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.

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)

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Posted by Paul Nelson at 3:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Anika Smith at 11:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 7:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Note: For a comprehensive rebuttal to critics of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

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.

Click here to enter.

What did the critics think of Expelled? Watch and find out.

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.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

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.

Posted by Logan Gage at 7:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Nelson at 7:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 7:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Nelson at 10:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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).

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.

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.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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)

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.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Paul Nelson at 11:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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

Posted by Paul Nelson at 11:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Note: For a comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

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!

Posted by Edward Sisson at 12:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

. . . 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.

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.

So why is Leshner supporting proposed revisions that water down the teaching of evolution?

Posted by Robert Crowther at 2:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"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?

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."

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.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

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.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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 provides nothing of the sort. All we’re left with is claims of hugely impressive numbers of studies ("100,000," "30,000," or "many," take your pick) which support "evolution," a term which is not clearly defined.

Lessons 2 & 3: Re-label Evidence Against “Evolution” as Religion and Claim That Such Evidence Doesn’t Exist
Next, Bolnick teaches us two classic Darwinist lessons in one single sentence. He re-labels any scientific challenges to natural selection as religion (particularly, special creation) and claims that any evidence against natural selection doesn’t exist, writing: "In contrast, no scientific evidence exists showing that species were created separately or that natural processes can’t account for observed evolution."

Bolnick’s claim is easy to refute. Was the notoriously non-creationist National Academy of Sciences (NAS) biologist Lynn Margulis advocating special creation when she observed that "[the] Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric"? Of course not. In fact, Bolnick himself provides a wonderful illustration of the "religious ferocity" of the pro-natural-selection rhetoric that Margulis laments is bad for scientific progress.

Lesson 4: Dogmatically Assert the "Overwhelming" Evidence for Evolution (But Don't Discuss the Evidence)
We Darwin-skeptics are continually amused with the frequency that the word "overwhelming" is used to describe the alleged evidence for "evolution." Bolnick teaches us how to make this argument, stating, "There is virtually universal support among research biologists for the overwhelming scientific evidence behind evolution." If it’s so "overwhelming," why can’t he give us an example? His op-ed gives us no real discussion of the scientific evidence. He just wants us to believe the evidence for evolution is "overwhelming." Perhaps this gives a hint of how he wants evolution taught in public schools.

Actually, Bolnick does give one example of the evidence . . . sort of. He says that "millions of fossils (yes, millions) … clearly illustrate a history of evolution." (Millions? At this point I can't help but imagine Dr. Evil bringing his pinky up to his chin and answering, "yes, millions.") If there are "millions of fossils" supporting "evolution" (which again, he doesn't define), then surely he could give us an example. Again, none is given.

Instead, Bolnick goes on the offensive against Darwin's critics, stating that critics of evolution "claim that an incomplete fossil record disproves evolution." Bolnick must be taking his cues from the NAS’s recent booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism, which similarly makes the bizarre and false assertion that Darwin’s critics “cite what they claim to be an incomplete fossil record as evidence that living things were created in their modern forms.” This claim makes no sense and turns history on its head.

One would only appeal to the incompleteness of the fossil record if somehow the record posed problems for their viewpoint. Thus, it is the Darwinists who have historically used the excuse that the fossil record is "incomplete" to justify clinging to Darwinian change in the face of missing fossil transitions. After all, Darwin himself heavily promoted the argument that, "The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties." Stephen Jay Gould wrote that many evolutionists have adopted Darwin's excuse for the fossil record, stating that "Darwin's [imperfection] argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution directly."

The unwillingness of biologists to abandon the "imperfection" or "incompleteness" argument to explain away the lack of transitional forms was so severe that one of Gould’s students, evolutionary biologist David Woodruff, had to plead with other biologists to accept the fossil record at face value. As Woodruff wrote in a letter to Science, "Evolutionary biologists can no longer ignore the fossil record on the ground that it is imperfect."

In fact, it is well known that in many instances the fossil record is quite complete—adequate enough to show that new fossil forms appeared in abrupt explosions. Bolnick, however, gives a revisionist history of the situation designed to paper over the fact that the fossil record has posed major problems for Darwinian evolution.

Lesson 5: Change the Topic from Science to Religion
Rather than giving any scientific details, Bolnick tries to frame this issue as a religious war, stating, "Opponents also argue that accepting the science of evolution means rejecting faith in God." Contrast Bolnick's statement the measured response of Texas State Board of Education chair Don McElroy, whose op-ed was published alongside Bolnick’s piece. McElroy wrote that people like Bolnick say that teaching the weaknesses of evolution "will inject religion into the science classroom" but then suggests "Should they be concerned? No. This will not happen."

It sure doesn't sound like McElroy is turning this into a religious war. And it's amusing how it's the Darwinists who talk the most about religion in this debate. By trying to turn this into a religious issue, Darwinists try to avoid talking about the scientific evidence and instead use religious arguments for their position.

Lesson 6: Demonize your Opponents
Bolnick's last tactic he illustrates is how to demonize one's opponents, making the blanket charge that Darwin-skeptics "frequently distort published research from respected scientists in an effort to mislead the general public about the scientific consensus supporting evolution." But what we have seen is that Bolnick is the one making vague and dogmatic appeals to "overwhelming" evidence supported by "more than 100,000" papers, yet the only discussion he gives of the scientific evidence is flat wrong.

I won’t partake in Bolnick's demonization, but a few questions must be raised: If his position that students should learn no weaknesses of evolution is so strong, why must Bolnick resort to talking about religion, puffing about "overwhelming" evidence supporting "evolution," and demonization of his opponents? Why can’t he give any good examples of the evidence?

Bolnick's choices of rhetorical tactics tell us much about the strength of his position. I hope now it's a little clearer why Texas Darwinists like Bolnick use so many bad arguments to keep students from learning about the scientific weaknesses of evolution in public schools.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

ENV readers in Texas have the opportunity tomorrow night (Tuesday), to see Dr. William Dembski present a lecture on "Darwin's Unpaid Debt." The lecture will be held at Baylor University and is hosted by the American Scientific Affiliation's Baylor Chapter.

According to ASA-Baylor, this is what Dembski will speak on:

Natural selection is widely supposed to be an information ratchet that gradually accumulates the information organisms need to acquire novel adaptations. Yet natural selection is nothing of the sort. The Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation is a low-level trial-and-error method for solving routine problems that is unequipped to handle the innovative problems that biological systems have solved in the course of natural history. Darwinism and evolutionary biology more generally, committed as they are to unguided material mechanisms, do not have the resources to solve biology's information problem. This talk will indicate why biology's information problem is unresolvable apart from intelligent design.

Posted by Anika Smith at 9:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A ScienceNOW news release from last Thursday, October 16, states that re-analyses of the products of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey's famous origin of life experiments from the 1950s have shown that more amino acids were present than were previously thought. Origin of life theorist Robert Hazen is quoted saying the study "highlights how easy it is to make the building blocks of life in plausible prebiotic conditions."

But did the experiments use "plausible prebiotic conditions"? The news release acknowledges that ammonia and methane were "gases presumed at the time to be the main constituents of the atmosphere billions of years ago." (emphasis added) Even Miller himself admitted that he ASSUMED these atmospheres because they produced the desired result for origin of life research, NOT because of the actual physical evidence:

“It is assumed that amino acids more complex than glycene were required for the origin of life, then these results indicate a need for CH4 (methane) in the atmosphere.” (Stanley Miller and Gordon Schlesinger, "Prebiotic Synthesis in Atmospheres Containing CH₄, CO, and CO₂," Journal of Molecular Evolution, Vol. 19:376-382 (1983).)

"We believe that there must have been a period when the earth's atmosphere was reducing, because the synthesis of compounds of biological interest takes place only under reducing conditions." (Stanley L. Miller, and Leslie E. Orgel, The Origins of Life on the Earth, pg. 33 (Prentice Hall, 1974).)

Regardless of how many chemical products useful to origin of life theorists came out of Miller’s experiments, many sources have shown that the earth’s early atmosphere was mainly composed largely of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and nitrogen (N₂), NOT methane or ammonia, as Miller's experiments required. The geochemical evidence is very clear on this point: the news release even admits, "The problem was that theoretical models and analyses of ancient rocks eventually convinced scientists that Earth's earliest atmosphere was not rich in hydrogen," and the Science paper admits, "Geoscientists today doubt that the primitive atmosphere had the highly reducing composition." Thinking along these same lines, leading origin of life theorist David Deamer observed that, "Carbon dioxide does not support the rich array of synthetic pathways leading to possible monomers, so the question arose again: what was the primary source of organic carbon compounds?" (Microbio. & Mol. Bio. Reviews, 61(2):239-261.)

A Local Volcanic Origin of Life?
The original excitement produced by the Miller-Urey experiment stemmed from the fact that it might indicate a vast primordial soup, filled with interacting organic molecules, and sufficient to overcome any great odds associated with the origin of life. After all, just last month Deamer said when asked about the "origin of the gene" that "genetic information more or less came out of nowhere by chance assemblages of short polymers." So chance still plays a big role in origin of life thinking, and one must somehow accumulate sufficient probabilistic resources to satisfy the mandates of "chance."

Since the earth's atmosphere is clearly not conducive to Miller-Urey type chemistry, the vast primordial soup hypothesis was abandoned. The ScienceNow news release suggests that instead, "It is possible that volcanoes, which were much more active early in Earth's history, seeded our planet with life's ingredients." Similarly, the paper states that "the volcanic apparatus experiment suggests that, even if the overall atmosphere was not reducing, localized prebiotic synthesis could have been effective."

But how will you get such localized highly reducing conditions in a few places on earth with a non-reducing atmosphere everywhere? In a paragraph in the Science paper describing such speculation, there is one "may" and four "coulds." Even if the "mays" and "coulds" imply a "did," such a scenario greatly reduces the amount of primordial soup to little localized pockets near island arc volcanoes, vastly reducing the ability to meet the odds required by Deamer's "chance."

I doubt that producing little localized collections of pre-biotic soup around island-arc volcanoes can produce anything remotely close to the amount of primordial soup needed to overcome the odds facing the chemical production of life. Having sufficient primordial soup to overcome the odds facing the chemical origin of life is especially important in light of the fact that origin of life scenarios still rely upon chance. But...

"The big question is what happened next"
Even if these experiments did use "plausible prebiotic conditions," they're millions of miles away from making life. Stanley Miller himself conceded in an undergraduate seminar I took from him at UCSD that "making compounds and making life are two different things." He's made statements to a similar effect publicly:

Even Miller throws up his hands at certain aspects of it. The first step, making the monomers, that’s easy. We understand it pretty well. But then you have to make the first self-replicating polymers. That’s very easy, he says, the sarcasm fairly dripping. Just like it’s easy to make money in the stock market--all you have to do is buy low and sell high. He laughs. Nobody knows how it’s done.

(Peter Radetsky, "How Did Life Start?" Discover Magazine at http://discovermagazine.com/1992/nov/howdidlifestart153/)

Perhaps all this explains why origin of life theorists are so excited about these new reports of more amino acids from Miller’s outdated and highly implausible experiment: they’re a bit over-eager for some good news.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It looks like the Texas media are already biting on the so-called "controversy" of Explore Evolution authors Meyer and Seelke being included on the state's Science Standards Review Panel.

Yesterday News 8 Austin, a local CNN affiliate, ran a story, "Intelligent design debate brews controversy in Texas," where in the first ten seconds of the video, the anchor introducing the story says that "one human rights organization is up in arms over the inclusion of several intelligent design scientists on the state's curriculum review panel."

Wow, a human rights organization... that's impressive. I'm thinking Amnesty International must be all over this issue.

What, you say, the group the news is referring to is actually the Texas Freedom Network? Oh. That's a bit confusing... I didn't realize that maintaining ignorance on evolution was a human right. My mistake.

The rest of it is interesting, if a little funny. ("Move over science books, another may be on the way." Because our bookshelves are too crowded? Should I tell Ken Miller to stop with his 17th edition of Biology?)

The story does let both sides of the issue speak, though there's some interesting interpretation of what they actually said.

"Intelligent design is essentially an undermining of the theory of evolution and sound science in our public schools, and we're deeply disturbed by that," TFN's President Kathy Miller said.

One of the three targeted by TFN, panelist Dr. Ralph Seelke is a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

"Simply allowing the student to look at scientific evidence for and against something, that is not by any means, by any stretch of the imagination teaching intelligent design--which I do not want," Seelke said.

Seelke said it's important for students to look at all theories on how life came about and not just evolution.

Posted by Anika Smith at 10:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

AUSTIN, TX – The Chicken Littles at the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) are ranting that the sky is falling because two of the six experts selected to review the state's science standards co-authored Explore Evolution, a textbook that examines both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution (www.exploreevolution.com).

What the TFN doesn't reveal is that another of the expert reviewers co-authored a one-sided, Darwin-only textbook! David Hillis, a biology professor at UT Austin co-authored the 2008 edition of Life: The Science of Biology, a textbook whose previous editions have been approved for use in Texas high schools. Hillis also serves as a spokesman for a pro-evolution lobbying group that is trying to remove language in the Texas science standards requiring students to study the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories. Gerald Skoog, another expert reviewer, has signed a statement issued by the same pro-evolution group, and he too has been a science textbook author and has a long history as a pro-Darwin activist.

"If being a textbook author really is a 'conflict of interest,' then why isn't TFN attacking Hillis and Skoog?" asked Casey Luskin, program officer for public policy and legal affairs at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. "In truth, textbook authors are precisely some of the experts who should be having input into science curriculum standards."

"TFN and other Darwinist activists are manufacturing a controversy because they don’t want a serious examination of the science standards, especially of their effort to gut the 'strengths and weaknesses' language. What are they afraid of?" asked Luskin.

"We think it’s fantastic that Dr. Meyer and Dr. Seelke have been invited to review the Texas science standards and explain why students should learn both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories," added Luskin. "And we also think it's great that people like Dr. Hillis and Dr. Gerald Skoog were chosen. Unlike the TFN, we think the state board of education should be applauded for choosing a diverse group of scientific reviewers. Getting honest input from science experts with diverse views is imperative if we’re going to build a world-class educational system."

Both Dr. Meyer and Dr. Seelke are practiced reviewers having been involved in other states' standards review processes. Dr. Meyer has previously been invited by the states of Ohio and Kansas to testify on their science standards.

Dr. Meyer is director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, and earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin of life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences.

Dr. Seelke received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine and has been an Associate Professor or Professor in the Department of Biology and Earth Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Superior since 1989 where he researches evolution’s capabilities and limitations in producing new functions in bacteria.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Late last year, a media firestorm erupted after the resignation of Texas Education Agency (TEA) science curriculum director Christine Comer. Evolution activists and media outlets both suggested that Comer was forced out of the TEA to silence her views supporting evolution after she used her official email account to publicize a propagandistic lecture by anti-ID activist and New Orleans Secular Humanist Association board member Barbara Forrest. Comer subsequently was portrayed as a veritable martyr for the pro-evolution cause, and her case received additional media attention earlier this year when she sued the TEA claiming unjust termination in violation of the Constitution.

But now it looks like Comer isn’t a martyr after all. Internal TEA documents released earlier today by Texans for Better Science Education show that Comer had a long history of disciplinary problems at her agency that had nothing to do with evolution. According to the TBSE press release, the documents show:

• Multiple findings of “insubordination” and “misconduct[.]”
  
• Reference to possible violation of the Texas Penal Code over payments made to Comer from entities receiving TEA money under contracts she administered.
  
• Comer received three separate disciplinary letters spanning at least eight separate incidents. Seven of these eight incidents had nothing to do with evolution.
  
• Comer had been disciplined and charged with “insubordination” because she repeatedly disregarded the TEA’s strict rule that staff must remain neutral and silent regarding unsettled curricular questions. Comer was charged with insubordination for violating this rule on issues that had nothing to do with evolution. In her last year alone at the TEA, Comer was found by superiors to be guilty of “insubordination” or “misconduct” on three separate occasions, including one incident where she disparaged the TEA leadership publicly.
  

It will be revealing to see how many media organizations cover this new information, especially those at the national level. Media outlets like the New York Times (see here and here and here) trumpeted Comer as a supposed victim of anti-evolution intolerance, even as they turned a blind eye to the widespread persecution of scientists and teachers who support intelligent design or are critical of Darwinism.

Now that there is evidence Comer was not in fact targeted for her views on evolution, will these same media organizations report the other side?

Posted by John West at 5:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Note: For a comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, check out NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

Follow Ben Stein's lead and sign the Academic Freedom Petition at www.academicfreedompetition.com today.

You can help by signing the Academic Freedom Petition and stand up for free speech and free scientific inquiry.

Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed will be released on DVD next week. Pre-order your copy here.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It seems that dogmatic Darwinists will now applaud efforts to consistently suppress scientific criticism of modern evolutionary theory. The winner is a biology professor at University of Minnesota. If you guessed the infamous PZ Myers, guess again, because this year's most dogmatic Darwinist is Randy Moore.

"The evidence supporting evolution is overwhelming and comes from diverse disciplines, such as molecular biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, ethology, and biochemistry. There is no controversy among biologists about whether evolution occurs, nor are there science-based alternative theories," states Dr. Moore. "Evolution is a unifying theme in biology; teaching it as such is the best way to show students what biology is about and how they can use evolution as a tool to understand our world. [Evolution] is as important an idea as there is in science – it is a great gift to give to students," says Dr. Moore.

In accepting his award, Moore manages to make a number of mistakes.

First, the evidence supporting evolution isn't as overwhelming or mountainous as Moore claims. Jonathan Wells proved this with Icons of Evolution which still causes conniption fits for Darwinists. More recently, the new supplementary biology text from Hill House Publishers, Explore Evolution, provides the case for and against Darwinian evolution and raises significant challenges to Darwinism in anatomical homology, molecular biology, and embryology, just to name a few.

Second, there's no knowing what Moore means when he says there's "no controversy among biologists about whether evolution occurs" because he doesn't clarify what he means by evolution. Obviously there is no controversy over microevolution, change over time. But there is huge controversy among scientists over evolution if you mean macroevolution. Witness the Dissent from Darwin list, where hundreds of scientists proclaim their skepticism.

Third, Darwinian evolution is not a theory of everything. To claim it the unifying theory of all biology is laughable. Simply consider the Altenberg conference just this past summer and it's clear that Darwinian evolution is on the ropes, not on the rise.

Fourth, just saying there are no "science-based alternative theories" doesn't make it so. Just look to scientific theories such as intelligent design, self-organization, endosymbiotic theory and so on.

As CSC Fellow Jonathan Witt once pointed out:

To shut down debate, other tactics are needed. A favorite is to assure people that Darwinism underpins all of modern biology. Many people of good will strongly believe this, but they are mistaken.

A.S. Wilkins, a leading evolutionary biologist, concedes this point. "The subject of evolution occupies a special, and paradoxical, place within biology as a whole," he wrote. "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas. Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

Posted by Robert Crowther at 11:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

At ID The Future there have been a number of interesting interviews recently broadcast with a wide variety of scientists, scholars, and educators who have their doubts about Darwinian evolution.

University of Warwick sociologist Steve Fuller, the author of the recent book, Dissent Over Descent discusses topics from his book and explains the nature and problem of a scientific consensus on controversial topics. Fuller argues that intelligent design is not anti-science (just anti-establishment), as biological study continues to become more like an engineering project, it will be harder for scientists to deny that life is intelligently designed. Listen as Fuller addresses why there is, in fact, dissent over descent.

CSC Fellow Ray Bohlin earned his Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of Texas at Dallas. During his academic studies Bohlin developed doubts about evolution that he then explored in his book, The Natural Limits to Biological Change written in 1984. Listen as he explains his skepticism of evolution and offers advice for emerging scientific doubters of Darwin.

Rodney LeVake, a former high school biology teacher, informally expressed doubts about evolution to a colleague who then reported him to the principal. LeVake ended up losing his biology position, not because he taught creationism or intelligent design, but because he committed a thought crime by doubting Darwinism. Listen to part one as he tells his story of clear academic persecution. Listen to part two as he continues his story, explaining the law suit and what happened afterwards.

ID The Future is a podcast that explores issues central to the case for intelligent design, from the Big Bang to the bacterial flagellum and beyond. It features commentary and analysis of science and news as well as interviews with scientists and scholars about the debate over evolution and intelligent design.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A news item posted October 7 on EcoWorldly announces:

Scientists Discover Fish in Act of Evolution in Africa's Greatest Lake.
In a report published in the journal Nature, researchers from Tokyo's Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology have observed the cichlid evolve into a new species better adapted in sighting its prey and predator.

But the researchers did not observe the origin of a new species. They did what biologists have been doing for a long time: They analyzed differences in existing species to find evidence to support a particular hypothesis of speciation. Anyone who reads the news report carefully finds this:

Researchers looked at two species, conspicuous by their red or blue colours. They determined through lab experiments that certain genetic mutations helped some fish adapt their vision at deeper levels to see the colour red and others in shallower water to recognise shades of blue.

This is just another episode in what I call in my Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design "one long bluff"—to distinguish it from Darwin's "one long argument," as he called The Origin of Species. The truth is that no one has ever observed—or at least, has never reported in the scientific literature—the origin of a new species by Darwin's mechanism of variation and natural selection. The first step in Darwinian evolution, which Darwinists have called "evolution's smoking gun" and without which nothing else follows, has never been found.

As Phillip E. Johnson wrote in 1999 in The Wall Street Journal, "When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they are in trouble."

Posted by Jonathan Wells at 1:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you missed seeing Expelled in theaters last spring, relax. Expelled will be out on DVD Tuesday, October 21st.

"Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way," says Stein. "Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. Its anti-the whole concept of learning."

Go here for more on Expelled.

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

During their opening statements in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, the plaintiffs argued that "there is no such thing as a little constitutional violation," and thus Dover's requirement that biology teachers read to students a short 4-paragraph statement that briefly mentioned intelligent design (ID) could be unconstitutional. (See Trial Transcript, Day 1, pg. 13.) But this is not how attorneys defending the pro-evolution UC Berkeley Evolution website argued in the Caldwell v. Caldwell lawsuit, where the 9th Circuit recently ruled that a parent could not sue because she had suffered no "injury in fact," even though she had observed government-endorsement of pro-evolution theology on a government-sponsored website. Apparently when Darwinists themselves face accusations of violating the establishment clause, they happily fall back to arguing that a "little constitutional violation" is not really a constitutional violation at all.

But this is only the beginning of hypocrisy highlighted by this case: Darwinists often attack ID for allegedly making religious arguments, but in this case, it was the Darwinists who were making religious arguments for evolution. The website at issue was created to assist teachers in teaching evolution. What it really did was help teachers promote pro-evolution religious viewpoints in the classroom. The website claimed that it is a "misconception" to believe that "evolution and religion incompatible," showing a cute graphic of a priest and a scientist holding hands, and referring readers to religious groups who endorse evolution. (Of course, it linked to no religious viewpoints that oppose evolution.) Can you imagine the outcry if the government told teachers that it is correct to teach "evolution and religion are incompatible" and then referred teachers to statements by conservative Christian denominations that oppose evolution?

Darwinists want to have it both ways: When the government supports ID, they want you to believe it unconstitutionally endorses a religious viewpoint and “there is no such thing as a little constitutional violation,” but when the Darwinists use the government to promote pro-evolution religious viewpoints on government-funded websites, they get off because there is no "injury in fact."

The "Little Constitutional Violation"
A parent, Jeanne Caldwell, brought a lawsuit against the administrators behind the UC Berkeley Evolution website because one of its pages endorses pro-evolution religious viewpoints. According to the 9th Circuit's recent ruling in the case, the plaintiff contends that the website unconstitutionally endorses the following religious viewpoints:

Justify Censorship on the Back of Your Car Today: The "Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It" Bumper Sticker!

"Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It"
Before delving further into Ravitch's conclusions, it must be noted that his entire argument depends on his claim that ID is not science but rather is religion, and huge portions of his argument in this regard cite to the Kitzmiller ruling. To justify his censorship, Ravitch essentially adopts the "Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It" approach to ID (see above). But Judge Jones is unlikely to be the final word on the constitutionality of teaching ID, for just some problems with the Kitzmiller ruling include the facts that Judge Jones:

Employed a false definition of ID that presumed that ID requires “supernatural creation” – a position that ID proponents who testified in court refuted during the trial;

Ignored the positive case for ID and falsely claimed that ID proponents make their case solely by arguing against evolution;

Overstepped the bounds of the judiciary and engaged in judicial activism by declaring that ID had been refuted, when in fact the judge was presented with credible scientific witnesses and publications on both sides, showing evidence of a scientific debate;

Used poor philosophy of science by presuming that being wrong precludes being scientific;

Dangerously stifled scientific advance by taking the level of support for a theory as a measure of whether an idea is scientific;

Blatantly ignored and denied the existence of pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific publications that were in fact testified about in his own courtroom;

Blatantly ignored and denied the existence of pro-ID scientific research and data that was in fact testified about in his own courtroom;

Adopted an unjust double-standard of legal analysis where religious implications, beliefs, motives, and affiliations count against ID but never against Darwinism;

(For more elaboration, see Traipsing Into Evolution (Discovery Institute Press, 2006) and also in “Intelligent Design will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover” (Montana Law Review, Winter, 2007).)

Now that we've reviewed some of the deficiencies in Ravitch's primary legal authority, let's further review his arguments.

The Poisonous Fruit of Kitzmiller
Ravitch argues that since administrators are given broad discretion by courts to restrict academic freedom when they fear an establishment of religion in the science classroom, that "university officials, as well as departmental curriculum committees, can exclude the teaching of ID if they choose to."

According to the case law cited by Ravitch, administrators are given discretion to restrict faculty speech merely because of the fear of an Establishment Clause violation, not because one has actually occurred. For example, Ravitch cites Bishop v. Aranov, 926 F.2d 1066 (11th Cir. 1991), which did not reach the question of whether a university faculty member had actually established religion through his in-classroom instruction. Rather, the Bishop court held that if university administrators have reasonable fears about religion coming into in-class instruction, they may restrict faculty speech.

In other words, courts put the decisions about academic freedom and religious establishment into the hands of administrators ... not the courts. Under such case law, if you're a university faculty member, the Constitution does not say "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," but rather it effectively says, "If your administrator reasonably fears you are establishing religion, they have the power to shut you up regardless of whether you are actually advancing religion in the classroom." People who care about freedom of speech should feel troubled by such case law.

Such case law bodes well for jurists like Ravitch who seek means to censor ID from science classes: nevermind the question of whether ID actually is religion, all this argument needs to justify censoring ID is some administrator who fears that ID is religion. And blindly saying "Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It," could provide the judicially necessary air of "reasonableness" to those fears, wrong as the Kitzmiller ruling may be. Thus, relying entirely upon Judge Jones, Ravitch contends that ID is religion, and therefore a university administrator may shut it down at his or her own discretion.

But what if a faculty member genuinely believes that ID is science, but some complaining administrator tries to shut her down because they believe ID is religion? Is there academic freedom for scientists who disagree with Judge Jones and believe that ID is science? Ravitch makes no defense for academic freedom for scientists who believe that ID is science, essentially capitulating to a federal judge (Judge Jones) to dictate what effectively counts and doesn't count as science in the university setting.

People who care about academic freedom for dissenting scientific viewpoints, and who care about the autonomy of the scientific community, should be very troubled at such reasoning.

Not "May"--University Administrators "Must" Censor ID
Ravitch argues that university administrators should not just have the right to shut down faculty who advocate ID, but they have the obligation to shut it down. According to Ravitch, "ID is a religiously motivated theory" and therefore "public universities and science departments may preclude ID from being taught in science classes." Ravitch then says that, "Establishment Clause concerns could make this 'may' a 'must.'" Thus Ravitch's argument is that if a scientist has personal religious beliefs and motives, he therefore cannot advocate his views to students in the university classroom setting.

This argument turns the First Amendment—which guarantees the "free exercise" of religion—on its head. If the religious motives of ID proponents count against ID, then why don't the anti-religious motives of leading Darwinists count against teaching Darwinism? After all, many leading Darwinists have expressed anti-religious motives:

Eugenie Scott is a public signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto, an aggressive statement of the humanist agenda to create a world with “without supernaturalism” based upon the view that “[h]umans are … the result of unguided evolutionary change” and the universe is “self-existing.”

Richard Dawkins is Oxford University’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and is probably the most famous evolutionist in the world. Yet Dawkins argues that belief in God is a “delusion” and that "Darwin made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Dawkins has stated his goal is “to kill religion” and when he received an award from the American Humanist Association, he declared that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”

Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, who has been a public advocate of teaching evolution in a one-sided pro-Darwin-only dogmatic fashion in public schools, says that “I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I’m all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life, is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science—to free people from superstition" and hopes that "this is something to which science can contribute ... it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”

These scientists are by no means alone in their views. In November, 2006 the New York Times covered a conference held at the scientific research hub The Salk Institute. The story reported a striking agenda on the part of leading scientists present at the conference to stifle religious belief in order to promote Darwinism to the public: “one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief.” The scientists were worried that evolution by natural selection and other views are “losing out in the intellectual marketplace” and one scientist sarcastically said the viewpoints “have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

I do not raise these examples to argue that one cannot accept evolution and religion or to argue that neo-Darwinism is not science. And I should note that these anti-religious advocates of evolution have every right to hold their anti-religious beliefs and motives. But these examples expose the intense hypocrisy and failure of Ravitch's harping upon the alleged religious motives of ID proponents. If Ravitch wants to argue that the religious motives of ID proponents make it unfit for the college classroom, he should consider what would happen if a fair court scrutinized the anti-religious motives of many leading neo-Darwinists.

Ravitch tries to Take Censorship All the Way
Ravitch doesn't just want ID out of university science classrooms. He argues that university science departments should be able to "exclude ID research from any support or recognition." Ravitch is generous enough (note: sarcasm) to concede that faculty could not have their tenure revoked simply because they do pro-ID research. Nonetheless, he argues that science departments could restrict academic freedom for scientists who do pro-ID research (by denying tenure, research support, etc.) because a science department could "simply decide that ID is not science, and therefore that ID research has no place in a science department." He continues:

"This Article asserts that the general standards of science departments, which include peer review, publication, and grant requirements, would enable a public university science department to deny tenure, research support, merit increases, and other forms of support and recognition to those whose research focuses on ID."

(Frank S. Ravitch, "Intelligent Design in Public University Science Departments: Academic Freedom or Establishment of Religion," 16 William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 1061 (April, 2008).)

Ravitch doesn't answer this question, but I'll try: Guillermo Gonzalez was an untenured assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State University (ISU) who happened to be pro-ID, and his support for ID played a major role in his denial of tenure last year. But ID wasn't his primary focus of research--he was a highly published authority on stellar metallicity. He also didn't teach about ID in the classroom. The only work he did on ID was a book, The Privileged Planet, that covered ID in only cosmology and was highly praised by various eminent scientists.

So here we have a highly published scientist who was denied tenure not because his research was about ID (it wasn't), and not because he taught ID in the classroom (he didn't), but simply because he supported ID. Gonzalez's situation was even less controversial than the hypothetical professor described by Ravitch, and yet Gonzalez was denied tenure. It seems that Ravitch's strategy for banishing the pro-ID viewpoint from the academy is already being implemented--and for far lesser thought-crimes than the scenario he describes.

At Gonzalez's university, the faculty handbook said that academic freedom is the "foundation of the university," and yet he was denied tenure. Those who care about academic freedom should be very troubled at these developments.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, in Part 1 of this 3-part series observing Banned Books Week, I recounted successful attempts to censor pro-intelligent design (ID) books from public school libraries, with high praise for such efforts from academia. But libraries, of course, aren't the only location where Darwinists have tried to ban pro-ID materials. In 2005, Darwinists successfully banned both pro-ID books and pro-ID viewpoints from both the library and the classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania. While public support for ID has remained high even after the Dover trial, this incident sadly motivated other Darwinists around the U.S. to go out and recreate little Dovers within their own spheres of influence. For example, in the wake of the Dover incident, the president of the University of Idaho instituted a campus-wide classroom speech-code, where “evolution” was “the only curriculum that is appropriate” for science classes. Endorsing his actions, the head of the University of Idaho's biochemistry department said, “We’ve been careful to make sure people aren’t going into the classroom saying, you’ve gotta’ think about ‘intelligent design’.” In this second installment of our series observing Banned Books Week, we repost below an article I published earlier this year in Salvo Magazine that tells some other stories of Dover-inspired censorship, titled, "Has ID Been Banned from Public Schools?":

By Casey Luskin, Salvo Magazine, Issue 4, Winter 2008.

For Americans, nothing sparks more interest in an idea than an attempt to ban it. Thus, in an odd twist of fate, intelligent-design (ID) proponents might want to thank the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for what they did during the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case.

In 2004, plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the Dover Area School District seeking an order "requiring the removal” of the mere favorable mention of intelligent design and a pro-ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, from Dover science classrooms. With the ACLU’s help, the plaintiffs were successful.

But has ID therefore been banned from all US schools? No. In our three-tiered system of federal courts, the Kitzmiller ruling was issued by the lowest level, a federal trial court. No other court ruling has squarely dealt with the constitutionality of teaching ID. Thus, despite all its fanfare, the Kitzmiller ruling only applies to the parties in that case; no other public-school district in the United States is subject to the judge’s ruling banning ID. Moreover, in the wake of the ACLU’s Kitzmiller lawsuit, interest in ID seems to be on the rise across America.

The same year that the ACLU successfully banned ID in Dover, the highly regarded scientific journal Nature featured a cover story on a worldwide student movement of "Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Clubs” that are supporting free discussion about ID on college and high-school campuses. Nature reported that "despite researchers’ apparent lack of interest, or perhaps because of it, the movement is catching on among students on US university campuses.”

Surveys confirm that interest in ID remains high. One survey published in the midst of the Dover lawsuit found that 74 percent of Americans have an intelligent-design viewpoint, and 82 percent want ID and/or creationism taught in public schools. Another survey taken just a few months after the Kitzmiller ruling found that over 77 percent of American voters agree that when evolution is taught, "students should also be able to learn about scientific evidence that points to an intelligent design of life.”

But just as the Kitzmiller case sparked interest in ID, it also motivated forces seeking to extinguish it. During the Dover trial, the president of the University of Idaho wrote to faculty, staff, and students that "evolution” was "the only curriculum that is appropriate” for "life, earth, and physical science courses or curricula.” More recently, Cornell’s interim president Hunter Rawlings devoted his State of the University Address to calmly attacking intelligent design as a "religious belief” and an "invasion” to be resisted by the faculty.

A student-led IDEA Club on Cornell’s campus immediately responded. "Attacking ID as a non-scientist and without addressing its scientific claims,” wrote the IDEA Club in a press release, "Rawlings states that it is religion masquerading as science.” The Cornell students argued that "this gross misstatement is a disservice to unbiased discourse” and concluded: "We would hope Rawlings will instead follow Cornell’s often lauded commitment to a free and open exchange of ideas.”

Some Cornell faculty heard these students’ call for free and open discussion. In the summer of 2006, Cornell’s biology department sponsored a class that dealt solely with intelligent design. The course was taught by an anti-ID biologist, but it was attended by students of many viewpoints and resulted in lively discussion and debate. Dozens of other colleges have now offered courses touching upon ID. It seems that the ACLU did not successfully kill off interest in ID after all.

There’s one last tale to be told regarding the Kitzmiller lawsuit and the banning of ID. Wikipedia has developed a reputation for being a biased and inaccurate source, especially when it comes to controversial issues such as ID. After the ACLU banned Of Pandas and People from Dover science classrooms, one Wikipedia user dared to take seriously Wikipedia’s encouragement to be "bold when updating articles”: He added the Pandas textbook to a page listing banned books.

Anticipating the intellectual lure of banned ideas, Wikipedia’s editors then removed the Pandas textbook from the banned-books page and locked the page from further edits, alleging it had been "vandalized.” Pointing out that ID has been banned is called a Wiki-crime, and banned pro-ID textbooks apparently must be banned from pages listing banned books.

In the wake of the ACLU’s lawsuit attempting to ban ID, student interest in the subject has only increased. No doubt the debate will continue over whether to allow ID in science classrooms or to ban it, but you can’t negate the evidence for design in biology through book bannings, speech codes, or judicial declarations. The ACLU has helped many people realize precisely this fact.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Get your banned intelligent design books: Darwin's Black Box: Darwin on Trial:

"Consider the experience of two librarians who received copies of two intelligent design books, Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe and Darwin on Trial by Philip Johnson, as donations to their high school collections. When the librarians refused to put the books on the school library shelves, they were accused of censorship. In fact, exercising their professional judgment, they concluded that these books had 'little or no value to our students and come from those with ulterior motives.'"

(Stephen A. Newman, “Evolution and the Holy Ghost of Scopes: Can Science Lose the Next Round?,” 8.2 Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion (Spring, 2007), internal citations removed.)

Newman's Newspeak
In George Orwell's famous book 1984, the authorities create a new language called "Newspeak," which changed the meaning of English words in order to control the thoughts of the people. For example, according to the Newspeak Dictionary, the "Chocorat," or chocolate ration, was defined as follows:

"1: The chocolate ration in 1983 was 30 grams per week. (standard Hershey Bar is 43 grams)
2: In the year 1984, the chocolate ration went up to 25 grams per week."

Earlier this year, the popular blog Little Green Footballs (LGF) made an outrageous attempt to link Discovery Institute to the Muslim creationist Harun Yahya (a.k.a. Adnan Oktar). Their post claimed, “Discovery Institute is in league with Islamist creationists, a fact that is indisputably true,” specifically mentioning Yahya / Oktar ("just happens to be a former volunteer for Harun Yahya"). Discovery Institute's president Bruce Chapman dignified their charges with a forceful refutation, but LGF’s reply to Mr. Chapman was basically a string of ad hominem attacks that relied on a tenuous chain of distorted and incomplete facts. If there was any doubt left that Discovery Institute and Islamic creationists are not "in league," consider a recent interview with Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar in Der Spiegel where he expressed his strong dislike for intelligent design (ID):

SPIEGEL ONLINE: To what extent were you influenced by the Christian fundamentalists from American and Europe, from the proponents of so-called Intelligent Design?

Oktar: I find this concept of Intelligent Design somewhat dishonest. One should straightforwardly believe in the existence of Allah, one should stand up for Religion, whether for Islam or Christianity. The concept of Intelligent Design claims that things were somehow created but not by whom. One should clearly say: It was Allah.

(Original Der Spiegel "INTERVIEW MIT HARUN YAHYA" in German, September 22, 2008, translation provided by a friend)

Yet Yahya is not the only creationist to oppose intelligent design. Old earth Christian creationist Hugh Ross has criticized ID saying, “Winning the argument for design without identifying the designer yields, at best, a sketchy origins model.” Young earth creationist leader Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research wrote that intelligent design, "even if well-meaning and effectively articulated, will not work ... because it is not the Biblical method." And Carl Wieland of Answers in Genesis ("AiG") says that "AiG's major 'strategy' is to boldly, but humbly, call the church back to its Biblical foundations” and therefore AiG does not “count ourselves a part of this movement nor campaign against it."

Addressing Misconceptions about ID
These creationists are absolutely right that ID does not try to address religious questions about the identity of the designer and does not use biblical or religious methodologies in making its case for design in nature. Of course, creationist groups can employ a religious methodology if that is what they desire to do, but intelligent design is different: ID takes a strictly scientific approach to studying origins. While some people may see that as a weakness, I have always seen that as a strength of ID.

And while some creationists seem to appreciate ID's scientific methodology and understand why ID does not try to address religious questions about the identity of the designer, others like Yahya apparently do not grasp ID’s approach: The refusal of ID proponents to use ID to draw scientific conclusions about the nature or identity of the designer is principled rather than merely rhetorical. It has nothing to do with being "dishonest"; rather, ID's non-identification of the designer stems from a desire to take a scientific approach, respect the limits of scientific inquiry, and not inject religious discussions about theological questions into science.

In short, ID as a scientific theory does not identify the designer because under present scientific knowledge and technology, there is no known scientific method for identifying the intelligent source responsible for design in nature. Thus for the scientific theory of ID to try to identify the designer would be to inappropriately conflate science with religion. Thomas Woodward explains the principled reasons why the current biological evidence for ID is insufficient to 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 empirical data, such as the information-rich, integrated complexity of the flagellar machine, may indicate that the flagellum arose by intelligent design. But that same empirical data does not inform us whether the intelligence that designed the flagellum is Yahweh, Allah, Buddha, Yoda, or some other type of intelligent agency. There is no known way to use such empirical data to determine the nature or identity of the designer, and since ID is based solely upon empirical data, the scientific theory of ID must remain silent on such questions.

In contrast to the claims of Yahya, ID’s non-identification of the designer has nothing to do with being “dishonest.” Yet many ID proponents (including me) have been extremely open about our personal views on the identity of the designer, but we have made it clear that these are our personal religious views and not the conclusions of intelligent design. In this regard, I have encountered ID-proponents who are openly Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, agnostic, or other. For further discussion and documentation, please read "Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why Intelligent Design Doesn't Identify the Designer," where I explain that, “I too believe the designer is the God of the Bible, but this is not a conclusion of ID; it is my personal religious view that stems from factors outside of intelligent design.”

As I noted, intelligent design’s non-identification of the designer stems from an intent to respect the limits of scientific inquiry and not make claims that go beyond what can be learned using scientific methods. Any fair analysis of the situation will come to the following conclusions:

Texas Darwinists are afraid of language in the Texas Science Standards that requires students to learn about the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, justifying their fear by claiming that when it comes to neo-Darwinian evolution, “[t]here may be some questions that may yet to be answered, but nothing that's to the level of a weakness.” Nothing that’s to the level of a weakness? That’s a pretty dogmatic and unscientific claim. If this Texas Darwinist is right, then I suppose that these comments by leading scientists must not show that there is anything that rises “to the level of a weakness” in neo-Darwinian evolution:

“We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.” -- Franklin Harold, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Colorado State University, in an Oxford University Press text.

“Darwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit. None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false. It does, however, mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs.” --U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell

"[The] Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric." --National Academy of Sciences member Lynn Margulis

“Mutations have a very limited ‘constructive capacity’ … No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.” --Past president of the French Academy of Sciences Pierre-Paul Grasse

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” --Late American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould

“Phylogenetic incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branchings within and among the various taxa to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves.” --The father of molecular systematics, Carl Woese

“Most of the animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear, 'fully formed,' in the Cambrian … The fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla." --Invertebrate Zoology Textbook

“It remains a mystery how the undirected process of mutation, combined with natural selection, has resulted in the creation of thousands of new proteins with extraordinarily diverse and well optimized functions. This problem is particularly acute for tightly integrated molecular systems that consist of many interacting parts…”
--Two leading biologists in Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics

“New species usually appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates.” --Eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr

I think that Texas Board of Education chair Don McLeroy was right to say that the requirement to teach students the “strengths and weaknesses” should be left in. As McLeroy said, "Evolution shouldn't have anything to worry about — if there's no weaknesses, there's no weaknesses." What are the Darwinists afraid of? A little critical analysis of evolution never hurt anyone who had the evidence on their side.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The latest from the Associated Press out in Texas (via Houston Chronicle) reports that "Scientists from Texas universities on Tuesday denounced what they called supernatural and religious teaching in public school science classrooms and voiced opposition to attempts to water down evolution instruction."

We covered the Texas science standards last week, noting that Darwinists there oppose teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.

In the AP article, no explanation is given for their opposition to the "strengths and weaknesses" language except the unsupported claim that thoroughly examining Darwin's theory in the classroom is something only creationists do.

Actually, AP reporter Kelley Shannon is pretty sure that the whole thing is a creationist ploy to teach religion in our schools. That's why she makes a point of giving credibility to the several Darwinists in the story before calling McLeroy a creationist, then discrediting the position she assigned him:

The Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based group that says it monitors the influence of the religious right, also praises the proposed language change.

But they say they fear State Board of Education members, led by chairman and creationist Don McLeroy, will switch the language back before the final vote.

Even at Baylor University in Waco, the world's largest Baptist university, professors don't teach creationism because it's not based on science, said Richard Duhrkopf, an associate professor of biology.

"Texas students need to understand what science is and what its limitation are," McLeroy said Tuesday, repeating part of an opinion piece he wrote in August. "I look at evolution as still a hypothesis with weaknesses." (emphasis added)

McLeroy has a legitimate argument, but reporters who couch support for teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution as mere creationism will not be satisfied with arguments. They want the narrative they're planning on, you know, the one where lots of scientists stand up to the Crazy Creationists and Their Clever Code:

Federal courts have ruled against forcing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design. So teaching the strengths and weaknesses of theories such as evolution has become "code" for pushing religion-based ideas in schools, said Dan Quinn, spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network.

"It's time for the State Board of Education to listen to experts instead of promoting their own personal and political agendas," Quinn said.

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