Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

There are also plenty of Web sites devoted to Intelligent Design, of course, but no serious peer-reviewed journals. Why might that be? If Intelligent Design were an idea whose time has come, you would think that young scientists would be dashing around their labs, glued to their computers, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology. Intelligent Design fans insist that the scientific establishment has a bias against their work that makes it impossible for them to break into the mainstream journals, but this is simply not credible. The Discovery Institute and other well-funded havens for Intelligent Design research could easily afford to produce a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal if there were anything to publish in it, and if they could find credible scientists to do the peer reviewing. Literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles are published every year elaborating and extending the basic theory of evolution, and most of the authors of these articles never become famous, in spite of their proven expertise. Surely a few of them would happily jump ship and risk ridicule from the establishment for the chance to become world-famous as the Scientist Who Refuted Darwin. But the backers of creationism don’t even bother offering the lure. They know better. They know that all they have going for them is propaganda, so that is what they spend their endowment on.

William Dembski (2003) has made available a list of four (count ’em!) peer-reviewed scientific articles that, he says, support Intelligent Design themes. (He also lists his own 1998 book, which is indeed published in a peer-reviewed series by Cambridge University Press.) But Dembski’s own comments on these essays make it clear that their arguments are at best, as he puts it, “non-Darwinian” (they are conducted without any specifically Darwinian premises), and hence might be put to use in support of an Intelligent Design argument. None of them actually advances an argument for Intelligent Design.

4. This standard way of talking masks a complication. When we speak of “half your genes” here, we mean half of those of your genes that are idiosyncratic, that distinguish you, genetically, from others in your species. In cloning, whatever genes you have that make you “special” (for better or for worse) get passed on in toto to your offspring. In sexual reproduction, only half of those genes show up in your offspring; your mate provides the balance of the idiosyncratic genes.

5. Does money emerge from pure barter systems by a series of gradual and scarcely noticed shifts in practice (the “commodity” theory), or does it always require some sort of “fiat” from some state authority or conscious agreement or compact (the “chartal” theory)? The origin of money has been debated for centuries. For a fascinating discussion of the history of the debate, together with some elegant economic models of the possible processes, see Awai, 2001. See also Burdett et al., 2001; and Seabright, 2004.

6. It is possible, of course, that in fact some one historical individual did so much of the early design work on money, or language, or music that he or she deserves the title of author, but this is extremely unlikely and entirely unnecessary. Evolution permits cultural design innovations to accumulate so gradually that authorship gets distributed over millions of clueless innovators over thousands of generations, just like the design innovations that revise genes.

7. The difference in the reproduction system makes a huge difference, of course. When the mint changes the year engraved on the die with which it stamps all the coins it makes, this is a sort of mutation, but such mutations don’t accumulate, normally. If a nick or blemish in the die doesn’t get repaired, it may mark all the coins for many years, and even get copied onto the successor die (if one of the coins it has made is chosen as the male from which the new female die is made), and that is more like a genetic mutation that gets transmitted to offspring.

8. On the imagined “intrinsic” value of money, see “Consciousness: How Much Is That in Real Money?,” in Dennett, 2005c.

9. On what it is like to be a turkey vulture, see Dennett, 1995a, reprinted in Dennett, 1998a.