The kind of extremism this world needs more of II:Irony of ironies.

On the Rube Goldberg approach to design.

Oracle Soup – Dialogue with a Theistic Evolutionist, Continued
Douglas Axe | @DougAxe

This is the third part of my discussion with theistic evolutionist Hans Vodder about my book, Undeniable. I describe the background in the  first post, and I end the  second post by asking Hans to clarify what he means when he says that conditions on the early Earth may have been conducive to biological evolution. Here is his reply:

I used “conditions” as a catch-all term for any physical circumstances relevant to life’s emergence. When I suggested circumstances may have been “conducive to biological evolution,” yes, I roughly meant they may have been sufficient to cause biological evolution. So, I guess I’ve conflated two separate issues here: a) the question of abiogenesis and b) the question of evolutionary development — sorry!

However, I don’t wish to dogmatize. Even though I’m no biologist, I realize that “origin of life” questions have not been settled definitively (as Stephen Meyer has argued in Signature in the Cell). So, I won’t say such conditions actually were conducive to abiogenesis.

My point is far more modest. It is this: even if a completely naturalistic account of life’s origin and development turns out to be true — and I’ve been arguing we can’t rule that out on probabilistic grounds alone — design doesn’t automatically disappear. As Antony Flew put it in his book God and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (p. 71):

“It is…useless to try to dispose finally of the [design] argument with a reference to the achievement of Darwin… [T]he regularities discovered and explained with the help of the theory of evolution by natural selection, like all other regularities in nature, can be just so much more grist to the mill.”

So, even if neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory coupled with some theory of abiogenesis turns out to be completely spot on, that doesn’t obviously remove design (let alone God) from the equation. A universe capable of permitting the evolution of life from non-life would arguably be a remarkable indication of cosmic fine-tuning. So, I don’t think the stakes in the “evolution/design” debate are necessarily as high for theism as is commonly thought.

But the way we think about the divine action across natural/supernatural divide in these contexts is also important. Perhaps we can discuss the Collins quotation to explore these issues further?

Thanks again for clarifying, Hans — very helpful!

You nicely summarized our main point of disagreement by saying you think we can’t rule out a completely naturalistic account of the origin of living things on probabilistic grounds alone. Since I think we can, and this is a major theme of Undeniable, I’d like to unpack this more before we move on.

In my first reply, I used the example of searching blindly for a diamond in the Sahara to show why improbabilities can’t be erased by invoking “conditions” to narrow the search. Briefly: fortuitous conditions that narrow the search so helpfully as to ensure success are themselves improbable. So, invoking these helpful conditions is the explanatory equivalent of the shell game — it only pretends to make the improbability disappear.

We agree on this point, Hans, which is a very good start!

By my understanding of our discussion, here’s where we still disagree: you think the “rigging” needed for the universe to have produced things like fireflies and horses and humans can fit within the regularities described by science, whereas I don’t.

Think of oracle soup — the imaginary version of alphabet soup I describe in the second chapter of my book. As the story goes, you boil this soup in a covered pot, and then, after allowing it to cool, you lift the lid to reveal written instructions for building something that’s very clever — “worthy of a patent.”

Now, we have no trouble rattling off any number of “conditions” that are relevant to the process of boiling alphabet soup: the broth’s viscosity, density, surface tension, and boiling point, the sizes, shapes, and consistencies of the pasta letters, the thickness and conductivity of the pot material, etc., etc. The point is that it’s manifestly inconceivable for any combination of these mere conditions to provide a satisfactory explanation for how instructions appeared on the soup’s surface.

Think of it this way. If we imagine a pot of oracle soup actually working, all of us would recognize this as something astonishing to the point of spookiness, and none of us should be content with an explanation in terms of mundane properties like viscosity and conductivity. Why? Because it’s the startling coincidence that must be explained, and none of those ho-hum parameters diminish this coincidence at all.

As for what’s at stake here, I think it has to do with the fact that life seems to compel everyone to acknowledge a Designer from an early age, whereas arguments about the fine-tuning of the physical universe have been accessible only to relatively few people relatively recently.

The kind of extremism this world needs more of.

Officials in Russia Honor Jehovah’s Witnesses, Including Jailed Danish Citizen, for Outstanding Community Service

NEW YORK—On June 2, 2017, officials in the Russian city of Oryol gave special recognition to the local congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, expressing gratitude for their participation in the city’s annual cleanup efforts on April 22, 2017. There were 70 Witnesses who volunteered to spend the day removing trash from the streets of Oryol and from the Orlik River that winds through the city. As a token of their appreciation, city officials presented the Witnesses with a small gift and a handwritten note stating, in part: “In gratitude for a good deed for the community and for the environment.”

  

However, one month after the cleanup, and one week before being formally thanked by city officials, one of the Witness volunteers, Dennis Christensen (pictured in above inset), was arrested for so-called extremist activity while attending a peaceful religious meeting on May 25. Russian authorities have been using the claim of extremist activity to target Jehovah’s Witnesses throughout the country.

“It is no surprise to those who know Jehovah’s Witnesses that Dennis, and the other members of the congregation, would voluntarily participate in the cleanup of their city. They have been performing this service for many years, continuing even after their legal entity was liquidated in 2016,” states David A. Semonian, a spokesman at the Witnesses’ world headquarters. “Jehovah’s Witnesses in Oryol and in other cities around the world are known for being model citizens. That is why it is ironic that Dennis, a diligent, law-abiding Christian, would be treated like a criminal shortly after making a positive contribution to his community that was recognized as honorable by officials in Oryol. We believe that Dennis should be released immediately and be allowed to continue his peaceful worship and positive community service in association with his fellow worshippers.”

The arrest of Mr. Christensen took place almost a year after the local legal entity used by the Witnesses in Oryol was liquidated on June 14, 2016. The charges leveled against Mr. Christensen also came on the heels of the April 20, 2017,   decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to liquidate the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, near St. Petersburg. Mr. Christensen is still being held in pretrial detention by authorities in Oryol.

Media Contact:

David A. Semonian, Office of Public Information, +1-845-524-3000

Man's best friend v. Darwin.

No, Your Dog Is Not a Barking Exemplar of Macroevolution
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Dogs are yet another evolutionary icon that  Jonathan Wells, perhaps in his next book, could handily leash and take for a walk. The idea expressed by Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others is that the descent from a common ancestor with wolves demonstrates not only the power of artificial selection, but by extension that of natural selection to sculpt brand new animals. In other words, your pooch is a barking exemplar of macroevolution.

One problem with this, among others, is that the virtue we value most in our dogs – the ability to form relationships with humans – appears to be no product of their evolution. At least it did not evolve from scratch. Dogs have it, but so, in their way, do wolves.

Here’s the tentative conclusion of research published in Royal Society Open Science, based on a limited sample of ten wolf cubs raised and cared for by humans as we would dogs, complete with “daily walks on leashes, cuddling, grooming, etc.”:

[W]e demonstrated that human-raised wolves can develop an individualized relationship with their human raisers which may not include attachment to and dependency on this person but which, at least before the sexual maturation of the animals, is characterized with a higher level of affiliation with the foster parent than with other closely familiar humans. Finally, we confirmed that intensive socialization and hand rearing result in general affinity towards humans.

This “affinity” may be more developed in dogs, which is to be expected, but it sounds like the seed is present in wolves. That would suggest it characterized the wild common ancestor of both dogs and wolves that existed 15,000 years ago.

From the story about this at Gizmodo:

[S]cientists have also documented some behavioral similarities between dogs and wolves. When greeting each other, for instance, wolves like to lick each others’ faces—a trait that’s all too familiar to dog owners. Wolves are also capable of following a person’s gaze into space, and they understand gestures like finger pointing (not even chimps can do this).

Given these similarities, [researcher Dorottya] Ujfalussy sought to learn more about the kinds of relationship that wolves, when socialized to humans, can have with their human caretakers. A primary aim of the study was to figure out what makes dogs so unique in their relationship with humans, and where their traits may have originated. Ultimately, Ujfalussy was trying to learn if dog behaviors were already present in ancestral wolves, or if they’re a product of domestication and artificial selection. This new research suggests the former may be true. [Emphasis added.]

The wolves were not found to be dependent on humans, as dogs are. But this is unsurprising. As geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig has described, the “evolution” of dogs from wolves “represents no increase in [biological] information but rather a decrease or loss of function on the genetic and anatomical levels” (as we reported here at Evolution News, see “The Dog Delusion”). Meaning no disrespect to them and certainly no lack of affection, but dogs are dependent because they are, in a sense, “degenerate” wolves.

A wolf is an apex predator, at home in a wild environment where your typical dog could not survive long or at all. In evolutionary terms, it’s a long step down. This explains, if you follow the interesting neighborhood-based social networking app Nextdoor, the constant refrain of panicked dog owners notifying everyone to be on the lookout for their lost pets. Even in a sheltered suburban context, dogs aren’t safe on their own.

In short, what’s most precious about them was likely there in the pre-dog ancestor. The rest was bred through loss of fitness. All of which is the opposite of what people typically mean when they talk about evolution.

I know, I know – some of this sounds unkind to them. But we love dogs just the same. They are our best friend. What they are not is a legitimate mascot for evolutionary advocates.