Larry Witham: ID Flack

I am currently re-reading Larry Witham's 2003 overview of the intelligent design movement, By Design: Science and the Search for God. Those who follow the ID movement closely know Witham as a former religion reporter for the Moonie-controlled Washington Times, and as the author of several uncritical articles about ID. Another tip-off that the content would be slanted was that this volume was donated to my university by the Trinity Evangelical Missionary Church, a local group that has donated a significant fraction of the antievolutionary content of our library. So it did not come as a surprise to me in my first reading that By Design was slanted. What did come as a surprise was the level of bias and misrepresentation, even to the point of blatant self-contradiction. I've finally gotten around to listing some of them.

A complete catalog of the misrepresentations would take dozens of pages, so I'll just focus on two chapters, entitled "The Movement" and "By Design".

On page 116, Witham says "What struck [Charles] Thaxton most, however, was that apparently no one in the science community dared raise the question of information. Much as a written page suggests an author, complex chemical information in DNA suggests the work of a mind---a key argument that was to be developed in the intelligent design movement. Leslie Orgel had mentioned the information puzzle in a footnote and used the term specified complexity to explain why the DNA codes were so different from redundant crystal structures."

And on page 117: "Nobody talked about DNA as "information" because it smacked of intention, not of chance and law."

So, is it really true that "nobody" talked about information with respect to DNA? And is the reason why that "information" suggests the work of a mind?

No. Once the structure of DNA was elucidated by Watson and Crick, the idea of DNA as a carrier for information occurred to everyone. In his classic 1958 paper, "On Protein Synthesis", which appeared in a Cambridge University Press volume entitled The Biological Replication of Macromolecules, Crick wrote (pp. 143-144):


"A systematic discussion of our present knowledge of protein synthesis could usefully be set out under three headings, each dealing with a flux: the flow of energy, the flow of matter, and the flow of information. I shall not discuss the first of these here. I shall have something to say about the second, but I shall particularly emphasize the third--the flow of information.

"By information I mean the specification of the amino acid sequence of the protein...

...

"As in even a small bacterial cell there are probably a thousand different kinds of protein, each containing some hundreds of amino acids in its own rigidly determined sequence, the amount of hereditary information required for sequentialization is quite considerable.

...

"In other words, the viral RNA appears to carry at least part of the information which determines the composition of the viral protein." (emphasis in original)

Crick introduced two important ideas in this paper. The first was the "Sequence Hypothesis":


"In its simplest form it assumes that the specificity of a piece of nucleic acid is expressed solely by the sequence of its bases, and that this sequence is a (simple) code for the amino acid sequence of a particular protein."

The second was what Crick jokingly called the "Central Dogma":


"This states that once 'information' has passed into protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of information from nucleic acide to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible. Information means here the precise determination of sequence, either of bases in the nucleic acid or of amino acid residues in the protein."

So, contrary to Witham and Thaxton, not only was the term "information" being used by the biological community well prior to Orgel's use of the term "specified complexity" in 1973, it constituted an important part of one of the most fundamental papers of the field.

Even well before the structure of DNA was deduced, information-like ideas in biology were obvious even to non-biologists. While he did not use the term "information", Erwin Schrödinger, in his celebrated 1943 series of lectures entitled What is Life?, stated that the "most essential part of a living cell--the chromosome fibre--may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal" (emphasis in original) and spoke of chromosomes as an "hereditary code-script". And the same year as Watson-Crick, a 1953 volume, edited by Henry Quastler, was entitled Information Theory in Biology.

Now here's the ironic part. After claiming on page 116 that "nobody in the science community dared raise the question of information", only 29 pages later Witham himself discusses "information" and the Crick's "sequence hypothesis", on page 145 of By Design! Being an ID flack means consistency gets thrown out the window.

Another tool of the ID flack is to praise the work of creationist hacks. For example, on p. 117 Dean Kenyon's book Biochemical Predestination is labeled as "seminal". Now a truly seminal work in biology would received hundreds of citations. According to the on-line citation search "Web of Science", Biochemical Predestination got 25. Sorry, 25 citations does not make a work seminal. (By contrast, Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene has over 3000 citations.)

Witham claims Thaxton's book The Mystery of Life's Origin (co-authored with Bradley and Olsen) "was unique in laying out all the current origin-of-life theories and how they fell short". Funny, I thought Shapiro's Origins, published about the same time, did that too. He also claims Thaxton's book "opened a new debate". But not much of one, it appears. Web of Science reveals only 25 citations, some of which are by other ID hacks such as Stephen Meyer, Rob Koons, and Henry Schaeffer.

On page 118, Witham favorably mentions Michael Denton's critique Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. But he does not mention that Denton's work was riddled with flaws and misunderstandings.

Here's how, on page 119, Witham discusses criticism of the book Of Pandas and People: "Attacking the book became a pastime for evolutionists in public education and the American Civil Liberties Union". But there is not a single mention of any of the many false claims and misrepresentations in Pandas.

On page 123 we have John West (yet another ID hack) wondering, "Where does information come from?" But don't expect Witham to point out the pure idiocy of this question and the simple answer it has (information comes from randomness).

On page 132, Witham claims "Behe keeps up his research". Not so. John Lynch, at Stranger Fruit, examined Behe's research record and concluded that he has published hardly anything with scientific content since 1998.

On page 146, Witham discusses Dembski's "complex specified information" (CSI). He claims it "exists in nature and in the scrambled security codes on credit cards". Here Witham seems confused. To my knowledge Dembski has never spoken about "scrambled security codes on credit cards". Rather, in Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology, Dembski claimed that it was the number on the credit card itself, not the security code, that constituted CSI. Witham treats CSI as if it were a coherent concept, completely ignoring the many critiques of Dembski's work, even though they were available long before By Design was published.

Witham ends his Chapter 8 by quoting physicist Paul Davies as follows: "Dembski's attempt to quantify design, or provide mathematical criteria for design, is extremely useful. I'm concerned that the suspicion of a hidden agenda is going to prevent that sort of work from receiving the recognition it deserves. Strictly speaking, you see, science should be judged purely on the science and not on the scientist."

I have to admit, I'm not terribly impressed with Davies and his understanding of information theory. I wrote once to correct some mistakes he made in The Fifth Miracle, and, to his credit, he eventually wrote back, admitting his errors and offering to correct them in a future edition. Later I asked him how, precisely, he thought Dembski's ideas were "useful", and what Dembski had to offer that was over and above the work of Kirchherr, Li, and Vitányi. He wrote back saying he did not want to be drawn into a debate. I note that Davies did not say he stood by his previous assessment of Dembski.

Witham could have, instead, ended his chapter with another view of Dembski's work, from David Wolpert: "I say Dembski "attempts to" turn this trick because despite his invoking the NFL theorems, his arguments are fatally informal and imprecise. Like monographs on any philosophical topic in the first category, Dembski's is written in jello. There simply is not enough that is firm in his text, not sufficient precision of formulation, to allow one to declare unambiguously 'right' or 'wrong' when reading through the argument. All one can do is squint, furrow one's brows, and then shrug."

But of course, ID flacks like to pretend that legitimate criticism doesn't exist. If you've read this far, here's the moral: if you are looking for an honest and accurate assessment of intelligent design, don't turn to a flack like Larry Witham.