At the Huffington Post, journalist Suzan Mazur is amusingly acid and on target in a report from the Royal Society meeting, “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology,” which sounds more stultifying the more I hear about it.

[O]ne of the opening speakers referred to himself as representing the Jurassic Age of science and pointed out that the content of the previous speaker’s lecture — which put more than the jet-lagged in the audience to sleep — could be found in existing textbooks. He was right about the previous talk, it was a rehash of Altenberg 2008 served with a dollop of natural selection. And so it went for most of the presentations, niche construction ad nauseam, except for talks by James Shapiro and John Dupré (I arrived late for Denis Noble’s). The event would have benefited from someone in the wings with a hook restraining speakers who insisted on relying on the mantra of natural selection to fill in the blanks of their science. Repeated references to the term became almost comical. Sir Patrick Bateson finally came to the rescue, cautioning against overuse of the “metaphor,” saying further that “natural selection is not an agent.”

In his defense of the meeting, principal organizer Denis Noble told me it was amazing the event happened at all because the Royal Society wanted to cancel it.

Ten of the 26 presenters were part of the John Templeton Foundation-funded Extended Synthesis project. Templeton is known for its pairing of science and religion. And as the talks proceeded, it appeared to some in the room that the JTF-funded scientists had both compromised their work and retarded science by accepting the foundation’s easy money.

This last observation points out for her “the issue of JTF cronyism and lack of transparency.”

She asks:

[J]ust what was the point of attracting a distinguished international gathering if the speakers had little new science to present? Why waste everyone’s time and money? After all, a round trip air ticket US-UK is $1,000, a three-day hotel stay at least another $500, plus meals, ground transportation and miscellaneous travel expenses (including the cost of replacing Wolford hosiery destroyed by a crudely stapled Royal Society program).

That’s unfortunate about the stockings. She is also not impressed by the physical surroundings — “I would say the Royal Society needs more than the coat of paint it is now getting, it needs to seriously update its conference facilities.”

Of things and persons to praise, Mazur found John Dupré “noteworthy” as “probably the most erudite” of the presenters, arguing for process ontology and “mesmerizing” Ms. Mazur with a single diamond earing set in his left ear. Also cutting an impressive figure, Stuart Pivar was “seated in the room between wife Larimore and co-author David Edelman and elegantly dressed in a black velvet jacket for the occasion.” Pivar in his research advocates for “embryo geometry” in explaining the “origin of the vertebrate body plan.” Mazur found it to be one of the few pieces of “notable conference news” that event organizer Denis Noble cited Pivar’s work.

What is that work all about, presented in a paper back in September that he co-authored in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology? I asked Discovery Institute embryologist Jonathan Wells, who commented:

Stuart Pivar describes the development of the vertebrate body plan in terms of mechanical constraints on geometric patterns. His approach is interesting, and it is relevant to an important aspect of embryology (namely, the generation of shape), but it is far from sufficient to explain development, much less evolution.

All in all, not quite as explosive as one might have expected — that would seem characterize the Royal Society meeting as a whole, where, tellingly, the group of scientists on hand who were friendly to intelligent design could only listen to the proceedings. Now, granting the floor to an ID advocate — that would have been interesting.

London is a long way to travel for such a gathering. As a gesture of goodwill, they could at least refund Suzan Mazur the cost of her ruined hosiery.

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