Feb. 8, 2006
 
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Ashby’s Argument for Intelligent Design Packed with Falsehoods
 
Dear Editor: The Feb. 6, 2006 GUEST OPINION: DNA Evidence of an Intelligent Designer By Tom Ashby (http://www.huntingtonnews.net/columns/060204-ashby-comment.html ) managed quite a feat: Mr. Ashby packed a good number of falsehoods associated with Intelligent Design Creationism into a few paragraphs without ever needing to provide any facts.
 
It is passing strange that Mr. Ashby, a religion and philosophy graduate of Kentucky Wesleyan College, could so taken with anything published by "Insight Magazine" or "The Washington Times" as these are organs of the Unification Church which preaches that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is the reincarnation of Jesus. It is not a surprise that the "Moonies" are the source of so much "Intelligent Design" rhetoric because if you proclaim to be the new "God on Earth," science is not your friend. In fact, leading Discovery Institute Senior Fellow and Intelligent Design intellectual superstar Jonathan Wells was instructed by "God on Earth" Sun Myung Moon, to earn a Ph.D. in biology just so that he could "destroy Darwinism."
 
There are too many errors of fact and reason in Ashby's editorial to expose here and now -- it takes much more effort to correct falsehoods than to repeat them. And merely repeat falsehoods is what Mr. Ashby has done. A standard technique in anti-science arguments is to make so many rapid-fire falsehoods that a scientist can't begin to keep up with them. I took the time this morning to hunt down Ashby's "quote" from billionaire Bill Gates. "Bill Gates describes DNA as being like a software program, except much more complex than any program ever devised."
 
This truth-claim has been promoted quite a bit recently by intelligent designer advocates. I found an early use of it by Stephen C. Meyer, Discovery Institute Fellow and young earth creationist. He used it this way, "If, as Bill Gates has said, "DNA is similar to a software program" but more complex, it makes sense, on analogical grounds, to consider inferring that it too had an intelligent source." in "DNA and Other Designs" Stephen Meyer First Things 102, April 1, 2000.
 
The quote is also used in 2004 by a publication tool of the radical Islamic cleric publishing under the pseudonym of Harun Yahya. One of his propaganda outlets called "Darwinism Watch" claimed that the quote came from the following citation, "Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Corporation, The Road Ahead, [1995], Penguin: London, Revised, 1996 p. 228." http://www.darwinism-watch.com/scien_american_2004_11.php
 
This is a good example of another common anti-science trick; giving a flawed reference to make it more difficult to verify sources. The actual reference is to page 188 of Gates' book which I'll return to in a moment. But a few points must go to the Muslims for at least properly quoting Gates which, as far as I could learn, Steve Meyer did not do until just a few months ago. "As Bill Gates has noted, "DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created." Stephen C. Meyer, "What is Intelligent Design?" National Post, (Canada) 1 December, 2005 and reprinted by "Catholic Educator's Resource Center." But even here he is slightly off the mark based on the copy of "The Road Ahead" I found in our library.
 
In rapid succession the quote was used in several other publications targeted at politically conservative, and religious audiences. These included "What Is Intelligent Design?" by Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute in "HUMAN EVENTS," and "Jefferson, Marx and intelligent design" by L. Baer for the moonie newspaper "The Washington Times," and now Ashby in the "Huntington News." It is nearly certain that these later authors have not read Bill Gates' book for themselves, they all use the mistaken wording used by Steve Meyer's article.
 
They all claim that this is somehow "evidence" in favor of IDC, but is it? Bill Gates wrote the sentence (or one nearly like it), but he wrote it in chapter about education and the Internet, and not in the least related to evolution or creationism. Chapter 9 of his book is titled "Education: The Best Investment, and the context of the quoted sentence is how Gates realized that biology was an interesting topic to study. The paragraph follows:
 
" We have all had teachers who made a difference. I had a great chemistry teacher in high school who made his subject immensely interesting. Chemistry seemed enthralling compared to biology. In biology, we were dissecting frogs - just hacking them to pieces, actually - and our teacher didn't explain why. My chemistry teacher sensationalized his subject a bit and promised that it would help us understand the world. When I was in my twenties, I read James D. Watson's "Molecular Biology of the Gene" and decided my high school experience had misled me. The understanding of life is a great subject. Biological information is the most important information we can discover, because over the next several decades it will revolutionize medicine. Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced then any software ever created. It seems amazing to me now that one great teacher made chemistry endlessly fascinating while I found biology totally boring. (Gates 1995, p. 188)"
 
There you have it -- Gates is not investing a great deal of attention to the facts of genetics -- he is talking about his experiences as a high schooler and the importance of good teachers. Further, there is nothing in the sentence or the idea behind it that attacks science or backs supernaturalism. The practice of misusing an author in this way is called "quote mining" and is a common practice in anti-science writing.
 
And is this notion that human DNA is more complex than "any program ever devised" actually factual? The book by Watson was published in 1965, and the book by Gates that Ashby is misquoting was published in 1995, before the human genome project when we did not even know how many genes humans had! At the time, Gates' statement was entirely reasonable, even though there was no actual data to test it. But Ashby makes a further claim, "... it is a well known fact that human DNA contains more organized information than the largest set of encyclopedias ever in print."
 
David Evans, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia has made some interesting comparisons between DNA and today's computer software as part of his Computer Science 201: Engineering Software course. Let's begin with his observation that complexity of computer software has grown at an amazing rate in the last 40 years (about since Watson's book on the gene was published). The Apollo mission guidance programs had about 36,000 instructions, but today's Windows XP made by Bill Gates' Microsoft has about fifty million instructions! Professor Evans then compares this to what we now know about genes. For example, the smallest known set of genes of an organism belong to a bacterial parasite called Nanoarchaeum equitans which has 522 genes representing about 40,000 bytes of information. In other terms, it is slightly larger than the Apollo guidance system. The human genome, or as Evans called it "The Make-Human Program," has a total of about 3 billion base pairs, which entail about 35 thousand genes. The total information content counting all of the bases is 750 megabytes, or just larger than the 650 megabytes that fit on your CDs at home. But, we have learned that massive amounts of human DNA are genetic "left overs," non-coding segments and duplications. In short, Human DNA has fewer working instructions than Windows software, and even its total 3 billion bases are tiny compared to Wal-Mart's 280 terabyte database (the equivalent of 1,120,000 billion DNA bases).
 
Like most antiscience, Ashby's "well known facts" are not facts.
 
Gary S. Hurd, Ph.D.
Dana Point, California