Darwin bars birds from getting driver's licenses

 Birds Don’t Drive Buicks Because of … Evolution, You See

Denyse O Leary

Archaeologist Sarah Newman offers the thesis that, contrary to our assumptions, animals taught humans culture. She writes at Aeon:

Many millennia before spectacular figures of horses, mammoths, lions and other animals were painted (c17,000 years ago) on the walls of the famous Lascaux cave in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, hominin artists were dragging their fingers through soft clay, pecking and scratching simple lines and circles into rock, and rubbing and dotting cave walls with red ochre. These early marks were often placed around or atop the polished surfaces and claw marks left behind by cave bears, felines and other mammals. Sometimes the human marks imitate the forms of existing scratches or smoothing made by other species. Human art, then, is part of a broader tradition of animal mark-making.

At times, this ‘parietal art’ (the name for human-made art on cave or rock walls) is so similar to animal traces that archaeologists struggle to disentangle and distinguish one from the other. In the 1960s, for example, the French prehistorian Amédée Lemozi interpreted a series of engraved lines at Pech-Merle cave in the Occitania region of southern France as a representation of a masked and wounded shaman. Lemozi saw lines piercing the figure of the shaman and pecking intended to represent wounds, leading him to suggest that the shaman was depicted undergoing a ritual death. Lemozi’s ideas were taken up by the Belgian prehistorian Lya Dams in the mid-1980s and extended into a broader exploration of wounded men in Palaeolithic art. A few years later, however, the French prehistorian Michel Lorblanchet showed that the many crisscrossing lines making up the ‘wounded shaman’ on the calcite surface of the cave were, in fact, gashes in multiple directions left by the claws of cave bears. 

“Animals taught us culture”, June 13, 2025

This sounds like a conventional case of over-interpretation on the part of Lya Dams. Now, if someone could show that the bears depicted shamans undergoing a ritual death, Newman might have a point…

Many of the bear marks, beaver logs, and bison paths that incited new human behaviours come from a time when the divide between human and nonhuman was more porous, when humans were discovering how to be human. That process of discovery was less about our species defining itself against everything else in the world than it was about interactions, observations, mimicry, creativity and experimentation. 

“Animals taught us culture”

Overall, Newman’s thesis seems to depend on the view that only the vice of human exceptionalism would cause us to see the Lascaux cave drawings as something intrinsically different from claw marks or St. Peter’s Basilica as something intrinsically different from beaver dams. 

But they are; they involve abstractions. That chasm may appear narrow to some but it is deep. No doubt, humans learned a lot by watching animals but the critical fact is that we learned fundamentally different things.

A More Measured Look

Also at Aeon, University of Sydney evolutionary biologist Antone Martinho-Truswell provides a more measured look at humans, animals, and culture:

Culture and its transmission from generation to generation is the defining feature of humanity. It is perhaps the best candidate for the thing that separates us from other beasts. Though there are other species that have been shown to hand down accumulated knowledge — including chimps, who show some evidence for cultural transmission of tool-use — no other animal approaches our ability to layer breakthrough upon breakthrough in such a complex way, and certainly no other animal does it with the conscious intent to lift future communities beyond the achievements that came before. That is a human distinction if there ever were one. 

“Empire of flight,” June 17, 2025

So, he asks, why don’t intelligent birds do the same things? “Why do they not have a market economy, with not only goods for trade, but luxury goods whose value relies on concepts rather than raw usefulness. Why don’t birds drive Bentleys?” 

He goes into a detailed explanation of how Darwinian natural selection explains it all, provided that we see its peaks as valleys instead and assume that it operates somewhat like gravity.

For a species like ours, the valley is deep and wide, driving increasingly capable brains and increasingly complex sharing of information — and presumably, creating enough gravity to draw other species in.

That hasn’t occurred.

For reptiles, fish, amphibians, cephalopods and other groups, it is not terribly surprising that they haven’t fallen down the well of complex culture in the evolutionary landscape. Their constellation of traits actually places them rather far away, in their own local minima, with the gravitational effects of human-style culture felt only distantly, if at all.

“Empire of flight”

And still no Bentleys for the birds? Martinho-Truswell blames flight:

Flight is an evolutionary black hole. It is a gravitational well with no bottom, a trait so powerfully effective at improving survival and reproduction that it plunges a species into a well of easy life and high fitness from which there is no escape. Or, to return to more conventional evolutionary language, it relieves an incomparable amount of selection pressure that might drive a species to alternative traits.

“Empire of flight”

This all seems a roundabout way of saying that humans are exceptional. And here’s the question that no one in evolutionary biology has the answer to: What is the “it” that we have and birds don’t? The conundrum of human consciousness strikes again.

Darwinists move the goalpost?

 Critics Change the Topic: Do Human-Human Genetic Differences Matter? 

Casey Luskin

Editor’s note: For the full “Chimps and Critics” series by Dr. Luskin, see here

One of the common yet unexpected reactions from critics to the discovery that humans and chimps are 15 percent genetically different is to change the topic. These critics want to focus on something else — human-human There’s still a lot we don’t know about human-human genetic differences, but it in no way affects the fact that we are 15 percent genetically different from chimps. This 15 percent difference refutes those who use the “1 percent” icon as an argument for evolution. We can’t dismiss the differences between humans and humans, or humans and chimps, as junk. But we also can’t assume that all types of genetic differences have the same kind of “meaning” or operate based upon the same “function per nucleotide” ratio. Critics need to stop casually dismissing these genetic differences as junk, because the evidence shows they are functional. What all this means for evolution remains to be seen — but one thing is clear: critics have not addressed or refuted my arguments, and in fact have badly misrepresented my arguments. How? We’ll explore that in a final post. genetic differences. I call this a “reaction” rather than an “objection” because these folks generally don’t contest the newest evidence about human-chimp genetic differences. Before going further, let’s remind ourselves of what the relevant arguments have been.

We’re Refuting an Icon of Evolution

For decades, prominent voices have frequently used the supposed “1 percent” genetic difference between humans and chimps as an unsophisticated argument for human-chimp common ancestry and human evolution, and against human exceptionalism. For example, we saw how Bill Nye said that “we share around 98.8 percent of our gene sequence with chimpanzees. This is striking evidence for chimps and chumps to have a common ancestor.” Or we recalled how the Smithsonian Institution claims that “DNA evidence … confirms that … humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor between 8 and 6 million years ago” since “there is only about a 1.2 percent genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees.” 

Years ago I noted that sometimes evolutionists are unaware of their own arguments, and they need to be reminded of what they’ve been saying. So there are many other scientific sources that we’ve documented saying this same thing. In 1998, the journal Science used the statistic to diminish the specialness of humans:

We humans like to think of ourselves as special, set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom by our ability to talk, write, build complex structures, and make moral distinctions. But when it comes to genes, humans are so similar to the two species of chimpanzee that physiologist Jared Diamond has called us “the third chimpanzee.” A quarter-century of genetic studies has consistently found that for any given region of the genome, humans and chimpanzees share at least 98.5% of their DNA.

In 2012, the Financial Times posted a typical argument, claiming that human-chimp genomes are highly similar, very junky, and all of this supports common ancestry:

If the theory of our evolutionary origins were true, we would expect species that split off from each other recently to have similar genes. And this is exactly what we find: we share 98 per cent of our DNA with our nearest living relative, the chimpanzee. This applies not only to the DNA that actually makes us work but equally to our vast amount of functionless so-called “junk DNA”, and even the remnants of ancient viruses that once worked their way into our genomes.

As I was writing this post, Amazon delivered a book I recently learned of titled 99% Ape: How Evolution Adds Up, published in 2008 by University of Chicago Press, and co-authored by seven university professors. It claims that of “the roughly 3 billion letters of the genetic code … The difference is just 1.06%” meaning the difference is “1% of 3 billion.” (p. 15) Don’t miss what they just said: they are explicitly applying the “1%” difference statistic to the entire genome. We now know that that statement is false and it is an ideal example of how these statistics have been misused.

The book then uses the supposed small percent genetic differences to argue for human-chimp common ancestry. 99% Ape states that Darwin “believed that the resemblance between humans and orang-utans was evidence of ‘common descent’, or evolution” (pp. 11-12), and claims that “small genetic changes can add up to significant changes in appearance, behaviour, and intelligence like those that took place over the short space of about 6 million years since chimps and humans parted company from our common ancestor.” (p. 15) The back cover says, “Darwin was mocked for suggesting that humans have apes for ancestors, but every scientific advance in the study of life in the last 150 years has confirmed the reality of evolution.” Really?—“Every scientific advance in the study of life” supports evolution? Those are very strong words for a book published by the University of Chicago Press, and this “99% ape” statistic is clearly intended as a forceful argument for evolution. 

So the supposed 1 percent genetic difference between humans and chimps has become an icon of evolution — a cherished argument used by many evolution defenders. That’s what this conversation has been about from the beginning: I’m not trying to argue that the 15 percent genetic difference between humans and chimps somehow confirms or refutes common ancestry or human evolution in general; I am simply pointing out that the factual basis for this common iconic argument for evolution is wrong — and it’s wrong by more than an order of magnitude. 

Not a Valid Argument for Evolution

The “1 percent” argument is not just wrong, it’s also logically fallacious. And so a secondary point I’ve been making is that the exact percent genetic similarity between humans and chimps, whatever it may be, is a fascinating number but, by itself, it’s really not relevant to addressing questions about evolution. 

From the beginning of this conversation — consistent with my past discussions — I’ve been clear that I don’t think the percent genetic similarity between humans and apes tells you anything about whether we share a common ancestor with chimps. As I wrote in 2021: “the ‘percent genome identity’ [i.e., percent genomic similarity between humans and chimps] provides no rigorous argument for common ancestry and does not answer many very interesting questions within this particular debate.”

This is because functional genetic similarities between humans and chimps could be explained by common ancestry, or by common design. Common ancestry is not the only way to explain genetic similarities. Intelligent agents can re-use functional code in different designs. Common design can explain shared functional genetic similarities just as well as common descent can. 

Again, I’ve been very consistent on this point. Even way back in 2008 I wrote: “the percent difference says nothing about whether humans and chimps share a common ancestor. The percent genetic similarity between humans and apes does not demonstrate Darwinian evolution, unless one excludes the possibility of intelligent design.” 

My point is this: I’ve never claimed that the mere percent genetic similarity between humans and chimps helps us discriminate between evolution or intelligent design. So if critics think that by citing human-human genetic similarities that somehow they are able to challenge my argument against evolution, then they misunderstand what I’m saying. In this conversation, I’m not making an argument against evolution. I’m showing that their argument for evolution — citing the supposed “1 percent” genetic similarity between humans and apes — was wrong. 

Do Human-Human Genetic Similarities Matter?

As noted, some critics have responded to this new evidence showing humans and chimps are 15 percent genetically different by changing the topic. Their claim is that certain humans are genetically different from others by up to 10 percent. 

This is also a very new claim based upon newly published and more complete human genomes. A 2023 paper in the journal Genomics Proteomics Bioinformatics compared the complete (“telomere-to-telomere”) genome sequence of a male human of Han Chinese descent to the complete sequence of a human genome called “CHM13.” It reported that when these two human genomes were compared, they showed “~330-Mb exclusive sequences, ~3100 unique genes, and tens of thousands or nucleotide and structural variations” and that “280–350-Mb sequences (~ 10%) in each haplotype are not or poorly aligned to others.” They state: “All these alignment results indicate that ~10% of sequences in each haplotype are of unique and represents most of the inter-individual genome diversity.” Critic Zachary Ardern highlights this, stating that the difference represents “a remarkable approximately 300+Mb each (9% of the genome!).” 

CHM13 does not come from a normal “human” person. It’s an immortalized cell line used in research that originated as a “hydatidiform mole” — essentially a botched human pregnancy where each cell contains two copies of each of the father’s chromosomes and none from the mother. Because it has essentially complete homozygosity, this has enabled improved sequencing of its genome — although one might rightly ask if telomeric sequences in a cell line like this still resemble telomeric sequences in a normal human. Nonetheless, as we reported, CHM13 is the genome used in the Progressive Cactus alignment of Yoo et al. (2025) which showed about 15 percent genetic differences from the complete chimp genome. (Our calculation of 14.9 percent genetic difference between humans and chimps is based upon 1.6 percent single nucleotide variation added to 13.3 percent gap divergence. It derives from analysis that uses a different human genome, not CHM13.) 

I’m skeptical that all of the 3,100 “unique genes” have been clearly confirmed as genes. Regardless, the claim is that these human genomes are about10 percent different from one another, which is said to make the statistic that humans and chimps are about 15 percent different much less interesting or impressive. 

A Lot Can Be Said in Response, Starting with the Obvious

1. Evidence regarding human-human genetic differences doesn’t refute, affect, or answer any of our arguments about human-chimp genetic differences.

Those who are talking about human-human intraspecific differences haven’t justified the continued use of the “1 percent” icon of evolution. My argument was narrow: those who have claimed we are only 1 percent genetically different from chimps were wrong on the facts. But icons of evolution don’t die easily.

The critics want to suggest that if 10 percent differences can evolve between humans then surely 15 percent differences can evolve between humans and chimps. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it isn’t. At this point I really don’t know. But it doesn’t matter: I have not made an affirmative argument that these differences are too great to evolve. I only said that “it may be possible to do an analysis of whether there is enough time in the fossil record for these genetic differences to evolve by random mutations and other unguided evolutionary mechanisms.” But I noted that this will be a difficult analysis to do, and I don’t yet know what the outcome of such an analysis would be:

Unfortunately, this analysis will be complicated by the fact that many the differences go beyond mere point mutations that could be studied through a relatively straightforward molecular clock analysis. From an evolutionary perspective, many of the large-scale “gap differences” between humans and chimps represent insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions, and other large-scale mutations. In order to do a waiting times analysis, one would have to calculate how often such mutations arise, and the likelihood of them arising by unguided evolutionary mechanisms in the time allowed by the fossil record (usually given as about 4 to 8 million years since our supposed most recent common ancestor we shared with chimps).

It may be a challenging analysis, but now that we have the necessary raw genome sequence data, at least we could start thinking about how to do it.

Perhaps such an analysis would pose a challenge to evolution, or perhaps it would not. I really don’t know, and it’s not really relevant to what I’ve been arguing. 

Two critics — Zachary Ardern, and especially Joel Duff — have recently argued that even 15 percent genetic differences between humans could potentially evolve in the time allowed by the fossil record. Duff, a professor of biology at the University of Akron and a theistic evolutionist, spends a lot of time answering certain creationists who say this new evidence of 15 percent genetic differences between humans and chimps definitively refutes evolution. But I haven’t argued that we know yet whether the 15 percent genetic difference between humans and chimps is a problem for unguided evolution. Duff claims that I have argued otherwise, but he has misstated my position. 

I do want to report, however, that I contacted Dr. Duff about his misstatements and he responded very graciously and apologetically. I believe it was an unintentional mistake, and I really appreciated his response to me. 

But There’s More to Say

2. 10 percent may not be a typical degree of human-human genetic difference.

Ardern notes that “A more recent paper (Liao et al. 2023) suggests on average 4.4% of sequences in pairwise human genome comparisons are either not assembled or can’t be aligned.” Duff acknowledges that “most people probably aren’t 10 percent different, probably more like 3 to 4 percent different.” So this 10 percent genetic difference between humans may not be typical. This is a new area of research, and more data is needed. 

3. Differences in human-human alignable DNA are much lower than in humans vs. chimps.

As we’ve discussed, alignable sections of the human and chimp genomes show about 1.6 percent difference. But the 2023 paper reports that alignable sections of these human genomes are far more similar than that:

Furthermore, in the perfect alignments longer than 50 kb, the weighted average identity between the two haplotypes of YAO is 99.94%, higher than that of 99.83% between YAO and CHM13, suggesting more nucleotide-level variations between YAO and CHM13

In other words, the single nucleotide variation between alignable portions of DNA is as low as 0.06 percent different (when comparing the two haplotypes of the Han Chinese individual) or 0.17 percent different (when comparing CHM13 to the Han Chinese individual’s genome). This is consistent with the NCBI’s longtime statement that “Between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation — biochemical individuality — is about .1 percent.” That’s a very small genetic difference, somewhere between 9 to 26 times less than the comparable type of genetic difference between humans and chimps.

As we saw, some critics argue that the non-alignable DNA can be dismissed because it’s genetic junk. Are we conceding this point by focusing on the fact that alignable DNA differences in humans are much smaller than they are between humans and chimps, implying that they matter a lot more than non-alignable DNA differences? Not at all. There’s good evidence that function exists throughout the genome, both in the alignable DNA that is full of single nucleotide differences, and in the non-alignable DNA that includes may differences in repetitive DNA and other larger-scale differences. We’ll elaborate that in a moment. 

4. We already have prima facie evidence that the vast majority of the human genome has function.

To repeat, there’s good evidence that the vast majority of the human genome is functional. In 2012, the ENCODE project found evidence for “biochemical functions for 80% of the genome, in particular outside of the well-studied protein-coding regions.” It stated, “The vast majority (80.4%) of the human genome participates in at least one biochemical RNA- and/or chromatin-associated event in at least one cell type.” We could go on and on citing evidence of function throughout the human genome. This is prima facie evidence that the vast majority of the human genome is functional — including evidence of numerous types of function for repetitive DNA. 

5. There is evidence that the character of non-alignable genetic differences between humans and humans can be different (and of a lesser degree) than the character of differences between humans and chimps.

The major non-alignable genetic differences between humans and humans, or between humans and chimps, often involves different numbers of copies of repeat sequences of DNA. Critics dismiss these differences as mere junk DNA, but it’s well-known that this kind of DNA difference can perform important functions in terms of both sequence and structure. As we previously saw, repetitive DNA can perform important functions as “non-B” DNA, where the number of copies present can form different structural shapes of the DNA which is important for formatting genome function. According to a paper in Nucleic Acids Research, this non-B DNA is known to be “important regulators of cellular processes” and has “unequivocal importance for genome function.” Indeed, a 2025 paper in Nature Communications noted that different shapes of DNA causes changes in gene regulation, which is crucial for genome function. 

In short, the number of copies of DNA repeats has a major influence on the 3D shape of chromosomes, and the 3D shape of chromosomes has a major impact on gene regulation. So the number of copies of repeats matters.

But how much do they matter? If they matter a lot in causing differences between humans and chimps, then why don’t they cause greater differences between humans? There’s still a lot we don’t know about genomics and this hasn’t been studied very much yet. But there is already some evidence that the nature of differences in repetitive DNA between humans and chimps can be different (and greater) than the nature of differences in repetitive DNA between humans and humans.

Consider Figure 5 from the open access 2024 Nature article “The variation and evolution of complete human centromeres.” It’s a complex figure so I’ve extracted certain key portions below:

Image from Figure 5, Logsdon et al., “The variation and evolution of complete human centromeres,” 629: 136–145 (2024), used under creative commons license

What you’re seeing here is an analysis of both the number and types of repeats present in the centromeric DNA of chromosome 5 in humans and chimps. In the diagram, “CHM1/CHM13” and “Human” are all different human genomes, and you can compare them to the centromeric DNA on the same chimp chromosome at the far right. What you see is that even between homologous human chromosomes, the size of the DNA in megabases (Mb) — i.e., number of repeats — can vary greatly. But the color of the DNA — which essentially represents the sequence / type of those repeats — between humans and humans is basically the same. 

Now compare the human centromeric DNA for chromosome 5 with that of the chimp. Here, again, we see differences in size, meaning that the length of the DNA (e.g., the number of copies of repeats) is different. But the color of the DNA in the chimp chromosome is different from what we see in homologous DNA in humans. What this means is that in chimps, not only is the length of the repetitive DNA different compared with humans, but so is the sequence of that repetitive DNA. 

In both cases (humans vs. human and human vs. chimp) you find large amounts of non-alignable DNA — what has been counted up as the “gap divergence.” But between humans, the non-alignability stems largely from the number of repeat copies, whereas between humans and chimps it stems both from the number of repeat copies and the sequences of those repeats. 

What exactly does this mean, biologically speaking? I don’t think anyone knows for sure. But what is clear is that there can be different characters in the types of non-alignable genetic differences. In this example, between humans the nonalignability stems primarily from differences in the number of copies of repeats, whereas between humans and chimps it involves both numbers of repeats and the sequence of those repeats. So the differences between humans and chimps are of a different and greater character than are the differences between humans.

This is just one example. But it shows that not all differences — including non-alignable “gap divergence” differences — are equal. We mustn’t assume that the percent of non-alignable DNA between humans necessarily has the same degree of differences compared with non-alignable DNA in humans and chimps. 

A Crude Assumption

6. Big differences in DNA need not equal big difference in function — but that doesn’t mean it’s junk DNA. 

In this conversation there are some crude assumptions that permeate the critics’ thinking: They seem to assume that the number of nucleotides involved in a function should be proportional to the amount of “function” that’s being encoded. Then, they seem to assume that if a stretch of DNA has a low “function per nucleotide” ratio, then it can’t be very important and can be dismissed as junk. On both counts their assumptions are flawed. 

Sometimes “a little bit” of DNA might encode “a lot” of function. For example, within gene-coding DNA, a single nucleotide change might make a large difference. This would represent a high “function per nucleotide” ratio.

But in other genomic contexts, “a lot” of DNA might encode “a little” function. For example, with repetitive DNA, a lot of DNA differences might be involved in changing the 3-D shape of the chromosome in the nucleus, and this might result in relatively small-scale changes in gene regulation. 

In all the cases we’re talking about, the DNA can be functional and shouldn’t be considered “junk.” Yet different types of DNA are designed to operate differently, with different “function to nucleotide” ratios. We can’t dismiss DNA as junk even in situations where a lot of DNA may be responsible for only a little bit of function.

An analogy here may help. Imagine a professional NFL football team, which has lots of people employed or connected to the team. Now some people who work for the team might have a major impact on the team’s success. For example, the quarterback is probably the most important player and has a high “impact per person” ratio. In fact any player on the field probably has a major impact on the team’s success. This could be analogous to DNA segments that directly encode genes. 

But in other cases, there are people who work for the team but have a lower “impact per person” ratio. The team probably employs janitors, marketing experts, and ticket-counter operators. They all contribute to the team’s success, but probably not at a level nearly as high or as crucial as the players on the field. These might be very roughly analogous to DNA involved in gene regulation. 

Lastly, there might be people connected to the team who make a difference, but at a much lower “impact per person” ratio. For example, think of the fans. Thousands of fans may attend games. The loss of any one fan might not hurt the team. In fact, the team could probably withstand the loss of large percentages of fans and not go bankrupt immediately. Yet, both individually and collectively, the fans have a major impact upon the team. Their purchasing of tickets, merchandise, and food at games is what ultimately funds the team’s revenue. Individually, each fan probably has a very low “person to impact” ratio, but they aren’t useless. In a biological context, this is like noting that repetitive DNA which plays structural roles in determining the 3-D shape of the chromosome may have a low “function per nucleotide” ratio, but it plays a functional role and certainly isn’t junk. 

The point is this: In some cases, many of the genetic differences between humans could be in DNA with a low “function per nucleotide” ratio, meaning that the DNA is functional but it equates to small phenotypic differences. We should not assume that these differences in non-alignable low “function per nucleotide” DNA represent junk DNA, nor should we assume that it must encode major phenotypic differences. There’s a middle-ground position that’s being ignored: The non-alignable DNA differences between humans could represent different numbers of repeat copies which, though involving large numbers of nucleotides, may have small-scale effects on gene regulation by changing the 3-D shapes of chromosomes. 

Critics in this conversation seem to think you can dismiss or ignore DNA with low “function per nucleotide” ratios. But you can’t say DNA is junk just because it has a low “function per nucleotide” ratio. In fact, this DNA may be doing precisely what it is designed to do. 

The Bottom Line

There’s still a lot we don’t know about human-human genetic differences, but it in no way affects the fact that we are 15 percent genetically different from chimps. This 15 percent difference refutes those who use the “1 percent” icon as an argument for evolution. We can’t dismiss the differences between humans and humans, or humans and chimps, as junk. But we also can’t assume that all types of genetic differences have the same kind of “meaning” or operate based upon the same “function per nucleotide” ratio. Critics need to stop casually dismissing these genetic differences as junk, because the evidence shows they are functional. What all this means for evolution remains to be seen — but one thing is clear: critics have not addressed or refuted my arguments, and in fact have badly misrepresented my arguments. How? We’ll explore that in a final post.

More on Darwinism's scientific pretensions.

 21st-Century Darwinism’s Impossible Situation

Daniel Witt

Charles Darwin lived in an era in which most scientists agreed that the different races of humans possessed distinct moral and intellectual capabilities, with white Europeans at the top and sub-Saharan Africans, Australian Aboriginals, and certain Native American groups at the bottom. Darwin explicitly used those supposed facts as evidence for his theory. As far as Darwin was concerned, differences in psychological, as well as physical, traits between different human populations were exactly what a theory of descent with modification from a common ancestor by random variation and natural selection would predict. 

That was well and fine… until the mid 20th century, when scientists concluded that the cognitive differences between the races were probably illusory. In the intervening decades, Darwinists have come up with a variety of arguments for why Darwinian evolutionary theory doesn’t predict racial IQ disparities after all. 

This is sort thing is pretty common in science, and it might be one of the main weaknesses in the scientific method. A scientific hypothesis is supposed to make testable predictions, but those predictions are often altered after the fact if they didn’t come true — effectively “retconning” the new evidence into the old hypothesis. Sadly, there are no Science Police to prevent this intellectual malfeasance. And it is especially difficult to detect when it occurs over many decades or centuries. 

In this case, there is certainly an a priori implausibility to the claim that Darwinism doesn’t predict racial disparities, since Darwin and Darwinists claimed racial disparities as evidence for their theory … until the evidence showed that no such disparities exist.

The Racialist Holdouts

 It's  not surprising, then, that some stubborn Darwinists are sticking with the racial implications of Darwinism, come hell or high water. 

In 2020, a group of Darwinist academics published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Personality and Individual Differences. The article was titled “Dodging Darwin: Race, evolution, and the hereditarian hypothesis,” and it amounted to a broadside attack on the dominant viewpoint that there are no innate racial differences in IQ. The authors argue that unfortunately “modern Darwinism in practice is severely limited when applied to humans.” They urge scholars to “overcome their understandable squeamishness and discomfort with hereditarianism to discuss it honestly and judiciously, so that researchers can fulfill the promise of the Darwinian revolution in psychology.”

Interestingly, most of the article is not taken up with presenting actual evidence of an innate racial IQ gap, but rather with the theoretical argument that Darwinism says it must be so. They address several theoretical “dodges” made to avoid this conclusion: 

To the popular argument that there is no clear or immutable line between any racial categories, they reply that (a) this is a strawman, because most prominent racialist thinkers did not really claim that, and (b) it is a red herring, because categories do not need to be discrete or immutable to have analytical value. They point to human age as an obvious example of non-discrete categories with somewhat arbitrary delineation, which nevertheless has immense analytical value. 

To the argument that no single characteristic is universally present in any so-called race, they reply that this is also true of the individual differences in men and women’s facial features — but it is nevertheless usually easy to distinguish between males and females by considering the features in aggregate. A detectable pattern does not depend on a single consistent factor. 

To the argument that human lineages diverged too recently to produce major differences in the brain, they point out that they are not arguing for large differences, but for small differences that can have significant effects. 

The bottom line for the authors is that even if you can come up with various arguments to exclude mental properties from evolutionary analysis, they all seem like special pleading. After all, most scholars agree that evolution has caused various physical differences in human populations. And most scholars agree that the brain is a physical organ. Yet mental differences are somehow exempt from evolutionary analysis. “This position appears intellectually indefensible,” they write, “because the brain is not somehow impervious to selective forces. Rather, it is an organ like any other and therefore is just as susceptible to evolutionary pressures as is the skin, lungs, or digestive system.” 

Modern Darwinists Are… Creationists and Dualists? 

Thus, they write, the modern consensus is really akin to creationism or mind-body dualism, “because it relies upon the implausible assumption that human psychological propensities were not selected for by different environments, niches, and climates in the past 50,000 years.”

I think the authors are just using “creationism” and “dualism” as swear words. But I would argue that this is true in a more technical sense as well: if you believe human brains were created according to a plan, or if you believe that there is more to the human mind than just the brain, you need not necessarily predict that the human mind will differ according to race or ethnicity. 

Needless to say, this article inspired backlash after it came out, and one of the professors was even fired from his university. But one has to feel that they were put in an impossible position. It wasn’t their fault that Darwinism has nasty implications. Modern academia demanded they accept Darwinism, but it also demanded they accept that racism had been disproven. The only two options were intellectual compartmentalization, or admitting the awkward implications of the theory and accepting the career consequences.

Well, those aren’t the only two options. They could have considered a different theory of origins, and accepted those career consequences.

The Real Dilemma  

I need to be clear that I am not trying to present a false dilemma. I am not saying that you must either accept 19th century racism or believe that God created humans ex nihilo in His image. 

The trouble is actually not even with evolution, per se, so much as the mechanism of evolution. After all, everyone from the staunchest Biblical creationist to the most dogmatic neo-Darwinist agrees that all humans, at least, share a common ancestor. And that means that the variations which exist between different human population groups are the result of evolution — presumably through random variation and natural selection. 

The question then is — what kind of changes is that sort of unguided process capable of producing? Any kind, or only some kinds? Few people would have a problem with the idea that unguided evolution can result in changes in skin pigmentation. But what about complex structures? If you believe that brains were built by unguided evolutionary processes, just like simpler features were, then you ought to expect the brains of different populations to develop differences, just like simpler features did. But if you believe that some form of intelligent design is needed to guide the construction of complex structures, you need not assume that brains would vary significantly according to lineage; the design goal would determine the quality of the brain, regardless of time and circumstances. 

To some readers, the idea that brains can’t evolve like simpler features may seem peculiar…because, don’t all of our brains evolve dramatically throughout our lives? As J. B. S. Haldane put it: 

The strangest thing about the origin of consciousness from unconsciousness is not that it has happened once in the remote past, but that it happens in the life of every one of us. An early human embryo without nervous system or sense organs, and no occupation but growth, has no more claim to consciousness than a plant — far less than a jelly-fish. A new-born baby may be conscious, but has less title to rationality than a dog or ape. The evolutionist makes the very modest claim that an increase in rationality such as every normal child shows in its lifetime has occurred in the ancestors of the human race in the last few million years.

This is a false equivalence, stemming from the failure to recognize that the power of an individual brain (or body) to complexify and evolve is itself a remarkable design feature in need of explanation. Darwinian evolution might be invoked to explain that feature, but if so, the feature cannot then be invoked to explain Darwinian evolution! That explanation is circular. 

Unstomachable or False… Or Both?

If science leads us to conclusions that we cannot stomach, there must be something wrong with either our stomachs or our science. In this instance, I would like to suggest that the problem is with our science. I am not saying that simply because I cannot stomach racism, but because the evidence seems to have failed the racialist hypothesis. I’m sure someone can point to studies that seem to show racial differences. But when you consider how the evidence concerning racial intelligence has developed over the last few centuries, the trendline is clear. 

When deciding what conclusions to draw from an investigation, it is important to remember that the results could have been different. This is obvious, but it is easy to forget, especially when the results come in over a long period of time. In the last few centuries, as means of transportations improved and different groups of humans increasingly interacted with each other, we could have discovered vast, immutable differences in intelligence and moral character between different groups of people. That was a possibility once. It was certainly expected in the 18th century, when people believed that savages with tails inhabited the Nicobar Islands. It was still the expectation when Darwin’s theory was formed, and it was what Darwin’s theory predicted. 

But it is not what we found. We found, to our surprise, the opposite. We found that we weren’t so different after all.

When the predictions of a theory turn out to be false, the theory should be reconsidered accordingly. So before anyone chokes down the racialist implications of Darwinism, it might be good to explore some other options.

More on darwinism and master race delusion.

 The End of Scientific Racism

Daniel Witt

One of C. S. Lewis’s intellectual nemeses was J. B. S. Haldane, the famed evolutionary biologist who came up with the idea that life originated in a “primordial soup.” Haldane even humorously compared himself to the inventor of anti-Lewisite, a chemical that neutralizes the toxin Lewisite. Other than their opinions, they had a lot in common. Not only were both men science fiction writers and public intellectuals, they moved in the same circles: Haldane was also a professor at Oxford and later Cambridge, and his sister, the writer and scientist Naomi Mitchison, was a good friend of J. R. R. Tolkien. 

Taking advantage of his own main advantage, Haldane accused Lewis of insufficient scientific accuracy in a mocking review of his science fiction trilogy.1 “Of course, the reason is clear enough,” Haldane wrote. “Christian mythology incorporated the cosmological theories current 18 centuries ago. Dante found it a slight strain to combine this mythology with the facts known in his own day. Milton found it harder. Mr. Lewis finds it impossible.” 

A bit disappointingly, the specific scientific criticisms Haldane offers are all pretty tangential — I’m not sure what the atmosphere of Mars, or the correct lifespan of a severed head perfused with blood, has to do with “Christian mythology.” But I’d like to borrow Haldane’s striking wording for a different diagnosis:

Darwinist mythology incorporated the racial theories current to the 18th century. Charles Darwin found it a slight strain to combine this mythology with the facts known in his day. J. B. S. Haldane found it harder. Contemporary biologists find it impossible.

Race Science in the Early 20th Century

In recent posts, I’ve argued that the modern theory of evolution was not merely influenced by the racial ideas of the time — it was founded on them. In the 18th century it was possible to believe that there were primitive savages who did not even possess the gift of speech (although they may have possessed tails). The apparently unbroken gradation from the higher apes to “civilized man” made it easy for Lord Monboddo, and later Erasmus Darwin, to propose that man had evolved from apes. By the 19th century, however, more facts had come to light, and Charles Darwin was well aware that there was actually an enormous gap between the “lowest savages” and the highest apes. Nevertheless, he argued that the evolutionary progression could still be observed in the gradation of the races above the gap, ranging from the best of the civilized Europeans down to the worst of the Fuegians, sub-Saharan Africans, and Australian aboriginals. 

When J. B. S. Haldane was starting his scientific career in the early 20th century, that idea was still widely accepted. In his 1927 collection Possible Worlds and Other Essays, Haldane writes that if a new religion were to be invented in the modern world, it would include the scientific ideas of the day just as the ancient religions had included the science of their day — and that therefore the modern religion would affirm “the existence of innate psychological difference between the human races,” among other things.2

Haldane initially subscribed to some of the racism of the era — but, to his credit, his views shifted over time as more evidence came to light. Haldane was an anti-imperialist with a taste for contrarianism and an instinct to side with the weak and oppressed (and those strong and powerful who claimed to be their benefactors, such as Stalin and Mao). Perhaps because of these sentiments, he seemed eager to accept the new evidence on race as it emerged. Thus, Haldane’s evolving views on race are a useful “canary in the coal mine” for the death of scientific racism. As the cutting edge of race science moved farther away from what Darwin’s premises, Haldane moved with it. 

The  Evolution of Race Science

Thus, in an essay written to combat the racial propaganda of the Third Reich, Haldane presents a rather ambiguous picture of racial differences, in accordance with the ambiguous state of the data available to him. He wrote:    

As for intelligence, it is certain that races overlap, for clever negroes are cleverer than stupid Englishmen, and musical Englishmen are more musical than unmusical negroes. 

We don’t know much about averages. In the United States whites do better than negroes, on the average, in intelligence tests. But this may have nothing to do with race, for education counts in these tests. In the army tests of 1914, the negroes of Ohio scored a higher average than the whites of Arkansas. 

Even if it were found that, given equal opportunities, whites were found to do better than negroes on tests drawn up by whites, it is quite likely that negro examiners could design test on which their own race would beat the whites!

Haldane thought the different races were each superior in their natural habitats, and that it therefore didn’t make sense to label one or another as absolutely superior. As for the question of general intelligence, he hoped that would finally be answered “when the different races have enjoyed real equality for another generation.” 

It turned out he didn’t have to wait that long. In 1945, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established along with the rest of the UN, and found itself faced with the prospect of coming up with an official stance on the contentious issue of race. To solve the problem, the agency summoned luminaries in biology from around the world to a conference in Paris. 

As an eminent evolutionary biologist, Haldane was among the summoned. Afterwards, Haldane wrote that he had found the conference helpful, because he learned the views of other scientists on the matter. He wrote: 

One thing that came clearly out of our discussion is that there was no evidence for inborn differences in any important aptitudes between people of different races. Certainly their performances are very different… It is only when the children of other races have been brought up like Europeans that the differences disappear. Fortunately this has happened often enough to tell a clear story. Thus on the whole American Red Indians have rather low intelligences quotients, and their half-breeds with whites are somewhere in between. But a number of Red Indian children adopted by whites did just as well as white children, and the children of the Caegi tribe, who used some of the money got from oil found on their territory to build schools, did equally well. There are also a few converse cases, as where poor whites on a small West Indian island did no better than their negro neighbours.

When the UNESCO statement was released in 1951, it presented these conclusions: 

When intelligence tests, even non-verbal, are made on a group of non-literate people, their scores are usually lower than those of more civilized people. It has also been recorded that even different groups of the same race occupying similarly high levels of civilization may also yield considerable differences in intelligence tests. When, however, the two groups have been brought up from childhood in similar environments the differences are usually very slight. There is good evidence that, given similar opportunities, the median performance (that is to say, the performance of the individual who is representative because he is surpassed by as many as he surpasses), and the variation around it, do not differ from one race to another.

Therefore, they concluded, any psychological attribute common to a group of people “is more likely to be due to a common history and social background” than to race. 

In other words, Lord Monboddo and Charles Darwin were wrong about humankind, and the centuries-old racial paradigm was finally at an end. This meant that a crucial piece of evidence in Darwin’s Descent of Man was also gone — though I’m not aware that Haldane ever acknowledged that. 

Environmental Pressure 

C. S. Lewis would not have been surprised. Since he was well aware of the limits of his scientific expertise, he was wary of getting involved in any scientific debates. But as an expert in the history of ideas, he knew that scientific theories don’t appear ex nihilo, but rather emerge out of the primordial intellectual soup of their time. When the environment changes, the theory either evolves or goes extinct. 

Haldane was no dummy3, and he also understood that the science of his day was fallible. But he was slower to skepticism than Lewis, because he believed science had a saving grace: the ease with which scientists accept new data. Haldane wrote: 

T]he experience of the past makes it clear that many of our most cherished scientific theories contain so much falsehood as to deserve the title of myths… The main objection to religious myths [in contrast] is that, once made, they are so difficult to destroy. Chemistry is not haunted by the phlogiston theory as Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices.

This is partly true. Haldane is right that most scientific theories die easily and do not leave a haunting ghost. But that is because most scientific theories do not merit intense emotional investment. No one cares too much about, say, the structure of bromine, or the atmosphere of Mars. Granted, people tend to have an emotional investment in the theories they themselves invented or have publicly defended — but when those scientists die, the scientific community usually moves on. 

But a few scientific theories do provoke strong emotional investment. These are theories that have implications about the things humans find most important: who we are, what we’re made for, who gets to decide the ultimate meaning of our lives, whether we will continue to exist after death (for better or worse), whether or not we’re allowed to have sex with the person we want to have sex with at a given moment…etc. In those cases, we should expect a dead scientific theory to leave a haunting for a long time, just as a religious theories do. 

Modern Darwinism has been undergoing severe environmental pressure since the time of J. B. S. Haldane, including (among other things) from new evidence on race and human origins. Neither Darwinism nor scientific racialism has given up the ghost easily, though there have been many efforts to extricate the former from the latter. In my next post, we’ll consider some contemporary challenges neo-Darwinists face in their attempt to make the theory retroactively imply racial equality.

Notes

1.Haldane was so pleased with it that he included it in one of his essay anthologies, despite admitting that it didn’t really fit.

2.Haldane, J. B. S. (1927). “Science and Theology as Art Forms.” In Of Possible Worlds and Other Essays, pages 228-231. Chatto and Windus. 

3.Except when it came to Joseph Stalin

Darwinists' secular myths are sacrosanct?

 Challenged on the “1 Percent” Myth, Smithsonian Gives a Meaningless Non-Answer

David Klinghoffer

Casey Luskin broke the bombshell story that a Nature paper published in April had overturned an evolutionary icon: the endlessly repeated statistic that human and chimp DNA are separated by a difference of just “1 percent” or so. Science media and educators brandish the figure to show that human beings are little more than just fancy chimpanzees. In fact, buried deep in the Supplemental Data of the paper (“Complete sequencing of ape genomes”) was the reality that the difference is more like 15 percent.

Journalist Elizabeth Shenk at World Magazine interviewed Dr. Luskin, the CSC’s Associate Director, alongside a co-author of the study, University of Washington geneticist Evan Eichler. Luskin has written to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, asking that that the misleading signage (e.g., “You and chimpanzees [are] 98.8% genetically similar”) be corrected to match the new data.

A Reasonable Request

That seems like a reasonable thing to ask of the country’s top science museum. But as Shenk notes, the Smithsonian has dodged the request. From, “Architect or ancestry? New research casts scientific doubt on traditional evolutionary theory”:

Casey Luskin, a geologist and lawyer at Discovery Institute, says this disproves the theory of a 1% difference. He added that the gap between the human genome and the chimp genome is “basically representing sections of the genomes that are so different that you can’t align them together to figure out exactly what is the percent difference.” Now Luskin and Discovery Institute are demanding the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History take down displays using outdated research arguing for common ancestry. The Smithsonian replied that, if it ever updates its numbers, it will take the study into account.

Luskin doesn’t see the similarities between human and ape DNA as proof of common ancestry. He explained how computer programmers borrow code and engineers use car wheels for planes — all to serve a specific purpose. “It’s a good design principle to reuse parts that work in different designs. The fact that we share a lot of similar DNA with the chimp could simply reflect the fact that we are built upon a common blueprint,” Luskin insists. “It shows common design, which could explain those similarities just as well as common descent. 

Note to the President

Ah, so to a plea for scientific accuracy, the nation’s own museum has replied by providing a meaningless non-answer. Dr. Luskin’s letter, republished here at Evolution News, documents the inaccurate signage. Another display repeats the falsehood: “There is only about a 1.2 percent genetic difference between modern humans and chimpanzees throughout much their genetic code.” Note to President Trump: I find it pretty disrespectful to the people who pay the bills at the Smithsonian (namely, American taxpayers) to refuse to provide a meaningful reply when questioned on a scientific point with profound implications. Don’t you?

More memories of an iconoclast.

 Jonathan Wells Cleared the Ground for Intelligent Design

Andrew McDiarmid

Before the positive case for intelligent design can be received effectively, the case against the Darwinian evolutionary mechanism must be clearly laid out. One man who was instrumental in this initial “ground clearing operation” was biologist Dr. Jonathan Wells, our friend and colleague who passed away in 2024 at the age of 82. On this ID the Future, I welcome Dr. Jay Richards to the podcast to share his memories of Dr. Wells and discuss the significance of Wells’s life and work. 

The conversation highlights Wells’s early and deep understanding of biological complexity, even in the late 1990s. Richards recalls Wells explaining that the information in organisms goes “way beyond” the sequential information in DNA. Wells perceived “orders of information” and “extra sources of information” coordinating organismal development, which couldn’t simply be located in DNA. He had a sense of the immateriality of the Genome, much like that of his friend Richard Sternberg, and anticipated the need for new categories and theories to account for what happens in organisms.

Dr.. Richards also describes his experience working closely with Wells on the classic work Icons of Evolution. Wells’s 2000 book was highly accessible and served as part of that necessary “ground clearing operation” showing that the reigning Darwinian explanation was inadequate by examining its pedagogical tools and claims, such as the infamous and long-known-inaccurate Haeckel’s embryos. Wells argued in Icons that Darwinism made predictions contrary to evidence and was a “paradigm that’s either spent or really never fit the facts.”

The episode also covers Wells’s intense work on Getting the Facts Straight, a viewer’s guide to the 2001 PBS series Evolution, which failed to accurately represent shortcomings of Darwinian theory and dismissed its critics. Wells was the primary author on the viewer’s guide, working diligently for weeks on it. The critique aimed to counter the series, especially because it was also turned into curricula for use in public schools across America. Download the podcast or listen to it here .

More grounds for denying darwinism

 

The line between science and pseudoscience just keeps getting thinner?

 How the “Scientific Community” Undermines Its Own Trustworthiness

David Coppedge

Leading spokespersons for science are complaining about the decline of public trust in their craft. They don’t need anyone to explain why this is happening. Their own journals contain the evidence. It’s time for a scientific revolution: an ethical revolution. Scientists need to clean up their act. Listen to their own confessions.

Peer Review: The Collapse Collapses

One of the strongest props for scientism has been peer review. This practice is meant to promote objectivity and accuracy in scientific publishing and weed out fraud and pseudoscience. The alleged lack of peer review has been used to bash design advocates (here). Inside the sausage factory of peer review, though, the atmosphere stinks, as many scientists know. Complaints against the practice have been increasing in intensity in the last two decades. Denyse O’Leary reported last year that it may be beyond reform.

To add insult to injury, Alexander Goldberg and six colleagues found that “peer reviews of peer reviews” are similarly flawed. Their randomized controlled test of studies that rank the effectiveness of peer reviews, published in PLOS ONE, found stink all the way up:

              In this work, we analyze the reliability of peer reviewing peer reviews. We find that many problems that exist in peer reviews of papers — inconsistencies, biases, miscalibration, subjectivity — also exist in peer reviews of peer reviews. In particular, while reviews of reviews may be useful in designing better incentives for high-quality reviewing and to measure effects of policy choices in peer review, considerable care must be taken when interpreting reviews of reviews as a sign of review quality

 implies, of course, that we cannot even trust the work of Goldberg and team in this paper. Who peer reviewed this “peer review of peer reviews” anyway? Only fallible humans, often too lazy to take “considerable care” when seeking the truth about a matter.

Procuring input from peers makes common sense, but such is not unique to science. Historians, teachers, and artists know the value of seeking wise advice from knowledgeable peers. To treat peer review in science as a reliable means to accuracy is naïve. The practice relies on the ethics of fallible humans, varies in its methodology from one field to another, and is subject to perverse incentives. Predatory journals have been on the rise, pretending to be peer reviewed but with low standards. Besides, many of the most epochal ideas in science were not peer reviewed. Principia, anyone?

Hiding Evidence

The “file drawer problem” leads invariably to biased reporting. It refers to scientists deciding not to report negative results. The silence creates an impression that research is making progress. This issue was brought to attention in 2014 by Franco et al. in Science, before the Open Science movement gained momentum.

Philip Moniz et al. stated in PNAS on March 2, “The file drawer problem — often operationalized in terms of statistically significant results being published and statistically insignificant not being published — is widely documented in the social sciences.” With two colleagues, Moniz sought to extend Franco’s work.

We examine projects begun after Franco et al. The updated period coincides with the contemporary open science movement. We find evidence of the problem, stemming from scholars opting to not write up insignificant results. However, that tendency is substantially smaller than it was in the prior decade. This suggests increased recognition of the importance of null results, even if the problem remains in the domain of survey experiments.

This sounds like a blindfolded person in Blind Man’s Bluff acting as his own caller: “I’m getting warmer.” How do the three know that the progress is being made in solving the file drawer problem, when they used flawed “survey experiments” themselves to come to that conclusion? They paid respondents to answer their questions. How objective is that? Some day in the future they may figure out the extent of the problem.

The file drawer problem we document appears to stem from researchers’ choices to not write up or submit null results. We cannot dismiss the possibility that those decisions correlate with other parts of the studies, meaning that they would not have been accepted if written/submitted. This highlights the importance of future work looking at other study aspects such as sponsors, the contribution relative to prior work, and so on, as well as variation in journal processes and prestige…. As null results become more acceptable, these types of factors may become more influential in the publication process.

Notice what “these types of factors” have in common: human fallibility. Scientists chose not to write up or submit null results, biasing the corpus of scientific literature toward the illusion of progress. Don’t imagine that this problem is limited to the social sciences. It’s human nature to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.

The Gollum Grasp

There’s another human foible messing up trust in science: the “Gollum Effect.” “It’s mine! My precious data.” This foible goes back centuries, leading to historic priority battles over scientific discoveries. But isn’t science supposed to rise above petty squabbles for the good of the world? Maybe in idyllic poetry it is, but often not in practice. Researchers at German universities in Wittenberg and Leipzig state that “the ‘Gollum effect’ hinders research and careers.” They begin with the Pollyana word “should” —

Scientific research should serve the good of mankind, which is why data is not kept under lock and key and findings are shared openly. “Unfortunately, the academic world does not always live up to this ideal. Possessiveness, exclusion, and the hoarding of data, resources and ideas are widespread issues,” explains Dr Jose Valdez, a biodiversity researcher at MLU and iDiv. The phenomenon is known as the “Gollum effect”, a term coined by the researchers themselves and inspired by the tragic character in “The Lord of the Rings” — a figure so fixated on a magic ring that his obsession pulls him into the abyss. “In science, possessive behaviour undermines scientific progress and disproportionately impacts early-career and lessed establish researchers,” says Valdez.

In a survey of 563 scientists in 64 countries, half the respondents said they “had experienced the phenomenon themselves.” But didn’t we just learn that survey experiments suffer from lower credibility?

The consequences of the Gollum effect can be serious. Over two thirds of those surveyed reported significant career setbacks. Many were forced to abandon their research topics, change research groups and institutes, or even leave science altogether. Only a third of those had experienced the Gollum effect said that they took any actions to defend themselves. Nearly a fifth of respondents even admitted to likely having displayed Gollum-like behaviour themselves.

And Now This

Just when these problems were shattering trust in scientism, this appeared: AI fakery. Nature warns, “Fake AI images will cause headaches for journals.” Even experts and peer reviewers have been demonstrably fooled by AI-generated images of tissues, tests have shown. Ralf Mrowka in Germany looked into methods of generating fake images.

The fabrications have reached a level of quality “that will give editors, reviewers and readers a hard time”, he says. “Once I have trained an AI model to generate this type of data, I can generate endless new fake images” and also make modifications to them, he adds. 

Nature reporter Dalmeet Singh Chawla said, “The race is on to build tools that can detect fraudulent AI-generated images in research.” Perhaps they will succeed, but this may be an ongoing spy-vs-spy saga as engineers try to design better tools for distinguishing authenticity from fakery.

But it gets worse. Nature worries that “AI-generated literature reviews threaten scientific progress.” AI is getting so good it can generate fake scientific papers, graphics and all, that can fool reviewers. What’s more, even the reviewers can be fake! What’s coming next? Will humans turn over science to humanoid robots? Built and trained by fallible humans, would they not reflect the same fallibility of their creators?

Ethics for Me but Not for Thee

With hands over their self-righteous hearts, Christine Coughlin and Nancy M. P. King of Wake Forest University write at The Conversation that “Science requires ethical oversight” — after which they launch into a political tirade against the current U.S. administration for cutting NIH funds they deem necessary to prevent research abuse. It’s odd they had nothing to say about ethical abuses at the NIH under the prior administration (see here, here, and here).

Regardless of one’s political view, it must seem highly out of line for institutional science to be wholeheartedly supportive of one party and critical of the other, something I witness almost daily in my scouring of science headlines. This, I feel, is the major reason for the declining trust in science. Political partisanship damages the reputation of science and its ideal of objectivity.

The Solution: Integrity

None of us knows everything. We need the freedom to share ideas and debate them. That is why groupthink hinders science. As long as the nebulous “scientific community” acts politically partisan and censors skeptics of Darwinism and materialism, it will continue to lose public trust. Open debate can help bring our fallibilities to the surface, where they can be exposed and corrected. Each interlocutor, though, must value integrity above all. 

Other writers here at Evolution News (Klinghoffer, Egnor, Gauger) have spoken out on the decline of integrity in science. Integrity means valuing truth over self. It means being honest with one’s own work when alone, being willing to stand against power and groupthink, and being willing to admit failure even when it costs. Integrity is a very un-Darwinian trait because it can decrease one’s fitness in a crazy world of liars and temptations. 

Integrity is also un-Darwinian in that it cannot evolve. If shoved into a Hegelian triad it might theoretically evolve into its own antithesis, collapsing in a heap of confusion. If science departments in our schools and universities return to an emphasis on integrity in every course, some alert students may reason that integrity cannot be a product of natural selection.

Integrity by its nature is eternal. Knowledge can accumulate, but integrity must stand rock solid against the winds of change. Scientists have undermined their own credibility of late, but whenever integrity is nurtured and takes root in science, it will produce the fruit of trustworthiness.