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The Anti-Defamation League, the country's leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers?
The ADL has objected to attempts to inject Nazi imagery into the health-care reform debate ("Such statements only serve to diminish and trivialize the extent of the Nazi regime's crimes against humanity"), the abortion debate ("Such analogies can only trivialize and diminish the horror"), the animal-rights debate ("the issue should stand on its own merits, rather than rely on inappropriate comparisons that only serve to trivialize the suffering of the six million Jews"), and in many other contexts.
But if Rush Limbaugh, for example, used "outrageous, deeply offensive and inappropriate" Nazi comparisons to stigmatize sponsors and supporters of health-care reform, why is it no less outrageous to compare people (like the late Irving Kristol, for example) who doubt Darwinian evolution to the moral cretins who deny the Holocaust? In his new book, currently the #22 best seller on Amazon, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Dawkins calls Darwin critics "history-deniers" and dwells on the comparison, even remarking that "The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust."
Is that some sort of cruel joke? The evidence for Darwin's account of evolution and, more so, its controversial mechanism of natural selection is a matter of inference, no matter how strong you think the inference is. The evidence for the Holocaust includes countless eye-witness accounts -- a very different and superior order of evidence.
"People who reject the theory of evolution should be placed on a level with Holocaust deniers, argues an author in his controversial new book," headlined the London Times when the book came out there last month. Yet not a peep from the ADL.
In his last book, The God Delusion, Dawkins used incredibly offensive language in characterizing the God of the Hebrew Bible, whom he called among other things, "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
Now in a Newsweek interview he repeats the insult, saying: "The God of the Old Testament is a monster. It's very, very hard for anybody to deny that. He's like a hyped-up Ayatollah Khomeini." Asked by Newsweek's Lisa Miller where this leaves the "90 percent of Americans [who] say they believe in God" and of whom "some portion...are intelligent people," Dawkins replies, "But they wouldn't disagree with what I said about the God of the Old Testament. They'd probably say something like, 'Oh, that's quite different. We believe in the God of the New Testament.'"
This places Jews among the portion of believing Americans who would have to be characterized as unintelligent. Miller calls Dawkins on this. He then says of Jews: "Well, sure enough. They'd say, 'OK, we've moved on since that time.' Thank goodness they have."
In other words, you can be an intelligent Christian who takes his Bible at least somewhat seriously, but not an intelligent Jew who does the same. And this is a statement, from a very prominent public intellectual, a popular and respected scientist and author, that neither the ADL nor any other Jewish anti-defamation group I'm aware of sees fit to protest? I find this bewildering.
The same Richard Dawkins paid a backhanded compliment to the "Jewish Lobby" a couple of years back in the Guardian, expressing the wish that if only atheists could throw their weight around like the Jews do, then how wonderful that would be: "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told -- religious Jews anyway -- than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place" (emphasis added).
There you have it. Not only does he trivialize the intellectual offense of Holocaust denial. Not only does he say the only intelligent Jews are either Christian converts or secularists. He tops it off by finding plausible the idea that a shadow "lobby" of Jews controls U.S. foreign policy.
The very term itself, Jewish Lobby, is of course a shibboleth. No one uses it who is friendly to the Jews. It's even more of a red flag than "Israel Lobby." The ADL's Abraham Foxman is himself the author of a recent book, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. In short, where on earth is the ADL when you need them?
Note: Cross-posted at David Klinghoffer's Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.
Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. This is the first of several posts discussing it.
The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution.” The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework. Nonetheless, like the important work over the years of Michigan State’s Richard Lenski on laboratory evolution of E. coli, which has shown trillions of bacteria evolving under selection for tens of thousands of generations yielding just broken genes and minor changes, the new work demonstrates the looming brick wall which confronts unguided evolution in at least one system. And it points strongly to the conclusion that such walls are common throughout all of biology.
In the paper Bridgham et al (2009) continue their earlier work on steroid hormone receptor evolution. Previously they had constructed in the laboratory a protein which they inferred to be the ancestral sequence of two modern hormone receptors abbreviated GR and MR (Bridgham et al 2006). They then showed that if they changed two amino acid residues in the inferred ancestral receptor protein into ones which occur in GR, they could change its binding specificity somewhat in the direction of modern GR’s specificity. (All the work was done on molecules in the laboratory. No measurements were made of the selective value of the changes in real organisms in nature. Thus any relevance to actual biology is speculative.) They surmised that a gene duplication plus sequence diversification could have given rise to MR and GR. As I wrote in a comment at the time, that was interesting work, and the conclusion was reasonable, but the result was exceedingly modest and well within the boundaries that an intelligent design proponent like myself would ascribe to Darwinian processes. After all, the starting point was a protein which binds several steroid hormones, and the ending point was a slightly different protein that binds the same steroid hormones with slightly different strengths. How hard could that be?
Well, it turns out that Darwinian evolution can have a lot of trouble accomplishing even that simple task, or at least its opposite. In the new paper the authors try the reverse experiment. They begin with the more modern hormone receptor (which is more restrictive in the steroids it binds) and ask whether a Darwinian process could get the ancestral activity back (which is more permissive). Their answer is no, it couldn’t. They show that a handful of amino acid residues in the more recent receptor would first have to be changed before it could act as the ancestral form is supposed to have done, and that is very unlikely to occur. In other words, the new starting point is also a protein which binds a steroid hormone, and the new desired ending point is also a slightly different protein that binds steroid hormones. How hard could that be? But it turns out that Darwinian processes can’t reach it, because several amino acids would have to be altered before the target activity kicked in.
A number of points can be drawn from this fine work:
- The central point of The Edge of Evolution was that if several amino acids of a protein must be changed before a certain selective effect is available, then that is effectively beyond the reach of Darwinian processes. Bridgham et al (2009) confirm that conclusion. (As an aside, it would make a good project for a sociologist of science to ask why the same conclusion is met with howls of protest when presented by a Darwinian skeptic such as myself, but garners praise when presented by someone else.)
- There is no reason to think the protein studied by Bridgham et al (2009) is unusual in its difficulty of developing a binding site for even a relatively closely-related substance. In fact, in the absence of strong opposing data, that should be the default, reasonable assumption.
- That same reasonable assumption counts strongly against any two unrelated proteins easily developing a binding site for each other.
- That reasonable assumption therefore negates all woolly Darwinian evolutionary scenarios where critical protein binding sites are assumed without justification to pop up when needed (such as, say, in the building of multiprotein structures like the cilium or flagellum).
- Thus the work strongly supports the conclusion of Edge that Darwinian processes are highly unlikely to have built the complex molecular machinery of the cell.
References
Bridgham,J.T., Ortlund,E.A., and Thornton,J.W. 2009. An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution. Nature 461:515-519.
Bridgham,J.T., Carroll,S.M., and Thornton,J.W. 2006. Evolution of hormone-receptor complexity by molecular exploitation. Science 312:97-101.
The Problem of Evil is perhaps the most vexing problem in theology. There are many answers to it, which means that there is no single satisfying answer to it. What I’ve never understood about theodicy is this: why do atheists ponder the Problem of Evil?
Jerry Coyne has a recent post on theodicy. He (finally) admits
…I’m no philosopher…this is amateur philosophizing.
Damn right. For a man who recently sneered at Thomas Aquinas, this is progress.
Coyne:
[I] have never seen a good solution to the problem of evil. Either you say that God wants some innocent people to suffer for reasons that make sense only to intellectual theologians (e.g., some of those people simply badly need to suffer; the Holocaust occurred so that Nazis could exercise free will); or you admit that God is sometimes a nasty deity (ok for the ancient Greeks, not so much for Abrahamics); or, if you’re an intellectually honest theist, you admit that you just don’t understand. But if you believe that God is powerful and good, by what virtue do you know those things for sure but don’t understand the rest?
There are, of course, countless attempts to understand how an infinitely good God can allow evil. I believe that it is because he gives us freedom, and freedom entails the possibility of evil. My dilemma is with natural evil. Why did God not stop the Indian Ocean tsunami? Why does he allow innocent kids to die from accidents or disease? There are theories to account for natural evil. I still don’t know.
But there’s an issue with Coyne’s question. This is it: I believe in God, and as such the question, "Why is there evil?" is a natural question for me.
But what warrant has Coyne to ask that question? Coyne is an atheist, and therefore he believes that there is no transcendent purpose in the world. And Coyne is a Darwinist, so he believes that there is no purpose in the origin of man. And Coyne is a materialist, so he believes that the human mind is, in some way, merely the brain — evolved meat.
Does it make sense for an atheist to ask, "why is there evil?"
Atheism of Coyne’s sort entails materialism and Darwinism, which are the denial of such categories as "good" and "evil." Atheism merely posits "is"; matter stripped of teleology provides no "ought." Why would Jerry Coyne, a purposeless amalgam of atoms, lie in bed at night contemplating events that occur to other purposeless amalgams of atoms? Whence the "ought"? It will do no good for Coyne to assert that somehow he and his species has transcended (due to his large brain, no doubt) mere matter. One cannot obtain that which does not exist. If there is no "ought" in existence itself, then our sense of "ought" is merely an illusion.
If Darwinism were true — if man were the product of mere purposeless variation and natural selection — then there would be nothing "evil" about catastrophes that afflicted genetically unrelated competitors. A child in Coyne’s daughter’s class dies of cancer? Bingo: more time the teacher can spend with Coyne's kid. A Tsunami kills hundreds of thousands in the Indian Ocean? Score! They won’t be competing with Coyne’s kid for jobs in the global economy.
So what is "evil," in the Darwinist understanding of man? "Evil" is if Coyne’s daughter delays childrearing in order to attend college and start her career, and thereby gives birth to two children in her lifetime, instead of three. Because of her obstinate un-Darwinian desire to get an education, Coyne’s genomic posterity is diminished by a third. Wicked. "Good" and "evil" necessarily take on very different meanings if the Darwinian understanding of man is true.
The Problem of Evil, as described by Coyne, is a theist’s problem. Atheists lack standing to ask it. If the Darwinian understanding of man were true, "evil" wouldn’t be a problem, and evil suffered by others who don’t carry our genes wouldn’t be perceived as a problem. The vast majority of "evil" afflicts others, and such "evil" to others would be of benefit those of us who are unafflicted in the struggle for life.
Coyne asserts:
And, of course, the best answer [to the Problem of Evil]: there isn’t a God, much less one who’s omnipotent and beneficent.
But just the opposite is true. The fact that Coyne is a compassionate man who asks, "Why is there evil?" — and I’m sure feels the angst inherent in that question no less than I do — mitigates powerfully against Coyne’s own belief in atheism and materialism and Darwinism. Why bemoan unfairness if there is no Source of fairness? Why care about the bereaved as long as your own genes are replicating — in fact, flourishing because of another’s loss? Why bemoan evil when man himself is the product of evil — a Hobbesian struggle for survival? If atheism and Darwinism and materialism were true, why would we see "evil" as a problem, rather than as an opportunity?
The problem of evil is a problem for theists. If atheism and Darwinism and materialism are true, there is no "problem of evil." There is no good and there is no evil. "Good and evil" is merely a trick that our evolved-meat-computer-brains play on us. We just survive, or we don’t survive. Except there’s not really a "we." "We" are merely selfish genes, sometimes replicated, sometimes not. And "selfish" genes aren't really selfish. They have no motives.
If atheism and Darwinism and materialism are true, there’s no good, there’s no evil, there’s no point to anything. To paraphrase Chesterton in a slightly different context, if you believe in atheism and Darwinism and materialism, that’s fine, but that’s all you can believe, because if you’re right, there’s nothing more.
Yet the Problem of Evil is a real problem; it is perhaps the root problem of man. Only theists have anything meaningful to say about it. Atheists have no standing to even ask why there is evil; they’ve abdicated on the question, "Why is there anything?" and in doing so they abdicate on any questions about good and evil and meaning in life.
But, of course, atheists do ask about evil, just like we all ask, because the Darwinian understanding of man isn’t true. It isn’t even coherent. And everyone, including Coyne, knows, on some level, that atheism and Darwinism and materialism aren’t true. The Problem of Evil is only a problem if there is a standard of good and evil that transcends us.
Atheism is a feeble ideology. Atheists don’t have answers; they don’t even have their own questions.
According to a live-blogger at the Southwestern premiere of “Darwin’s Dilemma” earlier tonight, a Darwinist during Q and A challenged Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells by charging that the interviews in the film of noted paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine (both evolutionists) were done a decade ago. “Are you aware that the interviews of Morris and Valentine were done 9 and 10 years ago?” the questioner asked. Apparently the implication was that the interviews were so old they no longer accurately reflected the views of Morris and Valentine. Except that the questioner was flat wrong. According to Illustra Media, with whom I checked tonight, the interviews were done specifically for this project in October and November of 2006—less than three years ago, not ten. And contrary to some other smears floating around on the internet, the interviews were open and above board. Both Morris and Valentine knew they were doing interviews for Illustra Media (previous producers of the pro-intelligent design films "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" and "The Privileged Planet"). Both men also knew that the interviews were for a film on the Cambrian Explosion. Both signed releases with Illustra allowing their interviews to be used. And both accepted payment for the interviews.
Question: Are Darwinists really so afraid of the evidence that this is the best they can muster?
Well, the news out of Oklahoma about Stephen Meyer's intelligent design presentation at the University last night is quite encouraging. Over three hundred people reportedly turned out for the lecture and discussion following. For all the potty-mouthed bluster that local Darwin activists offered up ahead of time, almost everyone in attendance, whether for or against ID, was civil and respectful during the presentation and discussion last night.
The local daily paper, The Norman Transcript, has two stories today, one about the event last night and one about the screening of Darwin's Dilemma this evening. Intelligent design is the most likely explanation of the origin of life, an author and speaker at the University of Oklahoma said Monday night.
The way Stephen C. Meyer came to that conclusion, was using Charles Darwin's own scientific method of determining which cause to accept for scientific questions in the remote past.
"The irony of that is that a conclusion that points to intelligent design" is reached by Darwin's own methods, Meyer said. The event was also covered by the student paper, The Oklahoma Daily: Stephen Meyer, director and senior fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, outlined his belief in the scientific authenticity of intelligent design, which he explains in his new book, “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.”
“If you apply Charles Darwin’s method of reasoning to what we know now that he didn’t, you come to exactly the opposite conclusion that he did,” Meyer said. “There is evidence of design in nature, and you find that evidence most obviously on display in the digital code that is stored in the DNA.” I suspect both reporters and both papers are all in for a surprise from the feedback they’re likely to get from the biology department at the university.
Over at the OU IDEA Club's website last night club president Josh Malone live-blogged his notes and thoughts about the event and gave a brief rundown of the Q&A session that followed. The photo here was sent in by him.
Remember that tonight is the screening of Darwin's Dilemma at 7pm in Kerr Auditorium at the Sam Noble Natural History Museum.
ENV: How do the scientific issues you write about affect the way we live? Why should the Darwin question matter to people who don’t normally concern themselves with scientific theories?
 DB: I think of the Darwinian debate in the way that Dickens thought of Jardynce v Jarndyce in Bleak House. It is awfully easy to be sucked into it, and once suckered, awfully difficult to get out. I have seen it so often. A man wakes and because has read a book or scanned an essay, he is persuaded that he can make a contribution. He is eager to make it. He offers his opinion on the Internet and is gratified by the prospect of the congratulations that he is shortly to receive. No one pays the slightest attention. He then discovers that to be heard, it is necessary that he amplifies his level of abuse. He does that, referring to the Discovery Institute as the Dishonesty Institute. Repeating the phrase as he moves his bowels affords him an unexpected pleasure. As his influence remains insignificant, his indignation mounts. In the morning, he scuttles to his computer to check his own postings; satisfied when he finds them, and beside himself when he fails. His appetite for conflict sharpens. He becomes determined to exaggerate every issue; and to magnify trivialities. Sooner or later, his Internet presence seems real, and his real life unreal. He ends in the state achieved by almost every Internet blogger: He commences to gibber repetitively. Glen Davidson, who posts to David Klinghoffer's blog, has recently entered the gibbering state.
It is all very sad. I have warned about the phenomenon many times.
Does Darwin matter? Yes, of course it matters. It matters a great deal. It matters whether the theory is true because for better or worse we value the truth and struggle to find it; but it would matter far more were we able to say once and for all that the theory is false. Darwinism involves a way of thought in biology, and were it to go, it would take a great many assumptions along with it. Just think of vitalism, for example. To say a word in its favor is at once to be accused of the cheapest kind of intellectual sentimentality. We know better and if we do not know better, they do. But hold on, please do. If by vitalism one means something like the 19th century idea of a vital fluid that informs living systems, then I am with them. That is so much sentimentality. But if by vitalism one means the thesis that living systems cannot be completely explained in terms of their physics or their chemistry — what then? Something must explain the difference, no? And if it is not a fluid, as naïve 19th-century biologists sometimes thought, it does not follow that it is nothing.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
This remark is half right: Nothing in biology does make sense. It is for the biology of the future to start making sense of it. If that in the end involves religious ideas or even religious I, that's fine with me. Let's ask the questions first, and reject the wrong answers when we know that they are wrong.
If you aren't at the University of Oklahoma tonight or tomorrow for the ID events you can still follow the events online through live blog updates here.
Somehow, over the past few years the University of Oklahoma has become a sort of ground zero for debating evolution and intelligent design. Appearances by William Dembski, Richard Dawkins, Michael Ruse and John West have all drawn large crowds, and not a little controversy. 
Tonight Dr. Stephen Meyer will deliver a lecture based on his book Signature in the Cell in Meachem Auditorium at the University of Oklahoma at 7pm. Darwinists are planning to attend with the hopes of confounding Meyer during the question and answer time. Since biologists like Dawkins and Francis Collins have avoided debating Meyer I don't think there will be much to confound him there tonight.
Tomorrow night, the new ID documentary Darwin’s Dilemma will be screened at 7pm in Kerr Auditorium in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with a post-film discussion featuring two leading intelligent design scientists, Meyer, and Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of Icons of Evolution. Again it looks as if local Darwin activists are planning to try and fill the audience with critics either to disrupt the film, or to harass the speakers during the discussion afterwards. Should be an interesting evening.
Both events sponsored by the student run IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness) Club of the University of Oklahoma. For more information e-mail: ouidea@gmail.com
ENV: You describe yourself as a “secular Jew” and “remarkably indifferent to the religious life.” Yet so much of your writing bears directly on whether religion has been intellectually defeated by secular, science-flavored ideologies. You can’t have given no thought to religious questions. Would you share with us your hunches and suspicions about spiritual reality, the trend in your thinking, if not your firm beliefs?
DB: No. Either I cannot or I will not. I do not know whether I am unable or unwilling. The question elicits in me a stubborn refusal. Please understand. It is not an issue of privacy. I have, after all, blabbed my life away: Why should I call a halt here? I suppose that I am by nature a counter-puncher. What I am able to discern of the religious experience often comes about reactively. V.S. Naipaul remarked recently that he found the religious life unthinkable.
He does, I was prompted to wonder? Why does he?
His attitude gives rise to mine. That is the way in which I wrote The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.
Is there anything authentic in my religious nature?
Beats me.
ENV: Your recent work is concerned with critiquing the myths of a materialist science. How does that theme relate to your earlier teaching and writing?
DB: I do think that my essays share a common concern. I agree with you. I am not sure whether “myths of a materialist science,” quite describes what I have always had in mind. It is something less grand, I suppose.
I don't think any of this ever made it into my classrooms. I was pretty much occupied in getting the calculus across to my students. I did not have much time for anything else.
ENV: Why do you live in Paris?
DB: What is it that Horace says? Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. [“Those who cross the sea change their sky, not their soul.”]
ENV: In Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled, you mentioned that you live in the oldest (one of the oldest?) apartment buildings in Paris. What is your life there like? Give us a quick slice of it.
DB: Up at four; at work at five; lunch in the local cafe, where I am a regular; exercise or walking in the afternoon; dinner out most nights; from time to time, the theater or a concert. I seem to have separated from the friends I made and I've not made new ones. I am by temperament solitary, like the mole or the badger, now that I come to think about it, the Old Mole of Rue Chanoinesse.
 There are a lot of false urban legends promoted in academia about intelligent design (ID). They often start with myths promoted by misinformed critiques in scientific journals, court rulings, or even talks by activists at scientific conferences. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for this misinformation to then be passed down to college students, who may know very little about ID and lack the resources to correct their professors’ misinformed and misplaced attacks on ID. Not anymore.
If you’re a college student, recently gone back to school and expecting to hear a lot of anti-ID views from your professors, we’re pleased to present this “Back to School Guide” for students as follows:
The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent Design
The guide contains suggestions for helpful pro-ID books, articles, and websites for students to read when investigating the issue. Additionally, it contains “Answers to Your Professor's Most Common Misinformed Objections to Intelligent Design.” Nine answers are given to common but false arguments against ID like “Intelligent Design Proponents Don’t Conduct or Publish Scientific Research” or “Intelligent Design Is a Science Stopper” or “Intelligent Design Has Been Refuted by the Overwhelming Evidence for Neo-Darwinian Evolution.”
There are three easy tips to remember as a student with an anti-ID professor:
Tip #1: Never opt out of learning evolution. In fact, learn about evolution every chance you get
Tip #2: Think for yourself, think critically, and question assumptions.
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.
The Darwinian educational establishment doesn’t make it easy to become objectively informed on the topic of evolution and ID. The way around the typical one-sided evolution curriculum is to investigate the issue for yourself. Yes, study and learn about the pro-evolution evolution viewpoint being taught. 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.
This student’s guide will help you to do that—and will help you open up the minds of uninformed critics and skeptics about the facts regarding intelligent design.
Question Everything But Darwin?
Incidentally, we’re not the only ones giving some back-to-school tips for studying evolution. The College Board, which produces the SAT exam and organizes Advanced Placement (A.P.) exams, recently released new suggested Science Standards for learning evolution. The College Board’s Science Standards contains some great language that pays lip service to critical thinking and inquiry-based science education (see below). However, as it turns out, and I was quite surprised to see this (note: sarcasm), but in the evolution sections all of their standards jettison any implementation of inquiry-based learning, as virtually EVERY SINGLE STANDARD require “Students understand that…” There’s nothing wrong with learning about evolution, but in the words of Steve Meyer, such language requires “unqualified affirmation and subtly demand assent” to evolution from the student.
Unfortunately, this approach to evolution education is all too common. Many educators do not encourage students to question neo-Darwinism and basically censor from students any science that challenges neo-Darwinian evolution. Regardless, below is some of the good language in the College Board’s new suggested science standards encouraging critical thinking. They probably don’t want you to apply these methods when studying evolution, but you might want to do that if you want to truly understand the science behind modern evolutionary biology: “In the course of learning to construct testable explanations and predictions, students will have opportunities to identify assumptions, to use critical thinking, to engage in problem solving, to determine what constitutes evidence, and to consider alternative explanations of observations.”
“Scientific investigations require identification of assumptions, use of critical and logical thinking, and consideration of alternative explanations.”
“Teachers and students should be expected to use in their classroom discourse the language, representations and reasoning structures that are accepted by scientists, but science discourse goes beyond proper language. It also engages students in making clear, to themselves and others, not just what they know, but how they know it — claims are made; evidence is produced; and explanations are formulated, revised and extended through science discourse during which claims, evidence and reasoning are discussed and critiqued.”
“Students ask scientific questions about phenomena, problems or issues that can be addressed through scientific investigations or with evidence from existing models. All science knowledge is eligible for such questioning. Keeping in mind that each phenomenon or problem occurs under specific conditions, students make predictions based on their science knowledge, observations and measurements of objects and events in the natural world, or data. Their predictions serve as a lens to focus data collection back to the scientific question. Students develop and refine both scientific questions and predictions so that they can be addressed through scientific investigations.”
“Students recognize, formulate, justify and revise scientific questions that can be addressed by science in order to construct explanations.”
“When posing a scientific question or solving a problem, it is important to identify what is known or assumed about the situation or condition being observed or measured.”
“Students are expected to ensure that the explanation is based on accurate information and sound reasoning. In addition to being able to make explicit justifications for their own claims, students should also be able to recognize and refute claims that do not reflect the use of scientific evidence and reasoning.”
“Both the evidence that supports the claim and the evidence that refutes the claim should be accounted for in the explanation. Alternative explanations should also be taken into consideration.”
“The reasoning that supports an explanation should include a series of logical statements. These interconnected statements should allude to supporting evidence and counterevidence, include an interpretation of data as it relates to the claim, and consider multiple alternative explanations. The explanation might also include an examination of other explanations for which the data might be used and an identification of any anomalous data that was rejected.”
“Criteria for the evaluation of a scientific explanation include, but are not limited to, the following: ... Integration of fact and opinion is avoided. ... Making conclusions that do not follow logically from the evidence is avoided. ... Explanation includes an explicit statement about the critical assumptions of the explanation. ... The claim is appropriately aligned to the scientific question or the prediction it is intended to address. ... The quality and quantity of the evidence used to support the explanation is appropriate. ... All of the evidence is used, not just selected portions of the evidence. ... The reasoning linking the claim to the evidence is strong. The reasoning is considered strong if it includes well-established, accurate scientific principles and if the steps of reasoning form a logical progression....” Students might wish to apply these inquiry-based principles of learning science when studying evolution and ID.
ENV: Darwinism is fiercely guarded by a scientific guild. What does the guild have at stake in this? Prestige? Money? To some observers, the defense seems impermeable. Do you see cracks in the fortress wall opening up?
DB: Fiercely guarded, but not, mind you, effectively guarded. If the Darwinian Guild, to adapt your phrase (since science has nothing to do with it), was interested in rational self promotion, the Guild would have never allowed its members to display in public their characteristic attitude of invincible arrogance and sheep-like stupidity. Just listen to them as they limber up in the insult room: Dumbski, Little Mikey Behe, Stevie Meyer (a regression to school yard taunts irresistible at both the Panda’s Thumb and Talk Reason), the creationist playbook, creationist pablum, creationism in a cheap tuxedo, tired creationist canards, creationist cranks, ID'iots, creotards, creos, sky fairies, liars for Jesus. I've even seen Disco'Tute, this the invention of an elderly fellow at the Panda's Thumb who, like Polonius, imagines that he is the soul of wit. One lunatic named Quick or Quack — or is that simply the sound of his posts? — has become fond of the phrase mendacious intellectual pornography and has so overused it that his fellow bloggers have taken to attacking him. When they do, Quick as a Quack responds that they are guilty of mendacious intellectual pornography. The gabble is as unedifying as it is unending.
What is wonderful, I think, is the way in which membership in the Guild so runs to type, P.Z. Myers, to take the loudest case, reveling in his role as the hearty American rustic, a man prepared as circumstances demand either to desecrate the Catholic wafer or at dinner to immerse his feet in a platter of boeuf bourguignon. If in public he now refrains from withdrawing long spools of lint from his navel and examining them studiously that is because Richard Dawkins has advised him that at Oxford, it is no longer done.
When it is late at night and my old war wounds ache, I very much enjoy chasing down discussions on the Panda’s Thumb in which members of the Guild begin to abuse one another, their indignation discharging itself in a series of menopausal hot flashes, the discussion skipping from disagreement to disgruntlement to peevishness and finally to insult, until at last someone stands accused of being a lying scum for Jesus.
I offer nothing as invention. I have made nothing up.
What I find most remarkable about the Darwinian Guild is what is least remarked. There is not a single first rate intelligence in the bunch.
Not one.
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Let's go back. At some time in the late 1980s or so, Darwin found himself promoted from the back alley to the Big Tent, where he very profitably employed himself in peddling a universal acid, one said to cure warts as well as it explained speciation. A world view was in prospect. And cheap, too. Academics who had grown weary of being foxes were delighted to become hedgehogs. They turned to radical Darwinism and Richard Dawkins because they could find no other place to turn. Stephen Jay Gould had already straddled so many fences, after all, that friends were concerned for the integrity of his genitals. His supporters were never quite clear whether NOMA designated a position in thought or a wing of the Museum of Modern Art. There was no turning to him.
How much better Darwin’s theory; once it had passed through the Dawkins mangler it emerged radical, simple, scientific, easy to grasp, and, of course, free of large wrinkles.
Academics who ten minutes before had been occupied in affirming their allegiance to Mao, and before Mao to Freud, affirmed their allegiance to Darwin. They had sworn — sworn! — never to be swept off their feet again. Darwin swept them up anyway.
Love is like that.
But still, trend setters tend to drop trends the very moment that trends become trendy. If you have taken the trouble to evacuate Cannes in order to become a radical Darwinist in Toulon, the last thing you would wish to see at that darling little restaurant on the Quai is Barbara Forrest preparing herself to barge right in, and my goodness that woman positively honks.
There is a sense, then, that so far as radical Darwinism goes, the tide is beginning to move out. Even David Brooks at the New York Times is persuaded that if someone like Susan Blackmore is now babbling about memes and genes, it really may be time to cough discreetly and withdraw. There is a difference, after all, between favoring the latest fad and indulging the feeble-minded. A number of academics — Tom Nagel and Jerry Fodor come to mind — say now that they knew it all along.
Perhaps this is so.
Is there more in all this than fashion? A little more. It is good for the cause that evolutionary psychology flamed and went. It revealed the gap that haunts all of evolutionary thought, and that is the gap between what life is and what the theory explains. Ideological systems do not crumble from the center; it is the margins that are the first to go.
This sense of a withdrawal from commitment is hardly unique to Darwinism. A retreat from theory is general. For more than thirty years now, bright physicists have very diligently attempted to unify the Standard Model of Particle Physics and General Relativity. The result has been string theory. The hoped-for unification still seems far away.
Peter Woit and Lee Smolin have both made the case to the general pubic. Although physicists were indignant, those with a certain kind of sensitivity began to hedge their bets. Just recently, Steven Weinberg gave a fascinating talk at CERN. A great physicist, Weinberg had during the 1990s offered string theory his support, and using the anthropic principle, he had correctly predicted the positive value of the cosmological constant. At CERN, he was more tentative. Perhaps the world required no more than General Relativity and the Standard Model.
This sort of thing cannot be learned. It is a gift. Some men are born knowing how to tip-toe across the lawn at night, shoes in hand. Leonard Susskind, on the other hand, is not one of them. Just recently, he has proposed uniting the implausible in physics with the absurd in biology, writing dreamily about Universal Darwinism, its role in cosmology, the subordination of chance to the multiplication of possibilities, the anthropic principle, the Landscape.
The physicists who discovered Toulon when it was just a dreary fishing village have already made plans to move on.
Rumor has it that Edward Witten and Steven Weinberg are thinking of Port au Prince.
They believe it is the coming thing.
Be sure to visit www.daviberlinski.org for more information.
Dr. John DeVincenzo, a distinguished California businessman, orchardist and community leader, died this week, a loss to leadership on many levels. He is remembered in the San Luis Obispo Tribune also as “a dedicated family man - energetic, funny, full of life and always pushing the limits on traditional thinking.”
Dr. DeVincenzo professionally was an orthodontist who was generous with his skills and resources. Throughout the past decade he was an enthusiastic supporter of Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture.
We note with final gratitude that the family has named Discovery Institute as one of John’s favorite charities. Those who wish to help further our work in his memory can do so by utilizing this online link or by sending checks marked the “DeVincenzo Fund” to the attention of Kelley Unger at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
ENV: Did anyone in particular, a colleague or friend, influence the conclusions you reach in these essays?
DB: No, I don't think so. Daniel Gallin has been an influence on my thinking, but our friendship ended more almost thirty years ago, and so his influence is no longer of this time or place. Daniel introduced me to model theory. That was his gift to me. After studying with Church at Princeton, I regarded model theory as an immersion into cool water. Such ease, such elegance, such freedom! Had I stayed in mathematics as a research mathematician, I would have stayed in model theory. In the 1980s, I wrote a monograph for the Princeton University Press in which I reached the conclusion that mathematics has no applications beyond finger counting. I stopped for fear that I would find myself affirming that it has no applications at all, circumstances that would have made it difficult for me to justify my work. I never published the thing. It is still sitting in my drawer together with my short stories and poems. But in writing it, I found myself using model theoretic methods over and over again. I've not gone back to the subject. Just a few years ago, I tried to catch up, reading Wilfred Hodges' Shorter Model Theory. Anyone who writes the shorter anything gets my vote.
It may seem odd to say that Marco had a la longue little effect on what I have written, but it is true. I loved the man; but what I took from our friendship and what I have written in these essays are two different things.
I have been influenced in a general way by a number of mathematicians: Daniel Gallin, as I have said, Marco, René Thom, Lipman Bers, Gian-Carlo Rota, and even Irving Siegel, whose friendship I acquired by correspondence. I admired these men, but by the time I came to write my essays, I had already developed my own way of thinking, and as often as not, what I took from them, now that I think about it, was as much an attitude as anything else. Gian-Carlo remarked to me once that mathematics was the last honest discipline. I was struck by the remark, one reason, of course, that Gian-Carlo made it; I thought then that it was true, and I think so now as well.
That is the kind of attitude I mean.
Today's commentary at Breakpoint is about Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell, which they hail as a "landmark book about intelligent design", adding that it is a "profound, hugely important book."
You can read it and listen to it here.
David Berlinski has been accused of being many things, but speechless is not one of them. Here is is a short interview clip from ID The Future where he addresses a range of scientific and philosophical issues that he expanded on his book The Devil's Delusion, which has just this week been released in paperback from Basic Books.
If you’re ever given a choice between seeing one of two doctors about a health concern, with all else about them being apparently equal, you’d be well advised to choose the older one. Oh but won’t the young guy have all the latest techniques and therapies at his disposal, fresh from med school? Maybe or maybe not. What’s more likely, and more important, is that the seasoned practitioner will have wisdom and experience of the human condition.
So too in the political world, where on the conservative side of the spectrum you have “neocons,” “paleocons,” and “theocons.” Those distinctions have always seemed a bit spurious, having to do more with preferences in personal style and social networking than anything else. A more important distinction may be between generationally older conservatives and younger ones.
The thought is prompted by the death of conservative icon Irving Kristol. The older conservatives, like Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, William F. Buckley, Richard John Neuhaus, Robert Bork, and others had (or have) a broader view and didn’t miss the forest for the trees. They were also Darwin-doubters. It’s the younger ones who are so focused on inert policy details that big philosophical issues mostly pass over their (or rather, our) heads. That, or they’re too intimidated or impressed by the culture around us to think fundamentally about the most important questions.
On the Darwin issue in particular, the explanation may also have something to do with the fact that former lefties like Kristol, or daring intellectual nonconformists like Buckley, had already shown the temerity to break with former ideological comrades or shock friends and elders. They took risks and had guts. Following their work as pioneers, being a conservative today requires no comparable courage, much as some conservatives would like to think otherwise.
Here, for your delectation, is Kristol on teaching the evolution controversy, from a New York Times op-ed ("Room for Darwin and the Bible") in 1986, one that likely could not be published there today (or in many a conservative venue for that matter):
The majority of our biologists still accept, and our textbooks still teach, the ''neo-Darwinian synthesis'' ....
Though this theory is usually taught as an established scientific truth, it is nothing of the sort. It has too many lacunae. [The] evidence does not provide us with the spectrum of intermediate species we would expect. Moreover, laboratory experiments reveal how close to impossible it is for one species to evolve into another, even allowing for selective breeding and some genetic mutation. There is unquestionably evolution within species: every animal breeder is engaged in exemplifying this enterprise. But the gradual transformation of the population of one species into another is a biological hypothesis, not a biological fact.
Moreover, today a significant minority of distinguished biologists and geneticists find this hypothesis incredible and insist that evolution must have proceeded by ''quantum jumps,'' caused by radical genetic mutation. This copes with some of the problems generated by neo-Darwinist orthodoxy, but only to create others. We just don't know of any such ''quantum jumps'' that create new species, since most genetic mutations work against the survival of the individual. So this is another hypothesis - no less plausible than the orthodox view, but still speculative.
And there are other speculations about evolution, some by Nobel prize-winning geneticists, that border on the bizarre - for example, that life on earth was produced by spermatozoa from outer space. In addition, many younger biologists (the so-called ''cladists'') are persuaded that the differences among species - including those that seem to be closely related -are such as to make the very concept of evolution questionable.
So ''evolution'' is no simple established scientific orthodoxy, and to teach it as such is an exercise in dogmatism. It is reasonable to suppose that if evolution were taught more cautiously, as a conglomerate idea consisting of conflicting hypotheses rather than as an unchallengeable certainty, it would be far less controversial. As things now stand, the religious fundamentalists are not far off the mark when they assert that evolution, as generally taught, has an unwarranted anti-religious edge to it.
ENV: When did you start thinking, as a critic, about Darwinian evolution? Did anything in your biography incline you to freethinking in that area?
It was the fall of 1965. My graduate school roommate Daniel Messenger and I were ambling along Nassau Street in Princeton. We were munching the kind of wonderful Winesap apples that seem to have disappeared as a variety. I wonder why that is? Daniel's girlfriend, Sandra Petersen, was there too. Daniel was a fine philosopher and Sandra was doing a degree in classical philosophy. We walked over to Darwin’s theory of evolution, living at the time in one of Princeton’s back alleys.
A back alley was the right place to look for Darwin. No one in the philosophy department at Princeton had ever introduced his name into a seminar, or thought to argue that his theory was relevant to our concerns.
At Columbia College I had been given a ten minute introduction to the theory of evolution in a class otherwise devoted to comparative anatomy. The impression conveyed was that Darwin’s theory was far less interesting than the details embedded in the anatomy of the Dogfish.
— Now if you will turn to your specimens, Gentlemen...
If I had had those ten minutes to count on, Daniel had more. At Brown, he had once read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This made him a considerable expert in my eyes. He knew what it was all about. I asked the obvious question: So is that it?
Apparently it was.
Daniel shrugged his rounded shoulders. Someone, he said, had figured it all out.
As she always did, Sandra kept her counsel. She was fond of Daniel; she thought me an idiot.
A year later, I found myself promoted from east coast snow to west coast sunshine. And promoted to more, far more. I was an assistant professor at Stanford: That was more. And I had been given access to the splendor of northern California: That was far more. What is that wonderful line by Robert Lowell? All of life’s grandeur is something with a girl in summer.
One night I was having dinner with my great friend, Daniel Gallin. At the time, he lived in San Francisco, his Delmar Street apartment high above the city. We could see the fog roll in, Nassau Street Daniel emerging briefly to offer Delmar Street Daniel the same reprise of Darwin’s theory that he had once offered me. Delmar Street Daniel was doing a PhD at Berkeley with Dana Scott; he was an excellent mathematician, and an even better logician. He reserved his approval for mathematical model theory, and his admiration for Alfred Tarski.
“Can you imagine?” he would ask on reading something absurd.
And Darwin?
Can you imagine!
*******************************************
At some time in the early 1970s, I came across the papers that Murray Eden and M.P. Schutzenberger had delivered to the 1966 Wistar Symposium, Mathematical Objections to Neo-Darwinism. I read them closely; I was impressed; and I discussed them at Columbia with Josh Kornberg, a molecular biologist, and George Pieczenik, a biochemist. Pieczenik had just finished his PhD, writing a thesis on the grammatical constraints embedded in the nucleic acids. Sympathetic to Murray’s position, he had discovered two facts: The first, that the nucleic acids contain internal terminator codons and the second, that they often express very long palindromes. Josh Kornberg, on the other hand, had no intellectual capital to invest in either Murray or Marco. Not a dime, he said.
Who cares, he added?
For a while, I thought I might find a way to represent an evolutionary process in automata-theoretic terms. And for obvious reasons. The construction of a complex system demands some scheme of anticipation and deferral — anticipation to determine where things are going, deferral to keep intermediates in reserve for later use. Finite state automata will not do; push-down storage automata are needed.
Sidney Morgenbesser accepted my paper for the Journal of Philosophy without asking for revisions. That my paper had very little to do with philosophy, he regarded as nothing more than an inconvenience. “Stick the word ‘philosophy’ in the title somewhere,” he said. So I called my paper, “Philosophical Aspects of Molecular Biological Systems.” Everyone was well satisfied, the philosophers because I was writing about biology, and the biologists because I was writing about philosophy.
It was my introduction to irrelevance, the writer’s natural state.
Somewhat later, Noam Chomsky gave me a letter of introduction that allowed me to meet Marco Schutzenberger in Paris.
I've written about Chomsky and Marco in Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck.
But this is the way it was. Darwin and I go back. He has long since moved from that scruffy back alley to something grand — near Lake Cuomo, I believe. Still, it is lucky that we met. I might have encountered Marx instead of Darwin on Nassau Street, another one of the back-alley boys, the fall of the Berlin Wall leaving me, like Roger Kimball, dancing with ghosts.
In my view, the most important question in the ID-Darwinism debate is this: what do we mean by design? All participants in the debate agree that living things manifest design of some sort; Darwinists assert that the design is unintelligent, the product of ateleological genetic variation and natural selection. ID proponents assert that design implies an intelligent source. Philosophers of an Aristotelian and Thomist stripe assert that teleology pervades nature, but insist that a proper understanding of teleology entails a metaphysical understanding of nature (hylomorphism) that differs from the metaphysical presuppositions of most ID advocates, who generally accept (implicitly if not explicitly) the mechanical view of nature shared by materialists.
In my view, we need to integrate our understanding of the obvious design that is manifest in biology with the teleology that is evident in all of nature. We need a "unified theory" of teleology in nature that intrinsically explains the obvious design in living things as well as the obvious teleology in scientific "laws" and in all natural change. That integration necessarily will come from the "teleology" camp; Darwinist "ateleology" is an impoverished philosophical mistake that persists only when it not made explicit. The ID-Darwinism debate is rapidly eroding materialist credibility, not only because of the strength of the ID arguments, but because ID proponents have forced materialists to state clearly what they believe. Candor is incompatible with materialist ideology; Darwinists are angry in large part because they've been forced to explain themselves.
Can a teleological understanding of nature of an Aristotelian sort bring together the seemingly disparate strands of modern science? Philosopher Ed Feser suggests that a hylomorphic understanding of quantum mechanics, which intrinsically depends on a teleological view of nature, provides a coherent framework on which to understand some counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. His source for this insight is Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer in the development of quantum theory.
Feser notes that, unlike many contemporary scientists like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, Heisenberg was philosophically literate, and he understood that classical philosophical notions are essential for an understanding of nature. Heisenberg saw that the "strangeness" of quantum mechanics was merely strange to the modern mind; classical Aristotelian notions such as act (the actual manifestation of a property) and potency (the potential, but not actual, manifestation of a property) anticipated many of the seemingly counterintuitive findings of quantum mechanics.
Heisenberg:
One might perhaps call [the statistical nature of quantum theory] an objective tendency or possibility, a “potentia” in the sense of Aristotelian philosophy. In fact, I believe that the language actually used by physicists when they speak about atomic events produces in their minds similar notions as the concept “potentia.” So the physicists have gradually become accustomed to considering the electronic orbits, etc., not as reality but rather as a kind of “potentia.” ...The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater… was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality...The probability function combines objective and subjective elements. It contains statements about possibilities or better tendencies (“potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy), and these statements are completely objective, they do not depend on any observer; and it contains statements about our knowledge of the system, which of course are subjective in so far as they may be different for different observers...If we compare [the quantum mechanical relationship between matter and energy] with the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form, we can say that the matter of Aristotle, which is mere “potentia,” should be compared to our concept of energy, which gets into “actuality” by means of the form, when the elementary particle is created.
Feser notes that Heisenberg's understanding of Aristote's notions of potency and act is not precisely correct in several ways, but he points out that Heisenberg understood that classical hylomorphic understanding of nature anticipated some of the "counterintuitive" aspects of quantum mechanics.
Feser:
In any event, it is clear that what Heisenberg is defending is a core thesis of [Aristotelian-Thomist] philosophy of nature, namely that we cannot make sense of the physical world behaving as it does without attributing to its basic components inherent powers which point beyond themselves to certain (often as yet unrealized) ends – a thesis that, as I have noted before, contemporary writers like Ellis, Cartwright, Molnar, and other “new essentialist” philosophers of science are starting to rediscover.
In my view, we are in the midst of a philosophical revolution. Like the materialist 'Mechanical Philosophy' revolution in the 18th century, the 20th and 21st century philosophical revolution is driven by contemporaneous advances in science. It began with quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, is now shaking the foundations of biology, and in time will cast aside simplistic materialist theories of the mind.
It is a corrective, really, to a banal philosophical mistake-- the assertion that nature was a 'machine', a system of passive matter organized by externally-imposed laws and comprehensible without reference to inherent essences and teleology. The strangeness of quantum mechanics has a simple explanation: 'mechanical system' is a woefully impoverished paradigm for nature. Nature is not a machine composed of passive parts acted on by external agency. Science is revealing that intrinsic essences and teleology pervade nature. Materialistic 'mechanism' as a philosophical system (if one can call a transparent mistake a 'system') leaves nature inherently incomprehensible. Materialistic Mechanical Philosophy is a philosophical system that creates philosophical problems; it doesn't, and can't, explain nature. Neither quantum mechanics, nor biology, nor the mind can be understood in the materialist paradigm.
Phillip Johnson is right: the debate about Darwinism is a philosophical debate. It is a debate about the metaphysical basis of science. This much about the denouement of the debate is clear: materialism and mechanism are dying. They are under siege from many fields of science-- from physics, from biology, from neuroscience. Its replacement is as of yet unclear, but an application of classical Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy to a 21st century understanding of nature (New Essentialism) is underway. It is a cogent and even elegant approach to understanding nature, and I believe that it has much to offer for our modern understanding of biology. It is quite compatible with 'evolution' understood as biological change over time and stripped of crude Darwinist metaphysics. New Essentialism may provide the insight into biological design that Darwinian materialism has utterly failed to provide.
The first review of my book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, has appeared. Larry Arnhart, professor of Political Science, Northern Illinois University, author of Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature, posted a perceptive review to his blogsite.
He provides a good summary of the book, and then offers the following remarks:
The elements of Nazi ideology seem diverse--racism, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, militarism, imperialistic expansionism, the ‘leadership principle,’ eugenics, and genocide. But Weikart is remarkably persuasive in showing how all of these strands of Nazi ideology are woven together by the final end of Hitler's ethic--the evolutionary improvement of the human species through the triumph of the Aryan race in the struggle for existence. Proponents of Darwinian ethics--like myself--should be honest in recognizing the impressive evidence that Weikart marshalls from Hitler's writings and speeches to show how Hitler's thought and actions were driven by a coherent view of Darwinian ethics.
After these comments, Arnhart poses three important questions and offers a few criticisms: “First, was Hitler’s Darwinian ethics scientifically correct? Second, was it logically derived from Darwin’s science? Third, what alternative view of morality is Weikart offering us?”
Arnhart and I agree on the first question that Hitler’s Darwinian ethics were not scientifically correct.
On the second question, I do not argue that Nazism is a logical deduction from Darwinism. However, I do point out that Hitler’s ideas about Darwinism and racial struggle were not all that far removed from leading Darwinists of his day, such as the geneticist Fritz Lenz or the anthropologist Eugen Fischer or the psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin. Darwin certainly did not embrace many ideas of the Nazis—such as anti-Semitism—but he did promote some elements of social Darwinism that were adopted and amplified by his successors.
In his review Arnhart is wrong to suggest that just because Darwin affirmed the unity of the human species and opposed slavery, that he somehow also rejected scientific racism. In Descent of Man Darwin claimed that non-European races were sub-species that were inferior intellectually and morally. While believing that black Africans, American Indians, and Australian aborigines were part of the human species, he nonetheless believed they were varieties inferior to Europeans. Even Desmond and Moore in their recent controversial book—which argues that Darwin’s abolitionist sentiments motivated and guided Darwin in formulating his evolutionary theory—admit that Darwin’s adoption of Malthusian principles gave scientific sanction for European colonial genocide. They state:
Malthus’s ‘grand crush of population’ resulted in conflict and conquest, and Darwin began to naturalize the genocide in these terms. He was assuming an inevitability that had to be explained, not a socially sanctioned expansion that had to be questioned.
. . .
Darwin was turning the contingencies of colonial history into a law of natural history. An implicit ranking—with the white man accorded the ‘best’ intellect—ensured the colonist won when cultures clashed. Already Darwin was accepting it as an evolutionary norm. Wedded so early to his evolutionary matrix, this supremacist image would itself be brought to justify later ethnic-cleansing policies, however abhorrent to Darwin’s own humanitarian ideals. (p. 148)
By biologizing colonial eradication, Darwin was making ‘racial’ extinction an inevitable evolutionary consequence. Disappearing natives were put on par with the fossils underfoot: Argentine dynasties had turned to dust before, the megafauna with its giant capybara Toxodon and ground sloth Megatherium, whose fossils he had found. Races and species perishing was the norm of prehistory. The uncivilized races were following suite, except that Darwin’ mechanism here was modern-day massacre. (p. 149)
Imperialist expansion was becoming the very motor of human progress. It is interesting, given the family’s emotional anti-slavery views, that Darwin’s biologizing of genocide should appear to be so dispassionate. (p. 150)
Natural selection was now predicated on the weaker being extinguished. Individuals, races even, had to perish for progress to occur. Thus it was, that ‘Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’. Europeans were the agents of Evolution.
. . .
Prichard’s warning about aboriginal slaughter was intended to alert the nation, but Darwin was already naturalizing the cause and rationalizing the outcome. (p. 151)
Arnhart takes me to task for not mentioning that Daniel Gasman in his work on The Scientific Origins of National Socialism denies the link between Darwin and Haeckel. I did not do so for two reasons: 1) Gasman is wrong on this point (see Robert J. Richards’ recent biography of Haeckel, where he argues that Darwin’s and Haeckel’s views of evolution were fundamentally compatible); and 2) Most historians do not hold Gasman’s book in very high regard.
Arnhart also criticizes me for not mentioning that Darwin opposed genetic determinism. The reason I didn’t mention it is because in fact Darwin did embrace biological determinism. Already in his 1838 notebooks Darwin stated the position that moral traits were hereditary, stating, “Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!!—The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!” He stated in another passage in his notebooks, “It is not more strange that there should be necessary wickedness than disease.” Thus for Darwin morally bad behavior was not contingent, but subject to causal necessity, produced especially by hereditary traits. He stated further in 1838 that “love is instinctive” and that social instincts were the basis for all (positive) moral traits.
Darwin took essentially that same position in Descent of Man, arguing rather forcefully that many moral traits were heritable. There are many passages that illustrate this, but to see how far Darwin took this biological determinism of moral traits, consider the following quotation from Descent:
If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering.
Now, to broach the final question: What alternative view of morality do I suggest? As a historian I did not attempt an overt answer to this question in my book, and this is the part of the review where Arnhart shows the greatest misunderstanding of my position. He incorrectly claims that I admitted that Hitler believed that human beings were created in the image of God. He misconstrued the following statement from my book: "In one memorable passage Hitler wrote that marriage should be 'an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.'" Since Hitler was discussing interracial marriages in this passage, it is quite apparent that, even if Hitler did think some humans were created in the image of God (which I am not sure he did), he certainly did not think all humans were created in the image of God. He also clearly did not think that disabled people were created in the image of God.
Thus my antidote for Hitler’s ethic is quite simple: abandon evolutionary ethics and embrace the view that all humans are created in the image of God.
The New Scientist may sound like a scholarly science publication, but in covering news it often revels in uninformed and unprofessional attacks on critics of Darwinian evolution. So it is somewhat of a surprise to see the publication produce a not-so-veiled pan of The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins' new book. If the evident disappointment expressed by science filmmaker Randy Olson is at all valid, Dawkins' resemblance to the creator of the original "Greatest Show on Earth," 19th Century circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum, is confirmed.
Dawkins doesn't address his real adversaries. He simply ignores Stephen Meyer, whose Signature in the Cell is now leading the science book parade in several Amazon categories. He just dubs opponents creationist reactionaries and assumes that his haughty air will delight his claque and daunt everyone else. He has plenty of ringmaster bluster left, but nothing much to say.
Reviewer Olson, a relentless Darwinist himself, has to complain of Dawkins, "Implying that your audience is stupid does not qualify as a great new angle."
Dawkins not only refuses to debate the likes of Stephen Meyer, he doesn't even take note of answers to his classic arguments. For example, watch this clip, "Climbing Mt. Improbable," from the newly released film, Darwin's Dilemma. It's a fine take-down of Dawkins' case for the nearly unlimited power of natural selection.
P.T. Barnum's famously asserted, "There's a sucker born every minute." C. R. Dawkins must be hoping that the suckers still will buy his books.
This article cross-posted from Discovery Blog.
ENV: Were you always subversive? Tell us about the childhood David Berlinski.
I am not sure that I would care to think of myself as subversive. It is a mole-and-badger kind of word, isn’t it? So long as we are searching for similes, I would prefer lion-like. Regal is another fine word.
I was from an early age indisposed to accept what I had been told. Having been urged not to insert a fork into an electrical outlet, I stuck one in anyway; I was shocked to discover that it was a poor idea, just as my mother had maintained. An impatient child, I became a school yard terror, and a high-school bully. At the Bronx High School of Science I was a part of the clique — Moose Moscowitz, Steven Parker, Arthur Klein, June Tauber, Alan Abramson — that inflicted a life-long feeling of inadequacy on everyone else. I am often astonished that we got out of high school alive.
I have always been haunted by the meaning of my childhood. I was born in New York just a few months after my parents left Europe in flight from the Nazis. My parents having escaped Spain on virtually the last passenger ship to leave occupied Europe — the Marquis de Camellia — I assign to myself a most romantic Spanish conception. My father served in the French Foreign Legion and he had fought throughout the battle of France, his regiment decimated, 250 men left alive from the 2,500 men entering combat. Nonetheless, he had been thrilled, he told me late in his life, to be able at last to face the Germans with a weapon in his hands. It was, unfortunately, a 1916 water-cooled Hotchkiss machine gun, but, my father assured me ominously, it got the job done all the same.
My mother’s hatred of the Germans and Germany continues unabated into her one hundredth year.
There has been that constant reminder throughout my life of exile and expatriation, the loss of language. I live my life within the English language: Obviously so; but to this day, it is the sound of the German language that conveys die Heimat to me. Not das Vaterland, God forbid, but die Heimat.
In the early 1980s, a little French and German production company asked me to write a screenplay based on Kurt Götz's fluffy little novel, Tatiana. They needed a screenwriter who could read the German original. So I had an advantage. The book was little known then and unknown today, but it prefigured Nabokov's Lolita, and so remains a curiosity among literary scholars. Götz had achieved a success of sorts in Hollywood; he was known as a boulevardier, a man about town. He ended his days as a California chicken farmer. This, too, is a part of it, a writer talking to chickens, a weathered hand against the sun.
Ten years before they fled France, my parents had fled Germany; theirs was thus a double flight and a double expatriation. They had together grown up together in Leipzig, and they were both graduates of the Leipzig Conservatory. In France, they repeated their education at the Ecole Normale de la Musique, my father studying composition with Nadia Boulanger and piano with Alfred Cortot. The story of their escape from occupied France in late 1941 was the drama of my childhood: Hiding from the Gestapo in Marseilles, entry visas to the United States, exist visas from France, entry visas to Spain, exist visas from Spain; black market intrigues, Varian Frey, the flight across the Pyrenees, Spanish months spent waiting. It is odd now to think of Franco’s Spain as a refuge, but it was theirs and obviously it was mine.
Growing up under these circumstances and growing up, too, in a northern Manhattan, every last neighborhood ghost gabbling away in German, the greengrocer, Selig, a refugee from the Kaiser's Germany, my greatest need in childhood was to escape the culture that my parents embodied. My greatest need thereafter was to reclaim it. These historical convulsions ramify downward through the generations. Both my children are expatriates.
My education was a straight shot: P.S. 84, the Bronx High School of Science, Columbia College, Princeton, my Ph.D., an accessory before the fact. What remains today of my institutional education is a three-part memory: An excellent year-long course in Euclidean geometry taught by Mrs. Mazen at the Bronx High School of Science; Norman Cantor’s course in medieval history at Columbia College; and Alonzo Church’s graduate course in mathematical logic at Princeton.
Thereafter, whatever I learned, I learned on my own.
For an idea that Darwinists say has no value, intelligent design still seems to captivate them a great deal. Darwinists in Oklahoma have their own list-serv which they use to make announcements, and currently are using to stir up more anti-ID animosity amongst evolutionary foot soldiers in the heartland. They're all aflutter about the screening of Darwin's Dilemma, and about Stephen Meyer's lecture on ID at University of Oklahoma next week. Note this bit of bogus puffery: 2. AND ANOTHER DI INTELLIGENT DESIGN TALK AT OU!
As part of the DI appearance on the OU campus Dr. Stephen C. Meyer will deliver a free lecture about his new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and Evidence for Intelligent Design, at 7 P.M. on September 28th in Meacham Auditorium. [Meyer attempts to show that the digital code embedded in DNA points to a designing intelligence and helps unravel a mystery that Darwin never addressed: how did the very first life begin? His book has been reviewed and dismissed by evolutionary biologists and offers no really new arguments from the anti-evolutionists. Strong opposition to his ideas is expected during the discussion period.] Well, actually, to date no Darwinist biologists have reviewed the book, let alone refuted it. (Heck, I doubt they've read it.) They've been conspicuously silent regarding the arguments Dr. Meyer makes in Signature in the Cell. I bet the scientific opposition to Dr. Meyer's lecture will be weak, not strong. Sadly, the Darwinists' opposition to Dr. Meyer thus far is completely without substance consisting solely of nasty personal attacks. Hopefully, that won't be the sort of drivel that comes up next week.
For those who need a dose of urbane wit and keen insight, never fear; David Berlinski is back.
With his excellent book is finally in paperback (after it sold out last year, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions was selling for more than three times its retail value on eBay), ENV interviewed Dr. Berlinski for a fascinating series of Q&A which we're kicking off tomorrow, as well as an upcoming series of podcasts over at ID the Future.
For more on Dr. Berlinski, including audio and video clips, articles, and continuing updates on his upcoming U.S. tour, head over to DavidBerlinski.org.
In a new segment, Bloggingheads chief Robert Wright and Bloggingheads correspondent George Johnson go on for 75 minutes about the trauma of a pair of heretics (me and Paul Nelson, on separate segments) appearing on their site. I would urge everyone who doesn’t have pressing matters to attend to, such as the need to wash your hair, to tune in for the full time. It’s really fascinating in its way to see two grown men in such a hand-wringing lather. It’s also fascinating to see that neither of them in 75 minutes offers a reason for the correctness of their own views, or the wrongness of ours. The closest they come is when George Johnson invokes the hoary “methodological naturalism.”
One little segment was particularly rich. Johnson is faint with indignation that, in a post commenting on Bloggingheads originally pulling my interview with John McWhorter, I put up the well-known picture of Joseph Stalin standing with a group of people and a second photo in which one poor bloke’s image had been removed. Why, lamented Johnson, I was comparing poor Bloggingheads to a murderous regime! These ID folks revel in their supposed persecution!
In that post my only remark concerning the picture (which appeared at the end) was “Below is a time-lapse picture of my Bloggingheads interview. I’m the guy on the right.” (That is, the fellow who had disappeared.) Now, it may be that George Johnson has never heard the phrase “tongue-in-cheek”; if so he should look it up. Otherwise he may be confused that the guy on the right actually doesn’t look like me, and that the interview wasn’t really filmed next to a Russian river.
Interestingly, at one point when he was explaining why he had the interview put back up, Robert Wright said that if you take down an interview that had been put up, why, it looks “like you’re trying to re-write history.” Well, now, what picture might someone post if he was trying to illustrate Wright’s astute point?
It’s funny how a little thing like a documentary film can send the Darwinist choir into tizzy tantrums. If Darwin’s theory is the be all end all of science, why are they so worried by a small, independent film? Because, it is the power of the ideas in the film that have them scared.
The makers of Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet have produced the third in their trilogy of films about intelligent design, Darwin’s Dilemma The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion. It’s a fantastic film and the producers are screening it in various venues around the country before it's release on DVD next week. One of which is the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, which has PZ Myers --who has one of the biggest Darwinian bullyhorns anywhere-- really in a fit. How dare a natural history museum allow such a film to be screened!
The real shame, though, is that they've landed a respectable venue for the premiere: The Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Oklahoma. Well, it was respectable. This will put a little spot of schmutz on their glossy reputation, I fear. …
So, where are the University of Oklahoma biology professors? Where is the staff of the museum? Where are the rational people of the state of Oklahoma? They should all be rising up in disgust to mock this ridiculous affair.  This explicit bit of disgust has an implicit threat of censorship behind it. Since the comment comes from Myers it can be filed in the department of no-big-frickin’-surprise. He’s the same state-funded blogger who said this about Darwin doubters: "I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It¹s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots." And in a follow-up for the department of no-big-frickin’-surprise here’s this bit of intolerance from Myers. Please don’t try to tell me that you object to the tone of our complaints. Our only problem is that we aren’t martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough. The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many schoolboard members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians. Now, according to Myers the Sam Noble Museum should be ashamed, ashamed of supporting free-speech and not succumbing to the Darwinist lobbies demands that all criticism of Darwin be suppressed. I don’t think there’s much shame in that.
This latest installment of my ongoing responses to Ken Miller regarding the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade will critically analyze Professor Miller’s citation of a 2008 paper co-authored by blood clotting expert Russell Doolittle. Citing to Doolittle, Miller claims that the lamprey lacks blood clotting components that Michael Behe, in Darwin’s Black Box, actually did describe as being part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade. The problem for Miller is that Doolittle's conclusion was based on there allegedly being only one gene in the lamprey homologous to blood clotting factors V or VIII, but Doolittle's reported data belies that conclusion: it shows there were multiple potential homologues for those factors--including at least two conspicuous homologues that imply both factors V and VIII might be in the lamprey. Other than Doolittle's self-professed "hopes," his reported data offers no compelling reason to believe that the lamprey lacks either factor V or VIII of the blood clotting cascade. This means Miller's argument against Behe fails.
This current response to Miller recently got more interesting. The website of the anti-ID media outlet Discover Magazine is presently touting Dr. Miller's alleged refutation of me on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade as an "intelligent design fail." Apparently Discover has not been closely following this exchange of late. As I documented in a response to Miller last month (titled "Ken Miller's Only a Theory Misquotes Michael Behe on Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade"), Miller was flat wrong to claim that the puffer fish's lack of certain blood clotting factors refuted any of Behe's arguments in Darwin's Black Box. A review of Darwin's Black Box--and Behe's clear explanation of own his writing--unambiguously demonstrates that in Darwin's Black Box, Behe did not argue that the factors in the intrinsic initiation pathway of the blood clotting cascade (which are the ones missing in the puffer fish) were irreducibly complex. And now today we see that the data reported in the Doolittle paper doesn't actually support the claims Miller wants to make.
Should Miller's fundamental and repeated misrepresentations of Behe in court, in lectures, and in his latest book qualify as a "fail"? How about Miller's reliance upon a paper that, when closely scrutinized, doesn't support the point he wants it to make? Is that a "fail"? How about Discover Magazine's devoted and forceful promotion of Miller's straw man attacks and misrepresentations of Behe's arguments? Read on and decide for yourself.
Miller Relies on Russell Doolittle
In his response to me on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade, Ken Miller claims that even if I am correct that he didn’t accurately represent Behe’s arguments about irreducible complexity during the Dover trial, Behe’s arguments are still refuted by a much more recent paper. That paper was co-authored by Russell Doolittle in 2008. According to Professor Miller, Doolittle’s paper “reports on a careful search through the lamprey genome. The lamprey, as luck would have it, has a perfectly functional clotting system, and it lacks not only the three factors missing in jawed fish, but also Factors IX and V.”
Behe did not claim that Factor IX was part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade, but Behe did argue that Factor V was part of that core. Since the lamprey allegedly lacks Factor V, Miller claims that Behe’s argument is refuted. But a closer analysis shows that Miller has over-stated the conclusions of Doolittle’s paper, and that some of Doolittle’s own conclusions are highly questionable given the data presented in the paper.
Doolittle’s Basic Conclusions
As we saw in his statement quoted above, Miller effectively equates the findings of Doolittle’s paper with respect to Factors IX and V. But Doolittle’s paper actually says significantly different things about Factor IX and Factor V.
Regarding Factor IX, the paper tentatively concludes that it doesn’t exist in the lamprey: “As in the case of the Trace database, no evidence was found in the draft assembly for a factor IX, despite exhaustive searching with factor IX sequences from a wide variety of species.” Doolittle et al. then conclude “we would cautiously propose that a gene corresponding to factor IX is not present in the lamprey genome.” (emphasis added) But like many of the other factors Miller tests for, Behe never claimed in Darwin's Black Box that Factor IX was part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade.
Regarding Factor V, the paper does not say that it is nowhere to be found in the lamprey genome. Miller claims that the lamprey “lacks” Factor V, but the paper says “the data are only consistent with a single copy of a gene corresponding to the precursor of clotting factors V and VIII.” The paper thus doesn’t say that the lamprey wholly “lacks” Factor V, but rather it says that the lamprey merely “lacks the separate equivalents of factors V and VIII (i.e., it has a preduplication gene).”
Behe did claim in Darwin’s Black Box that both Factors VIII and V were part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade, so if the lamprey lacks one of those two factors, we might have a challenge to Behe’s hypothesis. But even if the lamprey has only one gene that resembles both factors, it’s difficult to conclude that one of the functions of the two factors is being unfulfilled. After all, many proponents of the gene-duplication hypothesis argue that first a gene acquires multiple functions, and then after a duplication event, the functions of the two now-separate genes diverge. So it’s difficult for Miller or Doolittle to argue, under their theory’s own terms, that at least one of the two Factor V/VIII’s functions was going unfulfilled.
Indeed, Dr. Miller later admits in his response to me that according to Doolittle’s paper, “The lamprey genome does contain a single gene, somewhat related to Factor X and Factor V, but not identical to either.” (Miller here actually accidentally misstates the paper, which in fact states that “factors V and VIII seem to be represented by a single gene.” If I made a mistake like this I'd probably be reamed for making some kind of "fail," but I'll gladly let Miller off the hook for his unintended mistake.) Miller’s error aside, this is an important admission that could defeat his argument: taking Doolittle’s conclusion at face value, the lamprey very well MAY still have a component that fulfills the functions of both Factors V and VIII.
But there is more...
Clearly, there IS at least one factor V-like protein in the lamprey genome -- and as discussed below, there is likely more than one. Searches for key domains from Factor V turned up dozens of “hits” in the lamprey genome. But Factors V and VIII are very similar, and under their view that there’s only one such protein, the authors conclude that this one gene may represent a “precursor” to both proteins. An important question should now emerge:
Is there actually only one protein resembling Factors V and VIII in the lamprey genome?
If there is more than one protein resembling Factors V and VIII, then Doolittle and Miller’s argument that the lamprey lacks one of those two proteins falls apart.
Sparse Data Backing Doolittle’s Hopes and Dreams
Before I assess Doolittle and Miller’s answer to the question I’ve just posed, we have to ask whether the question can even be adequately addressed given the current non-existence of a complete lamprey genome database. Doolittle is alleging that particular blood clotting factors do not exist in the lamprey genome, yet a continuous database of the entire lamprey genome has not even yet been created. That poses a problem.
To answer our question, Doolittle must work many fragments of lamprey DNA sequences in a “trace” database. The “trace” database does contain over 14 billion nucleotides of lamprey DNA, and the lamprey genome is on the order of 2 billion base pairs. Doolittle searched (and found) 20 lamprey genes sequenced apart from the “trace” database, and concludes that therefore the trace database is “sufficiently redundant to make judgments about the presence or absence of particular genes.” Perhaps, but the bottom line is that the redundancy is, by Doolittle’s estimate, only “fivefold,” and we truly don’t know for a fact that all lamprey DNA is in the database.
Despite the lack of a whole lamprey genomic database, Doolittle sets out to investigate some ambitious claims in his paper. Why? Doolittle’s paper, seemingly, is one he has wanted to write for a long time. It is subtly framed as a response to Behe’s argument for irreducible complexity. Doolittle even says that before the study, he “hoped” that the lamprey blood clotting cascade would be simpler than that of other jawed vertebrates because previously it was said that “every component seems essential”: Blood coagulation is known to follow a similar scheme in all vertebrates, the culminating event being the thrombin-catalyzed conversion of fibrinogen into fibrin. Interest in how the process evolved to yield the complex system that occurs in mammals has been longstanding, not only because every component seems essential, but also because some of the factors -- like factors IX and X -- depend on others -- like factors VIII and V -- for their activity. It has long been appreciated that a series of different gene duplications gave rise to many of the factors, and it was hoped that studies on early diverging vertebrates, especially jawless fish, might reveal a simpler process as it existed in earlier times.
(Russell F. Doolittle, Yong Jiang, Justin Nand, "Genomic Evidence for a Simpler Clotting Scheme in Jawless Vertebrates," Journal of Molecular Evolution, Vol. 66:185–196 (2008), emphases added) At the very least, Doolittle is admitting that he entered this genomic study because he “hoped” that the lamprey might have a “simpler process” of blood clotting, thereby confirming his evolutionary bias. Such sparse data easily afford the opportunity to indulge your greatest hopes, and to confirm your biases. Looking at Figure 10 of Doolittle’s paper, I wonder if he was disappointed to find a system that really is, at the end of the day, at most lacking only 2 elements of the jawed vertebrate pathway -- the V-->Va component, and the X-->Xa component. Studies that are undertaken after their authors “hoped” for a particular result, especially when the subject is data as sparse as is the case here, need to be carefully scrutinized.
Is there really only one protein resembling Factors V and VIII in the lamprey genome?
As noted above, if there is more than one protein resembling Factors V and VIII, then Doolittle and Miller’s argument that the lamprey lacks one of those two proteins disintegrates. So let’s now return to this important question: Does Doolittle’s data support his claim that there is only one possible gene in the lamprey database resembling Factors V or VIII, and thus at most only one of the two proteins exists in the lamprey? I don’t think it does at all. Why not?
Factors V and VIII are extremely similar, and Doolittle’s paper admits that both factors yielded dozens of hits in the lamprey genome database. The proteins have a highly similar domain and sequence structure.
Both Factors V and VIII are composed of 3 types of components: three “A” domains (that are nearly identical), a “B” domain, and then a “discoidin” domain at the C-terminus. In both factors V and VIII, the A domains and “discoidin” domain are extremely similar, and the only major differences between the two factors lie in their “B” domains. But Doolittle’s study searched and reported that dozens of hits similar to the A domains of Factors V and VIII were found in the lamprey genome! As the paper stated: All told, searches of the six A domains (three each from human factors V and VIII) identified approximately 257 “hits” in the lamprey trace database. When these were compared with each other, many were found to contain the same (or virtually the same) inserts, and the number was subsequently reduced to 50 “hit-groups,” consistent with an approximate fivefold redundancy. There was a wide range, however, the number of identical inserts in the various groups ranged from 0 to 29.
(Russell F. Doolittle, Yong Jiang, Justin Nand, "Genomic Evidence for a Simpler Clotting Scheme in Jawless Vertebrates," Journal of Molecular Evolution, Vol. 66:185–196 (2008), emphasis added, internal citations removed) The known raw data thus actually shows that there is much more than merely ONE protein in the lamprey that resembles Factors V or VIII. The only reason that they don’t tag many of these proteins as Factors V or Factor VII is because there are other proteins in the blood, namely hephaestin and ceruloplasmin, that also use these types of A-domains. Doolittle’s reasoning, laden with evolutionary assumptions, ignores any protein that was allegedly more similar to hephaestin or ceruloplasmin as not possibly representing Factor V or Factor VIII, even though there were at least 50 such potential “hits” in the lamprey genome: Of the 50 unique hits, fewer than a dozen resembled factors V or VIII more than or as much as they did hephaestin or ceruloplasmin. Concerned that the initial search might have been compromised by the long query sequences that are inconsistent with exon-length targets, we redid the entire exercise on an exon-by-exon basis, using human exon sequences as queries. ... An analysis of matching segments make it clear that, at a minimum, there are four genes in lamprey that belong to the hephaestin-ceruloplasmin-factor V/VIII family, only one of which seems closer to the FV/VIII side of the family.”
(Russell F. Doolittle, Yong Jiang, Justin Nand, "Genomic Evidence for a Simpler Clotting Scheme in Jawless Vertebrates," Journal of Molecular Evolution, Vol. 66:185–196 (2008).) Given that the paper reported “hits” for many other lamprey genes based upon finding matches for strings of a mere 30 amino acids (see Table 1), it would seem that the authors are applying more stringent criteria for detecting Factors V or VIII than they applied elsewhere. It’s almost as if they “hoped” these factors wouldn’t be found.
All those ignored “hits” aside, if one looks carefully at the data reported, it turns out that there actually wasn’t just one protein that very closely resembled Factor V or Factor VIII, but TWO! The conclusion of their paper assigns a “hit” from the lamprey genome, Co-13587, to Factor V / VIII because it contains properties of those proteins including the unique “discoidin” domain at the C-terminus. But in Figure 4 of the paper, they note that another hit, Co-68932, “has its introns in exactly the same place as human factors V and VIII genes.” Thus, according to their data, there would actually seem to be at least two proteins in the lamprey genome that are similar to Factors V and VIII.
Factors V and VIII comprise proteins, and the lamprey genome apparently contains two proteins that are highly similar to those to proteins. Coincidence?
I’m at a loss to see why Doolittle et al. claimed there is only one gene closely resembling Factors V/VIII when in fact there appear to be at the very least two, if not more. And if there appear to be two, then they have no reason to claim that one of those two factors doesn’t exist in the lamprey genome. But of course, such a result might dash Doolittle’s hopes and dreams.
A Deeper Core?
Though Doolittle’s conclusion that the lamprey lacks an individual gene for Factor V appears to be unsupported by the data, let us now, just for the sake of argument, accept this conclusion. First, it shows that Behe’s hypothesis of irreducible complexity is testable. But we have to test it realistically. While Doolittle’s research is a good start, there could still be an irreducible core lurking at some lower level of complexity.
Miller seems more eager to refute Behe than he does to actually test the argument for irreducible complexity. Given that the lamprey still has nearly all of the components of the blood clotting cascade that Behe proposes are in the irreducibly complex core of the cascade, perhaps Doolittle’s paper indicates that there is an irreducible core to the blood clotting cascade after all: The paper admits that in the lamprey genome, “The basic events involving the thrombin-catalyzed conversion of fibrinogen to fibrin and its subsequent cross-linking and lysis were not an issue.” Indeed, Figure 10 has a proposed schematic of the lamprey blood clotting cascade that basically has all of the elements “after the fork” in the jawed vertebrate cascade, except for the V-->Va step and the X-->Xa step.
Importantly, the paper notes that “None of the principal clotting factors is found in the genome of the protochordate Ciona intestinales.” So if the closest alleged relative to vertebrates -- the tunicate -- apparently has none of these principal clotting factors, could we be zeroing in on an irreducibly complex core? For those who take the ID hypothesis seriously, and aren’t interested in false refutations of it, it’s a possibility worth exploring.
But before the lamprey blood clotting cascade can be understood well enough to adequately address some of these questions, it seems we’ll need more sequence data and a more realistic analysis of the lamprey genome than was employed in Doolittle’s paper.
The lesson to be learned here is to always fact-check the claims of supremely confident defenders of Darwin like Dr. Ken Miller. He’s a very smart biologist. However, sometimes looking closely at his citations shows just how weak his arguments are. In this case, it seems very likely that Miller’s authority, Doolittle, had a very weak basis indeed for claiming that the lamprey lacked Factor V or Factor VIII.
Recently the Wall Street Journal published dueling articles by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins entitled Man vs. God. The editors’ choice of Dawkins to represent the atheist viewpoint is understandable enough; in the interest of balance, it seems that the WSJ editors searched hard to find a theist who mangles theism as effectively as Dawkins mangles atheism. Author Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun given to syncretism who believes that "we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence,” answered the WSJ’s "Mangler of Theology" Ad, and Dawkins had his disputant.
Armstrong:
…Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart
Indeed, there are deep flaws in modern theology, but Darwin didn't reveal them; he concealed and exploited them. He exploited a deep error that had arisen out of Descartes’ rejection of Thomist metaphysics and his embrace of Mechanical Philosophy. Descartes and his successors dispensed with the hylomorphic understanding of nature—with Aristotle’s and Aquinas' understanding of substances as a composite of matter and form and the invocation of four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final) in nature—and replaced it with an anemic metaphysics of truncated material and efficient causes.
Mechanical Philosophy explains the world as a system of disparate mechanisms, mechanical particles and parts randomly bumping about and constrained only by laws of force, without intrinsic essence or teleology. It is a woefully impoverished attempt at metaphysics; it serves well Francis Bacon's dream of a model of nature that can be manipulated, but it utterly lacks the rich explanatory power of the traditional hylomorphic understanding of nature that is the foundation of Western philosophy and natural science. Mechanical Philosophy ignores teleology and organizational principles in nature; it is an impoverished description of nature as particles in motion. It has survived in spite of its inadequacy because of the remarkable success of scientific endeavors that have focused on the these limited mechanical aspects of nature. The focus on mechanical aspects of nature (material and efficient causes) obviously doesn't mean that such a focus is a complete description of nature, but it worked to advance the manipulation of nature, and over centuries we came to believe (falsely) that this truncated philosophy could be a comprehensive explanation of the natural world. There were of course ideologues who understood something else about Mechanical Philosophy: as it denies teleology in nature, it provides a wedge with which to deny the existence of God. For atheists, Mechanical Philosophy was a gift from... well, a gift.
Mechanical Philosophy is a methodology for manipulating nature; it explains nothing. Now don't get me wrong: I'm all for manipulating nature. I'm a neurosurgeon, and I manipulate nature professionally. I take out brain tumors, using very mechanical means, and during surgery inference to material and efficient causes suits me just fine. Applied science is a methodology, and for some purposes, that methodology is good enough. But the person on whom I'm operating can't be explained by the scientific method or by truncated notions of material and efficient causes. In fact, nothing in nature can really be explained without inference to all aspects of causation—material, efficient, formal, and final. And of course, hylomorphism (the metaphysical view that incorporates the four causes) necessarily leads to other conclusions, such as the existence of a Prime Mover/First Cause/Necessary Being. I'm fine with that, because I'm a Christian, and the necessary existence of a Creator seems obvious to me. I'm not an atheist, and therefore I don't begin with a bias that precludes a rigorous understanding of organizational principles and teleology in nature.
Perhaps the most obvious stumbling block of Mechanical Philosophy is its inability to explain life and the mind. Most people don't know or care about hylomorphism or Descartes or philosophical disputes that date back centuries, but they have the good sense to see that "particles in motion" is an impoverished framework for explaining biology and for explaining the immaterial aspects of the mind. They understand that it's not merely that "particles in motion" doesn't explain life and the mind; they understand that it can't explain life and the mind. Darwin's "accomplishment" was to offer a faux-explanation—chance (ateleology) and necessity (tautology)—to account for life. (Materialists are still scrambling, quite unsuccessfully, to provide a mechanical explanation for the mind). But Mechanical Philosophy has no explanatory power; it merely provides, under some circumstances, a methodology for applied science.
Essences (forms) and teleology pervade nature, and Mechanical Philosophy by its own precepts is blind to such aspects of reality. Darwin provided a faux-mechanism by which the living world acquired essences (species) and teleological attributes (specified complexity), without the invocation of real essence (form) or teleology. Darwin's error was to perpetuate an antecedent and much deeper philosophical error; he provided a faux-mechanism to explain life without reference to organizational principles and teleology in nature. Darwin concealed and exploited flaws in Mechanical Philosophy and in the anemic theology that it spawned; he didn’t reveal them.
Armstrong continues:
But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.
She gets it part-right. God isn’t a "Mechanick," because His creation isn’t mechanical (brought about merely by material and efficient causes). Nature has essence and teleology that transcend "Mechanicks." The theological embrace of the Divine Mechanick was a theological catastrophe.
Armstrong observes:
But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis…
She’s right. But then she falls off her rhetorical cliff:
…finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace…
Armstrong couldn't be more wrong. Darwin didn’t show that “there could be no proof for God’s existence”; nothing he wrote touched any of the classical demonstrations for the existence of God, which are logical demonstrations, not empirical hypotheses. Contra Armstrong, demonstrations of God’s existence are well within the competence of reason, because the philosophical and theological system constructed by Aristotle and Aquinas is the basis for reason. God undoubtedly provides “an inner haven of peace,” but His existence is, and as we shall see must be, demonstrable by reason.
With theists like Armstrong, theism needs no enemies. Richard Dawkins sees this. He observes:
Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."
Dawkins is remarkably lucid:
The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.
Dawkins is right (my fingers cramp as I type this). Armstrong’s theology is a muddled mess; it’s little more than an apology for atheism. Her assertion that God is That which "help[s] us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace" is just functional atheism cloaked in New Age psycho-babble. The Incarnation of Armstrong's God isn't Christ; it's Oprah.
Remarkably, and to Dawkins’ (Arrrgh..) credit, Dawkins refuses to accept Armstrong’s easily assailed straw man. Dawkins seems to grasp, with perplexing clarity, the incalculable damage "theists" like Armstrong do to the case for belief in God. God is not a sentiment or a celebrity therapist. He is the Foundation of Existence. He is the Source of reason, and His existence is demonstrable by reason. If He is none of these, He doesn’t exist. Real theologians and philosophers, and countless faithful and faithless alike, understand that God’s existence is a radical claim about fact.
Rigorous philosophical arguments that demonstrate the existence of God bear no resemblance to Armstrong’s woolly syncretistic meditations. The arguments with which New Atheists must struggle are the meticulous theistic arguments of Aristotle and Augustine and Maimonides and Averroes and Aquinas and Konig and Maritain and Gilson and Moreland and Plantinga and Craig. Not Armstrong. The debate with New Atheism is a debate about the rationality of belief in God, and the basis for that rational belief is built on several millennia of profound philosophical insight. The effective theist answer to New Atheist casuistry is not to point out that we feel awe and a sense of mystery and that the object of that awe must be God; the theist answer to New Atheists is that God’s existence is logically demonstrable, and that His existence is the indispensable basis for reason, science, and morality.
Richard Dawkins points out that people who believe in God believe that He “exists in objective reality.” Armstrong’s Wall Street Journal essay is the epitome of rhetorical incompetence: she provided Dawkins with an opportunity to get something right.
As Jonathan Wells reminds us in his new article, "Deepening Darwin's Dilemma," 2009 is a year of anniversaries for evolution — not just for Darwin and The Origin, but also the centennial of Charles Walcott's discovery of the Burgess Shale.
With Darwin's Dilemma coming out next week and premiering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Dr. Wells' article couldn't be more timely. As he explains in the film and will be on hand to explain in person on September 29, Darwin saw the Cambrian explosion as a serious argument against his theory, but he countered it by supposing "that fossils of the ancestors of Cambrian animals once existed but were destroyed...The discovery of microscopic and soft-bodied Precambrian fossils makes Darwin’s excuse sound hollow; and the more such discoveries are made, the hollower it sounds."
Click here to read the rest of the article, and see Dr. Wells in person at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on September 29.
For those of you in Oklahoma, two events two weeks from now are bringing intelligent design to your doorstep. First, Stephen C. Meyer will give a free lecture at the University of Oklahoma on September 28. The next day is the Southwestern premiere of Darwin's Dilemma at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History September 29th.
Darwin’s Dilemma will be screened at 7pm in Kerr Auditorium in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with a post-film discussion featuring two leading intelligent design scientists, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, and Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of Icons of Evolution.
The screening is sponsored by the student run IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness) Club of the University of Oklahoma.
What: Darwin's Dilemma film premiere
When: Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009 7pm
Who: Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, Dr. Jonathan Wells
Where: Kerr Auditorium, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History
For more information e-mail: ouidea@gmail.com
Read more about this event here, and click here to download a flyer for the event.
Recently a paper appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled "The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine." As you might expect, I was very interested in reading what the authors had to say. Unfortunately, as is all too common on this topic, the claims made in the paper far surpassed the data, and distinctions between such basic ideas as “reducible” versus “irreducible” and “Darwinian” versus “non-Darwinian” were pretty much ignored.
Since PNAS publishes letters to the editor on its website, I wrote in. Alas, it seems that polite comments by a person whose work is the clear target of the paper are not as welcome as one might suppose from reading the journal’s letters-policy announcement (“We wish to provide readers with an opportunity to constructively address a difference of opinion with authors of recent papers. Readers are encouraged to point out potential flaws or discrepancies or to comment on exceptional studies published in the journal. Replication and refutation are cornerstones of scientific progress, and we welcome your comments.”) My letter received a brusque rejection. Below I reproduce the letter for anyone interested in my reaction to the paper. (By the way, it’s not just me. Other scientists whose work is targeted sometimes get the run around on letters to the editor, too. For an amusing / astounding example, see here.)
Call me paranoid, but it seems to me that some top-notch journals are real anxious to be rid of the idea of irreducible complexity. Recall that last year Genetics published a paper purportedly refuting the difficulty of getting multiple required mutations by showing it’s quick and easy in a computer—if one of the mutations is neutral (rather than harmful) and first spreads in the population. Not long before that, PNAS published a paper supposedly refuting irreducible complexity by postulating that the entire flagellum could evolve from a single remarkable prodigy-gene. Not long before that, Science published a paper allegedly refuting irreducible complexity by showing that if an investigator altered a couple amino acid residues in a steroid hormone receptor, the receptor would bind steroids more weakly than the unmutated form. (That one also made the New York Times!) For my responses, see here, here, here, and here. So, arguably picayune, question-begging, and just plain wrong results disputing IC find their way into front-line journals with surprising frequency. Meanwhile, in actual laboratory evolution experiments, genes are broken right and left as bacteria try to outgrow each other.
Well, at least it’s nice to know that my work gives some authors a hook on which to hang results that otherwise would be publishable only in journals with impact factors of -3 or less. But if these are the best “refutations” that leading journals such as PNAS and Science can produce in more than a decade, then the concept of irreducible complexity is in very fine shape indeed.
*************
To the editor:
Reducible versus irreducible systems and Darwinian versus non-Darwinian processes
The recent paper by Clements et al (1) illustrates the need for more care to avoid non sequiturs in evolutionary narratives. The authors intend to show that Darwinian processes can account for a reducibly complex molecular machine. Yet, even if successful, that would not show that such processes could account for irreducibly complex machines, which Clements et al (1) cite as the chief difficulty for Darwinism raised by intelligent design proponents like myself. Irreducibly complex molecular systems, such as the bacterial flagellum or intracellular transport system, plainly cannot sustain their primary function if a critical mechanical part is removed. (2-4) Like a mousetrap without a spring, they would be broken. Here the authors first postulate (they do not demonstrate) an amino acid transporter that fortuitously also transports proteins inefficiently. (1) They subsequently attempt to show how the efficiency might be improved. A scenario for increasing the efficiency of a pre-existing, reducible function, however, says little about developing a novel, irreducible function.
Even as evidence for the applicability of Darwinian processes just to reducibly complex molecular machines, the data are greatly overinterpreted. A Darwinian pathway is not merely one that proceeds by “numerous, successive, slight modifications” (1) but, crucially, one where mutations are random with respect to any goal, including the future development of the organism. If some mutations arise non-randomly, the process is simply not Darwinian. Yet the authors say nothing about random mutation. Their chief data are sequence similarities between bacterial and mitochondrial proteins. However, the presumably homologous proteins have different functions, and bind non-homologous proteins. What is the likelihood that, say, a Tim44-like precursor would forsake its complex of bacterial proteins to join a complex of other proteins? Is such an event reasonably likely or prohibitively improbable? Clements et al (1) do not provide even crude estimates, let alone rigorous calculations or experiments, and thus provide no support for a formally Darwinian process. Their only relevant data in this regard is their demonstration that a singly-mutated bacterial TimB can substitute for Tim14 in mitochondrial transport. While that is certainly an interesting result, rescuing a pre-existing, functioning system in the laboratory is not at all the same thing as building a novel system step-by-random-step in nature.
Biologists have long been wary of attempts to fill in our lack of knowledge of the history of life with imaginative reconstructions that go far beyond the evidence. As I have discussed (5), extensive laboratory evolution studies over decades offer little support for the plausibility of such felicitous scenarios as Clements et al (1) propose. The authors may well be overlooking formidable difficulties that nature itself would encounter.
References
1. Clements A, et al. (2009) The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA doi/10.1073/pnas.0908264106.
2. Behe, MJ (1996) Darwin's Black Box :The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press, New York).
3. Behe MJ (2000) Self-organization and irreducibly complex systems: A reply to Shanks and Joplin. Phil Sci 67:155-162.
4. Behe MJ (2001) Reply to my critics: A response to reviews of Darwin's Black Box: the biochemical challenge to evolution. Biol Phil 16:685-709.
5. Behe, MJ (2007) The Edge of Evolution: the Search for the Limits of Darwinism (Free Press, New York).
Robert Deyes at Uncommon Descent continues his analysis of Signature in the Cell. A sound approach to scientific investigation does not necessarily bring with it a mandatory requirement to be a ‘nose to the grindstone’ experimentalist. Indeed scientists can and often do take data that others have amassed and interpret it in light of their own understanding of the matter at hand. Therein lies a lesson that, as science historians will note, is backed by an impressive list of prominent cases. In fact Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and even Charles Darwin challenged the viewpoints of their day through their own theoretical interpretations of reality. For Darwin this meant for the most part collecting data from botanists, breeders, ecologists, and paleontologists and constructing a paradigm-shifting synthesis on the evolution of life that did not necessarily hinge on his own data. Both Einstein’s two papers on relativity and Newton’s opus Principia were theoretical manifestos that at the time they were published had little experimental support. Read the rest here.
The world is awash with charities. Most are quite worthwhile. For pennies a day, you can send a child in an impoverished country to school, and kindle a lifetime of learning. But there remain many unmet needs.
What about people living in ideological poverty?
We’ve all heard the stories. Materialist philosophers of the mind who deny that the mind exists. Full professors of evolutionary biology who misunderstand demonstrations of the existence of God that are routinely mastered by teenagers in Introductory Philosophy courses. Atheist authors of letters to Christian nations who excoriate religion and ignore the unparalleled atrocities of atheism. Unrepentant Trotskyites who scold Christians for adherence to a messianic ideology.
Some of our fellow men live in intellectual squalor.
Believe it or not, there are materialist neurologists who believe that the ability of scientists to localize in the brain the neurological correlate of an experience is evidence that the experience is not real. There are "skeptical" scientists who believe that every single piece of evidence supports their materialist ideology. There are materialist mathematicians who passionately assert that "survivors survive" isn’t a tautology. There are evolutionary biologists who announce that the latest fossil finally proves evolution, which they insist was already a fact. There are logically-disabled Darwinists who, without cognitive dissonance, assert that intelligent design is both untrue and untestable. There are leading atheist scientists who oppose the appointment of a superbly qualified scientist to run the National Institutes of Health merely because he is a Christian, but they approve of the Presidential appointment of a Science Czar who has publicly endorsed forced abortions and involuntary mass sterilization. There are best-selling New Atheist authors who believe that it may be appropriate to kill some people because of their religious beliefs, or that religious education is child abuse, or that religious people may be appropriately relegated to zoos, or that the corrosion of Western civilization by Darwinian universal acid would be a good thing.
There is such poverty. There’s a national organization of biologists who are boycotting an entire state because the people who live there and who fund their grants refuse to be censored by them. There’s a prominent atheist mathematician who believes that the world would be a lot better off if disabled children were killed before birth, but he denies that his views are eugenic. There’s an Oxford professor of the Public Understanding of Science who denies the evidence for design in life, but he thinks that aliens might have been responsible.
It’s enough to make you cry.
What binds these intellectual unfortunates together is an impoverished ideology: New Atheism. It’s sad to note that a few percent of our brethren, a fringe really, live in intellectual squalor. How can you help alleviate the crushing metaphysical poverty of New Atheism? You can send a New Atheist to school. That’s why I’m starting the first New Atheist educational charity:
"Give-a-Clue."
"Give-a-Clue" is the first charity dedicated to providing New Atheists with what they need most desperately: a rudimentary education.
For a few dollars a day, "Give-a-Clue" can help a New Atheist of your choice get a clue. You can sponsor a New Atheist to begin a lifetime of education. You can choose to send your Atheist to a public university (just pennies/day) or to an Ivy League university (a hundred bucks/day), and you get to pick the course of study! Imagine your New Atheist sitting in a class in freshmen logic, or introductory theology, or rudimentary history, or elementary philosophy of science. Imagine his eyes opening in astonishment at the world of reason and logical discourse. He’ll learn to read critically, to question his own ideas as well as those of others, and to communicate with words instead of expletives.
Your New Atheist will write you each month; you can enjoy the satisfaction of reading for yourself how your immature beneficiary will grow and mature. You’ll watch — first-hand! — as your New Atheist gains perspective and grows intellectually. Oh, at first, the letters may be difficult to read. Spittle, casual obscenities, and desecrated communion Hosts may be all you’ll get. But have faith. As your New Atheist learns, he/she (you can choose a boy or a girl!) will mature into someone who can analyze evidence, adhere to logic, and formulate arguments. Watch with joy as they cast off New Atheism and embrace the examined life.
A mind, even if it’s just a couple of pounds of meat, is a terrible thing to waste. So please join me and a host of caring people to help rescue our hapless New Atheist neighbors from a life of witless dogma. Find it in your heart to spare a few dollars.
Give to "Give-a-Clue." Give until it hurts, because if New Atheism prevails, it’ll hurt a lot more.
A few weeks ago I discussed how the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A devoted its April, 2009 issue to the topic of biomimicry. The issue was introduced with a review by Bharat Bhushan, trying to deflect any possibility of intelligent design overtones from biomimicry by repeatedly referring to the power of “nature” to “evolve” these technologically useful structures. I concluded that “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.” What follows is a list of some of the fascinating examples of biomimicry discussed in Dr. Bhushan’s review:
Ancient examples such as the Chinese trying to make artificial silk
Birds inspiring aircraft and wing design
The construction of neural networks based upon "the desire to mimic the human brain,"
“The existence of biocells and DNA serves as a source of inspiration for nanotechnologists, who hope to one day build self-assembled molecular-scale devices”
Modeling the patterns by which spiders produce webs to create a “‘virtual spider robot’ that builds virtual webs, which perfectly mimic the visual architecture of real webs of the garden cross spider”
Light refraction in bird feathers and butterfly wings modeled to create better display screens
Self-sharpening teeth on many animals, such as vertebrates and echinoderms, being copied to produce better cutting tools
“[P]roteins are being used to control materials formation in practical engineering towards self-assembled, hybrid, functional materials structure”
Mimicking the “climbing and peeling ability of geckos” to create climbing robots
Tire treads inspired by the shape of toe pads on tree frogs
Speedo's "Fastskin bodysuit," used by many Olympic swimmers, which recreates properties of shark skin
Seashells inspiring better ceramics
Studying self-healing properties of biological systems to produce polymers and polymer composites capable of mending cracks
Polar bear-inspired furs, textiles, and thermal collectors
Spiny hooks on plant seeds and fruits inspiring velcro
Mimicking mechanisms of photosynthesis and chemical energy conversion to create cheaper solar cells
Studying the light refractive properties moth eyes to produce solar panels with less light reflection Bhushan lists biological features with potential uses in industry and technology, and the very first example he gives is, you guessed it, the bacterial flagellum. He also offers a detailed discussion of the how the hydrophobic and self-cleaning properties of plant surfaces could be “of interest in various applications, including self-cleaning windows, windshields and exterior paints for buildings, boats, ships and aircraft, utensils, roof tiles, textiles, solar panels and applications requiring antifouling and a reduction of drag in fluid flow, e.g. in micro/nanofluidics, boats, ships and aircraft.” Another fascinating suggestion is the possibility that “[r]eplication of the structure of gecko feet would enable the development of a superadhesive polymer tape capable of clean, dry adhesion, which is reversible.”
Finally, Bhushan proposes macro-biomimicry, suggesting that the general nature of hierarchical control in biological systems could be useful for construction purposes: Nature develops biological objects by means of growth or biologically controlled self-assembly adapting to the environmental condition and by using the most commonly found materials. Biological materials are developed by using the recipes contained in the genetic code. As a result, biological materials and tissues are created by hierarchical structuring at all levels in order to adapt form and structure to the function, which have the capability of adaptation to changing conditions and self-healing. The genetic algorithm interacts with the environmental condition, which provides flexibility. For example, a tree branch can grow differently in the direction of the wind and in the opposite direction. The only way to provide this adaptive self-assembly is a hierarchical self-organization of the material. Hierarchical structuring allows adaptation and optimization of the material at each level. It is apparent that nature uses hierarchical structures, consisting of nanostructures in many cases, to achieve the required performance. Understanding the role of hierarchical structure and development of low cost and flexible fabrication techniques would facilitate commercial applications.
(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 claims that “[i]t is clear that nature has evolved and optimized a large number of materials and structured surfaces with rather unique characteristics,” but when nature offers so many structures which outperform our intelligently designed technology, I don’t think his point about evolution is quite so “clear” at all.
From ID the Future:
 Click here to listen.
On this episode of ID the Future Anika Smith interviews Illustra Media producer Lad Allen on the new film out next week, Darwin's Dilemma. As the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media, Darwin's Dilemma represents a capstone for Allen, who traversed the globe to present the story of Darwin's journey to his theory of evolution and the Cambrian Explosion, the nagging problem for Darwin in the fossil record that has become a crisis for evolution today.
Listen in as Lad Allen shares with us what it's like to shoot on location in four continents and work with scientists like Simon Conway Morris and Stephen Meyer.
Darwin's Dilemma is the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media, and arguably the best in the series (though Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet were both excellent in their own right).
From the full announcement here: One of the most spectacular events in the history of life, the Cambrian explosion, is brought to life through stunning animation in the new documentary Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion released by Illustra Media September 15, 2009.
This major documentary, the third in Illustra’s internationally-acclaimed intelligent design series, probes one of the great mysteries of science, the Cambrian explosion, when in a moment of geological time complex animals first appeared on earth fully formed, without evidence of any evolutionary ancestors.
Here's the trailer for the film, and there's more info and clips available on the film website at www.darwinsdilemma.org.
Jerry Coyne and Jim Manzi have been mixing it up lately over the religious implications of evolution. Coyne asserts, quite rudely at times, that evolution disproves the existence of God. Manzi disagrees, and asserts that theism is compatible with evolutionary science.
I’ve had a blog discussion or two with Manzi, and he’s a thoughtful courteous interlocutor. He doesn’t believe that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific inference (so he’s not perfect), but he is logically rigorous and very well informed on scientific matters as well as on the broader philosophical issues. He believes that evolution, understood as an algorithmic process by which populations of organisms change over time, is compatible with belief in God. He asserts that evolutionary science does not demonstrate that atheism is true. He’s right.
Jerry Coyne is another matter. Coyne’s manner is sarcastic and supercilious, or at least as supercilious as one can get without relevant literacy. Coyne is an evolutionary biologist of the first rank, but that is where his competence ends. His arguments against the existence of God are embarrassing, and, like the arguments of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists, are eliciting a backlash among intellectuals who have at least a modicum of philosophical and theological education. I don’t claim for myself any more than a marginal competence — an amateur’s competence — on such matters, but in refuting Coyne, that’s all that’s necessary.1
Coyne:
Oh dear. This chestnut [Aquinas’ First Way] is so old that it’s fossilized. And the answer to this claim hasn’t changed for decades: why is God any more an “uncaused cause” than is the universe, or the “physical laws” themselves? God is always called the “uncaused cause” without further explanation, but that simply won’t do. If He was an uncaused cause, what did He do before creating everything? Hang around twiddling His thumbs? The people who make this argument are claiming, in effect, that God is by definition an uncaused cause, but we can properly ask “What caused God?” with exactly the same tenacity that theists ask “What caused matter?” And why is God exempt from having a cause, but matter or physical laws are not? This is just sophistry. Faitheist philosophers are always telling us that we don’t grasp the subtleties of theological argument, but that won’t wash here….
Aquinas’ First Way is an elaboration of Aristotle’s argument for the existence of an Unmoved Mover. It is traditionally called the Argument from Motion, but "motion" is the traditional Aristotelian word for what we moderns call change. Motion, meaning translation in space, is only one very limited meaning of classically understood "motion," which refers to any kind of change (e.g., a change in color, a change in shape, a change in temperature, etc.).
The Argument from Motion is based on the observation that all change involves the transition from possibility ("potency") to actuality ("act"). That is, when something changes, it moves from a state of potency for a certain attribute to a state of actuality for that attribute. An acorn is in potency for an oak tree (it is potentially an oak tree). When it becomes an oak tree, it is in act for an oak tree. It’s essential to note that "potency" means that the substance does not posses that attribute, it merely can, under the right circumstances, posses it. No thing can simultaneously be in potency and in act for the same attribute.
When something changes ("moves"), it goes from potency to act with respect to that attribute. But, by definition, a substance cannot change itself, because it lacks the attribute — it is in potency, not actuality. It can’t give itself what it doesn’t have. This is the basis for Thomas' famous dictum:
"That which is moved is moved by another."
It is logically necessary that everything that changes is changed by another. When a substance changes, it begins in potency (without the attribute) and ends in actuality (with the attribute). It cannot give itself the attribute, because, by definition, it is initially in potency for that attribute and doesn't have it to give. It must be changed (moved) by another.
Thomas’ observation is a commonplace. An acorn becomes an oak tree (the actualization of its potency) by the action of radiant heat from the sun, energy and matter from the soil and the air, etc. A tree falls because of the wind. A grass fire is ignited by lightning. Everything that changes is changed by another.
Yet, Aquinas (and Aristotle) noted that the proximate cause of the change (the sunlight, the chemicals in the soil, the wind or lightning) is, generally speaking, itself in a process of change, of transitioning from potency to act. And each change in nature was itself generally the result of change in another substance, and so on. Natural change of this sort is a layered hierarchy of changes — a hierarchy of transitions from potency to act.
The salient question is: can this hierarchy of change — this hierarchy of transitions from potency to act — go on to infinite regress? To understand the answer to this question, it is first important to understand the difference between a series of causes that is accidentally ordered and a series that is essentially ordered.
An accidental series is a series of causes extended in time; it is not essential to the continuation of the series that any of the prior causes remain in existence. The classic example of an accidentally ordered series of causes is a father begetting a son who begets a son who begets… and so on. Aquinas pointed out that this kind of casual series can go on to infinite regress (or at least there’s nothing self-contradictory about it).
But that is not the only kind of change. There are changes — causal series — that are ordered in priority, not in time. That is, there are causal series in which each of the causes must be in existence for the series to be actualized. For example, I use a hammer to hit a nail. The nail changes because it is hit by the hammer; the hammer changes because my hand moved it; my hand moved because my muscles contracted; my muscles contracted because of biochemical changes in my muscle cells; the biochemistry in my muscle cells changed because of action potentials in my nerves, etc.
This kind of casual series in which the series depends on the continuing existence of each component is called an essential series. The components of an essential series depend on the simultaneous existence of prior components. If one one member of the series doesn't exist (the nerve in my arm is cut), then all of the subsequent changes cease. Aquinas (and Aristotle before him) observed that, for an essential series, infinite regress of potency-to-act is not possible.
This is why: in an essentially ordered series of changes, each change depends simultaneously on a change from a prior member of the series. If all members of the series were merely in potency, but not in act, the series could never get started, because potency means lack of actuality. No subsequent "down-the-line" member of an essentially ordered series has independent causal power of its own. So an infinite essentially-ordered series of changes is impossible, because without a first act, it is merely potency (not actuality) all the way down, and nothing could get started. An essentially-ordered causal series must begin with act, not potency. There must be a first member of the series that is in pure act, without potency, or the essential series — the change — would not occur at all. The First Mover in the series must be itself unmoved, because if it were moved — that is, if it went from potency to act — it would necessarily be moved by another, and then wouldn’t be the first member of the series. An essentially ordered casual series must have a First Mover that is itself unmoved.
It's important to point out that Aquinas (and Aristotle) assumed an eternal universe for the purposes of the Argument from Motion. The First Mover is necessary for each and every essentially ordered series of changes in nature. The First Mover is necessary for change occurring at each moment. The argument is unrelated to the Big Bang; as noted, Aquinas assumed (for the sake of the First Way) that there was no temporal beginning of the universe. The argument works irrespective of whether or not the universe had a beginning in time.
The only way to explain change in the natural world is to posit the existence of an unmoved First Mover. Aquinas goes on (in Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica) to draw out in meticulous detail the necessary attributes of the First Mover, and he demonstrates that it is logically necessary that the First Mover have many attributes (simplicity, omnipotence, etc) that are traditionally attributed to God as understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Argument from Motion is rigorous, and I have merely summarized its salient points, but it is straightforward once the premises are established. It is a very powerful argument. Yet I am not here proposing that Aquinas’s First Way is irrefutable. I believe that it is valid, but thinkers much smarter than I am have debated it for millennia, and still debate it. It is disputed; it has certainly not been refuted. It is a very strong argument, and it has engaged the best philosophers for a very long time.
Enough with philosophical rigor; let’s get back to Coyne. He asserts:
Oh dear. This chestnut [Aquinas’ First Way] is so old that it’s fossilized. And the answer to this claim hasn’t changed for decades…
The philosophical debate on the Argument from Motion (“this chestnut”) has been ongoing for two and a half millennia (since Aristotle). Coyne, for reasons that are obscure, seems to think that the definitive answer was given “decades” ago. Coyne again:
… why is God any more an “uncaused cause” than is the universe, or the “physical laws” themselves? God is always called the “uncaused cause” without further explanation, but that simply won’t do. If He was an uncaused cause, what did He do before creating everything? Hang around twiddling His thumbs?...
Coyne doesn't understand the argument. Aquinas assumed an eternal universe; the First Mover is necessary for all essentially ordered change in the natural world at every moment; it depends not at all on a moment of creation in time. The argument is of course equally valid in a universe with a finite past, but assumptions as to the eternal or finite nature of the past have no bearing whatsoever on the argument. The First Mover is necessary for change at all moments in time; the First Mover is logically necessary once the nature of change is carefully understood.
Furthermore, contra Coyne, the conclusion that a First Mover is logically necessary to explain change in the natural world is the denouement of extraordinarily detailed “further explanation”; in Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas devoted hundreds of pages of meticulous philosophical reasoning to the explication of the argument. Coyne again:
The people who make this argument are claiming, in effect, that God is by definition an uncaused cause, but we can properly ask “What caused God?” with exactly the same tenacity that theists ask “What caused matter?”
Coyne can indeed ask what caused the First Mover with “tenacity,” but not with cogency. The logical conclusion of the Argument from Motion is that the First Mover can't be "caused." The First Mover is pure actuality. The First Mover cannot move from potency to act (i.e., "be caused") because it has no potency. Matter (substance) is caused because it has potency; it's not pure actuality. It changes, and thus it is a mixture of potency and act. Matter (substance) cannot be the First Mover, because it's not pure actuality. Coyne:
And why is God exempt from having a cause, but matter or physical laws are not? This is just sophistry.
Coyne doesn’t understand the Argument from Motion. The natural world needs a cause that is pure act because an essentially ordered series requires a First Mover that is Itself unmoved. This isn’t sophistry — it’s a detailed logical argument that Coyne doesn’t understand.
Faitheist philosophers are always telling us that we don’t grasp the subtleties of theological argument, but that won’t wash here…
The Argument from Motion was originally made by a pagan (Aristotle), not a “faitheist philosopher.” It has been held by countless thinkers representing an enormous range of metaphysical persuasions. It is an argument that depends entirely on philosophical, not "theological," premises. And if you make a modicum of effort to understand it, it's not particularly "subtle." It's routinely mastered by freshmen in Introduction to Philosophy courses.
There have been brilliant atheists (Hume, Russell, Quine) who have struggled with the profound philosophical issues raised by Aquinas’ Five Ways and by a host of other demonstrations for the existence of God. Their contributions warrant respect, but they have never successfully refuted the classical arguments. These powerful and elegant demonstrations of the necessary existence of a First Cause have been set aside by stipulation, not by refutation. It is merely fashionable to deny them. Yet this denial isn’t a denial of the truth of the arguments; it’s a denial of philosophical rigor. It’s a sneer. It now seems that our materialist intelligentsia’s understanding of classical philosophy has degenerated to the point where public intellectuals like Coyne can make arguments that would embarass a teenager in a first semester philosophy course.
Coyne doesn't understand the Argument from Motion. His arguments are too uninformed to even be sophistry. He’s all spittle. But there are people who do understand, and they’re taking notice. Thanks to the high public visibility of New Atheists like Coyne and Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens and Dennett, the anti-intellectual nature of New Atheism and the sheer malignity and fatuousness of what passes for New Atheist thought is becoming increasingly apparent to those who are paying attention to this debate. Many non-theists are cutting ties with New Atheism. The damage that Coyne and other New Atheists are doing to their own atheist cause is incalculable.
1 For a marvelous expert discussion of the New Atheists’ philosophical incompetence and a superb introduction to the Aristotelian/Thomist approach to arguments for God’s existence and the application of Thomism to modern science, I heartily recommend Ed Feser’s book, The Last Superstition. Feser, an academic philosopher and a Catholic who was converted to Christianity from atheism by the force of Thomist arguments, has a gift for exposition. The Last Superstition is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time.
Almost two years ago, I blogged about how conclusive evidence of function had been discovered for the appendix. Now function has been discovered for the appendix. Again.
A recent news article on Yahoo.com actually frames the issue fairly well:
The body's appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact, good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation. Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant. … In a way, the idea that the appendix is an organ whose time has passed has itself become a concept whose time is over.
"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," said researcher William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"
(Charles Q. Choi, "The Appendix: Useful and in Fact Promising," LiveScience on Yahoo News (August 24, 2009).) So what does the appendix do? According to the article, the appendix serves as “a vital safehouse where good bacteria could lie in wait until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea,” and “make[s], direct[s] and train[s] white blood cells.”
Incidentally, the appendix seems to pose other challenges for evolutionary arguments. As it is found in both marsupial and placental mammals, evolutionists are forced to believe that the same appendix evolved twice, independently, in a striking case of organ-level convergent evolution.
In any case, the story notes that Darwin was the one who advanced the now-rejected idea that the appendix is a useless organ: No less than Charles Darwin first suggested that the appendix was a vestigial organ from an ancestor that ate leaves, theorizing that it was the evolutionary remains of a larger structure, called a cecum, which once was used by now-extinct predecessors for digesting food. But following Eugenie Scott’s recent advice, the scientists quoted in the article are careful to not break the third commandment of Darwinism: “We're not saying that Darwin's idea of evolution is wrong - that would be absurd, as we're using his ideas on evolution to do this work. It's just that Darwin simply didn't have the information we have now.” Another story quotes the scientists similarly exonerating Darwin, stating: “Darwin simply didn't have access to the information we have … If Darwin had been aware of the species that have an appendix attached to a large cecum, and if he had known about the widespread nature of the appendix, he probably would not have thought of the appendix as a vestige of evolution.” Oh, I get it: Using Darwin’s ideas to disprove Darwin’s ideas proves Darwin was right. Makes perfect sense to me.
Summary: A recent article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) purports to explain the evolution of a relatively small molecular machine in the mitochondria that transports proteins across a membrane, thereby allegedly refuting irreducible complexity. Phrases and assertions like “'pre-adaptation' to bacteria ahead of a need for protein import,” “parts accumulate until they’re ready to snap together,” “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them,” or intelligently "engineered" macromutations are part and parcel of this latest failed attempt by critics of intelligent design (ID) to answer Michael Behe’s argument of irreducible complexity. As would be expected, when evolutionists are forced to resort to such goal-directed and teleological language and mechanisms, this shows that inherently, blind and unguided materialist explanations are not sufficient to produce irreducible complex systems. As discussed in more detail below, this latest attempt to answer irreducible complexity unwittingly shows the need for intelligent design. A summary of the problems includes:
No ID proponent ever claimed this particular machine is irreducibly complex, so theirs is something of a straw man rebuttal.
Most of the argument is based upon mere evidence of sequence homology with no detailed discussion of how to actually evolve bacterial proteins into the eukaryotic mitochondrial transport machine's proteins, or solve other problems necessary to evolve this biomolecular machine.
Most questions about the evolutionary pathway were solved by appealing to teleological-sounding explanations that the proteins were magically "preadapted" for use in the machine or that “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them.”
In their one attempt to use a protein homologue from bacteria in the eukaryotic system to test for compatibility, the investigators could only make the protein function after they intelligently "engineered" (their word) macromutations in the protein by adding extensive key signaling sequences as well as other apparently necessary changes.
There was no evidence found of a reduced version of this transport machine ("TIM"), so they had to try to find a reduced version of a different transport machine, "TOM" to provide "proof of principle'," but no prokaryotic homologues for TOM were reported.
The allegedly simpler version of the TOM transport machine still requires multiple proteins to function, allowing it to still perform all essential functions, and the system has at least two TOM proteins--not just one as the PNAS paper implies.
The allegedly simpler TOM system was claimed to be reduced only after a genomic study, which the investigators admit would miss proteins that were performing necessary functions but were too different from previously known TOM proteins to be detected.
According to the standard phylogeny, the allegedly simpler precursor could not even represent an ancestral form because it is descended from an ancestor that had the typical mitochondrial transport mechanisms.
Introduction
Articles on SoftPedia and Wired are touting a recent paper in PNAS titled “The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine,” claiming it explains the evolution of irreducible complexity. The PNAS article's opening paragraph cites to Michael Behe, stating that "Proponents of Intelligent Design have argued that these sophisticated machines are 'irreducibly complex,' with this standing as the proof that, at the molecular level, Darwin’s principles of evolution cannot explain the complexity of living systems." Of course, ID critics constantly tell us there’s not supposed to be any scientific debate on the question of irreducible complexity, but never mind that.
Let’s start with the Softpedia’s article’s claims about the flagellum that the “basic building blocks of this ‘instrument’ can be found elsewhere in the cell as well, but performing different tasks.” For one, all flagellar parts do not reside "elsewhere in the cell," as a number of necessary structures in flagella lack homologues outside of the flagellum. And even if all the parts did reside somewhere in the cell, just waiting to be co-opted for use in a functional flagellum, this would solve very little for the evolutionist. Angus Menuge explains why these co-option (also called "exaptation") stories are weak: For a working flagellum to be built by exaptation, the five following conditions would all have to be met:C1: Availability. Among the parts available for recruitment to form the flagellum, there would need to be ones capable of performing the highly specialized tasks of paddle, rotor, and motor, even though all of these items serve some other function or no function.
C2: Synchronization. The availability of these parts would have to be synchronized so that at some point, either individually or in combination, they are all available at the same time.
C3: Localization. The selected parts must all be made available at the same ‘construction site,’ perhaps not simultaneously but certainly at the time they are needed.
C4: Coordination. The parts must be coordinated in just the right way: even if all of the parts of a flagellum are available at the right time, it is clear that the majority of ways of assembling them will be non-functional or irrelevant.
C5: Interface compatibility. The parts must be mutually compatible, that is, ‘well-matched’ and capable of properly ‘interacting’: even if a paddle, rotor, and motor are put together in the right order, they also need to interface correctly. (Angus Menuge, Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science, pgs. 104-105 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).) Those who purport to explain flagellar evolution almost always only address C1 and ignore C2-C5. As will be seen below, this same critique applies with equal force to present arguments from this PNAS paper discussing the origin of mechanisms that transport proteins across the mitochondrial membrane.
The Refutation of a Straw Man
Mitochondria are a type of organelle in eukaryotic cells that produce ATP, a molecule that effectively carries usable energy for cellular reactions. Mitochondria are thus often termed the “batteries” or “powerhouses” of the cell. They are bounded by both an outer and inner membrane. To get a protein from outside the mitochondria to the inside of the mitochondria, you must pass the protein through both membranes through various types of transport mechanisms on each membrane. The function of these transport mechanisms is thus to grab a protein and pass it through a membrane. It's a modest function, but an important one.
Basically, the authors of the PNAS paper tried to explain how a molecular machine that transports proteins acros the inner membrane of mitochondria, called TIM23, evolved. No ID proponent has ever claimed that this particular system is irreducibly complex, making this a straw man attack. But never mind that, right?
Does "Preadaptation" and Intelligently "Engineered" Macromutations Solve C2-C5?
According to the authors of the PNAS paper, the primary evidence for the evolution of TIM23 is mere similarity between its components and other proteins that are found in bacteria. In a key summary of their argument which only solves C1, the authors state: We proposed that simple ‘‘core’’ machines were established in the first eukaryotes by drawing on preexisting bacterial proteins that had previously provided distinct functions. Subsequently, and in a step-wise process in keeping with Darwinian evolution, additional modules would have been added to the core machines to enhance their function. This proposition is supported by 3 findings: (i) that protein components found in bacteria are related in sequence to the components of mitochondrial protein transport machines, but (ii) that these bacterial proteins are not found as part of protein transport machines and (iii) that some apparently ‘‘primitive’’ organisms found today have protein transport machines that function with only one or few component parts. As can be seen, their argument primarily relies upon finding homologues of mitochondrial transport proteins elsewhere in biology. So have they explained how mitochondrial transport mechanisms evolved? Hardly. This only accounts for C1. But to truly offer "a step-wise process in keeping with Darwinian evolution," they must account for C2-C5 and explain how a functional advantage was gained along each small step of that evolution.
Regarding these homologues, the PNAS study found that 2 proteins in TIM23 — Tim44 and Tim14 — are similar to proteins in bacteria, TimA and TimB. TimA and TimB have a different function in bacteria (bacteria don’t have mitochondria), but they do reside in the bacterial cell membrane, something like how Tim44 and Tim14 reside in the mitochondrial inner membrane. It’s suggested that if TimA and TimB spontaneously combined with a LivH amino acid transporter machine, one could evolve a TIM23 transporter complex. Here's a summary of the steps they propose:
Evolve a binding interaction between TimA and LivH to allow a docking point for bacterial protein Hsp70, a protein transport motor.
Then evolve interactions between TimB and LivH.
Then, badabing: “With these 3 bacterial proteins [TimA, TimB, and LivH] cooperating as subunits of a primitive transport machine, a step-wise evolution of the more sophisticated mitochondrial TIM complex would be enabled.” The only real aspect of Menuge's required explanatory components offered for all three proteins is C1. They claim that if 3 parts are lying around (step C1 from Menuge), then they’ve effectively solved the evolutionary problem. Not so. What are the odds of the parts suddenly coming together to form a functional mitochondrial transport mechanism? What are the odds of suddenly producing functional binding sites between all of these proteins? These are major problems, but they barely tried to address these questions. For the most part, they just address C1 and claim the debate is over. Their argument is like saying that if you put all of (or in this case, some of) the parts for a computer in a box, and even shake it up a little, you get a computer. But real machines require a lot more than having their parts lying around in a box.
There is a way to determine if C2-C5 pose a problem for the evolution of these proteins. They could replace the DNA encoding Tim44 and Tim14 in a eukaryotic cell's DNA with the genes encoding TimA and TimB, respectively, and see what happens.
The authors didn't do this for TimA (they just made sequence and structural comparisons) and thus really gave no detailed analysis of how TimA might evolve into Tim44. Nonetheless, they assert that "Point mutations in a short segment required for interaction of the TimA protein with LivH would provide a docking point for the bacterial Hsp70, which is the direct homologue of the protein transport motor," even though they don't identify what those point mutations would be, or how many there would need to be, or what other mutations (such as insertion of the proper signaling sequences) would be necessary to evolve a TimA-like protein to function as Tim44.
For TimB evolving into Tim14, their work is far more amusing. The authors "engineered" (their word) a modified version of TimB, by inducing mutations, not the least of which was the fact that TimB was "engineered for expression in yeast by adding an N-terminal mitochondrial targeting sequence and transmembrane domain." So in other words, they solved C2, C3, and C4 -- getting the protein expressed in the right place at the right time -- through some carefully completed and pretty hefty intelligently "engineered" additions of necessary sequences. These sorts of intelligently engineered macromutations do not model what nature could reasonably accomplish.
Regardless, they state: "Although the bacterial proteins function in simple assemblies, relatively little mutation would be required to convert them to function as a protein transport machine." Is "relatively little mutation" a technical term? Spontaneously adding the proper targeting sequences, transmembrane domains, and signaling sequences is definitely not "relatively little mutation." If anything, this research shows that evolution works best when it is intelligently "engineered."
Rather than giving a careful account of C2-C5, the PNAS paper's authors offer an explanation that sounds that quite teleological: “Together with the LivH amino acid transporter, these component parts would have provided ’pre-adaptation’ to bacteria ahead of a need for protein import.” Likewise, the Wired article takes care of this problem by asserting that these parts evolved, were just “ready to snap together,” and suddenly performed an entirely new function: The process by which parts accumulate until they’re ready to snap together is called preadaptation. It’s a form of “neutral evolution,” in which the buildup of the parts provides no immediate advantage or disadvantage. Neutral evolution falls outside the descriptions of Charles Darwin. But once the pieces gather, mutation and natural selection can take care of the rest, ultimately resulting in the now-complex form of TIM23. Wired even quotes one of the scientists who co-authored the study saying, “But when you think about it in a neutral evolutionary fashion, in which these machineries emerge before there’s a need for them, then it makes sense.”
Does it really “make sense” that the evolutionary rebuttal to irreducible complexity is sheer dumb luck, where for absolutely no apparently reason the parts for this machine just happen to be “preadapted” and “ready to snap together” and the “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them”? If this is the answer to Michael Behe, then it seems Behe’s arguments still stand.
Terms like “ready to snap together” or “pre-adaptation” sound highly goal directed, and a blind and unguided process like materialistic evolution is not supposed to be goal directed. Of course when all of these proteins are intact and functioning together, they yield a function that gives an advantage. But where did these parts suddenly come from, fully formed, in the first place, "ready to snap together" to perform this new function? When evolutionists invoke explanations like “preadaptation,” Scott Gilbert seems very right to make the critique that “[t]he modern synthesis is good at modelling the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.” “Preadaptation” or “ready to snap together” or “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them” are not unguided materialist explanations of evolution — like it or not they're unwittingly appealing to a goal directed process. And there’s only one goal-directed process I know of in town: intelligent design.
These teleology-laden responses give me more confidence than ever in the potency of the challenge of irreducible complexity to evolutionary biology. It’s responses like these that made me a skeptic of neo-Darwinism and a proponent of intelligent design in the first place.
The Allegedly Simpler Machine is the Wrong Machine and Still Requires Multiple Proteins
The PNAS authors seem cognizant of the unlikelihood of these parts suddenly being “ready to snap together” and thus seek to simplify the system, asking, “could a single component of the machine function in the absence of the others to provide even inefficient protein transport?” Here they get into trouble with respect to TIM23. They’d love to find an example of just one of the TIM23 proteins functioning as a full transport mechanism somewhere, but they don’t have any evidence of that. TIM23 works in the inner membrane of the mitochondria, but there’s a similar transport mechanism on the outer membrane called TOM.
Through a genomic search, they found that in one case, TOM appears to be composed of only 1 protein complex, rather than the usual 3 or 5 — or so they say (more on this below). It’s supposed to be "proof of principle" that other transport machines could also function with only one protein: Exhaustive analysis of the genome sequence of one group of organisms, the microsporidia, shows that they have lost the Tom22, Tom5, Tom6, and Tom7 components from their core TOM complex, and have only the Tom40 channel subunit (31). They didn't report any prokaryotic homologues for proteins in the TOM complex (one presumes they would have reported such had they found them), so they don't seem to find any examples of transport mechanisms that are both potentially reducible and have prokaryotic homologues. Nonetheless, the authors make it sound like this function can be performed with only one protein in the TOM complex, but dig up their Reference 31 from the above quote, and you find a very different, and much more interesting, story.
The PNAS paper's author's their citation for this point, Reference 31, is a January 2009 paper in the journal Eukaryotic Cell, which shows that the mitochondrial transport system in certain microsporidia (a phylum of unicellular parasites) is still very complex. (Note: microsporidia are very different from many other eukaryotes, and have a mitochondria-like organelle called the mitosome, but we’ll follow the PNAS paper’s terminology and just use the term “mitochondria” for the purposes of this response.) Look at Figure 5 on page 6 of the Eukaryotic Cell paper (which is free). On the left side in part A is the typical mitochondrial transport system known from most eukaryotes; on the right side in part B is the system for Encephalitozoon cuniculi, the species of microsporidia that allegedly has a reduced mitochondrial transport mechanism.
In Figure 5A, note that the typical eukaryotic mitochondrial transport system has redundant (i.e. 2 types of) transport machines on the inner membrane but only one type on the outer membrane. But in E. cuniculi, there’s only one transport mechanism in the inner membrane. This is the most significant extent of the “reducible complexity” that this paper reported, as seen in Figure 1 below:
Figure 1: Highly Simplified Reproduction of Figure 5 from R. F. Waller et al., "Evidence of a Reduced and Modified Mitochondrial Protein Import Apparatus in Microsporidian Mitosomes," Eukaryotic Cell, Vol. 8(1):19-26 (Jan. 2009). Note: This diagram is highly simplified; each of the TIM and TOM complexes listed below have a number of other proteins associated with them, as well as other necessary components, in the actual diagram.
Tim23 and Tim22 have overlapping functions and redundancy to transport proteins across the inner membrane, as the Eukaryotic Cell article observes, “Mitochondrial proteins can take one of several routes to the mitochondrion via this apparatus” and complexes appear in "duplicate specialist form." It doesn’t seem absolutely necessary to have two types of transport machines on the inner membrane if one can do the job. Is it any surprise, therefore, to find a simpler eukaryote has just one type of transport machine on the inner membrane? This isn’t a surprising finding since most higher eukaryotes seem to have redundant systems on the inner membrane.
Indeed, regarding some of the allegedly missing proteins in the E. cuniculi’s TOM complex on the outer membrane, the paper notes that “substrate overlap between Tom20 and Tom70 occurs.” Another review of TIM and TOM complexes in the journal Current Biology likewise states: The two [outer membrane] targeting pathways are not, however, strictly separated. Some preproteins can use both Tom70–Tom37 and Tom20–Tom22 and, most importantly, preproteins that are initially recognized by Tom70 are transferred to Tom22 before their insertion into the import pore formed by Tom40 (and possibly Tom5). There is thus much redundancy in the typical eukaryotic transport system. But looking at Figure 5b, in the paper, note that even in the “reduced” system in E. cuniculi, at least 8 protein complexes (not one protein) are still needed to do the full job--including 4 components (not one protein) associated with the outer membrane. And contra the PNAS paper, there isn't just one protein in the reduced TOM complex, but two.
To my knowledge, no ID proponent has ever claimed that these particular mitochondrial transport mechanisms are irreducibly complex. But what we are told is in E. cuniculi could represent an irreducible core, as it seems necessary to have one transport machine on the outer membrane and one on the inner membrane, each with a minimum number of parts, for this system to function. The Eukaryotic Cell paper confirms this point, stating: It is possible, however, that our observations reflect an import machinery that has been reduced in response to dramatic reductionism seen throughout microsporidian biology. It is notable that, of the subset of import machinery that the HMMs have identified, all major essential functions are represented, although only once rather than in duplicate specialist form as seen in fungi and animals (Fig. 5). (emphasis added) They’re saying that, although in higher eukaryotes there is redundancy of function ("duplicate specialist form") for the transport systems, even in microsporidia, “all major essential functions are represented.” Thus even with a reduced yet still-complex form in E. cuniculi, it is still able to perform all the functions--a huge admission! They further state that the overall configuration shows “evidence of a conserved system, albeit in relatively minimal form”: Our use of HMM to search E. cuniculi data shows that candidates for Tom70, Tom40, and Tim22 are identified with high confidence, and additional new components of the TIM complex (Tim50 and Pam16) and the SAM complex (Sam50) were discovered. These results offer further evidence of a conserved import system, albeit in relatively minimal form (Fig. 5). Indeed, regarding the TOM70 protein, they state, “Despite these losses, all other major structural features identified in the yeast Tom70 structure appear to have been conserved.” (emphasis added) So it's not reduced at all in the sense that all of the major functional components are still there in some form, and lot of proteins are necessary — at least 8 in fact — to get a protein from outside the mitochondria to the interior of the mitochondria in microsporidia.
The PNAS paper sets up a straw man claim — that the redundant mitochondrial transport system in higher eukaryotes is irreducibly complex — and then they knock it down. What we see in microsporidia may simply represent an irreducible core (see here for an explanation of the “irreducible core” concept). Try to evolve a system less complex than this, and you might not get any function.
In fact, these ID critics might be leaving off one extremely important component of this system from their irreducible core — the signal sequence on the proteins that are going to be transported. Much like a key that turns a lock, a signal on the protein is typically required for proteins to gain access into the mitochondria through these transport gates. The authors also do not consider the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to produce this lock-and-key component of the system.
Again, it must be noted that Reference 31 studies TOM, a different system than the one for which the PNAS study found homologues in bacteria (TIM23). Looking at Reference 31, we see that the simplest known mitochondrial transport system is much more complex than the PNAS paper makes it sound.
Are All E. cuniculi TOM and TIM Proteins Presently Detectable?
It’s important to note that the study in Eukaryotic Cell claimed the TOM in E. cuniculi was reduced only after a genomic study, which the investigators admit would miss proteins that were performing necessary functions but were too different from previously known TOM proteins to be detected. E. cuniculi might have more (or even all) of the standard TOM proteins fulfilling all the typical functional roles in the typical TOM system, but we wouldn’t know it from this study. Thus, the Eukaryotic Cell paper states: The skeletal form of the mitosomal protein import machinery identified here might reflect the difficulty in identifying homologues of many of the import proteins of fungi and animals, particularly several of the small proteins. Presently few genomic data exist for microsporidia aside from E. cuniculi, limiting the opportunity to look more broadly for mitosomal homologues in this group. (emphasis added) Again, that’s a huge admission that these allegedly reduced mitochondrial transport machines may very well be more complex than their study showed. In fact, the paper observes that “many TOM and TIM proteins show weak conservation of primary sequence,” which makes it difficult to identify them in genomic searches. In the case of some of the smaller proteins in the TOM and TIM complexes, the paper debates whether they should even expect to be able to find them: While some of the smaller proteins (e.g., the small Toms and tiny Tims) may be difficult to recognize because of the relative simplicity of these short sequences, the absence of matches for many of the import proteins is conspicuous given that they are readily recovered from other fungal and animal genomes. In one case they write that they aren’t sure whether the inability to identify certain proteins in these systems is due to the fact that they aren’t there, or if it’s because they are just very different from the equivalent proteins (which we’ve sequenced and are using as a basis for search) in higher eukaryotes: It is unclear whether failure to identify further SAM complex proteins (Sam35, Sam37, and Mdm10) is due to poor conservation of these proteins or to a capacity of Sam50 to act alone. Thus, more equivalent proteins may be present in E. cuniculi than was reported, but they may not have been detectable in their genomic search because they’re too different from presently known transport proteins. We don’t know for sure what the case is because these genomic studies don’t closely investigate the inner workings of these systems; they just scan for previously known gene sequences. If equivalent proteins are in microsporidia, then there’s no reason to believe it has a scaled down mitochondrial transport system.
Encephalitozoon cuniculi Can’t Be a Precursor to Higher Eukaryotes
Finally, it must be noted that under the prevailing phylogeny of eukaryotes, it’s impossible that the protein transport machines in the microsporidian E. cuniculi mitosomes represent some relict state before multiple TIM and TOM complexes evolved in higher eukaryotes. As the Eukaryotic Cell article states: Given that microsporidia are most closely related to fungi and therefore diverged within the fungal-animal lineage, the ancestral microsporidia most likely possessed the common Tom and Tim proteins seen in both fungi and animals today. Thus, the reduced transport mechanisms in E. cuniculi likely represent loss of function from the normal, more complicated state, that we find in most higher eukaryotes: The specialization of two TIM complexes early in eukaryotic evolution enabled diverse mitochondrial protein traffic. The presence of only a single inner membrane pore in E. cuniculi suggests that microsporidia have reversed this specialization in the face of reduced protein traffic and overall cellular reduction. (emphasis added) This organism thus cannot actually directly show some evolutionary precursor to the more advanced mitochondrial transport mechanisms we observe today.
Conclusion
The Wired article asserts that the mitochondrial transport system “seems to pose a cellular chicken-and-egg question: How could protein transport evolve when it was necessary to survive in the first place?” As can be seen, however, studies are showing that even in the "reduced" mitochondrial transport systems, “all major essential functions are represented” and many proteins are necessary to fulfill the job. The main difference is the lack of redundant systems and fewer total proteins. Wired has not solved this “chicken-and-egg question” because even the allegedly simpler system is still complex, containing multiple functional multi-protein transport machines as well as a number of required additional proteins for the transport process.
What is most revealing is that these evolutionists are forced resort to goal-directed explanatory language like “preadapted,” “parts accumulate until they’re ready to snap together,” or “machineries emerge before there’s a need for them." Additionally, in the one case where they tried, they found it necessary to radically and intelligently "enginee[r]" a prokaryotic homologue of a transport protein to make it function in a eukaryote. No ID proponent has ever claimed these particular systems are irreducibly complex, but if these evolutionists' arguments are any indication, then even here intelligent design seems to have the upper hand, and blind and undirected processes appear insufficient. If this paper's explanation for the evolution of this machine, in their own words, "provides a blueprint for the evolution of cellular machinery in general," then it's clear that Darwinian evolutionary explanations for the origins of cellular machinery are deficient.
The PNAS article rightly states, "How these molecular machines evolved is a fundamental question." One would think that such a fundamental question would demand a detailed, rigorous answer. Unfortunately, the PNAS authors treat this "fundamental question" as if it is solved and irreducible complexity refuted through some pretty shallow investigation and a lot of explanations that sound teleological. They want to win the debate without having one.
They are right that this is a "fundamental question," and irreducible complexity — in the cases where ID proponents have actually argued for it — still holds much merit.
How many intellectuals and media conveyers will defend free speech and the importance of an unfettered debate of ideas? Fewer and fewer. We are witnessing in America a kind of academic French Revolution, where leading opinion is fratricidal, enraged, fanatical — and then overthrown to make room for a newer fanaticism.
People are not getting their heads chopped off physically, of course, but careers are being sliced off and reputations ruined. Fear is in the air.
There are manifold efforts to chase down, stigmatize and eradicate intellectual dissent, almost all of them in universities and media outlets. There is no recourse for the honest scholar or commentator except to stand up to the bullies, pay the price and then live in peace with his conscience, whatever his resulting — usually diminished — station might be.
But I am most familiar, of course, with the tawdry campaign of Darwinists to misrepresent and punish those scientists and science writers who dissent from Darwinism, or merely are known to associate with dissenters. Think I am exaggerating? Forget the film Expelled and what it revealed. Forget that the man in the film who simply defended the rights of dissenters, Ben Stein, himself has been punished. Just look at what the Darwinists are doing to one another when someone dares to talk to dissenters. The recent Evolution News articles about the fuss at Bloggingheads has a number of excellent pieces on this affair. David Klinghoffer in his article employs the apt metaphor of "ritual contamination."
I use the French Revolution metaphor above. But one also might mention McCarthyism — not the reality alone, but also the hysteria around it. A Christian, citing Dante, among others, could mention human nature and the temptation to pride and its brothers, envy and spite.
But let us also invoke the metaphor of evolution. Would the Darwinists like to explain how natural selection works to cause otherwise mature people in universities and media to ostracize — excommunicate — colleagues who dare to dissent from someone's concept of orthodoxy? Is there a gene for persecution that causes them to hector not merely dissenters but those who are guilty merely of taking the views of dissenters seriously?
Or maybe we should just invoke a television metaphor about childishness: "I have my fingers in my ears! La, la, la, la! I can't HEAR you!"
If you weren't able to join us for the official Signature in the Cell book release party at the Seattle Art Museum, you can still watch author Stephen Meyer's presentation this weekend on C-SPAN2's BookTV: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
About the Program
Stephen Meyer argues that our DNA provides evidence of an intelligent designer and helps explain how life began. He spoke at the Seattle Art Museum during an event hosted by the Discovery Institute.
Future Airings
* Saturday, September 5th at 7pm (ET)
* Sunday, September 6th at 7am (ET)
* Monday, September 7th at 12pm (ET)
* Tuesday, September 8th at 12am (ET)
P.Z. Myers has a recent post (“Morality Doesn’t Equal God”) in which he takes issue with Robert Wright, who is proposing a new kind of rapprochement between religion and science. Wright recommends that we move to a consensus on the view that purpose and moral law is inherent in nature, a view cleverly dubbed ’Neism’ (Naturalism melded with Deism) by Joe Carter. I believe that Wright’s view is philosophically incoherent and even pernicious. His motives for imputing teleology and morality to nature are clear enough: Darwinism is faltering under scrutiny, as it denies teleology and fails to explain the moral law, and it will crumble unless it is welded to an ideology that invokes both. It’s ironic that Darwinism may well segue into a nature religion, which is probably its only way out of its inexorable slide into the materialist dust-bin (Marxism and Freudianism will shift over to make room). But mankind has had plenty of nature religions, and they have never failed to be intellectually vacuous and culturally pernicious. We don’t need another.
P.Z. Myers takes issue with Wright from the Darwinist perspective:
All we have to do to end the conflict between science and religion is convert the Christians to deists and get the scientists to pretend that evolution is teleological! Who knew it would be so easy? Unfortunately, from my perspective, knowledge is not one of those things on which one can compromise — you've either got evidence for something, or you don't. We do not have evidence for purpose in evolution, and if anything, all the evidence is against the idea that evolution has a direction or that natural selection can be anything but an unguided response to local conditions.
Myers denies the teleology in nature that is obvious to all honest observers. Ironically, it is the inference to teleology, not the inference to Darwinian randomness, that is the basis for nearly all modern biological research. Most research in genetics, cell biology, physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, etc. depends critically on understanding the purposes of biological structures and systems. Evolutionary just-so stories about how these systems came to be are of little value to research. Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of teleology.
Myers:
Furthermore, [Wright’s] example doesn't work. He's all hung up on the "moral law", and even cites C.S. Lewis. He wants to argue that the existence of morality, even if it isn't derived from a god, is still an indication of the existence of a general directedness or overarching nudge from the laws of the universe, and therefore we should all just get along and accept this awesome pan-galactic force.
Myers is too smart to be duped by a “pan-galactic force”:
Nope, says I.
Myers explains:
First, there is no moral law: the universe is a nasty, heartless place where most things wouldn't mind killing you if you let them.
Myers misunderstands moral law. The moral law applies to human beings, not to inanimate matter and not to non-human life. The fact that meteors can strike and kill at random or that viruses cause epidemics aren’t violations of moral law. Meteors and viruses aren’t subject to moral law; therefore, their agency isn’t evidence against moral law. They are governed by physical law, the origin of which atheists are as unable to explain as they are unable to explain the origin of moral law.
No one claims that inanimate matter or even sentient non-human living things are subject to moral law. The issue Myers raises — "the nasty heartless universe" — is the question of theodicy, which is a profound theological question, but is not not a question of moral law.
Myers continues:
No one is compelled to be nice…
The fact that no one is "compelled to be nice" is evidence favoring the existence of moral law. If moral conduct is compelled, it isn’t moral, it’s merely… compelled. Moral law is "ought," not "is" or "must." To act morally, we must have the choice to not act morally, but choose to act morally anyway. A compelled act is, from the standpoint of the person compelled, morally neutral. A person compelled to act exercises no moral choice, precisely because the act is compelled.
Myers digs a deeper hole:
…you or anyone could go on a murder spree, and all that is stopping you is your self-interest (it is very destructive to your personal bliss to knock down your social support system) and the self-interest of others, who would try to stop you. There is nothing 'out there' that imposes morality on you, other than local, temporary conditions, a lot of social enculturation, and probably a bit of genetic hardwiring that you've inherited from ancestors who lived under similar conditions…
Is Myers serious? Does he really believe that all that is stopping you or him or me from murdering people is our self-interest? Myers insists that the entire reason that you aren’t a serial killer is that doing so would destroy your "personal bliss" by "knocking down your social support system." Is it really true that you don’t kill people because of “local, temporary conditions, a lot of social enculturation, and probably a bit of genetic hardwiring that you've inherited from ancestors who lived under similar conditions…”?
The reason that the vast majority of us don’t commit murder is that we think it’s morally wrong to kill innocent people. We hew to a moral code that presses upon us. We don’t refrain from slaughtering innocents for merely selfish reasons; even if we were certain to get away with murder and gain some benefit, the vast majority of us wouldn’t kill. In fact, if a person does kill because he’s confident he won’t get caught and he can benefit from the act (say from an insurance policy on a spouse), we universally acknowledge that that act is the act of a particularly evil psychopath. Such cold-blooded murder is recognized universally as particularly abhorrent, not as the working out of the normal human moral calculus. As philosopher David Stove pointed out in his superb book Darwinian Fairytales, this kind of Darwinian nonsense is just slander against humanity. We don’t refrain from murder merely because our selfish genes arrange it so, or merely because we are hoping for reciprocal altruism, or merely because we wish to enhance the flourishing of two siblings or eight cousins. We refrain from murder, and we refrain from a multitude of evils, because these acts are wrong, and we know them to be wrong. We are moral agents, not Darwinian robots.
Myers then slanders Wright with this nonsense:
… maybe Wright is just taking a practical approach to winning that lucrative Templeton prize. It's not because the universe drives his argument, but because he too is responding in a self-interested way to local conditions.
Neither I nor Myers have any personal insight into Wright’s motives, but I suspect that Wright expressed his views because he believes they are true. I see no reason to impugn his motives. I doubt that Wright is “responding in a self-interested way to local conditions.” I don’t think that Wright is trying to disseminate his DNA, or to help his cousins flourish, or to get reciprocal perks, or to detect cheaters.
Moral law is an imperative pressed upon us. It is perhaps the single most important influence on our lives. We live in a milieu of moral imperatives and moral choices; we have impressed upon us moral decisions about ourselves, our families, strangers, humanity as a whole, nature, etc. Even those who break the moral code in heinous ways nearly always use moral arguments to justify their acts ("I killed the guy because he had it coming…"; "the pogrom was justified because of all the evil the Jews had done…"). Sages from Moses to Aquinas to Kant have understood that the moral imperative is fundamental to what it is to be human, and they understood that it necessarily has a transcendent cause.
Perhaps no where is the vacuity of new atheism more evident than in Darwinian "explanations" for morality and altruism. Myers’ assertion that there is no transcendent moral law — that we are merely survival robots acting in self-interest — is just calumny against humanity. Myers betrays a willful ignorance of the real qualities that make us human. Darwinian atheism provides no insight into moral conduct; it’s an abdication of insight about man.
The most important criterion in evaluating a metaphysical view is this question: how much ignorance does it demand? That is, how much of reality does it intrinsically deny or fail to explain? Atheism demands deep ignorance. Atheism entails the denial of intelligent agency — the denial of a Mind — at the foundation of existence itself. Atheism is a denial of teleology in nature and of a moral code in human affairs. Yet nature is inexplicable without reference to teleology, and we are everywhere and always pressed upon by a moral code that is in us but not from us.
The new issue of American Spectator is out with a rave review of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. Writer Dan Peterson opens with the revelation that this book wasn't just good — it was a game-changer:
When I learned that Dr. Stephen Meyer had written a new book on the evidence of design displayed in living cells, I expected to be impressed by it. I wasn’t prepared to have my mind blown — which is what happened.
We've heard before that Dr. Meyer's book is more than dangerous to the Darwinist case; it's comprehensive and devastating:
Meyer’s argument is a comprehensive one, rooted in multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines, and he is perhaps uniquely qualified to make it. His background is in physics and earth science, and he earned his PhD from Cambridge University in philosophy of science, with a thesis on origin of life research. Although not himself a biologist, the detailed facts of molecular biology Meyer presents in the book, on which he bases his principal arguments, are sound and accurate scientifically...
Signature in the Cell takes readers on a tour of scientific history from Darwin to Watson and Crick...
And that’s where the book becomes mind-blowing. In a few chapters, Meyer lays out with admirable clarity the chemical processes by which information is stored in the DNA molecule and details the tightly integrated cell machinery for transcription of that information. He describes the built-in error correction mechanisms that allow that information to be read and duplicated with astounding accuracy. He shows how the primary code in DNA (which is not suited to forming proteins directly) is translated into a higher-level code, which in turn specifies the sequencing of the 20 amino acids used to form proteins, and he delineates the mechanism by which amino acids are then assemble in precise order in the cell’s ribosome to become functional proteins.
These and other cellular processes are set forth in considerable technical detail. It takes a big of concentration, but with the help of the book’s many illustrations and Meyer’s lucid writing style, the technical scientific descriptions are remarkably easy to follow.
By the time the reader is done with them, an unbidden conviction takes shape: these astonishingly intricate molecular machines, and the informational software that drives them, could not have arisen, even in a vastly simpler form, as a result of chance combinations of chemicals on the primitive earth.
Read the whole review for yourself here, or download it as a PDF here.
The imbroglio over editorial policy at Bloggingheads.tv would be of minor interest if it didn’t present such an evocative window on the psychology of the Darwin-believing community. Did you ever think about what actually drives these people?
To recap: Robert Wright, the site’s editor-in-chief, was out of the shop when his staff pulled down an interview, six hours after it was put up, between linguist John McWhorter and biochemist Michael Behe. Somehow, pressure was applied to McWhorter resulting in his actually issuing a public apology. He was forced to cringe and beg forgiveness. Anyone could see the reason he had given offense: McWhorter in the interview expressed undisguised admiration for Behe’s specialty in the intelligent design field, irreducible complexity. When Wright returned, he reversed the move and restored Behe/McWhorter. The lesson to be drawn is that were it not for Wright’s doing the decent thing, then intelligent-design advocate Behe would have remained censored. Whoever intimidated McWhorter would have won the day -- illustrating a dynamic well known to ID sympathizers in the academic science world, and in intellectual life in general. When it comes to intelligent design, silence is the safe policy. The preferable strategy is to align your view with Darwinian orthodoxy.
The next act has involved more public pronouncements -- this time from disgruntled science contributors to Bloggingheads: physicist Sean Carroll and science writer Carl Zimmer. The two participated in a conference call with Wright, demanding that he formulate a policy that would never again allow a “creationist” to speak for himself on Bloggingheads. Wright knows the difference between creationism and intelligent design -- he articulated it nicely in a 2002 article in Time magazine. Carroll and Zimmer seemingly don’t. That or they prefer to use the more inflammatory language to refer to Behe, who merely disputes the mechanism of evolution.
As he wrote in a comment on Carroll’s blog, Wright wasn’t pleased either by the McWhorter interview or by another with Paul Nelson, but he was unwilling to capitulate and make the blanket promise that Carroll and Zimmer wanted, forever to exclude from attention anyone who dissents from evolutionary dogma. So both men wrote preening, self-congratulatory declarations on their blogs that they were through with Bloggingheads. They quit.
Carroll wanted “a slightly more elevated brand of discourse.” He wrote, “Certainly none of we [sic] scientists who were disturbed that the dialogue existed in the first place ever asked that it be removed.” Yet it should never have been posted. An ID advocate could speak on Bloggingheads if he has “respectable thoughts” on other subjects. But not on ID. That would create a “connection with a brand,” that brand would be shared by the “creationist” and Sean Carroll, and that would not be acceptable. Participants should be “serious people.” Some years ago he “declined an invitation” to a Templeton Foundation conference because “I didn’t want to be seen” at such an event. Harry Kroto was disappointed “that I would sully myself” by indirect Templeton connections. And no wonder: “we all have to look at ourselves in the mirror.”
Notes of self-regard peek through again and again in his long blog post. Respect, brand image, the appearance of seriousness, personal associations, sullying yourself by down-market affiliations, gazing upon yourself in the mirror.
In a comment on the blog, David Killoren of Bloggingheads cements the point by unabashedly flattering: I want to voice agreement with Sean about a few things. I agree that creationists and ID’ers are crackpots. I agree that these crackpots do harm (e.g. by corrupting public perception of science). I agree that appearing on a site that has featured crackpots could damage the reputation and integrity of reputable scientists, so I fully understand Sean’s choice to stay away from BhTV (although I’d be very happy if he were to reconsider) [emphasis added]. He concludes: “One Sean Carroll diavlog is worth any number of creationism conversations. If I could rewind and start over I’d aim to do it all differently.” David Killoren too is seeking someone’s regard, whose prestige should rub off a bit on him. As the guy who himself set up the Paul Nelson interview, he anxiously wants no one to mistake what side he is on.
How much of this is about science and how much of it is about personal status, social and professional esteem? Evolution, the history of life, whether any known material mechanism alone can account for life’s development -- these are scientific questions but they are surrounded by auras of psychological and social significance that can’t be understood simply in scientific terms.
Everyone wants to be esteemed by others and, more importantly, by himself. Dangers to your status are scary things, for all of us. But in the world of Darwinism, as this Bloggingheads episode reveals, the normal, healthy care for your personal reputation becomes intensified. The touch of “creationism” becomes something weirdly akin to ritual contamination as the ancients understood it. No one is going to think Sean Carroll is soft on “creationism” just because he appears on Bloggingheads, even if the latter were to invite Michael Behe to interview a different intelligent-design theorist every week of the year.
But if he continues his association with Robert Wright’s website, even if Wright in fact never again has an ID advocate on, just because Wright has failed to offer the demanded promise, then this does threaten to contaminate Sean Carroll by a mechanism that can only be characterized as magical, occult, beyond rational. Sitting on a chair or bed where a creationist sat, being under the same roof as his corpse, being associated with a website that provided a platform for two “creationists” and won’t absolutely promise it will never do so again -- it’s all the same.
As for poor John McWhorter, he presents us with the dread spectacle of the person already contaminated, seeking a remedy for his affliction -- and not finding it. This incident will contaminate him with creationism for years to come. He is the man in Leviticus, afflicted with a skin contamination, and compelled to live for some time outside the camp. “His garments shall be rent, the hair of his head shall be unshorn, and he shall cloak himself up to his lips; he is to call out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’”
Am I scoffing? Not at all. Evolutionary psychologists no doubt have their own explanation, another just so story, for why so many ancient cultures share ideas of contamination. We could probably all agree that there is an underlying structure in the human mind that responds to the idea of contaminants. Where did we get it from? You tell me.
One thing’s clear. Social anxiety plays some role in the fear and dread that intelligent design provokes among people who are too dedicated to their own brand image. We’ve long known this. But it doesn’t explain entirely the absolute horror not of being thought of as a “creationist” but merely of being touched by the slightest taint, the merest hint, of the idea. For that, I think we need to go a little deeper.
In any case, this is the current culture of science. Does anyone seriously think it doesn't impede the free exploration of ideas?
Sean Carroll is one of those open-minded science types who are always generously offering the rest of us lectures on the importance of intellectual freedom and open inquiry--at least when the subject of discussion is buried in the annals of history. When it comes to people debating issues today, however, there are other things which must be taken into consideration.
Like whether Carroll agrees with them.
He is particularly upset about Bloggingheads.tv running a dialogue between John McWhorter and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe, a professional scientist. "Unfortunately," he says, "I won’t be appearing on Bloggingheads.tv any more."
So there.
Bloggingheads.tv is a site that bills itself as "a place where great minds don't think alike," a slogan that sounds suspiciously like a description of a place where great minds don't actually think alike. Carroll's problem with the site is that it included a dialogue with someone he doesn't think like--namely, Michael Behe--and he doesn't think this is something that a site designed for discussion between people who don't agree should do.
Here is Carroll, expounding on his reasons from opposing open discussion on bloggingheads.tv:
Here’s the distinction I want to draw, which might admittedly be a very fine line. If someone wants to talk about ID as a socio/religio/political phenomenon worth of study by anthropologists and sociologists, that’s fine. (Presumably the right people to have that discussion are anthropologists or sociologists or historians/philosophers of science, not biochemists who have wandered into looney land.) If someone wants to talk to someone who believes in ID about something that person has respectable thoughts about, that would also be fine with me. If you want to talk to a theologian about theology, or a politician about politics, or an artist about art, the fact that such a person has ID sympathies doesn’t bother me in the least. But if you present a discussion about the scientific merits of ID, with someone who actually believes that such merits exist — then you are wasting my time and giving up on the goal of having a worthwhile intellectual discussion. Which is fine, if that’s what you want to do. But it’s not an endeavor with which I want to be associated.
In other words, a site dedicated to discussions between people who don't agree shouldn't run any dialogues that include people who don't agree with Carroll. And if it does, then Carroll's not going to be associated with it. He'll just go back over to his own blog, where, if he gets into a debate, he will at least be assured that his opponent will agree with him.
G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw once debated the question, "Do we agree?" Carroll and Bloggingheads.tv are now debating the question of whether two people who don't agree should debate the question of whether two people who don't agree should debate. About whether two people who don't agree should debate, that is.
Of course, the difference is that Chesterton and Shaw conducted their debate in full knowledge that it was a joke.
After Bloggingheads-tv posted the dialogue, it apparently received complaints from Carroll and his allies, on the grounds that people like Behe were "crackpots." So it took the post down. But then the hard-to-please Carroll, who complained that the site should never have posted the dialogue in the first place, got upset when the site took it down:
Then, to make things more bizarre, the dialogue suddenly disappeared from the site. I still have very little understanding why that happened. The reason given was that it was removed at McWhorter’s behest, because he didn’t think it represented him, Behe, or BH.tv very well. I’m sure that is the reason it was removed, although I have no idea what McWhorter was thinking — either when he proposed the dialogue, or while he was doing it, or when he asked that it be taken down. In other words, Carroll complained about the post being put up. Bloggingheads.tv took the post down. Then Carroll complained that the site took the post down.
If only Bloggingheads.tv would act in as non-erratic a fashion as Carroll, maybe he would come back and be associated with the site again. Then it wouldn't, like, be so bizarre.
But Carroll gives the reason he was upset that the site took the post down:
That feeds right into the persecution complex of the creationists, who like nothing more than to complain about how they are oppressed by the system. Carroll is against giving people he disagrees with any excuse to complain that they are oppressed by the system. And the best way to do that, he suggests, is by never giving them a chance to speak in the first place. It's so simple, really.
Oh, but then there's the last part of the saga: Bloggingheads.tv put the post back up! And if you think this pleased the dyspeptic Carroll, why, you're just not paying attention.
Remember, these Intelligent Design people are crackpots. Unlike Carroll. Who's not.
Historian Richard Weikart's provocative new book, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, comes out today, illuminating the mercilessly coherent worldview driving Nazi policy in 20th century Germany.
Weikart persuasively mounts his case that Hitler was not a madman; rather, he sought to improve the human race via "evolutionary progress," an ethic that influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improved human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination. By embracing this particular brand of ethics, Hitler managed to perpetrate much greater evil than he would have had he been merely opportunistic or amoral.
It's an intriguing argument, which Weikart defended on yesterday's ID the Future podcast. Take a listen for more on Hitler's Ethic.
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