Evolution News & Views

CSC senior fellow Benjamin Wiker has had an opportunity to interview Oxford philosopher Antony Flew. Flew, an Oxford educated philosopher, held a number of distinguished teaching posts at British universities and had been a prominent atheist throughout the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, he was sort of Richard Dawkins before Dawkins, his name synonymous with staunchly materialistic beliefs.

Another CSC senior fellow, Jonathan Witt, first wrote on Flew abandoning his adherence to atheism back in 2004 in the Seattle Times. So this isn't exactly new news. However, Flew has now published a book explaining in more details his change of mind titled, "There Is A God." In it he explains his change as a journey into reason.

Flew told Wiker:

There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself – which is far more complex than the physical Universe – can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source.

Asked how he views this Intelligent Source Flew responded:

I accept the God of Aristotle who shares all the attributes you cite. Like Lewis I believe that God is a person but not the sort of person with whom you can have a talk. It is the ultimate being, the Creator of the Universe.

Read the full interview here.

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Mike Gene recently posted on Telic Thoughts responding to professor James F. McGrath, who accuses intelligent design (ID) proponents of being dishonest when they claim that ID does not identify the designer. This professor wrote: “That isn't an instance of humility, but of strategy, and we all know why the strategy is being used: to wedge ID into science classrooms by disconnecting it from religion.” Similarly, I recently read a law review article co-authored by Barbara Forrest where she asserts with Stephen Gey and Matthew Brauer that "an intelligent designer is simply a subtle reference to God." (More on problems with this article in Part 2.) Professor McGrath is perhaps unfamiliar with writings and position of ID proponents on this point. Thomas Woodward clearly explains the principled reasons why the biological evidence for ID may not allow us to identify the designer:

There is no ‘Made by Yahweh’ engraved on the side of the bacterial rotary motor—the flagellum. In order to find out what or who its designer is, one must go outside the narrow discipline of biology. Cross-disciplinary dialogue must begin with the fields of philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and theology. Design itself, however, is a direct scientific inference; it does not depend on a single religious premise for its conclusions.

(Thomas Woodward, Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, pg. 15 (Baker Books, 2006).)

In other words, the flagellar machine itself indicates that it did not arise by a random and unguided process like Darwinian evolution, but rather arose by a non-random and intelligently directed process such as intelligent design. However, while biological structures may be scientifically explained via intelligent design, the structures themselves have no way of directly telling us whether the designer is Yahweh, Buddha, Yoda, or some other type of intelligent agency. Thus, in contrast to the professor’s incorrect accusation that this is part of a “strategy … to wedge ID into science classrooms,” ID’s non-identification of the designer stems from a scientific desire to take a scientific approach and respect the limits of science and not inject religious discussions about theological questions into scientific inquiry. In other words, using present knowledge, identifying the designer can’t be done by science. It is a strictly theological question, and thus for the theory of ID to try to identify the designer would be to inappropriately conflate science with religion.

Indeed, even the staunchly anti-ID website, TalkOrigins, admits that "an anthropomorphized designer need not be a deity. The atheistic religion of Raelianism, for example, proposes that humans were created by extraterrestrials." It's a rare instance to hear TalkOrigins sound like ID proponents, but they are correct. (It's likely that the author's motive is to protect atheism in light of nature's design rather than to formulate ID as a science that doesn’t investigate religious issues.)

David DeWolf, John West and I also address this issue in our recent Montana Law Review article:

It is important to stress that the refusal of ID proponents to draw scientific conclusions about the nature or identity of the designer is principled rather than merely rhetorical. ID is primarily a historical science, meaning it uses principles of uniformitarianism to study present-day causes and then applies them to the historical record in order to infer the best explanation for the origin of the natural phenomena being studied. ID starts with observations from “uniform sensory experience” showing the effects of intelligence in the natural world. As Pandas explains, scientists have uniform sensory experience with intelligent causes (i.e. humans), thus making intelligence an appropriate explanatory cause within historical scientific fields. However, the “supernatural” cannot be observed, and thus historical scientists applying uniformitarian reasoning cannot appeal to the supernatural. If the intelligence responsible for life was supernatural, science could only infer the prior action of intelligence, but could not determine whether the intelligence was supernatural.

(David K. DeWolf, John G. West, and Casey Luskin, “Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” 68 Montana Law Review 7, 30 (Spring, 2007) (emboldened emphasis added)(internal citations removed).)

Charles Thaxton took precisely this approach in the Kitzmiller trial, where he explained:

I wasn’t comfortable with the typical vocabulary that for the most part creationists were using because it didn’t express what I was trying to do. They were wanting to bring God into the discussion, and I was wanting to stay within the empirical domain and do what you can do legitimately there.

This is further explained below in an excerpt from our Montana Law Review article:

ID Does Not “Require Supernatural Causation”
ID as a scientific theory does not attempt to address religious questions about the identity or metaphysical nature of the designer. This has been the consistent view of ID proponents for the last two decades, and Judge Jones was presented with extensive documentation of this fact in amicus briefs filed by the Discovery Institute and FTE, which the text of his opinion seemed to have ignored. Judge Jones also ignored—or misinterpreted—key passages from the Pandas textbook that addressed this issue. For example, the published version of Pandas used in Dover schools explained that ID merely seeks to infer “intelligent causes” and is compatible with a wide variety of religious viewpoints, including pantheism and agnosticism:

The idea that life had an intelligent source is hardly unique to Christian fundamentalism. Advocates of design have included not only Christians and other religious theists, but pantheists, Greek and Enlightenment philosophers and now include many modern scientists who describe themselves as religiously agnostic. Moreover, the concept of design implies absolutely nothing about beliefs normally associated with Christian fundamentalism, such as a young earth, a global flood, or even the existence of the Christian God. All it implies is that life had an intelligent source.

One would think this passage would be highly relevant to the determination of the religious nature of ID, but Judge Jones did not even quote it in his ruling. Rather, he cited another passage from Pandas out of context in order to insist that ID requires supernatural causation:

[A]n explicit concession that the intelligent designer works outside the laws of nature and science and a direct reference to religion is Pandas’ rhetorical statement, “what kind of intelligent agent was it [the designer]” and answer: “On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy.”

But an examination of the full passage cited by Judge Jones makes clear that he misused it. The passage does not state that an intelligent designer must be supernatural, but rather that science is unable to address this question:

If science is based upon experience, then science tells us the message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent cause. What kind of intelligent agent was it? On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy. But that should not prevent science from acknowledging evidences for an intelligent cause origin wherever they may exist. This is no different, really, than if we discovered life did result from natural causes. We still would not know, from science, if the natural cause was all that was involved, or if the ultimate explanation was beyond nature, and using the natural cause.

Indeed at one point, Pandas even seems to adopt methodological naturalism, stating that “intelligence . . . can be recognized by uniform sensory experience, and the supernatural . . . cannot.”

(David K. DeWolf, John G. West, and Casey Luskin, “Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” 68 Montana Law Review 7, 28-30 (Spring, 2007) (internal citations removed).)

Part 2 will further discuss whether ID proponents are open about their views on the identity of the designer.

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Juno Walker at Letters from Vrai has responded to my post Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education. Dr Massimo Pigliucci published an essay in The McGill Journal of Education in which he made the absurd claim that effective science education would dissuade students from a belief in Heaven. I pointed out in my post that Heaven wasn’t exactly a proper subject for the scientific method and that the assertion that science education was even applicable to a belief in Heaven was fundamentalism — a kind of atheist fundamentalism. The conflation of methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism — science and atheism — is no more acceptable pedagogy than the conflation of science and creationism. Atheism and creationism are philosophical inferences, and, irrespective of the truth of either faith, neither is consistent with the scientific method. The scientific method — methodological naturalism — is the data-driven study of nature. It’s based on natural, not supernatural, claims. The irony is that the McGill Journal of Education published Dr. Pigliucci's atheist broadsheet for fundamentalism in science education, but would never publish a creationist broadsheet for fundamentalism in science education.

Walker cites Darwinist philosopher Barbara Forrest to defend the assertion that atheism is a scientifically justifiable inference. Dr. Forrest:

…the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion, given (1) the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism, combined with (2) the massive amount of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural. The above factors together provide solid grounding for philosophical naturalism, while supernaturalism remains little more than a logical possibility.

Dr. Forrest is mistaken. The demonstrated success of methodological naturalism has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of philosophical naturalism, because the assertion of philosophical naturalism (there are no extra-natural things) is outside the purview of methodological naturalism (the study of natural things). Methodological naturalism is defined by its inability to adjudicate extra-natural questions.

Dr. Forrest’s claim (3) that philosophical naturalism must be true because of "the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural" is nonsense. The methods for knowing the supernatural are by definition beyond the scope of methodological naturalism and are properly philosophical methods, not scientific methods. Forrest's implicit assertion that there is no philosophical "method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural" is an assertion that two and a half millenia of Western philosophy don't exist. What of Platonic Forms, Thomist proofs for the existence of God, Anslem's and Descartes' and Plantinga's Ontological Arguments, and Kant's Argument From Morality? It's safe to say that most of Western philosophy addresses issues that transcend our direct experience of the natural world. Ironically, Forrest's use of the scientific method to assert that the supernatural world doesn't exist employs one of the few philosophical methodologies that can't address questions outside of the natural world.

Methodological naturalism — the scientific method — precludes all extra-natural philosophical constraints on interpretation of physical data. That’s the point of methodological naturalism — the method of data collection and interpretation must be without extra-natural assumptions. Colloquially, methodological naturalism is 'following the physical evidence, unencumbered by extra-natural inference.' The design inference is based on evidence about the natural world. It is a violation of methodological naturalism to categorically exclude the design inference based on the postulate that the supernatural does not exist. The scientific method hews to evidence, not to philosophical dogma.

The approach to science in the era before the scientific method, much like the approach of atheists and Darwinists today, was to apply a priori philosophical constraints to the study of natural phenomena. The ancients modeled planetary motion as perfect circles because of the philosophical assumption that heavenly bodies must move ‘perfectly,’ and non-circular motion was considered imperfect and thus impermissible. Johannes Kepler’s laws of elliptical planetary motion were an early triumph of the scientific method because Kepler discarded philosophical dogma and considered only the evidence. Of course, Kepler was a devout Christian (as were nearly all Enlightenment scientists), and he interpreted the laws of planetary motion as God’s geometrical plan for the universe. Philosophical constraints — a priori constraints — on interpretation of data are inconsistent with the scientific method, but philosophical reflection on the data isn’t. Newton derived his laws of motion from mathematical considerations and from data, yet he believed that the fabric of space and time in which the laws acted was the mind of God. Philosophical reflection on scientific data — including reflection on supernatural causation — has a long and quite honorable history.

So what of Forrest’s fourth claim: that the truth of philosophical naturalism is supported by "the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural"? It's a bizarre inference, as divorced from empirical evidence as could be imagined. The past several centuries of Western science have revealed a universe created ex nihilo, governed by astonishingly intricate mathematical laws accessible to the human mind and characterized by properties of forces and energy and matter so closely tied to the existence of human life that cosmologists have had to invoke the existence of countless other universes to elide the anthropic implications. Life itself depends on a code — remarkably like a computer language — to produce, run and replicate cellular components that are themselves best described as intricate nanotechnology.

Here’s the atheist interpretation of this scientific evidence: atheism is the only permissible explanation. Atheists are entitled to their opinion, but they have no business teaching students that atheist fundamentalism defines the limits of science.

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Ken Miller was recently quoted in a campus news article saying, “We have the fossils. … We win." Professor Miller’s logical fallacy was pointed out years ago by those who attempted to clarify reasoning in paleontology, systematics, and evolutionary biology, and it led some scientists (like Colin Patterson) to the conclusion that a paleontological pattern may support or falsify an evolutionary hypothesis, but it can never absolutely prove one (i.e. fossils can’t make Darwinism positively “win”). As a result, some scientists (e.g., Brower, 2000) proposed a strict separation between paleontology and systematics on the one hand, and evolutionary theory on the other. Unfortunately, this clear-thinking approach has been largely abandoned or ignored by most paleontologists and evolutionary biologists. Those who are ignorant of this fallacy don’t realize that pattern observations are independent of process hypotheses. (For instance, just because I know the sun "rises" everyday does not mean my pet theory about its origin must be correct.) Rather than following the approach of authorities like Colin Patterson, Professor Miller seems to draw his amusing talking points on evolution from comedian Lewis Black, whom Jonathan Wells recounts in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design makes the following authoritarian argument for Darwinism: “I don’t have to argue [evolution] any more. Fossils. Fossils. Fossils. I win.’’

The campus news article stated that Miller "demonstrated the 23 intermediate species that have been discovered as evolutionary stepping stones between land mammals and swimming mammals," and called whales "the poster children for macroevolution." I would have loved to have been there to see Miller "demonstrat[e]" all "23 intermediate species." That sounds a lot more impressive than University of Michigan whale paleontology expert Philip Gingerich's admission that currently the "poster children" merely have "fossils illustrating three or four steps that bridge the precursor of whales to today's mammals." Indeed, Kevin Padian noted that these "poster children" fossils have "distinguishing characteristics, which they would have to lose in order to be considered direct ancestors of other known forms." My suspicion is that Professor Miller didn’t delve into too many details, but rather used the fossil name-dropping approach to discussing alleged intermediates between land-mammals and whales. I have described this approach as follows:

[John] Wise and [Pia] Vogel also mention "whale-like tetrapods" and "tetrapod-like whales," name-dropping a long string of fossil names but leaving the reader with little, if any, information about this alleged evolutionary transition. ... So how good an example is this "poster child"?

Philip Gingerich admits that "[w]hales have not been collected on a fine enough time scale to see rapid change. This will be revealed through more fieldwork. So far we have fossils illustrating three or four steps that bridge the precursor of whales to today's mammals." To be fair, there are some fossils in this field with cetacean features, but some of the fossils cited by Wise and Vogel are land mammals that do not explain how whales become aquatic. For example, Wise and Vogel mention Pakicetus, a full-fledged land-mammal with ear-bones like a whale. Full-fledged land mammals don't provide much evidence when one is trying to document the evolution of fully-aquatic whales from land-mammals. So Wise and Vogel name-drop Ambulocetus. But this fossil also had strong load-bearing legs with "large hind limbs and enormous feet," a "long, muscular body," and a pelvis "like that of a land mammal" (Gingerich, 2001). These two fossils don't look like a "walking whale" (as they were called in National Geographic). Instead, Wise & Vogel subsequently name-drop Rodhocetus: it probably spent more time in the water than Ambulocetus, and did not swim like a whale, but had large feet and hands. One expert said Rodhocetus probably swam like Ambulocetus: "an otter-like pelvic paddler" or alternatively, that it had "[t]runk and limb proportions" that "are most similar to those of the living, highly aquatic, foot-powered desmans." Of course, desmans are a type of European mole that do just fine walking on land. Are the whales walking yet?

But let's acknowledge that theses fossils do have some skeletal characteristics which appear intermediate between the features of land-mammals and whales. Have Darwinian paleontologists made their case? The aforementioned bird evolution expert, Alan Feduccia, observes that "the evolution of whales (the 'poster child' for macroevolution) from terrestrial ungulates is well documented at < 10 million years." Think about that for a moment. Whales, with all of their complex adaptations for aquatic life evolved from a "primitive little mammal" (Steven Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable, pg. 93) to a full-fledged whale in less than ten million years. Whales have a long generation time, meaning that there were perhaps only a few million generations at best to allow for the change to add up. If they had a generation time as short as 5 years, Haldane's dilemma predicts that only a few thousand mutations could become fixed into an evolving population during that time period. (See Walter ReMine, The Biotic Message.) [In other words, the fossil record permits dramatically insufficient time to convert a land-mammal into a whale.]

Wise and Vogel can name-drop whatever fossils they like, but if the amount of time allowed by the fossil record for this evolutionary transition is too short to accommodate the vast genetic and morphological changes that must have taken place, critical thinkers have good reasons to be skeptical of this evolutionary story. The exceedingly short timescale of the alleged evolution of whales from land mammals is a major problem with this Neo-Darwinian story, but this point is never mentioned by Wise and Vogel as they name-drop their supposed fossil evidence.

(Casey Luskin, "A Reply to Dr. John Wise and Dr. Pia Vogel's Evidentiary Response to Intelligent Design")

Something tells me Miller didn't mention this problem either. Regardless, this article raises two crucial questions:

(1) Miller was brought to speak by the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire's Chippewa Valley Dialogue on Science and Religion. Will the university now bring a pro-ID speaker to speak in favor of intelligent design to correct any of Miller's mistakes? (According to their events page, it doesn't look like they plan to invite any speakers to support ID anytime soon.)

(2) Apparently Miller feels comfortable declaring victory for evolution regarding whale origins. But what about the numerous other aspects of the fossil record where the fossil record does not give so many hints of an evolutionary story? As a college-level invertebrate zoology textbook states, "Most of the animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear, 'fully formed,' in the Cambrian, some 550 million years ago . . . [t]he fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla." Ken Miller thinks that when he "has the fossils," he "wins." So when Miller doesn't have the fossils, does that mean he will he admit that he loses?

Reference Cited: A.V.Z. Brower, “Evolution is not a necessary assumption of cladistics,” Cladistics Vol. 16(1):143-154 (2000).

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Click here to view a PDF of the full cover. (file size is 3mb)

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In a bold move, the little-known group Florida Citizens for Science are excommunicating all scientists who raise any concerns about neo-Darwinism from the "scientific community."

In an Orlando Sentinel story about the adoption of new science standards, Joe Wolf, president of Florida Citizens for Science and newly anointed spokesperson for the worldwide "scientific community," had this to say about the scientific problems with neo-Darwinism:

"It's a PR issue," he said. "And it's a religious issue. In the scientific community, it's not an issue."(emphasis mine)

Here are members of the scientific community to whom it is an issue, and who I am sure will be surprised to be so unceremoniously booted from the "scientific community":

Jeery Fodor, State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University, Guggenheim Fellow, Fullbright Fellow (Oxford), Woodrow Wilson Fellow (Princeton):

The ironic upshot is that at a time when the theory of natural selection has become an article of pop culture, it is faced with what may be the most serious challenge it has had so far. Darwinists have been known to say that adaptationism is the best idea that anybody has ever had. It would be a good joke if the best idea that anybody has ever had turned out not to be true. A lot of the history of science consists of the world playing that sort of joke on our most cherished theories.

The National Research Council (National Academies) published a report this past summer that frankly stated:

Natural selection based solely on mutation is probably not an adequate mechanism for evolving complexity.

Over 700 doctoral scientists have expressed their skepticism of Darwinian evolution, signing onto a statement that reads:

"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

Eugene Koonin, senior research scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, and National Institutes of Health recently published a paper that claims:

The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. ... No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.

According to the Sentinel:

Proposed standards for seventh-graders, for example, would require that students should be able to "recognize and describe that fossil evidence is consistent with the idea that human beings evolved from earlier species."

Heck, clearly some former members of the "scientific community" don't think this anymore.

How big (or productive) will the "scientific community" be when all Darwin-doubters are forced out?

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Micheal Behe has a three-part post titled Kenneth R. Miller and the Problem of Evil (part 1, part 2, part 3)on his Amazon author's page in which he makes a pretty bold assertion about one of his loudest critics:

Kenneth Miller is an intelligent design proponent.

Behe is serious, adding that "with respect to design, he and I differ only on degree, not on principle."

Behe's posts come as a response to a second, needless to say negative, review of his new book The Edge of Evolution by Miller in the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

Despite Darwinist's efforts to affect a sort of crib death by attacking the book relentlessly, The Edge of Evolution is doing well in terms of sales to those interested in science:
#1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Bioengineering > Biochemistry
#2 in Books > Science > Evolution > Organic
#3 in Books > Science > Agricultural Sciences > Biochemistry

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Sometimes you run across something so head-shakingly wrong that you have to ask yourself, where did they come up with that? Take this editorial today in the Arizona Daily Wildcat for example. Upon hearing the basis for the new movie “Expelled,” student columnist Taylor Kessinger actually calls for more academic persecution to rain down upon ID proponents:

On the other hand, does science discriminate against proponents of intelligent design? Well, sure, but only in the same sense that a university discriminates against bad students or the stock market discriminates against people who make poor financial decisions.

If anything, the problem is that there isn't enough discrimination against this idea. (emphasis added)

Kessinger discounts any claim that professors deserve academic freedom by asserting that “freedom of speech doesn't protect the rights of professors to make claims with no scientific backing without repercussions. Universities don't stand for professors who waste funds and time researching astrology, parapsychology or other pseudoscientific ideas, and they never should.”

There are two false assumptions under which Kessinger is operating here, and they’re leading him further from the truth and rational discussion than he surely would want. To that end, we’ll do him the favor of pointing out his error. Hopefully his youth will help him overcome his embarrassment and win out over any inclination to intellectual laziness in relying on, say, Wikipedia to do his research for him.

His first mistake is in believing that design proponents who face academic persecution deserve what they get, so to speak. It’s tragic that this discrimination occurs against such renowned and respected scientists as Guillermo Gonzalez, but the tragedy is compounded by the ignorance which leads students to think it’s OK when views outside the consensus are punished – not for (as Kessinger seems to think) being taught in the classroom or taking away funds from other research, but for merely being advocated outside of the university.

Sadly, Kessinger is not the only student who has been taught that it’s good and entirely appropriate to discriminate against intelligent design supporters. I once told a good friend of mine in college about a professor I knew who lost his job over his support of intelligent design. Her response? “Silly ID people — that’s what you get.” Upon further examination, she admitted that she didn’t know much about intelligent design, just what her professors taught her — that it was merely a negative argument against Darwinism without any scientific research.

This second misapprehension is what students are being taught by many Darwinist professors about intelligent design, and this is why some actually support persecuting ID proponents. Much like my friend, the author of this editorial was told somewhere along the way that “[i]ntelligent design simply asserts that structures like the human eye and bacterial flagellum couldn't possibly have formed by random chance, so an intelligent designer is needed.”

Nevermind that this is not the definition used by proponents of intelligent design. What we have here is the next generation’s inheritance from the likes of Eugenie Scott and PZ Myers, filtered on down to local professors who teach their students to ignore the truth about intelligent design. This ignorance becomes even more obvious in the editorial's conclusion, which laughably challenges ID proponents to “define intelligent design in unambiguous terms [and] outline exactly what the theory predicts and explain how it can be tested.”

Gladly. Anyone who cares to ask an actual design proponent will hear a clear definition along the lines of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Is that still too ambiguous? Maybe you should check out some of the peer-reviewed ID research. Oh, and you wanted some predictions, right?

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In Part 1, I discussed the fact that the Council of Europe (CoE) has recently adopted a resolution alleging that intelligent design (ID) is “a threat to human rights.” The CoE resolutions carry no force of law, but regardless, it’s difficult to keep a straight face that these European politicians would let their dogmatism shine so brilliantly that they would label the questioning of Darwinism as a threat to human rights. As mathematician and Parisian David Berlinski stated, “if this is what a threat to human rights amounts to, count me among its supporters; I’m threatening away with the best of them.” It’s also worth noting that only about 7% of the total members of the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly voted in favor of this resolution, making one wonder if the CoE’s own members took the resolution seriously. This second installment will assess some of the most dogmatic, intolerant, and undemocratic features of the resolution.

Dogmatic and Unscientific Treatment of Evolution
The resolution treats the debate over evolution in an unscientific fashion, stating: “From a scientific view point, there is absolutely no doubt that evolution is a central theory for our understanding of life on Earth.” Any sentence which begins with the words “From a scientific view point,” should never then go on to say, in contradiction, “there is absolutely no doubt...” The CoE’s resolution does not treat evolution as a tentative matter, but rather as a dogmatic faith.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ “Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science” contains an essay by Ernst Mayr emphasizing the tentativeness of scientific knowledge:

One of the most characteristic features of science is this openness to challenge. The willingness to abandon a currently accepted believe when a new, better one is proposed is an important demarcation between science and religious dogma. (“Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science,” pg. 43)

Perhaps the CoE is correct that “evolution is a central theory for our understanding of life on Earth.” But many scientists, such as U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Phil Skell, would disagree with that statement, and the 700+ signers of the dissent from Darwinism-list, would stridently disagree. To say that “there is absolutely no doubt” as to the truth of that statement is unscientific and contradicts the scientific mindset described by Ernst Mayr.

The resolution later states that “creationism” is “born of the denial of the evolution of species through natural selection.” Ignoring the “denial” rhetoric, it’s worth repeating that many scientists who are not necessarily creationists have doubted the sufficiency of natural selection to produce new biological complexity. Over 700 doctoral scientists have signed a statement agreeing, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” In fact, there are signers of this list who would eschew the label “creationist.”

This skepticism and encouraging of “Careful examination of the evidence” seems to be the type of mindset that belongs in science, not the “there is absolutely no doubt” mindset of the CoE.

Finally, the resolution even complains that “creationists seek to … sow doubt” in people’s minds regarding evolution. Here the CoE makes its intent clear: It simply wants prevent “doubt” and stop the public from doubting evolution at all costs. By labeling such doubts as a “threat to human rights,” this resolution is part of their strategy to make such thoughts unpopular by equating Darwin-skepticism with the highest thought-crime possible. But isn’t science supposed to permit – and even embrace – skepticism and doubt? By equating Darwin-doubting with a thought-crime against humanity, the resolution exposes the CoE as being the very types of dogmatists they claim to eschew.

Elevating Science As Superior To Religion
Finally, the resolution states that creationism aims to “impose religious dogma” and asserts we must avoid “the advent of an ‘all things are equal’ attitude, which may seem appealing and tolerant but is actually disastrous.” In other words, “religious dogma” is not “equal” to Darwinian evolution. This reminds of the Orwellian propaganda in the book Animal Farm which famously said: "All things are equal but some things are more equal than others." Whatever you or I may think of that position, there can be no mistaking that they are claiming that religion is less “equal” than science. The CoE has explicitly adopted the position that religion is inferior to science.

Conclusion
Much more could be said about problems with the CoE’s resolution, “The dangers of creationism in education.” In the end, it appears to nothing more than a recapitulation of Darwinist misinformation about ID that managed to get the endorsement of 48 European politicians, amounting to 7% of Europe’s largest human rights body. Since less than 12% of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly apparently showed up to vote on the resolution, this was enough support to pass the resolution. But the resolution carries no force of law, and when closely scrutinized, even less force of persuasion.

It’s worth ending this analysis by reiterating the words of the European Center for Law and Justice in its memorandum in opposition to the resolution:

The result of passing the Resolution would be the prevention of academic and educative discussion between the theory of intelligent design and the theory of evolution. This approach can only hamper the educational progress of students by restricting their examination of competing scientific ideas and will necessarily violate the right to freedom of expression, including academic freedom, and the right to free exercise of religion in education. Therefore, the Parliamentary Assembly should reject the Resolution as incompatible with the goals and ideals of the Council of Europe.

Perhaps the passage of this resolution tells us who truly represents a threat to freedom in education and human rights in Europe after all. Don’t forget to listen to David Berlinkski’s analysis here.

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It's worth remembering that the struggle for academic freedom is not limited to professors being denied tenure or government scientists facing persecution. It extends to college and high school classrooms, affecting students as well as teachers.

Now the people behind "Expelled" have launched a new feature at their website to expose the depth and breadth of this campaign to deny academic freedom to Darwin-doubters:

Ever sat in class and had your professor straight up challenge your intelligence for suggesting even the possibility of an intelligent design in the universe?

Tired of being labeled merely for questioning aspects of the Darwinian theory of evolution?? Ever been scoffed at or ridiculed in front of your peers?

Well, here’s your opportunity to tell your story on our Website AND possibly be in the movie, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”! Tell the world some of the outrageous things your professors say about your questions.

You and your story just might be chosen by our producers to be in the film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”! Let your voice be heard!

If you've ever been expelled for questioning Darwin, consider sharing your story in writing, audio, or video, and let the truth be told.

Posted by Anika Smith at 12:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Massimo Pigliucci is a colleague of mine here at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He’s a professor of evolutionary biology and philosophy. I don’t know him personally, but by all reports he is a fine scientist and teacher. He’s written an essay in the McGill Journal of Education about improving science education in light of the controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design. It’s a fascinating essay. Dr. Pigliucci writes well, and he reveals much about Darwinists’ approach to the scientific and educational conflict between intelligent design and Darwinism.

His abstract sums it up:

The creation-evolution “controversy” has been with us for more than a century. Here I argue that merely teaching more science will probably not improve the situation; we need to understand the controversy as part of a broader problem with public acceptance of pseudoscience, and respond by teaching how science works as a method. Critical thinking is difficult to teach, but educators can rely on increasing evidence from neurobiology about how the brain learns, or fails to.

He reiterates his conflation of intelligent design and creationism and his dismissal of the scientific controversy early in his essay:

The creation-evolution problem is more acute and difficult to overcome precisely because it is not a scientific controversy.

So far, routine Darwinist boilerplate. But Dr. Pigliucci is being disingenuous. The controversy Darwinists currently face isn’t with creationism. Creationism is the belief that the first couple of chapters of Genesis are literally true. It arises from religious belief—a particular interpretation of the Bible, not from scientific evidence. Creationism isn’t what all the recent fuss is about.

The real controversy— and it is a raging controversy— is about intelligent design. Intelligent design is the scientific theory that there is evidence for intelligent agency in some aspects of biology, for example in the genetic code and in the intricate molecular machines inside cells. Intelligent design isn’t a religious belief. It’s a scientific inference. Of course intelligent design scientists are mostly theists, just as Darwinists are mostly atheists.

Scientists who support intelligent design are a very small fraction of scientists, at least a small fraction of biologists. Yet the controversy between intelligent design and Darwinism is a scientific controversy. Whether a controversy is scientific or not is a qualitative question, not a quantitative question. A scientific controversy is generated when even one scientist asks a perceptive and important question. Dr. Pigliucci knows the difference between creationism and intelligent design, and he knows that the issues raised by I.D. scientists — such as irreducible complexity — are genuine scientific issues. Yet he misrepresents the controversy in the first sentences of his essay. If Dr. Pigliiucci is to improve science education, honesty about the issues is a good place to start.

Dr. Pigliucci goes on to stress the need for science education to eradicate belief in ‘unscientific’ stuff, such as UFOs and the paranormal. He points out (candidly, to his credit) that training in science is no barrier to such belief. If anything, studies suggest that scientifically trained students are more likely to believe in UFOs and the paranormal than students trained in the liberal arts. The most ardent apostle of S.E.T.I. and of belief in the existence of alien civilizations in the 20th century was atheist astronomer Carl Sagan. Dr. Pigliucci points out, perceptively I think, that liberal arts education is more likely than scientific training to foster effective critical thinking.

Then he makes a point that is, well, jaw-dropping. He proposes better science education as a tonic against belief in Heaven:

In fact, the connection between education (science education in particular) and belief in paranormal phenomena or explanations is an empirical matter...a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (as cited by Goode, 2002) found that belief in heaven as a real (physical) place does diminish according to increasing levels of education from 92 percent among people with less than a high school education to 73 percent among people with a postgraduate education.

Why is Dr. Pigliucci surprised that most people, even well-educated people, believe in Heaven? How does science prove the non-existence of things outside of nature? Paranormal phenomena and UFOs involve events in nature that can be studied using the methods of science, and science provides evidence that paranormal phenomena and UFOs are unlikely to exist. But how exactly does science provide evidence that Heaven doesn’t exist? Dr. Pigliucci cites no data or experiments, and it’s difficult to see how the scientific method, which is suited to the study of the natural world, applies to inferences about religious beliefs in the afterlife. But Dr. Pigliucci’s argument that science is a cure for belief in the afterlife fails even by his own standards of science. To the extent that science can address such issues as the afterlife, there is a large scientific literature on near-death experiences that, while far short of proof, certainly cannot be interpreted as scientifically disproving the existence of heaven or of an afterlife.

Dr. Pigliucci goes on to sneer at the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that Heaven is a place:

...but three out of four people with a college-level education in the US still believe in the physical existence of Heaven!

How exactly would ‘improved’ science education dissuade students from belief that Heaven physically exists? In what way have scientists investigated Heaven? That would be quite a sabbatical. The natural world is the only domain to which science appertains.

What scientific evidence is there that ‘places’ don’t exist outside of our routine experience with nature? Actually, modern physics and cosmology make liberal inference to places outside of our perception, such as higher spatial dimensions curled up in String Theory and multiverses conjured up to circumvent anthropic inferences. Yet despite abundant scientific inference to places outside of our world as we experience it, Dr. Pigliucci believes that adequate science education would dissuade students from their religious beliefs — from their beliefs in the world outside of nature.

Why would Dr. Pigliucci make such a silly assertion, that science in some way, properly taught, ought to dissuade students from belief in the existence of Heaven? This is why: Dr. Pigliucci conflates methodological naturalism — the systematic data-driven study of the natural world — with philosophical naturalism — the philosophical assertion that nature is all that exists. He conflates science with atheism.

That’s standard Darwinist boilerplate as well. Dr. Pigliucci is a ‘skeptic’ who has written a column for The Freethinker On-Line, and his personal disdain for religious belief is obvious. What influence does his personal metaphysical ideology have on his recommendations for improving science education? Quite a bit, one suspects.

In point of fact, Dr. Pigliucci proposes to teach students philosophical naturalism veiled in scientific naturalism. His purpose is ideological. Ironically, the indoctrination he proposes would raise the same issues of neutrality in religious instruction in public schools that Darwinists invoke about the teaching of biblical creationism. Fundamentalists of all stripes can't seem to keep their religious views out of science. Dr. Pigliucci — a professor of philosophy as well as of evolutionary biology — knows the difference between atheism and science. His choice not to be forthright about the difference is emblematic of the fundamentalist approach — the Darwinist approach — to science education.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In Part 1, I recounted how Darwinists are deeply invested in the rhetorical value of the emotional argument that humans and chimps have a 98% - 99% genetic similarity. Anthropologist John Marks reports that sometimes Darwinists even use this statistic to contend that our lives are “meaningless”! To explore this debate, I recently blogged about a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%” that reported that the 1% human/chimp genetic difference statistic was a "myth," because “studies are showing that [humans and chimps] are not as similar as many tend to believe.” The Science news article reported that improved genome comparison modeling methods indicate that humans and chimps are “6.4%” genetically distinct from one another.

Apparently my discussion of the Science news article concerned its author, Jon Cohen, whose e-mail response to me I also posted in full in Part 1. Oddly, Mr. Cohen’s response backpedals and promotes the importance of the 1% human/chimp genetic-difference statistic—despite the fact that his Science article had forcefully emphasized the decreasing importance of that statistic. Perhaps he wasn’t quite ready to share any of the responsility for Darwinists losing their rhetorical investment in the 1% statistic. I now publish my response to Mr. Cohen below. I hope that this exchange not only provides an educational object lesson to readers regarding the quality of counter-arguments from the Darwinian science-writing community, but also helps readers understand why the 1.23% human/chimp genetic difference statistic is not all it appears to be. Here is my reply to Mr. Cohen:

Dear Mr. Cohen,

Greetings and thank you for e-mailing me about your concerns, and for also passing on many articles pertinent to this subject. I think it’s best to start this off by saying that I saw your bio on the AAAS website that noted that you are a UCSD graduate who lives in San Diego county. In light of the tragic fires that are currently threatening many in San Diego, I wanted to say that I hope the best for you and your family and I hope you are safe tonight.

Regarding your e-mail, when I read the subject of your e-mail, "Errors in your posting," I expected your e-mail to document actual errors in my posting. Instead, I merely found you making accusations against me that I "selectively and out of context" "fail to scrutinize what the original reports," and that I am "sloppy, inaccurate, and overtly biased." These assorted accusations sound serious, and if they proved true, of course I would be concerned and I would want to issue some correction. But in fact your accusations were not backed up by anything you said in your e-mail.

Please allow me to discuss your concerns below.

Concern 1. You wrote that "our genes--in contrast to what the Scientific American posting states--are only 1.23% different" (emphasis yours). My post never said otherwise, but your implication is that I should have devoted my post to pushing the 1% DNA sequence-difference statistic rather than the 6.4% gene-copy difference statistic. But my post was reporting on your Science news article, and the Scientific American blog post, and since those two sources dealt primarily with emphasizing the importance gene copy percent similarities between humans and chimps rather than DNA-sequence differences, my post dealt with gene copy percent differences between humans and chimps. Thus, I focused on quoting those sources where those sources stated, "human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%” and "humans may have as little as 99% of their genes in common with one another, and, by the same analysis, as little as 95% of their genes in common with chimpanzees."

Your e-mail seems to imply that you feel I should have promoted the 1% human/chimp DNA-sequence difference statistic as the more important figure, but in fact I was simply following the approach you took in your Science news article where you printed the following descriptions about the 1% DNA-sequence difference statistic:

"myth"

“truism [that] should be retired”

“more a hindrance for understanding than a help”

“the 1% difference wasn’t the whole story.”

“studies are showing that they are not as similar as many tend to believe”

To respond directly to your concern, my post never stated nor implied that the 1% figure was itself incorrect in its context. Rather, I followed your approach by quoting you calling it a “myth” or by characterizing it as "becoming a thing of the past" (following you when you suggested it may be a “truism [that] should be retired” or quoting a scientist who called it “more a hindrance for understanding than a help”. To reiterate: I never said that the 1% figure was itself incorrect, I just implied that it is becoming irrelevant due to more important statistical methods of comparison related to gene copy number—doing my best to convey to our readers the message of your article.

I do not see any grounds for complaint on your part regarding my treatment of this matter since I was essentially following the very approach you took in your article. In fact, I find it ironic that you are now emailing me promoting the importance of the 1% sequence difference statistic when in fact your article calls that 1% statistic a "myth," a “truism [that] should be retired,” a “hindrance for understanding,” not “the whole story,” etc. Is the author of the “Myth of 1%” article is now trying to promote that same 1% myth after Discovery Institute blogged about your article and observed that humans and chimps “are not as similar as many tend to believe”? Your e-mail to me comes off like backpedaling.

Concern 2. You wrote: "You also state that my article ‘reports’ that copy numbers differ by 6.4%. Not only does this misleadingly imply that humans thus differ from chimps by 6.4% (it's probably closer to 5%), you fail to note that my article was not the source of this figure: I was citing a report that was done by a computational genomics researcher."

Regarding your charge that I imply that your article was the source of the 6.4% statistic, observe that my original blog post stated that your article was a "Science news article" that "reported" that gene copy numbers differed by 6.4% between humans and chimps. No informed reader would take your article as the original research source for that statistic, but rather they would take it precisely how I described it: a Science news source reporting on other research. To learn about the original source, the reader could look up your article (which my post links to). I find it ironic that you are criticizing me for doing exactly what you did: I quoted a source discussing the 6.4% research finding, and I noted my source.

Regarding your charge that gene copy similarity differs by 5% rather than 6.4%, and that I used the wrong statistical percentage, I first note that I quoted the Scientific American post where it stated that "humans may have … as little as 95% of their genes in common with chimpanzees." 95% “in common” of course equals a 5% difference, so the 5% approximation seems present in the quote I provided from Scientific American.

But there deeper problem with this complaint: you claim that my post is “misleading” because you say the 6.4% statistic is “probably closer to 5%”. Yet I am perplexed at how you complain to me here, because when I stated the 6.4% difference, I was simply quoting your article, and your article never says anything about a 5% gene copy difference statistic and in fact the statistic you give is 6.4%. If the 6.4% statistic is in error, then your article is the source of that error because my post directly quoted your article! It seems that you accuse me of propagating an error when I was just quoting you. If it was in error, have you corrected it publicly? If so, I’d be happy to update my post accordingly.

Here you employ an unfortunate example of Darwinian moral logic: I quote a pro-evolution science reporter, and then that pro-evolution science reporter claims that his statement was off by ~1.4% and accuses me of propagating an error by quoting him. Such Darwinian moral logic is incredible, but it does have a simple and clear-cut rule: if a Darwinist is wrong, it must be an ID guy’s fault.

Concern 3. You wrote: "The 1.23% is a hard fact: It's based on sequencing the entire human genome and the chimpanzee genome" (emphasis yours). I'm more than willing to believe you when you wrote “The 1.23% is a hard fact" — and as I noted above, I never claimed that the statistic was wrong. To repeat, the only language I used to describe the 1% statistic was language that you yourself used in your article (i.e. “Myth”) or characterizing it how you did (i.e. “truism should be retired”), etc. Nonetheless, despite your article's emphatic diminution of the importance of the 1% statistic, I am more than willing to accept that the 1.23% sequence difference statistic “is a hard fact.” But I do have some comments in this regard:

In fact, the distinction between (i) the 6.4% difference in non-coding DNA and gene-copy number and (ii) 1.23% difference between the gene sequences is not one of estimate versus “hard fact,” but rather represents different kinds of estimates. The 1.23% difference is every bit as much an estimate as the 6.4%. For example, the 1.23% comes from sequence alignments that were performed only when homologous genes were available from both genomes. Indeed, your Science news article concedes this fact, as it admits that “the figure reflects only base substitutions, not the many stretches of DNA that have been inserted or deleted in the genomes.” What do you do when the chimp genome has no homologue to a human gene or non-coding DNA sequence? Do you add all those residues to the error column? No, you ignore them altogether. So the 1.23% is not really a "hard fact," unless you are careful to so caveat the result: it ignores insertions and deletions (“indels”), especially genes that are present in one species but absent in the other.

Given that (quite large) caveat then yes, the 1.23% figure probably has much less uncertainty than the 6.4% figure. But given that the 1.23% statistic requires such a weighty caveat (your article admits that the indels may account for up to 3% differences between the two genomes — more than twice as great as the 1.23% difference statistic itself!), one is not unjustified in holding skepticism towards claims that the 1.23% statistic is really all that impressive or meaningful.

There is also the problem that the 1.23% value does not have a lot of meaning since there is quite a bit of variance between genes. Many human-chimp gene comparisons show identical or near identical alignments, but so do some human-banana alignments. More importantly, certain types of human-chimp alignments show substantial differences, but the 1.23% statistic averages over all of them. Yes, it provides an overall average value which might be helpful when merely comparing different genomes, but given the all-important caveats, its importance is dubious.

In the end, it seems like you are now backpedaling by stridently promoting the 1% similarity statistic to me in your e-mail, calling it a "hard fact" when you yourself reported in your article that it was a "myth," suggested it may be a “truism [that] should be retired,” quoted a scientist calling it “more a hindrance for understanding than a help,” and reported it “wasn’t the whole story,” etc. Regardless, the wording I used in my blog post simply followed the wording of your article, so if there is any error here, it cannot be attributed to me for following the approach you took in your Science news article.

Concern 4. You wrote: "The claim that humans are as different from each other as was previously thought we were different from chimps also is misleading and inaccurate." Regarding this complaint, I was simply quoting the Scientific American article when it stated, “Humans turn out to be as genetically different from one another as it was previously thought they were different from chimps.” If you take issue with that claim, then again I have 2 questions:

(1) Did you e-mail the author of the Scientific American post, the original source for that claim, to state your objections?
(2) If not, why not?

Again, I was simply quoting a science news source, Scientific American. If their source was in error, I would love to know about it so I can make it clear to our readers that Scientific American was wrong. But it seems to me that if you have concerns, you need to take the issue up with them, as they are the ones who said it.

Again, I see an astounding type of Darwinian moral logic at work here: if a Darwinist is wrong, it must be an ID guy’s fault. I’ll be happy to correct anything if Scientific American posts any changes on this matter.

Concern 5. You observe that "None of the original studies I cited in my article or Venter's genome paper suggest in any way that their findings challenge Darwinian evolution, and I doubt that any of those researchers would support that conclusion from their data." In response I ask you, where did I state that any of these papers "challenge Darwinian evolution"? I am simply discussing a scientific debate of interest to our readers, namely the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps, and my post made no conclusions about the validity of Darwinian evolution. Again, I see no error, but you’re putting words in my mouth that I simply did not state. In fact, I specifically stated that biologists will have to sort out the implications of these data, as I wrote: "The implications of these differences remain to be sorted out by biologists."

Concern 6. You wrote: "The bottom line is that your post is so distant from the sources that you have completely garbled the data to support Intelligent Design." I’ve already established that I followed the sources I quoted accurately and that I myself did not “garble” anything. But here’s the more pertinent question: where did I state that any of these papers "support intelligent design"? I am simply discussing a scientific debate of interest to our readers, namely the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps, and my post made no conclusions about the validity of intelligent design.

Again, I see no error, but you seem to be putting words in my mouth that I did not state. And I reiterate that my post specifically remained neutral on the issue of larger implications of these data by stating "The implications of these differences remain to be sorted out by biologists."

This now raises a question, what are the implications of these findings? As your piece discussed, these comparisons have been raised by evolutionists, and evolutionists have claimed these comparisons as powerful evidence for the theory. Subsequent modification and elaboration on these data are naturally going to be of interest to our readers, even if hard and fast conclusions are not immediately obvious.

We might reasonably ask the evolutionist why the 1% difference value was considered to be such powerful evidence for Darwinian evolution, and at what point does the comparison cease to support Darwinian evolution? 2%? 3%? 6.4%? 10%? Is there an objective metric for falsification here?

Of course there are no answers to these questions, because the reasoning behind the claim that 1% difference was powerful evidence for evolution was never elucidated in the first place. This is why I wrote:

From a technical scientific perspective, the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps seems to be of questionable relevance when one is trying to determine whether two species share a Darwinian past. After all, designers regularly re-use parts that work, especially programming components, so there’s no reason to presume that mere genetic similarity necessarily implies common descent over common design. Moreover, even if such genetic similarities were to imply common ancestry, they don’t demonstrate a plausible stepwise Darwinian evolutionary pathway.

Your insistence that the evolutionists find no problem with these newer data is no surprise. But this hardly means the data are of no interest.

Conclusion
You wrote: "You are welcome to post my e-mail in its entirety, but given the errors that you made in your post by selectively quoting from other posts, please do not excerpt this for a public posting."

I appreciate your kind offer. As you identified no errors in my post (#s 1-6); made accusations against me which are much more strongly applicable against you given that I was simply following your approach (#s 1-3); accused me of making errors when in reality, if there are errors, then those are the errors of authorities whom I quoted and not errors on my part (#s 2 & 4); and finally falsely accused me of saying things I never said (#s 5-6); the only reason I think it would be worth responding publicly would be to show people your apparent backpedaling, and to reveal the quality of your objections. But I can assure you that if I do choose to respond, I will most certainly respect your request and I will post your reply to me in its entirety.

Finally, to end on a friendly personal note, I’m also a UCSD alum and I lived in San Diego for many years. In fact I spent much time yesterday checking on my friends in San Diego in light of the fire (some of whom are still waiting to see if their homes survive). One of my friends, like you, lives in Cardiff by the Sea, and his family has evacuated to Los Angeles. So I wish you and your family safety, health, and peace during this time.

If you have time to reply, I look forward to any answers you may have to my questions. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Casey Luskin
UCSD Classes of 2000 (B.S.) and 2001 (M.S.)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 2:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From a technical scientific perspective, the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps seems to be of questionable relevance when one is trying to determine whether two species share a Darwinian past. After all, designers regularly re-use parts that work, especially programming components, so there’s no reason to presume that mere genetic similarity necessarily implies common descent over common design. Moreover, even if such genetic similarities were to imply common ancestry, they don’t demonstrate a plausible stepwise Darwinian evolutionary pathway. Nonetheless, on a rhetorical level, the claim that humans and chimps are 99% the same is a powerful emotional argument aiding those seeking to evangelize for Darwinism. For example, last year a cover story of Time magazine proclaimed: “chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, roughly 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level.” In his 2002 book, What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, University of North Carolina Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks (an avowed evolutionist himself) laments how Darwinian scientists abuse this statistic:

[W]hy should it really matter whether we are descended from arboreal hairy primates or not? … The reason it matters to so many people is that scientists have made it matter, and they’ve done so in the worst possible way. They’ve taken a proposition …”We are descended from apes”—and stretched it into a series of additional propositions, often both authoritative and odious. Thirty years ago, in a widely read scientific-philosophical work called Chance and Necessity, the French molecular biologist Jacques Monod argued that evolution shows life to be meaningless.

(Jonathan Marks, What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, pg. 281 (University of California Press, 2002).)

Thus, it seems that many committed Darwinists have invested much rhetorical capital into the allegedly near-100% degree of genetic similarity between humans and apes, and Marks recounts they have even used it to argue that "life [is] meaningless."

But what would people think about evolution if Time magazine instead printed the following hypothetical story:

“Chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, and we used to think they were 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level, but since we’ve sequenced the chimp and human genomes, scientists are calling that statistic a 'myth' because improved methods of comparing genomes reveal that chimps are only 94% to 95% similar to humans.”

The Darwinist argument loses some of its punch, doesn't it? Yet this hypothetical headline above seems entirely appropriate in light of the findings reported in my blog post from this past weekend about a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%.” This article reported, “Genomewise, humans and chimpanzees are quite similar, but studies are showing that they are not as similar as many tend to believe” and went on to report that recent studies show that "human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%." It sounds like the kind of report that might cause the human-chimp similarity argument to lose some of its punch.

Soon after my post went live, the author of the “The Myth of 1%” article, Jon Cohen, contacted me with various concerns about my blog post. To help readers explore this dialogue, below I reprint Jon Cohen’s article to me in full (with permission), and my response to Mr. Cohen can be read here.

From: Jon Cohen [snip]

Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 12:05 PM

To: Casey Luskin

Cc: [Snip]

Subject: Errors in your posting

Mr. Luskin,

I wrote the Science news article that you refer to in your recent posting on the Discovery Institute's "Evolution News and Views."

Given that "misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason" for that site, which complains that "much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased," I wanted to point out that your own post contains several errors and apparent misunderstandings. I realize that you are largely reporting what others have written, but you do it selectively and out of context--and you also fail to scrutinize what the original reports said.

As I wrote in my article, chimps and humans do differ genetically by more than 1%, but our genes--in contrast to what the Scientific American posting states--are only 1.23% different. The bulk of the differences between chimps and humans exist in noncoding regions of the genome that regulate our genes and in gene copy number variation/segmental duplication, which ultimately determine how much product (typically protein) they produce. You also state that my article "reports" that copy numbers differ by 6.4%. Not only does this misleadingly imply that humans thus differ from chimps by 6.4% (it's probably closer to 5%), you fail to note that my article was not the source of this figure: I was citing a report that was done by a computational genomics researcher. In other words, it's a model, which is another way of saying it's an estimate, not a hard fact. (The 1.23% is a hard fact: It's based on sequencing the entire human genome and the chimpanzee genome.)

The claim that humans are as different from each other as was previously thought we were different from chimps also is misleading and inaccurate. No credible study that I know of ever suggested that one human's genes differ from another human's gene by 1.23%. The Scientific America posting--which is referring to an AP story in USA Today that's referring to the PLoS Biology paper about Craig Venter's genome--does not explain that Venter reported a 0.5% difference between his inherited genome from his mother and father, which once again is measuring not simply gene differences but differences in noncoding regions that include inserts and deletions (that may sometimes contain copied or deleted genes or may impact regulation).

None of the original studies I cited in my article or Venter's genome paper suggest in any way that their findings challenge Darwinian evolution, and I doubt that any of those researchers would support that conclusion from their data. And indeed, the fact that we differ genetically by more than 1%, largely for gene regulatory reasons, was predicted in Science more than 30 years ago (again as my article notes)--and the 1975 article was co-authored by one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists at the time, Allan Wilson.

The bottom line is that your post is so distant from the sources that you have completely garbled the data to support Intelligent Design. It's sloppy, inaccurate, and overtly biased.

Your are welcome to post my e-mail in its entirety, but given the errors that you made in your post by selectively quoting from other posts, please do not excerpt this for a public posting.

I'm also attaching original papers that discuss these issues. It's complicated stuff, and I hope these papers help clarify the details.

Jon Cohen

My response to Mr. Cohen can be read here.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 2:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last night Ben Stein showed up on The O'Reilly Factor to talk about his forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and the fact that scientists are being persecuted for simply questioning Darwinism in some case, or for researching and advancing the theory of intelligent design in others. Interestingly, I would bet that none of the scientists who will appear in Expelled (and by all accounts there will be a LOT of them) are creationists. Unfortunately, Bill O'Reilly simply conflates intelligent design with creationism, mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer. Not so. (see here, here and here to start) Compare O'Reilly's misunderstanding with this letter from a guy who clearly gets it.

It was unfortunate too that Ben referred to the "gaps" in Darwin's theory, as if those are the only issues that intelligent design theory addresses. To be sure there are shortcomings with Darwinism, the scientific literature of late is full of them. However, intelligent design also provides a robust positive case, and a serious scientific research approach. This is the news that O’Reilly’s viewers need to hear about.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

By Pete Chadwell

Posted by Anika Smith at 5:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The mainstream media in the United States—and some of the conservative press, for that matter—are loathe to own up to the racist and anti-Semitic history, and the anti-individual rights posture, of applied Darwinism. They want people to think that eugenics is not really traceable to Darwin, or to think that if some (many) of Darwin’s kin undeniably were leading early eugenicists, there no longer is support for their kinds of ideas among today’s Darwinists.

So thank you, Johnjoe McFadden, professor of genetics at the University of Surrey, for using the current flap over the views of Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, to set the record straight. And congratulations to The Guardian for printing the McFadden article.

The eugenics movement never died out. It has many contemporary variants and highly praised elite proponents—who, not surprisingly, are opposed to any scientists who challenge Darwin’s theory and want them drummed out of academia.

Read about it in John West’s new book, Darwin Day in America, coming out from ISI Press in three weeks. The book is authoritative and detailed. And the details are sobering and scary.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 5:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

A key point of my book Darwin Day in America is that materialism did not begin (or end) with Charles Darwin.

One of the pre-Darwin champions of materialism I cover in my book is physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the provocative tract Man a Machine (L’Homme Machine), published in 1748. According to La Mettrie, “the human body is a machine which winds its own springs” and the “the diverse states” of the human mind “are always correlative with those of the body.” In other words, human beings are mechanisms whose rational life is completely dependent on physical causes. Those causes include everything from raw meat to heredity.

In what has to be one of the more interesting passages in culinary analysis, La Mettrie opined:

Raw meat makes animals fierce, and it would have the same effect on man. This is so true that the English who eat meat red and bloody, and not as well done as ours, seem to share more or less in the savagery due to this kind of good.

A substantial part of La Mettrie’s treatise was devoted to attacking the belief that an unbridgeable gulf separated human beings from animals. According to La Mettrie, there was nothing mysterious in how to raise apes to men, because there was nothing mysterious in how men acquired their own rational faculties:

Man has been trained in the same way as animals. He has become an author, as they became beasts of burden. A geometrician has learned to perform the most difficult demonstrations and calculations, as a monkey has learned to take his little hat off and on, and to mount his tame dog.

Underlying every part of Man a Machine is La Mettrie’s steadfast faith that there is no mystery in attributing mind to matter. Indeed, La Mettrie asserted that “given the least principle of motion, animated bodies will have all that is necessary for moving, feeling, thinking, repenting.”

More than a century later, the kind of extreme reductionist thinking championed by La Mettrie was developed in a far more convincing manner by Charles Darwin in his book The Descent of Man. You can read about Darwin’s effort to apply materialism to human beings and human culture in “Darwin’s Revolution,” chapter 2 of Darwin Day in America.

To order Darwin Day in America click here. To find out more information about the book (and watch the trailer), visit the book’s website here.

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