When I wrote earlier on the Stalinist erasure of John McWhorter’s interview with biochemist Michael Behe on Bloggingheads.tv, I began by saying, “Wow.” I will say that again: “Wow.” Why wow? Because Bloggingheads editor-in-chief Robert Wright was, as I’d suspected, out of the shop when it happened -- on a silent meditation retreat, in fact -- and on returning he reversed his staff’s Orwellian move and put the interview back up. Way to go, Mr. Wright!

There are three orders of business here. First, congratulations to Robert Wright, whose very interesting book The Evolution of God I’ve commented on before. He writes sensibly in explanation of what happened, making clear that the censoring of Behe was indefensible without publicly condemning his subordinates, which would have been ungracious:

This diavlog has now been re-posted. The decision to remove it from the site was made by BhTV staff while I was away and unavailable for consultation. (Yes, even in a wired world it's possible to take yourself off the grid. Here's how I did it.) It's impossible to say for sure whether, in the heat of the moment, I would have made a decision different from the staff's decision. But on reflection I've decided that removing this particular diavlog from the site is hard to justify by any general principle that should govern our future conduct. In other words, it's not a precedent I'd want to live with. At the same time, I can imagine circumstances under which a diavlog would warrant removal from the site. So this episode has usefully spurred me and the BhTV staff to try to articulate some rules of the road for this sort of thing. Within a week, the results will be posted, along with some related thoughts on the whole idea behind Bloggingheads.tv, here.

So saying mazal tov to Wright is point one. Point two is that this should be a lesson for him and everyone else, underlining the unthinking prejudice that Darwin-doubters face. Someone at Bloggingheads muzzled McWhorter for allowing a full and friendly presentation of Behe’s ideas on irreducible complexity. The interview went up and then was taken down in the space of about six hours. That’s fast. Not only was the interview erased but sufficient pressure was brought to bear on McWhorter that he wrote, or allowed someone else to write, an apology for conducting the interview in the first place!

Why would he concede so quickly? It can only be that he felt threatened in some way. If he refused, he must have thought, he would lose something of value. Probably something having to do with his livelihood. I can’t imagine he’s afraid of negative comments left on Bloggingheads by anonymous Darwin believers, or by snarky, obscene bloggers like Abigail Smith. (For the record, he did not respond to an email request from me for his own take.)

The lesson is that this is how Darwinism works, intimidating anyone who might publicly dissent. This time there was a Robert Wright to set things right. But as I said before, he stands out from other Darwinists by his open-mindedness. This was a decent thing he did. It’s the exception that proves the rule. The rule is that Darwinism will not tolerate a dialogue, will not accept being questioned.

Point three is that now Wright has ruled that in his shop, it’s not forbidden to question Darwinian evolution, why not let more flowers bloom? Wright is a materialist and thinks a modern scientific outlook necessitates a materialist view. (Maybe he’d put it differently himself.) That’s an opinion worth a serious discussion. It would make for a fascinating conversation. What I’d love to see is a dialogue on Blogginheads between Wright and Stephen Meyer (Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design) or David Berlinski (The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretension) on materialism itself.

Alternatively, more of a debate between Meyer or Berlinski and the Darwinist of Mr. Wright’s choice, if any would dare. How about it, Bob?

Update: Robert Wright on intelligent design, Time magazine, March 11, 2002:

Critics of ID, which has been billed in the press as new and sophisticated, say it's just creationism in disguise. If so it's a good disguise. Creationists believe that God made current life-forms from scratch. The ID movement takes no position on how life got here, and many adherents believe in evolution. Some even grant a role to the evolutionary engine posited by Darwin: natural selection. They just deny that natural selection alone could have driven life all the way from pond scum to us.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 3:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Exactly one hundred years ago leading American paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott (right) was hiking along Burgess Pass in the Canadian Rockies when he found a slab of shale containing fossil crustaceans. His interest piqued, Wolcott made return trips to the Burgess Shale in the following years where he ultimately collected tens of thousands of fossils. Many of these fossils were extraordinarily well-preserved, and they were mysterious. They included strange forms like Anomalocaris, Opabinia, Wiwaxia, and Hallucigenia. These fossils revealed a mystery: like other Cambrian fauna, these strange soft-bodied fossils appeared in the fossil record abruptly, without evolutionary precursors.

Darwin himself was aware of this problem in his own day, writing that the lack of fossil evidence for the evolution of Cambrian trilobites "must at present remain inexplicable; and may be truely urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained." Nearly 150 years after Darwin penned those words, biology textbooks are still observing things like, "Most of the animal phyla that are represented in the fossil record first appear, 'fully formed,' in the Cambrian." Indeed, the striking appearance of animals in the Cambrian explosion is captured in a recent article in Nature article commemorating the 100th anniversary of Wolcott's discovery, stating that "virtually all animal groups alive today were present in Cambrian seas."

The Cambrian seas are now being brought back to life in a new video from Illustra Media titled "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record," set to be released next month. With all the stunning animation and computer graphics we've grown accustomed to enjoying from Illustra, the film tells the story of Wolcott's discovery of the Burgess shale and both the beauty and scientific importance of the fossils he found. It also recounts attempts by paleontologists to explain away the abrupt appearance of major animal groups in the Cambrian explosion and offers the views of scientists who feel the best explanation for the bioinformational explosion recorded in Cambrian rocks is intelligent design.

We'll have more on this film in the next few weeks, but it's a good time to remember Wolcott's important discovery 100 years ago and the challenge it has brought to Darwinian thinking.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads TV, Robert Wright, has re-instated my interview with linguist John McWhorter on that website. Wright was away last week when the brouhaha occurred. It’s good to see that a steady editorial hand is back in charge.

Posted by Michael Behe at 10:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve just been through the weirdest book-related experience I’ve had since a Canadian university professor with a loaded rat trap chased me around after a talk I gave a dozen years ago, threatening to spring it on me. Last week I got the following email bearing the title “Invitation to Appear on Bloggingheads TV” from a senior editor at that site:

Hi, Michael–

I’d like to invite you to appear on Bloggingheads.tv, a web site that hosts video dialogues between journalists, bloggers, and scholars. We have a partnership with the New York Times by which they feature excerpts from some of our shows on their site.

Past guests include prominent thinkers such as Paul Krugman, Paul Ehrlich, Frans de Waal, David Frum, Richard Wrangham, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, and Michael Kinsley.

Here is one of our recent shows, a dialogue between Paul Nelson, of the Discovery Institute, and Ron Numbers, of Wisconsin-Madison:

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/21107

I’m hoping that you might be interested in participating, as well. First-time participants often report how refreshingly unconstrained they find the format—how it lets them present their views with a depth and subtlety not possible on TV or radio. We’d love to have you join us.

If you’re available, please let me know, and we can see about arranging a taping. Thank you for your time.

Everything was arranged for the taping Tuesday afternoon. When the interview started, I was surprised and delighted to learn that McWhorter was actually a fan of mine. He said (I’m paraphrasing here) he loved The Edge of Evolution and wanted the book to become better known. He said that this was one of the few times that he initiated an interview at Bloggingheads. He said he was familiar with criticisms of the book and found them unpersuasive. He said that Darwinism just didn’t seem to him to be able to cut the mustard in explaining life, and he had yet to read a good, detailed explanation for a large evolutionary change. He also said that he had never believed in God, but that EOE got him thinking. In return I summarized my arguments from EOE, talked about protein structure, addressed his objections that intelligent design is “boring” and a scientific dead-end, and so on. At the end of the taping I thought, gee, those folks at Bloggingheads TV are a real nice bunch.

The next day I emailed the Bloggingheads editor to ask when the show would go on. He answered right back that at that very moment it had been activated, and thanks for participating. I clicked the link, and there was the show. I thought I looked older on screen than I am (my beard isn’t really that white), but emailed some friends to let them know the interview was up anyway. That evening I got an email from one of them saying that he couldn’t find the interview — it had been yanked.

Let me emphasize this, dear readers. Here we are living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And yet a web site puts up an interview with an (ahem…) somewhat controversial figure, pulls it back down within hours, erases it, sends it down the memory hole. Why might that be? There would seem to be two possibilities: 1) maybe we aren’t quite as free as we think, or 2) maybe not quite as brave.

I bet on possibility #2. Because of the magic of the internet, it turns out that shortly after the show’s posting the comments section of the site was overrun by “bitterly virulent” (in the words of one principal in this saga) cyber bullies, some murmuring darkly about a grim future for Bloggingheads. After I found out the video was removed I emailed John McWhorter and the editor to ask for an explanation, and John emailed back that he himself requested the video to be pulled because people thought he was too easy on me, which was supposedly contrary to that old Bloggingheads spirit. I find that quite implausible (other shows on the site feature discussions between people who agree on many things). Rather, I suspect the folks at the website weren’t expecting the vitriolic reaction, began to worry about their good names and future employment prospects, pictured themselves banished to a virtual leper colony, panicked, and folded.

Well, mobs, including internet mobs, are scary things, and it’s understandable to panic when they unexpectedly show up at your door. But if you’re going to set up a website to air discussions about contentious issues of the day, you should have a whole lot more guts than displayed by Bloggingheads TV.

For those who want to watch for themselves the interview that made grown men tremble, it can be seen here.

Below is a time-lapse picture of my Bloggingheads interview. I’m the guy on the right.

Posted by Michael Behe at 10:13 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Wow. This is positively Stalinist. Robert Wright's Bloggingheads.tv has abruptly removed an interview it put up hours before in which linguist Dr. John McWhorter talks with biochemist Dr. Michael Behe about Behe's The Edge of Evolution. It's a fascinating exchange. McWhorter starts off by saying that while his own writing has been primarily on race, other subjects interest him more. For example, it would seem, evolution.

He proceeds to reveal startling depths of enthusiasm for Behe, Behe's book, and intelligent design. He talks about how he never previously believed in God and never wanted to until he read Behe, who of course in his own writing steers clear of theological ruminations (apart from noting that he's a Roman Catholic). A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, McWhorter clearly has been thinking and reading about the subject for years. He makes a stimulating, well informed interviewer for Behe.

Sounds good, right? No, bad! Very bad! Bad McWhorter! Apologize now!

OK, I will!

Something evidently happened behind the scenes at Bloggingheads. So the interview was taken down, at which point an anonymous Orwellian Administrator posted as follows:

John McWhorter feels, with regret, that this interview represents neither himself, Professor Behe, nor Bloggingheads usefully, takes full responsibility for same, and has asked that it be taken down from the site. He apologizes to all who found its airing objectionable.

The irony is that Wright himself has stood out from other Darwinists for his honesty and openness. I blogged earlier on his offer of a "grand bargain" of peace between Darwin-believers and Darwin-doubters. Is our part of the bargain then to be seen and not heard? Or maybe not even seen. Wright seems to be away from email. One assumes this happened while he was out of the shop.

Efforts to get a meaningful comment from anyone else at Bloggingheads have so far not panned out. We'll keep you posted.

But OK, let's try to give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you have to be a practicing scientist in a white lab coat to have an opinion on Darwinism? You mean like Behe himself? No, dummy, like McWhorter who's only got a PhD from Stanford in linguistics, taught at Berkeley and Cornell, and wrote a book about the evolution of language! Obviously just another know-nothing creationist.

Or could it be that there's something inappropriate, according to the vaunted Bloggingheads tradition, about an interviewer expressing undisguised friendliness to the subject of his interview? Hmm, compare and contrast with this Bloggingheads interview with atheist Darwinian biologist P.Z. Myers by Abigail Smith, a wide-eyed, giggling University of Oklahoma grad student in a tank top. In one segment, the stolid Myers and flirty Smith commiserate with each other about the misery of having to review "creationist screeds" such as those by Michael Behe. Does this young lady, who also blogs, ever challenge Myers on anything? Maybe I missed it.

Here's her cheerfully obscene take on censoring Behe. It's odd, what she says about the Behe-McWhorter interaction would be far more accurately said about Myers-Smith. We'll leave it at that, since this is a blog for all the family.

Editor's note: This entry is cross-posted at David Klinghoffer Beliefnet's blog, Kingdom of Priests.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 8:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As of late there has been a lot of spittle passed between two camps in the Darwin-sphere. Things are getting really nasty, as so often happens among atheist factions.

On one side are the new atheists: Coyne, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Myers.

On the other side are the … well for want of a better word — the "framing" atheists: Ruse, Mooney, Kirshenbaum, Nisbet, Scott.

With the exception of a few theist Darwinians (an oxymoron, I know) like Ken Miller, the motivation of the combatants seems to be the same: how to best advance an atheist-Darwinian understanding of man and nature. The factions differ on tactics.

The new atheists advocate militancy. They believe:

1) The scientific method is the proper tool for acquiring all knowledge. (Which is self-contradictory, because this positivist assertion is itself a philosophical, not a scientific, inference.)
2) Science, properly understood, proves atheism true (which is, of course, nonsense. The obvious and inescapable inference to formal and final causation in nature — the governance of nature — implies the primacy of a Mind that transcends the natural world).
3) Religion is a scourge on mankind (actually, men have been always and everywhere disposed to evil. The most radical evil known to man has been atheism in power — cf the Reign of Terror, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, etc…).
4) Totalitarian methods, such as denial of positions of leadership based on religious beliefs (e.g. Francis Collins) and expulsion of skeptics (e.g. Expelled), are necessary to advance atheism, particularly in science.

The framing atheists advocate tactical savvy. They believe:

1) The scientific method cannot be applied to non-scientific domains of inquiry.
2) Atheism and Darwinism are true for philosophical reasons, but science is best conducted without explicit reference to metaphysics.
3) The impact of religion on mankind is mixed, and it is imperative to preserve the good (Christian ethics) and exclude the bad (creationism).
4) Totalitarian methods, which are inherent to atheism-in-practice, should be eschewed, for tactical as well as (perhaps) moral reasons.

It’ll be interesting to see how the struggle between the new atheists and the framing atheists works itself out. I have no doubt that the new atheist approach is of considerable help to the ID movement. New atheism is an amalgam of all that is odious about atheism: self-aggrandizing arrogance, ignorance of even the rudiments of philosophy or theology or history, and the inexorable recourse to censorship, professional destruction, and other totalitarian methods. The only way in which the new atheists make the theist job harder in this debate is that the new atheists are so radically explicit that they’re difficult to satirize.

Framing atheists are much more difficult to deal with. They are less likely to be practicing scientists, but they are much savvier about the effective advancement of their ideology. The only way that atheism can advance is if it is implicit in cultural change, not explicit. That is why Darwinism has been atheism’s most powerful engine, bar none. The assertion that there is no God and therefore no teleology in nature is, to thoughtful men, transparent nonsense; it can only be advanced by cloaking it in ‘science’ — ill-defined concepts such as ‘evolution’ serve nicely, and have been remarkably effective.

Framing atheists understand this. Philosopher Michael Ruse is a likeable fellow, but his muddled thinking on the ID-Darwinism debate is no more correct or even coherent than that of his feral new atheist interlocutors. But Ruse does have the sense to see that Darwinism fails when it is marketed as a totalitarian religion, and that the only way to advance Darwinian atheism and materialism in our culture is to be less than explicit about its (quite obvious) characteristics and implications. Chris Mooney, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Matt Nisbet, and Eugenie Scott understand the marketing tactics needed to advance the atheist world-view as well. I suspect that their critique of the new atheists has little to do with principle; if new atheism were clearly successful in advancing its agenda, the framers would be quietly enjoying atheism’s growing ideological hegemony, and would raise no objections at all to its ugly tactics. But the framers see the iceberg approaching, and they realize that atheism will fail if it is explicit and tries to advance using the totalitarian methods inherent to it.

New atheists' candor has forced framing atheists to do salvage work. But what framing atheists need to ask themselves is this: is atheism worth saving? Perhaps the foundation of existence is a Mind, and not mere matter.

Perhaps teleology in nature is real.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I like Robert Wright and enjoyed his recent book The Evolution of God. One thing I value about him is his candor. Thus in his New York Times op-ed on Sunday proposing a "grand bargain" between religion and science (i.e., Darwinism), he can't help but blurt out what would be asked in this bargain even of religious believers who think they've already managed to square God with Darwin. These believers, notably adherents of "theistic evolution," with their minimalist view of the Deity, should be prepared to "scale back their conception of God's role in creation." If I'm reading Bob Wright correctly, even the theism-lite of theistic evolution can be reconciled with a full-bodied Darwinism only at the cost of further "scaling back" any remotely traditional estimation of God's role in the history of life. Have I not said that to you before?

Wright is smart, honest and likable, yet, I think, misses some key points. For one, contrary to the first sentence in his essay, there's no "war" going on between science and religion. There is, however, a struggle between two visions of science -- one that keeps its mind open to evidence of purpose being worked out in detail ("intelligent design") in nature, and one that rules out such evidence on principle (represented by a range of perspectives from theistic evolution to atheist materialism). The former vision asks questions of evolutionary theory that the latter can't answer. How did the first life begin? Where did the information coded initially in the genome come from? Given that this same information is grossly inadequate to explaining the levels of organization that most interest Robert Wright and other believers in evolutionary psychology, namely those levels associated traditionally with the operation of the soul, and given that natural selection has only genetic information to operate on, how can Darwinian theory explain the development of those features of human life that set us apart from animals? For that matter, how does it explain certain levels of organization in animals that simply can't be explained by DNA coding for proteins? In genetic terms, what exactly is being selected?

Over at my Beliefnet blog, we were discussing astrology. On evolutionary psychology and its peculiar parallels with that ancient art, David Berlinski had this to say several years ago in The Weekly Standard:

As so often happens in the sciences, molecular biology has resolved its mysteries by magical thinking. Whatever the process, it is DNA, according to official doctrine, that is still crucial, still in charge, an agency capable of achieving every biological effect. Evolutionary biologists now assign to the human genome full responsibility for altruism, date rape, aggression, eating disorders, and a taste for Mansfield Park. The truth is we do not know how the genome achieves any effect beyond the molecular. Although more powerful by far than astrology, molecular biology is not appreciably different in kind, the various celestial houses having about as much to do with human affairs as the various genes.

Allow me to put the issue in perhaps unexpectedly personal terms. I was adopted and did not meet my birth mother until I was in my mid 20s. She and my adoptive parents have very little in common -- not religion, not background, not country of origin, not tastes. Almost nothing. (You can read more about the story in my first book, The Lord Will Gather Me In.) I inherited from my adoptive parents many culturally rooted preferences. Of course I did. But I inherited from my birth mother other things, as I've come to realize over the years since we developed a relationship. Hair color and complexion. Yeah sure, big deal. But also attitudes, habits, tastes -- not for Mansfield Park but Graham Greene, whom she was reading when pregnant with me, for one example. Just a lot of things that if you're Robert Wright, you'd have to assume were granted through the coded language of DNA, a language that codes for cell components and nothing else.

This is what’s meant by “magical thinking.”

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 8:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

After attending public schools from kindergarten through my masters degree, I learned a few lessons about staying informed while studying a biased and one-sided origins curriculum. My large, inner-city public high school was rich in diversity, and I learned to appreciate a multiplicity of viewpoints and backgrounds. Unfortunately, this diversity did not extend into the biology classroom. There I was told there was one, and only one, acceptable perspective regarding origins: neo-Darwinian theory. As students head back to school this year, I want to share some tips I’ve learned to help students stay informed on this topic:

Tip #1: Never opt out of learning evolution. In fact, learn about evolution every chance you get.

Evolutionary biologist Patrick J. Keeling claims in a recent letter to the editor in the journal Science that, after “a creationist visited my biology class,” his class was promised a lecture in evolution, which “never materialized.” He writes, “I wanted to know what we were missing, and why.”

I can empathize with Keeling. I had an analogous but opposite experience studying evolution in high school. At the end of our stridenly pro-Darwin unit on evolution, my public high school biology teacher promised us a debate, which like Keeling’s evolution lecture, never materialized. Then in college, I took many courses covering evolution at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. But just like my experience in high school, there was virtually no meaningful debate or dialogue over the fundamental questions. Neo-Darwinian evolution was always taken as a given. Exactly like Keeling, I wanted to know what I was missing.

Despite the one-sided nature of my education, I’m glad I studied evolution. In fact, the more evolutionary biology I took, the more I became convinced that the theory was based upon unproven assumptions, contradictory methodologies, and supported weakly by the data.

So my first tip is to never be afraid to study evolution. But when you do study evolution, always think critically and keep yourself proactively informed about a diversity of viewpoints (see tips 2 and 3 below).

Tip #2: Think for yourself, think critically, and question assumptions.

Though my professors rarely (if ever) would acknowledge it, I quickly discovered in college that nearly all evolutionary claims are based mostly upon assumptions. Modern evolutionary theory is assumed to be true, and then the data is interpreted based upon Darwinian assumptions. The challenge for you, the truth-seeking student, is to always try to separate out the raw data from the assumptions that guide interpretation of the data.

Keep your eyes out for circular reasoning. You’ll see that very quickly, evolutionary assumptions become “facts,” and future data must be assembled in order to be consistent with those “facts.”

Realize that evolutionary thinking often employs contradictory logic and inconsistent methodologies. The logic employed to infer evolution in situation A may be precisely the exact opposite of the logic used to infer evolution in situation B. Here are a couple examples:

• Biological similarity between two species implies inheritance from a common ancestor (i.e. vertical common descent) except for when it doesn’t (and then they appeal to processes like "convergent evolution" or "horizontal gene transfer").
• Neo-Darwinism predicts transitional forms may be found, but when they’re not found, that just shows that the transitions took place too rapidly and in populations too small to (statistically speaking) become fossilized.
• Evolutionary genetics predicts the genome will be full of useless junk DNA, except for when we discover function for such “junk” DNA. Then evolution predicts that cells would never retain useless junk DNA in the first place.

When both A and (not) A imply evolution, you know a theory is based upon an inconsistent scientific methodology. Keep an eye out for assumptions and contradictory methodologies, for they abound in evolutionary reasoning.

Finally, you must be careful to always think for yourself. Everyone wants to be "scientifically literate," but the Darwin lobby pressures people by redefining “scientific literacy” to mean “acceptance of evolution” rather than “an independent mind who understands science and forms its own informed opinions.” Evolutionary thinking banks on you letting down your guard and letting its assumptions slip into your thought processes. This is why it’s vital that you think for yourself and question assumptions.

Critical thinking showed me what neo-Darwinian evolution was really all about: a set of questionable assumptions, not a compelling conclusion. Self-initiated critical thinking can be a tall task, but seeking the truth is worth every mental calorie expended.

Tip #3: Proactively learn about credible scientific viewpoints that dissent from Darwinism on your own time, even if your classes censor those non-evolutionary viewpoints.

Patrick Keeling’s letter goes on to say what he had to do to learn about evolution: “For the first time in my life, I willingly (eagerly even) picked up my textbook and studiously read it. With growing interest, I realized that evolution made an awful lot of sense, and that I was being hoodwinked by my biology class.”

Keeling’s story sounds sympathetic, but the reality is that it is unrepresentative of the typical experience. The overwhelming majority of students in public high schools, colleges, and universities are not “hoodwinked” into ignorance about evolution, but rather are forced to study pro-Darwin-only curricula that misrepresent, disparage, or simply censor non-evolutionary viewpoints.

In fact, Keeling’s words describe exactly how I felt after studying only the pro-evolution viewpoint in high school and college but then finally discovered that there are credible scientific views that dissent from neo-Darwinism that were never disclosed to us. I was a victim of censorship. I have a strong suspicion that it is my story, not Keeling's, that is much closer to what most people experience.

The Darwinian educational establishment doesn’t make it easy for you to become objectively informed on the topic of evolution, but with a little work on your own, it can be done. The way around the typical one-sided evolution curriculum is to investigate the issue for yourself. Yes, take courses advocating evolution. But also read material from credible Darwin skeptics to learn about other viewpoints. Only then can you truly make up your mind in an informed fashion.

To help you find resources that dissent from Darwinism, in a couple weeks we’ll be releasing a Back to School Guide to Studying Evolution. Stay tuned for more information. In the meantime, check out some of the websites below for updates and resources on evolution:

• IntelligentDesign.org [intelligent design gateway portal]
• EvolutionNews.org Blog
• ID the Future Podcast
• ID-Related books
• Free online pro-ID articles
• Other web resources

Whatever conclusion you come to, study evolution, think for yourself, think critically, question assumptions, and investigate dissenting viewpoints on your own time!

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A recent Reuters article titled “IBM uses DNA to make next-gen microchips” explains, as the title suggests, that microchip manufacturers are finding it cheaper and more efficient to use DNA as a framework on which to build microchips. The news story is based upon a new article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology proposing that DNA can form a template for building microchips: “DNA origami, in which a long single strand of DNA is folded into a shape using shorter 'staple strands'6, can display 6-nm-resolution patterns of binding sites, in principle allowing complex arrangements of carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, or quantum dots.”

This article is part of a much bigger trend, as scientific journals are increasingly discussing biomimetics. The journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A recently devoted an entire issue to the topic. Although the issue’s introductory article by Bharat Bhushan recounts dozens of instances of biological structures proving useful models or inspiration for human-designed technology, his preface is careful to include the customary homage to evolution and disavowal of any intelligent design (ID) applications: “Nature has gone through evolution over the 3.8 Gyr since life is estimated to have appeared on Earth. Nature has evolved objects with high performance using commonly found materials.”

Bhushan’s review article in the same issue, “Biomimetics: lessons from nature – an overview,” opens with similar praise of the alleged ingenuity of nature:

Nature has developed materials, objects and processes that function from the macroscale to the nanoscale. These have gone through evolution over 3.8 Gyr. The emerging field of biomimetics allows one to mimic biology or nature to develop nanomaterials, nanodevices and processes. … Nature has gone through evolution over the 3.8 Gyr since life is estimated to have appeared on the Earth. Nature has evolved objects with high performance using commonly found materials. These function on the macroscale to the nanoscale. The understanding of the functions provided by objects and processes found in nature can guide us to imitate and produce nanomaterials, nanodevices and processes. Biologically inspired design or adaptation or derivation from nature is referred to as ‘biomimetics’. It means mimicking biology or nature.

(Bharat Bhushan, “Biomimetics: lessons from nature – an overview,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, Vol. 367, 1445–1486 (2009) (internal citations removed).)

Biological materials are highly organized from the molecular to the nanoscale, microscale and macroscale, often in a hierarchical manner with intricate nanoarchitecture that ultimately makes up a myriad of different functional elements. Nature uses commonly found materials.

(Bharat Bhushan, “Biomimetics: lessons from nature – an overview,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, Vol. 367, 1445–1486 (2009) (internal citations removed).)

Bhushan ends his article by paying further lip surface to evolution, stating, “It is clear that nature has evolved and optimized a large number of materials and structured surfaces with rather unique characteristics. As we understand the underlying mechanisms, we can begin to exploit them for commercial applications.” Dr. Bhushan’s chosen blindness to the intelligent design implications of his field does not negate the many dozens of instances of biomimicry discussed in his article and other articles in this recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A. I’ll recount some of these examples of biomimicry further in a forthcoming post.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

To: Ben Stein

From: Walter Duranty
New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist (deceased, but never fired).
936,287,434 Seventh Circle
Moloch Township, Gehenna.

Dearest Ben,

My condolences on your involuntary departure from the New York Times. Down Here, we all find it very amusing.

Yea, we all know that you got canned by the Grey Lady- by e-mail, no less. The pretense: your ‘crime’ was to hawk the services of an on-line credit report company that the Times management thought unethical.

Of course, causing people who trusted you to lose money would have been your quickest ticket to promotion at the ‘Newspaper with a of Record.’

Pinch Sulzberger reduced the value of the stock of the world’s ‘Newspaper of Record’ by 6 billion dollars (1999 50 bucks /share; 2009 8 bucks/share; current market cap $1.1 billion) in substantial part by using the newspaper as his ideological cudgel. And he fired you for risking other people’s money? Remember the above the fold coverage of McCain’s faux ‘sex scandal’ that coincided with the Grey Lady’s ‘writer’s block’ about John Edwards' real sex scandal? How about the brutal dissection of Sara Palin’s family that coincided with the omerta about Barack Obama’s dubious Chicago associates? Which ‘significant other’ was more important for voters to know about—Levi Johnston or Tony Rezko? Which relationship got the most press at the ‘Newspaper of Record’?

So the public figured: why pay two bucks for the Times, when you can get the content for free from the Democratic National Committee?

You were fired for ideological reasons — your criticism of Goldman Sachs, your skepticism of President Obama’s policies, sure, but most of all, because you didn’t fit.

‘Didn’t fit,’ you ask? Let me explain.

Surely you remember me. In the 1930’s, I was the New York Times' witness to the Soviet experiment. But I worked for Stalin, too. I was an unregistered shill for the most prolific totalitarian killing machine in human history. I put the New York Times imprimatur — a Grey Lady smiley face — on the intentional starvation of 10 million people in the Ukraine. Yet I was never fired from the New York Times. In fact, I won a Pulitzer Prize.

Why? Why did Malcolm Muggeridge have to sneak his accurate dispatches about the Holodomor out of the Soviet Union in diplomatic pouches, while my crafted fabrications were trumpeted in the ‘Newspaper of Record’ above-the-fold?

The reason is simple. The Times has a policy: ‘all the news that fits.’ In 1931, scientific materialism, in its Soviet apparition, ‘fit.’ I got published. In 1957, scientific materialism, in its Cuban apparition, ‘fit.’ Herbert Matthews got published. In 1975, scientific materialism, in its Cambodian apparition, ‘fit,’ and Sydney Schanberg got published. In 2009, scientific materialism, in its Darwinian apparition, fit. Sam Harris got published.

You didn’t read the memo. Scientific materialism is haute credo. Has been for a century. You questioned it.

You made Expelled.

You got fired. We spoke power to truth, you might say

But there was more to it. Do you know what really set us off?

You stole ideas from Saul.

No, not that Saul. We lost him on the Damascus road (very bad denouement, when he was so promising!). I mean our Saul.

Saul Alinsky.

He dedicated his masterpiece — Rules For Radicals — to Our Father:

“Lest we forget at least…the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

# 5: “Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage."

#13 “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

#6 "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."

Those are our tactics; how dare you — HOW DARE YOU — use them against us!

That’s why you were fired. It had nothing to do with ‘ethics’. Trust me — the New York Times doesn’t know nothin’ from ethics. Ask the Ukrainians. Ask the Cubans. Ask the Cambodians. The Times outsources ethics; had to hire a ‘Public Editor’ to do their ethics for them. Would you go to a doctor who had to hire somebody to do his ethics? You were fired because Expelled hurt us — it hurt materialists — and it hurt us by using our own tactics. ‘Freeze a target, ridicule it, and have fun doing it.’ Don’ t you understand anything about intellectual property? It’s our tactic, not yours! You froze us, you ridiculed us, and you did it with a smile. It was damned effective and we’ll never forgive you for it.

Expelled was a strategic catastrophe for us, and you let us do it to ourselves. We said on camera: 'Religion is like knitting…,' 'We’ll let them keep their churches...,' 'Maybe life came from crystals…,' 'No, it was from lightning…,' 'No, it was aliens…'

You had to pay. The Obama criticism was just the last straw. We were out to get you long before that. We took a while to drop the axe to make sure the hoi polloi didn’t connect the dots. But you paid — you were expelled. An enacted parable, so to speak. Most of the people smart enough to see the irony already understand us anyway, so we lost nothing by implicitly proving the thesis of your movie. This was a lesson. Endorse scientific materialism, in its nouveau apparition, and you’re in, ticket punched. Question scientific materialism, and you’ll pay. Anyone listening? Anyone?

So I’m cuttin’ this letter short. I’ve got to get to the store to pick up the Sunday Times. (Yea, we get the Times Down Here. Circulation is up!) The Weekender sells out quick in the inconvenience stores; there are ungodly lines. ‘Why are the lines so long,’ you ask? It’s because we’ve got some conservatives Down Here and they’re required to read Frank Rich — you know, Lake of Fire, all that stuff…

Regards,

Walter

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Updated]

In a recent post, I noted that Ken Miller misrepresented Michael Behe’s arguments on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade in his book, Only a Theory. When I blogged at the end of last year about Miller’s similar mistakes at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Dr. Miller responded by making me aware of something I did not previously remember: apparently Michael Behe wrote the section in Of Pandas and People on blood clotting. The treatment of the blood clotting cascade in Pandas (1993) could possibly be subject to Miller’s arguments, but as I showed, Behe’s treatment of the topic in Darwin’s Black Box (1996) would not be refuted in any way by Miller's arguments.

To summarize and review, Pandas argues that all of the components both before and after the fork in the blood clotting cascade are irreducibly complex, but in Darwin’s Black Box Behe only argues that the components after the fork comprise an irreducibly complex system. Since Miller's arguments only pertained to elements before the fork, from the intrinsic pathway in the blood clotting cascade, they did not refute Behe's discussion in Darwin's Black Box.

I contacted Behe about the differences between the two works, and he informed me that the differences between the treatment of blood clotting in Pandas (1993) and Darwin’s Black Box (1996) were the result of his refining, tightening, improving, and revising his arguments before publishing Darwin's Black Box. There's nothing wrong with Behe updating and improving his arguments. Unfortunately, Ken Miller seems intent on critiquing the earlier treatment of the subject in Pandas, and not critiquing Behe’s updated, revised, and much stronger treatment in Darwin’s Black Box. But what if we were to hold Miller to this unfair and inappropriate standard of scholarship? Miller would have to protest, because he has revised and improved his own arguments many times over the years. Here are a couple of notable examples where Dr. Miller has updated and improved some bad arguments:

Miller’s Removal of “Evolution is random and undirected” Textbook Language.
No fewer than five editions of Miller’s leading high school textbook Biology (elephant version) infamously stated, “Evolution is random and undirected.” At the Dover trial, Miller immediately retracted the use of that language, admitting during cross-examination that this statement would “requir[e] a conclusion about meaning and purpose that I think is beyond the realm of science.” Miller’s later biology textbooks (like the lion series or the dragonfly series) don’t have these words, so it seems that he feels he should have the freedom to update and revise his arguments.

At court, Miller used a two-pronged strategy to deflect the presence of this language in his textbooks.

First, he claimed the language was only found in the third edition of the Biology and was immediately removed, although in fact the statement may be found in all five editions (1991, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000) of the textbook. (For documentation, see Ken Miller's "Random and Undirected" Testimony and the update.)

Next, Miller tried to blame the “evolution is random and undirected” line on his co-author, Joseph Levine. This sounds plausible, but Miller’s own book Finding Darwin’s God (where there's no co-author) frequently uses that same language to describe neo-Darwinian evolution:

“[the] random, undirected process of mutation had produced the ‘right’ kind of variation for natural selection to act upon” (p. 51)

"a random, undirected process like evolution" (p. 102)

"[Richard Dawkins successfully explained how] blind, random, undirected evolution [could] have produced such an intricate set of structures and organs, so brilliantly dedicated to a single purpose" (p. 137)

"the random, undirected processes of mutation and natural selection" (p. 145)

"Evolution is a natural process, and natural processes are undirected" (p. 244)

Miller’s Removal of Haeckel's Drawings and Recapitulation Theory from Textbooks
Some of Miller’s earliest textbooks, such as Biology: Discovering Life, used Haeckel’s embryo drawings and even promoted the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. As seen at The Textbooks Don’t Lie: Haeckel’s Faked Drawings Have Been Used to Promote Evolution: Miller & Levine (1994) (Part I), Miller later not only (to his credit) removed all of these from his textbooks, but even tried (poorly, since his own textbooks show otherwise) to deny that these had been promoted by biologists in recent years.

Dr. Miller is, again, to be commended for removing these inaccurate drawings and outdated ideas from his textbooks, but the point is that clearly he feels it is permissible to update, improve, and revise arguments when appropriate. Yet when he critiques Michael Behe, Miller insists upon critiquing Behe’s earlier treatments of the irreducibility of the blood clotting cascade in Pandas, and not Behe's updated and revised arguments in Darwin's Black Box.

Miller wrongly tries to paint me as advocating that Pandas should be used in high school biology classrooms--something that I have never advocated. Nor would I recommend that public schools use highly inaccurate editions of Miller's textbook Biology: Discovering Life. All that aside, authors -- including Ken Miller -- should be allowed to update and revise their arguments. But when they make appropriate revisions, critics should address their updated arguments, not ignore them and only discuss weaker, previous forms of the argument.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:07 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A new article titled "Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success," in the journal IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans by William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II uses computer simulations and information theory to challenge the ability of Darwinian processes to create new functional genetic information. (For a PDF of the article, see here.)

Darwinian evolution is, at its heart, a search algorithm that uses a trial and error process of random mutation and unguided natural selection to find genotypes (i.e. DNA sequences) that lead to phenotypes (i.e. biomolecules and body plans) that have high fitness (i.e. foster survival and reproduction). Dembski and Marks' article explains that unless you start off with some information indicating where peaks in a fitness landscape may lie, any search — including a Darwinian one — is on average no better than a random search.

After assessing various examples of evolutionary searches, Dembski and Marks show that attempts to model Darwinian evolution via computer simulations, such Richard Dawkins' famous "METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL" example, start off with, as Dembski and Marks put it, "problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure." According to the paper, such simulations only reach their evolutionary targets because there is pre-specified "accurate information to guide them," or what they call "active information." The implication, of course, is that some intelligent programmer is required to front-load a search with active information if the search is to successfully find rare functional genetic sequences. They conclude, "Active information is clearly required in even modestly sized searches."

This paper is in many ways a validation of some of Dembski's core ideas in his 2001 book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence , which argued that some intelligent input is required to produce novel complex and specified information. Dembski has blogged about his paper at Uncommon Descent, explaining how it supports ID:

Our critics will immediately say that this really isn’t a pro-ID article but that it’s about something else (I’ve seen this line now for over a decade once work on ID started encroaching into peer-review territory). Before you believe this, have a look at the article. In it we critique, for instance, Richard Dawkins METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL (p. 1055). Question: When Dawkins introduced this example, was he arguing pro-Darwinism? Yes he was. In critiquing his example and arguing that information is not created by unguided evolutionary processes, we are indeed making an argument that supports ID.

Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs, on average, as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a moderately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Computers, despite their speed in performing queries, are completely inadequate for resolving even moderately sized search problems without accurate information to guide them. We propose three measures to characterize the information required for successful search: 1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target using random search; 2) exogenous information, which measures the difficulty that remains in finding a target once a search takes advantage of problem specific information; and 3) active information, which, as the difference between endogenous and exogenous information, measures the contribution of problem-specific information for successfully finding a target. This paper develops a methodology based on these information measures to gauge the effectiveness with which problem-specific information facilitates successful search. It then applies this methodology to various search tools widely used in evolutionary search.

(William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, "Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans, Vol. 39 (5):1051-1061 (September, 2009).)

Research Faced A Rocky Road to Publication
The article was published from the work of Drs. Dembski and Marks with their Evolutionary Informatics Lab. A few years ago, Marks started Evolutionary Informatics Lab at Baylor University (with William Dembski) to study the ability of Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms to produce new information. However, critics of their work tried hard to shut down the lab and its research.

Marks published the lab’s research on his personal faculty webspace under the Baylor University web domain, and then made the mistake of doing an ID the Future Podcast interview with me discussing the research. He soon thereafter received an e-mail from his Dean, Ben Kelley, demanding the following:

"I have received several concerned messages this week about an interview and web site dealing with evolutionary computing associated [with] ID. Please disconnect this web site immediately and Cheryl will arrange a time for us to meet immediately upon my return."

This article represents only the beginning of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab’s publications, as the lab has additional work that is ready to be sent out and delivered at conferences. We look forward to seeing the results of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab's ongoing work in the coming years.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last week some readers of my Beliefnet blog had a hard time accepting that the rabbinic term "apikoros," a kind of heretic, denotes someone who rejects -- if I may use the contemporary term -- intelligent design. One fellow, by a rigorous Google search, even believed he'd found Internet-based proof that an apikoros designates a Christian! Um, no.

The Mishnah uses the word without explanation, for a category of persons who have no share in the World to Come. The Talmud links it with insolence either to the face of the Sages or in their presence. (See Sanhedrin 90a, 99b.) Maimonides finds an etymological connection to an Aramaic word for "disparagement." But what of the idea content of the term? In the Mishnah's context, it's linked with other heretical ideas. The apikoros is listed alongside other heretics, those who say the resurrection of the dead has no support in the Torah and those who deny the Torah's divine origins. These are intellectual matters, not merely ones of temperament or manners. In a Hebrew dictionary, it is defined as an "atheist, freethinker, heretic."

Rabbi Joseph Albo, a medieval luminary, explains the term as referring to the Greek philosopher Epicurus (born c. 342 BCE) and his school (Sefer ha-Ikkarim 1:10). In Hebrew, Epicurus is "Epikoros." In case you're curious, Apikoros and Epikoros are spelled the exact same way, though for some reason the traditional Talmudic pronunciation, unlike modern Hebrew, gives the initial vowel sound as an "a" rather than an "e." In popular English usage today, an "Epicurean" means someone  who seeks pleasure in fine food or wine, but that's not what Epicurus himself was about. Epicurean thought does stress the pursuit of pleasure but not the short term kind. Rather, it urges us to avoid pain and think in terms of longer term, though not eternal, happiness. Among other things, to escape emotional pain, Epicurus advocated masturbation over sexual relationships.

Part of Epicurus's program was to eliminate fear of divine justice. The gods, he explained, were off in their distant celestial realm, indifferent to our world. In line with this, the philosopher taught that human life is a purely material affair. Even the soul is made of physical matter. There's nothing to fear from the gods in part because once you're dead, your dead. There is no afterlife. This is understood to be a comfort.

Reality, he taught, is purely material, composed of "atoms." The universe came into being through the unguided colliding of these atoms. "The world is, therefore, due to mechanical causes and there is no need to postulate teleology"  -- purpose or design -- summarizes Frederick Copleston in A History of Philosophy. For the rabbis, this last point is the key to what's wrong with Epicureanism.

In the classic medieval philosophical work Kuzari, which takes the form of a dialogue between a rabbi and the king of the Khazars, Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi makes this explicit. In the Fifth Essay (5:9, 5:20), the rabbinic protagonist teaches,

We perceive [divine] wisdom in many creations, and the necessary purposes they serve....This wisdom was alluded to by King David in the Psalm [104], "How great are Your deeds, God." He wrote it to refute the arguments of Epicurus the Greek, who believed that the universe came about incidentally [b'mikreh, lit. by chance]....

All phenomena are traceable back to the Primary Cause in one of two ways: either directly from God's will, or through intermediaries. An example of the first way is the order and assembly that is evident in living creatures, plant life, and celestial spheres. No intellectual person can attribute this to happenstance. It is rather attributable [directly] to the design of the wise Maker.

Hear that? No intelligent person would deny the evidence of design in living creatures. That is, nobody would do so unless he was an Epicurean, against which teaching the Jews are called to stand as a witness:

The Jewish people provided every nation with a refutation against the Epicureans, who follow the beliefs of Epicurus the Greek. He said that all things happen incidentally, and that nothing in this world shows evidence of intent from a [higher] sentient being. His colleagues were called hedonists because they believed that pleasure is the ultimate objective and the principal good.

Rabbi Korobkin clarifies in a footnote,

Because of his radical beliefs and the wanton behavior of some of his followers, Epicurus was viewed by the Sages as one of the most morally destructive of all Greek philosophers.

Any questions?

Editor's Note: This entry is cross-posted from David Klinghoffer's blog, Kingdom of Priests.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 2:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, I posted responses to some errors in Kenneth Miller's book Only a Theory and promised to end the series with a look at Dr. Miller's treatment of the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade. (For those prior posts, see here and here.) Discussing Ken Miller's treatment of the blood clotting cascade in Only a Theory first requires a little backstory. Last December 2008 and early January 2009, I published a series of 3 posts that responded to Ken Miller’s arguments, during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, about irreducible complexity and the blood clotting cascade (BCC). (For the posts, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) Those posts showed that in his Dover trial testimony, Dr. Miller misrepresented Michael Behe’s arguments regarding irreducible complexity and the BCC. Ken Miller’s recent book, Only a Theory, does much the same. But before we get into that, let’s review Miller’s mistake at the Dover trial.

Miller’s Basic Mistake
The blood clotting cascade in humans and most other vertebrates has two possible biochemical initiation pathways: the intrinsic pathway and the extrinsic pathway. This is shown in the rough schematic diagram below:

Miller Repeats the Error in Only a Theory by Misquoting Behe
In Only a Theory, Miller makes exactly the same error. After showing a diagram of the BCC that includes all three prongs -- including the intrinsic and extrinsic initiation pathways -- Miller asserts that, “Intelligent design argues that the pathway cannot work until all of these factors are in place…” (p. 32) On the next page, Miller claims that Behe “unequivocally” argues that “each and every part of the system has to be present simultaneously for blood to clot” (Miller’s words, p. 33). Then on pages 33-34, Miller quotes Behe (or perhaps better put, misquotes Behe) to try justify his point. The precise reproduction of Miller’s quotation of Behe is shown below (Miller’s citations notes, found on page 225 of his book, are also shown below):

Since each step necessarily requires several parts, not only is the entire blood-clotting cascade irreducibly complex, but so is each step in the pathway.¹³

…In the absence of any of the components, blood does not clot, and the system fails.¹⁴

13. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 87.

14. Ibid., 86.

(Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, pp. 33-34, 225 (Viking, 2008).)

Finally, on page 62 of Only a Theory, Miller purports to paraphrase the above quotes from Behe, writing: “As Michael Behe has written, the entire system has to be in place for clotting to work properly, and in the absence of any of the components blood does not clot and the system fails.” Miller then claims that Behe has been refuted because “The genome of the fugu, or puffer fish, lacks three of the clotting factors -- and its blood clots just fine.” (p 63) Of course, as seen below, those three factors are all from the intrinsic pathway, which Behe never claims in Darwin's Black Box are part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade.

Elaborating on Miller’s Misquote of Behe
To repeat, the problem with Miller’s arguments in Only a Theory is the same as the problem with Miller’s testimony at the Dover trial: The three factors Miller refers to from the puffer fish are factors XI, XII, and XIIa -- all from the intrinsic pathway. But in Darwin’s Black Box Michael Behe did not claim that the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways were part of an irreducibly complex system. Specifically, Behe stated that his argument for irreducible complexity in the BCC pertained only to components "beyond the fork," after the intrinsic and extrinsic initiation pathways of the blood-clotting cascade converge, and did not apply to components “before the fork” (i.e. such as the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways). Behe made this very clear at the Dover trial, and but he first made it clear in Darwin’s Black Box:

Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where some details are less well known, the blood-clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity. That is, it is a single system composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system effectively to cease functioning. The function of the blood clotting cascade is to form a solid barrier at the right time and place that is able to stop blood flow out of an injured vessel. The components of the system (beyond the fork in the pathway) are fibrinogen, prothrombin, Stuart factor, and proaccelerin. Just as none of the parts of the Foghorn system is used for anything except controlling the fall of the telephone pole, so none of the cascade proteins are used for anything except controlling the formation of a blood clot. Yet in the absence of any one of the components, blood does not clot, and the system fails.

(Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, p. 86 (Free Press, 1996), emphases added.)

Miller’s quote of Behe from page 87:
Miller quotes Behe on page 87 of Darwin’s Black Box stating: “Since each step necessarily requires several parts, not only is the entire blood-clotting system irreducibly complex, but so is each step in the pathway.” By this point in his chapter on blood clotting, Behe was now discussing a hypothetical scenario that would insert new proteins into the cascade, for Behe had already moved past expounding upon exactly which components of the BCC are irreducibly complex. Leaving that point aside, the question is, what does Behe mean by the “system”? The context makes Behe’s meaning clear:

Behe is only discussing the components of the system “beyond the fork” and not those “before the fork” because Behe had defined the term “blood-clotting system” as NOT including the components “before the fork.” Thus, Behe wrote:

“Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where some details are less well known, the blood-clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity.” (Darwin’s Black Box, p. 86)

Miller has to ignore the Miller-refuting quote -- which Miller never mentions in Only a Theory -- in order to make his misrepresentation-based case. There is no indication anywhere that Behe intended to change the scope of the term “blood-clotting system” anywhere in the rest of that section to include the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways. Indeed, Miller’s page 87 quote from Behe is merely discussing hypothetical scenarios that ONLY deal with adding or deleting cascade components after the fork.

All of this was plain to me when I read Behe’s chapter on blood-clotting, and it should be plain to anyone who reads Darwin’s Black Box without prejudice: The phrase “entire blood-clotting system” only pertains to the “entire” segment “beyond the fork.” To imply that the quote Miller cites from page 87 applies to components before the fork misrepresents Behe’s manifest meaning.

Miller’s quote of Behe from page 86:
Now let’s look at Miller’s quote of Behe from page 86 of Darwin’s Black Box, which Miller gives as follows: “…In the absence of any of the components, blood does not clot, and the system fails.”

As noted, this quote is from page 86, yet in Only a Theory, Miller oddly places this quote directly after a later quote from Behe on page 87. Why? Whatever his reasons, the effect is to badly distort Behe’s argument.

As we saw in the Miller-refuting quote above, this page 86 quote from Behe actually comes earlier in the book, from a different section with a very different context, and it is indeed the concluding statement for the paragraph where Behe makes the important Miller-refuting quote: “Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where some details are less well known, the blood-clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity.”

Hopefully by now the egregiousness of Miller’s treatment of Behe is clear. Miller picked sentences out of context from Darwin’s Black Box and rearranged them – placing an earlier quote after a later quote – in order to create a string of quotes that make it appear as if Behe says that extrinsic pathway, intrinsic pathway, and components beyond the fork of the blood clotting cascade all comprise an irreducibly complex system. Moreover, Miller completely ignored the Miller-refuting quote – which his page 86 quote is really supposed to be attached to – that clarifies Behe’s argument so that you know that his argument for irreducible complexity of the BCC does not include the extrinsic or intrinsic pathways.

What does Michael Behe Have to Say About All of This?
There’s no one better to explain Behe’s intended meaning than Michael Behe himself. So if you’ve read this twice, and you’re a finding it hard to follow, then consider this: Michael Behe agrees with me, as he indicates in the following posting on his Amazon.com blog, written in response to Professor Miller:

In Chapter 4 of Darwin’s Black Box I first described the clotting cascade and then, in a section called “Similarities and Differences”, analyzed it in terms of irreducible complexity. Near the beginning of that part I had written, “Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where details are less well known, the blood clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity... The components of the system (beyond the fork in the pathway) are fibrinogen, prothrombin, Stuart factor, and proaccelerin.” Casey Luskin concludes that from that point on I was focusing my argument on the system beyond the fork in the pathway, containing those components I named. That is a reasonable conclusion because, well, because that’s what I said I was doing, and Mr. Luskin can comprehend the English language.

Apparently Prof. Miller can’t. He breathlessly reports that one page after I had qualified my argument I wrote “Since each step necessarily requires several parts, not only is the entire blood-clotting system irreducibly complex, but so is each step in the pathway” and Miller asserts that meant I had inexplicably switched back to considering the whole cascade, including the initial steps. It seems not to have occurred to Miller that that sentence should be read in the context of the previous page, so he focuses on the components before the fork, the better to construct a strawman to knock down. In fact, in that section containing the second quote (“Since each step...”) I was arguing about the difficulty of inserting a new step into the middle of a generic, pre-existing cascade (“One could imagine a blood clotting system that was somewhat simpler than the real one—where, say, Stuart factor, after activation by the rest of the cascade, directly cuts fibrinogen to form fibrin, bypassing thrombin”), and likened it to inserting a lock in a ship canal. It could be done if an intelligent agent were directing it, but it would be really difficult to do by chance/selection. All that seems to have passed Miller by.

In philosophy there is something called the “principle of charitable reading.” In a nutshell it means that one should construe an author’s argument in the best way possible, so that the argument is engaged in its strongest form. Unfortunately, in my experience Miller does the opposite — call it the “principle of malicious reading.” He ignores (or doesn’t comprehend) context, ignores (or doesn’t comprehend) the distinctions an author makes, and construes the argument in the worst way possible.

Final Comments on Miller’s Response to My 2008 Blog Posts
After my 3 posts at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 responding to Ken Miller’s arguments about irreducible complexity and the blood clotting cascade, Dr. Miller wrote a response to my December 2008 posts, misquoting many of the same passages from Behe discussed above, claiming that I misread Behe and that in Darwin’s Black Box, Behe actually argued that the irreducibly complex components of the BCC included all three prongs of the system -- the intrinsic pathway, the extrinsic pathway, and everything after the fork. Miller thus wrote in response: “Unlike Mr. Luskin, I read Behe's whole book — including the parts before and after page 86” and then suggested, “Casey, if you really want to defend Michael Behe, a good place to start would be by reading him.”

Those weren’t exactly the kindest words coming from my friend Dr. Miller, but regardless, Darwin’s Black Box was the book that first introduced me to ID when I read it for the first time in 1997. I’ve consulted it many times over the years since then. A careful and fair read of Darwin's Black Box shows that when Miller wrote, “I took Michael Behe at his word,” that Miller’s self-praise is undeserved, for whether intentionally or unintentionally, it seems clear that he took Michael Behe dramatically out of context.

Further responses to Dr. Miller's response to me on Behe and blood clotting will be made in a couple of forthcoming posts.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last year ID the Future featured a series of podcasts (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) with Bradley Monton, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which discussed Monton's support for intelligent design. Monton is notable as he’s one of the atheist intellectuals who feels that many intelligent design arguments hold merit. He has recently published a book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, which was reviewed by Tom Gilson at Breakpoint. Gilson’s excellent review is titled, “ID's Unlikely Defender,” and he writes:

Monton is willing to evaluate ID according to what its proponents actually affirm about it. He devotes most of a chapter to working through what the Discovery Institute genuinely means in its most basic statement of the theory. Unlike many others, he sees no reason to suppose--at least until proven otherwise—that ID proponents are mendacious conspirators. He argues effectively that opponents’ most frequently-stated dismissals of ID (“it’s purely religion,” for example, or “it isn’t science”) fail when subjected to thoughtful analysis.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Much of the debate about evolution turns on language, and there is much misrepresentation, mostly on one side of the debate. Darwinists assert that "evolution is a fact," when what they really mean is that "Darwinism is a fact," but they don't want to assert that explicitly. They misrepresent their narrow theory of evolutionary change as synonymous with evolutionary change understood more broadly. They do so for several reasons, including the unfavorable connotations of Darwinism and the paucity of evidence and logic to support Darwin's radical assertion.

The truth is that Darwinism is not the same thing as evolution. Evolution is the theory that living things change over time. So understood, evolution is obviously true. There are several theories as to how evolution happens.

Darwinism is the theory that evolution lacks teleology — changes in organisms over time have no goal or purpose. Biological structure and function is the product of differential survival of chance variations. Chance and necessity. "Chance" in the Darwinian lexicon means "without teleology."

There are several camps on the Darwinist side: there are adaptationists, who believe that most or all evolutionary changes are the result of natural selection, and the drifters, who believe that much evolutionary change is neutral with respect to selection. Both agree that the variation on which selection acts or doesn't act is non-teleological. The debate between adaptationists and drifters is acrimonious, and, in my view, witless. Natural selection applies to all evolutionary change — adaptive, drifting, and designed. Survivors always survive.

There is a school of "theistic evolution," which asserts that God played a (subtle) role in guiding evolutionary change. Theistic evolution is a cornucopia of viewpoints, usually vague. Theories of theistic evolution are generally stated with such imprecision as to render them sentiment rather than science. They are generally poor theology as well.

Teleological theories of evolution come in two strains. Intelligent design theory asserts that the most reasonable explanation for some aspects of evolution is a process of design analogous to human design. There are some theorists who agree that evolution is teleological but take exception to the "extrinsic" design implication of design theory. These theorists are Thomists who represent the Catholic view of evolution. They see evolutionary change as a manifestation of Final Cause, as understood by Aristotle and Aquinas. They view teleology to be intrinsic to biological change and in fact intrinsic to all changes in nature. Both intelligent design and Thomist approaches to evolution are teleological; they differ in the metaphysical understanding of teleology.

In battles of ideas, ontology recapitulates philology. Truth recapitulates language. The philological issues — the language of the debate and the meanings assigned to words — determine in large part the truth we see. In the debate over evolution, the meanings are subtle, and they have been misrepresented (by Darwinists). The reason for the misrepresentations by Darwinists is ideological. Darwinism is indispensable to "intellectual fulfillment" in atheism, and it is defended, without regard for truth.

The truth in the debate about evolution turns largely on the meaning assigned to the terms of the debate. But it’s a mistake to conclude that the truth about evolution is impenetrable. In evolutionary biology, the facts are fairly obvious. Evolution means changes in living things over time. There have been substantial changes in living things over time, and biological structures and functions have obvious purposes. Biology is saturated with purpose, as is all of nature. Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of teleology.

In my view, it’s fair to say that there are two true things about evolution:

Evolution occurs, and it is teleological. The evidence for each of these assertions is overwhelming, and each is a fact.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In two recent posts (here and here), I discussed the continuing misrepresentations of intelligent design by Francis Collins, whose confirmation as head of the National Institutes of Health in the Obama administration was announced on August 7.

Today I would like to shift the focus to Dr. Collins’ misrepresentation of evolutionary biology—or more precisely, to his misrepresentation of the scientific usefulness of evolution to biology. Collins has every right to endorse neo-Darwinian evolution if he wishes, but his view of evolution's value to scientific research is pretty much over-the-top. In a recent interview, he claimed:

Trying to do biology without evolution would be like trying to do physics without mathematics.

A number of leading scientists feel very differently from Collins. As National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell has written, the hyping of neo-Darwinism's importance to science goes well beyond reality:

I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No. ... Darwinian evolution -- whatever its other virtues -- does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. ... the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs.

(Philip Skell, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin? Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology,” The Scientist (August 29, 2005).)

In another essay, Dr. Skell added that he had

queried biologists working in areas where one might have thought the Darwinian paradigm could guide research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I learned that the theory had provided no discernible guidance in choosing the experimental designs but was brought in, after the breakthrough discoveries, as an interesting narrative gloss.

(Philip Skell, Politics and the Life Sciences, Vol. 27(2):47-49 (October 9, 2008).

When testifying before the Texas State Board of Education this past March, Dr. Ray Bohlin said the following when asked about the utility of evolution for biological research. He answered:

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.

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. ... I would say that there is very little that you cannot fully understand apart from the theory of evolution.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I discussed an interview with Francis Collins in Books and Culture where Dr. Collins wrongly called intelligent design (ID) unfalsifiable. Before offering more critiques of the interview, I want to say that in some respects, I have found Francis Collins' voice to be a welcome addition to the debate over evolution and ID. I am very much in agreement with Dr. Collins on certain issues, such as the evidence for design from the fine-tuning of physics and the frailties of Darwinian explanations for many higher aspects of the human psyche and behavior (i.e. our moral and religious urges). Collins is of course entitled to disagree with ID in biology, but I'm becoming saddened by the charged and inaccurate rhetoric he's increasingly employing to express that disagreement.

In the recent interview with Collins by Karl Giberson, the two adopt some less-than-charitable and inaccurate rhetorical devices highly similar to those used by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE): Collins calls ID “outside of science” and Giberson calls ID “anti-evolutionist.” ID is neither of those two things. Given that there are highly credentialed ID proponents who are practicing scientists and accept many core tenets of evolution (like change over time in both lower and higher taxa, and even common ancestry), it would seem that Dr. Collins and Dr. Giberson have misstated the nature of ID.

But perhaps the most unfortunate rhetorical tactic that Collins and Giberson repeatedly employ is the classic NCSE talking point (used in "Expelled Exposed") that those who claim there is discrimination against ID proponents in the academy are somehow imagining the persecution. In particular, Collins says:

Stating this is a convenient way to float the idea that evolution is a conspiracy that is about to be exposed. That's the idea behind the movie Expelled, which tries to make that same case -- that there is a conspiracy to squash the truth. That viewpoint totally misunderstands the nature of science. Anybody who has lived within the scientific community would immediately -- regardless of their worldview -- rebel against the idea that science would be able to sustain such a conspiracy. Scientists are all about upsetting and overturning things. And if you're the one who's discovered how to overturn evolution, you're going to win the Nobel Prize!

The position that people on the outside of science -- like the creationists and the people in the ID camp -- have adopted, that such a conspiracy could actually exist for more than thirty seconds, completely flies in the face of the realities of the sociology of the field of science. It's an insult.

Contra Collins, it doesn't take a "conspiracy" to explain the pattern of discrimination against ID proponents in the scientific community. In many other fields, this phenomenon is well recognized: it’s often called institutionalized discrimination or institutionalized bias. And it's not very nice to tell victims of such institutionalized discrimination that they are merely imagining a "conspiracy."

For example, imagine telling racial minorities who felt they were facing discrimination from an industry in the 1940s that they were merely inventing a “conspiracy.” Or imagine telling women who faced discrimination in a field in the 1950s that they were just paranoid and imagining a “conspiracy.” We all know from history that institutionalized discrimination and intolerance can be very real and powerful forces shaping personnel decisions within an established system. There are good historical examples of such, and accepting this requires no “conspiracy.”

The truth is that if you ask historians of science, you’ll find that the notion that scientists can be systematically intolerant of those who challenge reigning paradigms is not necessarily all that controversial. As Thomas Kuhn observed long ago:

No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others.

(Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Ed, 1970, Univ of Chicago Press, pg. 24)

The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.”

(Nicholas Wade, "Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers," New York Times Blog, July 23, 2009.)

Conformity and group-think are attitudes of particular danger in science, an endeavor that is inherently revolutionary because progress often depends on overturning established wisdom....The academic monocultures referred to by Dr. Bouchard are the kind of thing that sabotages scientific creativity....What’s wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics.

(Nicholas Wade, "Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers, New York Times Blog, July 23, 2009.)

It is dangerous to raise attention to the fact that there is no satisfying explanation for macroevolution. One easily becomes a target of orthodox evolutionary biology and a false friend of proponents of non-scientific concepts.

(Günter Theißen, "The proper place of hopeful monsters in evolutionary biology," Theory in Biosciences, Vol. 124:349–369 (2006).)

Similarly, the leading American evolutionary scientist, Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould, explained why a Collins-esque view of scientists as perfectly objective robots is naïve:

Our [scientists'] ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective 'scientific method,' with individual scientists as logical and interchangeable robots, is self-serving mythology.

(Stephen Jay Gould, “In the Mind of the Beholder," Natural History, Vol. 103 (2):15 (1994).)

There are many pitfalls faced by those who dissent from the majority scientific viewpoint. Expelled shows in case after case -- providing much documentation -- that ID proponents have faced unfair discrimination in the academy. Collins makes no attempt to rebut that documentation, instead sweeping it all aside by falsely labeling it a “conspiracy” theory. Given Collins' thoughtfulness in many other areas of this debate, I hope he will choose to abandon this inaccurate and damaging rhetoric in the future.

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

In a previous post, I analyzed the writings of Presidential science czar John Holdren in his 1977 textbook Ecoscience. In the chapter on population control, Holdren and co-authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich endorse a range of coercive measures to decrease human population. I begin in Holdren’s book where I left off in my prior post.

In a section entitled “Involuntary Fertility Control,” Holdren wrote:

The third approach to population limitation is involuntary fertility control. Several coercive proposals deserve discussion, mainly because some countries may ultimately have to resort to them unless current birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means.

Note Holdren’s explicit endorsement of involuntary methods of birth control — “some countries may ultimately have to resort to them” unless birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means. The “other means” that he has previously endorsed include forced abortions and the intentional infliction of economic catastrophe on poor countries.

Holdren continues:

Some involuntary measures could be less repressive or discriminatory, in fact, than some of the socioeconomic measures suggested

The “socioeconomic measures” of population control he refers to and has endorsed (under some circumstances) run the gamut from withholding government benefits to the policy of inflicting economic catastrophe on poor nations.

Holdren describes one of the "less repressive or discriminatory measures" that some countries "may ultimately have to resort to":

In the 1960’s it was proposed to vasectomize (sic) all fathers of three or more children in India. The proposal was defeated then not only on moral grounds but on practical ones as well; there simply were not enough medical personnel available even to start on the eligible candidates, let alone to deal with the new recruits (sic) added each day! Massive assistance from the developed world in the form of medical and paramedical personnel and/or a training program for local people nevertheless might have put the policy within the realm of possibility. India in the mid-1970’s not only entertained the idea of compulsory sterilization, but moved toward implementing it, perhaps fearing that famine, war, or disease might otherwise take the problem out of its hands. This decision was greeted with dismay abroad, but Indira Gandhi’s government felt it had little other choice. There is too little time left to experiment further with educational programs and hope that social change will generate a spontaneous fertility decline, and most of the Indian population is too poor for direct economic pressures (especially penalties) to be effective.

Note that Holdren explicitly endorses the Indian sterilization program:

There is too little time left to experiment further with educational programs and hope that social change will generate a spontaneous fertility decline, and most of the Indian population is too poor for direct economic pressures...

In the mid-1970’s the Indian government instituted population control measures of the sort that Holdren and other population control experts endorsed. Government officials were issued sterilization quotas, and the police carried out many of the sterilizations (vasectomies) themselves. Officially, all Indian men with two or more children were required to undergo sterilization, but many poor men with no children and even political opponents of the government were involuntarily sterilized. Even young boys were sterilized in order to meet quotas.

Holdren writes:

A program of sterilizing women after their second or their third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. This of course would be feasible only in countries where the majority of births are medically assisted. Unfortunately, such a program therefore is not practical for most less developed countries (although in China mothers of three children are commonly “expected” to undergo sterilization).[emphasis mine]

Note again that Holdren explicitly endorses involuntary sterilization: “Unfortunately, such a program therefore is not practical” because there are not enough trained personnel in poor countries to sterilize millions of women against their will.

The Indian sterilization program, based on principles that Holdren explicitly endorsed in his textbook, sterilized 8 million people — 6.2 million men and 2 million women against their will. There were 1,774 deaths due to botched sterilization procedures, according to the government's own statistics. Strong legal penalties were instituted against people who resisted, including denial of irrigation water to farmers, denial of food rations, electricity, and medical care. The principle of the Indian socialist government’s sterilization program was, “Who refuses sterilization shall not eat.” Popular outrage at the population control atrocities played a major role in the fall of the government in elections in 1977, and it continues to play a significant role in Indian politics to this day.

Dr. Holdren, who is now President Obama’s top science advisor, explicitly endorsed the Indian government’s forced sterilization of millions of men ("There is too little time left to experiment further with educational programs...") and referred to logistical impediments to involuntary mass sterilizations of women as "unfortunate."

Holdren's office recently issued a press release denying that Holdren had ever endorsed involuntary sterilization:

"Dr. Holdren has stated flatly that he does not now support and has never supported compulsory abortions, compulsory sterilization, or other coercive approaches to limiting population growth..."

Holdren didn't make that denial during his Senate testimony, because it would have been perjury.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Steven Novella has a post in which he discusses recent experiments in which scientists induce the perceptions common to out-of-body experiences (OBE’s), which are experienced by many people and are generally thought to be of mystical or spiritual origin. Dr. Novella:

New research builds upon the growing body of research into how our brains give us a sense that we are inside our bodies. That is one of the brain’s functions that we take for granted – and do not even realize that it is a function of the brain or that it is necessary – until it is not functioning. When that happens we have an out-of-body experience (OBE)…

Prior to modern neuroscience, OBEs were interpreted as mystical or spiritual experiences. In many cultures they were provoked by drugs during spiritual rituals. They have also been reported during certain dream states and in near-death experiences.

The research that Dr. Novella describes is interesting, and involves the use of virtual reality visors that confuse a subject as to the location of his body and the location of various sensations such as vibrations and lights. The subject, under some circumstances, may misinterpret the somatic locations of the sensory stimuli. The correlation between the actual location of his body and his perception of his location is altered.

Many neuroscientists and commentators draw the conclusion that research such as this is evidence that that the evoked sensation (OBE’s, experiences of the presence of God, etc.) represents an illusion, not anything corresponding (under other non-experimental circumstances) to reality. The inference is that this may be part of the mechanism by which OBE’s occur, and that by providing the mechanism, we have demonstrated that OBE’s aren’t real. This conclusion is of course erroneous — an example of the Genetic Fallacy.

There was no more or less warrant to assert or deny the reality of OBE’s “prior to modern science” than there is now. Modern neuroscience can tell us much that is interesting and important about the neurological correlates of OBE’s, but it doesn’t have much that is meaningful to say about the reality of OBE’s.

The most important thing about the interpretation of modern neuroscience is to understand what it tells us, and what it doesn’t tell us. The virtual reality experiments don’t count against the reality of OBE’s, as experienced by people outside of the laboratory. One could even assert, and it would be a cogent argument (although it’s not one that I particularly endorse), that the evocation of OBE’s in the laboratory supports the reality of OBE’s, because all or nearly all mental events evoked experimentally or by seizures (such as flashes of light, tactile sensations, odors, movements of limbs, etc) represent experiences of real things, under other circumstances. Stimulation of the visual cortex evokes flashes of light or patterns of colors (sensations of things that are real at times); it doesn’t invoke unicorns. The same inferences applied to OBE’s would lead to the conclusion that OBE’s are just as real as light, odors, movements, etc, because real experiences share the characteristic that they can be invoked by experimentally manipulating the brain. A cynic might even suggest that the unreality of a perception could be inferred by the failure to experimentally evoke it. Most sensations that can be evoked experimentally by manipulation of the brain represent, under other circumstances, real experiences.

Millions of people have had OBE’s, and there is certainly no coherent neurosientific evidence that would disprove the reality of the experience. Surely not all these people are intoxicated or having seizures. There are and have been countless rational, non-intoxicated and non-epileptic people who have had spiritual experiences. Neuroscience can tell us much about the neurological correlates for such experiences, but in doing so doesn’t in any way imply that the sensations aren’t real, any more than the experimental demonstration of neurological correlates for the perception of light implies that light isn’t real. The same kind of faulty reasoning has been used to ‘explain’ (and thereby deny the reality of) religious belief, a sense of God’s presence, etc. This faulty reasoning seems to be common among people with a materialist bias.

The most serious problem in science today, in my view, is that our technological expertise greatly exceeds our ability to understand the real meaning of the results we obtain. From elegantly designed experiments we too often draw witless conclusions, and our conclusions are commonly driven by our ideological presuppositions rather than by the evidence or by logic. I don’t know if OBE’s are real, but an opinion as to whether OBE’s are real or not is grounded in the answers to metaphysical questions such as ‘do we have a soul?’ and ‘can the soul separate or subsist without the body?’. On these fundamental questions, neuroscience has remarkably little traction, and we err greatly when we pretend that it does.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 2:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The eco-science community was rocked last week by the revelation of a scientific paper published in 1972 by presidential science advisor John Holdren. The paper, published in Eco-Science Proceedings, correctly predicted atmospheric CO2 levels for the month of March 1972.

It’s been called “The Veracity Incident,” and it has scandalized the eco-science community. There have been several calls for Holdren’s resignation, and organizations such as the Ecological Defense Fund and the Sierra Team have demanded an explanation from the embattled Presidential Science Advisor.

The outrage was summed up by Eugene Birkenstock, of the Sierra Team Malaria Memorial Calendar Project, which is an eco-charity that sends beautiful Sierra Team Memorial Calendars to the families of the 1.5 million children in the Third World who die of malaria each year since DDT was banned in 1970.

For decades, the eco-science community has scrupulously avoided veracity in its scientific predictions. Our forbearers have set the standards in the 1960’s and 70’s: Rachel Carson, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Nigel Calder, George Wald, and John Holdren. Scientific accuracy on the part of an investigator calls into question the investigator’s commitment to eco-science. We have standards.

“65 million Americans” will die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to “22.6 million”. Paul Ehrlich, 1968

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . [AND] hundreds of millions of people [including Americans] are going to starve to death." Paul Ehrlich (Holdren’s co-author and mentor) 1968

"Smog disasters" in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. Paul Ehrlich 1969

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Paul Ehrlich 1969

"Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." Paul Ehrlich 1976

"The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." Environmentalist Nigel Calder at the first Earth Day celebration.

"The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." Eco-scientist C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization, 1969

The world will be “...eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age,” Eco-scientist Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.

"A billion people could die from global warming by 2020," John Holdren 1986, reiterated in Senate testimony, 2009.

The eco-science community has a long scientific tradition and adheres to very public standards, and Holdren’s single accurate prediction raised quite a few eyebrows.

Many eco-scientists have been reluctant to publicly criticize Holdren, who is the nation’s top science administrator. But privately, the ecological community is deeply hurt by Holdren’s episode of veracity.

One eco-scientist who was willing to go on the record was Sky Wetherspoon, a colleague of Holdren’s eco-mentor and co-author Paul Ehrlich. In 1977 Ehrlich, his wife, and Holdren co-authored Ecoscience, a classic genocide textbook.

Wetherspoon:

“I am of course a bit disturbed by these reports of John’s veracity, but Paul and I do understand that John was very youthful and idealistic. He didn’t understand the fundamentals of population science. But we forgive him,” he whispered, as if he were correcting a naughty grandchild. He said that Dr. Ehrlich has paid little attention to the controversy. “He’s still perplexed by England’s existence.”

This commentator asked the population scientist, who wished to remain anonymous: What is there to understand about eco-science that is different from other science?

The population researcher confided:

“You don’t understand about the relationship between eco-science and data. The purpose of eco-science isn’t to test hypotheses; it’s to eliminate challenges to your hypothesis. In normal science, let’s say that A is your hypothesis. If you test hypotheses A, B, C, and D against the evidence, and the evidence supports A, you’ve established two things. First, A is supported by the evidence, and second, the conclusion that A is true is dependent on the evidence.”

“But eco-science is true, regardless of the evidence. So eco-scientists use a different method. Let’s say A is our hypothesis. If we are asked to test A, B, C, and D against the evidence, we say that advocates of B are industry-funded shills, advocates of C are endangering the ecosystem by obstinate delay, and advocates of D are Climate Change Denialists. We eliminate challenges to A, using political, not scientific, arguments. Then the evidence is only tested against A, and then A of course is verified. A is independent of data. It’s not really a hypothesis; it’s merely the justification for what we want to do. That’s eco-science“

“In eco-science, one must at all costs avoid accurate predictions. Accurate predictions reinforce the idea that data matters. We don’t want accurate predictions, because the purpose of our work is to rid ecological science of dependency on data. Our conclusions have nothing to do with data. We dictate; we don’t ‘test’”

“Yea, bizarre predictions are indispensable. Eco-science has a constituency — funding agencies, and we advertise. Do you think that the government would’ve spent seventy-nine billion bucks on global warming research if there weren’t hype? Crap, on TV they hype deodorant like your life depends on it. We do the same with science. There’s not a lot of money in science, unless you start your own eco-hedge fund, like Al Gore. A real “green” initiative, if you know what I mean. Old Al's like the Jimmy Swaggart of the environmental movement. But ordinary scientists are utterly dependent on grants, and you’ve got to make your stuff seem important — real important."

"Let’s say your research is on cod sperm. It’s what you did your thesis on. You're an assistant professor at Podunk U. No tenure. You’ve been struggling with grant applications — 'Diurnal Variation of Cod Sperm' — or something. You get zippo. Not even ranked. It’s gonna be food-stamp time. You go to the AAAS meeting, and at the podium there’s this homeless-looking guy with a beard saying crazy stuff — 'a billion people dead in 10 years from the weather…,' but then you realize: this stuff is gold! You rush back to the lab, and submit the new application: 'The Effect of Anthropogenic Global Warming on Diurnal Variation of Cod Sperm.' A couple of months later, you get a call from the National Science Foundation telling you to open your lab window, because they gotta pour the grant money in through a chute. Bingo. And suddenly you love that homeless-looking guy with the nut-job predictions, because he can sell. Anything. Holdren's like the science Billy Mays."

“But bizarre predictions are essential to eco-science in another way — I think a more important way.” The eco-scientist drew an analogy: “If you invite a normal relative to Thanksgiving dinner, people will pay attention to his manners and hold him to reasonable standards. But if you’ve got an uncle who’s totally bat-shit, nobody notices if he doesn’t use the proper fork for his salad. He’s no longer held to the standards of everyone else. When a scientist asserts that ‘in ten years one billion people may die because of the weather,’ he pretty much insulates himself from any further accusation of scientific incompetence. After all, if someone accuses him of being wrong on a prediction of a fraction of a degree change in temperature in Antarctica, he can reply, 'Hey, you call that an error? It’s damn close, compared to what I said about a billion people…' The best way to foist data-free eco-science on the public is to eradicate the notion that data matters at all. I mean, what new prediction looks bad when you’ve been predicting for half a century that a billion people are gonna die tomorrow? Being ‘bat-shit’ insulates eco-science.”

The eco-scientist sat back in his chair, and gazed out the window.

“Our guys have been saying this stuff for half a century: 'the battle to feed humanity was over in 1969'…'65 million Americans will starve by 1989'… 'England won’t exist by the year 2000'…'a billion people could die from the weather by 2020'… don’t you see? It’s all bullshit — intentional bullshit. It’s the Cloward-Piven strategy, applied to science. Our goal isn’t to make science better; the goal is to destroy science, to overwhelm it with pure crap, and rebuild it eco-friendly-and-data-free. It’s like what the Marxists did: make some totally bizarre assertions that everyone knows is crap, then accuse the few people with the guts to openly question it of being reactionaries or deniers or something, and then do everything you can to destroy them. Eventually people learn: don’t question eco-science, and especially don’t imply that data matters. We can’t be proven wrong. We want science to dictate, not investigate."

"No. Just the opposite. Credibility is the antithesis of power. When facts matter, facts dictate. You can only dictate when the facts don't matter. So we've been sayin' crazy-ass stuff for 50 years. 'It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,' 'By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half'...'The battle to feed humanity is over...,' '65 million Americans will die of starvation between 1980 and 1989.' We've been breaking down antiquated notions like 'accurate prediction' or 'data analysis' or 'empirically-supported hypotheses.' There’s no better way to do that than to publish rank bullshit, utterly unrelated to facts, and tout it as consensus science. In fact, the more unrelated it is to facts, the better. Look, if you make a prediction about the temperature next year and you're right, sure you might get a little funding, but then you've got to keep getting it right. It's better if you create a political climate in which you predict that next year a billion people are gonna die because of depletion of the rainforests by dioxin-crazed polar bears. Call it consensus science, and destroy people who ask questions. When they fund you for that, you've won, and you don't have to worry about getting it right. You'll be funded forever. You've changed the ground rules. It's eco-science ground rules. A 'green' revolution, if you know what I mean.“

“Look, I know he was right once. But he’s been wrong since. Really really wrong, over and over again, and he works hard at it. Everybody agrees that he’s made up for getting it right once. We should give him a break.”

As the storm over Holdren’s paper abates, this commentator tried to interview him to get his take on his brief 37-year-old detour into credibility. Holdren’s spokesperson said that the Presidential Science Advisor was unavailable for comment. Dr. Holdren is touring Sri Lanka, distributing copies of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to malaria-stricken villagers. He will then travel to China to give the keynote address in Bejing at the "Bare-Branches Symposium." Dr. Holdren's paper is entitled, “Female Infanticide: Can it Reduce Greenhouse Gasses?”

In response to persistent requests for commentary, the White House released a statement reassuring eco-activists that Holdren categorically repudiates scientific accuracy and that “the ‘Veracity Incident’ is irrelevant to the science advisor’s long-held devotion to eco-science.” The office also released a correction by Holdren of his assertion during his Senate testimony that one billion people may die from the weather by 2020.

“Dr. Holdren has announced that he has upgraded the estimate he gave in his Senate testimony from one billion to 100 billion weather-related deaths in the next decade, because he had not factored in deaths from world-wide tsunamis triggered by Antarctic volcanoes.“

Posted by Michael Egnor at 2:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you needed more evidence that the Darwin lobby wants to turn science education into little more than unquestioned propaganda, take a look at the outlandish new “study” evaluating state science standards published by two officials of the National Center for Science Education, the leading Darwin-only lobbying group. Published by a journal devoted to the one-sided teaching of evolution, the article by Louise Mead and Anton Mates condemns various states for filling their science standards with “dangerous” words and “creationist jargon.”

Just what are these “dangerous” words that must be banned?

“Assess,” “Analyze,” “Evaluate,” and “Critique.”

No, I’m not kidding.

Evolutionists typically claim that the evidence for modern Darwinism is “overwhelming.” But they act as if they know that the evidence is so shaky that the slightest whiff of open discussion will topple the theory, and they are working overtime to prevent students and teachers from being able to evaluate the evidence for themselves.

Increasingly, the Darwinists’ justification for shutting down open inquiry by students and teachers is the patronizing insistence that high school students are too infantile to be allowed to discuss things like adults. In the words of Mead and Mates: “Expecting high school biology students to be able to evaluate evolutionary theory is no more reasonable than expecting high school physics students to evaluate quantum field theory. If students had the necessary knowledge and skills to make such judgments, there would be little reason for college science courses!” Rubbish. If high school students are capable of understanding the arguments and evidence for evolutionary theory, then they should be able to understand—and rationally discuss—scientific criticisms of modern evolutionary theory.

At some point, reasonable people outside the Darwin lobby are going to realize that the real threat to science education in America isn’t coming from proponents of intelligent design or other critics of Neo-Darwinism. It’s coming from the Darwinists themselves, who are trying to replace the scientific method in science classrooms with unthinking dogmatism and learning by rote.

Posted by John West at 8:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ben Stein probably thought he could do his work on the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and not himself endure the kind of personal attacks that, in the film, he defended Darwin critics against. In fact, what he found was that Darwinism is at the root of the worldview of the materialist Left and even the materialist Right. You can't say or do anything to offend them. You can't even advocate academic freedom.

The people who demanded free speech in the 60s and shouted down figures of authority are now the tenured faculty and newsroom editors of the Establishment. And now they are disallowing any criticism at all.

So, unlikely as it seems, Ben Stein became a martyr. Richard Dawkins intervened at the University of Vermont last spring to deny Stein a gig as Commencement Speaker. Now Ben has been disingenously trashed by The New York Times. Typically, when firing Stein as a business columnist the Times couldn't give the actual reason--which is ideological--and instead had to insinuate that he had a "conflict of interest." That is a joke as well as an insult.

Actually, I think Ben may come to enjoy the role of martyr. Like many of us, he never really suffered much discrimination in his life and may find it an interesting experience. As middle age creeps into Medicare Age, he may even find the sting of the lash will stimulate his muse--his comic muse, I hope. It is notable that his American Spectator column on the firing has generated hundreds of comments, almost all favorable, the others sublimely ignorant and smug.

Think of the new material you've been handed, Ben. Maybe the Intelligent Designer is priming you for a book!

This post is cross-posted at Discovery Blog.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 5:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes the hollowness of contemporary conservatism gets me down. An earlier figure in the conservative tradition, Whittaker Chambers, began his journey up from Communism one morning when he was feeding his little daughter and he noticed her ear. Suddenly he felt the power and beauty in its evident design, and this transformed his whole view of reality.

His political philosophy is summarized in the sentence from Witness, "Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible." Perceiving that his daughter's ear reflected purpose, intelligence, and design made it possible for him to turn from Marx to Moses, and the rest of Scripture, for illumination.

Compare the timeless wisdom of Chambers with two respectable modern-day conservatives who write on bioethics.

In Touchstone, my colleague John West reviews Yuval Levin's Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy and Eric Cohen's In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology. There's much to admire in the two books, which "offer profound insights into the dangers of scientific utopianism, the value of deomcratic politics as a moderating influence on science, and the need for science to be guided by moral purposes." Levin and Cohen warn of future dangers from genetic engineering, a "new eugenics," and the like.

That's terrific, but West perceptively notes that both books fail to comprehend the degree to which nightmarish trends in contemporary bioethical thinking are tied up with Darwinian ideology. On the contrary, Levin and Cohen are careful to make sure the reader understands they would not be so benighted as to reject Darwinian evolution.

Levin, in particular, chides conservatives who "accept the proposition that the claims of evolution are in direct competition with the claims of Biblical religion or traditional morality, when in fact each offers answers to a different set of questions altogether." Levin's announcement of the compatibility of Darwinism with "Biblical religion" would be news to Charles Darwin, whose private musings show how his biological theory eroded his own religious faith and whose book The Descent of Man outlined the radical implications of his theory for morality, sex, religion, and society.

The earnest authors want to draw not only on the Bible but on Aristotle and on political philosophy generally, not realizing that if Darwinism is true, the authority of all these sources is radically undercut:

Appeals to "unchanging human nature," the "soul," or traditional morality are tantamount to fairy tales in the Darwinian worldview. According to Darwinism, there is nothing unchanging about human nature; it continues to evolve, along with the conditions for survival. Likewise, a nonmaterial soul is sheer fantasy because (to cite the late Stephen Jay Gould) "matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity." Even morality is simply an unintended byproduct of the material struggle for survival. As leading Darwinists E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse argue,

Morality...is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends....In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.

Cohen is more willing than Levin to acknowledge that many of the unsavory implications of Darwinism stem from the theory's core and even from Darwin himself. Cohen also points out that Darwinian biology offers no explanation for the origin of matter or "the source of nature's fixed laws." Yet in the end, he embraces the blind Darwinian mechanism of selection and mutation as the "likely" explanation for the emergence of man on the earth.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 7:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A new video, Journey Inside The Cell, launched today dramatically illustrates the evidence for intelligent design within DNA, as described in Stephen C. Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne 2009).

“This video is going to make things worse for critics of intelligent design,” Dr. Meyer explains. “They will have more difficulty convincing the public that their eyes are deceiving them when the evidence for design literally unfolds before them in this animation.”

Narrated by Meyer, the video is a short tour of the molecular labyrinth, the cell’s sophisticated information-processing system, which not only produces machines, but also reproduces itself.

You can view the video at www.intelligentdesign.org, or on Youtube. For copyright permissions, contact cscinfo@discovery.org.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 6:59 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The anti-ID crowd has an old canard about there being no serious scientists who doubt Darwin, let alone any that support intelligent design. And they like to say that there is no science being done by ID scientists. Both ideas are not just false, but absurdly so. Note this announcement of new scientific arrivals at Biologic Institute. Professor Matti Leisola, the Dean of Chemistry and Materials Science at Helsinki University of Technology in Finland; Colin Reeves, Professor of Operational Research in the School of Mathematical and Information Sciences at Coventry University; and Professor Stuart Burgess, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bristol.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In case you were wondering about that radicalism of Global Warming Climate Change fundamentalists, the President’s new science czar John Holdren made some recent assertions that should put your doubts to rest.

In a July 2008 interview on the leftist television program Democracy Now!, Holdren reiterates conventional Malthusian alarmism, complete with a running video of wildfires, storms, and floods positioned over his left shoulder. He takes shots at global warming Climate Change ‘deniers’ (at about 3:20 into the video), attributing the success of skeptics to “the preoccupation of the media with balance and with controversy”.

“Balance” and "controversy" are a bête-noire for climate alarmists.

Further into the interview (at about 7:45 into the video), the moderator raises a question about the recommendation of climate alarmist and top NASA climate scientist James Hansen that the chief executives of oil companies to “be tried for their role in spreading disinformation on climate change”. Hansen recommended that they be indicted and tried for “crimes against humanity” if they continue to "dispute" and “to fund contrarians”.

The moderator asked Holdren:

Dr. John Holdren, do you agree with James Hansen’s statement that the CEO’s of large energy companies are guilty of should be tried (sic) for crimes against humanity?

I couldn’t really say.I’m not qualified to assess what the heads of oil companies, past or present, have done in this domain. My understanding is that Exxon, in particular, did fund a variety of small think tanks to generate what amounts to propaganda against understanding of what climate change was doing and the human role in causing it. Whether that sort of activity really constitutes crimes against humanity is something for those more embedded in the legal system than I to judge…

Here’s an example of crimes against humanity that are much more explicit. In 1977, the authors of Ecoscience, a textbook on environmental issues and population control, endorsed a cornucopia of policies to address the overpopulation crisis and to reduce human fertility. Their recommendations included forced abortions, forced sterilizations, involuntary removal of children from families of limited means, government-issued licenses as a requirement to have children, and even the intentional infliction of economic catastrophes on poor countries to reduce population.

The authors of Ecoscience qualified their recommendation for the intentional infliction of economic catastrophe on vulnerable populations:

At the very least, [policies that inflict economic catastrophe to reduce fertility] should be considered only if milder measures fail completely.” (Ecoscience p 768)

The measures the authors endorsed met several of the criteria for genocide established by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It defined genocide:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[emphasis mine]

Dr. Holdren is now our nation's top science administrator.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

In the growing public debate about coercive population control policies and Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren, it is important to read exactly what Holdren (and his co-authors Paul and Anna Ehrlich) wrote in their 1977 textbook Ecoscience. The question is this: were Holdren’s recommendations merely the academic exercise of listing other people’s recommendations (with disavowal or without any kind of endorsement), or did Holdren endorse any of these measures or counsel serious consideration of them.

Here are the relevant pages of Holdren’s book; there is much more than I can deal with in this post, and I will be reviewing all of Holdren’s writings in Ecoscience in future posts, word for word.

Let's begin. Holdren bottom of first paragraph, p786):

In LDC’s [less developed countries] a childless or single lifestyle might be encouraged deliberately as the status of women approaches parity with that of men. Although free and easy association of the sexes might be tolerated in such a society, responsible parenthood ought to be encouraged and illegitimate childbearing could be strongly discouraged.

How could illegitimate childbearing be “strongly discouraged”? Holdren continues:

One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption- especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement or adoption, depending on the society. [emphasis mine]

Holdren’s next paragraph is astonishing:

Somewhat more repressive measures for discouraging large families have also been proposed, such as assigning public housing …[illegible]…removing dependency allowances from student grants or military pay. Some of these have been implemented in crowded Singapore, whose population program has been counted as one of the most successful.[Emphasis mine]

”Somewhat more repressive measures”?. Holdren asserts that less repressive measures include forced adoptions, forcing a single mother to adopt her own child if she wished to keep it, and forcing single women to choose between marriage, abortion, or adoption, all of which may not be enough; withholding of government benefits may be needed! Holdren bizarrely views human rights atrocities such as forced abortions and involuntary removal of children from mothers as less repressive measures than…”removing dependency allowances from student grants”?

His next paragraph is even more chilling and more revealing:

All socioeconomic measures are derived from knowledge of social conditions that have been associated with low birth rates in the past. The more repressive suggestions are based on observations that people have voluntarily controlled their reproduction most stringently during periods of great social and economic stress and insecurity, such as the Depression of the 1930’s. In a sense, all such proposals are shots in the dark. Not enough is known about fertility motivation to predict the effectiveness of such policies. Studies by demographer Judith Blake and by economist Alan Sweezy for instance, have cast serious doubt on the belief that economic considerations are of the greatest importance in decline of fertility trends. Sweezy has shown that the decline of fertility in the 1930’s in the United States was merely a continuation of an earlier trend. If their views are correct, then severely repressive economic measures might prove to be both ineffective and unnecessary as a vehicle for population control, as well as socially undesirable. At the very least, they should be considered only if milder measures fail completely.[emphasis mine]

Holdren muses about the "effectiveness" of inducing economic catastrophe — economic catastrophe as policy — in order to control fertility.

Note that Holdren is making policy recommendations — "...should be considered...". He is recommending (if "milder" methods fail) the intentional imposition of economic catastrophe such as a depression on overpopulated nations. The impact on sustenance farmers in the third world of economic catastrophe as a 'policy' would likely include famine. Holdren raises questions about such measures only because they are likely “ineffective and unnecessary”. He makes no mention of the fact that they are atrocities.

The use of socioeconomic measures against vulnerable populations to reduce their population has a long history. In 1948, the United Nations passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It defined genocide:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[emphasis mine]

Holdren's advocacy of inflicted economic catastrophe to reduce fertility and removal of children from vulnerable families met three separate definitions of genocide.

He imposed conditions on the genocide:

At the very least, [policies that inflict economic catastrophe to reduce fertility] should be considered only if milder measures fail completely.

The “milder measures” that Holdren advocates include forced abortions, removal of children from families, and... removing dependency allowances from student grants.

Note again that Holdren is making policy recommendations — "...should be considered...". The context is clear: Holdren is providing specific policy recommendations for which he clearly has sympathy; he is not merely listing the views of others nor is he expressing meaningful disagreement with those views. The few qualms he raises are pragmatic, not principled. He explicitly endorsed crimes against humanity and genocide.

But there’s something that is, perhaps, even more disturbing. Holdren's advocacy of intentional economic catastrophe is in fact the kernel of his current ‘eco-advocacy,’ which is for radical limits on economic growth to curb global warming climate change. Holdren's recommendations to curb climate change would have a profound impact on the economies of first world nations, but the most devastating economic impact would be on the (overpopulated) third world. Holdren's current advocacy of draconian economic measures to curb population growth global warming climate change are really the same measures he advocated in 1977. The measures are the same — induced economic catastrophe; the pretext changes.

Induced economic catastrophe from draconian reduction of carbon emissions in third world countries is population control— for millions of sustenance farmers. Holdren’s climate change policies dovetail quite nicely with his ‘population control’ policies.

Holdren’s belated (by 30 years) assurance during his confirmation hearings that he does not and did not support coercive measures to control population growth is obviously a self-serving lie. His record is remarkable for his failure to repudiate his clear endorsement of genocide, and for his long-standing endorsement of radical measures and intentional economic catastrophe to address the climate change 'crisis.' He’s a fanatic, and ‘humanity-as-pestilence’ is his confession of faith. His pretext for culling humanity is the only thing that changes.

Holdren’s abhorrent recommendations were not merely academic; he and his eco-collaborators have spawned brutal violations of human rights, most notably in China (forced abortions, sterilizations and female infanticide over the past half-century) and Peru (involuntary sterilizations in the 1990’s) and even in the United States ( Parenthood's targeted placement of abortion clinics in African American neighborhoods). Holdren and other population control eco-fundamentalists created an academic and political environment in which these policies were deemed acceptable. Holdren and his eco-colleagues — and their apologists — bear a direct and personal responsibility for these atrocities.

Holdren's advocacy of crimes against humanity and genocide to reduce fertility is an inconvenient truth. It’s time that Holdren’s smarmy enablers in the science community face up to Holdren’s clearly expressed opinions and to the consequences of the policies he and others explicitly or tacitly endorsed. There have been too many weasel-words about the atrocities of population control. Ethical scientists and commentators need to openly denounce coercive population control ideology and disassociate themselves from the people and organizations that have advocated genocide.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

In the media, it’s not unusual for an interviewer and interviewee to hold similar views on whatever subject they are discussing. Radio show hosts and podcasters, for example, commonly interview friendly guests. But imagine if Paul Allen interviewed Bill Gates on the merits of Microsoft, and then published the interview as an independent journalistic article in Wired magazine. Not only would it would read like a paid advertisement, but critics would begin wondering if Wired was in business to promote Microsoft products. The Microsoft example is of course fictional, but something like it happened recently when Karl Giberson (executive vice president of the BioLogos Foundation) interviewed Francis Collins (the president of BioLogos), and then published the interview in Christianity Today’s Books and Culture. In this case, the product being promoted was theistic evolution.

In the "interview," Collins makes some inaccurate criticisms of intelligent design (ID). Giberson asked him: “What do you think of this project that the Discovery Institute has launched with a laboratory where they want to do genuine scientific research, with their own in-house Intelligent Design scientists?” Collins replied: “It is hard for me to imagine what they will do. ID doesn’t actually propose any falsifiable hypotheses.” This is an odd response from Collins given that in his book The Language of God, he argues as if junk DNA falsifies design.

In The Language of God, Collins makes the case that a huge portion of our genome is junk, writing that, “Mammalian genomes are littered with such AREs [ancient repetitive elements], with roughly 45 percent of the human genome made up of such genetic flotsam and jetsam.” (pg. 136)

“Flotsam and jetsam” is of course debris or junk floating in the ocean, often being trash thrown overboard by mariners. So Collins indicates that he would apparently believe that at least nearly half of our genome is comprised of useless junk DNA. When we find shared non-functional elements in different species, Collins argues this is evidence for common ancestry:

“Even more compelling evidence for a common ancestor comes from the study of what are known as ancient repetitive elements (AREs)....Mammalian genomes are littered with such AREs, with roughly 45 percent of the human genome made up of such genetic flotsam and jetsam....There are AREs throughout the human and mouse genomes that were truncated when they landed, removing any possibility of their functioning….Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed these decapitated AREs in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable.” (The Language of God, pp. 135-137)

Collins' use of this testable prediction of ID is seen in his logic where he states that shared structures that DO have a function do not allow one to discriminate between common design and common descent, and thus do not refute design:

“This evidence does not, of course, prove a common ancestor; from a creationist perspective, such similarities could simply demonstrate that God used successful design principles over and over again.” (The Language of God, pg. 134)

“Of course, some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by a Creator for a good reason, and our discounting them as 'junk DNA' just betrays our current level of ignorance.” (The Language of God, p. 136)

So Collins’s view implies that design is falsifiable, after all. But as Logan Gage and I observe in our response to Dr. Collins, he is simply wrong on the facts that we should assume these genetic elements are non-functional "junk." Studies have found extensive evidence of function for AREs, and it’s not clear at all that they should be presumed to be functionless “junk.” Citing a paper by Richard Sternberg in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, we write:

Collins is wrong to make an argument from ignorance and assume that AREs (or “truncated AREs”) have no function, merely because no function is currently known. In 2002, evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg surveyed the literature and found extensive evidence for function in AREs. Sternberg’s article concluded that “the selfish DNA narrative and allied frameworks must join the other ‘icons’ of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory that, despite their variance with empirical evidence, nevertheless persist in the literature.” Reprinted from Sternberg’s paper, known genomic/epigenetic roles of REs include:

satellite repeats forming higher-order nuclear structures;

satellite repeats forming centromeres;

satellite repeats and other REs involved in chromatin condensation;

telomeric tandem repeats and LINE elements;

subtelomeric nuclear positioning/chromatin boundary elements;

non-TE interspersed chromatin boundary elements;

short, interspersed nuclear elements or SINEs as nucleation centers for methylation;

SINEs as chromatin boundary/insulator elements;

SINEs involved in cell proliferation;

SINEs involved in cellular stress responses;

SINEs involved in translation (may be connected to stress response);

SINEs involved in binding cohesion to chromosomes; and

LINEs involved in DNA repair.

(Source: Richard 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).

(Casey Luskin and Logan Gage, "A Reply to Francis Collins’s Darwinian Arguments for Common Ancestry of Apes and Humans," in Intelligent Design 101 (Kregel, 2008).)

Searching for function for non-coding DNA is not the only realm where scientists are seeking to test ID. The Biologic Institute’s research page explains that they are testing ID by studying the degree of complex and specified information (CSI) in DNA, the constraints required for life, and the ability of intelligence vs. Darwinian processes to produce CSI.

(In private conversations, I've directly seen or heard of prominent theistic evolutionists claiming that ID proponents are not practicing scientists. However this claim originated, it is false and these theistic evolutionists, whom I have no doubt care deeply about seeking truth, should stop making it.)

Clearly there's another side to the story that counter's Dr. Collins' allegation that ID is not falsifiable. The question now becomes: Would Books and Culture publish a similar interview with an ID-proponent, say, Stephen Meyer, defending the pro-ID viewpoint?

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:53 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Atheist Jerry Coyne has been "chewing over" the President’s selection of Francis Collins as head of the National Institutes of Health. Collins, by consensus, is superbly qualified as a scientist and an administrator to run NIH. He’s a distinguished geneticist and directed the Human Genome Project. He’s also a Christian, and has no problem with publicly discussing his reasons and faith. For Coyne, that’s the rub. Coyne begins his post by wanting to “give the guy a break,” but his patience is quickly exhausted.

Coyne:

…[I] do want to emphasize again that the guy is deeply, deeply superstitious, to the point where, on his website BioLogos and his book The Language of God, he lets his faith contaminate his scientific views. So I can’t help but be a bit worried.

So Coyne believes that faith “contaminates” science. About his own contamination of science with fundamentalist atheism Coyne seems oblivious. Coyne mentions two “reactions” to the problem of Collins’ Christianity:

1. I expect Collins to resign from BioLogos if he wants to maintain any scientific credibility. Yes, the guy has every right to believe what he wants, but a director of the nation’s most prestigious research foundation has to have some standards, and BioLogos is beyond the pale. Mixing science with faith as it does, it gives people the wrong view of what science is all about and gives his official imprimatur to essentially private beliefs. Certainly, private expressions of faith are absolutely fine, but Collins has chosen to make his views public, and discuss their relationship to science. Deism is one thing, but to find God in quantum uncertainty, or to see the evolution of humanoids as inevitable, are pollutions of science. I will continue to criticize BioLogos for their mush-brain-ness, and will include Collins’s name if he’s still associated with it.

What arrogance. Collins' membership in a perfectly mainstream Christian organization on his own time is no business whatsoever of Coyne's. BioLogos’ goals are laudable; it seeks to show the obvious compatibility between Christianity and science (science arose as a consequence of the Judeo-Christian understanding of nature and of man’s relation to it). Regrettably Collins did in fact resign from BioLogos, giving in to the atheist thought police who seek to quench any expression of the intimate link between Christian faith and modern science.

Coyne has a second “reaction”:

2. Think about this: would a nonbelieving scientist who was as vociferous an atheist as Collins is a Christian have any chance to get the NIH spot? I don’t think so. And a Scientologist who publicly espoused his belief in Xenu and thetans would be considered too much of a lunatic to have responsibility for the NIH. But of course Christianity is a publicly acceptable form of superstition, and Scientology is not.

Actually, the appointment as Presidential Science Advisor of vociferous eco-fundamentalist John Holdren, who has publicly endorsed serious consideration of crimes against humanity such as forced sterilizations and abortions, dissemination of contraceptives in public drinking water and staple foods, and licensure of women in order to have children, has been greeted by atheists such as Coyne (who presumably shares Holdren’s nut-case views) with silence, and even approbation. And regarding Coyne’s equation of Christianity with Scientology, a recent Baylor study shows that it is atheism that is most highly correlated with superstition and bizarre beliefs. The Wall Street Journal reported:

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians

Collins’ public expression of deep Christian faith is much needed in our culture and particularly in science. We need the science, the ethics, and the sanity that Christianity has bequeathed to our culture. We need more public expression of sincere religious faith. The encroachment on our culture of fundamentalist atheism, to which the development of modern science owes nothing, is one of the most serious problems we face, as any acquaintance with Coyne’s arrogant intolerance of Christianity and his silent complacency regarding Holdren’s genocidal writings makes very clear.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you want to understand the social and political implications of the atheist/materialist worldview, you need look no further than the science blogsphere’s reaction to the appointments of Francis Collins to head the NIH and John Holdren as President Obama’s science advisor.

Collins is a superbly qualified scientist (a leading molecular geneticist) and administrator (former head of the Human Genome Project). He is also a Christian, and holds fairly traditional Christian beliefs. He is not a young earth creationist, and there is no evidence that his Christian faith has hampered his scientific work in any way.

The reaction in the scientific blogsphere to Collins' appointment has been apoplectic. P.Z. Myers, Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, and other atheists have excoriated the President for his appointment of Collins. They believe that Collins' traditional Christian views either disqualify him or raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve in a high position in science administration.

The atheist science blogshpere has taken a very different view of John Holdren’s appointment. For example, P.Z. Myers gushed

The bads [Rick Warren and Ken Salazar] are awful, but I've got to say that [President Obama’s] good decisions are very, very good. The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be John Holdren of Harvard University, a professor of environmental policy who takes a hard line on global climate change — he was an advisor to Al Gore on the movie, An Inconvenient Truth

The “very very good” Dr. Holdren is an eco-fundamentalist and population control fanatic with a track record of junk science and advocacy of totalitarian methods to reduce human fertility. In the 1970’s, he (and colleagues such as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford) predicted massive worldwide famine as a result of overpopulation by the year 2000. In The Population Bomb, Holdren’s colleague and future co-author Ehrlich predicted that

""The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Ehrlich predicted that starvation would occur in the West as well as in the Third World; in 1969, Ehrlich wrote

“I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

The ecocatastrophe would not merely be limited to humanity; In 1970, Ehrlich wrote

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

In 1977, Holdren and Ehrlich (and Erlich’s wife) published the textbook Ecoscience, in which Holdren and his co-authors reiterated their delirious claims about the dangers of unchecked human fertility. In a chapter entitled "Human Predicament: Finding a Way Out", Holdren and Ehrlich gave serious consideration to totalitarian methods for dealing with the Eugenics DDT nuclear winter global cooling global warming climate change overpopulation ‘crisis’:

• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.

• Women—particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth--could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.

• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.

• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into public drinking water or in staple foods.

• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.

• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.

Each of these policy recommendations is a crime against humanity. Yet Holdren wrote that serious consideration should be given to these large-scale coercive measures to reduce population, and suggested that certain human populations were more of a burden on the ecosystem than others. Holdren’s justification of widespread systematic targeted forced sterilizations and abortions on undesirable human populations for the purpose of reducing their population is advocacy of genocide.

Yet P.Z. Myers offers no criticism of Holdren’s appointment, and no criticism of his population control views, while he has repeatedly criticized Collins’ appointment because of his Christian faith.

P.Z. Myers’ criticism of Collins' appointment because of his Christianity is deplorable. The denial of government appointments based on religious belief is unconstitutional, as the Constitution prohibits the use of religious tests for public office (Article IV, section 3). Myers’ effusive endorsement of Holdren’s “very very good” appointment as science advisor to the President, and Myers’ silence (have the words ‘silence’ and ‘P.Z. Myers’ ever appeared in the same sentence before?) about Holdren’s record is ‘much much worse’. By enthusiastically endorsing Holdren's appointment while remaining uncharacteristically silent about Holdren’s clearly expressed view that totalitarian methods of population control should be given serious consideration, P.Z. Myers tacitly endorses crimes against humanity.

New Atheists are silent about eco-genocide, because Holdren's ecological fundamentalism is woven in the fabric of atheism, which is the indispensable philosophical ground for totalitarianism in the 20th century.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:13 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)