In 2003, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski, philosopher Robert Pennock and others co-published a Nature paper titled "The evolutionary origin of complex features" reporting results of a computer simulation of evolution dubbed "Avida." Though publicly arguing that Avida refuted intelligent design by showing the evolution of irreducible complexity, their paper refused cite the work of Michael Behe or any other ID proponent. Now, Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks expose in a paper in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics why Lenski and Pennock's "Avida" simulation fails to accurately model Darwinian evolution.

Darwinian evolution has no prior knowledge about the search target, but Avida's programmers have intelligently designed Avida by smuggling in "active information" to help the program overcome the handicap of Darwinian blindness. Avida is based upon the premise that its target function ("EQU") will be eventually found simply by building on simpler logic functions. Ewert, Dembski, and Marks call this attempt to model a stepwise advantage "stair step active information," observing that "Avida uses stair step active information by rewarding logic functions using a smaller number of nands to construct functions requiring more." Significantly, Ewert, Dembski, and Marks find that "Removing stair steps deteriorates Avida's performance," quoting from Lenski and Pennock's paper admitting that "where only EQU was rewarded ... none of these populations evolved EQU." Avida is thus designed to evolve, even though its designers don't make that clear. Ewert, Dembski, and Marks thus conclude with the exhortation that, "To have integrity, computer simulations of evolutionary search like Avida should make explicit ... the prior knowledge that gives rise to the active information in the search algorithm."

The abstract reads:

According to conservation of information theorems, performance of an arbitrarily chosen search, on average, does no better than blind search. Domain expertise and prior knowledge about search space structure or target location is therefore essential in crafting the search algorithm. The effectiveness of a given algorithm can be measured by the active information introduced to the search. We illustrate this by identifying sources of active information in Avida, a software program designed to search for logic functions using nand gates. Avida uses stair step active information by rewarding logic functions using a smaller number of nands to construct functions requiring more. Removing stair steps deteriorates Avida’s performance while removing deleterious instructions improves it. Some search algorithms use prior knowledge better than others. For the Avida digital organism, a simple evolutionary strategy generates the Avida target in far fewer instructions using only the prior knowledge available to Avida.

(Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, "Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism," Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics San Antonio, TX, USA, 3047-3053 (October 2009).)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s amazing to me how many Darwinists are willing to embrace government censorship in order to prop up their favored theory. It’s equally amazing to me how few Darwinists understand the key difference between what private groups can do (they can sometimes discriminate based on viewpoint) and what government agencies are allowed to do (they must treat all citizens equally, regardless of viewpoint). These issues are coming out with full force in discussions spurred by the Los Angeles Times story this week highlighting the California Science Center’s censorship last October of a privately-sponsored screening of the pro-intelligent design film Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.

On a radio show this week, someone defended the Science Center’s censorship of Darwin’s Dilemma by equating intelligent design to Holocaust denial and arguing that the Science Center’s censorship was no different from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (a private group) denying someone permission to screen a Holocaust-denial film at its Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

The fact that some Darwinists can’t resist comparing intelligent design to Holocaust denial tells one more about their own insecurity and incivility than it does about the legitimacy of intelligent design. The debate over whether nature is the product of intelligence or a blind process is one of the great debates of Western Civilization, and significant numbers of philosophers, scientists, and other scholars have espoused some form of intelligent design over the past century, including the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Wallace! Comparing support for intelligent design to Holocaust denial is a shameful effort to suppress open debate by smear tactics. This tactic is especially appalling given the clear historical connection between Darwinism and the development of Nazi ideology itself. Given the role played by Darwinism in the ideology of the Holocaust, one would think that modern Darwinists would be a little squeamish in equating their critics to Holocaust deniers.

Darwinist smear tactics notwithstanding, the comparison between what the California Science Center did and the hypothetical case of the Simon Wiesenthal Center completely misses the point. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is a private entity, and so it certainly has the legal right to limit the rental of its facilities to those who support its mission.

But the California Science Center is a government agency, not a private organization. As a part of California state government, the Science Center is required to abide by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Unlike private groups or individuals, a government agency is obliged to treat all citizens equally regardless of their religious or political viewpoints. In this case, once the California Science Center decided to rent its auditorium to the public, it couldn’t discriminate against groups whose viewpoints it might not favor. The Science Center didn’t have to rent its facilities to the public, but once it did so, as a government agency, it was required by the First Amendment to treat all citizens equally. Allowing the Science Center to deny citizens equal access to its facilities would be a clear violation of the Constitution.

Those who think that the Science Center (again, a government agency) did nothing wrong in banning the privately-sponsored screening of an intelligent design film might want to consider how far they are willing to apply their support for government censorship. Would they also approve a town council deciding that a public park can be rented for a demonstration to denounce Obama administration policies, but not for a counter-demonstration supporting the Obama administration? If not, why not? There is no in principle difference between a government agency denying equal access to the rental of park facilities for demonstrations and a government agency denying equal access to the rental of a government auditorium.

If you are a proponent of Darwin’s theory, I’d urge you to think long and hard about how far you are willing to go down the path of trashing the Constitution. Are you really willing to jettison the First Amendment in your obsession to shield Darwinian theory from scrutiny? Are you that insecure? Do you think that the evidence for your theory is so weak that you need to resort to government censorship to prevent anyone from even hearing another point of view?

Posted by John West at 12:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Is there a "magic bullet" mechanism by which blind and unguided search engines can find rare, isolated targets? This question may seem esoteric, but it's the precise problem facing Darwinian evolution. In a new scientific paper published in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Discovery Institute senior fellow William Dembski and Robert J. Marks explain why Bernoulli's Principle of Insufficient Reason dictates that without prior knowledge about the search target or the search space, no search algorithm will ever increase the probability of finding the target. Any search that increases the probability of finding the target smuggles in "active information" about the target's location or the search space. In other words, when it comes to finding rare targets in search space, there's no such thing as a "free lunch." The implications for Darwinism are potent: the "limited number of endpoints on which evolution converges constitute intrinsic targets," and thus "in biology, as in computing, there is no free lunch." According to this paper, the Darwinian mechanism is thus not the efficient search engine many claim it is. The abstract reads:

Conservation of information (COI) popularized by the no free lunch theorem is a great leveler of search algorithms, showing that on average no search outperforms any other. Yet in practice some searches appear to outperform others. In consequence, some have questioned the significance of COI to the performance of search algorithms. An underlying foundation of COI is Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason (PrOIR) which imposes of a uniform distribution on a search space in the absence of all prior knowledge about the search target or the search space structure. The assumption is conserved under mapping. If the probability of finding a target in a search space is p, then the problem of finding the target in any subset of the search space is p. More generally, all some-to-many mappings of a uniform search space result in a new search space where the chance of doing better than p is 50-50. Consequently the chance of doing worse is 50-50. This result can be viewed as a confirming property of COI. To properly assess the significance of the COI for search, one must completely identify the precise sources of information that affect search performance. This discussion leads to resolution of the seeming conflict between COI and the observation that some search algorithms perform well on a large class of problems.

(William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, “Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics San Antonio, TX, USA, 2647-2652 (October 2009).)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:56 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Finally, it seems that the filing of two separate lawsuits against the California Science Center for its blatant viewpoint discrimination when it censored Darwin's Dilemma has caught the attention of the mainstream media. The Los Angeles Times is now reporting on the story.

Strangely, the California Science Center (CSC) claims to have cancelled a contract with the American Freedom Alliance not because of something the AFA did, but rather because they didn't like the press release put out by Discovery Institute. It might come as a shock to the CSC, but free speech is still protected in this country. The Institute can, and will, say whatever it wants to about the public activities of its scientists and researchers. The CSC has no right to limit our speech, and they have no leverage to bring to bear against the AFA and punish them for something they also have no control over. That is just a ploy to avoid the real issue, theviewpoint discrimination engaged in by a department of the state government.

We've covered this story since the beginning , especially the part played by the Smithsonian, which The Los Angeles Times is also focusing on. I asked in a blog post on Oct. 10 whether the Smithsonian bullied the CSC into cancelling the film. It sure looked like it then.

Earlier this week, Discovery Institute issued its own press release (independent of AFA) announcing that the AFA would be hosting a screening of the film, followed by a discussion with Discovery scientists at a Smithsonian affiliated museum. That is apparently when the screening became a problem. The LA Daily News reports that Smithsonian spokesman Randall Kremer said "he saw the press release a few days ago and was concerned by its reference to the Smithsonian." It certainly seems that the Science Center didn't have a problem until the Smithsonian had a problem.

"The only reason I spoke with anyone at the California Science Center is I was concerned by the inference (in the press release that) there was a showing of the film at a Smithsonian branch, which is how the California Science Center was portrayed in the news release," Kremer said. "Of course, that is not the case. They are independent and any decisions they make on this are on their own."

Really? The Science Center had already made the decision to allow the screening. Canceling it only happened after the Smithsonian saw the press release and at least one Smithsonian official called the Science Center in concern.

On Oct. 5, the science center, one of 165 national affiliates of the Smithsonian that enjoy special access to loans from its massive collection, received an alert -- and a complaint -- from Harold Closter, director of the Smithsonian's affiliates program. Closter gave the science center the head's-up about a news release that had been issued not by the AFA but by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design and whose researchers are featured in "Darwin's Dilemma." In an e-mail that's an exhibit in the lawsuit, he wrote that the news release wrongly implied that the California Science Center is "a West Coast branch of the Smithsonian, and that the film showing is a Smithsonian event." Closter asked science center officials to correct the error but did not mention canceling the screening.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

As 2009 comes to an end, so does the delirium of “Darwin Year.” From “Darwin Day” on February 12 (Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday) to November 24 (the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species), Darwin’s disciples spared no expense (using mostly taxpayers’ money) in their exuberant celebrations, even though most of Darwin’s ideas were mistaken and his contributions to science were insignificant compared to those of hundreds of others—including (to name just a few) Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein in physics; Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier and Willard Gibbs in chemistry; and Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier and Gregor Mendel in biology.

What Darwin promoted was not empirical science but materialistic philosophy. As historian Neal C. Gillespie wrote in 1979, “It is sometimes said that Darwin converted the scientific world to evolution by showing them the process by which it had occurred,” but “it was more Darwin's insistence on totally natural explanations than on natural selection that won their adherence.” (Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, p.147) The Darwinian revolution was primarily philosophical, and Darwin's philosophy limited science to “the discovery of laws which reflected the operation of purely natural or ‘secondary’ causes.” Furthermore, “there could be no out-of-bounds signs... When sufficient natural or physical causes were not known they must nonetheless be assumed to exist to the exclusion of other causes.”

But the assumption that everything can be explained by natural causes is characteristic of materialistic philosophy. This is why atheists want to establish Darwin Day as a secular alternative to Christmas.

The U. S. “Public” Broadcasting System (PBS) has a long history of promoting materialistic philosophy disguised as empirical science. In 1980, PBS brought us Carl Sagan’s thirteen-part Cosmos series, which featured Sagan—in the name of Science—assuring us that “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

In 2001, PBS broadcasted the seven-part series Evolution. The first episode featured atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett praising “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” which according to Dennett “eats through just about every traditional concept”—including the concept of God. (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 63) At the time, the Discovery Institute published a scene-by-scene viewer’s guide that documented the flawed science and anti-religious bias of the series, yet PBS’s Evolution is still being used to indoctrinate students in U. S. public schools. My son’s high school biology teacher used it; her favorite episode was the fifth, “Why Sex?”, in which an evolutionary psychologist confidently claimed that artistic achievements such as Handel’s Messiah are produced by “our sexual instincts for impressing the opposite sex.”

Now PBS is about to jump on the departing Darwin Year bandwagon with another special, “What Darwin Never Knew,” scheduled to air on December 29.

According to PBS, the special will offer “answers to riddles that Darwin couldn't explain. Breakthroughs in a brand-new science—nicknamed ‘evo-devo’—are linking the enigmas of evolution to another of nature's great mysteries, the development of the embryo. NOVA takes viewers on a journey from the Galapagos Islands to the Arctic, and from the explosion of animal forms half a billion years ago to the research labs of today. Scientists are finally beginning to crack nature's biggest secrets at the genetic level. The results are confirming the brilliance of Darwin's insights while revealing clues to life's breathtaking diversity in ways the great naturalist could scarcely have imagined.”

“Confirming the brilliance of Darwin’s insights…” Oh, really? Darwin was completely wrong about the nature of inheritance; it took Gregor Mendel (who was unconvinced by Darwinism) to set things straight. Darwin was also wrong about the origin of variations; he (like Lamarck) thought that they came from use and disuse. When Darwinists finally embraced Mendelian genetics in the 1930s and molecular genetics in the 1950s, they assumed that embryo development is controlled by a genetic program encoded in DNA. Accidental mutations in DNA, they believed, could then alter the program and modify embryo development to produce the raw materials for evolution.

In the 1980s, however, biologists discovered that many of the genes involved in embryo development are similar in many different types of animals—from fruit flies to humans. Since differences in development were supposedly due to differences in genes, the similarities seemed paradoxical, but a new discipline called “evolutionary developmental biology,” or evo-devo (pronounced eevo-deevo) attributed them to inheritance from a common ancestor. Now evo-devo is all the rage among Darwinists.

Yet the paradox remains. If the developmental genes of insects and mammals are similar, then—as Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti puts it—why is a fly not a horse?

The standard Darwinian answer still attributes differences to DNA mutations. But biologists have now generated all possible developmental mutations in fruit flies, and the evidence shows that there are only three possible outcomes: a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly. Not even a new species of fruit fly, much less a horse fly or a horse. Evo-devo has not come close to cracking “nature’s biggest secrets.” In fact, there is growing evidence that DNA contains only a small part of the program for embryo development.

No matter. PBS falls back on what Darwin himself thought was the best embryological evidence for his theory: similarities in the embryos of vertebrates (animals with backbones). “It seems to me,” Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, “the leading facts in embryology, which are second to none in importance, are explained on the principle of variations in the many descendants from some one ancient progenitor.” And those leading facts, according to him, were that “the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar.” Darwin even believed that early embryos “show us, more or less completely, the condition of the progenitor of the whole group in its adult state.”

On the website for its December 29 special, PBS offers an interactive “Guess the Embryo” exercise featuring four different vertebrate embryos: an 8 day-old mouse, a 5 day-old quail, a 17 day-old turtle, and a 40 day-old bat. The purpose of the exercise is to convince viewers that “embryos of different species can appear startlingly similar to one another.” A discerning viewer, however, will notice that the turtle embryo already has a rudimentary shell on its back—thus distinguishing it clearly from the others. A discerning viewer might also notice that the bat embryo bears little resemblance to the mouse embryo, even though both are mammals.

What viewers may not know—and PBS does not tell them—is that the interactive exercise shows embryos midway through development. The earliest stages are systematically omitted. Perhaps this is because in their earliest stages vertebrate embryos are striking different from each other. They follow a pattern that embryologists call the “developmental hourglass”—wide at the top, narrow in the middle, and wide at the bottom. In other words, vertebrate embryos start out very different from each other, become superficially similar midway through development, then diverge again as they mature. Like Darwin’s German disciple Ernst Haeckel, PBS distorts vertebrate development to make it seem to provide evidence for Darwin’s theory.

The American people deserve better from their “Public” Broadcasting System.

Posted by Jonathan Wells at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A reader of my blog, Paul Burnett taunts me:

Go ahead, David, say it: "Darwin taught Hitler (and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot) how to kill millions of people."

Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could all be boiled down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li -- "To rebel is justified" -- but that standard translation obscures the force of the li (reason or principle) that rebellion was now said to have. That Neo-Confucian word in [its] new context really meant that rebellion was a natural law, and that lesson had been taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly, from Darwin. For the li of revolution, they had said, lay in evolution.

Darwin justified revolution and thereby helped the cultural revolutions of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Hu Shih, and Mao Tse-tung (and, of course, so many others), and the political revolutions of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K'ai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung. As things turned out, therefore, he seemd to help Mao Tse-tung the most, and indeed he did. He helped make the Marxists the fittest.

Darwin created the ideological vacuum [by undermining traditional ideas] that cried out for something like Marxism, and he established criteria for what that something should be. The new fit and fittening ideology had to be based on the Western science of evolutionary progress. It had to identify inevitable, natural stages of human social development. It had to promise historical inevitability and yet at the same time recognize the vital importance of human action. It had to be based on struggle and yet stress mutual aid among members of the ch'un. It had to provide a non-racial enemy to explain China's inner and outer troubles without damning the Chinese -- and it had to give the underdog a chance.

That last stipulation was not Darwin's by any stretch of the imagination, but every Chinese Darwinist we have seen forced Darwin to give the underdog a chance....

The notion that one can be prescient of evolution's Way has led some to feel that the prescient have special rights, if not duties, in the struggle they believe that Way requires. And so Darwin has ironically helped produce a new kind of religious know-it-all-ism, and a concomitant new kind of religious self-righteousness and religious intolerance....

Mao Tse-tung in an angry moment (as late as 1964) swore that "all demons shall be annihilated." He dehumanized his enemies, partly in traditional hyperbole, partly in Social Darwinian "realism." Like the Anarchists he saw reactionaries as evolutionary throwbacks, who deserved extinction. The people's enemies were non-people, and they did not deserve to be treated as people.

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

It's the holiday season, which means that cheer and values like charity, academic freedom, tolerance, and diversity are abounding--but apparently not among Darwin's defenders in the United Kingdom. A recent angry editorial by the "Atheist Examiner" titled "Creationists try to sneak Intelligent Design into school libraries" tells the story -- except that it's not the actual story.

The correct story is that "Truth in Science," a British organization allied with a number of credible British scientists and academics, is offering Explore Evolution to school libraries. Contra the "Atheist Examiner" article, the textbook Explore Evolution does not argue for intelligent design, but rather presents students with the scientific evidence both for and against neo-Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design is not advocated in the book. What the book does contain are numerous references to mainstream scientific publications raising serious questions about core aspects of neo-Darwinian evolution. The textbook's authors include university faculty and Ph.D. scientists from top institutions. The real story here is that because the textbook challenges Darwinism, British evolutionists want it banned from public school libraries.

In that regard, the "Atheist Examiner" quotes a letter from a librarian in Wales who boasted about his efforts to ban Explore Evolution from his library and protect his students from its arguments. As the librarian writes in New Humanist:

The "textbook" is in essence a vehicle for smuggling in the idea of intelligent design by the back door. The claim that it ‘increase[s] ... understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory’ is, to put it politely, verging on the disingenuous.

As both a school librarian entrusted with helping teachers shape the minds of young citizens and promote critical enquiry, and as a citizen concerned with the quality of public education in this county, I am worried that this book, which will have undoubtedly been sent to other schools, might be taken at face value and find its way into libraries and classrooms.

I’d therefore be grateful if you could help spread the truth about this book, both to illustrate one of the underhand ways in which proponents of intelligence design – who include, it appears from the publicity sheet, some scientists holding senior posts in respectable academic institutions – seek to propagate their beliefs, and to assist librarians, teachers and others interested in promoting a proper understanding of science and society.

Is this what groups like the "Atheist Examiner" and "New Humanist" stand for--academic censorship of viewpoints that challenge Darwinism? Let's hope that this Christmas season true critical thinking is allowed in school libraries in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, where students are given full access to the scientific data and are allowed to think for themselves--even if that leads to questioning Darwinism.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

2009 is almost over, but the hangover from the Darwin parties has already begun. Jonathan Wells has the story at American Spectator:

The Darwin Year delirium reached such an extreme that even evolutionists grew weary of it.

Cambridge University paleontologist Simon Conway Morris wrote in Current Biology, "More than one of my colleagues has cast her eye around the packed conference room and then murmured sotte voce that, well, she was suffering a little from Darwin fatigue." Conway Morris wondered whether the "obsession" with Darwin and the "endless cycle" of centennial celebrations reflected "a loss of way, an eclipse of confidence," and he criticized those who "caper around the Darwinian totem" while ignoring the contributions of others.

University of Florida biologist Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis wrote in Science, "Just when it looked like the 'ultra-Darwinists' were winning the 'year of Darwin' with their interminable love-fests, triumphalist narratives, and self-serving revisionist histories; when we were starting to think that Darwin was the only evolutionist to have lived in the past 150 years; and when we might conclude that nearly the entire evolutionary community had drunk the Kool-Aid of antiquarian Darwinism," David Prindle published a book on Stephen Jay Gould that "would likely challenge much of the ultra-orthodoxy passing as reflective history and science written expressly for the year of Darwin." Smocovitis concluded: "Darwin is dead. Long live evolution."

Posted by Anika Smith at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Those who follow the debate over evolution will remember 2009 as the year Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell convincingly made a new scientific case for intelligent design. In fact, according to Doug Groothuis, "Its publication may prove to be a decisive moment for the Intelligent Design movement.

One could not ask for more in a philosophy of science treatise than what we find in The Signature in the Cell. The book is no less than magisterial, an adjective that curmudgeons such as myself seldom use. At every level--philosophical, scientific, historical and literary--it is a superb treatise.

Reading every word of its 508 pages of text (not counting end notes)--as I did--repays the reader greatly. Meyer thoroughly examines a most significant topic--how life came about--and does so in an engaging, warm, and philosophically rigorous fashion. (Few books ever do such a thing.) In fact, I have never read a book that goes so deep while remaining so welcoming to the reader. It does do by using a minimal narrative structure--there is no obtrusive autobiography here--to guide us through the issues and arguments pertaining to the nature and origin life at the genetic level. The reader is lead step-by-step into the question of the origin of biological information, and so receives a hearty education in the history of science in general and the scientific question to understand life itself. (emphasis added)

Of course, it's difficult to be objective when it seems everyone has a stake in the debate over the origin of life itself. As another reviewer observes:

Certainly in our own day such inquiries are made with apostolic fervor, both by those who adhere to science and by those who follow faith – and by that segment of every population, quieter than the first two and by far more numerous, who believe it’s possible to live in both mindsets simultaneously. These are the great and rancorous ‘God Debates’ of our beleaguered modern moment, with battle-ready contestants on both sides, writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Behe, and Kenneth Miller squaring off on TV screen and town hall stage to wrestle with eschatological questions as old as Abraham. The fool sayeth in his heart ‘there is no God’ – the wise man, apparently, sayeth it on Larry King Live.

Into this supercharged atmosphere Cambridge-educated chemist and scientific historian Stephen Meyer puts forth his own case in his new book Signature in the Cell. In its calmly-reasoned 400 pages (with an extra 100 tightly-packed endnotes), Meyer constructs the strongest argument yet made for the theory of Intelligent Design, and he does it without once advocating any living God.

Read the rest of this substantive review here.

Posted by Anika Smith at 11:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When debating intelligent design (ID), there are countless times I’ve heard the old objection, “But aren’t there millions of years for Darwinian evolution?” Perhaps there are, but that doesn’t mean the Darwinian mechanism has sufficient opportunities to produce the observed complexity found in life. Darwin put forward a falsifiable theory, stating that his mechanism must work by “numerous successive slight modifications.” Michael Behe took Darwin at his word, and argued in Darwin’s Black Box that irreducible complexity refuted Darwinian evolution because there exist complex structures that cannot be built in such a stepwise manner. Darwin’s latter day defenders responded to Behe by effectively putting Darwinism into an unfalsifiable position: they put forth wildly speculative and unlikely appeals to indirect evolution. Largely based upon “exaptation,” these scenarios required that complex biological systems be built by spontaneously “co-opting” or borrowing multiple parts within the cell to suddenly to perform wholly different functions in an entirely new system. The only evidence for such speculative scenarios is typically “protein homology,” or sequence similarity between one part and another. The mere remote possibility of such a story is said to salvage evolution from falsification by Behe’s arguments.

But is “mere possibility” sufficient justification to assert “scientific plausibility”? A new peer-reviewed article in Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling asks just this question. The abstract states:

Mere possibility is not an adequate basis for asserting scientific plausibility. A precisely defined universal bound is needed beyond which the assertion of plausibility, particularly in life-origin models, can be considered operationally falsified. But can something so seemingly relative and subjective as plausibility ever be quantified? Amazingly, the answer is, “Yes.” A method of objectively measuring the plausibility of any chance hypothesis (The Universal Plausibility Metric [UPM]) is presented. A numerical inequality is also provided whereby any chance hypothesis can be definitively falsified when its UPM metric of ξ is < 1 (The Universal Plausibility Principle [UPP]). Both UPM and UPP pre-exist and are independent of any experimental design and data set.

(David L. Abel, “The Universal Plausibility Metric (UPM) & Principle (UPP),” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Vol. 6:27 (Dec. 3, 2009).)

It’s not just prominent proponents of intelligent design who are publishing peer-reviewed articles that support ID arguments. Other scientists are doing the same—and this article by Abel in fact cites to the work of Douglas Axe, Stephen Meyer and William Dembski, eloquently explaining why the progress of science depends on our rejecting falsified theories and not retaining highly unlikely explanations:

But at some point our reluctance to exclude any possibility becomes stultifying to operational science. Falsification is critical to narrowing down the list of serious possibilities. Almost all hypotheses are possible. Few of them wind up being helpful and scientific ally productive. Just because a hypothesis is possible should not grant that hypothesis scientific respectability. More attention to the concept of “infeasibility” has been suggested. Millions of dollars in astrobiology grant money have been wasted on scenarios that are possible, but plausibly bankrupt. The question for scientific methodology should not be, “Is this scenario possible?” The question should be, “Is this possibility a plausible scientific hypothesis?” One chance in 10²⁰⁰ is theoretically possible, but given maximum cosmic probabilistic resources, such a possibility is hardly plausible. With funding resources rapidly drying up, science needs a foundational principle by which to falsify a myriad of theoretical possibilities that are not worthy of serious scientific consideration and modeling.

(David L. Abel, “The Universal Plausibility Metric (UPM) & Principle (UPP),” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Vol. 6:27 (Dec. 3, 2009).

LLOYD: I'm gonna ask you something flat out and I want you to answer me honestly: What do you think the chances are of a girl like you and a guy like me ending up together?

MARY: Lloyd, that's difficult to say. I mean we hardly--

LLOYD: --I asked you to be honest, Mary.

MARY: But Lloyd, I really can't--

LLOYD: --Come on, give it to me straight. I drove a long way to see you, the least you can do is level with me. What are my chances?

MARY: Not good.

LLOYD: You mean not good, like one out of a hundred?

MARY; I'd say more like one out of a million.

LLOYD: So you're telling me there's a chance?

Michael Behe responded to his critics by noting that like Lloyd, they need to learn when it’s time to acknowledge they’re not gonna get the girl. He thus writes:

[O]ne needs to relax Darwin's criterion from this: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." to something like this:

If a complex organ exists which seems very unlikely to have been produced by numerous, successive, slight modifications, and if no experiments have shown that it or comparable structures can be so produced, then maybe we are barking up the wrong tree. So, LET'S BREAK SOME RULES!

Of course people will differ on the point at which they decide to break rules. But at least with the realistic criterion there could be evidence against the unfalsifiable. At least then people like Doolittle and Miller would run a risk when they cite an experiment that shows the opposite of what they had thought. At least then science would have a way to escape from the rut of unfalsifiability and think new thoughts.

(Michael Behe, "Answering Scientific Criticisms of Intelligent Design," Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute, Vol 9:146-147 (Ignatius Press, 2000))

The same standard should apply in falsifying ridiculously implausible life-origin assertions. Combinatorial imaginings and hypothetical scenarios can be endlessly argued simply on the grounds that they are theoretically possible. But there is a point beyond which arguing the plausibility of an absurdly low probability becomes operationally counterproductive. That point can actually be quantified for universal application to all fields of science, not just astrobiology. Quantification of a UPM and application of the UPP inequality test to that specific UPM provides for definitive, unequivocal falsification of scientifically unhelpful and functionally useless hypotheses. When the UPP is violated, declaring falsification of that highly implausible notion is just as justified as the firm commitment we make to any mathematical axiom or physical “law” of motion.

(David L. Abel, “The Universal Plausibility Metric (UPM) & Principle (UPP),” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Vol. 6:27 (Dec. 3, 2009).

^cΩ_u = Universe = 10¹³ reactions/sec X 10¹⁷ secs X 10⁷⁸ atoms = 10¹⁰⁸

^cΩ_g = Galaxy = 10¹³ X 10¹⁷ X 10⁶⁶ = 10⁹⁶

^cΩ_s = Solar System = 10¹³ X 10¹⁷ X 10⁵⁵ = 10⁸⁵

^cΩ_e = Earth = 10¹³ X 10¹⁷ X 10⁴⁰ = 10⁷⁰

The application of The Universal Plausibility Principle (UPP) precludes the inclusion in scientific literature of wild metaphysical conjectures that conveniently ignore or illegitimately inflate probabilistic resources to beyond the limits of observational science. The UPM and UPP together prevent rapidly shrinking funding and labor resources from being wasted on preposterous notions that have no legitimate place in science. At best, notions with ξ < 1 should be considered not only operationally falsified hypotheses, but bad metaphysics on a plane equivalent to blind faith and superstition.

(David L. Abel, “The Universal Plausibility Metric (UPM) & Principle (UPP),” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Vol. 6:27 (Dec. 3, 2009).

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The parallels between the CRU email scandal (aka "Climategate") and the abuse of science perpetrated by those who want to keep Darwin-skeptics out of their universities, journals, and way, are clear to those closely involved in the debate over evolution. Today Stephen Meyer explains in an article at Human Events how familiar it is to have "scientists from various academic institutions hard at work suppressing dissent from other scientists who have doubts on global warming, massaging research data to fit preconceived ideas, and seeking to manipulate the gold standard 'peer review' process to keep skeptical views from being heard."

Does this sound familiar at all? To me, as a prominent skeptic of modern Darwinian theory, it sure does. For years, Darwin-doubting scientists have complained of precisely such abuses, committed by Darwin zealots in academia.

There have been parallels cases where e-mail traffic was released showing Darwinian scientists displaying the same contempt for fair play and academic openness as we see now in the climate emails. One instance involved a distinguished astrophysicist at Iowa State University, Guillermo Gonzalez, who broke ranks with colleagues in his department over the issue of intelligent design in cosmology. Released under the Iowa Open Records Act, e-mails from his fellow scientists at ISU showed how his department conspired against him, denying Dr. Gonzales tenure as retribution for his views.

To me, the most poignant correspondence emerging from CRU e-mails involves discussion about punishing a particular editor at a peer-reviewed journal who was defying the orthodox establishment by publishing skeptical research.

Posted by Anika Smith at 11:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Confronted with problems in life, it’s useful to think in terms of trends. Whether I am a consumer strapped with paying off credit card debit or a Darwinian biologist strapped with trying to explain the origin and development of life, is a given problem’s power to bedevil me getting, on the whole, bigger or smaller? If smaller, then that’s a cause for relief. Evolutionists talk grandly, seeking to give the impression that their problem is increasingly in hand, or in the bag, or under control, whichever metaphor you prefer. But this is mostly bluff, as a report in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology reminds us.

If the evolutionary origin of DNA coding remains an enigma, try adding to that the origin of histone coding that’s associated with it. A group of researchers from Emory University School of Medicine have revealed ways that histones receive modifications in such a way as to convey information that in turn allows the information in DNA to be properly read.

When things like cells and the proteins that make them go were understood to be simple blob- or crystal-like entities, then explaining how their structure could be accounted for in terms of natural selection seemed a task that was not far out of reach. On the contrary, it appeared to be intuitively easy to imagine how a full and satisfying account could be detailed.

Histones are proteins that form the nucleosome spools on which DNA is coiled tightly to fit the stuff into the minute confines of the cell. Steve Meyer observes in Signature in the Cell, “[I]t is the specific shape of the histone proteins that enables them to do their job….Thanks in part to nucleosome spooling, the information storage density of DNA is many times that of our most advanced silicon chips.”

The Emory scientists used X-rays to explore how two enzymes, PHF8 and KIAA18718, modify histones by removing methyl groups from their tails. Lead researcher Xiaodong Cheng explained to ScienceDaily that it’s like finding a book in a vast library: “[Y]ou need some signs telling you how the stacks are organized. Similarly, the machinery that reads DNA needs some guidance to get to the right place."

The enzymes that are the heroes of this story ensure that the signage that lights the way to just the right book out of thousands doesn’t itself mislead or confuse the reader. In Signature, Meyer characterizes as “uncanny” the matching of positively charged to negatively charged regions on the histone proteins and the coiled DNA. The way histone modification works increases the mystification. It’s all the problem of explaining specified complexity -- expressed in the shapes proteins take and the arrangement of their amino-acid building-blocks -- but magnified yet again.

Ah, poor old Darwinists. It’s quite a bit like having a credit card debt towering over your head and then getting a letter from your bank saying they’ve decided to up your interest rate. How will evolutionary theory ever pay down its obligation to explain all this?

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It seems that climate scientists aren't just nasty and unprofessional in emails.

Dr. Andrew Watson, a leading climate scientist from the scandal-plagued School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, appeared December 4th on BBC's Newsnight program with global warming skeptic Marc Morano. Morano, who runs the superb Climate Depot site, took Watson to task for his denial of the scandal that has rocked the Climate Research Unit at Watson's university. Watson, who bears an amusing resemblance to Richard Dawkins, clearly was not accustomed to vigorous questions from his lessers, and appeared angry, defensive, and arrogant.

At the close of the interview, after telling Mornao to "shut up" and still on live television, Professor Watson commented "What an a**hole."

Take a look at the video, and decide for yourself which participant is advocating integrity in science, and which participant is in denial.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 5:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: Dec. 20 was the 4th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision banning the mention of intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania classrooms.

Prominent philosopher and legal scholar Thomas Nagel, an atheist, endorses an argument that is obvious: if the argument against intelligent design in biology (Darwinism) counts as a scientific argument, then the argument for intelligent design in biology must count as a scientific argument, because the two differing conclusions are just the negative and affirmative denouement of the same argument. That is of course not to say that one or the other argument about design is true; it is merely to say the obvious: that for either to be true, the question of intelligent design must be a scientific question.

Nagel applies this self-evident observation to the teaching of evolution in schools:

From the beginning it has been commonplace to present the theory of evolution by random mutation and natural selection as an alternative to intentional design as an explanation of the functional organization of living organisms. The evidence for the theory is supposed to be evidence for the absence of purpose in the causation of the development of life-forms on this planet. It is not just the theory that life evolved over billions of years, and that all species are descended from a common ancestor. Its defining element is the claim that all this happened as the result of the appearance of random and purposeless mutations in the genetic material followed by natural selection due to the resulting heritable variations in reproductive fitness. It displaces design by proposing an alternative...It is therefore puzzling that the denial of this inference, i.e., the claim that the evidence offered for the theory does not support the kind of explanation it proposes, and that the purposive alternative has not been displaced, should be dismissed as not science. The contention seems to be that, although science can demonstrate the falsehood of the design hypothesis, no evidence against that demonstration can be regarded as scientific support for the hypothesis. Only the falsehood, and not the truth, of ID can count as a scientific claim.

Nagel draws out the implications of the Darwinist denial of the design question in science in this critique of Judge Jones' decision in Dover:

Judge Jones is careful to say, “We express no opinion on the ultimate veracity of ID as a supernatural explanation.”18 This is not the position of most evolutionary scientists, however. They believe that there are no supernatural explanations, and that trying to show that they are incompatible with the evidence is a waste of time. It is part of their basic epistemological and metaphysical framework, which either excludes the existence of God or, at best, places him entirely outside the boundaries of the natural universe. They do not think, Maybe there are supernatural explanations, but if there are, science cannot discover them. Rather, they think, Anybody who is willing even to consider supernatural explanations is living in the past.

We cannot, however, make this a fundamental principle of public education. I understand the attitude that ID is just the latest manifestation of the fundamentalist threat, and that you have to stand and fight them here or you will end up having to fight for the right to teach evolution at all. However, I believe that both intellectually and constitutionally the line does not have to be drawn at this point, and that a noncommittal discussion of some of the issues would be preferable.

Nagel's essay (from last year) is superb, and warrants a reading. As an atheist, Nagel notes that Darwinists' efforts to censor discussion of ID in biology is deeply flawed logic and may even run afoul of the Establishment Clause.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 7:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[T]he "bad designs" [in creatures] are more than just random flaws in the "design" of organisms: they are flaws that are explicable only if those organisms had evolved from ancestors that were different.

Why do cave fish have nonfunctional eyes? That's bad design for sure. You could impute it to the quirks of God, but isn't it more parsimonious to conclude (and we know this independently from molecular data) that those fish evolved from fully-eyed fish that lived above the ground?

In the end, theodicy is the Achilles heel of religion: attempts to explain evil just make theologians look more ridiculous and unconvincing.

What kind of world would convince you that there is no God?

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

The continued success of Signature In The Cell has driven Darwinists crazy. They’re desperately making louder and ever more ridiculous denunciations of the book and anyone who might have the temerity to suggest people read it for themselves.

An interesting and informative back and forth has been taking place on the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, where last month noted atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel recommended SITC as one of the best books of the year. Not surprisingly, he was attacked (he responded, and he was attacked again) by a Darwinist who told people forgo reading SITC and instead just read Wikipedia. Is this what passes for civil discourse on important topics now? Just ignore the arguments you don't like? A pretty pathetic state of affairs if true.

Nagel wasn't just attacked in the TLS, but also by Darwin activist Brian Leiter, who as far as I can tell is grossly ignorant or a liar when it comes to the issue of intelligent design. (He writes as if he knows something about what we do at Discovery Institute, attributing to us things which we in fact do not do, so he is either ignorant or a liar.)

Today, Leiter was taken to task for challenging someone obviously his superior when it comes to philosophical arguments. Over at the Libertarian-leaning Lewrockwell.com, David Gordon has a very good essay on the whole frakas where he explains:

Nagel's remarks on Intelligent Design are of great philosophical significance. He is an atheist and does not accept the view that a designing mind directed the evolutionary process. But he opposes what he deems a contemporary prejudice in favor of reductionist naturalism. He doubts that Darwinism can adequately explain the existence of objective value ...

He concludes by defending civil debate and discourse and denouncing the attempts to suppress such debate as deplorable.

I have gone on at some length about this, because the attempt by Leiter and others to block inquiry that challenges naturalism seems to me altogether deplorable. To some people, evidently, the first line of the False Priestess in In Memoriam is Holy Writ, not to be questioned: "The stars, she whispers, blindly run." But even if these avid naturalists are correct in their metaphysics, debate needs to be encouraged rather than suppressed. Perhaps Leiter should reread On Liberty. Pending that happy event, one can only say of his abuse that the barking of Bill Sikes's dog just tells us that Bill Sikes is in the neighborhood.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 3:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Quick question: What upcoming holiday would have priests in white vestments admonishing you to turn off your TV and take comfort in hearing an old story?

If you're tired of watching It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol yet again, perhaps Darwin can occupy your cold winter nights. As a holiday treat, Origins would like to point out that this summer's Darwin Festival in Cambridge, U.K., has compiled videos of many of its sessions, which typically start with a reading from Darwin's correspondence.

Clearly these people are barbarians.

Posted by Anika Smith at 10:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Pour yourself some hot cider, and enjoy some music for the season:

link

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

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. 

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this year George Gilder endorsed David Berlinski's book The Deniable Darwin with this quote from the back cover:

“David Berlinski is to science writing what Tiger Woods is to golf. He can score from anywhere, against any opponent, on any course."

Posted by Robert Crowther at 4:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum has an article well worth reading in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Santorum compares the tactics of suppression used in the global warming debate to similar tactics used in the debate over Darwinism:

Questioning the scientific consensus in pursuit of the truth is an important part of how science has advanced through the centuries. But what happens when the scientific consensus becomes an ideology that trumps the pursuit of truth? Answer: Those making legitimate inquiries are ostracized, the careers of dissenters are destroyed, and debate is stifled.

Unfortunately, I am referring not only to the current proponents of the theory of man-made global warming. In 2001, I offered a legislative amendment about teaching the subject of evolution. I caught more flak for this simple amendment than for almost anything else I championed in the Senate.

Posted by John West at 4:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Some very prominent members of the American Physical Society are circulating an email asking the Society to withdraw a position statement adopted on 2007 that supported the theory of global warming. It's a powerful statement by leading physicists who are obviously furious about the ClimateGate fraud and about the impact it will have on science. Compare this statement to the cowardly and arrogant editorial in Nature and to the spinning of this transparent fraud by faux pro-science journalists and blogs.

Note that the authors of the email have tried to get the APS management to withdraw the 2007 statement supporting global warming theory because it was based on the fraudulent science. They were unsuccessful, and the APS management has also refused to bring the issue to the membership. Establishment science is circling the wagons to protect this fraud.

Ethical scientists are mortified by the scientific misconduct and fraud in climate science; the question is: are there enough ethical scientists to bring integrity back to science? These courageous folks are trying very hard. I hope they succeed.

The email:

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled "The Climate Science isn't Settled," for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s somehow cheering to know that while the pompous know-nothingism of Darwinian atheists in the U.S. is matched by those in England, so too not only in our country but in theirs the screechy ignorance receives its appropriate reply from people with good sense and an open mind. Some of the latter include atheists who, however, arrived at their unbelief through honest reflection rather than through the mind-numbing route of fealty to Darwinist orthodoxy. Such a person is Thomas Nagel, the distinguished NYU philosopher. He praised Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design in the Times Literary Supplement as a “book of the year,” concluding with this enviable endorsement:

[A] detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter -- something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin….Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.

“Detailed account”?? How about “religious speculation”?

Nagel is a respected philosopher who’s made big contributions to several areas of philosophy, and this is inexplicable, at least to me. I have already called this to the attention of the TLS, just so they know.

Do any of you know of critiques of Meyer’s book written by scientists? I haven’t been able to find any on the internet, and would appreciate links.

Readers who wish to know more about this topic are strongly advised to keep their hard-earned cash in their pockets, forgo Meyer’s book, and simply read “RNA world” on Wikipedia.

Fletcher’s statement that “It is hard to imagine a worse book” suggests that he has read it. If he has, he knows that it includes a chapter on “The RNA World” which describes that hypothesis for the origin of DNA at least as fully as the Wikipedia article that Fletcher recommends. Meyer discusses this and other proposals about the chemical precursors of DNA, and argues that they all pose similar problems about how the process could have got started.

It is an amusing irony that while castigating students of religion for believing in the supernatural, [Fletcher] offers in its place an entirely imaginary “RNA world” the only support for which is speculation!

Dr. Myers teaches at the Morris, Minnesota, satellite campus of the University of Minnesota, a college well known as the Harvard of Morris, Minnesota. So you know when he evaluates a book and calls it “slop,” a book on which he has not laid on eye, that’s a view that carries weight.

In all seriousness, what is this with people having any opinion at all of a book that, allow me to repeat, they haven’t read and of which, as with Jerry Coyne, they admit they haven’t so much as read a review? Even a far more measured writer like Jonathan Derbybshire, reporting for the New Statesman on the Nagel-TLS dustup, concedes, “I haven’t read Myer’s book, nor am I competent to assess Fletcher’s contention that Nagel had simply got the science wrong.” Honesty counts for something, though Derbyshire (not to be confused with National Review’s John Derbyshire) might have at least taken the trouble to spell Steve Meyer’s name correctly.

Alas, carelessness and dishonesty are hallmarks of the Darwinian propagandists. Hordes of whom, by the way, have been trying to overwhelm Signature’s Amazon page. They post abusive “reviews” making, again, little pretense of having turned a single page even as they then try to boost their own phony evaluations by gathering in mobs generated by email lists and clicking on the Yes button at the question, “Was this review helpful to you?” Per Amazon’s easily exploited house rules, this has the effect of boosting the “review” to enhanced prominence. It’s a fraudulent tactic, and sadly typical.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 2:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hey Don --

I want you should do me a favor. I noticed that you put up this real negative review of Steve Meyer's Signature in the Cell on Amazon. I want to tell you, I loved the stuff about the slow fuse and all. It brought back memories of the time Boom Boom Salacio was a Senior Fellow at the DI. The Putznagel Salami Fire? That was Boom Boom. We all miss the Big Guy at the DI. But here's the thing. The moment your review hit the stands, bang! sales of Meyer's book go through the roof. I mean you're taking Boom Boom to a whole new level.

So I was thinking that maybe you could give my book a negative review too? Make it a real scorcher and all. It's called The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions. I mean, how long did it take to write the Meyer review? Five minutes, tops? Am I right?

If you don't want to read my book, no problem. Write the review without reading the book. Just use the Meyer review and cross out his name. I need to kind of boost sales what with all the excitement over Meyer's book. We're pretty competitive over here at the DI and also my tailor is starting to complain about his bill.

So I'm counting on you as a friend. If you won't do it as a friend, then do it for science. And if you won't do it as a friend and you won't do it for science, hey, what good are you?

Am I right?

Best,
D

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

Download the full "Truth or Dare with Dr. Ken Miller" Lecture Guide Permission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use.

Misrepresentations aside, as part of his case for common descent, Professor Miller loves to name-drop fossils which allegedly demonstrate evolutionary transitions between various groups. While there are a number of examples he likes to give, three can be covered here:

Fish to Amphibians: Dr. Miller commonly cites Tiktaalik as a transitional form between fish and amphibians. Its discoverer Neil Shubin even claimed it is a “fish with a wrist.” The reality is that Tiktaalik has a fin that is quite unextraordinarily fish-like and has a wholly different structure from the true wrists of tetrapods. Since Tiktaalik has no carpal bones, phalanges, or other tetrapod wrist-bones, it would seem that the wrist of Tiktaalik exists only the minds of evolutionists with overactive imaginations.²⁶

Whales Transitions: Dr. Miller cites alleged fossil transitions between land-mammals and whales. He often cites many fossil names, but whale evolution expert Philip Gingerich admits that this series merely has "fossils illustrating three or four steps that bridge the precursor of whales to today's mammals."²⁷ Even if we grant—for the sake of argument—that some of these fossils have characteristics intermediate between land-mammals and whales, neo-Darwinists are still left with a grave conundrum: Alan Feduccia observes that "the evolution of whales (the 'poster child' for macroevolution) from terrestrial ungulates is well documented at < 10 million years."²⁸

Think about that for a moment.

According to the fossil record, if neo-Darwinism is correct then whales, with all of their complex adaptations for aquatic life evolved by unguided natural selection and random, blind mutations from a "primitive little mammal"²⁹ to a full-fledged whale in less than ten million years. Whales have a long generation time, meaning that there were perhaps only a few million generations at best to allow for the change to add up. If they had a generation time as short as 5 years, Haldane's dilemma predicts that at most only a few thousand mutations could become fixed into an evolving population during that time period.³⁰ This is dramatically insufficient to account for the innumerable complex genetic changes that would be required to convert a land mammal into a fully aquatic whale. In other words, regardless of what fossils are found, the fossil record permits dramatically insufficient time to convert a land-mammal into a whale by neo-Darwinian processes.

Hominid Fossils: Ken Miller often cites hominid fossils as alleged examples of transitional forms. His book Only a Theory states that when it comes to human origins, “[w]e have, in reality, discovered so many missing links that the real question has become how to deal with this embarrassment of riches—in other words, how to connect the dots.”³¹

In his 2004 book What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline, leading evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated: "The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap. How can we explain this seeming saltation? Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time-honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative."³² It seems that Miller’s standard for a “missing link” is any fossil that exists, regardless of whether it actually demonstrates the evolution of humans. But when it comes to key evolutionary events—such as fossils that bridge the gap between the ape-like australopithecines and our genus Homo, Mayr acknowledges that the links are still “missing.”

References Cited:

[24.] Only a Theory, p. 51 (2008).

[25.] The Design Revolution, p. 178 (2004).

[26.] For more responses on Tiktaalik, see:
• “An ‘Ulnare’ and an ‘Intermedium’ a Wrist Do Not Make: A Response to Carl Zimmer”
• “Tiktaalik roseae: Where's the Wrist?”
• “For Darwinian Evolution, It’s One Step Forward, Acknowledging Two Steps Back: Taking A Look at Tiktaalik”

[27.] Interview with Gingerich

[28.] "‘Big bang’ for tertiary birds?," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol.18:172-176 (2003).

[29.] Steven Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable, p. 93.

[30.] See Walter ReMine, The Biotic Message.

[31.] Only a Theory, p. 92 (2008).

[32.] What Makes Biology Unique?, p. 198 (2004).

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A quick heads-up for our readers with cable: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed will be playing on Showtime tomorrow through the 21st:

On Showtime 2 12/16/09 at 11:15 AM

On Showtime Showcase
12/17/09 at 6:15 PM

On Showtime
12/19/09 at 5:15 PM

On Showtime
12/19/09 at 4:30 AM

On Showtime Showcase
12/21/09 at 10:00 PM

On Demand
Available from 12/11/09 to 01/07/10

If you find similarities between Ben Stein's account of the ID movement and the ClimateGate news of scientists blackballed from science journals and treated like traitors, well, welcome to reality.

Posted by Anika Smith at 12:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Want to know more about the Amazon.com bestselling book that made the Times Literary Supplement's Top Books of 2009? Robert Deyes has a review of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell below:

New Intelligent Design Book A Landmark Assault On Scientific Naturalism
In his recent book Signature In The Cell, Meyer presents a fresh outlook on one of the most compelling facets of the Intelligent Design case — that of biological information in DNA. Meyer provides a lucid and personal account of his own experiences as a scientist and philosopher revealing to the reader the watershed events that led to his move towards the intelligent design alternative.

Meyer's historical overview of the key events that shaped origin-of-life biology is extremely readable and well illustrated. Both the style and the content of his discourse keep the reader focused on the ID thread of reasoning that he gradually develops throughout his book.
Meyer does a marvelous job in conveying the personal tensions that so characterized the DNA story. His extensive coverage of 'turning point' historical moments reveals an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. Like few other scientific discoveries, that of the structure of DNA brought fundamental changes to our understanding of the chemistry of life since life itself could no longer be considered to be a mere product of matter and energy. As Meyer elaborates, information in the form of a DNA code had emerged as the critical player in defining the hereditary makeup of nature.

Meyer fleshes out a cohesive argument for intelligent design garnering support from an extensive body of molecular evidence and expert commentaries. His review of the `chicken and egg' paradox, as relates to the integral interdependencies of molecular systems such as transcription and translation, highlights once more why it is that evolutionary `pie in the sky' assumptions are powerless to explain the origins of critical life processes. Meyer then goes on to boldly entertain the idea that intelligent design presents us with the only causally adequate explanation for the origin of biological information and spends much of the remainder of his book tying together substantial evidence in support of his position.

Following in the footsteps of fellow ID advocate William Dembski, Meyer has done us all a great service by showing how the chance assembly of a 150 amino-acid protein pales in front of the available probabilistic resources of our universe. In other words, we are stopped dead in our tracks by a probabilistic impasse of the highest order before we have even begun assessing the geological plausibility of competing origin of life scenarios.

The scientific method commits us to finding the best explanation for the phenomena we observe. Drawing from the opinions of NIH biologist Peter Mora, Meyer shows us how the chance hypothesis — that purports to explain how life arose without recourse to design or necessity — has been found wanting particularly in light of the ever-growing picture of the complexity of the cell. A debate-clincher in Meyer's expose comes from his comprehensive summarization of the bellyaches associated with chemist Stanley Miller's controversial spark discharge apparatus.

In Signature In The Cell Meyer builds on Dembski's cornerstone case and uses a seemingly non-ending supply of illustrations to firm up his own supportive arguments. One can only imagine how Darwin might have felt coming back to find intelligent design legitimized through his own Vera Causa criterion. My hunch is that he would have applauded the current state of debate.

Posted by Anika Smith at 2:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Which of the items below is an exercise in science from a peer-reviewed journal, and which is an example of religion in a popular magazine?

According to conservation of information theorems, performance of an arbitrarily chosen search, on average, does no better than blind search. Domain expertise and prior knowledge about search space structure or target location is therefore essential in crafting the search algorithm. The effectiveness of a given algorithm can be measured by the active information introduced to the search. We illustrate this by identifying sources of active information in Avida, a software program designed to search for logic functions using nand gates. Avida uses stair step active information by rewarding logic functions using a smaller number of nands to construct functions requiring more. Removing stair steps deteriorates Avida’s performance while removing deleterious instructions improves it. Some search algorithms use prior knowledge better than others. For the Avida digital organism, a simple evolutionary strategy generates the Avida target in far fewer instructions using only the prior knowledge available to Avida. (here)

Camp Quest (which stands for Question, Understand, Explore, Search, and Test), an operation that holds summer camps in six states in the United States, one in Ontario, and, for the first time last summer, in the United Kingdom, swaps out a religious perspective for a scientific one, and has campers ponder their places in the universe using logic. "The whole thing is to show the virtues of evidence and inquiry and reason over visions and faith," … Though Camp Quest kids participate in many different science-related activities as they enjoy a week in nature, a staple of every session is a round of the "Invisible Unicorns Challenge." Campers are introduced to two invisible unicorns that roam the camp and encouraged to develop rational arguments that prove to camp counselors that the unicorns don't exist. At Camp Quest UK this summer, Stein says that campers turned in some impressive efforts at disproving the unicorns' existence, but as in every previous iteration of the game, no one succeeded. (here)

Posted by Robert Crowther at 3:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

“Before going on,” said Frost, “I must ask you to be strictly objective. Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to each other are chemical phenomena. Social relations are chemical relations. You must observe these feelings in yourself in an objective manner. Do not let them distract your attention from the facts.”

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1946)

The relevance of this passage from Lewis will be clear below. But first…

Marc Hauser’s Surprising Thesis: If You’re Human, You Are Built to Understand Right and Wrong

For some weeks, I’ve had a note in my calendar to wrap up a piece of unfinished business from my coverage of the University of Chicago Darwin conference – i.e., to say something about Marc Hauser’s fascinating plenary lecture on the origins of morality. Hauser argued that moral behavior is largely insensitive to gender, education, cultural background, class, or even religious belief. Rather, humans seem to be hard-wired (biologically) with a moral sense. Find a member of the species Homo sapiens, Hauser argued, and you’ve located an organism that knows some actions are right, and others, wrong.

Here is how Hauser put his case in a recent essay:

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn't dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden.

Now, the announced title of Hauser’s Chicago talk was “Where Do Morals Come From? NOT Religion!” So I expected a Richard Dawkinsian or PZ Myerish attack on nasty old pernicious religion – but Hauser had almost nothing to say along those lines. Indeed, he had almost nothing to say about how Darwinian evolution explained the origin of human moral behavior.

What Hauser did present was piles of evidence for human uniqueness, with respect to morality. Summarizing new experimental data, for instance, showing the predictable onset of self-sacrificial behavior in children – at about the age of 8, children begin to act on a sense of “fairness,” and will give valuable objects to others, which they might just as easily have kept for themselves – Hauser said, “This type of behavior is uniquely human. We see nothing like this in other animals.”

In the weeks since Hauser’s lecture, I have often reflected on its remarkable content (I hope Jerry Coyne follows through with his commitment to make the videos of the Chicago talks available online), and have found myself cheered up. Why? Because a design theorist could have given Hauser’s lecture. Maybe even the Apostle Paul:

For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness…(Romans 2:14-15)

The “law” here, of course, comprises religiously-codified proscriptions and commands, as contained in sacred texts such as the Pentateuch. Hauser denies that morality arises from religion, but Paul would have agreed with him. Only a tiny fraction of the great mass of humanity around Paul in the Mediterranean world of the first century AD were Jews, with the Mosaic law.

Nevertheless, Egyptians and Romans and Greeks and Persians knew that murder, and adultery, and theft were wrong. The law was written on their hearts, by design.

Looking into the Abyss

So Hauser cheered me up, but then Alex Rosenberg of Duke University brought me down. Way down.

When I taught philosophy to undergraduates at the University of Chicago (1987-91), we'd read some Nietzsche, and usually a handful of students would be swept off their feet by his undeniable panache and bad-boy attitude. The Nietzschean spell rarely lasted the entire quarter, however. Genuinely consistent and thoroughgoing disciples of Nietzsche make for miserable classmates. When the sophomore Ubermensch talks over the other students for the 20th time, and doesn't give a damn if they like it or not, stuck as they are in their slave morality -- well, let's just say these are not people you want to invite to your party, and you certainly wouldn't want that same wretchedly consistent Nietzschean living next door.

Nor would I want a consistent eliminative materialist as my neighbor. For Alex Rosenberg, "scientism" is a good thing, because it tells us that since everything is particles in motion, and particles in motion know nothing of morality, what we see as right and wrong today, and tomorrow, will be entirely contingent on the vagaries of evolution:

Since natural selection has no foresight, we have no idea whether the moral core we now endorse will hold up, be selected for, over the long-term future of our species, if any.

On this view, if rape, or theft (or whatever) is perceived as "wrong," that is strictly a temporary perception which may be swept away by changing circumstances tomorrow. At bottom, nature has no purposes, argues Rosenberg, other than the illusory. Thus, the message of a consistent naturalism

forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.

There are self-referential problems with Rosenberg's thesis which I leave as an exercise for the reader (Ed Feser provides a guide). Here I want only to note that few philosophical naturalists have Rosenberg's nerve. Why?

Maybe because they look into the abyss and don't like what they see there.

Thank goodness, or God, for that. Let us praise blessedly sane inconsistency. I want someone as my neighbor whose moral intuitions are stronger -- a LOT stronger -- than his philosophy.

Posted by Paul Nelson at 1:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In nine highly readable chapters The Darwin Myth takes its reader from Darwin’s boyhood of wealth and privilege, to his brief stint in theology school, his quest for adventure, and the development of his “one long argument” that would form the remainder of his life’s work. This bold and uncompromising biography exposes Darwin “warts and all,” the flaws of Darwinian evolution, and the dark and disturbing consequences of a theory that easily lent itself to social Darwinism, the eugenics movement, and even Hitler’s völkisch racism.

The title is apt and revealing, for no figure in history has been the subject of more myth-mongering than Charles Darwin. That myth—at least a central one—is this: Darwin started as a creationist, but his assiduous sifting of nature’s clues during his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle forced him to conclude that species evolved through the process of natural selection acting on random variation. For Darwin, evolution was blind and undirected. He came to this, he assured everyone, reluctantly, only when overwhelmed by the mass of incontrovertible evidence. It sounds good, but, as Wiker points out, “The facts speak otherwise. Charles Darwin was a third generation evolutionist. He carefully read his grandfather’s Zoönomia very early on, he studied under the radical evolutionist Robert Grant while in medical school, he worked through arguments of the French evolutionist Lamarck, and it would be hard to imagine him not discussing evolution with his father and brother around the table and in front of the fire—all this, before he had set foot on the Beagle” (137) (emphasis added).

This point is important. It means that Darwin already had a mental template with which to interpret his data; that template was philosophical materialism. In short, Darwin’s metaphysic preceded his science. Having determined that the natural world had no guiding hand (nor any need of one) he set about crafting a theory to fit that conviction. Thus, On the Origin of Species (1859) did not specifically argue against God. In fact, Darwin was silent on this issue, “but that silence,” as Wiker explains, “was transparent in its implications: Darwin had not said anything about God because he had rendered Him entirely superfluous” (88). Emboldened by his success, he published The Descent of Man (1871), applying his “survival of the fittest” notion to humans in “a brutal tautology” (143).

This book, unlike any other in the long history of Darwin biography, exposes the myth and the myth-makers, not least of which was Darwin himself, who provided an airbrushed self-portrait in his Autobiography. Initially written for family and friends, his son Francis readily appreciated its promotional value and secured its posthumous publication in 1887. From that point on, Darwin’s life and work was largely interpreted within a framework of his own making. With a naïve acceptance seldom accorded a historical figure, Darwin and Darwinism became synonymous with science itself. Yet doubts arose. Even Darwin sympathizers like William Irvine depicted a cagey neurotic who parlayed imagined illnesses to his own convenience in Apes, Angels and Victorians (1955), and Darwin Medalist Cyril Dean Darlington called the medal’s namesake a “slippery” character not to be trusted in his Darwin’s Place in History (1959). Even more critical were Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) and Howard E. Gruber’s Darwin on Man (1974), both skeptical of Darwin’s imputed objectivity. Harsher still was R. F. Baum’s Doctors of Modernity (1988), a little read but scathing indictment of Darwinism. Nevertheless, the hagiography and apologetics largely continued until Adrian Desmond and James Moore took a more honest look in Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (1991). This work was soon buried under the sheer massiveness of Janet Browne’s two-volume Charles Darwin (1995, 2002), a biography that eschewed critical analysis in favor of a ponderous compilation of minutia. (Interestingly, Desmond and Moore, perhaps judging themselves a bit too honest, recently tried to rehabilitate Darwin into an abolitionist champion of “brotherhood science” in Darwin’s Sacred Cause, a claim Wiker convincingly refutes.)

The point is, with few exceptions, the vast historiography of Darwiniana accepted, ignored, or timorously erased around the edges of this paragon and his paradigm. Not so The Darwin Myth. At last the façade is removed—here is the unadulterated picture of the man and the -ism that bears his name. The picture isn’t pretty, but it is refreshingly honest.

Posted by Michael Flannery at 10:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Round-up of some recent noteworthy articles on ClimateGate:

Henninger on ClimateGate
Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal has a superb overview of the deeper implications of the global warming fraud. He understands what this catastrophe means for science. As Henninger points out, global warming science has for a couple of decades been the public face of science, hyped and sold as a commodity indispensable to humanity's survival. As it is revealed as a fraud, the public reassessment of science will shake science to its foundations. His thoughts on the encroachment of post-modernism on science are fascinating.

George Will and David Limbaugh on ClimateGate
George Will has an essay on the recently affirmed scientific misconduct and fraud in the climate science industry. Will has run afoul of climate alarmists in the past by questioning their "consensus" science and their utter intolerance for dissent (bonus question: in what other area of science do ideologically motivated scientists behave this way?). The warmists have viciously attacked him. Now that the evidence from the emerging CRU scandal is proving Will right, he pens a fine essay. His insight into the political and economic machinations of corrupt science is particularly acute. David Limbaugh, meanwhile, has an excellent essay on ClimateGate at Human Events.

Christopher Booker: "Climategate reveals the most influential tree in the world"
There is a fascinating essay by journalist Christopher Booker, in which Booker explains the details of the tree-ring data manipulations in the Climategate scandal.

Mark Steyn on ClimateGate: "the First Church of the Settled Scientist"
Mark Steyn--the best essayist on earth--has a characteristically superb take on ClimateGate.

Frank J on Climate Scientists: "Not Another Krypton on Our Watch..."
Frank J, author of the immortal Nuke the Moon post on IMAO, has penned a delightful character study of scientists convinced of their indispensability in defending mankind from scientific untruth.

The Clearest Explanation of the Decline They Hid
Marc Sheppard at American Thinker has a detailed but very clear explanation of what the climate scientists "hid" when they "hid the decline." It wasn't the recent warming trend since 1998; it was something much more important, and it was something that, if not hidden, would unravel the anthropogenic global warming theory in short order. This puts the lie to Nature's editorial claiming that ClimateGate doesn't invalidate "the large body of global warming science." There is nothing left of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis if this "inconvenient" aspect of the data isn't hidden. And of course, this Scientific Scam of the Century was perpetrated in Nature itself, with the editors' apparent acquiescence.

Who Knew That the University of Minnesota Morris was the Epicenter of Greenhouse Gasses?
Cornelius Hunter has a post in which he has tracked down the primary forcing factor in atmospheric heating. It seems that we Darwin skeptics have really been fighting global warming for the past couple of years. Maybe there's a Nobel Prize in this...

Darwin Eugenics DDT Population bomb New Ice Age Heterosexual AIDS Global Warming Climate Change
In the annals of perpetual science fraud, the New Ice Age of the 1970s sometimes gets overlooked (it's dwarfed by so many other frauds perpetrated in the name of "consensus science"). But science ideologues and alarmists have been busy since the mid-19th century trying, with varying degrees of success, to impose their agendas on our society. Gary Sutton of Forbes has a nice review of the science-hoax of the 1970s that promised a climate catastrophe, if we didn't listen to the scientists.

Dilbert on Global Warming
From John at Powerline.

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

While there have been many events to discuss intelligent design sponsored by the scientific establishment this year, few have dared to invite an actual design proponent.

But on the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, Biologic Institute Director Douglas Axe was invited to the National Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, for a panel discussion titled Design without a Designer? where "the 'bold generation' of young thinkers turned up in droves, listening intently as the discussion went well beyond its advertised ninety minutes.":

To my knowledge the event wasn’t recorded, so a transcript may never appear. I’ll include my statements below (which I had to prepare in advance for translation). I have to confess, though, that the mere fact that this took place at all impressed me beyond anything that was said. You have to wonder what Darwin would have thought had he known that his theory would still be the subject of scientific debate a century and a half later. Does anything become healthy after so many years of limping along?

The official description of the event is remarkable in itself, in that it sheds the usual religious caricature of ID in favor of the real scientific issue— whether there is objective evidence of creative intelligence behind the design of life. We’ve translated the short version as follows:

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Darwin’s theory, this high-caliber panel discussion between evolutionists and Darwin critics will consider the question of whether the evolution of life on Earth is based solely on blind and unguided natural processes, or whether there is non-religiously based, verifiable evidence of meaningful and purposeful acts of creative intelligence in the natural world. This meeting at the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History aims to contribute constructively and with clarity and objectivity to this important debate. A public debate between evolutionary biologists and evolutionary critics at this high level is very rare in Germany, and therefore can be expected to be a very exciting evening.

Posted by Anika Smith at 4:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Does science have a magisterium?

That's the question Jay Richards puts to NRO's John Derbyshire today at The American, where he aptly notes:

Derbyshire appeals to a scientific magisterium: “Science contains a core magisterium, which we can and do trust.” This should give anyone who has followed the climate change debate the creeps—a reaction Derbyshire anticipates in the column. But he seems blind to why talk of a scientific magisterium is creepy; so let me spell it out.

Other than listing the things Derbyshire thinks are settled and “without serious competitors,” he doesn’t really even identify what the magisterium is. This gives the impression that the magisterium is the subjectively determined list of things that people with power claim are settled. And that impression encourages the postmodern doubters of truth that Derbyshire hopes to keep back from the gates.

Richards makes the rather obvious point (obvious to everyone but Derb, perhaps?) that science is not the Catholic Church, which does have a magisterium, "a single institution, which one is free to trust or not to trust." (nota bene, the actual Magisterium of the Catholic Church John Derbyshire does not trust, being an admitted anti-Catholic.)

But science has none of that, and doesn’t claim to. It’s not a single institution. It doesn’t claim to be based on divine revelation or be guided by the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t have a priesthood or a central authority. It doesn’t even have a settled body of teachings. Science isn’t, and ought not to be, a surrogate religion.

Of course, most of what we believe to be scientifically verified truth is based on the testimony of scientists, textbooks, and journalists. In fact, most of what we all believe about most things is based on testimony. That’s okay. But anyone with a passing acquaintance with the history of science knows that every age has had a reigning intellectual orthodoxy or orthodoxies, declared to be “settled science” (a term Derbyshire summons) that were later seen to be erroneous. It doesn’t follow that because most scientists believe something to be true, or hold to a “consensus,” it ought to be doubted. Sometimes there are well-founded consensuses. But if you have good reason to be suspicious of a claim made by scientists, including lots of scientists, then you’re not under an intellectual obligation to submit to it.

In fact, no one appeals to consensus on the really solid stuff. Have you ever heard anyone cry consensus when talking about the Periodic Table of the Elements? More often than not, “consensus” is used to intimidate and silence dissenters. A scientific magisterium sounds like consensus-on-steroids, and brings to mind the big, state-funded “science” of which philosophers of science like Michael Polanyi have rightly been suspicious. It’s reminiscent of the way the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is often invoked to silence debate about the causes of climate change.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Anika Smith at 2:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ideas matter. That's the lesson of history, and one brought into stark relief by Richard Weikart's work as an historian. This week Dr. Weikart has an article that delves into what Darwinism really means for Darwinists and morality:

The Darwin celebrations this year have reinforced my concern that Darwinism is not merely a scientific theory. For many Darwinists, it is much more than that. For some it is the basis for a secular worldview that not only rejects theism, but also promotes moral relativism.

How clearly this is seen in Weikart's example:

A young man was performing rap songs on evolutionary themes that he had been commissioned to write and perform for the Darwin celebrations in Britain. He told us between his songs that in some species, such as praying mantises and black widows, the females kill their mates after procreating. This is an evolutionary adaptation. The rapper then continued by saying that it is only chance—like the flip of a coin, he said—that our own species does not exhibit such a behavior. He then stated that if we did act this way, our moral systems and religions would revolve around females killing their mates. (Take-home lesson: Morality and religion are contingent products of mindless processes).

This view may sound bizarre, but it is actually very similar to a statement Darwin made in the Origin of Species, where he mentioned that some species commit infanticide. He then stated that if we as humans had been raised with their instincts, infanticide would then be moral. Darwin’s own moral relativism was even more apparent in Descent of Man, where he argued that sexual morality had evolved over human history. At one point in the human past, he argued, “promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” Polygamy and monogamy were later evolutionary adaptations, he thought. Similar ideas are commonplace today in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, both influential movements in intellectual circles.

At a dinner at the close of the conference, I spoke with a philosophy graduate student who told me that because empathy and thus morality were traits produced by evolution, he was convinced that morality was relative. When I asked him if he then thought Hitler was not evil, he told me that even though he personally finds Hitler repugnant, that repugnance has no objective validity, so, he stated, “Hitler was OK.” He then told me that he doesn't want his rational belief in relativistic morality to influence his own moral standards, but he still considered his moral standards evolved traits that are purely subjective. I told him that I thought the reason his “instincts” and rationality about morality were at odds was because morality really is objective, but he didn't see it that way.

Posted by Anika Smith at 7:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sheril Kirshenbaum, who blogs at Chris Mooney's blog Intersection, seems to have an better understanding of the ramifications of the ClimateGate fraud than Mooney does. This fraud will unravel the global warming hoax in short order (public opinion was moving against it even before ClimateGate), and it will likely lead to a civil war within science, pitting scientists who adhere to high standards of integrity against opportunists and ideologues who use science for their own purposes.

But Kirshenbaum gets the problem and the solution completely wrong.

Her post:

I’ve been quieter on the blog this week while in Texas–where I must say I’m impressed at both the hospitality and barbecue. But that doesn’t mean I can escape the PR mess that is “ClimateGate.” Out at a local pub last night, surrounded by cheering basketball fans and $2.25 pints, it wasn’t long before a friendly new acquaintance inquired, “So what’s all this stuff on tv about scientists and data?”

I continue to believe that despite however many editorials are published in academic journals, however many science journalists come forward playing defense, and no matter how many scientists calmly (or not so calmly) explain that this email kerfuffle probably only serves to demonstrate that scientists are people too, the damage has been done. The entire episode is an unfortunate case study of our increasingly Unscientific America–an example of how the media distorts a story, partisanship spins the details to suit a particular agenda, and scientists are ill-equipped to manage the PR fallout.

I am saddened to observe the state of broad perception of climate science, but not surprised. Further, this is not “the public’s” fault. It’s up to us in the scientific community to figure out how to stay on message. If we aren’t prepared to speak up for ourselves in a united voice about the state of the planet, others with less noble intentions will. And we won’t like the result. [emphasis mine]

Kirshenbaum has it exactly wrong. Real scientists don't "stay on message." Real scientists don't have a "message." Politicians and ideologues and science journalists have "messages," and they have seduced many scientists to betray their science and "speak up in a united voice." Science is the study of nature--science follows the evidence, wherever is leads. Real scientists are inveterate skeptics. Unanimity and "messages" are the antithesis of science.

A large part of the blame for this debacle rests with ideologues like Kirshenbaum and Mooney who have perverted science with their hard-left ideology. They have damaged science in ways that scientists haven't even begun to comprehend.

Science-journalists-with-an-agenda are toxic to science, because agenda-driven polemics are the antithesis of science. Within the scientific community only fools and opportunists collaborate with polemicists. Unfortunately, that may be a very large segment of the scientific community.

If scientists with integrity really begin to push back against the polemicists, it could get very ugly. Science-civil-war ugly. But the current state of science--the relinquishment of scientific integrity to advance political agendas--is much much uglier. If the politicization of science continues apace, good scientists will be driven out, and all of science will become politics, pursued by other means.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 11:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Post modernism is creeping into science. The bizarre rationalizations for the self-admitted scientific fraud perpetrated in the ClimateGate scandal are a radical departure from traditional scientific standards. Scientists are rushing to defend the indefensible: manipulating data, faking data, destroying data to prevent examination by other scientists, and conspiring to take control of peer review to advance a particular scientific theory. All of these acts constitute gross scientific misconduct, and several decades ago commission of any of these transgressions would have ended a scientific career.

No so any more. The leading scientific journal Nature has defended all of these scientific crimes by asserting that these scientists were under stress, and the Nature editors have made the bizarre claim that evidence for widespread manipulation of peer-review doesn't cast doubt on the body of climate science that has been validated by the same corrupt peer-review process revealed in the emails and of which Nature has been a part.

Peer review is the jury that decides what counts as valid science. Manipulation of peer-review is to science what jury tampering is to justice; it's a crime, it is perhaps the most dishonest thing a practitioner can do, and it invalidates verdicts, scientific or judicial, arrived at through the corrupt process.

Does evidence really matter in science? Does data matter? A science blogger at climate alarmist blog Get Energy Smart! Now!!! sums up the emerging attitude in ideologically motivated science:

"True information, if it is true, doesn’t necessarily mean truthful."

Derrida is in the laboratory.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 11:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The climate fraud spreads to NASA:

Researcher: NASA Hiding Climate Data

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.

Hmmm. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is directed by global warming nut Dr. James Hansen. Hansen recently had to retract his 'scientific conclusions' regarding temperature trends in the 20th century when his analysis was shown to be grossly in error, and the 'error' (sit down for this) exaggerated... warming! Why would his organization be unwilling to release raw data and other documents regarding the research despite Freedom of Information Act requests for two years? They must be busy.

"I assume that what is there is highly damaging," Mr. Horner said. "These guys are quite clearly bound and determined not to reveal their internal discussions about this."

Oh, come on. Why expect government employees spending public money and who promote science that is poised to change world economy and governance be expected to conduct their research in a way that is transparent and publicly accountable? This violates every precept of climate science.

The numbers matter. Under pressure in 2007, NASA recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest year in its records for the contiguous 48 states. NASA later changed that data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are tied for first, with 1934 slightly cooler.

Mr. Horner, a noted global warming skeptic and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, wants a look at the data and the discussions that went into those changes. He said he's given the agency until the end of the year to comply or else he'll sue to compel the information's release.

His fight mirrors one in Europe that has sprung up over the the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in the UK after thousands of e-mails from the center were obtained and appear to show researchers shaving their data to make it conform to their expectation, and show efforts to try to drive global warming skeptics out of the conversation.

The center's chief has stepped down pending an investigation into the e-mails.

The center has also had to acknowledge in response to a freedom of information request under British law that it tossed out much of the raw data that it used to draw up the temperature models that have underpinned much of the science behind global warming.

Mr. Horner suspects the same sort of data-shaving has happened at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), another leading global warming research center.

Mark Hess, public affairs director for the Goddard Space Flight Center which runs the GISS laboratory, said they are working on Mr. Horner's request, though he couldn't say why they have taken so long.

"...why they have taken so long": they had to call in the IT guys to find the 'delete all data' button. Consensus science takes time.

"We're collecting the information and will respond with all the responsive relevant information to all of his requests," Mr. Hess said. "It's just a process you have to go through where you have to collect data that's responsive."

"Apollo 13, this is Houston. We're working on your problem as we speak. It will take a couple of years, but it's just a process you have to go through..."

He said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn't say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data. The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant.

Sure. The "public affairs director for the Goddard Space Flight Center," an agency mired in global warming science, is unfamiliar with a massive worldwide scandal involving much of the science his agency responsible for.

"Several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening. I don't think that's anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week.

The climate is changing rapidly, Mr. Gibbs, as you will understand in 2010.

But Republicans on Capitol Hill say the revelations deserve a congressional investigation. Republican leaders also sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson Wednesday telling her she should withdraw a series of EPA rules until the global warming science can be better substantiated. For now, climate scientists are rallying around the British researchers.

Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University who is under fire for his involvement in the British e-mail exchanges, said the e-mails' release was timed to skunk up next week's U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen. Mr. Obama is planning to attend.

"They've taken scientists' words and phrases and quoted them out of context, completely misrepresenting what they were saying," Mr. Mann told AccuWeather.com in an interview, calling it a "manufactured controversy."

All of the manufacturing was done by the scientists who hid the data and wrote the emails. And is 160 mb of text and data "out of context"? Simple solution, Dr. Mann. Provide us with all of your (publicly-funded) emails and data, to provide 'context'. They're going to seize your hard drives anyway.

NASA's GISS was forced to update its data in 2007 after questions were raised by Steve McIntyre, who runs ClimateAudit.com.

GISS had initially listed the warmest years as 1998, 1934, 2006, 1921 and 1931. After Mr. McIntyre's questions GISS rejiggered the list and 1934 was warmest, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006 and then 1931. But since then, the list has been rewritten again so it now runs 1998, 2006, 1934, 1921, 1999.

The institute blamed a "minor data processing error" for the changes but says it doesn't make much difference since the top three years remain in a "statistical tie" either way.

NASA, an organization that can hit Neptune with a rocket, can't read thermometers. Why is it that the warmists' "minor processing errors" never seem to exaggerate cooling? Warmists' "error bars" only go in one direction. Odd.

Mr. Horner said he's seeking the data itself, but he also wants to see the chain of e-mails from scientists discussing the changes.

The Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days. Mr. Horner says he's never received an official acknowledgement of his three separate FOIA requests, but has received e-mails showing the agency is aware of them.

He said he has provided NASA with a notice of intent to sue under FOIA, but said he also hopes members of Congress get involved and demand the information be released.

NASA and CRU data are considered the backbone of much of the science that suggests the earth is warming due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions. NASA argues its data suggests this decade has been the warmest on record.

On the other hand, data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville suggests temperatures have been relatively flat for most of this decade.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 11:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Forget your Prius. Forget all that tedious recycling your kids bug you about. Forget solar panels on your house.

The UN Population Fund has a better way to fight the scourage of global warming:

Condoms.

Fight Climate Change With Free Condoms, U.N. Population Fund Says

London (AP) - The battle against global warming could be helped if the world slowed population growth by making free condoms and family planning advice more widely available, the U.N. Population Fund said Wednesday.

Who knew that thing you carried in your wallet throughout high school could save the planet.

The agency did not recommend countries set limits on how many children people should have, but said: "Women with access to reproductive health services ... have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse gas emissions...As the growth of population, economies and consumption outpaces the Earth's capacity to adjust, climate change could become much more extreme and conceivably catastrophic," the report said.

It's great that the population control folks want the common man to share the burden of saving the planet. Do they have any particular populations in mind?

The world's population will likely rise from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050, with most of the growth in less developed regions, according to a 2006 report by the United Nations.

Oh. The planet could be most efficiently saved from global warming by limiting population in third-world countries.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. [emphasis mine]

Well, even if it's genocide to target third world populations for "access to reproductive health services," at least the scientific basis for the use of fertility control as a method of combating global warming is well established...

The U.N. Population Fund acknowledged it had no proof of the effect that population control would have on climate change. "The linkages between population and climate change are in most cases complex and indirect," the report said.

Oh, so they think that genocide might be helpful in saving the planet, but there's no scientific evidence...

...Still, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, the U.N. Population Fund's executive director, told a news conference in London on Wednesday that global warming could be catastrophic for people in poor countries, particularly women.

Global warming is a threat to women? The U.N. Population Fund is directly responsible for the most horrific femicide (deliberate killing of girls and women) in history. "Population control" programs endorsed by the U.N. Population Fund and other population control nuts are responsible for the "Missing Women of Asia," first noted by Indian Nobel Laurate Amartya Sen. There are 100 million fewer women than men in southeastern Asia, mostly in China and India, due to sex-selective abortions and female infanticide.

The death toll among women from global warming: zero. The death toll among women from policies advanced by the U.N. Population Control Fund: 100 million.

One analyst seems to understand the unique venality of the population control zealots:

On Wednesday, one analyst criticized the U.N. Population Fund's pronouncements as alarmist and unhelpful.

"It requires a major leap of imagination to believe that free condoms will cool down the climate," said Caroline Boin, a policy analyst at International Policy Network, a London-based think tank.

She also questioned earlier efforts by the agency to control the world's population.

In its 1987 report, the U.N. Population Fund warned that once the global population hit 5 billion, the world "could degenerate into disaster." At the time, the agency said "more vigorous attempts to slow undue population growth" were needed in many countries.

According to Boin, "Numerous environmental indicators show that with development and economic growth we are able to preserve more natural habitats. There is no causal relationship between population density and poverty."

In this month's Bulletin, the World Health Organization's journal, two experts also warned about the dangers of linking fertility to climate change.

"Using the need to reduce climate change as a justification for curbing the fertility of individual women at best provokes controversy and at worst provides a mandate to suppress individual freedoms," wrote WHO's Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum and Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan.

The perceived threat to humanity posed by global warming is based on fraudulent science and is probably minimal. The hypotheticals of the global warming nuts are a joke--"billions and billions will die... polar bears will drown..." But there have been real deaths on a large scale caused by these creeps. The threat to humanity posed by the U.N. Population Fund and associated population zealots is a matter of historical fact, and is ongoing.

The only way that "population control" fights global warming is that it elimininates tens of millions of innocent warm bodies.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 11:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From the introduction to The Deniable Darwin:

My own view, repeated in virtually all of my essays, is that the sense of skepticism engendered by the sciences would be far more appropriately directed toward the sciences than toward anything else. It is not a view that has engendered wide-spread approval. The sciences require no criticism, many scientists say, because the sciences comprise a uniquely self-critical institution, with questionable theories and theoreticians passing constantly before stern appellate review. Judgment is unrelenting. And impartial. Individual scientists may make mistakes, but like the Communist Party under Lenin, science is infallible because its judgments are collective. Critics are not only unwelcome, they are unneeded. The biologist Paul Gross has made himself the master of this attitude and invokes it on every conceivable occasion.

Now no one doubts that scientists are sometimes critical of themselves. Among astrophysicists, backbiting often leads to backstabbing. The bloodletting that ensues is on occasion salutary. But the process of peer review by which grants are funded and papers assigned to scientific journals, is, by its very nature, an undertaking in which a court reviews its own decisions and generally finds them good. It serves the useful purpose of settling various scores, but it does not – and it cannot – achieve the ends that criticism is intended to serve.

If the scientific critic finds himself needed wherever he goes, like a hanging judge he finds himself unwelcome wherever he appears, all the more reason, it seems to me, that he really should get around as much as possible.

Posted by David Berlinski at 3:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A confused and wholly erroneous review of Ben Wiker's Darwin Myth by Todd Wood appeared recently on Todd's Blog. Wood's review suffers from three major errors (and likely many more if I took the necessary time to delineate them all), but in the interest of calling them out without wasting too much time on such an obviously muddled missive, permit me to note the following:

First, Wood claims that "Wiker's Darwin is an evolutionist from the start, thanks to the influence of Lamarck, Grant, and Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia." Actuall,y what Wiker says is that "the theory came before the facts. It was a philosophical and cultural inheritance before Charles Darwin himself went in search of evidence to support it" (p. 137). This is true and it is also amply demonstrated in the experiences that 17 year-old Charles had in the Plinian Society in addition to Robert Edmond Grant (whom he met at that Society), his grandfather (an irreverent transmutationist), and his father (a closet nonbeliever by just about every biographer's account including Wiker). Every major metaphysical concept Darwin was later to embrace he was introduced to as a Plinian (e.g. mind as solely matter, humans and animals as one, radical materialism). This was, in Adrian Desmond and James Moore's own words, Darwin's introduction to "seditious science" (see chapter 3 of their Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist). Wood has Wiker asking the wrong question. Wiker didn't ask, when did Darwin become an evolutionist?, he asked, when did Darwin develop his worldview or philosophy? That is a powerful and important question and one not asked enough by Darwin's biographers past and present; too bad Wood missed this point so tellingly and clearly made by Wiker. Understood in Wiker's context there is, in fact, ample evidence for showing that Darwin's theory was well ahead of his facts and it can be clearly seen in many references to his private notebooks. Permit me one example (for others I suggest reading the introduction to my Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution and, of course, the subject of Wood's mischaracterizations, Wiker's own Darwin Myth). "Why is thought, being a secretion of the brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter?," Darwin rhetorically asks, "It is our arrogance, it is our admiration of ourselves . . . " (Darwin, Notebooks, p. 231). In other words, our intellects are simply products of our material brain (Darwin thought God was of our making, too) and our thinking otherwise is simply arrogant. Darwin wrote this at age 29, four years before his rough 35-page sketch on transmutation and six years before his 230-page draft of the general theory. Wiker is correct; the theory ran well ahead of the facts. Wood's reference to mockingbirds in the Galapagos is utterly irrelevant is simply demonstrates his complete obliviousness to Wiker's important and well-supported thesis.

Wood goes on claim that we know very little about what Darwin thought about species before he started his notebooks, suggesting that Charles was little more than a blank slate when it came to such matters. But this isn't so, and, despite Wood's demand for more primary sources from Wiker, we don't need them on this account. Janet Browne, the reigning Dean of Darwin biographers, points out that Charles' dismissal of Grant's influence upon him as claimed in his Autobiography is not to be believed:

But Charles Darwin's phlegmatic response was puzzling. Far too disingenuous in his Autobiography, he was in truth well prepared to understand the importance both of Lamarck and of his grandfather. At the time Grant spoke to him, Darwin had already read Lamarck's technical guide to the classification of invertebrates, the Systemè des animaux sans vertèbres (1801), which included the text of a lecture in which Lamarck clearly proposed that species change through time. From this lecture he would quickly have grasped the essentials of Lamarck's theory. And he had by then studied Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary works, particularly the Zoonomia. A previously unknown list made by Darwin of the books he read during his second year at Edinburgh makes it plain that he studied his grandfather's volumes closely--closely enough to continue the interest by reading Anna Seward's biography of him (published in 1814) and following up crucial questions about the nature of life and organisation as raised in the Zoonomia and by contemporary debates in Edinburgh in other medical texts of the period. Young Darwin, it now turns out, was well aware of evolutionary views and perfectly capable of grasping the full implication of what Grant had to say (Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, p. 83).

Now Wiker makes a similar point, but what can Wood say to Browne? Is she wrong too?! Besides, the point here is two-fold: 1) Wiker's thesis that Darwin's theory preceded the facts is borne out by Darwin's own reading on the subject, reading commenced long before the Beagle set sail; and 2) Darwin's asseveration to the contrary as found in his Autobiography simply supports Wiker's contention that Charles was less than forthright in characterizing his own intellectual development. Why? Because to suggest otherwise might have impugned the "scientific rigor" of his method in developing his evolutionary theory. And this isn't an isolated case. Others could be shown where Darwin's claims in his Autobiography simply don't match with his private notebooks. No wonder that Howard Gruber admitted that "Darwin presented himself in ways that are not supported by the evidence of the notebooks," and his "actual way of working . . . would never have passed muster in a methodological court of inquiry among Darwin's scientific contemporaries" (Darwin on Man, p. 122).

The third point in Wood's bewildering account of The Darwin Myth is that Wiker is somehow wrong in insisting that Darwin's was "an entirely godless account of evolution." Wood's counterpoint to this is a famous letter to Asa Gray, written just six months after the publication of his Origen, claiming to be atheistically "bewildered" and having had "no intention to write atheistically." Well, a few points need to be made here. First, from the account above (not from Wiker but from Browne) we know that Darwin could be disingenuous in presenting his own life story; the reality doesn't fit the presentation. Why should we now believe Darwin's letter to Gray at face value? The answer is we shouldn't. Darwin was eager for Gray (a thoroughgoing theist) to support his new book and, in fact, paid to have Gray's favorable reviews of Origin published and distributed in pamphlet form. Wood mistakes cagey self-promotion for alleged bewilderment (a typical Darwin strategy). While Darwin was no doubt miffed at Gray's theistic spin to Origin, "That is not what he meant the theory to do," Wiker points out, "and in private letters he politely made his objections known to Gray. Yet--and this was typical of Darwin--he had no qualms about using Gray's argument if it would smooth the way for acceptance of his theory" (pp. 108-109). How do we know this? We know this by examining the details of his theory with his actions and matching (or mismatching as the case may be) his statements to his actions. Second, if Darwin truly had "no intention" to write atheistically, why did he exclaim so emphatically, "But I groan over man. . . . Eheu!, Eheu!, Eheu!--Your miserable friend, C. Darwin" when Alfred Russel Wallace suggested that only an "Overruling Intelligence" could account for the human intellect? (See letter to Wallace Jan. 26, 1870 in Marchant, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, p. 206.) If Darwin had no intention to write atheistically and if he genuinely believed "all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator" as he claimed to Gray, why such a wail at Wallace's suggestion?

In the end, Wood claims "this book just asks us to take Wiker's word for it." Well, let's add Janet Browne and Howard Gruber to the list. For that matter, even noted evolutionist C. D. Darlington admitted that Darwin adopted "a flexible strategy which is not to be reconciled with even average intellectual integrity: by contrast with Wallace, Lyell, Hooker, Chambers or even Spencer, Darwin was slippery (Darwin's Place in History, p. 60), and Stanley Jaki's Savior of Science could also be added to the list of those who have questioned Darwin's veracity. While all these prior investigators recognized Darwin's duplicity, none of them took the bold, logical, and perfectly warranted step that Wiker did because (again) they generally failed to ask the right question. So Wood's complaint falls wide of the mark. The error here is not that Wiker's evidence is weak (it is not), but rather that it seems clear Wood is totally unfamiliar with (or suffering from selective amnesia of) Darwin's historiography.

Wiker's account remains a must read, despite this bungled attempt at a review.

Posted by Michael Flannery at 8:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)