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In Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism, Robert Pennock takes a step in the right direction, toward genuine engagement with his opponents. I don't think he gets all the way there, but he has made a start. You wouldn't guess that from Phillip Johnson's response to Pennock in the last issue of BOOKS & CULTURE (where Johnson speaks of "the kind of logical fallacy you can flunk an undergraduate for misunderstanding" and "these rather obvious points, which bright high school students can readily understand"), nor from Michael Behe's review of Pennock's book in The Weekly Standard (June 7, 1999, pp. 35–7). In particular, both Johnson and Behe are dismissive of what Johnson calls
Pennock's centerpiece argument, the evolution of languages. Of course language has evolved, just as symphony orchestras and computer software have evolved. All these examples illustrate the often unpredictable results of interaction among intelligent agents. They do not support an inference that intelligence is not needed to produce either language or software.
Behe summarizes Pennock's argument thus:
The Bible says that all the plants and animals were created within a few days of one another; the Bible also records that human languages were created simultaneously by God, to foil plans for the tower of Babel; so Pennock concludes that if he can convince creationists there is good evidence that modern languages arose from a common ancestral language, he may be able to get them to give up their insistence on the simultaneous creation of all living things.
So far so good; that's an accurate summary. But immediately following this useful exposition, Behe proceeds to garble Pennock's argument (we'll come back to this in a moment) and muddies the waters altogether:
[Pennock] announces proudly, "To my knowledge no one has drawn this important parallel before" between linguistic and biological evolution. Well, no wonder. People who believe that the Bible trumps fossils and Stephen Jay Gould will also use it to trump Noam Chomsky and Indo-European roots.
But Pennock is being disingenuous. His target is not biblical literalists; it's intelligent-design theorists, who have no quarrel with linguistic changes. His whole etymological argument stands as an exercise in misdirection: The point is simply to leave an association in the reader's mind between the design argument and the inability to see that French is similar to Spanish.
So, let us say we have read Pennock's book and also Johnson's and Behe's dismissals. Where do we begin sorting all this out? And, come to think of it, why should we bother? The answer is that unless we are merely pretending to respond to a particular argument, when in fact we are simply trotting out a stock response, we are obligated to read and respond with a degree of attention and care. Johnson and Behe have not done that, and their responses are in this respect characteristic of the polemics of the intelligent-design movement.
First, Behe's quotation—which is taken out of context—grossly misrepresents Pennock's argument. Pennock does not say that no one before him has pointed out the parallel between linguistic and biological evolution—a claim that would be an utter absurdity. On the contrary, Pennock devotes considerable attention to the nineteenth-century comparative linguist August Schleicher, one of Darwin's first champions in Germany, and the interplay between the maturation of historical linguistics and Darwin's evolving theory—a subject that receives book-length treatment in a superb monograph by Stephen Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, published after Pennock's book had already gone to press. Alter shows how the potent image of Darwin's "Tree of Life" paralleled the "family tree of language" shown in countless versions in nineteenth-century linguistic treatises, the two images reinforcing the authority of each other in the public mind.
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