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This is the fourth in a blog series responding to John Timmer's online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution. The first part is here, the second here, and the third here.
4. Well, the Tetrapods are Monophyletic: Only "Ph.D." Malcolm Gordon Disagrees, Right?
Timmer accuses EE of what he calls the "find a Ph.D." approach: "if you look hard enough, you can find someone with a PhD who will say anything." In this instance, Timmer disparages the minority viewpoint of UCLA biologist Malcolm Gordon (a tenured professor, actually), who has argued that the tetrapods may have evolved polyphyletically (i.e., more than once).
It's the textbook catechism again: why bother with citing some lone dissenter like Gordon? Timmer counts noses, and the sum determines what is worthy of attention. Claim that the scientists cited in EE pale in numbers to those who support the catechismal view, and voilá, case closed. There is no controversy and we can all go home.
This is science by census. But does Timmer really want us to believe that numbers of scientists, and not the evidence and how best to interpret it, is what matters?
As it happens — to play along with Timmer's counting-noses game — Gordon developed his view with the late UCLA paleontologist Everett Olson (a former president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology), in Invasions of the Land: The Transitions of Organisms from Aquatic to Terrestrial Life (1995), a book published by Columbia University Press. More recently, Gordon articulated his ideas with the Australian paleontologist John Long. But, as Timmer says, these are just another couple of Ph.Ds — you know: find a Ph.D, he'll say anything.
So let's look at the evidence. A review of the literature shows that there is much more to this story than Timmer lets on.
Surveying the problem of the overall picture of tetrapod evolution, Gordon (1999, 338) writes:
Despite the large volume of publication, however, the underlying reality remains unchanged: everything we know is circumstantial and indirect, and what actually occurred remains unknown. This sentiment was later confirmed in part by Takezaki et al. (2004). They compared sequences of 44 nuclear genes encoding over 10,400 positions in their attempts to resolve the phylogenetic relationships between the coelacanth, lungfish and tetrapod lines. They write:
Apparently, the coelacanth, lungfish, and tetrapod lineages diverged within such a short time interval that at this level of analysis, their relationships appear to be an irresolvable trichotomy. (2004, 1512) These findings amplify what Gordon (1999, 339) said five years earlier:
Thus there are significant variations regarding conclusions derived from molecular biological data sets, and differences between various parts of the morphological and molecular data sets. Gordon goes on:
The living lungfishes and the coelacanth represent tiny, randomly selected remnants of ancient groups that were numerous, varied, and widely distributed in the Devonian. One can only wonder at how accurate, or even relevant, the relationships that we estimate to exist between these organisms today may be with respect to the actual phylogenetic relationships of their basal groups. (1999, 340) Gordon's main point is that the biogeographic distribution of the tetrapods in the Late Devonian, coupled with the incongruence of molecular data, coupled with a knowledge of the range of environments occupied by early tetrapods, support the contention that the tetrapods may have arisen polyphyletically. The assumed sarcopterygian progenitors in the Late Devonian had low offspring dispersal ranges and limited geographic ranges, yet the early tetrapods they supposedly evolved into also occupied separate and limited geographic ranges, and had limited dispersal. Many of the earliest tetrapods inhabited environments from shallow marine tidal areas to brackish environments to fresh (Blieck et al., 2007).
However, these groups were also widely separated without any apparent environmental continuity between them at the time of their evolution. Late Devonian tetrapod species are "highly endemic" (Clack 2006, 184), meaning that they are "restricted to the locality or region where they have been collected" (Blieck et al. 2007, 229). The fossils come from sites many thousands of miles apart.
Thus, the phylogenetic series reconstructed in familiar evolutionary cladograms include taxa rarely found together as fossils. Cambridge University paleontologist Jennifer Clack, an expert on this evidence, notes that "taking the tetrapods sites worldwide, one thing is obvious: they lie scattered over the globe in places that were remote from each, on separate continents, even in the Devonian" (2002, 99). "These forms," note other paleontologists working on the puzzle (Zhu et al. 2002, 720), "seem to have achieved worldwide distribution and great taxonomic diversity within a relatively short time." This paleo-biogeographical puzzle raises significant evidential difficulties for monophyletic (single origin) scenarios.
Weighing these paleo-biogeographic challenges, Clack (2002, 99) considers the possibility of polyphyletic tetrapod origins, but then dismisses that hypothesis as less likely than the monophyletic scenario:
The alternative, that tetrapods radiated independently from lobe-fins that had originally been euryhaline [salt-tolerating] and subsequently lost their salt tolerance, seems even more unlikely and countered by the detailed similarities that are found in the tetrapods now known from over the world. Here Gordon disagrees — and we have a case study in the fragility of the "consilience" of data lauded by Timmer.
Timmer argues that a "consilience" of different lines of evidence strongly favors the catechismal (monophyletic) tale, and faults EE for neglecting this consilience (e.g., the putatively mutually reinforcing molecular and anatomical data). He complains, for instance, that EE says nothing about the methods of cladistics, the approach within biological systematics that organizes taxa by shared characters: "A description of cladistic methods," he writes, "doesn’t appear at all in EE."
But it is an open question whether molecules do reinforce morphology. Furthermore, as Gordon wryly observes (1999, 339) — and as is generally known among systematists — cladistic methods presuppose common ancestry:
First, since the analyses [of tetrapod relationships] were all done cladistically, the underlying phylogenetic model in all cases was monophyletic. A single "main line" of tetrapod evolution is assumed to have existed in all cases. Possible polyphyletic scenarios were methodologically and philosophically excluded as implausible. The widely-used software packages that implement cladistic methods will try to arrange molecular and anatomical data (characters) into a monophyletic tree, come what may. Some of the characters will end up as homologies — i.e., as similarities caused by common ancestry — and others as homoplasies — i.e., as similarities not caused by common ancestry — but the assumption that a monophyletic tree exists somewhere in the data is not up for grabs. Cladistic methods generate monophyletic trees, because they can't help but make such trees: that's what the methods were designed to do.
As Gordon's skepticism about cladistics indicates, behind the public proclamations that molecules confirm morphology, which Timmer recites, is an extensive scientific debate about the dangers of circularity in systematic methods. These questions are well-known to working systematists.
Could students hear about these questions? Why not? Is the catechism really more important?
EE concerns itself, therefore, with the logically prior question of "How do biologists infer (know) that all organisms, or some group of organisms, share a common ancestor?" That's a question students need to be able to answer, weighing the evidence pro and con, before they take up the merits of cladistics (which assumes the truth of monophyly as a first principle).
Up next: When Did "Neo-Darwinism" Become a Dirty Word?
References
Blieck, A., G. Clement, H. Blom, H. Lelievre, E. Luksevics, M. Streel, J. Thorez and G. C. Young. 2007. The biostratigraphical and palaeogeographical framework of the earliest diversification of tetrapods (Late Devonian). Geological Society, London, Special Publications volume 278. pp. 219-235.
Clack, Jennifer. 2002. Gaining Ground: The Orign and Evolution of Tetrapods. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Clack, Jennifer A. 2006. The emergence of early tetrapods. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 232:167–189.
Gordon, Malcolm S. 1999. The Concept of Monophyly: A Speculative Essay. Biology and Philosophy 14:331–348.
Long, John A. and Malcolm S Gordon. 2004. The greatest step in vertebrate history: a paleobiological review of the fish-tetrapod transition. Physiol. Biochem. Zool. 77:700-19.
Takezaki, Naoko, Felipe Figueroa, Zofia Zaleska-Rutczynska, Naoyuki Takahata and Jan Klein. 2004. The Phylogenetic Relationship of Tetrapod, Coelacanth, and Lungfish Revealed by the Sequences of Forty-Four Nuclear Genes. Molecular Biology and Evolution 21:1512-1524.
Zhu, Min, Per E. Ahlberg, Wenjin Zhao, and Liantao Jia 2002. First Devonian tetrapod from Asia. Nature 420:760-1.
Tis the season to creep yourself out with a good story -- especially a true story. ID the Future features a special Halloween podcast that delves into the real-life inspiration for a fearful favorite:
 Click here to listen.
On this episode of ID the Future, John West shares the inspiration for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
In his book, Darwin Day in America, West examines the experiments Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini conducted on human corpses. His gruesome work provided the inspiration for Frankenstein and foreshadowed the rise of a virulent strain of materialism that attempted to use science to reduce human beings to mere matter in motion.
Vancouver Sun columnist Peter McKnight has suddenly launched a crusade against intelligent design in a series of columns looking at science and religion.
In the second part we learn that McKnight is sadly uninformed about intelligent design. He conflates it with creationism, and confines it pretty much to biology. Indeed, the theory goes beyond just biology and encompasses, physics, chemistry and cosmology as well. Intelligent design is not creationism, nor was it developed to get around court rulings. A little history is in order here.
Instead of appearing in the late 1980s as McKnight implies, we know that Oxford scholar F.C.S. Schiller employed the term "intelligent design" in 1897, writing that "it will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of Evolution may be guided by an intelligent design." In By Design, a history of the current design controversy, journalist Larry Witham traces the roots of the contemporary intelligent design movement in biology to the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 70s ID ideas began appearing in the scientific literature in various fields. Leading theoretical physicist Paul Davies described the fine-tuning of the universe as "the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design." Fred Hoyle, the eminent theoretical physicist and agnostic, followed with The Intelligent Universe (1983), featuring chapter titles like "The Information Rich Universe" and "What is Intelligence Up To?" Hoyle wrote: A component has evidently been missing from cosmological studies. The origin of the Universe, like the solution of the Rubik cube, requires an intelligence. In 1984 one of the first scientific books advocating intelligent design appeared, Mystery of Life's Origin, which was favorably received by leading scientists and scholars and lauded by journals such as the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. Also in 1984 biologist Ray Bohlin published The Natural Limits to Biological Change, one of the first books to use the term "intelligent design" in its modern sense. All of this was before court cases such as Edwards v. Aguillard, which didn’t come until years later. This is covered in The Origins of Intelligent Design by senior fellow Jonathan Witt.
Interestingly, McKnight gives ID proponent credit for what we don't do, not for what we do do.
He claims that ID has produced no research program, nor any peer-reviewed articles. It's hard to believe that he did any research whatsoever, or he would have learned about the controversy that surrounded Stephen Meyer's 2004 paper published by the Smithsonian's Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, which led to one of the most infamous cases of the trampling of academic freedom rights of a scientist — Richard Sternberg. He also could have reviewed the list of peer-reviewed papers on our website here. And he could have reviewed the information about ID research ongoing at the Biologic Institute.
But then he claims: The centre has proven highly successful in this regard, convincing many politicians to consider laws favouring at least the mention of ID in biology classes. Completely false. We have never championed laws or standards or any such thing that would push ID into biology classes. What we have endorsed is the idea that students should learn all about Darwinian evolution, including the evidence that supports it and the evidence that challenges it.
As for his rehashing the Wedge Document, we’ve responded to that so many times it’s again hard to see how he couldn’t have found our responses and seen that we’ve already refuted such assertions and claims.
McKnight concludes by saying: By eschewing reliance on supernatural causes, science has been tremendously successful at explaining - and controlling - the natural world. If we were to permit consideration of the supernatural, this success would likely come to a crashing halt because once we posit a supernatural cause for some phenomenon, we have our answer, and there is no reason to seek further explanation.
One thing that also struck me as strange when I read this was that he claims science can’t proceed if you believe in supernatural causes.
To be clear: He claims that we posit supernatural causes. We don't. We are not positing supernatural causes — only intelligent ones.
McKnight argues that positing supernatural causes is a science stopper. But since we are positing intelligent causes, we should ask whether this would be a science stopper. It is not. Our standard riposte is about junk DNA, but why would we not seek further explanation if ID is true? I think, like the junk DNA example shows, ID would make us look at all sorts of things we’ve never even thought to explore.
I also wondered how it was that any pre-enlightenment science progressed. All the way back to the Greeks most "scientists" were folks who believed in supernatural causes. Yet, that didn’t stop Keppler or Brahe or Newton or Bacon or any of them from continuing to investigate and explore and experiment.
We're giving away 10 copies of Expelled on DVD!
There is still time left to enter the contest to win a copy of Expelled. All entries must be in by midnight October 31st.
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What did the critics think of Expelled? Watch and find out.
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Winners will be announced here at Evolution News & Views on Monday, Nov. 3rd. If you don't win, you can always order up your copy here.
Whenever biochemist Michael Behe's argument for design from "irreducibly complex" molecular machines appears, there is a Darwinist waiting in the wings with a devastating critique (or so he thinks).
Take as an example the following passage from biologist Craig M. Story. He recently reviewed Fazale Rana's new book The Cell's Design for Christianity Today (see "Same Song, Second Verse"). In his review, he critiques Behe's argument, because according to Dr. Story, Rana merely regurgitates Behe. Rana, like Behe before him, may be commended for providing a layman's description of a number of astonishingly intricate cellular processes. But his portraits of cellular workings will fail to convince most mainstream scientists for the same reason that Behe's book has been roundly dismissed: The analogy between manmade machines and cells is a poor one at best. Cellular components, although machine-like in some respects, do not behave like manmade machines. They self-assemble and self-manufacture, and they are able to transform available energy sources such as light to fuel metabolic activity.
Now what's wrong with this reply? Didn't we all learn from Hume that arguments from analogy are inherently weak?
Well, not really. What we were supposed to learn from Hume is that analogical arguments are only as strong as the analogy (and keep in mind that ALL analogies have differences, otherwise they would not be analogies). How anyone who has seen a bacterial flagellum could think there is not a strong resemblance to an outboard motor in both appearance and function is, I admit, beyond me.
Even if irreducibly complex systems are disanalogous to human-made machines, we must ask in what respect they are disanalogous. According to Story, "Cellular components, although machine-like in some respects, do not behave like manmade machines. They self-assemble and self-manufacture, and they are able to transform available energy sources such as light to fuel metabolic activity. The cell can also replicate itself and copies of its parts, given energy and simple raw materials."
But what does this show? Only that while cellular components are similar in many ways, they are also different in that...cells are actually much MORE complex than human-made machines! And therefore, it is likely that the process by which the cells originated is at least as complex as the process by which human-made machines appear (which we know involves intelligent design). What, after all, would we conclude if we stumbled upon a factory where machines not only worked with amazing efficiency but, before wearing out, actually reproduced themselves with astounding accuracy and converted energy from their environment into usable fuel so that they never needed electricity or gas?
In sum, if Rana is indeed making an argument from analogy, I think he escapes Story's criticism unscathed.
What is worse for Dr. Story is that Behe does NOT make an argument from analogy, anyway. The arguments proffered by both Behe and other design theorists like Dembski and Meyer focus on the properties humanly designed objects and biological objects actually share, not properties that have some analogous resemblance.
For instance, these theorists often point to what is at the heart of all biological life, namely DNA. They then point out that this biological information has the SAME semantic properties that human written or spoken language has. They are not making an analogy at all. Rather, at the very heart of life, we have found a property that in every other situation we KNOW is designed. The same goes for the organizational properties and the functions displayed by a host of irreducibly complex molecular machines. These properties and functions are ones held in common with human-made machines. They are not mere analogous properties.
So, perhaps Story is right in at least one respect. The "mainstream scientists" he has in mind may, sadly, not be convinced by Behe's argument. But if that is so, one can only suspect that that is because they, like Story, while understanding a great deal of biology fail to understand the design argument.
Two scientists who read the second reply to John Timmer complained (one publicly, the other in an email) that I had neglected to inform readers about the refutation of one of Christian Schwabe's claims about the protein relaxin. Their complaints, while in my view misdirected, raise some interesting questions that I'll discuss in my next blog entry.
First, Schwabe's claim, and the testing that challenges it. In this 1999 paper, Schwabe claimed to have isolated the protein relaxin from Ciona intestinalis, a tunicate. Given the usual functional roles of relaxin in vertebrates (e.g., relaxing or widening the birth canal during parturition; hence, its name), this would have been a remarkable discovery, if supported by further research. Ciona doesn't bear live young via a birth canal.
When the complete genome of Ciona was published, however, the sequence for relaxin wasn't there. Thus, Schwabe's 1999 finding was likely the result of contamination.
My correspondent griped that I'd failed to inform readers about this explicitly:
Why didn't you mention in your Schwabe post that his claim of pig relaxin in Ciona is probably due to contamination? It's dishonest not to. Particularly when you lecture your readers on the importance of data, you can't let something like this go unmentioned. A vague reference to Hafner & Korthof just doesn't cut it.
The "vague reference" he mentions is my citation of this paper, which strongly criticizes Schwabe's 1999 FASEB paper. So it seems I needed to do more than cite Schwabe's critics, such as Wilkinson et al. 2005, who also critically evaluated the Ciona claim, and whom I also cited.
Okay: so let's make it really plain: the Ciona relaxin finding was probably the result of contamination. But anyone who followed up my citations would have quickly found this, so...I can't see what I missed.
In any case, the point of my Schwabe reply wasn't to endorse all of Schwabe's arguments or claims, but to illustrate the existence of a genuine controversy about relaxin, which Timmer had denied.
I've got a parallel situation for my two critics to consider, in my next post.
P.Z. Myers and Steven Novella have recent posts on a new front in the war between materialism and reality. Having convinced only a small fraction of Americans that chance and tautology — i.e. Darwinism — adequately explains life (despite a court-ordered monopoly on public education for the last half-century), materialists are moving on to your mind. Materialism posits that your mind is meat. No soul, no spirit, just chemicals, congealed by natural selection to dupe you into believing that you’re more than an evanescent meat-robot.
It’s a hard sell, but that’s not to say that materialists haven’t tried. In the first half of the 20th century, behaviorists (e.g. B.F. Skinner) proposed that internal mental states were irrelevant or didn’t exist at all. All that mattered in the study of the mind was stimulus and response. Behaviorism turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a sterile avenue of research, as one might guess about a theory of the mind that denied or ignored mental states. As a theory of the mind, it is now largely regarded as insane, even by materialists. Behaviorism may be the only scientific theory to be finally extinguished by a joke:
After a night of passion, one behaviorist rolls over in bed and says to the other: "that was good for you; how was it for me?"
Atheist-materialist Sigmund Freud constructed an immense theory of the mind. A literary theory, that is. Freudian concepts of the human psyche remain embedded in our culture, but not in our laboratories or in our academies, and Freudianism plays no significant role in neuroscience or in modern analytic philosophy. Reference to "penis envy" at a college seminar will elicit a legal, not a scientific, response.
In the second half of the 20th century, materialists advanced identity theory, which is the theory that the mind just is the brain, entirely. Your thoughts are synapses, or chemicals, or electrical gradients, or whatever, as long as it’s material. Mental states are brain states. That’s all there is. Identity theory went through some iterations, until it was pointed out that identity theory violated the centuries-old maxim of the indiscernibility of identicals (Leibniz’ Law), which noted that things couldn’t be identical unless they shared all properties. That's what "identical" means. Thoughts aren't the same thing as synapses for the simplest of reasons: they're not the same thing. The mind (subjective experience, meaning, beliefs, etc) and the brain (mass, volume, temperature, etc) share no properties at all. Oops.
Identity theory went down the materialist memory hole several decades ago (except for P.Z. Myers, who didn't get the memo), to be replaced by functionalism. Functionalism for a while was all the rage, but it’s lost much of its luster. Functionalism is the theory that the mind isn’t the brain, but the mind is what the brain does. Like computer hardware running a program. One has the amusing suspicion that the hardware/software theory of the mind has more to do with the Digital Age zeitgeist than with genuine neuroscientific insight. Pleistocene materialists, had they paused to ponder such matters, probably thought the mind was like fire, or a wheel. But the mind isn’t really like a computer, in many important ways. Computers don’t really seem to have subjective states or beliefs, for example. The human mind doesn’t seem to merely "run programs." Functionalism offers no coherent explanation for the two most salient characteristics of mental states: qualia and intentionality. Qualia is subjective experience, and there’s no reason to infer that running programs transforms third-person ontogeny (it) into first person ontogeny (I). The description of pain is not the same thing as the experience of pain. Some functionalists, for example Daniel Dennett, elide this obvious defeater for functionalism by denying that qualia actually exist as real subjective experiences. Yet Dennett, presumably, still asks for Novocain at the dentist’s office.
Intentionality is the "aboutness" of a mental state. It is essentially meaning, and meaning is a hallmark of minds and is never observed in matter except as a characteristic imparted to matter by a mind. Ink on paper has no meaning unless it is processed (written and/or read) by a mind. Minds impart intentionality, and there’s not a shred of evidence that matter (even brain tissue) alone can impart intentionality. Minds can’t come entirely from matter because intentionality doesn't come from matter.
Some materialists deny the reality of intentionality, and describe it as a trick played by our brains. We don’t really have "meaning." We just have brain states, which we misinterpret as having meaning. Two principal proponents of this view are Paul and Patricia Churchland, materialist philosophers who actually think that minds don’t exist at all. They advocate what is called eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialists assert that we are just brains, and that beliefs, meaning, and desires aren't real. Only the brain is real. Our belief that we have minds is "folk psychology," which is a cornucopia of naïve inferences (such as the naïve view that we have beliefs, opinions, desires) held by the benighted mass of humanity who don’t understand the real materialist nature of man. Eliminative materialism, while popular within the materialist community, has made little progress outside of the materialists’ locked ideological ward. Benighted "folk" have difficulty accepting the belief that there are no beliefs.
The most recent materialist "insight" about the mind has been evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is the "science" of explaining the human mind as a material residue of brain mutations in our survival-challenged ape (err…hominid) ancestors. A recent notable contribution of evolutionary psychology to our understanding of the human mind is a Nature Genetics article announcing that the human mind evolved because of one of our million year-old mutant hominid ancestors got better spit. The press release, which invariably accompanies evolutionary "discoveries," announced that the explanation for the human brain is to be found "in the cheeks," specifically in the saliva in the hairy cheeks of an extinct hominid. Better spit — better digestion — better brains — better apes. Ecce homo. Evolutionary psychology's salient accomplishment is to have made itself immune to parody.
Which brings us to Steven Pinker, a professor of (evolutionary) psychology at Harvard, who has made a career out of using the popular press to point out the ugly implications of the current evolutionary materialist theory of the mind, and to champion those implications. As the evolutionary theories of the mind change hourly, Pinker has been prolific. His recent essay in The New Republic, “The Stupidity of Dignity,” is the clearest example I know of the materialist understanding of the mind applied to modern medical ethics. Pinker argues that our traditional understanding of human dignity, based as it is on several millennia of religious and philosophical insight, will have to be discarded in light of our new "evolutionary" understanding of human beings and of the human mind, for whom autonomy — the struggle for survival — is paramount. Pinker asserts that autonomy, not dignity, must be the basis for medical ethics, because dignity is antiquated “theocon” religious nonsense. Pinker fails to note that the autonomous are those who least need the protection afforded by medical ethics. It is precisely those who aren’t autonomous who most need protection based on dignity, and they need protection from those who are autonomous. The materialist understanding of man isn’t the basis for a new ethics. It’s the end of ethics.
The materialist project to explain the mind reads less like a compendium of scientific and philosophical investigation than like a psychiatrist’s case log. Succinctly, the materialist project is batsh*t. The mind is a catastrophe for materialism. Materialism doesn’t explain the mind, and it probably can’t explain the mind. Materialism flounders on the hard problem of consciousness — the problem of understanding how it is that we are subjects and not just objects. Now a number of scientists and other academics are challenging this repellent materialist nonsense. There’s no scientific or even logical justification for the inference that the mind is merely the brain, without remainder, and the philosophical and sociological implications of the materialist view of the mind are abhorrent. Now there’s a reality-based push-back to materialist superstition, and the materialists have an insurrection on their hands.
The meat-robots are stirring.
This is the third in a blog series responding to John Timmer's online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution. The first part is here, and the second here.
3. Open Your Catechism to Page One: The Fact of Evolution
So what is the “fact” of evolution? Timmer argues that “aspects of the theory [of evolution] can be safely treated as fact,” and in support of this point, cites a paper by the Canadian geneticist T. Ryan Gregory, entitled "Evolution as Fact, Theory and Path."
Here is how Gregory (2008, 49) defines the “fact” of evolution:
The notion that species may change through time and that living organisms are related to one another through common descent…species have changed over time and are connected by descent from common ancestors.
Change through time, descent of organisms from common ancestors -- hey, that sounds familiar:
Evolution #1: “Change over time” First, evolution can mean that the life forms we see today are different than the life forms that lived in the past. (EE, p. 8)
…we have to make an important distinction between the terms common descent and Universal Common Descent. You may think the terms mean the same thing. They don’t. As we’ve just seen, it’s possible to think that some organisms share a common ancestor without thinking that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor. (EE, p. 10)
If the “fact of evolution” means simply change over time and common descent, then EE affirms the fact of evolution. But that’s hardly surprising: so does almost any biologist, from the staff of the young-earth Institute for Creation Research to the curators of the American Museum of Natural History.
That’s not what “the fact of evolution” means to most evolutionary biologists, however. The standard view is Darwin’s single (monophyletic) tree, rooted in LUCA:
The millions of diverse living species we find around us in the modern world are descended from a common ancestor that lived in the remote past. (Ayala and Valentine 1979, 1)
Evolution asserts that the pattern of similarity by which all known organisms may be linked is the natural outcome of some process of genealogy. In other words, all organisms are related. (Eldredge and Cracraft 1980, 2)
It is important to realize at the outset that evolution is not “just a theory.” It is, again, a theory and a fact…[N]ew forms of life are continually generated by the splitting of a single lineage into two or more lineages. This is known as “speciation.” About five million years ago, a species of primates split into two distinct lineages: one leading to modern chimpanzees and the other to modern humans. And this ancestral primate itself shared a common ancestor with earlier primates, which in turn shared a common ancestor with other mammals. The earlier ancestor of all mammals shared an even earlier ancestor with reptiles, and so on back to the origin of life. Such successive splitting yields the common metaphor of an evolutionary “tree of life,” whose root was the first species to arise and whose twigs are the millions of living species. Any two extant species share a common ancestor, which can in principle be found by tracing that pair of twigs back through the branches to the node where they meet. (Coyne 2005, 23; second emphasis added)
If “all organisms are related” (meaning "any two species share a common ancestor" in a universal evolutionary tree) because they “descended from a common ancestor,” then the fact of evolution means Universal Common Descent, or Darwin’s Tree of Life: “all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form” (1859, 484).
Universal Common Descent is a “fact,” however, coming under increasing skeptical scrutiny from evolutionary biologists, as Timmer saw first-hand at the Rockefeller University symposium on evolution this past May. Since the first edition of EE was published in 2007, prominent biologists such as Craig Venter, Eugene Koonin, and William Martin have added their doubts to those of Carl Woese, W. Ford Doolittle, Michael Syvanen, and the other evolutionary skeptics of Universal Common Descent cited in EE.
Consider, for instance, Eugene Koonin’s “biological big bang” proposal:
…it is generally assumed that, in principle, the TOL [Tree of Life] exists and is resolvable although, in practice, full resolution might never be attained and, furthermore, might not even be particularly important for understanding the actual events that transpired during the respective transitional stages.
Here, I argue for a fundamentally different solution, i.e., that a single, uninterrupted TOL does not exist, although the evolution of large divisions of life for extended time intervals can be adequately described by trees. (2007, 3; reference numbers omitted)
Or Craig Venter:
We're just at the tip of the iceberg of what the [genetic] divergence is on this planet... One question is, can we extrapolate back from this data set to describe the most recent common ancestor. I don't necessarily buy that there is a single ancestor. It’s counterintuitive to me. I think we may have thousands of recent common ancestors and they are not necessarily so common. (Brockman 2007, p. 42)
Or William Martin:
Traditional approaches to characterizing prokaryote genome evolution focus on the component of the genome that fits the metaphor of a tree. The issue is how large that component is over the fullness of evolutionary time. Although there can be little doubt that a considerable component of prokaryote genome evolution over recent evolutionary time scales is fundamentally treelike in nature, differences in gene content exceeding 30% among individual strains of E. coli demonstrate that LGT [lateral gene transfer] has substantial impact on genome evolution even at the species level. Our findings indicate that, over long evolutionary time scales, the cumulative role of LGT leaves almost no gene family among prokaryotes untouched....When all genes and genomes are considered, the tree paradigm fits only a small minority of the genome at best; hence, more realistic computational models for the microbial evolutionary process are needed. (Dagan et al. 2008, p. 10043; note numbers omitted)
Now this is a case where the catechism is going to lead students straight away from interesting puzzles, for reasons having nothing to do with intelligent design: both Koonin and Venter are on record as strongly opposing ID. When Carl Woese -- for what it’s worth, another opponent of ID -- argues that “the time has come for Biology to go beyond the Doctrine of Common Descent” (2002, p. 8745), will students be allowed to learn about the molecular data motivating his argument?
Or will it be back to the catechism? Incidentally, Timmer fumbles Woese’s argument, saying it “partly hinges on definitions, rather than some objectively apparent biological property.” But Woese’s case rests on objective molecular characters, their apparent incompatibility within a single common ancestor, and the non-homology of key proteins across domains (see Roberts et al. 2008). The Archaea, Eucarya, and Bacteria were defined on the grounds of molecular data, not verbal distinctions.
Fears about giving aid and comfort to ID advocates, no matter how misplaced those fears may be, will, if given their head, irreparably damage science education in America. Teaching the theory of evolution responsibly entails far more than giving students a familiar catechism to recite.
Up next: The Origin of the Tetrapods
References
Ayala, Francisco and James Valentine. 1979. Evolving: the theory and processes of organic evolution. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.
Brockman, John, ed. 2007. Life: What A Concept! An Edge E-Book, available at http://www.edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf.
Coyne, Jerry. 2005. The faith that dares not speak its name. The New Republic, 22/29 August 2005, pp. 21-33.
Dagan, Tal, Yael Artzy-Randrup, and William Martin. 2008. Modular networks and cumulative impact of lateral transfer in prokaryote genome evolution. PNAS 105:10039-10044.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray.
Eldredge, Niles and Joel Cracraft. 1980. Phylogenetic Patterns and the Evolutionary Process. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gregory, T. Ryan. 2008. Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path. Evolution: Education and Outreach 1:46-52.
Koonin, Eugene. 2007. The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution. Biology Direct 2:21.
Roberts, E., A. Sethi, J. Montoya, C.R. Woese, and Z. Luthey-Schulten. 2008. Molecular signatures of ribosomal evolution. PNAS 105:13953-8.
Woese, Carl. 2002. On the evolution of cells. PNAS 99:8742-77.
Science standards review processes always seem to send Darwinists into a misinformation flurry. The current review of Texas' standards is no exception. Josh Rosenau has a post up yesterday attacking Casey Luskin that has a number of errors. Josh is in elite company, as these are the very same errors that spread like the flu through the MSM last spring. At that time we reported how the New York Times and Washington Post, among others, were misreporting the facts about "strengths and weaknesses" language in the Texas science standards.
Now Josh writes: At issue is a Disco.-inspired standard in the older TEKS which requires teachers to have students "analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information" (my emphasis). I corrected this back in June:
Let's review. In 1998, the Texas Board of Education adopted the current set of science standards calling on students "to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information." You can read the standards for yourself here. As for claims that we try to get intelligent design into the curriculum, that's just not the case. Our science education policy is very clear. In November of 2003 Discovery Institute issued a Q&A that stated: Does Discovery Institute advocate requiring intelligent design theory in textbooks as an alternative?
Absolutely not. We are NOT seeking to have intelligent design included in textbooks or in classroom instruction. We only want factual errors corrected and legitimate scientific weaknesses of neo-Darwinism presented. Darwinists are fond of trying to change the subject from teaching the case for and against Darwinian evolution, and make this a debate over whether or not to include intelligent design in the curriculum. That isn't the issue.
In my first post on TEKS reviewer Ronald Wetherington, professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University (SMU), I discussed his history of trying to stifle free speech on evolution and then denying his intolerant actions. In one of his articles about Discovery Institute’s SMU conference, Wetherington attacked the conference because it was "not … a … balanced discussion, but rather a partisan promotion," elsewhere attacking it as "not a debate, but a one-sided promotion." (Wetherington must have forgotten Discovery Institute invited SMU Darwinists to participate in the conference, but they declined.) When writing about a different issue, he lamented incidents where "dissent is treated as irrelevant."
So out of one side of his mouth, Wetherington protests "one-sided promotions" and discussions that are not "balanced," and says that doesn’t like it when "dissent is treated as irrelevant." Yet Wetherington's op-ed co-author, Prof. Wise, later taught a course whose website stated, "You don't have to teach both sides of a debate if one side is a load of crap." To my knowledge, Wetherington has not spoken out against Wise's course, which was so unbalanced that it called the opposing viewpoint "a load of crap." It seems that when Wetherington has spoken on evolution, the other side of his mouth has actively sought to stifle dissenters from Darwinism.
I have a feeling Wetherington's prior hypocrisy is a foreshadowing of the kind of evolution-education he's going to recommend in Texas. In fact, we can be pretty confident that he won't be advocating a "balanced discussion" but will instead advocate that Texas students learn a one-sided and partisan promotion of evolution, which treats dissent from Darwinism as "irrelevant."
What’s the Point?
I don't say any of this to protest Wetherington's appointment to review the TEKS. I'm glad that they picked Wetherington for the review panel: he's an experienced educator and he holds a prestigious position as director of SMU's Center for Teaching Excellence. Moreover, censorious or not, his view surely represents those of many Darwinist scientists and the Texas State Board of Education should hear that view when deciding how to teach evolution.
So what's the point? The point is to show how Texas Darwinists operate: With one side of their mouths, they claim the other side is intolerant and give lip service to "balance," while out of the other side they advocate a one-sided promotion of evolution, opposing balance, and censoring dissenting viewpoints because they are allegedly irrelevant.
One of the expert reviewers of the draft Texas science standards, Southern Methodist University (SMU) professor Ronald Wetherington, has a track record of advocating censorship to restrict the free flow of information on evolution to students. So extreme is Wetherington’s intolerance that last year he attempted to ban a voluntary conference on intelligent design at SMU co-sponsored by a student group and Discovery Institute. That’s right: Not only does Wetherington want to control what goes on inside the classroom, he wants the power to censor speakers outside the classroom co-sponsored by students on their own time!
Wetherington is one of three pro-Darwin-only scientists asked to review proposed changes to the state’s science standards. Last week, we reported on the other two Darwinist reviewers and how Texas’s NCSE-clone, the “Texas Freedom Network” (TFN), tried to manufacture a controversy when it hypocritically charged that some reviewers of the Texas science standards (the “TEKS”) have a conflict of interest because they co-authored a textbook about evolution (Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism). TFN’s charge was empty because such scientists would be ideal candidates to advise a state board of education on teaching evolution and other areas of science. TFN’s charge was also highly hypocritical since two of the three Darwinists TEKS reviewers (David Hillis and Gerald Skoog) have co-authored biology textbooks, one of which might be up for adoption in Texas very soon.
But thus far we’ve said very little about the third Darwinist TEKS reviewer, Ronald K. Wetherington, a professor of anthropology at SMU, who was selected by Republican board members Geraldine Miller and Pat Hardy. Wetherington has a history of trying to stifle free speech on evolution, and then denying his intolerant actions. This should give you a hint about what kind of evolution-education he’s going to propose for Texas students: If history is to be our guide, Wetherington is going to propose ardently dogmatic pro-Darwin-only evolution education standards, and when pressed, he’ll deny that he’s trying to censor or stifle any dissenting views.
Wetherington Stifles Darwin-Dissenters on the SMU Campus
In 2007, Discovery Institute helped sponsor a conference on the SMU campus about intelligent design and evolution. All normal campus SMU procedures were used to sponsor and plan this event, and the conference was perfectly legitimate. Yet Wetherington was part of a small cadre of vocal SMU Darwinists who, as the Dallas Morning News (DMN) reported, “demanded that the university bar the Discovery Institute from campus.” Elsewhere the DMN observed that, “Science professors upset about a presentation on ‘Intelligent Design’ fired blistering letters to the administration, asking that the event be shut down.” In particular, SMU’s anthropology department, of which Wetherington is a member, wrote a letter to the SMU administration trying to get the conference kicked off campus: “[Discovery Institute has] no place on an academic campus with their polemics hidden behind a deceptive mask. We urge the University to recognize this and to withdraw its permission to use our facilities and our name.” (emphasis added) On the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website Wetherington similarly wrote that the conference “has no place on a university campus — even a Christian one!”
Wetherington’s Credibility Gap
When pressed with his intolerance, Wetherington responded by denying his own actions. In a letter to SMU Daily, Wetherington tried to backpedal and downplay his attempts to censor the pro-ID viewpoint, claiming that his protests were merely “a call for disallowing the conference until its legal scheduling was confirmed.” Really? Was Wetherington’s normal practice as an anthropology professor to double-check all conferences planned at SMU to confirm whether they had undergone “legal scheduling”?
In an op-ed in the DMN that he co-authored with SMU biologist John Wise, Wetherington promoted the outlandish conspiracy theory that Discovery Institute says that evolution “should be replaced by its mystical world view” calling the conference “deliberate deception.” They also protested being called “intolerant” for trying to stop the conference, and claimed to believe in the “basic right to believe, worship and express oneself as one desires.” Except, it would seem, in academia—for his group wrote, “We urge the University to … withdraw its permission to use our facilities and our name,” and he also said the conference “has no place on a university campus.”
Does it sound like Wetherington was just checking to make sure the conference had undergone “legal scheduling”? Who is now hiding “behind a deceptive mask” or using “deliberate deception”? Wetherington’s attempt to backpedal away from his censorious demands to cancel the conference have a major credibility gap.
In one of his articles, Wetherington protests being painted as “intolerant.” Readers can decide for themselves whether he deserves that label.
This is the second in a blog series responding to John Timmer's online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution. The first part is here.
2. Much Ado About A Footnote Citing Christian Schwabe
One theme of EE addresses differing views among evolutionary biologists about Darwin’s Tree of Life, i.e., the theory of the universal common ancestry of all organisms on Earth: more precisely, the monophyly of terrestrial life, rooted in the Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA. While the majority position within evolutionary biology endorses monophyly, a growing minority of workers argue for multiple independent origins, or polyphyly (see below). It’s an important controversy, well worth the attention of textbooks.
But Timmer accuses EE of a “bait-and-switch” move in describing this controversy. By “lumping…together in a single footnote” several scientists with very different views about the overall pattern of life’s history, he argues, EE tries for “borrowed credibility,” misleading its readers about the true outlines of the current mono- versus polyphyly debate.
Timmer is particularly exercised by EE’s inclusion of the ideas of Professor Christian Schwabe of the Medical University of South Carolina, whose publications he calls “borderline deranged.” Given the space Timmer uses to criticize Schwabe, one might think that the latter’s ideas receive significant attention in EE.
No, actually: the book mentions Schwabe exactly once, in a single footnote (which cites three of his papers). Timmer claims that EE lumps Schwabe together with other, better-known scientists, such as National Academy of Sciences member Carl Woese, as advocates of the polyphyletic view, without informing the reader about the different number of separate origins postulated by their respective theories.
But here is the actual EE footnote (p. 11):
Scientists who support a polyphyletic view differ on how many trees one should expect to find in the “orchard” of life. Some, such as microbiologist Carl Woese of the University of Illinois, argue that life on earth is descended “not from one, but from three distinctly different cell types” (“On the evolution of cells,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (2002):8742- 77; 8746). Others, including Malcolm Gordon of UCLA and Christian Schwabe of the Medical University of South Carolina, think there might be a greater number of separate trees.
And that’s it. No misdirection or lumping: Woese says three independent origins; Schwabe and Gordon say more. Anyone who reads the EE footnote should grasp that scientific opinions about polyphyly differ.
Let’s go back, however, to Timmer’s charitable label for Schwabe, “borderline deranged,” as it gives us our first opportunity to address the catechism versus data dilemma in more depth.
Timmer acknowledges that “every couple of years, [Schwabe] publishes a paper in which he argues in favor” of his “borderline deranged” ideas. These, however, “are not scientific controversies,” Timmer claims, but “actually opinions that have barely registered within the wider scientific community.”
Really? To see how Schwabe’s research raises challenges to monophyly and universal common ancestry, consider this excerpt from one of his papers cited in EE:
Against this background of high variability between relaxins from purportedly closely related species, the relaxins of pig and whale are all but identical. The molecules derived from rats, guinea pigs, man and pigs are as distant from each other (approximately 55%) as all are from the elasmobranch’s [shark’s] relaxin. … Insulin, however, brings man and pig phylogenetically closer together than chimpanzee and man. (Schwabe 1994, 171-2)
According to Timmer’s catechism, however, none of this is worth talking about, because Schwabe’s ideas are just too crazy for serious consideration.
But someone forgot to tell journal editors and referees. Schwabe’s “deranged” ideas -- coming from a tenured professor of biochemistry, and based in part on the puzzling features of relaxin (not "reflexin," as Timmer writes), and its phylogenetic distribution -- have cleared editorial review at the following journals:
• Christian Schwabe and Gregory Warr, “A Polyphyletic View of Evolution: The Genetic Potential Hypothesis,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 27 (1984):465-85.
• Christian Schwabe, “On the validity of molecular evolution,” Trends in Biochemical Sciences 11 (1986):280-3.
• C. Schwabe and E.E. Büllesbach, “Relaxin: structures, functions, promises, and nonevolution,” FASEB Journal 8 (1994):1152-60.
• Christian Schwabe, “Theoretical limitations of molecular phylogenetics and the evolution of relaxins,” Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology 107B (1994):167-77.
• Christian Schwabe, “Genomic Potential Hypothesis of Evolution: A Concept of Biogenesis in Habitable Spaces of the Universe,” The Anatomical Record 268 (2002):171–179.
• Christian Schwabe, “Chemistry and Biodiversity,” Chemistry and Biodiversity 1 (2004):1584-9.
Were these papers ignored? No: the relaxin puzzles are well-known; as other biologists who study relaxin observe (Wilkinson et al. 2005, 3),
Relaxin evolution has confounded researchers for decades. High sequence variability in relaxins across closely related species is a well-known feature of this peptide, however startling similarities have been observed between very distant species such as pigs and whales.
Nor have Schwabe’s heterodox ideas about the evolutionary process escaped critical notice. His 2004 paper in the journal Chemistry and Biodiversity was followed immediately -- in the very same issue -- with a critical reply, as was the case with Schwabe’s 1999 FASEB Journal paper. Hafner and Korthof (2006) argue vigorously against Schwabe’s position, and Wilkinson et al. (2005, 9) note that “relaxin evolution has been the centre of much controversy,” which they believe their approach has been able to resolve.
“The centre of much controversy” -- but Timmer says (falsely) that no one cares, because it’s all “borderline deranged” anyway. Thus, what might be an interesting case study, supported by multiple peer-reviewed publications, pro and con, about how to interpret molecular evidence in relation to the tree of life and its origin, would be tossed aside by Timmer, in favor of the catechism: the “fact” of evolution, never mind the data.
As we mentioned above, EE cites Schwabe in a single footnote. His name never appears in the main text. A reader who followed up the Schwabe citations, however, would find a rich controversy, likely to stimulate thinking.
And that’s good, all worries about the complicated data notwithstanding.
Up next: The "Fact" of Evolution
References
Hafner, Martin and Gert Korthof. 2006. Does a “500 million-year-old hormone” disprove Darwin? The FASEB Journal 20:1290-2.
Schwabe, Christian. 1994. Theoretical limitations of molecular phylogenetics and the evolution of relaxins. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology 107B:167-77.
Wilkinson, Tracey N., Terence P. Speed, Geoffrey W. Tregear, and Ross A.D, Bathgate. 2005. Evolution of the relaxin-like peptide family. BMC Evolutionary Biology 5:14.
This is the first in a series of blog entries replying to John Timmer's online critique of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution, posted by Paul Nelson on behalf of the book's production team.
1. Introduction: Sending Him the Book Didn’t Help
On September 24, 2008, biologist and science writer John Timmer published an online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution (EE). Timmer had previously written about EE without having read it, so Discovery Institute sent him a copy.
Alas -- having EE in his hands improved neither the quality of Timmer’s writing about the book, nor indeed his coverage of the relevant science. In fact, Timmer so baldly misrepresents both the content of Explore Evolution, but especially the associated scientific evidence and controversies, that his review perfectly illustrates the need for a book like EE.
Our reply will reverse the order of Timmer's review. He starts by using nearly 1200 words to speculate about the motives of EE's authors. Since Timmer did not contact any of us, his speculations -- such as “the authors know precisely the sort of conclusions they’d like everyone to reach” -- cannot be better than groundless. We shall comment briefly in the last part of our reply, however, on a couple of his more philosophical points.
We want to focus on the science. Timmer’s review reflects a deep dilemma that increasingly confronts educators in biology. The devil is in the details -- the data -- but if organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, or the National Association of Biology Teachers, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science, don’t want students to hear about the devil, namely, about challenges to accepted theory, then they will have to omit -- i.e., censor -- the data, namely, the evidence and how biologists variously interpret it.
Hence, many scientific publications that raise interesting questions about evolution will never see the inside of a classroom. The questions are too risky. Science education will become a catechism, diverging from science itself, because the questions now being raised by many evolutionary biologists cut ever closer to claims long held to be “fact.”
This dilemma -- call it the catechism versus the data -- does not concern intelligent design, which has already found its way into public attention without science classroom endorsement. The dilemma concerns, rather, how evolution is taught. When students hear that “biologists today know that natural selection explains the origin of complexity,” or “all biologists agree that every living thing descended from a single common ancestor” -- stock claims in many biology textbooks -- they are being miseducated about the actual state of the science.
And that is wrong.
In what follows, then, we rebut Timmer’s hopelessly inaccurate construal of the contents of EE, and the evidence on which the book rests.
Up next: Much Ado About a Footnote Citing Christian Schwabe
Hmmm — a video comes out (Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, currently #11 at Amazon) saying that if you question Darwinism, you get trashed and denounced. And the mass response is to trash and denounce the video.
Don't the denouncers realize their own conduct proves the video is true? Do the denouncers not realize the irony of their own behavior?
Or are they really taking the position that those who doubt Darwinism are typically free of being denounced?
I reminds me of my C-SPAN experience with Barry Lynn — he denounced my doubting of Darwin, but then when I said that as a general rule people who doubt Darwin get denounced, he denounced that statement as well. But Barry — you just did it to me!
Click here to view full size.
Anyone who is familiar with Alan Leshner will know that he is a dogmatic defender of Darwin-only science education, and so you will be shocked to find out that he now seems to agree with us. You may also be shocked to learn that he favors teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. They say that students need to hear about the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, which of course is true. Yes, we do say that, as do many scientists, teachers, educators, and school board members all over the country. Just this past summer the state of Louisiana passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which protects teachers who discuss the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. So far, so good; we're all in agreement.
. . . Until Leshner completely misstates our views and positions in his very next sentence.
Referring to those who advocate for teaching more about evolution, for not watering down what our students are taught in science classes, for telling them about the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, Leshner mistakenly says this: But then they argue that the universe is so complex that it required an intelligent designer and that should be taught in science classes as an alternative to evolution. Wrong. No one in any position of authority, nor any of the experts asked to participate in the standards review process, has this position. No serious people are advocating that intelligent design should be taught in Texas science classes. Leshner is either sadly misinformed or willfully misrepresenting the views of those involved in the process.
In fact, a Dallas Morning News headline earlier this year trumpeted the fact that: Education board opposes intelligent design in curricula. If that isn't clear enough for folks like Leshner, the DMN even added a subhead: Even creationists say theory doesn't belong in class with evolution.
Let's be clear: No one is advocating for including intelligent design in Texas.
The rest of Leshner's piece blathers on about religion and the faith of scientists. Who cares? That's not the issue here. The issue is the scientific evidence for and against Darwinism.
If a tenth grader can understand the evidence that supports Darwin's theory, they can certainly understand the evidence that challenges it.
Darwin himself stated it best in On the Origin of Species:"A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."
According to Leshner: Bringing nonscientific ideas into biology classes creates unacceptable risks. It will confuse young students and teach them to distrust well-established scientific facts. Classrooms could become religious battlegrounds. Lawsuits over policy could drain local school districts. And employers everywhere would worry about the quality of Texas' students. We agree with Leshner on this as well. Students should be learning the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolution — anything less is a disservice to them.
So why is Leshner supporting proposed revisions that water down the teaching of evolution?
"Skeptical" atheist Steven Novella has a blog post on "Mande Barung," an Indian version of the Himalayan Yeti and the North American Bigfoot. Novella ruminates on the credulity of one Dipu Marak, a local passionate believer in the shy mythical creature. Debunking Yeti sightings is low-hanging fruit for skeptics like Novella, whose skepticism knows no limits — except for his own materialist ideology, about which he is credulous to the bone. One wonders why atheist "skeptics" need to explain to their readership — presumably compliant atheist skeptics all — that Yeti probably don't exist.
Logan Gage explains why. Gage has a superb essay entitled, "Which Secular Superstition do you Believe?" Gage asks:
…[Who] is more likely to believe wild eyed superstitions these days, the religious or irreligious?
The answer, Gage observes, is unambiguous:
Just last week Rodney Stark, a respected scholar at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion, released a study entitled "What Americans Really Believe." Stark and fellow researchers commissioned The Gallup Organization to poll Americans on questions of religious import…Many of the fascinating findings of this year's Baylor Religion Survey, which asks much deeper questions than typical religious surveys, center on atheists and the irreligious…Gallup asked questions regarding belief in things like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis, haunted houses, and astrology. Baylor's researchers aggregated these figures, producing an index of paranormal belief. As Mollie Ziegler Hemingway reported in The Wall Street Journal, "While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did."…"In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead."
The theistic and particularly the Christian view that nature is the creation of a rational mind is the foundation of modern science. Atheistic ideology, which denies rational purpose or design in nature, does nothing to advance science. Gage notes:
Even many non-religious historians of science now understand that, far from perpetuating old superstitions, the Judeo-Christian tradition constituted a radical break with pagan thought. It posited a single rational mind behind the universe rather than myriad irrational spirits in the universe…This Gestalt shift was crucial in the rise of modern science. It is no accident that experimental science arose in the West where the idea of the intelligibility of nature took root, for it made sense to seek orderly laws of nature if there exists a rational lawgiver of the universe…While the findings of the Baylor study appear counterintuitive, perhaps they shouldn't. Once we lose "faith" in the rational intelligibility of the universe, what is left to dissuade us from the latest findings of UFO-logy?
It is amusing that, despite the pretensions of atheist "skeptics" such as Novella, atheists are much more likely to believe pseudoscientific claims such as UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, psychics, Atlantis, and astrology than are traditional religious believers. Four times as likely, to be precise (31% vs. 8%). Yet this should come as no surprise. Nearly all atheists believe that the genetic code and the intricate nanotechnology in living cells arose entirely by random mutations and natural selection. Compared to the belief that life arose by chance and tautology, Bigfoot and astrology seem downright plausible.
Gage sums it up eloquently:
The existential question facing science today is whether it can survive an intellectual milieu dominated by the materialist superstition.
Distinguished scientist and professor James M. Tour will moderate a
debate next month in Texas about intelligent design and evolution featuring four prominent scientists and philosophers. What's interesting is that defending intelligent design are an agnostic who is skeptical of ID and an atheist philosopher. That would be Dr. David Berlinski and Dr. Bradley Monton, respectively. Defending evolution will be British theologian Denis Alexander and well-known physicist Lawrence Krauss.
Here's how the hosts at St. Andrews Episcopal church in Fort Worth, Texas describe the debate: The issue of the debate is one of the most emotionally-charged questions facing our country today. The debate seeks to present the audience with different perspectives and helpful insights to enable them to form better conclusions about faith and science. It will feature four world renowned participants who will address this significant issue from different viewpoints; specifically, a Pro-Intelligent Design Theist and Atheist, and an Anti-Intelligent Design Theist and Atheist. Our moderator, Dr. James M. Tour, is an individual of impeccable scientific standing and credentials. It should be pointed out that David Berlinski is not a theist but an agnostic, as was made clear in his recent, hot-selling book The Devil's Delusion. While he is a prominent skeptic of Darwinism, he is not a proponent of intelligent design. An interesting choice to defend the theory, to be sure.
Berlinski's partner is Dr. Bradley Monton, a philosophy prof at the University of Colorado at Boulder whose areas of specialization include the philosophy of science (especially philosophy of physics -- which will make his interactions with Krauss all the more juicy).
Monton argues that there is some legitimate scientific evidence for the existence of an intelligent designer of our universe, but admits that in the current environment it's unlikely that such evidence will convert atheists to theism, or Darwinists to modern science.
Opposing Monton and Berlinski are Denis Alexander and Lawrence Krauss, also an odd pairing, one a theologian, the other a strident atheist.
Dr. Alexander, the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, will speak from the anti-ID position. Here's a theologian who agrees with the world's most vociferous atheist — Richard Dawkins — that of course we live in a universe which displays design, but it's not real design.
Joining him will be Dr. Krauss, the Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Physics Department, Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative, and Inaugural Director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. If there's any time remaining after giving his title, he will simply state that there is no evidence for design.
Expect sparks and more than a touch of arrogance.
Friday, November 7, 2008
7:00 – 10:00 p.m.
Will Rogers Auditorium
3401 W. Lancaster Ave.
Fort Worth, Texas
Tickets: $10 Adults; $5 Students
Please contact St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
at 817-332-3191 for tickets. Download the debate brochure here.
Daniel Bolnick, a leader of the pro-Darwin only “Texas 21st Century Science Coalition,” recently published an op-ed in the Waco Tribune which provides some good lessons on how to argue for “evolution” to the public: Be extremely dogmatic and vague about the evidence.
Lesson 1: Vaguely Assert Massive Support for “Evolution” From the Scientific Literature
Bolnick writes that in the past decade, “biologists have published more than 30,000 research articles demonstrating that evolution has occurred and how it works,” further stating that “[m]ore than 100,000 published biological research studies demonstrate the fact of evolutionary change.” So just how does Bolnick define “evolution”? He doesn’t, thus introducing equivocation and vagueness into the discussion.
"Evolution" can refer to something as simple as minor changes within individual species that occur over short periods of time (Evolution #1), which no one denies. Others use “Evolution” to mean something much more far-reaching, such as claiming that all living organisms are descended from a single common ancestor (Evolution #2), or that natural selection is the driving force producing life’s complexity (Evolution #3). No one contests Evolution #1, and in fact there’s plenty of evidence for it in the scientific literature. But Evolution #2 and Evolution #3 are far more controversial. Unfortunately, Bolnick seems to be pulling the Evolution Bait-and-Switch, citing uncontroversial evidence for Evolution #1 as if it were evidence for Evolution #2 or #3.
Later, Bolnick discusses Evolution #3 and apparently the number of studies that document such "evolution" drop from "30,000" or "100,000" (I’m not sure which it is) down to "many," as he writes: "Many experimental studies demonstrate that natural selection and related processes can produce observed evolutionary changes." At this point, an example of one of these “many experimental studies” would be nice. But Bolnick prov |
