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The Associated Press has corrected an inaccurate article about the Iowa Academic Freedom bill which had stated that "The bill asserts that teaching religious theories of evolution falls under academic freedom. It would let teachers at all education levels teach religious theories as science and forbid them from discounting non-science based answers from students." The bill, of course, says precisely the opposite, as it expressly states: “This section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.” Thankfully, after being shown the actual text of the bill, the AP realized that it was erroneous to claim that the bill allows the teaching of “religious theories” and it has now printed a correction stating: In a Feb. 26 story about a legislative bill that protects criticism of evolution, The Associated Press reported erroneously that the measure would let educators teach religious theories as science. The bill would prohibit promotion of religious doctrine, and the question of whether religious-based arguments would be allowed in classrooms is a matter of debate among supporters and opponents. This just shows that when the media uncritically repeats the talking points of Darwinist critics of academic freedom, that the truth is not heard. The AP should be commended for fixing their error.
In his essay for Forbes.com, Jerry Coyne takes me to task for my dissent from Darwinism. According to Coyne, “The tenets of evolutionary theory are simple: Life evolved, largely under the influence of natural selection; this evolution took a rather long time; and species alive and dead can be organized on the basis of shared similarities into a tree whose branching pattern implies that every pair of living species has a common ancestor. Among genuine scientists, there is not the slightest doubt about the truth of these ideas.”
Coyne writes that I am “decades out of date” and show “no sign of knowing anything at all about evolutionary biology in the 21st century.” Indeed, “there is so much evidence" for Darwinism that “one would have to be either willfully ignorant or blinded by faith” to doubt it.
Am I really “decades out of date” and “either willfully ignorant or blinded by faith”?
As evidence for Darwinism, Coyne cites the fossil record. But the fossil record lacks the innumerable transitional forms predicted by Darwin’s theory. And shared similarities among species have not produced a consistent branching tree pattern. Evolutionary trees based on anatomical features conflict with trees based on molecular evidence, and trees based on one molecule conflict with trees based on other molecules. The recent scientific literature is full of such examples.
Coyne cites the existence of “dead genes” as evidence for Darwin’s unguided process and evidence against intelligent design. But data from the genome projects show that most—perhaps all—of what was previously thought to be “junk DNA” is in fact functional. Following Coyne’s logic, the recent scientific literature actually provides evidence against Darwinism and for intelligent design.
So Coyne’s defense of Darwinism ignores recent scientific evidence. And his criticism of intelligent design (ID) rests on a misconception. According to him, ID claims that “if we don’t understand something, there’s no point in trying to understand it—we should just throw up our hands and say, ‘God did it’.”
But ID claims only that we can infer from evidence that some features of living things are better explained by an intelligent cause than by unguided natural processes. ID is not an argument from ignorance, and it does not explain things by saying “God did it.”
Darwinism and intelligent design are merely different answers to the same scientific question: Is there evidence for design in biology? Consider a living cell, which contains tens of thousands of different kinds of biomolecules. Some of the molecules—such as DNA—carry complex information. As Bill Gates describes it, “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”(1)
Other biomolecules translate the DNA code into functional proteins such as enzymes. Still other molecules are motors, or energy-producing factories, or intricate surface channels that regulate the cell’s interactions with the outside world.
Darwinists claim that all of this originated from random mutations and unguided natural selection, without design. Yet there isn’t a single detailed, evidence-based explanation for the evolution of any biomolecule from primordial precursors. All Darwinists have to offer are “just-so” stories about how biomolecules might have originated.
Is design an argument from ignorance, a mere assertion that ‘God did it’? Not at all. Intelligent design is a scientific inference based on knowledge. We have extensive knowledge of computer codes, motors and energy-producing factories. All of them are designed. The more we learn about living cells, the more they look like things that can only be made by design. Modern cell biology implicitly accepts this and consists essentially of reverse engineering. My own research, which involves the mechanisms by which the brain regulates pulsatile blood flow from the heart, relies on the application of engineering principles—design principles—to study brain blood flow.
Science, properly conducted, follows the evidence wherever it leads. The fact that so many biologists defend Darwinism in spite of the evidence shows that something else is going on here. As I wrote in my original essay, “the fight against the design inference in biology is motivated by fundamentalist atheism. Darwinists detest intelligent design theory because it is compatible with belief in God.”
I quoted several other Darwinists, but I could also have quoted Coyne. “There is a fundamental conflict” between science and religion, Coyne wrote in 2008, and it “can never be reconciled until all religions cease making claims about the nature of reality.” In fact, “the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism.”
Atheism is the consensus among evolutionary biologists. In a remarkably candid essay, leading evolutionary biologist Dr. Richard Lewontin—Dr. Coyne’s mentor at Harvard—wrote:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
So there is a deeper commitment at stake here, one that has little to do with scientific evidence. Darwinism is atheist ideology, imposed on science. This might explain why Darwinists do not want their scientific critics to be heard, and why Coyne excoriates Forbes.com for providing space to them.
Intelligent design theory takes a different approach to science. It is open to any kind of causation—random or designed—in accordance with the evidence. Some aspects of biology, particularly molecular biology, show clear scientific evidence for intelligent design.
I respectfully ask my Darwinist colleagues to set aside atheist ideology, and follow the evidence.
(1) Bill Gates, with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 188.
In Part 3 of this series, I discussed a recent article published on MSNBC titled, "Fossils reveal truth about Darwin's theory" that puffs the fossil evidence for evolution. In that installment, I discussed the fact that the article relied entirely upon evolutionary scientist Donald Prothero touting various examples of alleged transitional forms -- but that Prothero's arguments didn't disclose the real history of the fossil record, and included much speculation and assumption-laden evolutionary interpretation.
One of the showcase fossils in the article is the alleged "frogamander," which is supposedly a transitional form between frogs and salamanders. Frogs and salamanders are of course both amphibians, and indeed the article admits that the fossil is simply "a toothed amphibian" (nothing extraordinary), and asserts this fossil is special because it purportedly has "a wide skull and large ear drum (like frogs) and two fused ankle bones as seen in salamanders." A brief analysis of this alleged transitional fossil shows its underwhelming features.
The Nature paper that first reported the fossil opens with a striking retroactive confession of evolutionist ignorance, as it states: "The origin of extant amphibians (Lissamphibia: frogs, salamanders and caecilians) is one of the most controversial questions in vertebrate evolution, owing to large morphological and temporal gaps in the fossil record." So does this one fossil solve all these questions? Of course not. And of course the fact that this field is one where transitional links are strikingly missing is not discussed by Prothero in the MSNBC article.
The Nature paper further explains that "strikingly, the broad skull shape, the greatly enlarged vacuities on the palate, and the shortened vertebral column and tail give the immediate impression of a Palaeozoic batrachian." Batrachians include frogs, toads, and other tail-less amphibians, so in other words, the body of this fragmented fossil is largely like a frog or toad. This fossil appears extremely froglike, apart from its allegedly "fused ankle bones." Behold, below are the incredible purported "frogamander's" transitional fused ankle bones, each about 1-millimeter in size (labeled bc and dt3):
(Adapted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Anderson et al., "A stem batrachian from the Early Permian of Texas and the origin of frogs and salamanders," Nature Vol. 453:515-518 (May 22, 2008), Fig. 3b)
Are you convinced by these two amazing <1 mm sized bones that this is a transitional form worthy of touting in Foxnews or MSNBC headlines? You shouldn't be, because a lot of assumptions went into the claim that it had salamander-like ankle-bones. The original Nature paper shows that the limbs of this fossil were highly fragmented and largely missing, as seen in the diagram below:
(Adapted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Anderson et al., "A stem batrachian from the Early Permian of Texas and the origin of frogs and salamanders," Nature Vol. 453:515-518 (May 22, 2008), Fig. 1b)
Their argument that this fossil has salamander-like ankle-bones rests on 2 assumptions: (1) That the millimeter-sized bones were found in their real-life location, and (2) That the ankle bones that aren't there, aren't there because they hadn't hardened yet, not because were lost from the fossil. While many limb bones (including many tarsal and carpal bones) are missing from this fossil, the authors assume that the missing ankle-bones bones weren't lost from the fossil (like many other bones clearly were), but that they hadn't ossified yet, and thus this fossil allegedly exhibits a salamander-like developmental pattern. But if the other ankle-bones bones are just plain missing — like many other bones in this fossil are obviously missing — then their case for salamander-like ankle-bones is greatly weakened. Given that we know that a lot of tarsal (ankle) bones are missing from this fossil, it's entirely possible that the bones normally found in a frog foot are just plain missing. Evolutionary assumptions — not the raw data — are what is driving this interpretation.
Even if they're right about the fossil reconstruction, we're still talking about an evolutionary story based upon two millimeter-sized ankle bones — not exactly a shining example of transitional features. And even if this is an ancestor of frogs and salamanders, their story isn't neat and tidy. It requires some pesky evolutionary reversals, as the Nature piece states: "If our interpretations are correct, the preaxial pattern of digital development is either independently derived in Gerobatrachus and salamanders, or primitive in batrachians but reversed in frogs." Indeed, their phylogenetic tree for various living and extinct amphibians has a consistency index of only 0.250, meaning that ~75% of the character data conflict with the phylogenetic hierarchy in their tree (i.e. HOMOPLASY). To say the least, this does not inspire confidence in the integrity of their claimed evolutionary relationships.
Of course none of this is mentioned in the MSNBC puff-piece on evolution, which simply calls this fossil the amazing "frogamander" that demonstrates the "truth about Darwin's theory."
I think that Niles Eldredge would beg to differ, as he would say that the truth about Darwin's theory is also revealed in the largescale pattern we see in the fossil record where evolutionary change is not documented by fossils. As I quoted in Part 3, the words of evolutionary paleontologist Niles Eldredge are again appropriate: “...we have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not."
Eldredge's criticism of his own field seems to be ripe for application against Donald Prothero, the geologist that MSNBC uses as its singular authority on evolution and the fossil record. This MSNBC puff-piece on transitional fossils provides an illustrative case study in the conflicting views surrounding these allegedly transitional fossils. And when they rely on polemical authors like Donald Prothero who misrepresent views on the nature of some of these fossils, you can be sure that the goal is to pay homage to Darwin, not careful or objective scientific analysis.
Much to the chagrin of those who wish to prevent students from learning about science that challenges neo-Darwinism, academic freedom bills have been submitted to the legislatures of five states so far this year. The arguments from critics against these bills are utterly predictable — but they unwittingly demonstrate the need for academic freedom legislation.
Before the Oklahoma Academic Freedom Bill died in committee last week, two Oklahoma Darwinists created a scare-FAQ to lobby Oklahoma legislators, stating: "This bill is designed to cast doubt on science as a valid way of understanding the world and to promote ideas based on religious faith. … This is a ‘Trojan horse’ bill intended to open the door for the teaching of religious concepts in school science classes." Similar arguments were made by Iowa Darwinists, who signed a petition stating that “’academic freedom’ for alternative theories is simply a mechanism to introduce religious or non-scientific doctrines into our science curriculum.”
These arguments are difficult to take seriously, because the actual text of the Oklahoma bill, for example, says precisely the opposite:
This act only protects the teaching of scientific information, and this act shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or non-beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or non-religion. On the contrary, the intent is to create an environment in which both the teacher and students can openly and objectively discuss the facts and observations of science, and the assumptions that underlie their interpretation. Plainly, the teaching of religion will NOT be protected by this bill; it only protects the teaching of science. What these Darwinists really don’t like about the bill, of course, is that it protects the rights of teachers to discuss scientific weaknesses in evolution. By falsely equating such discussions with religion, which is illegal to advocate in public school science classrooms, these Darwinists are creating the very climate of fear and intimidation that this bill is designed to alleviate. Thus, whether they realize or not, theses fear-mongering Darwinists have unwittingly provided an elegant justification for the bill.
The Oklahoma Darwinists further argued that “weaknesses” in evolution cannot be taught because… Promoting the notion that there is some scientific controversy is just plain dishonest…. That fact that evolution has occurred is accepted by virtually all scientists around the world and is as well established as the fact that the Earth is round. There really are no scientific ‘weaknesses.’ If one looks at the sources of these alleged weaknesses, we find they are phony fabrications, invented and promoted by people who don’t like evolution. Likewise, the Iowa Darwinists assert that “there is no real dissent within the scientific community.” We’ve heard this before (see " Who in Texas Is Afraid of a Little Critical Analysis of Evolution?"). More troubling, however, is the type of climate created in the classroom when you tell teachers and students that it’s “dishonest” to discuss scientific doubts about evolution because there is “no real dissent,” or that there are “no scientific ‘weaknesses’” in evolution — only “phony fabrications.” The effect of these Darwinist arguments, ironically, is to chill academic freedom through scare-tactics where teachers fear they will be subject to ridicule, intimidation, or worse if they raise these scientific controversies with students. Again, this is precisely why academic freedom legislation is needed.
Falsehoods and More Fear-Mongering
The Oklahoma Darwinists promoted the patently false claim that the Louisiana Academic Freedom bill has cost taxpayers in that state money: “In Louisiana school districts have faced serious problems implementing the law and costly lawsuits filed over its constitutionality.” The problem with that claim is that not one single lawsuit has been filed in Louisiana over their academic freedom law. Their statement is a falsehood, pure and simple.
Similar fear-mongering is found in the Iowa Darwinist petition, which states, “Similar efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in schools repeatedly have been found to be unconstitutional, something witnessed most recently in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) in Pennsylvania.” But the policy in Dover is in no way “similar” to an academic freedom bill for a variety of reasons:
First, Dover’s policy required the teaching of intelligent design, whereas academic freedom legislation compels teachers to do nothing differently, it only protects the rights of teachers to choose to teach scientific controversies in an objective manner without having to fear for their jobs.
Second, these academic freedom bills do not bring intelligent design into the curriculum because they do not try to settle the dispute over whether intelligent design is science. All the bills do protect is teaching science, and they expressly do not protect teaching religion. Who could object to that?
Finally, academic freedom legislation does not “undermine the teaching of evolution.” In fact, the bills protect the teaching of the “scientific strengths” of evolution as much as they protect the teaching of weaknesses. Eugenie Scott and other Darwinists are constantly complaining (and rightly so) that many teachers feel intimidated from teaching a pro-evolution curriculum. These bills protect those teachers' rights just as much as they protect teachers that want to also discuss scientific challenges to evolution. These bills are true academic freedom bills: they protect the teaching of legitimate science surrounding evolution and other controversial scientific theories, whether for or against.
Projecting Charges of Censorship
Finally, the Oklahoma Darwinist engages in projection, stating: “this approach teaches our children that it is acceptable to simply ignore the parts of science they don’t happen to like.”
This allegation turns the intent of the bill on its head. This bill doesn’t remove evolution from the classroom! This bill allows teachers to ignore no part of the required curriculum, and last time I checked, Oklahoma teachers are still required to teach evolution. In fact, as noted, the bill protects the rights of teachers discuss the “strengths” of evolution as much as its “weaknesses.”
Thus, this bill is not about taking science out of the classroom, but allowing more science into the classroom. By denying that there are any scientific weaknesses in evolution, it’s these Darwinists who wish to “ignore the parts of science they don’t happen to like.”
What's Really Going On Here?
The difference between proponents of academic freedom and these Darwinists is that supporters of this bill have no objections to teaching the pro-evolution scientific evidence. The bills' supporters simply want teachers to have the freedom to give students access to more science on controversial scientific topics. These Darwinists are the ones who want to censor viewpoints by using intimidation tactics to convince teachers that if they discuss scientific weaknesses in evolution, then religion and “dishonesty” will come into the classroom. Such rhetoric creates a climate that intimidates teachers from feeling free to teach controversial scientific theories in an objective manner that discusses both majority and dissenting scientific viewpoints. This is harmful to education, freedom of inquiry, and the pursuit of scientific truth.
The anti-freedom behavior of these Darwinists shows precisely why legislation like this is needed.
In Part 1 and Part 2, I discussed two of MSNBC’s recent puff-pieces promoting evolution that they’ve published to celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday. The final article, which pushed evolution much harder than the others, was titled, “Fossils reveal truth about Darwin's theory” (also posted on Foxnews) and gloated, “Events and press releases are geared, in part, to combat false claims made by some who would discredit the theory. One frequently cited ‘hole’ in the theory: Creationists claim there are no transitional fossils, a.k.a. missing links. Biologists and paleontologists, among others, know this claim is false.”
The initial glaring problem with the MNSBC puff-piece is that so-called “creationists” are by no means the only ones discussing a lack of transitional fossils in the fossil record. There are many (i.e. many dozens) of admissions from leading evolutionary paleontologists acknowledging that the fossil record does not generally show a pattern of gradual evolution and that plausible transitional fossils are generally missing.
Moreover, the MSNBC article misrepresents how critics characterize the fossil record. Sophisticated critics of the fossil record don’t contend that there are “no transitional fossils,” but rather observe that the pattern we see in the history of life is one of explosions, where potential transitional fossils are the exceedingly rare exception. Rather than acknowledging the general pattern of explosions in the fossil record, MSNBC asserts that the fossil record “is full of” transitional forms that show “gradual change over time.” But many scientists unmentioned in this article have stated otherwise.
As a first of many possible examples...
... a 2001 college-level invertebrate zoology textbook acknowledges that the fossil record has not given clues to help explain the abrupt appearance of animal phyla in the Cambrian explosion: Most of the animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear, 'fully formed,' in the Cambrian some 550 million years ago...The fossil record is therefore of no help with respect to the origin and early diversification of the various animal phyla. Likewise, Robert Carroll recognizes that "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."
Of course no mention of the Cambrian explosion was made in the MSNBC puff-piece.
But this is not the only such "explosion" in the fossil record. Paleontologists have observed a fish explosion, a plant explosion, a bird explosion, and even a mammal explosion. Abrupt explosions of mass biological diversity seem to be the rule, not the exception, for the fossil record. In fact, no mention whatsoever of the "explosion" pattern in the history of life was made in MSNBC puff-piece.
The reality is that evolutionary transitions plausibly documented by fossils seem to be the rare exception in the fossil record. As leading evolutionary biologist, the late Ernst Mayr, wrote in 2001, "When we look at the living biota, whether at the level of the higher taxa or even at that of the species, discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent. . . . The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediates." This phenomenon exists not only at the species level but also at the level of higher taxa, as one zoology textbook discusses: Many species remain virtually unchanged for millions of years, then suddenly disappear to be replaced by a quite different, but related, form. Moreover, most major groups of animals appear abruptly in the fossil record, fully formed, and with no fossils yet discovered that form a transition from their parent group. Likewise, the leading evolutionary paleontologist Niles Eldredge has stated, “...we have proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not."
Ignoring this pattern, the MSNBC puff-piece cites Donald Prothero’s book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, to assert that the fossil record “is full of” transitional forms that show “gradual change over time.”
Buying Prothero's Arguments? Caveat Emptor!
First, Prothero’s book--which forms the basis of authority for the MSNBC puff-piece--is hard to take seriously because it reads more like a polemic than a serious academic treatment. Consider these statements from Prothero's book: “[T]he creationist political pressure, propaganda, and lies are not restricted to public schools. In many smaller colleges … the professors are just as intimidated by creationist bullies who are eager to disrupt class.” (Prothero, p. 354; Note: it's amusing that Prothero provides no documentation to back his anecdotal claim.)
“If the fundamentalists continue to expand their political power, are we in for another Inquisition, with the religious fanatics suppressing and destroying books and evidence, and harassing anyone who doesn’t agree with them?” (Prothero, p. 355)
“Many scientists and authors have written how uplifting and liberating the scientific worldview can be for humankind, especially in comparison to the vengeful God of the Old Testament.” (Prothero, p. 358) Prothero’s book sounds like one with an agenda that clearly falls short of a calm, collected, objective scientific analysis. His examples of transitional forms follow a similar form of argumentation. In fact, when reviewing Prothero's book, Niles Eldredge made a subtle but unmistakable complaint that Prothero did not discuss the overall pattern of evolution in the fossil record, where we often don't find transitional forms and instead find abrupt appearance of new species: [George Gaylord] Simpson begged to differ: His entire point in the ensuing chapters was to demonstrate that patterns in evolutionary history characteristically repeat themselves regardless of position in time, place, or clade. The pattern he focused on was the rapid-seeming appearance of higher taxa with their defining adaptations/ synapomorphies already well in place in the earliest known fossils—implying to Simpson a very rapid evolutionary origin, often leaving no trace of intermediates.
(Niles Eldredge, "Paleontology and Evolution," Review of Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, by Donald R. Prothero, in Evolution, Vol. 62-6:1544–1546 (2008).) When commenting directly on Prothero's book's unyielding focus on alleged transitional forms, Eldredge goes on to say that Simpson "would still wonder—as I do—if that is all there is to the story. Prothero does not address the repeated-pattern phenomena that arrested Simpson and those, like myself, who have gotten the message that here lies the path where paleontology can make a real difference in understanding how evolution has produced the history of life that it has."
In other words, Eldredge notes that Prothero basically ignores the all-too-common pattern in the fossil record where groups appear abruptly without transitions. Eldredge thus observes that one of Simpson's "core postulates" is that "large-scale events in evolutionary history are not exactly like the patterns produced in selection experiments under laboratory conditions," and thus we often find what he calls "’Starburst’ phylogenies,” specifically mentioning the "Cambrian explosion": “Starburst” phylogenies based on extant taxa can be expected to reflect monophyletic subcomponents of such turnovers-cum-rapid evolutionary diversification. The persistent lack of resolution of the relationships of the three major clades of coelomate animals, for example, arguably reflects rapid diversification of the “Cambrian Explosion.” But although such patterns literally leap out of the fossil record, and have been known since the days of Cuvier in the early 19th century, phylogenetic systematists still routinely dismiss “unresolved” polychotomies simply as products of faulty data or analysis.
(Niles Eldredge, "Paleontology and Evolution," Review of Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, by Donald R. Prothero, in Evolution, Vol. 62-6:1544–1546 (2008).) Eldredge thus complains that this sort of “explosion” or “starburst” pattern is not mentioned by Prothero in his book: Beyond a discussion of punctuated equilibria (a passage in part geared to refuting creationist claims that punk eek is merely a storyline made up to hide the absence of transitional, 'missing-link' fossils), there is nothing of Simpson’s second theme connecting paleontology with evolutionary thought in a far more dynamic way.
(Niles Eldredge, "Paleontology and Evolution," Review of Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, by Donald R. Prothero, in Evolution, Vol. 62-6:1544–1546 (2008).) Again, Eldredge complains that Prothero's book does not contain a complete discussion of the fossil record: But still the plaintive lines from the Threepenny Opera (Lotte Lenya singing “Is that all there is, my friend. . .?”) echo in my ears as I type these words. Van Dam et al. (2006) recently published an analysis of rodent evolutionary history in the fossil record of Spain between 24.5 and 2.5 million years ago. Most of the evolution is tied up in turnovers—where extinction takes out most of the existing fauna, and evolution thereupon kicks in and produces new species in cross-genealogical spasms of replacement that Darwin actually knew about (i.e., as a general pattern) but found threatening to his theory. It is not: except in the sense that it implies (as does the basic postulate of punctuated equilibria) that most morphological change in evolutionary history (and remember that morphological change is the Ur-probleme of evolution) occurs in conjunction with speciation events. If that is so, that is way not expected from conventional evolutionary theory.
(Niles Eldredge, "Paleontology and Evolution," Review of Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, by Donald R. Prothero, in Evolution, Vol. 62-6:1544–1546 (2008).) Again, the translation is that Eldredge is saying that "most morphological change in evolutionary history ... occurs in conjunction with speciation events" and thus evolutionary change is seen to occur too quickly to be documented by fossils. And Eldredge is basically complaining that Prothero doesn't disclose this fact of life's history in Prothero's book. So the buyer should beware that Prothero’s book does not tell us everything about, as the book's subtitle advertises, “what the fossils say.” Prothero's book is an incomplete discussion of the fossil record that ignores the highly common, if not general pattern, of abrupt appearance of new biological forms.
Not only that, but some of the specific examples of alleged “transitional” forms mentioned by Prothero in the MSNBC puff-piece also give questionable interpretations of “what the fossils say.”
What DO Prothero's Fossils Really Say?
The first example of a transitional form given by Prothero in the MSNBC puff-piece was Sahelanthropus tchadensis, or the Toumai skull, which according to the article "walked upright 7 million years ago on two feet but is quite chimp-like in its skull size, teeth, brow ridges and face" and "could be a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.” Of course, what the article doesn’t tell readers that the Toumai fossil is known only from a fragmented cranium! As an article in The Guardian reported, it was composed of “skull and jaw fragments.” The notion that they know this fossil “walked upright” is pure speculation and interpretation, much like many transitional forms. This should be a lesson for those who would buy wholesale Prothero's interpretations of fossils.
Darwinists often claim to have found upright-walking apes even when the evidence doesn’t support that view. They did the same thing with Lucy, the famous australopithecine fossil (see "My Pilgrimage to Lucy’s Holy Relics Fails to Inspire Faith in Darwinism" for details).
Another set of alleged transitional forms are early elephant-like fossils connecting Mastodons and Elephants. I’m willing to consider these plausible relatives of elephants, but we’re not talking about large-scale evolution. Again, we see Prothero bluffing: he calls Moeritherium the “ultimate transitional fossil,” yet even Wikipedia notes that this fossil is seen as “a branch of the order that died out, leaving no descendants.”
Of course, Prothero also cites some of the usual transitional forms, like Archaeopteryx (which I discussed in Part 1) and Tiktaalik. We’ve discussed Tiktaalik as being over-hyped as a transitional many times here on ENV: "The Rise and Fall of Tiktaalik? Darwinists Admit "Quality" of Evolutionary Icon is "Poor" in Retroactive Confession of Ignorance"
"An "Ulnare" and an "Intermedium" a Wrist Do Not Make: A Response to Carl Zimmer"
"Tiktaalik roseae: Where's the Wrist? (Updated)"
"For Darwinian Evolution, It’s One Step Forward, Acknowledging Two Steps Back: Taking A Look at Tiktaalik" In my final installment, I'll discuss one fossil from this article given the contrived name, the "frogamander," and show how it too has been subject to unwarranted evolutionary speculation and assumption-laden interpretation.
Tom Woodward of the C.S. Lewis Society, who will be appearing at the Darwin's Legacy -- The Hidden Story event along with Steve Fuller and Michael Medved, has just let us know that the event will now be broadcast live on the internet thanks to Tampa conservative talk radio station 860 WGUL. The program runs 7:00PM to 9:00PM Easter time, Thursday February 26th. The station will carry the news at the top of the hour, but by 7:05pm EST it will be begin streaming audio of the event. Go to http://860wgul.townhall.com/ and click on LISTEN LIVE in the upper left hand corner.
 If Charles Darwin were to show up at his 200th birthday celebration in 2009, he would be shocked by the scientific puzzles and cultural fallout that his theory generated. To trace the untold story of the controversy he sparked, The C.S. Lewis Society is featuring a live discussion with:
Dr. Steve Fuller
Author of Dissent over Descent
Social Scientist from England
Authority in the Movie, "Expelled."
Dr. Michael Medved
Nationally Syndicated Talk Radio Host
2 Million Daily Listeners
New York Times Best Selling Author.
Dr. Tom Woodward
Author of Doubts about Darwin and Darwin Strikes Back
Research Professor at Trinity College.
Date: 7:00PM to 9:00PM, Thursday February 26th
Location:
The Oval Theater, University of South Florida's Marshall Center
4202 East Fowler Ave.
Tampa, FL 33620
Students $5 - Adults $10
For Information and Advanced Ticket Sales,
Call (813) 639-1903 or visit us online at www.bayword.com
Click here to view full size event flyer.
A robust debate about Darwinian evolution has been taking place over at Forbes.com recently. The venerable techonomy site published over 20 articles in honor of Darwin's birthday, four of which were from ID proponents. As usual, having any articles skeptical of Darwinism is a bridge too far for some, namely Darwin defender Jerry Coyne who attacked not just the authors, but Forbes itself for the temerity to discuss such views publicly.
No less than a member of the National Academy has responded. Forbes.com has just posted a piece by Philip S. Skell, The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution. Skell argues that ...
Darwinian evolution is being pushed as a theory of everything. According to Skell it is being oversold to the public as the foundation of all modern scientific breakthroughs without any basis in reality.
Writes Skell: To conflate contemporary scientific studies of existing organisms with those of the paleontologists serves mainly to misguide the public and teachers of the young. An examination of the papers in the National Academy of Sciences' premiere journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as well as many other journals and the Nobel awards for biological discoveries, supports the crucial distinction I am making.
Examining the major advances in biological knowledge, one fails to find any real connection between biological history and the experimental designs that have produced today's cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety of living organisms perform their functions. It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers and other practitioners of biological science.
It is widely accepted that the growth of science and technology in the West, which accounts for the remarkable advances we enjoy today in medicine, agriculture, travel, communications, etc., coincided with the separation, several centuries ago, of the experimental sciences from the dominance of the other important fields of philosophy, metaphysics, theology and history.
Yet many popularizers of Darwin's theory now claim that without the study of ancient biological history, our students will not be prepared to engage in the great variety of modern experimental activities expected of them. The public should view with profound alarm this unnecessary and misguided reintroduction of speculative historical, philosophical and religious ideas into the realms of experimental science.
It is more crucial to consider history in the fields of astrophysics and geology than in biology. For example, the electromagnetic radiations arriving at our detectors inform us of the ongoing events that occurred billions of years ago in distant parts of our universe that have been traveling for all this time to reach us. And the rock formations of concern to geologists have resided largely undisturbed since their formations.
But fossils fail to inform us of the nature of our ancient antecedents--because they have been transformed into stones that give us only a minuscule, often misleading impression of their former essences and thus are largely irrelevant to modern biology's experimentations with living organisms.
For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year's more virulent strain. That would be like depending upon our knowledge of ancient Hittite economics to understand 21st-century economics. Read the entire essay here.
If you're interested in more about what Dr. Skell thinks about Darwinian evolution, and about how he came to be a Darwin skeptic you can listen to three short but informative interviews with him at ID The Future.
Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part One
In this ID the Future podcast, Casey Luskin interviews Philip S. Skell, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Skell discusses his research, which has included work on reactive intermediates in chemistry, free-atom reactions, and reactions of free carbonium ions.
Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part Two
On this episode of ID the Future, National Academy of Sciences member Phillip Skell shares his story of becoming a Darwin-skeptic with Casey Luskin, explaining how his experience in antibiotic research and the questions he posed to his colleagues inspired his 2005 article in The Scientist, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin?: Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology.”
Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part Three
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews National Academy of Sciences member Phillip Skell on his advice for young scientists who may be Darwin-skeptics. Dr. Skell has been outspoken in his stand for academic freedom and against intolerance.
MSNBC’s Birthday Present to Charles Darwin: Puff-Pieces on Evolution (Part 2)
As part of their celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday, MSNBC has been printing puff-pieces promoting evolution. In Part 1, I discussed their piece using weak and controversial evidence documenting the alleged dinosaur to bird transition. In this section, I’ll be discussing another little piece they published, "Seven signs of evolution in action." This piece takes very little time to rebut, and those familiar with weak arguments used to buttress evolution in this debate will likely be able to guess the arguments used in the "Seven signs" piece simply by my rebuttal. In fact, the interesting part about this piece is not so much the rebuttal, but the quality of evidence that MSNBC is using to promote evolution:
7 Signs of Microevolution in Action
Sign # 1: Darwin’s finches are evidence for trivial microevolution.
Sign # 2: If humans are doing the selecting, then it isn’t natural selection — it’s artificial selection!
Sign # 3: Humans aren’t evolving — we are only getting taller/stronger/healthier due to a better diet / living condition etc. Since this type of change doesn’t affect our DNA, it isn’t true “evolution” unless you’re a Lamarckian. It’s for this reason that many scientists have proclaimed that human evolution is now effectively over!
Sign # 4: Bacterial resistance is a common and is a trivial form of evolution.
Sign # 5: Longer legs in toads? Again, this is microevolution. And the legs were only 6% longer — when you’re dealing with legs that are only a few inches long anyways, we’re talking about millimeters of change. This is not impressive evolution.
Sign # 6: As for flatfish evolution, we discussed this a long time ago at National Geographic Finds Opportunity to Conflate Intelligent Design with Creationism while Misreporting Fish Fossil.
Sign # 7: A type of lizard that is "dropping their limbs"? Ignoring the inconvenient truth that Australian skinks DO have quite functional limbs, at best this provides evidence for loss of function. How about explaining gain of function?
In the final third and fourth installments, I’ll discuss MSNBC’s longer piece pushing allegedly transitional forms from the fossil record.
Casey Luskin and John West were in Oklahoma yesterday at an Academic Freedom Day event hosted by the IDEA club at University of Oklahoma. Not surprisingly Darwinists were in attendance, and showed their complete and utter lack of civility. Casey sent me this e-mail recapping once such encounter during the Q&A following his presentation. Pro-Evolution Blogger Abbie Smith Flipped Me Off on Friday Night, and Here’s the Story
University of Oklahoma (OU) graduate student and science-blogger Abbie Smith flipped me off during my talk about academic freedom at the University of Oklahoma on Friday night. But before I get to that part, I’d like to tell what actually happened.
After reviewing some of the problems with the Kitzmiller ruling, my talk focused on the importance of protecting academic freedom. I made the point that Darwinists use a variety of tactics to shut down free and open debate on intelligent design (ID) and evolution. These tactics range from persecution of ID-proponents to fear-mongering that challenging Darwin is “dishonest” or brings religion into the classroom, to personal attacks on ID proponents designed to intidimate people from speaking freely in support of ID. I went though arguments made by local Oklahoma Darwinists. First I discused false fear-mongering tactics made by two OU facutly in a document they distributed to oppose the Oklahoma Academic Freedom Bill. Continuing with local attacks on acadmic freedom, I mentioned an incident on Abbie Smith’s ERV blog where she scrambled the comments that a pro-ID blogger Julie Haberle was making on the blog, and then telling Ms. Haberle to post a nude photo of herself to get the comments unscrambled.
When my talk ended, Abbie asked the first question. It wasn’t really a question, and her response was to defend her conduct. I felt she deserved the right to explain herself, and since Abbie was hanging herself with every word she spoke, I let her continue. She defended her treatment of Haberle on the grounds that Haberle was a “troll” who was posting spam. Having seen Abbie Smith defend what is indefensible under any circumstances, there was really little more to say. It is never defensible to ask, whether seriously or joking, that a woman post a nude photo of herself in order to participate in civil discussion.
I didn’t know exactly what Ms. Haberle was posting because I can’t read her comments. All I know is that even if Haberle was posting what Smith called “spam,” Smith’s tactic of scrambling the words (“devowelling them”) and then suggesting that Haberle post a nude photo in order to get her comments unscrambled represents a tactic that would intimidate ID proponents from speaking freely on her blog.
I called Abbie on this. My talk had made it clear that we needed to forge a civil discussion on this issue. In fact, one of the final punchline points of my talk was as follows:
“I’m not interested in holding grudges. I’m interested in forgiving so we can all move forward in a spirit of civility! …There Is a Better Way: Free Speech, Civility, and Peaceful Co-Existence in the Academy”
At one point Abbie said something about being banned from Bill Dembski’s blog. But since I know nothing about the circumstances of this event, I couldn’t really comment.
Finally, Abbie got to her question stating that most students are too stupid to even know that the earth revolves around the sun, so how can they learn about debates over natural selection? (Abbie’s argument apparently did not resonate well with certain audience members, as one student came up to me afterwards and told me he did not appreciate being told that students are too stupid to learn about these debates. I later learned that Abbie was merely recapitulating an argument made by John Lynch during his recent talk at OU.) I answered that since biology textbooks already teach students that natural selection is the driving force generating the adaptive complexity of life, that students clearly are expected to learn about this topic. And since scientists have debated the adequacy of natural selection in mainstream scientific journals, then students should be able to learn the existence of those debates as well. After all, if students can learn about the evidence supporting certain claims in the textbook, there’s nothing stopping them from learning about evidence that challenges certain claims in the textbook.
I was quite civil to Abbie during our entire discussion. I tried my best to make it clear to her that I had no ill-will or malice towards her, and that I was not angry over her behavior, I was just hoping she would respond favorably to my call for civility. I specifically emphasized the point that one need not agree with me on ID to agree with me about the importance of civility.
That’s what I said in response to Abbie. Thus ended our dialogue. Sadly, it seems that my calls for civility were not heard by Abbie: as Abbie walked away from the mic after I answered her question, she flipped me off.
Today NPR's All Things Considered reported on the running debate between Evolution News & Views contributor Dr. Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery at SUNY Stony Brook, and Darwinist neurologist Dr. Steven Novella from Yale. With "Doubting Darwin: Debate Over The Mind's Evolution" NPR takes a look at the scientific debate over the mind-brain problem currently shaking up neuroscience. Listen to the report here because, as reporter Jon Hamilton notes, "The outcome of the mind-brain debate will have a profound impact on everything from what students learn in high school to how decisions are made at the end of life."
Here are a few of Dr. Egnor's posts on the mind-brain problem and some background on the back-and-forth between Dr. Egnor and Dr. Novella:
You won’t find any well-known intelligent design advocates among the speakers at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held recently in Chicago. But that does not mean ID was not there -- quite the contrary. Like the social outcast left uninvited to the garden party, who nevertheless becomes the main topic of conversation, ID was on the lips of most of the speakers at an overflow Sunday (2/15) afternoon session, Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. One could be forgiven for leaving the session thinking that evolutionary biology was defined largely by its opposition to ID.
This was, of course, not the point the sessions organizers (Eugenie Scott and Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education [NCSE]) meant to convey. In their remarks, both Scott and Rosenau stressed that controversies about evolution exist, not for any genuine scientific reason, but because of political, cultural and religious agitation from organizations such as the one sponsoring this website.
Subsequent speakers, however, presented evidence and data that they said challenged ID, contradicting the "politics not science" opening (see forthcoming entries in this AAAS series).
Rosenau took his theme from T.H. Dobzhansky’s famous (1973) aphorism, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” After showing data indicating that most Americans remain skeptical of Darwinian (undirected) evolution -- a skepticism, he noted, that does not exist for other scientific theories or claims, such as continental drift or the uselessness of antibiotics against viruses -- Rosenau gave examples of findings in a variety of fields that (he said) could only be understood via evolution. The development of the medicine Taxol™ , for instance, or the engineering of General Electric jet turbines and radio antennae by evolutionary algorithms, or integrated pest management (IPM) methods, make sense only in the light of evolution. Evolution is for everyone, said Rosenau, flashing a slide with the cover of David Sloan Wilson's book Evolution for Everyone (Delacorte, 2007).
I was attending the session as a reporter, and felt it would be out of place to engage Rosenau in an argument (we are friendly acquaintances). But his recommendations, both of Dobzhansky (1973) and Wilson (2007), show why NCSE policy and educational advice is doomed only to prolong the controversies Rosenau and his colleagues so earnestly wish to lay to rest.
Let's start with Dobzhansky (1973). While it is reasonable to assume that Rosenau has actually read this essay, that probably wasn't true for nearly all of his AAAS audience. This isn't surprising; most professional biologists I’ve met know only Dobzhansky's famous aphorism, but have never read the 1973 essay itself.
They should. You can read it here. (A pdf of the original is available here.) The essay represents Dobzhansky’s passionately-argued theological case against intelligent design and for evolution as God’s method of creation. Dobzhansky writes that biological diversity becomes understandable
if the Creator has created the living world not by caprice, but by evolution propelled by natural selection. It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutually exclusive alternatives. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature’s, method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still underway. (1973, 127)
This is theology -- or more precisely, theology and science entangled so thoroughly that, like a color tint mixed into a can of white paint, the result is irreversible.
The same is true of Wilson (2007). Unlike Dobzhansky, Wilson is not a religious believer. He is, however, deeply interested in religion as a central feature of human existence, and how religious behavior makes evolutionary sense.
Here is the first paragraph of Wilson's book:
This is the book of tall claims about evolution: that it can become uncontroversial; that the basic principles are easy to learn; that everyone should want to learn them, once their implications are understood; that evolution and religion, those old enemies who currently occupy opposite corners of human thought, can be brought harmoniously together. (2007, 1; second emphasis added)
Later in the book, Wilson repeats this point: “Evolution and religion can no longer occupy opposite corners of human thought” (2007, 253).
Again, it's reasonable to assume that Rosenau read the materials he recommended to the AAAS audience. But if Dobzhansky and Wilson are right, a biology classroom is exactly the correct venue to raise theological issues, such as God’s method of creating, or the content and function of religious belief.
Now this is hardly what the NCSE officially advises the public. Science and religion, they say, should be respectful, but very much separate, neighbors.
Alas, that is advice for a world that does not, and never did, exist. That the NCSE and Rosenau may find Dobzhansky's particular theology congenial, for example, does not change the fact that Dobzhansky’s view is theological, and hence, subject to legitimate dissent on equal terms.
Simultaneously telling people, however, that the science classroom is off limits to theology -- except for this God-used-evolution-and-it’s-blasphemy-to-suggest-otherwise view, advocated by a leading neo-Darwinian biologist, and maybe a couple of other tolerable theologies -- guarantees an ongoing controversy. A philosophical rule decreed by those holding institutional power (whether in the courts or national science and education organizations), but violated by those very same institutions in practice, is not a rule anyone else will follow -- nor should they.
But what most belied the NCSE approach was the remainder of the symposium. It turns out that evolution makes sense of biology because, despite what the ID folks tell us, the origin of life is nearly solved, and -- in cell and organismal biology -- a really intelligent designer would not have done various things.
References
Dobzhansky T.H. 1973. Nothing In Biology Makes Sense Except In The Light Of Evolution. American Biology Teacher 35:125-129.
Wilson, David Sloan. 2007. Evolution for Everyone. New York: Delacorte.
Up next: David Deamer on the origin of life
A recent article in Science titled “Adaptive Radiation: Contrasting Theory with Data” admits that the evidence documenting the precise workings of a key macroevolutionary mechanism -- "adaptive radiation" -- is missing. The article concedes that "how exactly radiation occurs, and how it differs among taxa and in different settings, as well as why some lineages radiate and others do not, are still unclear."
When studying evolutionary biology in college, I learned that new types of organisms have commonly appeared abruptly in the history of life. Since Darwinian evolution is supposed to proceed by “numerous, successive, slight modifications,” this data made little sense in the light of evolution. Our professors always reassured us that rapid evolution or abrupt appearance of major macroevolutionary innovations could be explained by a mechanism they called “adaptive radiation.” For example, my intro-level college biology textbook, Campbell’s Biology, gives the short explanation that “[t]he evolution of many diversely adapted species from a common ancestor is called adaptive radiation.” (Biology, 4th ed., p. 444) Very few additional details are provided about this mechanism, which is supposed to explain how many species rapidly diversify and fill new niches quickly. This always left me wondering: is “adaptive radiation” simply a magic wand that can be waved over the history of life to explain how diverse macroevolutionary innovations can arise quickly in the history of life, or is there actually hard evidence for this theory? This recent article in Science has confirmed my suspicions that it’s the former.
As noted, the article is titled, “Adaptive Radiation: Contrasting Theory with Data” (the title provides another example where scientists use the word “theory” in a sense that doesn’t mean a well-tested explanation) and it admits that our empirical examples of adaptive radiations are all within low-level taxa groups: “Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos islands, Anolis lizards on Caribbean islands (Fig. 1), Hawaiian silverswords, and cichlids of the East African Great Lakes.” According to the article, some of these examples (like Darwin’s finches, or the silverswords, which only have about 5 species) are not impressive because they have “relatively low species richness.” Given the similarity of these species (in each case, we’re still dealing with finches, lizards, silverswords, or aquarium fish), these do not inspire confidence in the creative power of adaptive radiation to produce large-scale changes in organisms.
The mechanism of adaptive radiation is said to account for some of the most important events in the history of life. Robert Carroll observes in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that “within less then [sic] 10 million years, almost all of the advanced phyla appeared, including echinoderms, chordates, annelids, brachiopods, molluscs and a host of arthropods” and concludes that “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.” Indeed, this recent article in Science admits molecular and fossil evidence for abrupt appearance, stating, “An increasingly common theme in molecular studies of speciation is the finding of a burst of species diversification early in a clade’s history (37, 38). This pattern is also seen in the fossil records for some groups.” The paper subtly acknowledges evidence for rapid appearance of species, and then openly admits that we don’t have sufficient empirical to understand this allegedly crucial evolution mechanism of “adaptive radiation” to explain abrupt origins of species: “More empirical studies are needed specifically aimed at assessing the predictions discussed above. At present, we are left with a haphazard set of studies that happen to be relevant.”
“More generally, evolutionary biology is an inductive science in which we establish generalities by the accumulation of case studies. The number of adaptive radiations that have been extensively studied from the many different perspectives relevant to our discussions is surprisingly small. More detailed studies, integrating across a variety of approaches and disciplines, is needed to build a reservoir of case studies from which generalizations can be drawn.”
(Sergey Gavrilets and Jonathan B. Losos, "Adaptive Radiation: Contrasting Theory with Data," Science, Vol. 323:732-737 (February 6, 2009).) Despite the candid admissions about the lack of data showing how adaptive radiations proceed, this magic wand of “adaptive radiation” is waved over the history of life to account for the huge portions of macroevolutionary innovation. This does not inspire confidence in modern evolutionary biology.
The article further admits that a problem when studying radiations is that you’re dealing with one-time events that are unpredictable: "extrapolation from processes operating today to what happened early in the history of a radiation is problematic; in the past, different processes may have operated or the outcome of these processes may have been different." In other words, when we’re dealing with one-time events that can’t be repeated or tested in the laboratory, we can’t predict the outcome: “In the 150 years since publication of the Origin, adaptive radiations have continued to astonish and inspire scientists and the public alike. But how exactly radiation occurs, and how it differs among taxa and in different settings, as well as why some lineages radiate and others do not, are still unclear. Most likely this is because there is no single answer: Lineages vary in manifold ways, various evolutionary factors act simultaneously, similar evolutionary outcomes can be achieved via alternative paths, and the contingencies of place and time play a large role in guiding the evolutionary process.”
(Sergey Gavrilets and Jonathan B. Losos, "Adaptive Radiation: Contrasting Theory with Data," Science, Vol. 323:732-737 (February 6, 2009).) The lack of predictability inherent in this crucial evolutionary mechanism doesn’t mean that adaptive radiations are unscientific as explanations. Historical sciences often deal with unique historical events that could not have been predicted and certainly cannot be repeated. But the admissions of this paper show that evolutionary biology does not always rely on predictable processes.
This article should be admired for its candidness about the lack of data for adaptive radiation. Somehow I suspect that when biologists answer its calls for more studies, they won’t find evidence that natural selection—even operating upon species expanding into new, open habitats and niches—can produce large-scale evolutionary change at the rapid rates required by the fossil and molecular data.
I’ve been corresponding with Nicolas Gotelli, a University of Vermont biologist. When I received his response to my initial email, I thought it was so ridiculous and hypocritical that I said to myself, Wouldn’t it be amusing to publish this on ENV? Then I reflected disappointedly, No, it’s a private correspondence, that would be unethical! I can’t do it without his permission and, since he’d have to be pretty thoughtless to allow someone to reprint his hysterically bristling letter, it’s not worth asking.
Luckily, Professor Gotelli has solved my problem for me. He promptly and without seeking permission sent our emails off to PZ Myers, who immediately published them on Pharyngula. You can read the correspondence there. Thank you, gentlemen.
Gotelli is the fellow who wrote an op-ed in the Burlington Free Press expressing the view that it was only proper that UVM should cancel Ben Stein as graduation speaker because the popular entertainer is also a “notorious advocate of intelligent design” who maintains that Darwinian ideas had deadly consequences in the form of Nazi racist ideology (only too true). Gotelli asserted it was appropriate to invite “controversial” speakers to campus, since “one of the best ways to refute intellectually bankrupt ideas is to expose them to the light of day.” But a commencement speaker is someone special, Gotelli went on, someone chosen for his peer-reviewed scholarship.
Someone, it turns out, like the widely published scholar Howard Dean, to whom UVM turned next and who will deliver the commencement address. What, as one online reader of Gotelli’s op-ed plaintively asked, “Was Daffy Duck unavailable?”
Prompted by a friend in Vermont who wanted to see Stein speak at UVM, I wrote to Gotelli on the assumption that just possibly he was sincere in his protestations about being for free speech. Perhaps he would agree to advise me on finding a forum for a debate about Darwinism on the UVM campus, on some occasion other than commencement. I suggested that rather than Ben Stein, it might be illuminating to put up a scientific Darwin critic like Stephen Meyer or David Berlinski against a Darwinian advocate like, oh, Nick Gotelli.
It was a pipe dream of mine. These guys always run from debates as fast as they can manage, hiding and shivering behind the excuse of not wanting to grant public recognition to doubts about Darwin -- doubts shared, of course, by most Americans. Sure enough, Gotelli wrote back, all in a huff. First, he was offended by a post on ENV that mildly guffawed at his op-ed and the choice of Dean as commencement speaker -- thinking I had written the post, which actually I didn’t. Gotelli had misunderstood the author identification. He called the post “sneering” -- which it hardly was -- and decried my “two-faced dishonesty” in now writing to him in a courteous tone.
I always try to write to and about people in a courteous tone. Not so, Gotelli -- or PZ Myers, or most anyone I can think of in the online Darwinist community, where venom and vulgarity are the norm. Which is interesting in itself. I guess ideas have consequences after all.
After throwing around the scare word “creationism” a number of times and mixing it up with other insults and untruths, Gotelli closes by, first, withdrawing his earlier suggestion that Stein (or anyone associated with ID) would make an appropriate “controversial” campus speaker, and then childishly warning that if I should try to reply to him, he would not answer me or anyone else from the Discovery Institute. In other words, “Nah nah nah, boo boo!” as my kids would put it.
Hypocrisy may be the wrong word for Gotelli’s about-face on free speech. Anyone who fails, out of weakness or temptation, to live up to his own openly professed ideals is a hypocrite. That would include most human beings. The normal feeling that goes with this is embarrassment. A hypocrite wouldn’t seek to publicize his hypocrisy.
Maybe, then, the right designation for someone like Gotelli is a cynic. That’s someone who treats ideas as chess pieces. When it suits your purposes, you advance an idea -- like “free speech.” When it doesn’t suit your purpose, the same idea becomes expendable, a useless pawn.
But no, that’s not quite it either. A cynic is typically smart enough to try to keep his cynicism a secret. That’s part of his game strategy. A cynic wouldn’t forward his correspondence to a buddy with a popular website, so that everyone could see how little trouble he takes to consider the words he writes.
The person who would do that isn’t a hypocrite or a cynic. He’s a fool.
With Darwin’s 200th birthday recently upon us, the media is pushing Darwinism harder than ever. MSNBC, in particular, has recently posted three puff-pieces about the evidence for evolution. My purpose here is not to exhaustively rebut everything these articles say, but to show that for a lot of the evidence they cite in favor of evolution, there’s another side to the story that isn’t being represented. It’s too bad the media is only telling the public one-side of the story.
Fluffy Evidence for the Dino To Bird Transition
The first piece, titled “9 links in the dinosaur-to-bird transition is intended to bolster the theory that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. The MSNBC piece cites as its primary piece of evidence the fossil Archaeopteryx, about which it says: “Archaeopteryx's feathers and birdlike wishbone – along with reptilian features such as a long bony tail, claws and teeth – are seen as strong evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.” While there is no doubt that Archaeopteryx represents a bird species with a mosaic of some reptilian and many avian traits, these observations are not support for a transition unless the fossil fits a larger, coherent picture of evolution.
Archaeopteryx was a true bird, capable of flight, but where did it come from? The theropod dinosaurs, from which Archaeopteryx is said to have descended, lived at least 20 million years after Archaeopteryx (see Nature, Vol. 400:58–61 (July 1, 1999)). This leaves us with a striking situation: Archaeopteryx, a true bird, has no real candidates for fossil ancestors whatsoever. Given that Archaeopteryx really is a bird, then from what, if anything, did birds evolve?
The theropod-to-bird hypothesis has bigger problems than fossil order. An evolutionary interpretation of the fossil data requires that many specialized features required for birds flight, including feathers, evolved for purposes other than flight. Feathers supposedly evolved from scales, but pennaceous feathers are so well-suited for flight that it is difficult to imagine functional 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.
And there are other problems. Bird evolution expert Alan Feduccia explains that developmental biology strongly challenges the theropod-to-bird hypothesis. In all egg-laying vertebrates, the digits (i.e. fingers) on the hand develop out of a mass of cartilage. Bird digits develop out of digits 2, 3, and 4 from the cartilaginous array, but fossil evidence indicates that theropod dinosaurs develop their “fingers” from digits 1, 2, and 3. This strongly contradicts the cladistic methodology which evolutionists use to argue that birds must be descended from theropods.
But if birds didn’t come from theropods, this leaves a large gap, for there are no nearby fossil candidates for the ancestor of birds. Feduccia concludes, “In spite of some paleontologists’ desperate pleas for us to accept through faith the dinosaurian origin of avian flight, the details of the origin of birds remain elusive after more than a hundred and fifty years.” If Archaeopteryx is the first known true bird, then again I ask, from what, if anything, did birds evolve? The fossil record does not tell us. There is simply not a coherent picture of evolution through this transitional form. Perhaps a better explanation is that Archaeopteryx represents a mosaic form where an creative designer used creativity to play a variation upon a theme.
The MSNBC site also makes a big deal out of other evidence that appears highly circumstantial and uninteresting. The site claims that certain dinosaurs laid 2 eggs at a time, and that daddy dinosaurs guarded eggs. Two questions arise: Why is this impressive evidence that birds are descended from theropod dinosaurs, and how they know this for a fact? Lots of species lay eggs (of varying numbers) and daddies often get involved with child protection. The article also cites a bird-like feature of "pneumatization" in some theropod dinosaur bones where "air sacs from the lung invade the bone." But again, it has been long known that non-theropod dinosaurs far removed from birds have pneumatization of their bones, so this evidence isn't especially interesting either. MSNBC even cites the fact that some theropods were small as another crucial piece of amazing evidence that birds evolved from theropods. Forgive me if this seems like unimpressive circumstantial evidence.
Finally, the story cites alleged feathered dinosaurs. Assuming that they’ve found real feathers, and not “dino-fuzz,” it’s worth nothing that, as Alan Feduccia observes, many of these alleged feathered dinos are “replete with features of secondarily flightless” birds, meaning that they are true birds that have lost their ability to fly and are not evolutionary intermediates. I discussed this in detail at Is the Latest ‘Feathered Dinosaur’ Actually a Secondarily Flightless Bird?.
Despite the weak evidence supporting this evolutionary story, Phillip Johnson provides a lucid and charitable analysis of the importance of Archaeopteryx: "Archaeopteryx is on the whole a point for Darwinists, but how important is it? Persons who come to the fossil evidence as convinced Darwinists will see a stunning confirmation, but skeptics will see a lonely exception to a consistent pattern of fossil disconfirmation."
Update: A single website, NCSEExposed.org, has now been created to host this response to "Expelled Exposed," as well as some updates. Visit NCSE Exposed for your one-stop shop rebuttal to Expelled Exposed!
In light of the DVD release a few months ago of the terrific Ben Stein documentary Expelled, we thought it would be a good time to provide a comprehensive listing of articles that correct the various misrepresentations and falsehoods spread by Darwinists about Expelled.
Most of the falsehoods in circulation about the film can be traced to a website called "Expelled Exposed" set up by the pro-Darwin National Center for Science Education (NCSE) as part of its PR effort to smear the documentary last year. “Expelled Exposed” alleges that Expelled made “dishonest attempts to make mountains out of molehills and to create martyrs where martyrdom does not exist.” As John West observed in response, "The basic thrust of [“Expelled Exposed”] seems to be the preposterous claim that pro-ID scientists never, ever face harassment, intimidation, or persecution. Not ever! Scientists who claim otherwise—such as biologist Richard Sternberg, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, and Baylor University engineering professor Robert Marks—must be cry-babies or worse. The NCSE's approach is otherwise known as 'blaming the victim.'"
Although the NCSE's website spends much energy attempting (poorly) to debunk and deny claims that ID proponents experience persecution, the attitude found at “Expelled Exposed” wouldn’t be any different even if its authors admitted that the attacks experienced by pro-ID scientists had actually occurred. In essence, “Expelled Exposed” effectively says, 'There’s no persecution of ID-proponents in the academy. But even if there was, so what? They deserve it.'
"Expelled Exposed" occasionally pays lip-service to freedom of speech, but the site itself should be exposed for what it really is: an attempt to subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—convince readers that the pro-ID viewpoint does not deserve the full protections of academic freedom. By unashamedly encouraging would-be persecutors, “Expelled Exposed” unwittingly justifies the central thesis of the Expelled documentary, namely that ID proponents lack academic freedom and experience unjust persecution and blacklisting within the academy.
Responses Regarding Individual Scientists in Expelled
Guillermo Gonzalez:
Many of the false claims in “Expelled Exposed” regarding astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez are rebutted in a response I wrote to Michael Shermer’s error-ridden review of Expelled, “Michael Shermer’s Fact-Free Attack on Expelled Exposes Intolerance of Darwinists towards Pro-Intelligent Design Scientists.” Further documentation of the persecution experienced by Gonzalez can be found at "Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez And Academic Persecution" or FreeGonzalez.com. In particular, some of the following links are useful for rebutting false claims regarding Guillermo Gonzalez:
"ISU astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez's stellar publication record outshines colleagues" rebuts the false claim that Gonzalez has not produced many research papers since getting involved with ID.
"Chronicle of Higher Education Promotes Misinformation about Guillermo Gonzalez’s Publication Rate" shows the NCSE’s misplaced reliance upon the Chronicle of Higher Education’s false claim that "Gonzalez’s publication output dropped steadily during his time at ISU.” The reality is that while at ISU, Gonzalez outperformed all of the tenured astronomers who voted against his tenure in key measures of productivity.
"Guillermo Gonzalez Has Highest Normalized Citation Count among ISU Astronomers for Publications Since 2001” discusses the highly impressive impact Gonzalez made upon the scientific community during his time at ISU.
"Design Was the Issue After All: ISU’s official explanation in Gonzalez case exposed as a sham" rebuts false insinuations by "Expelled Exposed" that ID was not the overriding factor in Gonzalez’s denial of tenure.
"Secret ISU Faculty E-mails Express Vitriol Towards Intelligent Design, Disregard for Academic Freedom, and attempts to Hide a Plot to Oust an Outstanding Scientist" provides further rebuttal to false insinuations that ID was not the overriding factor in Gonzalez’s denial of tenure.
"Cataloguing Darwinist Denials and Flip-Flopping over the Role of Intelligent Design in ISU’s Tenuregate" rebuts the NCSE's attempts to deny that ID played a major role in Gonzalez’s denial of tenure.
“The Truth about Research Grants, Gonzalez and ISU” rebuts misrepresentations by "Expelled Exposed" about the role of grants in ISU tenure evaluations.
"Praise from Scientists for The Privileged Planet" rebuts any false insinuations that Dr. Gonzalez's work on ID is illegitimate or does not deserve the protection of academic freedom.
Richard Sternberg:
Many of the false claims at "Expelled Exposed" about Richard Sternberg also seem to parrot the arguments of Michael Shermer, and thus my response to Shermer provides rebuttals to many of the website’s claims: see “Michael Shermer’s Fact-Free Attack on Expelled Exposes Intolerance of Darwinists towards Pro-Intelligent Design Scientists.” “Expelled Exposed” makes the unbelievable assertion that “the worst that happened to Sternberg is that people said some unkind things about him in private email to one another.“ My rebuttal to Shermer documents the precise e-mails and evidence which show that, contrary to the claims of “Expelled Exposed,” Sternberg did experience harassment and persecution, including pressure to resign, investigations into his outside activities regarding evolution, and inappropriate restrictions on his research.
More facts about Richard Sternberg’s unfortunate story can be found on his home page at RichardSternberg.org as well as at the following links:
"Sternberg, Smithsonian, Meyer, And The Paper That Started It All"
“Statement of Facts / Response to Misinformation” rebuts the false claim by "Expelled Exposed" that Stephen Meyer’s paper was outside the scope of Proceedings for the Biological Society of Washington.
U.S. Office of Special Counsel Letter (2005)
"Transcript of NPR Report on Sternberg Case"
U.S. House of Representatives Staff Report (2006): Intolerance and the Politicization of Science at the Smithsonian
Appendix to U.S. House of Representatives Staff Report (2006): Intolerance and the Politicization of Science at the Smithsonian
Caroline Crocker:
Caroline Crocker wrote her own direct rebuttal correcting various false claims about herself in “Expelled Exposed,” "Reply to Expelled Exposed." Crocker points out that “Expelled Exposed” fails to understand that “calling scientific arguments ‘creationist’ does not address the validity of the arguments. It is merely an ad hominem attack that does not require response.” More information about Crocker's plight can be seen in "One Long Article: Washington Post Highlights Persecution of Caroline Crocker." Some of the website’s false attacks upon Crocker’s scientific arguments are rebutted at "Problems with the Natural Chemical 'Origin of Life'" and "Critics Rave Over Icons of Evolution: A Response to Published Reviews." Further direct rebuttals to "Expelled Exposed" from Dr. Crocker will be included in her forthcoming book about her experience to be published later in 2009.
"Expelled Exposed" tries to muddy the waters about Crocker's plight. On the one hand, it suggests that she was let go "simply for staffing reasons," further stating that "[w]e do not know for certain why Crocker was not re-hired for her non-tenure track job." On the other hand, the website tries to impugn Crocker by claiming she received received "student complaints," and "was unable or unwilling to teach accurate science." The truth is that at the very time she was told by her Department Head that she would be disciplined for challenging evolution and mentioning ID in the classroom, Crocker received a performance review from her Provost who called her teaching "outstanding" as "evidenced by unusually high student rankings"! (emphasis added) The Provost even praised her saying, "This kind of teaching quality is essential for this vital educational program, and we're very grateful for your successful efforts." Such statements hardly describe a teacher who would be expected to soon lose her job, was receiving poor student reviews, or was teaching inaccurately. Yet Crocker did subsequently loser her job, and received all kinds of after-the-fact attacks on her performance. The NCSE's litmus test for teaching "accurate science" seems to be paying homage to Darwin, and their characterization of Crocker as a poor instructor is simply false. For details and documentation on the praise given to Crocker's teaching abilities at George Mason University, see Letters About Caroline Crocker.
Moreover, according to this letter from Crocker's then-attorney, Mr. Edward Sisson, there is evidence that GMU breached Dr. Crocker's contract by falsely claiming she had signed a 1-year contract that expired in 2005, when in fact she (and other witnesses) claim that she had signed a 3-year contract that was not to expire until 2007.
Robert Marks:
“Expelled Exposed” leaves off key facts about the persecution Robert Marks endured at Baylor University and tries to make it sound like his persecution was reasonable (more on this below). In the end, Marks’ website was permanently shut down, Baylor pressured Marks to cease his ID-related research, and Baylor even returned grant money given to Marks to hire research assistants his ID-related work. For the full story on Marks that “Expelled Exposed” doesn’t tell you, see:
“Academic Freedom Expelled from Baylor University”
“BU had role in Dembski return”
Ironically, by admitting that Marks’s treatment was related to his ID work (they acknowledge it concerned "the intelligent design material"), “Expelled Exposed” has admitted precisely what Baylor denied. For details, see “Credibility Gap: Baylor Denies Robert Marks’ Situation Has Anything to do with ID.”
Michael Egnor:
SUNY Professor of Neurosurgery Michael Egnor asked "How much information can actually be produced by Darwinian mechanisms?" and was then subjected to many harsh attacks on the internet. Some of Egnor’s experiences were recounted in Expelled and “Expelled Exposed” obliges the movie by quoting some of the bloggers who attacked Egnor. “Expelled Exposed” makes typical assertions that Egnor (who isn’t just a brain surgeon but is a professor of brain surgery!) doesn’t understand the science he’s talking about. As is typical, Egnor’s critics don’t answer his question, but engage in further demonization of Egnor, as the post that “Expelled Exposed” quotes is titled “Egnorance: The Egotistical Combination of Ignorance and Arrogance.” It seems that “Expelled Exposed” simply proves Egnor’s point about the incivility of his critics. In fact, Dr. Egnor—with far more grace and civility than his critics—has handled his critics quite easily, as is seen in the following links:
“Dr. Humburg Sets Me and Galen Straight” “Asking the Right Questions Brings out Internet Darwinists’ True Colors” “Another post from a ‘Bastion of S***headed Ignorance’”
“Darwinian Medicine and Military History” “‘Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?’”
“Orac’s Challenge: Do Scientists ever use the Design Inference in Biology? (Hmmm...let me think…)”
“Dunford, Darwinism, and the Paranoid Style” “Proving Dr. Novella Wrong: Enjoying Tennis in a Persistent Vegetative State”
As a final point regarding Dr. Egnor, “Expelled Exposed” also claims that “most physicians accept evolution,” but a poll from 2005 revealed that up to 60% of doctors take a pro-ID position. For details, see “Poll: 60 Percent of Doctors Reject Darwinism.”
Responses Regarding ”Expelled Exposed” and Its Discussion of Hitler's Reliance upon Darwin
“Expelled Exposed" makes various questionable arguments about how the Expelled documentary treats the issue of Hitler's reliance upon Darwinism. This is, of course, a highly delicate issue that must be handled with great sensitivity to all involved. But misrepresentations of Expelled abound and "Expelled Exposed" is more than happy to indulge them, for Expelled was not trying to claim that modern-day Darwinists are Nazis, but was simply observing the historical connections of Hitler’s reliance upon Darwinism. A number of articles defending Expelled ‘s treatment of this issue can be found at some of the following links:
"Connecting Hitler and Darwin" by David Berlinski.
"Don't Doubt It: An important historic sidebar on Hitler and Darwin" by David Klinghoffer.
"What’s wrong with uttering 'Darwin' and 'Hitler' in the same breath?" by William Dembski.
"Breeding Our Way out of Poverty" by John G. West (excerpted from Darwin Day in America).
"Why the Darwin-Hitler Link Is So Sensitive" by Tom Gilson.
"Why the Jews?" by David Klinghoffer.
"The Descent of Darwinism from Hitlerism" by David Klinghoffer.
"Darwin and the Nazis" by Richard Weikart.
"Opening up Mein Kampf" by David Klinghoffer.
"Hitler's Debt to Darwin" by David Klinghoffer.
"Re-examining the Darwin-Hitler Link" by Richard Weikart.
"Expelled does NOT try to ‘blame Darwin for the Holocaust’" by David Klinghoffer.
"Darwin and Hitler: In Their Own Words" by Benjamin Wiker.
As a lawyer with some training in identifying credible witnesses, there is one final point that must be made about Expelled and its discussion of Hitler’s reliance upon Darwin. It seems to me highly compelling that the person in Expelled who makes the most forceful argument that Hitler made natural reliance upon Darwin was the curator of a government museum in Germany dedicated to remembering the horrors of the Nazis. This museum curator is a neutral third party with no personal stake in the debate over Darwin and is thus a highly credible witness. Yet she is the one arguing that Hitler made heavy reliance upon Darwin. If Hitler didn't rely on Darwin, then it seems that curators of Holocaust remembrance-museums in Germany must also be in on the big conspiracy to make it seem that he did.
Responses Regarding General Attacks Upon Intelligent Design in "Expelled Exposed"
“Expelled Exposed” features various videos about the Kitzmiller v. Dover lawsuit, encouraging its readers to take the Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It approach to ID. In fact, many of the false claims by "Expelled Exposed" related to the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial are rebutted in the law review article "Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover" or at the website TraipsingIntoEvolution.com. Other articles that refute many of the false claims about ID in "Expelled Exposed" are found at some of the following links:
"Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why Intelligent Design Doesn't Identify the Designer" rebuts the false claim that the designer must be a supernatural being “whom everyone recognizes as God.”
"ID Does Not Address Religious Claims About the Supernatural" rebuts the false claim that ID is a form of creationism and necessarily refers to a supernatural or divine being.
"The ‘Wedge Document’: ‘So What’?" rebuts the fallacious arguments by "Expelled Exposed" regarding Discovery Institute and the "wedge document."
"Any larger philosophical implications of intelligent design, or any religious motives, beliefs, and affiliations of ID proponents, do not disqualify ID from having scientific merit" rebuts the fallacious harping by "Expelled Exposed" on the alleged religious motives, beliefs, and affiliations of ID proponents.
"FAQ: Does intelligent design theory implement the scientific method?" rebuts the false claim by "Expelled Exposed" that ID has an “unscientific nature.”
"The Positive Case for Design" rebuts the false claim by "Expelled Exposed" that ID’s “main activity appears to be to carp about the success of evolution.”
"Intelligent design (ID) has scientific merit because it uses the scientific method to make its claims and infers design by testing its positive predictions" and "FAQ: Does intelligent design make predictions? Is it testable?" rebut the false claim by "Expelled Exposed" that “intelligent design claims cannot be tested” and its blatantly false claim that “No observation could possibly be incompatible with a claim that an ‘intelligent agent’ … acted to, say, introduce information into a system.”
"The Facts about Intelligent Design" rebuts the citation by "Expelled Exposed" of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism as an accurate source of criticism against ID.
"Barking up the Wrong Tree" and "Peter Atkins Dramatically Overstates the Evidence for Evolutionary Phylogenies" rebut inaccurate insinuations by "Expelled Exposed" that we have a nice, neat picture of the “tree of life.”
"A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ 'The Information Challenge'" rebuts the false claims by "Expelled Exposed" that natural selection can produce new meaningful biological information.
"Problems with the Natural Chemical 'Origin of Life'" rebuts false insinuations by "Expelled Exposed" that origin of life researchers are making noteworthy progress towards explaining the chemical origin of life.
Biologic Institute’s Research Page rebuts the false claim by "Expelled Exposed" that intelligent design proponents are “scientifically unproductive” or that ID proponents “have not performed the research and theory-building demanded of everyone in the scientific enterprise.”
Likewise, "Peer-Reviewed & Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design (Annotated)" rebuts the false claim by "Expelled Exposed" that ID proponents do not do research.
Additionally, the Evolutionary Informatics Lab of Robert J. Marks (the lab which has been forced off the Baylor campus) conducts computer simulation research into evolution and has a website hosting papers that support ID and challenge Darwinian evolution.
Responses Regarding the NCSE’s Attempt to Promote Darwinist Persecution Stories
While “Expelled Exposed” tries to "blame the victim" by attacking ID proponents who were persecuted, it also tries to create the impression that Darwinists are subjected to persecution and harassment. "Expelled Exposed" thus attempts to get a lot of mileage out of false and exaggerated claims of one incident, that of Chris Comer, a former staff member at the Texas Education Agency who Darwinists have claimed was fired because she didn’t support teaching creationism. According to "Expelled Exposed," Comer was "Expelled for Real."
“Expelled Exposed” basically took Comer’s side of the story and uncritically promoted it to the public. But Comer’s side of the story is only one side and the truth appears very different from what she is saying--she wasn't fired and no one in Texas was advocating the teaching of creationism. As John West observes, "now it looks like Comer isn’t a martyr after all. Internal TEA documents released earlier today by Texans for Better Science Education (TBSE) show that Comer had a long history of disciplinary problems at her agency that had nothing to do with evolution." For more details on what really happened in the case of Chris Comer, visit any of the following links:
"Inventing a Martyr? Newly-Released Documents Suggest that Christine Comer’s Resignation Was Due to Misconduct, Not Views on Evolution" by John West.
"Newly Released Internal Documents Indicate Former TEA Official Chris Comer Resigned Over Misconduct and Insubordination Issues--Not Over Her Views on Evolution" by Texans For Better Science Education.
"Summary and Timeline of Chris Comer’s Disciplinary History at the TEA" by Texans For Better Science Education.
"Documentation of Comer’s Case" by Texans For Better Science Education.
It should be noted that there is a marked difference between the case of Comer and those scientists in Expelled: Comer had a long history of insubordination, as she "received a three disciplinary letters spanning at least eight separate incidents, and seven of these eight incidents had nothing to do with evolution" and "During her last year at the TEA, Comer was found guilty of violating direct orders—'insubordination'—on three separate occasions." Perhaps some Darwinists do experience persecution for their views, and if that happens, it is most inappropriate. But as TBSE stated, "If Darwinists want to create a scandal and invent a martyr for their cause, they appear to have picked the wrong case."
Conclusion: ”Expelled Exposed” is Intended as a Breeding Ground for Future Persecutors
Setting aside the errors and misrepresentations about Expelled and ID, the most interesting aspect of “Expelled Exposed” is the mere fact that it exists. “Expelled Exposed” is an attempt by the NCSE to on the one hand argue that ID proponents don’t get persecuted, and on the other hand argue that they deserve all the persecution they receive anyway. This isn’t merely “blaming the victim,” it’s also called inciting the mob, and it’s just one part of the NCSE’s strategy to blacklist and censor ID proponents within academia.
When discussing Guillermo Gonzalez, "Expelled Exposed" says that his "distracting work on an unscientific enterprise like intelligent design," among other things, "make[s] it impossible for supporters to legitimately claim that the decision not to grant him tenure was unfounded." The site also argues that ID proponents do not deserve the protection of academic freedom, stating, "A scientist should not expect his colleagues to ignore his advocacy of a perspective that those in his field have overwhelmingly rejected." In other words, when ID-proponents like Gonzalez come up for tenure, the NCSE thinks that ID should count as an automatic and absolute negative. Clearly the NCSE endorses discriminating against Gonzalez simply because he supports ID.
When discussing Richard Sternberg, NCSE executive director Eugenie Scott seemed to contradict the claim of “Expelled Exposed” that “the worst that happened to Sternberg is that people said some unkind things about him in private email to one another.“ In an article in The Washington Post, Scott admitted that there was discrimination against Sternberg due to his views on evolution, and even tried to justify it: [S]aid Eugenie Scott, the group's executive director[:] "If this was a corporation, and an employee did something that really embarrassed the administration, really blew it, how long do you think that person would be employed?" ... Scott, of the NCSE, insisted that Smithsonian scientists had no choice but to explore Sternberg's religious beliefs. "They don't care if you are religious, but they do care a lot if you are a creationist," Scott said. "Sternberg denies it, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it argues for zealotry."
(Michael Powell, "Editor Explains Reasons for 'Intelligent Design' Article," Washington Post, August 19, 2005, emphases added) Thus, not only does Scott sanction attacks upon scientists “if you are a creationist” but she contradicts “Expelled Exposed” by acknowledging--and trying to justify—events that “Expelled Exposed” claims never happened to Sternberg.
When discussing Caroline Crocker, “Expelled Exposed” says that “there may have been grounds to fire her with cause” and complains in the same sentence that she was allegedly “teaching demonstrably false creationist material.” Apparently if a scientist is teaching what the NCSE deems is “false creationist material,” she can be fired. “Expelled Exposed” goes on to argue that universities should be able to censor ID from courses: She was instructed to not teach about intelligent design and creation science, which was not part of the curriculum of the courses she had been hired to teach. Academic freedom does not mean the freedom to teach about anything you want, regardless of the expected content of your courses. The site further asserts that Crocker “failed to teach the curriculum, and short-changed her students by not teaching them standard science in favor of a lot of misinformation” and therefore her employer “would have been justified in firing her outright.” Again, the site continues saying that, “if Crocker was unable or unwilling to teach accurate science, and there is evidence of this, an institution would have been entirely justified in making a negative evaluation and not renewing her contract.” In other words, if Crocker isn’t willing to fully support neo-Darwinism in the classroom, then universities have the right to fire her. (See above for discussion of Crocker's extremely high student reviews that counter's the NCSE's mis-characterization of her teaching abilities.)
When discussing Robert Marks, “Expelled Exposed” admits that “Concerned that the material on the website misleadingly suggested a connection between the intelligent design material and Baylor, administrators temporarily shut the website down…,” thereby acknowledging precisely what Baylor University denied: that Marks faced negative treatment due to his work’s relation to ID. But since Marks still has a job at Baylor, “Expelled Exposed” asks “Where is the harm?,” as if shutting down faculty websites for no reason other than its pro-ID content is not a legitimate form of academic “harm.”
“Expelled Exposed” says that SUNY Professor of Neurosurgery Michael Egnor "was shocked by the 'viciousness' and 'baseness' of the response" he received when critiquing neo-Darwinism on the internet. “Expelled Exposed” apparently tacitly defends such behavior, as its only response is, "Egnor had apparently never been on the Internet before."
In perhaps its most blatant statement against academic freedom for ID-proponents, “Expelled Exposed” expressly argues that ID proponents “have failed to make a convincing case for it, yet they seem to believe that they have an entitlement to a place in academia.” In other words, because the NCSE believes that ID has “failed to make a convincing case,” it wants readers to come away from its website believing that ID proponents don't have a right "to a place in academia.”
This statement not only shows that the NCSE is encouraging discrimination and intolerance towards intelligent design, but the argument turns the true meaning of academic freedom on its head.
Of course critics of ID (like the folks at the NCSE) should have every right to publish their views within academic circles and should have the full protection of academic freedom. But academic freedom doesn’t just mean the freedom to agree with the predominant viewpoint. Academic freedom in science means nothing if it doesn’t include the right to hold legitimate minority scientific viewpoints. ID proponents have published serious scientific research in mainstream, credible academic venues. Many of them have sterling academic qualifications and accomplishments. They have earned the right to freely express their views without fear of intimidation or discrimination.
But free expression of pro-ID views in the academy is exactly what the NCSE doesn't want. “Expelled Exposed” is now exposed for what it really is: it’s not just a website making the case against ID (which is perfectly fine if that’s what ID critics want to do)—it’s a website attempting to convince people that ID deserves no academic freedom. In other words, “Expelled Exposed” is an effort to encourage the further persecution of ID-proponents.
Ironically, by denying that professionally qualified ID proponents have a right to "a place in academia,” “Expelled Exposed” has justified the central thesis of the documentary Expelled, namely that qualified ID proponents do not receive academic freedom to hold, discuss, and promote their views within the academy.
Reminder: A single website, NCSEExposed.org, has now been created to host this response to "Expelled Exposed," as well as some updates. Visit NCSE Exposed for your one-stop shop rebuttal to Expelled Exposed!
Over at Uncommon Descent, Michael Flannery has an excellent post examining Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause, in which the authors try to humanize Darwin by showing that he was driven by his passionate hatred of slavery. But is this accurate?
Flannery points out that the main question really is, does the anti-slavery Darwin necessarily make for a “kinder, gentler” Darwin? Read it all at Uncommon Descent.
Then check out Flannery's own new book Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism.
In a recent post, Dr. Steven Novella took issue with an essay I wrote for Forbes.com. Dr. Novella objects to my observation that there the fossil record does not accord with Darwinian predictions of gradual transitions between species. The fossil record shows sharp discontinuity between species, not the gradual transitions that Darwinism inherently predicts.
Dr. Novella writes:
Darwin himself thought that the fossil record would show gradual continual change among species. What we found, rather, was relative stability punctuated by speciation events - species would remain mostly stable for about 2 million years on average, then disappear from the fossil record. Meanwhile, new species would appear. Gould and Eldridge termed this pattern punctuated equilirium [sic], and creationists have dutifly [sic] ignored them ever since. Egnor is also wrong on many levels. First, while species are generally stable, they do drift over their time on earth. Sometimes they even show gradual directed change.
Next, Dr. Novella makes the astonishing gaffe:
The fossil record shows a pattern of new species arising which are clearly related to and derived from older species. There is a clear pattern of branching descent in the fossil record - to the degree that it is complete. The fossil record is highly spotty, but the more we fill it in the more it fits the pattern of branching descent.
The fossil record does not show a “clear pattern of branching descent in the fossil record”, even “to the degree that it is complete.” The fossil record shows punctuated equilibrium, which is stasis in a species for millions of years, then disappearance of the species. New species arise, discontinuous with old species. Even isolated 'transitional' forms are rare, and gradual transitions are virtually non-existent.
Furthermore, molecular genetics has refuted Darwin’s “Tree of Life”— as Dr. Novella characterizes it, the “clear pattern of branching descent”— unequivocally. The generally pro-Darwinism magazine New Scientist, in its recent cover story, “Why Darwin Was Wrong About the Tree of Life”, pointed out that scientists are abandoning the vertical Tree of Life. Molecular biology is showing deep inconsistencies in Darwinists’ simplistic understanding of similarities and differences in biological structure:
Quoting several leading biologists, the article notes:
…Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality…[t]hat bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change…The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that…What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change. Biology is vastly more complex than we thought…and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century…
Yet Dr. Novella asserts that “There is a clear pattern of branching descent in the fossil record - to the degree that it is complete.” He’s wrong, and even other Darwinists admit it. There is no clear pattern of branching descent of living things, despite the propaganda in countless textbooks. The fossil record and the genetic evidence are not consistent with each other. Even the genetic evidence isn’t internally consistent with Darwin’s tree: DNA evidence conflicts with RNA evidence:
The problems began in the early 1990s when it became possible to sequence actual bacterial and archaeal genes rather than just RNA. Everybody expected these DNA sequences to confirm the RNA tree, and sometimes they did but, crucially, sometimes they did not. RNA, for example, might suggest that species A was more closely related to species B than species C, but a tree made from DNA would suggest the reverse. Which was correct? Paradoxically, both - but only if the main premise underpinning Darwin's tree was incorrect…
The evidence is so clear that Darwin’s “Tree of Life” is wrong that now even Darwinists are jumping ship.
So why would Dr. Novella publicly misrepresent the state of the science? Either Dr. Novella’s claim is the result of his ignorance of the relevant science, or it is an intentional misrepresentation.
Dr. Novella should explain his misrepresentation.
This was the Darwin Day video podcast from ID The Future yesterday, but I thought it would be good to highlight it for regular ENV visitors as well.
This special video episode of ID the Future celebrates Darwin Day with a look back at the man and his theory by three scientists and scholars who join in the scientific dissent from evolution.
Biologist Jonathan Wells, author and M.D. Geoffrey Simmons, and molecular biologist Douglas Axe shed light on the problems with Darwin's theory as they share what led each of them to their skepticism.
Jonathan Wells first became skeptical of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, but it was in his studies in embryology that he became skeptical of common ancestry. Dr. Wells takes a historical look at the impact of Darwin's theory and discusses how unnecessary it is for modern science.
Geoffrey Simmons, M.D., explains how he became a Darwin skeptic after looking at the evidence and finding the evidence for evolution lacking.
And Molecular biologist Douglas Axe from Biologic Institute explains the problems genetic mutations pose for Darwin's theory.
Listen in to their stories and appreciate again the scientific evidence against Darwin's theory.
From the new Zogby poll this week:
QUESTION: Charles Darwin wrote that when considering the evidence for his theory of evolution, “…a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with Darwin’s statement?
Strongly agree 45%
Somewhat agree 31%
Total Agree 76%
Somewhat disagree 6%
Strongly disagree 12%
Total Disagree 19%
Not sure 5%
Three-quarters (76%) say they agree with Darwin’s statement, while about a fifth (19%) say they disagree.
At a time when Darwin’s words and ideas are being showcased, it is interesting that his own support for academic freedom and freedom of scientific inquiry is largely being ignored by the media and downplayed by the scientific community. Darwin famously wrote in On the Origins of Species that when considering the evidence for evolution, “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” More than three-fourths of respondents said they agreed with Charles Darwin’s statement. This is in line with the results for each of the other questions supporting teaching both the evidence for and against evolution.
We're happy to announce the winners of the 2009 Academic Freedom Day Video and Essay Contest. We had lots of great entries, but the judges have narrowed it down and finally selected a Grand Prize overall winner ($500 award), and a 1st place winner ($250 award) in each category.
Grand Prize Overall Winner: Joshua Owens, Forth Worth, TX (read the essay here).
1st Place Essay Winner: Jaron Daniel Schoone, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (read the essay here).
1st Place Video Winner: David Daudelin, Hackettstown, NJ (watch the video here).
Essay honorable mention: Sarah Horton, Grove City, PA (read the essay here).
Video honorable mention: Brian Miller, Amy Ingermanson, Michael Curtain and Aubrey Burd, Battleground, WA (watch the video here).
The number of fawning pieces about Charles Darwin of late have been overwhelming, to say the least. Likewise the celebrations at biology departments across the country are in full swing today with cake eating contests, Darwin carols, game shows, honorary operas, and even the minting of new money with his likeness in the UK.
But there are some over takes on Darwin and his legacy, including a number of articles we're happy to highlight for your Darwin Day reading pleasure.
- Professors Show Need for Academic Freedom Bill by The Oklahoma Daily Editorial Board, The Oklahoma Daily
- Happy Atheist Day by Dr. Michael Egnor, Evolution News & Views
- Happy Darwin Day? by Dr. Jonathan Wells, The Washington Times
- Darwin, Intelligent Design, and Freedom of Discovery on Evolutionists' Holy Day by Casey Luskin, US News & World Report
- Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin by Dr. Benjamin Wiker, InsideCatholic.com
- Darwin's Birth Day by Dr. Geoffrey Simmons, Discovery Institute
- Darwin would teach 'weaknesses,' too by Kelly Coghlan, Dallas Morning News
- There is no politically correct science by Dr. John West, Forbes.com
- A Neurosurgeon, Not A Darwinist by Dr. Michael Egnor, Forbes.com
- The problem of evidence by Dr. Jonathan Wells, Forbes.com
Enjoy.
Dr. Steven Novella recently took issue with an essay I wrote for Forbes.com. Forbes has a fair survey of differing opinions on Darwin’s theory, which, of course, has angered Darwinists, who realize that the continued viability of Darwin’s theory depends on its insulation from criticism. They censor criticism of Darwinism in schools, and they aren’t happy to see the weaknesses of Darwinism discussed in the public forum, along with its strengths.
In my essay, I reviewed some of the scientific problems with Darwin’s theory, and I pointed out that Darwinism is itself a religious ideology. Darwin’s theory is the creation myth of atheism.
Dr. Novella begins:
First, I must point out that Egnor insists on referring to evolutionary theory as “Darwinism.” As many others have pointed out before, this is a propaganda tactic to attempt to diminish evolutionary theory to the quaint ideas of one guy. It is also misleading, for the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory differs in significant ways from strict Darwinian theory.
I use the term 'Darwinism' for several reasons.
First, 'evolution' merely means changes in populations over time, and 'evolutionary biology' is the study of changes in populations over time. 'Evolution' is a set of data. 'Evolutionary biology' is the study of that data. Darwinism and intelligent design are theories that purport to explain that data. But the theories aren't themselves the data, nor are they the field of study.
Darwinism is the theory that random variation and ‘survival of survivors’ is the best scientific explanation for the evolutionary data. It is not synonymous with the data (evolution) nor is it synonymous with the field of science itself (evolutionary biology). Intelligent design is the theory that design is the best scientific explanation for some of the data. It is not synonymous with the data (evolution) nor is it synonymous with the field of science itself (evolutionary biology).
Intelligent design and Darwinism are theories. They are opposite answers to the same scientific question: is there evidence for teleology in biology? They both depend on the same data, and each represents a refutation of the other. If there is evidence for teleology in biology, ID is true and Darwinism is false. If there isn't evidence for teleology in biology, Darwinism is true and ID is false. The testability of each theory depends on the testability (the refutation) of the other, and the validity of each theory depends on the invalidity of the other. Neither theory is a data set or a scientific discipline. Neither theory is 'evolution' or 'evolutionary biology.'
The effort to conflate an individual theory — Darwinism — with the data itself or with the entire scientific discipline is an effort to circumvent discussion of the evidence and to impose Darwinist dogma on the science.
My second reason for calling Darwinism “Darwinism” is that Darwinists use it. On Februrary 12th, Darwin’s parishoners aren't celebrating 'Evolution Day' or 'Evolutionary Biology Day' or 'Natural Selection Day' or 'Punctuated Equilibrium Day' or 'Modern-Neo-Darwinian-Synthesis Day.' They're celebrating 'Darwin Day.'
'Darwinism' seems so much less cumbersome than the alternatives. Yet I share some of Dr. Novella's angst about properly naming Darwinist ideology. No single word — at least no word I can think of — seems to encapsulate its essence.
Oh, before I forget — Happy Atheist Day.
From the new Zogby poll this week:
QUESTION: Would you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree that teachers and students should have the academic freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution as a scientific theory?
Strongly agree 54%
Somewhat agree 26%
Total Agree 80%
Somewhat disagree 6%
Strongly disagree 11%
Total Disagree 16%
Not sure 4%
A large majority of respondents (80%) agree that teachers and students should have academic freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution as a scientific theory, with more than half (54%) saying they strongly agree. Only 16% disagree.
Although the media consistently portray support for the freedom to discuss both sides of the evolution debate as coming primarily from conservative Christians, these poll results show something far different and will shatter some preconceptions about who supports letting students hear a balanced presentation on Darwinian evolution. It turns out that:
- Democrats (82%) support giving teachers and students the freedom to discuss Darwinism’s “strengths and weaknesses” even more overwhelmingly than Republicans (73%).
- Self-identified liberals (86%) favor the freedom to discuss evolution’s “strengths and weaknesses” more than conservatives (72%).
- College graduates (84%) support the freedom to discuss evolution’s “strengths and weaknesses” more than those without a college degree.
- Individuals identifying with no Christian or Jewish denomination favor the freedom to discuss evolution’s “strengths and weaknesses” by nearly 82%.
Clearly, support for the freedom to teach the controversy about Darwinian evolution cuts across religion, party affiliation, political ideology, and educational levels.
Darwinist Dr. Jerry Coyne, in his New Republic article "Seeing and Believing; The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail," quotes the National Academy of Sciences on the reconciliation of religion and science. The NAS statement is worth a post on its own.
Dr. Coyne notes:
The National Academy of Sciences, America's most prestigious scientific body, issued a pamphlet assuring us that we can have our faith and Darwin, too:
“Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.”
Science and religion don’t address entirely separate aspects of human experience. There is one truth about the world. The truth about the natural world is obviously a part of metaphysical truth. Science addresses the truth about the natural world, and religion addresses the deeper metaphysical truth. There are no separate magesteria, despite Stephen J. Gould’s spin. If God made the world, then intelligent design is true, assuming that the artifacts of His designing intelligence can be recognized as such. If there is no God, and the world just came to be, then Darwinism is true, because ID and Darwinism are just the affirmative and the negative answer to the same question: is there evidence for design in biology?
This is clear: metaphysical truth determines scientific truth. If there is a designer (metaphysical truth), then intelligent design is true (scientific truth). If there is no designer (metaphysical truth), then Darwinism is true (scientific truth).
The effort to separate religion and science is disingenuous. All major scientific theories have religious implications, and all religious beliefs have implications for science. The court-imposed Darwinist monopoly on public education has had profound impact on religious belief and discourse in this country, and it is a major factor in the culture war. The effort by the NAS and many other Darwinists to separate religion and science and to advocate the compatibility between religion and Darwinism is to deny the profound religious motivation and consequences of their own largely atheist ideology — an ideology that candid Darwinists/atheists, such as Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, Myers, and Moran, are delighted to proclaim. The faux-separation of science from its inherent religious origins and implications is an effort to mitigate the legal and public relations backlash against the obvious atheist proselytizing in our science classrooms.
Either our natural world is the product of intelligent agency, or it is not. And that’s a scientific question. Using court-ordered censorship, Darwinists have succeeded in establishing a monopoly on instruction about biology and human origins in public schools. That instruction is inherently religious, because all scientific theories begin with religious (metaphysical) premises and draw religious (metaphysical) conclusions. Ideas have premises and consequences.
The NAS is right to assert that religious belief and science are compatible, but they are compatible not because they address entirely separate aspects of human experience. They are compatible because they they overlap. Scientific understanding is based on metaphysical understanding, which is religion. Science and religion are indispensable to one another. The question is whether practitioners of science and religion, which describes all of us to a greater or lesser extent, are honest about the religious foundations and implications of our scientific opinions.
For Darwinists, the assertion that religion and science are separate magesteria serves a polemical purpose. It justifies the advancement of their ideology, cloaked as disinterested science, in public forums and particularly in public schools without their admission that Darwinism intrinsically advances atheism. Darwinist censorship in academia and in public schools of any meaningful criticism of Darwinism has given one side of this religious argument a monopoly on the public education of our children. Darwin’s theory has been ideologically potent far in excess of its scientific vacuity. Its ideological potency in our culture is mostly a consequence of educational monopoly and censorship of criticism.
Many Americans are beginning to understand that Darwinism is a religious worldview — it is the creation myth of atheism — and that it has a monopoly on public education. As public opinion polls show, there is massive public support for open discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinism in public schools, and for an end to censorship in science.
The assertion by the NAS that science and religion address separate aspects of life is witless. Truth is unitary. Obviously it matters whether or not God exists, and whether or not He created the universe and man. It matters theologically, it matters philosophically, it matters historically, it matters ethically, it matters politically, and it matters scientifically. It matters scientifically because science is the search for truth about the natural world, and if it was designed by an intelligent agent, that’s the truth about it, and it’s a scientific truth, and it matters.
From the new Zogby poll this week:
QUESTION: I am going to read you two statements about Biology teachers teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. Please tell me which statement comes closest to your own point of view—Statement A or Statement B?
Statement A: Biology teachers should teach only Darwin’s theory of evolution and the scientific evidence that supports it.
Statement B: Biology teachers should teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it.
Statement A 14%
Statement B 78%
Neither 5%
Other/Not sure 2%
 A large majority (78%) say Statement B, “Biology teachers should teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it,” comes closest to their point of view, while 14% say Statement A, “Biology teachers should teach only Darwin’s theory of evolution and the scientific evidence that supports it” comes closest to theirs.
The majority supporting teaching both sides of the evolution debate jumped by 9 points since 2006, when this question was last asked:
Results from Zogby nationwide poll in 2006
Statement A 21%
Statement B 69%
Neither/Other/Not sure 10%
Random sample of 1,004 likely voters. Conducted by Zogby International on Feb.27-Mar. 2, 2006. Margin of error +/-3.2%.
Over the past three years, supporters of Darwinian evolution have insisted that there is no scientific evidence critical of Darwin’s theory to present to students. They also have claimed that the Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design trial settled this issue and so there should be no more debate about how evolution is taught in public schools. But the public has not been convinced. Indeed, support for the Darwinists’ position has dropped significantly while support for teaching the controversy over evolution has risen.
Notably, according to the new poll, young adults are far less likely than any other age group to favor a one-sided approach to teaching evolution. When asked if they agreed with the statement that biology teachers should teach “only Darwin’s theory of evolution and the scientific evidence that supports it”—the position typically advocated by pro-Darwin activists and academic partisans—0% agreed among those in the 18-24 year-old age bracket!
This morning the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog picked up the news about the national Darwin Day poll making waves for teaching evolution, even paying us a nice compliment or two while re-imagining history (for the record, DI's ed policy has always been to teach the controversy). But the really interesting thing is that they wanted an "expert" opinion on the poll (besides the professionals at Zogby) and so they turned to — who else? — Richard Dawkins:
"It is indeed a stupid poll," Dr. Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist (and On Faith panelist) told me in an email. "Actually I think I'd say a dishonest poll -- because the QUESTION PRESUMES that there is scientific evidence against evolution. Of course, if we have a theory where there is evidence for and against, it would be ridiculous to teach only the evidence in favour.
Leaving aside the irony that Dawkins is a panelist for a blog "On Faith," allow him to explain why, in his view, it's stupid to think that there might be evidence against evolution:
"Now, if there really is evidence against evolution, the Discovery Institute should go into the laboratory, or the field, and find it, and publish it in the scientific journals. Instead, they mislead the public, by phrasing a question which presumes that there is evidence against."
Dawkins denies that evidence against evolution exists — where have we heard this before? — but then extends an invitation: "Go into the lab!" he says. "Publish in the scientific journals!" he says.
It's funny how similar his tactics are to Darwin apologist Eugenie Scott's: Deny that evidence against evolution exists, then when scientists do lab work and publish papers in journals, deny that they exist and cover it up as fast as you can.
It's no wonder that staunch evolution supporters like Dawkins are now trying to discount the overwhelming public support for teaching the controversy.
Darwinist Dr. Jerry Coyne, in his New Republic article Seeing and Believing; The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail”, asks if religion and science can be reconciled. He notes:
…[T]here are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward.
Dr. Coyne' s description of the beliefs of many Christians of the literal truth of the Bible as "the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities" is a perplexing slur. I disagree with young-earth creationists on the time-frame of history and biology, but I don't believe that their beliefs are "primitive." They understand Christianity differently than I do, but on the really important question — 'is there teleology in biology and in the natural world' — they are exactly right, in my view. I reserve the appellation "primitive" for the utterly unsubstantiated Darwinist belief that human beings arose literally from mud by a random process of 'survival of survivors.' Unlike Darwinists, young-earth creationists get the important part — the obvious evidence for design in life — right.
That aside, Dr. Coyne’s sloppy use of the terms ‘religion’ ‘faith,’ ‘science,’ and ‘revelation’ muddle the real issues.
‘Religion’ is so vague as to be meaningless in this context. If religion means belief in a particular ultimate reality, then all such beliefs — evangelical Christianity, Buddhism, atheism, materialism — are religions. If religion is taken to mean adherence to dogma, then it is the fervor and intractability with which beliefs are held that matter, and many ‘new atheists’ are more religious than many liberal mainline Protestants. The term ‘religion’ encompasses such a vast array of beliefs that the question ‘are religion and science compatible’ is meaningless. In addition, the term ‘science’ is horribly vague. Orthodox Christianity is certainly compatible with Newtonian physics, but it is not compatible with the inference to non-teleological biological evolution, which is Darwinism. The salient questions are ‘is belief in the God of orthodox Christianity and Darwinism compatible’ and ‘is belief in Theravada Buddhism and quantum mechanics compatible’ and ‘is belief in atheism and molecular genetics compatible.’ Various religious beliefs and various scientific beliefs are so profoundly different that the question about compatibility can’t be answered without a specific description of the beliefs. The proper answer to the question ‘are religion and science compatible’ is: which religion and which science?
Coyne’s use of ‘faith’ is similarly muddled. Speaking from a Christian perspective, faith doesn’t mean ‘belief in that for which there is no evidence.’ That has never been the Christian definition of faith. Faith means the belief in the implications of the evidence, even when some of the implications extend well beyond the raw evidence. Faith is fidelity to a unified understanding of reality, even though the evidence is necessarily incomplete. Chesterton explained his faith in Christ as a consequence of his experience that Christianity fits life ‘like a key fits a lock.’ For many aspects of belief, Christians accept the experiences of others, because it is not possible for each of us to have the full array of personal experiences, and we trust the experiences of others if those experiences are consistent with what we have personally come to understand.
Most — in fact nearly all — of what we believe in science is just the same kind of faith. Exactly the same kind of faith. None of us, not even the world’s leading scientists, have more than a sliver of personal experience of scientific truth. How many evolutionary biologists have personally seen evolution of a new species as a consequence of non-teleological heritable variation and natural selection? The answer is: none. How many cosmologists have seen the Big Bang? How many physicists have seen a quantum waveform collapse? Obviously, none have. Scientists believe in the implications of the evidence, even when some of the implications extend well beyond the raw evidence. Scientific faith is fidelity to a unified understanding of natural reality, even though the evidence is necessarily incomplete. Just like religious faith.
But many will argue that scientific evidence can be shown to others, and tested, and falsified, at least in theory, whereas religious faith is a personal experience that can’t readily be communicated or tested. Scientific beliefs are more likely to be quantified then are religious beliefs, but then religious beliefs are based on a much broader and deeper range of experience than are scientific beliefs. And the assertion that scientific beliefs are empirically verifiable in a way that religious beliefs are not is a mantra that does not withstand scrutiny. I point out that that process of evaluation of scientific evidence involves many years of education that is available to only a few, and even possible for only a few. Most people have not been trained in relativistic physics or in evolutionary biology to a professional level, and most people couldn’t understand to a level of subtlety these scientific disciplines even if they had the training available to them. Even leading scientists tend to specialize so intensely that much of the evidence in their own broader scientific field is outside of their personal experience.
Scientific belief and religious belief are both based largely on faith, understood as the belief in the implications of the evidence, even when some of the implications extend beyond the raw evidence.
To what extent can the rational basis for scientific faith be tested by a personal encounter with the evidence? It is perhaps true that I would have faith in the Darwinian understanding of biology if I were to obtain a PhD in evolutionary biology and conduct original research for many years. Yet it is perhaps true that Dr. Coyne would have faith in Christ if he were to enter a seminary, be ordained, obtain a doctorate in theology and pray in a monastery for many years. Faith of both kinds — Darwinian and Christian — can be tested to some extent by personal experience.
Coyne’s use of ‘science’ is similarly muddled. Science is the study of the natural world, and specifically, it is the study of natural effects. There is nothing in science or in the philosophy of science that coherently rules out extra-(super) natural causes. In fact, extra-natural causes are the basis for some of our most successful science. Cosmology is based on Big Bang theory, which posits creation ex-nihilo, which by definition is extra-natural. There is no reason to insist that effects in the natural world must be the result of natural causes. And if extra-natural causes are necessary to explain nature (as is the case for the origin of the universe), then religion, understood as the study of the broader metaphysical issues, seems necessary to science.
Finally, Coyne’s invocation of ‘revelation’ is disingenuous. Belief in revelation simply means belief in that which we have not personally encountered based on trust in the authority of others and an acceptance of the compatibility of the revealed information with what we have personally encountered. Most of science is revealed, in the sense that most of what we believe in science are things we have not personally tested. I don’t know personally that the gravity on Jupiter is much stronger than the gravity on earth. I accept the authority of physicists and astronomers who have told me. Yet for me, it’s revealed truth, not my experiential truth. Evolutionary biology is for most of us revealed truth as well. We have not seen evolution in the Cambrian, and most of us have not professionally examined the fossils. Those who have faith in the Darwinian explanation for evolution accept this revelation based on authority (they trust evolutionary biologists to get it right) and based on the congruence between the Darwinian explanation for evolution in the Cambrian and their own personal worldview. Belief in the Resurrection of Christ and in evolution by random variation and natural selection are both based on a combination of revelation, evidence, and congruence with a larger world-view. A Christian might even suggest that the evidence for the Resurrection is stronger than the evidence for Darwinian mechanisms in the Cambrian, because the Resurrection is a much more widely-held belief, it's a much more recent event and, unlike evolution of species, there were witnesses.
My view is this: religious beliefs and scientific beliefs share much in common. Coyne's proposed incompatibility is based on his own profound misunderstanding of theology and of the philosophy of science. Atheists such as Dr. Coyne have ideological reasons to ascribe a different standard of credibility to their own beliefs than to those of others. If Darwinism were subjected to rigorous critique on a level with other religious/scientific beliefs, it would collapse in short time. Darwinists need to insulate their theory from criticism, so they misrepresent the religious nature of Darwinism — by insisting that it is pure 'science' — and they use the federal courts to prohibit any discussion of Darwinism's weaknesses in public schools. Their reluctance to permit even a whisper of critique of their theory in schools speaks to the fragility of their ideology. It's evident that they believe that Darwin's theory won't even withstand the scrutiny of schoolchildren.
To answer the question ‘can science and religion be reconciled,’ one must first ask it in a way that can be answered. Can evolutionary change be reconciled with Christianity? Can biological information be reconciled with atheism? Coyne elides these essential subtleties. He doesn’t even ask coherent questions.
I suspect that Dr. Coyne, an atheist, understands these questions all too well, and doesn't like the answers.
Surprisingly Strong Support Seen Among Democrats and Liberals
A new Zogby poll on the eve of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday shows a dramatic rise in the number of Americans who agree that when biology teachers teach the scientific evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution, they also should teach the scientific evidence against it. Surprisingly, the poll also shows overwhelming support among self-identified Democrats and liberals for academic freedom to discuss the “strengths and weaknesses” evolution.
Over 78% of likely voters agree with teaching both the evidence for and against Darwin’s theory, according to the new national poll.
“This represents a dramatic 9-point jump from 2006, when only 69% of respondents in a similar poll favored teaching both sides,” said Discovery Institute’s Dr. John West. “At the same time, the number of likely voters who support teaching only the evidence that favors evolution dropped 7 points from 21% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2009.
“We need to change Darwin Day to Academic Freedom Day because just when Darwinists are celebrating evolution’s triumph, this poll shows that they have been losing the public debate over whether students need to hear both sides,” added West. “There appears to be a public backlash against the strong-arm tactics being employed by many Darwinists to intimidate scientists, teachers, and students who want to raise criticisms of Darwin’s theory.”
The poll results also shatter some preconceptions about who supports letting students hear a balanced presentation on Darwinian evolution, with Democrats supporting teaching Darwinism’s “strengths and weaknesses” even more overwhelmingly than Republicans, at 82% and 73%, respectively.
Added West: “Media reports insinuate that a right-wing conspiracy of know nothings and religious extremists is afoot. But the Zogby poll reflects a very broad-based and well-informed constituency for academic freedom that includes liberals, moderates, independents, and people from every race and age group. The Darwin Lobby has really isolated itself from public opinion.”
The telephone poll, commissioned by Discovery Institute and conducted Jan. 29-31, surveyed over 1,000 likely voters and has a +/-3.1% margin of error.
Download our report on the 2009 Zogby poll about evolution and academic freedom here.
Download the full 2009 Zogby poll report here.
A recent Nature news article remarks about the production of the first self-replicating RNA molecules capable of catalyzing their own replication. Origin of life researchers are excited about this because they think it shows one possible step in their story about how life might have arisen via natural processes, without intelligent design (ID). One big problem with their story: under no uncertain terms did natural processes produce this molecule. One line from the Nature article says it all: “Joyce and his colleague Tracey Lincoln made paired RNA catalysts.” (emphasis added) One pro-ID chemist explained to me privately the precise design parameters that were required to produce the self-replicating enzymes and to use it to produce life: - The system is completely contrived consisting ONLY of catalysts and substrates. No competing materials or reactions were allowed. No natural analog is possible.
- There is a vast gulf between their reaction mixtures and anything that might possibly come from a Stanley Miller type electric discharge experiment. This requires explanation.
- The 5’-end of the oligonucleotides were primed for the condensation reaction by prior synthesis of the high energy triphosphate form. Simple phosphates fail to react or react at rates orders of magnitude slower. Clearly the reaction only does what the chemist intended.
- Reactions were carried out at 42 deg C. --> fine-tuning --> fine-tuner!
- Only one bond is formed by either of the paired enzymes. The rest of the molecule was pre-assembled by Joyce and his colleagues. What this experiment shows is that some clever chemists have spent ten years of their lives re-engineering a pair of RNA-zymes to catalyze ONE reaction. And without a constant supply of pre-fabricated component parts, nothing happens. Indeed, if anything, the road to self-assembly just got longer.
The take-home point here is that origin-of-life experiments--while fascinating in their chemical accomplishments--demonstrate little if they do not mimic natural conditions. When intelligent agents intervene to create conditions that would never exist in the real-world, the experiments instead show the need for intelligent design to insert information to form life, not the power of material causes.
William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, in The Design of Life, likewise discuss how similar experiments generating functional ribozymes require the intelligent insertion of information at each step:
Do SELEX experiments therefore demonstrate the power of purely materialistic forces to evolve biologically significant RNA structures under realistic prebiotic conditions? Not at all. Intelligent intervention by the experimenter is indispensable. In SELEX experiments, large pools of randomized RNA molecules are formed by intelligent synthesis and not by chance—there is no natural route to RNA (in fact, the chemical processes in nature that facilitate the formation of nucleotide bases undercut the formation of RNA’s sugar-phosphate backbone and vice versa). The artificially synthesized molecules are then sifted chemically by various means to select for catalytic function. What’s more, the catalytic function is specified by the investigator. Those molecules showing some activity are isolated and become templates for the next round of selection. And so on, round after round. At every step in SELEX and ribozyme (catalytic RNA) engineering experiments, the investigator is carefully arranging the outcome, even if he or she does not know the specific sequence that will emerge. It is simply irrelevant that the investigator learns the identity or structure of the evolved ribozyme only after the experiment is over. The investigator first had to specify a precise catalytic function. Next, the investigator had to specify a fitness measure gauging degree of catalytic function for a given polynucleotide. And finally, the investigator had to run an experiment to optimize the fitness measure. Only then does the investigator obtain a polynucleotide exhibiting the catalytic function of interest. In all such experiments the investigator is inserting crucial information at every step. Ribozyme engineering is engineering. Indeed, there is no evidence that natural processes as found in nature can do their own ribozyme engineering without the aid of human intelligence.
(William Dembski & Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life: Discovering Sign of Intelligence in Biological Systems, General Notes, pg. 59) Incredibly, the Nature news article about these newly constructed RNA molecules offers the following punchline: “Ellington says that the observation that different winning enzymes emerge in different conditions is crucial because it further undermines the intelligent-design idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the intervention of a supernatural being.” Ignoring the fact that Ellington wrongly mischaracterizes ID as a necessary appeal to the “supernatural,” it’s amazing to believe that intelligent agency is now being cited as a refutation of intelligent agency. For some materialists, it seems that no form of evidence can count against their viewpoint.
As I mentioned in previous posts in this brief series, the ID-bashing blog Little Green Footballs has done important work in sensitizing us to the sympathies expressed in parts of the Muslim world for Hitler and Nazism. One of the most sickening videos I’ve ever seen was noted recently on LGF. It was of a smiling, youngish Egyptian cleric in front of a slick TV backdrop, praising the Nazis for slaughtering Jews and saying he only hoped it would be Muslims who do this work, blessed by Allah, next time around. On an inset screen, the cleric nodded and gestured approvingly to old black-and-white newsreels from the death camps, of Jewish corpses being bulldozed, or pulled out of ovens as smoking skeletons.
LGF author Charles Johnson is troubled by the weakness of Western leaders who don’t want to see what we are up against in the war on terror, who shrink from a strong and confident stance in dealing with challenges from the Muslim world. However, Johnson never makes the connection between the Darwinism he defends and the sapping of Western confidence that he laments.
This may seem surprising to those who are familiar with the history of 19th-century colonialism. Darwinian theory fueled an arrogant contempt for other nations that seems the very opposite of liberal guilt and weakness. It was not some sort of “crude” distortion of Darwin’s thought but a straightforward application of it that led to the biologization of foreign policy in the age of imperialism.
Typical of this school of thought is an influential 1896 essay in the London Saturday Review by P. Charles Michael, “A Biological View of Our Foreign Policy.” Charles H. Harvey wrote The Biology of British Politics in 1904. Karl Pearson, professor of eugenics at London University and a leading theorist on England’s national destiny, wrote: “History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.” The stuff is straight out of Darwin.
Consider King Leopold II (1835-1909) of Belgium, responsible for the enslavement and murder of millions in Belgian Congo. The horror crystallized in the phrase from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “Exterminate all the brutes,” scrawled by the character Kurtz across a manuscript during his time as chief of an ivory-harvesting station far up the Congo River, is just a brief encapsulation of the ethics implied by Darwin’s theory, echoing Darwin’s own language. He was fond of the word “exterminate.”
As literary scholars have argued, Conrad knew from personal experience what happened in the Congo and why. The savagery of the European powers in their race to carve up Africa, the “merry dance of death and trade,” was fueled by “scientific” racism of the kind that was inspired by Darwin.
Sounds pretty self-assertive. But the toxic fusion of nationalism and racism was discredited by the Nazis. Since then, no one who’s not demented wants to go near it.
The problem for the increasingly secularized West is that in our age of Darwin, the older, far more wholesome rationale for national self-assertion and self-defense is also looked at askance. Americans once understood there was something very special indeed about our country, something worth defending and otherwise sacrificing for. That something has to do with ideals of ordered freedom ultimately rooted in Western religious values.
I’m working on a review now for the Weekly Standard of a fascinating new book, Joshua A. Berman’s Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford U. Press). Professor Berman finds the source of Western-style political egalitarianism in the Pentateuch. Conservatives have argued similarly. In The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk traces America’s line of inheritance from “Mount Sinai to Massachusetts Bay,” showing how “the American moral order could not have come into existence at all, had it not been for the legacy left by Israel.”
Or as Whittaker Chambers put it in Witness, “Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.”
A disenchanted world of the kind that Darwin helped to bequeath to us is inclined to regard this spiritual heritage as bogus, and so along with it a critical piece of what people used to find most dear about America. In a Darwinian age, a crucial plank underlying America’s spiritual identity is snapped in half. Having rightly rejected Darwinian racism as the basis of nationalism, we are also increasingly bereft of healthier alternatives.
Our country’s moral order derives, of course, from other sources too, independent of the Bible. But without a spiritual heritage, our identity as a nation would be substantially crippled. That may be why versions of patriotism denatured by the subtraction of this faith element often seem kind of lame and uninspiring.
So it goes, too, in the rest of the Western world. It’s no wonder that the most highly secularized nations—those in Western Europe—also have the hardest time explaining why they have a right to defend their own historically Christian cultures from the fundamentalist Muslim culture that—and here we return to LGF—blogger Charles Johnson regards with understandable anxiety and dismay.
Yet if Johnson and like-minded conservatives had their way on the evolution issue, basically banishing challenges to Darwinism from public life, they might well succeed only in hastening the very fate—the West’s increasing capitulation to terror—that they otherwise so earnestly and effectively warn us against.
This keeps getting better and better. First the University of Vermont announces that they've replaced Ben Stein with Howard Dean (yes, that Howard Dean) as their commencement speaker.
Then UVM biology prof Nick Gotelli writes an opinion piece in the Burlington Free Press arguing that Stein is unqualified to be a commencement speaker because he has no peer-reviewed scientific scholarship.
I kid you not:
The real issue is not political correctness, but scholarship. I will leave it to my colleagues in the economics department to weigh in on Stein's scholastic achievements as an economist. As far as the sciences go, I am unaware of a single publication by Stein that has appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. In the sciences, these peer-reviewed journal articles are the currency by which we judge all scholars, and they form the basis for job offers, promotions and advancement in academia.
Stein's ideas are widely discredited by reputable academic scholars as well as by the mainstream media, and that is the real reason we don't want him to represent us on graduation day.
Hey, if the mainstream media says it, it must be true! Good thing UVM now has that paragon of scientific research, Howard Dean, to restore their honor.
Over at Forbes.com they've just posted over 20 articles related to Darwin and evolution in advance of next week's hoopla around the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. Kudos to editor Hana Alberts for compiling such compelling reading. As she notes in her introduction to the special report: More questions than we'd like were raised long ago, and remain unanswered. Two of the biggest: If humans are no different than animals, what is the status of free will, of morality borne from the brain, not the body? Can and should we apply ideas about the "survival of the fittest" to economics, to population control, to law, to love?
These gripping uncertainties spring from our common desire to eliminate uncertainty, or the unknowns of the surrounding universe, by subjecting them to knowledge, scrutiny and documentation. And as a result, we gamely hope that we'll stumble into some unequivocal truths about our place in the world, and why we are where we are. To their credit, Forbes solicited articles from a variety of viewpoints, and the authors include CSC Fellows John West and Jonathan Wells, as well as Darwin skeptics like Michael Egnor and Michael Flannery, along with Darwinists like Michael Ruse, Larry Arnhart, Lionel Tiger and more. Here are a few highlights.
There Is No 'Politically Correct' Science By John G. West
It's impossible to isolate Darwinian theories from their societal consequences.
Darwin also laid the groundwork in Descent of Man for the emergence of eugenics, the crusade to breed better humans by weeding out those deemed biologically "unfit." Darwin warned that civilized societies were sinning against natural selection by helping the poor, treating the sick and inoculating people against smallpox. Alfred Russel Wallace By Michael A. Flannery Yet Darwin and Wallace had very different views of how their respective evolutionary mechanisms worked. In the end, those differences would lead to two inherently oppositional theories--Darwin's driven by wholly random processes, and Wallace's imbued with design and purpose. Wallace eventually broke with Darwin in 1869 over the ability of natural selection to explain the human intellect. For him, nature was infused with teleological meaning. A Neurosurgeon, Not A Darwinist
By Michael Egnor I saw that Darwinism was a Potemkin village. But it wasn't clear to me why evolutionary biologists were so passionately devoted to such pallid science. The evidence that the Darwinian understanding of biological origins was inadequate has been in hand for quite a while.
Why, when the genetic code was unraveled, didn't scientists question Darwin's assumption of randomness? Why didn't Darwinists ask the difficult questions that are posed for their theory by the astonishing complexity of intracellular molecular machinery? Why do Darwinists claim that intelligent design is untestable, and simultaneously claim that it is wrong? The Problem Of Evidence By Jonathan Wells Before 1859 science meant (and still means, for most people) testing hypotheses by comparing them with the evidence. For Darwin and his followers, however, "science" is the search for natural explanations. Such explanations should be plausible--that is, they cannot blatantly contradict the facts--but instead of being based on evidence they are based on the assumption that everything can be explained materialistically.
About the Darwin-Hitler connection, I’ve written many times before (see here, here, and here, for example), quoting Hitler himself, his standard biographers, and Hannah Arendt. What emerges is that Nazism is indeed a kind of applied Darwinism, unintended by Charles Darwin himself, of course. Ideas have consequences, and some of them are unintended. Obvious, right?
Not to blogger Charles Johnson in Little Green Footballs, who jumped on me in a recent post for writing two sentences in a Jerusalem Post op-ed to the effect that “Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers. In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.” And that remains true, despite the fact that Hitler doesn’t cite Darwin as an intellectual influence. Citing influence wasn’t Hitler’s style, but it seems he absorbed his Darwinian worldview from the poisonous popular Viennese press. Richard Weikart goes into detail about this in his important book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which I’ve drawn much from.
Hitler certainly doesn’t cite Christian teaching as an influence either—but that hasn’t stopped critics of Christianity from tying that faith to Nazi anti-Semitism.
Yes, someone will object at this point, but what about the famous line at the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, “In defending myself against the Jews, I am acting for the Lord”? When Hitler invoked “the Lord,” this was not the God of Christianity, as the immediate context makes crystal clear. “Eternal Nature,” he writes in the preceding paragraph in the same chapter, “inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin’s laws. Those are Hitler’s “Almighty Creator,” as he goes on to say, the “Lord” whose work he proposes to do by making war on the Jews.
The chapter to read in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, “Nation and Race,” where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is transparently phrased in Darwinian terms.
But you don’t have to be an advocate of intelligent design—or that hooded, phantom menace, a "creationist"—to see this. In Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson writes that “Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism” (p. 5).
If you want the assurance of a liberal and a critic of Catholic Christianity, turn to James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. Carroll notes that the ideal of Nazi-style “blood purity” was articulated by thinkers in the Catholic Church as far back as 1449, specifically by Spanish “Old Christians” who feared that Jewish-born converts to Catholicism would spoil the Spanish Christian limpieza de sangre. Carroll calls Hitler a “product” of this line of racially based anti-Jewish thinking. But for all that the historian wants to emphasize the Church’s guilt, such as it may be, he acknowledges that “the scientific Enlightenment, pursuing its decidedly nonreligious agenda, added its own twist…, especially in the figure of Charles Darwin.”
Carroll quotes Darwin’s fell prophecy in The Descent of Man that “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” He acknowledges the influence exercised by the “‘Germanizing’ of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche, at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler’s all-encompassing ideology of race was a ‘vulgarized version,’ in one scholar’s phrase, of the social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd.”
“Social Darwinism” is a phrase used to insulate Darwin himself from the consequences of his ideas and his words. Carroll concludes, “So however much Hitler twisted what preceded him, it is also the case that he emerged from it” (p. 477).
I have argued just that, adding only that the influence of Darwinism is the more concrete, since he used biological language in couching his call for race war, whereas he did not use the ancient Christian vocabulary that assailed Jews as “Christ killers.”
We know from other sources of his contempt for Christian belief. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes that what Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was precisely its rejection of the conclusions that followed from Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”
That is point number one I would make to Charles Johnson and other conservatives who share his perspective. There is nothing in defending Darwinian science, if you choose to defend it, that should make you feel obliged to deny the influence that Darwin had on the rise of Nazi race theory.
No, and let me emphasize this because it otherwise always gets lost when people get upset, this doesn't make Darwin a proto-Hitler and it doesn't mean Darwin somehow caused the Holocaust. But it does remind us of an obvious truth: The way you picture how the world works must inevitably influence, somehow, the way you think it should work. Not determine it, but influence it. It's a reason to take a second, critical look at Darwinian theory, not necessarily to reject it. Just that.
The second point is less obvious but possibly more interesting. More tomorrow.
The Darwinists are clearly not happy about the supplemental textbook Explore Evolution (EE), and given their showing thus far, they’re getting increasingly desperate to find ways to attack it. The latest review attacking EE was published in the journal Evolution and Development by Brian Metscher, a biologist in Austria. Employing what ID historian and rhetorician Thomas Woodward calls the “sledgehammer” approach, Metscher makes the grand sweeping conclusion that “[e]very talking point in the book has been dealt with already.” Metscher doesn’t specify precisely what those “talking points” are, but if EE is so wrong, surely Metscher can give us a scholarly refutation of the book. Instead Metscher cites to TalkOrigins and an internet Darwinist named Lenny Flank, who offers some interesting advice for those defending evolution. Metscher cites a long screed by Flank attacking EE which offers, among other things, the following critique of the textbook:
Just got my first look at the tome today. I can sum up my feelings in one word:
BWA HA HA HA HA HA AH AH A !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In other Darwinist blogs (not cited by Metscher), Flank has suggested that one way to defend evolution is to find certain religious “fundamentalists,” and then “round them all up and shoot them.” Flank elaborates on his strategy, stating, “I love fundies. I really do. Every time they shoot themselves in the head, it saves ME the trouble.” Elsewhere, when defending evolution, Flank urges evolutionists to avoid discussing scientific issues: “Don't focus on the science... scientists arguing over science is a recipe for boredom.” Flank continues, “This isn't a science symposium. Don't treat it as one...This fight is a political fight.” Instead, Flank recommends attacking ID proponents “from every possible direction... don’t give them an instant's rest”; they should be smeared as “extremists” and “religious zealots” who are advocating “fundamentalist Christian theocracy.”
Unfortunately, Metscher seems to have adopted the same rhetorical style modeled by Flank. In his review, Metscher calls EE a “pestilence” that is “159 glossy pages of color-illustrated creationist nostalgia.” (Compare that statement to Metscher’s authority Lenny Flank, who similarly writes that EE, “consists of nothing but the same old crap that creationist/IDers have been putting out for forty years.” See here for a refutation of the Metscher/Flank false and fallacious correlation-equals-creationist-causation argument.) According to Metscher, the textbook is both “pathetic” and an “insidious threat to education.” At one point, Metscher charges EE with “abusing actual scientific results,” even complaining that EE invokes “that irritating homology-is-circular thing.” Metscher's likewise scholarly conclusion? EE “resembles not so much a Trojan horse as an email virus, or the introduction of sterile males into an insect population.” To answer the question you’re thinking right now, the answer is, Yes, this review apparently did meet the standards for publication in a Darwinist scientific journal.
Despite his own questionable citation sources, Metscher attacks the references in Explore Evolution, complaining that the textbook cites a paper in Bioessays to bolster its claim that complex systems like the four-chambered heart must have arisen “as complete systems.” Metscher complains that the paper cited doesn’t specifically mention heart evolution, but in fact this article’s general conclusion about morphological evolution endorses the precise point being made in EE: “it is unlikely that morphological evolution can be seen as the accumulation of small morphological variation of trait values as described by some neo-Darwinian research.” (Isaac Salazar-Ciudad, "On the origins of morphological disparity and its diverse developmental bases," BioEssays, Vol. 28:1112–1122, (2006).) Thus, the conclusion of this paper is actually far stronger and broader than the narrow point for which EE cites it, and EE seems fully justified in citing this paper to justify suspicions that complex biological features in animals (like the four-chambered heart) are not amenable to Darwinian modes of evolution. Given the discussions above, perhaps Metscher should start scrutinizing his own citations before he attacks those of others.
Another highly amusing part of the review is the fact that its author — a theoretical biologist in Austria — is instructing his fellow biologists about how Explore Evolution will be treated under American constitutional law. Here, his analysis is less grim, for Metscher offers his own legal opinion that, since “[e]verything about this book is designed to avoid the legal obstacles,” therefore “[t]his book is less likely … to be snagged by the Establishment Clause.” Alternatively, one might observe that since this textbook focuses solely on science, it poses no foreseeable constitutional problems for usage in state schools. Leave it to a Darwinist biologist to spin constitutionality — a strength — into a defect.
It’s also amusing that Metscher’s conclusion about EE’s apparent constitutionality is contradicted by his citation to Lenny Flank, where Flank offers the learned legal opinion that EE “it certainly doesn't look like this book will stand a snowball's chance in hell, once it gets to court,” further declaring that “[i]f this book ever goes to trial, I want a front rwo [sic] seat.”
Despite EE’s grounding in the mainstream scientific literature, part of Metscher’s conspiracy theory, of course, is that the book is a front for creationism. He thus charges that Explore Evolution is guilty of “omitting time scales.” Yet Explore Evolution plainly observes that trilobite fossils are found in “in rock layers covering a period of about 300 million years.” (pp. 16-17) Regarding the Cambrian explosion, the book observes that “about 530 million years ago, more than half of the major animal groups (called phyla) appear suddenly in the fossil record.” (p. 22) In fact, page 18 of EE is a full-page diagram of the entire geological timescale, with all of the standard geological ages included, and of course no criticism of the timescale whatsoever. To put it charitably, one cannot help but doubt if Metscher spent as much time reading EE as he spent reading Lenny Flank.
Demonstrating that the paranoid style isn’t just limited to American politics, Austrian biologist Brian Metscher has adopted Lenny Flank’s advice on avoiding discussing the science and painting his intellectual opponents as extremists who are conspiring to skirt the law. I suspect that Metscher’s outlandish rhetoric in his attack on EE would make Lenny Flank proud. Let’s just hope that Metscher doesn’t decide to adopt Flank’s militant recommendations for defending evolution.
[Note: For a more comprehensive rebuttal to critics of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]
Alas, poor Richard. Out of a job, and still twitching from Ben Stein's unveiling of his pro-intelligent design tendencies in Expelled last year, he apparently spends his time dogging Ben Stein's heels. Here's how a fawning university president gushed about getting an e-mail from Dawkins telling him to bounce Stein as a commencement speaker later this year. Is the correspondence between you and Professor Richard Dawkins authentic?
Fogel: It is authentic; I admire his work greatly. I have read his work and I have been deeply instructed by it., as I said to him. I was really quite honored to have an e-mail from him directly.
What was the first e-mail from him about?
Fogel: It was to discuss his dismay and concern along the lines we have already discussed.
And also to give me some of his more person background that I had certainly been unaware of. I did not know that he was shown in the movie ‘Expelled’ and that he had been manipulated by the producers and that his words had been used out of context.
What a bunch of malarkey. Of course, Fogel hasn't seen Expelled or he'd realize that the interview with Dawkins was long, exhaustive and in no way taken out of context. The bogus charges against the producers have long been laid to rest (see here, here, and here). The only person still smarting about this is poor Richard.
According to VM paper The Burlington Free Press: Stein called the university’s response to the furor “chicken sh**, and you can quote me on that.”
The irony is that now Ben Stein (who has championed academic freedom so strongly) is experiencing what he documented in Expelled. The best thing to do is to let Fogel know what you think, and to follow Stein's lead and sign the Academic Freedom Petition.
The popular conservative blogger Little Green Footballs has it in for Darwin doubters and recently called me a near-liar merely for alluding in an article to the well-known Darwin-Hitler connection. He regards the very idea of such a connection as a “creationist” canard. “Klinghoffer’s claim,” comments LGF, “is just short of an outright lie.”
Normally, I think it’s best for friends of ID to avoid a defensive posture and generally let critics say what they want without our always feeling obliged to respond. But here, because LGF is otherwise such an interesting and valuable blog, and because he’s given me an occasion to raise important related questions, I am going to answer him after all.
As of this writing, if you glance at LGF’s tag cloud, you’ll see that he has devoted more items tagged to the topic of “Evolution” in the past 60 days (33 tags) than he has to that of “Militant Islam” (32 tags). That’s significant because LGF came to prominence in the first place after the blog’s author — whose name is Charles Johnson — had his political consciousness transformed in the wake of 9/11. Ever since then, he’s been an outspoken and influential critic of Muslim fundamentalism. He never misses an opportunity to chide liberals for weakness and naivety in the face of Islamic fascism.
I like his blog, including the lovely photos he used to post, shots of the Pacific Ocean from the coast around Los Angeles, a geography I love. He's also a bicycle enthusiast, so we have that in common. But as I say, he’s not a fan of Discovery Institute (DI). One doesn’t get the sense that he’s contemplated the scientific issues involved very seriously. Instead, his thinking seems to proceed along the following lines.
Advocating an aggressive and confident stance in the confrontation with radical Islam, LGF appears to view any challenge to secularism as a concession to the great Islamic fundamentalist enemy. Since intelligent design’s critique of Darwinism implicitly poses a challenge to one of secularism’s main support pillars, and since secularism (in his view) is a bulwark in the defense of the West, it follows according to a certain stunted logic that blog-warriors arrayed against the Muslim terror threat must also rally in defense of Darwin and against intelligent design.
Given the way blogging rhetoric tends to go, I guess it was inevitable that Johnson would even try to associate the Discovery Institute itself with terrorism: “When they aren’t busy praising Osama bin Laden or applauding Hamas for murdering Jews, the Wahhabi propaganda site IslamOnline is fully on board with the Discovery Institute and their ‘intelligent design’ hoax.” Sigh. This almost is too silly even to touch upon.
You might as well link DI with Hitlerism because, as Johnson points out, a 1935 set of guidelines for banning books, published in a Nazi library journal, included “Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).” So you see, one Nazi organ was actually critical of Darwin. The Discovery Institute is critical of Darwin. It follows by the rigorous standards of argumentation which LGF applies in these matters that DI is in bed not only with Islamists but with Nazis — or, anyway, Nazi librarians!
But there are good reasons for looking a little more closely at LGF’s stance, chiefly that I know it to be shared by a certain portion of conservatives who are similarly animated by the struggle with radical Islam. A couple of points need to be made — about which, more tomorrow.
Discovery Institute today announced the launch of Academic Freedom Day in honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday on February 12, 2009.
"We’re celebrating Charles Darwin’s birthday by supporting what he supported: academic freedom,” said Robert Crowther, Director of Communications at Discovery Institute. “Like Darwin, we recognize the importance of having an open and honest debate between evolution and intelligent design.”
In his revolutionary On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” This quote is the cornerstone of the Institute’s Academic Freedom Day efforts.
The Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is sponsoring Academic Freedom Day, assisting student groups, clubs, and individual students to organize Academic Freedom Day Events centered on Darwin’s birthday and his fair-minded approach to freedom of inquiry.
These events will give students and youth workers a way to express their support for free speech and the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution. In preparation for Academic Freedom Day, the CSC has launched academicfreedomday.com, a website where students and others will be equipped to support academic freedom and fight censorship in tangible ways, like signing the academic freedom petition on evolution, wearing Academic Freedom Day t-shirts, entering the academic freedom on evolution video and essay contest, screening movies like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed starring Ben Stein and Icons of Evolution, and starting Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) clubs.
“With the release of Expelled last year, we found that many young people want to know what they can do to stand up for academic freedom,” Crowther explained. “Now we’re equipping them to make a difference in science education across the country.”
For more information on Academic Freedom Day, visit www.academicfreedomday.com.
Let your voice be heard: If you think it was wrong for Ben Stein to be pushed out as this year’s commencement speaker at University of Vermont, send a message to University President Daniel Fogel at Daniel.Fogel@uvm.edu or 802-656-3186.
Apologizing for inviting gifted actor and writer Ben Stein to be commencement speaker at the University of Vermont, University President Daniel Fogel has highlighted what he called Stein’s “highly controversial views” about “evolutionary theory, intelligent design, and the role of science in the Holocaust.” Fogel went on to express penance for inviting Stein by claiming that “Commencement should be a time when our community gathers inclusively, not divisively.”
I guess inclusivity is why in 2007 Fogel chose as commencement speaker Democratic congressman John Lewis, who in 1995 compared Republicans to Nazis (last year Lewis compared John McCain and Sarah Palin to segregationist George Wallace and racist church bombers). Or perhaps President Fogel’s concern for inclusivity is better demonstrated by his 2006 commencement speaker, Gustavo Esteva, a far-left activist and advisor to the radical Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico.
In today’s academic double-speak, invitations to far-left revolutionaries and race-baiting Congressmen are apparently “inclusive,” while inviting a speaker who favors free speech on the issue of evolution is beyond the pale.
Of course, it’s being reported that Stein withdrew as the university’s commencement speaker “voluntarily.” “Voluntarily,” that is, after he received a phone call from Dr. Fogel likely making clear he was no longer welcome. Given Fogel’s subsequent disavowal of inviting Stein in the first place, it’s pretty obvious that his phone call was designed to elicit Stein’s withdrawal. Fogel’s spinelessness in the face of the Darwinist thought-police is equaled only by his tone-deafness to his own rhetoric. After disowning Stein, Fogel has continued to insist: “I am firm in my belief—profoundly held—that, as a university, UVM is and must remain a marketplace of ideas.” Fogel's ideal marketplace must have a lot of empty shelves.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Ben Stein “has withdrawn from an engagement to speak at the University of Vermont’s spring commencement after his invitation drew complaints about his views on biological evolution.” The article reports: “According to the Burlington Free Press, the vast majority of protesters were not affiliated with the University of Vermont; only ‘about a half dozen’ objections came from the campus.” So why did protests about Stein start pouring in from outside the University of Vermont (UVM)? The answer seems clear: Stein’s invitation to speak at UVM was first raised to the Darwinist community in a post by PZ Myers titled, “University of Vermont makes an embarrassing decision.” Given the large following of PZ’s blog, this undoubtedly resulted in readers who were “not affiliated with the University of Vermont” sending e-mails protesting Stein’s involvement.
It also seems highly unlikely that Stein's withdrawal was completely voluntary—after all, Dan Fogel, the President of the UVM, has been making it patently clear that supporters of intelligent design deserve second-class treatment at his school. Fogel has been all but parroting PZ’s rhetoric that “it's a real slap in the face for the university to drag in this disgrace who has been a figurehead for a movement that is trying to replace science with superstition,” as Fogel stated:: ”This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view. Ben Stein spoke here last spring to great acclaim," UVM President Dan Fogel said. "It's an issue about the appropriateness of awarding an honorary degree to someone whose views in many ways ignore or affront the fundamental values of scientific inquiry and I greatly regret that I was not attuned to those issues." Like many Darwinists, Fogel is so blind to his own intolerance that he doesn’t see the contradictions in his own argument: He claims this isn’t about academic freedom, but he’s refusing to give an honorary degree to Stein simply because Stein supports intelligent design.
But does Fogel’s view support academic freedom? Fogel’s pretext is the usual one used to discriminate against ID proponents—he claims that Stein’s “views in many ways ignore or affront the fundamental values of scientific inquiry”—but this is just plain old intolerance for those scientists and scholars who think that intelligent design is an idea worth taking seriously. Thus Fogel's argument is self-refuting: the fact that he won’t give honorary degrees to someone simply because they support ID demonstrates the lack of academic freedom for ID proponents in the academy.
Fogel makes the same mistake in this non-credible denial that academic freedom is the issue: “But I have to say, the issue here, and this is important, is not freedom of expression. Ben Stein has come to our campus to speak, and some of the faculty that are colleagues here wrote to me to say that they have no objection to him coming here to speak. It was the legitimate concern among members of the community regarding the implications of granting an honorary degree to someone whose ideas fundamentally ignore the basics of scientific inquiry.” Again, Fogel’s denial that this bears upon academic freedom has a huge credibility gap: Fogel claims this isn’t about freedom of expression, but it seems clear that scholars aren’t free to express support for intelligent design or they are charged with “ignor[ing] the basics of scientific inquiry.”
The response from PZ? “Fogel just shot way up in my esteem.” QED.
[Editor's Note: Douglas Axe is actually a molecular biologist, not a microbiologist. And it’s been pointed out that the quote I used from Axe’s piece that describes the Darwinian story as requiring 400 million years had a context — the supposed evolution of a proto-insect into a wide variety of insect life forms. However, the way I presented it makes it sound like the whole of Darwinian evolution was only supposed to require 400 million years, which wasn’t what Axe was saying.]
As the number of celebrations of Darwin and his theory mount ad nauseam, one evolution researcher suggests that the emperor has no clothes. Douglas Axe, a microbiologist and director of the Biologic Institute, has posted an article pointing out that a bold generation of up and coming young scientists is likely to dethrone Darwin's theory for lack of evidence. Axe's own area of expertise is the origin and evolution of proteins and protein systems, so he examines one recent paper to see what sorts of challenges to Darwinian evolution the next generation will be discussing for years to come. He reviews the paper, penned by Darwinists as a way to show how the theory works, and finds that: The Darwinian story hopes to explain all the remarkable transformations within 400 million years, but the math shows that it actually explains no remarkable transformation in that time. Read the full piece on the BI site.
Original Article
It’s a big year for all things Darwin. This month, two centuries after his birth, we commemorate the man and his accomplishments. And in November, a century and a half after On the Origin of Species was published, we commemorate the beginnings of the theory by which we all know him.
 But how exactly should we think of his theory? Is it to be remembered the way we remember the man—as an important part of the past? Or is it to be remembered as something more than that—as an intellectual seed that grew into something that thrives to this day?
Many, of course, would like to think of Darwin’s theory in these flourishing terms. But the growth of something else makes this view increasingly hard to hold. We refer here to the seldom discussed but steadily expanding body of peer-reviewed scientific work that refuses to square with Darwinism.
Take a look at the recent Genetics paper by Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt. [1] They’ve done the math to calculate how long it would take for Darwin’s mechanism to accomplish a particular kind of functional conversion. And their eagerness to “expose flaws in some of Michael Behe’s arguments” [1] shows that they think they’ve resuscitated Darwinism after Behe pronounced it dead. [2]
Have they?
Maybe the answer depends on how vigorous a theory you were hoping for. Part of what ails Darwinism, in other words, may be that people have such high expectations of it.
If you think Darwinism explains how life acquired the great variety of forms we see around us (the grand vision that Darwin himself had) you’ll probably be disappointed with Durrett and Schmidt’s findings. Darwin’s vision is chock-full of conversions of the most profound kind—all complex life forms originating from one or a few simple forms. Whereas the conversions that Durrett and Schmidt examine are nothing like that.
Theirs are conversions not from one body plan to another, or from one organ or tissue or cell type to another, or even from one protein molecule or gene to another, but rather from one binding site to another. These binding sites are DNA sequences about one hundredth the size of a gene that affect how a nearby gene is switched on and off. Conversion is accomplished by two point mutations occurring in succession:
We think of the A mutation [i.e., the first] as damaging an existing transcription factor binding site and the B mutation as creating a second new binding site at a different location within the regulatory region. … We used the word ‘damage’ above to indicate that the mutation may only reduce the binding efficiency, not destroy the binding site. However, even if it does, the [A] mutation need not be lethal. [1]
Now, there are two important questions to be asked here. The first, which Durrett and Schmidt address, is the question of whether this kind of two-step conversion can evolve in a Darwinian fashion—and if so under what circumstances. The second, which they largely avoid, is the question of relevance to Darwin’s grand vision. That is, even if we knew these binding-site conversions to be feasible, would that give us any reason to think that the more profound conversions are feasible?
As things stand, scientific caution dictates a ‘no’ answer to this second question. The right kind of evidence could conceivably change that answer, but there are good reasons to think no such evidence will appear. The main reason is simply that converting one binding site to another accomplishes no significant structural reorganization, whereas transitions to new life forms would require radical structural reorganization. It’s not that a binding site change can have no effect (indeed, it could be lethal), but rather that it cannot have the required effect—the complete top-down reorganization needed for a transition to a substantially different form of life.
By way of analogy, you might easily cause your favorite software to crash by changing a bit or two in the compiled executable file, but you can’t possibly convert it into something altogether different (and equally useful) by such a simple change, or even by a series of such changes with each version improving on the prior one. To get a substantially new piece of software, you would need to substantially re-engineer the original code knowing that your work wouldn’t pay off until it’s finished. Darwinism just doesn’t have the patience for this.
Furthermore, returning to the first question, it seems that even humble binding-site conversions are typically beyond the reach of Darwinian evolution. Durrett and Schmidt conclude that “this type of change would take >100 million years” in a human line [1], which is problematic in view of the fact that the entire history of primates is thought to be shorter than that [3].
Might the prospects be less bleak for more prolific species with shorter generation times? As it turns out, even there Darwinism appears to be teetering on the brink of collapse. Choosing fruit flies as a favorable organism, Durrett and Schmidt calculate that what is impossible in humans would take only “a few million years” in these insects. To get that figure, however, they had to assume that the damage caused by the first mutation has a negligible effect on fitness. In other words, they had to leap from “the mutation need not be lethal” to (in effect) ‘the mutation causes no significant harm’. That’s a big leap.
What happens if we instead assume a small but significant cost—say, a 5% reduction in fitness? By their math it would then take around 400 million years for the binding-site switch to prove its benefit (if it had one) by becoming fully established in the fruit fly population. [4] By way of comparison, the whole insect class—the most diverse animal group on the planet—is thought to have come into existence well within that time frame. [5]
Do you see the problem? On the one hand we’re supposed to believe that the Darwinian mechanism converted a proto-insect into a stunning array of radically different life forms (termites, beetles, ants, wasps, bees, dragonflies, stick insects, aphids, fleas, flies, mantises, cockroaches, moths, butterflies, etc., each group with its own diversity) well within the space of 400 million years. But on the other hand, when we actually do the math we find that a single insignificant conversion of binding sites would reasonably be expected to consume all of that time.
The contrast could hardly be more stark: The Darwinian story hopes to explain all the remarkable transformations within 400 million years, but the math shows that it actually explains no remarkable transformation in that time.
If that doesn’t call for a serious rethink, it’s hard to imagine what would.
The truth of the matter, much to the chagrin of contemporary biology, is that Darwin’s theory should have been laid to rest some time ago. It certainly deserved all the interest it generated in its day, but at some later point that interest was transformed from the critical kind to the credulous kind. Regrettably, that change took hold before the most conclusive data came to light.
But all is not lost—even wrong ideas can make big contributions to the advancement of science. Few biologists want to see Darwin’s theory filed in that category, but if that is its rightful place, then you can be sure that’s exactly where one bold generation of biologists will file it—someday.
The timing of such things is hard to predict, but we suspect that many members of the bold generation will be in polite attendance at the Darwin celebrations this year.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18791261
[2] Behe M (2007) The Edge of Evolution. Free Press.
[3] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0303/02-mya-nf.html
[4] Calculated by multiplying their figure of 4325 years (pg. 1507, col. 1, line 4) first by 100 (pg. 1507, col. 1, line 14) and then by rho, which is calculated to be about 900 according to their formula (pg. 1507, col. 1, line 17).
[5] http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Tree_of_Life/PhylumArthropoda/Subphylum-Hexapoda/subphylum_insecta_fossils.htm
A survey conducted recently in England reveals that 51 percent of the British public believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of living things, and that intelligent design must be involved. The survey was conducted by the polling firm ComRes for Theos, a theology think tank.
The report of the survey of the British public, published in the Telegraph, noted:
In the survey, 51 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that "evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages"...A further 40 per cent disagreed, while the rest said they did not know…The suggestion that a designer's input is needed reflects the "intelligent design" theory, promoted by American creationists as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.
The irony is that only 10-20% of the British public attend church each week, which is significantly less than half of the portion of the British population who support intelligent design. A similar disparity is seen in the United States, where 80-90 % of the American public believe that design played some role in biology, whereas only 40-50% attend church regularly.
The meaning of this disparity between support for intelligent design and church attendance is obvious: support for intelligent design extends far beyond the segment of the population that is traditionally religious. Weekly church attendance is a minimal criterion to be labeled “fundamentalist” or devout. The inference to design in biology is held by the majority of both the American and British public, and for more than half of people who support design, the reasons are not devout acquiescence to religious dogma. For most supporters of intelligent design in biology, design is inferred empirically.
After generations of Darwinist indoctrination in public schools, more than half of the British public doubts Darwinism as an adequate explanation for life. One can understand the Darwinist panic in the United States and England at even minimal discussion of the weaknesses of Darwin’s theory in public schools. Even with a monopoly on scientific indoctrination, Darwinists are unable to convince even half of the public of the truth of their theory.
Of course, Richard Dawkins was appalled by the results of the survey. The Telegraph article quotes Dawkins:
Prof Dawkins expressed dismay at the findings of the ComRes survey, of 2,060 adults, which he claimed were confirmation that much of the population is "pig-ignorant" about science…"Obviously life, which was Darwin's own subject, is not the result of chance," he said…"Any fool can see that. Natural selection is the very antithesis of chance…"The error is to think that God is the only alternative to chance, and Darwin surely didn't think that because he himself discovered the most important non-theistic alternative to chance, namely natural selection."
I never cease to be astonished by Darwinist arrogance. Dawkins, the Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, replies to the survey by insulting 25 million of his countrymen — “pig-ignorant…any fool can see that. Natural Selection…” Yet Dawkins is wrong about natural selection and chance. Chance is a vague concept, and its vagueness is exploited by Darwinists. A flipped coin obeys all of the laws of physics; its motion is entirely deterministic. Yet where it lands — heads or tails — is the epitome of chance. Chance in flipping a coin is the antithesis of design. If the outcome of the flip is designed, the flip is unfair, and is not governed by chance.
In the same sense, Darwin’s theory is the assertion that living things, like a flipped coin, are subject only to the laws of nature, and are not subject to designing intelligence. If the outcome of the flip or the structure of a living thing is determined by a designer, the occurrence is not chance.
Dawkins is being disingenuous. An outcome can be entirely determined by natural laws — which is what he means by evolution — and yet can be chance. A flipped coin is an example. ‘Chance’ in physical science does not refer to determinism or conformity to natural laws. Chance in physical science refers specifically to events that lack intelligent design. Chance is the lack of teleology. The essence of Darwin’s theory is the denial of teleology. The essence of Darwin's theory is the affirmation of chance — meaning lack of design — as the origin of all biological complexity. The essence of intelligent design theory is the affirmation of teleology. It is teleology that is denied or affirmed in this debate. And despite generations of indoctrination public schools, most of the public recognizes the obvious teleology — the obvious lack of chance — the obvious design — in living things.
The Telegraph article notes:
Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, accused Dawkins of evolving into a "very simple kind of thinker".
Finally, we have an example of evolution that is undeniably true.
 A couple weeks ago, the Seattle Times printed an article titled, “Few lining up to see famous fossil at Pacific Science Center,” noting the poor public attendance of the exhibit showing the bones of the famous hominid fossil “Lucy” here in Seattle. Having studied about Lucy and other fossils supposedly documenting human evolution for many years, I was already planning on attending the exhibit. The whole experience seeing Lucy was enlightening, though probably not in the way its creators intended. In short, I left the exhibit struck by the paucity of actual hard evidence for human evolution from ape-like species, and the amount of subjective, contradictory interpretation that goes into fossil hominid reconstructions.
“Lucy” was discovered by paleoanthropologist Donald Johansen and his team in Ethiopia in 1974. The first half (or more!) of the exhibit was actually quite fascinating as it told the cultural and political history of the Ethiopian people and the Aksumite Empire. This history seemed well-documented by facts and evidence, replete with coins, weapons, religious artifacts, and art, which inform us about this rich and beautiful culture. And when the evidence was thin, the exhibit acknowledged that there are aspects of the Aksumite people where we know very little. This high standard of evidential documentation and appropriate tentativeness disappeared, however, as soon as we entered the section of the exhibit dealing with human evolution.
Lucy in the Dirt With Rock Rubble
The first thing my friends and I noticed when seeing Lucy’s bones was the incompleteness of her skeleton. Only 40% was found, and a significant percentage of the known bones are rib fragments. Very little useful material from Lucy’s skull was recovered. (This seems to be common: many of the replica skulls of early hominids at the exhibit were clearly based upon extremely fragmentary pieces.) And yet, according to the exhibit, Lucy still represents the most complete pre-Homo known hominid skeleton to date.
Not only was I underwhelmed by the incompleteness of Lucy’s skeleton, but I was also struck by admissions at the exhibit that, in my mind, cast serious doubt on whether we know for certain that Lucy’s bones are from a single individual from a single species.
In a video playing at the exhibit, Johansen admitted that when he found Lucy, he “looked up the slope and there were other bones sticking out.” So this was not a case where the bones were found together forming a contiguous skeleton, but rather they were scattered across a hillside. At one point, Johansen even says that if there had been only one more rainstorm, Lucy’s bones might have been washed away, never to be seen again. This does not inspire confidence in the integrity of Lucy’s skeleton or its proper reconstruction: If the next rainstorm could wash Lucy away completely, what happened during the prior rainstorms to mix-up “Lucy” with who-knows-what? How do we know that “Lucy” doesn’t represent bones from multiple individuals or even multiple species?
The classic rejoinder to these questions claims that since none of Lucy’s bones are duplicated, that this shows she’s a single individual. But given the fragmentary nature of many of the bones and the highly incomplete nature of the skeleton, this argument seems fragile. Perhaps many of the bones are from one individual. But can we be sure that all are from one individual? Take Lucy's femur or the pelvis, the most-prized parts of her skeleton. It's a very difficult case to conclusively make that all "Lucy's" bones are clearly from one individual of one species, and it requires some heavy assumptions.
Regardless, seeing the broken scraps of old Lucy laid out under the protective glass, with full skeletal and full-flesh reconstructions of Lucy abounding throughout the exhibit, I could not help but recall the words of the famed physical anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton, who in 1931 wisely counseled that “alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little, if any, scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public." (Up From The Ape, pg. 329.)
Forcing Old Bones Into New Interpretations
As noted, the most interesting part of Lucy’s skeleton is her half-pelvis and half-femur that were discovered, which are said to indicate that she walked upright. Thus, despite these nagging questions about the integrity of Lucy’s skeleton, the exhibit boldly states that “Lucy’s species walked bipedally, in much the same way as we do,” at one point saying Lucy’s skeleton “approximate[s] a chimpanzee-like head perched atop a human-like body.” Of course, this is a gross oversimplification of the data and a poor reflection of the sharply contradicting opinions of many learned paleoanthropologists.
Lucy did have a small, chimp-like head, but as Mark Collard and Leslie Aiello observe in Nature, much of the rest of the body of Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, was also “quite ape-like” with respect to its “relatively long and curved fingers, relatively long arms, and funnel-shaped chest.” (Nature, Vol 404:339-340, 3-23-00.)
Collard and Aiello’s article also reports that we now have “good evidence” that A. afarensis (including Lucy) “‘knuckle-walked’, as chimps and gorillas do today.” Due to their evolutionary preconception that Lucy was a bipedal precursor to our genus Homo, they call this plain evidence that Lucy knuckled-walked “counterintuitive.” They suggest the possibility that “the locomotor repertoire of A. afarensis included forms of bipedalism, climbing and knuckle-walking.” This is a tenuous proposal, however, as knuckle-walking is obviously very different from bipedal locomotion. Collard and Aiello suggest avoiding the "counterintuitive" evidence that Lucy climbed and knuckle-walked by discarding it as unused “primitive retentions” from her ancestors.
By ignoring the skeletal evidence that Lucy didn't walk "bipedally, in much the same way as we do," I'm sure these Darwinists are pleased that Lucy can retain her prized position as our alleged bipedal ape-like ancestor. But science writer Jeremy Cherfas explains why this evolutionary holdover argument is weak: Everything about her skeleton, from fingertips to toes, suggests that Lucy and her sisters retain several traits that would be very suitable for climbing in trees. Some of those same treeclimbing adaptations can still be detected, albeit much reduced, in much later hominids such as the 2-million-year old specimens of Homo habilis from the Olduvai gorge. It could be argued that Lucy’s arboreal adaptations are just a hangover from her treedwelling past, but animals do not often retain traits that they do not use, and to find those same features in specimens 2 million years later makes it most unlikely that they are remnants.
(Jeremy Cherfas, “Trees have made man upright,” New Scientist, Vol. 97:172 (1983).) The only reason to discard Lucy’s clear anatomical evidence that she climbed trees and knuckle-walked is the Darwinist preference for her to be a fully-bipedal ape that was on her way toward evolving into a human being.
No Love for Lucy’s Status as a Transitional Hominid
Let’s assume for the moment that Lucy was a fully bipedal ape: should that necessarily qualify her as a human ancestor? Given that the much earlier fossil record from the Miocene yields bipedal apes that supposedly evolved upright-walking completely independently from the line that supposedly led to humans, it would seem that the answer is clearly no.
Moreover, even if Lucy did walk upright, there is good evidence that her mode of locomotion was in significant ways very different from humans. One book for sale at the Lucy exhibit — Origins Reconsidered, by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin — argues that A. afarensis and other australopithecines "almost certainly were not adapted to a striding gait and running, as humans are." (pg. 195) It doesn't seem very advantageous, and therefore likely, to use bipedality as your primary mode of locomotion if you can't use it to quickly run away from predators. Lewin and Leakey then quote Leslie Aiello stating, "No doubt about it[,] Australopithecines are like apes, and the Homo group are like humans. Something major occurred when Homo evolved, and it wasn't just in the brain." (pg. 194, 196) Their quotation of Peter Schmid’s surprise at the non-human qualities of Lucy’s skeleton is striking: ”We were sent a cast of the Lucy skeleton, and I was asked to assemble it for display,” remembers Peter Schmid, a paleontologist at the Anthropological Institute in Zurich. … ”When I started to put [Lucy’s] skeleton together, I expected it to look human,” Schmid continues. “Everyone had talked about Lucy as being very modern, very human, so I was surprised by what I saw.” … “What you see in Australopithecus is not what you’d want in an efficient bipedal running animal,” says Peter. “The shoulders were high, and, combined with the funnel-shaped chest, would have made arm swinging very improbable in the human sense. It wouldn’t have been able to lift its thorax for the kind of deep breathing that we do when we run. The abdomen was potbellied, and there was no waste, so that would have restricted the flexibility that’s essential to human running.”
(Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human, pgs. 193-194 (Anchor, 1993).) One article in the Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution from 2000 likewise emphasizes the anatomical differences between members of the genus Australopithecus and humans, stating, “We, like many others, interpret the anatomical evidence to show that early H. sapiens was significantly and dramatically different from earlier and penecontemporary australopithecines in virtually every element of its skeleton and every remnant of its behavior.” ( Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol. 17:2-22.) The article states that our genus Homo thus arose via an abrupt "genetic revolution," where "no australopithecine species is obviously transitional."
Lucy’s Still Got Explaining to Do
Given that some leading experts would probably sharply disagree with some of the claims about Lucy at the Pacific Science Center’s exhibit, it seems appropriate to quote an article in the Journal of Human Evolution which concluded that the lack of fossil data about Lucy necessarily prevents paleoanthropologists from making firm conclusions about her mode of locomotion and bipedal stature: The conclusion is that Lucy's erect posture is unlike that seen in modern humans and is still a mystery. Not enough fossil data are yet available to make a final judgement on the nature of her erect posture. … Prevailing views of Lucy’s posture are almost impossible to reconcile. When one looks at the reconstruction proposed by Lovejoy and by Weaver, one gets the impression that her fleshed reconstruction would be a perfectly modern biped. But when one looks at the preliminary reconstruction recently shown at the Smithsonian, one gets the impression of a chimpanzee awkwardly attempting to stand on its hindlimbs and about to fall on its front limbs. … To resolve such differences, more anatomical (fossil) evidence is needed. The available data at present are open to widely different interpretations. Until more fossils are recovered and until we have a better interpretation of human and non-human primate positional behavior, there is likely to be a continuing debate on the subject of Lucy’s posture and locomotion. Lucy’s erect posture still is a mystery.
(M. Maurice Abitbol, “Lateral view of Australopithecus afarensis: primitive aspects of bipedal positional behavior in the earliest hominids,” Journal of Human Evolution, Vol. 28:211-229 (1995) (internal citations removed).) A 1981 commentary in Science captured this precise problem with the insufficiency of the data regarding hominid fossils: "The field of paleoanthropology naturally excites interest because of our own interest in origins. And, because conclusions of emotional significance to many must be drawn from extremely paltry evidence, it is often difficult to separate the personal from the scientific disputes raging in the field." This quote seems highly applicable to Lucy's exhibit at the Pacific Science Center, as we see bold claims based upon very sparse evidence from a discipline where paleoanthropologists are discarding evidence which doesn’t fit their vision of human evolution.
Perhaps Abitbol correctly describes how scientists should be promoting Lucy to the public: “The available data at present are open to widely different interpretations. … Lucy’s erect posture still is a mystery.” In fact, I think that if Lucy’s exhibit discussed the controversy over Lucy’s status as a bipedal hominid and a transitional form, she might be attracting far more attendees. It seems that the more ardently the Darwinists promote evolution to the public, the more the public is losing interest.
Conclusion: Go See Lucy Anyway
No doubt many an eager Darwinist has attended the Lucy exhibit hoping to find confirmation of their views. Instead, what they found was a small coffin-like case holding scraps ambiguous bones.
Whether you’re a true believer in Lucy's status as a transitional form, or an apostate who suspects that her story and reconstruction could be largely myth, the Lucy exhibit at the Pacific Science Center is worth visiting (after all, even atheists visit holy relics due to their literary and cultural significance). So go see the exhibit, keep an open mind, and come to your own conclusions. Just be forewarned that regardless of what you believe, you’re likely to walk away from Lucy feeling underwhelmed at the incompleteness of the fossil and the lack of clarity in the case for human evolution.
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