RationalWiki:Kitzmiller v. Dover annotated transcript/P051
Trial transcript: Day 15 (October 24), AM Session, Part 1
THE COURT: All right. Good morning to all. And we are going to take testimony out of order, is that correct?
MR. GILLEN: That's correct, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Okay. Are you prepared? Then you may proceed.
MR. GILLEN: Thank you, Your Honor. The defense calls Dr. Steve Fuller.
Whereupon,
STEVE WILLIAM FULLER
having been duly sworn, testified as follows:
COURTROOM DEPUTY: If you'll state your name and spell your name for the record.
THE WITNESS: My name is Steve William Fuller. S-T-E-V-E. W-I-double L-I-A-M. F-U-double L-E-R.
DIRECT EXAMINATION
ON QUALIFICATIONS
BY MR. GILLEN:
Q. Good morning, Dr. Fuller.
A. Good morning.
Q. We've brought you here to offer an opinion on behalf of the Defendants in this action, and I'd like to briefly introduce you and your academic credentials to the Court. Would you please give us your current position of employment?
A. I'm a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.
Q. What is the standing of the University of Warwick as in the British education system?
A. It's normally regarded as one of the top five research universities in Britain, and we do have a national ranking system, so this is pretty consistent.
Q. Do you have a chair at that university?
A. Yes, I do. I've had that since 1999.
Q. And what does it mean to have a chair?
A. Well, in the United Kingdom, only about 10 to 15 percent of academics are full professor, which is what a chair amounts to. And I've held a chair in that sense since 1994, since moving to the United Kingdom. So I was also a chair at the University of Durham before then.
Q. Let's take a brief look at your educational background. Where did you do your undergraduate work?
A. I did my undergraduate work at Columbia University in New York, and I graduated summa cum laude in 1979.
Q. After that, did you go on for further study?
A. Yes, I won a Kellett fellowship to Cambridge University, which was my first trip to the United Kingdom. That was in 1979. And I was there for two years. I earned a Master of Philosophy and then went on and did a Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, which I completed in 1985.
Q. And what is the standing of the University of Pittsburgh as it relates to your academic pursuits?
A. My Ph.D. is in history and philosophy of science, and the University of Pittsburgh is probably the best department, certainly in the United States, and probably in the world.
Q. Okay.
MR. GILLEN: Your Honor, may I approach the witness?
THE COURT: You may.
MR. GILLEN: Thank you.
BY MR. GILLEN:
Q. Steve, I've just given you a copy of your CV, which is Defendants' Exhibit 243. I'd like you to take a look at that, and I'm going to ask you a little bit about your credentials. As we go on, let me ask you, have you been a visiting professor at other institutions?
A. Yes, at several different countries, in fact, including Sweden, Israel, Japan, and, of course, I've been back in the United States as well.
Q. In terms of your -- let's take a look, a brief look at your publications. Can you give us an idea in general for the number and kind of your academic publications?
A. Well, roughly speaking, I have 200 published articles or book chapters, vast majority of which have been peer reviewed. And also, I have a lot of book reviews and incidental pieces, including pieces in the media. And this has been over the last 20 years.
And in terms of books, I have -- well, nine books actually published at the moment. There will be two more coming out by the beginning of next year. And altogether, my works, one sort or another, have been translated into about 15 languages.
Q. Have you given academic presentations and talks?
A. Yes. I have given them throughout the world, 500 maybe altogether. They are listed in the curriculum vitae. They've been on every continent. Many keynote addresses in a wide variety of fields. Yeah.
Q. How many countries approximately?
A. About 25 to 30.
Q. I'd like to draw attention to two elements of your CV. I notice that you received a post-doc from, was it the National Science Foundation?
A. Yes, I was the first National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow in history and philosophy of science in 1989, and that was at the University of Iowa.
Q. You mentioned history and philosophy of science. What was your nature of your work in that post-doctoral fellowship?
A. Well, I was working on the rhetoric of science, and that is to say, the means by which science is made persuasive for larger public social audience, and they have a program there. And the idea was basically to bring scholars into places where they would have some kind of synergy.
Q. Then in terms of firsts, I note you were also the first research fellow in the public understanding of science at the United Kingdom's Economic and Science Research Council?
A. Social Research Council.
Q. Thank you. What did that position entail?
A. Well, the United Kingdom has been very much in the vanguard of public understanding of science; that's to say, the need to study the role of science in society and how people perceive it. And I was the first fellow in this while I was at the University of Durham.
And during that time, I ran a global cyber conference where people around the world were able to discuss matters having to do with the, you know, their perceptions of science and forth. And a lot of different issues got raised in that context.
Q. You mentioned peer review. Do you participate in that process?
A. Yes, very heavily. In fact, I've just about peer reviewed anything you could peer review. I mean, people, books, articles. In my CV, I list -- I've peer reviewed for about 50 journals. I mean, at the moment, while I'm here I'm supposed to be peer reviewing eight articles, which I'm not being able to get to.
And these are in a wide range of disciplines, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, but there have been a couple of occasions in the natural sciences where I would be a peer reviewer, having to do with issues in the history, philosophy, or sociology of science that would arise in those adjourns.
I also peer review for academic publishers both in Britain and the United States. And I also peer review grant applications, including still in the United States, as well as in Britain for the European Union and for Australian and Canadian Research Councils. I recently chaired the International Advisory Board that basically signs off on peer review grants for the Academy of Finland, and -- yeah, that about sums it up, I suppose.
Oh, also not to mention tenure and promotion cases which are, in a sense, kind of, of that kind as well academically.
Q. You've mentioned that your work is in philosophy and the history of science. I take it that work started with your Ph.D. dissertation?
A. That's correct. Yes.
Q. Tell us about that briefly.
A. My Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh was done under the supervision of J.E. a/k/a Ted McGuire, James Edward McGuire, who's probably America's leading expert on Sir Isaac Newton's, the relation between Sir Isaac Newton's science and his religious beliefs.
I mean, my Ph.D. wasn't on that topic specifically, but I took a lot of courses with regard to that and have followed that up in many respects. But the Ph.D. itself was on bounded rationality in a legal and scientific decision making. And there I was --
Q. I'm sorry. Tell us, just give us an idea for what that bounded rationality means?
A. Bounded rationality is an expression from Herbert Simon, and it has to do with basically making decisions under conditions of material constraints; so whether we're talking about resource constraints, time restraints, so forth.
For Simon, who was a Nobel Prize winner in economics and originally trained as a political scientist, this was kind of the, main kind of reasoning that was involved in a field that he called the sciences of the artificial, which was meant to be a kind of universal science of design, and in which case, one could, as it were, interpret all sorts of issues that wouldn't be normally thought of as designed based issues as designed based ones.
Q. Do you see that work you did on bounded rationality as having relevance to this case?
A. Yes, indeed, because it seems to me that one of the things that's at stake here is the idea that intelligent design, as it were, is something more than just a kind of a fig leaf for the idea of God or some other kind of religious entity.
And the point here about Herbert Simon, who has no very clear, no theistic views whatsoever, is that he actually thought it was possible to have a universal science of design, and that was what the sciences of the artificial were about. And bounded rationality was a key kind of inference and form of reasoning within that.
Q. Let me take a brief look at some of your books. And just, we'll briefly describe the subject matter and how it bears on your expertise. The first book I see listed is Social Epistemology. Would you briefly describe the subject matter of that text?
A. Yes. Social Epistemology, it's not a phrase that I coined, but in the sense I'm most closely associated with it. It was the title of my fist book. It basically kind of lays out the foundations for the kind of work I currently do, which has to do with looking at the social foundations of knowledge, as the title indicates, both from an empirical and historical standpoint, but also what you might say, enormative in policy standpoint.
Given what we know about the nature of knowledge and how it's developed, what sorts of policy should we be setting for it, and how, and for whom. And that's the general scope of the book. And --
Q. I'm sorry. Does that book relate to some of the issues in this case?
A. Yes. The one chapter of my Ph.D. that I ever published is, in fact, a chapter of this book. And it's on consensus formation in science. And one of the things that I address there, which I do think is relevant to the case, is how exactly does consensus form in the scientific community.
Given that there are many scientists working in many different locations, how does one get a sense that there is a dominant theory or paradigm operating at any given point. And my view on this, which I developed, is, in fact, there is never -- it's very rare to actually find a decision point where you say, well, some crucial test has been done, and this theory has been shown to be true, and this one has been shown to be false.
But rather, what you have is kind of a statistical drift in allegiances among people working in the scientific community over time, and especially if you add to it generational change. What you end up getting is kind of a, what Thomas Kuhn would call, a paradigm shift; that is to say that, where over a relatively short period of time, simply by virtue of the fact that the new people come in with new assumptions and new ideas, that you actually do get a massive shift, but not necessarily because there's ever been any decisive moment where someone has proven one theory to be true and another theory to be false.
THE COURT: Wendy, is he going too fast?
COURT REPORTER. Yes.
THE WITNESS: I'm sorry. My apologies.
THE COURT: I sensed that. A little slower. And it's important that we get a good record here, so just take the pace down.
MR. GILLEN: I warned him, Your Honor.
THE WITNESS: I'm sorry. My apologies, Your Honor.
THE COURT: That's all right.
MR. GILLEN: It's just part of the process.
THE COURT: I'm trying to help Wendy out.
BY MR. GILLEN:
Q. Let's take a look at your second book, Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents. Briefly describe, if you would, the subject matter of that text?
A. Yes. This is a book, as the title may suggest to you, it's relatively critical of the current state of the philosophy of science. But one of the -- I guess the key thing, as far as this case is concerned, that is of interest, is that I very strongly identify myself as being a philosophical naturalist.
Q. And if you would just briefly explain what that means?
A. Well, a naturalist basically is someone who believes that everything that happens in reality, as it were, can be understood as part of the natural world. And more specifically, that can be understood in terms, at least in principle, in terms of the methods of the natural sciences.
And that includes human, social, life as well. That's the general perspective that naturalism offers. And I identify specifically with that view in the book, and I haven't retracted it either.
Q. Well, let me ask you, does that philosophical disposition you've described relate back to your work with Newton?
A. Well, I mean, the issue here -- not in a very direct way actually. But it does relate to the idea of what happens over time regardless of where scientific beliefs come from, that there is a tendency, in fact, to be assimilated into this naturalistic view.
Q. Does it speak to science and the nature of science?
A. What does?
Q. Your text, Philosophy of Sciences --
A. Yes, it does. Yes. See, one of the problems that I argue about in the book is that there's a sense in which, if we're going to understand the nature of science, we have so sort of study it naturalistically. One of the consequences of that may be that we find out things about the nature of science that we didn't quite realize were true.
And one conclusion that I think is very relevant to this case is that, ironically perhaps, from a naturalistic standpoint, if you study how you actually come about to a culture or a society that thinks seriously about scientific questions and the way that we're used to, you may have had to start off with something like a monotheistic standpoint that, that may, in fact, be a natural fact about the way science develops. And that is a point that I first raise in that book and then subsequently develop.
Q. Let's look at your next book, Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge. Would you briefly describe what that text addresses?
A. Well, that one has to do again, as the title suggests, with the rhetorical character of science. And here, I think one has to understand rhetoric as kind of the arts and sciences of persuasion. And I'm talking about this here not only in terms of, as it were, how science or organized bodies of knowledge make themselves persuasive to the larger society, but I'm also talking about how scientists amongst themselves persuade each other to be part of a common group or a common paradigm that move together despite perhaps some internal disagreements.
And one thing I would say that is relevant to this case from this book is that, some concepts from this book have, in fact, been inspirational for people who have been writing about the rhetoric about how the neo-Darwinian synthesis was forged in the middle third of the 20th century, because that is an example of where there's been a lot of strategic ambiguity and suppressed disagreements among people operating in many various disciplines in order to move forward with this general picture that the neo-Darwinian synthesis puts forward.
Q. Does that text speak to the science, non-science boundary?
A. Yes, in the sense that this always has to be negotiated. It is, in fact, very easy, as it were, for things to fall out that, in a sense, the boundary between science and non-science isn't something one can ever take for granted. It is actively being negotiated at all times because there are all kinds of people who are trying to make claims that what they're doing is scientific.
Insofar as science is the most authoritative body of knowledge in society. So in that respect, there's a kind of policing, you might say, and an occasional negotiation of the boundary that takes place.
Q. How about your next book, Science. Give us an idea for the subject matter of that text.
A. Well, that book, in a way, really gets, I think, very close to the heart of the issues. This is a book that, in fact, I developed a part -- from my undergraduate teaching in Britain. It's been published both in Britain and the United States.
And the idea here is, I basically look at what is the concept of science from a social standpoint. So this is a book in a series called Concepts in the Social Sciences. And one of the points that I make very much up front is that, if you want to identify something as a science, it's going to be very difficult to identify it purely in terms of what the practitioners do, okay, because, in fact, if you look at the various fields that we normally call science, ranging from physics to chemistry to biology and including many of the social sciences and so forth, people are doing vastly different things even within the disciplines themselves.
So there's a sense in which one can grant that there's a lot of technical expertise required of people who do science and get trained in science, but that in itself does not explain the thing being science. There's something in addition. Okay. And that has to do with the way in which this body of knowledge called science relates to the larger society.
And in a sense, the question then becomes, how does science establish this kind of authority? And it's in this context that issues like testability, some of the issues that have been arising in this trial, are, in fact, quite important and, in fact, then serve as a kind of umbrella notion for understanding the way in which vastly different practices are relating to the larger society.
Q. Your next text is the Governance of Science. Give us an idea of the subject matter of that text.
A. Well, The Governance of Science again, as the title suggests, addresses sort of the political structure of science, you might say, and the occasion for it. And this is something I think that would be very familiar to people who are in the kinds of fields I operate in.
There has been a kind of, you might say, a shift in the burden of proof with regard to the way in which one defends the value of science in the post Cold War era. There's a sense in which the, if you look at the Cold War era, that was the period where science, especially in this country, in the United States, was very much centrally funded, where there were national agendas, where it was seen as very obviously a bowl work of national security.
And, in fact, in a sense, the Cold War was being conducted as a race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, kind of at a surrogate level, as a science race. But now with the end of the Cold War, there's kind of an open question about what the value of science is.
So there's been a tendency to devolve funding away from the central authorities, from the Government. And then the question becomes, okay, if we're not worried about science as a bowl work to national security, why should we be supporting science, and should the state be supporting science, or should it just be completely devolved to private authorities? And that's kind of the central problem of the book.
Q. Does the text Governance of Science speak to the role of peer review in science?
A. Well, yes. And one of the things that it says is that, while the scientific community is nominally governed by a peer review process, as a matter of fact, relatively few scientists ever participate in it.
So if one were to look at the structure of science from a sort of, you might say, political science standpoint, and ask, well, what kind of regime governs science, it wouldn't be a democracy in the sense that everyone has an equal say, or even that there are clear representative bodies in terms of which the bulk of the scientific community, as it were, could turn to and who would then, in turn, be held accountable.
There is a tendency, in fact, for science to be governed by a kind of, to put it bluntly, self-perpetuating elite.
Q. Well, let's skip for a moment to your text Knowledgement Management Foundations. Is that a related work?
A. Yes, I mean the Knowledgement Management Foundations book, the phrase knowledgement management, which is probably one of the -- now one of the hottest topics in business school research in a way reflects kind of what's happened to organized knowledge in our time.
Namely, it's a kind of -- it's something that's seen as very powerful, very important as a resource, but as it were, doesn't have a kind of natural home anymore. So that when one talks about knowledge management, it could be knowledge produced not only in universities, but in R and D divisions of industrial labs, or think tanks, or all kinds of places.
And then the question becomes, is there some kind of, you know, organized uniform way of regulating what's going on, you know, given that the universities no longer seem to have a monopoly over this? So I deal with that. In that context, I actually spend more time talking about the role of peer review and the strengths and weaknesses of it.
Q. You've got a text entitled Thomas Kuhn. Would you give us the general idea for that text's subject matter?
A. Thomas Kuhn was probably the most influential theorist of science, certainly in the second half the 20th century, and maybe the entire 20th century. Certainly one still to this day, he is one of the five most cited people in the humanities and social sciences.
And he published this book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, which is probably the most important book that people in my field ever read and very influential outside of it.
What I argue in my book called Thomas Kuhn, which is probably the book that's been most highly reviewed, 50, 60 reviews, from the New York Times to esoteric academic journals around the world, is that basically his theory is not only false, but also in a way, bad policy, you might say, in terms of the way one thinks about the governance of science, and in a sense, has had a very bad influence in the way we think about science, because the key thing about Kuhn's book, and again, this is quite relevant to the case, is that, Kuhn is very big on the idea that, at any given point in the history of science, there is a dominant paradigm, and that's, in fact, how you know there's a science.
So there's always one dominant paradigm, and that the only way in which you can have alternative points of views that have anything any kind of legitimacy is if that paradigm is, in a sense, in a self-destruct mode.
So when it has accumulated so many anomalies, that then people start looking for alternatives. But otherwise, there is no incentive within science to be looking for an alternative while the dominant paradigm is still strong. It seems to me, while this may cover about 300 years of the history of physics, that's historically all that it covers.
And in any case, it is bad as a kind of policy recommendation in terms of how to organize your science generally.
Q. Well, looking at Kuhn versus Popper, does that take up the idea of normal science or paradigm that Kuhn developed?
A. Yes. I mean, Karl Popper had a -- Karl Popper is originally a Viennese philosopher of science who, under the Nazi occupation, moved to Britain and spent most of his career at the London School of Economics, had a very famous debate with Kuhn in 1965.
Popper was a believer that, of the idea that science was kind of the vanguard of what he called the open society. That is to say, a society where all claims in principle are open to criticism and that, in fact, the way we make progress both socially and scientifically is through mutual criticism and learning collectively through that mutual criticism.
But the question then becomes, under what kinds of social arrangements is that possible? And the big debate with Kuhn was basically over this point, because Kuhn basically said you really couldn't have science if, in fact, you allowed free flowing criticism at all times.
There's a sense in which science has to close ranks, has to be dogmatic, and, in a sense, has to start excluding people. And that's, in fact, one of the secrets of science's success, is that kind of monolithic structure that goes on as long as possible. And what I do in this book is basically take Popper's side of the issue.
Q. And is that -- describe just the thrust of your text as it relates to distinguishing Kuhn's position?
A. Okay. Well, it seems to me that one problem that we have nowadays where, you might say, the start-up costs for coming up with alternative theories in science are so high, not only in terms of the academic background that people need to have, but also the amount of material resources one needs to have to mount labs and research teams and stuff of that kind, that it's, in fact, very difficult in the current climate to mount very serious fundamental criticisms, because you really have to do a lot of front loading before you actually get to the point where criticism will be taken seriously at a fundamental level. And this is a relatively recent development, certainly a 20th century development.
Q. Is your discussion of Popper in this book linked to ideas of testability, and if so, how?
A. Well, Popper is primarily known in philosophy of science for having put forward the criteria of falsification, which is his preferred way of talking about testability, which is -- basically what you do is, you set up a very stiff test where, in a sense, if the theory actually passes it, it's kind of unique in passing it, you wouldn't expect it to pass it, and, therefore, it supposedly says something very significant about the theory's knowledge claims.
Popper primarily imagined this kind of in the context of what is known in the trade as a crucial experiment where, in a sense, you have a kind of two theories facing off over some kind of common phenomena where they say radically different things about.
And that's -- and the point being, right, how do you get two theories to be sufficiently equalized in status that they will be tested by one case? See, Popper is kind of imagining science is a bit like a game, right, where you go in and match and both sides are imagined to be fundamentally equal, and then they test their wits against themselves.
But, of course, in the kind of world we live in, theories don't come in equal. Some theories come in with a lot more resources, a lot more back story that provides a kind of authority and makes it very difficult for these theories to be tested adequately.
Q. You mentioned the Open Society. How about the Open University. I note that your CV reveals you've done work there and some work in an area that touches directly on this case. What is the Open University?
A. Yes, the Open University is the original -- I believe it's the original, and probably still the largest, or one of the world's largest, distance learning institutions.
It was created in the 1960's as part of a labor government initiative in the United Kingdom to enable people in Britain to get higher education more easily; so the idea being that you would purchase these books and study guides and things, there would be television programs that would be shown very early in the morning that would cover the courses, and every week there would be classes taught basically in classrooms that aren't being used, you know.
So it would be like evening classes, things of that kind. So 3 to 400,000 people currently are enrolled in this. And it has a very high academic reputation.
Q. And you've done a course in the Open University that touches on the subject matter of this litigation, correct?
A. That's correct.
Q. Describe it, please.
A. A few years ago, maybe 10 years ago, the Open University established a Master's of Science in science communication. And within that, there is a module, which I'm the author of it, called Are Science and Religion Compatible? And the way in which this module is set up is basically a text by me where I'm taking the students through a set of readings.
And the basic thrust of this is that, science and religion are compatible at an intellectual level, but there have been institutional reasons why there has been conflict -- and actually, it is focused on the United States -- and saying that there is some idiosyncratic features of the way in which the separation of church and state and how these things have developed in this country that have exacerbated differences between science and religion more than is intellectually warranted.
Q. There's a course, I believe, or a section entitled Will Science Recreate Creationism? Is that correct?
A. Yes. That is toward the end of the module. One thing I should point out, as a sort of back drop to this, the module was originally published in 1998, and so one of the things that comes up toward the end of it, there is a piece from Michael Behe in there, so this is at the beginning of what we now call the intelligent design stuff coming out. And there is a discussion of the significance of that movement.
And what I'm talking about in that part of the module is basically that, the kind of design based impulses, the idea of doing science from a design standpoint -- and let me be clear by what I take that to mean. That is to say, imagining yourself in the mind of God.
I think that is kind of what we're talking about here. Is something that may, in fact, be recreated within what we call mainstream ordinary science, especially as computer programming and the whole idea having to design programs becomes a more integral part of how science is done.
So this sort of idea of design which, you know, a lot of people think of as a purely religious idea is, in fact, an idea that is probably going to be of great significance as a kind of heuristic for doing science in the future as more and more science goes on computers.
And I also argue in the module that this will not be, in a sense, a radically new thing that, in fact, there is a lot of precedent for this way of thinking about how science is done throughout the history of science.
Q. Let me ask you to just give a little detail about, you mentioned, history of science, philosophy of science, and sociology of science. I just want to get a brief description of how those disciplines are defined and how they relate. Let's look first at history of science. What is the field of inquiry known as history of science?
A. Okay. I think the best way to answer that, I mean, other than stating the obvious, it's about the history of science, is that there is a sense in which this field, the question to ask about is, why is this field different from science? The reason is because, in fact, when most scientists learn science, they don't learn very much of their history or the kind of history that they learn is self-serving.
That is to say, it is a history that is written from the standpoint of leading up to whatever the current state of research is. Now Thomas Kuhn called this Orwellian, right, thinking about the, you know, the ministry of truth in 1984, right, which is constantly rewriting the history to justify whatever happens to be current government policy.
Well, this is, in a sense, the kind of history that scientists normally learn about their own fields, which means that there needs to be this other field, history of science, done by historians, that actually tells you what did happen in the history of science in a not scientifically self-serving way.
Typically, that subject, the history of science, turns out to be quite critical of the taken for granted notions that scientists operate with today.
Q. You mentioned philosophy of science. What is that field of inquiry?
A. Now philosophy of science is a field that, first of all, historically used to be quite co-extensive with science. So if you look at somebody like Sir Isaac Newton, not only does he give you the laws of motion, he gives you the laws of the scientific method as to how he got the laws of motion.
That used to be quite common. So that was a sense in which, back in those days, you know, 17th, 18th century, it was all natural philosophy. So it was like science and philosophy of science at the same time. But the field now is an independent field just like history of science is.
And it has been that way certainly since the middle third of the 20th century, and it basically tries to come up with criteria of what it is to be scientific, that is specifiable independently of what is the dominant theory in any given scientific discipline.
And this is where issues of testability get their legs, because there's a sense in which one can talk about testability in a way that is abstracted from what the dominant sciences are at the moment and provides, you might say, a kind of neutral court of appeal.
I mean, that's kind of a -- in fact, it is a kind of quasi-judicial traditional discipline traditionally, which makes judgments about what is science and not science from a punitively neutral standpoint.
Q. You mentioned sociology of science. Give us an idea of the subject matter of that inquiry.
A. The sociology of science is the most recent of these disciplines, and it is a field that is concerned with the institutional conditions under which science, however one defines it, is made possible, and also kind of the internal arrangements that have to take place.
So, for example, you know, a philosopher of science might say, well, you know, what makes a science scientific is that it's testable. A sociologist might come back and say, yeah, but what if it's impossible for anybody to pay attention to your tests?
There has to be some kind of social conditions, as it were, before, in fact, a lot of this science can get off the ground and be maintained. And sociologists are very sensitive to that. And very much like the historians, they tend to look at the ways in which things have been excluded or marginalized over the course of the history of science.
Q. You're identified with a journal Social Epistemology. What is social epistemology?
A. Social epistemology, in a way, is designed to be a kind of synthesis of these three fields that we were talking about -- history, philosophy, and sociology of science -- and basically take the incites from these fields, and with a kind of normative orientation -- now normative, the word normative in philosophy basically has to do with what ought to be the case, right, policy, right, to put it in a kind of practical way.
And so, in other words, given what we know about the way in which science has been organized in the past and many different cultures and so forth, how should it be organized now, and are there problems, and how might they be remedied, and all of that kind of stuff. And that's what social epistemology is concerned with.
Q. Well, the Plaintiffs have had an expert here in history and philosophy of science also, and he has addressed some of the issues that you've sketched out in connection with your work.
But in connection with that, I'd like to ask you, how is it then that your training, your area of academic expertise qualifies you to address the issues in this case that relate to science? You're not a scientist.
A. Well, I think the key thing is that, if you have noticed from what I said about the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, the kinds of things that are, as it were, relevant to know about science aren't necessarily the things that would be in a science curriculum, especially if we're talking about people who are being professionally trained to be scientists.
Nowadays, to be professionally trained to be a scientist, is, in effect, to be a technical specialist in a very small area, a small branch even of your own science. And very often, these technical specialists have to take largely on faith what people from other branches of their own field are doing because they have only the most cursory understanding of it.
Now if what we're doing here in this case is making judgments about what is science and not science, we're making very general global kinds of judgments, right, the kinds of information and knowledge and forms of reasoning that one needs to have would not normally be part of an ordinary scientific education, but would, in fact, require this additional kind of knowledge, the kind of knowledge that one gets from studying the history, philosophy, and sociology of science.
Q. So is it true then that the training you have actually makes you better equipped to answer that issue than a scientist that's practicing?
A. Yes.
MR. GILLEN: Your Honor, at this time I would proffer Dr. Fuller as an expert in the history of science, the philosophy of science, and the sociology of science.
THE COURT: All right. Is there a stipulation with respect to his testimony?
MR. WALCZAK: There is, Your Honor.
THE COURT: All right. Then he's admitted for that purpose, and you may proceed with your direct examination.
MR. GILLEN: Thank you, Your Honor.
DIRECT EXAMINATION
BY MR. GILLEN:
Q. Dr. Fuller, as we begin, I'd like to-
THE COURT: Keep the --
THE WITNESS: I'm sorry, Your Honor.
THE COURT: That's all right. It's the afternoon in the UK.
THE WITNESS: I'm just kind of wound up.
THE COURT: We're not quite as awake as you are perhaps, but if you just keep it at a modest pace, then we'll have no problem. You may proceed.
MR. GILLEN: Thank you, Your Honor.
BY MR. GILLEN:
Q. Dr. Fuller, as we begin your direct examination, which is my opportunity to elicit your opinions, I want to ask you a few questions, which we'll go back and explain. Do you have an opinion concerning whether intelligent design is science?
A. Yes.
Q. What is that opinion?
A. It is.
Q. Do you have an opinion concerning whether intelligent design is religion?
A. It is not.
Q. Do you have an opinion concerning whether intelligent design is inherently religious?
A. It is not.
Q. Do you have an opinion concerning whether intelligent design is creation-science?
A. Nope, it is not.
Q. Do you have an opinion --
A. I do have an opinion. The opinion is, it is not.
Q. Thank you. Do you have an opinion concerning whether intelligent design is creationism?
A. I do, and it is not.
Q. Do you have an opinion concerning whether methodological naturalism is an essential element of science?
A. It is not an essential element of science.
Q. Do you have an opinion concerning whether any testability criteria, if applied evenhandedly, makes intelligent design as much a testable scientific theory as evolutionary theory?
A. Yes, it does.
Q. What is it your opinion?
A. It is. Yes, it does.
Q. The remainder of your testimony will be our opportunity to explain the basis for your opinions. And I'd like to start at the outset by explaining the basis for your opinion that intelligent design is science. Explain why you believe intelligent design qualifies as science.
A. Okay. Having looked at some of the materials in intelligent design, and I guess I'm most familiar with the work of Dembski and Behe, that, first of all, there are some salient phenomena. One of the things that you want, a science needs to be grounded in something, needs to have a kind of subject matter.
And Dembski and Behe have identified something. They identify it in quite different ways. And here I'm referring to the sort of irreducible complexity complex specified information kind of notion. Dembski comes at it from a kind of, you might take, top down standpoint, where in a sense he's trying to define a sort of domain of design that is separable from necessity and chance.
And his most motivation, intellectual motivation for it has to do with the difficulty, if not impossibility, of coming up with a random number generator.
The elusiveness of the idea of chance which, in other words, whenever you try to come up with a random number generator, it seems as though you can always figure out what the program is, which means it's really designed. Okay.
And that's kind of what motivates him to think, well, you know, why is it so hard to come up with a kind of formula for randomness? Okay. And that kind, you know, led him in that direction.
There is a problem and a problem that is generally recognized by mathematicians and statisticians, regardless of what they think of Dembski, there is an issue there that deserves attention.
In the case of Behe, he's a bottom up guy. He's a more inductive guy. And he sees phenomena, biochemical systems in particular, the structure of the cell, that natural selection historically at least has had difficulty trying to explain. And he thinks, well, you know, that might indicate that there is something quite special in terms of its status as a biological entity.
And design would enter there. So there is this issue of salient phenomena that aren't readily being explained by the already existing theories that then create a kind of pretext for thinking that one then can perhaps, you know, have an extended field of research. Moreover -- oh, sorry.
Q. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. Go ahead.
A. The other point I just want to raise is that, design isn't just the name of particular phenomena that other theories can't explain. But also it is, as I mentioned with regard to Dembski, meant to be a kind of general explanatory framework for a research program that covers basically anything that could be regarded as design.
I mean, so, for example, in evolution, there is a tendency to kind of use design sometimes literally and sometimes metaphorically, and there's a kind of ambiguity that's there in the discussion in the evolution literature.
But I think, with these guys who do intelligent design, design is meant to be literal. That is to say, you're going to have one science at the end of the day that is going to explain how artifacts are, and is going to explain how the biological systems are, and social systems perhaps, all under a common science of design. So there is, in a sense, a kind of general explanatory framework here that is also at play.
Q. You contrasted the approaches taken by Dembski and Behe. What did you mean by that?
A. Well, in science, you might say that some scientists work deductively, other scientists work inductively. With intelligent design, you've got a bit of both. Okay. So that Dembski, who is a mathematician by training, and in many respects, has a kind of intellectual background that one, let's say Sir Isaac Newton, had, right, tends to think about these things very much from the top down, Right.
So he's thinking in terms of, where do the fundamental -- what is designed in the most fundamental abstract mathematically specifiable way? Now Behe, right, is a lab scientist, and so he's used to looking at phenomena, and he sees phenomena that don't lend themselves to very easy explanations. And so then he tries to then induce the kind of explanation for it.
Q. If part of what has been said in the courtroom is that intelligent design is not science because it would be necessary to revolutionize science for intelligent design to be considered science, does the aim of revolution disqualify intelligent design from the realm of scientific theory?
A. No, not at all. And I think -- I mean, this word scientific revolution, as I mentioned earlier, is largely associated with Thomas Kuhn, who I wrote these books about. And I think there are two things I would draw your attention to with regard to the concept of scientific revolution.
One is, first of all, we should -- you know, it's a dramatic term. That's the first point. It's not a political revolution, a scientific revolution, and I do think that sometimes some of the rhetoric of that expression, of the term revolution leaks out, and one thinks, oh, my God, if we have a scientific revolution, there goes civilization or something.
Okay. So a scientific revolution isn't meant to be quite like a political revolution. But one thing it does draw attention to, it seems to me, is, you don't have revolutions unless you have a clear sense of what is currently dominant, because what are you revolting against after all?
In other words, if we lived in a world, a scientific world where there were multiple theories around, all roughly equal, all pursuing their own lines of research, and doing things, you know, wherever the truth may lead these respective research programs, there would never be a clear enough sense of a dominant theory to then have to say, we've got to revolt against it.
The idea of revolution presupposes a dominant paradigm, that there is, in fact, a dominant power base in the science at the moment. And that's, in a sense, the most powerful kind of background conception to a scientific revolution. And I do think, in the kind of environment in which we live for science, where resources are so highly concentrated, that, in effect, if you want to make a fundamental intellectual or conceptual change, it's going to -- you're going to have to do something like a revolution.
Q. There's been some discussion in the courtroom thus far about the historical dimensions of this, the issue that's being litigated. I want to ask you, in light of that, are scientific revolutionists unprecedented?
A. No. I mean, in fact, Thomas Kuhn thought that they were a normal part of how science operates. His theory, which is based on the idea that a science can be identified by the fact that it has a dominant theory or paradigm at any given time, his view was that, these theories do their research, eventually accumulate anomalies, that is to say unsolved problems, both at an empirical and conceptual level, and then over time eventually, they get so many of these problems, that people begin to start looking for alternatives.
But Kuhn's point is that, it only happens at that point. It doesn't happen while the theory is still doing well. And this is where he and Popper disagreed substantially. But point is that, yes, one can talk about scientific revolutions. Some of them have even been planned.
I guess that's kind of the point that's relevant to this case, because a lot of revolutions in science are revolutions that are sort of seen in retrospect, okay, that in retrospect, we see that there was a scientific revolution in the 17th century.
That phrase, scientific revolution, was not coined until the 1940's, okay. But there are revolutions that have been planned.
Q. Give us a sense, just sketch out a few, to give us an idea of how the phenomena manifests itself?
A. The most self-conscious scientific revolution in the sense that the guy says, I'm doing a revolution, watch out, okay, and succeeds, is Antoine Lavoisier, who is associated with the chemical revolution in the late 18th century.
And in the history of science, Lavoisier is primarily known as the discoverer of oxygen. And the way he did this, and this is quite symptomatic of the way he did science generally, was, he was in correspondence with Joseph Priestly in the United Kingdom, who was actually a very good experimentalist and who discovered this thing that he called dephlogisticated air.
The thing to keep in mind is that, before Lavoisier, chemistry was a very practical kind of subject, not very mathematical, kind of a thing that, you know, a bit like pharmacy, you know. It had this kind of element, practical applied kind of element to it.
And people were trying to come together with some fundamental notions. And Priestly came up with this idea of dephlogisticated air, that is air without phlogiston, which was regarded as the fundamental element of chemistry at the time. But this element was very strange because, basically, when it was around, things lost weight. When you added phlogiston, it would lose weight. Very strange element.
Lavoisier reinterpreted all of Priestly's experiments and a load of other experiments that chemists had been doing in the 18th century and basically said, look, these guys are misrepresenting what they're actually discovering. In a sense, we need a new kind of classifications system for chemistry so we can make sense of all of these very weird results.
See, because the issue here is, you can have a lot of weird results in science and do a lot of very good practical work, and what you need is a kind of incentive to unify stuff in a way that hadn't been unified before in order to get a real science off the ground.
And that's what Lavoisier did. He wasn't that great an experimentalist. He did some experiments, but for the most part, what would launch the chemical revolution was a systematic reinterpretation of a lot of stuff that other chemists had been doing for centuries.
Q. Well, there's been, you know, the subject here is the neo-Darwinian synthesis. And there's been talk of genetics. And I know you and I have discussed Mendel and his role, which seems to bear directly on the neo-Darwinian synthesis. So please describe -- let me ask you are first. Do you regard Mendel's work as a scientific revolution?
A. Well, it's one of those cases of revolution in retrospect in the sense that Mendel's work -- maybe I should say something about who Mendel is?
Q. Certainly.
A. You know. Well, Mendel, who's regarded normally as the Father of Genetics, was a monk, a Catholic monk in Moravia, which is now part of the Czech Republic, whose writing in the mid 19th century, and did these very famous experiments with peas where he basically came out with a kind of a prototype for the fundamental laws of heredity.
And one problem that he had was trying to get the stuff published. It was a very difficult sort of idea to get across to people, because he was writing in a period where, even though Darwin's work wasn't completely accepted, nevertheless there was a view that evolution was more or less right.
And what that suggested to botanists at the time was that, through heredity, there would be over time a kind of blending of characteristics, right, that that would be kind of the incremental change, the evolution over time, as plants with different traits, right, sort of bred together.
But what Mendel showed, or claimed to have shown, was that, in fact, there are some fixed ratios between what we now called dominant and recessive traits, right, that are reproduced each generation, right, because they are intrinsic to the peas regardless of what the individual peas, what they looked like, okay.
Now the head of the leading botany journal just couldn't buy this, and, in fact, Mendel was a special creationist. I mean, he believed that these were like inherent in the peas and they were kind of created that way. And so it was only much later on when -- that Mendel's work got accepted, basically when you got to a point where people could come up with some kind of naturalistic interpretation, you know, understood in that methodological naturalistic way, of what he was doing.
Q. Well, carrying that forward in terms of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, let me ask you, was that synthesis regarded or described as a revolution in time?
A. Well, this is the -- you're raising a very interesting point here, because obviously, in this talk of scientific revolutions, you know, one thinks of Newton, one thinks of Einstein, and I mentioned Lavoisier with the chemical revolution, and, of course, one things there's a Darwinian revolution.
And Michael Ruse wrote a book in 1979 called The Darwinian Revolution. So when did it happen? And this is an interesting question. If you read Michael Ruse's book, and this is the first time -- I mean, this is the first time where in print people talk about Darwinian revolution, he thinks it actually happened shortly after Darwin published Origin of the Species, 1859.
But in fact, for reasons, you know, that I'm not going to go into here, it's not until you get to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which is being forged in the 1930's and 40's, that you actually have something that does look like a scientific revolution in the sense that you get biology in a state that looks something like the way Newton brought physics into in the late 18th century.
And what the neo-Darwinian synthesis is, what it synthesizes is genetics with the kind of natural historical framework that Darwinians already have. So basically, to go back to the example of Mendel, you know, you basically bring the two sides together.
You bring together Mendel and the genetic viewpoint, which, in a sense, is very much looking at life from a design standpoint or the fundamental bits of life, how do they combine to produce the things of things we see in the world, and you combine that with the natural history standpoint of Darwin, which is one that kind of looks at nature as it's already out there in nature, and then tries to make inferences about what's the source of that variety that we see.
It's only in the 1930's and 40's that you actually get those two parts of the puzzle put together that enables the kind of people, you know, who have been testifying for the Plaintiffs to all say, they're part of the same science.
Q. You mentioned Einstein. Just give us a brief discussion of the way in which his theory might be regarded as revolutionary?
A. Now Einstein is a kind of case that Thomas Kuhn talks about and people normally talk about as a scientific revolution. And there are lots of aspects of it that are quite interesting, I think, from, you know, in terms of bench marks for thinking about what's going on in this case.
One is that, when Einstein published his famous papers in 1905, you know, in relativity theory, in Brownian motion. He was, in fact, a patent clerk in Baron, Switzerland, having failed his entrance examinations in science -- by the way, Mendel also failed his entrance examinations in science.
There's a long history of revolutionaries being academic failures. I don't know if that's so easy anymore, but it certainly historically has been the case. And so he writes -- but he was someone who, you know, was following developments in physics. And this was during a period in physics where still you could make major breakthroughs just by doing, you know, chalk on blackboard stuff, you know, mathematics and relatively simple experiments.
And, in fact, there were several experiments, the most famous of which being a Michaelson-Morley experiment, which seemed to suggest that light could bend, that light would slow down if it's moving against the motion of the Earth, that needed to be explained. It was an anomaly within Newtonian mechanics. These were generally well-known.
Anyone who was following physics would know that Newtonian mechanics had some serious problems that physicists themselves couldn't quite get.
So Einstein writes up these equations, which basically end up saying, well, you got to drop absolute space in time, which is what all the Newtonians were presupposing, and say instead that, light is constant, and then that would make sense out of everything. He submits this paper.
It's a very -- it's a very clever kind of move, but it's very radical as well. And he submits it to the leading physics journal. And Max Planck, Father of Quantum Mechanics, is the editor. And he sees that the mathematics in Einstein's paper is a little goofy, but he fixes it up and makes it publishable. And then, of course, people really start to take it seriously.
Some interesting things about this is, Einstein was inspired to actually think along these lines that, in fact, there may be some fundamental problem with Newtonian mechanics, and that was the reason why it couldn't explain these experiments I just mentioned.
By reading a book by Aernst Mach, M-a-c-h, called The Science of Mechanics, which is largely a historical work kind of putting together in a nice summary package all of the objections that people had been maintaining about Newtonian mechanics for the previous 200 years.
You see, Newtonian mechanics had some unresolved conceptual problems from its very outset, including how do you justify absolute space in time. That's just taken on faith by Newton. And the Newtonians did as well, because it was able to solve a lot of empirical problems for many years.
However, by the late 19th century, problems are starting to accumulate empirically, so people are beginning to question the conceptual basis. And Mach, as kind of this historian of all of this, said, you know, Einstein reads this to say, wow, so there were objections there for a long time, it was just, you know, that there was no incentive, as it were, to actually try to put these objections together and think if we can come up with some kind of positive alternative.
But now at this stage in the history of physics, there seem to be. And that's kind of what Einstein did. And he mentions this, that he was inspired this way.
Q. Well, you've mentioned this accumulated set of problems for Newtonian physics. Let me ask you, looking at this state of affairs today with respect to evolutionary theory, do you, in your opinion, think there's reason to believe that there are an accumulating set of problems that may be a pre-cursor to a similar development in biology?
A. Well, there are certainly some longstanding conceptual issues that just don't seem to go away. And some of them are quite -- and some of them reflect kind of the fault lines of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. As I mentioned earlier, right, it has to do with the relationship between genetics and natural history being brought together.
But these two disciplines are really quite fundamentally different in how they think about life. So, for example, one way, one area where this is coming to a head has to do with exactly how one defines the idea of common descent; that is to say, the idea that there are common ancestors for all organisms, which is very much a key, a corner stone of the evolutionary synthesis.
Traditionally, common descent was identified morphologically, which is to say, you sort of, as it were, give the precedence the natural historians looking at the way the animals, how they appear to you in the field, what their physiologies are like, and so forth, what they're shaped like, all that kind of thing.
But with the advent of genetics, one then comes up with a kind of alternative way of doing this, right, which actually looks at genetic similarity between organisms, and then one comes up with a somewhat different tree of life, as it were.
This is kind of an ongoing debate. And you end up getting somewhat different trees of life often with some surprising consequences and surprising divergences. In a sense, that's a residue of the fact that the two main bodies of disciplines that were brought together in the neo-Darwinian synthesis are really, you know, sort of approach the nature of life in fundamentally different ways.
And so that issue kind of revives itself in the debates over what common descent means. Now there are other issues as well. So, for example, how much does natural selection explain survival of the species? Different biologists have different angles on this. Some, like Richard Dawkins, takes what's called a very strong adaptationist approach where everything is the product of natural selection.
Others say, well, there's sexual selection, there's random genetic drift, there's maybe punctuated equilibrium. You know, there may even be some version of the inheritance of acquired traits in some aspects of things. And different biologists, you might say, would apportion the explanatory merit of these mechanisms differently.
And there is no consensus on this, though most agree that natural selection, in some sense, is dominant. But then that raises the question of, at what level of organic reality does natural selection operate? So there's a very -- especially in the philosophy of biology, but it definitely affects biology itself, an issue over units of selection. What exactly is selected?
Are we talking -- Richard Dawkins thinks selection occurs at the gene level, right. When he says, selfish genes, what he means is, that, as it were, evolution is written from the standpoint of the gene. The genes are what is being selected, and everything else, like the organisms that contain the genes, they are mere vehicles for genes, that genes are really where the selection is.
Darwin himself believed selection occurred at the level of the organism, that you guys see natural selection in principle happening if you were actually there whatever billions of years ago, because it's happening on organisms. They live or die. That was kind of how he saw it.
Then you can think about, well, maybe there's group selection or kin selection. So that's to say, larger and larger units where selection is occurring. And throughout the history of evolution, you've got people pitching the claim at all these different levels, and then again, lots of disagreements.
And again, these things are not being resolved. They're just kind of continuing. They're rumbling along, you might say.
Q. Well, do you see reason to believe that, how should I say this, that there are, there's a way in which the theory at the level you've described it, is not actually shaping science as practice?
A. Well, this is the issue, right, because if, you know, what I've just been sort of laying out for you in terms of these theoretical disputes that exist within evolution, in a sense, what I'm talking about there is what is most directly identified with evolution. If one wants to -- and when people have been testifying in this case, whenever they've talked about evolution, they've used the kinds of concepts I've just been talking about, all of which are essentially contested by people in the biological community.
I'm not saying they don't believe these concepts. But exactly their definition and how they apply and their explanatory scope, all of this is being contested. So you wonder, how is it possible for biology to be conducted on a day-to-day basis, given all of this kind of conflict at this supposedly fundamental level of biology?
Well, the answer is, it isn't fundamental for doing biology. In other words, these debates over evolutionary theory, that, in fact, define what evolutionary theory is, kind of continue in the kind of parallel universe to the rest of biology.
And in a sense, one way you can see this is that, if you look at the Nobel prizes that have been awarded for physiology in medicine, which is the field, the biological field, essentially, you don't find anyone ever getting the prize specifically for evolution. Okay.
What they get prizes for are genetics, for ethology, for various branches of medicine, for physiology, animal behavior, right. In other words, they get the prizes for areas of research that are much closer to the phenomena than the sort of generalizing, universalizing level in which evolution operates.
This is not to say that these different disciplines cannot be explained or cannot be illuminated by evolution. But the point is, one doesn't need to be an evolutionist in order to do the work in these respective fields, at least sufficiently to be able to be recognized as important practitioners of those fields.
Q. Well, in light of what you're saying, do you see a meaningful connection between the work of the scientists winning the Nobel Prize or working the lab day-to-day and the theory? Is there evidence that the theory exerts a powerful influence over their work?
A. I mean, this is the thing that's very difficult, it's a very difficult thing to document. I mean, of course, we certainly had enormous numbers of pronouncements telling us that evolutionary theory is the foundation or the corner stone of biology.
The National Academy of Sciences, I believe, says this. But you see, is this literally true? Because at least from the standpoint of someone like myself, who's looking at this as a historian philosopher or sociologist of science, when we think about foundation or corner stone of a science, we're always thinking about Newtonian mechanics.
There's a sense in which physics is kind of always the bench mark for us, because there you have a very clear sense of a science where you have fundamental laws, right, and where you can deduce conclusions, and where different aspects of reality, in a sense, can be sort of figured into it in various ways.
There's a kind of tight theoretical deductive connection that leads to predictions that can be validated or not, as the case may be. And now, of course, after Newton, we've got Einstein, and we see physicists struggling very hard to come up with a sort of grand unified theory.
And what they mean by that is, something that's very deductively tight in that kind of way. And they recognize that there is a sense in which there is a crisis in physics. Now evolutionary theory isn't structured this way. Biology isn't structured this way as a discipline where there's any sense in which one is talking about unification in that very tight kind of sense.
Rather, what you have is lots of different disciplines within the biological sciences -- and, you know, I've rattled off a few already -- kind of doing their own work, you know, with their own theories and methods that pertain to the branches of life that they're concerned with, right, and then every now and then, paying lip service to some concept in evolutionary theory.
And one way in which I try to show this in the expert witness statement that I provided for this trial is this testimony of the guy, Nicholas Rasmussen, who is a historian of biology at the University of New South Wales, who basically makes the point that it's a mistake to treat evolutionary theory as if it were the same thing as contemporary biology, that, in fact, biology is all of these different fields.
They have radically different histories. They come from many different directions, some of which are more or less related to developments in evolutionary theory. The problem, however, is that evolutionary theory is, in a sense, a kind of universal rhetoric of biology; that is to say, a repository for terms and concepts that people from all these different biological fields can regularly use to explain and illuminate what they're talking about.
Q. How did Rasmussen go about substantiating his point concerning the relative --
A. Well, Rasmussen was someone who was himself initially trained as a biologist. I mean, a lot of people in my field, though not myself, but a lot of people in my field originally have a kind of science training, and for various reasons of disinterest, disenchantment, or disillusionment move into history, philosophy, and sociology, instead of staying with the original science.
So Rasmussen had some sense that, if you look at day-to-day work of biologists in the lab or in the field, all of this evolutionary stuff doesn't really happen. It happens somewhere else. So what he did was, he did a data base search of all of the -- of all the journals that are listed, biology journals that are listed for the year. The year he looked at was 1989.
And he found that, in a generous estimation, that is to say, if you look at the key words and abstracts of articles -- and abstracts of articles are the things that typically have what are the main points and the main things that the author wants to get across to the scientific community -- if you look at those things for the year 1989, and you look for the occurrence of the word evolution and the word -- and the phrase natural selection, you will find no more than 10 percent of articles include this in 1989. No more than 10 percent.
Q. Is it in 1989 or was there a period of inquiry?
A. Well, it was 1989. But then I checked this. I was very, you know, concerned, is this right? I mean -- and is it the same today, because we're now 15 years later? And what does this look like as a kind of historical phenomenon?
I mean, I think one thing to keep in mind here is, this is against the back drop of everybody saying, you know, evolutionary theory is taken for granted. And so you wonder, okay, maybe that's why it's not being talked about very much.
So what I did was, I looked at the data bases -- and now it's a lot easier to do it because we've got computer search programs -- for the biological sciences and biology, all of the articles, books, websites, whatever, from 1960 to the present. And here we're talking about 1.3 million items. And --
MR. WALCZAK: Your Honor, I'm sorry. I'm just going to object. This is nowhere in his expert report.
MR. GILLEN: I mean, he's referenced the Rasmussen article in his --
MR. WALCZAK: But we're now talking about a study that is not part of his expert report. I certainly don't find it. And I could be mistaken, but I don't think so.
THE COURT: Well, let's use this as an appropriate time to take a break. I have something else I must attend to at this point. I was going to break at 10:20 anyway. Why don't you look and see if you can find it either directly or in the context of the expert report, and I'll hear your objection or renewed objection after the break. Why don't we take about a 20 minute break. Water or decaff only.
THE WITNESS: My apologies, again, Your Honor.
MR. GILLEN: I understand.
THE COURT: And we'll return in 20 minutes.
MR. GILLEN: I got a paddle back there.
THE COURT: We'll be in recess.
(Whereupon, a recess was taken at 10:20 a.m. and proceedings reconvened at 10:44 a.m.)