>> Does anyone else find the words "This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered" to be infuriatingly hypocritical?

Yes, I do. Because we're probably justified in suspecting that most people bent on stickering textbooks like this aren't actually too interested in "critical consideration."

However, there's a middle ground between evolution and creationism that can sometimes be compelling. It's the whole "intelligent design" thing. Perhaps the term is used most often by euphemism-seeking creationists, but others are approaching the debate with a bit more agnostic honesty.

I'd never heard of George Gilder before, but the October issue of Wired describes him as a "technogeek guru of bandwidth utopia." He's also a defender of intelligent design. He writes:

The Darwinist materialist paradigm, however, is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago. Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists coming to understand that the cell is not a simple lump of protoplasm, as Charles Darwin believed. It's a complex information-processing machine comprising tens of thousands of proteins arranged in fabulously intricate algorithms of communication and synthesis. The human body contains some 60 trillion cells. Each one stores information in DNA codes, processes and replicates it in three forms of RNA and thousands of supporting enzymes, exquisitely supplies the system with energy, and seals it in semipermeable phospholipid membranes. It is a process subject to the mathematical theory of information, which shows that even mutations occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and selected at the rate of a Google search couldn't beget the intricate interwoven fabric of structure and function of a human being in such a short amount of time. Natural selection should be taught for its important role in the adaption of species, but Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science. (Emphasis added.)

The notion that Darwin's relevance fades in light of the incredible things we've learned about DNA is, I think, an interesting one.

To which I will now reply...

Spine,

I have several concerns about what you wrote...

Firstly, I think it's a mistake to call Intelligent Design a "middleground" between Creationism and evolution. ID is the undead zombie child of a philosophical position called the agument from design, which held that proof of God's existence could be found in the clearly intelligent (so the argument went) design we can see in nature. How could such complexity and beauty have occured by chance, it was argued. Scottish empirical philosopher David Hume pretty much put this idea to bed in his book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where he pointed out one cannot demonstrate the existence of God a priori. He writes:

"Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no Being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no Being, whose existence is demonstrable."

He goes on to point out that some patterns in mathematics appear to have amazingly complex design behind them even though they can be shown to have emerged from the nature of the numbers themselves--so maybe the order we perceive in nature is simply the result of the nature of matter and does not require a specific intelligent creator. Ultimately, Hume dismisses the argument from design, and I don't think I'm employing hyperbole to say that no serious philosophical thinker has since managed to overcome Hume's objections.

Creationists, recognizing the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled that "religion" cannot be taught in public schools (first amendment and everything), have fallen back on this old "philosophical" argument as a run-around technique. Their goals are the same--to undo the heretic idea being taught in public schools' science classes that Genesis is not literally true by sheilding students from evolutionary science education, which plainly shows an altogether different picture. They are attempting to change the wrapping on their position to make it appear as though it's not a religious one, but a philosophical one--and in the worst cases, a scientific one. Intelligent Design is inherently non-scientific because no predictions can be made using it as a starting point. ID is niether observable, nor testable, scientifically.

This brings us to your Mr. Gilder. To claim that "the Dawinist materialist paradigm ... is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago" is both naive and arrogant. The nature of scientific paradigm shifts makes it impossible to predict when they are going to occur (see Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Moreover, even if the cell is mind-bogglingly more complex than Darwin ever imagined, so what? So biological systems are really really complex. Likewise, gravitational systems are far more complex than Newton could have ever conceived, but his laws of gravity (however wrongly they were modeled from the perspective of a modern general relativist) still manage to get space probes to the outer planets--they are still "correct" in the most basic sense.

A scientific paradigm shift (as defined by Kuhn) requires a fundamental change in the model on which the theory is based. Newtonian physics to Einsteinian--the advent of tectonic plate theory--these are paradigm shifts. Learning more about DNA codes doesn't undermine the Darwinian model at all. Darwin's great gift to science was not a description of cell structure, it was the process of evolution by natural selection. Obviously modern science has modified the finer points--like adding the mechanism of random mutation, a concept not discovered until after Darwin's death--but the Darwinian paradigm is very much in full sway.

Note the phrase that appears twice in Gilder's quote: "Darwinian materialism." I had to do a little Googling to figure out what special significance this phrase holds for him and other ID proponents. Apparently, it's the random part of evolution that disturbs them the most. Some ID adherents--like Gilder, apparently--are scientifically hip enough to accept that the universe really is billions of years old and that species do evolve through the process of natural selection (the vast majority of ID folks deny these basic scientific facts) but they just can't accept the randomness of it all. How could it all have happened by chance? It just doesn't feel right. To which I say, fine. Where's the science? Show me that the universe isn't random, that there is definitively a designer or at least show me some good evidence that doesn't rely on my feelings.

Science continually shows us that the universe is vast, cold, and relatively meaningless. That doesn't sit well with some people. Okay, but don't go screwing up basic public school science education because of your existential crisis. Have a stiff drink and suck it up like the rest of us.