Leading off was today's interview of ARN Executive Director Dennis Wagner, who discussed with Casey Luskin the expelling of Ben Stein from the University of Vermont, the censorship of Michael Behe's Bloggingheads.tv interview, and the lawsuit against the California Science Center over their cancellation of the pro-ID film, Darwin’s Dilemma.

Stay tuned to the entire series of podcasts this week at IDtheFuture.com.

We just received a review copy of "What Darwin Got Wrong", the new book attacking Darwinian evolution by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, two thorougly materalistic scientists. Why does that matter? Because typically materialists have been the most ardent defenders of Darwin's theory of natural selection. With the publication of this book, that is likely to change.

For those of you wondering what this is all about let me back up to 2007 when Fodor published his first piece of heresy in the London Review of Books, "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings". That article led to Stanley Salthe, another materialist scientist who doubts Darwrinian evolution (and has signed the Dissent From Darwin statement to boot), to convene an e-mail discussion group that became what is now known as the Altenberg 16.

Science writer Susan Mazur reported on that meeting, and later wrote an entire book about the 16 scientists who were basically affirming what we'd been saying here at ENV for years -- Darwinian evolution is dead. She wrote:

What it amounts to is a gathering of 16 biologists and philosophers of rock star stature – let's call them "the Altenberg 16" – who recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence. It's pre the discovery of DNA, lacks a theory for body form and does not accommodate "other" new phenomena.

When I called Fodor to discuss his article, he joked that he was now in the Witness Protection Program because he'd been so besieged following the LRB piece. ... Fodor also told me that "you can't put this stuff in the press because it's an attack on the theory of natural selection" and besides "99.99% of the population have no idea what the theory of natural selection is".

Since these doubts aren't anything new to many scientists who've been saying this for years, I thought I'd ask them what their initial thoughts about this book are. Here are a few responses.

On his website David Berlinski, author of The Deniable Darwin writes in part:

What is encouraging about Jerry Fodor's and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's arguments in What Darwin Got Wrong is just that Fodor and Piattelli- Palmarini had the nerve to make them. What is discouraging about their arguments is just that it has taken them so long to acquire their nerve. Where have you been fellahs?

Every argument that they advance others have advanced before them. Who in particular? Me, for sure. I have called attention to the striking analogy between Skinner and Darwin for more than fifteen years now.

Darwinian propagandists would like the public to believe that there is no scientific debate about the adequacy of evolutionary theory--though scientists have actually been debating it ever since The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's book, What Darwin Got Wrong, is the latest contribution to this long-standing scientific controversy.

Darwin considered natural selection--survival of the fittest--to be the "most important" mechanism of evolution, but Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (like many scientist before them) argue that it is not. Although they accept Darwin's idea that living things are descended from a common ancestor, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini cite abundant evidence against natural selection.

They call much of the "vast literature" on this subject "distressingly uncritical" and write "it is high time that Darwinists take this evidence seriously."

So the scientific debate continues--the debate that Darwinian propagandists say doesn't exist.

The smoke from Darwin’s 200 birthday candles had barely dissipated when Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini announce “What Darwin Got Wrong” — evolution’s mechanism. Natural selection just can’t cut the mustard, they explain. But since the proposal of a natural mechanism for evolution is the very reason for Darwin’s scientific and cultural importance, his achievement apparently has been way overblown by pretty much the entire biological community. Now, I wonder who else has been saying that for the last few decades?

Fodor correctly understands that natural selection, Darwin's designer substitute mechanism, lacks the creative power that has long been attributed to it. Natural selection by definition only "selects" or favors functional advantage. What we have learned in biology over the last 50 years shows that at every level in the biological hierarchy -- whether we are talking about novel genes, proteins, molecular machines, signal transduction circuits, organs, or body plans -- functional advantage depends upon the occurrence of a series of vastly improbable and tightly coordinated mutational events. Careful quantitative analysis has shown that these events that are so improbable as to put thresholds of selectable function well beyond the reach of chance. The selection and mutation mechanism does not work because the mechanism of natural selection depends on too many improbable things going right before there is anything to select at all.

The past week’s startling news of backpedaling from the “primordial soup” theory rang a bell, though I wasn’t instantly able to say whose comedy routine it put me in mind of. Hm, was it Monty Python? ScienceDaily carries the story:

For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a “primordial soup” of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the “soup” theory has been overturned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.

]]>"Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all," said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. "We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H₂, CO₂, N₂, and H₂S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent -- one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores."

In Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer writes about how back in 1985 he came across Thaxton, Bradley and Olson’s The Mystery of Life’s Origin, which “provided a comprehensive critique of the attempts that had been made to explain how the first life had arisen from the primordial ocean, the so-called pre-biotic soup.”

The soup-spilling team writing in BioEssays concentrates on the source of energy needed to power life into existence. Was it from UV radiation, as J.B.S. Haldane theorized in 1929? Or from a hydrothermal vent? This overlooks a much trickier problem: the source not of the relevant energy but the relevant biological information. As Meyer remarks in Signature, origin-of-life scenarios that “just transfer the information problem into the chemical soup itself” fit into a “clear pattern. Every attempt to explain the origin of biological information either failed because it transferred the problem elsewhere or ‘succeeded’ only by presupposing unexplained sources of information.”

Anyway, the lame retreat from a stance previously thumped with tremendous vigor sounds Pythonesque but no, a quick Internet search reveals it’s actually from Get Smart. Along with “Missed it by that much” and “Sorry about that, Chief,” “Would you believe…” was a repeated line from the classic 1960s TV show. It always introduced Agent Maxwell Smart’s attempt to climb down from an earlier, bolder claim in favor of increasingly pitiable ones: “I happen to be an expert in karate, Judo and tempura. Would you believe that I can break eight boards with one karate chop? No? Would you believe three boards? Would you believe a loaf of bread?”

But enough nostalgia. Read the ScienceDaily article here.

Though the 99% number has received some qualifiers, and has even been referred to as a “myth” in Science, the basic idea remains firmly entrenched in the media collective consciousness.

But evidence seems to be piling up that the similarities are not nearly what has been advertised. Geneticist Richard Buggs has reflected on this, and has even predicted “that when we have a reliable, complete chimpanzee genome, the overall similarity of the human genome will prove to be close to 70% (and very far from 99%).”

It will be interesting to see how Buggs' prediction holds up over time. If he’s right, this will be one more switch from “meme” to “myth” in the Darwinian ledger.

Recall that Richard Dawkins argued common descent would be overturned if fossils occurred out of evolutionary sequence. “Evolution could so easily be disproved,” he writes (2009, p. 147), “if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order.” This prediction follows a long tradition in evolutionary reasoning, reaching back to the early 20th century, in which the possibility of “Precambrian rabbits” has been regarded as a crucial test of the theory of common descent.

But, as I’ll explain below, “Precambrian rabbits” are found all the time. These fossil discoveries aren’t seen as telling against common descent, however, because the “incompleteness of the fossil record” absorbs the blow. In part 1, for example, I showed how the concept of “ghost lineages” allows evolutionary theorists to accommodate anomalous stratigraphic (fossil) distributions. In short, when fossils occur out of order — as either too early or too late — ghost lineages mend the damage by invisibly extending the temporal ranges of groups, well beyond the actual fossil data, to achieve congruence with expectations. In part 2, I’ll show how common descent is further insulated from paleontological challenges by a protective buffer of auxiliary hypotheses.

Think about the problem this way. When a prediction of common descent fails, who pays for the failed prediction?

The cop writes a ticket for the broken prediction and hands it through the window. The vehicle belongs to common descent (CD), and indeed, she was driving when it was pulled over. Nevertheless, CD passes the ticket to one of her passengers.

“Take care of this for me, won’t you?" she says, as she sips her imported bottled water.

You get the picture. Common descent never pays for a ticket, because everyone else picks up the cost.

Let’s start with an influential paper by two leading paleontologists, from the early 1990s.

2. Norell and Novacek 1992: How Well Does the Fossil Record Match Cladistic Predictions?

In 1992, vertebrate paleontologist Mark Norell — who coined the term “ghost lineage” — and his American Museum of Natural History colleague Michael Novacek, asked an important question: How well does the fossil record fit with evolutionary expectations based on cladistic analysis? (A cladistic analysis of fossil and extant groups uses their characters to derive a cladogram, an evolutionary tree predicted independently of the groups’ stratigraphic [geological] position.) As Norell and Novacek explain,

Our purpose was to examine the reliability of the fossil record in recovering the sequence of fossil divergence events. The cladistic result [prediction] is not necessarily the closer match to the “true” phylogeny; it simply provides an independent means of assessing the timing of evolutionary events in the fossil record. (1992, p. 1691)

To assess the congruence of cladograms and fossils, Norell and Novacek assigned ranks to each. See Figure 1, from their paper: “Age rank” gives the location in geological time of the fossil distributions of groups ABCD, whereas “clade rank” gives the branching or phylogenetic order of the same groups, based in this case not on stratigraphy, but on the anatomical (or molecular) characters of ABCD.

Fig. 1. Norell and Novacek (1992, p. 1692) assigned ranks to vertebrate groups, using both stratigraphic distribution and cladistic branching order. These diagrams show the ranks for hypothetical groups ABCD.

When plotted in this way, the two ranks — if congruent for any group — should produce points lying along a diagonal. "Complete congruence between the fossil record and the cladogram," write Norell and Novacek, "in sequence of ranks and level of precision will produce a diagonal line of points intersecting the axes at their origin" (1992, p. 1691; emphasis added). See Figure 2, where the blue diagonal represents congruence. Points falling above that line mark groups arising too early in the fossil record, with respect to their clade rank, whereas points below the diagonal represent groups arising too late.

Fig. 2. For any taxonomic group, congruence between its age (fossil) rank and clade rank will produce a point lying on the blue diagonal. Points above that line represent groups that appear too early in the fossil record, with respect to their clade rank, whereas points below represent groups appearing too late in the fossil record with respect to clade rank.

Norell and Novacek then plotted age and clade ranks for several vertebrate groups. Figure 3 shows two such plots from their paper, for equids (i.e., horses and their relatives) and higher primates.

Fig. 3. Plots of age ranks as a function of clade ranks for two mammalian groups, equids and higher primates. The "pretty" plot for equids shows most of the points falling close to the diagonal, indicating (relatively) good congruence. The "not so pretty" plot for higher primates, by contrast, shows considerable scatter. For instance, the taxon marked by the green arrow appears too early in the fossil record, whereas the taxon marked by the red arrow appears too late.

Note that the equid plot corresponds well to the congruence diagonal, with only a couple of points straying. Norell and Novacek call this a "remarkable match of that [fossil] record with cladistic results" (1992, p. 1692). The higher primate plot, on the other hand, is frankly a mess. The taxon indicated by the green arrow, for instance, appears too early in the record, whereas the taxon marked by the red arrow appears very late (in both cases, with respect to cladistic predictions).

Now, before we look at how Norell and Novacek explained departures from theoretical expectation — including the not-so-pretty scatter in the higher primate plot — time for another visit with the logic of testing. We've got a handy bumper sticker for that.

3. When Data Don't Cooperate

Testing a theory does not mean applauding whenever data and theory agree, while waving away or ignoring the instances where they don't. That would be like assessing someone's driving record by counting only the days when she didn't speed or run through stop signs. Here's another bumper sticker to make the point:

Remember the question motivating all this: How can common descent be challenged or questioned by paleontological evidence? Dawkins, following Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, and many other evolutionists, argues that common descent would be falsified if fossils were found out of evolutionary sequence.

This prediction may be represented schematically as follows (see Figure 4):

Fig. 4. Common Descent (CD) is widely said to predict that fossils should occur in the geological column in the correct evolutionary order.

If the prediction of "fossils in correct evolutionary order" follows from common descent, then when the prediction is overturned — as in the case of higher primate fossils (see the not-so-pretty plot, in Fig. 3, above) — common descent is falsified, at least for that group.

Right?

4. Don't Be So Naïve, Paul

Of course not. Figure 5 shows what actually happens:

Fig. 5. When the prediction from CD of correct fossil order fails, the auxiliary hypothesis of "poor fossil record" absorbs the anomaly. CD is thereby protected from observational challenge.

Thus, when Norell and Novacek assessed the lack of congruence in the higher primate plot, guess who paid the ticket? Hint — not the driver:

The relationships examined here also reveal that the quality of the fossil record judged from other perspectives does not necessarily reveal its match with independently derived phylogenetic evidence....the primate fossil record poorly reflects higher level cladistic branching patterns. This is because some taxa (tarsiers and cheirogalines, for instance) thought to have branched off very early in primate history appear late in the record or have no fossil record. (1992, p. 1692; emphasis added)

Well, go figure. The higher primate fossil record is unreliable. Common descent is still true, of course. (In part 3 of this series, I'll review a new theory for the common descent of the primates that sets their fossil record entirely to one side, as completely unreliable.)

In a deeply insightful paper published in 1978, which deserves to be better known, systematist Gareth Nelson grasped that what he calls "the paleontological argument" — namely, that fossils provide a reliable guide to evolutionary relationships — cannot be tested. Figure 5 shows why: the ad hoc hypothesis of the incompleteness of the fossil record absorbs any contrary evidence. As Nelson (1978, p. 331) writes,

Within the history of paleontology, I am aware of numerous apparent falsifiers of the paleontological argument; these have usually been rendered impotent as falsifiers by the ad hoc alternative that the fossil record was not as complete as previously believed....The paleontological argument seems fallacious because it is accepted in principle as non-falsifiable (it is always protected from falsification by an ad hoc alternative that is always, and obviously, true).

The "ad hoc alternative" is always true, because new fossils are always being found. As Nelson (1978, p. 331) notes — one can almost see him grinning — "The ad hoc alternative admittedly has appeal: how could its truth be doubted with the newly discovered fossils in hand?"

You can't lose betting on the incompleteness of the fossil record. And, because you can't lose, this ad hoc hypothesis works as a perfect sink to absorb any anomalous data the fossil record may reveal. Observe what happened recently with the discovery of the anomalously early Polish trackways. Did anyone question the common descent of the tetrapods?

Whaddya, crazy?

5. But No One Expects Common Descent to Pay for Her Tickets

This may seem a harsh judgment. It isn't. Following the publication of Norell and Novacek 1992, a flurry of research began, led mainly by paleontologist Michael Benton and his co-workers, to examine the congruence of the fossil record and cladograms. I'll discuss their research in greater depth in part 3. Here I want only to look at how Benton et al. handled the lack of congruence they found in one of their studies.

"What Causes Poor Matching of Age and Clade Data?" That's the question Benton et al. asked in their 1999 paper on the problem (Benton, Hitchin and Wills 1999, p. 592). And here is their answer, which I have formatted as a series of bullet points for ease of reference:

Variations in congruence between cladograms and stratigraphic data result from several factors:

1. differences in the quality of cladograms;

2. differences in the quality of the fossil record;

3. stratigraphic problems;

4. categorical (taxonomic) focus; and

5. sampling density.

Only by looking at each case in some detail can we hope to determine the reasons for particularly good or particularly bad matching. (1999, p. 592)

Notice what theory is NOT in the list of possibilities to explain lack of congruence: the falsity of common descent itself. Figure 6 shows the logic. The investigator has (at least) five possible ad hoc or auxiliary hypotheses available to absorb any anomalous paleontological data.

Fig. 6. Multiple possible ad hoc or auxiliary hypotheses are available to explain lack of congruence between the fossil record and cladistic predictions. These may be employed singly or in combination. Common descent (CD) is thus protected from observational challenge.

Common descent, although sitting in the driver's seat, can pass any ticket she receives to one of her passengers. And she will.

Okay, I guess.

But what evidence cannot question, evidence cannot support.

In part 3, we'll look at how all this plays out in current evolutionary research.

References

Benton, Michael, Rebecca Hitchin, and Matthew Wills. 1999. Assessing Congruence Between Cladistic and Stratigraphic Data. Systematic Biology 48:581-596.

Dawkins, Richard. 2009. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. New York: The Free Press.

Nelson, Gareth. 1978. Ontogeny, Phylogeny, Paleontology, and the Biogenetic Law. Systematic Zoology 27:324-345.

Norell, Mark and Novacek, Michael. 1992. The Fossil Record and Evolution: Comparing Cladistic and Paleontologic Evidence for Vertebrate History. Science 255:1690-93.

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

The segments of this guide have included:

Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”?

Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design

Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution

The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils

Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum

Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade

Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”?

With a little proactive self-education, critical thinking, and patience, you can keep yourself informed in this debate. Many of the websites listed below contain helpful information and resources about evolution and intelligent design.

I hope this guide is helpful and wish you the best as you explore this exciting and challenging debate.

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

In Only a Theory, Miller claims that when the plaintiffs' attorneys at the Dover trial did a literature-dump bluff on Behe during cross-examination—placing before him over 50 papers and nearly a dozen books purportedly explaining the evolution of the immune system—that Behe said that they were "not 'good enough.’" Miller even goes so far as to characterize Behe's response as follows: "Even when presented with every opportunity to make their case, the defenders of design resorted to little more than saying 'It's not good enough for me' in the face of overwhelming evidence for evolution."⁴¹ What did Behe really say?

If by overwhelming evidence for "evolution," Miller meant neo-Darwinian evolution, where random mutation and natural selection are the driving force generating biological complexity in an adaptive, step-by-step fashion, then Behe is on quite firm ground in doubting Miller's assertion of "overwhelming" evidence for the evolution of the immune system. Behe knew this, and thus stated during his cross examination about the immune system: "In many of [the papers] they're not actually discussing mutation. They're discussing similarities and sequences between parts of the immune system in vertebrates and some elements of transposons."⁴²

A. No, they certainly do not. My answer, or my argument is that the literature has no detailed rigorous explanations for how complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation and natural selection and these articles do not address that.

Q. So these are not good enough?

A. They're wonderful articles. They're very interesting. They simply just don't address the question that I pose.⁴³

The relentless plaintiffs’ attorney then pestered Behe again with nearly the same question “Is that your position today that these articles aren't good enough, you need to see a step-by-step description?” and Behe clearly replied, “These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it's not that they aren't good enough. It's simply that they are addressed to a different subject.”⁴⁴

The plaintiffs’ attorney continued pressing Behe, and later Behe again emphasized this point: “Most of them have evolution or related words in the title, so I can confirm that, but what I strongly doubt is that any of these address the question in a rigorous detailed fashion of how the immune system or irreducibly complex components of it could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection.”⁴⁵

Does Behe say, as Miller characterizes it, "It's not good enough for me," or in Judge Jones' words, the papers are "not 'good enough’”? Not at all, because Behe actually says: "These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it's not that they aren't good enough. It's simply that they are addressed to a different subject."

In other words, Behe said precisely the opposite of what Miller claims Behe said. Of course Miller copied the error from Judge Jones, who copied the error from the ACLU's "Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law" brief,⁴⁶ but unfortunately this false account of Behe’s testimony continues to be perpetuated by Miller in his books and lectures about Dover.

More important than all of this is the fact that Behe’s response to these papers was right on target: the papers dumped on Behe during cross-examination made for a nice display of courtroom theatrics, but they did not establish a step-by-step Darwinian explanation of the origin of the immune system. Instead, the papers made comparisons of DNA sequences—a type of evidence that doesn’t refute irreducible complexity, making the same mistake discussed earlier in, “Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry with Evidence for Darwinian Evolution.”

References Cited:

[41.] Only a Theory, p. 74 (2008).

[42.] Day 12 PM testimony, p. 12.

[43.] Day 12 PM testimony, p. 16.

[44.] Day 12 PM testimony, pp. 18-19, emphasis added.

[45.] Day 12 PM testimony, pp. 20-21.

[46.] See ”A Comparison of Judge Jones' Opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover with Plaintiffs' Proposed ‘Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law’"

Following that, there will be Darwin vs. Design "Pizza Bash" featuring Dr. Berlinski and Dr. Tom Woodward this Saturday:

Pizza Kick-off: On Saturday, Feb 6th at 6:00 pm, at the First Alliance Church of Ft. Lauderdale (900 SW 31st Ave.) Dr. Tom Woodward and the C. S. Lewis Society are hosting a pizza-bash "meet and greet Berlinski/Woodward" for interested persons in the Ft. Lauderdale area and beyond. There is no charge; there will be a basket for free-will donations. RSVP is requested; email twdwrd@tampabay.rr.com to list name, phone and number of group coming.

Main Course at 7:00 pm: Dr. Woodward will give a powerpoint overview of the current Darwin-vs-Design clash. Then he will introduce and interview Dr. David Berlinski about the flaws that he sees in Darwinian theory and in the preachings of the "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins. Dr. Berlinski, self-described as a secular Jew, has emerged as one of the world's most powerful critics of Darwinian theory. His sizzling critique of the New Atheism, The Devil's Delusion, along with the newly released The Deniable Darwin, have caused a buzz about his startling insights.

For more information, contact Dr. Tom Woodward, Director of C. S. Lewis Society, at 727-642-8574 or twdwrd@tampabay.rr.com.

Meyer does not mean well. He is spreading lies and confusing people by distorting real science. Is that the unfortunate result of “meaning well”? Do you think that because somebody is a “Christian brother,” he’s incapable of lying for Jesus?

Isn’t it strange, though, that for all the persistent attacks on Meyer, in quite personal terms, Professor Coyne hasn’t dared to actually read Steve’s book? That’s obvious because Coyne’s throwaway summary of its contents -- Signature “maintains that cells must have been designed by God because they’re too complex to have evolved” -- is an absurd misrepresentation. Even someone who had only read reviews of the book would know as much. Has Coyne in fact read the critical review of Signature, by Darrel Falk, on which he bestows approval? Or Meyer’s detailed response to Falk, which Coyne dismisses as “more of the same ID pap”? Unless he’s a very poor reader -- and being a professor at the University of Chicago would presumably indicate otherwise -- you do get the strong impression that he’s commenting upon a bunch of writing by other people without having read it, certainly not with any care. Maybe he’s too busy playing with his cats that he makes so much of on his blog. Or maybe he’s sloppy. This is the same Dr. Coyne who earlier characterized Steve Meyer as a “young-earth creationist,” which of course he’s not.

But I dunno, attacking someone else for writing something that you haven’t read or even carefully read about strikes me as just plain old dishonest. If you add to that Coyne’s braying slurs against Steve Meyer as “lying for Jesus,” a “lying liar,” etc., then to the charge of dishonesty I think you’d have to add hypocrisy as well.

1. Summary

In LeVake v. Independent School District, high school biology teacher Rodney LeVake was reassigned after he allegedly failed to adequately cover the curriculum requirements for evolution and told his administrators that he intended to teach scientific criticisms of evolution.¹²⁷ LeVake stated, “I will accompany [the] treatment of evolution with an honest look at the difficulties and inconsistencies of the theory without turning my class into a religious one.”¹²⁸ There was no indication that Mr. LeVake intended to teach creationism or intelligent design.¹²⁹ LeVake was subsequently transferred to teach a ninth-grade natural science class.¹³⁰ LeVake brought suit alleging violation of his right to free exercise of religion, free speech, freedom of conscience, as well as due process and academic freedom rights, maintaining that the material he wanted to teach his students was lawful.¹³¹ The issue in LeVake became whether or not Mr. LeVake’s speech rights as a teacher trumped the district’s ability to exercise control over the science curriculum.¹³² The Minnesota Court of Appeals sided with the school district, holding that “LeVake's responsibility as a public school teacher to teach evolution in the manner prescribed by the curriculum overrides his First Amendment [free speech] rights as a private citizen.”¹³³

The LeVake ruling reflects the low degree of academic freedom that teachers have below the university level, absent some form of legislative protection.¹³⁴ The ruling is consistent with an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held that administrators may impose “reasonable restrictions” on teacher speech in public schools.¹³⁵ While academic freedom is to think critically about topics, and evolution would be one of them. And so I didn’t think it as a defiant proclamation on my part. I was just simply mentioning that I thought that Darwinian evolution had some flaws that would be worthwhile taking a look at. understandably restricted, there must come a point where restrictions are no longer “reasonable.” For example, if state or local statutes require that textbooks must be accurate,¹³⁶ it could be unreasonable to prevent a teacher from using scholarly sources to provide scientific criticisms of incorrect claims made in textbooks about evolution. Teachers may also address the controversy over evolution whenever there is current public debate over origins science.¹³⁷

As noted, the Supreme Court already implied in Edwards that it is possible for a legislature to “require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught.”¹³⁸ Indeed, even groups such as the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State acknowledge that “any genuinely scientific evidence for or against any explanation of life may be taught.”¹³⁹ Yet teacher academic freedom is limited, and LeVake demonstrates the need for clear legislative protection of academic freedom for teachers to assert such rights.

It has been this author’s experience that LeVake is sometimes miscited as holding that it is unconstitutional to teach scientific criticisms in public schools. This case stands for no such thing. At base, this is an employment law case about the freedom of speech retained by a government employee when acting in the course of his employment. The court did not attempt to make any determinations about the constitutionality of scientifically critiquing evolution in public schools. It simply balanced Mr. LeVake’s academic freedom rights to offer material outside the curriculum against the interests of the school district to control the curriculum.

In the final analysis, the fact pattern in LeVake may have made it a poor test case for teacher academic freedom. According to the court, Mr. LeVake had previously failed to teach the evolution curriculum and had stated that he could not teach the curriculum in the future.¹⁴⁰ Commentator Francis Beckwith observes that “[i]n light of the deference accorded states in matters of public education, and given the school district's legal duty to teach the curriculum correctly, the court seemed to have balanced the interests of LeVake and the school district appropriately.”¹⁴¹ But Beckwith concludes that if LeVake had both “agreed to teach the curriculum in precisely the way he was told to do so, and subsequently taught everything required in the curriculum” and only “offered nonreligious criticisms of evolution” from legitimate scholarly sources, that he might have had “a case with law in his favor.”¹⁴² If the court had found that Mr. LeVake had taught the required curriculum under legislatively protected teacher academic freedom, there is little doubt that he would have won his case.¹⁴³ This case therefore does not offend the proposition that teachers who fulfill the required curriculum and teach the evidence for evolution may assert the academic freedom to also teach students about scientific problems with evolution.

[Editor’s Note: This survey of LeVake v. Indep. Sch. Dist. is an excerpt from the article “Does Challenging Darwin Create Constitutional Jeopardy? A Comprehensive Survey of Case Law Regarding the Teaching of Biological Origins,” Hamline University Law Review, Vol. 32(1):1-64 (Winter, 2009), published by Hamline University School of Law. This excerpt covers the case LeVake v. Indep. Sch. Dist.; the full article can be read here.]

References Cited
[127.] LeVake v. Indep. Sch. Dist. No. 656, 625 N.W.2d 502 (Minn. Ct. App. 2001),cert. denied, 534 U.S. 1081 (2002)at 505-06. Mr. LeVake claims that he did in fact not fail to teach or refuse to teach the required evolution curriculum. According to an interview the author conducted with Mr. LeVake:

Casey Luskin: “There have been people including both the court and some Darwinists involved with this situation who claimed that you refused to teach evolution. Is that true?
Rodney LeVake: “No, that was actually not the case at all. It wasn’t that I was refusing to teach evolution. They wanted to know my views about what I thought about evolution. And I told them that I had some concerns about it from a scientific standpoint. I thought that would be a good quality to have and help my biology students to think critically about this. After all, that’s what science is all about, trying to help students
Casey Luskin: “They’ve also said Mr. LeVake that you refused to teach basically the full curriculum regarding evolution and what you were supposed to teach. Was that a true charge against you?
Rodney LeVake: “No. As I had mentioned, on the side as I was talking earlier, I was teaching the very same thing as my mentor teacher was right next door. Every single day I taught the very same thing that he taught.”

See ID the Future Podcast, Rodney LeVake: Expelled Science Teacher, Part 1. (edited for clarity).
[128.] LeVake, 625 N.W.2d at 506.
[129.] See id. at 505.
[130.] Id. at 507.
[131.] Id.
[132.] Id. at 508.
[133.] Id. at 509.
[134.] Such legislative protection may come from academic freedom bills, such as the ones proposed in Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Florida in recent years. See, e.g., David DeWolf, Seth Cooper & John G. West, Legal Analysis of the Alabama House Substitute for SB 336, May 14, 2004, (discussing one of these bills).
[135.] Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260, 267 (1988).
[136.] For example, California has a statute requiring that “[a]ll instructional materials adopted by any governing board for use in the schools shall be, to the satisfaction of the governing board, accurate, objective, and current and suited to the needs and comprehension of pupils at their respective grade levels.” CAL. EDUCATION CODE § 60045(a) (West 2003). A scholarly source discussing inaccuracies in textbooks over the evidence supporting evolution might be Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution (2000).
[137.] See, e.g., Piver v. Pender County Bd. of Educ., 835 F.2d 1076, 1078 (4th Cir.1987), cert. denied, 487 U.S. 1206 (1988) (indicating that a public employee’s “[s]peech is constitutionally protected only if it relates to matters of public concern . . . and if the interests of the teacher and the community in discussing these issues outweigh the interests of the school in maintaining an efficient workplace” (citations omitted)).
[138.] Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578, 593 (1987).
[139.] American Civil Liberties Union, Religion in the Public Schools: A Joint Statement of Current Law, Apr. 12, 1995,
[140.] LeVake v. Indep. Sch. Dist. No. 656, 625 N.W.2d 502, 505 (Minn. Ct. App.
2001), cert. denied, 534 U.S. 1081 (2002). Mr. LeVake claims he did not fail to teach the curriculum. See supra note 128.
[141.] Francis J. Beckwith, A Liberty Not Fully Evolved?: The Case of Rodney LeVake and the Right of Public School Teachers to Criticize Darwinism, 39 San Diego L. Rev. 1311, 1319 (2002).
[142.] Id. at 1319-21.
[143.] Id. at 1323-25.

The event will be broadcast LIVE tonight from 7:05-9:00pm, on the internet You can stream it live from either of these radio websites: AM 570 and 910 or AM 860 WGUL.

To listen to the event in its entirety, click here.

Click here to register for this event

Discovery Institute senior fellow and national radio personality Michael Medved will lead a two-hour discussion about the evidence for intelligent design and the challenges it proposes to modern evolutionary theory. Joining him will be Signature in the Cell author, Stephen C. Meyer, leading Darwin skeptic and author of The Deniable Darwin, David Berlinski, and scientist, scholar and writer, Thomas Woodward, author of Darwin Strikes Back.

In 1985, I attended a conference that brought a fascinating problem in origin-of-life biology to my attention—the problem of explaining how the information necessary to produce the first living cell arose. At the time, I was working as a geophysicist doing digital signal processing, a form of information analysis and technology. A year later, I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Cambridge, where I eventually completed a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science after doing interdisciplinary research on the scientific and methodological issues in origin-of-life biology. In the ensuing years, I continued to study the problem of the origin of life and have authored peer-reviewed and peer-edited scientific articles on the topic of biological origins, as well as co-authoring a peer-reviewed biology textbook. Last year, after having researched the subject for more than two decades, I published Signature in the Cell, which provides an extensive evaluation of the principal competing theories of the origin of biological information and the related question of the origin of life. Since its completion, the book has been endorsed by prominent scientists including Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences; Scott Turner, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York; and Professor Norman Nevin, one of Britain’s leading geneticists.

Nevertheless, in his recent review on the Biologos website, Prof. Darrel Falk characterizes me as merely a well-meaning, but ultimately unqualified, philosopher and religious believer who lacks the scientific expertise to evaluate origin-of-life research and who, in any case, has overlooked the promise of recent pre-biotic simulation experiments. On the basis of two such experiments, Falk suggests I have jumped prematurely to the conclusion that pre-biotic chemistry cannot account for the origin of life. Yet neither of the scientific experiments he cites provides evidence that refutes the argument of my book or solves the central mystery that it addresses. Indeed, both experiments actually reinforce—if inadvertently—the main argument of Signature in the Cell.

The central argument of my book is that intelligent design—the activity of a conscious and rational deliberative agent—best explains the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell. I argue this because of two things that we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which following Charles Darwin I take to be the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate—explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals. In other words, intelligent design is the only explanation that cites a cause known to have the capacity to produce the key effect in question.

For more of Dr. Meyer's responses to critics, visit his website, SignatureInTheCell.com.

First, there's a free screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed starring Ben Stein. Q & A about the movie with Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs at the Discovery Institute, will follow.

Time: 5 pm
Location: University of Arkansas Union Theatre

Following that is a lecture, "The Positive Scientific Case for Intelligent Design and Why it’s being Expelled from Academia," by Casey Luskin.

Time: 7 pm
Location: University of Arkansas Union Theatre

Interest in intelligent design is growing in Britain. Earlier this month, Stephen Meyer, who appears in Expelled, defended both the film and ID in a debate with atheist Peter Atkins, which you can listen to here.

The "Bad Boy UK Version" promises to be a hit in a market that has been dominated by the likes of Richard Dawkins, whose appearance in the film and startling admission that intelligent design exists — coming from aliens, of course — might raise a few eyebrows in his native land.

What's the old saying about prophets and honor in their homeland?

What do you get when you add together the big bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and the evolution of life? Definitely not a materialistic theory of origins, answers Sewell, a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso.

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Sewell concludes that while there is much in the history of life that seems to suggest natural causes, there is little evidence to support Charles Darwin’s idea that natural selection of random variations can explain major evolutionary advances.

“In The Beginning provides delightful and wide-ranging commentary on the origins debate and intelligent design,” says biophysicist Dr. Cornelius Hunter. “Sewell provides much needed clarity on topics that are too often misunderstood, like his discussion of the commonly confused problem of entropy, which is a must read.”

Granville Sewell is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso. He completed his PhD in Mathematics at Purdue University in 1972 and has worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University, the University of Texas Center for High Performance Computing (Austin), and Texas A&M University. He also spent one semester teaching at Universidad Nacional de Tucuman in Argentina on a Fullbright grant. Dr. Sewell has written three books on numerical analysis and is the author of a widely-used finite element computer program.