In a recent blog post titled "Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down," University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne firmly and publicly rejects the attempts by Darwin-lobbying organizations like the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to convince the American public that Darwinism and Christian faith are compatible. In case these organizations really want to know my opinion, I'm on Jerry's side.

Except that I'm only mostly on his side. You see Jerry is spot on when he writes

But any injection of teleology into evolutionary biology violates precisely the great advance of Darwin’s theory: to explain the appearance of design by a purely materialistic process — no deity required. In a letter to his mentor Charles Lyell, Darwin explicitly decried the idea of divine intervention in evolution:

I entirely reject, as in my judgment quite unnecessary, any subsequent addition ‘of new powers and attributes and forces,’ or of any ‘principle of improvement’, except in so far as every character which is naturally selected or preserved is in some way an advantage or improvement, otherwise it would not have been selected. If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish. . . I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

But his other over-generalizations about Science and Religion being incompatible are, of course, extremely over-simplified. If only Science (capital S) and Religion (capital R) actually existed as such abstractions, Jerry would have the beginnings of an argument.

In all this, I am left ambivalent. On one hand, Coyne seems to refuse to mislead the public simply to advance a cause that he cares about. And this is a rather virtuous thing. On the other hand, one gets the sense Coyne doesn't want to mislead the public not so much because he loves science but because he wants to see materialism thrive in America. And this keeps people like me from getting too excited about the virtuous stance of Dr. Coyne.

Posted by Logan Gage at 8:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Note: This is Part 4 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

So evolutionary theory needs better evidence than the fossil record can provide. Coyne correctly notes: “When he wrote The Origin, Darwin considered embryology his strongest evidence for evolution.” Darwin had written that the evidence seemed to show that “the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar,” a pattern that “reveals community of descent.” Indeed, Darwin thought that early embryos “show us, more or less completely, the condition of the progenitor of the whole group in its adult state.”¹⁵

But Darwin was not an embryologist. In The Origin of Species he supported his contention by citing a passage by German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer:

“The embryos of mammals, birds, lizards and snakes, and probably chelonia [turtles] are in their earliest states exceedingly like one another.... In my possession are two little embryos in spirit, whose names I have omitted to attach, and at present I am quite unable to say to what class they belong. They may be lizards or small birds, or very young mammals, so complete is the similarity in the mode of formation of the head and trunk in these animals.”¹⁶

Ironically, von Baer was a strong critic of Darwin’s theory, rejecting the idea that all vertebrates share a common ancestor. According to historian of science Timothy Lenoir, von Baer feared that Darwin and his followers had “already accepted the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis as true before they set to the task of observing embryos.” The myth that von Baer’s work supported Darwin’s theory was due primarily to another German biologist, Ernst Haeckel.”¹⁸

Haeckel maintained not only that all vertebrate embryos evolved from a common ancestor, but also that in their development (“ontogeny”) they replay (“recapitulate”) their evolutionary history (“phylogeny”). He called this The Biogenetic Law: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

In Why Evolution Is True, Coyne writes that “the ‘recapitulation’ of an evolutionary sequence is seen in the developmental sequence” of various organs. “Each vertebrate undergoes development in a series of stages, and the sequence of those stages happens to follow the evolutionary sequence of its ancestors.” The probable reason for this is that “as one species evolves into another, the descendant inherits the developmental program of its ancestor.” So the descendant tacks changes “onto what is already a robust and basic developmental plan. It is best for things that evolved later to be programmed to develop later in the embryo. This ‘adding new stuff onto old’ principle also explains why the sequence of developmental stages mirrors the evolutionary sequence of organisms. As one group evolves from another, it often adds its developmental program on top of the old one.” Thus “all vertebrates begin development looking like embryonic fish because we all descended from a fishlike ancestor.”¹⁹

Nevertheless, Coyne writes, Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law “wasn’t strictly true,” because “embryonic stages don’t look like the adult forms of their ancestors,” as Haeckel (and Darwin) believed, “but like the embryonic forms of their ancestors.” But this reformulation of The Biogenetic Law doesn’t solve the problem. First, fossil embryos are extremely rare,²⁰ so the reformulated law has to rely on embryos of modern organisms that are assumed to resemble ancestral forms. The result is a circular argument: According to Darwin’s theory, fish are our ancestors; human embryos (allegedly) look like fish embryos; therefore, human embryos look like the embryos of our ancestors. Theory first, observation later—just as von Baer had objected.

Second, the idea that later evolutionary stages can simply be tacked onto development is biologically unrealistic. A human is not just a fish embryo with some added features. As British embryologist Walter Garstang pointed out in 1922, “a house is not a cottage with an extra story on the top. A house represents a higher grade in the evolution of a residence, but the whole building is altered—foundations, timbers, and roof—even if the bricks are the same.”²¹

Third, and most important, vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their earliest stages. In the 1860s, Haeckel made some drawings to show that vertebrate embryos look almost identical in their first stage—but his drawings were faked. Not only had he distorted the embryos by making them appear more similar than they really are, but he had also omitted earlier stages in which the embryos are strikingly different from each other. A human embryo in its earliest stages looks nothing like a fish embryo.

Only after vertebrate embryos have progressed halfway through their development do they reach the stage that Darwin and Haeckel treated as the first. Developmental biologists call this different-similar-different pattern the “developmental hourglass.” Vertebrate embryos do not resemble each other in their earliest stages, but they converge somewhat in appearance midway through development before diverging again. If ontogeny were a recapitulation of phylogeny, such a pattern would be more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry. Modern Darwinists attempt to salvage their theory by assuming that the common ancestry of vertebrates is obscured because early development can evolve easily, but there is no justification for this assumption other than the theory itself.²²

Although Haeckel’s drawings were exposed as fakes by his own contemporaries, biology textbooks used them throughout the twentieth century to convince students that humans share a common ancestor with fish. Then, in 1997, a scientific journal published an article comparing photos of vertebrate embryos to Haeckel’s drawings, which the lead author described as “one of the most famous fakes in biology.” In 2000, Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called Haeckel’s drawings “fraudulent” and wrote that biologists should “be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks.”²³

But Coyne is not ashamed. He defends Haeckel’s drawings “Haeckel was accused, largely unjustly,” Coyne writes, “of fudging some drawings of early embryos to make them look more similar than they really are. Yet we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water.”²⁴ The “baby” is Darwin’s theory, which Coyne stubbornly defends regardless of the evidence.

Next up, vestigal organs and bad design.

Notes
¹⁵ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 79.
Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter XIV, pp. 386-396. Available online (2009) here.
¹⁶ Darwin, The Origin of Species, Chapter XIV, pp. 387-388. Available online (2009) here.
¹⁷ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 73.
Karl Ernst von Baer, “On the Development of Animals, with Observations and Reflections: The Fifth Scholium,” translated by Thomas Henry Huxley, pp. 186-237 in Arthur Henfrey & Thomas H. Huxley (editors), Scientific Memoirs: Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and from Foreign Journals: Natural History (London, 1853; reprinted 1966 by Johnson Reprint Corporation, New York). The passage quoted by Darwin is on p. 210.
Jane M. Oppenheimer, “An Embryological Enigma in the Origin of Species,” pp. 221-255 in Jane M. Oppenheimer, Essays in the History of Embryology and Biology (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1967).
¹⁸ Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 258.
Frederick B. Churchill, “The Rise of Classical Descriptive Embryology,” pp. 1-29 in Scott F. Gilbert (editor), A Conceptual History of Modern Embryology (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 19-20.
¹⁹ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 77-79.
²⁰ Simon Conway Morris, “Fossil Embryos,” pp. 703-711 in Claudio D. Stern (editor), Gastrulation: From Cells to Embryos (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004).
²¹ Walter Garstang, “The theory of recapitulation: a critical restatement of the biogenetic law,” Journal of the Linnean Society (Zoology), 35 (1922): 81-101.
²² See Chapter Five and accompanying references in Wells, Icons of Evolution.
See Chapter Three and accompanying references in Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.
²³ Michael K. Richardson, J. Hanken, M. L. Gooneratne, C. Pieau, A. Raynaud, L. Selwood & G. M. Wright, “There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development,” Anatomy & Embryology 196 (1997): 91-106.
Michael K. Richardson, quoted in Elizabeth Pennisi, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,” Science 277 (1997): 1435.
Stephen Jay Gould, “Abscheulich! Atrocious!” Natural History (March, 2000), pp. 42-49.
“Hoax of Dodos” (2007). Available online (2009) here.
²⁴ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 78.

Posted by Jonathan Wells at 5:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Having one's position repeatedly mischaracterized by those who refuse to be corrected is an annoyingly common problem for intelligent design. While some people are just sincerely mistaken in thinking that it's creationism, some — like Ken Miller — know better, but as UK columnist Melanie Phillips points out in "Creating an insult to intelligence," it's beneficial to damage people's reputations by confusing the two:

Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science. Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly scientists, holds that the complexity of science suggests that there must have been a governing intelligence behind the origin of matter, which could not have developed spontaneously from nothing.

The confusion arises partly out of ignorance, with people lazily confusing belief in a Creator with Creationism. But belief in a Creator is common to all people of monotheistic faith – with many scientists amongst them -- the vast majority of whom would regard Creationism as totally ludicrous. In coming to the conclusion that a governing intelligence must have been responsible for the ultimate origin of matter, Intelligent Design proponents are essentially saying there must have been a creator. The difference between them and people of religious faith is that ID proponents do not necessarily believe in a personalised Creator, or God.

As a result, both Creationists and many others of religious faith disdain Intelligent Design, just as ID proponents think Creationism is totally off the wall. Yet the two continue to be conflated. And ignorance is only partly responsible for the confusion, since militant evangelical atheists deliberately conflate Intelligent Design with Creationism in order to smear and discredit ID and its adherents. (emphasis mine)

Posted by Anika Smith at 4:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We often hear from Darwinians that the biological world is replete with examples of shoddy engineering, or, as they prefer to put it, bad design. One such case of really poor construction is the inverted retina of the vertebrate eye. As we all know, the retina of our eyes is configured all wrong because the cells that gather photons, the rod photoreceptors, are behind two other tissue layers. Light first strikes the ganglion cells and then passes by or through the bipolar cells before reaching the rod photoreceptors. Surely, a child could have arranged the system better — so they tell us.

The problem with this story of supposed unintelligent design is that it is long on anthropomorphisms and short on evidence. Consider nocturnal mammals. Night vision for, say, a mouse is no small feat. Light intensities during night can be a million times less than those of the day, so the rod cells must be optimized — yes, optimized — to capture even the few stray photons that strike them. Given the backwards organization of the mouse’s retina, how is this scavenging of light accomplished? Part of the solution is that the ganglion and bipolar cell layers are thinner in mammals that are nocturnal. But other optimizations must also occur. Enter the cell nucleus and “junk” DNA.

Only around 1.5 percent of mammalian DNA encodes proteins. Since it has become lore to equate protein-coding regions of the genome with “genes” and “information,” the remaining approximately 98.5 percent of DNA has been dismissed as junk. Yet, for what is purported to be mere genetic gibberish, it is strikingly ordered along the length of the chromosome. Like the barcodes on consumer items that we are all familiar with, each chromosome has a particular banding pattern. This pattern reflects how different types of DNA sequences are linearly distributed. The “core” of a mammalian chromosome, the centromere, and the genomic segments that frame it largely consist of long tracks of species-specific repetitive elements — these areas give rise to “C-bands” after a chemical stain has been applied. Then, alternating along the chromosome arms are two other kinds of bands that appear after different staining procedures. One called “R-bands” is rich in protein-coding genes and a particular class of retrotransposon called SINEs (for Short Interspersed Nuclear Elements). SINE sequence families are restricted to certain taxonomic groups. The other is termed “G-bands” and it has a high concentration of another class of retrotransposon called LINEs (for Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements), that can also be used to distinguish between species. Finally, the ends of the chromosome, telomeres, are comprised of a completely different set of repetitive DNA sequences.

In general, C-bands and G-bands are complexed with proteins and RNAs to give a more compact organization called heterochromatin, whereas R-bands have a more open conformation referred to as euchromatin.

Why bother with such details? Well, each of these chromosome bands has a preferred location in the cell nucleus. Open any good textbook on mammalian anatomy and you will note that cell types can often be distinguished by the shape and size of the nucleus, as well as the positions of euchromatin and heterochromatin in that organelle. Nevertheless, most cell nuclei follow a general rule where euchromatin is located in the interior, in various compartments that are dense with transcription factories, RNA processing machinery, and many other components. Heterochromatin, on the other hand, is found mainly around the periphery of the nucleus. A striking exception to this principle is found in the nuclei of rod cells in nocturnal mammals.

Reporting in the journal Cell, Irina Solovei and coworkers have just discovered that, in contrast to the nucleus organization seen in ganglion and bipolar cells of the retina, a remarkable inversion of chromosome band localities occurs in the rod photoreceptors of mammals with night vision (Solovei I, Kreysing M, Lanctôt C, Kösem S, Peichl L, Cremer T, Guck J, Joffe B. 2009. "Nuclear Architecture of Rod Photoreceptor Cells Adapts to Vision in Mammalian Evolution." Cell 137(2): 356-368). First, the C-bands of all the chromosomes including the centromere coalesce in the center of the nucleus to produce a dense chromocenter. Keep in mind that the DNA backbone of this chromocenter in different mammals is repetitive and highly species-specific. Second, a shell of LINE-rich G-band sequences surrounds the C-bands. Finally, the R-bands including all examined protein-coding genes are placed next to the nuclear envelope. The nucleus of this cell type is also smaller so as to make the pattern more compact. This ordered movement of billions of basepairs according to their “barcode status” begins in the rod photoreceptor cells at birth, at least in the mouse, and continues for weeks and months.

Why the elaborate repositioning of so much “junk” DNA in the rod cells of nocturnal mammals? The answer is optics. A central cluster of chromocenters surrounded by a layer of LINE-dense heterochromatin enables the nucleus to be a converging lens for photons, so that the latter can pass without hindrance to the rod outer segments that sense light. In other words, the genome regions with the highest refractive index — undoubtedly enhanced by the proteins bound to the repetitive DNA — are concentrated in the interior, followed by the sequences with the next highest level of refractivity, to prevent against the scattering of light. The nuclear genome is thus transformed into an optical device that is designed to assist in the capturing of photons. This chromatin-based convex (focusing) lens is so well constructed that it still works when lattices of rod cells are made to be disordered. Normal cell nuclei actually scatter light.

So the next time someone tells you that it “strains credulity” to think that more than a few pieces of “junk DNA” could be functional in the cell — that the data only point to the lack of design and suboptimality — remind them of the rod cell nuclei of the humble mouse.

Posted by Richard Sternberg at 8:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This week Inside Catholic republished an absolutely brilliant essay by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Benjamin Wiker on the problem of evil.

This essay is one of the most thoughtful replies to the problem of evil—that the existence of evil evidences against God's existence—I've seen packed into a short essay. It is a must read.

Wiker describes how, in a feat of fuzzy thinking, evolution typically plays into dialogue on the problem of evil. Evolutionary answers to the problem, he argues, are more likely to do away with evil than explain it.

And among the many important questions Wiker poses is whether we really want all evil purged from the earth. Take a look to see his surprising answer.

Posted by Logan Gage at 2:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the Darwinist repertoire, a standard response to evidence of design in the genome is to point to the existence of “junk DNA.” What is it doing there, if purposeful design really is detectable in the history of life’s development? Of course this assumes that the “junk” really is junk. That assumption has been cast increasingly into doubt. New research just out in the journal Nature Genetics finds evidence that genetic elements previously thought of as rubbish are anything but that. The research describes tiny strands of RNA, previously thought to be junk, that now turn out to play a role in gene expression. Another finding by Dr. Geoff Faulkner shows that “retrotransposons,” a further variety of “junk” as the dogma previously taught, play a similar role.

Nearly half of the mammalian genome (less than 45 percent) is comprised of DNA sequences thought for decades to be but evolutionary flotsam and jetsam or junk: retrotransposons. Found along every one of our chromosomes, retrotransposons mobilize within our cells via RNA copies, copies that are then converted into DNA and afterward pasted into different DNA sites. To be sure, the vast majority of these “jumping gene” duplicates, well over a million elements, appear to be little more than pseudogenes, defective images of master templates that merely drift by mutations into a phylogenetic oblivion.

Retrotransposons appear to fit the neo-Darwinian story perfectly. First, the master templates of these elements seem to serve no other purpose than to promote their own replication at the expense of the cell, and so, by the criteria of Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene, retrotransposons are selfish genes par excellence. Second, the DNA progeny of such “endogenous viruses” are without a doubt marred in various ways, as just mentioned. Relative to the original, in other words, they are junk. Third, a retrotransposon inserted into a chromosome can disrupt normal gene functions, and mutations due to these sequences have long been detected. Fourth, only a comparative few retrotransposons are conserved across different groups of mammals, with most of the DNA families being restricted to certain families, genera, or even species. Humans and mice as well as mice and rats can readily be separated solely on the basis of their retrotransposon profiles. So the bulk of these sequences do not merit being retained by natural selection.

With such facts at hand, it is no wonder that retrotransposons and other “non-coding” DNAs are part of Exhibit A on the side of the neo-Darwinian prosecution, over and against the intelligent design defense.

But there have always been big holes in this tale of selfish, junk DNA. We have known since the late 1980s that retrotransposons are distributed non-randomly along chromosomes. Even though humans and mice and rats have different families of these sequences — ultimately a reflection, according to neo-Darwinists, of randomness — the linear pattern of placement of the elements is uncannily similar. Likewise, data accumulated throughout the ’80s and ’90s which indicated that normal gene regulation can be controlled by pieces of such mobile DNA. Evidence for other diverse regulatory roles of retrotransposons has also continued to mount till the present.

But it wasn’t until recently that we learned just how extensive is the informational impact of retrotransposons on the mammalian genome. The recent study by Geoffrey Faulkner et al. ("The regulated retrotransposon transcriptome of mammalian cells,") is only the latest. Using the RNA expression profiles of the human and mouse genomes as a backdrop, a number of key facts were uncovered. For one thing, tens to hundreds of thousands of transcription start sites — the beginning points of RNA transcripts — occur in retrotransposons. According to the data they gathered, anywhere from 6 to 30 percent of RNAs in the two species arise from repetitive (aka “junk”) DNA. For another, elements that reside in or near protein-coding genes provide alternative regions to initiate transcription, many previously unknown, and they allow for the production of various non-translated RNAs. The “start RNA production” signals conveyed by retrotransposons such as the mouse-specific VL30 retrovirus-like sequences are also markedly tissue-specific. Altogether, the results point to retrotransposons being “intrinsic components of the transcription forest regions of the genome” (Faulkner et al., 2009).

This is all rather awkward for the Darwinian side, obviously. Another standard weapon in their armory is to charge intelligent-design theorists with making a “God of the gaps” argument, where gaps in scientific knowledge are assumed to be evidence of design. The reality is that the case for Darwinian evolution is much more reasonably shown to depend on gaps — in our knowledge of what “junk DNA” does, for one thing. Hence a sobriquet for the view that evolutionists are saddled with defending: “Darwin of the gaps.”

Posted by Richard Sternberg at 8:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Note: This is Part 3 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Coyne goes on to discuss several “transitional” forms. “One of our best examples of an evolutionary transition,” he writes, is the fossil record of whales, “since we have a chronologically ordered series of fossils, perhaps a lineage of ancestors and descendants, showing their movement from land to water.”⁹

“The sequence begins,” Coyne writes, “with the recently discovered fossil of a close relative of whales, a raccoon-sized animal called Indohyus. Living 48 million years ago, Indohyus was… probably very close to what the whale ancestor looked like.” In the next paragraph, Coyne writes, “Indohyus was not the ancestor of whales, but was almost certainly its cousin. But if we go back 4 million more years, to 52 million years ago, we see what might well be that ancestor. It is a fossil skull from a wolf-sized creature called Pakicetus, which is bit more whalelike than Indohyus.” On the page separating these two paragraphs is a figure captioned “Transitional forms in the evolution of modern whales,” which shows Indohyus as the first in the series and Pakicetus as the second.¹⁰

But Pakicetus—as Coyne just told us—is 4 million years older than Indohyus. To a Darwinist, this doesn’t matter: Pakicetus is “more whalelike” than Indohyus, so it must fall between Indohyus and modern whales, regardless of the fossil evidence.

(Coyne performs the same trick with fossils that are supposedly ancestral to modern birds. The textbook icon Archaeopteryx, with feathered wings like a modern bird but teeth and a tail like a reptile, is dated at 145 million years. But what Coyne calls the “nonflying feathered dinosaur fossils”—which should have come before Archaeopteryx—are tens of millions of years younger. Like Darwinists Kevin Padian and Luis Chiappe eleven years earlier, Coyne simply rearranges the evidence to fit Darwinian theory.)¹¹

So much for Coyne’s prediction that “later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones.” And so much for his argument that “if evolution were not true, fossils would not occur in an order that makes evolutionary sense.” Ignoring the facts he himself has just presented, Coyne brazenly concludes: “When we find transitional forms, they occur in the fossil record precisely where they should.” If Coyne’s book were turned into a movie, this scene might feature Chico Marx saying, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”¹²

There is another problem with the whale series (and every other series of fossils) that Coyne fails to address: No species in the series could possibly be the ancestor of any other, because all of them possess characteristics they would first have to lose before evolving into a subsequent form. This is why the scientific literature typically shows each species branching off a supposed lineage.

In the figure below, all the lines are hypothetical. The diagram on the left is a representation of evolutionary theory: Species A is ancestral to B, which is ancestral to C, which is ancestral to D, which is ancestral to E. But the diagram on the right is a better representation of the evidence: Species A, B, C and D are not in the actual lineage leading to E, which remains unknown.

It turns out that no series of fossils can provide evidence for Darwinian descent with modification. Even in the case of living species, buried remains cannot generally be used to establish ancestor-descendant relationships. Imagine finding two human skeletons in the same grave, one about thirty years older than the other. Was the older individual the parent of the younger? Without written genealogical records and identifying marks (or in some cases DNA), it is impossible to answer the question. And in this case we would be dealing with two skeletons from the same species that are only a generation apart and from the same location. With fossils from different species that are now extinct, and widely separated in time and space, there is no way to establish that one is the ancestor of another—no matter how many transitional fossils we find.

In 1978, Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History wrote: “The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.”¹³ Nature science writer Henry Gee wrote in 1999 that “no fossil is buried with its birth certificate.” When we call new fossil discoveries “missing links,” it is “as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.” Gee concluded: “To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”¹⁴

Next time, I'll address Coyne's mistakes on embryos.

Notes
⁹ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 48.
¹⁰ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 49-51.
¹¹ Kevin Padian & Luis M. Chiappe, “The origin and early evolution of birds,” Biological Reviews 73 (1998): 1-42. Available online (2009) here.
Wells, Icons of Evolution, pp. 119-122.
¹² Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 25, 53.
Chico Marx in Duck Soup (Paramount Pictures, 1933). This and other Marx Brothers quotations are available online (2009) here.
¹³ Gareth Nelson, “Presentation to the American Museum of Natural History (1969),” in David M. Williams & Malte C. Ebach, “The reform of palaeontology and the rise of biogeography—25 years after 'ontogeny, phylogeny, palaeontology and the biogenetic law' (Nelson, 1978),” Journal of Biogeography 31 (2004): 685-712.
¹⁴ Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time. New York: Free Press, 1999, pp. 5, 32, 113-117.
Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006). More information available online (2009) here.

Posted by Jonathan Wells at 3:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Gary Rhoades at AAUP responded to my original post. My own response is below the fold.

Dear Mr. Crowther,

Apparently patience is not one of your stronger virtues, at least not in this case. If you were really interested in my response, or in the position of the AAUP, you might have had the courtesy to give me a reasonable amount of time to respond to your letter below (which came to me at 3:33p.m. EST today, whereas your posting below was 1:24 p.m today, though the time zone is not posted).

Upon returning to my emails late this afternoon, after addressing some other pressing matters
earlier in the afternoon, I come to find that you have already posted the following on your organization’s website:

The tone of your piece is, I note, somewhat different than your email to me below. It assumes and prejudges my response and the position of the AAUP.

In fact, you wrote:

“I e-mailed Mr. Rhoades to see what he had to say (as you'll see below, I think I already know what he'll say).”

In this case, Mr. Crowther, you need to reexamine your certainties about what others think and/or will say.

So let me respond, and ask that in the interests of fair play, you publish my response, in its entirety, on your web site.

It seems that I must disappoint you, Mr. Crowther.

I am happy to correct your inaccurate view of the AAUP’s position on external speakers.
The position of the AAUP on external speakers is quite clear, and is without reference to the particular positions or views of the speakers.

In fact, as our statement makes explicit:

In its 2005 statement, the Association laid out its basic policy on invited speakers. It articulated these fundamental principles:

• Many colleges and universities permit student and faculty groups to issue their own invitations to outside speakers. That practice is an important part of academic freedom and institutions should respect it.
  
• When an authorized faculty or student group invites an outside speaker, the institution is not thereby expressing its approval or disapproval of the speaker or what the speaker has said, or will say.
  
• Colleges are free to announce that they do not officially endorse a speaker or the views a speaker expresses, but they should not cancel a speech because people on campus or in the community either disagree with its content or disapprove of the speaker.
  
• Institutions should ensure that all legitimately invited speakers can express their views and that open discussion can take place.
  
• Only “in the most extraordinary circumstances” may invitations be canceled out of concern for safety.”

In short, Mr. Crowther, contrary to what you suggest, we defend the right of all legitimately invited speakers to be heard. And yes, that would include Ben Stein. If you read our statement and press release carefully, you will see that we did not target any institutions for rescinding invitations to speakers. Nor do we provide a “list,” as you seem to suggest, of speakers who we defend, intimating that if one is not on the list we do not support their right to be heard. I trust that this clarifies our position.

Gary Rhoades
General Secretary, AAUP

As I wrote back to Rhoades, the AAUP has hardly been supportive of the rights and freedoms of scientists and scholars in academia who support intelligent design, or even just question some parts of modern evolutionary theory. Many such scientists have been harassed, such as Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, Dr. Robert Marks, and Dr. Scott Minnich. In the case of Gonzalez the AAUP was silent when he was denied due process and ultimately denied tenure in spite of a stellar academic and publishing record. His case was a travesty, an ideological witch hunt in which he was punished for views he holds outside the classroom. Additionally, the AAUP adopted a resolution that inaccurately claims that academic freedom bills that protect teachers who present scientific evidence that challenges Darwinian evolution as being the same as “intelligent design.” That’s simply false. It shouldn’t be surprising to either anyone that I am skeptical about the AAUP’s actual regard for academic freedom.

As for the “list”, the statement AAUP issued Friday indeed reads that way.

“Recent weeks have witnessed an increasing number of attempts by groups ranging across the ideological spectrum to prevent various speakers from addressing campus audiences. Among those speakers have been biologist Richard Dawkins, education professor William Ayers, political scientist Norman Finkelstein, and Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu. Perhaps no attempt to ban a speaker has drawn more attention than the effort by off-campus groups to prevent President Barack Obama from delivering this year’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame.”

I am still wondering if the AAUP will revise that release to include Ben Stein. Or, does the AAUP only support academic freedom for those left of center? Everyone they mention certainly could be described that way.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 11:37 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Friday in Washington, D.C. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hosted an event titled "Genes, Neuroscience, and Free Will." The panel, which discussed whether new findings in neuroscience and genetics have destroyed our notion of free will, consisted of James Q. Wilson (Pepperdine), David Brooks (New York Times), Charles Murray (AEI), Sally Satel (AEI), and moderator Christina Hoff Sommers (AEI).

I won't bother to record the differing views of the panelists, for their differences were very few and very far between. Essentially, they all argued that we have an innate sense of free will and that findings in genetics and neuroscience have not undermined it because: (1) sure, genes determine behavior, but not 100%; often the environment contributes to our behavior also, and (2) the number of factors determining our behavior are so many, and the human brain so complex, that we will never be able to pinpoint the genetic and other material causes of our behaviors.

To all this Hoff Sommers asked the obvious question: Sure, genes might not determine all our behavior, for the environment may contribute too, but is that really enough to escape determinism? After all, both my genes and my environment are outside of me and my will?

To this, the two giants of modern social science research—Willson and Murray—had

little to say. I don't believe they understood the full weight of the objection. After all, they seemed to think, we are mere material machines and we know we have free will, so this must all work out just fine. Murray spoke of how our behavior is bounded (or limited) by genes and environment but not determined. But one wonders which part of Murray stood outside of his genes and environment to make this observation? His response assumes that there is a reality, "us," which is more than the sum of "our" genes shaped by our environment. And this is exactly what materialist neuroscience denies. Wilson fared worse. In his response he actually said that he wasn't interested in the question. (N.B., (2) doesn't help the case for free will at all, for it represents an epistemological limitation, not a refutation of determinism. It amounts to saying that "we" may never be able to fully comprehend the myriad ways in which we are determined.)

If you watch the discussion, I think you will be struck by one other thing. At the very beginning Hoff Sommers seems to imply that DNA gives a hard material basis for human nature. (I believe Wilson has written along such lines, also.) But this seems clearly mistaken. If Darwinism is true, there is no such thing as a human being, let alone human nature. There are just various organisms which right now happen to anatomically resemble each other and will one day in the not too distant future evolve new physical and intellectual features.

You see, Darwinism destroys the classical view of essences. There is no underlying immaterial, unchangeable stable reality to the natural world. Rather, there is just a long spectrum of organisms, and what we call a 'species' is really just an arbitrary snapshot in the history of life. All of this goes to the heart of many of the panelists' concerns. Hoff Sommers, I believe, is very concerned with letting boys be boys and girls girls; several of the panelists are against over-medicating our children; Murray is terrified at the prospect that government and society might begin to manipulate our genomes. But what unifies these concerns and gives them legitimacy is the one idea they implicitly deny: That there is a stable reality called human nature.

The classical mind saw the necessity of these things and postulated a soul. But as that is unfashionable now-a-days, materialist intellectuals are happy to overlook the inconsistencies and retain the notion of human nature (and all that comes with it like humanity's moral and intellectual nature) even though their materialism denies such a nature.

So in the end, this panel of incredibly smart people could neither marshal a plausible defense of free will nor human nature.

For those interested in going deeper into these issues, I heartily recommend Benjamin Wiker's Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists and John West's Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest.

Posted by Logan Gage at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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

Where was the American Association of University Professors when Richard Dawkins led an unruly internet mob to get Ben Stein's invitation to speak at the University of Vermont rescinded? They were stone cold silent as Stein was kicked to the curb by UV president Daniel Fogel, at the behest of Dawkins and other intolerant Darwinsts.

Now the AAUP has the nerve to issue a statement warning schools not to rescind invitations to outside speakers. General Secretary Gary Rhoades writes:

The opportunity to be confronted with diverse opinions is at the core of academic freedom, which is vital to a free society and a quality education. The AAUP will continue to work to ensure such academic freedom.

I e-mailed Mr. Rhoades

to see what he had to say (as you'll see below, I think I already know what he'll say).

To: grhoades@aaup.org

Mr. Rhoades, I applaud the AAUP’s statement supporting academic freedom for outside speakers on university campuses. Earlier this year, Ben Stein was uninvited from delivering the commencement address at the University of Vermont. In fact, one of the people you defended in your statement today, Richard Dawkins, wrote a letter to the UV president condemning the decision to invite Stein. AAUP is absolutely correct to defend Dawkins’ right to be invited and speak at universities. In fact, we denounced as censorship attempts to have him expelled from speaking at Oklahoma University earlier this year. While there was a controversy about Dawkins, he was NOT uninvited, nor was his event canceled. Ben Stein though was definitely the victim of censorship, ironically at the hands of someone you are defending.

Your statement claims: The opportunity to be confronted with diverse opinions is at the core of academic freedom, which is vital to a free society and a quality education. The AAUP will continue to work to ensure such academic freedom.

What is the AAUP’s position on what happened to Stein? I’d like to know if you will update your list of recent speakers being censored to include Stein?

In his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, Jonathan Wells wrote:

Apparently, however, academic freedom doesn't extend to critics of Darwinism. When University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill called victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 "little Eichmanns," the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) defended his academic freedom, reaffirming the AAUP's commitment "to preserving and advancing principles of academic freedom in this nation’s colleges and universities. Freedom of faculty members to express views, however unpopular or distasteful, is an essential condition of an institution of higher learning that is truly free." But when word of President White's edict reached Jonathan Knight, director of the AAUP's Office of Academic Freedom, Knight said: "Academic freedom is not a license to teach anything you like." [17] In the Orwellian thinking of the AAUP, all unpopular views are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Defenders of President White's edict pointed to a "consensus" of scientists that intelligent design is wrong. But how could there be a "consensus" if qualified scientists such as Minnich and Behe are excluded from voting? This sounds suspiciously like those "unanimous" elections for which the former Soviet Union became notorious. Just as truth could not be decided by the Communist Party in Moscow, Russia, so it cannot be decided by the Darwinist Party in Moscow, Idaho.

[17] "AAUP Statement on Professor Ward Churchill Controversy," American Association of University Professors, February 3, 2005. Available online (April 2006) at
http://www.aaup.org/newsroom/Newsitems/churchill.htm
John Miller, "U of I President: Teach Only Evolution in Science Classes," Associated Press, October 6, 2005. Available online (April 2006) at http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&program=CSC%20-%20Views%20and%20News&id=2922

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who raises doubts about evolution in public discussions with non-scientists knows the automatic response you always get from the Three Monkeys crowd. Hands wrapped tightly over eyes, ears, and mouth, they chant: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil -- about Darwin!

That’s not exactly how it comes out. People will say things more like: But science has spoken! Scientists say! Science wins! Which sounds reasonable at first, until you reflect that it’s a little like a Roman Catholic fending off some challenge to his faith by pointing out that 98 percent of Catholic priests agree with Catholic doctrine, and who knows more about Catholicism than Catholic priests? So it must be true. (Or substitute rabbis and Jewish doctrine, pastors and Protestant belief, etc.) As James Le Fanu smartly notes in his new book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), there is a similar circularity to the “Scientists say!” case for Darwinian dogma:

The commitment to Darwin’s materialist explanation of the living world would, in time, become a qualification requirement for all who aspired to pursue a career in biology -- where to express doubt (at least publicly) was tantamount to confessing to being of unsound (or at least unscientific) mind.

Scientists themselves, apart from being qualified for the priesthood on the condition of their voicing no doubts about Darwin, are caught in a conflict of interest. Their professional standing is predicated on explaining a purely physical reality:

Scientists cannot acknowledge the possibility of there being a ‘dual’ nature of reality, with both a material and a non-material realm, for that would be to subvert their exclusive claims to understand how the world ‘works.’ Hence the silence. Scientists cannot ‘see’ the significance of the findings of the recent past because they cannot stand outside their materialist view and conceive of forms of understanding different from those in which they have been trained....

The dual nature of reality has, in short, been censored, written out of the script as being of historical interest only, a relic of the superstitious ways of thinking of the distant past.

The loss is all of ours. Le Fanu describes the cost of Darwinism: “We have lost that sense of living in an enchanted world” that was taken for granted 150 years ago. As Richard Dawkins himself puts it, in his world there is “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good -- nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Or as Isaiah Berlin bizarrely remarked, “As for the meaning of life, I do not believe it has any -- and [that] is a source of great comfort.”

The situation is not irreversible, though: “It cannot be long before a proper appreciation of the true significance of the findings of the recent past begins to sow doubts in inquisitive minds.” If as many people read Le Fanu’s book as it deserves, the time of that hoped for outcome will have been advanced at least a little.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 10:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Read Part I here

Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago. In Why Evolution Is True, he summarizes Darwinism—the modern theory of evolution—as follows: “Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.” ¹

Coyne further explains that evolution “simply means that a species undergoes genetic change over time. That is, over many generations a species can evolve into something quite different, and those differences are based on changes in the DNA, which originate as mutations. The species of animals and plants living today weren’t around in the past, but are descended from those that lived earlier.”²

According to Coyne, however, “if evolution meant only gradual genetic change within a species, we’d have only one species today—a single highly evolved descendant of the first species. Yet we have many… How does this diversity arise from one ancestral form?” It arises because of “splitting, or, more accurately, speciation,” which “simply means the evolution of different groups that can’t interbreed.”³

If Darwinian theory were true, “we should be able to find some cases of speciation in the fossil record, with one line of descent dividing into two or more. And we should be able to find new species forming in the wild.” Furthermore, “we should be able to find examples of species that link together major groups suspected to have common ancestry, like birds with reptiles and fish with amphibians.” Finally, there are facts that “make sense only in light of the theory of evolution” but do not make sense in the light of creation or design. These include “patterns of species distribution on the earth’s surface, peculiarities of how organisms develop from embryos, and the existence of vestigial features that are of no apparent use.” Coyne concludes his introduction with the bold statement that “all the evidence—both old and new—leads ineluctably to the conclusion that evolution is true.”⁴

Of course, “evolution” is undeniably true if it means simply that existing species can change in minor ways over time, or that many species living today did not exist in the past. But Darwin’s claim that all species are modified descendants of a common ancestor, and Coyne’s claim that DNA mutations and natural selection have produced those modifications, are not so undeniably true. Coyne devotes the remainder of his book to providing evidence for them.

Fossils
Coyne turns first to the fossil record. “We should be able,” he writes, “to find some evidence for evolutionary change in the fossil record. The deepest (and oldest) layers of rock would contain the fossils of more primitive species, and some fossils should become more complex as the layers of rock become younger, with organisms resembling present-day species found in the most recent layers. And we should be able to see some species changing over time, forming lineages showing ‘descent with modification’ (adaptation).” In particular, “later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones.”⁵

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin acknowledged that the fossil record presented difficulties for his theory. “By the theory of natural selection,” he wrote, “all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differences not greater than we see between the natural and domestic varieties of the same species at the present day.” Thus in the past “the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.” But Darwin knew that the major animal groups—which modern biologists call “phyla”—appeared fully formed in what were at the time the earliest known fossil-bearing rocks, deposited during a geological period known as the Cambrian. He considered this a “serious” difficulty for his theory, since “if the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed… and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures.” And “to the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.” So “the case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”⁶

Darwin defended his theory by citing the imperfection of the geological record. In particular, he argued that Precambrian fossils had been destroyed by heat, pressure, and erosion. Some of Darwin’s modern followers have likewise argued that Precambrian fossils existed but were later destroyed, or that Precambrian organisms were too small or too soft to have fossilized in the first place. Since 1859, however, paleontologists have discovered many Precambrian fossils, many of them microscopic or soft-bodied. As American paleobiologist William Schopf wrote in 1994, “The long-held notion that Precambrian organisms must have been too small or too delicate to have been preserved in geological materials… [is] now recognized as incorrect.” If anything, the abrupt appearance of the major animal phyla about 540 million years ago—which modern biologists call “the Cambrian explosion” or “biology’s Big Bang”—is better documented now than in Darwin’s time. According to Berkeley paleontologist James Valentine and his colleagues, the “explosion is real, it is too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record.” Indeed, as more fossils are discovered it becomes clear that the Cambrian explosion was “even more abrupt and extensive than previously envisioned.”⁷

What does Coyne’s book have to say about this?

“Around 600 million years ago,” Coyne writes, “a whole gamut of relatively simple but multicelled organisms arise, including worms, jellyfish, and sponges. These groups diversify over the next several million years, with terrestrial plants and tetrapods (four-legged animals, the earliest of which were lobe-finned fish) appearing about 400 million years ago.”⁸

In other words, Coyne’s account of evolutionary history jumps from 600 to 400 million years ago without mentioning the 540 million year-old Cambrian explosion. In this respect, Coyne’s book reads like a modern biology textbook that has been written to indoctrinate students in Darwinian evolution rather than provide them with the facts.

More on Coyne tomorrow.

Notes
¹ Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (New York: Viking, 2009), p. 3.
² Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 3-4.
³ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 5-6.
⁴ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 18-19.
⁵ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 17-18, 25.
⁶ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Sixth Edition (London: John Murray, 1872), Chapter X, pp. 266, 285-288. Available online (2009) here.
⁷ J. William Schopf, “The early evolution of life: solution to Darwin’s dilemma,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 9 (1994): 375-377.
James W. Valentine, Stanley M. Awramik, Philip W. Signor & M. Sadler, “The Biological Explosion at the Precambrian-Cambrian Boundary,” Evolutionary Biology 25 (1991): 279-356.
James W. Valentine & Douglas H. Erwin, “Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments: The Fossil Record,” pp. 71-107 in Rudolf A. Raff & Elizabeth C. Raff, (editors), Development as an Evolutionary Process (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1987).
Jeffrey S. Levinton, “The Big Bang of Animal Evolution,” Scientific American 267 (November, 1992): 84-91.
“The Scientific Controversy Over the Cambrian Explosion,” Discovery Institute. Available online (2009) here.
Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2002), Chapter 3. More information available online (2009) here.
Stephen C. Meyer, “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang,” pp. 323-402 in John Angus Campbell & Stephen C. Meyer (editors), Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003). More information available online (2009) here.
⁸ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 28.

Posted by Jonathan Wells at 3:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We have a 2 year old, Saul, who is very attached to his comfort jacket. It’s like a security blanket for him, blue and quilted and thoroughly stained. He doesn’t wear it, since it is too small for him by now anyway. He holds it and sleeps with it, and if you try to take it away from him when he’s in bed — say, to put it in the laundry — watch out. He will be extremely ticked off, crying, fussing.

In an important new book, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), British physician and historian James Le Fanu speculates that Darwinism works that way for many people. It’s a “comfort blanket,” explaining everything about living creatures in tidy materialist terms without having to appeal to mysterious, unknowable forces outside nature. Maybe that’s why scientists and laymen alike get so very upset and even abusive when you try, however gently, to tug it out of their arms.

Darwinism hasn’t been aired out or laundered in about 150 years. It’s a closed loop, effectively unquestionable, despite the fact that major chunks of biological evidence are against it. Le Fanu, about whom I’ve been writing this series, focuses on DNA and the human brain. Darwinism stands for the belief that everything can be explained in natural terms, but these two features of biology unyieldingly defy such comforting explanations.

Consider the Hox “master” genes that determine the spatial configuration of the front and back ends of creatures as diverse as frogs, mice, and humans. The Swiss biologist Walter Gehring showed that “the same ‘master’ genes mastermind the three-dimensional structures of all living things….The same master genes that cause a fly to have the form of a fly cause a mouse to have the form of a mouse.” Stephen Jay Gould admitted the “explicitly unexpected character” of this discovery.

Unexpected is right. The physically encoded information needed to form that mouse, as opposed to that fly, isn’t there. Instead, “It is as if the ‘idea’ of the fly (or any other organism) must somehow permeate the genome that gives rise to it.”

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake puts a little differently, hypothesizing "the existence of some 'field' by which an organism knows itself, and its parts, in their entirety." But neo-Darwinism's proposed mechanism of evolution can only, even in theory, affect a physical entity — the genome. How could it produce an "idea" or a "field"?

Same goes for the brain. Again, physical explanations of how it gives rise to the mind consistently explode upon takeoff. The brain is no computer, where every operation can be traced to physically describable events: “Neither the findings of the PET scanner nor Professor [Eric] Kandel’s scientific explanations can begin to account for the power of memory to retain…visual images over decades and retrieve them at will, any more than they can account for remembering the words of a familiar hymn or recalling a telephone number.”

That’s just for starters. The brain-computer analogy utterly fails to clarify how “just a few thousand genes might instruct the arrangement of those billions of neurons with their ‘hardwired’ faculties of language and mathematics.”

And a good thing that is, too. Because if the mind really did reside entirely in the brain, if the mind were genuinely reducible to the brain, that would mean the end of free will -- a computer ultimately can do only what it’s programmed to do (in this case, programmed by a mindless nature) — and that in turn would spell the end of moral responsibility.

In fact, materialist scientists and other thinkers have often denied the reality of free will. Le Fanu quotes Britain’s leading neuroscientist, Colin Blakemore: “We [may] feel ourselves to be in control of our actions, but that feeling is itself a product of our brain, whose machinery has been designed by means of natural selection.”

But cognitive science has demonstrated clearly that non-material things — thoughts — can change the brain itself. This is the scientifically confirmable reality behind cognitive therapy where altering the way you think about your own thoughts can remake brain circuitry in ways that anyone can see by a glance at “before” and “after” PET scans of brain activity.

On this point, Le Fanu discusses the research of UCLA’s Jeffrey Schwartz, another Darwin doubter: “Professor Schwartz and others [demonstrate] how ‘beliefs and expectations’ can ‘modulate’ the physical activity of the brain,” thus “restor[ing] the notion of personal responsibility.”

Fascinatingly, Le Fanu describes an enigmatic dance between physical and non-physical forces that drive life’s development, whether historically in the formation of species or individually in the growth and maturing of a single human being. It’s clear however that while life has a physical basis, it’s something beyond the merely physical that drives it all.

Le Fanu is not being coy when he writes that this observation provides “no direct evidence for a Creator.” But he finds “there is vastly greater evidence of ‘design’ — for those who would wish to interpret it as such — than for the supposition that the vast panoply of nature should be the incidental consequence of…numerous random genetic mutations.”

Why that matters, not just to science but to the way we live, Le Fanu takes up at the end of the book. More on that tomorrow.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 8:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On Earth Day 2009, we are reminded of the ecological importance of recycling. As a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, Jerry A. Coyne must be keen on recycling: He even recycles worn-out arguments for Darwinism.

If "evolution" meant simply that existing species can undergo minor changes over time, or that many species alive today did not exist in the past, then evolution would undeniably be true. But "evolution" for Coyne means Darwinism — the theory that all living things are descendants of a common ancestor, modified by unguided natural processes such as DNA mutations and natural selection.

Coyne discusses the fossil record, embryos, vestigial structures, the geographic distribution of species, artificial and natural selection, and the origin of species. In the process, (1) he ignores the Cambrian explosion — which Darwin considered a "serious" problem — and he rearranges the fossil record to fit Darwin’s theory; (2) he defends Ernst Haeckel — who faked some drawings of vertebrate embryos to provide support for Darwinism — and he dredges up the doctrine that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; (3) he claims that much human DNA is useless junk — despite abundant recent evidence that this is not true — and he relies on theological arguments that have no legitimate place in natural science; (4) he invokes "the well-known process called convergent evolution" to explain many cases of the geographic distribution of species — even though the "well-known process" is merely speculation — and he again falls back on theology to justify a supposedly scientific theory; and (5) he describes examples of natural and artificial selection — none of which show anything more than minor changes within existing species — and he misrepresents experimental evidence to make it sound as though the origin of species by natural selection has been directly observed.

Why Evolution Is True reads like a recycled old biology textbook that shamelessly exaggerates the meager evidence for Darwinism, blatantly ignores the mounting evidence against it, and lamely falls back on theological arguments to make its case. Students with access to the evidence and freedom to think critically might nevertheless find Coyne’s book useful — as an example of how not to do science.

In the next few days I will post a series here at ENV detailing the problems with Coyne's book.

Posted by Jonathan Wells at 1:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today is Earth Day. And it is worth pondering once again how marvelous Earth really is.

Yet I find my mind today asking why anyone should care for Earth. From the materialist perspective, we are not really "supposed" to be here. And, we're the late-comers to the party! So it always amazes me that many materialists are such avid environmentalists. But maybe this should not be surprising; after all, if one is a materialist, the earth is all there is, so we better keep it going!

This response, however pragmatic, doesn't satisfy me, though. For why should we keep anything going? For if the materialist is saying that the Earth is of intrinsic value, we can (indeed we must!) ask, where does the value come from? Further, why is pragmatism itself of any value?

If you find yourself asking similar questions today, pick up a copy of The Privileged Planet. For in it you will find one argument: that the very structure of the universe, and our planet itself, is shot through with purpose, with value.

If this argument is sound, it provides one answer to the question, "Why care about Earth at all?"

Posted by Logan Gage at 12:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, some students from a university biology class have e-mailed us trying to answer a challenge from their professor to "Find a fact (observation, data) that supports" intelligent design or evolution. These students wanted to find facts supporting intelligent design, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I told them that ID meets their professor’s definition of a theory: something that is "supported by a large amount of data (observations in the physical world)” and has a “broad application to explain a wide range of phenomena" and "a framework that allows the development of novel hypotheses (questions about nature)." In this second installment I’ll provide the rest of my response to these students, discussing in more detail exactly how intelligent design meets their professor’s definition of a scientific theory:

So let's now return to how intelligent design is a "theory" (under your professor's definition). There are innumerable data and observations of the physical world that support intelligent design from a wide variety of fields. For me, the most compelling fact (in biology) is the presence of highly complex and specified information in the genome (see Axe, 2000 and Axe, 2004), and specified and complex information is a reliable indicator of design (Dembski, 1998). In fact, I think that another student from your class emailed me asking the same question, and here's the answer I gave (expanded here).

If you'd like a more comprehensive discussion of this evidence and how ID provides a framework for developing novel hypotheses, you might enjoy my article, "The Positive Case for Design." To summarize that paper, ID theorists start by observing how intelligent agents act when they design things. Some of their observations show that:

(1) Intelligent agents think with an “end goal” in mind, allowing them to solve complex problems by taking many parts and arranging them in intricate patterns that perform a specific function (e.g. complex and specified information).
(2) Intelligent agents can rapidly infuse large amounts of information into systems:
(3) Intelligent agents ‘re-use’ functional components that work over and over in different systems (e.g., wheels for cars and airplanes).
(4) Intelligent agents typically create functional things.

Keeping our numbering straight, we can use those observations to generate hypotheses based upon testable predictions in a variety of different fields:

(1) Natural structures will be found that contain many parts arranged in intricate patterns that perform a specific function (e.g. complex and specified information).
(2) Forms containing large amounts of novel information will appear in the fossil record suddenly and without similar precursors.
(3) Convergence will occur routinely. That is, genes and other functional parts will be re-used in different and unrelated organisms.
(4) Much so-called “junk DNA” will turn out to perform valuable functions.

Thus, intelligent design can predict and explain a broad range of observations in many scientific fields. Below is a discussion of some of the fields where ID provides a framework for predicting, understanding, and explaining data from a wide variety of scientific fields:

Biochemistry, where ID explains and predicts the presence of high levels of complex and specified information in proteins and DNA (Axe, 2000; Axe, 2004; Behe & Snoke, 2004);

Genetics, where ID predicts and explains function for so-called “junk” DNA while neo-Darwinism stifles such research (Sternberg, 2002; Wells, 2004; Makalowski, 2003; Gibbs, 2003);

Systematics, where ID explains why there are similarities between living species, including examples of extreme genetic “convergence” that severely conflict with conventional evolutionary phylogenies (Lönnig, 2004; Nelson & Wells, 2003; Lawton, 2009);

Cell biology, where ID explains why the cell resembles “designed structures rather than accidental by-products of neo-Darwinian evolution,” allowing scientists to better understand the workings of molecular machines (Wells, 2005; Minnich & Meyer, 2004; Behe, 1996; Lönnig, 2004);

Systems biology, where ID encourages biologists to look at various biological systems as integrated components of larger systems that are designed to work together in a top-down, coordinated fashion, which is what biologists are finding is the case (Lönnig, 2004; Bract 2002; Kitano, 2003);

Animal biology, where ID predicts function for allegedly “vestigial” organs, structures, or systems whereas evolution has made many faulty predictions here (Wells, 2002; Dembski & Wells, 2008);

(Note: your professor says that the appendix "do[es] not seem to have any purpose" and is "useless," but he's mistaken. There is in fact extensive evidence of immuno-function for the appendix. See Martin, Loren G., “What is the function of the human appendix?” Scientific American (October 21, 1999), and Bollinger, R. Randal et al., “Biofilms in the Large Bowel Suggest an Apparent Function of the Human Vermiform Appendix,” 249 JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY: 826-31 (2007); Duke University Medical Center, “Appendix Isn't Useless At All: It's A Safe House For Good Bacteria,” SCIENCEDAILY (October 8, 2007). Your professor says you "can’t use the appendix," but you don’t want to use the appendix as evidence for evolution because it has been demonstrated to NOT be "useless" and your professor is uncritically promoting Darwinian urban legends, providing you with an object lesson for how Darwinian assumptions and predictions stifle scientific progress.)

Bioinformatics, where ID explains the presence of new layers of information and functional language embedded in the genetic codes, as well as other codes within biology (Wells, 2004; Meyer, 2004b; Voie, 2006; Abel & Trevors, 2006);

Information theory, where ID encourages scientists to understand where intelligent causes are superior to natural causes in producing certain types of information (Dembski, 1998; Dembski & Marks, 2009a; Dembski & Marks, 2009b; Voie, 2006; Trevors & Abel, 2004; Abel & Trevors, 2006);

Paleontology, where ID's prediction of irreducibly complexity in biological systems explains paleontological patterns such as the abrupt appearance of biological life forms, punctuated change, and stasis throughout the history of life (Meyer, Ross, Nelson & Chien, 2003; Meyer, 2004a; Meyer, 2004b; Luskin, 2005; Luskin, 2008);

Physics and Cosmology, where ID encourages scientists to investigate and discover more instances of fine-tuning of the laws of physics and properties of our universe that uniquely allow for the existence of advanced forms of life (Gonzalez & Richards, 2004; Brumfiel, 2006).

Your professor stated that the "fact can be any observation in biology that is substantiated by publication in a scientific journal," and in this regard I've listed many of the references cited for you below. In my opinion, ID explains quite a broad range of data and provides us with a powerful framework for predicting and understanding data from a variety of different fields. Thanks for your time and I hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Casey Luskin

References Cited:
Douglas D. Axe, "Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors," Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 301:585-595 (2000)

Douglas D. Axe, "Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds," Journal of Molecular Biology, 1-21 (2004)

Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press, 1996)

Michael J. Behe & David W. Snoke, "Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Features That Require Multiple Amino Acid Residues," Protein Science, Vol 13:2651-2664 (2004)

Geoff Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, Vol. 439: 10-12 (Jan. 5, 2006)

Bract, "Inventions, Algorithms, and Biological Design," in Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design (Vol. 1.1, 2002)

William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

a. William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success” (In publication, 2009)

b. William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search” (In publication, 2009)

William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Living Systems, (FTE, 2008) (see www.thedesignoflife.net)

Wayt T. Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome: Gems among the Junk,” Scientific American (November, 2003)

Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards, The Privileged Planet: How our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, (Regnery, 2004)

Graham Lawton, "Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life," New Scientist (January 21, 2009)

Hiroaki Kitano, ”Systems Biology: A Brief Overview,” Science, Vol. 295: 1662-1664 (March 1, 2002)

Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, "Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible complexity," in Dynamical Genetics pp. 101-119 (Valerio Parisi, Valeria De Fonzo, and Filippo Aluffi-Pentini eds., 2004)

Casey Luskin, “Human Origins and Intelligent Design,” Progress in Complexity and Design, (Vol 4.1, November, 2005)

Casey Luskin, "Intelligent Design Has Scientific Merit in Paleontology," part of the "Does Intelligent Design Have Merit?" debate at OpposingViews.com (September, 2008)

Wojciech Makalowski, “Not Junk After All,” Science, Vol. 300(5623):1246-1247 (May 23, 2003)

Stephen C. Meyer, Marcus Ross, Paul Nelson & Paul Chien, "The Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang," in Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (John A. Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer eds., Michigan State University Press, 2003)

a. Stephen C. Meyer, “The Cambrian Information Explosion,” in Debating Design (edited by Michael Ruse and William Dembski; Cambridge University Press 2004)

b. Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004)

Scott A. Minnich & Stephen C. Meyer, “Genetic analysis of coordinate flagellar and type III regulatory circuits in pathogenic bacteria,” in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design & Nature, Rhodes Greece (M.W. Collins & C.A. Brebbia eds., 2004)

Paul Nelson and Jonathan Wells, “Homology in Biology,” in Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, (Michigan State University Press, 2003)

Richard v. Sternberg, "On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic– Epigenetic System," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 981: 154–188 (2002)

J.T. Trevors and D.L. Abel, "Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life," Cell Biology International, Vol. 28: 729-739 (2004)

D. L. Abel & J. T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models," Physics of Life Reviews, Vol. 3: 211–228 (2006)

Øyvind Albert Voie, "Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent," Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, Vol. 28:1000–1004 (2006)

Jonathan Wells, "Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research" Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design (Vol. 3.1.2, November 2004)

Jonathan Wells, "Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force?," Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum, Vol. 98:71-96 (2005)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who served as director of Paris’s Musee d’Histoire Naturelle, held that there was an unknown biological “formative impulse,” an organizational principle of some kind, that directed the formation of diverse kinds of life. It is such an idea that James Le Fanu seeks to revive in his excellent new book, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon). It does appear that something is guiding life’s evolution toward intelligible ends. Dr. Le Fanu, in appreciation of whom I am writing this series, urges us to be comfortable with saying science does and perhaps cannot know the nature or source of that impulse.

Darwin, of course, sought to identify the principle or law behind evolution as mindless, unguided natural selection. But among the delights of Le Fanu’s book is his utterly apology-free take down of Darwin.

Long before today’s modern Darwin Lobby perfected the polemical art of the false dilemma — wherein you are either a Biblical creationist or a full communicant in the Church of Darwin, for there can be no other alternative — Darwin himself “portray[ed] those who might dispute his explanation as being Biblical creationists.” That included even Cuvier, about whose thinking on natural history Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species: “Nothing can be more hopeless than to explain this similarity of pattern [in body plans by supposing] it has pleased the Creator to construct all the animals in each great class on a uniform plan.”

If Darwin wished to attribute naïve religious prejudice to Cuvier, we can play that game too. For Le Fanu points out the Enlightenment prejudice that Darwin himself served — that of naturalism, where “nature was perceived as a closed system of causes and effects governed by its own internal laws that were immune to divine intervention — thus precluding the possibility of miracles, whether ‘natural’ or otherwise.”

The world to which the Enlightenment had given birth by the middle of the 19th century was primed and ready to embrace Darwin’s theory. Yet doubts emerged immediately and never went away. There was the “‘inconceivably great’ number of transitional fossils” that were supposed to be in the ground but weren’t, and the “‘puzzle of perfection,’ the impossibility of demonstrating how a blind, ‘trial and error,’ random process can give rise to ‘organs of extreme perfection.’”

In ultimately setting aside such difficulties, Darwin abandoned the scientific method. Science is supposed to be about observation from which theories are generated. In describing microevolution, trivial things like the finch’s beak, Darwin was on scientific secure ground. But when he extrapolated from this, developing the theory of macroevolution, he was forced to interpret his observations based on the pre-existing theory. Le Fanu: “Now all observations” — whether of the fossil record or organs like the eye — “had to be tailored to fit the presumed evolutionary mechanism — no matter how contradictory or improbable it might seem.”

Darwin’s, then, became the ultimate Teflon Theory, invulnerable ever to being falsified, with “skeptics [being] seen off with the charge that they are closet creationists, while [the theory’s] many faults are accommodated on the grounds of there being no better alternative.”

Le Fanu reminds us, “The greatest obstacle to scientific progress…is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.” That illusion was further shattered when the mystery of DNA and the Double Helix was finally elucidated. More on that tomorrow.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 2:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We’ve recently received a number of e-mails from students asking for help. A university biology professor has apparently challenged his class to "[f]ind a fact (observation, data) that supports" evolution or intelligent design. The students e-mailed us asking for help answering his challenge with regards to intelligent design. My response, which I’ve now sent to a few of the students in the course, has been, "Where to begin?" Below I post Part 1 or my reply to one student, with names and quotes removed to protect the innocent:

Dear [Snip],

Greetings and thanks for your email. I think that someone else from your class already emailed me with the same question. According to the document you sent me, your professor stated the following:

To qualify as a theory, ID must meet the following criteria:

1. It must be supported by a large amount of data (observations in the physical world) and it must have broad application to explain a wide range of phenomena.
2. It must provide a framework that allows the development of novel hypotheses (questions about nature).

He then challenged you to "Find a fact (observation, data) that supports" intelligent design. My response is, where to begin? Before we get into that, let's address your comment that you are struggling to clearly understand the proper definitions of theories and hypotheses.

First, I appreciate the difficulties you are having with the definitions of terms like "theory." I agree with your professor's definitions of "fact" and "hypothesis," and I partly agree with your professor's definition of "theory." For some details on these questions, I recommend that you read an article I wrote on this topic at: Is "Evolution" a "Theory" or "Fact" or Is This Just a Trivial Game of Semantics?

Here I explain that in practice, scientists use different definitions for terms like "theory," thus creating confusion. Here's a point I make in the article, modified to help answer your present concerns:

"Theory" can have multiple definitions. When I look up "theory" in my 1996 edition of Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (WEUDEL), the word “theory” has 7 or 8 different entries:

1. a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity.

2. a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.

3. Math. a body of principles, theorems, or the like, belonging to one subject: number theory.

4. the branch of a science or art that deals with its principles or methods, as distinguished from its practice: music theory.
5. a particular conception or view of something to be done or of the method of doing it; a system of rules or principles.
6. contemplation or speculation.
7. guess or conjecture.

According to entry #2, "theory" can mean "a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact." Similarly, entries #6 and #7 define "theory" as "contemplation or speculation" or "guess or conjecture" (what I'll call the "soft" of theory). The upshot of the soft definition of theory is that evolutionists who imply that the term "theory" can never mean that "conjecture or guess" are in fact wrong, because "theory" can in fact mean conjecture or guess. On the other hand, if you’re a Darwin-skeptic who thinks that "theory" necessarily means "conjecture" or a "guess" and can never mean a verified scientific explanation, then you are wrong: After listing these entries, my 1996 edition of WEUDEL elaborates on proper usage of the word "theory" within the scientific community:

"1. THEORY, HYPOTHESIS are used in non-technical contexts to mean untested idea or opinion. The THEORY in technical use is a more or less verified or established explanation accounting for known facts or phenomena: the theory of relativity. A hypothesis is a conjecture put forth as a possible explanation of phenomena or relations, which serve as a basis of argument or experimentation to reach the truth: This idea is only a hypothesis."

Within technical scientific discussions, the term "theory" typically is understood to mean "a more or less verified or established explanation." We’ll call this the hard definition of theory. But is this hard definition of theory the only way that scientists use the word "theory"?

When a Darwin-skeptic says "evolution is a theory, not a fact," evolutionists often pounce and assert that the authoritative scientists never use the word "theory" to mean conjecture or guess. For example, Ken Miller's 2007 edition of the textbook Biology bluffs by implying that there is a united front and complete conformity within the scientific community regarding proper usage of the word "theory." Miller's textbook states: "In science, the word theory applies to a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations." Such evolutionist claims of unanimity within the scientific community are not correct.

While scientists do typically imply the "hard" definition when using the word "theory," they don't always use it in that sense. If scientists always meant the "hard" definition of "theory," then scientists would virtually never use the phrase "new theory" because an idea does not attain the status of a theory until it becomes well-established and verified, withstanding many tests until it is no longer "a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural." Yet a quick search of PubMed for the phrase "new theory" reveals dozens and dozens of hits from the technical scientific literature where scientists offered "a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural" but called that explanation a "theory."

You can read my article for examples of where scientists use the term "theory" in the "soft" sense. The truth is that scientists can use both the "soft" or "hard" definition of "theory" when they use the term.

Regardless, this is a semantic debate, and if we accept your professor's "hard" definition as the only proper usage of "theory," then ID most definitely is "supported by a large amount of data (observations in the physical world)” and it does “have broad application to explain a wide range of phenomena" and "a framework that allows the development of novel hypotheses (questions about nature)."

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

When the novelist, biographer and literary critic A.N. Wilson came out recently as a Darwin skeptic, in comments to the New Statesman the book he mentioned as substantiating his skepticism is James Le Fanu’s new and outstandingly readable and informative book Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon). For the moment, this is probably the one book you should buy for your Darwin-devoted friends — if you are going to buy just one. In this little series, continued from last week, I am just trying to give a flavor of the book.

Le Fanu is a distinguished British physician and author of peer-reviewed medical journal essays. He exemplifies the Talmud’s note of advice that a person should “Teach your tongue to say ‘I do not know’” (Berachot 4a). Le Fanu knows a lot and wears his erudition very lightly, but his main point is that the more science reveals about the most important question a human can ask — What is man and how did he come to be? — the more we have to admit that we don’t know.

Le Fanu demonstrates this by masterfully recounting the epic crack-up of expectations that prevailed till recently for the prospects of three scientific enterprises. Darwinian evolution, genetics, and brain research were supposed to combine to give a compelling, coherent and united account of man’s origin and nature. They did no such thing and the prospect of their doing so in the future appears hopeless.

Among other things, for example, the Human Genome Project and the Chimpanzee Genome Project revealed the similarity in the genomic coding region of humans and chimps — 98 percent interchangeable, as we’re always reminded. Something like that figure includes other vertebrates as well, such as the modest mouse. Le Fanu readily agrees that this suggests evidence of common descent.

But notwithstanding the Darwinist reflex of trumpeting the 98 percent figure at any opportunity, it in fact represents a tremendous blow to the rest of the structure of neo-Darwinism. After all, the human genome itself comprises only 25,000 genes. According evolutionary orthodoxy, everything we are as humans is somehow coded in that precious but seemingly meager allowance of information. If so, how does a mere 2 percent of the genome account for all that separates a person from an ape — or for that matter, from a mouse?

Le Fanu calls this the “numbers problem”:

The genome projects were predicated on the assumption that the “genes for” the delicate, stooping head and pure white petals of the snowdrop would be different from the “genes for” the colorful, upstanding petals of the tulip, which would be different again from the “genes for” flies and frogs, birds and humans. But the genome projects reveal a very different story, where the genes “code for” the nuts and bolts of the cells from which all living things are made -- the hormones, enzymes and proteins of the “chemistry of life” -- but the diverse subtlety of form, shape and color that distinguishes snowdrops from tulips, flies from frogs and humans, is nowhere to be found.

Setting aside animals, the presumed stages of human evolution — the famous Lucy and Turkana Boy, Neanderthal, the sudden eruption of genuine and impressive culture with Cromagnon man — also seem to defy any genetically informed explanation. Rather than the gradualist model, it is “as if a switch were thrown, the curtain rose, and there was man at the center of the stage of world events.” Recognizably modern man, I mean — an artist, Le Fanu points out, producing masterpieces 17,000 years ago to be compared with Greek art of only 2430 years ago.

Where did this man come from? “The trivial genetic differences that separate our primate cousins from ourselves seem quite insufficient to account for” the transformation.

Isn’t Darwinian theory supposed to solve that mystery? The operative word is “supposed.” More on Le Fanu’s destruction of Darwin tomorrow.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 1:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today at Beliefnet, David Klinghoffer has a provocative essay commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. Klinghoffer notes that Columbine killer Eric Harris was inspired in part by his fanatical devotion to Darwinian natural selection, a trait Harris unfortunately shared with many opponents of human dignity during the past century. Given the pervasive influence of Social Darwinism in our culture, Klinghoffer suggests that Darwin's Tree of Life might be more appropriately viewed as a Tree of Death:

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution with its Tree of Life is applauded by most sophisticated Americans and Europeans as a scientific idea pure and simple, without the aura of dread and terror that, properly, should surround it in our minds.

Why should we so regard it? Not necessarily because of any judgment about whether the idea is right or wrong as science, but rather because of the uncanny way evolution has had of supplying the rationale and creating the backdrop for the most twisted, monstrous social movements that have sprung up in Western culture in the past century and half.

For more, go here.

Posted by John West at 7:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The late William Steig is the author of such popular children's books as Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, The Amazing Bone, and the successful DreamWorks franchise Shrek. He's also author of a lesser known book, Yellow & Pink. Yellow and Pink are two hand painted marionettes who find themselves resting on a grassy heath and pondering their origins. The portly Pink claims that they must have been made by someone. Thin Yellow, on the contrary, thinks they must have been the product of a series of fortunate accidents over millions of years. They go back and forth like this for pages, seeming to end in a standstill. But just then, a marionette maker wanders over, picks them up, inspects them, says, "Nice and dry," and carries them over his shoulder to his house.

Obviously the book is an allegory for the perennial debate about our own origins. Are we here by design, or are we the result of a series of happy accidents? Is there any more fundamental question we can ask? As the dialogue makes clear, though, it's intended as a lighthearted exchange based mostly on competing intuitions. It's hardly a primer on modern evolutionary theory or the contemporary debate over intelligent design.

I've probably read the book to my daughters a hundred times, because they begged for it, and have often wondered why so many officially smart people hadn't noticed it in all these years (it was first released in 1984). Finally, after the book has gone out of print, it has been mentioned in a relevant venue. Writing in Paper Cuts, the New York Times' blog about books, Gregory Cowles complains about stumbling across the book in the library, owing to the fame of its author.

He has nothing to say about the qualities of the book — its cleverness, the quirky personalities of the characters, the simple drawings that somehow capture rich subtlety and emotional detail — or the fact that kids love the book. All we get is the boilerplate identification of science with materialism. "It’s not the pro-religion stance that bothers me here," he explains, "so much as it is the anti-science one." Yeah right.

He makes clear that he won't be reading the book again to his children. Apparently a children's book that dares to ask the most perennial question in human history is enough to cause metaphysical indignation at the New York Times.

Posted by Jay Richards at 1:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Timothy Sandefur is an atheist legal commentator who believes that it is unconstitutional to teach the weaknesses, along with the strengths, of evolutionary theory in schools. His reason: he believes that evolutionary theory has no weaknesses:

...to teach the (non-existent) “weaknesses” of evolution in a government classroom is almost always (a) contrary to the lesson plan—and therefore a violation of a teacher’s employment contract—or (b) in reality an attempt to teach creationism to school children as true...[t]he Establishment Clause forbids the government from declaring any religious viewpoint to be true. [emphasis mine]

Sandefur is particularly upset by the participation of Christians in the public square. His view of the Establishment clause is, even by his own admission, “extreme”:

I believe tax exemptions for churches are unconstitutional violations of the Establishment Clause—a well-respected position in First Amendment law, although not one the Supreme Court has endorsed. I believe “In God We Trust” on the currency is an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause—a position shared by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and many respected First Amendment scholars, and one the Supreme Court chickened out of addressing. Presidents invoking God in speeches is troubling from a First Amendment perspective, but it’s widely understood that they’re speaking only of their own religious views, something a President, like any other citizen, has a right to do. I believe military chaplains are also a violation of the First Amendment—an extreme position, but one I’m proud to say James Madison himself, author of the First Amendment, also held. And if it were true that “atheist ideology” were being taught in government schools, that too would be unconstitutional. It happens not to be true.[Emphasis mine]

Mr. Sandefur’s assertion that “military chaplains are also a violation of the First Amendment” is noteworthy. He presumably would allow our soldiers in Fallujah to pay their chaplains with bake sales, on their own time.

Mr. Sandefur is an atheist fundamentalist. He advocates the expulsion of Christianity from the public square, and he demands judicially enforced censorship of scrutiny of Darwinism in public schools. There is a totalitarian streak in atheism.

Mr. Sandefur’s constraint is that he lives in a democracy, which limits the ability of fringe ideologues to impose their ideology on the majority. So atheist fundamentalists use idiosyncratic interpretations of the First Amendment — which was enacted to protect free speech — to spur the courts to impose by fiat censorship that atheists could never impose by the electoral process. The American public overwhelmingly supports the right to teach both the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory in schools. The Supreme Court, in Edwards v. Aguillard, ruled that it is constitutional to “require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught.” Thousands of evolutionary biologists conduct research on the weaknesses of evolutionary theory using public funds. Teaching public school students about the weaknesses and strengths of evolutionary theory is supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans, is constitutional, and is good science.

Mr. Sandefur disagrees. His argument is this: evolution is a theory without weaknesses, and the discussion of weaknesses in public schools is unconstitutional and can be silenced by legal force.

Mr. Sandefur, on his blog “Freespace,” describes himself as a “libertarian.” On the issue of evolution, "Freespace" refers to Mr. Sandefur’s freedom, not yours.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Discovery Institute’s third annual Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design are still accepting applications, and the deadline has been extended to April 30. The seminars have been a great experience for all involved (click here to listen to a report about the program from some former participants), and we expect this year to be no different.

The program is an incredible opportunity for students to spend 9 days learning about intelligent design from top ID thinkers such as Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Richard Sternberg, Jay Richards, Doug Axe, John West, and many others. The program’s website, including the online application, can be found here: discovery.org/summerseminar

To briefly give some details, the program runs from July 10-18 and it is free for those who are accepted into the program. The program focuses on science but also covers the social impacts of the debate over evolution and ID. In fact, there are two tracks in the program: one for science majors and another for those in the social sciences that focuses more on the philosophy / law / social dimensions of the debate.

The Application: Note that students must apply to be accepted into the program, and only graduate students or undergraduates at the junior-class-level or above are accepted. More applications are submitted than there are spots available, but don’t let that discourage you from applying — in fact, if you’re interested, this means you should apply ASAP. The application deadline has been extended until April 30, and there is an online application at the link above (discovery.org/summerseminar). All you need for the application is to fill out the requested information and provide the following four items:

1. A copy of your resume;
2. A letter of recommendation from an ID-friendly source;
3. A copy of your academic transcript;
4. A short (one page) statement of your interest in ID within your field of study.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 3:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Atheist constitutional commentator and attorney Timothy Sandefur and I have exchanged blog ripostes about his bizarre assertion that teaching public school students that the theory of evolution has weaknesses as well as strengths is a violation of the Establishment Clause.

Mr. Sandefur asserted:

…to teach the (non-existent) “weaknesses” of evolution in a government classroom is almost always (a) contrary to the lesson plan—and therefore a violation of a teacher’s employment contract—or (b) in reality an attempt to teach creationism to school children as true...To teach a religious viewpoint—such as that God created life—in government classrooms, taught by government employees, is to put the government’s imprimatur on that religious viewpoint and in violation of the Establishment Clause.

Mr. Sandefur believes that the weaknesses of evolutionary theory are non-existent, and to teach the weaknesses (as well as the strengths) of evolutionary theory is to teach a religious viewpoint.

!

I replied that evolutionary theory obviously has weaknesses, as all scientific theories do, and that is not a religious viewpoint. It's a scientific viewpoint. All theories in science have strengths and weaknesses. Weaknesses of scientific theories are the basis for scientific research. The weaknesses of evolutionary theory are the basis for evolutionary research. It's just as constitutional to use public funds to teach students about those scientific weaknesses as it is to use public funds to conduct scientific research on those scientific weaknesses. It’s just good science.

Mr. Sandefur replied:

Dr. Egnor has now moved on to argue that the Establishment Clause forbids the government from funding research in evolutionary biology.

!!

No. Unlike Mr. Sandefur, I believe that publicly-funded research and teaching about evolution — strengths and weaknesses — is constitutional. I pointed out that Mr. Sandefur was inconsistent; if his assertion is accepted that publicly funded teaching about the weaknesses of evolutionary biology is unconstitutional, it follows that publicly funded research on the weaknesses of evolutionary biology is unconstitutional as well, because both teaching and research involve the use of public funds to address weaknesses of evolutionary theory. Their constitutionality stands or falls together.

I think that both teaching and research about the weaknesses of evolutionary theory are obviously constitutional. Mr. Sandefur disagrees. He believes that teaching students about the weaknesses is unconstitutional, but publicly funded research about the weaknesses is constitutional. Mr. Sandefur’s view is incoherent.

The Supreme Court, in Edwards v. Aguillard, ruled that it is permissible to "require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught." This is my view, again, stated succinctly, so Mr. Sandefur can grasp it:

We should teach and study the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, with public funds, without hindrance. We need more academic freedom, and more teaching and research on evolution, not less.

Mr. Sandefur believes that teaching public school children that evolutionary theory has weaknesses is unconstitutional. He's wrong on the law, and transparently so. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Mr.Sandefur was merely trying to silence criticism of Darwinism in public school classrooms, and he's grasping at any premise he can think of to do it.

Here’s a question to ponder: most scientific disciplines welcome scrutiny and debate. That's how science is done. Why is censorship of scrutiny so much a part of evolutionary science?

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:13 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Though he’s fairly prominent character, I admit James Le Fanu was not till recently on my radar screen or that of anyone else around here that I know of. A British medical doctor who publishes in peer-reviewed medical journals like the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the British Medical Journal, a columnist for the London Telegraph, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his book The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (2001), Dr. Le Fanu turns out to be a flaming Darwin doubter, too. He comes out with a vengeance in his new book, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves," which hammers scientific materialism to bits. It really is a book you shouldn’t miss buying and reading.

What’s so notable? First of all, the man writes like an angel. Second, his book appears under the imprint of Pantheon, a very mainstream venue that I’ve never associated with conservative, religious, unconventional, or other dangerous types of authors. Third, while in his Acknowledgements, Le Fanu thanks a bunch of fellow writers who will be well known to readers of ENV — Michael Behe, Jeffrey Schwartz, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, and others — again, as far as I know his acquaintance with them was not personal but through reading their books and then thinking his own thoughts.

Le Fanu doesn’t mention intelligent design or Discovery Institute, which is just as well. It probably explains how he flew under not only our radar but that of Pantheon Books.

Before getting to the content of his book in future posts in this series, a word about how paradigms shift. The appearance of this book is significant as a cultural event. Unknown to us, Dr. James Le Fanu has been assimilating the scientific critique of Darwinism and adding to it his own insights about the history of science. He now appears before us, fully formed in his views — kind of like the periodic sudden radiations of novel forms of life that have been going on, contrary to Darwinian expectations, for the past 500 million years or so. Of course there are multitudes of other Darwin doubters — including most Americans — but Le Fanu is a surprise doubter because of his previous credits and his professional associations, someone that, if we knew nothing else about him, you’d assume to be most likely another unthinking go-along Darwinist.

If his thoughts and doubts were quietly bubbling all this time without our knowing it, there are surely many other such individuals from backgrounds like his own whose doubts about Darwin, similarly, will emerge in due time. When enough have done so, the whole framework in which people who like to think of themselves as smart and educated will massively shift, almost overnight.

As Le Fanu himself writes, “It cannot be long before a proper appreciation of the true significance of the findings of the recent past begins to sow doubts in inquisitive minds.”

More on those recent findings in the next installment.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 6:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

NYT Book Review editor Gregory Cowles has attacked William Steig's Yellow & Pink. It seems that not even children's books are safe from Darwinian scrutiny at The New York Times.

Posted by Anika Smith at 3:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Atheist legal commentator Timothy Sandefur believes that the discussion of the weaknesses (in addition to the strengths) of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools is an unconstitutional violation of the Establishment Clause. Yet he sees no Establishment Clause problem with the public funding of research in evolutionary biology that asks the same questions that he believes are constitutionally proscribed in public schools.

For example, Mr. Sandefur apparently believes that teaching public school students that there are large inadequately explained gaps in the fossil record is a violation of the Establishment Clause. Yet, as it happens, there is substantial publicly funded ongoing research being conducted by evolutionary biologists on these large inadequately explained gaps. Mr. Sandefur has no Establishment Clause objections to the public funding of the research on this topic; he only objects to publicly funded teaching on this topic. Yet the teaching and the research both address the same premise — that there are large unexplained gaps in the fossil record.

Mr. Sandefur asserts:

…the Constitution places no specific limit against the use of taxpayer money to fund secular activities and the propagation of scientific facts—while it absolutely forbids the spending of taxpayer money for religious activities and the propagation of such religious viewpoints as creationism…

Worst of all (for Mr. Sandefur), some public school textbooks reproduce this phrase — surely "the propagation of such religious viewpoints as creationism":

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…

Our Creator is the Source of our rights.

How does an atheist like Mr. Sandefur insulate his personal Creation Myth from scrutiny in public schools, when the Founding Fathers explicitly stated that the rights Mr. Sandefur invokes to censor scrutiny of Darwinism are endowed... by our Creator?

You have to love the irony.

Thus, Mr. Sandefur's atheist angst. Mr. Sandefur, who eschews theism but not worship , no doubt reflects: 'What would Howard Roark do?" He would refuse to be tied down by cognitive dissonance. Mr. Sandefur endorses censorship of science in public schools based on his own idiosyncratic interpretation of the Establishment Clause. The Establishment Clause (notice how infrequently Mr. Sandefur actually quotes it) merely says this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…" followed by the Free Exercise Clause, "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from establishing religion. Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory does not establish religion in any way, shape or form. Rather, to paraphrase Mr. Sandefur, it pertains to a secular activity of the scientific investigation of various scientific claims and facts. Discussing the strengths and weakness of a scientific theory is merely science. Science is the discussion of weaknesses and strengths of theories about nature. As the U.S. Supreme Court stated in the case Edwards v. Aguillard, it is not impermissible to "require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught." What Mr. Sandefur is demanding isn't enforcement of the Establishment Clause, which the Supreme Court has ruled does not prohibit critiques of prevailing scientific theories. Mr. Sandefur is demanding censorship of a scientific discussion of which he disapproves.

Now back to the issue of public funding for the research and teaching of Darwin’s theory.

Research in evolutionary biology is inherently research on the weaknesses of Darwinian theory. That’s what 'research' means. Research addresses problems that are not yet adequately addressed by the prevailing understanding of the science. Publicly-funded scientific research that does not address scientific questions (weaknesses) goes by another name: fraud.

It’s noteworthy that Mr. Sandefur does not infer that the publicly-funded research on the weaknesses of evolutionary theory is unconstitutional, yet he infers that publicly-funded teaching of the weaknesses of evolutionary theory is unconstitutional. In Mr. Sandefur’s view, it’s perfectly constitutional to spend taxpayer money on research on questions in evolutionary biology, but it’s unconstitutional for public schools to teach those same questions to students. Mr. Sandefur is highly selective in his Establishment Clause angst.

Taken together, Mr. Sandefur’s constitutional 'interpretations' advance Darwinism at public expense. It is unsurprising to note that this comports nicely with Mr. Sandefur’s atheist beliefs, which seem to benefit from his remarkably flexible Constitutional interpretation.

In Mr. Sandefur’s view, Darwinists may receive public funds to study scientific questions that the public is not permitted ask in public schools. Whether constitutional or not, this clearly advances Darwinism and the atheist metaphysics in which Darwinism is grounded.

Mr. Sandefur is demanding censorship of objective discussion of a scientific theory — Darwinism — that is central to his own personal religious belief — atheism. He is using the First Amendment, which was intended to protect freedom of inquiry, to stifle freedom of inquiry.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 7:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Timothy Sandefur has been waiting anxiously for my reply to his most recent post. He and I disagree on this point: I believe that teaching the strengths and weakness of Darwin’s theory in public schools is constitutional and is good science. He believes that teaching the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory is unconstitutional, and that only the strengths of Darwinism may be taught to schoolchildren.

In his most recent post, he begins with three points.

First, Mr. Sandefur asserts:

[Egnor] accuses me of misrepresenting him by calling him a creationist

Next:

[Egnor] claims that it is constitutional for creationists to teach religion in government schools

But what is “religion”?

Religion can be defined in two ways. First, religion is a belief in a particular ultimate metaphysical reality. Mr. Sandefur’s religion is that there is no God. My religion is that God exists, and that he is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Other peoples’ religions are that many Gods exist (polytheism), or all is God (monism, or pantheism), or that God is Yahweh, or that God is Allah, etc. (monotheism).

The second definition of religion — the definition favored by sociologists of religion — is that religion is liturgy, a set of customs and practices of worship. Traditional religions certainly meet this definition, and atheism ironically comes close as well. Atheists in the French Revolution founded the Cult of Reason, and they seized several Parisian churches and dedicated them to the Cult. Atheism was (and is) the state religion of communist nations, in which worship of leaders and veneration of relics is a bastard liturgy. The modern atheist adulation of Darwin has religious overtones — P.Z. Myers desecrated Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion along with the Koran and the Eucharist. The act of desecration presupposes sacredness.

Public school advocacy of religion in the first sense — religion as an opinion about ultimate metaphysical reality — is unconstitutional, because it represents the government ‘establishment’ of a particular metaphysical reality as true. Public schools can’t constitutionally teach that God does exist, or that he doesn’t exist. They obviously can (and should) teach students about the arguments advanced about these fundamentally important issues. No child should graduate public school without intimate familiarity with Aquinas' Five Ways, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the Elohist and Jahwist contribution to the Torah, and the philosophy of Epicurus and Lucretius, the views of Nietzsche and Hume, among many others. The philosophical and theological illiteracy of public school graduates is a scandal. Although public schools cannot constitutionally advocate the truth of any one of these views, students should be aware of all of these perspectives — both theist and atheist.

Yet instruction in metaphysics isn't limited to philosophy classes. Much of what children learn in science class about evolution has profound metaphysical implications. Again, in this case it's best to teach students about both scientific views for and against evolution, without indoctrinating them in only one view or the other. Mr. Sandefur seems to prefer that students be indoctrinated in only the evidence for evolution. But my argument is simply that it is perfectly constitutional to teach students about scientific critique of evolution as well. As the U.S. Supreme Court stated in the case Edwards v. Aguillard, it is not impermissible to "require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught."

Public school advocacy of religion in the second sense — religion is custom and liturgy — is unconstitutional, because it represents the government ‘establishment’ of a particular custom and liturgy. However, there is no religion that includes ‘strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory’ in its liturgy. And teaching students about both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution also establishes no particular metaphysical reality as true (religion in the "first" sense). Therefore there is no reason to conclude that teaching the strength and weakness of Darwin’s theory is unconstitutional.

Mr. Sandefur:

third, [Egnor] claims I am part of a conspiracy to preach atheism to schoolkids...or something.

Yet Mr. Sandefur insists that public school children be taught only Darwinism’s strengths. Thus, it's clear that Mr. Sandefur wants to indoctrinate students, one way or the other.

He insists that teaching the weaknesses of Darwin’s theory, along with the strengths, is unconstitutional. This is unfortunate: the First Amendment was designed to protect freedom of inquiry, but Mr. Sandefur wants to misuse the First Amendment's legitimate prohibition on religious establishment in order to ban scientific inquiry into the weaknesses of evolution.

Remarkably, Mr. Sandefur's idiosyncratic interpretation of the Constitution — he believes that the Establishment Clause prohibits objective teaching of one particular scientific theory — coincides perfectly with his personal religious beliefs. Mr. Sandefur is an atheist. The atheist understanding of the creation of life — the atheist Creation Myth — is Darwin’s theory of evolution. Mr.Sandefur proposes that school children be taught only the strengths of Darwin’s theory, and not the weaknesses, and he supports the use of force via federal courts to establish as fact this core tenet of atheism in public schools.

He might deny it, but it fits “conspiracy to preach atheism to schoolkids” pretty well.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I did an interview with an NPR reporter, Bob Garfield, for his NPR show "On the Media" about the recent decision of the Texas State Board of Education to require critical analysis of evolution. I am used to hostile and skeptical questions from the media--and in fact I generally welcome good, hard discussions from reporters. But this reporter was particularly hostile and seemed to have an agenda to paint Darwin-skeptics like crazy religious fanatics. The final story lived up to its expectations.

The Interview: A string of False Accusations and "How Dare You?" Type Questions

The interview started with benign questions about the recent decision of the Texas State Board of Education to welcome scientific critique of evolution into the curriculum. This quickly descended into various "how dare you" type questions, about whether this was all a plot by the "Religious Right" to insert religion into public schools, and why I rejected all the fossil and cosmological evidence that shows the universe isn't 10,000 years old. "Huh?," I replied. I quickly informed Mr. Garfield that not only do we oppose advocating religion in science classrooms, but that I'm not a young earth creationist, and that the debate in Texas has never been about young earth creationism. The new Texas Science Standards only require scientific critical analysis of evolution, and in no way shape or form invited biblical creationism or religion into the classroom.

Mr. Garfield was also reminded that many of the 13 members of the Texas State Board of Education who voted for the new science standards both professed to accept evolution and stridently opposed the teaching of creationism, and thus it would seem highly unlikely that the new Texas standards were a "Trojan horse" for teaching religion. Nonetheless, the final story favorably quoted members of the evolution lobby saying this is all a ruse for creationism.

But during our interview, having lost his argument that the new Texas Science Standards were a conspiracy to bring religion into the curriculum, Garfield shifted our conversation to the science. Again, he asked various "How dare you?" type questions, making assertions like virtually "100%" of scientists accept evolution, or that evolution comprised the unchallengeable "consensus," or that there is no fossil evidence that challenges evolution. I reminded him that a critical mass of well-credentialed scientists in fact don't support neo-Darwinian evolution, and that a number of Ph.D. biologists testified in Texas about scientific weaknesses in evolution. He then accused me of cherry-picking data because, outside of the Texas hearings, he asserted that essentially the "universe" of scientists support evolution. Not true, I told him. I replied that while surely majority of scientists do support evolution, there are credible scientists who dissent from it--hundreds of Ph.D.s in fact--and that there are plenty of discussions of doubts about core claims of neo-Darwinism in the scientific literature. I also discussed some of the reasons for these doubts-ranging from the inability of empirical evidence of natural selection to be extrapolated to bolster the grand claims of neo-Darwinism to the lack of confirming fossil evidence.

Mr. Garfield's reply to my discussion of the science was that we were getting outside of his field, and he cut all of my discussions of the scientific weaknesses in neo-Darwinism from the final story. There's no shame in him not knowing much about science, but it's troubling that despite his self-professed ignorance on the science, he acted like he knew for a fact that skeptics of Darwinian evolution had no scientific basis should be treated like crazy religious fanatics.

As a last ditch attempt to discredit Darwin-doubters, Garfield compared teaching critique of evolution to teaching Holocaust denial. I replied that not only is there a world of difference between the two (hundreds of serious Ph.D. scientists doubt neo-Darwinism, and one cannot find such credibility supporting something as pernicious as Holocaust denial!), but I also told him that given that I (as well as many other Darwin-skeptics) am Jewish and had close friends impacted by the Holocaust, his comparison was not just fallacious, but out-of-line. I mentioned that even more scientists would come out of the closet to express their doubts about evolution were it not for the intolerance in the scientific community towards dissent from Darwinism. His reply was to twist my position into allegedly arguing that scientists don't really believe in evolution, they're just forced to pledge allegiance to it due to pressure. I replied that this was not at all what I was saying, because of course a great many scientists harbor purely bona fide scientific support for evolution. My point was that were it not for the climate of intolerance, we'd see far more doubters and skeptics breaking their silence. However, in the final story, Garfield apparently sliced and diced my response so that it sounded like I affirmed his assertion that any "consensus" over evolution is the result of intimidation, when that is not at all how I responded to his question and false characterization of my views.

NPR Reporter Lets Ken Miller Play Spokesman For Discovery Institute

Rather than letting me accurately state my own views, the final story interviewed Ken Miller and quoted HIM as the expert on Discovery Institute's positions. Wow. Most amusingly, Miller couldn't even get the name of our ID program correct, as he misstated the name of the Center for Science and Culture as the "committee on science and culture." Would-be spokesman Miller also apparently speaks for Discovery Institute's finances, as he called us a "very well-funded think tank," even though his own biology department's budget dwarfs our ID-budget.

Garfield also allowed Miller to speak for Discovery Institute regarding its involvement in the Dover case, stating that "It's clear that their [Discovery Institute's] arguments and their publications and their ideas were very much behind what the school board wanted to do, and were part of the reason for the trial happening in the first place." Somehow Miller, in his new NPR-given role as spokesman for Discovery Institute, failed to mention that Discovery Institute opposed Dover's policy to mandate ID from the very beginning. In fact, I explained all of this to an "On the media" staffer who interviewed me, but none of my discussion of our actual involvement with Dover made it into the final story. Instead, Ken Miller was granted the privilege of speaking for Discovery Institute and Dover.

NPR's Garfield Touts Chris Comer as a "Victim" But Neglects to Mention One Supremely Important Fact

The final NPR story showed one additional evidence of gross media bias. Garfield closed by interviewing Chris Comer about the purported discrimination she faced at the hands of the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Garfield stated that Comer "could be labeled a victim of the culture of intolerance, but not for being a creationist." Garfield then let Comer tell her story of alleged discrimination, claiming that the TEA was "firing me over evolution. ... it was as if I had committed murder," when in fact she wasn't even "fired"! There's nothing wrong with Garfield letting Comer tell her side of the story, even if it's not entirely accurate. But the offense came when Garfield somehow forgot to report one minor detail that listeners would probably want to know, namely the fact that a few days before his story aired, a federal judge threw Comer's discrimination lawsuit out of court on its merits.

Mr. Garfield apparently didn't want to let a little fact like that get in the way of his touting Comer as a "victim of the culture of intolerance." (Garfield also neglected to mention Comer's history of insubordination and misconduct at the TEA.)

Fin

Throughout his interview with me, the mindset of Mr. Garfield was basically 'If you doubt Darwinian evolution, you're a crazy religious fanatic who is equivalent to a Holocaust denier.' Based on my experience in the interview, it was unsurprising when I heard the final story and saw how it sliced and diced my quotes to misrepresent my position, let Ken Miller speak for (and misrepresent) Discovery Institute, and forgot to mention that Garfield's centerpiece evidence of "intolerance" against evolutionists was just thrown out of court.

I guess when you're trying to paint Darwin-skeptics as intolerant religious fanatics to the public, stereotypes and caricatures are far more important than the facts.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, David Brooks published a column titled "The End of Philosophy" in The New York Times (April 7, 2009). Brooks, long one of the most thoughtful writers in public life, addresses an ages-old tension over whether reason controls our moral intuitions and passions, or whether moral intuition/feeling is king and reason is only rationalization.

In the latter view, Brooks says,

moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous....Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies....

Maybe so. But Brooks seems to have not noticed what he lost when he accepted this view. He may think that this view accurately reflects reality because it would lead us to postulate that the products of such evolutionary processes would have both angels and devils in their nature. And lo and behold, this is precisely what we find!

Yet this is not the correct assumption. If mere material processes have determined our moral evaluations, then we should not expect that humans will be part good and part bad; rather we should expect that either there is no such thing as objective morality, or if there is humans cannot know it. Like many a Darwinists, Brooks evaluates Darwinian evolution like a kid examining a diorama, as though he were outside the thing being examined.

This leads him to say some misguided things.

For instance, Brooks thinks that the "first nice thing about this evolutionary approach to morality is that it emphasizes the social nature of moral intuition." But by what standard can Brooks call the social nature of moral intuition "nice"? Why not prefer thinking of humans as cold Cartesian rationalists alone on their modernist islands? Supposedly evolution, and nothing objective, has shaped Brooks' moral intuition here. And if so, I see no reason why he should try to persuade anyone else that this is a nice feature of the Darwinian approach to moral judgment.

Similarly Brooks says that this evolutionary picture paints "a warmer view of human nature." But again, by what standard? This statement is only true if objective moral standards exist. Otherwise Brooks can be saying no more than that we meet our own evolved standard of goodness. But of course we do! How could it be otherwise?

Finally, Brooks returns to rationality. "There are times," he claims, "when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions...." This may be true, but how can it be so on Darwinism? In other words, if the Darwinian view holds that our moral intuitions are the product of mindless material forces, must the Darwinian not also hold that his rationality is also the product of such a-rational forces? Brooks writes as though his rationality remains unaffected by such evolutionary processes, as though it fell from heaven like manna.

Brooks' reason cannot stand outside of his moral intuitions if both were affected by the same a-rational evolutionary pressures. For this reason, philosophers like Alvin Plantinga have argued that naturalistic evolution undermines itself: if our minds are not necessarily reliable because they are the product of unintelligent, a-rational forces, why think that the outputs of those minds (say, abstract theories like Darwinian evolution) are true?

Like the Marxist who claims that everything is determined by socio-economic forces (except for himslef who, of course, has no class interest), and the Freudian with his determinant sexual urges and primal psychological forces (except for himself who somehow developed rational psychological theories), the Darwinist is a man at war with himself. For he is engaged in mortal combat with rationality itself.

At the terminus of the Darwinian path we find not the end of philosophy but the end of objective morality and rationality.

N.B., my colleague David Klinghoffer has his take on Brooks' article over at Kingdom of Priests.

Posted by Logan Gage at 2:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As a final installment in my “Texas Hold ‘Em” series calling the bluffs of Texas evolutionists, I’d like to highlight one section from Discovery Institute’s rebuttal to Ronald Wetherington’s Testimony before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE). Wetherington, who is a professor of anthropology at SMU, testified extensively to the TSBOE about human evolution, his area of expertise. Wetherington stated regarding human origins that we have “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in the world. No gaps. No lack of transitional fossils. … So when people talk about the lack of transitional fossils or gaps in the fossil record, it absolutely is not true.” But a close look at the evidence, as reported in the mainstream scientific literature, shows that it is Wetherington’s talk that is “not true.” As a preliminary example, a 2004 book by leading evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated that "The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap” and therefore we are in a situation “[n]ot having any fossils that can serve as missing links." To read the full statement calling Wetherington’s bluff, go to the section of Discovery’s response to Wetherington on his “Misrepresentations of the Evidence for Human Evolutionary Origins.”

F. Misrepresentations of the Evidence for Human Evolutionary Origins

Prof. Wetherington asserted that when it comes to human evolution, we have “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in the world. No gaps. No lack of transitional fossils. … So when people talk about the lack of transitional fossils or gaps in the fossil record, it absolutely is not true.” Though this is supposed to be Wetherington’s area of expertise, again we see him dramatically overstating the evidence as well as failing to acknowledge counter-opinions by experts within his own field.

Wetherington mentioned by name only three allegedly transitional fossil species. However, the quality of these alleged “transitional fossils” leaves much to be desired and their status as human ancestors is in fact disputed by some paleontological data.

The first fossil mentioned by Wetherington was Sahelanthropus tchadensis. But this fossil (also called the “Toumai skull”) is known only from one skull and some jaw fragments, and one leading researcher said “I tend towards thinking this is the skull of a female gorilla.”⁴⁵ Wetherington bluffed when he told the TSBOE that we know this fossil qualifies as a transitional form leading to humans. Indeed, leading paleoanthropologists have warned in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) that tooth and and skull bones alone are insufficient to properly classify or understand a hominid species:

Rather, our results show that the type of craniodental characters that have hitherto been used in hominin phylogenetics are probably not reliable for reconstructing the phylogenetic relationships of higher primate species and genera, including those among the hominins.⁴⁶

Another bluff from Wetherington came when he claimed that “Every fossil we find reinforces the sequence that we had previously supposed to exist rather than suggesting something different.” But in fact this Toumai skull, first published in 2002, provides an excellent counterexample to his wildly false assertion. Commenting on the Toumai skull in the journal Nature, leading paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood began an article by observing, “A single fossil can fundamentally change the way we reconstruct the tree of life." He goes on to state:

If we accept these as sufficient evidence to classify S. tchadensis as a hominid at the base, or stem, of the modern human clade, then it plays havoc with the tidy model of human origins. Quite simply, a hominid of this age should only just be beginning to show signs of being a hominid. It certainly should not have the face of a hominid less than one-third of its geological age. Also, if it is accepted as a stem hominid, under the tidy model the principle of parsimony dictates that all creatures with more primitive faces (and that is a very long list) would, perforce, have to be excluded from the ancestry of modern humans.⁴⁷

In other words, if we accept the Toumai skull as the stem ancestor of humans, as Professor Wetherington does, then many other alleged hominid species—including the other species mentioned by Wetherington that are discussed below—could not be counted as ancestors of humans.

Professor Wetherington stated that it “is not true” that there are gaps in the fossil record for the origin “for our own species, rather than for some others,” but paleoanthropological expert Wood states that fossils like this show “compelling evidence that our own origins are as complex and as difficult to trace as those of any other group of organisms.”⁴⁸ Indeed, Harvard zoologist Richard Lewontin wrote in 1995 that

When we consider the remote past, before the origin of the actual species Homo sapiens, we are faced with a fragmentary and disconnected fossil record. Despite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor.⁴⁹

Again, it is clear that Wetherington is bluffing to claim there are “no gaps” in the fossil evidence for human evolution. If the Toumai skull represents a transitional fossil which allegedly plugs a “gap” and doesn’t “play havoc” with the proclaimed human evolutionary tree, then the evidence for human evolution must be quite weak indeed.

Wetherington next mentioned Ardipithecus as an alleged transitional form leading to humans—but this fossil too has highly fragmented remains, and has been called a hominid primarily on the basis of some of its teeth.⁵⁰ Its extremely fragmented remains prevent paleoanthropologists from determining much about this species, including questions such as whether it walked upright.⁵¹ Paleoanthropologist Tim White has called the record of early hominids from this period, “a black hole in the fossil record,”⁵² and the few fossils that are known are based upon limited remains wherein it is not possible to make firm conclusions about these fossils.⁵³

Despite the questions about Ardipithecus, Wetherington claimed that it “became Australopithecus afarensis 4 million years ago.” He based this claim (presumably) upon a paper by Tim White in 2006, but this paper starts by admitting that “The origin of Australopithecus, the genus widely interpreted as ancestral to Homo, is a central problem in human evolutionary studies. Australopithecus species differ markedly from extant African apes and candidate ancestral hominids such as Ardipithecus, Orrorin and Sahelanthropus.”⁵⁴ And the evidence that allegedly made one species intermediate was its “masticatory robusticity" (in other words, its ability to chew harder stuff). This does not make for an impressive evolutionary scheme, and again this claim is based entirely upon reconstructed tooth fragments which, as noted, have been highly criticized by leading paleontologists as a form of data on which to base claims of hominid Phylogenetic relationships.⁵⁵

And what about Australopithecus? Australopithecus literally means “Southern Ape,” and despite Wetherington’s claim that there is “no lack of transitional fossils,” there is a stark lack of intermediates between the ape-like australopithecines and the genus Homo. Indeed, in 2004 in his book What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline, the leading evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated: "The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap. How can we explain this seeming saltation? Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time-honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative."⁵⁶

Contrary to Wetherington’s claims that the basic evolutionary hypothesis about the human lineage is never being altered, a 1999 article in Science by leaders in paleoanthropology found that Homo habilis should be classified as an australopithecine,⁵⁷ and an article titled “African fossils paint messy picture of human evolution” reported that how new fossil finds prevented Homo habilis from being part of our family tree:

The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens. But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature. In 2000 Leakey found an old H. erectus complete skull within walking distance of an upper jaw of the H. habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. That makes it unlikely that H. erectus evolved from H. habilis, researchers said.⁵⁸

With habilis removed from our direct ancestry, what exactly is the direct ancestor of Homo linking back to the australopithecines? Two paleoanthropologists wrote in Nature in 2005 that we don’t know the direct ancestor of our genus Homo:

[An early form of Homo] marks such a radical departure from previous forms of Homo (such as H. habilis) in its height, reduced sexual dimorphism, long limbs and modern body proportions that it is hard at present to identify its immediate ancestry in east Africa. Not for nothing has it been described as a hominin “without an ancestor, without a clear past.”⁵⁹

Likewise, an article in the Journal of Human Evolution stated:

The anatomy of the earliest H. sapiens sample indicates significant modifications of the ancestral genome and is not simply an extension of evolutionary trends in an earlier australopithecine lineage throughout the Pliocene. In fact, its combination of features never appears earlier...⁶⁰

These authors said the origin of Homo required “a genetic revolution” where “no australopithecine species is obviously transitional.” One commentator said this shows a “big bang theory” of human origins because “[t]he first members of early Homo sapiens are really quite distinct from their australopithecine predecessors and contemporaries.”⁶¹

Contrary to this data, Wetherington asserted in his testimony that the origin of our species represents “a gradualistic evolutionary change,” despite the fact that there are clear gaps in the record. Indeed, one paper in the Journal of Human Evolution found that the origin of key features of our genus Homo was anything but gradual: “It appears from the hominid fossil record of pelvic bones that two periods of stasis exist and are separated by a period of very rapid evolution corresponding to the emergence of the genus Homo.”⁶²

In contrast to these tentative admissions from paleoanthropologists, Wetherington makes firm and dogmatic statements that dramatically overstate the fossil evidence for human origins. Compare Wetherington’s dogmatic assertions to the following comment by an editor of Nature: “Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations.”⁶³ Clearly Wetherington misrepresented the completeness of the evidence for human evolution, and there are indeed many gaps in the record of human origins.

References Cited:
[45.] Quoting Dr. Brigitte Senut, also stating “One of Dr Senut's colleagues, Dr Martin Pickford, who was in London this week, is also reported to have told peers that he thought the new Chadian skull was from a ‘proto-gorilla’. “ See “Skull find sparks controversy” (July 12, 2002) at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2125244.stm

[46.] Mark Collard and Bernard Wood, "How reliable are human phylogenetic hypotheses?," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 97(9):5003–5006 (April 25, 1999).

[47.] Bernard Wood, “Hominid revelations from Chad,” Nature, Vol. 418:133-135 (July 11, 2002) at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6894/full/418133a.html (emphasis added).

[48.] Bernard Wood, “Hominid revelations from Chad,” Nature, Vol. 418:133-135 (July 11, 2002) at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6894/full/418133a.html (emphasis added).

[49.] Richard C. Lewontin, Human Diversity, p. 163 (Scientific American Library: New York NY, 1995).

[50.] Y. Haaile-Selassie, “Late Miocene hominids from the Middle Awash, Ethiopia,” Nature, Vol. 412:178-181 (July 12, 2001).

[51.] See Figure 2, Bernard Wood, “Hominid revelations from Chad,” Nature, Vol. 418:133-135 (July 11, 2002) at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6894/full/418133a.html

[52.] A. Gibbons, “In Search of the First Hominids,” Science, 295:1214-1219 (February 15, 2002).

[53.] See Figure 2, Bernard Wood, “Hominid revelations from Chad,” Nature, Vol. 418:133-135 (July 11, 2002) at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6894/full/418133a.html

[54.] Tim D. White et al., “Asa Issie, Aramis and the origin of Australopithecus,” Nature, Vol. 440:883-889 (April 13, 2006).

[55.] Mark Collard and Bernard Wood, "How reliable are human phylogenetic hypotheses?," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 97(9):5003–5006 (April 25, 2009).

[56.] Ernst Mayr, What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline, pg. 198 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

[57.] Bernard Wood and Mark Collard, "The Human Genus," Science, Vol. 284:65-71 (April 2, 1999).

[58.] Associated Press, “African fossils paint messy picture of human evolution; who was our ancestor's ancestor?,” International Herald Tribune, at http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/08/america/NA-GEN-US-Human-Evolution.php

[59.] Robin Dennell & Wil Roebroeks, “An Asian perspective on early human dispersal from Africa,” Nature, Vol. 438:1099-1104 (Dec. 22/29, 2005) (internal citations removed) (emphasis added).

[60.] Hawks, J., Hunley, K., Sang-Hee, L., Wolpoff, M., “Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Evolution,” Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution, 17(1):2-22 (January, 2000).

[61.] “New study suggests big bang theory of human evolution,” (January 10, 2000) at http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/Releases/2000/Jan00/r011000b.html

[62.] F. Marchal, “A New Morphometric Analysis of the Hominid Pelvic Bone,” Journal of Human Evolution, Vol. 38:347-365 (2000).

[63.] H. Gee, “Return to the planet of the apes,” Nature, Vol. 412:131-132 (July 12, 2001).

Posted by Casey Luskin at 7:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Why is it that Darwinian rhetorical strategies often remind me of a Monty Python sketch? In this case, the one about the philosophy department at the University of Wollamaloo, where every faculty member is called Bruce and the departmental rules include “Rule two: No member of the faculty is to maltreat the Abbos [aboriginal Australians] in any way a'all -- if there's anyone watching.”

So Michael Behe amusingly notes in his Amazon blog how public Darwinian responses to the main argument of his book The Edge of Evolution differ from responses in more technical forums. Or as Bruce might put it, Rule one: No member of the Darwin Lobby may admit that evolution poses seemingly unsolvable enigmas -- if there’s anyone watching.

When The Edge of Evolution came out, reviewers such as Sean Carroll at the U. of Wisconsin and Jerry Coyne at the U. of Chicago were full of reassuring noises for their readers in Science and The New Republic respectively. Behe had shown the insuperable difficulties evolution faces in explaining how multiple mutations can add up to results even as basic as the most elementary protein features, notably binding sites.

Coyne intoned, “In fact, interactions between proteins, like any complex interaction, were certainly built up step by mutational step ... This process could have begun with weak protein-protein associations that were beneficial to the organism. These were then strengthened gradually...”

Uh huh. As Behe summarizes, the “take-home message of the reviews for the public and for scientists in other fields was the same: Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. No problem here.”

But in less publicly exposed venues, the mask of longstanding confidence comes off. Behe points to a recent paper seeking to clear up precisely the problem that Carroll and Coyne insisted upon as being non-existent. Appearing in the online journal Biology Direct, the paper is accompanied by comments from journal editor Eugene Koonin. He congratulates the authors on their “brilliant,” “novel solution” to “the old enigma of the evolution of complex features in proteins that require two or more mutations [emphasis added].”

That would be the same old enigma that, when in the public eye, Darwin’s defenders are so zealous to deny as being enigmatic at all. Only when no one’s watching are the Bruces free to admit such things.

A different question is whether or not the enigma has indeed been solved. Behe thinks not. The Biology Direct authors claim that a source of mutations apart from that at the DNA level can give a sort of leg up, a “look ahead” effect, to the process of natural selection operating on random genetic mutations. When genes are translated into proteins, more mutations can occur than when DNA is replicating, so that, according to one estimate, 1 in 10 proteins is afflicted in this way.

Behe argues that this piece of speculation is itself afflicted in various ways, most importantly that it is merely speculative. Instead of focusing on such inherently inadequate models, it makes much more sense to take seriously the kind of actual data that properly constrains theoretical models.

Which happens to be the main point of The Edge of Evolution. Writes Behe:

To have a good idea of what Darwinian evolution can do, we no longer need to rely solely on speculative models, which may overlook or misjudge aspects of biology that nature would encounter. We already have good data in hand. We already have results that should constrain models. Over many thousands of generations, astronomical numbers of malarial cells seem not to have been able to take advantage of the look-ahead effect or anything else to build new, coherent molecular machinery. All that’s been seen in that system in response to antibiotics are a few point mutations. In tens of thousands of generations, with a cumulative population size in the trillions, no coherent new systems have been seen in the fascinating work of Richard Lenski on the laboratory evolution of E. coli. Instead, even beneficial mutations have turned out to be degradative ones, where previously functioning genes are deleted or made less effective. And that’s the same result as has been seen in the human genome in response to selective pressure due to malaria -- a number of degraded genes or regulatory elements, and no new machinery.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 1:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On Saturday April 4th, I attended a debate between Discovery Institute fellow William Lane Craig and "new atheist" Christopher Hitchens on "Does God Exist?" As the debate venue was Biola University, the audience was partial towards Craig. But a sizeable number of Hitchens-fans turned out as well, though they probably weren't energized by Hitchens' admission during the debate that "there's nothing new about the new atheists, it's just that we're recent."

Craig's opening statement presented 5 arguments, but I will only recount two (maybe three) at present: the Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, and the Moral Argument. As it turns out, Darwinian evolution and the "cruelty" of biological processes played a major role in Hitchens' arguments against the proposition that God exists.

1. The Cosmological Argument: No Rebuttal Whatsoever From Hitchens
William Lane Craig laid out the "Cosmological argument" as follows:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

2. The Teleological Argument: Hitchens Drops the Issue and Turns to Emotion After Craig's Forceful Rebuttal
Craig then presented the teleological argument as follows:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design.

2. It is not due to law or chance.

3. Therefore, it is due to design.

As Craig rebutted the multiverse objection in his opening statement, Hitchens' only rebuttal was to assert that Darwin refuted the teleological argument in biology, and therefore teleological arguments are subject to refutation, and we don't know enough physics at this time to know if this argument will hold up in the future. Hitchens also asserted, "I don't know any physicist" who accepts the fine-tuning argument for cosmic design, which he called an “arrogant assumption.”

Hitchens’ statement says more about his lack of familiarity with physicists than it says about physicists themselves. Thus Craig forcefully refuted Hitchens' response by quoting some prominent physicists and philosophers of science not only endorsing the teleological argument for cosmic design, but also stating that the more we learn about physics, the stronger the evidence of fine-tuning is becoming. According to the quotes given by Craig, this evidence of cosmic fine-tuning is unlikely to change anytime soon.

I would have added quotes from Nobel Laureate physicist Charles Townes endorsing cosmic design as follows:

“Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here. Some scientists argue that 'well, there's an enormous number of universes and each one is a little different. This one just happened to turn out right.' Well, that's a postulate, and it's a pretty fantastic postulate — it assumes there really are an enormous number of universes and that the laws could be different for each of them. The other possibility is that ours was planned, and that's why it has come out so specially.”

('Explore as much as we can': Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes on evolution, intelligent design, and the meaning of life," By Bonnie Azab Powell, UC Berkeley NewsCenter, (June 17 2005).)

Craig also dispatched with Hitchens' references to Darwin by observing that Christian theism is not incompatible with evolution--though it quickly became clear that by "evolution," Craig meant change over time or common ancestry, and did not mean classical unguided and blind Darwinian evolution. After quoting scientists discussing the astronomically low odds of the unguided occurrence of various stages in human evolution, Craig stated that "if evolution did occur, it was literally a miracle and evidence for the existence of God."

Craig's argument about the unlikelihood of unguided human evolution was recently bolstered by biologists writing in the journal Genetics, who observed:

Our previous work has shown that, in humans, a new transcription factor binding site can be created by a single mutation in an average of 60,000 years, but, as our new results show, a coordinated pair of mutations that first inactivates a binding site and then creates a new one is very unlikely to occur on a reasonable timescale.

(Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt, "Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution," Genetics, Vol. 180: 1501–1509 (November 2008), emphasis added.)

David Klinghoffer has recently posted some excellent (and entertaining) summaries of the highlights of Discovery Institute’s responses to the testimony of evolutionist experts David Hillis and Ronald Wetherington before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE) on January 21, 2009. (See also Ralph Seelke’s response to Hillis.) One part of the response to self-proclaimed tree of life “expert” David Hillis that should not be missed is Discovery's response to his bluffs and misrepresentations regarding the congruence of molecular and morphological phylogenies within the tree of life. Specifically, Hillis told the board that there is “overwhelming agreement correspondence as you go from protein to protein, DNA sequence to DNA sequence” when reconstructing evolutionary history using biological molecules. But anyone accurately testifying about the state of molecular systematics would never make that claim, and there is much documentation in the mainstream scientific literature refuting it. What follows is this section of the rebuttal to Hillis that is of interest to those wondering about the viability of Hillis' claims about congruence and correspondence within the "tree of life":

B. Hillis Misled Board about Challenges to Darwin’s Tree of Life

Hillis cited himself as a “world’s leading exper[t] on the tree of life” and later told the TSBOE that there is “overwhelming agreement correspondence as you go from protein to protein, DNA sequence to DNA sequence” when reconstructing evolutionary history using biological molecules. Hillis’s self-proclaimed expertise makes it all the more egregious that he tried to mislead the TSBOE about the widespread prevalence of incongruencies between various molecular phylogenies within his field of systematics.

Indeed, the cover story of the journal New Scientist, published on the very day that Hillis testified before the TSBOE, was titled “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life.” Directly contradicting Hillis’s gross oversimplification of molecular systematics, the article reported that “The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories.” The article observed that with the sequencing of the genes and proteins of various living organisms, the tree of life fell apart:

“For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life,” says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. 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,” says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change.⁷

To reiterate, the basic problem is that one gene or protein yields one version of the “tree of life,” while another gene or protein yields an entirely different tree. As the New Scientist article stated:

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.⁸

Likewise, leading evolutionary bioinformatics specialist W. Ford Doolittle explains, “Molecular phylogenists will have failed to find the ‘true tree,’ not because their methods are inadequate or because they have chosen the wrong genes, but because the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree.”⁹ Hillis (and others) may claim that this problem is only encountered when one tries to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of microorganisms, such as bacteria, which can swap genes through a process called “horizontal gene transfer,” thereby muddying any phylogenetic signal. But this objection holds no water, because the tree of life is challenged even among higher organisms where such gene-swapping does not take place. As the article explains:

Syvanen recently compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes. In theory, he should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals. He failed. The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories. This was especially true of sea-squirt genes. Conventionally, sea squirts—also known as tunicates—are lumped together with frogs, humans and other vertebrates in the phylum Chordata, but the genes were sending mixed signals. Some genes did indeed cluster within the chordates, but others indicated that tunicates should be placed with sea urchins, which aren't chordates. “Roughly 50 per cent of its genes have one evolutionary history and 50 per cent another,” Syvanen says.¹⁰

To reiterate, even among higher organisms, the article explains that “The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories,” therefore leading Syvanen to say regarding the relationships of these higher groups, “We’ve just annihilated the tree of life.” This directly contradicts the claims of Hillis.

Other scientists agree. Looking higher up the tree, a recent study published in Science tried to construct a phylogeny of animal relationships but concluded that “[d]espite the amount of data and breadth of taxa analyzed, relationships among most [animal] phyla remained unresolved.”¹¹ Likewise, Carl Woese, the father of evolutionary molecular systematics, observed that these problems extend well beyond the base of the tree of life: “Phylogenetic incongruities [conflicts] can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branchings within and among the various taxa to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves.”¹²

Striking admissions of troubles in reconstructing the “tree of life” also came from a paper in the journal PLOS Biology, entitled “Bushes in the Tree of Life.” The authors acknowledge that “a large fraction of single genes produce phylogenies of poor quality,” observing that one study “omitted 35% of single genes from their data matrix, because those genes produced phylogenies at odds with conventional wisdom.”¹³ The paper suggests that “certain critical parts of the [tree of life] may be difficult to resolve, regardless of the quantity of conventional data available.”¹⁴ The paper even contends that “[t]he recurring discovery of persistently unresolved clades (bushes) should force a re-evaluation of several widely held assumptions of molecular systematics.”¹⁵

Likewise, National Academy of Sciences biologist Lynn Margulis has had harsh words for the field of molecular systematics which Hillis studies. In her article, “The Phylogenetic Tree Topples” she explains that “many biologists claim they know for sure that random mutation (purposeless chance) is the source of inherited variation that generates new species of life and that life evolved in a single-common-trunk, dichotomously branching-phylogenetic-tree pattern!” But she dissents from that view and attacks the dogmatism of evolutionary systematists, noting that “[e]specially dogmatic are those molecular modelers of the ‘tree of life’ who, ignorant of alternative topologies (such as webs), don’t study ancestors.”¹⁶

Hillis may put up non-credible protests that none of this represents a “weakness” in neo-Darwinian evolution. He told the TSBOE that there is “overwhelming agreement correspondence as you go from protein to protein, DNA sequence to DNA sequence.” But should we believe him? As the New Scientist article admits, “Ever since Darwin the tree has been the unifying principle for understanding the history of life on Earth,” but since “different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories,” the notion of a tree of life is now quickly becoming a vision of the past—as the article stated, it’s being “annihilated.”

C. Hillis Misled the Board about the Congruence between Anatomical Phylogenies and Molecular Phylogenies

Despite the fact that he called himself a “tree of life expert,” David Hillis also made the grossly inaccurate claim that “there’s overwhelming correspondence between the basic structures we have about the tree of life from anatomical data, from biochemical data, molecular sequence data.” Yet many evolutionary scientists have recognized that evolutionary trees based upon morphology (physical characteristics of organisms) or fossils, commonly conflict with evolutionary trees based upon DNA or protein sequences (also called molecule-based trees).

For example, a review paper by Darwinian leaders in this field stated, “As morphologists with high hopes of molecular systematics, we end this survey with our hopes dampened. Congruence between molecular phylogenies is as elusive as it is in morphology and as it is between molecules and morphology.”¹⁷ Another set of pro-evolution experts wrote, “That molecular evidence typically squares with morphological patterns is a view held by many biologists, but interestingly, by relatively few systematists. Most of the latter know that the two lines of evidence may often be incongruent.”¹⁸

The widespread prevalence of disagreement and non-correspondence between molecule-based evolutionary trees and anatomy-based evolutionary trees led to a major article in Nature that reported that “disparities between molecular and morphological trees” lead to “evolution wars” because “Evolutionary trees constructed by studying biological molecules often don’t resemble those drawn up from morphology.”¹⁹ The article’s revelation of the disparities between molecular and morphological phylogenies was striking:

When biologists talk of the ‘evolution wars’, they usually mean the ongoing battle for supremacy in American schoolrooms between Darwinists and their creationist opponents. But the phrase could also be applied to a debate that is raging within systematics. On one side stand traditionalists who have built evolutionary trees from decades of work on species' morphological characteristics. On the other lie molecular systematists, who are convinced that comparisons of DNA and other biological molecules are the best way to unravel the secrets of evolutionary history.

[…]

So can the disparities between molecular and morphological trees ever be resolved? Some proponents of the molecular approach claim there is no need. The solution, they say, is to throw out morphology, and accept their version of the truth. “Our method provides the final conclusion about phylogeny,” claims Okada. Shared ancestry means a genetic relationship, the molecular camp argues, so it must be better to analyse DNA and the proteins it encodes, rather than morphological characters that can end up looking similar as a result of convergent evolution in unrelated groups, rather than through common descent. But morphologists respond that convergence can also happen at the molecular level, and note there is a long history of systematists making large claims based on one new form of evidence, only to be proved wrong at a later date.²⁰

Likewise, a review article in the journal Bioessays reported that despite a vast increase in the amount of data since Darwin’s time, “our ability to reconstruct accurately the tree of life may not have improved significantly over the last 100 years,” and that, “[d]espite increasing methodological sophistication, phylogenies derived from morphology, and those inferred from molecules, are not always converging on a consensus.”²¹ Strikingly, an article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution concluded, “the wealth of competing morphological, as well as molecular proposals [of] the prevailing phylogenies of the mammalian orders would reduce [the mammalian tree] to an unresolved bush, the only consistent clade probably being the grouping of elephants and sea cows.”²²

Hillis claimed there is “overwhelming correspondence” between anatomical and molecular phylogenies, but he seems to be inaccurately stating the facts on this matter. The truth is that there is great incongruence between these two different types of phylogenies, and that this incongruence is a huge issue within own his field of systematics. Why did Hillis misrepresent this information to the TSBOE?

References Cited:
[7.] Graham Lawton, "Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life," New Scientist (January 21, 2009) (emphasis added).

[8.] Graham Lawton, "Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life," New Scientist (January 21, 2009).

[9.] W. Ford Doolittle, "Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree," Science, Vol. 284:2124-2128 (June 25, 1999).

[10.] Graham Lawton, "Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life," New Scientist (January 21, 2009).

[11.] Antonis Rokas, Dirk Krueger, Sean B. Carroll, "Animal Evolution and the Molecular Signature of Radiations Compressed in Time," Science, Vol. 310:1933-1938 (Dec. 23, 2005).

[12.] Carl Woese "The Universal Ancestor," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 95:6854-9859 (June, 1998) (emphasis added).

[13.] Antonis Rokas & Sean B. Carroll, "Bushes in the Tree of Life," PLOS Biology, Vol 4(11): 1899-1904 (Nov., 2006) (internal citations and figures omitted).

[14.] Antonis Rokas & Sean B. Carroll, "Bushes in the Tree of Life," PLOS Biology, Vol 4(11): 1899-1904 (Nov., 2006) (internal citations and figures omitted).

[15.] Antonis Rokas & Sean B. Carroll, "Bushes in the Tree of Life," PLOS Biology, Vol 4(11): 1899-1904 (Nov., 2006) (internal citations and figures omitted).

[16.] Lynn Margulis, “The Phylogenetic Tree Topples,” American Scientist, Vol 94 (3) (May-June, 2006).

[17.] Patterson et al., "Congruence between Molecular and Morphological Phylogenies," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol 24, pg. 179 (1993) (emphasis added).

[18.] Masami Hasegawa, Jun Adachi, Michel C. Milinkovitch, "Novel Phylogeny of Whales Supported by Total Molecular Evidence," Journal of Molecular Evolution, Vol. 44, pgs. S117-S120 (Supplement 1, 1997) (emphasis added).

[19.] Trisha Gura, “Bones, Molecules or Both?,” Nature, Vol. 406:230-233 (July 20, 2000) (emphasis added).

[20.] Trisha Gura, “Bones, Molecules or Both?,” Nature, Vol. 406:230-233 (July 20, 2000).

[21.] Matthew A. Wills, "The tree of life and the rock of ages: are we getting better at estimating phylogeny," BioEssays, Vol. 24: 203-207 (2002), reporting on the findings of Michael J. Benton, "Finding the tree of life: matching phylogenetic trees to the fossil record through the 20th century," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, Vol. 268: 2123-2130 (2001).

[22.] W. W. De Jong, “Molecules remodel the mammalian tree,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol 13(7):270-274 (July 7, 1998).

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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

Dr. Caroline Crocker, whose story was told in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, sent me the following report on a recent lecture by Michael Shermer, who also appeared briefly in Expelled to say that scientists who doubt Darwin are not discriminated against in academia. Dr. Crocker and others of course are proof that he is wrong.

I recently attended a lecture by Michael Shermer at the UCSD Biological Science Symposium (4/2/09). His title was, “Why Darwin Matters,” but his topic was mostly religion. He started by defining science as looking for natural explanations for natural phenomena and said that his purpose was to “debunk the junk and expose sloppy thinking.” So, I must go on to the content of the lecture—or lack of it.

What a disappointment! I was hoping to hear some reasoned thoughts, maybe even something to challenge my way of thinking. Instead we were subjected to

an evening of slapstick comedy, cheap laughs and the demolition of strawmen. Lots of cartoons, a film of the evolution of Homer Simpson, photos of the Creation Science Museum with lots of ridicule. I wondered if the 1500 people listening registered how their intelligence was being insulted since Shermer obviously did not consider them capable of logical thinking—only bully-like laughter.

Or, is it possible that Shermer actually is incapable of understanding what intelligent design (ID) theorists have been trying to explain for so long? His characterization of ID was that the theory says, 1) It looks designed, 2) We can’t think how it was designed naturally, 3) Therefore it was designed supernaturally. (God of the gaps.) Okay everyone, laugh at the stupid ID theorists.

Shermer then went on to give the example of Sir Isaac Newton who assumed that the planets line up in a plane because God made things this way. Shermer told his audience that ID theorists do not talk about this because science has now discovered a natural explanation for this phenomenon.

But, is that what ID says? Not at all. Rather, ID says that it is possible to detect the action of intelligence in the world by the presence of two features: complexity and specificity. Our experience with the world shows that if something that is highly complex and ALSO conforms to a pre-existing pattern or contains information, then it designed by an intelligent being. Therefore, when we see these features in naturally-occurring objects, we posit that an intelligent being may have played a part in designing them. Science of course cannot speculate about the identity of this being. So, what about Newton’s planets? Well, they do not exhibit much complexity and lining up is not exactly spectacular specificity. Perhaps this is why ID theorists do not talk about Newton’s ideas?

Shermer then made a very quick foray into explaining away some of the concerns that ID theorists have with regard to evolution. The Cambrian explosion and lack of transitional forms in the fossil record were addressed by saying that the Cambrian period was actually quite long. Also many of the transitional forms had soft bodies—and anyway, we do have some transitional forms, like Ambulocetus. Irreducible complexity was quickly dismissed by a slide showing a bird with wings that are not used for flying and pictures of a mousetrap with fewer than all of its parts. He did not attempt an explanation of how it would work. Shermer did not explain specified complexity, possibly because he did understand the concept.

After this, Shermer began to air his philosophical and theological ignorance (yes, in a science lecture). I was astonished at how a Darwinist who complains about mixing science and religion spent most of his time at the Biological Science Symposium talking about religion. Especially when he made a point that he is not opposed to discussing religion, just not in science class. One is forced to wonder at the duplicity of his actions. Shermer repeatedly complained that his evaluation of the design seen in nature is that it is not intelligent. For example, why would a designer cause the eye to see upside down and backwards? Obviously, Shermer could have done it better. So, his argument, if I am understanding him, is that if something is designed badly, it was not designed. Hmm, does that apply to faulty appliances, automobiles, and even rockets? Those that malfunction were not designed but evolved?

Then Dr. Shermer came to the question that children always ask, “Well, if God made everything, who made God?” The answer they were hoping for was, “Oh, yeah, you’re the first one to think of that. Hmm, guess He doesn’t exist.” But this is an age-old question, almost the pons asinorum of philosophy and theology. An immense sophisticated literature has been developed around the First Cause question, and Shermer acted like he’d never heard of it.

Some of my more astute readers may have noticed that this is definitely not science, as Shermer defined it, but he did not seem to realize. He said that all good scientists would ask who made the designer, and who made him and so on, seemingly forgetting the first few sentences of his lecture where he said that science looks only for natural explanations for natural phenomena.

And the lecture went on—from bad to worse. Now, Shermer began to throw in a few mistakes. For example, he claimed that all ID advocates believe in the God of Abraham and are motivated by wanting to share Jesus. His evidence? Shermer claims that after two beers all ID advocates admit that they are Christians (the closet variety I presume). Is it possible that he has never heard of Sir Anthony Flew who is no longer an atheist, but is certainly not a Christian? Or, what about Dr. David Berlinski, Ben Stein or Dr. Steve Fuller, none of whom would claim to be Christians, not all of whom are even theists. Of more concern is that it would appear that Shermer is saying that having a religious belief makes one unable to think scientifically. This is dangerous ground, Dr. Shermer, since atheism has also been defined as a religion (7th Circuit Court of Appeals)! My assessment of last night’s talk is that Shermer’s atheism (he calls it skepticism) is even evangelistic.

The talk was concluded with a consideration of the Anthropic Principle or the fact that the universe is fine-tuned for life. Shermer admitted that he has been given cause for thought by six key physical constants and the narrow range of values that enable our existence, but then went on to dismiss their significance by suggesting the possibility of parallel universes, which also “evolve.” He admitted that there is no evidence for a multiverse, but claimed that since religion is “anthropocentrically absurd” we need to “climb to a higher plane of humanity and humility” and embrace “sciensuality” and buy his book.

Are you convinced? I am not.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 6:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There's an interesting column in today's Vancouver Sun, "'Scientism' infects Darwinian debates An unflinching belief that science can explain everything about evolution becomes its own ideology". Interesting because it is rare to see sceintism called out and criticized, especially by someone who shows his own high level of faith in evolution.

According to the author, Douglas Todd:

There are two major obstacles to a rich public discussion on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and what it means to all of us.

The most obvious obstacle is religious literalism, which leads to Creationism. It's the belief the Bible or other ancient sacred texts offer the first and last word on how humans came into existence.

The second major barrier to a rewarding public conversation about the impact of evolution on the way we understand the world is not named nearly as much.

It is "scientism."

Scientism is the belief that the sciences have no boundaries and will, in the end, be able to explain everything in the universe. Scientism can, like religious literalism, become its own ideology.

The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology and Ethics defines scientism as "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of natural science to be applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities)."

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Julie Berwald, a freelance textbook writer who testified against critical thinking on evolution last week before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE), has written an inaccurate and unhappy report at the highly partisan Wired Magazine website about the Texas Science Standards hearing on March 25. According to Berwald’s account, she stated:

"It's really hard to come up with scientifically based weaknesses to evolution." The intelligent-design supporters exploded in protest.

The chairman banged his gavel repeatedly. "I will not have that kind of outburst in this room. If it happens again, I'll clear the room and we'll only have the testifiers in here. I'll do it!"

This was Berwald's first bluff. The problem is that Berwald, whose attention during her testimony was apparently fixed on the Board and not the audience, is completely wrong about who was actually responsible for the outburst. What she heard was in fact no “protest,” but the evolution lobby cooing in support of her statement. I was sitting (totally quietly) at the back of the room observing what happened and clearly saw that the evolution lobby (which was congregated in a section directly to my right) was loudly praising her testimony—it was no outburst from the “intelligent-design supporters.” To verify my memory, I checked with one of the professional biologists who testified in favor of teaching weaknesses in evolution, who was sitting near the evolution lobby. He confirmed that the outburst came from “all the green shirted evolutionists” who were sitting all around him (the evolution lobby wore green shirts as a little PR stunt).

Berwald’s Bluff #2: Does Virtually All Biology Research Require Evolution?

That wasn’t the only misrepresentation from Berwald. She neglected to mention the part of her testimony where she asserted that “evolution plays a fundamental role in understanding all biological processes … further, very little in biology is testable except in the light of evolution.” This bluff was difficult to take seriously, because even if you’re an evolutionist, it should be pretty obvious that it’s easy to do a lot of biology research without considerations of evolution.

Berwald’s second bluff was not lost on other members of the TSBOE, who then proceeded to ask some of the Ph.D. biologists who testified in favor of teaching the weaknesses in evolution about whether evolution was necessary to do biology research. Ray Bohlin, who spent years studying evolution in graduate school, was pressed with this question:

Terri Leo (board member): “We heard testimony that it’s very hard to find evidence that doesn’t support Darwin’s theory, and … We have also heard the comment that very little in biology is testable except for in the light of evolution. Do you feel that evolution is necessary for all of your research? …”

Dr. Bohlin: “I’d be willing to say that virtually 90, 95% of all molecular and cell biology, which is where my Ph.D. is in, does not require evolution whatsoever. The research I did on a complex in the electron transport chain in mitochondria, didn’t require evolutionary background to do that research and to do that project. I think that when you go into areas of evolutionary biology when we’re looking for how things change over time, there’s a lot of what we could call evolution. Natural selection and mutat[ion]—those things are necessary and those processes need to be understood. But when we’re trying to discover how things work, what is the genome about, how does the genome function, what’s this junk DNA stuff, we don’t need the evolutionary hypothesis to investigate that. We might look to see how it impacts evolution, evolutionary theory, the data and the information we receive. But you don’t need evolution to do the research.”

Dobzhansky spoke for himself. … If you look at scientific textbooks and ask the question, if the theory of evolution were not in that textbook, what material would not make sense? And I would say that very little, if any, would not make sense. In fact, I think that anybody who learned the material apart from Darwin in those textbooks could go on to be successful scientists, veterinarians, and medical doctors. The theory of evolution contributes very little to an understanding of basic science and scientific research. The researchers I have known over the time—it’s hard to get them into a discussion about evolution because they are more interested in dealing with the molecular mechanisms that are going on in nature in living cells. So I would say that there is very little that you cannot fully understand apart from the theory of evolution. (emphasis added)

Berwald’s Bluff #3: According to Berwald, Ph.D. Biologists Who Doubt Evolution Aren’t “Scientists”

Berwald’s most egregious error came when she wrote: “What makes this debate so heated? In the hearing room, when creationists bring up weaknesses in evolution, scientists are baffled.” Ignoring her inappropriate use of the “creationist” label, apparently professor Berwald doesn’t consider the Ph.D. biologists who testified at the hearing in support of teaching weaknesses in evolution—Ph.D.s from places like Rice University (Sara Kolb Hicks), University of Georgia (Don Ewert), University of Texas Dallas (Ray Bohlin), and Texas A & M (Wade Warren)—to be “scientists.” This is how Texas evolutionists bluff to the public.

Near the end of her testimony, Berwald told the TSBOE that they shouldn’t want someone like her writing about “weaknesses” in evolution in biology textbooks. You know what? Dr. Berwald was absolutely right: Anyone who cannot even extend to her colleagues who hold Ph.D.s in biology and doubt evolution the basic courtesy of recognizing that they are “scientists” is not capable of treating evolution objectively in a biology textbook.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Nobody but a pedant enjoys being pedantic. But putting Darwinist experts in their place, particularly those who testified before the Texas State Board of Education, requires pointing out in detail their misleading simplifications of the fields in which they are supposed to be expertly qualified. Discovery staff have carefully combed the testimony of Professors David Hillis and Ronald Wetherington, finding numerous significant instances of egregious falsehood. Making this clear puts one in danger of seeming pedantic.

But it’s important, in part because we hereby challenge Hillis and Wetherington to defend their statements, in light of the detailed and devastating analyses that are now available online here and here. Of course, they won’t respond, nor, I guess, will anyone in the Darwin Lobby. Which tells you about all you need to know.

As discussed in Discovery Institute's rebuttal to Wetherington's January 21 testimony before the Texas State Board, his simplifications are as gross and unprofessional as those of Hillis. He reminds me of the Monty Python sketch “How to Do It,” where three smiley-faced presenters explain in under a minute and a half “how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first,” explains John Cleese, “here’s Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.”

The whole issue before the Board was whether high school students deserve to be made aware of the debates in biology that go to the heart of whether Darwinian theory is remotely plausible anymore. A lot is at stake in those debates — nothing less than what it means to be human — so not skimping on the details would seem to be the appropriate course. This is not about obscure academic infighting. Yet again and again, Wetherington, like Hillis, assured the Texas Board that it was it all very simple and clear, there is no debate, it’s all been settled. Or as Cleese explains flute playing, “Well here we are. You blow there and you move your fingers up and down here.”

Dr. Wetherington is an anthropologist at Southern Methodist University. His field is human evolution, so he ought to know about that subject. Yet when asked, he bluffed about how human origins are graced by “arguably the most complete sequence of fossil succession of any mammal in the world. No gaps. No lack of transitional fossils. … So when people talk about the lack of transitional fossils or gaps in the fossil record, it absolutely is not true.”

But according to authorities in his own field, it absolutely is true. Wetherington rattled off three supposed transitional fossil species, which no doubt impressed those on the Board who wanted to be impressed. However one of those, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, is dismissed by leading scientists as “the skull of a female gorilla.” Another, Ardipithecus, is called a hominid based on a handful of teeth.

Regarding S. tchadensis, the journal Nature judged that if accepted as a hominid, “then it plays havoc with the tidy model of human origins.” As for Ardipithecus, paleoanthropologist Tim White calls the period in which it, or rather its teeth, emerged “a black hole in the fossil record.” As recently as 2004, evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr candidly discussed the enormous gap in the record of human origins: “The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap. How can we explain this seeming saltation? Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time-honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative.” In 2000, a University of Michigan study aptly described a “big bang theory” of human origins, noting that “[t]he first members of early Homo sapiens are really quite distinct from their australopithecine predecessors and contemporaries.”

Wetherington was equally simplistic and Python-esque in dismissing the extraordinary difficulty of evolving an eye, even from a preexisting light-sensitive patch. The book he recommended that purportedly solves the problem of the eye is Francisco Ayala’s Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, which laughably simplifies what eye-evolution would entail: “Further steps -- the deposition of pigment around the spot, configuration of cells into a cuplike shape, thickening of the epidermis leading to the development of a lens, development of muscles to move the eyes and nerves to transmit optical signals to the brain -- gradually led to the highly developed eyes of vertebrates and celphalopod (octopuses and squids) and to the compound eyes of insects.”

The absurdity of the characterization, in the context of Richard Dawkins’ discussion of the same point, has been painfully noted by Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and others. Even a Darwinian evolutionary biologist such as Sean B. Carroll warns about “simple” eyespots: “But do not be fooled by these eyes’ simple construction and appearance. They are built with and use many of the ingredients used in fancier eyes.”

Wetherington chose to be fooled and to fool those of his listeners who also wished to be fooled. So too in his reassuring noises about how as we have learned more about genetics and biochemistry, “evolution by natural selection became an even better and even more complete explanation by utilizing and incorporating genetics.” Of course the opposite is true. The more we know about those fields, the less convincing Darwinism becomes.

Not only notorious intelligent design theorists say so. In 2000, the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics described the “mystery [of] how the undirected process of mutation, combined with natural selection, has resulted in the creation of thousands of new proteins with extraordinarily diverse and well-optimized functions. This problem is particularly acute for tightly integrated molecular systems that consist of many interacting parts.” In 2001, biochemist Franklin Harold agreed that “there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”

This year in the journal Genetics, a pair of Cornell mathematicians took issue with Michael Behe on various points but conceded the time scale needed to produce a particular coordinated pair of mutations would vastly exceed the period during which humans are thought to have evolved — 100 million years plus versus only a few million years.

The more we know about genetics, the more we must, if we are honest with ourselves, doubt Darwin.

I’m not calling Wetherington a deliberate liar. Rather, it seems obvious that men and women who invest themselves in their work over a lifetime may come to tell lies to themselves without ever knowing it, in order to maintain crucial fictions on which their life’s work depends. It’s human nature.

But calling Wetherington sloppy with his facts — yes, that we can do. Like Hillis, he blithely declared that regarding Behe’s irreducible complexity, “That debate is over,” notwithstanding the variety of mainstream publications that have been debating against, and on behalf of, Behe since Darwin’s Black Box came out in 1996. Discovery’s analysis of Wetherington’s testimony reproduces a list of these publications.

On much simpler factual points, Wetherington got things wrong too. He claimed that the term “missing link” is no longer used in scientific journals. But it is used, in places like Science, Nature, Paleobiology, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and elsewhere.

He claimed that the Cambrian explosion took place over “at least 25 million years, perhaps longer.” But more distinguished scientists peg that timeframe at under 10 million years. He dismissed the significance of that great explosion of animal phyla as being dominated by two phyla. But no, 19 out of 28 phyla appeared. He regaled Board members with the information that rodents form a taxonomic class. But no, they form an order. He noted that Hox genes require no mutations “to change from one kind of animal to another” — a piece of information that would startle Darwinian biologists.

And so on. Look, I know this may sound like pedantry but the guy was put up as an expert and he plainly misrepresented the very facts on which his claim to expertise was based. This is, alas, not an isolated incident, as the case of David Hillis demonstrates.

It’s fortunate indeed, and a credit to skeptical laymen, that a majority of Board members were not fooled — as the National Center for Science Education, bless their hearts, has been sorrowfully lamenting.

For more information, please see An Analysis of the Expert Testimony of Prof. Ronald Wetherington before the Texas State Board of Education on January 21, 2009

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 2:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last fall, John West blogged about a press release from Texans for Better Science Education (TBSE) about Chris Comer's lawsuit against the Texas Education Agency (TEA), a lawsuit which has been highly touted by the NCSE and other evolution lobbyists as purported evidence of discrimination against evolutionists. They claimed that Comer was "expelled for real," and the national newsmedia uncritically bought the story hook, line and sinker. As TBSE's timeline of Chris Comer's disciplinary problems observed, "News reports of Comer’s departure have parroted the claim that Comer was 'fired' because she opposed teaching 'creationism' and 'intelligent design' and supported evolution." The reality is that Comer was not "fired" and her resignation came because (as West put it), "TEA documents ... show that Comer had a long history of disciplinary problems at her agency that had nothing to do with evolution." TBSE rightly observed that "[i]f Darwinists want to create a scandal and invent a martyr for their cause, they appear to have picked the wrong case." This week Comer's lawsuit was dismissed, further showing the baselessness of her claims of discrimination.

When I first read the complaint in the Comer case, I was struck by how Comer equivocated over the meaning of the word "neutral." Comer claimed that the TEA illegally required her to remain "neutral" on creationism, when in reality the TEA's policy simply required its staff to remain "neutral" on unsettled curricular matters (regardless of the subject matter in question). The former type of "neutrality" is legal neutrality and is violated only when there is a lack of religious neutrality, whereas the latter type of neutrality simply means avoiding taking a position on an unsettled curricular policy. The latter type should be considered distinct, as far as the law is concerned, from questions about religious "neutrality." Thus Comer's entire lawsuit was based upon equivocating over the legal meaning of "neutrality," conflating the TEA's benign (and statutorily mandated) policy requiring staff "neutrality" on unsettled curricular questions, with the constitutional requirement of religious "neutrality."

Thankfully, the judge in this lawsuit saw through Comer's fallacious arguments. Here are some excerpts from the ruling dismissing Comer's case:

The Agency's neutrality policy has different origins and effects from the balanced-treatment approach struck down in Aguillard. Agency staff must remain neutral on contested curriculum issues, not only creationism and evolution. The policy is reasonable, given the elected body the Agency supports. The Agency supports 15 elected Board members who often disagree among themselves regarding curriculum issues and who make final decisions regarding such disputed issues. Agency staff, by virtue of their job description, must avoid acting in ways that favor any particular Board member's position. (p. 15)

[...]

Comer repeatedly asserts that the neutrality policy treats creationism like science, but it only treats creationism as science to the extent that Agency staff may not take a public position on it. Given the reasons for the Agency's neutrality policy, Agency staff must remain neutral on disputed curriculum issues regardless of a particular position's merit or constitutionality. The State "readily agree[s] that if the Board chooses to consider including some kind of recognition of alternatives to evolutionary theory in the biology curriculum, it will be entering perilous waters", but that is the Board's voyage to weather. (p. 16)

[...]

In sum, Comer provides no summary-judgment proof raising an issue of material fact regarding whether the Agency's neutrality policy has a primary effect of advancing or endorsing religion. As a matter of law, the Agency's neutrality policy, if it advances religion at all, only does so incidentally. Further, a reasonable observer of the neutrality policy would not believe the Agency endorses religion through the policy. Because the neutrality policy does not violate the Establishment Clause, all of Comer's claims fail, and the Court will grant summary judgment in favor of the Agency. (p. 18)

The truth of the matter is that the Texas Education Agency had very good reasons for being upset at Comer's violation of its neutrality policy on unsettled curriculum questions: TBSE's timeline shows that Comer had violated this policy multiple times during her tenure at the TEA, and some of those instances had nothing to do with evolution. According to TBSE, some of Comer's troubles at the TEA included:

Multiple findings of “insubordination” and “misconduct,”

Reference to possible violation of the Texas Penal Code over payments made to Comer from entities receiving TEA money under contracts she administered.

Comer received three separate disciplinary letters spanning at least eight separate incidents. Seven of these eight incidents had nothing to do with evolution.

Comer had been disciplined and charged with “insubordination” because she repeatedly disregarded the TEA’s strict rule that staff must remain neutral and silent regarding unsettled curricular questions. Comer was charged with insubordination for violating this rule on issues that had nothing to do with evolution. In her last year alone at the TEA, Comer was found by superiors to be guilty of “insubordination” or “misconduct” on three separate occasions, including one incident where she disparaged the TEA leadership publicly.

(TBSE Press Release on Chris Comer case)

What do we call a lawsuit from an ousted employee with a history of disciplinary problems, which is then touted to the national media as evidence of discrimination, when the entire lawsuit is based upon equivocation, misrepresentation, and a stifling of the employee's less-than-exemplary history of disciplinary problems? We call it a publicity stunt. (In this case, a publicity stunt that was carefully timed to distract from all the bona fide discrimination against Darwin-skeptics that was being revealed via the release of the Expelled documentary.) Thankfully, a clear-thinking judge has now tossed this publicity stunt from court.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone knows the scene in Annie Hall. Woody Allen as Alvy Singer is standing in line to see a movie and a pretentious twit of a Columbia professor behind him is going on in a loud voice about Marshall McLuhan. Alvy first berates the guy — “Aren’t you ashamed to pontificate like that? And the funny part of it is, Marshall McLuhan, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan!” Then from behind a movie poster he pulls McLuhan himself, who agrees with Alvy: “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!”

Alvy then turns to the camera and wishes, “Boy, if life were only like this!”

Sometimes it is. This is a brief series about Darwinian “experts” who arouse the admiration of people who don’t know any better, and don't particularly want to know, but who then turn out to have their facts all wrong. The first illustration is Professor David Hillis of the University of Texas. In his testimony to the Texas State Board of Education about teaching evolution, he referred to the research of Ralph Seelke, a University of Wisconsin biologist.

Seelke’s work tests evolution’s power to produce two necessary mutations in a case where the mutations, to produce a beneficial function, need to happen pretty much simultaneously. Realistically, it can’t happen. He finds that this represents an insuperable obstacle to evolution’s getting its job done. In his testimony, Hillis replied to a question from Board member Pat Hardy, with her touching faith in experts: “I was just curious about Dr. Seelke’s research. How does that demonstrate the weakness of evolution?"

Hillis answered that “Well, I’m very glad you asked that. There’s nothing in that that you could construe as being a weakness of evolution.” He went on to assure Ms. Hardy that another biologist, James Bull, has worked it all out, showing that “simultaneously selecting two things at once, has been achieved multiple times in many experimental conditions. So the fact that [Seelke] was unable to get it can hardly be construed as a weakness in evolution. It does occur — you can do it — it happens in real world organisms.”

What was that about bull?

Not long after, Ralph Seelke stepped out from behind the movie poster. In a polite yet devastating memo to the TSBE, he showed how little Hillis understood about either his or Bull’s work:

Dr. Hillis is an articulate devotee of evolution, but in this case he is wrong. In fact, there is a general consensus that a requirement for two independent events is a barrier to evolution. And, while Dr. Bull has made important contributions to our understanding of evolution, his work has not addressed the issue of multiple independent steps being a barrier to evolution.

An illustration of this that Seelke mentions is antiviral drug cocktails used to treat HIV infections. The cocktails, comprising three drugs working simultaneously, take advantage precisely of the HIV virus’s key weakness — its general inability, for all the virus’s notoriously high rate of mutation, to produce three separate protective mutations at the same time. To save lives, medicine here is using its implicit knowledge of evolution’s inadequacy.

Which is ironic because another occasion for bluffing in Hillis’s testimony, not related to Ralph Seelke, came in his pumping up the importance of evolution in developing medical and agricultural technologies. Kids have to be instructed in Darwinian evolution, and only in Darwinian evolution, otherwise we’ll starve and die of disease.

It’s all scare talk, of course, as even some honest Darwinists admit. Thus in 2006 in the journal Nature, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne frankly told the truth, that

evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of "like begets like."

Actually, Discovery Institute staff have gone over Hillis’s testimony carefully and found numerous instances of bluffing, evasion, error, and distortion. The document is worth reading in its entirety. One wishes that Board member Pat Hardy had taken the time to read through it. If she had done so, it would have shattered her faith in experts.

Some highlights include:

Hillis claimed to be a “world’s leading exper[t] on the tree of life” and pretended that there is “overwhelming agreement” about the shape of the evolutionary tree based on protein and DNA sequencing. Uh, not true. The same day Hillis testified, the journal New Scientist ran a cover story under the title “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life.” Why? Because, genes and proteins tell multiple contradictory stories about the shape of the purported tree.

Add to this the different stories told by morphology and fossils, and you’ve got a hopeless mess of a tree on your hands, a tree that has been run through a sawmill. As the Journal of Molecular Evolution summarized, “That molecular evidence typically squares with morphological patterns is a view held by many biologists, but interestingly, by relatively few systematists. Most of the latter know that the two lines of evidence may often be incongruent.”

Hillis tried to claim that the Discovery Institute had misrepresented the briefness of the Cambrian explosion timeframe. Instead of taking place over 5 to 10 million years, said Hillis, it occurred “over many tens or millions of years.” No. Mainstream estimates place the duration at less than 10 million years. Hillis also claimed the Cambrian was no huge deal anyway, since “most of the major phyla…appear later than that.” As Marshall McLuhan would say, “How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!” Biology and zoology textbooks agree that 70 percent (19 out of 28) of known living animal phyla indeed appeared in that amazingly brief space of time.

At another point, Hillis sought first to dodge a question about the origin of information in DNA, claiming he couldn’t understand the question, then he realized he did understand the question but — no problem! He maintained that lab experiments have shown how information in RNA could have arisen. Problem is, those experiments (called SELEX) rely at every step on artificial, intelligent selection by researchers to do their magic. But explaining how information arose without intelligent design is exactly the problem facing origin of life research — a most daunting dilemma.

Hillis attacked Discovery Institute for suggesting that new revelations about “Junk DNA” cast doubt on Darwinian theory. But the familiar bogeyman of DI has hardly been the only source of this view. A paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences made the same point, arguing that “neo-Darwinian ‘narratives’ have been the primary obstacle to elucidating the effects of these enigmatic components of chromosomes,” and therefore, “a new conceptual framework is needed.”

Hillis blithely claimed that “irreducible complexity” and Michael Behe’s articulation of that powerful challenge to Darwinian theory has been “refuted” and “rejected by the scientific community at large.” Where does Hillis get this stuff, the sheer nerve? Peer-reviewed publications in a variety of journals and books have respectfully elaborated upon and discussed Behe’s idea. Some of those journals and books including Dynamical Genetics, the Annual Review of Genetics, Compositional Evolution (MIT Press), Bioremediation, Biodiversity and Bioavailibility, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Physics of Life Reviews, etc., etc.

Hillis tried to dodge the importance of challenges to natural selection by claiming that, well, after all, “no one is arguing that natural selection is the only thing that accounts for all of life’s diversity.” So natural selection doesn’t need to carry all the groaning weight that Darwin critics attribute to it. This minimizes the prospect of its imminent collapse. But countless Darwinians affirm the mechanism’s centrality to their prized theory — as, for example, the authors of the leading textbook Genetics do when they write, “The driving force of adaptive evolution is natural selection, which is a consequence of hereditary differences among organisms in their ability to survive and reproduce in the prevailing environment.” Hillis’s own textbook Life: The Science of Biology says much the same, in its 2008 edition, on page 497. Maybe he’d like to review what he and his co-authors wrote.

Hillis sweepingly claimed that 100 scientific articles gathered for the Texas Board’s perusal, demonstrating Darwinism’s weaknesses, showed nothing of the sort. After all, he claimed, the articles’ authors were all “ardent evolutionary biologists.” No. You could hardly say that, honestly, about tough-minded Darwin doubters like Philip Skell, D.W. Snoke, John A. Davison, Scott A. Minnich, Granville Sewell, and many others among the authors of the research articles.

Who knows what David Hillis with his MacArthur Foundation “Genius” prize was thinking as he rattled off one untruth or half-truth after another before the Texas Board. My guess is that the right word for what he was doing is “bluffing.” He made it all sound so simple — a straight narrative line for those on the Board, and in life, who like their narrative lines to be straight and simple. Untruth as a collaborative effort between the deceiver and the deceived.

Tomorrow, another bluffer, anthropologist Ronald Wetherington of SMU.

For more details, see An Analysis of the Expert Testimony of Prof. David Hillis before the Texas State Board of Education on January 21, 2009

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 5:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well, sort of.

From Biologic's Perspectives:

Researchers at Biologic Institute have stunned the scientific community with the announcement today of a fully functioning automobile capable of replicating itself. Although simple autocatalytic versions of self-replication have previously been demonstrated, the complexity of the system described today—complete with GPS navigation, DVD player, and onboard WiFi—has taken everyone by surprise. In the minds of many, this discovery has forever altered the once fundamental distinction between life and non-life.
...
According to lead scientist Otto Cloner, “In the right kind of environment the process of self-replication just takes off. I still get goose bumps watching it.” The prototype self-replicator is a slightly modified version of the popular Jeep Wrangler—unmanned. When just one of these self-propelled prototypes is placed in an appropriate environment (one lacking any other self-propelled vehicles) magic happens. Or so it seems. Dr. Cloner himself takes the more modest view that “the replicative mechanism is really quite simple when properly understood”.

Despite the April fun, there's a serious point which Biologic director Douglas Axe makes clear:

Believe it or not there’s a serious point here having to do with scientific studies of self-replication and the origin of life. Consider the recent Science paper by Tracey Lincoln and Gerald Joyce. The paper describes RNA chains about 70 nucleotides long that produce copies of themselves when placed in the right kind of mixture. The authors use the term “cross-replication” to describe this because they found that it works best with two distinct RNA chains, each of which catalyzes formation of the other one from supplied precursors. But since either of these RNAs could potentially kick the process off (by forming the other), much of the commentary on this widely publicized study refers to it as an example of self-replication.

Posted by Anika Smith at 7:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)