  Mack Dombrowski , Computer Sciences Corporation and the Space Telescope Science Institute, and in full disclosure I'll say I also teach a science class part-time at the University of Maryland University College.

When I think about how we decide what gets taught in classes, in history class, say, who would know better than historians?  In a mathematics class, well, I have to leave it to the mathematicians.  They know best.  You know, we can't give the students all the little tidbits, all the little axioms, theorems of mathematics and ask them to make sense of it.  We have to rely on experts to do that, and that happens in science as well.  We rely on the scientific community to understand what's good science and what's not.  But what I hear suggested is introducing something into the science classroom that is not accepted by the science community, and I guess I'd like to ask both of you what you feel the criteria should be for what gets included into the science classroom or any subject in the classroom given that students don't have the ability or the time to take all the facts and put it together themselves.

DR. NELSON:  I'm not sure I have a quick answer for that, but it seems to me that the science I know most intimately, evolutionary biology, began in its modern form with Darwin's "Origin of Species."

I was really struck in this debate in Philly on National Public Radio when Neil Shanks said, "When I put the question to him directly, would he let students read "The Origin of Species,"  he said no.  And the reason he said no is because of the very considerable theological content of that book.

Here's a little experiment you can do.  Go and search the on-line editions with the key word Creator, capital C, and you'll get lots of hits.  Many of those passages Darwin will be saying here's what the theory of creation predicts, here's what my theory predicts.  Here's my view of God, you know, here's a creationist view of God.

Now, is it reasonable to ask a student to evaluate those kinds of arguments only critically.  In other words, all the student can do is say I'm going to criticize creation, but if they try to make a positive case or give a different conception of the creator, then a piece of duct tape is put over their mouth constitutionally.  I'm sorry.  I just find that completely unreasonable.

DR. MILLER:  Well, with all due respect, I'm not sure Paul answered the question.  He gave a speech about teaching "The Origin of Species."  I'm not aware of a single school district in which the introduction of passages from "The Origin of Species" has been the object of a lawsuit, so I don't know where people clamp down on this.  I'm aware actually of dozens of high schools around the country who actually use my book, "Finding Darwin's God," despite the fact that Dr. Nelson assured us that it couldn't be used in public school.  So, this is a surprise to me.  I'd love to see "The Origin of Species" even though, despite the fact that it has references to the creator taught in the classroom.

There are parts of it that include Darwin's theological and philosophical speculations.  They're not taught as science.  They're taught as theological and philosophical speculations, which are often part of what goes on in a science classroom.  How do you decide what goes on in a science classroom?  I think the answer to that is simple.  It's the scientific consensus.  How do you decide what you tell students is unsolved, uncertain, mysterious.  The answer again is the scientific consensus.

The July 1st issue of "Science" magazine had the headline:  "125 Unsolved Questions in Science."  We have to tell students what those unsolved questions are.  But whether we appeared here by instantaneous appearance in creation or whether by a biological process of evolution, that's not an unsolved question.  It's the biological process of evolution that brought us here.

Intelligent design advocates are fond of pointing to the big bang hypothesis as a radical hypothesis that was rejected by science and eventually came around and is now accepted in the scientific community.  If they wanted to treat their ideas in the same way that Arno Penzias treated the big bang, I'd say that's terrific because what they did was to try to gather scientific support, win the scientific consensus, which they did over several decades, and once you win the scientific consensus, quite automatically you wind up in curriculum, college courses, and eventually in high school and grade school classes.  Intelligent design has been either unable or unwilling to win the scientific consensus, so what you see now is an end run around the scientific process to use political means, state boards of education, curriculum development to inject this into the classroom without winning the scientific consensus, and I think that's bad policy.

DR. NELSON:  Quick clarification.  I am on record as opposing requiring the teaching of intelligent design in any public school classroom.  That's a consistent position of mine, one reason I could never be a witness at Dover, and so I agree with Ken that design will find its way into public high school classrooms via the long, painful process that he just described.  That's a separate question from what I presented in my talk, though, which is that evolutionary theory itself, as it is already being taught, raises issues that involve design, and it's constitutionally wrong to hinder students and teachers from discussing those issues.

MS. SATEL:  Gentlemen.

MR. NOTTURNO:  Mark Notturno.  I'm with Interactivity Foundation. I also used to work closely with the late philosopher Sir Karl Popper, edited several of his books, and I'm struck with Ken Miller saying repeatedly that there are no or no positive arguments for intelligent design because one of the ways in which I read the literature is that is not simply an argument for ignorance; that pointing out difficulties with evolution is one thing, but then there's another move, and the move is something like this.  He says, well, there are these cellular machines that we're seeing.  We don't know the plausible way that you get it from evolution, but we do know of a force that creates such machines; namely, intelligence, human intelligence for example.  And I'm wondering how you would respond to that because another strange thing that I've been wondering about is that would you agree that we ourselves are now in the process through such things as biogenetic engineering of trying to intelligently design life forms?

People talk about the Cambrian explosion and the appearance of life forms on Earth.  Would you agree that the Department of Defense is actively thinking of trying to inject life forms onto Mars?

DR. MILLER:  You mean a new defense weapon would be a device called the Cambrian explosive?

MR. NOTTURNO:  No, that we are thinking of seeding Mars and trying to grow an atmosphere there.  And so--I'm not thinking of this as being an argument for or against intelligent design, but it strikes me that these are sort of blind spots in the ways in which people respond to the intelligent design argument.  It doesn't seem to be simply an argument from ignorance.  There's another move.  The move is we do know of forces, mainly human intelligence.  We create such machines.

I was thinking of writing a paper that would begin with the question aren't scientific theories intelligently designed because we design scientific theories, and we do so intelligently.  We do it with our intelligence, so why do we have to immediately jump to the creator or to the God question?  It would seem to me that, you know, it may not answer all of our big questions, but if we were to find out tomorrow that the Earth was seeded by intelligent designers from extraterrestrial, I think we'd all be interested, and I think that it would also perhaps have some implications for how we think about our religious beliefs.

MS. SATEL:  Thank you.

DR. MILLER:  It would have some implications, yes.  Make a hell of a TV show plot, for one thing.

You basically in your question overlooked a fundamental point, and the fundamental point that you overlook is you say the cell is filled with these machines.  We know that human beings design machines--not machines like these, of course, not in self-replicating things, but human beings design machines, so couldn't they have been designed?  Well, the answer is yes.  And you know what?  Just about any historical event whether it's the Cambrian explosion, the appearance of the bacterial flagellum, the first appearance of the ribosome, or the Red Sox victory in the World Series in 2004 could be the result of outside supernatural intelligent intervention.  In fact, I live in New England.  You'd be surprised how many people in my part of the country think of divine intervention when they think of the baseball playoffs last year.  And a lot of people think that's true.  So, these kinds of theories might be right.  The North may very well have prevailed in the battle of Gettysburg precisely because of an outside intelligent designer or force, but it's not testable and it's not science.  And I would apply the same thing to that.

The machines that you speak of, the main argument, the only argument I ever see for why they had to be created/designed is because of the claim that evolution can't produce them.  Therefore that, once again, is the negative argument, and even your own description of this is essentially a question based on negative argument:  if evolution couldn't have produced it, then the possibility is design.  I was surprised when--not surprised, but I was sort of bemused when Paul said he's not in favor of the teaching of intelligent design in school.  Presumably he's just in favor of teaching the "evidence against evolution."  There isn't anything to intelligent design except the "evidence against evolution," and therefore that amounts to the same thing.

DR. NELSON:  If I could respond to that very quickly, Ken keeps coming back to this idea of negative arguments as somehow flawed or inherently weaker than other kinds of arguments.  The fact is these kinds of laws called universal negative proscriptions are widespread in science.  If I gave you a proposal that I could have realtime communication between me here on Earth and someone on Mars just the way I would pick up a phone and call them, you would give me a negative argument.  What you would say is, the propagation of the speed of light through space is--there's a speed limit on that.  You will never, as far as we know from current physics, talk in realtime to someone on Mars.

Now, I say, well, you just rejected my research problem.  That's a negative argument.  I'm sorry,  that's the way the world works.  So, I think Ken is not being entirely fair to the real strength of these kinds of arguments in science.

VOICE:  I want to see if you're going to give me lots of time?

MS. SATEL:  Oh, you're getting lots of time.  The lady behind you, please.  Ma'am.

MS. PAPANOS:  Dolores Papanos (ph), Smithsonian Institution.  The Discovery Institute produced a movie that pretty much said Earth was a unique, special place because it had an intelligent designer.  Should life be found on Mars or maybe one of Saturn's moons or should Mars be found to have an atmosphere two billions years ago that was very much like Earth's now, are those planetary bodies going to need their own intelligent designers?  Will it be the same one?  What would that say about Earth's uniqueness in terms of supporting life?

DR. MILLER:  I think it means there'll be more movies at the Smithsonian.

DR. NELSON:  That's an interesting question.  You know, if we did find life on Mars, which I don't expect to happen, or on one of the moons of Jupiter, again I think they're probably quite sterile, it would be a fascinating question to look at its molecular composition, and the one thing I would predict:  it will be no less complex than life here on Earth.  As far as we know right now, though, what you've proposed is strictly counterfactual.  There is no life on Mars or on any other body in the solar system other than Earth.

MS. PAPANOS:  A quick follow-up.  I'm wondering, with all due respect, how you can dismiss the possibility when we haven't even gone there with the proper tools or with the most  robust tools and investigated those questions.

DR. NELSON:  No, I don't dismiss the possibility.  It's a live possibility.  What I'm saying is at this moment the best indication is that there is nothing up there.

MS. HOLDEN:  Constance Holden, Science magazine.  I'd like to ask Dr. Nelson about the timing of intelligent design.  Was everything designed at the beginning of the universe and then left to run out like clockwork or is there continuous process of design or did it go on for a while and then stop 10,000 years ago or what?  Because Dr. Behe said you could make, you could falsify design by trying to grow flagella on bacteria for a few years, 10,000 generations, and then if they grew flagella, that would falsify design, but he didn't explain how he kept design out of the lab during that period.  So, I'd really like some clarification on the timing.

DR. NELSON:  Well, under the design umbrella--after all, design is a very modest claim that one can detect the action of intelligence in the universe--under that umbrella you can find a whole range of views.  In fact, one of Ken's criticisms of design is that there's no unanimity about, for instance, these questions of timing and so forth.  But I really regard those as secondary to the question is it possible to detect the action of intelligence?  And certainly we know that we can do this.  Every human being does it every day.  Design, to be a scientific theory, must make testable predictions.  I think that it does.  I think that Mike's proposal about the limits of variation in bacteria is testable.  In fact, Mike is working on a project right now carrying that out.

If you conceive design in a kind of whimsical way as well, you know, a transcendent being can do whatever he pleases, that can't be tested, but that's not what's on the table.  There are specific concrete proposals that can be tested.  In fact, as I said, Ken's written a book trying to do that.   DR. MILLER:  What Ken has written a book doing is looking at the arguments against evolution, which are all that design has, and showing that they're wrong.  I don't think it would be too forward of me to observe that Dr. Nelson did not answer the question, and the nature of the question was if design happened, and I tried very hard at the beginning of my talk to show that design is equivalent to creation.  You really mean the flagellum was created.  You really mean the animals in the Cambrian explosion were created.  You really mean the eukaryotic cilia, RNA, the first cell were created at a particular point in the Earth's authentic natural history.  If that's true--might be true.  If that's true, it's only reasonable to ask when did this happen?  Did all this creative activity occur in a single period of time?  Has it occurred over time?  Or if you accept the geologic time scale, has the creator to do little here--the designer, sorry--a little here, little there, little more, tinker a little more and finally say okay, it's time to tinker with the human genome?  And if so, is he doing anything today?  In other words, is he going into the laboratory and doing things?

These are important questions because if you take the intelligent design critique of evolution seriously, if you take it as an intellectual idea--and I do take it seriously--then you subject it to that kind of analysis.  If these organisms were created, if they appeared at a certain time, we got to know what that time is.  And what you just saw from Dr. Nelson is an example not of a scientific answer, but of a political strategy to say there's a variety of views, and this keeps the biblical literalists, the young Earth creationists, the progressive creationists all under the same political tent in opposition to evolution, but it doesn't go a smidge towards answering an authentic and important scientific question.

MS. SATEL:  Time for one more question.  The gentleman standing up.

MR. KLINE:  Thank you.  Mal Kline, Accuracy in Academia.

Dr. Miller, you mentioned the footprints of the creator.  Speaking of footprints, what is the fossil record that supports evolution?

DR. MILLER:  The fossil record that supports evolution, sir, is the fossil record itself, and that is a series of basically progressive events that shows the origin of a whole variety of species.  I'd be glad to show you slides documenting the human fossil record, the fossil record of the elephant, the fossil record of the transition of terrestrial mammals into whales.  Many people in the intelligent design community about ten or 15 years ago were busy ridiculing the idea, for example, that one could ever find any fossil forms that would document how the first swimming whales actually showed up on the Earth.  That was until paleontologists began to dig them up and began to dig up one after another after another.  So, the documentation of what happened in the Earth's natural history is rich and gets richer every year with every paleontological find.

DR. NELSON:  I think Ken again is only giving you part of the story.  Darwin knew all about the Cambrian explosion.  He dedicated a very large portion of "The Origin" to the problem.  I would say that today in 2005, that problem of the origin of the basic groups of animals is, if anything, more severe now than when Darwin wrote, and most of the record is of marine invertebrates, and that record strongly points against any kind of evolutionary tree or gradualistic scenario.  So, the paleontological findings that we have are more considerably now than they were in 1859, but the overwhelming signal from the record is one of discontinuity, not of a single Darwinian tree.

DR. MILLER:  And what Dr. Nelson completely overlooks is the discovery of small bilaterian animals of metazoan fossils in the area before the pre-Cambrian, the discovery of an extensive pre-Cambrian fauna which wasn't known in Darwin's time and adds immensely to our understand of life before it, and most importantly, most critically, the molecular evidence, and that is when metazoans, when animals appear in the Cambrian explosion.  Cambrian explosion, by the way, was not one month, one year or even a million years, but a period of time stretching over about 35 million years, which is a long time by anybody's stretch, in which most but not all of the major animal phyla appeared.

The important point about this is the animal phyla that emerged all have in them the same basic molecular tools for building the body parts.  And what clearly happened in the Cambria is that these parts that build the bodies of various animals became widespread, they diversified into a large number of body plans, which gave rise to the phyla today.  The commonality of these body plans shows very clearly that the animals of the Cambrian have roots in common ancestry.  The molecular evidence reviewed in Shawn Carroll's book, which Dr. Nelson plugged, is incontrovertible and is very clear, and it adds a richness and a dimension to the understanding of this that simply would not have been known in Darwin's time.

MS. SATEL:  We have to end here.  Thank you for such an illuminating debate.  We're going to continue again at 10:30 with Father Coyne, so we'll see you then.  Thank you so much.

[Applause.]

[Recess.]

MR. ENTINE:  I want to welcome everyone back to our conference on teaching intelligent design in the classrooms.  My name is Jon Entine.  I'm an adjunct scholar, adjunct fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute, and along with Sally and Rick Hess organized this conference.

Last July Christof Schoenborn, an influential Cardinal from Vienna, claimed in a widely circulated op ed piece in the New York Times that random evolution is incompatible with the Catholic Church's belief in a creator God.  He wrote:  "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense, an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection, is not.  Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science."
He added that evolution should be taught as just one of the many theories of human origins.

This statement appeared to mark a shift in the perceived view of the church represented in prior statement by Pope John Paul II, that natural selection is compatible with Catholic doctrine.  Needless to say, these comments caused quite a stir among both scientists and theologians.

Well, today we are privileged enough to have with us both the scientists and a theologian to discuss the controversy and the relationship of God and science.  Father George Coyne was gracious enough to fly in just yesterday from Rome, where he is the Director of the Vatican Observatory headquartered at Castel Gandolfo, a position he's held since 1978.  Dr. Coyne obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy from Georgetown University in 1962 and the licentiate in theology from Woodstock College in Maryland in 1966.  Since 1966 he has been associated with the astronomy programs at the University of Arizona, which has a research branch linked to the Vatican Observatory.

His research interests have ranged from the study of the lunar surface to the birth of stars.  Parallel to his scientific research he has developed an interest in the history and philosophy of science and in the relationship between science and religion.   After Father Coyne's talk, Michael Novak, a theologian and historian who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at AEI, will have some comments as well.

Father Coyne.

FATHER COYNE:  You'll have to pardon me if I go like this a lot, but I haven't practiced my backhand for a long time.  But I have to use two instruments here, so we'll see how it goes.

First of all, I'd like to make clear everything that Jon said happened in the last millennium, you know, so we have to move forward into the present.

I am a Catholic and a priest, but at least for the first two thirds of my talk, I'm talking to you as a scientists.  Do I have to take this off?  It's a little harder to get back on, but I can loosen it.  I'm talking now as a scientist really.  There will be some theological insertions, but at the end I'll try and draw from my best knowledge of theology.  I'm not a theologian so that Michael knows very well, I'm Catholic priest who has studied some theology.

You'll have to excuse a bit the repetition from the previous setting here, but it will be a repetition with sort of a Catholic point of view.  I would essentially like to share with you two convictions.  One, that the intelligent design movement I'll call it while evoking a God of power and might, a designer God, actually belittles God and makes him or her too small and paltry.

Number two.  I'm putting it right out there, okay, that our scientific understanding of the universe untainted by religious considerations provides for those who do believe in God a marvelous opportunity to reflect upon those beliefs.  Please note carefully that I distinguish and will continue to do so in this presentation between science and religion, which to me are totally separate human pursuits.  Science is completely neutral with respect to theistic or atheistic--I've just come from Italy--implications which may be drawn from scientific results.

The current situation in the evolution debate is better understood, to my mind, if we review a few significant episodes in the history of the debate from a catholic point of view.  In 1669 Neil Stenson (ph), a Danish scientist and Catholic priest, discovered in the mountains of Tuscany, Italy, the fossil of a whale's tooth almost identical to that of a whale caught off the coast of Leghorn, Italy, the previous day.  He intuited that Tuscany must have been inundated in geological times by an ocean.

He identified three different geological strata, and for the first time proposed a temporal sequence for the formation of the Earth's crust.  For the first time, also, the biblical flood was considered as a source of these inundations.  From then on, the mistaken attempt to employ the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge would unduly complicate the debate over evolution.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, John-Baptiste Lemarque (ph) introduced the evolution of species and claimed that there was no clear distinction biologically between closely allied species.  Until the time of Lemarque evolutionary biologists spoke of a chain of nature, a linear progression in the evolution of species.  He introduced, Lemarque introduced, the concept not of a chain, but of an evolutionary tree and also that of natural selection.  But the geological findings of Stenson and the evolutionary biology of Lemarque required times much longer than those deduced from the Bible.  Billions of years instead of thousands of years.

Despite what it commonly thought, it was not Charles Darwin who caused problems for theologians with the implications that might be drawn from the theory of evolution.  About 100 years before Darwin, the College de Sorbonne in Paris, a kind of French holy office or inquisition, condemned the great French naturalist George Buffon for having proposed from both the cooling rate and the sequence of geological strata that it took billions of years to form the crust of the earth.  Darwin's great contribution to the growing scientific evidence for evolution was not so much evolution as such, but rather the adaptation of living organisms to their environment , only one of the two great pillars of evolutionary theory which are, to my mind, internal mutations in an organism followed by natural selection.

Controversy from religious believers immediately showed its foreboding head.  The mistaken thinking, which continues somewhat to our day, was essentially that if we human beings are descended from the apes, then we are only apes.  Furthermore, religious thinkers, not Darwin himself, thought mistakenly that evolution was dominated by chance, and therefore not under God's dominion.  It is not dominated by chance, as I will soon show.

The great British intellectual and Roman Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman stated in 1868, "The theory of Darwin, true or not, is not necessarily atheistic.  On the contrary, it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of divine providence and skill."

What a marvelous intuition and one which we shall see fits very well the implications to be drawn from our scientific knowledge of an evolutionary universe.

This brief survey of some historical incident shows the ups and downs of the view of the churches and especially the Catholic church with respect to Darwinian evolution.  However, one half century after Darwin, research on evolution by Catholic scholars was a veritable minefield.  Many saw coming a Galileo affair.  Nonetheless, in 1966 in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul, II, declared that, "New scientific knowledge has led us to the conclusion that the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis."

The new scientific knowledge has also led to what is now called neo-Darwinian evolution, for the most part in continuity with Darwin, but obviously progressing beyond his science.  The most recent episode cited by John in the relationship of the Catholic church to science, a tragic one as I see it, is the affirmation by Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn in his article in the New York Times of 7 July 2005, that neo-Darwinian evolution is not compatible with Catholic doctrine, and he opts obviously for intelligent design.  To my estimation, the Cardinal is in error.  Here I am a humble priest saying a Cardinal is in error, but the truth neither respects democracy nor hierarchy.  The truth is the truth.  If I speak the truth, so help me, God.

[Laughter.]

He is in error on at least five fundamental issues, and I wish you would carefully listen to each.  The scientific theory of evolution, as all scientific theories, as I have said before, is completely neutral with respect to religious thinking.  The Cardinal does not accept that.

Second, the message of John Paul, II, to which I have just referred and which is dismissed by the Cardinal as, I quote, "rather vague and unimportant,"--would that John Paul, II, were alive at that time--is a fundamental church teaching, this letter of John Paul, II, which significantly advances the evolution debate.

Three, neo-Darwinian evolution is not, in the words of the Cardinal, and I quote, "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection."  I think Ken has already well established that.

Four, the apparent directionality, apparent directionality seen by science and the evolutionary process does not require a designer.

Five, intelligent design is not science, despite the Cardinal's statement that, I quote again, "neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis"--he's also bringing in cosmology and I'll have a chance to address that--the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology were invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science."  "Purpose and design found in modern science said the Cardinal."  He is wrong.

I would like now to address some of these issues by demonstrating with a series of slides of the best modern scientific view of the universe and evolution, physical, chemical, and biological.  Chemists and biologists will pardon me.  I'm an astrophysicist/cosmologist; so, though I bring in those things, I bring them in only against that background and with a degree of personal ignorance, so pardon me on those issues.

As a Christian believer at the end of the slides I would like them to draw some implications.  I'll put my collar back on for the science presented.  The following text I have given the people some copies of the text.  I'm not going to read this text now.  I'm simply going to use it to show this series of slides.

I talk about the dance of the fertile universe; that chance destiny, necessity if you will, and fertility are three fundamental concepts to our understanding the evolutionary universe.  Once I get this going, maybe it will work.  No, I'm going to have to ask someone to forward.  John could or, Joe, could you?  Here we go.  So, my question is chance or necessity and if it's one or the other, is God required?

I would like to do a few sort of fundamental little things at first.  I call it the fertility of the human versus the fertility of the universe, and fertility is a snare word.  I don't know what it means in either of these two contexts, as you'll see, but I like to present the numbers.  Biologists correct me, but of about 30,000 human genes, okay, about 2,000 vary from one individual to the other.  If that's so, then the replica from one individual to another would therefore vary by two to the power of 2,010.  That number is fairly large.  It's 10 to the 605th.  That means that each of us as an individual has the capacity to produce genetically different eggs or sperm to a total of 10 to the 600th.  That's a number.

In the visible universe there are 10 to the 76 atoms.  Comparing those two numbers, I don't know what it means.  I'd like just to show you them.  It proposes a question to me.  How out of 10 to the 76 atoms did we generate living beings who have that capacity?  It's a marvelous thing that we have just comparing those two numbers.  Sometime, Ken, you and I should discuss that.

I would also like to present you a calendar of the universe as best we know it today empirically, and I'll do it, because these are big numbers, by shrinking down the whole age of the universe to one Earth year.  Okay?  I've changed the scale on you.  If I do that, then it's obvious.  Whoops.  Let's not jump again too fast.  No.  Yeah.  Obviously, 1 January, the big bang.  We come down to dinosaurs only live five days, but they had the good fortune of being born on Christmas Day, et cetera.

[Laughter.]

If we look at the last day of the year as the most interesting, then we see the following.  Jesus Christ was born two seconds before the end.  Galileo one second, if I'm reading this correctly.  And we're at midnight today.

Now, this can say many things.  Oh, it shrinks down so that we can get a feeling for these time scales.  What it says to me is let's go cautiously about these very major problems.  Science, if we date it from Galileo, has only been going on for two seconds.  Give us a little more time.  I mean, we're only at the beginning, as I think Ken and Dr. Nelson in their debate continue to go back and forth on this, we're ignorant.  There's a lot more to learn.  You can draw the conclusions, but I like to draw my own ignorance from this, okay.  As a scientist I've only been working for two seconds, and I've enjoyed every second of it.

[Laughter.]

This is the heart of the Orion nebula, which is a nebula up in the sky.  I put it here to ask why are there incandescent regions here?  Now I have to get my back hand going.  No, I don't.  Sorry to waste your time on this.  Laser menu.  Think I'll not use that since I haven't learned it enough.

If you blow this up by a Hubble space telescope picture, this is what you see.  I'm just going to ask a simple question.  It's cropped a bit, but you will notice that off to the left, your left, is the red region and off to your right is the blue region.  Why are there such a good separation between blue gas and red gas?  Because, very brief terms.  In the red gas, young stars, the most energetic stars, have already been born.  They're irradiating the gas.  The energy is being absorbed and re-radiated, and the H Alpha line of hydrogen, which is in the red region of the spectrum.  The blue gas is too far from the stellar womb, so to speak, so it's reflecting rather than absorbing and re-emitting, and that's why it's blue.  That's why the sky is blue, if you come to Arizona.  I don't doubt you see a blue sky too often in the Chesapeake Bay area, but when you do, it's blue.  And for the same reason that the reflection nebula here is blue.  Although I've said it's occurring in a galaxy like our own, just to remind you, this object here is the Andromeda galaxy, contains 10 billion stars, 10 billion.  Okay?  That's 10 to power 11.  And it measures across the hundred thousand light years.  So that if you're at one end and your friend is at the other and you light a match, he's going to have to wait 100,000 years to see it.

 If you'll pardon me, I can say this because I don't have a mother-in-law, but it would make a nice conversation with your mother-in-law.  You stand here and look across the galaxy.  You say, "Mom, how are you doing?"  "Well, my knee is not"--but it takes 200,000 to learn about your mother-in-law's knee.

Well, let's get on more seriously here.  This is the equatorial plane of our galaxy.  I'm building up to something.  I'm not just giving you a course in cosmology.  This is a mosaic of photos taken from within our galaxy, obviously.  We can't get outside our galaxy to look in, but a galaxy typically is a very flat system.  It's like a table top.  It's 200 times longer than it is thick, and we're in the plane of the galaxy, so it's very hard to construct the structure of the galaxy because we're in it and in the gas and dust that's concentrated to the disk.

But my question is, why are there these incandescent gas zones, the red zones?  What's that all about?  Well, let's look in optical light.  This is an infrared light.  If you look in optical light, you see this, a little piece of the previous slide, which has myriads of stars, but it shows also these dark areas.  What are those dark areas about?  Well, they're like the North American nebula.  This is a marvelous thing.  A designer, God, did a great job here in creating North America in the sky.  Okay?  There's the Florida peninsula, poor folks expecting another hurricane, the Yucatan peninsula, okay, Chesapeake Bay area up there, greatest bay in the world.  I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, by the way, and California and Arizona were not discovered yet.

[Laughter.]

No, seriously, why this dark area here between Florida and Mexico and all those other stars?  Is that a lack of stars?  Absolutely not.  It's far from it.  There's a veil of gas and dust hanging down that are hiding the stars that are on the other side of that screen, much more distant than the universe, and those stars are embedded in this gas and dust.  That dark area there, the Gulf of Mexico is it, yeah, the Gulf of Mexico is a stellar womb.  It's giving birth to myriads and myriads of stars.  This is how a star is born.

This is a gas cloud that contains about, oh, maybe a thousand times the mass of our sun.  It fragments, the fragments collapse, and they form stars because as a fragment about 200 stars if not more are going to f