Dr. Jerry Coyne is a prominent evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively about the Darwinism/intelligent design controversy, and he is highly critical of I.D. Recently in The New Republic, he published a review of two books: “Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution” By Karl W. Giberson and “Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul” By Kenneth R. Miller. Dr. Coyne’s review, entitled “Seeing is Believing” is long, and is an fine example of the convoluted arguments used by Darwinists to defend their ideology against the overwhelming scientific evidence that favors design in biology and against the American public who overwhelmingly favor (by a ratio of 3:1) discussion of the strengths and weakness of Darwinism in public schools. Dr. Coyne’s review is, in other words, a fine example of Darwinist ideological distortion of science and endorsement of censorship in education.
So I’ll review Dr. Coyne’s review in detail. I’ll quote Dr. Coyne, then reply.
Early in his essay Dr. Coyne writes:
… the history of creationism in America has itself been an evolutionary process guided by a form of natural selection. After each successive form of creationism has been struck down by the courts for violating the First Amendment, a modified form of the doctrine has appeared, missing some religious content and more heavily disguised in scientific garb. Over time, the movement has shifted from straight Biblical creationism to "scientific creationism," in which the very facts of science were said to support religious stories such as the Genesis creation and Noah's Ark, and then morphed into intelligent design, or ID, a theory completely stripped of its Biblical patina. None of this has fooled the courts…
Dr. Coyne misunderstands the history of this issue. Regardless of whether or not creationism has undergone an “evolutionary” process, ID isn’t on the historical continuum with creationism. Creationism is the opinion that Genesis is more or less literally true as science. Many Christians hold to that view, and they have my respect, but I (and the vast majority of I.D. advocates) disagree.
Intelligent design is the opinion that design is empirically detectable in biology, and that it is the best scientific inference to explain many aspects of biology, especially the genetic code and the complex molecular machinery inside cells. I wasn’t a creationist, ever. I was a Darwinist, for most of my life, until I looked closely at the evidence. Most ID advocates have had similar experiences. Most ID advocates were never creationists, and ID is not creationism nor is it derived from it. In fact, ID has been criticized by the creationist community. ID is an appeal to evidence in the natural world, not an appeal to Biblical revelation.
ID has a long pedigree in science and philosophy. The great Greek philosophers — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus — noted the obvious evidence for design in nature, and the design inferences of leading Christian theologians — Augustine, Aquinas, Abelard, Pascal — were inferences to evidence in nature and did not depend on a literal reading of Genesis. Most (virtually all) of the great scientists since the enlightenment (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Pascal, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Planck, Schrodinger) inferred design in nature. ID has been the scientific understanding of nature throughout most of history. ID didn’t “evolve” from creationism.
Creationism — the view that Genesis is literally true as a scientific text — has a much more recent pedigree, and is primarily associated with modern Protestantism. I believe that creationists are right about the most important aspect of natural science: there is evidence for design in nature. But that doesn't make me a creationist. But as an ID advocate I believe in following the natural evidence, and in my view (and the view of most ID theorists) the evidence doesn’t support a literal interpretation of Genesis.
The evolution of this debate has not been the evolution from creationism to ID. ID has been the mainstream scientific inference for nearly all scientists and philosophers for several millennia. It didn’t evolve from Christian creationism. The first people to systematically infer design in nature weren’t Christians (they were early Greek philosophers), and most people throughout the world today who infer design as the most reasonable explanation for natural science aren’t Christians (they’re Muslims, Buddhists, Confucianists, Hindus, etc). The design inference in natural science is common to virtually all cultures, present and past.
But, pace Dr. Coyne, there has been “evolution” of this debate. Yet Dr. Coyne misrepresents it. The evolution has been that of Darwinist tactics. Darwin's theory is the creation myth of atheism, and for the past century Darwinists have worked very hard to impose their ideology using the science curriculum in public schools. In the Scopes trial (1927), Darwinists fought censorship of their views at the hands of fundamentalists. Perhaps in this case, they were on the right side of the issue. However, in many subsequent cases, such as Daniel v. Waters (1975), Edwards vs Aguillard (1987), or McLean v. Arkansas (1982), the Darwinists became the censors, as they won court cases that successfully banned creationism from public schools. The Darwinist push for censorship of dissenting views continued. In Selman v. Cobb County (2005) Darwinists used federal courts to censor a sticker in biology textbooks that said: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, concerning the origin of living things”. In Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), Darwinists again used federal courts to censor a brief mention of intelligent design in biology classrooms.
And their efforts to censor continue outside of the courts. Recent Darwinist efforts in Texas asked the Texas State Board of Education to to remove any reference to teaching weaknesses of evolution in public schools, because such teaching would obviously allow teachers and students to discuss the evidence for and against Darwin’s theory. Darwinists have no intention of allowing real discussion — which includes critique as well as endorsement — of Darwinism in public schools.
Dr. Coyne’s invocation of legal coercion — "…None of this has fooled the courts…” — is telling. The real evolution of ID-Darwinism debate has been the evolving willingness of Darwinists to use increasingly stringent court-imposed censorship to defend Darwinist dogma in public schools. They have been quite successful at imposing their ideology on our children. The underpinning of Darwinists’ aversion to open discussion or criticism of Darwin’s ‘Fact’ in public schools is their obvious fear of the scientific evidence itself. The survival of Darwinist ideology as the only acceptable theory of biological origins depends almost entirely on censorship. There is no other field of science in which scientists go to court to silence opposing theories.
So Darwinists have most certainly evolved a lot themselves. Back in 1925, they were being censored. But in the decades since, Darwinian fundamentalists have established a long track record of censoring views that disagree with them. This is why many people — including Justice Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court — today think that we have "Scopes in reverse."
I must say that I’ve never understood the rhetorical force of the ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. The God of the Gaps sneer is invoked to imply the inexorability of materialism as a complete explanation in natural science. Any critique of materialist dogma in science from a design or immaterial perspective is derided as a 'God of the Gaps' argument. But the real issue is the gaps, which are plentiful and very wide.
Dr. Novella is fond of the God of the Gaps sneer, in the form of "Dualism of the Gaps." I have not met a materialist as supremely confident of the complete explanatory power of materialism as he is. It’s ironic, as Dr. Novella claims the appellation “skeptic,” yet he shows no skepticism for his own materialist dogma. Profound skepticism for the views of opponents, combined with complacent credulity for one’s own views, is the stuff of ideological advocacy, not skepticism.
Dr. Novella responded recently to my post in which I clarified my views on the mind-brain problem. He accuses me of using a ‘Dualism of the Gaps’ argument. I’ve merely pointed out that the salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, incorrigibility, restricted access, continuity of self through time, and unity of consciousness (the ‘binding problem’) seem to be impossible to explain materialistically. Materialistic explanations for subjective mental states are not impossible merely because we lack experiments or evidence. Materialistic explanations for the mind are impossible within the framework of materialism itself, because mental properties are not physical properties. Nothing about matter as understood in our current scientific paradigm invokes subjective mental experience. The essential qualities on the mind are immaterial. Invocation of immaterial causation that incorporates subjectivity seems necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the mind.
Dr. Novella argues:
My “dualism of the gaps” point, however, is that lack of complete knowledge does not justify inserting a magical answer. Our lack of complete knowledge about life does not justify inventing a vital life force to explain it, our incomplete knowledge of evolution does not justify inventing an intelligent designer who miracled life into existence, and our current state of neuroscience does not require inserting a non-corporeal mind separate from the brain.. Further - you cannot logically justify a positive claim based upon a lack of information. Where is the evidence for a vital force, or an intelligent designer, or the ghost in the machine? There isn’t any, such claims are based entirely on perceived gaps in knowledge.
But we don’t ‘lack knowledge’ about the mind. We have a rich knowledge of the mind. Much of philosophy, art, literature, psychology, politics, and history are essentially knowledge of the human mind. It’s fair to say that most of what mankind knows is knowledge about the mind. By any measure, we probably know much more about the mind than we do about the natural world.
And we certainly don't 'lack knowledge' about the brain. We have made astonishing strides over the past century in understanding neuroscience, from the molecular level to the functioning of the nervous system as a whole. We can image the brain functionally in real time with considerable precision. We can record brain waves with relative ease from the whole brain, and we can do surgery that enables us to record electrical activity in regions of the brain a few cubic millimeters in volume. We know an enormous amount about the brain.
Yet we know nothing — nothing — about how subjective experience could arise from matter alone. We certainly know a lot about correlations. But about causation — how matter even could cause subjective mental states — we know nothing. We don't even have a scientific paradigm by which we could even imagine what such an answer could be like. Subjective mental states share no properties whatsoever with matter. The 'explanatory gap' — our inability to explain the subjective in terms of the objective — is as wide as ever. It's infinitely wide. We don't even know where to begin to answer the question 'how does subjectivity arise in association with matter' from a materialistic standpoint.
Dr. Novella is wrong to attribute the inference to dualism to an argument from ignorance. The exact opposite is true. The reason that immaterial causation is invoked to explain the mind is because we know so much about the mind and about the brain, and it’s evident to most people (that is, people who aren’t dogmatic materialists) that the mind isn’t material. It isn’t an argument from ignorance. It’s an argument from deep knowledge — deep knowledge of the mind and of the brain. The invocation of immaterial causation for aspects of mental states is the result of our deep knowledge of the difference between mind and matter.
Perhaps it was more understandable several centuries ago for the philosophically naive to hold to a confident assurance that science would ultimately explain the mind purely in terms of the material brain. Neuroscience has rendered that view no longer tenable. The explanatory gap is real, and our evolving knowledge of neuroscience only makes the futility of materialist attempts to close the explanatory gap even more clear. This is not, pace Dr. Novella, infering a positive conclusion from negative evidence. This is coming to accept the obvious; neuroscience has failed to show how subjective experience arises from objective matter. In this, materialist neuorscientists are a bit late. Philosophers have pointed out the fundamentally different ontologies of mind and matter for several millenia, and it's time for materialistic neuroscientists to admit the obvious. The inference to immaterial causation is an honest effort to address the questions inherent to the mind-brain problem.The inference to materialism is an effort to evade the questions; materialism is an effort to explain the gap away.
And Dr. Novella’s reference to “magic” is ironic. It is materialism that invokes “magic” in the mind-brain problem. Materialists insist that meaning and subjective experience arise spontaneously from amalgams of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins, although a rigorous scientific description of brain physiology can be done without any reference to subjective experience. There’s no ‘science’ there; the inference to subjective experience is epiphenomenal on materialistic science, which inherently lacks reference to subjective states. By denying the real problems raised by the subjective nature of mental states, materialism invokes magical explanations for the mind. The materialist argument is essentially this: ‘materialism is the complete explanation for the mind, and if you ask questions, you’re a neuroscience denialist’.
Dr. Novella asserts:
…it is clearly established, in my opinion, that the brain causes mind. The gap in our knowledge is in how the brain causes mind. I am open to any hypothesis that is scientifically testable and is compatible with existing established scientific knowledge…To put it another way - Egnor would have you believe that any scientific hypothesis is the same as a “god of the gaps” argument, but they are not. A hypothesis is testable. A”god of the gaps” argument simply inserts a final and untestable answer into a current gap in our scientific knowledge.
Dr. Novella insists that the only question that remains is how the brain causes the mind. And he implicitly restricts the explanations to his dogmatic philosophical materialism, which he confuses with the scientific method, which is the method by which natural effects are studied. Yet natural effects in science need not have natural causes; Big Bang theory, which posits the creation of all matter and time ex-nihilo, explains material effects (matter, time, and natural laws) using an immaterial cause (creation ex-nihilo).
There is no philosophical, logical, or empirical basis to insist that materialism, or any monistic understanding of nature, is the necessary explanatory framework in natural science. Science is the inference to best explanation for the natural world, and, in keeping with contemporary evidence and scientific gestalt, materialism is no longer in ascendency in the scientific world. Its scientific heyday was in the 18thand 19th centuries, in which Laplace famously bragged that given all of the current physical information about the world he could know the future with certainty. In the 19th century, Darwin proposed to explain all of the complexity of life as a product of material chance and necessity. Yet the 20th century has not been kind to materialist complacency. Quantum mechanics, in many of its interpretations, invokes an observer in order to collapse a waveform. Relativistic cosmology invokes creation ex-nihilo and multiverses. The origin of life problem is essentially intractable, an inference that is supported, rather than weakened, by the panoply of wild guesses as to how it could have happened. Random genetic variation and ‘survival of survivors’ is grossly inadequate to explain the genetic code and intracellular molecular nanotechnology. The inference that brain matter entirely explains the immaterial aspects of mental states isn’t even logically coherent, let alone scientifically verified. The 20th century, materialist denial notwithstanding, has been a catastrophe for strict materialism.
It’s mere dogma on Dr. Novella’s part— and historically ignorant dogma, at that— to assert that materialism explains everything, and to insist that we just wait patiently for the next materialistic revelation.
Materialism explains what it can. As a method — the invocation of material and efficient causatio n— it has been quite successful, particularly in classical physics and chemistry as they were developed in the 18th and 19th century. But the 20th century has been very hard on materialism — creation of the universe ex-nihilo, the observer effect in quantum mechanics, the origin of life, the origin of biological information, the cause of the immaterial mind — all seem to belie materialist reduction.
There’s much that materialism can’t explain. Some philosophers and scientists believe that the problem may lie with the artificial restrictions that dogmatic materialism imposes on natural science. Perhaps the natural phenomena on which materialism flounders, such as the Big Bang, the origin of life, the overwhelming evidence for intricate intelligent design in molecular biology, and the immaterial aspects of mental states, are better understood using all four Aristotelian causes — formal and final causes, as well as material and efficient causes. Perhaps design and teleology play a role in natural science.
To the dogmatic materialist, teleology in nature is a very dangerous inference, because it’s incompatible with atheism, which is the materialists’ religion. Acceptance of the obvious evidence for design and teleology in nature would force materialists to rethink their worldview, which never comes easy, especially for fundamentalists.
The evidence that some aspects of the mind are immaterial is overwhelming. It's notable that many of the leading neuroscientists — Sherrington, Penfield, Eccles, Libet — were dualists. Dualism of some sort is the most reasonable scientific framework to apply to the mind-brain problem, because, unlike dogmatic materialism, it just follows the evidence.
I Win a “Golden Woo Award” -- But Where’s My Stipend, Because I’d Like to Send a Gift…
Atheist/materialist ‘Skeptico’ (why are these guys/ladies so afraid to have their names associated with their ideas?) has announced the “Golden Woo” awards, which he-she has decided to bestow on people who have expressed views incompatible with Skeptico’s personal ideology. Skeptico explains:
I decided I would start some of my own – The Golden Woo Awards for outstanding work in the promotion of Woo in the previous year. It’s a bit like the Golden Globes, only for, er, Woo.
What is “Woo”? Skeptico explains:
Now, some of you might notice that the award titles look similar to Randi’s Pigasus Awards, with just the words “paranormal,” “occult” etc. replaced with Woo, and might think I’ve just run out of ideas for posts and purloined Randi’s idea as my own. (Cough.) Clearly that isn’t true as I have at least one extra category that Randi doesn’t have. However, if you were to view this post as my Golden Globes in advance of Randi’s Oscars... then you could. Perhaps the great man might even read this and get some ideas for April 1st?...OK so here goes – the Golden Woos for 2008. I hope you’ll find them entertaining.
Skeptico, who emulates atheist/materialist magician “The Amazing Randi,” has decided to give out awards to other people that he believes are devoted to silly ideas. And the first Golden Woo Award recipient is…your humble neurosurgeon and atheism/materialism ‘denialist’:
The scientist or academic who said or did the silliest thing related to Woo…Michael Egnor for his tireless support of Intelligent Design Creationism, and especially his many recent assaults on materialism.
Skeptico, who believes that all life, including the genetic code and intricate nanotechnology inside living cells, arose from primeval mud by a process of chance and tautology (random heritable variation and natural selection), is certainly well-situated to recognize Woo. So what exactly is it about my scientific and philosophical views that Skeptico finds so…Wooful?
For an example of the latter, see his article ‘Waiter, My Steak Isn’t Altruistic Enough!’. [“] A snippet:There is no shared property yet identified by science through which brain matter can cause mental acts like altruism. Material substances have mass and energy. Ideas have purpose and judgment. There is no commonality[“].
So I win this materialist's "Golden Woo Award" because I assert that there are properties of the mind, such as purpose and judgement, that are not properties of matter. Furthermore, I assert that this is a problem for materialism.I humbly accept the award, and I would like to thank... Aw, let's get down to the important stuff. I would presume that there is a stipend for winning a “Golden Woo Award”, but I must admit that I feel a bit guilty collecting all of the money myself. I certainly haven’t done all of this work on the immateriality of mental states alone.
After all, the observation that mental states have immaterial characteristics that are different from material (brain ) states is the fundamental issue in the debate about the mind-brain problem. Other purveyors of Woo -- ‘the lack of commonality between mind and matter’ -- include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Adler, Craig, Russell, Popper, Girard, Chalmers, Jackson, Putnam, Anscombe, Nagel, among many others.
Here’s a more complete list of some of my neglected but just as worthy co-Woo-laureates.
Oh, and there are innumerable scientists who should share my “Golden Woo Award” for distinguishing mind from matter. They include Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Faraday, Pasteur, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrödinger, Bohr, Sherrington, Penfield, Eccles, Beauregard, Schwartz, and Libet, to name just a few.
The distinction between mental states and brain states has been the central issue in the philosophy of the mind-brain problem for several thousand years, and it’s the central dilemma in the neuroscience of consciousness for the past century.
Skeptico seems unaware of these issues, which is characteristic of so many dogmatic materialists today. Materialists like Skeptico don’t even understand the profound questions raised by functional biological complexity or by the immaterial nature of mental states.
But in a way I’m glad that Skeptico is so uninformed. Otherwise, I’d have to share my Golden Woo Award stipend with countless philosophers and scientists who have asked the same questions I have about the mind-brain problem. What’s remarkable about materialists like Skeptico is how little they have engaged the real issues with which materialism must struggle. There’s a willful ignorance among materialists about the real problems that biological design and the immaterial nature of mental states raise for materialist dogma. Rather than thoughtfully engaging these issues, they sneer.
Anyway, I’ve decided what to do with my award. I only need $12.98, and I’m going to buy a gift for Skeptico which might help him-her begin to move beyond materialism.
Discovery Institute Announces 2009 Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences and Culture
Discovery Institute is pleased to announce two intensive summer seminars on intelligent design, science, and culture from July 10-18, 2009 in Seattle. The first seminar is for students in the natural sciences and philosophy of science; the second seminar is for students in the social sciences and humanities (including politics, law, journalism, and theology).
These seminars are designed for highly-motivated college students who seek a deeper understanding of science and its implications for society. The seminar focusing on ID in the natural sciences will explore the scientific issues in greater technical detail and the seminar on ID in the social sciences and humanities will give more in-depth attention to the social impact of science. Past seminars have included such speakers as William Dembski, Charles Thaxton, Jonathan Wells, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, Robert Marks, Scott Minnich, Bruce Gordon, John West, Jonathan Witt, and Casey Luskin.
Discovery Institute will pay expenses for students who are accepted into this special program (travel, lodging, meals, books and other course materials). Applications will be accepted until April 17, 2009, but earlier applications may receive priority consideration. Questions or requests for more information should be directed to Dr. Bruce Gordon, Research Director, Center for Science and Culture at bgordon@discovery.org.
[Author's Note: This is a fun statement that I recently posted on the IDEA Center's website. Since it discusses the latest Darwinist rhetorical trends regarding the entire ID movement, I thought readers of ENV would be interested in reading it as well. The original article is posted on the IDEA Center's website, here.]
IDEA Center: "I feel happy, I feel happy"
"I feel fine ... I think I'll go for a walk ... I feel happy, I feel happy" says a lively chap being dragged off as dead by a confused would-be coroner in Monty Python's classic movie The Holy Grail. Like this coroner, Darwinists eagerly want ID to die, or at least they want to bury a movement that is very much alive. Also like this would-be coroner, it seems that in their eagerness to declare ID dead, the Darwinists are willing to use a club to try to make their claims of IDEA's death a reality, at least in their own minds.
2009 is the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, and Darwinists seem more obsessed than ever with death. In particular, they seem suspiciously over-eager to proclaim the alleged death of the intelligent design (ID) movement. The New York Times (an unashamedly pro-Darwin media outlet) recently tried to jump on the current cultural infatuation with vampires by publishing an article titled "Four Stakes in the Heart of Intelligent Design" (the article merely touts four lightweight books for the lay reader that critique ID). NCSE affiliates Nick Matzke and Kevin Padian also recently published an article in a scientific journal claiming that the "case for ID" has "collapsed," gleefully asserting their hope that "no one with scientific or philosophical integrity is going to take [ID] seriously in future."
The somewhat rough-and-tumble internet Darwinist choir, which tends to live in its own world, has also jumped on this bandwagon of declaring ID dead. In fact, they recently decided to play coroner over the IDEA Center. To give a couple examples, one internet Darwinist wrote a blog post eagerly calling IDEA "dead" (this internet Darwinist also had the maturity to call ID "stupidity" and William Dembski "either delusional or a bald-faced liar"). The internet Darwinists at PandasThumb apparently believe the conspiracy theories they read on these sorts of blogs, and proceeded to write their own amusing post rejoicing over an alleged "IDEA obituary."
It's hard to take these kinds of people seriously, not only because of their hyperbolic rhetoric and their obsession with the death of ID, but also because of all the exciting activity occurring presently at the IDEA Center! To say the least, we at the IDEA Center got a good laugh reading these IDEA Center death certificates fabricated by these highly imaginative internet Darwinists.
For example, one piece of evidence they cited to declare IDEA "dead" was their assertion that IDEA hasn't published all of its "quarterly" issues of The Light Bulb. Perhaps that's because our Light Bulb newsletter isn't published quarterly, it's published semi-annually (i.e. it comes out 2 times per year, not 4 times). As our newsletter page has long stated, "The IDEA Center publishes a semi-annual newsletter called, 'The Light Bulb,'" and it lists both issues for 2008 (to see those issues, click here or here).
The internet Darwinists' main piece of evidence that IDEA is "dead" was their claim that our IDEA Club chapter locations page is out-of-date. It is out-of-date, and we're actually working on revamping the entire page which is a long-term project requiring the production of new hyperlinked maps that we hope to complete in the coming months.
But IDEA Clubs are certainly not "dead." In fact, the IDEA Center's primary program is helping students to start extra-curricular IDEA Clubs on university and high school campuses around the United States and the world. In August of 2008, the IDEA Center hired its first full-time staff member, Mr. Brian Westad, as its new IDEA Club Director, to oversee the IDEA Club program.
Right now, as of January 2009, there are about a dozen IDEA Club chapters that are active or in-formation. In fact, since the Darwinists first started proclaiming the false death of IDEA, we've received over eight inquiries into starting new IDEA Clubs. Not only are rumor's of IDEA's death greatly exaggerated, but the more the internet Darwinists declare IDEA to be dead, the more IDEA seems to be growing. If you're interested in learning more about starting an IDEA Club, please contact Brian at brianw@ideacenter.org.
Quite amusingly, these kinds of Darwinists seem to alternate between proclaiming the death of ID, and crying that the sky is falling because ID allegedly threatens to impose theocracy and destroy science, democracy, and free, modern civilization. You can't destroy civilization if you're dead, so which is it? Forgive us if we at the IDEA Center somehow doubt that these Darwinists actually believe what they are saying.
Regardless, it seems clear that these Darwinists wish not to see the contradictions in their own arguments, so our advice is this: if you need a coroner, don't call the internet Darwinists because they're not very good at assessing whether something is dead. After all, the Darwinists have been wrong before. In the volume Intelligent Design 101, Phillip Johnson tells the story of how Darwinists declared a false victory over their opponents during the 100th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species 50 years ago in 1959:
[A]s 1959 approached, evolutionary scientists thought that the mid-century would be an ideal time to hold a triumphant celebration. A professor at the University of Chicago organized the Darwin Centennial Celebration and landed the most prominent Darwinian speaker, Sir Julian Huxley to keynote the event.
Huxley was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the British naturalist who pushed for public debates in favor of Darwinism in the early years. Grandfather Huxley became known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” because of his spirited advocacy for Darwin’s theory. Grandson, Huxley was a prominent zoologist in his own right and one of the founders of what would later come to be called the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, the modern version of Darwinism. He was also an international statesman, a founding father of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Huxley was also the would-be founder of a new religion of evolutionary humanism. He wrote a book called Religion Without Revelation (Harper, 1957) that attempted to found a religion upon the scientific way of thinking. Science replaced revelation as the source of knowledge, and humanity, rather than God, sat at the top of Huxley’s scala naturae.
This centennial was held at the University of Chicago on Thanksgiving weekend, 1959. It attracted so much press attention that it seemed to signify to the world, as intended, that Darwinism was triumphant everywhere. Huxley, in his keynote address, made it clear that this was a triumph in science and in religion. He said that there is now no room for a divinized father figure, an imaginary god who is really just a projection of our human father. Huxley was branding a new religion in which “[i]n the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created: it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion.”4 Essentially, then, one religion is replaced by another—triumphant evolutionary science explains everything.
At that point, many scientific authorities had the view that only a minor “mop-up” operation was necessary in the cultural war against theistic religion. Christianity, in particular, had been beaten. Science, the new religion, would replace it, with evolution as the creator.
[...]
Each of these events were said to make the case for the triumph of scientific materialism and Darwinism. That triumph fell apart, however, once people started scrutinizing the evidence.
Of course anyone who knows their history of the evolution-debate knows what happened next: serious scientists rose up and started publicly questioning Darwinism, leading to the birth of the creation science movement in the 1960s, and later, the birth of the intelligent design movement in the 1980s and 1990s.
The IDEA Center doesn't promote creation science, and intelligent design is of course very different from creationism, but it will be interesting to see how opposition to Darwin surges in the coming years now that Darwinists are using this current anniversary as another occasion to wrongly declare their opposition to be dead. Perhaps in another 50 years, future historians of evolution will be once-again writing that "That triumph fell apart, however, once people started scrutinizing the evidence."
Surprise of the Week: New York Times Gets the Real Story on Texas Evolution Standards
Kudos to the New York Times for filing a story on the actions of the Texas State Board of Education that actually describes what happened last week. Unlike much of the rest of the newsmedia, the Times doesn’t tell only half of what happened or play up the hysterics. The story’s even-handed title is telling: “Split Outcome in Texas Battle on Teaching of Evolution.”
Of course, being the Times, pro-Darwin bias does creep in at points, most egregiously in the ludicrous “definition” offered of intelligent design (“the notion of a divine hand guiding creation”). It used to be common courtesy for reporters to allow supporters of an idea to explain what they mean by it rather than rely on an opponent’s caricature of the idea. No more. Readers who want to know the real definition of intelligent design can go here.
Texas Story Evolves: First It Was "Critics of Evolution Defeated!"; Now It's "The Sky Is Falling!"
It was as predictable as soggy weather in Seattle in November. First, reporters insisted that the Texas State Board of Education dealt a body blow to supporters of the critical analysis of evolution by dropping language in their existing science standards that call on students to examine the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories. Of course, these same reporters neglected to inform the public that the Board also passed several amendments to the evolution standards requiring students to “analyze and evaluate” the main concepts of evolution such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations. Once evolutionists began to complain about some of the changes to the evolution standards, the reporters apparently changed their mind. Now the Texas story is quickly evolving into “The Sky Is Falling!” Alas, the media’s newest spin is just as inaccurate as the first—and just as banal.
Pro-Darwin Crowd Starts Smear Campaign on Texas Board of Education's Evolution Changes
According to a reporter who contacted me earlier today, the Darwin-only crowd in Texas is now smearing the State Board of Education for adopting amendments to the proposed science standards on evolution that promote “creationism,” and young earth creationism to boot. So what else is new? In reality, there is nothing in the amendments adopted that promote creationism, yet alone young earth creationism. But the Darwin-only crowd automatically attacks anything they don't like as creationism. It’s a reflex action. They can’t help themselves. Yet in this case they just look plain silly. For example, how does it promote creationism to insist that students "analyze and evaluate" all the major parts of evolutionary theory? “Analyze and evaluate” is language they earlier claimed to love--only, it turns out, not when applied to evolution! The other side is engaging in their usual bait-and-switch tactics. They claim to support critical inquiry in science, but whenever it gets applied to evolution, they suddenly expose themselves for the dogmatists they are.
Recap: Texas Board of Education's Actions on Evolution
Earlier today, the Texas State Board of Education unanimously approved the first reading of new science standards for the state. It was one step back, two giant steps forward. Although the Board refused to reinstate language calling on students to examine the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, the Board added new language requiring students to “analyze and evaluate” all the major parts of evolutionary theory, including common descent, natural selection, and mutation. The additions to the proposed science standards were adopted yesterday in committee, but as we reported last night, most of the newsmedia completely missed the boat on what happened, probably because many reporters didn’t stay to the end of the meeting. Here is a preliminary summary of what the Board did:
On the minus side, Board members narrowly defeated in committee a motion to reinstate language from the state’s existing science standards calling on students to examine the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories. The motion failed on a tie vote (7-7). As a result, the Board left intact less specific language requiring students to “analyze and evaluate” scientific explanations. The less specific language isn’t great, because it might be easier to evade, but it’s not terrible either—especially if the standard is actually applied to how students learn about evolution (something never done consistently with the “strengths and weaknesses” language). Notably, several opponents on the Board of the stronger “strengths and weaknesses” language insisted that the new “analyze and evaluate” language would provide for just as much critical inquiry as the “strengths and weaknesses” language. The new language should be interpreted and applied accordingly (we’ll see whether it is).
On the plus side, Board members adopted a series of amendments to require students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for evolution.(Note: The following preliminary text is based on what I heard from the live audio of yesterday’s hearing. New text is in bold.)
First, a series of amendments were made to the standards for the new Earth and Space Science course, most notably one to a standard on common ancestry:
evaluate a variety of fossil types, proposed transitional fossils, fossil lineages, and significant fossil deposits and assess the arguments for and against universal common descent in light of this fossil evidence.
Next, a series of amendments were made to the standards on evolution for high school biology requiring that students “analyze and evaluate” key concepts in modern evolutionary theory:
(7) Science concepts. The student knows evolutionary theory is a scientific explanation for the unity and diversity of life. The student is expected to:
(A) analyze and evaluate how evidence of common ancestry among groups is provided by the fossil record, biogeography, and homologies including anatomical, molecular, and developmental;
(B) analyze and evaluate how natural selection produces change in populations, not individuals;
(C) analyze and evaluate how the elements of natural selection including inherited variation, the potential of a population to produce more offspring than can survive, and a finite supply of environmental resources result in differential reproductive success;
(D) analyze and evaluate the relationship of natural selection to adaptation, and to the development of diversity in and among species; and
(E) analyze and evaluate the effects of other evolutionary mechanisms including genetic drift, gene flow, mutation, and recombination.
Finally, the Board approved in committee the insertion of a new evolution standard for high school biology on common ancestry:
Analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record.
Of course, these revisions aren’t final. Now that the Board has approved the first draft, you can bet that Darwinists will do their best to undo the good changes at the Board's March meeting, where the final vote on adoption will occur. At the same time, those who support genuine critical inquiry in science need to continue to push for the “strengths and weaknesses” language to be restored to the standards, as well as to defend the good changes that have been made requiring students to analyze and evaluate the main parts of evolutionary theory.
Austin Statesman Scoops Texas Board Evolution Story
Kudos to Austin American Statesman reporter Molly Bloom. She apparently stayed for the entire Texas State Board of Education meeting, unlike some of her colleagues in the press. She’s the first reporter I’ve seen who actually reports the fact that the Texas Board voted to revise proposed standards on evolution to require students to analyze and evaluate the key concepts of the theory such as common ancestry and natural selection. Her story, “Third state education board vote mandates teaching students challenges to evolution” gets the basic point right, even though she is still off on the details. She only describes the new evolution standard added at the behest of state board Chair Don McElroy, failing to mention earlier approval of a series of amendments offered by board member Terri Leo to the evolution standards. Still, Ms. Bloom is to be congratulated for covering something the rest of the press thus far has missed.
UPDATE (6:25 pm Pacific Time): The Associated Press has finally gotten the message that something else happened at the Board meeting, but the piece doesn't seem to be based on independent reporting, because it repeats the same errors as the Statesman piece and only mentions McElroy's amendment, not the others.
Surprise Texas Board Action on Evolution Completely Missed by Media
Apparently there weren’t many reporters who stayed for the entire Texas Board of Education meeting today. That’s the only conclusion I can draw from the slew of utterly misleading stories this afternoon and evening from the Associated Press, the Dallas Morning, and other media outlets claiming that those of us who favor critical analysis of modern evolutionary theory in the classroom suffered a big “defeat” in Texas today. It’s true that the Board narrowly rejected a motion to preserve the language in the current science standards calling for students to study the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories. But that’s only half of the story. Later in the afternoon, the Board amazingly passed a series of amendments to the actual science standards dealing with evolution—both for general biology, and for a new course in earth and space science. These amendments, most of which were enacted by large margins, specifically require students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for common ancestry, natural selection, mutation, and a variety of other planks of modern evolutionary theory. The new evolution standards are a huge advance over the previous language, and are a great victory for parents, teachers, and students who want good science education in the state of Texas. Note to reporters: You need to stay to the end of government meetings you cover, and you need to talk with people on both sides of controversial issues before you report about them. It remains to be seen whether reporters will correct the record once they find out what actually happened.
Texas State Board of Education Votes To Require Students to Analyze and Evaluate Evolution
AUSTIN, TX--The Texas State Board of Education today voted to require students to analyze and evaluate common ancestry and natural selection, both key components of modern evolutionary theory. The surprising vote came after the Board failed to reinstate language in the overall science standards explicitly requiring coverage of the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories.
“The Texas Board of Education took one step back and two steps forward today,” said Dr. John West of the Discovery Institute. “While we wish they would have retained the strengths and weaknesses language in the overall standards, they did something truly remarkable today. They voted to require students to analyze and evaluate some of the most important and controversial aspects of modern evolutionary theory such as the fossil record, universal common descent and even natural selection."
According to West these changes to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills means that teachers and students will be able to discuss the scientific evidence that is supportive as well as evidence that is not supportive of all scientific theories.
“Analyzing, evaluating, any additional scrutiny of evolution can only help students to learn more about the theory,” said West, who is associate director of the Institute’s Center for Science & Culture.
Question for Self-Proclaimed tree of life "expert" David Hillis
Looks like David Hillis, the self-proclaimed "world's leading expert" on tree of life phylogeny didn't get the memo.
Media experts who prepare business leaders, public figures and so on to meet the press always remind their charges to read the newspaper. Never go before the media, or a state board of education, not having at least read the headlines of the day. I've seen very accomplished CEO's literally spill their coffee on themselves at an important press conference when confronted with a late breaking headline they're not prepared for.
It's too bad that yesterday when Hillis stepped arrogantly to the microphone and artlessly asserted his alleged expertise, that no one presented him with just these two headlines:
The debate before the board of course is whether or not there are any weaknesses with modern Darwinian theory. Hillis, Skoog, and Wetherington, amazingly refused to admit any weakness whatsoever, even when presented with evidence showing that there are weaknesses and that scientists robustly debate them and what they mean for the theory.
Hillis asserted that the traditional Darwinian tree of life is just fine the way it is, and he should know after all ,as he explained, he is the world's expert on the tree of life. Except that he doesn't know, and it looks like he isn't quite the expert he claimed.
Strengths and Weaknesses in David Hillis’s Arguments about the Cambrian Explosion
Tonight in Texas, Darwinist expert David Hillis testified that the Cambrian explosion took many tens of millions of years, also stating that there are no credible scientific weaknesses in neo-Darwinian evolution. His evolutonary theory of the Cambrian Explosion has a grave weakness. One of the 100+ mainstream scientific papers discussing weaknesses in evolution that Stephen Meyer presented to the Texas State Board of Education today absolutely refuted Hillis's argument:
“Until 530 million years ago, multicellular animals consisted primarily of simple, soft-bodied forms, most of which have been identified from the fossil record as cnidarians and sponges. Then, within less then 10 million years, almost all of the advanced phyla appeared, including echinoderms, chordates, annelids, brachiopods, molluscs and a host of arthropods. The extreme speed of anatomical change and adaptive radiation during this brief time period requires explanations that go beyond those proposed for the evolution of species within the modern biota “
(R. L. Carroll, "Towards a new evolutionary synthesis," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 15(1):27-32 (2000) (emphasis added).)
It sounds like David Hillis’s arguments for evolution may have weaknesses after all. Too bad he doesn't want students to learn about any of them.
Dr. Charles Garner and Other Experts Shatter the Darwinist Illusion that “Theories Don’t Have Weaknesses”
AUSTIN, TX--One of the more bizarre talking points we’ve been hearing from Texas Darwinists today is the claim that “theories don’t have weaknesses.” According to them, if we call evolution as a “theory,” then by definition it can’t have weaknesses. This isn’t unusual: Darwinists often like to define terms such that they win the argument by definitional fiat. Some scientists who testified today in Texas, however, saw through the Darwinists' rhetorical tactic.
Dr. Charles Garner, who holds a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from University of Colorado, Boulder and is now a Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Baylor University. He’s been a scientist for a long time and is familiar with the field. How did he respond to the bizarre claim that scientific theories “don’t have weaknesses”? Here’s what Dr. Garner said: “the idea that theories don’t have weaknesses is a recent invention of these TEKS hearing. I had never heard in all my scientific training that theories don’t have weaknesses until November.”
Likewise, Stephen C. Meyer testified “By the way, those who say that theories don’t have weaknesses are forgetting their history of science. Ever heard of phlogiston theory or geocentrism or geosynclinal theory? Or even Newton’s theory of universal gravitation? All these ideas were considered theories in their heyday, and are now known to have serious weaknesses.”
Hopefully the Darwinists will make better arguments than personal attacks on Dr. Meyer and talking-points like “theories don’t have weaknesses.”
Ralph Seelke’s Testimony About His Own Scientific Research Showing Limits to Bacterial Evolution Sweeps Away False Religion Accusations
AUSTIN, TX--This afternoon at the Texas State Board of Education, microbiologist Ralph Seelke gave a wonderful presentation about his own laboratory research on bacterial evolution which shows that there are clear limits on the ability of bacteria to evolve certain functions. His response to those who charge that teaching scientific weaknesses of evolution would bring religion into the classroom was elegant and irrefutable: “My bacteria have been accused of violating the First Amendment.”
Epilogue on Dr. Meyer’s Texas Testimony: Stephen Meyer Demolishes Darwinist Personal Attacks
AUSTIN, TX--As I noted in my other blog post on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s testimony today before the Texas State Board of Education, you can always tell a strength of a person’s position based upon the arguments they make. In this regard, Texas Darwinists apparently scripted 2 questions for hostile Texas State Board of Education members to ask Dr. Meyer. Both questions were asked by Board Member Bob Craig and dealt with, you guessed it, personal attacks on Dr. Meyer.
The first question the Texas Darwinists asked was whether Dr. Meyer has a Ph.D. in biology. No, Dr. Meyer answered, he merely holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and History of Science from Cambridge University that focused on the history of evolution. As usual, the Darwinists are not being self-reflective, because one of their own experts--Gerald Skoog--doesn't even have a Ph.D.--he has an Ed.D. in Secondary Education. Thankfully, one board member exposed the Darwinist hypocrisy to the crowd, much to the Darwinists’ dismay.
The other hypocritical and unreflective question the Texas Darwinists scripted implied that Dr. Meyer had a conflict of interest because he's co-authored a textbook that could be impacted by this debate. We dealt with this red-herring question here: Somehow Texas Darwinists managed to forget that, again, one of their own experts, Darwinist biologist David Hillis 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.
Apparently hypocritical and unreflective personal attacks were all the Darwinists could muster in the Q & A session with Dr. Meyer.
Texas Debate Update: Stephen Meyer Demolishes Eugenie Scott's One Argument
I'm posting the following report for Casey Luskin, who is currently in Texas at the expert hearing before the Texas State Board of Education.
AUSTIN, TX--The NCSE and their friends at the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) are here in Texas and they have one main argument. Or maybe two. The first argument basically says this: Don't listen to any of these guys because they're creationists. Creationists. Creationists. Creationists.
Creationists. Did I mention that they're just creationists?
The logical fallacies and falsehoods in this short sound-byte argument are legion. They include: motive-mongering, false premise, the genetic fallacy, and perhaps most of all hypocrisy.
As Meyer testified, he fully accepts a billions of years old earth. He doesn’t fit Eugenie Scott’s “creationist” mold.
Moreover, as Meyer testified, this motive-mongering distracts from the evidence, and a really fascinating scientific debate. I would add that Eugenie's obsession with her opponents’ alleged religious beliefs is hypocrisy: After all, she's a signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto. But Steve Meyer had more integrity and better arguments to say than to stand up and say "Don't listen to Eugenie Scott because she's a Secular Humanist, Secular Humanist, Secular Humanist." In fact, Meyer's exact words in his written testimony for such persons was, “if some scientists make the theory of evolution into a religion or worldview, I have no problem with that. That is their right.”
Instead of motive-mongering, Dr. Meyer annihilated Eugenie’s and the TFN's other main argument, which could, if it were true, actually hold rhetorical validity: It’s their facade that neo-Darwinian evolution has no scientific weaknesses. It's a pretty easy argument to demolish. Dr. Meyer presented the Texas State Board of Education with four thick binders full of over 100 mainstream scientific articles that express scientific challenges to key aspects of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, especially challenging the arguments used to support it in biology textbooks.
You can always tell the strength of a person's position based upon the kinds of arguments they make. If the NCSE and TFN's obsession with the "creationists" and their predictable bluff that neo-Darwinism has no weaknesses has one purpose: to distract people from the scientific evidence. That's what they want the board to do, so the board will adopt standards that will not inform students about scientific weaknesses in evolution.
Hopefully the Texas State Board of Education will adopt standards that choose truth over distractions, and academic freedom over fear.
When asked whether or not she would entertain whether evolution has any weaknesses, Eugenie Scott invited scientists with scientific evidence to show her. "Let them come and talk to people like professor De Lozanne [Ed: who testified earlier] -- let them come and talk at the universities."
Note to Eugenie: You kick people out of universities. It seems to happen a lot in Texas especially, for some reason -- remember the SMU Darwin v. Design conferences, or the controversy over Bob Marks at Baylor? In fact, one of the expert reviewers on your side -- Ron Wetherington -- led the charge against allowing ID scientists to speak at SMU.
What people say is one thing -- what they do is sometimes entirely different.
We're down in Austin, covering the Texas Board of Education hearings today, and this morning's public testimony is... well.. interesting. To say that there is interest in this issue is an understatement -- the room is packed with people standing along the walls and sitting with their laptops on the floor, waiting for their turn to get a word in on this controversy.
It's interesting to hear the testimonies from both sides in the public. We just had a mother speaking in favor of keeping "strengths and weaknesses" in the science standards who shared how her children's AP biology teacher would not allow any questioning of Darwin's theory -- the Board members called it "intimidation," and that doesn't seem far off:
"I'm here saying don't take [the TEKS] out, we have to have them in here," she said.
"I think our kids will completely be denied to have a voice and ask a question regarding the strengths and weaknesses of any theory, particularly evolution. I'm just standing up for our kids."
She was followed by UT-Austin professor Arturo de Lozanne, who rather sweetly told the Board that the strengths and weaknesses language would destroy the scientific supremacy of the great state of Texas.
He opened his testimony by reminding us all of President Obama's inaugural address, then told the Board that it's their "responsibility to adopt the proposed standards without attempting to revert to antiquated language from last century," highlighting the fact that the "strengths and weaknesses" language has been in the TEKS for more than a decade.
Despite this fact, he went on to tell the Board that if they keep this language, they'll endanger their children's futures and invite pseudoscience to "harm us all."
"Even though it sounds reasonable, it can be used to block the adoption of wonderful textbooks or to introduce pseudoscience... like that book from Discovery Institute." Then he raises the point that he's an admissions officer, and he sees students who question evolution "fall behind their peers in admissions" -- fear-mongering is a familiar tactic here.
Board member Terri Leo asked him if he believes "that the last 20 years we've been doing pseudoscience?"
Apparently, after twenty years this is an issue because "no books were available pretending to do science in disguise." He refers the Board to Explore Evolution and says, "Strengths and weaknesses is a toxic term."
Another Texan is testifying and quickly sharing 4 stories of teachers and principals who have been told not to talk about weaknesses of evolution, some of them losing their jobs.
Remind me again why the TEKS aren't necessary to protect students and teachers?
In previous posts in this brief series, we’ve been looking at the relationship between Marx and Darwin, who developed parallel theories of historical or natural law. In a religious context, law is perceived as static and eternal: God’s law, higher than any man, worthy of judging kings and tyrants by its light. Marxism and Darwinism, as materialist philosophies, believe they have succeeded in obviating the need for God, or metaphysics generally. For them, there is no such thing as a static, eternal moral law.
Thus in the Descent of Man, Darwin describes the process by which morals evolve, just like animal bodies. He finds nothing absolute or God-given even in a seemingly fundamental moral instinct like that against incest: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.” The place of God is taken, instead, by a law of movement. History is a tide that moves the development of nature or society along with it according to an impersonal, unguided, yet scientifically describable law. Evolution and revolution are really the same dynamic, looked at respectively from a natural and a social perspective. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote of Darwin and Marx, “If one considers, not the actual achievement, but the basic philosophies of both men, it turns out that ultimately the movement of history and the movement of nature are one and the same.”
This helps clarify why, under Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes, what Arendt called “total terror” was the predictable result. The only morality was that of the law of history’s movement, whether seen in biological or economic terms. Either way, if you opposed it, you were an enemy and qualified for destruction.
Stalin’s version of evolution derived from the thread in that philosophical and scientific tradition that in turn came down from the earlier French evolutionist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). Larmarck argued that characteristics acquired by an organism in its lifetime could be passed down to offspring, making environment of equal importance to heredity. (Modern evolutionary theory excludes this idea.) Hitler’s more strictly Darwinian methods, obsessed with heredity, accordingly emphasized eugenics and murder to rid society of genetic undesirables, while Stalin’s approach emphasized manipulation of the social environment, isolating deviants, sending adults and children possessing minds “diseased” as judged by anti-Soviet thinking off to the Gulag so as not to corrupt healthy minds. The subtle difference hardly mattered to the millions who were murdered in pursuit of an evolutionary nightmare.
Initially, the Soviet regime was fascinated by eugenics, establishing a Russian Eugenic Society in 1921 and immediately proceeding to study the Jewish question. But Marxism in general was of two minds about evolution, and as noted above, tended to favor the Lamarckian side of the theory. Already in 1906, Stalin had declared himself for Lamarck. This was not a rejection of Darwinism per se but simply of the evolutionary mechanism that Darwin personally made famous, natural selection. For various reasons, Communists preferred to think in terms of environmental selection as the impersonal mechanism driving evolution. In the 1930s, Stalin beat the drum for Lamarck with increased intensity. After 1945, the official evolutionary theory of Soviet Communism was represented by a Ukrainian agronomist and scientific fraud, Trofim Lysenko. Under the rule of Lysenkoism, dissenters from the favored evolutionary orthodoxy were subject to career-destruction, imprisonment, even death.
Rather than breeding supermen through genetics as Hitler did, Soviet evolutionism sought to do so through heavy-handed manipulation of the environment, including through exile, imprisonment and murder. In the Great Terror of 1937-8, one of the common classes of victims was the “socially harmful.” This was not merely a political category but an evolutionary one.
The Soviet state was, then, an experiment in applied Darwinism. Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist who broke with colleagues to report honestly on the Stalinist terror-famine, later noted: “It is interesting to reflect that now, in the light of all that has happened, the early obscurantist opponents of Darwinian evolution seem vastly more sagacious and farseeing than its early excited champions.” Which about sums it up.
In 1891 in Gori, Georgia, a 13-year-old choirboy with dreams of becoming a priest, Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was discovered by his mother at dawn, having stayed awake through the night reading Darwin’s Origin of Species.
“I loved the book so much, Mummy, I couldn’t stop reading,” he explained. He later told a friend that God “doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived.”
“How can you say such a thing?” the friend exclaimed, to which the boy, the future Joseph Stalin, replied by handing him a copy of Darwin.
In this little series, we are asking, among other things, what came from Stalin’s precocious appreciation of evolutionary theory? Hitler and Stalin alike sought to create a new race of supermen. Where did they both happen to get this idea? From Darwinian theory, in the broad sense, of course.
To understand why this is so, we need to go back to the origins of Communist philosophy. Communists from the very beginning were attracted to Darwinism because, as Engels remarked in a letter to Marx, it eliminated “teleology” from the story of life’s history. That is, it obviated the need for understanding life’s development as having been directed by a transcendent personal being outside nature, and it opened the way to understanding history as being directed by impersonal forces of the kind envisioned by Marx. In 1861, upon reading the Origin of Species, Marx exulted: “Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a natural scientific basis for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course.”
How can we blame Darwin for any of that when Marx and Engels had already arrived at the outlines of their philosophy by 1859 when the Origin first appeared? Yes, Marx saw in Darwinism a confirmation of his views, and Engels did so even more emphatically. But what does that prove?
True again, Lenin kept a statuette prominently situated on the desk in his Kremlin office, depicting a monkey contemplating the skull of a man and surmounting the single dedicatory word, “DARWIN.” It had several meanings. The ape statue signified Lenin’s contempt for fellow men, who were nothing but apes’ children; also the Soviet state’s idolatrous regard for science, for Lenin held resolutely to the Communist faith that Marxism itself was a scientific doctrine; and most ominously, it alluded to the Darwinian struggle applied to social classes, with the proletariat rising to its destined rule after the competing classes of aristocrats, bourgeois, priests, and peasants had been exterminated. For Lenin, as for Darwin, “extermination” was a favorite word.
As for Lenin’s successor, Stalin wrote an ideological tract, Anarchism or Socialism?, speculating on Darwinian science and declaring, “Evolution prepares for revolution and creates the ground for it; revolution consummates the process of evolution and facilitates its further activity.”
But still, Marx, not Darwin, published first.
The relationship between Communism and Darwinism has been debated by scholars for years, leaving a muddy and frustrating mass of claims and counterclaims. Yet there is a clear and satisfying way to resolve the debate. Both Marxists and Darwinists are heirs to the materialist revolt against metaphysics that began in the 17th century with Hobbes and Locke and of the 18th century “naturalist” revolt against Church and Throne inaugurated by Rousseau. Marx simply emerged from that tradition a little earlier than Darwin. However, because in Darwin the worldview reached its apogee of influence, it is called Darwinism and therefore Marx is aptly called a Darwinist.
Christian readers will, I trust, forgive the following rough analogy. Marx was to Darwin, very approximately, as John the Baptist was to Jesus: a forbearer, a contemporary, and a disciple. The worldview that bears Darwin’s name justly does so in the same way that the name Christianity alludes to the personality of a historical figure, called Jesus Christ, even though Jesus and many of his ideas emerged from a tradition, Judaism, that long preceded him and on which he placed his own particular interpretation, and even though Jesus’ ideas were further developed by Paul, the gospel writers, the early church fathers, and later Christian thinkers.
What Marx and Darwin shared, to the world’s sorrow, was brilliantly seen by Hannah Arendt. It is what makes Hitlerism and Stalinism two sides of the same coin. More on that tomorrow.
Darwinists are quick to claim there is no controversy over Darwinian evolution, and indeed often claim there are no weaknesses whatsover with Darwin's controversial theory. Take the case of Texas firebrand, and Darwinian activist and evolution defender Dr. Steven Schafersman. Schafersman is opposed to students learning about both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. When it comes to weaknesses of evolution, Schafersman has --over time-- transitioned his position from one point to another so many times that his tree of evolution looks more like a bush. First there were no weaknesses, then there were only a few certain weaknesses. Of late, he has ended up again defending the position that there are no weaknesses whatsoever. John West outlines how Schafersman has wiggled, squiggled, and morphed over time. If you want to see evolution in action, check out the ID The Future story on The Evolving Dr. Schafersman.
Support the Teaching of Strengths and Weaknesses of Evolution
If you live in Texas and would like to let the state's board of education know where you stand on teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, you can do so here. You can support academic freedom by signing this statement:
I agree that the current wording of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) that specifies teaching both "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution and other theories, having the effect of both interesting students in the subjects and in developing critical thinking skills, and having withstood TWENTY YEARS of good service in Texas without a single lawsuit, should be retained.
So, Darwinists are admitting that up until Friday, Jan. 16 2009 @ 4:10PM, evolution was “mostly theory.” Interesting. I am now certain that dogs adapt to their environment, too. Last night my dog kept barking and I shook my finger and spoke very firmly to her and made her sit on her bed. She stopped barking. So, at 7:10 pm I had a perfect example of evolution. Or was it adaptation? Or was it bad parenting? Whatever, we now see that dogs evolve, which previously had been believed to be “mostly theory.” My peers, who were there reviewing the moment, are skeptical because they think my dog is asexual. Regardless, this is all speculation — except for poor Kali. She still lacks an opposable thumb.
And Lo, Darwin Is With You Always, Even Unto the End of the Age
The NCSE would like to remind us that Darwin Day is approaching (it's less than a month away -- do you still need to buy Darwin presents?), and Glenn Branch wants you to take Darwin on your shoulder with you, wherever you go, whether "at the museum or in a pew, at a lecture hall or in a movie theater, out in the park or indoors on a badminton court – to learn about, discuss, and celebrate Darwin..."
Here's an even better idea: why not stand up for academic freedom and remember what Darwin said about fair results and balancing both sides of the question? And if you're a student, see if you can win $500 while you're at it.
Does Darwinism lend support more naturally to a capitalist moral-economic perspective or to some other competing philosophical standpoint, say, a Marxist one?
Economic historian Niall Ferguson takes the former view. He’s been having a good run with his new book The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World — that is, apart from being taken to task by a number of reviewers for applying a Darwinian framework to understanding market forces. In the current New York Review of Books, economist Robert Skidelsky chides Ferguson for purveying “false analogies between financial evolution and Darwinian natural selection....These attempts to explain the rise of money in terms of natural processes strike me as being both morally and philosophically naïve.”
Ferguson describes the “creative destruction” that comes about when financial institutions can’t cut it in the marketplace and so fail and disappear, to be replaced with better adapted competitors. Darwinian capitalism?
Unless your moral, political, and philosophical ideas are completely untethered by reality, then the way you picture in your mind the rules by which the world does work should have some impact on the way you think it should work. So the various answers that have been offered to the question of how life developed naturally lend themselves to the construction of philosophies that answer other, more practical questions, including how human fulfillment is achieved in the economic realm. Why not that? The notion that theories of evolution properly contribute nothing to theories of how wealth is created and divided just makes no sense. If life’s history required the guidance of a transcendent source of intelligence, that has consequences in the realm of economics. If life developed without guidance, but merely under the power of a Darwinian mechanism, that too has consequences, probably different ones.
The problem comes in determining what those consequences are. I haven’t read Ferguson’s book, but it sounds like he’s offering the traditional Darwinian tautology: The fittest firms survive. And what, in economic history, defines fitness? Well, survival. Because, you see, those that survive are, uh, those that survive.
Ferguson traces his idea that “Darwinian processes may be at work in the economy” back to Thorstein Veblen, who “first posed the question ‘Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science’ (implying that it really was) as long ago as 1898.” But the truth is that economic thinking that claims to be based on evolutionary science goes back decades before that.
In the preface to Capital in 1864, Karl Marx heralded his own ideas as presenting “the development of the economic formation of society as a process in natural history.” In his oration at Marx’s funeral in London’s Highgate Cemetery, Engels gave the ultimate compliment: “As Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” That was March 17, 1883.
Starting tomorrow, I would like to devote a couple posts to the thesis that Communism has deeper Darwinian roots than many of us realize. That, in fact, even though Marx had already begun sketching the outlines of his ideas before Darwin published the Origin of Species — the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, the Origin in 1859 — he is fairly called a Darwinist. That, finally, the men who translated Marxism into practical political terms in the form of Soviet terror were evolutionary thinkers, just as they themselves claimed to be.
The back-and-forth between Casey Luskin and Kenneth Miller has been going on for a couple weeks now, both on this blog and over at Carl Zimmer's blog, and now Michael Behe weighs in on the debate over what he meant when he wrote about the blood clotting cascade in Darwin's Black Box:
In Chapter 4 of Darwin’s Black Box I first described the clotting cascade and then, in a section called “Similarities and Differences”, analyzed it in terms of irreducible complexity. Near the beginning of that part I had written, “Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where details are less well known, the blood clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity... The components of the system (beyond the fork in the pathway) are fibrinogen, prothrombin, Stuart factor, and proaccelerin.” Casey Luskin concludes that from that point on I was focusing my argument on the system beyond the fork in the pathway, containing those components I named. That is a reasonable conclusion because, well, because that’s what I said I was doing, and Mr. Luskin can comprehend the English language.
Apparently Prof. Miller can’t. He breathlessly reports that one page after I had qualified my argument I wrote “Since each step necessarily requires several parts, not only is the entire blood-clotting system irreducibly complex, but so is each step in the pathway” and Miller asserts that meant I had inexplicably switched back to considering the whole cascade, including the initial steps. It seems not to have occurred to Miller that that sentence should be read in the context of the previous page, so he focuses on the components before the fork, the better to construct a strawman to knock down.
The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) voted unanimously to adopt rules today implementing the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), the landmark academic freedom bill passed last summer.
The rules approved by the BESE effectuate the academic freedom bill’s purpose to allow teachers to use supplementary materials to teach controversial scientific theories without threat of recrimination.
A subcommittee of the Board removed a provision prohibiting intelligent design before passing the rules unanimously. The legally redundant provision would have gone beyond the intent of the legislation and was dropped after the subcommittee heard testimony from supporters and opponents of the language.
In adopting these rules, the BESE reiterated its support for academic freedom for teachers to teach controversial scientific theories.
According to Discovery Institute education policy analyst Casey Luskin, “This is another victory for Louisiana students and teachers to have a climate of academic freedom to learn about scientific controversies over evolution and other topics in the curriculum.”
Several Louisiana scientists testified in favor of academic freedom of evolution-education, including biologist Wade Warren, biochemist Brenda Peirson, and chemistry professor Joshua Williams.
Louisiana biology teacher Patsy Peebles testified in favor of the language prohibiting intelligent design. When she falsely claimed that ID had been banned by the U.S. Supreme Court, attorney John Wells corrected her, reminding the BESE that the Supreme Court has not ruled on intelligent design.
Stay tuned to Evolution News & Views for more as the story develops.
Will Darwinists Defend Evolution’s Weaknesses This Time, in Texas?
In 2002, the Ohio State Board of Education (SBOE) invited in science experts to testify about teaching both evidence for and against Darwinian evolution. In 2005 it was the Kansas SBOE's turn. The New York Times reported that the board's hearing turned into "a forum on one of the most controversial questions in education and politics: How to teach about the origin of life?”
The stunning thing about the Kansas SBOE meeting was that Darwinists refused to defend their theory, instead opting not to attend at all.
Now it is 2009, and next week the Texas SBOE will host its own meeting on the matter of how best to teach evolution. This time the board will hear testimony from six experts, including three scientists who are recommending that students should learn about scientific evidence that challenges Darwin’s theory of evolution.
On Wednesday, January 21st, at least three of six experts invited by the SBOE to review a proposed update of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for science will give testimony to the board in support of their recommendation that the board retain controversial language in the TEKS calling on students to examine the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories in order to strengthen students’ critical thinking skills.
The question is: will Texans hear Darwinists defend evolution? Will the experts invited to explain why students should learn about both strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution actually show up? I for one hope they do. Vigorous debate and civil discourse are good for science, good for education, and good for making wise policy decisions. Kudos to the Texas board for hosting an airing of such an important issue.
Medieval alchemists searched for a legendary “philosopher’s stone” capable of turning lead into gold. Modern Darwinists have given us a different “philosopher’s stone” — one that turns gold into lead.
Darwinism is the doctrine that all living things are biological descendants of common ancestors that have been modified by unguided variations and natural selection. Although Darwinists claim that their doctrine is supported by “overwhelming evidence,” nothing could be further from the truth. The fossil record shows that living things originated in a particular pattern, but Darwinists themselves (when they’re being candid) admit that the pattern tells us nothing about the process of origination. As for the process, variation and selection are well-documented in existing species, but Darwin didn’t write a book titled How Existing Species Change Over Time. He wrote a book titled The Origin of Species — and no one has ever observed the origin of a single species by variation and selection.
Empirical science tests hypotheses by comparing them with the evidence, but Darwinists never allow evidence to jeopardize their basic claims. Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument,” but his followers are engaged in one long bluff. Books and articles promoting Darwinism invariably make inflated claims based on little evidence — or worse, evidence that is misrepresented or even faked.
Among the inflated claims, those prevalent in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology (“evo-psycho” for short) tend to be the silliest. Sociobiology and evo-psycho are so fanciful that even some Darwinists criticize them for consisting of nothing more than “just-so” stories. A century ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote entertaining but scientifically meaningless “just-so stories” about how the camel got its hump, how leopards got their spots, and so on. In 1978, Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould faulted sociobiology for relying on just-so stories in which “virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.” 1
In 2000, University of Leicester geneticist Gabriel Dover wrote:
This problem with just-so story telling is not some minor irritation… The problem runs much deeper and wider, embracing many new disciplines of evolutionary psychology, Darwinian medicine, linguistics, biological ethics and sociobiology. Here quite vulgar explanations are offered, based on the crudest applications of selection theory, of why we humans are the way we are… Not only is there the embarrassing spectacle of psychologists, philosophers and linguists rushing down the road of selfish genetic determinism, but we are also shackled with their self-imposed justification in giving ‘scientific’ respectability to complex behavioral phenomena in humans which we simply do not so far have the scientific tools and methodologies to investigate.2
In 2001, the U.S. Public Broadcasting System (PBS) produced a lavish eight-hour propaganda series titled Evolution. Episode Five featured evo-psycho advocate Geoffrey Miller. According to the narrator, Miller “believes the human brain, like the peacock’s magnificent tail, is an extravagance that evolved—at least in part—to help us attract a mate, and pass on genes.” But Miller “is just getting started when he argues that the size of our brains can be attributed to our ancestors’ sexual choices. He’s also convinced that artistic expression, no matter how sublime, has its roots in our desire to impress the opposite sex. And that includes music, art, the poetic and storytelling uses of language – even a good sense of humor. According to Miller, they all stem from our instincts for sexual display.” Miller himself then said, “I think when a lot of people produce cultural displays, what they’re doing in a sense is exercising these, these sexual instincts for impressing the opposite sex.”
To illustrate Miller’s claim that artistic creativity is reducible to our ancestors’ sexual choices, PBS’s Evolution chose — of all things! — the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. According to evo-psycho, Handel did it for sex. In fact, however, Handel composed the Messiah as a benefit concert, and he personally conducted scores of performances that raised substantial funds for a London hospital and for people in debtors' prisons. Far from trying to satisfy his sexual desire, Handel used his creative abilities for deeply altruistic purposes, and the Messiah stands as a legacy to his Christian faith.
Nevertheless, for Miller — as for Freud — all of human culture is a by-product of selfish sexual urges. But “Freud’s views lost credibility,” wrote University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne in 2000
when people realized that they were not at all based on science, but were really an ideological edifice, a myth about human life, that was utterly resistant to scientific refutation. By judicious manipulation, every possible observation of human behavior could be (and was) fitted into the Freudian framework. The same trick is now being perpetrated by the evolutionary psychologists. They, too, deal in their own dogmas, and not in propositions of science.3
Coyne was criticizing evolutionary psychology in general. But many biologists have also criticized Miller’s specific ideas about the evolution of the human brain. “How does one actually test these ideas?” wrote University of Sheffield behavioral ecologist Tim Birkhead in a 2000 review of Miller’s work. “Without a concerted effort to do this, evolutionary psychology will remain in the realms of armchair entertainment rather than real science.”4 In another review of Miller’s work, American Museum of Natural History paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall wrote: “In the end we are looking here at a product of the storyteller’s art, not of science.” 5
Now Denis Dutton has come out with yet another retelling of the evo-psycho story. In The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury Press, 2008), Dutton attributes human artistic tastes to our evolutionary history — especially sexual selection. According to an online review by Michael O'Donnell, Dutton’s “idea of an evolutionary basis to the arts” is “compelling,” because “unless you are inclined to believe that an omniscient creator bestowed on some people angelic voices to fill his cathedrals with heavenly airs, there must be some scientific explanation for artistic talent.”
But “scientific” here does not mean “consistent with the evidence.” It means “consistent with Darwinism.” And although Darwinists such as Gould and Coyne and Tattersall criticized evo-psycho for storytelling, Darwinism from the start has consisted mainly of storytelling. What matters in Darwinism is not following the evidence wherever it leads, but seeking explanations that are (a) materialistic and (b) believable, meaning only they are not blatantly contradicted by the evidence. Darwinism masquerades as empirical science, but in reality it is just materialistic storytelling.
Unfortunately, materialism has no room for angels; that’s why Miller and O’Donnell are deaf to the angelic voices that most other people hear in the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Materialism reduces art to lust; that’s why evo-psycho regards the Messiah as nothing more than high-end erotica. And that’s why the philosopher’s stone of Darwinism turns gold into lead.
1 Stephen Jay Gould, “Sociobiology: the art of storytelling,” New Scientist (16 November 1978), p. 530. See also Tom Bethell, “Against Sociobiology,” First Things (January, 2001).
2 Gabriel Dover, Dear Mr. Darwin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 44-45.
3 Jerry A. Coyne, “Of Vice and Men: The fairy tales of evolutionary psychology,” a review of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape, in The New Republic (April 3, 2000).
4 Tim Birkhead, “Strictly for the birds,” a review of Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind in New Scientist (May 13, 2000), 48-49.
5 Ian Tattersall, “Whatever turns you on,” a review of Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind, in The New York Times Book Review (June 11, 2000).
Darwinist and University of Toronto biochemistry professor, Larry Moran, who has called publicly for the expulsion of Christian college students who, despite passing all exams, don’t personally believe in atheism and materialism, has commented on my recent post on qualia in the mind-body problem. I had used a famous traditional philosophical argument on the mind-body problem called the ‘knowledge argument.’ The knowledge argument, first articulated explicitly by Frank Jackson in his ‘Mary’s Room’ thought problem in 1982, highlights the hard problem of consciousness, which is the problem of subjectivity. Why is it that we have subjective first-person experience, whereas all that we know about the brain is objective third person knowledge? The knowledge argument points out that there are things about mental states — subjective experience called ‘qualia’ — that are knowledge that is not material. The denouement of the knowledge argument is that materialist monism is an incomplete description of the mind because it is inadequate to explain subjective experience. Some sort of dualism is necessary for a satisfactory understanding of the mind.
The knowledge argument is a profound problem for strict materialism, and materialist philosophers of the mind such as Daniel Dennett have devoted considerable effort to refuting it. The primary materialist recourse has been to deny the reality of subjective mental states. Most philosophers — and most other people — find such denial hard to take seriously.
I formulated a question for Dr. Steven Novella, who is a materialist with a dogmatic approach to the mind-body problem, that is based on the knowledge argument. My question is this:
It seems that there is knowledge about the experience of seeing color that is not material knowledge. We can in theory (if not in practicality) describe all material knowledge about color and its perception. But how could we describe what color looks like to someone who is color-blind?
If there is knowledge about seeing color that is not material knowledge, then materialism is an incomplete theory of the mind. Some form of dualism is necessary.
This is Dr. Moran’s answer to my question:
Thanks to one of our favorite IDiots, Michael Egnor, we now have an answer to an important question. The question is whether there are ways of knowing other than science (evidence + rationalism). Egnor's answer is .... wait for it .... subjective experience!
After describing my question, Dr. Moran sneers:
That's a tough question all right. But it's only one of many difficult questions of this type. Here are some others that Michael Egnor might want to ponder.
How do you explain intelligence to someone who is stupid?
How do you explain what it's like to be abducted by UFO's if you've never been kidnapped by aliens?
How does a bat explain echolocation to a human?
How do you explain astrology to someone who doesn't know their birthday?
How do you explain love, or anger, to someone who has never been angry or in love?
How do you explain homeopathy to someone who has never been cured by drinking water?
How do you explain Canada to someone who has never been there?
Where are the weapons of mass destruction?
Does Michael Egnor exist?
Dr. Moran elides the issue raised by the knowledge argument: how is it that we have subjective experiences, given that nothing that we know about the brain from a materialistic standpoint invokes first person ontology? How does the “I” of the mind arise from the “it” of the brain? The question is fundamental to the mind-brain problem, and Moran’s response is to sneer. He doesn’t even understand the questions central to the mind-body problem.
Dr. Moran harbors disdain for anyone — especially Christians — who ask questions outside of the purview of his own atheism and materialism, and he’ s unembarrassed about his own philosophical ignorance. Dr. Moran is emblematic of so many Darwinian fundamentalists: he recognizes no genuine knowledge outside of the narrow confines of his own limited world-view. He’s a deeply religious man in his own right, although he lacks the introspective depth to see it. He worships at the altar of scientism, the metaphysical claim that scientific knowledge is the only reliable knowledge. Scientism is self-refuting, obviously, because the claim that scientific knowledge is the only reliable knowledge is itself a claim that is outside science. It’s a metaphysical claim, and Moran’s ignorance of even rudimentary metaphysical arguments is obvious from his post.
Dr. Moran has repeatedly expressed his view that Christian students and scientists should be driven out of academia because of their personal religious beliefs, regardless of their academic accomplishments. Now he sneers at one of the central questions in the modern philosophical debate on the mind-brain question. Dr. Moran is an embarrassment to the vast majority of thoughtful scientists who use science for its proper purpose, and a tremendous asset to those of us who are trying very hard to lift the rock under which Darwinists like Moran hide.
Texas Board of Education Schedules Special Expert Hearing on Strengths and Weaknesses of Evolution
Austin, TX -- The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) has scheduled a hearing of scientific experts, including three scientists who are recommending that students should learn about scientific evidence that challenges Darwin’s theory of evolution.
On Wednesday, January 21st, six experts selected by the SBOE to review a proposed update of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for science will give testimony to the board. Three of the scientists will recommend that the board retain long-standing language in the TEKS calling on students to examine the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories in order to strengthen students’ critical thinking skills. The other experts are on record supporting repeal of the language.
“We’re very pleased that in this Darwin bicentennial year Texas has invited scientists on both sides of the evolution debate to testify about the scientific status of Darwin’s theory,” said Dr. John West, associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture.
According to one of the experts, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, examining the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories is a core part of the scientific process, and abandoning such critical analysis merely to satisfy ideological demands of Darwinists harms students by giving them a false view of scientific inquiry.
“Science education that does not encourage students to evaluate competing scientific arguments is not teaching students about the way science actually operates,” emphasized Dr. Meyer in his written report. Meyer, a Cambridge-trained philosopher of science, directs the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute.
Meyer will be joined in recommending the preservation of the “strengths and weaknesses” language in the TEKS by Baylor University chemistry professor Dr. Charles Garner and University of Wisconsin-Superior biology professor Ralph W. Seelke, whose laboratory research investigates the ability of natural selection to produce new functions in bacteria.
Previously, these scientists have advised the SBOE that good science education should encourage students to learn the scientific facts and engage in more critical thinking than they would under the currently proposed TEKS.
Loss of Function in Stickleback Fish = Loss of Another Argument for "Macroevolution" for Francis Collins
In his book The Language of God, theistic evolutionist scientist Francis Collins contends that diversity within populations of stickleback fish demonstrates that there is no distinction between “macroevolution” and “microevolution.” According to Collins, “It is not hard to see how the difference between freshwater and saltwater sticklebacks could be extended to generate all kinds of fish. The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution is therefore seen to be rather arbitrary; larger changes that result in new species are a result of a succession of smaller incremental steps.” (p. 132) Aside from the fact that this provides another example refuting the Darwinist myth that ID proponents invented terms like “macroevolution” or “microevolution,” a closer look at the facts shows that Collins’ story sheds little light, if any, on "macroevolution," unless one considers loss of function to constitute impressive "macroevolution."
There are two basic groups of sticklebacks: marine (saltwater) sticklebacks that have armor-plating, and freshwater sticklebacks with normal fish scales and little-to-no armor-plating. According to Collins, the presence of unique armor-plating in marine sticklebacks shows great variation within a group that is relatively low on the taxonomic hierarchy, allegedly demonstrating the possibility for large-scale evolution. Or perhaps better put, microevolutionary devolution…
A scientific study published a few months ago reports that the marine stickleback (the ones with the armor plates) came before freshwater sticklebacks (the ones without armor-plating), meaning that this is not an example of the evolution of a new function, but an example of loss-of-function, or what one might term devolution. As a Science Daily press release on the paper from this past September stated, this evolution entailed “[s]hedding some genetically induced excess baggage”:
Shedding some genetically induced excess baggage may have helped a tiny fish thrive in freshwater and outsize its marine ancestors. Measuring three to 10 centimetres long, stickleback fish originated in the ocean but began populating freshwater lakes and streams following the last ice age. Over the past 20,000 years – a relatively short time span in evolutionary terms – freshwater sticklebacks have lost their bony lateral plates, or “armour,” in these new environments. “Scientists have identified a mutant form of a gene, or allele, that prohibits the growth of armour,” says UBC Zoology PhD candidate Rowan Barrett. Found in fewer than one per cent of marine sticklebacks, this allele is very common in freshwater populations.
Alas, Collins’ example, which is intended to break down the distinction between macroevolution and microevolution, really only provides evidence that populations of organisms can lose unique and complex features when selection pressure is relaxed. This tells us nothing about how complex features like armor-plating evolved in the first place — it just shows something we already knew: that Darwinian evolution is great at losing functional genetic information. I’m sure that most biologists — either pro-ID or anti-ID — would consider finding that populations can lose certain complex features to be unsurprising.
The argument that this example of evolution is weak because it entails loss of function is also made by some leading evolutionary biologists. Hopi E. Hoekstra and Jerry Coyne’s review article, "The Locus of Evolution: Evo Devo and the Genetics of Adaptation," published in the journal Evolution in 2007, specifically critiques the argument that the stickleback story demonstrates the creative power of evolution:
Finally, we must recall that these three studies focus primarily on the loss of traits ([stickleback] pelvic spines, wing spots, and trichomes). Supporting the evo devo claim that cis-regulatory changes are responsible for morphological innovations requires showing that promoters are important in the evolution of new traits, not just the losses of old ones.
(Hopi E. Hoekstra and Jerry A. Coyne, "The Locus of Evolution: Evo Devo and the Genetics of Adaptation," Evolution, Vol. 61-5: 995–1016 (2007).)
Significantly, the Hoekstra and Coyne argue that the case for cis-regulatory evolution (as argued with the sticklebacks) is presently weak because “the most widely cited examples of adaptive cis-regulatory mutations focus on trait loss rather than gain.” The article concludes, “evo devo’s enthusiasm for cis-regulatory changes is unfounded and premature. There is no evidence at present that cis-regulatory changes play a major role— much less a pre-eminent one—in adaptive evolution.”
Despite these problems, the best part about this story isn’t Collins’ bad argument for "macroevolution," but rather it's the ScienceDaily press release’s misleading title: “'Armored' Fish Study Helps Strengthen Darwin's Natural Selection Theory.” If evidence showing that populations can lose a unique and complex characteristic is considered to “strengthen Darwin’s natural selection theory,” then Darwin’s "natural selection theory" must be indeed gravely lacking in evidence supporting its grand claims.
There is a lot to be said on the passing of Father Richard John Neuhaus, dean of the theoconservatives, of whom I count myself one. The phrase he is most associated with, which has to do with giving religion a place “in the public square,” has become a cliché. Yet clichéd phrases can still refer to profoundly important ideas. The idea that faith has a role to play in public discussions of public issues, notably in politics, did not seem obvious at all when Fr. Neuhaus wrote his controversial 1984 book The Naked Public Square. It’s an idea that still has legions of enemies, including among some political conservatives, even as it continues to guide those of us who followed the lead of this brilliant, principled, immensely influential Catholic priest and intellectual.
His many friends and admirers will remember different things about him. Speaking for myself, he was both an inspiration and an irritant — one that sometimes inspired by irritating — a story I told in my first book, The Lord Will Gather Me In. I knew him from New York, when I was an editor at National Review, and he and I had a couple of intense disputatious and personal conversations about Judaism and Christianity that had a definite impact on my spiritual future, if not the one he intended.
What readers of ENV need to know, and what they probably won’t read elsewhere, is that Fr. Neuhaus was among the few prominent conservative intellectuals who, when it came to the Darwin debate, really “got it.” In his journal First Things he published articles by ID writers like Stephen Meyer and Phillip Johnson on subjects where other conservative journals still fear to tread.
At the Discovery Institute we’ll certainly not forget one of his last written comments, in the December 2008 issue of FT, from his popular blog-style commentary section. It was a typically incisive item on an upcoming “scientific” conference at the Vatican whose organizers have managed to define “science” in such a way that…Well, read it for yourself:
…[O]ne watches with keen interest the planning for a March conference in Rome sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Gregorian University, and the University of Notre Dame. The conference is to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and it has been announced that proponents of “creationism and intelligent design” will not be invited. The lumping together of creationism and intelligent design is telling. They are quite distinct enterprises; the former is typically in defense of a literal reading of Genesis while the latter is a scientifically based theory of purpose or teleology in natural development. Fr. Marc Leclerc, a Jesuit philosophy professor at the Gregorian, explained that the organizers “wanted to create a conference that was strictly scientific” in order to discuss, as Catholic News Service puts it, “rational philosophy and theology along with the latest scientific discoveries.” Fr. Leclerc said that arguments “that cannot be critically defined as being science or philosophy or theology did not seem feasible to include in a dialogue at this level.” The report continues: “Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the other extreme of the evolution debate--proponents of an overly scientific conception of evolution and natural selection--also were not invited.” So let’s see now: The conference is strictly scientific. In that case, there would seem to be no reason for the Church to be sponsoring it, since there are numerous other institutions that attend to the strictly scientific. Then we are told the conference will also include philosophers and theologians, but only those who are rational--meaning, presumably, those who do not raise critical questions about the strictly scientific. We are told it will exclude scientific ideologues who reject what philosophers and theologians have to say about creation, history, teleology, and human nature and will also exclude scientists who, on the basis of scientific evidence, contend, as the Catholic Church contends, for design and purpose in nature. The organizers seem to think they are being even-handed, but it is all quite confusing. One would not like to think that the purpose of the March conference is to secure for the Catholic Church a clean bill of health from [those] who condemn any deviation from scientistic ideology as anti-intellectualism.
It’s Time for Me to Unshatter My "Three Pillars of Neuroscience Denial"…
Dr. Novella, the dogmatic neurologist from Yale who can’t fathom why his materialist ideology isn’t accepted as truth by all, concludes his latest mind-brain problem post (after calling me intellectually dishonest, a creationist, etc.) with this rhetorical flourish:
Dr. Egnor’s three pillars of neuroscience denial - dualism of the gaps; denying the inferences from brain-mind correlation; and confusing the question of how the brain causes mind with the question of does the brain cause mind - have all been shattered.
My ‘"three pillars of neuroscience denial have been shattered"?
!
Well, it’s time for me to unshatter them.
Shattered Pillar # 1: My "dualism of the gaps."
Dr. Novella’s invocation of "…of the gaps" is a canard. Of course, it’s intended to evoke "God of the gaps," but Dr. Novella misses the real issue. The mind-brain problem is essentially a gap: an "Explanatory Gap," in philosopher Joseph Levine’s words. We don’t have an explanation for the mental in terms of the physical. We have no explanation for how subjective mental experience arises from objective material existence. Nothing in physical brain science intrinsically invokes subjective consciousness. We can describe brain anatomy and physiology just fine with objective third-person science. There is no point at which an electrochemical description of hippocampal neurons invokes subjective experience. There is a gap, a chasm really, between neuroscience and consciousness.
Dr. Novella proposes materialism to fill the "gap." I propose dualism to fill the "gap." Dr. Novella and I share the gap in common; my views are no more or less "dualism of the gaps" than his views are "materialism of the gaps." It’s our gap, and we each propose a different way to fill it.
I’m trying to explain the gap in the mind-brain problem, and dualism seems to me to be the most satisfactory framework. One has the sense that Dr. Novella isn’t really trying to explain the gap, which is the subjective aspect of mental states. He’s trying to explain it away.
Shattered Pillar # 2: "denying the inferences from brain-mind correlation".
I don’t deny the inferences from brain-mind correlation. Unlike Dr. Novella, I draw inferences that are supported by data, and I avoid pronouncements that my ideology is proven and the battle is over. Both dualism and materialist monism hold that the brain and mind correlate. The issue at hand is causation, not correlation.
The issue of causation is subtle, and evidence can be interpreted in several ways. Dualist neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz has pointed out that there is abundant neurophysiological evidence that mental states can alter brain states, which is consistent with dualism. Benjamin Libet, 20th century’s leading neuroscientist in the study of the relationship between the mind and the brain, held a view of the mind-brain relationship that is best described as property dualism. In the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Libet wrote:
If it is proposed that subjective experience and the phenomenal self are constructed illusions, then we should ask "Who is observing this illusion?" … [We] must not accept the panicking fear, of most philosophers and probably cognitive scientists, that any theory must exorcise any implied "ghost of agency". Theories that avoid any "ghost" have not successfully or convincingly explained the unity of conscious experience and the experience of conscious control of voluntary acts. Postulating a subjective "ghost" need not be incompatible with the laws of nature, as Schroedinger pointed out…The conscious mental field (CMF), that I have postulated to account for the unity of experience and an active role for conscious intention to act, could be viewed as a sort of "ghost". However, it is supposed to emerge from suitable natural activities of cerebral neurons, but with *de novo* properties not evident in the physical neural elements from which it derived. Some people may wish to call this dualism, but let us not be frightened off by name calling. The CMF does not represent the dualism of Descartes, who described the mind as a separable substance. My CMF proposal is of course very speculative. But I do not know of any existing evidence that contradicts the proposal, and, furthermore, it is amenable to a direct experimental test of its validity
.
Benjamin Libet — the leading neuroscientist in the study of the mind-brain relationship — explicitly rejected strict materialism, and invoked a “ghost of agency” — property dualism — to explain subjective experience.
Shattered Pillar # 3: "confusing the question of how the brain causes mind with the question of does the brain cause mind"
Dr. Novella elides the central problem with strict materialism in the mind-brain problem. The first question isn’t "how the brain causes the mind" or "does the brain cause the mind." The primary question is this:
can the brain cause the mind?
In order to subject a theory to empirical test, it must first be logically coherent. Materialism fails as logic. What does it mean to say, "The brain causes subjective experience"? There is nothing about the physical scientific description of the brain that invokes subjectivity. The salient qualities of the mind — free will, restricted access and incorrigibility, qualia, intentionality, persistence of self over time, and unity of consciousness — are not properties of matter. Subjectivity is imputed by materialists to neural function, without coherent explanation or logical law-like dependence. The materialist assertion that the brain is the entire cause of the mind is merely an act of faith appended to the science.
Dr. Novella’s debate isn’t with “neuroscience denialists”; it’s with the leading neuroscientists of the 20th century — among them Sherrington, Penfield, Eccles, and Libet — all of whom were dualists. I agree with these fellow neuroscientists that an adequate understanding of the mind-brain relationship requires dualism.
So what about my "three shattered pillars of neuroscience denial"? On the mind-brain problem, modern neuroscience is quite consistent with a dualist view, and materialism hasn’t even achieved logical coherence.
Texans for Better Science Education just posted an enlightening analysis of the recent push-poll by Darwinists at the far-left advocacy group Texas Freedom Network and the polls of the public's views on what should be taught in science classes regarding evolution.
In a transparent attempt to support their campaign TFN has conducted and has been promoting a clearly biased and misleading survey. TBSE feels it is critical for the public to see how TFN’s "results" compare to other polls across America, which have been conducted by unbiased and nationally recognized pollsters. (In contrast, TFN not only picked their own pollster but they also supplied the list of people to survey!)
Intolerance on Parade in Texas Debate Over Evolution
Eric Lane, head of the local San Antonio chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, makes bold — and bogus — assertions in the San Antonio Express about the current debate over how to teach evolution, and what he imagines might be the reasons behind it. Not surprisingly, Lane apparently didn’t bother to do a shred of research, instead seeming quite satisfied to let his imagination come up with all sorts ridiculous things.
It isn’t as if you can’t read what Discovery’s views are on science education, or even specifically what my own views are (they're all over this blog after all). So there’s really no excuse to so blatantly misrepresent our position, and what our motivations are.
Lane writes:
In the upcoming months, the Texas State Board of Education will make a decision on whether public school science classes will teach scientific concepts or religious non-scientific beliefs known as intelligent design/creationism.
Right from the get-go Lane throws up a bogus straw man that he can waste his dozen paragraphs bashing the stuffing out of. The Texas SBOE is not considering religious non-scientific beliefs, nor ...
... creationism, and certainly not intelligent design for inclusion in science classes.
The real issue? The Texas SBOE (SBOE) is currently reviewing their state’s science standards, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), which were originally adopted in 1998. The controversial issue before the SBOE is whether the TEKS will retain language calling for students to learn about both the scientific “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories. Some have proposed removing that language from the TEKS entirely, while others have suggested that good science education that encourages critical thinking should apply to all aspects of the curriculum, especially to the teaching of controversial scientific theories like neo-Darwinian evolution.
Lane further proves his ignorance by suggesting that the whole debate is a fundamentalist, right-wing plot to usher in “a theistic fundamentalist Christian nation.”
Intelligent design advocates, primarily associated with the Discovery Institute based in the state of Washington, assert that life is so complex that it can be explained only by an “intelligent cause or agent.” In other words, a God. But not just any God. It has to be the God of Christianity. A Protestant. And a fundamentalist.
If Lane were right, I’d be in a world of trouble. I’m not a fundamentalist right-wing theocrat. I’m a libertarian agnostic. I work at Discovery Institute, so I can talk with some authority about the bogus charges Lane levels at the Institute and myself.
Nowhere do we ever argue or claim that science tells us the designer is God, any god. (I wonder how Lane would propose to scientifically determine that?) Science can’t tell you who the designer is, and Discovery Institute and its fellows and staff are in agreement on that point.
For me this issue is, broadly, one of academic freedom and freedom of scientific inquiry, and a battle against intolerance. Specifically, the debate in Texas is about whether or not teachers will be free to discuss the full range of scientific evidence related to evolutionary biology. Will they be free to tell students about weaknesses in Darwinian evolution? Or will they be stifled by governmental regulations limiting them to only, dogmatically, presenting students with evidence that allegedly supports Darwin’s theory.
Like Lane, I don’t want to see religion taught in public schools. I agree that science is for science classes. Unlike Lane though, I want teachers and students to be free to discuss all the scientific evidence related to modern evolutionary theory, not just evidence purported to support it. Critical thinking is about weighing both the strengths and weaknesses of any argument. Darwin said it best, of course: “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”
In his book Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul, author Edwards Humes makes many inaccurate claims about science education policy. Humes’ partisanship comes through clearly in these discussions, as he contends that those who would not teach evolution in a one-sided pro-Darwin-only fashion are engaged in a “concerted attack … on the teaching of evolution and other bedrock principles of modern science.” (pg. 25.) Humes' repetition of common Darwinist rhetoric is only the beginning of the problem, for he makes many...
Incorrect Claims about Science Standards and Education Policy:
Humes goes after good science education formerly in the Ohio and Kansas science standards, calling them a “concerted attack” on “the teaching of evolution” which shook “bedrock principles of modern science.” (pg. 25.) But a close look at Ohio’s former policy shows that it yielded many pedagogical benefits to students, citing the National Research Council’s suggestion that students engage in “critical and logical thinking.” Does Humes oppose the use of “critical and logical thinking” when it comes to evolution? For more information about Ohio's former science policy, see Ohio State Board of Education Repeals Critical Analysis Policy; Sends to Subcommittee for Further Review and Recommendation."
Humes fails to note that leading ID-proponents criticized the 1999 Kansas school board for removing some aspects of evolution from their state science standards in 1999. For example, when discussing Kansas, Phillip Johnson wrote: “Of course students should learn the orthodox Darwinian theory and the evidence that supports it, but they should also learn why so many are skeptical, and they should hear the skeptical arguments in their strongest form rather than in a caricature intended to make them look as silly as possible.” Michael Behe contends that schools should “[t]each Darwin's elegant theory. But also discuss where it has real problems accounting for the data, where data are severely limited…” Finally, Jonathan Wells opines that “[s]tudents should be taught about Darwinian evolution because it is enormously influential in modern biology. But they should also be given the resources to evaluate the theory critically.” For more information, see Phillip Johnson, The Wedge of Truth, pg. 82 (Intervarsity Press, 1999); Michael Behe, “Teach Evolution and Ask Hard Questions,” New York Times, (August 13, 1999), and Jonathan Wells, “Give students the resources to critique Darwin,” Kansas City Star, (August 1 1999).
Conclusion
When trying to convince me to do an interview for Monkey Girl, author Edwards Humes told me he was non-partisan. But we have seen that his book unilaterally takes the side of the Darwinists, constantly portrays ID-proponents in a negative light, and often recapitulates common Darwinist talking points. In fact, Humes’ repeated uncritical recapitulation and endorsement of nearly everything Judge Jones and the Darwinists said in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial makes Monkey Girl about as partisan as you can possibly get. But what would you expect from an author who said that evolution is better supported than gravity?
In his book Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul, Edwards Humes says that, “if the evolution wars are to continue, let the combatants be armed with facts, not fiction.” (pg. viii.) Unfortunately, one will not find a balanced treatment of the facts in Monkey Girl, for it offers a strikingly false and inaccurate account of ID and the Kitzmiller case. Monkey Girl is worth reading if you want to understand the popular Darwinist perspective this debate. But if Monkey Girl is any indication, it’s a very one-sided perspective that is betrayed by many facts and filled with false caricatures and stereotypes.
R.R. Reno, features editor at First Things, has a fine essay on the mind-brain problem that addresses many of the issues that Steven Novella and I have been debating over the past year or so. The substance of my arguments against Dr. Novella’s dogmatic materialism and his astonishing hubris regarding the application of neuroscience to the mind brain problem ("Every single prediction of materialism has been proven…") has been twofold.
First, I assert that the materialistic understanding of the mind isn’t even logically coherent. The salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, restricted access, continuity of self through time, incorrigibility, and unity of consciousness are not properties of matter, and there are very strong philosophical and logical reasons to reject the thesis that the mind is matter or that the mind is caused entirely by matter, without remainder. Materialist theories of the mind haven’t even reached logical coherence, let alone empirical verification.
My second argument is that, contrary to the hyperbolic claims of materialists, modern neuroscience accords quite well with dualist (and hylomorphic) understandings of the mind-brain relationship. The pioneer in the scientific study of the relationship between the brain and the mind was UCSF neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet, who described his own understanding of the mind-brain relationship as essentially property dualism. Other leaders in neuroscience, such as neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (the father of epilepsy surgery), Sir John Eccles (Nobel Laurate in medicine for his pioneering work on neuronal synapses) and Charles Sherrington (the father of modern neuroscience) were explicit dualists. The inference to dualism in neuroscience has been emphasized by UCLA neurologist and neuroscientist Jeffery Schwartz, who has documented the substantial evidence that mental changes can induce measurable changes in brain function. Obviously these observations aren’t decisive; a materialist could assert that the brain changes were induced by other brain changes, and that the mental states were epiphenomenal, but the salient point is that advances in neuroscience admit dualist as well as materialist interpretations.
In his essay "Brain Science and the Soul," Reno, writing from the Christian perspective on the mind-body problem, observes:
We often hear that modern science requires us to reject traditional Christian views of the human person. The argument goes something like this: If we can see the physical process by which ideas are associated or feelings felt or decisions made, then surely we must admit that human beings are nothing more than physical entities. The concept of a soul, so we are told, is irrelevant…Well, it turns out that science now points us in a different direction. These days, cognitive scientists are doing experiments that use MRI technology to visualize the brain while subjects undergo experiences, solve problems, and make decisions. This approach allows scientists to see and theorize about the significance and sources of patterns in our brains, patterns that shape the way we respond to the world. We are learning about the highway system of neurological movement, which turns out to be decisive for the way our minds work. ..The new emphasis on patterns of neural activity suggests an important support for the traditional Christian understanding of the soul. The cutting edge of brain science makes it clear that it is as foolish to say that our brains are just neurons as it is to say that highways are just concrete and asphalt. After all, what matters to the motorist is the way in which the concrete is organized to create an interlocking system of usable roads. The same holds for the gray matter inside our heads.
Reno points out new research that is quite consonant with a traditional dualist view of the mind:
What’s striking, however, is that the new scientific work on the brain offers an even more interesting and dramatic confirmation of traditional views of the soul. In a recent MRI study, “The Vulcanization of the Human Brain: A Neural Perspective on Interactions Between Cognition and Emotion,” Princeton brain scientist Jonathan D. Cohen has looked at patterns of brain activity while subjects respond to moral dilemmas and make moral decisions. It turns out that the brain patterns related to moral decisions need to be trained. The soul must be disciplined…Our solutions to ethical problems, Cohen’s work shows, are influenced by the intercommunication between different parts of the brain. Subjects with a high degree of neural activity linking the brain stem to the frontal lobe tend to allow emotional responses to override rational assessments of moral dilemmas. Subjects make more rational decisions, he reports, when the neurological activity from the primitive part of the brain is blocked from interfering with the frontal lobe. Cohen then concludes that these patterns of open and blocked communication are not fixed by nature. They solidify over time. Our brain patterns are vulcanized, as he puts it, and this occurs by the constant repetition of these patterns. The river cuts its channel.
And indeed, Reno observes, this hylomorphic ('matter-form') understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body, which was further developed from Aristotle by St. Thomas Aquinas, has its roots not only in classical Greek philosophy but in the earliest Christian understanding of man:
The Christian tradition adds the ambitions of holiness to Aristotle’s ideal of virtue, but the same view of the soul is at work. Whether infused by God as supernatural virtues or won by ascetic discipline, the soul worthy of fellowship with God is not gilded with a strange, ethereal substance. The soul—the patterns of the body and especially the brain—is “conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29)... So much for the confident materialists who thought they had the facts on their side. Today’s science seems to confute yesterday’s scientific propagandists. As David Brooks observed in a recent column, “The momentum has shifted away from hardcore materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief, and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.”
Reno recognizes the importance of this research for the dualist-materialist debate:
Daniel Dennett, call your office: The human person is pretty much what the Christian tradition has always assumed. We’re not just stuff. We’re stuff given life in a very special way: We’re animals with rational souls capable of remarkable change and development. Precisely because a human soul is unstable, and subject to influence, and hardening over time, the Christian tradition has put a great deal of weight on moral and spiritual discipline in order to “vulcanize” the networks that lead to properly ordered emotions, thoughts, and decisions. Now it seems that brain science is showing that the traditional emphasis on moral and spiritual discipline was exactly right.
Reno recognizes that neuroscience is confirming traditional dualist ways of understanding the human mind:
Aristotle thought that the virtues were connected somehow, so much so that he doubted that a man could be both courageous and a glutton, or prudent while nonetheless intemperate. Here again today’s science seems to vindicate the old view.
My own view of the relationship between the mind and the brain tends to hylomorphism, specifically the variant of traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism called Thomistic dualism, which is the view that the soul (of which the mind is a part) is the substantial form of the body (of which the brain is a part). Thomistic dualism has much strength, not the least of which is that it offers a intrinsic explanation for the interaction between mind and brain and it is entirely consistent with the correlation between mental states and brain states that is evident in neuroscience. Correlation between mind and brain states, but not identity or reduction, is precisely what is predicted by Thomistic dualism. Furthermore in the Thomistic view the ‘rational’ soul is that aspect of the soul (i.e. that aspect of the form of the body) that is in some respects independent of matter. Thus the Thomistic view incorporates subjective properties of the mind, and can give rise to the uniquely mental properties of intentionality, free will, qualia, etc. on which materialist theories crumble.
The hylomorphic understanding of the mind-brain relationship may bridge the "Explanatory Gap" in our understanding of how the subjective properties of the human mind are related to the objective properties of the human brain. Hylomorphism involves the attribution of formal and final causes to our understanding of nature, not merely efficient and material causes which have been the mainstay of scientific investigation over the past several centuries. Indeed, many aspects of nature can be understood for practical purposes simply by investigating efficient and material causes, but some of the profound difficulties that we have encountered in explaining the mind using materialistic paradigms may be the result of erroneously restricting our repertoire for mental causation to material and efficient causes. It may be that the mind can only be understood by reference to formal and final causes, in addition to efficient and material causes. Our difficulty with understanding the mind, and particularly with understanding the ‘Hard Problem’ of the mind, may be that we’re using a scientific paradigm fit for molecules and motion, but not for meaning and purpose.
The mind-brain problem is a crisis for materialism — just as the abundant evidence for design in biology is a crisis for materialism — because materialism invokes only material and efficient causes, which are inadequate to explain several important aspects of nature.
Materialism is an incomplete understanding of reality.
Note: In my original version of this post, I inadvertently described Benjamin Libet's view of the mind as "substance dualism". I meant to say "property dualism", and I have corrected it in the post.
To give a feel for the partisan nature of Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul, Edward Humes’ website for his book has boasted glowing endorsements from reviewers like Eugenie Scott, P.Z. Myers, Michael Shermer, and conspicuously, no ID -proponents. One of the major themes of Humes’ book is to promote the view that evolution is compatible with religion. As discussed below, Humes even goes so far as to claim (wrongly) that Darwin did not come to doubt God and religion due to his scientific studies. Humes' push for the compatibility between evolution and religion is a little suspicious, given that many of his reviewers are avowed atheists.
Humes once boasted a review of Monkey Girl by P.Z. Myers, a notorious atheist who purports to provide “random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal” on his blog. He now includes a review by Eugenie Scott, a signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto.
Michael Shermer, another favorable reviewer on his website, wrote an article titled “Science Is My Savior,” explaining how as a graduate student he became enamored with an evolutionary biology professor and soon thereafter “abandoned Christianity and stripped off my silver ichthus, replacing what was for me the stultifying dogma of a 2,000-year-old religion with the worldview of an always changing, always fresh science.” Shermer’s advice? “As for evolution, it happened. Deal with it.”
Indeed, the LA Times reviewer of Humes’ book takes a fairly anti-religious stance, stating that it is “a cruel twist to evolutionists” that “human beings are ‘genetically disposed to believe in mysteries, miracles, God, and faith.’” The reviewer also states that he “only wish[es]” he could “close” his eyes to the Christian “fundamentalism” Humes recounts in his book. It seems that many of Humes’ leading reviewers themselves accept evolution but reject religion.
For all his discussion of the religious views of ID proponents, it would be interesting if Humes would reveal his own metaphysical perspective. Will he do that? Regardless, this post will go on to discuss...
Humes' Misconstruals of Religion and of Science:
Humes asserts that Darwin "did not come to doubt God and religion because of his scientific research or because of his theory of evolution, as critics of evolution sometimes allege," (pg. 120) a claim countered by some leading Darwin scholars and Darwin’s own autobiography. Darwin scholar (and die-hard Darwinist) George Levine explains that Darwin saw in biology a “horror" because there is "so much that goes awry, so much that is distorted, cruel, violent,” leading to deep “resentment against the beneficent, omniscient Creator who might be thought to have produced such horrors.” Thus Darwin himself wrote, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a large family of parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
In his Autobiography, Darwin took aim at belief in a personal God which he believed was superseded directly by his theory of natural selection, writing: “Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.” Readers can decide for themselves if Humes is correct to state that it is only “critics of evolution” who claim that Darwin’s scientific research impacted his personal faith.
Humes cites a “computer program” which he claims explains "the plausibility of eye evolution by natural selection with a virtual organism possessed of a flat, three-layer eyespot similar to the sensory organ on many simple microscopic creatures.” (pg. 125.) First we must ask, where did these first "three-layer eyspots" come from? Humes gives no explanation. But evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll admitted that it is inappropriate to assume that such early eyes were simple, writing, “do not be fooled by these eyes’ simple construction and appearance. They are built with and use many of the ingredients used in fancier eyes.” Humes' most egregious error with regards to eye evolution is that Humes apparently didn't know that there is no such computer program as he cites, and that these claims are a Darwinist urban legend promoted by Richard Dawkins. The real study’s math and the notion that it used a computer program were refuted by Darwin-skeptic and mathematician David Berlinski. For details, see by David Berlinski's "The Vampire’s Heart."
Humes appeals to exaptation to explain how bird wings evolved, claiming that bird wings and their feathers may have been initially used for warmth, or thermal regulation, and then “natural selection could favor these natural capes and select for larger and more thermally efficient variations.” (pg. 126.) In my chapter, “Finding Intelligent Design in Nature” in the book Intelligent Design 101, I explain why this makes a weak argument:
An evolutionary interpretation of the fossil data requires that many key features that allow birds to fly, including feathers, evolved for a purpose other than flight. Feathers supposedly evolved from scales, but pennaceous feathers are so well-suited for flight that it is difficult to imagine transitional stages between scales and fully functional flight feathers. According to much prevailing evolutionary wisdom, natural selection is not the powerful force driving the evolution of traits necessary for flight. Rather, bird flight has become a mere accident and lucky byproduct of a morphological coincidence. This does not make for a compelling evolutionary story.
Humes claims that molecular biology has “ratified” common descent, stating that “Darwin’s belief in common descent seemed to be ratified by these breakthroughs in the new science of biochemistry and molecular biology.” (pg. 122.) I wasn't aware that scientific theories were "ratified" by votes like legislation, but Humes apparently is not aware that many leading evolutionists have admitted that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find consensus about common descent from the molecular phylogenetic data. Others have admitted that molecular biology has created turmoil for advocates of common descent. For details, see "Barking up the Wrong Tree" and "Peter Atkins Dramatically Overstates the Evidence for Evolutionary Phylogenies."
Humes claims that scientists can trace the “development of modern humans—Homo sapiens—from a long line of earlier hominids and ape-like ancestors,” and he asserts that “[t]he chain of what appear to be transitional species is well documented in the fossil record.” (pg. 123.) The data does not support Humes' claim. For starters, Humes mislabels Australopithecus afarensis as a “powerful” species of the genus Australopithecus, when in reality it is thought to be one of the smaller, gracile members of that genus. For details, see "Human Origins and Intelligent Design" or “Paleoanthropologists Disown Homo habilis from Our Direct Family Tree.”
Continuing his trend of making harsh attacks against ID proponents, Humes quotes mathematician Jeffrey Shallit accusing Dembski of “intellectual dishonesty” and stating that Dembski’s work is “riddled with errors and inconsistencies he has not acknowledged.” But Humes fails to recognize that Dembski has responded to Shallit’s criticisms extensively, as is found in Dembski’s book No Free Lunch, and that Dembski feels Shallit’s latest criticisms add little to their current debate and were weak and unworthy of response. For more information on Dembski's responses to Shallit, see Dembski's book, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/jeffrey-shallit/, and http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/jeffrey-shallit-part-ii/.
Humes praises Darwinists like Nick Matzke who attacked Stephen C. Meyer’s pro-ID scientific article in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (PBSW) for arguing that the paper "was utterly lacking in scientific merit" and because it allegedly "falsely equated arguments against evolution with arguments for design." Humes should have fact-checked Matzke's claims. In fact, has Humes even read Meyer's PBSW article? It contains extensive sections laying out a strong positive case for design, as is seen in the following excerpts from Meyer's PBSW article (note: each paragraph is an individual excerpt from Meyer's article):
"Intelligent human agents--in virtue of their rationality and consciousness--have demonstrated the power to produce information in the form of linear sequence-specific arrangements of characters. Indeed, experience affirms that information of this type routinely arises from the activity of intelligent agents. A computer user who traces the information on a screen back to its source invariably comes to a mind--that of a software engineer or programmer. The information in a book or inscriptions ultimately derives from a writer or scribe--from a mental, rather than a strictly material, cause. Our experience-based knowledge of information-flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified complexity (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source from a mind or personal agent. As Quastler (1964) put it, the “creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity” (p. 16). Experience teaches this obvious truth."
"For historical scientists, “the present is the key to the past” means that present experience-based knowledge of cause and effect relationships typically guides the assessment of the plausibility of proposed causes of past events. Yet it is precisely for this reason that current advocates of the design hypothesis want to reconsider design as an explanation for the origin of biological form and information. This review, and much of the literature it has surveyed, suggests that four of the most prominent models for explaining the origin of biological form fail to provide adequate causal explanations for the discontinuous increases of CSI that are required to produce novel morphologies. Yet, we have repeated experience of rational and conscious agents--in particular ourselves--generating or causing increases in complex specified information, both in the form of sequence-specific lines of code and in the form of hierarchically arranged systems of parts."
"What natural selection lacks, intelligent selection--purposive or goal-directed design--provides. Rational agents can arrange both matter and symbols with distant goals in mind. In using language, the human mind routinely “finds” or generates highly improbable linguistic sequences to convey an intended or preconceived idea. In the process of thought, functional objectives precede and constrain the selection of words, sounds and symbols to generate functional (and indeed meaningful) sequences from among a vast ensemble of meaningless alternative combinations of sound or symbol (Denton 1986:309-311). Similarly, the construction of complex technological objects and products, such as bridges, circuit boards, engines and software, result from the application of goal-directed constraints (Polanyi 1967, 1968). Indeed, in all functionally integrated complex systems where the cause is known by experience or observation, design engineers or other intelligent agents applied boundary constraints to limit possibilities in order to produce improbable forms, sequences or structures. Rational agents have repeatedly demonstrated the capacity to constrain the possible to actualize improbable but initially unrealized future functions. Repeated experience affirms that intelligent agents (minds) uniquely possess such causal powers."
"Intelligent agents have foresight. Such agents can select functional goals before they exist. They can devise or select material means to accomplish those ends from among an array of possibilities and then actualize those goals in accord with a preconceived design plan or set of functional requirements. Rational agents can constrain combinatorial space with distant outcomes in mind. The causal powers that natural selection lacks--almost by definition--are associated with the attributes of consciousness and rationality--with purposive intelligence. Thus, by invoking design to explain the origin of new biological information, contemporary design theorists are not positing an arbitrary explanatory element unmotivated by a consideration of the evidence. Instead, they are positing an entity possessing precisely the attributes and causal powers that the phenomenon in question requires as a condition of its production and explanation."
Meyer's article contains a strong positive argument for design and does not "equat[e] arguments against evolution with arguments for design." Only by disregarding the bulk of what Meyer wrote in his PBSW paper can Humes, relying on Matzke, make that false claim.
Humes should have also scrutinized some of Matzke's claims against Meyer, but instead relies on Matzke to claim that "recent discoveries had uncovered predecessor organisms in the fossil record that had previously been overlooked because of their fragility and small size.” (pg. 198.) Mike Gene did some fact-checking on Matzke, noting that Matzke's claim that “Meyer repeats the claim that there are no transitional fossils for the Cambrian phyla” is false, because as Gene observes, “no where does [Meyer] actually claim ‘there are no transitional fossils for the Cambrian phyla.’”
Matzke attacks some of Meyer’s footnotes and citations, claiming that “of the two papers by Foote cited by Meyer, neither deals with the Cambrian/Precambrian records.” Yet Meyer cited two other studies besides those by Foote to bolster this point, neither of which Matzke refutes, and in fact one of Meyer’s citations to Foote does mention the Cambrian. Unfortunately, Humes repeats Matzke's criticisms of Meyer without investigating them carefully.
In his description of Matzke's argument, Humes insinutates that the Cambrian explosion is not a real event, but an artefact of poor preservation in the fossil record. But many experts and authority disagree with this view. Simon Conway Morris explains that “The 'Cambrian explosion' is a real evolutionary event, but its origins are obscure.” This corroborates with Meyer’s actual argument, which observes that “several recent discoveries and analyses suggest that these morphological gaps may not be merely an artifact of incomplete sampling of the fossil record … suggesting that the fossil record is at least approximately reliable.”
The alleged Precambrian fossils cited by Matzke comes from a paper by J. Y. Chen, the same scientist who stated that, "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin.” Nonetheless, Matzke claims that Chen’s article documents “fossils of the long-hypothesized small, soft-bodied precambrian worm.” Yet Chen's article does not contain the word “worm” and the word “small” is perhaps an understatement: the fossils are under 180 micrometers, smaller than the width of 4 human-hairs. Having read the paper, I'm not even sure if these microscopic features can be safely called fossils. More importantly, this fossil does not challenge Meyer’s argument: it was already known before this fossil was reported that a precambrian mollusk-like animal existed, Kimberella. Meyer easily dealt with such evidence in his paper, observing that “even on the most optimistic interpretation of these remains, Precambrian strata account for no more than four animal body plans,” and therefore “neither the peculiar Ediacaran fauna nor the Precambrian fossil record taken as a whole establishes the existence of the wide variety of transitional intermediates that neo-Darwinism and punctuated equilibrium require.” Adding the ambiguous microfossil that Matzke cites into the mix hardly changes the reality of the Cambrian explosion.
This same point is implied by Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote:
More importantly, paleontologists have documented a fairly rich record of [Precambrian] benthic tracks and trails (but no body fossils) that could not have been made by the sessile or planktonic Ediacaran organisms and have, by consensus of all experts, been regarded as bilaterian in origin. But-and here's the rub these trackways are very small, measuring 5 mm in diameter at a maximum, with most only 1 mm. or so in width (see Valentine and Collins, 2000). Moreover, these tracks and trails do not extend deeply into Precambrian time. Hughes (2000, pg. 64) states: "Traces made by bilaterians extend back to about 550 million years at least, but earlier sediments are famous for their undisturbed sedimentary lamination. The rise of animals able to mine organic resources in sediments in complex ways officially defines the base of the Cambrian." Thus, positive evidence indicates only a late Precambrian origin for bilaterians of any kind. The same data imply that all Precambrian bilaterians ranged in size from the microscopic to the barely visible, and that the Cambrian boundary marks a real and geologically sudden appearance of both large complex bilaterian body fossils, and a major change in the size and complexity of their tracks and trails…
Indeed, a recent discovery showed that Precambrian trail fossils do not necessarily indicate the presence of multi-cellular organisms. It seems that Humes’ mention newly discovered fossils does little to challenge Meyer’s argument, nor does it even clearly affect the number of Precambrian body plans that Meyer acknowledged scientists were aware of when he published his article.
Humes mentions the panda’s thumb, claiming it provides evidence for evolution, calling “the panda’s unusual adaptation for stripping the bark from bamboo shoots—a rather clumsy extra thumb—as a proof of evolution in action.” In fact, computer tomography studies have shown that the panda’s thumb is not clumsy at all. According to an analysis published in Nature, the panda’s thumb works “with great dexterity.” For details, see “Is the Panda's Thumb a ‘Clumsy’ Adaptation that Refutes Intelligent Design?"
In a recent post, I pointed out the obvious — that traditional allopathic medical practice is capable of causing considerable harm to patients, and I appealed to some of the particularly nasty critics of alternative medicine to back off with the venom directed against practitioners and ordinary people who have experienced benefit from alternative medicine or who are concerned about the risks associated with vaccinations. We doctors have our hands full protecting patients from our own mistakes, without spending our time excoriating accupuncturists. A little perspective is in order.
So why are these particular bloggers so obsessed with hatred for people who question medical or scientific orthodoxy? Most of these arrogant critics are atheist/materialist physicians, and their anger is fueled by the refusal of the public and many other scientists and physicians to accede to their orthodoxy. Their issue is ideological, not medical or scientific. Scientism is a materialist religion — a metaphysical stance — and its priests don’t suffer questions lightly.
My view on the debate between allopathic medicine and alternative medicine is straightforward: follow the evidence wherever it leads, and do so with professionalism and respect. It is based on the evidence that I doubt the efficacy of many of the claims made by proponents of alternative medicine, and it's based on the evidence that I support intelligent design theory and the viewpoint that the mind is not merely the brain. In that sense, I’m very much a denialist. I deny many of the claims of proponents of alternative medicine, I deny some of the claims made by proponents of allopathic medicine, and I deny Darwinism as an adequate explanation for life and I deny materialism as adequate for the mind. I'm interested in evidence, not doctrinal purity or ideological bullying.
For my temerity, I got ‘smackdowned.’ One PalMD from ‘Denialism blog’ thumped his anonymous chest:
Smackdown, please (yes, Egnor, I'm talking to you)
…You see, once you wander off the reality reservation, you open up your mind to all kinds of narishkeit. Take Dr. Michael Egnor, the creationist neurosurgeon. He holds some fantastical beliefs about mind-body dualism and creationism. His big thing is "non-materialist neuroscience"---an idea that is prima facie ridiculous, especially for someone who plays with brains all day, and can quite literally change someone's mind with a scalpel…
It’s not worth quoting much more. You get the drift. So who is ‘PalMD'? ‘PalMD’ is an anonymous physician blogger who claims to be an “internist in the Midwestern United States.” He's challenged me by name with a schoolyard taunt, but... what's his name? Who is 'PalMD'?
The irony is delightful. PalMD claims to represent mainstream 'science-based medicine,' yet he lacks the courage to blog under his real name. I’ve always blogged under my own name, because I have little respect for physicians who express viewpoints on the internet and yet are afraid to have their names associated with their opinions. I mean what I say, and I’m willing to stand by it. I don’t say one thing anonymously, and another thing for attribution.
Why then is PalMD — who’s ‘talking to…me’ — afraid to provide readers with his own name? Obviously, he’s afraid that people will link his opinions with his name. ‘PalMD’ is afraid that his patients will google his name and read his blog. Perhaps his patients would realize that they're the people who he derides as idiots, crazy, cultists, 'anti-science,' and 'Deniers.' Perhaps his patients would take offense at his equation of people who don't march in lock-step with his atheist/materialist beliefs (that is, most people) with Holocaust deniers. Perhaps PalMD's patients and colleagues would realize that their doctor/colleague is an arrogant bigot who ridicules Christians who pray and believe they have souls:
...illogical thinking leads to the adoption of idiocy...[Egnor] reached out to the creationist cults. Apparently their brand of crazy wasn't enough for him...[Egnor] bemoans the arrogance of doctors...[b]ut what is his solution?... Prayer? ...So [Egnor] believes that the mind is not brain-dependent---so what?...Does he make sure to use a Sharpie to demarcate the soul before putting steel to flesh?
Devout Christians who take Genesis literally (i.e. half of Americans) are 'idiots' and members of "creationist cults"? PalMD should be afraid that anyone would read his swill and link it to his name. It's likely that most of his patients, colleagues, and friends pray, believe in God, and believe they have souls, and they probably would take offense if they knew that their doctor/colleague/friend equated them with cultists and Holocaust deniers because of their religious beliefs. Anonymous blogging is common among atheists/materialists/Darwinists, and for a reason. Despite their claim to represent mainstream science, many Darwinian fundamentalists like PalMD are ill-tempered bigots who are loathe to have their opinions publicly associated with their names. For obvious reasons.
So I won’t be engaging in a ‘Smackdown’ with PalMD unless I (and readers) know who ‘PalMD’ is. It's hard to take an anonymous chest-thumping bigot seriously. Once I know his real name, and once his viewpoints are publicly associated with his name, we can begin a genuine discussion about medical errors, medical arrogance, scientism, bigotry, ‘denialism’ and...oh yes... cowardice.
How Kenneth Miller Used Smoke-and-Mirrors to Misrepresent Michael Behe on the Irreducible Complexity of the Blood-Clotting Cascade (Part 3)
In Part 1, I showed how Ken Miller purported to refute Michael Behe's arguments about the irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade, but actually badly misrepresented Behe's arguments to Judge Jones. In short, the purported knockout experiments (in the form comparative biochemistry) that Ken Miller cited to Judge Jones, where the blood-clotting cascade still worked in the absence of certain factors, dealt entirely with factors that Behe specifically did not claim were part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood-clotting cascade. Behe explained this problem in Miller's argument to Judge Jones, but apparently Behe's testimony fell on deaf ears. In Part 2, I discussed how Miller might not have even refuted the more expansive arguments for irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade made in the textbook Of Pandas and People, since his argument is based upon a logical leap that was not confirmed by experimental data. To analogize Miller's error, he effectively argued that a bike doesn't need both its wheels because unicycles function with only one wheel, but Miller never actually cited any tests on a bike showing you can ride a bike that's missing a wheel.
In light of those problems with Miller's testimony, consider the patent falsity of Judge Jones’ claim that "scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe's predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade":
[W]ith regard to the blood-clotting cascade, Dr. Miller demonstrated that the alleged irreducible complexity of the bloodclotting cascade has been disproven by peer-reviewed studies dating back to 1969, which show that dolphins' and whales' blood clots despite missing a part of the cascade, a study that was confirmed by molecular testing in 1998. (1:122–29 (Miller); P–854.17–854.22). Additionally and more recently, scientists published studies showing that in puffer fish, blood clots despite the cascade missing not only one, but three parts. (1:128–29 (Miller)). Accordingly, scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe's predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade.
(Judge John E. Jones III, Kitzmiller v. Dover, 400 F.Supp.2d 707, 740 (M.D.Pa 2005).)
As the foregoing discussions in Part 1 and Part 2 made clear, Judge Jones' assertion was simply wrong. This gives us further reason for understanding why federal judges should not become the arbiters of complex scientific questions about biological origins. Yet perhaps Judge Jones does not deserve the final blame for this mistake. After all, he simply copied this section dealing with blood clotting from the Kitzmiller plaintiffs' "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law," as seen in the table below:
Judge Jones' Kitzmiller ruling
Kitzmiller Plaintiffs' Proposed "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law"
Dr. Miller demonstrated that the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade has been disproven by peer-reviewed studies dating back to 1969, which show that dolphins' and whales' blood clots despite missing a part of the cascade, a study that was confirmed by molecular testing in 1998. (1:122-29 (Miller); P-854.17-854.22). Additionally and more recently, scientists published studies showing that in puffer fish, blood clots despite the cascade missing not only one, but three parts. (1:128-29 (Miller)). Accordingly, scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Professor Behe's predication about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade.
Dr. Miller demonstrated that the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade has been disproven by peer-reviewed studies going back to 1969, which showed that dolphins' and whales' blood clots despite missing a part of the cascade, a study that was confirmed by molecular testing in 1998. 1: 122-29; P854.17-854.22. More recently, scientists published studies showing that in puffer fish, blood clots despite the cascade missing not only one, but three parts. 1: 128-29. In sum, scientists in peer-reviewed publications have refuted Behe's prediction about the alleged irreducible complexity of the blood-clotting cascade.
While Judge Jones' copying was not improper as far as judicial ethics are concerned, the trivial non-substantive stylistic differences (italicized in the table above) between his ruling's inaccurate treatment of blood clotting and the plaintiffs' brief would make even a cheating high school student blush: "going back" becomes "dating back"; "More recently" becomes "Additionally and more recently"; "In sum" becomes "Accordingly." And we're left wondering, did Judge Jones intentionally take a subtle jab at Behe by changing "Behe's prediction" to "Behe's predication" ("predication" can mean "an act … of preaching")?
In his book Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul, Edwards Humes says that, “if the evolution wars are to continue, let the combatants be armed with facts, not fiction.” (pg. viii.) Yet as discussed in my previous post, it seems that Humes is more interested in mud-slinging against intelligent design (ID) proponents than providing a balanced discussion of the facts. In particular, Humes engages in name-calling in response to Traipsing Into Evolution, our rebuttal to the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling, calling it the “rant of a sore loser” and claiming it was an “an adaptation of angry Internet postings” wherethat we “just made [things] up” and engaged in “complete fabrication.” But I agree with Humes that what matters most are the facts. If the facts are on his side, why must Humes resort to such name-calling? This post will therefore compare the facts with many of the false claims that made during...
Humes' Attacks on Traipsing Into Evolution:
My first hint that Humes was stretching for ways to attack our book Traipsing Into Evolution came when he complained about the definition we gave for the word "traipse" (a word Judge Jones used in his ruling) at the beginning of the book. Our definition came from a 1982 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary as “[t]o walk about idly or intrusively." Apparently for Humes, that definition is too old, and the definition of “traipse” has changed in the past 25 years. For the record, the definition of “traipse” hasn’t changed. The 2006 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary uses a near-identical definition (“To walk or tramp about; gad”) and Random House Unabridged Dictionary, published in 2006, defines “traipse” as “to walk or go aimlessly or idly without finding or reaching one’s goal.” It seems that Humes was a little too eager to attack our book.
Humes then develops much harsher attacks against the book, claiming that Traipsing Into Evolution made a “complete fabrication” by claiming that Judge Jones tried to "conflat[e] ID with fundamentalism." Since Humes apparently doesn’t want to acknowledge how Judge Jones tried to connect ID to fundamentalism in the Kitzmiller ruling, I’ll trace the connection clearly and show that our claim was not “fabricated” at all. In the Kitzmiller ruling, Judge Jones wrote that “opposition [to evolution] grew out of a religious tradition, Christian Fundamentalism,” and he then went on to show that creation science was tied to Fundamentalism, stating, “The terms ‘creation science’ and ‘scientific creationism’ have been adopted by these Fundamentalists as descriptive of their study of creation and the origins of Man.” He then tried to explicitly tie ID to Genesis-based creationism, stating that “ID is a form of creationism [because] ID uses the same, or exceedingly similar arguments as were posited in support of creationism … the words ‘God,’ ‘creationism,’ and ‘Genesis’ have been systematically purged from ID explanations,” and therefore “ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism,” and “ID is a form of creationism.” The connection that Judge Jones tried to make is simplistic (and false, when one digs deeper): Judge Jones tied fundamentalism to creation science, then he tried to tie ID to creationism. He did this for legal purposes because he wanted to conclude that the Dover School Board's promotion of ID arguments would, in the eyes of Dover community members, endorse “fundamentalism.” Thus, Jones specifically argued that under the endorsement test, Dover’s ID policy would ‘‘communicat[e] to those who endorse evolution that they are political outsiders, while communicat[ing] to the Christian fundamentalists and creationists who pushed for a disclaimer that they are political insiders.”
The word “conflate” means "to bring together" — and that’s exactly what Judge Jones tried to do with respect to ID and fundamentalism. He did it for legal purposes so that supporting one could be seen as endorsing the other. Humes' harsh attacks on Traipsing Into Evolution are false, and it certainly cannot be fairly argued that our claim was a “complete fabrication.” Can that same charge be made against Humes’ false accusations against the book?
Humes' one real substantive critique of Traipsing Into Evolution is his listing of about 4 or 5 different types of arguments to claim that ID requires supernatural creation, thereby arguing that Traipsing Into Evolution "fails to address" (pg. 344) the evidence Judge Jones cited on this point in the Kitzmiller ruling. In contrast, it is Humes and Judge Jones who are “failing to address” the evidence and arguments we raised in Traipsing Into Evolution — evidence which was also put before Judge Jones.
Humes’ weak examples include: (1) Out-of-context quotations from Michael Behe where Humes tries to switch philosophical implications of ID with the actual scientific content of the theory; (2) Comments by Behe about the definition of science which had NOTHING to do with claiming ID was supernatural; (3) False claims that Scott Minnich said that the ground rules of science had to be changed for ID to be considered science; (4) Irrelevant comments by Steve Fuller and William Dembski attacking methodological naturalism, and (5) Irrelevant comments about Of Pandas and People (Pandas) that ignore what Pandas actually said. I’ll treat each one of these arguments separately:
1. Humes' Out-of-context quotations from Michael Behe: Humes observes that Behe said that it is "implausible that the designer is a natural entity," but this small snippet is a quotation that is taken grossly out-of-context. The citation is to where Behe is writing in a PHILOSOPHY journal about the philosophical implications of ID, where he is arguing that, on a philosophical level, there must be a regress back to some non-natural designer. Behe thinks such a regress can be made on a philosophical level, but he’s not making a scientific argument, nor is he discussing the actual scientific conclusions of ID. In fact, Humes ignores that Behe's same article leaves open the possibility that, philosophically, humans were directly designed by a natural designer, as Behe states: “I should add that there is nothing in the previous reasoning to rule out the hypothesis that we terrestrials were designed by a natural designer which was itself designed by a supernatural designer, or that there was a series of designers between the supernatural one and us, or some variation of this. It simply means that at the beginning of the chain, input from beyond nature was required.”
In his response to Judge Jones' ruling, Behe explained that the court blatantly misrepresented his views, and the theory of ID, because this quote was simply looking at the philosophical implications of ID:
"Again, repeatedly, the Court’s opinion ignores the distinction between an implication of a theory and the theory itself. If I think it is implausible that the cause of the Big Bang was natural, as I do, that does not make the Big Bang Theory a religious one, because the theory is based on physical, observable data and logical inferences. The same is true for ID."
(Michael Behe, “Whether Intelligent Design is Science: A Response to the Opinion of the Court in Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District”)
Additionally, Humes ignores the fact that Behe has clearly explained in multiple places that the scientific theory of intelligent design does not require the supernatural:
"The conclusion that something was designed can be made quite independently of knowledge of the designer. As a matter of procedure, the design must first be apprehended before there can be any further question about the designer. The inference to design can be held with all the firmness that is possible in this world, without knowing anything about the designer." (Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, pg. 197.)
"The most important difference [between modern intelligent design theory and Paley's arguments] is that [intelligent design] is limited to design itself; I strongly emphasize that it is not an argument for the existence of a benevolent God, as Paley's was. I hasten to add that I myself do believe in a benevolent God, and I recognize that philosophy and theology may be able to extend the argument. But a scientific argument for design in biology does not reach that far. Thus while I argue for design, the question of the identity of the designer is left open. Possible candidates for the role of designer include: the God of Christianity; an angel--fallen or not; Plato's demi-urge; some mystical new age force; space aliens from Alpha Centauri; time travelers; or some utterly unknown intelligent being. Of course, some of these possibilities may seem more plausible than others based on information from fields other than science. Nonetheless, as regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newton's phrase hypothesis non fingo.
(Michael Behe, "The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis," Philosophia Christi, Series 2, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2001), pg. 165, emphasis added.)
“most people (including myself) will attribute the design to God--based in part on other, non-scientific judgments they have made--I did not claim that the biochemical evidence leads ineluctably to a conclusion about who the designer is. In fact, I directly said that, from a scientific point of view, the question remains open. ... The biochemical evidence strongly indicates design, but does not show who the designer was”
(Michael Behe, “Philosophical Objections to Intelligent Design: Response to Critics,” http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_philosophicalobjectionsresponse.htm)
So Behe has been very clear that intelligent design itself does not require a supernatural designer. In fact, he gave clear and direct testimony at the trial, which Judge Jones ignored, explaining that ID does not require the supernatural:
Q. So is it accurate for people to claim or to represent that intelligent design holds that the designer was God?
Behe: No, that is completely inaccurate.
Q. Well, people have asked you your opinion as to who you believe the designer is, is that correct?
Behe: That is right.
Q. Has science answered that question?
Behe: No, science has not done so.
Q. And I believe you have answered on occasion that you believe the designer is God, is that correct?
Behe: Yes, that's correct.
Q. Are you making a scientific claim with that answer?
Behe: No, I conclude that based on theological and philosophical and historical factors.
(Behe, October 17 AM testimony, pgs. 94-95.)
Thus, Judge Jones (and then Edward Humes) misconstrued the actual theory of ID — which Behe makes clear does not require the supernatural — with the philosophical implications that Behe has drawn from the theory.
2. Humes' misconstrual of Behe's definition of science: Humes’ comment about Behe's definition of science (with respect to ID and astrology) is again grossly out-of-context because this segment of Behe's testimony had absolutely nothing to do with whether ID required supernatural intervention. In fact, evolution fits under Behe's definition of science, but that doesn’t mean that evolution requires the supernatural any more than it means that ID requires the supernatural.
3. Humes' uncritical misconstruals of Scott Minnich's testimony: Humes parrots Judge Jones (who copied and pasted from the ACLU) quoting pro-ID biochemist and Kitzmiller expert witness Scott Minnich out-of-context, stating that “Professor Minnich testified that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened so that supernatural forces can be considered.” No, Dr. Minnich NEVER said anything like that and in fact testified that ID does not require the supernatural. The citation is to page 97 of Minnich’s Nov. 4th AM testimony. I was in the courtroom when Minnich gave this testimony and I remember clearly what he said, and the context of the exchange. Here’s what Minnich actually said in the segment cited by Judge Jones, as it was recorded by the court reporter:
Q. Well, the answer to my question, and I understand you had a qualification, was true. For intelligent design to be considered science, the definition of science or the rules of science have to be broadened so that supernatural causes can be considered, correct?
A. Correct, if intelligent causes can be considered. I won't necessarily -- you know, you're extrapolating to the supernatural. And that is one possibility.
Thus, Minnich’s comment about changing the definition of science (which they claimed was methodological naturalism) is conditional — science only has to be redefined if one defines mere intelligent causes to be supernatural. But Minnich isn't saying ID necessarily postulates a supernatural cause because the supernatural is “one possibility” and, as he points out, the hostile attorney was “extrapolating to the supernatural," but Minnich "won't necessarily" do that. Minnich, however, made it clear that he was not “extrapolating to the supernatural,” as will be seen by looking at various excerpts from Minnich's testimony:
Q. Do you have an opinion as to whether intelligent design requires the action of a supernatural creator?
A. I do.
Q. What is that opinion?
A. It does not.
(Minnich November 3 PM testimony, pgs. 45-46, 135.)
Q. Is it -- does intelligent design tell us how many designers there are? Is it just one or could it be more?
A. It could be more.
Q. So it could be a whole family of designers, right?
A. I suppose so.
Q. It could be competing designers? We could have one designer who's designing good things and another designer who's designing bad things, right?
A. I don't -- yeah, what's your point?
Q. Well, does intelligent design tell us whether there could be –
A. No, no.
(Minnich, November 4th AM testimony, pg. 94.)
Q. Now, the conclusion that something was designed, does that require knowledge of the designer?
A. No. Absolutely not.
Q. Why not?
A. Well, I mean, we can infer design, but the science isn't going to tell us anything about the designer unless it's, you know, signed on one of these components, and we haven't found that yet.
Q. So is it accurate for people to claim or to represent that intelligent design holds that the designer is God?
A. No, absolutely not.
Q. Has science answered this question, the source of design --
A. No.
(Minnich, November 3 PM testimony, pg. 57.)
Again, during cross-examination, we see that Minnich says that ID permits a supernatural creator, but doesn’t require it:
Q. Would it be fair to say that intelligent design does not exclude the possibility of a supernatural cause as the designer?
A. It does not exclude.
Q. And, in fact, a designer could be a deity, correct?
A. It could be.
Q. And that would clearly be supernatural, right?
A. Right, but that's -- that would be a philosophical addition to that science isn't going to take, isn't going to tell us. I think I made that clear.
(Minnich, November 4 AM testimony, pgs. 95-96.)
Thus, Minnich makes it clear that the science of ID cannot tell you if the designer is natural or supernatural. Here, again, is exchange cited by Judge Jones (and thus, by Humes), which comes soon after this last quote given above:
Q. Well, the answer to my question, and I understand you had a qualification, was true. For intelligent design to be considered science, the definition of science or the rules of science have to be broadened so that supernatural causes can be considered, correct?
A. Correct, if intelligent causes can be considered. I won't necessarily -- you know, you're extrapolating to the supernatural. And that is one possibility.
(Minnich, November 4 AM testimony, pg. 97.)
In his answer, Minnich makes it clear that methodological naturalism only excludes ID to the extent that it excludes “intelligent causes” by considering them to be "supernatural" — this is why he says “correct, if intelligent causes can be considered..." He attributed the extrapolation that ID requires a “supernatural cause” to the Darwinist attorney, Mr. Harvey, because Dr. Minnich had already made it clear that the science cannot tell you if the designer is natural or supernatural. It is “one possibility” that the designer is supernatural, but Minnich makes it clear that the scientific theory does not tell you that. The implication of Dr. Minnich’s logic is that if methodological naturalism does NOT exclude merely intelligent causes then, the Mr. Harvey’s answer is incorrect — if intelligent causes cannot be considered excluded.
Minnich also makes it clear that ID goes no further than inferring intelligence, stating, "So we're looking at the empirical evidence. We find irreducible complex systems. When we find these in any other context they're the product of intelligence, we infer by standard scientific inference or reasoning that these systems are also the product of intelligence, and we leave it at that." (Minnich, Nov. 3rd Testimony, pgs. 49-50.) In one final exchange from his direct testimony, Minnich makes it clear that methodological naturalism doesn’t exclude ID because ID doesn’t require supernatural action:
Q. Does intelligent design require the action of a supernatural creator acting outside the laws of nature?
A. No.
[…]
Q. Does intelligent design rule out a natural explanation for design foundation?
A. It doesn't.
Q. We heard quite a bit of testimony during the course of this trial about methodological naturalism, and I believe you indicated in your deposition you see that as placing limits on intelligent design, is that correct?
A. It does. It can. In the sense that it limits explanations it can be advanced, but it has the same kind of stricture on other avenues of scientific research as well.
Q. Does methodological naturalism necessarily exclude intelligent design from the realm of science?
A. No, it doesn't.
Q. Why not?
A. Again, I mean, there could be a natural cause for the systems we're trying to explain.
(Minnich, November 3 PM testimony, pgs. 135-137.)
Thus, Minnich once again makes it clear that methodological naturalism does not exclude design unless design is appealing to a supernatural creator. But he has made it clear that intelligent design is not an explanation to the supernatural, so it isn’t excluded by methodological naturalism. Dr. Minnich’s position should now be clear: he doesn’t think that methodological naturalism excludes ID unless you (a) wrongly extrapolate that ID requires a supernatural explanation, or (b) classify all intelligent causes as "supernatural" such that methodological naturalism would exclude any intelligent causes. This is because Minnich was clear that “we infer by standard scientific inference or reasoning that these systems are also the product of intelligence, and we leave it at that.” Humes, following Judge Jones, misrepresented Minnich’s testimony.
4. Humes cites irrelevant discussions from Steve Fuller and William Dembski: Humes quotes Steve Fuller and William Dembski bashing methodological naturalism, but we explain in our book (in a section that Humes apparently ignores) why, even if methodological naturalism is a correct criterion of science, that it does not disqualify ID from being science:
Whether methodological naturalism is really a foundational ground rule for the operation of science has been sharply disputed by historians and philosophers of science. Assuming ad arguendo that Judge Jones is correct [that science should be defined by methodological naturalism], his argument proves far less than he believes. Intelligent design, properly conceived, does not need to violate methodological naturalism, a point that expert witness Scott Minnich made clear at trial. To understand why this is the case, one needs to understand how a design inference is drawn. Intelligent design theory assumes that intelligence is a property which we can understand through general observation of intelligent agents in the natural world. An intelligent agent exhibits predictable modes of designing because it has the property of intelligence, regardless of whether or not the agent is ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural.’ Thus, the theory of intelligent design does not investigate whether the designing intelligent agent was natural or supernatural because it assumes that things designed by an intelligence may possess certain perceptible properties regardless of whether that intelligent agent is a natural entity, or in some way supernatural. Contrary to Judge Jones, intelligent design is clearly based upon an explanatory cause whose behavior is understandable and yields predictable evidence that it was at work. … Intelligent causes can be inferred through confirmable data. The types of information produced by intelligent causes can be observed and then measured. Scientists can use observations and experiments to base their conclusions of intelligent design upon empirical evidence. Intelligent design limits its claims to those which can be established through the data. In this way, intelligent design does not violate the mandates of predictability and reliability laid down for science by methodological naturalism (whatever the failings and limitations of methodological naturalism).
(Traipsing Into Evolution, pg. 37.)
5. Humes' Misrepresentations of Pandas: Humes claims that the Pandas textbook shows that "ID is a supernatural, religious idea." (pg. 344.) But Humes somehow misses that Pandas makes precisely the opposite claim — that the science of ID cannot determine whether the intelligence behind life is natural or supernatural, as these excepts from Pandas demonstrate:
"If science is based upon experience, then science tells us the message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent cause. But what kind of intelligent agent was it? On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy. But that should not prevent science from acknowledging evidences for an intelligent cause origin wherever they may exist. This is no different, really, than if we discovered life did result from natural causes. We still would not know, from science, if the natural cause was all that was involved, or if the ultimate explanation was beyond nature, and using the natural cause."
(Of Pandas and People, pg. 7, emphasis added.)
"Surely the intelligent design explanation has unanswered questions of its own. But unanswered questions, which exist on both sides, are an essential part of healthy science; they define the areas of needed research. Questions often expose hidden errors that have impeded the progress of science. For example, the place of intelligent design in science has been troubling for more than a century. That is because on the whole, scientists from within Western culture failed to distinguish between intelligence, which can be recognized by uniform sensory experience, and the supernatural, which cannot. Today we recognize that appeals to intelligent design may be considered in science, as illustrated by current NASA search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Archaeology has pioneered the development of methods for distinguishing the effects of natural and intelligent causes. We should recognize, however, that if we go further, and conclude that the intelligence responsible for biological origins is outside the universe (supernatural) or within it, we do so without the help of science."
(Of Pandas and People, pgs. 126-127, emphasis added.)
"The idea that life had an intelligent source is hardly unique to Christian fundamentalism. Advocates of design have included not only Christians and other religious theists, but pantheists, Greek and Enlightenment philosophers and now include many modern scientists who describe themselves as religiously agnostic. Moreover, the concept of design implies absolutely nothing about beliefs and normally associated with Christian fundamentalism, such as a young earth, a global flood, or even the existence of the Christian God. All it implies is that life had an intelligent source."
(Of Pandas and People, pg. 161.)
Indeed, at one point, Pandas even seems to adopt methodological naturalism, stating that “intelligence . . . can be recognized by uniform sensory experience, and the supernatural . . . cannot.” (pg. 126.) Somehow Humes must have missed those passages where Pandas makes it clear that ID does not require the supernatural. For more details on Pandas, see “Response to ACLU ID FAQ: Part 1” and “Intelligent Design will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover.”
Dr. Novella, the dogmatic neurologist from Yale who can’t fathom why his materialist ideology isn’t accepted as truth by all, concludes his latest mind-brain problem 
