Post-Darwinist

Recently, I've been writing about Jerry Coyne's comments on Mike Behe's most recent paper. Coyne is billed by his U as "internationally famous defender of evolution against proponents of intelligent design." Good man on fruit flies, too.

It occurred to me to pull up my Coyne files, re other things he has said. A most interesting picture emerges - in a world where hordes bravely speak the group's latest mind, the prof (Department of Ecology and Evolution) gives the impression of speaking his own. I won't hazard whether that earns him greater trust because I don't know whether Darwin's folk trust people who think for themselves, but here goes:

Coyne on the useful idiots of theistic evolution:

- Theistic evolution is compromise. ("Coyne is particularly annoyed by the folks at the Darwin-defending but religion-appeasing National Center for Science Education, for "compromising the very science they aspire to defend." - quoted in Klinghoffer )

Theistic evolution claims are wearing thin. ("Liberal religious people have been important allies in our struggle against creationism, and it is not pleasant to alienate them by declaring how we feel. This is why, as a tactical matter, groups such as the National Academy of Sciences claim that religion and science do not conflict. But their main evidence — the existence of religious scientists — is wearing thin as scientists grow ever more vociferous about their lack of faith." - quoted in Iannone)

He also enjoys taking the fun out of Fundamentalism, when not engaging in it himself.

(My best guess is that he pays closer attention to the ID guys, as they offer a serious challenge.)

What Jerry Coyne has said about evolutionary biology:

Almost no findings are replicated: ("Almost no findings are replicated, there’s a premium on publishing positive results, and, unlike some other areas, findings in evolutionary biology don't necessarily build on each other: workers usually don’t have to repeat other people's work as a basis for their own.")

Also here : (In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. ... The latest deadweight dragging us closer to phrenology is "evolutionary psychology," or the science formerly known as sociobiology, which studies the evolutionary roots of human behavior. There is nothing inherently wrong with this enterprise, and it has proposed some intriguing theories, particularly about the evolution of language. The problem is that evolutionary psychology suffers from the scientific equivalent of megalomania. Most of its adherents are convinced that virtually every human action or feeling, including depression, homosexuality, religion, and consciousness, was put directly into our brains by natural selection.)

- Randy "Flock of Dodos" Olson thinks Coyne more persuasive about evolutionary biology than Richard Dawkins

Oh, and Coyne on Ann Coulter:

From the Stop the Coult! files: ("The remarkable thing about all this is that Jerry Coyne thinks he needs to take on Ann Coulter. There was a time when a guy like Jerry Coyne would not know who Ann Coulter is, and possibly would not know what a pundette is, unless he had married his cook and she insisted on subscribing to some vile rag that ... " - O'Leary ) Just shows you how things change ...

Coyne vs. Behe :

But, Jerry, what about all those dogs?

Could Darwinists be running low on insults?

Mike Behe replies to detractor Jerry Coyne ...

Labels: Jerry Coyne

Apparently, pundette Ann Coulter has continued to say unnice things about Darwinists and Darwinism (gasp! Say it ain't so!):

Interviewer Charlotte Allen: Many arguments in favor of Darwinian evolution strike me as actually being arguments against the existence of God--that is, why would a creator create tapeworms, disease viruses, and other bad things? Why do you think such things exist in a world of intelligent design?

The Coult: Your question is incomprehensible. I assume you are trying to ask me: "Why would God create tapeworms?"

My answer is: God also created mosquitoes, which I hate. But purple martins love mosquitoes and would probably all starve without them. It's kind of a "big picture" thing. Of course that doesn't explain why He created Michael Moore. For that, I have no explanation. My guess is that disease, pestilence, and Michael Moore are all perversions of the good that God created, a result of sin entering the world through Adam and Eve.

The whole interview is hilarious. Interviewer Charlotte Allen, who belongs to the tut-tut school of religious journalism, is way out of her depth. She doesn't understand that the Coult is actually not afraid of the people she herself is afraid of and can live without their good opinion.

And just when you thought the fun might end, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has found it necessary to take a swipe at the Coult (and a whole bunch of other people too):

First, one has to ask whether Coulter (who, by the way, attacks me in her book) really understands the Darwinism she rejects. The answer is a resounding No. According to the book's acknowledgments, Coulter was tutored in the "complex ideas" of evolution by David Berlinski, a science writer; Michael Behe, a third-rate biologist at Lehigh University (whose own department's website disowns his bizarre ideas); and William Dembski, a fairly bright theologian who went off the intellectual rails and now peddles creationism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. These are the "giants" of the ID movement, which shows how retarded it really is. Learning biology from this lot is like learning elocution from George W. Bush.

Well, of course. To believe Darwinism, you must learn from a Darwinist, preferably an ascended master. Otherwise, you don't stand a chance.

The remarkable thing about all this is that Jerry Coyne thinks he needs to take on Ann Coulter. There was a time when a guy like Jerry Coyne would not know who Ann Coulter is, and possibly would not know what a pundette is, unless he had married his cook and she insisted on subscribing to some vile rag that ...

Personally, I do not know how the Coult manages to look nearly naked when she is actually, technically at least, wearing clothes. But that is not a suitable subject for a family blog.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Labels: Ann Coulter, Charlotte Allen, Darwinism, Jerry Coyne

Mike Behe

Society must, after all, continue the fight against ADD (attention deficit Darwinism):

Try as one might to keep Darwinists focused on the data, some can't help reverting to their favorite trope: questioning Darwinism simply must be based on religion. Unfortunately Professor Coyne succumbs to this. Introducing his blog post he writes:

What role does the appearance of new genes, versus simple changes in old ones, play in evolution? There are two reasons why this question has recently become important.... The first involves a scientific controversy.... The second controversy is religious. Some advocates of intelligent design (ID)--most notably Michael Behe in a recent paper--have implied not only that evolved new genes or new genetic "elements" (e.g., regulatory sequences) aren't important in evolution, but that they play almost no role at all, especially compared to mutations that simply inactivate genes or make small changes, like single nucleotide substitutions, in existing genes. This is based on the religiously-motivated "theory" of ID, which maintains that new genetic information cannot arise by natural selection, but must installed [sic] in our genome by a magic poof from Jebus. [sic]

Jerry Coyne

Anyone who reads the paper, however, knows my conclusions were based on the reviewed experiments of many labs over decades. Even Coyne knows this. In the very next sentence he writes, inconsistently, "I've criticized Behe's conclusions, which are based on laboratory studies of bacteria and viruses that virtually eliminated the possibility of seeing new genes arise, but I don't want to reiterate my arguments here." Yet if my conclusions are based on "laboratory studies," then they ain't "religious," even if Coyne disagrees with them.
Professor Coyne is so upset, he imagines things that aren't in the paper. (They are "implied," you see.)

For more, go here.

Labels: Jerry Coyne, Michael Behe

Jerry A. Coyne, of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, criticizing an author named David P. Mindell in the eminent science journal Nature, for announcing that everything including sliced bread is one of the benefits of believing Darwin, which means believing that the entire history of life after its origin can be explained by natural selection acting on random genetic mutations:

To some extent these excesses are not Mindell's fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like.' ( "Selling Darwin" Nature, Vol 442, 31 August 2006 - but you must pay.)

So then why are careers endangered or wrecked over carefully considered refusals to believe in Darwinism (which Coyne, like most Darwinists, merely describes as "evolution")?

Well, readers of this blog will know my own view, that Darwinism is the creation story of secularist atheism. Demands for assent to Darwinism (or, in some tellings, universal Darwinism) are demands for assent to the rule of the public square by that particular body of thought.

Dr. Coyne ends by ridiculing creationists and intelligent design supporters for doubting that Darwinism is the origin of new species, even though there is so little evidence that he is forced to use the analogy that one language can change slowly into another. But, of course, languages are intelligently designed by the groups that use them (working, of course, from a logical base that is innate).

I might be a bit light blogging for a couple of days because I have to go give a talk at the Toronto ID conference on why there is an intelligent design controversy and why it isn't going away - and why trying to force people to say they agree with Darwin or punish them when they don't - will not make it go away. Thanks to Dr. Coyne for helping me understand.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

Labels: benefits, Darwinism, evolution, Jerry Coyne

When a book that challenges a consensus comes out, it is prudent to read the book before reading the reviews. Chances are, the reviews are written by prominent defenders of the status quo and - critically - you stand little chance of getting a clear sense of either the book's content or the thrust of its argument. Sometimes, careers depend on obfuscating the issues. The response to Edge of Evolution provides an excellent demonstration of this effect.

The review in Publisher's Weekly set the tone: Behe is incompetent.

From Publishers Weekly

... Although Behe writes with passion and clarity, his calculations of probability ignore biologists' rejection of the premise that evolution has been working toward producing any particular end product. Furthermore, he repeatedly refers to the shortcomings of "Darwin's theory-the power of natural selection coupled to random mutation," but current biological theory encompasses far more than this simplistic view. Most important, Behe reaches the controversial conclusion that the workings of an intelligent designer is the only reasonable alternative to evolution, even without affirmative evidence in its favor.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This sort of review invites people not to read the book. Indeed, if you are the sort of person who nods happily when you hear Daniel Dennett say that Darwin's is the "single best idea anyone has ever had" or subscribes to the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution, I would not advise you to read it either. You cannot guard your fragile faith too carefully, and I certainly don't want to be responsible for upsetting you.

For the rest of us: The reviewer gives little attention to the carefully set out argument to which EoE is devoted: Natural selection, observed in the laboratory has not produced anything like the results that Darwinism needs. Therefore our picture of evolution is defective. Notice how the review raises a number of red herrings instead. For example, "current biological theory encompasses far more than this simplistic view."

In fact, Darwinian evolution has always been by far the most popular kind among evolutionary biologists. The fact that it demonstrably fails to do what it is supposed to do is a serious problem - to the extent that it is in fact a theory in science and not simply a faith position among atheists and theistic evolutionists.

And the very dogs yelp Darwin's name!

Arch-Darwinist and author of best-seller The God Delusion Richard Dawkins' review of Behe in the New York Times (July 1, 2007) strives to frame the world's view of Behe.

Dawkins is never short of adoring fans, and evidently the delight is mutual. Indeed, in By Design or by Chance? I quoted one of Dawkins's editors to this effect,

If you’re an intelligent reader, and you read certain literary novels that everybody has to read, along with seeing Tarantino movies, then reading Richard Dawkins has become part of your cultural baggage.

Darwinism is mental wallpaper for such people, and it is most unlikely that they are interested in the question of whether, when tested in lab studies, Darwinian evolution really worked. That's almost, well, vulgar.

Dawkins revels in his contempt for Behe (a working scientist, not a don like himself) and then distracts his readers by pointing, with self-indulgent glee, to the large variety in the shapes and sizes of domestic dogs, as "proving" Behe wrong. Come to think of it, how could Behe be so dense as not to have noticed the dogs in the park?

But Dawkins is evading the issue, of course. Dog breeding emphasizes some available canine traits at the expense of others. The dog need not evolve a new post-canine trait. That is precisely what Dawkins, famously, claims that Darwinism can do. And Behe, controversially, shows that, in the very situations where Darwinism can actually be tested, Darwinism does that too rarely to merit the role it is given.

Another reviewer, Jerry Coyne, angrily responds :

Behe has lost his case in the arena that matters most to all of us: the right of a scientifically misguided -- and largely theological -- theory to be accepted as science in public schools. (Remember that Behe wrote half of a chapter in the second edition of the discredited textbook, Of Pandas and People, at issue in the Dover trial). ID, irreducible complexity -- the whole lot of gussied-up creationist claims -- have been found by the courts to be "not science". Behe's IDeas can't get a place alongside evolution in the public schools. That is far more damaging than a few critiques levelled in scientific journals and highbrow magazines.

This says so much more about Coyne than about Behe. Yes, indeed, if public schools are forced by the courts to flak for Darwin, a few in every generation will grow up to praise his name. And that's what "matters most to all of us"? Speak for yourself, Jerry Coyne.

Meanwhile, the desperately academic review in evangelical thinkmag Books & Culture manages to go on and on, giving barely a hint of the point of Behe's assault on the Darwinist's key premise. Here is an instance of the prattle:

Now Behe frequently introduces, quite legitimately, the notion of coherence or "fit" in his description of how protein machines work. Design, he says, is nothing more then "a purposeful arrangement of parts." In this regard he has reproduced Aristotle's distinction between the heterogeneous and homogeneous ordering of parts. Heaps and aggregates are homogeneously ordered. They can be measured and weighed. But whenever a number of distinct parts "fit together" to perform a single function, we have a qualitatively distinct heterogeneous ordering.

Compare that to Behe's clear exposition of the problem with Darwinism in the lab. Far better you should read the book.

Some other lines from Behe's critics are illuminating:

University of Florida Darwinist Michael Ruse has the answer for Mark Colvin of PM Australia (June 15, 2007) as to why people think Behe might have a point:

MICHAEL RUSE: Well, you know, we philosophers have a term, and I guess I'm not allowed to use the philosophical term on the radio, but let's just say it's BS, and it's BS baffles brains. I mean, the point is the intelligent design arguments are just as primitive as they ever were, but of course you don't just come along and say, oh well, I've got the design or something like that, you turn to the science textbooks or whatever, you start to talk about the flagellum, and most people wouldn't know a flagellum if their sister married one, and you know, and then you show them two or three pages of chemical formulae and you say, oh my God, I remember grade 10 when I flunked that one, or my girlfriend did it for me. I mean, people are impressed. But of course the thing is you've got to be working with people who are impressed in the first place."

"I think that what we're seeing is, as I say, a part and parcel reaction against modernity, against science, against philosophy, and I think that what we are seeing, particularly in America, is a reaction against the Enlightenment as it manifested itself in the second half of the 19th century, people looking for simplistic solutions, whether it be George W. Bush, whether it be moral values, whether it be, oh well, let's walk in and show those Iraqis who really is boss, or teach intelligent design in the school."

The lab results can wait, I guess.

Interestingly, Michael Lemonick at Time Magazine already knew back in April that no debate is really necessary on the subject of the limits of Darwinism:

So the answer to your question, fellas, is that the Darwinists are afraid of two things. The first is giving you folks a shred of credibility by appearing in the same room with you. The second is that your piles of half truths will actually make people more ignorant.

Right. Time Magazine doesn't need lab results either. They're just more piles of half truths that make people more ignorant. The Taliban should steal that line, actually.

Some have made accusations about Behe himself. For example, Brown University biochemist Ken Miller, who has a considerable reputation as a Catholic Darwinist, has apparently claimed that Behe has never presented his results to a scientific meeting. Behe has said in response,

I presented the data which became the Behe/Snoke paper as a poster at a national meeting of the Protein Society in Philadelphia several years ago. 2) I have met with and/or presented seminars on ID to a number of science departments, including the department of biochemistry of the Mayo Clinic, the department of Genetics at Princeton, dept of Genetics at the University of Georgia, The Royal Society of Medicine, Dept of Chem & Biochem at U South Carolina, the dept of biochemistry at the University of California San Francisco, and others.

Arguably, Miller might not have known about those, but if he is going to accuse others (or, rather, insinuate) of cowardly avoiding presentations to experts, he should endeavor to find out the facts. On the other hand, he has no excuse for the following: 1) I presented a seminar to a Gordon Conference on Organic chemistry; the next year Miller himself was invited to present to the same Conference as a response to me. Clearly, then, he knew I had presented the year before
at that conference. 2) After the debate between ID/Darwinism on William Buckley's Firing Line program in 1999, he and I wrote a *joint letter* to the organizing committees for the next national meetings of the American Society for Cell Biology (his professional society) and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (my professional society) proposing a session on ID, pro and con, with the two of us presenting. We never heard back from them. Miller has a lot of chutzpah to lead people to believe I avoid such conferences when we
wrote a joint letter to propose such a session!!!

Curiously, amid all this evasion, textbook author Larry Moran, an evolutionary biologist who has written to tell me that he is not Darwinist nor a fan of evolutionary psychology (though also no friend to intelligent design), seems to be one of the few who is prepared to address the challenge:

I'm reading The Edge of Evolution, the new book by Michael Behe. I'm not finished but I can tell you it's going to be a challenge to refute Behe's main claims. That's not because he's correct—far from it—but because he has done a clever job of picking out scientific data to support his case. The idea is that random mutation and natural selection are simply not capable of doing the things they have to do in order for large scale changes to accumulate. His probability arguments are more sophisticated than those of the average IDiot and I think we owe it to Behe to address them rather than just dismiss them out-of-hand because we don't like the conclusion. I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Yes, come to think of it, someone should take up the challenge and focus on scientific data that support or fail to support his case. It would be fascinating if the person who did it was an evolutionary biologist.

(Note: See my update here.)

Behe talks back

Behe responds to his critics here at his blog (scroll down).

He also (April 19, 2007) comments on a Liu and Ochman paper that suggests that Darwiism might be going wild.

Audio: Mike Behe Michael Medved's show (June 4, 2007).

I started this three-part post by expressing the view that Edge of Evolution is a turning point in the conflict between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. The reason I think so is that it focuses clearly and systematically on the one question that can presently be answered: Can Darwinian evolution do what its proponents claim. If not - and Behe certainly makes a powerful case that the answer is no - whether intelligent design is true, along with assorted other controversies, is a question for another day. There is plenty of rubble to clear up as it is.

Return to beginning : Book Review: Behe's Edge of Evolution: A turning point in the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy?

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?, or my book of essays on faith and science topics, Faith@Science: Why science needs faith in the 21st century (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford, 2001). You can read excerpts as well.

Labels: Darwinism, edge of evolution, Michael Behe, reviews

defending his recent paper.

Mike Behe's reply (excerpt):

Yes, complex gain-of-FCT events would not be expected to occur, but simple GOF's would. Yet they didn't show up.

Professor Coyne then proceeds to put words in my mouth:

What [Be]he's saying is this: "Yes, gain of FCTs could, and likely is, more important in nature than seen in these short-term experiments. But my conclusions are limited to these types of short-term lab studies."

No, that is not what I was saying at all. I was saying that, no matter what causes gain-of-FCT events to sporadically arise in nature (and I of course think the more complex ones likely resulted from deliberate intelligent design), short-term Darwinian evolution will be dominated by loss-of-FCT, which is itself an important, basic fact about the tempo of evolution.
Above I quoted Coyne talking about "complex FCTs, which take time to build or acquire from a rare horizontal transmission event." Yet cells aren't going to sit around twiddling their thumbs until that rare event shows up. Any mutation which confers an advantage at any time will be selected, and the large majority of those in the short term will be LOF. Ironically, Coyne seems to underestimate the power of natural selection, which "is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest...." A process which scrutinizes life "daily and hourly," as Darwin wrote, isn't going to wait around for some rare event.

Labels: Michael Behe

Apparently, Jerry Coyne is now attacking me, re Behe's paper. To judge from his blog post's title, he has me confused with Discovery Institute.*

Labels: Michael Behe

From Live Journal via Mark Shea, originally at Why Evolution is True (Jerry Coyne's site), we have the Brazilian Treehopper, also this model ...

And if you think that's weird, see these. The funny part is the proposed Darwinian explanation:

A first guess is that it’s a sexually-selected trait, but those are often limited to males, and these creatures (and the ones below) show the ornaments in both sexes. Kemp hypothesizes—and this seems quite reasonable—that “the hollow globes, like the remarkable excrescences exhibited by other treehoppers, probably deter predators.” It would be hard to grab, much less chow down on, a beast with all those spines and excrescences.

Note, though, that the ornament sports many bristles. If these are sensory bristles, and not just deterrents to predation or irritating spines, then the ornament may have an unknown tactile function.

All of this assumes that, like your great-aunt's collection of porcelain mushrooms, the bug's globes can exist only if they have a practical purpose.

Oh and here is some fun with Mark Shea on a related theme: The Darwinist's uncanny ability to discern matters hid from unbelieving eyes:

All these "origin of religion" accounts seem to me to be transparently obvious demonstrations of the habit of many atheists of worshipping rather than using the intellect. The subtext of them is "I am a member of a new, radically evolved, and superior species that stands apart from and over homo religiosus. I know the inmost thoughts of people who lived 20,000 years ago. I understand the inner contours of the believing mind better than the believer does. And I can tell you that Christians believe in the the Creed because some cave dweller 20,000 years ago heard the wind in the branches and thought it was a god passing by, or had a bad dream and thus all humans came to believe in prophecy."

There you go, instant book deal and glowing reviews from the olds media.

Hat tip: The Sheepcat For more on Jerry Coyne, go here.

Labels: adaptation, natural selection

In Are Religious Liberals Useful Idiots or Just Idiots?, Darwinists Debate, David Klinghoffer writes, at BeliefNet:

Today Daily Kos blogger Erratic Synapse lashes Discover Magazine blogger Chris Mooney and Barbara Forrest, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Their offense? Calling for "civility" toward Darwin-believing religious moderates. Mooney had previously attacked biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, who urges a No More Mr. Nice Guy stance. Writes Coyne: "Professional societies like the National Academy of Sciences...have concluded that to make evolution palatable to Americans, you must show that it is not only consistent with religion, but also no threat to it." Coyne is particularly annoyed by the folks at the Darwin-defending but religion-appeasing National Center for Science Education, for "compromising the very science they aspire to defend."

In the 2008 documentary Expelled, atheist Richard Dawkins scathingly makes a similar point about the NCSE and its ilk. "There's a kind of science defense lobby or an evolution defense lobby, in particular," Dawkins says. "They are mostly atheists, but they are wanting to -- desperately wanting -- to be friendly to mainstream, sensible religious people. And the way you do that is to tell them that there's no incompatibility between science and religion."

Of course, everyone knows this is true. Darwinism is basically about atheism; its frantic promotion is about providing atheism with a creation story, which any religious agenda must have.

I had not thought much about Darwinism until I started to research By Design or by Chance? in 2002, and then I was astonished to discover the number of people who had lost their contact with traditional religion explicitly on that account.

People deserve to know this, especially when Darwinism is fronted to the school system as "just another theory in science." It never has been and never will be, and the day it is, it will be quietly relegated to the shelf as just another theory about how life forms come to look like they do, along with neoteny and Lamarckism.

As for the religious liberals, it seems to me that they have just plain lost their way. There was a time when religious liberalism accommodated traditional religions to the facts of globalization, technical change, and so forth. But today, it seems primarily about accommodating to atheistic materialism in stages rather than all at once, which is why liberal church membership is tanking rapidly.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Labels: atheism, Darwinism

Here is - on display - an example of the fundamentalist streak in Darwin fans ( already clearly demonstrated in the Michael Reiss affair).

American Darwin fan Jerry Coyne, promoting Richard Dawkins's book, The Blind Watchmaker issues a fatwa in Nature:

If a presidential candidate doesn't accept evolution after reading this book, there is no hope.

I see. And what if an American fundamentalist leader had said:

If a presidential candidate doesn't accept Jesus as his personal savior after reading the New Testament, there is no hope.

Or perchance we hear from another quarter,

“If a presidential candidate doesn't accept Islam after reading the Koran, there is no hope.

Well then, I guess there is no hope for the free society because at any given time a huge number of people - in the hundreds of millions - express varying degrees of belief and disbelief in these and a great many other explanations of our origin and destiny.

You wouldn’t think a free society would be as popular as it is in that case … so many people trying to get in, and not many trying to get out ...

As a matter of fact, in the late 1980s, American constitutional lawyer Phillip E. Johnson did read Dawkins's Watchmaker. But he also read Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. So he knew why Dawkins's (and Coyne's) large claims do not add up.

I guess there is no hope for him either then. Here is what I wrote about that in By Design or by Chance?:

Johnson did not begin to think seriously about design issues until 1987–1988, while on sabbatical in England. There he read Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985).43 Denton argued, contra Dawkins, that Darwinism was simply not answering the questions that many scientists were asking about evolution. Unlike most writers on Darwinism, Denton did not soft-pedal the problems with Darwinism. He said:

"While most evolutionary biologists who have written recently about evolution concede that the problems are serious, nearly all take an ultimately conservative stand, believing that they can be explained away by making only minor adjustments to the Darwinian framework. In this book I have adopted the radical approach. By presenting a systematic critique of the current Darwinian model, ranging from paleontology to molecular biology, I have tried to show why I believe that the problems are too severe and too intractable to offer any hope of resolution in terms of the orthodox Darwinian framework, and that consequently the conservative view is no longer tenable."

... Johnson decided that Denton was either “very, very wrong, or very, very important.” But he did not make up his mind right away.

He did later though, after talking to a number of other straight-goods people. He became, of course, the "godfather" of the intelligent design community in the United States, with the publication of his own Darwin on Trial, loudly deplored by Darwin grantsmen and box wallahs ever since, around the world.

Note: Coyne also notes his own forthcoming work, Why Evolution Is True (Viking 2009).

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Labels: Darwinism and popular culture, Jerry Coyne

A friend writes to draw my attention to "Mark Lynas: the green heretic persecuted for his nuclear conversion" (Sunday Times, September 28, 2008)

We are told that

The climate change expert Mark Lynas has been scorned by eco-colleagues for daring to speak up for atomic power.

Why?

Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. My tipping point came when I discovered just how much nuclear power has changed since I first set my mind against it. Prescription for the Planet, a new book by the American writer Tom Blees, opened my eyes to fourth-generation “fast-breeder” reactors, which use fuel much more efficiently than the old-style reactors, produce shorter-lived waste and can also be designed to be “walk-away safe”.

Best of all, these new reactors – prototypes of which have already been tested – can produce power by burning up existing stocks of nuclear waste. As Blees puts it: “Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to get rid of.” Who could object to that?

Who? Funny you should ask. That guy went from hero to zero in six seconds, just because he made the mistake of finding out about promising new developments in nuclear power. Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, the stellar courage of big science toffs is well illustrated by his experience:

When I e-mailed a senior ecological scientist with my conclusions, he agreed, but only privately. “Do not cite me as promoting nuclear,” he begged. I am still shocked that people of his stature are too intimidated to speak out. The result of this fear is that the public is dangerously misinformed about nuclear power.

Years ago, a retired Canadian scientist told me that he, for one, felt that properly managed nuclear was far safer in the long run than dependence on oil, which is disproportionately associated with dangerous politics. He also pointed out that keeping nuclear energy out of the wrong hands is a problem we will have whether we use it or not.

I guess he'd be a heretic too these days.

Anyway, American Darwin fan Jerry Coyne prophesies

There is a crisis in scientific literacy in the United States: only 25% of Americans accept our evolution from ape-like ancestors, yet 74% believe in angels.

Let's leave the apes and angels out of it for a moment. The United States is still the world science leader, so "Coyne's crisis" needs some unpacking.

Maybe I can help.

In the United States, and to some extent in Canada, people feel comfortable dissenting respectfully from authorities. Especially authorities that have often been wrong.

People here have access to non-state controlled media. So they know that authorities are often wrong. Yesterday, I talked about the false convictions that have depended on bad forensic science. Yes, reform is possible, of course. But reformers must start by facing the fact that "the assured results of modern science" can be plain wrong. And that requires critical thinking.

I myself have written several health science stories about wrong ideas marketed to the public. For example, being somewhat overweight is not a serious health hazard. Trying to lose a slightly excess amount of weight may harm your health more. And - since we are here anyway - any believable model of human evolution would predict that slight overweight is a plus, not a minus.

But that is only one example. There are many others. I don't want to get into the enormous global warming controversy because I do not have the background in it. But I must say that when foretold apocalypses do not occur, the dumb masses begin to question the wild-eyed prophets of climate science. They may not say anything, but they do know what to think.

If Prophet Coyne has so few followers in his native land, he may well wish to look to his Message.

Progress in science often depends on people who are willing to turn around and start running the other way, while the herd is stampeding off a cliff.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Labels: science and society

A friend brought this one to my attention from Better Homes & Gardens ( January 2004, 111):

DARWIN'S FUSSY EATERS. The next time the kids are fussing about eating anything other than Mac and cheese, bear in mind that they may be hardwired to be picky. British scientists recently theorized that young children shun many vegetables and strange meats because of an evolutionary safeguard that protected them from toxic plants and food poisoning. Knowing this won't convince them to eat broccoli, but you can at least take comfort in the fact that it's not your cooking.

Wow. Evolutionary safeguards are pretty awesome. Not only did natural selection discourage kids from eating many nutritious vegetables and meats (or so we are told) but it actually managed the feat before macaroni and cheese had evolved.

Actually, I have nothing against evolutionary psychology because I like folk tales as well as anyone. But calling it a science discipline is another matter. Actually, it’s part of the reason the public is skeptical of Darwinism. Read enough of this stuff and the same thoughts will occur to you as occurred to me and to Jerry Coyne, a Darwinist who would likely disagree with me on just about everything else:

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. The latest deadweight dragging us closer to phrenology is "evolutionary psychology," or the science formerly known as sociobiology, which studies the evolutionary roots of human behavior. There is nothing inherently wrong with this enterprise, and it has proposed some intriguing theories, particularly about the evolution of language. The problem is that evolutionary psychology suffers from the scientific equivalent of megalomania. Most of its adherents are convinced that virtually every human action or feeling, including depression, homosexuality, religion, and consciousness, was put directly into our brains by natural selection. In this view, evolution becomes the key--the only key-- that can unlock our humanity. (Jerry A. Coyne, [Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago], “The fairy tales of evolutionary psychology.” Review of A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, by Randy Thornhill & Craig T. Palmer, MIT Press, 2000. The New Republic, March 4, 2000.).

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

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Labels: children, evolution, food poisoning, kids, protection, vegetables

At AccessResearchNetwork, British physicist David Tyler writes about the latest division in the orthodox Darwin camp:

Towards constructive discourse in science 

Inclusive Fitness Theory (IFT) is of considerable importance to Darwinian evolutionists. The theory is concerned with the phenomena of altruistic behaviour and eusocial societies, both of which involve the willingness of some animals to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the group. Darwin struggled to provide a rationale, and so did those who followed him. It was Bill Hamilton who put together a coherent theory and Richard Dawkins who popularised it in The Selfish Gene. For many, IFT has achieved the status of orthodoxy. It was an intellectual and an emotional shock, therefore, when a paper appeared in Nature (August 2010) from three prominent evolutionary biologists saying that the IFT paradigm is unproductive. Responses were immediate and much of it was hostile. Science journalist Roger Highfield provided an overview of the controversy: 

"The mainstream media often like to portray the scientific community as regularly riven by blazing rows. Scientists, understandably, complain: after all, if you go to any mainstream academic conference, you won't find any hint of controversy about the MMR jab or the reality of climate change, let alone argy-bargy over the basic facts of evolution. But in the past few weeks, I have witnessed a bare-knuckle brouhaha that would make an uninformed outsider gasp at how bloody a battle over a seemingly arcane issue can be. The row was triggered by a paper in Nature by Martin Nowak, Edward Wilson and Corina Tarnita of Harvard University. While some hailed it as "revolutionary" and a "return to rigour", others condemned it as "sad", "baffling", "irritating" and "unscholarly"." 

Readers of this blog might be interested in the reactions of Jerry Coyne, who was mystified by Ed Wilson's participation in the paper. 

"I don't know what's gotten into E. O. Wilson. He's certainly the world's most famous evolutionary biologist, and has gone from strength to strength over the years, winning two Pulitzer Prizes, writing great general books on not only ants but conservation and social behavior. [. . .] But now Wilson, along with some collaborators like David Sloan Wilson and Martin Nowak, is definitely heading off on the wrong track. They're attacking kin selection, maintaining not only that it has nothing to do with the evolution of social insects, but that's it's also a bad way to look at evolution in general. And they're wrong - dead wrong."
Coyne is also outraged by the publication of this paper in a prestigious journal ... (links at site)

Oh, where have we heard that before? Any time anyone who doubts Darwin gets a paper published, we hear the Darwin lobby booing and hissing.

But now that they are divided among themselves, they may not be able to drown out everyone else.

Labels: kin selection

Recently, biochemist Michael Behe published an article in Quarterly Review of Biology, titled "Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and 'The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution'," arguing that "the most common adaptive changes seen ... are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function."

Labels: Michael Behe

Here are some essays I had meant to get around to linking for ages: Michael Ruse's "Gaia in the Light of Modern Science" (Chronicle of Higher Education, August 11, 2009) where he - in a genteel way - attacks the Gaia hypothesis (that Earth can be seen as One Big Organism).

It just isn't materialist enough, and the machine metaphor works better.

That's an interesting example of a thoroughly confused point of view because the machine metaphor for nature only "works" better if you don't mind the massive environment damage that results when people treat nature that way. But every "progressive" person is supposed to mind that a lot, and Ruse gives himself out as a progressive person.

Also, given the amount of co-operation that occurs in nature, the "one big organism" idea is in principle, reasonable. Gardeners use it all the time, especially when assessing the impact of a proposed change to land use. Or, as some of us say, "When you throw something away, where exactly is 'away'?"

One of the worst offences of Darwinism - of which Ruse is an impassioned defender - was to create the impression that nature is mostly about competition ("nature red in tooth and claw"). Competition is a minor part of the story. It often doesn't even happen in a way that supports Darwinism.

For example, I remember a cat expert explaining to me years ago: Tom cats don't necessarily care if other tom cats mate with their females. They'll sit passively and watch (as long as they have already got their turn). What they don't want is other toms roaming their territory.

That explains the cat behaviour I have observed over my lifetime much more accurately than any "selfish gene" hypothesis ever did. But people who have been trained to see the world through Darwinism see competition either where it doesn't exist or where - when it does - it doesn't really support Darwinism.

I've written about Ruse here.

While we are here, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has an essay in The New Republic ("Creationism for Liberals", August 12, 2009), attacking Robert Wright's The Evolution of God. I expect that Wright's book is pretty silly, as the title implies. Coyne's essay goes on and on, and tends to get worse, especially when he tries his hand at New Testament scholarship and history of religion. Read it for fun and games.

Labels: Gaia hypothesis; non-zero

I mean, really, whodathunkit? I haven't got the book Greatest Show on Earth yet - Bantam's publicist could always get in touch with me at oleary@sympatico.ca, if she wants to send me a copy.

What's interesting to me is that Randy "Flock of Dodos" Olson, referring to Dawkins's constant free insults, says

Dawkins provides a transcript of his interview with the president of Concerned Women for America which reads like a Monty Python skit as the woman, a bullheaded creationist, simply answers all of Dawkins's sophisticated argumentation by saying she's not convinced - like a cartoon character standing in front of a hail of bullets taunting, "You missed me."

It's a shame Dawkins couldn't take a few tips from his atheist colleague Jerry Coyne. Coyne's powerful and popular book [Why Evolution Is True] was, to quote Booklist, "far more presentational than disputatious". That is a desperately needed attribute these days in making the convincing - and persuasive - case for evolution.

In short, Olson is virtually admitting that, in his view, Dawkins did not make a very effective case, but he does quite the fancy dance around admitting it.

But Dawkins refuses to debate educated people who doubt his theories, like Michael Behe. People like Olson and institutions like New Scientist help him get away with this because they need to believe so badly that if they suspect he laid an egg, they could not admit it to themselves, never mind to others.

Anyway, Olson's suggestion won't work. No one believes for a moment that any of these people regard the public that pays their bills with other than the contempt born of sublime, unjustifiable arrogance. Not only does that attitude leak out all over, but - in my experience - in any situation where they get the upper hand, everyone else is expected to just shut up and believe whatever they say, even if what they say is as ridiculous as the ramblings of "evolutionary" psychology.

But things are changing. As I have written elsewhere, "evolutionary" psychology has started to take a well-deserved beating, despite the fact that evolutionary biologists have generally refused to denounce it. Their attitude reveals their reckless arrogance because, apart from a few figures like "selfish gene" Dawkins, they didn't even create that monster!

They could have just cut loose nonsense like the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution without harm to their current beliefs, in the same way that the Catholic Church, which accepts miracles in principle, can say that a local housewife's claims are "not of interest to the faithful." But the Darwinists, unlike the Catholic Church, never thought that the good sense of educated non-members or doubters would matter. We'll see.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Labels: Randy Olson, Richard Dawkins

Years ago, when people would ask me how anyone could take seriously the pseudo-insights from evolutionary psychology, I would say that Darwinism today is where astrology was in the high middle ages: Truth, falsehood and nonsense all defend it equally. Its practitioners need only emit agreeable nonsense, and everyone who wants to get on in the world immediately acquiesces. (Unless he has a power base that suspects it is bunk.)

Mathematician Jason Rosenhouse, who hatres the ID folk, nonetheless thinks, as I do, that evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne signally failed to grapple with any real issues when he tried to trash Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution.

Coyne's little challenges here are a mixture of good points and bad points, but they are all jumbled together and the whole thing is presented with such malice that he even managed to turn me off, and I already think Behe is a snake. If he could piss ME off just think of the effect he is having on anyone who does not already despise ID.

Earth to Rosenhouse: Most of the world doesn't despise ID. People who doze gravel at a steep angle to pay your salary do not usually despise ID.

I seem to recall University of Toronto evolutionary biologist Larry Moran saying something similar.

(I shouldn’t need to say this here, but you have to meet a cogent argument with a cogent argument, and you can’t meet a cogent argument with dancing with the biologists. Well, you can, but ... )

Rosenhouse and Moran both think Darwinism can be fireproofed. Good job I don’t underwrite the policy.

Labels: edge of evolution, Jason Rosenhouse, Jerry Coyne, Larry Moran, Michael Behe

Jerry Coyne is always fun. He has the distinction of being a Darwinist who is perfectly honest about the war between Darwinism and any belief in the uniqueness of humans - many examples here, and such relief from any contact with Christian Darwinists.

Recently, he commented on an article in The New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, “The truth wears off: is there something wrong with the scientific method?”.

Basically, Lehrer says, an initial demonstration in science tends to weaken or disappear when attempts are made to replicate it:

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily falling. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineties. Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested again and again. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts are losing their truth.

Read more here [some more there, but you must pay for the rest].

Coyne writes in "The 'decline effect': can we demonstrate anything in science?"

I tend to agree with Lehrer about studies in my own field of evolutionary biology. Almost no findings are replicated, there’s a premium on publishing positive results, and, unlike some other areas, findings in evolutionary biology don't necessarily build on each other: workers usually don’t have to repeat other people's work as a basis for their own. (I'm speaking here mostly of experimental work, not things like studies of transitional fossils.) Ditto for ecology. Yet that doesn't mean that everything is arbitrary. I’m pretty sure, for instance, that the reason why male interspecific hybrids in Drosophila are sterile while females aren't ("Haldane's rule") reflects genes whose effects on hybrid sterility are recessive. That’s been demonstrated by several workers. And I'm even more sure that humans are more closely related to chimps than to orangutans. Nevertheless, when a single new finding appears, I often find myself wondering if it would stand up if somebody repeated the study, or did it in another species.

Good thing to wonder about. Time more people wondered about that. Breath of fresh air.

Personally, I am most wary of any finding that is breathlessly touted as proving what our moral and intellectual superiors (in their own view) totally believe already, so why anyone even did the study isn't clear. Couldn't they just save a bundle by making the whole thing up? Given that we all must swallow it anyway, or so we are told.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Labels: Darwinism, Jerry Coyne

With the neo-Darwinian synthesis, Darwinism became a simple, elegant theory in science that might - or might not - do what is claimed for it.

Is Darwinism the explanation of finch beak changes in the Galapagos? Maybe. (There are opinions pro and con about that.)

Is it the explanation for certain beneficial mutations in the malaria parasite? Apparently, yes.

Does it explain why the giraffe has a long neck? Apparently no.

Does it explain why men cheat on their wives? Huh? Who let YOU in here, creepazoid? I SAID we needed someone to keep a watch on the door!

I think that after Behe's Edge of Evolution, the legitimate questions revolve around what Darwinism can be shown to actually do, in the restricted sphere where we can be quite sure it is doing anything at all.

One reason I came to realize that Darwinism’s power had been blown out of all proportion was the relative unwillingness of evolutionary biologists to detach themselves from the florid arguments of evolutionary psychology. Normally, people in their position will be anxious to cut loose from cranks.

With some sensible exceptions such as Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne, they didn’t cut loose, and there was one obvious reason why they didn’t. They don't want the books balanced. They don’t want any accounting of what Darwinism can actually do.

Now that I have read Edge of Evolution I think I pretty much know why.

It's too bad if we have to admit that we really don't have a good theory of how evolution happens, but apparently we really don't.

Labels: edge of evolution, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology

Here's a podcast by Casey Luskin, one of the evil Discos, on whether the study of evolution has any practical benefits for science:

Does evolution have any practical benefits for science? In this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin reveals that the answer, surprisingly, is no. Listen as Luskin discusses past biological discoveries, reviews recent surveys of biologists, and quotes several scientists, including noted Professor of Biology and intelligent design critic Jerry Coyne. All three sources agree: the theory of evolution has yielded few practical benefits for scientific discovery.

Actually, that's not really very surprising.

The study of evolution is the study of - to use the vernacular - what used to was and ain't no more. It is necessarily heavy on speculation and interpretation. That's okay, as long as it doesn't become a cult.

Fast forward to Darwinism, which - unfortunately - has become a cult, big time.

Plus, I have been meaning to post this for months - Catriona J MacCallum (PLOS Biology, April 2007 Volume 5 Issue 4 e112) argues for the alleged importance of evolution in medicine. She complains,

One reason that evolution doesn’t figure prominently in the medical community is that although it makes sense to have evolution taught as part of medicine, that doesn’t make it essential. ... , medicine is primarily focused on problem-solving and proximate causation, and ultimate explanations can seem irrelevant to clinical practice. Crudely put, does a mechanic need to understand the origins, history, and technological advances that have gone into the modern motor vehicle in order to fix it?

Crudely put, medicine is about saving lives and limbs today in the real world.

MacCallum thinks that evolution can help us understand epidemics, and this may be so if we mean the evolution of bacteria in a test tube. Not that bacteria evolve much, if you go by Edge of Evolution, except that they tend to junk intricate machinery under stress.

Apart from that, consider the example of heart attacks: What if the lemur-like creature from which humans are said to descend never had heart attacks? What if it usually did, under stress? How does such information help the medical interne whose patient presents with cardiac arrest? Whatever the interne decides to do must work in half a minute, not half a billion years.

Yes, evolution is very interesting - like any other type of ancient history - but no, it is not essential. I think it should definitely be studied, along with the cave paintings, ancient Egypt and theories about the origin of life and the universe and all that. But the burden of pretending that evolution is useful in a concrete way is tiresome and surely avoidable.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Labels: evolution, evolutionary medicine, medicine