|
« January 2007 |
Main
| March 2007 »
A recent law review article by self-described “liberal First Amendment theorist” Arnold H. Loewy argues that it is constitutional to teach intelligent design in public schools. Writing in First Amendment Law Review, Loewy points out that “[t]o allow all ideas about the origin of man that do not presuppose an intelligent designer, but forbid all theories that explore the possibilities of such a designer, expresses hostility, not neutrality, towards religion.” Similar to the position of Discovery Institute, Loewy does not believe that intelligent design should therefore be required in schools. But he does think that it should not be prohibited simply because many will perceive it has having “partial congruence with religion”:
I believe that teaching intelligent design in public schools is constitutional (outside of the unusual context of the Kitzmiller situation). First, under Establishment Clause doctrine, States may not disapprove of religion. And, a fortiori, courts cannot disapprove of religion. Of course, I am not arguing that a State must teach intelligent design. States are free within quite broad parameters to set their own curricula. As important as the question of intelligent design is, failure to teach it hardly constitutes disapproval of religion. But when the Court invalidates teaching a theory of origin because of its partial congruence with religion, that is disapproval.
(Arnold H. Loewy, “The Wisdom and Constitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design in Public Schools,” 5 First Amendment Law Review 82, 88 (2006).) This is precisely what Discovery Institute argued in its amicus brief to Judge Jones: religious or anti-religious implications do not prohibit a theory from being taught, and even if the Dover School Board had religious motive, that does not mean ID could not be taught in a different setting under a variety of legitimate secular pedagogical purposes. Loewy agrees, and he thinks ID should be permitted under free speech principles: [I]nvalidating the teaching of intelligent design in public schools is flatly inconsistent with free speech principles. … If the Supreme Court ever gets a case, unlike Kitzmiller, where the School Board or Legislature's apparent motive for integrating intelligent design into the curriculum is to maximize student exposure to different ideas about the origin of the species, and not to indoctrinate religion, the Court should uphold the provision.
(Loewy, 5 First Amendment Law Review at 89.) As will be discussed in a forthcoming post, Loewy's support for teaching intelligent design brought him a barrage of harsh ridicule (also in law review print) from a Darwinist attorney in the Kitzmiller case. Hopefully Loewy will stick to his position and not be intimidated into adopting the party line by the namecalling.
A 2005 New York Times article asserted that ID proponents failed to respond to a call for research proposals from the John Templeton Foundation, a group that funds research dealing with origins. The New York Times reported that Templeton’s Charles Harper claimed that he had requested research proposals from ID-proponents, proposals which "never came in.” A new report now calls the veracity of the New York Times’s story into “grave doubt.” According to both ResearchID.org and UncommonDescent, Harper now claims that the New York Times completely invented this story.
As ResearchID.org reports: In response to an inquiry about whether the JTF put out a call to ID scholars for grant requests, Harper specifically stated that, “No such request [for proposals] was made. There never was a call-for-proposals to the ID community. All I said [to the reporter] is that, like anybody else, ID people could apply and proposals submitted would be reviewed on their merits. No blackballing.” The New York Times article also describes the JTF as being formerly pro-ID but becoming disillusioned with ID. But Harper responded to the article’s claim saying, “This is completely false. It is a creation of media narrative manufacture.”
[Emphasis in original; Media Misreports Intelligent Design Research and the John Templeton Foundation, by Joseph C. Campana, February 27, 2007] The report also documents that, while Templeton is not exactly ID-friendly, it has funded research from ID-proponents in the past, including some of the work that led to William Dembski’s book No Free Lunch. Read the full article here.
I recently found myself in a conversation with two college undergraduates, both of them seniors in the natural sciences (physics and biochemistry, respectively). At one point we were discussing alchemy, which they knew as a pre-modern attempt to transmute lead into gold. I asked them whether they could name any famous alchemists. They could not, though one of them dimly recalled hearing of “someone whose name began with A.”
I then predicted that Darwinian evolution would eventually fade into the same obscurity that now shrouds alchemy. Although I knew from previous conversations that my young friends were skeptical of Darwinian theory, they expressed considerable surprise at my prediction, if only because Darwinism is presently held in such high esteem by their professors.
So I proceeded to explain the basis for my prediction.
First, Darwinism is similar to alchemy in purporting to hold the key to transmutation. Alchemists sought the secret of turning lead into gold; Darwinists think they already possess the secret of turning bacteria into baboons.
The alchemists, of course, were looking in the wrong place, expecting to find their secret in physical mixtures or chemical reactions, when transmutation of the elements had to wait for radically new discoveries in nuclear physics. Darwinists are also looking in the wrong place, expecting to explain large-scale evolution by DNA mutations and natural selection, when abundant evidence already indicates that those processes cannot do the job. When biologists eventually unravel the true organizing principles of life, they will quickly put Darwinism behind them.
Of course, there are also significant differences between alchemy and Darwinism. One is that alchemists were self-consciously searching for The Answer; Darwinists think they already have It. Another is that alchemy contributed many insights, materials and tools to the development of modern chemistry; Darwinism has almost nothing to contribute to the development of biology. The insights, materials and tools used by Darwinists have almost all been lifted from animal and plant breeders, classical biology, Mendelian genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology – none of which owe anything to Darwin’s theory. The only things Darwinism can call its own are speculations about common ancestry and the transmutation of species that look increasingly implausible with each new piece of evidence.
Finally, alchemists knew that philosophy and theology were as integral to their discipline as observation and experimentation; Darwinists think they are above philosophy and theology. Even though Darwin’s Origin of Species and subsequent defenses of his theory are inextricably tied to arguments about why God supposedly wouldn’t have made living things the way they are, Darwinists invariably accuse their critics of being religiously motivated while they think they’re just dealing with the facts.
Which reminds me of another conversation I had fifteen years ago with some communists. I was a graduate student in biology at the time, and we were discussing the nature of science. I stated that no science is entirely objective – that is, based only on the facts and free of subjective elements. One of the communists replied that he knew of such a science. I asked him what it was, expecting him to say physics (for which I already had a well thought-out response). But his answer was “The Marxist theory of history.”
Darwinists, like Marxists, tend to be blind to their own commitment to materialistic philosophy. In this regard, Darwinists are more like Marxists than alchemists. So instead of becoming, like alchemy, just a dim recollection (“someone whose name began with D”), Darwinism might, like Marxism, persist for a while (after passing into oblivion everywhere else in the world) – on American college campuses.
Mike Gene has put together some excellent material at TelicThoughts where he explains why Nick Matzke is wrong to go around using his “ID=Creationism” talking point. It’s a seductive meme for Darwinists, but these arguments don’t impress Mike Gene, who looks at how ID is formulated and finds that it is not creationism. Be sure to read some of Mike Gene’s work: “The ID=Creationism Meme” or ID 101 or ID 102 for details.
When the Kitzmiller ruling was issued, Darwinists were quick to give it nothing but unyielding praise, while many ID-proponents immediately observed that Judge Jones made findings outside the scope of the judicial system. For example, I critiqued the ruling because “[i]t overreaches the judicial arm by ruling that the nature of science is characterized by methodological naturalism and that intelligent design is not science.” Darwinist Tim Sandefur replied, using irrelevant examples to claim that “surely a judge can decide that science is characterized by methodological naturalism.” A little over a year later, one of the most prominent anti-ID legal scholars has agreed in print with my position on this question. Wexler, an associate professor at Boston University School of Law, rejects ID and believes it is unconstitutional. But he warns in the latest issue of First Amendment Law Review that “ID opponents should not be overly hasty to praise Judge Jones' discussion.” Wexler writes:
The opinion's main flaw lies in the conclusion with which most ID opponents were particularly pleased--namely, the judge's finding that ID is not science. I take this position, I hasten to add, not because I necessarily think that ID is science. As someone who is neither a scientist nor a philosopher of science, I do not know if ID is science. But the important issue for evaluating the decision is not whether ID actually is science--a question that sounds in philosophy of science--but rather whether judges should be deciding in their written opinions that ID is or is not science as a matter of law. On this question, I think the answer is "no," particularly when the overall question posed to a court is whether teaching ID endorses religion, not whether ID is or is not science. The part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous both to science and to freedom of religion.
(Jay D. Wexler, “Kitzimller and the ‘Is It Science?’ Question,” 5 First Amendment Law Review 90, 92-93 (2006).) Towards the end of his article, Wexler explains why he doesn’t want judges defining science: in a different case, he fears that defining science might legitimize teaching ID! if one judge can practice philosophy of science, what is to stop others from doing the same? Perhaps the next judge to hear an ID case will decide that science simply means "the process of searching for the best logical explanations for observed data." In that case, schools might be allowed to teach … ID… Is this really a can of worms that ID opponents want to open?
(Wexler, 5 First Amendment Law Review, at 107.) The implication here is that perhaps there are legitimate ways of defining science which would permit ID to be taught. It seems that Wexler’s real concern here is the outcome—not the inherent fairness of the process.
As will be discussed in a coming post, a Darwinist attorney for the Kitzmiller plaintiffs also published in this law review journal, and attacked Wexler with harsh ridicule for critiquing Judge Jones. It's unfortunate that Wexler had to undergo such ridicule for stating his views, but perhaps now he has a small taste what many ID-advocates commonly experience.
Cross-posted at Discovery Blog.
Senator John McCain signing autographs after his speech on foreign policy at the Seattle Westin Hotel.
"Defcon," the Campaign to Defend the Constitution (such a high sounding name!), put out a press release and blog post this week that attempted to sandbag Sen. John McCain, criticizing him for speaking to a Seattle policy luncheon today where Discovery Institute was one of the "co-presenters". Defcon scolded McCain for attending an event in which Discovery was involved and for thereby "lending credence (sic) to this organization". Defcon called on McCain to cancel the speech. At the definitely un-cancelled event today I asked Sen. McCain if he had heard of Defcon. He hadn't.
Defcon is a creature of Fenton Communications, the left and far-left operation that backs the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the ACLU, Rainforest Action Network and Global Exchange (the anti-WTO demonstrators). Fenton is also famous for attacking U.S. corporations with bogus environmental and consumerist claims. "To Change an Industry, Target One Company," is a favorite Fenton motto. Among the fake scandals Fenton has shopped was the Alar scare that unfairly damaged the U.S. apple industry. Fenton recently helped create Defcon, to combat, among other things, us.
The press contact for Defcon's broadside against Sen. McCain this week is Timi Gerson, who is a Fenton veteran of Moveon.org. So you begin to get the picture. It is fair to say that we would not be Fenton’s favorite think tank on almost any topic.
The silliness began with a contradictory attempt to a) suggest that we had finagled a speech by an unsuspecting Sen. McCain to talk about intelligent design; and b) that we really were not involved in the luncheon event, after all, or had misrepresented our role. In fact, the major sponsors were Seattle's World Affairs Council and City Club. They asked us to join them as a "co-presenter", as we often do, and we agreed. This is SOP for non-profit groups in this area who want to build a crowd for a nationally prominent speaker. We do the same when we are the main sponsor of an event. (A World Affairs Council leader called after the event to express dismay that one of his staffers had made an "inappropriate" comment to a reporter that Discovery had merely "hopped on" the event.)
As for why we would be participating in a speech on foreign policy by Sen. McCain, it apparently is unknown to many observers that Discovery holds a number of foreign policy events; most recently ones on Somalia, the dissident groups in Iran and on current difficulties in U.S.-Russian relations. Our involvement in foreign policy issues is even older than our interest in science and culture.
Anyhow, for better or worse, intelligent design didn't even come up at the McCain event today, though a reporter may have asked about it afterwards.
On the margins of the event I did have a chance to discuss Iran with the Senator (and with Iranian-American leader, Shayan Arya, shown below).
And Tom Till of our Cascadia Center on Transportation had a chance to talk with Sen. McCain about two issues we care about: energy conservation and passenger rail reform. Tom is seen below explaining our proposal for Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs). It's a proposal backed by several in Congress, including Senators Lieberman and Brownback, and Washington Congressmen Jay Inslee and Dave Reichert. Discovery and the Senator share a strong interest in passenger rail reform. Senator McCain showed interest. It’s all that we could ask.
One final thought about Defcon. Reporters should be wary of the ways Defcon represents us and our positions. We speak for ourselves and our positions are often very different from what Defcon tells the press.
National Geographic recently posted “Francis Collins: The Scientist as Believer,” an interview by John Horgan. The interview is nearly all about religion, but I have two comments touching on evolution.
First, Collins explains that though he believes in miracles as a Christian, “as a scientist I set my standards for miracles very high.” This is, of course, a wise foreign policy. But it brings back to mind the way Collins treats ID in his book The Language of God. Like Darwin before him, Collins uses a subtle rhetorical trick. He treats “special creation” as his interlocutor. That is, he writes as though the only games in town are blind Darwinian evolution and (perhaps a crude characterization of) the God of biblical fundamentalism poofing everything into existence in a capricious manner. Clearly this is a false dilemma—as the existence of scientists like Michael Behe testifies. Or again, what if nature manifests intelligence in an Aristotelian sense?
My second reflection regards altruism. Horgan asks Dr. Collins if he thinks Darwinism can explain altruism. Collins responds: It's been a little of a just-so story so far. Many would argue that altruism has been supported by evolution because it helps the group survive. But some people sacrificially give of themselves to those who are outside their group and with whom they have absolutely nothing in common. Such as Mother Teresa, Oskar Schindler, many others. That is the nobility of humankind in its purist form. That doesn't seem like it can be explained by a Darwinian model, but I'm not hanging my faith on this. Collins is surely right in noting that Darwinian accounts of altruism are just-so stories. In The Language of God, he even says that altruism “presents a major challenge for the evolutionist.” Indeed. But if Collins is willing to cede all of human biological development to a blind Darwinian process of mutation and selection, on what grounds does Collins then stand to challenge altruism or any other human behavior as not stemming from the Darwinian process? If the amazing human body developed under the influence of natural selection, how did the human psyche and brain escape such an apparently powerful process?
Dr. Collins is handling the universal acid like baby formula.
What happens when a professor of neurosurgey who is a Darwin-skeptic and just happens to be a brain surgeon visits a popular Darwinist blog? He leaves with unanswered questions. Last week Rob Crowther highlighted how Dr. Michael Egnor visited Time magazine’s science blog where a reporter admitted his Darwinist bias and was unable to answer Egnor’s question: “how much new information can Darwinian mechanisms generate?” Egnor is professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook and an award-winning brain surgeon who has been named one of New York's best doctors by New York Magazine. Egnor recently took his questions to P.Z. Myers’ popular science blog Pharyngula, where Egnor continues—unanswered—to press Darwinists for how Darwinian mechanisms produce new information.
Egnor concludes: I did a PubMed search just now. I searched for ‘measurement’, and ‘information’ and ‘random’ and ‘e coli’. There were only three articles, none of which have any bearing on my question. The first article, by Bettelheim et al, was entitled ‘The diversity of Escherichia coli serotypes and biotypes in cattle faeces’. searched for an actual measurement of the amount of new information that a Darwinian process can generate, and I got an article on ‘cattle faeces’. I love little ironies. Did the Darwinists respond to Egnor's question? Most tried to explain how there can be an increase in Shannon information, but as Egnor explained, "Shannon information is not relevant to biological information.” Egnor points out: “Your example of Labbe’s paper on gene duplication is, presumably, not to be taken too seriously. If you count copies as new information, you must have a hard time with plagiarism in your classes. All that the miscreant students would have to say is 'It's just like gene duplication. Plagiarism is new information- you said so on your blog!'” One Darwinist tried to respond by calling him names—"EGNORamu[s]." As of now--about 3 days since Egnor’s comment--there have been only 4 responding comments, none of which explain how Darwinian mechanisms produce specified complexity. But don't take my word for it: Read the whole thread here and decide for yourself if anyone answered Egnor. The text of Egnor’s full comment is below:
P.Z.,
Thanks for your comments on my correspondence with Mike Lemonick, and I appreciate the comments by the folks on this blog (most of them, at least!).
I'm not an enemy of evolutionary biology. I believe in evolution as much as you do, in the sense that living things have changed over time. I just don't think that the evidence supports the view that all biological complexity arose by the process of random variation (and natural selection). I think that some aspects of living things, particularly the specified information in biological molecules, are more reasonably explained as the consequence of design.
Obviously, this raises profound philosophical and theological questions. If some aspects of living things show evidence of design, where does the design come from? This philosophical conundrum isn't anything new in science. We don't know where the laws of physics come from either, but that doesn't preclude the scientific inference that there are laws of physics. Newton's demonstration of a 'clockwork' physical world that adhered to mathematical laws played an important role in the rise of Deism in the 18th century. The religious implications of Newton’s work didn't place Newtonian mechanics outside science.
I am not an evolutionary biologist, and my research (on cerebrospinal fluid dynamics and cerebral blood flow) is certainly not closely related to evolutionary biology. There isn't any area of medicine that makes much routine use of evolutionary biology, except perhaps microbiology, and most of microbiology is molecular and cellular biology. Doctors don't deal much with evolutionary biology, since eugenics went out of fashion. So I'm not an expert. My questions shouldn't present much of a challenge to you.
How much new specified information can random variation and natural selection generate? Please note that my question starts with 'how much'- it's quantitative, and it's quantitative about information, not literature citations. I didn't ask 'how many papers can I generate when I go to PubMed and type 'gene duplication evolution'. I asked for a measurement of new specified information, empirically determined, the reference(s)in which this measurement was reported, and a thoughtful analysis as to whether this 'rate of acquisition' of new specified information by random heritable variation and natural selection can account for the net information measured in individuals of the species in which the measurement was made. Mike Lemonick was wrong that this isn’t an important question in evolutionary biology. This is the central question.
Your example of Labbe’s paper on gene duplication is, presumably, not to be taken too seriously. If you count copies as new information, you must have a hard time with plagiarism in your classes. All that the miscreant students would have to say is 'It's just like gene duplication. Plagiarism is new information- you said so on your blog!'.
Duplication of information isn’t the generation of new information. No one doubts that living things can copy parts of themselves. You have presented no evidence that the process of (slightly imperfect) copying is the source of all that can be copied and the source of what actually does the copying. I was hoping (but not really expecting) that experts like you could do more than Mike Lemonick did. Lemonick just threw out cant, and you just gave me citation chaff. No measurements of actual new information.
There is obviously a threshold of the information-generating power of RM + NS. If I were to leave a culture of S. Aureus, mixed with a few drops of penicillin, in an incubator, and came back a few weeks later to find penicillin-resistant organisms growing in the culture, I would have no problem with theory that that RM+NS accounted for it.
Yet, if I found cockroaches crawling in the bacterial culture after two weeks, I wouldn’t accept RM+NS as an explanation for the cockroaches in the culture. They came from somewhere else. They didn’t evolve from the bacteria, in two weeks.
So what’s the threshold, quantitatively? It seems to be a threshold of information generating capability. But the information in living things is specified; it does things, specific things. In that sense, it differs completely from Shannon information, which is a measure of randomness and the extent to which a message can be compressed. Shannon information is not relevant to biological information..
Regarding your PubMed literature search, I must not have used the words 'Information', 'Measurement, and 'Random' often enough in my discussion with Mike Lemonick, and you thought I said 'gene' 'duplication' and 'evolution'. I understand; we all make mistakes. If you actually want to answer my question, type 'information', and (not 'or'!) 'measurement', and 'random', and the name of the species in which you wish to look for experimental measurement of information generation by random processes.
I did a PubMed search just now. I searched for ‘measurement’, and ‘information’ and ‘random’ and ‘e coli’. There were only three articles, none of which have any bearing on my question. The first article, by Bettelheim et al, was entitled ‘The diversity of Escherichia coli serotypes and biotypes in cattle faeces’.
I searched for an actual measurement of the amount of new information that a Darwinian process can generate, and I got an article on ‘cattle faeces’. I love little ironies.
Mike Egnor
(http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/02/dr_michael_egnor_challenges_ev.php#comment-349555)
Last fall I posted a response to Chris Mooney’s chapter in The Republican War on Science where I rebutted much of what he said in his book against intelligent design (which can be read here). Recently, Mooney wrote an aticle in the LA Times, co-authored with Alan Sokal, where he stepped up the rhetoric against Darwin-skeptics, calling them “the worst science abusers.” Mooney always equates Darwin-skeptics with “religious fundamentalists” and even goes so far as to invoke the “denier of evolution” name-calling approach:
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria do not spare deniers of evolution, and global climate change will not spare any of us. As physicist Richard Feynman wrote in connection with the space shuttle Challenger disaster, "nature cannot be fooled." Apart from the harsh rhetoric, the problem with Mooney’s straw man is that no Darwin-skeptic is a “denier” that Darwinian principles are useful at explaining why bacteria can acquire resistance to antibiotics. This extreme example of small-scale evolution results in no new species and no net additions of novel biological information to the genome. But it does happen, and thus it provides a useful example of precisely what neo-Darwinian processes actually can produce.
So why does Mooney argue so harshly against those he labels “science abusers,” “deniers of evolution,” and “religious fundamentalists” (who he claims are engaged in an “interminable push” to “undermine the teaching of evolution in American schools”)? A little research on Mooney’s background quickly may reveal the answer.
According to a page on Yale’s campus notes, Mooney was “copresident and a founding member of the Yale College Society for Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics” and “interned with the CFA [Campus Freethought Alliance] … where he helped draft the organization's ‘Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.’” Of course Mooney has every right to be a secular humanist activist—and he’s entitled to his viewpoint. His own personal religious or anti-religious beliefs and motives in no way diminish the validity of his scientific views. But they are relevant in one important sense: The instant Mooney plays the religious-motive card against Darwin-skeptics (which he does heavily in his book), he should realize that his own hand is weak. In fact, Chris Mooney provides a yet another example of the fact that many (though certainly not all, of course) leading Darwinist activists are secular humanists.
I will agree with one statement Mooney makes in his editorial: “journalists and citizens must renounce a lazy ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ approach and start analyzing critically the quality of the evidence.” I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, Mooney rejects his own advice and calls those who would critically analyze evolution “the worst science abusers” who are trying to “undermine the teaching of evolution.” Just like the Darwinists in New Mexico, scientific freedom of thought is fine for Mooney until it begins to encroach upon evolution.
Jack Cashill has an insightful column on the progressive mindset, especially as exemplified by Darwin's modern defenders. Where others see light, they see a threat to their way of life. And given their mastery of the media and academia, they do a great job of screening out the uncomfortable. Read the column here.
The New Yorker recently published a story by Jonathan Rosen: "Missing Link: Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin's neglected double." Picking up on a thought of G.K. Chesterton, Rosen notes that while he did "as much as anyone to overturn traditional religious assumptions, Wallace proceeded to horrify his fellow-evolutionists by concluding that natural selection could not in itself explain the uniqueness of man." There must be intelligent guidance, claimed Wallace.
And this raises an interesting question: Would Judge Jones' Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling have banned the views of the co-founder of evolution from Pennsylvania classrooms? A question already addressed in Traipsing Into Evolution:
...Schiller, like modern design theorist Michael Behe, argued for intelligent design without rejecting all forms of evolution or even common descent.
Prominent nineteenth century scientists held similar views, including even Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-developer with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection. By the late nineteenth century, Wallace came to believe that natural selection acting on random variations could not explain a number of things in biology, especially the development of the human brain. He concluded instead that “a Higher Intelligence” guided the process:
[T]here seems to be evidence of a Power which has guided the action of those laws [of organic development] in definite directions and for special ends. And so far from this view being out of harmony with the teachings of science, it has a striking analogy with what is now taking place in the world....22 While Wallace certainly ascribed more religious meaning to his concept than was warranted by the data, he nonetheless recognized that it was possible to detect design in nature. It is ironic that Judge Jones’ decision effectively renders unconstitutional the views of the co-founder of the modern theory of evolution.
In Think, a philosophy journal published by The Royal Institute of Philosophy, Phillip Johnson has published an article entitled "Intelligent Design in Biology: the Current Situation and Future Prospects" which assesses the current state of the debate over intelligent design. The full article may be read here.
Johnson explains that, despite the advances of the 20th century, many Darwinists still use old arguments that merely reflect microevolution. Johnson writes regarding the Galapagos finches:
To make the story look better, the National Academy of Sciences improved on some the facts in its 1998 booklet on Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science. This version of the story omits the beaks’ return to normal and encourages teachers to speculate that a “new species of finch” might arise in 200 years if the initial trend towards increased beak size continued indefinitely. When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in court, you know they are having trouble fitting their evidence to the theory they want to support.
(Phillip Johnson, “Intelligent Design in Biology: the Current Situation and Future Prospects”) Despite the lack of significant scientific roadblocks to the advancement of intelligent design, Johnson explains that Darwinists have worked hard to stifle discussion of intelligent design by misconstruing the theory as “creationism.” Johnson observes that “[b]ecause a gag order is in force, ID is not discussed in the scientific literature.” But he is nonetheless optimistic that this gag order will be lifted: Today authoritarian rules ban the hypothesis of intelligent design from scientific discussion and fiercely suppress it by lawsuits. A genuinely confident scientific culture that was making continual progress in confirming its theories and solving problems would not need or want to rely on intimidation to silence dissent. It may require many long years of struggle before the hypothesis of real design in biology will be able to receive a fair hearing, but the day of that fair hearing will arrive, and eventually people may wonder how a materialist theory as shaky as Darwinism was able to captivate so many minds for so long. … I am still convinced that the possible role of intelligent causes in the history or life will eventually become a subject that leading scientists will want to address in a fair-minded manner. For now, the influential scientific organizations are passionately committed to explanations that consider only material causes, so they reject out of hand any suggestion that intelligent cause may also have played some role. It seems that supporting materialism, rather than following the evidence to whatever conclusion it leads is their prime commitment.
(Phillip Johnson, “Intelligent Design in Biology: the Current Situation and Future Prospects”) Will the gag-order be lifted and other explanations be considered? Only time will tell, but the empirical data supporting design will never go away.
Some Darwinists have recently tried to rewrite history, claiming that no one uses Haeckel’s embryo drawings anymore. But on December 2, 2006, Truth in Science, a British group which supports intelligent design, reported that London’s The Science Museum had colorized versions of Haeckel’s embryo drawings on their website. Before that time, the museum’s website had used drawings that looked like this:
(Graphic provided courtesy of David Anderson of BCSE-Revealed.) Clearly Haeckel's faked drawings were promoted by the museum as of December, 2006 as evidence for evolution. In fact, Truth in Science reported that the caption also read, "It seems that an efficient way of marking out the body plan arose millions of years ago, and has remained virtually unchanged throughout animal evolution."
About ten days later, Truth in Science again reported that the museum had removed the drawings and replaced them with photographs. As of January 13, 2007, the photograph used by London’s The Science Museum used looked like this:
Now, as of February 20, 2007, they use black and white embryo drawings which look like this:
(Original graphic from http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/lifecycle/24.asp.)
What’s going on here? Originally, The Science Museum had colorized versions of Haeckel's fraudulent embryo drawings posted on their website as a line of evidence supporting evolution. Next, Truth in Science posted documentation that the embryo drawings were “one of the most famous fakes in biology.” Then the museum removed the faked drawings and replaced them with photographs. The upper caption remained the same throughout the entire episode, and the lower caption underwent only trivial changes, as it now reads "At early stages in their development cat, bat and human embryos share remarkable similarities." Clearly London’s The Science Museum changed their Haeckel's embryo drawings graphic in direct response to Truth in Science’s protests against using the fake drawings.
There have been times when our critics have seemed a little . . . well . . . silly. Most often, this happens when someone decides they don’t have to actually understand anything about the intelligent design position before they attack it. Krauze over at Telic Thoughts illuminates with a great example of a ridiculous straw-man argument. He writes: One of the reasons I don't take grandiose statements about how "many scientists reject intelligent design" seriously is because the average scientist has no clue as to what intelligent design is about, having only read some anti-ID editorials in the journals they subscribe to.
In the latest bit of threatiness, Darwinists are claiming that “if there is an intelligent designer, then almost everything else you know about science is wrong. Then your flu vaccine wouldn’t work, your car wouldn’t start, there was no Hiroshima ...”
While the fear-mongering of this is all very familiar, I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone try to use working technology to argue against ID. While several of our critics use varying theological arguments from dysteleology against ID, wrongly claiming that personal pain and sub-optimal design disprove design theory, these guys are actually saying that things working properly disproves ID! This is quite the shift in tactics.
It’s one thing to argue over the evidence and engage in an honest debate. It’s another thing entirely to prop up a straw-man argument against ID and hysterically claim that the theory endangers scientific advancement.
After the Kansas school board threw out objective science curriculum standards in favor of dogmatic Darwin-only teaching rules, Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts weighed in on the board's redefining what science is. This was a big issue in 2005 that we reported extensively (see here and here). The board has adopted a definition of science out of step with most states’ in the nation.
In coverage of the issue, one news story quoted Dr. Massimo Pigliucci: Pigliucci, a professor of Ecology & Evolution and Philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook, told TechNewsWorld. "It simply means that science does not (and cannot) deal with supernatural phenomena.” Quite appropriately, Gene pointed out that atheist Darwinists like Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and PZ Myers are all advocating what he calls a crank position, namely that science proves there is no God. Isn't that dealing with the supernatural?
Still more interesting to me is Pigliucci's response at Telic Thoughts this morning: pigliucci Says:
February 16th, 2007 at 7:53 am |
It seems to me that Dawkins is wrong in claiming that the existence of a generic God (what he calls "the God hypothesis") is a scientific matter, it isn't. However, he is correct that plenty of specific claims about specific gods can be scientifically tested and refused: if your religion says that there was a worldwide flood 4000 years ago, it is simply wrong, and if that claim is tightly bound with your belief in that god, well, then you are out of luck.
As for Dennett and Harris, I find their claims perfectly reasonable, but they are not saying that those claims are scientific (only consistent with science, which is a wholly different thing).
Cheers,
Massimo Pigliucci So, when the big bad scary wedge document was splashed all over the internet, we were accused (mistakenly) of trying to usher in a theocracy because we said we had no problem with a science that is consonant (a wholly different thing than same as) with theism. Here's the relevant response from the truth sheet. It wants to "reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." We admit it: We want to end the abuse of science by Darwinists like Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson who try to use science to debunk religion, and we want to provide support for scientists and philosophers who think that real science is actually "consonant with… theistic convictions." Please note, however: "Consonant with" means "in harmony with." It does not mean "same as." Recent developments in physics, cosmology, biochemistry, and related sciences may lead to a new harmony between science and religion. (emphasis mine)
What's good for the Darwinist goose should be good for the ID gander.
[Edited] Bilbo of Telic Thoughts ... [references] an early, notable use of the term "intelligent design," this one by one of the 20th century's leading scientists, agnostic Fred Hoyle: On January 12th, 1982, Sir Fred Hoyle delivered the Omni Lecture at the Royal Institution, London, entitled "Evolution from Space," which was later reprinted in a book by the same title ... In it he discussed the overwhelming improbability of getting the enzymes needed for even the simplest form of life to function by chance.... The difference between an intelligent ordering, whether of words, fruit boxes, amino acids, or the Rubik cube, and merely random shufflings can be fantastically large, even as large as a number that would fill the whole volume of Shakespeare's plays with its zeros. So if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design [my emphasis]. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true. (27-28)
... [The Hoyle passage] renders all the more implausible the anti-ID claim that intelligent design is just creationism repackaged after a 1987 Supreme Court ruling against biblical creationism. First, like the seminal work of intelligent design, The Mystery of Life's Origin (1984), Hoyle's design argument predates the 1987 ruling by several years. Second, Hoyle wasn't a Christian. He wasn't a Jew. He wasn't even a theist. He was an agnostic who thought the intelligence responsible for first life must have come from within the universe.
Third, and also like The Mystery of Life's Origin, Hoyle based his design inference purely on physical evidence and neither appealed to, nor attempted to reconcile his argument with, a particular reading of the Genesis account of creation. Thus, even if it came to light that Hoyle secretly wore bad shoes, attended a Holy Roller congregation in the back woods of Alabama, and peppered all his private conversations with "Praise Gawd!" it wouldn't matter: the substance of his design argument was based on physical evidence rather than Scriptural authority and therefore should be judged on the physical evidence rather than on any hidden motives he may or may not have had.
Hoyle also contributed to the revival of design thinking in the modern era through his work on, and discussion of, the fine tuning of the physical constants of nature. I discuss his contribution, and the history of intelligent design, here. Bilbo's Telic Thoughts piece is here.
The irony, of course, is that "Bilbo" ... [called attention to the Hoyle passage]—a Telic Thoughts contributor forced to adopt a pseudonym so that he can proceed, to borrow Hoyle's words, "directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion." Scientists of good will, on every side of the origins controversy, need to fight to restore both academic and intellectual freedom to origins science.
In particular, evolutionists who prize academic freedom—those occupying secure industry positions, tenured positions, or full professorships—need at last to put those positions to use, even if it means an uncomfortable moment or two at the next cocktail party. Will a true liberal from the ranks of prominent evolutionists please stand up and defend the rights of academic scientists who see a role for intelligent causation in the history of life and the universe?
Note: The original mistakenly described Bilbo as having "discovered" the passage.
This post will provide a final discussion of an article in Scientific American entitled "A Simpler Origin for Life" by Robert Shapiro. Part I explained why the Miller-Urey experiment and the DNA-first hypothesis is deficient. In Part II, I explained Shapiro's apt criticisms of the RNA-world hypothesis. Those who have abandoned the RNA-world hypothesis still seek a self-replicating molecule to qualify as the climax of chemical-origin of life scenarios--the "pre-RNA world." However, Shapiro observes not only that "no trace of this hypothetical primal replicator and catalyst has been recognized so far in modern biology," but also that "the spontaneous appearance of any such replicator without the assistance of a chemist faces implausibilities that dwarf those involved in the preparation of a mere nucleotide soup."
The reason that producing such a special self-replicator is so difficult is that a self-replicating molecule would have to incorporate nothing but the right nucleotides (or nucleotide-analog molecules) in a long chain, never splitting into two chains and never incorporating other random organic molecules which would mess up replication. He explains: "There is no reason to presume than an indifferent nature would not combine units at random, producing an immense variety of hybrid short, terminated chains, rather than the much longer one of uniform backbone geometry needed to support replicator and catalytic functions."
Shapiro doesn't even begin to address the problem of getting the "nucleotides" of this "pre-RNA" molecule in an order such that self-replication is possible. Again, his analogy is apt: Probability calculations could be made, but I prefer a variation on a much-used analogy. Picture a gorilla (very long arms are needed) at an immense keyboard connected to a word processor. The keyboard contains not only the symbols used in English and European languages but also a huge excess drawn from every other known language and all of the symbol sets stored in a typical computer. The chances for the spontaneous assembly of a replicator in the pool I described above can be compared to those of the gorilla composing, in English, a coherent recipe for the preparation of chili con carne. With similar considerations in mind Gerald F. Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute and Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute concluded that the spontaneous appearance of RNA chains on the lifeless Earth "would have been a near miracle." I would extend this conclusion to all of the proposed RNA substitutes that I mentioned above.
(Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, February 12, 2007) Shapiro's preferred solution is to redefine the first life as a thermodynamic state—not a molecule—but an energy driven network of chemicals which can reduce entropy in a system, and most importantly, can grow, reproduce, and therefore evolve under natural selection. Shapiro notes that some people would call this a "metabolism first" system rather than a hereditary molecule first system. But like many proponents of the RNA world or pre-RNA world hypotheses, Shapiro gives scant explanation for how these life-like metabolic networks can come into existence naturally, and he gives no details as to how these thermodynamic states produce real life—life as we know it today. Calling for complex molecules like nucleotides to arise for functions other than their current function as the letters of the language of life doesn’t sound so “simple.”
Shapiro admits that many details are missing from his hypothesis, but perhaps further research will solve them. We'll just have to wait and see...
[Editor's Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes' book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America's Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, "Monkey Girl.]
Last year I was contacted by Edward Humes, a reporter who wanted an interview for a book he was writing on the Dover trial. In his original emails (which he now refuses to grant me permission to quote), Humes claimed to be fair and non-partisan. I felt suspicious because reporters that take great lengths to tell me they are neutral usually write highly biased and partisan anti-ID stories. What did Humes write? As I discussed in Part I and Part II of this series, Humes’ posted an intelligent design (ID) and evolution FAQ which is extremely partisan, claiming that evolution has more scientific support than gravity and that ID is simply a religious viewpoint. Of course Humes has every right to his viewpoint, but his present claims do not jive well with his earlier statements when he was trying to get an interview with me. But to discover that Humes’ book has an anti-ID slant, one read no further than the book-endorsements he posts from Darwinists! This third installment will recount the praise Darwinists are giving to Humes’ book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul.
Interesting Reviewers
Keep in mind that last year Humes emailed me promising he was non-partisan. Now his book is so non-partisan that he apparently only posts reviews from leading Darwinists—many of whom are, coincidentally, avowed atheists.
The famous atheist Darwinist Michael Shermer is calling Monkey Girl “[a] must read for anyone who cares about science, education, and liberty.” P.Z. Myers, the well-known atheist biologist who told us that “I get to vote on tenure decisions at my university, and I can assure you that if someone comes up who claims that ID 'theory' is science, I will vote against them,” has high praise for Humes’ book: This book reads like a novel. Even though I knew how it would turn out, I had to keep going... I knew there was a first-rate dramatic story in the Dover trial, and Edward Humes has written it. Now I'm just waiting for the movie. Humes also allowed the LA Times to have a review copy. The LA Times reviewer apparently believes it is a “a cruel twist to evolutionists” that “human beings are ‘genetically disposed to believe in mysteries, miracles, God, and faith.’” The reviewer also states that he “only wish[es]” he could “close” his eyes to the Christian “fundamentalism” Humes recounts in his book.** These are all interesting reviewers, and Humes also posts high praise from various other Darwinist bloggers who typically take the Darwinist party line.
But that is only the beginning.
Judge John E. Jones III has apparently endorsed Humes’ book, saying, “Ed Humes' remarkable and balanced narrative has captured the essence of this complex and emotional dispute. When discussing the trial I have frequently found myself saying that to truly understand it, you had to be there. Humes' compelling book accomplishes just that.” Make of that whatever you will.
Why Only Darwinist Reviewers?
Perhaps Judge Jones is right and Edward Humes is a good writer who captures the trial with all its emotion. Regardless, there is one giant omission from his reviewers: Anyone who supports ID. In fact, Discovery Institute requested a review copy of Humes’ book to no avail. For someone who claimed to be fair and neutral when he was researching the book, Humes sure seems sheepish about asking anyone who isn’t a well-known hardline Darwinist to review his book.
Halftime
At this point, I’ve recounted Humes’ glowing praise from only hardline Darwinists, his highly partisan and inaccurate FAQ, and the fact that he changed his FAQ in response to my emails and then did not disclose key changes while accusing me of misstating the FAQ. Yet Humes originally came to me soliciting an interview claiming to be fair and neutral.
Some readers may choose to believe that Humes developed his views while he wrote the book and was forthright towards me. Unsurprisingly, that is what Humes claims, and Humes' Darwinist reviewers will certainly take that line in his defense. And if that’s the case, Humes could simply make his book proposal public, because that should reveal whether he really was non-partisan when he researched his book. That would certainly lay my suspicions to rest. But Humes continues to refuse to make his book proposal public. Other readers may wonder what Humes is hiding in the book proposal.
Regardless, there is no doubt that Humes is now a complete partisan (who believes evolution is better supported than gravity) and that he is promoting much false information about ID.
Because Discovery Institute was unable to obtain a review copy of Humes’ book, I had to order it off Amazon, and I have not yet received the book (somehow many Darwinist bloggers already have copies, as they've reviewed for Humes on his blog). Perhaps after the book arrives, further commentary can be made about it. Meanwhile, I'm sure Edward Humes won't complain too much about the free publicity we're giving him. After all, you know what they say...
**Note: I was originally mistaken in saying that Humes "chose" the LA Times reviewer, but this point does not detract from other the interesting choices of pro-Darwin reviewers that Humes seems to have chosen--like P.Z. Myers and Michael Shermer, and various pro-Darwin bloggers.
Friday saw a column by William Buckley at National Review regarding the announcement that US Senator John McCain is speaking at a luncheon in Seattle co-hosted by Discovery Institute next week. The luncheon is about McCain's vision of the United States' role in the world and the co-sponsors are the CityClub of Seattle and the Settle World Affairs Council. It is hardly an intelligent design related event. But, some critics of ours can't help but get all in a lather about things like this. So much so that even William Buckley has heard from them. His response in National Review is concise, succinct and to the point. (You expected anything else?) Buckley goes right to the heart of the matter, that for science to progress scientists must be allowed to follow the evidence where it leads, and you cannot just arbirtraily rule things out of bounds. It seems an ancient controversy, and of course it is. Fifteen minutes after Charles Darwin explained his theory of evolution, his disciples—apostles—ruled out any heresy on the subject of the naturalist explanation for human life. He sums it up nicely: But the intelligent liberal community should not impose on anyone a requirement of believing that there is only the single, materialist word on the subject, and that only contempt is merited by those who consent to appear at think tanks composed of men and women prepared to explore ultimate questions, which certainly include the question, Did God have a hand in creating all of this? Including the great messes we live with? Read the full piece here.
There’s an old lawyers’ joke about the “cracked kettle” approach to legal argumentation. Jones sues Smith for borrowing her kettle and returning it with a crack in it. Smith’s lawyer then defends her with the following arguments (in order):
1. Smith didn’t borrow the kettle.
2. The kettle was cracked before Smith borrowed it.
3. When Smith returned the kettle, it wasn't cracked.
4. There never was a kettle. In my book Icons of Evolution I described a 2000 conference talk in which Kevin Padian (President of the National Center for Science Education) used argumentation very much like this to defend his claim that birds are modified descendants of dinosaurs. 1 Darwinists are now using a similar approach to defend Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings.
Historical Background
Charles Darwin thought that "by far the strongest" evidence that humans and fish are descended from a common ancestor was the striking similarity of their early embryos. According to Darwin, the fact that "the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar… reveals community of descent." 2 To illustrate this, German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel made some drawings in the 1860s to show that the embryos of vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) look almost identical in their earliest stages.
But Haeckel faked his drawings. Not only do they distort vertebrate embryos by making them appear more similar than they really are (in a way that Stephen Jay Gould wrote "can only be called fraudulent" 3), but they also omit classes and stages that do not fit Darwin’s theory. Most significantly, Haeckel omitted the earliest stages, in which vertebrate embryos are strikingly different from each other. The stage he portrayed as the first is actually midway through development. Yet according to Darwin’s logic, early dis-similarities do not provide evidence for common ancestry.
Haeckel used his faked drawings to support not only Darwinian evolution, but also his own "Biogenetic Law," which stated that embryos pass through the adult stages of their ancestors in the process of development. In Haeckel’s words, "ontogeny [development] recapitulates phylogeny [evolution]." Darwin also believed in recapitulation; he wrote in The Origin of Species that early embryos "show us, more or less completely, the condition of the progenitor of the whole group in its adult state." 4
Haeckel’s drawings were exposed as fakes by his own contemporaries, and his Biogenetic Law was thoroughly discredited by 20th century biologists. It is now generally acknowledged that early embryos never resemble the adults of their supposed ancestors. A modern version of recapitulation claims that early embryos resemble the embryos of their ancestors, but since fossil embryos are extremely rare, this claim is little more than speculation based on the assumption that Darwin’s theory is true.
Biology Textbooks
Many modern biology textbooks inform students that Haeckel’s dictum, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," has been discredited, but the same textbooks often use Haeckel’s drawings (or modern versions of them) to persuade students that human embryos provide clues to our evolutionary history and evidence for Darwin’s theory. For example, the 1994 edition of the college textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell features Haeckel’s drawings and claims that neo-Darwinian mechanisms explain why "embryos of different species so often resemble each other in their early stages and, as they develop, seem sometimes to replay the steps of evolution." 5
The 1999 edition of Raven and Johnson’s textbook, Biology, accompanies a colorized version of Haeckel’s drawings with the caption: "Notice that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking resemblance to each other." Elsewhere the book explains: "Some of the strongest anatomical evidence supporting evolution comes from comparisons of how organisms develop. In many cases, the evolutionary history of an organism can be seen to unfold during its development, with the embryo exhibiting characteristics of the embryos of its ancestors." 6
Dozens of other biology textbooks published since 1990 have used Haeckel’s drawings (or modern versions of them) as evidence for Darwinian evolution. These include textbooks published as recently as 2004. 7
Flock of Dodos
Evolutionary biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson has now produced a film titled "Flock of Dodos: The Evolution – Intelligent Design Circus." 8 The film pokes fun at both sides in the debate, though it clearly favors the Darwinists.
Assuring me that he would be fair to both sides, Olson interviewed me for the film in August 2005 and asked me to comment on Haeckel’s embryo drawings. In the finished film, Olson concedes that the drawings are fraudulent, but he states on camera that "you don’t find them" in recent textbooks as evidence for Darwinian evolution. In one scene, Olson hands Kansas attorney (and Darwin critic) John Calvert a recent biology textbook and challenges him to find Haeckel’s drawings in it. Taken by surprise, Calvert can’t do it. Afterwards, Olson displays a 1914 textbook containing the drawings but claims they haven’t been used since then. The film then compares my book Icons of Evolution to a supermarket tabloid.
Calvert later faxed Olson pages from a recent textbook containing Haeckel’s drawings, but Olson gives no hint of that in his film. Furthermore, Olson claims to have read Icons of Evolution, but if had he would have known that eight widely used biology textbooks with copyright dates between 1998 and 2000 contain versions of the faked drawings. I sent Olson an email in May 2006 citing three more textbooks with copyright dates of 2004 that contained Haeckel’s drawings, and I suggested: "You owe it to your audiences to acknowledge that in this respect your film is promoting a demonstrable lie." 9
Olson ignored me.
The film showed in Seattle on February 7, 2007, and afterwards several people in the audience asked Olson about Haeckel’s embryo drawings. The next day he wrote on an Internet blog 10: While it’s important that everyone keep straight the absurdity of wrangling over Haeckel's embryos, it is much more important that a single word is kept in mind throughout this – TRIVIA. Everyone needs to stay focused on the larger issue which is the subtitle of Wells’s book, ‘Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong.’ As I point out in Dodos, he doesn't say ‘some,’ or ‘a little bit,’ or ‘a few things.’ He says MUCH.
The important thing is that the whole process needs to begin with THE BURDEN OF PROOF being on him to prove that his case consists of more than just trivia… The burden of proof needs to remain on him to make the case for this word "much." With the Haeckel's embryos anecdote he is implying that the entire field of evolutionary embryology is faulty just because of this piece of teaching trivia which is a crusty artifact from the world of science history.
And this is all a part of this larger syndrome that I think of as "Trivia Tackling" -- the idea of trying to take down a large institution, idea or individual, not by assailing the large and significant parts, but by doggedly locking on to pieces of trivia… It's fine to split hairs about the last remaining vestiges of Haeckel's artwork in the teaching of embryology, but the important issue is whether "much of what we teach about evolution is wrong." It isn't. The Cracked Haeckel Argument
So Olson makes the following arguments (in order): 1. Haeckel’s drawings were faked, but they’re not used in recent textbooks.
2. They’re used in recent textbooks, but not as evidence for Darwinian evolution – only as a "crusty artifact" of science history.
3. When they ARE used in recent textbooks as evidence for Darwinian evolution, the fakery is "trivial" – because there’s lots of other evidence. This looks a lot like the "cracked kettle" argument. The only element missing is the claim that "there never were any fake drawings." Fortunately, other Darwinists supply the missing link.
One who comes close is the host of the blog on which Olson posted his comments, Paul Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota. Writing about Haeckel’s embryos, Myers states: "The point is still valid; there is an interesting phenomenon going on in development, in which there is a period during which the body plan of vertebrates is roughly laid out, and biology has some explanations for it." The drawings (or modern versions of them) "reveal deep homologies that support evolutionary explanations of the origins of animal diversity." In other words, the drawings aren’t fundamentally wrong.
This view is stated more plainly by other Darwinists. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, has said that Haeckel "may have fudged his drawings somewhat," but "the basic point that's being illustrated by those drawings is still accurate." Textbook-writer Douglas J. Futuyma euphemistically concedes that Haeckel "did improve his drawings," but he falsely insists that early vertebrate embryos "really are more similar, overall, than the animals are later in development." 11
In other words, Haeckel may have fudged or improved his embryos, but they more or less accurately represent what’s really going on in vertebrate development. They weren’t faked at all.
This completes the Cracked Haeckel argument: 1. Haeckel’s drawings are fake, but they’re not used in recent textbooks.
2. They’re used in recent textbooks, but not as evidence for Darwinian evolution.
3. They’re used as evidence for Darwinian evolution, but it doesn’t matter because there’s lots of other evidence.
4. The drawings aren’t fake. Now, that’s funny. In fact, it’s funnier than anything in "Flock of Dodos."
NOTES
1 Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000), pp. 132-134. iconsofevolution.com
2 Charles Darwin, in a September 10, 1860 letter to Asa Gray, in Francis Darwin (editor), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1896), Vol. II, p. 131. Available Online Here
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Sixth Edition, Chapter XIV, section on "Development and Embryology." Available Online Here
3 Stephen Jay Gould, "Abscheulich! Atrocious!" Natural History (March, 2000), pp. 42-49.
4 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Sixth Edition, Chapter XIV, section on "Development and Embryology." Available Online Here
5 Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts & James D. Watson, Molecular Biology of the Cell, Third Edition (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), pp. 32-33.
6 Peter H. Raven & George B. Johnson, Biology, Fifth Edition (Boston: WCB/McGraw-Hill, 1999), pp. 1181, 416.
7 Cecie Starr & Ralph Taggart, Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life, Tenth Edition (Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, 2004), p. 315.
Joseph Raver, Biology: Patterns and Processes of Life (Dallas, TX: J. M. LeBel Publishers, 2004), p. 100.
Donald Voet & Judith G. Voet, Biochemistry, Third Edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), p. 14.
[NOTE: Several of these have subsequently responded to criticisms by removing the drawings.]
8 Randy Olson, "Flock of Dodos: The Evolution – Intelligent Design Circus," 2007. flockofdodos.com
9 Jonathan Wells, "Flock of Dodos, or Pack of Lies?" Evolution News and Views, February 9, 2007. Available Online Here
"Hoax of Dodos," Evolution News and Views, February 7, 2007. Available Online Here
10 Randy Olson, "Greetings from Seattle," February 8, 2007. Available Online Here
11 Eugenie Scott, interview in "Icons of Evolution," Coldwater Media, 2002. coldwatermedia.com
Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2005), p. 535.
In honor of Darwin Day this week we issued our annual update to the Scientific Dissent from Darwin list. Apparently, it is dishonest to point out that 700 scientists are skeptical of Darwinian evolution. Never mind that we have never tried to claim that a majority of scientists are Darwin doubters, not even close. The whole point of the list was to refute the claim in PBS' 2001 Evolution series that no scientists doubted Darwin. (Then it was 'no credible scientists'; which became 'well, not very many scientists'; and so on.) Still. Time magazine journalist Michael Lemonick got himself all in a huff over the list. So much so he even attacked the doctor we quoted in the release about the list. Lemonick attacks Dr. Michael Egnor --professor of Neurosurgery at State University of New York-- for not knowing enough about biology, for not having a degree in the field, for only being a brain surgeon. That’s rich coming from a guy who writes for a weekly news tabloid. His credentials: I've been covering science in major publications for more than two decades. Consider the fact that I may have actually learned a thing or two along the way.
Egnor responded on Lemonick’s blog and an enlightening debate ensued. Egnor doesn't pull his punches and holds his own very well, consistently and repeatedly poking Lemonick in the eye with the relevant issues. I am asking a simple question: show me the evidence (journal, date, page) that new information, measured in bits or any appropriate units, can emerge from random variation and natural selection, without intelligent agency. And again later: My 'argument' is just a question: how much new information can Darwinian mechanisms generate? Egnor points out that Darwinists never answer his question. So, Lemonick answers him by saying: "... that your question isn't a legitimate one in the first place, and thus doesn't even interest actual scientists."
Rather than answer the question (you’d think after covering the issue for two decades, he could come up with an answer or two) or deal with the relevant scientific issues, Lemonick responds with comments like these: Sorry to break the news, but evolution has passed every test required of a scientific theory. It offers a mechanism, makes predictions about what we should find in the fossil record that have been fulfilled and explains in an elegant way the relationships between creatures living and dead. Calling it a religion is, I'm sad to say, just plain ignorant. and Despite what has often been claimed, here and elsewhere, evolution has not been falsified. and There is no scientific controversy over evolution in any meaningful sense, and the Discovery Institute is spinning like a top to pretend otherwise. Yet his own blog is evidence of the scientific debate.
Egnor finally concludes: "I'm on my fourth post here, and my fourth request for a number and references on the amount of information that Darwinian mechanisms can generate. The response has been handwaving, algorithms, credentials thumping, political sneers, and insults. No experimental biological data." Another Darwinist poster makes this amazing assertion: Proteins, however, are the natural result of lightning striking primordial ooze -- it's been shown in the lab. So, what we have here is, again, random chance creating new information. That's all that goes on here. Random chance creates new information, then natural selection prunes away the information that is not conducive to reproduction. Proven in a lab? Talk about committing intellectual fraud. He should go back and read CSC senior fellow Dr. David Berlinski’s enlightening piece On the Origins of Life. Or Icons of Evolution by Dr. Jonathan Wells.
If this is the best they can do, then you really don't have to be a brain surgeon to poke holes in their arguments — but it can't hurt.
Writing in Scientific American Robert Shapiro recounts many criticisms of popular models for the chemical origin of life. Part I recounted why many origin of life theorists reject the possibility that DNA was the first genetic molecule. As noted, Shapiro even takes aim at those who suggest that the Miller-Urey experiment chemistry was important for forming prebiotic molecules on meteorites because studies of these meteorites show "a bias toward the formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life." Due to these deficiencies, Shapiro then notes that increasing numbers of prebiotic chemists now turn to RNA as the first form of life. Yet Shapiro observes that some scientists have called the natural origination of the first RNA molecule "the prebiotic chemist's nightmare."
Shapiro explains that "[e]normous obstacles block Gilbert's picture of the origin of life, sufficient to provoke another Nobelist, Christian De Duve of Rockefeller University, to ask rhetorically, 'Did God make RNA?'" The problem is that even given a soup of the right ingredients--sugar, phosphate, nitrogen, and oxygen--the components of RNA can be connected in innumerable different patterns, most of which are not nucleotides like those used in RNA, and the infinitely large majority of which are not even nucleotides.
So how did RNA form? Shapiro notes that those who bank on Miller-Urey chemistry to form the building blocks of RNA are challenged by the fact that such experiments do not produce nucleotides or even simpler nucleosides. Others have tried to recreate RNA in experiments meant to simulate other natural environments, such as some prebiotic soup (the existence of which is doubtful).
While chemists occasionally produce familiar organic molecules through this process, they use experiments which do not necessarily mimic real-earth conditions. Shapiro is therefore skeptical that RNA could be produced in a natural environment because "neither chemists nor laboratories were present on the early Earth to produce RNA." Shapiro thus gives a wonderful golf-analogy to explain the problems faced by those trying to simulate how RNA could be produced naturally: The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time. No physical law need be broken for spontaneous RNA formation to happen, but the chances against it are so immense, that the suggestion implies that the non-living world had an innate desire to generate RNA. The majority of origin-of-life scientists who still support the RNA-first theory either accept this concept (implicitly, if not explicitly) or feel that the immensely unfavorable odds were simply overcome by good luck.
(Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, February 12, 2007) Shapiro notes that some scientists are abandoning the RNA world hypothesis: "Many chemists, confronted with these difficulties, have fled the RNA-first hypothesis as if it were a building on fire." Their new solution, and its problems, will be discussed in the next post.
RIA Novosti news service writer Alexander Arkhangelsky discusses culture, politics and science in an insightful article (“Cartoons and Darwin”) that should give Americans pause. Cultural traditions in Russia today simultaneously bounce off the old Soviet values, pre-Revolutionary values (evoking the prominence of the Orthodox Church) and the rather chaotic commercial and political influences of the present. Where Arkhangelsky comes down seems to us eminently sound: “Students should know about Darwinism and anti-Darwinism, the scientific and the religious.” If he means the science on both sides and the religion ON BOTH SIDES, I would have to agree—for Russians. Here in America, we should stick to the scientific case on both sides. That alone would be a huge advantage. But it is interesting to consider that the Russians may have a clearer grasp of what academic freedom means on this issue than their counterparts in the mainstream U.S. media.
Personally, I am beginning to think that Russia is not being adequately and accurately reported in this country!
It looks like mainstream journalists are beginning to take notice of the persecution of Darwin-skeptics. Writing in yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Joel Connelly asks us to "Take a look at Seattle in the year 2077." His satirical history from that vantage point—looking back at today from the future—sees oddities of many kinds. Among them, Darwin-skeptics, including Discovery Institute's president Bruce Chapman, will be imprisoned because they "refused to recant their criticism of Darwin." Connelly writes:
Conservative scholars of the Discovery Institute refused to recant their criticism of Darwin. Joshua took us past a converted theater on Pine Street reserved for such "hard-core" offenders.
The Discovery scholars were forced to watch, 18 hours a day, House speeches by former Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, old PBS documentaries by Bill Moyers, and films of Sen. Joe Biden at Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings.
They did not break but smuggled out articles detailing a new theory of "Counterintelligent Design."
"Prison Letters to Sarah," the prison correspondence of Discovery Institute founder Bruce Chapman and his wife, became an international best-seller.”
(Joel Connelly, "Take a look at Seattle in the year 2077," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 14, 2007)
In an article titled “A Simpler Origin for Life”—a title which hides the implication of the article, Robert Shapiro, writing in Scientific American, highlights many problems with chemical origin of life scenarios. Shapiro quotes Richard Dawkins on his worship of the first self-replicating molecule and says "[a]t some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator." (emphasis in original) That's "Replicator" with a capital "R". But, as Shapiro explains, the conventional explanation is not nearly so simple:
Unfortunately, complications soon set in. DNA replication cannot proceed without the assistance of a number of proteins--members of a family of large molecules that are chemically very different from DNA. Proteins, like DNA, are constructed by linking subunits, amino acids in this case, together to form a long chain. Cells employ twenty of these building blocks in the proteins that they make, affording a variety of products capable of performing many different tasks--proteins are the handymen of the living cell. Their most famous subclass, the enzymes, act as expeditors, speeding up chemical processes that would otherwise take place too slowly to be of use to life. The above account brings to mind the old riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? DNA holds the recipe for protein construction. Yet that information cannot be retrieved or copied without the assistance of proteins. Which large molecule, then, appeared first in getting life started--proteins (the chicken) or DNA (the egg)?
(Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, February 12, 2007) Shapiro also takes aim at the hypothesis that Miller-Urey type chemistry may have led to life's building blocks in meteorites: By extrapolation of these results, some writers have presumed that all of life's building could be formed with ease in Miller-type experiments and were present in meteorites and other extraterrestrial bodies. This is not the case. A careful examination of the results of the analysis of several meteorites led the scientists who conducted the work to a different conclusion: inanimate nature has a bias toward the formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life. (When larger carbon-containing molecules are produced, they tend to be insoluble, hydrogen-poor substances that organic chemists call tars.) I have observed a similar pattern in the results of many spark discharge experiments.
(Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, February 12, 2007, emphasis added) Shapiro then recounts that in the 1980's some suggested that "Life began with the appearance of the first RNA molecule." But Shapiro explains that RNA cannot be the first life, because "the clues I have cited only support the weaker conclusion that RNA preceded DNA and proteins; they provide no information about the origin of life, which may have involved stages prior to the RNA world in which other living entities ruled supreme." He goes on to critique the RNA world hypothesis, and lamenting that "despite the difficulties that I will discuss in the next section, perhaps two-thirds of scientists publishing in the origin-of life field (as judged by a count of papers published in 2006 in the journal Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere) still support the idea that life began with the spontaneous formation of RNA or a related self-copying molecule."
More of Shapiro's discussion will be mentioned in the next post...
We wrapped up our Darwin Day celebration with The Kindlings Muse, a locally produced roundtable discussion and podcast which regularly features thoughtful and engaging intellectuals on its program. This week featured our own Dr. John West and Adrian Wyard, from Counterbalance Foundation. The topic was “The New Atheism,” based on an article of the same name from WIRED.
The first segment is already up on the Kindlings site, and it features host Dick Staub interviewing Mr. Wyard and getting a great overview of the three books in question. Staub is a wonderful host who gets to the heart of the matter in a breezy, easygoing way. He asked Wyard to summarize and explain the 3 books by hardline Darwinists and evangelical atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, and he notes that each of the three authors in question is advancing the atheist position through a different discipline, all of them claiming science on their side.
The conversation that follows is well worth listening. Wyard notes that the change in the “new” atheism is that the stakes have been raised. “Religious language seems appropriate” to describe their fanaticism as they call on moderates to “listen to the prophetic voice of a small few” who will save us through science.
CSC’s Logan Gage noted the same thing last year in his article from The Examiner, and readers are encouraged to revisit it here.
Staub notices that Dawkins talks “almost like a religious fundamentalist.” In fact, it is Dawkins’ Darwinism which requires atheism in his view of science. Wyard goes on to explain how Dawkins doesn't make any distinction "between metaphysics and physics" but seeks to make the issue about naturalism and supernaturalism. He rightly identifies this as the legacy of 19th-century postivism... but you'll have to tune in for the next segment to hear what happened when Dr. John West joined the conversation and the really engaging and provocative dialogue ensued.
Note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact that the Sacramento Unified School District has not yet officially acted on the name change to its middle school.
Like most mainstream American newspapers, the Sacramento Bee is a strong and uncritical proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution. The Bee recently demonstrated its devotion to the Darwinist cause with two news articles spotlighting the celebration of Darwin Day in Sacramento.
Ironically, the day after Darwin Day, the Bee included an editorial that rightly condemns the American eugenics movement and that rightly supports a proposal to remove a famous Sacramentan's name from a school based on his enthusiastic support of eugenics.
As the Bee acknowledges in its editorial, "At its zenith in the 1930 [sic.], eugenics was used to justify the imprisonment and slaughter of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the blatant discrimination against racial minorities and Southern Europeans in this country."
Charles M. Goethe was a Sacramento leader of the early Twentieth Century whose civic achievements included being one of the "founding fathers" of the California State University at Sacramento (CSUS). As a result of his civic achievements, Goethe's name appears on public parks, schools and buildings in Sacramento, including, until recently, on a public arboretum at CSUS.
Unfortunately, Goethe was also a very enthusiastic and public supporter of eugenics programs. Goethe's ugly legacy as a eugenicist recently inspired the CSUS to remove his name from a public arboretum and community members to demand that a local school district remove Goethe's name from a public middle school.
The connection between Darwin's theory of evolution and eugenics is a well-documented dark side of the history of Darwinism. So how can the Sacramento Bee's editorial board square its admirable condemnation of eugenics with the Bee's unwavering support for Darwin and his theory of evolution? The Bee, like all too many in the mainstream media, simply appears to a turn a blind eye to some of the uglier ramifications of Darwin's theory of evolution for society.
It is commendable that eugenicists like Goethe are finally being outed and dethroned from their privileged place in history in Sacramento and elsewhere. If only the mainstream media would similarly “out” Darwinism’s crucial contribution to the eugenics crusade.
Richard Fortey, President of the Geological Society of London, has found a heretofore unknown formula for attacking ID. In “The Ego and the ID,” Fortey calls his interlocutors “religious hard liners,” says that if they doubt common ancestry it is tantamount to “believing the earth is flat as a pancake,” and calls them “IDiots.” How becoming of the Michael Faraday Prize recipient. I suppose Faraday himself would surely have been a “religious hard liner” by Fortey’s standards.
Fortey continues:
The problem for scientists is that when this additional design factor is added it serves only to suppress questions - and science is all about tackling questions head-on. Why should we spend money on setting up experiments to simulate the creation of the first living cell if the motive force was a "designer"? No experiment can detect such metaphysical seasoning in the primeval soup.
Science has always been about tackling new areas of knowledge, with theory and experiment interacting creatively. If God's influence is invoked for any breakthrough in life's story, research is simply stopped dead in its tracks: no point in investigating further. ID therefore becomes a brake on discovery, not a way of enriching it. As readers of this blog—or readers of any ID literature, for that matter—know, ID is a minimal scientific project seeking to detect design in the natural world. No one is trying to detect “metaphysical seasoning”; they are trying to identify designed objects.
Fortey has the same problem Richard Dawkins has: He excludes design from the get-go. Instead of arguing on evidential grounds that Darwinism provides a better explanation than ID for certain natural objects, Fortey argues that ID should not be introduced as an explanation at all. Or, as he says approvingly of other scientists, “they…believe that God should not be introduced into the explanation of nature.” Fine. But then Fortey should forthrightly admit that his case for a materialist theory of evolution has nothing to do with evidence. After all, there is no possible competition.
Finally, the notion that ID would stifle scientific research is false. Just because ID theorists might not search out a materialist explanation of the origin of life does not mean they would not search out any explanation. In fact, philosopher of science and ID theorist Stephen Meyer is arguing that intelligence is the best explanation of the origin of biological information over and against the proposed materialist explanations. Don't be fooled by Fortey's false dilemma between accepting a materialist explanation or no explanation at all. If a scientist thinks the universe and objects in it were designed for a purpose, why would she be less likely to go and search out function and purpose in nature than her colleagues who believe the universe is the product of mindless, accidental, blind processes?
Those who see evidence that the development of life was directed by intelligence are in no more danger of abandoning science than Faraday.
As was expected, earlier today the Kansas State Board of Education voted 6-4 to adopt dumbed-down science standards that delete any mention of scientific data that might be perceived as critical of Darwinian evolution. But that's not all. The board also gutted a history of science standard that called on students to study both the abuses and the successes of science in history. The history of science standard had encouraged students to learn about such tragedies as the eugenics movement and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. But studying the misuses of science was apparently too much of a downer for the Darwin-only crowd, so they rewrote the standard to ensure that students would be exposed only to the triumphs of science in history. When asked to defend this Orwellian rewriting of history, the main backer of the change offered phony excuses.
Don't expect the "mainstream" media to notice the biting irony here: The people they like to portray as the champions of free inquiry and scientific literacy are the very ones trying to dumb-down science curricula in order to suppress information they find uncomfortable. Fortunately, Americans still have the freedom to investigate the truth for themselves, which is why the Darwinists' current strategy will be such a loser over the long term. Trying to stamp out the discussion of ideas you don't like is a sign of insecurity, and thoughtful people will eventually see through such tactics.
ENV editor, Anika Smith, has a delightful column in the SPU Falcon newspaper titled Beware of 'Darwin Day'. In describing some of the more humorous elements of Darwin Day celebrations (carols, Darwin look-alike contests and even an incredible, edible tree of life) Smith notes the holiday's familiar trappings. If you're wondering what a secular humanist does to commemorate such an occasion, it turns out that these particular humanists stand on street corners and hand out leaflets about evolution in an attempt to reach passers-by.
In Victoria, B.C., a philosophy of religion professor organized a Darwin Day celebration for his students where they decked the halls with humanist style. Participants decorated an evolution tree, exchanged Darwin cards and even sang evolution carols.
If this sounds familiar to you, that's because it was designed that way. This celebration, like so many others, was styled as a "light-hearted satire" of Christmas. Had the celebration taken place in a culture with a different religious history, such as Turkey, it might look something more like the Feast of Sacrifice.
The Associated Press is reporting on the Kansas State Board of Education's proposed deletion of the Tuskegee experiment, eugenics, and other abuses of science from the state's existing science curriculum standards. The only complaint I have about the article is that it does not make clear that the existing history of science standard, which I favor, asks for students to study the positive achievements of science as well as the abuses of science. The purpose is to give students a balanced understanding of the history of science. It is the Darwinists who are trying to suppress the coverage of both sides, not ID proponents.
It is interesting to look at the tortured explanations offered by Darwinists trying to defend this change.
According to the article:
the passage [in the science standards] had drawn criticism from scientists who note that only abuses perceived as linked to evolution were mentioned.
"That was never in the science standards until the intelligent designers inserted it," said Steve Case, associate director of the Center for Science Education at the University of Kansas. "Introducing that was just a way to get at their attack, 'Scientific knowledge is bad.'"
Although eugenics was certainly linked to Darwinian biology, I don't believe the Tuskegee experiment was, so the claim that the examples are only those linked to evolution is wrong. Moreover, the claim that the original standard was intended to show that "scientific knowledge is bad" is absurd. The original standard clearly called for students to learn about both the successes and the misuses of science. It is Steve Case who is advocating a propagandistic approach by gutting the standard so that now it will require the study of only the successes of science. Case's attitude could be described as "science can do no wrong--ever!"
Case also falsely implies that the science standards merely deal with "science and the science process," therefore
Discussions about eugenics and the Tuskegee study are best left to history courses, he said.
"We're teaching science and science process," he said. "Historians have their own research techniques and their own interpretations of history."
These comments ignore a couple of salient facts. First, the "history of science" is one of the major components of the Kansas science standards, and Case is not proposing that it be deleted. So he is flat wrong to claim that the history of science isn't a proper part of the science standards. (Indeed, Case wants to leave in the study of the history of science so long as it focuses just on the successes of science.) Second, although Case references history courses, he neglects to mention that the existing Kansas social studies standards do not cover the issues raised in the history of science standard in question. Moreover, I know of no proposal by Case to revise the social studies standards in order to change that fact .
The bottom line is that Darwinists in Kansas want the history of science taught just as propagandistically as the theory of evolution.
In Monday's New York Times ("Believing Scriptures but Playing by
Science's Rules"), Cornelia Dean joins Eugenie Scott of the Darwin lobby
NCSE (National Center for Science Education) in raising the tantalizing
thought that (as "some say") maybe scientists who have earned legitimate
doctorates in scientific fields, but are known to hold private views that
question Darwinism, should be denied their professional degrees. Take that
in: Perhaps doctoral candidates whose personal views deviate from an
ideological party line should be punished professionally. Presumably, if
they are in a later stage in their career, you can thwart their application
for tenure; or later still, a promotion to full professor.
This has long been suggested by firebrand Darwinists, such as those
attending the "Beyond Belief" conclave in San Diego late last year. Now it
is posed coyly as an open question on the news pages of the New York Times.
Corny Dean, from my experience, decides on her own what terms--and
science standards--mean. For example, "creationism" in the Dean Lexicon is a
totally flexible term that embraces without distinction people who support
intelligent design and those who support a Young Earth. Dean knows the
difference in common usage, but she isn't about to let the readers in on it.
For her the pejorative terminology carries too much ideological advantage to
let mere accuracy, let alone nuance, intervene.
She likewise wields the word "fundamentalist" as a club against anyone
who is religious and also questions Darwinism. This, her editors, if they
consult their own style book, know is a misuse. Even at the New York Times
you are not supposed to call people "fundamentalists" unless that is what
they call themselves. Ms. Dean apparently makes her own rules.
Dean is adroit enough to report the views of a few academics who resist
persecuting colleagues for their personal beliefs. But she clearly comes
down on the side of redefining the responsibility of scholarship in a way
that serves her purposes. Why not discriminate against students and
professors suspected of religious or anti-Darwinian views? After all, she
concludes, citing Eugenie Scott, "fundamentalists who capitalize on secular
credentials to 'mis-educate the public' were doing a disservice."
A fine Orwellian sentiment, isn't it? You can now lose your hard earned
doctoral degree for "doing a disservice" in the eyes of some Eugenie Scott
or Cornelia Dean at Hale-Bopp U or Quark College. This is like the other
euphemism one discovers at tenure time, "lack of collegiality," which really
means "we don't like the person's views."
Copy the Times article from the paper's website (they won't let us
reprint it here) and send it to your friends. It is a keepsake for the day
when the history of academic discrimination in this era is written.
 Darwin Day is upon us at long last.
Now for a full week humanists the world over will celebrate the birth of their saint, Charles Darwin. Celebrations come complete with Darwin carols celebrating atheism and sung to Christmas carol tunes; edible trees of life; Darwin look-a-like contests; and lots more revelry. Discovery Institute is honoring Darwin with a short vidcast of their popular ID The Future podcast titled "Darwin Day and the Deification of Charles Darwin." It features CSC senior fellows Dr. John West and Dr. Jonathan Wells discussing the historical importance of Darwinism and its impact on modern science and society. - Click here to watch the video at ID The Future.
- Click here to download and view a high-resolution version of the video. (150MB)
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh are busy imitating nature’s design by building nanomachines.
Two things to note: First, these new designs are not perfect, and yet they were clearly designed by intelligence. I hope ID critics will finally put to rest the inane charge that if a system has a flaw in any sense—that is, if it is not optimal in every sense (which is impossible)—then that system was not designed. As the scientists note, the nanomachines they are making are not even as good as nature’s nanotechnology.
Second, if nature is full of such poorly designed systems, why is it that some of the best scientists in the world keep looking to nature for lessons in design?
It’s one thing to steal an idea. It is another to add insult to injury.
Now that Darwin Day is finally here, we have cause to reflect on the occasion with two articles out today. John West has a brief history of the anti-religious bias of The Gospel According to Darwin in NRO, where he notes that Darwin Day celebrations are fascinating because they expose a side of the controversy over evolution in America that is rarely covered by the mainstream media. Although journalists routinely write about the presumed religious motives of anyone critical of unguided evolution, they almost never discuss the anti-religious mindset that motivates many of evolution’s staunchest defenders.
Over at The Weekly Standard, David Klinghoffer has a thoughtful piece on Darwin Day and the coincidental anniversary of the eugenics movement: Darwin Day, as it's called, is meant to be cheerful, with a bit of good-natured triumphalism, marking what celebrants see as the intellectual victory of Darwinism, the theory of evolution by the purely material mechanism of natural selection. But set aside the scientific legacy for a moment to consider the less frequently discussed question of Darwin's moral heritage. This year happens to mark another anniversary as well: a tragic one, strongly linked to Darwinian theory.
As of 2007, it is exactly a century since the key turning point in the Darwin-inspired American eugenic movement. In 1907, the state of Indiana achieved the distinction of becoming the world's first government entity to enforce sterilization of institutionalized "idiots," "imbeciles," and other individuals deemed genetically "unfit." The idea caught on. Read the rest of the article here.
Text of the letter sent to the Kansas State Board of Education today by Discovery Institute:
February 12, 2007
Kansas State Board of Education
Kansas State Department of Education
120 SE 10th Avenue
Topeka, KS 66612-1182
Dear Members of the Board:
It has come to my attention that one of the changes to the Kansas Science Curriculum Standards that the Board is intending to vote on would delete the following language from Standard 7 (Grades 8-12), Benchmark 3:
Science has led to significant improvements in physical health and economic growth; however, modern science can sometimes be abused by scientists and policymakers, leading to significant negative consequences for society and violations of human dignity (e.g., the eugenics movement in America and Germany; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments; and scientific justifications of eugenics and racism). (SOURCE: Kansas Science Curriculum Standards, Standard 7: History and Nature of Science, Grades 8-12, Benchmark 3, Additional Specificity, 1a)
If the proposed change is adopted, the only language remaining in 1a would be the following statement: “Modern science has been a successful enterprise that contributes to dramatic improvements in the human condition.”
The effect of this change would be to transform the study of the history of science from a serious intellectual endeavor into one-sided propaganda. Rather than an honest discussion of both the benefits and the challenges posed by modern science, students would learn only about the past successes of science. Yet it is just as important for students to understand the abuses of science throughout history as it is for them to understand its successes.
Indeed, it is only by studying these past abuses that students--our scientists of the future--can learn about the critical importance of science operating within ethical standards. As has often been said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)
The examples cited in the existing science standards are ones every educated person should know about.
The Tuskegee experiment, which took place from the 1930s to the early 1970s, left nearly 400 African-American men untreated during the late stages of syphilis in order to collect medical data from their autopsies. Conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, the experiment is one of the most infamous examples of the abuse of human research subjects, and President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology for the experiment in 1997. It would be indefensible for the Board to remove this issue from coverage in the state standards.
The eugenics movement, meanwhile, was an attempt to breed human beings by applying the principles of Darwinian biology, and for several decades it was championed as good science by America's leading evolutionary biologists and scientific organizations. As a result more than 60,000 Americans were sterilized against their will. This year marks the centennial of the world's first eugenical sterilization law, passed by the Indiana legislature in March 1907. Kansas passed its own sterilization law in 1913. Again, every educated person should know about the eugenics movement and its impact on American social policy during the past century.
I sincerely hope you will reconsider this proposed change.
Sincerely,
John G. West, Ph.D.
Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs
Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute
The day after "Darwin Day," the Kansas State Board of Education plans to vote on whether to delete from its science curriculum standards the study of the abuses of science as well as the successes. This incredible proposal by Darwinists in Kansas to sanitize the real history of science shows the lengths to which they will go to promote their dogmatic views. We have just sent a letter to the Board protesting the proposed change. The proposal is part of a package of revisions to the science standards that will also delete any discussion of scientific data critical of Darwinian evolution. Below is the text of the press release describing what is going on:
TOPEKA--A national group is urging the Kansas State Board of Education to reject on Tuesday a plan to delete coverage of the historical misuses of science from state curriculum standards, including a reference to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment targeting African-Americans.
"The board's plan to whitewash the history of science is shameful," said Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. West sent a letter to the board on Monday opposing the change.
"Especially disturbing is the board's proposal--during Black History month no less--to eliminate any mention of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment from the state curriculum, as well as any reference to the eugenics movement that targeted the disabled," added West.
The Tuskegee experiment, which took place from the 1930s to the early 1970s, left nearly 400 African-American men untreated during the late stages of syphilis in order to collect medical data from their autopsies. Conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, the experiment is one of the most infamous examples of the abuse of human research subjects. President Clinton issued a formal apology for the experiment in 1997.
The eugenics movement, meanwhile, was an attempt to breed human beings by applying the principles of Darwinian biology, and for decades it was championed as good science by America's leading evolutionary biologists and scientific organizations. This year marks the centennial of the world's first eugenical sterilization law, passed by the Indiana legislature in March 1907. Kansas passed its own sterilization law in 1913.
"It is only by studying these past abuses that students--our scientists of the future--can learn about the critical importance of science operating within ethical standards," wrote West to the board. "As has often been said, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'"
Kansas' current standards call for students to understand that:
"modern science has been a successful enterprise that contributes to dramatic improvements in the human condition," but also that "modern science can sometimes be abused by scientists and policymakers, leading to significant negative consequences for society and violations of human dignity (e.g., the eugenics movement in America and Germany; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments; and scientific justifications of eugenics and racism)."
The latter language would be deleted under the proposal to be voted on Tuesday, which is part of a package of changes being championed by the new pro-Darwin majority on the state board.
[Editor's Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes' book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America's Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, "Monkey Girl.]
In Part I, I discussed how in the spring of 2006, I was contacted by a reporter named Edwards Humes who was writing a book on the Dover trial. He claimed to be supremely neutral, fair, and non-partisan. (Humes now refuses to grant me permission to directly quote his emails where he made these claims of neutrality.) But I had reasons to be suspicious. Reporters who go out of their way to claim to be fair often turn out to be agenda-driven Darwinists in non-partisan clothing. Indeed, Humes’ present FAQ on his book’s website is entirely pro-evolution and anti-ID. This second installment will discuss additional inaccuracies in Humes’ evolving FAQ.
Humes on ID and Creationism
Humes’ present FAQ states: “Intelligent Design is a non-biblical form of creationism that avoids overtly religious references but posits an unnamed master ‘designer’…“ But he specifically told me in one of his original emails requesting an interview that he did not equate ID with the unqualified descriptor creationism. (As noted, Humes refuses to grant me permission to directly quote his original e-mails.) Does his FAQ now provide a neutral or non-partisan description of ID? Obviously, the claim that ID is creationism is a "form of creationism" is wrong, as was compellingly argued to Judge Jones here and here.
Humes on the “infinitely powerful designer”
Humes’ present FAQ states that ID “posits a supernatural process — an intelligent designer fashioning life and the universe…” But that isn’t what his FAQ always said. As of January 28, it stated that ID “posits a supernatural process — an infinitely powerful designer creating life and the universe…” (emphasis added) Why did his FAQ change? Because I challenged him. I e-mailed Humes a few weeks ago noting that the theory of intelligent design does not try to identify the designer as “infinitely powerful” or “supernatural.” Humes apparently has fixed the former error, but not the latter. But that’s not the interesting part of the story.
After I challenged Humes’ false characterization of ID, he removed the words “infinitely powerful designer,” and then sent me an email which accused me of misstating his FAQ, making no disclosure whatsoever that he had changed those words in his FAQ. That he would change his FAQ in that manner, not disclose that change, and then accuse me of misstating it only made me more suspicious of him. (Of course I saved the original version of his FAQ.)
But even Humes’ improved FAQ does not accurately characterize how leading proponents of ID define their theory. For one of a great many examples, the Pandas textbook states: “Surely the intelligent design explanation has unanswered questions of its own … [I]ntelligence .. can be recognized by uniform sensory experience, and the supernatural ... cannot. ... We should recognize, however, that if we go further, and conclude that the intelligence responsible for biological origins is outside the universe (supernatural) or within it, we do so without the help of science … All it implies is that life had an intelligent source." (Of Pandas and People, pg. 126-127, 161) According these passages which Judge Jones and Humes' FAQ ignore, the theory of ID does not conclude whether the designer is supernatural or natural.
Should ID proponents be allowed to speak for themselves, or will Humes simply repeat the partisan misconstruals of Darwinists? Apparently Humes' FAQ employs the latter option.
Humes on ID and Science
When Humes emailed me in spring 2006, he implied that he accepted that ID had science, and he claimed to be non-partisan and neutral. He gave no indication that he believed ID was merely a religious idea. But when I first encountered his FAQ a few weeks ago, it stated that “evolution is a scientific idea, while Intelligent Design is a religious idea.”
After reading the original wording of the FAQ, I emailed Humes and challenged his claim that “Intelligent Design is a religious idea.” Where in Cambridge University Press monograph The Design Inference does William Dembski use a religious methodology to infer design? Is not the design inference based upon the scientific methodology that we observe that intelligent agents are the sole known cause of high levels of specified and complex information, and then we find high levels of specified and complex information in nature? You can disagree with the ID-inference, but you can't deny its empirical, non-religious methodology.
Humes mustered no response my challenges about ID's methodology. Instead he changed his FAQ and e-mailed me back, again, not disclosing that he changed this statement in his FAQ and again, accusing me of misrepresenting his FAQ. The new version of his FAQ has slightly softer language stating that “evolution is a scientific idea, while Intelligent Design is seen by many as a religious idea.” That he would backtrack and then not disclose it in the email accusing me of misstating his FAQ has further heightened my suspicions.
Interesting Choices of Reviewers...
There are other problems with Humes’ FAQ which I will leave alone for now. Darwinist defenders will claim Humes developed his highly-partisan viewpoint while researching the book. And who are Humes’ defenders? His book has received glowing endorsements from hard-line Darwinists like P.Z. Myers, Michael Shermer, and even Judge John E. Jones. However Humes started out, to get an endorsement from P.Z. Myers and Michael Shermer, I expect his final take to be anything but neutral.
No one can blame me for my present suspicions. Of course Humes claims, and others will claim, that he was neutral when he started his research and developed his partisan views as time passed.
But Humes' own self-proclamations carry little weight in this analysis.
All I really have to go on are the original assertions from Humes which claimed he was non-partisan and fair while simultaneously trying to convince me to do an interview, and his present highly partisan FAQ. Given that Humes now refuses to both disclose his book proposal (which might reveal the truth) and grant me permission to quote his original emails, and that he is changing his FAQ and then privately accusing me of misstating it while not disclosing all the changes he made, I feel my suspicions are not unreasonable. If only Humes would give me a credible reason—besides his own assertions—to change my mind, perhaps I might. Perhaps Humes will even respond to this page, making baseless accusations against me for exploring my reasonable suspicions, like he did privately in his recent emails to me. Most likely he'll just rely on his Darwinist reviewers / bloggers to defend him. The nature of their responses are fully anticipated.
But there is more evidence to weigh at the present time. Part III will discuss Humes’ glowing endorsements from leading Darwinists. Apparently Humes only felt comfortable sending the book out to Darwinists like P.Z. Myers and Michael Shermer for review…
Scott Adams of Dilbert fame asks: Suppose we found a blob on Mars that moved under its own power and wasn’t a carbon-based life form. How could we tell if it was intelligent?
....What if the blob authored a book?
Don’t answer too quickly because it’s a trick question. Remember, a trillion monkeys with typewriters can write a book if you wait long enough. So let’s up the ante and say that the blob on Mars writes lots of different books. And let’s say it composes some music, designs some evening gowns, and paints some lovely pictures too. Now do you conclude that the blob is intelligent?
It’s a trick question because atheists believe that the Big Bang did all of those things and more. The Big Bang caused the sequence of events that culminated in the Bible, the Koran, and most important – Dilbert comics. If the blob on Mars created literature, we would surely consider it intelligent.
The rest is here.
Here are Scott's answers to objections to his post.
And here are Scott's comments about speculation as to his motives, which includes another chapter from his running argument with pro-Darwin attack dog P.Z. Myers.
The documentary Flock of Dodos depicts biologist Jonathan Wells as a fraud for claiming in his book Icons of Evolution (2000) that Haeckel’s bogus embryo drawings were used by modern textbooks to misrepresent the evidence for Darwinian evolution. But at a screening last Wednesday night at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Olson essentially admitted that it was his film that was wrong, not Wells. In answer to an audience question about whether he still maintained that "there are no Haeckel's embryos in modern textbooks," Olson replied:
at the time of that discussion [about Haeckel's embryos in the film], I wasn’t aware that apparently there are a few textbooks that have traces of Haeckel’s embryos that they use for models of these things. (emphasis added)
After this stunning admission, Olson went into full-spin mode, insisting that the whole matter was trivial and insignificant. Question: If the issue is so insignificant, why did Olson spend an entire segment in his film trying to debunk the claim that Haeckel's embryos have been used in modern textbooks?
Another audience member then pressed Olson about how carefully he had investigated the issue before attacking Wells, asking "how many textbooks did you investigate before you made the statement that it wasn’t in the book? And you just said that you didn’t look."
Olson responded: “Right, and it’s a statement of opinion in that scene there.”
Notice how Olson avoided answering the actual question put to him: How many textbooks did he examine before making his false claim that Haeckel's embryos were not in modern textbooks?
At least Olson has now basically admitted he was wrong. But don’t hold your breath for him to correct his film or apologize to Jonathan Wells. After all, Olson was informed about these errors in his film last year, but did nothing to correct them. He still seems to be hoping that his viewers will be a “flock of dodos" and accept his claims without questioning.
If you would like to listen to Olson’s admissions for yourself, download my podcast at ID The Future, which contains audio clips of Olson’s recent backtracking.
EDITORS NOTE: This is an updated and expanded version of a previous post.
Darwinist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson showed “Flock of Dodos” in Seattle on Wednesday, February 7. Although the film sacrifices truth in order to tell a good story, it fails even at that. As entertainment, it’s a flop.
But I’m less interested in the film’s cinematic shortcomings than in the way it misrepresents the truth – and in the way Olson is dealing with criticisms of those misrepresentations.
In his film, Olson implies that I’m the one guilty of misrepresentation for reporting in my 2000 book Icons of Evolution that modern biology textbooks use faked embryo drawings to convince students of Darwinism – the theory that all living things are descended from a common ancestor by unguided natural processes such as random variation and survival of the fittest. The embryo drawings purport to show that fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and humans look almost identical in their earliest stages and thus provide evidence that we all share a common ancestor.
Yet the drawings (by 19th century German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel) not only distort the embryos they purport to represent – they also omit stages that do not fit Darwin’s theory. Darwin thought that the “strongest single class of facts in favor of” his theory was that embryos of different classes are most similar in their earliest stages and become different only as they develop toward adulthood. But the truth is that early vertebrate embryos are strikingly different from each other; they become somewhat similar (though not as similar as Haeckel made them out to be) halfway through development, before they become different again as adults.
Olson concedes that the drawings are fraudulent, but he states on camera that “you don’t find them” in recent textbooks. In one scene, Olson hands Kansas attorney (and Darwin critic) John Calvert a recent biology textbook and challenges him to find Haeckel’s drawings in it. Taken by surprise, Calvert can’t do it. Afterwards, Olson displays a 1914 textbook containing the drawings but claims they haven’t been used since then. The film then compares Icons of Evolution to a supermarket tabloid.
Calvert later faxed Olson pages from a recent textbook containing Haeckel’s drawings, but Olson gives no hint of that in his film. Furthermore, Olson claims to have read Icons of Evolution, but if had he would have known that eight widely used biology textbooks with copyright dates between 1998 and 2000 contain versions of the faked drawings. After hearing reports of the film before it was released, I sent Olson an email in May 2006 citing three more textbooks with copyright dates of 2004 that contained Haeckel’s drawings, and I suggested: “You owe it to your audiences to acknowledge that in this respect your film is promoting a demonstrable lie.”
Olson ignored me.
The evening “Flock of Dodos” showed in Seattle, several people in the audience asked Olson about the discrepancy between the claims in his film and the contents of the textbooks. The next morning, Olson wrote on an Internet blog: “While it’s important that everyone keep straight the absurdity of wrangling over Haeckel's embryos, it is much more important that a single word is kept in mind throughout this – TRIVIA. Everyone needs to stay focused on the larger issue which is the subtitle of Wells’s book, ‘Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong.’ As I point out in Dodos, he doesn't say ‘some,’ or ‘a little bit,’ or ‘a few things.’ He says MUCH.” Olson continued: “The important thing is that the whole process needs to begin with THE BURDEN OF PROOF being on him [Wells] … to make the case for this word ‘much.’ With the Haeckel’s embryos anecdote he is implying that the entire field of evolutionary embryology is faulty just because of this piece of teaching trivia which is a crusty artifact from the world of science history.” But if Haeckel’s drawings were just a “crusty artifact from the world of science history,” they wouldn’t still be used in textbooks as evidence for Darwinian evolution. Furthermore, there are many other misrepresentations in the teaching of evolution, even in embryology. For example, textbooks tell students that mutations in embryos account for the origin of new organs and body plans, even though experiments have shown that no matter what we do to a fruit fly embryo there are only three possible outcomes: a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly. Biology textbooks also distort and exaggerate the evidence from fossils, molecules, comparative anatomy, and field studies of natural selection.
Trivial? Only if you think that misrepresenting the evidence for a scientific theory is trivial.
Since writing Icons of Evolution I’ve learned that the evidence for Darwinian evolution is even weaker than I once thought. If I were writing the book today, its subtitle might be “Why MOST of what we teach about evolution is wrong.”
Olson insists that the burden of proof is on me, but that’s just goofy. The burden of proof is on those who claim that “evolution is a fact” supported by “overwhelming evidence,” and that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (a slogan Olson repeats in his film). These are extraordinary claims, and as such they require extraordinary support – which Darwinists keep promising but fail to deliver. I show just how unsupported these inflated claims are in my 2006 book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.
One more thing. Olson’s comments the day after showing his film in Seattle were posted on a blog maintained by University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers, who declared in 2005 that it’s time “for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer” on those who criticize Darwinism. Just before Olson posted his comment, Myers wrote on his blog that the point of Haeckel’s embryo drawings “is still valid; there is an interesting phenomenon going on in development, in which there is a period during which the body plan of vertebrates is roughly laid out.”
Is that really what biology textbooks are saying with Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings? Of course not. In fact, if Olson objects to trivia, it’s hard to imagine a more trivial statement than “there is a period during which the body plan of vertebrates is roughly laid out.” Since animals aren’t born as fully formed adults, but develop from single egg cells, this statement is about as meaningful as “the sky is above us” or “the future lies ahead.”
Myers’s statement reminds me of a bait-and-switch advocated by National Center for Science Education Director Eugenie Scott (whom Olson in his blog post praises along with Myers). Scott recommends peddling Darwinian evolution to unsuspecting students by telling them that evolution is “the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past.” After she gets them nodding in agreement to something so trivially obvious that no sane person would deny it, she gradually introduces them to “The Big Idea” – Darwinism.
This is not science, but a con game, and “Flock of Dodos” is part of it.
(For more information visit www.hoaxofdodos.com)
Professor of Design and Nature Stuart Burgess of Bristol University (UK) was interviewed in yesterday's The Independent. This is a man who knows something about design. He is worth heeding: I've been designing systems like spacecraft for more than 20 years. One of the lessons I've learnt is that complex systems require an immense amount of intelligence to design. I've seen a lot of irreducible complexity in engineering. I have also seen organs in nature that are apparently irreducible. An irreducibly complex organ is one where several parts are required simultaneously for the system to function usefully, so it cannot have evolved, bit by bit, over time. See the article here.
As reported earlier this week (see here and here), filmmaker Randy Olson presented fiction as fact in his anti-ID documentary Flock of Dodos. But rather than apologize for his film’s repeated bloopers and misrepresentations, Olson is now digging himself a deeper hole in recent comments posted to a Darwinist blog.
One of Olson’s biggest bloopers in the film is his purported refutation of biologist Jonathan Wells. Olson portrays Wells as dishonest and unreliable for claiming in Icons of Evolution (2000) that modern textbooks continued to reprint Haeckel’s bogus embryo diagrams misrepresenting the biological evidence for evolution. Olson admits that Haeckel’s embryo diagrams were fraudulent, but he insists they haven’t appeared in modern textbooks, and he has someone in the film equate Wells with the National Enquirer for saying otherwise. Even after being informed last year that he got his facts wrong, Olson refused to correct his film or retract his smear of Wells. Now Olson is in full-spin mode, defensively insisting that his smear of Wells is inconsequential. On a pro-Darwin blogsite, Olson has claimed:
But while its important that everyone keep straight the absurdity of wrangling over Haeckel's embryos, it is much more important that a single word is kept in mind throughout this -- TRIVIA. Everyone needs to stay focused on the larger issue which is the subtitle of Wells book, "Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong." As I point out in Dodos, he doesn't say "some," or "a little bit," or "a few things." He says MUCH.
The important thing is that the whole process needs to begin with THE BURDEN OF PROOF being on him to prove that his case consists of more than just trivia.
But it was Olson himself who chose to base his entire refutation of Wells on the spurious claim that Haeckel’s embryos weren’t reprinted by modern textbooks. Here is what Olson said in Flock of Dodos:
Wells chooses 11 standard examples used in the teaching of evolution. What he calls the icons of evolution. We don't have time to go through all his examples, but if even one of them is wrong then we have to wonder about his whole book. (emphasis added)
Olson didn’t bother to present any other evidence in his film that Wells’ book is inaccurate, because he asserted that if he could refute one “icon” covered by Wells, that would be enough to refute the legitimacy of Wells’ entire book. But Olson got his facts wrong, and so his purported refutation of Wells has imploded. It is Olson who botched his case, not Wells. Wells’ book contains a wealth of information and documentation about each of his major claims (including 70 pages of research notes providing citations to the primary scientific literature). Wells has met his burden of proof. Randy Olson has not met his. He owes Wells a retraction--and an apology.
It was gratifying to read the AP account of Cardinal Schoenborn’s lecture in New York last night and to note the way that His Eminence once again set the media and others straight on the position of the Catholic Church. It won’t make any difference to the Darwinists, of course, because, depending on their audience, they hold either that the Church has accepted Darwinism or that the Catholic Church is just an enemy of reason. Don’t confuse Darwinists with evidence on anything.
Personally, for me the most satisfying part of the Cardinal’s lecture was his critique of court-ordered censorship of ID in school rooms. It seems to have escaped the New York Times and many other opinion leaders that the Kitzmiller (Dover) decision was about that subject. The court had no capacity to judge ID on its scientific merits, but it did have an obligation to speak to First Amendment issues. Sadly, the judge, as we have shown, took over 90 percent of his ruling on ID right out of the ACLU brief—factual errors and all. None of the details presumably matter to the Cardinal, just the blatant effort at censorship.
Since our critics always like to put words—and policy positions—in our mouths, let me remind the reader that Discovery Institute does not support requiring the teaching of ID, only the teaching of the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory. Like Cardinal Schoenborn we also support academic freedom on the subject of intelligent design. Let the critics therefore deal with the true issue of censorship.
Today Discovery announced that another 100 scientists have signed the Dissent from Darwin list. It now totals 700 names. One of the new signers is Dr. Michael Egnor, award winning professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at SUNY (Stony Brook). Says Dr. Egnor, “Darwinism plays no role in medicine. Period.” And “Darwinists have not shown any evidence that natural selection is capable of generating significant amounts of information.”
He and Cardinal Schoenborn are on the same page: Let people debate this issue openly. Don’t try to hide the evidence or shut down the controversy. That is a dead end not only for education, but for science.
In a speech last night in New York City, Roman Catholic Cardinal Cristoph Schoenborn of Vienna sharply criticized efforts in America to prevent students and the public from learning about the debate over Darwin’s theory. According to the Associated Press report:
Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna said in a lecture that restricting debate about Darwin's theory of evolution amounts to censorship in schools and in the broader public.
"Commonly in the scientific community every inquiry into the scientific weaknesses of the theory is blocked off at the very outset," Schoenborn said of Darwinism. "To some extent there prevails a type of censoring here of the sort for which one eagerly reproached the church in former times."
In his comments, the Cardinal condemned in particular the Kitzmiller v. Dover court decision in 2005 banning the coverage of intelligent design in science classes in Dover, Pennsylvania:
The Austrian cardinal said he found it "amazing" that a U.S. federal court ruled in 2005 that the Dover, Pennsylvania, public school district could not teach the concept of "intelligent design" as part of its science class...
"A truly liberal society would at least allow students to hear of the debate," he said.
As readers of this blog know, Discovery Institute opposed the Dover policy, because it does not favor efforts to require the inclusion of intelligent design in public schools. But, like the Cardinal, the Institute also strongly opposed the Kitzmiller decision’s attempt to ban even voluntary discussions of intelligent design and to declare them unconstitutional. The Cardinal is to be commended for continuing to champion the right of free expression in the growing debate over Darwinism.
Scienceblog writer Josh Rosenau accuses John West of wrongly faulting a 2002 textbook for printing bogus embryo diagrams derived from Ernst Haeckel's famous faked drawings. Rosenau assures readers: You'll note that, despite West's claim that this is "a version of Haeckel's drawings," they are actually quite different in their details. These are clearly redrawn photographs of actual embryos, and as such do not bear the taint of any errors Haeckel made, intentionally or otherwise. Trying to smear biologist and filmmaker Randy Olson because West doesn't understand the subject is hardly honest. Rosenau either didn't bother to look at the actual comparison images we provided, or he is Olsonizing the issue by deliberately misleading his readers. Click here to see an animation that lays Haeckel embryo drawings over the drawings in a 2002 biology textbook. (Depending on the speed of your connection it may take a few moments to load.) This animation is also clearly seen in the Hoax of Dodos Youtube video. Decide for yourself whether these drawings were taken from photographs or Haeckel. (By the way, if you want to see what photographs of the real embryos look like, click here to download an image that shows you. You can see for yourself that the textbook drawing we cited obviously wasn't redrawn from actual photos. That's why the textbook publisher in late 2003 finally had to agree to replace the bogus drawings after Discovery Institute repeatedly complained to the Texas State Board of Education.)
Note: This is the second of two blog posts responding to the errors and misrepresentations in the film Flock of Dodos. For more information, visit www.hoaxofdodos.com.
 In Flock of Dodos, filmmaker Randy Olson tries his best to discredit Discovery Institute (DI), the leading think tank supporting scientists and scholars researching intelligent design (ID). But he only ends up discrediting himself by showing how far he is willing to stretch the truth. This article looks at some of the film’s most egregious errors about DI, starting with its claims about the Institute’s budget.
Inflating DI’s Budget—by over 300%!
According to Flock of Dodos, Discovery Institute has a huge budget for its intelligent design program that dwarfs the resources of evolution’s supporters. “The Discovery Institute is truly the big fish in this picture, with an annual budget of around 5 million dollars,” Olson tells the audience. Later, a woman is shown repeating the same figure. The clear impression left with viewers is that the Institute spends $5 million a year to promote intelligent design.
Not even close.
Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (its program on intelligent design and evolution) only spent $1.2 million in 2003, the year that Olson uses for his film. In 2004 it spent the same, and in 2005 it spent $1.6 million.
Indeed, the budget for the entire Discovery Institute, including expenditures on non-intelligent design programs on transportation, technology, and other topics, has never reached $5 million. In 2003, the Institute as a whole spent $2.5 million, or half the figure cited by Olson. In 2004, it spent $3.5 million, and in 2005 it spent $3.9 million. These facts are publicly available for anyone to check on the Institute’s Form 990s posted at www.guidestar.com.
How, then, did Olson arrive at his bogus number?
Give him credit for creativity. Although viewers are clearly led to believe that Olson is talking about DI’s activities relating to intelligent design, Olson lumped together the finances for all of Discovery’s programs, including those that have nothing to do with ID. Since even that sleight of hand wouldn’t get him to $5 million, he then arbitrarily defined Discovery’s “budget” not as its expenditures for a given year, but as its total revenues—even though this figure includes multi-year grants that must be spent over more than one year. Next, he used the revenue figure from 2003, which happened to be higher than the figures from 2004 and 2005. But even that number only got him to $4.2 million, not $5 million. So what did he do? He simply added $800,000 that didn’t exist to produce a figure that sounded more impressive. That’s the sort of creative math that gets ordinary people in trouble with the IRS.
But Olson’s mispresentations about the Institute’s finances don’t end there. As part of an effort to discredit the Institute’s supporters, the film shows a clip of Bill Wagnon claiming that "the Discovery Institute people... are funded by folks like the Unification Church, Reverend Moon...." The audience is never informed that this smear is absolutely false—or that Olson himself admits its falsity. In an e-mail to Discovery Institute in 2006, Olson conceded: “Bill Wagnon says you are funded by the Unification Church, which I know to be untrue.” (emphasis) Olson kept Wagnon’s false claim in his film anyway.
Even if Olson’s bogus budget claims were correct, his overall point would still be absurd. The idea that the resources of Discovery Institute dwarf those of evolutionists is preposterous. The budget of a single state university biology department is far larger than DI’s entire program on intelligent design—as are the budgets of many of the groups that form the “evolution lobby” in the United States, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which alone has a budget of more than $75 million. If intelligent design has gained a voice in the public arena, it is definitely not because it is better funded than the proponents of evolution.
Other Falsehoods and Distortions
Flock of Dodos is filled with numerous other falsehoods and distortions about Discovery Institute as well:
• The film falsely claims that DI helped initiate the controversy over intelligent design in Dover, PA. In fact, the Institute discouraged the Dover School Board from trying to mandate intelligent design, and then urged repeal of the Dover policy well before any lawsuit was filed. (For the truth, see “Setting the Record Straight about DI’s Role in the Dover School District Case.”)
• The film maliciously implies that DI Fellow John Angus Campbell hid his Discovery affiliation at a pro-ID conference where the filmmakers interviewed him. In fact, Campbell’s connection to DI has been noted on our website for years, and it was highlighted in the publicity for the conference in question. However, since Campbell is not a paid Fellow of the Institute, and since his salaried position is at a university, it is quite natural for him to list that position as his main affiliation. The fact that Randy Olson didn’t do his homework about Campbell before his interview is not Dr. Campbell’s fault.
• Olson misrepresents the content of the so-called “Wedge” document. (For the truth, see “Discovery Institute's 'Wedge Document': How Darwinist Paranoia Fueled an Urban Legend.")
Olson’s Double Standard
Throughout Flock of Dodos Olson displays a clear double standard. He seeks to discredit DI because he thinks it receives funding from some groups he classifies as “right wing,” but he never bothers to ask about the funding sources of pro-Darwin groups such as the National Center for Science Education. (Indeed, he himself has refused to disclose the funders of his own film, so no one gets to question him about his funding.) Similarly, Olson finds it significant that Discovery Institute hired a public relations firm for less than a year, but he ignores the regular use of PR firms by pro-evolution groups. The ACLU, for example, hired a Washington, DC public relations firm to represent itself in the Dover case. And the left-wing PR firm Fenton Communications has been used to promote “Evolution Sunday” as well as to coordinate the slick “Campaign to Defend the Constitution” that works to repeal “teach the controversy” policies on Darwinian evolution. Contrary to Olson, if evolution proponents have failed to persuade the public, it is not because of a lack of funds or PR. It’s because of the lack of evidence for their position.
Why Did DI Limit Its Cooperation with Olson?
Olson is upset that DI would not grant him all of the interviews he wanted with DI staff and Fellows. But the way his film plays fast and loose with the facts in order to further his agenda amply justifies DI’s limited cooperation. DI staff are happy to talk with reputable journalists, whether or not they are hostile to DI’s position, and they have done so with Newsweek, Time, Science, the New York Times, CNN, and many other media outlets. But there is no point in assisting a filmmaker who doesn’t want to let the facts get in the way of his pre-determined agenda.
Olson must think his audience is a bunch of “dodos” if he believes no one will notice his repeated departures from the truth.
Note: This is the first of two blog posts responding to the errors and misrepresentations in the film Flock of Dodos. This post is co-authored with Casey Luskin. For more information, visit www.hoaxofdodos.com.
Were Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo diagrams ever used in modern textbooks to prove evolution? Not according to filmmaker Randy Olson, who in his film Flock of Dodos portrays biologist Jonathan Wells as a fraud for claiming in the book Icons of Evolution (2000) that modern biology textbooks continued to reprint Haeckel-based drawings.
But it turns out that Olson is the one who is promoting a fraud. The diagrams in question were unquestionably used in modern textbooks, and Olson himself knows that fact.
In the nineteenth century, German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel produced drawings depicting human and fish embryos as almost identical in their early stages—supposedly providing evidence for their common ancestry.  Olson concedes that Haeckel’s drawings are bogus, but he assures viewers that they haven’t been used in modern textbooks. "You don't find” Haeckel’s embryo drawings in modern textbooks, Olson confidently asserts. “There's no trace of [them] other than a mention that Haeckel once upon a time came up with this... idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Intelligent design proponent John Calvert is then shown flipping through a biology textbook in a vain effort to find the embryo diagrams, and the only textbook Olson can find with the drawings dates from 1914. The segment closes with a scientist comparing biologist Jonathan Wells’ book, Icons of Evolution, to the National Enquirer and with an onscreen graphic showing Wells’ book next to a tabloid. The obvious take-home message is that Wells and other ID proponents who have criticized the continued use of Haeckel’s embryo drawings in textbooks are fabricating their complaint.
Olson’s account would have been news to the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, who skewered the continued use of Haeckel’s drawings in the journal Natural History a few months before Wells’ book was published in 2000. Gould wrote: We should... not be surprised that Haeckel's drawings entered nineteenth-century textbooks. But we do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks! [Stephen Jay Gould, “Abscheulich! (Atrocious!),” Natural History, March 2000, emphasis added] Olson’s revisionist history would also be news to New York Times science reporter James Glanz, who in 2001 reported that Haeckel’s “drawings were reproduced in textbook after textbook for more than a century.” [James Glanz, “Biology Text Illustrations More Fiction Than Fact,” New York Times, April 8, 2001] Indeed, Glanz pointed out that one of the biology textbooks recycling Haeckel’s embryo drawings was co-authored by none other than Bruce Alberts, then-head of the National Academy of Sciences: One of the texts that includes the faulty drawings is the third edition of ''Molecular Biology of the Cell,'' the bedrock text of the field. Its authors include Dr. Bruce Alberts, a biochemist who is president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Dr. James D. Watson, the geneticist who shared a Nobel Prize for unraveling the structure of DNA.
In an interview, Dr. Alberts said he believed Haeckel's drawings were ''overinterpreted,'' or highly idealized, rather than outright fakes. But he said they would be removed from the fourth edition of the textbook, to appear at the end of this year. Even self-proclaimed “evolution evangelist” Eugenie Scott at the National Center for Science Education hasn’t had the audacity to claim that Haeckel’s embryo drawings never appeared in modern textbooks. In an interview for the documentary version of Icons of Evolution, she explained that “the reason why the diagrams are reproduced is because they’re easily available. There’s no copyright on them. It’s an easy way to illustrate a point.”
It is true that after Jonathan Wells’ book was published in 2000 a number of textbooks removed Haeckel’s embryo drawings. But that is no thanks to defenders of Darwinism. As late as 2003, three textbook publishers were still trying to use Haeckel-based drawings in books submitted for review during the biology textbook adoption process in Texas. When Discovery Institute and Texans for Better Science Education brought up this fact, the reaction of Darwinists in Texas was to insist that the textbooks had no factual errors. Only after months of pushing by critics did the publishers finally agree to withdraw the drawings.
Now that Haeckel’s diagrams are on their way out because of the efforts of Darwin’s critics, Olson wants to erase this embarrassing episode from the history of evolution by pretending Haeckel’s drawings were never used in the first place. Has he been reading Orwell’s 1984, by chance?
Olson’s botched coverage of Haeckel’s embryo drawings may have been due initially to ignorance and sloppiness. Although in his film Olson claims to have read Wells’ book Icons of Evolution, he shows little indication of having actually done so. Since Wells’ book provides extensive documentation of the textbooks that have recycled Haeckel’s diagrams, it would have been easy for Olson to have checked the relevant textbooks if he doubted Wells’ account. But the excuse of ignorance no longer applies. At a pre-release screening of Olson’s film at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography in San Diego in April, 2006, Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin confronted Olson with copies of recent textbooks that reused Haeckel’s drawings. Later Jonathan Wells sent Olson an e-mail providing a list of recent textbooks that have included the diagrams. Olson has been informed of the facts, but he has chosen to keep hoaxing his audiences.
Olson must believe his viewers are a bunch of “dodos” if he believes they are going to fall for such a complete rewriting of history!
[Editor's Note: For a full and comprehensive review and response to Edward Humes' book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, and the Battle for America's Soul, please see A Partisan Affair: A Response to Edward Humes’ Inaccurate History of Kitzmiller v. Dover and Intelligent Design, "Monkey Girl.]
The York Dispatch has an article promoting an anti-ID book about the Dover trial by a Darwinist journalist, Edward Humes. Last spring, I was contacted by Mr. Humes, who requested an interview for his book. He immediately tried to convince me he was fair and objective, which is usually a red flag that a reporter isn’t going to be fair or objective. I would directly quote Humes declaring his commitment to a non-partisan journalism, but he is refusing to give me permission to quote his original emails. Due to my suspicions last year, I only granted Humes a short phone interview where we discussed the nature of intelligent design (ID). Now that Humes’ book, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul, is published, he’s posted an FAQ on his website which is strongly pro-evolution and anti-ID. There's nothing wrong with having a viewpoint, but unlike Humes, most people aren't going around requesting interviews of ID-proponents while claiming to be non-partisan. The highly biased, inaccurate, and partisan nature of Humes' present FAQ makes me feel that my suspicions of his intent were justified.
Evolution vs. Gravity
During our brief call last year, I got Humes to admit that he accepted evolution. That's not necessarily a big deal, but just how staunch is Humes’ support for evolution? Now we learn: Humes’ present FAQ states, “There is more scientific evidence, laboratory testing and direct observation to support evolutionary theory than virtually any other scientific theory, including gravitational theory...” (emphasis added)
I’ve never seen a single journalist who promised he was fair and non-partisan subsequently claim that evolution has more scientific support than gravity. In fact, I can't recall witnessing anyone anywhere ever claim that evolution has more scientific evidence than gravity. (I'm sure some Darwinist bloggers will now repeat this claim, which will be amusing to watch.) I'll let you, the reader, judge for yourself whether Humes' prior pledges of neutrality are credible.
Evolution and Randomness
Humes’ FAQ states: “Fact: Evolution is mindless, but never random.” (emphasis added) He told me that he would engage in careful fact-checking, but did Humes check his facts here? Consider what Darwinist textbooks, Nobel laureates, and other leading scientists say about whether evolution is "never random": [N]o species has “chosen” a strategy. Rather, its ancestors—little by little, generation after generation—merely wandered into a successful way of life through the action of random evolutionary forces …. Once pointed in a certain direction, a line of evolution survives only if the cosmic dice continues to roll in its favor. … [J]ust by chance, a wonderful diversity of life has developed during the billions of years in which organisms have been evolving on earth. (Burton S. Guttman, Biology, pgs. 36-37 (1st ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), emphases added.)
[E]volution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection. (Letter from The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity: Nobel Laureates Initiative, emphasis added.)
Evolution certainly does involve randomness; it does involve unpredictable chance. For example, the origin of new genetic variation by mutation is a process that involves a great deal of chance. Genetic drift, the process I referred to earlier, is a matter of chance. … In addition, the particular sequence of environmental changes that the Earth underwent and that organisms were exposed to over billions of years has left a long-term imprint on species as they are today. If the sequence of environmental changes were different, you would have a different evolutionary history, leading to entirely different organisms over time. (Natural Selection: How Evolution Works: Interview with Douglas Futuyma, emphasis added.) Evolution clearly includes both random and non-random factors. This is explained by Sean B. Carroll in The Making of the Fittest, where he writes that evolution entails "[t]he individual components of chance (in producing variation) and selection (in determining which variants succeed)." (pg. 32)
Carroll also charges that "[t]he role of chance is often inflated (sometimes deliberately so by opponents of evolution) to mean that evolution occurs completely at random." In this instance, I think the reverse is occurring: a staunch proponent of evolution is deliberately downplaying the role of chance by saying evolution is "never random." But that isn't what many leading Darwinists say, and again, we see Humes behaving in a highly partisan manner.
Humes' Refusal to Make Book Proposal Public
When Humes contacted me last year, I asked him if he would provide his book proposal because that would probably show if had an agenda. He declined, stating as his given reason that he didn’t want to risk anyone stealing his book idea. That sounded fair, so I dropped my request. But now that his book is published, no one can steal his ideas, so I recently re-asked him to make his book proposal public so he can prove that he had no agenda when writing Monkey Girl. But Humes still refuses to make his book proposal public!
Indeed, Humes won't even give me permission to quote his old emails where he declared to be neutral and non-partisan. All of this has made his statements towards me last year even more suspect.
Humes' book has glowing endorsements from P.Z. Myers, Micheal Shermer, Judge Jones, and various Darwinist bloggers. Humes and his Darwinist defenders will probably reply by claiming Humes started off neutral but developed his viewpoint while writing his book. Perhaps that's true. If it is, then I'd love for Humes to make his book proposal public and show everyone that he was indeed unbiased when he interviewed his subjects and wrote his book. But I've asked Humes to disclose his book proposal, and he won't. All of the facts I have to go on presently suggest Humes is an extremely partisan journalist.
In response to my recent email inquiries, Humes modified his FAQ, and even made changes which he did not disclose to me. After this, he accused me of misstating his FAQ. This only gives me more reason to doubt his intentions and suspect him of extreme partisanship. I’ll be discussing some of Humes' changes and accusations and the partisan nature of his FAQ further in the next installment…
There is an interesting article in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer about Darwin Day. As the reporter notes, the Discovery Institute marks the same occasion with a lecture and discussion on "Darwin Day and the Deification of Charles Darwin." On Darwin Day we will be broadcasting a short lecture by Dr. John West and Dr. Jonathan Wells about Darwin and his impact on modern science. The 30 minute program will be available at ID The Future and on Youtube. (Check back here on Feb 12 for exact links).
According to the P-I article the films maker, oceanographer Randy Olson, started out really liking the work of Discovery, but only after we didn't want to appear in his film did he resort to motive mongering and distorting our position on evolution. That's one approach to getting interviews. If you don't do this, I'll make you look bad. And he tried to do just that.
One thing that the reporter got wrong is how he defines what intelligent design is and how it differs from Darwinian evolution. (But, maybe he got that from Randy Olson.) Cohen writes: "Evolution includes the ideas that plants and animals can change from one generation to the next and that different species descend from common ancestors. Discovery's intelligent design proponents concede the first kind of evolution but challenge the second. They say some sort of intelligent designer is a more likely explanation for ordered complexity found in nature." Not exactly. In fact, the theory of intelligent design doesn't exclude the possibility of common ancestry at all. There are three common, but very different definitions of biological evolution. When speaking with people about the issue it is important to ask them which definition of evolution they are using: 1) Change over time (even billions of years, most leading ID proponents believe the universe is billions of years old)
2) Common ancestry, all forms of life evolved from a single original life form
3) Natural selection acting on random mutation is the primary mechanism by which life forms have evolved. ID scientists do not have a problem with definition #1. There is some debate over definition #2, but it is not incompatible with ID. Definition #3, commonly referred to as Darwinian Evolution, is a specific part of evolution that ID challenges and is the heart of Darwin’s theory.
Randy Olson clearly didn't understand what intelligent design is when he told his story, so it's no surprise if he misrepresented it to Cohen as well.
The main thing that Olson got wrong in his film Flock of Dodos is that he charges biologist Jonathan Wells with being a fraud for claiming that modern biology textbooks still include Ernst Haeckel's faked drawings of embryos as evidence for Darwinian evolution. It's been well-known for a century that Haeckel's drawings are bogus. Olson doesn't contest this. What he does contest is Wells' claim that they are still in use in modern textbooks. It’s a silly assertion on Olson’s part since it is so easily proven to be wrong. We have shelves full of modern textbooks using the drawings, the sad fact being that the some are still in use in biology classes today. Olson knew this, but persists in making the claim, turning his flock of dodos into a hoax of dodos.
We will be issuing more detailed responses to Olson’s film throughout this week, leading up to Darwin Day, Feb. 12 when it is scheduled to be screened in a few small science venues.
World renowned Darwin defender Richard Dawkins is very firm in his opinions on what does or does not exist. But, now there's some question about whether he exists. In the Youtube video The Dawkins Delusion Dr. Terry Tommyrot asks: "If there is a Dawkins why hasn't he shown himself to me?"
As Paul Nelson has recognized, it's ironic when scientists issue press releases alleging they've refuted intelligent design (ID), supposedly resolving a scientific controversy they claim doesn’t even exist. Pro-ID biochemist and Discovery Institute fellow Michael Behe has already responded to a recent paper doing just that. In what appears to be another good example of a retroactive confession of Darwinist ignorance, the press release from the authors acknowledges that “[t]he development of complex features such as new protein structures by the process of evolution is largely elusive.” But I thought Nicholas Matzke of the NCSE had long ago told a reporter that “[t]he origin of genetic information is thoroughly understood.” I guess these Darwinist biochemists see it differently. They nonetheless try to answer the challenges of ID, stating: “[T]he protagonists of an intelligent design theory deny the invention of complex protein structures by few mutational steps, scientists working on evolutionary biology have found indications for bridge states that combine original and novel features.” This sure sounds like a scientific dispute to me.
Indeed, a German press release on the paper specifically cites Behe as the scientist to whom they are responding: “While advocates of intelligent design-theory, like the US-American scientist Michael J. Behe, exclude the invention of new complex protein structures through few mutational steps, evolutionary biologists have found hints, that new proteins can originate out of transitional forms that unite primitive and new properties.” (Translation provided by William Dembski through a colleague.) In another confession of retroactive ignorance, the scientists go on to say, “until now this has only shown by the accumulation of artificial mutations, that merely simulate evolutionary processes." But why respond to the scientific challenges of ID if they aren’t worthwhile?
Regardless, Behe provides a clear explanation of why this study does not explain how neo-Darwinian evolution can produce novel complexity at the molecular level: My general reaction to breathless papers like this is that they vastly oversimplify the problems evolution faces. Consider a very rugged evolutionary landscape. Imagine peaks big and small all packed closely together. It would of course be very difficult for a cell or organism to traverse such a landscape. Now, however, suppose an investigator focuses his gaze on just one peak of the rugged landscape and myopically performs experiments whose products lie very close to the peak. In that case the investigator is artificially reducing what in reality is a very rugged landscape to one that looks rather smooth. The results tell us very little about the ability of random processes to traverse the larger, rugged landscape.
(Michael Behe, “The evolutionary puzzle becomes more complex at a higher level of cellular organization.” No kidding.) There seems little doubt that scientists like Michael Behe will continue to argue that [t]he development of complex features such as new protein structures by the process of evolution is" still "largely elusive." Meanwhile, the imaginary debate continues to rage on.
[this post was edited for clarity shortly after posting]
In Part I of this series, I discussed how Michael Francisco's post last year had a bumper sticker for people who take the “Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It” approach to intelligent design. Devin James Carpenter, over at Warren Reports blog deserves the bumper sticker due to his many inaccurate statements about intelligent design and his thoroughgoing acceptance of Judge Jones' Kitzmiller ruling. In this second installment, I will discuss problems with some of Carpenter's arguments against intelligent design (ID).
Misrepresentations of ID
Carpenter states that ID “calls into question (on a theological basis) the ability of nature to transform simple biological beings into complex ones.” To claim that ID challenges neo-Darwinism "on a theological basis" is a flat-out misrepresentation of ID. Michael Behe provides clear empirical reasons, based upon challenges which go back to Darwin himself, as to why the mutation-selection mechanism cannot produce irreducible complexity. But to summarize some Behe's of empirical and non-theological challenges: In The Origin of Species, Darwin stated:If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. A system which meets Darwin's criterion is one which exhibits irreducible complexity. By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional. To dismiss Behe’s arguments by asserting they merely have “a theological basis” completely misrepresents them and dismisses them in a fashion which will leave any informed person—whether a critic or supporter of ID—fully cognizant that Carpenter has neither appreciated nor engaged the real issues.
Intelligent Design and Negative Arguments
Carpenter states: “‘intelligent design’ seems to be merely a negative theory, meaning it only criticizes evolution and doesn’t propose anything scientific of its own” and he quotes a critic saying that because ID does not explain some things, therefore it explains no things. Again, this is a blatant misrepresentation of ID. ID proposes to positively explain (among other things) that high levels of specified complexity, such as irreducible complexity, come from intelligence. This is a positive and predictive argument for intelligent design (that is further outlined here). This positive case was made explicit by Scott Minnich during the Dover trial, where he eloquently stated: In other words, you're saying, it's an argument out of ignorance. And I don't think it is. Again, it's an argument out of our common cause and effect experience where we find these machines or information storage systems. From our experience, we know there's an intelligence behind it. (Day 21, pg. 86) Clearly there is a positive argument for design, which Carpenter completely ignores.
Who is Promoting “Bad Philosophy”?
Carpenter accuses ID-proponents of employing “bad philosophy,” but I will let you, the reader, judge Carpenter’s philosophy for yourself. Carpenter states: [T]here are many other examples that would lead the viewer to believe that humans and animals are not designed by a sentient being but by nature. For example, “some cave animals, descended from sighted ancestors that invaded caves, have rudimentary eyes that cannot see; the eyes degenerated after they were no longer needed.” Since Carpenter concedes that the “cave animals” are descended from organisms with functional eyes, the obvious answer from ID-perspective would be that the eyes were designed, and subsequently lost function through precisely the same explanation he gives ("degeneration"). In our experienced, designed structures often undergo degeneration after they were initially designed. For example, if you take a functional television and put it on top of a mountain and then return after 30 years, my guess is that it will no longer function. Since natural processes destroyed its function, does that mean that it was not originally designed? Of course not.
ID does not deny that natural selection is a real force at work in nature, even acting upon organisms which were designed. In fact, ID-proponents are often amused that the best examples Darwinists give of natural selection typically entail loss of function, not the generation of a novel feature. ID is concerned with how new biological functions originate, not with how they can be lost due to misuse.
Carpenter also asks, “what about the human appendix? An appendix is ‘certainly not the product of intelligent design,’” and then he quotes Jerry Coyne, who assumes that the appendix is functionless and simply causes disease. Carpenter is promoting a Darwinist urban legend. As a physiology professor Scientific American states at Scientific American: “For years, the appendix was credited with very little physiological function. We now know, however, that the appendix serves an important role in the fetus and in young adults. … Among adult humans, the appendix is now thought to be involved primarily in immune functions.” So Carpenter is wrong to imply that the appendix is a useless organ that only causes pain and suffering.
But what about pain and suffering? Is design refuted if the structure can sometimes cause pain? Carpenter then quotes Neil deGrasse Tyson discussing diseases and natural events which kill organisms and species, claiming this is “counterintuitive to a design theory.” But ID does not try to analyze the moral purposes of the designer. Indeed, whether we like it or not, guns and atomic bombs are all designed—designed to kill. On what basis does Carpenter claim that something which causes pain or death cannot be designed?
In fact, most of Carpenter's arguments here are simply theological objections to design, based upon the “problem of evil.” Since he raises theological objections it should be noted that many religions have had theological answers to the “problem of evil” for millennia. But ID does not concern itself with such theological questions, and thus Carpenter’s objections are moot.
This whole discussion from Carpenter is intriguing, because he previously attacked ID as something that cannot be "falsified and tested" (see part I). Yet now he claims that the presence of disease and death is “counterintuitive to a design theory.” If Carpenter wants to claim that ID is both unfalsifiable and false, and cite the fact that “cave animals” can lose their sight or that organisms get sick and die as evidence that ID wrong, then I will let readers judge for themselves who is promoting “bad philosophy.”
Get yours today: the "Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It" bumper sticker! |
|
When A Court Hands you Lemons...
Carpenter’s makes one final blunder I’ll discuss, regarding Judge Jones application of the Lemon test. The Lemon test is a three-part legal test used to determine if a law violates the First Amendment's prohibition on establishing religion. Carpenter writes: “Judge Jones made the right decision, concluding that ‘intelligent design’ is based on religion rather than science, and…that intelligent design is an updated version of ‘creation science’ which is unconstitutional given that it violates all three facets of the ‘Lemon’ test.”
There are at least 2 major problems with this statement: First, Carpenter claims that the law violated "all three facets" of the Lemon test. The third "facet" of the Lemon test prohibits "excessive entanglement" between government and religion. But as Judge Jones said in a footnote: “Plaintiffs are not claiming excessive entanglement. Accordingly, Plaintiffs argue that the ID Policy is violative of the first two prongs of the Lemon test, the purpose and effect prongs.” Thus Judge Jones did not even assess the third prong of the Lemon test.
Second, ID is not based upon religion, but upon an empirical argument which looks at the types of information produced by intelligent agents and then seeks to test for that information in natural objects. When tests reveal such information is detected, design is inferred. It’s a simple empirically based argument with no theological basis whatsoever.
The moral of this story is: Just because a judge and a bunch of his internet supporters say something, doesn't mean it is true.
Last year, a post from Michael Francisco presented the “Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It” bumper sticker. A recent blog post at Warren Reports Blog employs so much uncritical acceptance of Judge Jones' ruling (calling it a “scathing decision” and a “hard blow”), gets so many facts wrong, and is so full of contradictions that its author, Devin James Carpenter, deserves to have the bumper sticker awarded to him. This 2-part series will respond to some of Carpenter’s statements.
The "Main Issues"
Carpenter states: “The main issues in Kitzmiller v. Dover were: the soundness of evolution and ‘intelligent design’ as science, the separation of church and state, and the philosophy of science itself.”
Actually, that’s not true. The main issues in Kitzmiller v. Dover were whether Dover’s policy was (1) enacted for a secular purpose and (2) whether it had a primary effect which was secular. If the policy failed either of those tests, then it was unconstitutional. Judge Jones could have answered these questions without addressing the soundness of evolution or ID as science or defining science. Indeed, even the leading anti-ID legal scholar Jay Wexler argues, “The part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous to both science and freedom of religion.” In order to resolve the Kitzmiller case, all Judge Jones had to find was whether the Dover Area School Board had a predominantly religious purpose—none of those other issues were mandatory.
Intelligent Design and the Designer
Carpenter observes that “‘intelligent design’ advocate Michael Behe ... talked at length about ‘irreducible complexity,’” and then immediately Carpenter states that “[t]he plaintiffs noted, however, that science is only concerned with things that can be falsified and tested.” But the Kitzmiller plaintiffs conceded that irreducible complexity IS testable. The plaintiffs claimed that invoking the supernatural cannot be done because science cannot appeal to the supernatural. That’s why both the Kitzmiller plaintiffs and Carpenter, who states that ID invokes a “higher power” or “an invisible, supernatural being,” are wrong. As discussed many places (like here), the theory of intelligent design does not try to identify whether the designer is natural or supernatural. As the Pandas textbook states, “All it implies is that life had an intelligent source.” Since we have much observation-based experience with the products of intelligence, we can search for specified or irreducible complexity in the natural world, thereby testing for intelligent design--not trying to idenitf supernatural design--in natural objects.
But this wasn’t the most egregious misrepresentation of Carpenter. Carpenter states “Michael Behe said in his testimony that ‘the designer is in fact God’” and claims that this is what drives Behe’s ideas. In fact, Behe actually said: Q. So is it accurate for people to claim or to represent that intelligent design holds that the designer was God?
A. No, that is completely inaccurate.
Q. Well, people have asked you your opinion as to who you believe the designer is, is that correct?
A. That is right.
Q. Has science answered that question?
A. No, science has not done so.
Q. And I believe you have answered on occasion that you believe the designer is God, is that correct?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. Are you making a scientific claim with that answer?
A. No, I conclude that based on theological and philosophical and historical factors.
(Day 10 testimony) Clearly Behe explains that science and intelligent design cannot tell you if the designer is God. Behe’s own theological view is that the designer is God, but that is not a conclusion of intelligent design. Thus, when Behe makes the statement quoted by Carpenter, this is the context of what Behe actually says: “I think I said that at the beginning of my testimony yesterday, that I think in fact from -- from other perspectives, that the designer is in fact God.” The full context makes it clear that Behe's conclusion that the designer is God does NOT come from ID but from his own personal theological views. But Carpenter does not provide this context, leaving readers thinking that ID concludes the designer is God.
Misstating the “Wedge Document”
Carpenter also misquotes the “Wedge document,” claiming that one of its goals is “replacing current scientific practice with ‘theistic and Christian science.’” That is NOT what the Wedge Document says, and it does not even contain the phrase “theistic and Christian science.” Its true meaning is explained here. If motives matter so much to Carpenter, why doesn’t he scrutinize the fact that many leading Darwinists have anti-religious motives? Or is Carpenter applying a double-standard?
ID and Conservatives
Carpenter asserts that “[m]ost conservative intellectuals seem embarrassed by intelligent design.” He quotes Charles Krauthammer, who badly misunderstands ID and whose misunderstandings of ID we’ve responded to at length (for example, see here or here). Indeed, John West recently authored Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest, where he rebuts many arguments from the leading conservatives who do oppose ID.
Who is “Steve Chapman”?
Carpenter quotes someone named “Steve Chapman, the founder of the Discovery Institute” who he claims called the Dover ruling a “disaster…as a public relations matter.” Carpenter can be forgiven, as he probably meant “Bruce Chapman,” but this make me wonder, how familiar is Carpenter with the subject of his critique? With so many people (like Carpenter) using the Dover decision to misrepresent ID and confuse the basic facts (e.g. "Steve Chapman"), perhaps Bruce Chapman was correct. But readers are invited to read the full article quoting Bruce Chapman to see the context of Chapman’s views.
Part II of this response will discuss Mr. Carpenter's philosophical and other arguments against ID.
Chuck Colson dedicated a recent BreakPoint commentary to Discovery Institute’s report on Judge Jones’s ruling in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, which found that Judge Jones copied more than 90% of his ruling on whether intelligent design is science from the ACLU. He writes, Thus, as the Discovery Institute notes, the central part of the ruling reflects no original, deliberative activity or independent examination of the record on the judge’s part.
And that’s not all. The problem when you let somebody else write your decision is that they may make a mistake. And you, then, look silly. This is the point of why Judge Jones' copying of the ACLU brief undermines the credibility of his decision in Dover. Colson's response is clear: Cutting and pasting from one side’s brief does not say much for impartiality—something for you to point out next time someone throws the Dover decision in your face.
The most recent Nobel prize for physics recently was awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their contribution to the big bang theory of the origin of the universe. Smoot is a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. He has no ties that I'm aware of to the Intelligent Design community, and I know that he doesn't have ties to Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
However, like several other prominent contemporary physicists (e.g., Arno Penzias, Owen Gingerich, and Paul Davies), Smoot has made remarks that suggest he considers the best explanation for certain features of the natural world to be a teleological or purposeful cause—what we in the ID community refer to as intelligent design and what the pope recently described as creative reason.
For instance, a quotation web page hosted by The Veritas Forum at the University of California Santa Barbara features several pro-design quotations from leading physicists around the world, and includes one from Wrinkles in Time: The Imprint of Creation. There Smoot and co-author Keay Davidson write, “The big bang, the most cataclysmic event we can imagine, on closer inspection appears finely orchestrated” (p. 135). And in the same book: "Until the late 1910's, humans were as ignorant of cosmic origins as they had ever been. Those who didn't take Genesis literally had no reason to believe there had been a beginning" (p. 30).
Several of his comments touching on the question of teleology in nature can be found at a site featuring excerpts from science journalist Fred Heeren’s book Show me God: Discovery 5 - 1992: NASA's COBE satellite team discovered the predicted ripples in the cosmic background radiation. George Smoot, the team's leader, called these seeds for future galaxy superclusters "fingerprints from the Maker." And this: Stephen Hawking wrote, "If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million, the universe would have re-collapsed before it ever reached it present state." Slightly faster than the critical rate and matter would have dispersed too rapidly to allow stars and galaxies to form. George Smoot describes the creation even[t] as "finely orchestrated." In an interview in the same book, Smoot describes the evidence for purposeful fine tuning in greater detail: “In order to make a universe as big and wonderful as it is, lasting as long as it is—we’re talking fifteen billion years and we’re talking huge distances here—in order for it to be that big, you have to make it perfectly. Otherwise, imperfections would mount up and the universe would either collapse on itself or fly apart, and so it’s actually quite a precise job. And I don’t know if you’ve had discussions with people about how critical it is that the density of the universe come out so close to the density that decides whether it’s going to keep expanding forever or collapse back, but we know it’s within one percent.” (p. 168) Philosophical materialists insist that matter and energy are all there is. How do they respond to the testimony of such scientists? They hope no one will notice. One tactic of philosophical materialists (who represent roughly 10 percent of the American population as well as a small minority of the global population) is to try to present those who see physical evidence for design in nature as marginal crackpots or as purely motivated by religious faith. This tactic becomes increasingly difficult when respected scientists stand up and notice in public the plain evidence of nature. Here are a few more relevant quotations from the Veritas Forum web page: Paul Davies has moved from promoting atheism to conceding that "the laws [of physics] ... seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design." (Superforce, p. 243) He further testifies, "There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all ... it seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe ... The impression of design is overwhelming." (The Cosmic Blueprint, p. 203)
Paul Davies
Superforce, p. 243
The Cosmic Blueprint, p. 203
“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”
Freeman Dyson
Disturbing the Universe
New York: Harper & Row, 1979, p. 250
"The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation ... His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."
Albert Einstein
"A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."
Sir Fred Hoyle
“If we accept the big bang theory, and most cosmologists now do, then a ‘creation’ of some sort is forced upon us.”
Barry Parker
Creation—the Story of the Origin and Evolution of the Universe
New York & London: Plenum Press, 1988, p. 202
Compared to the alternative of supposing that matter and energy somehow always existed, British physicist Edmund Whittaker says, “It is simpler to postulate creation ex nihilo—Divine will constituting Nature from nothingness.”
Edmund Whittaker cited in
Fred Heeren
Show Me God: What the Message from Space Is Telling Us About God
Day Star Publications, 2000, pp. 121
“We do, of course, have an alternative. We could say that there was no creation, and that the universe has always been here. But this is even more difficult to accept than creation.”
Barry Parker
Creation—the Story of the Origin and Evolution of the Universe
New York & London: Plenum Press, 1988, pp. 201-202
Einstein later chided himself for introducing his famous fudge factor in order to make his theory fit. He called the addition of his cosmological constant “the greatest blunder of my life.” (cited by Richard Morris, The Fate of the Universe, New York: Playboy Press, 1982, p. 28) He wrote: “The mathematician Friedmann found a way out of the dilemma. His results then found a surprising confirmation by Hubble’s discovery of the expansion (of the universe).” (cited by Barry Parker, Creation—the Story of the Origin and Evolution of the Universe, New York & London: Plenum Press, 1988, pp. 53-54). After this Einstein wrote not only of the necessity for a beginning, but of his desire “to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thought, the rest are details.” (cited by Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality—Beyond the New Physics, Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985, p. 177).
Fred Heeren
Show Me God: What the Message from Space Is Telling Us About God
Day Star Publications, 2000, pp. 135
“Certainly there was something that set it all off. Certainly, if you are religious, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis.”
Robert Wilson
An interview with Fred Heeren
Show Me God: What the Message from Space Is Telling Us About God
Day Star Publications, 2000, p. 157
“How is it that common elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen happened to have just the kind of atomic structure that they needed to combine to make the molecules upon which life depends? It is almost as though the universe had been consciously designed…”
Richard Morris
The Fate of the Universe
New York: Playboy Press, 1982, p. 28
"Every one of these forces must have just the right strength if there is to be any possibility of life. For example, if electrical forces were much stronger than they are, then no element heavier than hydrogen could form ... But electrical repulsion cannot be too weak. if it were, protons would combine too easily, and the sun ...(assuming that it had somehow managed to exist up to now) would explode like a thermonuclear bomb."
Richard Morris
The Fate of the Universe
New York: Playboy Press, 1982, p. 153
"Stronger (nuclear) forces would cause all of the primordial hydrogen -- not just 25% of it -- to be synthesized into helium early in the history of the universe. And without hydrogen, the stars could never begin to shine."
Richard Morris
The Fate of the Universe
New York: Playboy Press, 1982, p. 153
“To make sense of this view (design as opposed to accident), one must accept the idea of transcendence: that the Designer exists in a totally different order of reality or being, not restrained within the bounds of the Universe itself.”
George F. R. Ellis
Before the Beginning – Cosmology Explained
London and New York: Boyars/Bowerdean, 1993, 1994, p. 97
And here is one more they could add to their page, this from Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias:
In summary, therefore, astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say "supernatural"), plan.
(from The New York Times, Jan. 2, 1979)
I recently predicted that Darwinists in New Mexico would oppose an innocuous academic freedom bill which protects the teaching of science, and science only, in the science classroom, even if the science challenges neo-Darwinism. As the bill states, “‘Scientific information’ does not include information derived from religious or philosophical writings, beliefs or doctrines,” but teachers will be given “the right and freedom, when a theory of biological origins is taught, to objectively inform students of scientific information relevant to the strengths and weaknesses of that theory.” How could this bill possibly allow the teaching of anything but science in the science classroom? Darwinists’ attacks upon the bill have already begun, as Marshall Berman presented a talk at Los Alamos National Lab on January 22 entitled, “The ‘Intelligently Designed’ Attack on Science and Society.” As predicted, the talk opposed such freedom of inquiry on evolution.
The New Mexico bill is not about intelligent design. Even Berman admits in his talk that it “[d]oes not mention Intelligent Design, creationism, religion or God.” Yet Berman’s talk contained more than 30 slides about ID out of 40 (which I will discuss in a forthcoming post), suggesting that, given his focus, it is all about intelligent design. In Berman’s own words, he described the bill as the following: “Give teachers the affirmative right and freedom” to inform students of other “scientific information” about biological origins and protect them.
“Encourage students to think critically” about biological origins
Does not mention Intelligent Design, creationism, religion or God
Real but unstated goal is to allow teaching ID creationism in science classes!
Legislation is nearly identical with that proposed in OK, AL, and other states.
(Marshall Berman's PowerPoint Presentation) Berman thus made no critiques of the actual bill but merely expressed his conspiracy theory that this is somehow going to let religion into the classroom. Keep in mind that the bill states "'Scientific information' does not include information derived from religious or philosophical writings, beliefs or doctrines." What the bill is about is allowing teachers to “objectively inform students of scientific information relevant to the strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories of biological origins. If Berman doesn’t even consider ID science, why is he so worried about the bill? In fact, who would oppose a bill that protects the teaching of science, and science only, in the science classroom? Yet Berman tells people to “[o]ppose the bill and resolution that will be presented at the NM Legislature.”
Perhaps Berman’s true reasons for opposing the bill were actually presented in his own talk when he discussed the arguments from proponents of objective science in Kansas: “Critics … are trying to censor science, they’re trying to stifle science, they’re afraid to let students learn about some of the problems with evolutionary theory.”
The January 25th issue of Nature carries a “Progress” paper by Poelwijk et al that’s touted on the cover as “Plugging Darwin’s Gaps,” and cited by its authors as addressing concerns raised by proponents of intelligent design. The gist of the paper is that some amino acid residues of several proteins can be altered in the lab to produce proteins with properties slightly different from those they started with. A major example the authors cite is the work of Bridgham et al (2006) altering hormone receptors, which I blogged on last year. That very modest paper was puffed not only in Science, but in the New York Times, too. It seems some scientists have discovered that one way to hype otherwise-lackluster work is to claim that it discredits ID.
Quite unsurprisingly, the current paper shows that microevolution can happen. Small changes in a protein may not destroy its activity. If you start out with a protein that does something, such as bind DNA or a hormone, it’s not surprising that you can sometimes find a sequence of changes that can allow the protein to do something closely similar, such as bind a second sequence of DNA or a second, structurally-similar hormone.
My general reaction to breathless papers like this is that they vastly oversimplify the problems evolution faces. Consider a very rugged evolutionary landscape. Imagine peaks big and small all packed closely together. It would of course be very difficult for a cell or organism to traverse such a landscape. Now, however, suppose an investigator focuses his gaze on just one peak of the rugged landscape and myopically performs experiments whose products lie very close to the peak. In that case the investigator is artificially reducing what in reality is a very rugged landscape to one that looks rather smooth. The results tell us very little about the ability of random processes to traverse the larger, rugged landscape.
The authors remark, “The evolutionary puzzle becomes more complex at a higher level of cellular organization.” No kidding. Nonetheless, they, like most Darwinists, assume that larger changes involving more components are simple extrapolations of smaller changes. A good reason to be extremely skeptical of that is the work of Richard Lenski, which they cite. Lenski and his collaborators have grown E. coli in his lab for tens of thousands of generations, in a cumulative population size of trillions of cells, and they have seen no building of new systems, just isolated mutations in various genes. Apparently, nature has a much more difficult time putting together new systems than do human investigators in a lab.
Poelwijk,F.J., Kiviet,D.J., Weinreich,D.M., and Tans,S.J. 2007. Empirical fitness landscapes reveal accessible evolutionary paths. Nature 445:383-386.
Bridgham,J.T., Carroll,S.M., and Thornton,J.W. 2006. Evolution of hormone-receptor complexity by molecular exploitation. Science 312:97-101.
John Fleck, a science writer with the Albuquerque Journal, has praised the evolution blog Panda's Thumb on the Albuquerque Journal website, even linking to the Darwinist blog. The Albuquerque Journal headlined the academic freedom bill as a “'Creationism' Measure” while Fleck called it “the latest ‘intelligent design’ bill in the New Mexico legilsature [sic].” The bill says nothing about intelligent design or creationism, and it only protects the teaching of “scientific information relevant to the strengths and weaknesses” of a theory of biological origins. Both articles leave off a crucial portion of the bill which explicitly does not protect the teaching of “information derived from religious or philosophical writings, beliefs or doctrines.” Why would anyone oppose this bill? It’s simple: they don’t want scientific information taught to students if it challenges Darwin. To hide their censorial mindset, Darwinists try to justify opposing the bill by claiming it promotes religion. Fair-minded readers can decide for themselves whether religion is permitted under this bill. Regardless, there’s no question that the Albuquerque Journal is doing their best to promote the viewpoint of the Darwinists. Could a media source reveal its pro-Darwinist bias any more clearly?
[Some corrections were made later in the day after this was first posted.]
|
 |
