On the Darwinian thought police.

All Those Darwinian Doubts

David Berlinski
Wichita Eagle
March 9, 2005

The defense of Darwin's theory of evolution has now fallen into the hands of biologists who believe in suppressing criticism when possible and ignoring it when not. It is not a strategy calculated in induce confidence in the scientific method. A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington concluded that the events taking place during the Cambrian era could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design—hardly a position unknown in the history of western science. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists. Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceeding's papers, but in the case of Steven Meyer's "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once. 

Publication of the paper, they confessed, was a mistake. It would never happen again. It had barely happened at all. And peer review?

The hell with it.

"If scientists do not oppose antievolutionism," Eugenie Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, remarked, "it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak." Scott's understanding of "opposition" had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: "Avoid debates." 

Everyone else had better shut up. 

In this country, at least, no one is ever going to shut up, the more so since the case against Darwin's theory retains an almost lunatic vitality. 

Look — The suggestion that Darwin's theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences — quantum electrodynamics, say — is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to thirteen unyielding decimal places. Darwin's theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all.

Look — Field studies attempting to measure natural selection inevitably report weak to non-existent selection effects. 

Look — Darwin's theory is open at one end since there are no plausible account for the origins of life.

Look — The astonishing and irreducible complexity of various cellular structures has not yet successfully been described, let alone explained.

Look — A great many species enter the fossil record trailing no obvious ancestors and depart for Valhalla leaving no obvious descendents. 

Look — Where attempts to replicate Darwinian evolution on the computer have been successful, they have not used classical Darwinian principles, and where they have used such principles, they have not been successful. 

Look — Tens of thousands of fruit flies have come and gone in laboratory experiments, and every last one of them has remained a fruit fly to the end, all efforts to see the miracle of speciation unavailing. 

Look — The remarkable similarity in the genome of a great many organisms suggests that there is at bottom only one living system; but how then to account for the astonishing differences between human beings and their near relatives — differences that remain obvious to anyone who has visited a zoo?

But look again — If the differences between organisms are scientifically more interesting than their genomic similarities, of what use is Darwin's theory since its otherwise mysterious operations take place by genetic variations?

These are hardly trivial questions. Each suggests a dozen others. These are hardly circumstances that do much to support the view that there are "no valid criticisms of Darwin's theory," as so many recent editorials have suggested.

Serious biologists quite understand all this. They rather regard Darwin's theory as an elderly uncle invited to a family dinner. The old boy has no hair, he has no teeth, he is hard of hearing, and he often drools. Addressing even senior members at table as Sonny, he is inordinately eager to tell the same story over and over again.

But he's family. What can you do?

David Berlinski holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is the author of On Systems Analysis, A Tour of the Calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm, Newton's Gift, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky, and, most recently, Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics.

Where some see a canyon..

Keeping an Eye on Evolution: Richard Dawkins, a relentless Darwinian spear carrier, trips over Mount Improbable.

Review of Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins (W. H. Norton & Company, Inc. 1996)
David Berlinski


The theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought. It is large, almost entirely useless, and the object of superstitious awe. Richard Dawkins is widely known as the theory's uncompromising champion. Having made his case in The Blind Watchmaker and River out of Eden, Dawkins proposes to make it yet again in Climbing Mount Improbable. He is not a man given to tiring himself by repetition. 

Darwin's theory has a double aspect. The first is the doctrine of descent with modification; the second, the doctrine of random variation and natural selection. Descent with modification provides the pattern; random variation and natural selection, the mechanism. Dawkins' concern is with the mechanism; the pattern he takes for granted. 

Biological structures such as the mammalian eye are complex in the sense that they contain many parts arranged in specific ways. It is unlikely that such structures could have been discovered by chance. No one, the astrophysicist N. C. Wickramasinghe once observed with some asperity, expects a tornado touching on a junkyard to produce a Boeing 747. This may suggest--it has suggested to some physicists--a disturbing gap between what life has accomplished and what the theory of evolution can explain. The suggestion provokes Dawkins to indignation. "It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious," he writes, mixing three metaphors joyously, that the discovery by chance of a complex object is improbable; but the Darwinian mechanism, he adds, "acts by breaking the improbability up into small manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes...." 

This is a fine image, one introduced originally by the American bio-mathematician Sewell Wright. Random variation offers the mountaineer an allowance of small changes. Chance is at work. Natural selection freezes the successful changes in place. And this process owes nothing to chance. In time, the successful changes form a connected path, a staircase to complexity. 

The example that Dawkins pursues in greatest detail is the eye. Darwin himself wondered at its complexity, remarking in a letter to an American colleague that "the eye...gives me a cold shudder." That shudder notwithstanding, Darwin resolved his doubts in his own favor; the eye, he concluded, was created by a single-step series of improvements, what he called 'fine gradations.' Where Darwin went, Dawkins follows. 

It is one thing, however, to appeal to a path up Mount Improbable, quite another to demonstrate its existence. Dawkins has persuaded himself that because such a path might exist, further argument is unnecessary. Impediments are simply directed to disappear: "There is no difficulty"; "there is a definite tendency in the right direction"; "It is easy to see that..."; "it is not at all difficult to imagine...." 

In fact, the difficulties are very considerable. A single retinal cell of the human eye consists of a nucleus, a mitochondrial rod, and a rectangular array containing discrete layers of photon-trapping pigment. The evolutionary development of the eye evidently required an increase in such layers. An inferential staircase being required, the thing virtually constructs itself, Dawkins believes, one layer at a time. "The point," he writes, "is that ninety-one membranes are more effective...than ninety, ninety are more effective that eighty-nine, and so on back to one membrane, which is more effective than zero." 

This is a plausible scheme only because Dawkins has considered a single feature of the eye in isolation. The parts of a complex artifact or object typically gain their usefulness as an ensemble. A Dixie Cup consists of a tube joined to a disk. Without the disk, the cup does not hold less water than it might; it cannot hold water at all. And ditto for the tube, the two items, disk and tube, forming an irreducibly complex system. 

What holds for the Dixie Cup holds for the eye as well. Light strikes the eye in the form of photons, but the optic nerve conveys electrical impulses to the brain. Acting as a sophisticated transducer, the eye must mediate between two different physical signals. The retinal cells that figure in Dawkins' account are connected to horizontal cells; these shuttle information laterally between photoreceptors in order to smooth the visual signal. Amacrine cells act to filter the signal. Bipolar cells convey visual information further to ganglion cells, which in turn conduct information to the optic nerve. The system gives every indication of being tightly integrated, its parts mutually dependent. 

The very problem that Darwin's theory was designed to evade now reappears. Like vibrations passing through a spider's web, changes to any part of the eye, if they are to improve vision, must bring about changes throughout the optical system. Without a correlative increase in the size and complexity of the optic nerve, an increase in the number of photoreceptive membranes can have no effect. A change in the optic nerve must in turn induce corresponding neurological changes in the brain. If these changes come about simultaneously, it makes no sense to talk of a gradual ascent of Mount Improbable. If they do not come about simultaneously, it is not clear why they should come about at all. 

The same problem reappears at the level of biochemistry. Dawkins has framed his discussion in terms of gross anatomy. Each anatomical change that he describes requires a number of coordinate biochemical steps. "[T]he anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple," the biochemist Mike Behe remarks in a provocative new book (Darwin's Black Box), "actually involve staggeringly complicated biochemical processes." A number of separate biochemical events are required simply to begin the process of curving a layer of proteins to form a lens. What initiates the sequence? How is it coordinated? And how controlled? On these absolutely fundamental matters, Dawkins has nothing whatsoever to say. 

In addition to the eye, Dawkins discusses spiders and their webs, the origin of flight, and the nature of seashells. The natural history is charming. 

Dawkins is a capable if somewhat dry prose stylist, although such expressions as 'designoid' and 'wince-makingly' are themselves wince-making. The science throughout is primitive. Difficulties are resolved by sleight-of-hand. "In real life," Dawkins remarks in a representative passage, "there may be formidable complications of detail." Yes? What of them, those formidable complications? "These emerge simply and without fuss." 

Is the elephant's large nose truly the result of an evolutionary progression? Then some demonstration is required showing that intermediate-sized noses are valuable as well. None is forthcoming. "If a medium sized trunk were always less efficient," Dawkins writes, "than either a small nose or a big trunk, the big trunk would never have evolved." Indeed. The emergence of powered flight is treated as an engaging fable, one in which either arboreal animals glided downward from the tree tops or a primitive dinosaur hopped upward toward the sky. "The beauty of this theory," Dawkins affirms, commending the hopping scenario, "is that the same nervous circuits that were used to control the center of gravity in the jumping ancestor would, rather effortlessly, have lent themselves to controlling the flight surfaces later in the evolutionary story." It is the phrase "rather effortlessly" that gives to this preposterous assertion its antic charm. 

A final note. In a book whose examples are chosen from natural history, it is important to get the details right. Hawks may soar or sail, but they cannot hover like helicopters. Not all organisms share precisely the same genetic code. And Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM's Big Blue, and not a program entitled Genius 2. 

On teaching Darwinism:more education less indoctrination

How Should We Teach Evolution?

Casey Luskin March 16, 2015 3:38 AM 

In recent posts (here, here, and here), I've considered some of the misinformation directed at students from Darwin-lobbying groups like the National Center for Science Education. Having answered false claims by evolution advocates in the context of science education, it's fair to ask now: How should evolution be taught? Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture has made its position clear on many occasions in the past, but since media and advocacy groups continue to advance misunderstandings and distortions, it can't hurt to say it once more.

Darwinian evolution should be fully and completely taught in public schools, and schools need to teach more about evolution, not less. Unfortunately, most biology classrooms teach a one-sided, pro-Darwin-only curriculum that censors serious any scientific critique of neo-Darwinism. This makes for bad science education. It doesn't teach students how to think, just what to think. Instead, schools should teach about both the strengths and weaknesses of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories and let students critically evaluate the arguments and evidence in this debate.

Teaching students in such a balanced, objective manner turns classroom instruction away from indoctrination and toward genuine education. Critically analyzing Darwinian evolution teaches students more about the facts of biology and produces scientifically minded students with good critical thinking skills. As Charles Darwin himself wrote in the Origin of Species: "a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."¹

Modern biology textbooks have a chronic habit of papering over scientific evidence that dissents from the standard lines of evidence --or "icons" -- that are used to support Darwinian evolution. For example, textbooks often present examples of small-scale "microevolution" and over-extrapolate from this evidence to make unwarranted claims about "macroevolution." They discuss minute changes in the sizes of beaks on the Galápagos finches or small changes in the colors of peppered moths to claim that fundamentally new types of organisms can evolve via Darwinian processes.²

But evolutionary biologist Robert L. Carroll asks: "Can changes in individual characters, such as the relative frequency of genes for light and dark wing color in moths adapting to industrial pollution, simply be multiplied over time to account for the origin of moths and butterflies within insects, the origin of insects from primitive arthropods, or the origin of arthropods from among primitive multicellular organisms?"³ Many scientists feel the answer is no. However, biology textbooks never inform students of this fact. Students need to have access to all of the evidence regarding Darwinian evolution so they can make up their own minds.

Science education theorists agree that students learn science best when they learn about arguments for and against a particular concept. A 2010 paper in the journal Science observes that "[c]ritique is not, therefore, some peripheral feature of science, but rather it is core to its practice." The paper found that students learn science best when they are asked "to discriminate between evidence that supports ... or does not support"⁴ a given scientific concept.

Science education is about teaching students the facts of biology, but also about teaching them how to think like scientists. When students are told that Darwinian evolution is a "settled theory" or that there "is no controversy over evolution," that not only misinforms them about debates taking place among scientists, but it fails to teach students how to use critical thinking on these important scientific questions. When evolution advocates demand that students should not learn about scientific weaknesses in evolution, the real losers are the students who are denied opportunities to learn about all of the evidence and are prevented from studying different legitimate scientific viewpoints regarding Darwinism.

There is a vibrant debate over Darwinian evolution taking place in the scientific community, and the scientists who have signed the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism List invite you to investigate it. As the 900 signers to the list agree: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

References:

[1.] Charles Darwin, Introduction, The Origin of Species (1859), Literature.org, accessed March 14, 2012, http://literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species-6th-edition/introduction.html.

[2.] See Jonathan Wells, "Second Thoughts about Peppered Moths," The Scientist, Vol. 13(11):13 (1999).

[3.] Robert Carroll, Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, pp. 8-10 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[4.] Jonathan Osborne, "Arguing to Learn in Science: The Role of Collaborative, Critical Discourse,"Science, Vol. 328: 463-466 (April 23, 2010).