On making new gods II

The accompanying Commentary  reinforces the point made in part 1 of this topic.

Recently the Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt, a book that raises many questions about the theory of evolution. As his title tells us, Darwin himself shared one of these doubts. The book has sold well, reaching #7 on the New York Timesbestseller list, #4 on the Los Angeles Times list, and #10 on Publishers Weekly.

Organisms are intelligently designed, says Meyer, who has a PhD from Cambridge University in the philosophy of science. His book is an education, demanding attentive reading but no specialized knowledge. To a large extent it uses the facts and arguments of professional biologists, some bordering on open dissent from the orthodoxy.

Darwin’s Doubt has also been subjected to a barrage of what can only be called hate. “Mendacious intellectual pornography” is among the more inventive descriptions. Hundreds of negative comments appeared on Amazon review page within hours of the 498-page book’s publication.

Donald Prothero, a geologist and research associate at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, typified many when he said that Meyer is a “fool,” “incompetent,” guilty of “ignorance,” in “way over his head,” with a “completely false understanding of the subject.” Further, Meyer argues “dishonestly,” promotes a “fundamental lie,” promotes a “fairy tale,” and so on.

Would a scientist make his case that way if he had real arguments? Prothero did attempt a few substantive criticisms, but inadvertently demonstrated that he had not read Meyer’s chapters that had already addressed them. Prothero, in truth, hankers after creationism as his preferred target. But Meyer’s book is devoid of creationism or biblical references. It’s all science.

Along with the attacks, we find more and more biologists recognizing that intelligent design (ID) is a serious endeavor. Meyer’s book has been praised by George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School; Scott Turner, a professor of biology at SUNY; Russell Carlson, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Georgia and a dozen others. George Gilder, most recently the author of Knowledge and Power, calls Darwin’s Doubt “the best science book ever written.”

So what is going on? A clue was provided by Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, published last year and the subject of a Weekly Standardcover story (“The Heretic”) by former American Spectator writer Andy Ferguson. But before discussing Nagel, who encountered his own shower of brickbats, I’ll say a little more about Darwin’s Doubt.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species claimed that organisms arose by random variation and natural selection, which must have been a slow business. But the fossil record shows that the major animal forms appeared without visible predecessors — an event known as the Cambrian Explosion. As the Darwinian rulebook regards such sudden changes as highly improbable, the evolutionists encounter two problems: insufficient time and missing fossils.

The Cambrian explosion occurred about 530 million years ago. More recent discoveries in China showed that the new phyla — for example arthropods, chordates, and brachiopods — appeared within a ten-million-year period. Others say the “explosive” period took only 5 to 6 million years. Compared with the reported three-billion year history of life on earth, the Cambrian explosion is the equivalent of just a few minutes in a 24-hour day. It happened in a geological blink.

The Chinese discoveries confirmed what had already been found at the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. No plausible ancestors have yet been found in lower strata, either in Canada or China. Some of the Cambrian creatures are highly complex. Among the earliest are well-preserved trilobites, with lens-focusing eyes and a 360-degree field of vision. “Not so primitive,” as Meyer writes.

Cambrian phyla were originally discovered in Wales. Darwin knew about them and realized that unless ancestors were found, his theory was in trouble. So the problem has been understood for over 150 years.

Meyer’s discussion of the problem is unrivaled in its detail and clarity. He covers the various escape routes that Darwinians have proposed. Maybe, for example, the antecedent forms lacked hard parts and so couldn’t fossilize? Awkward fact: Lots of soft-bodied organisms from the pre-Cambrian have been preserved, but they don’t get us closer to a solution.

Another chapter discusses what is known as punctuated equilibrium. The paleontologist Niles Eldredge became an expert on the ancient trilobites. At first it bothered him that they were all so similar. Then he concluded that “the absence of change” was itself significant. Stasis was “data,” not a mere artifact. With Stephen Jay Gould, he formulated “punctuated equilibrium,” which became well known. Long periods when animal forms are static, they theorized, are punctuated by periods in which new forms of animal life arise quickly — so quickly we can’t expect them to leave a record.

Years ago, speaking in a tone of subdued irony for my benefit, Donn Rosen, a curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, wryly summarized what is involved: “Darwin said that speciation occurred too slowly for us to see it. Gould and Eldredge said it occurred too quickly for us to see it. Either way we don’t see it.”

More formally, Meyer shows that “punk eek” doesn’t work out as hoped. Not only have those fleeting ancestors not appeared anywhere, the proponents of punctuated equilibrium never came up with a mechanism that could plausibly produce so much anatomical change so quickly.

Meyer also describes how work in statistical paleontology has undermined the idea that the missing ancestral fossils are merely an artifact of incomplete sampling. If you hunt in lots of different places and keep unearthing the same old specimens, it becomes ever harder to maintain that you still haven’t looked hard enough. Maybe the missing ones never were there to begin with.

A generation ago, Colin Patterson, the senior paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said in a public forum that he didn’t know of any evidence for evolution. There was some grumbling, but he knew that the crucial evidence was missing. And like Thomas Nagel today, he emphasized that he was an atheist — this was no creationist speaking.

IN THE SECOND PART of Meyer’s book, “How to Build an Animal,” the argument changes. Meyer shows that building new animal body plans requires the origin of new genetic information and “epigenetic” information (biological information stored in places outside of DNA). He shows the Cambrian explosion is not just an explosion of new forms of animal life, but an explosion of the information or instructions necessary to build them.

But to generate new information, neo-Darwinism relies on mutations — random changes in the arrangement of the chemical “bases” that function like alphabetic characters in the genetic text stored in DNA. And to build whole new animals, lots of major mutations are needed, but most are lethal.

The geneticist Hermann J. Muller, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1946, bombarded fruit flies with X-rays, which he thought would “speed up evolution.” But nothing came of it. Fruit flies not killed by the X-rays remained fruit flies. Also, mutations that occur early in embryonic development are always lethal — generating “dead animals incapable of further evolution,” as Meyer writes. Late-acting mutations may be viable, but these “do not affect global animal architectures.” Hence the Darwinian dilemma: “Major changes are not viable; viable changes are not major.”

Here Meyer also demonstrates the mathematical implausibility of the neo-Darwinian explanation for the origin of new genetic information. The speedy appearance of animals with new body plans creates a big statistical problem. Its key point is easily grasped. Guessing a one-digit number might be easy and won’t take that long. But guessing a ten or a one hundred digit number will likely take you a very long time. In biology, random mutations are equivalent to the “guesses” and the DNA and proteins are like numbers with hundreds or thousands of precisely arranged digits. The “right guess” corresponds to a DNA sequence that will produce a new protein with some heritable “adaptive” benefit for the offspring.

In all animals we find intricately folded proteins made of hundreds of precisely arranged sequences of amino acids. Meyer cites the work of molecular biologist Douglas Axe who has shown that generating even just one new protein by mutating DNA at random has a prohibitively small chance of ever occurring even on the scale of evolutionary deep time. The number of amino acid combinations that mutations much search vastly exceeds the time that is available to evolutionary history, let alone the brief period of the Cambrian explosion.

It gets worse. The improbability of a right guess, or sequence, must be multiplied over and over, because the next mutation could cancel the first. Imagine you are on a desert island with buried treasure, and X marks the spot. You hope to find the X by taking random steps. You may indeed soon step in the right direction. But you have no way of knowing which direction that is. So your second step may return you to square one. The standard Darwinian view takes no account of mutations that reverse the progress made.

In addition, proteins and genes cannot be randomly changed much at all without degrading their function. They are equivalent to small islands of function surrounded by huge seas of disorder. There is no way to “walk” from one island to another and still survive.

Yet, transitions from one body plan to another must be viable at every stage. Darwin once argued that bears may have been ancestral to whales. Consider the difficulty. A brilliant engineer might conceivably know how to assemble a whale out of molecules, amino acids, DNA, proteins, and all its other parts. No one remotely knows how to do this. But let’s posit an engineer of superhuman skill.

Then you give him the bad news. In making the bear-to-whale transition, the ever-modifying creature has to continue living, breathing, and reproducing even as those changes are taking place. That would be like telling a naval architect that he has to redesign an army tank into a submarine, but at every transition the vehicle has to function as a weapon of war. By the way, it must also be able to give birth to baby submarines.

IN THE THIRD PART of his book, Meyer outlines his positive case for intelligent design. Ironically, here he uses the same principle of scientific reasoning that Darwin used in the Origin. Darwin subscribed to a principle of scientific reasoning known as the Vera Causaprinciple. This asserts that scientists should seek to explain events in the remote past by causes “now in operation.” Meyer applies this to the question of the origin of the information necessary to produce new forms of animal life. He argues that the only known cause of the origin of the kind of digital information that arises in the Cambrian explosion is intelligent activity. He quotes the information theorist Henry Quastler who stated that “the creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity.” Thus, he concludes, using Darwin’s principle, that intelligent design provides the best explanation for the Cambrian information explosion.

If a correct scientific theory is pursued, we expect new knowledge to comport with the theory. Yet recent discoveries, especially in molecular biology, were not foreseen and have weakened Darwinism. For example, Darwin’s German contemporary and supporter Ernst Haeckel viewed the cell as a simple lump of “protoplasm.” Now we know that it is a hi-tech nano-factory complicated beyond comprehension. A cell can also reproduce itself, something no man-made machine has yet been able to do.

It is said that intelligent design makes no predictions, but it does, and one has been dramatically confirmed. William Dembski, the author of several ID books, predicted in 1998: “On an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If on the other hand organisms are designed, we expect DNA as much as possible to exhibit function.” The “junk DNA” theory has been supported by most leading biologists, including NIH Director Francis Collins.

But Dembski’s view was confirmed last year by prestigious science journals, including Nature. They published papers on the ENCODE project, challenging the view that DNA contains mostly a record of the “errors” in the Darwinian process. ENCODE reported last year that over 80% of DNA in the human genome “serves some purpose, biochemically speaking.” Earlier, 98% had been considered junk.

Meyer also reviews the “Rules of Science” decreeing what is permitted if an investigation is to be called scientific. “Methodological naturalism” is the main one today: Only material causes are permitted. That rule is the basis for Darwinian accusations that ID is creationism. ID does admit non-material causes, thereby flouting the (recently imposed) rule obliging scientists to adhere to naturalism all the way.

Yet science itself abounds with non-material entities. Information is non-material and if it is essential for building organisms, how is it transmitted to the three-dimensional world of matter? There’s an obvious parallel, Meyer points out. How are the decisions we make in our own conscious minds transmitted to the world of physical matter? We know every day that we can transform our mental decisions into physical acts. We choose to lift our arm, and it lifts.

Neuroscience hopes to explain this materially — to show how the brain’s nerve endings translate into consciousness, thence into acts. But one may predict that they will keep looking for a long time, because the gulf separating matter and consciousness is greater than that separating us from the remotest galaxy. That doesn’t mean that mind is too remote, unreal, or can be excluded from science. Mind is within us and nothing can be closer. Without it, the very ideas, theories, and arguments of science wouldn’t exist.

If our own minds can disturb matter in ways that cannot be explained by materialists, is it not possible that some larger or more encompassing Mind can impact the world of nature? No, say the materialists. Why not? Because, in their philosophy, matter is all that exists. That’s why they call themselves materialists. And that is why Thomas Nagel’s book is so significant. His book is subtitled “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” Incidentally, Nagel has also gone out of his way to praise Stephen Meyer.

Even though Nagel is a prominent philosopher with an endowed chair at New York University, his book was reviled by prominent evolutionists — so much so that the New Republic called them “Darwinian dittoheads.” In Britain, the Guardian newspaper called Mind and Cosmos “the most despised science book of 2012.” Maybe Meyer will win that honor in 2013.

Materialism, sometimes called naturalism, is the belief that matter — molecules in motion — is all that exists. Everything else: mind, consciousness, spirit — must somehow be reduced to the orchestrated firing of neurons. It was this bleak philosophy that Nagel challenged.

The point is that if matter is all that exists, then something like Darwinism must be true, because highly complex organisms are real; not just men but mice, and on down to bacteria. How did they get here, in a purely material world? They must have accumulated themselves, bit by accidental bit, over a very long period. Which is close to being a re-description of Darwin’s theory. Darwin wrote in a notebook that he was a materialist himself, but hardly dare say so openly. His theory of evolution by natural selection was his attempt to confine science to an exclusive reliance on material causes.

It follows that those Darwinists who are also materialists — most of them are — can take this philosophy as their backstop and relax. They don’t have to master or rebut ID arguments. They don’t even have to listen to them. Their science is already built into their philosophy. But if Nagel’s doubts about materialism hold up (and few laymen really accept materialism in the first place, because it denies free will and we know that consciousness is real), then the idea that there never was much to support Darwinism may one day be accepted. It was extrapolated from the observed facts of variation; it was assumed but has never been demonstrated.

This much is clear: The Darwinists cannot live with ID as their enemy. They can easily co-exist with creationism, but that came from the Bible, which can be dismissed in our secular age. They rage at ID, on the other hand, because it challenges them in what they have seen as their strong suit: Science.

On Higher education V

On Higher EducationVI

Jehovah's servants Champions of civil liberty.

Jehovah’s Witnesses were unlikely champions of religious freedom.
BY SARAH BARRINGER GORDON

One of the most momentous cases on the Supreme Court docket as war raged globally in 1943 was about a single sentence said aloud by schoolchildren every day. They stood, held their right hands over their hearts or in a raised-arm salute and began, “I pledge allegiance to the flag…” To most Americans the pledge was a solemn affirmation of national unity, especially at a time when millions of U.S. troops were fighting overseas. But the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious sect renowned for descending en masse on small towns or city neighborhoods and calling on members of other faiths to “awake” and escape the snare of the devil and his minions, felt otherwise. They insisted that pledging allegiance to the flag was a form of idolatry akin to the worship of graven images prohibited by the Bible. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Walter Barnett (whose surname was misspelled by a court clerk) argued that the constitutional rights of his daughters Marie, 8, and Gathie, 9, were violated when they were expelled from Slip Hill Grade School near Charleston, W.Va., for refusing to recite the pledge.

In a landmark decision written by Justice Robert Jackson and announced on Flag Day, June 14, the Supreme Court sided with the Witnesses. “To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds,” Jackson said. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses were unlikely champions of religious freedom. The sect’s leaders denounced all other religions and all secular governments as tools of the devil, and preached the imminence of the Apocalypse, during which no one except Jehovah’s Witnesses would be spared. But their persistence in fighting in the courts for their beliefs had a dramatic impact on constitutional law. Barnette is just one of several major Supreme Court decisions involving freedom of religion, speech, assembly and conscience that arose from clashes between Jehovah’s Witnesses and government authorities. The Witnesses insisted that God’s law demanded they refrain from all pledges of allegiance to earthly governments. They tested the nation’s tolerance of controversial beliefs and led to an increasing recognition that a willingness to embrace religious diversity is what distinguishes America from tyrannical regimes.

The Witness sect was founded in the 1870s, and caused a stir when the founder, Charles Taze Russell, a haberdasher in Pittsburgh, predicted the world would come to an end in 1914. Russell died in 1916; he was succeeded by his lawyer Joseph Franklin Rutherford, who shrewdly emphasized that the Apocalypse was near, but not so near that Witnesses didn’t have time to convert new followers, which they were required to do lest they miss out on salvation. This “blood guilt” propelled in-your-face proselytizing by Witnesses in various communities on street corners and in door-to-door visits. Soon the sect developed a reputation for exhibiting “astonishing powers of annoyance,” as one legal commentator put it.

Rutherford ruled the Witnesses with an iron fist. He routinely encouraged public displays of contempt for “Satan’s world,” which included all other religions and all secular governments. At the time, the number of Witnesses in the U.S.—roughly 40,000—was so small that many Americans could ignore them. But in Nazi Germany, no group was too small to escape the eye of new chancellor Adolf Hitler, who banned the Witnesses after they refused to show their fealty to him with the mandatory “Heil Hitler” raised-arm salute. (Many Witnesses would later perish in his death camps.) In response, Rutherford praised the German Witnesses and advised all of his followers to refuse to participate in any oaths of allegiance that violated (in his view) the Second Commandment: “Thou shall have no Gods before me.”

With conflict looming around the world in the 1930s, many states enacted flag salute requirements, especially in schools. The steadfast refusal of Witnesses to pledge, combined with their refusal to serve in the military or to support America’s war effort in any way, triggered public anger. Witnesses soon became a ubiquitous presence in courtrooms across the country.

The relationship between Witnesses and the courts was complicated, in part because of the open disdain Rutherford and his followers displayed toward all forms of government and organized religion. Rutherford instructed Witnesses not to vote, serve on juries or participate in other civic duties. He even claimed Social Security numbers were the “mark of the beast” foretold in Revelations. The Catholic Church, said Rutherford, was a “racket,” and Protestants and Jews were “great simpletons,” taken in by the Catholic hierarchy to “carry on her commercial, religious traffic and increase her revenues.” Complaints about unwelcome public proselytizing by Witnesses led to frequent run-ins with state and local authorities and hundreds of appearances in lower courts. Every day in court for Rutherford and the Witnesses’ chief attorney, Hayden Covington, was an opportunity to preach the true meaning of law to the judges and to confront the satanic government.

In late 1935, Witness Walter Gobitas’ two children—Lillian, 12, and Billy, 10—were expelled from school in Minersville, Pa., because they balked at the mandatory recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, and a long court battle ensued. When Gobitis v. Minersville School District (as with Barnette, a court clerk misspelled the family surname) made its way to the Supreme Court in the spring of 1940, Rutherford and Covington framed their argument in religious terms, claiming that any statute contrary to God’s law as given to Moses must be void. The Court rejected the Witnesses’ claim, holding that the secular interests of the school district in fostering patriotism were paramount. In the majority opinion, written during the same month that France fell to the Nazis, Felix Frankfurter wrote: “National unity is the basis of national security.” The plaintiffs, said Frankfurter, were free to “fight out the wise use of legislative authority in the forum of public opinion and before legislative assemblies.”

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Harlan Stone argued that “constitutional guarantees or personal liberty are not always absolutes…but it is a long step, and one which I am unwilling to take, that government may, as a supposed educational measure…compel public affirmations which violate their public conscience.” Further, said Stone, the prospect of help for this “small and helpless minority” by the political process was so remote that Frankfurter had effectively “surrendered…the liberty of small minorities to the popular will.”

Public reaction to Gobitis bordered on hysteria, colored by the hotly debated prospect of American participation in the war in Europe. Some vigilantes interpreted the Supreme Court’s decision as a signal that Jehovah’s Witnesses were traitors who might be linked to a network of Nazi spies and saboteurs. In Imperial, a town outside Pittsburgh, a mob descended on a small group of Witnesses and pummeled them mercilessly. One Witness was beaten unconscious, and those who fled were cornered by ax- and knife-wielding men riding the town’s fire truck as someone yelled, “Get the ropes! Bring the flag!” In Kennebunk, Maine, the Witnesses’ gathering place, Kingdom Hall, was ransacked and torched, and days of rioting ensued. In Litchfield, Ill., an angry crowd spread an American flag on the hood of a car and watched while a man repeatedly smashed the head of a Witness upon it. In Rockville, Md., Witnesses were assaulted across the street from the police station, while officers stood and watched. By the end of the year, the American Civil Liberties Union estimated that 1,500 Witnesses had been assaulted in 335 separate attacks.

The reversal of Gobitis in Barnette just three years later was remarkably swift considering the typical pace of deliberations in the Supreme Court. In the wake of all the violence against Witnesses, three Supreme Court justices—William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy and Hugo Black—publicly signaled in a separate case that they thought Gobitis had been “wrongly decided.” When Barnette reached the Supreme Court in 1943, Harlan Stone, the lone dissenter in Gobitis, had risen to chief justice. The facts of the two cases mirrored each other, but the outcome differed dramatically. Most important, in ruling that Witness children could not be forced to recite the pledge, the new majority rejected the notion that legislatures, rather than the courts, were the proper place to address questions involving religious liberty. The “very purpose” of the Bill of Rights, wrote Justice Robert Jackson, was to protect some issues from the majority rule of politics. “One’s right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, may not be submitted to vote….Fundamental rights depend on the outcome of no elections.” Jackson’s opinion was laced with condemnation of enforced patriotism and oblique hints at the slaughter taking place in Hitler’s Europe. “Those who begin in coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters,” Jackson wrote. “Compulsory unification of opinions achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” Religious dissenters, when seen from this perspective, are like the canary in the coal mine: When they begin to suffer and die, everyone should be worried that the atmosphere has been polluted by tyranny.

Today, the Witnesses still proselytize, but their right to do so is well established thanks to their long legal campaign. Over time they became less confrontational and blended into the fabric of American life.

In the wake of the Barnette decision, the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance continued to occupy a key (yet ambiguous) place in American politics and law. The original pledge was a secular oath, with no reference to any power greater than the United States of America. The phrase “under God” was added by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower on Flag Day, June 14, 1954. Eisenhower, who had grown up in a Jehovah’s Witness household but later became a Presbyterian, alluded to the growing threat posed by Communists in the Soviet Union and China when he signed the bill: “In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resources in peace and war.”

Eisenhower’s political instincts for the ways that religion functioned in American life were finely honed: Support for the amendment to the Pledge of Allegiance was strong, including an overwhelming majority of Catholics and Protestants as well as a majority of Jews. According to a Gallup survey, the only group that truly opposed the change was the smattering of atheists. In a country locked in battle with godless communism, a spiritual weapon such as an amended pledge that was not denominationally specific made sense. Only after the intervening half-century and more does the “Judeo-Christian” God invoked in the pledge seem less than broadly inclusive.

Sarah Barringer Gordon is the author of The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America.

Darwin and Hitler.

unsettling "Settled science"

Tom Wolfe and the "Kudzu" of "Settled Science"
Evolution News & Views

Writing in Commentary, Andrew Ferguson offers a fantastic review of Tom Wolfe's takedown of Darwin, The Kingdom of Speech.

On Jerry Coyne's review in the Washington Post:

The reviewer was Jerry Coyne, a biologist from the University of Chicago and a volunteer border cop who patrols the perimeter where science and popular culture meet, making sure that scientists are accorded the proper deference. The Kingdom of Speech is deeply transgressive in this way. Wolfe makes sport of scientific pretensions generally and neo-Darwinian pretensions specifically, and Coyne, a neo-Darwinist to the soles of his Birkenstocks, isn't going to let a mere journalist, or even a Grand Old Man of Letters, get away with it.

Fact-check: Coyne wears specially custom-handmade cowboy boots, not Birkenstocks. He must own closets full. We know because he spends a great deal of space on his evolution blog detailing this with accompanying photos of the boots both under construction and on his feet. Only imagined dialogues between a cat and a dog receive more attention. Even Wolfe would have a hard time spoofing Coyne. Otherwise this is spot-on.

More:

[Coyne] charges him with ignorance and unreason and, above all, presumption. Among scientists, this is a common reaction to an uppity layman. In their better moods, even scientific fundamentalists will tell you the glory of science lies in the endless empirical testing and revision of theories, the back-and-forth of assertion and rebuttal, the stuttering, incremental advance toward truth, the openness to dissent and new ideas. And most often that's what science is. Let an uncredentialed outsider sneak into the lab, however, asking rude questions about one theory or another, and -- wham! -- the back-and-forth is shut down and something called "settled science" rises in its place to keep the amateurs at bay.

In neo-Darwinism, the "settled science" has spread like kudzu, as more and more areas of human life, from morality to music, are recast as nothing more than the consequence of natural selection.

"Settled science" as kudzu infestation. A brilliant image.

On the role of human exceptionalism, and careerism, in the evolution debate:

You don't hear much about [Alfred Russel] Wallace anymore, and you hear even less about [Max] Muller, while their contemporary Darwin became, of course, one of the most famous men who ever lived. Human exceptionalism has a lot to do with their relative reputations. Wallace embraced it and so did Muller; indeed, they thought it was self- evident. Darwin didn't. And most scientists, especially fundamentalists like Jerry Coyne, have inherited Darwin's materialism as dogma. It's a good deal for scientists. After all, if everything we consider uniquely human is a consequence of purely materialistic processes, then the guys who study materialistic processes for a living hold the key to every human question. It's nice work if you can get it.

Marx had this much right: Ideas are strongly influenced by the way people choose to make a living. The practice of materialist science is self-confirming. The notion that scientists with a lifetime invested in drawing materialist conclusions would readily give fair consideration to ideas challenging the way they make their living is a joke.

Putting The Kingdom of Speech into the context of Wolfe's earlier books:

The Kingdom of Speech is popular intellectual history of the most exhilarating kind. Its closest antecedents came along nearly 40 years ago, both of them also by Wolfe. The Painted Word laid waste the world of abstract art, and From Bauhaus to Our House attacked the absurdities of modernist architecture. In all three of these books, Wolfe lampoons the reigning orthodoxy of our intellectual elites...

In conclusion:

Wolfe joins a small and hardy band of writers and other high-brows who take joy in staring down the bullies of scientism: Marilynne Robinson, David Berlinski, Wendell Berry, Thomas Nagel, a few others.


Berlinski, Nagel, Wolfe -- that is excellent company to be in. Read the rest here.

Power to the PC police?:Pros and cons.

A clash of Titans XXXII

Truth is dangerous III

Darwinism can't win even with loaded dice.

Researchers Ran a Massive Yearlong Experiment to Get Bacteria to Evolve. Guess What Happened?

Evolution News & Views

It's a struggle out there. You have to be fit to survive. When the pressure is on, nature favors the ones who can take the heat.

It's a theme that has been drummed into our heads since school. It's a cultural meme. Social Darwinists used it to justify atrocities -- see the new documentary The Biology of the Second Reich. Today's kinder, gentler Darwinists downplay the violence in the struggle for existence, yet the fact as they see it is inescapable: environmental circumstances select random genetic mutations that confer fitness, i.e., survival, by allowing organisms to adapt.

That in a nutshell explains the development of complex life forms. We're assured there are gobs of evidence for it, too.

Looking into a recent paper in PNAS about evolutionary fitness tradeoffs, you have to feel sorry for a team of five evolutionists from UC Irvine who did their level best to produce clear evidence for the favored story. They began with a startling revelation:

Despite the centrality of adaptation to evolution, surprisingly little is knownabout the diversity of mutations that contribute to adaptation or about their phenotypic and fitness effects (1). There are, in fact, only a few well-known examples linking genotype, phenotype, and adaptation in nature (2-4). (Emphasis added.)

Those references are worth a glance. Reference (1) is to H. Allen Orr (2005), "The genetic theory of adaptation: a brief history,"where he states, "Here I survey the history of adaptation theory, focusing on the rise and fall of various views over the past century and the reasons for the slow development of a mature theory of adaptation."

References (2-4) surely must represent what, in the authors' opinions, constitute the best "well-known examples linking genotype, phenotype, and adaptation in nature." What are they? #2 is about stickleback fish that gained or lost body armor, but the authors admit, like these ones do, that "the genetic and molecular basis of morphological evolution is poorly understood." #3 is about mice with varying coat colors due to a single mutation that allows light-colored mice to survive better on light backgrounds and dark-colored mice to survive better on dark backgrounds (a kind of "peppered mice" story). #4 is about a gene in butterflies that affects wing pattern mimicry. So these are their best examples linking genes to adaptation. What became of Darwin's finches and peppered moths?

Moving right along, the UC Irvine team next offers an excuse for this lack of evidence:

In nature, this connection is often complicated by factors such as varying selection pressures or underlying genetic heterogeneities. Although the task is difficult, the general inability to connect phenotype to genotype in the context of environmental adaptation has been a major failing in the field of evolution.

So they are here to fix that epic fail. After listing four complicating factors in their study, they say this in the last sentence of the paper:

Given the breadth of these complexities in a well-controlled experimental system, it is no wonder that the mapping of genotype, phenotype, and fitness continues to be a daunting task in natural populations.

In a moment we will see what they did and what went wrong, but first pause to be astonished.This is the theory that is so well-established by mountains of evidence, we are constantly told, that any criticism of it must be stifled as ignorant, and only this theory must be allowed to be considered scientific. They have just told us otherwise. "Surprisingly little is known" about it, and the best examples they could produce are all instances of trivial variations among existing species. If they had better examples, they surely would have brandished them proudly instead of giving excuses about how hard it is to find genetic evidence for adaptation.

The Experimental Test

Their experiment should have been ideal for testing the genetics of adaptation: 2,000 generations of E. coli bacteria subjected to heat. "In total, we performed >800 fitness competitions, making this one of the largest studies of its kind." The games are on! Evolve or perish! Long live the fittest!

Their "large-scale experiment" started with an "ancestral strain" of E. coli bacteria that they replicated 115 times and subjected to high temperatures (42.2 °C, or 108 °F) for 2,000 generations. "At the end of the experiment, fitness was measured at 42.2 °C for a single clone from each of 114 lineages; on average, fitness increased ∼40% during the yearlong experiment" (meaning, there were still some that hadn't died of heat exhaustion).

The hunt was on for genetic mutations that conferred ability to take the heat. "We sequenced the genome of these 114 clones, identifying 1,258 mutations relative to the ancestral genome," they say. To decide which mutations most likely had something to do with fitness, they identified two "adaptive pathways," both affecting RNA polymerase (RNAP). Clones could survive with one or the other mutation, but not the two together: "mutations in the two pathways were strongly negatively associated." (This is called negative epistasis; more on that later).

Their challenge of linking genetic mutations to fitness, though, was only beginning.

Our thermal stress experiment has identified many putatively beneficial mutationsthat lead to higher fitness under thermal stress. However, we still do not know the phenotypic consequences of these mutations or their relationship with fitness. Do the apparently distinct adaptive pathways converge on similar phenotypes? Or might the two pathways ... lead to alternative phenotypic solutions to a common selective pressure?

Here we begin to address these questions by measuring a complex phenotype: the magnitude of fitness tradeoffs across a thermal gradient. Evolutionary tradeoffs, which are defined as reduced fitness in a nonselected environment, are of great interest in their own right; they are widely observed and frequently assumed to govern and constrain trait evolution.

The operative word there is "assumed." For example, all these mutations may have been neutral, with no phenotypic consequences. Or, mutations for better survival in heat might have had negative consequences for surviving cold (an evolutionary trade-off), with no overall gain in fitness. "Whatever the cause, tradeoffs have rarely been linked to specific genetic variants" -- another embarrassing revelation.

Paltry Results

In this ideal setup (one of the largest of its kind, remember), they were not even looking for a glamorous innovation, like a wing or an eye. Just connecting a particular mutation to a functional phenotype would have been rated a great success, even if all it meant was shifting the germ's optimum temperature range by a few degrees. Trade-offs notwithstanding, so what if the fittest germ in the hot tub would shiver in the cold bath? They would at least be able to connect "genotype, phenotype and adaptation" together -- the kind of evidence neo-Darwinians need and want.

They found that half the clones shifted their thermal range upward by a few degrees (losing ability to survive cold -- the trade-off), and others survived the heat without losing ability to survive cold. Then they found two independent mutations in the RNAP gene that appear relevant to those shifts, as long as they don't occur together. Success? Not so fast.

For one thing, they don't know why those mutations had that effect. They suggested that they might slow RNAP down when its tendency under heat stress is to speed up, thus improving its likelihood to finish a protein synthesis, but this was not clear. Also, to their surprise, the ancestral strain could sometimes bounce back from doom through the "Lazarus effect" (resurrection from the dead) -- but they don't know how that effect works.

Surprisingly, however, w_a [absolute fitness] of the ancestor was negative (w_a = −0.290) but not significantly <0 .00="" 45.0="" able="" and="" at="" fig.="" nbsp="" s1="" s2="" strong="" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">This unexpected behavior

 was caused by the occasional sudden recovery of populations whose densities had initially declined markedly, a phenomenon known as the "Lazarus effect".

So how is Lazarus coming out of the grave? They don't know. Maybe there is some "preadaptation" to heat in these bacteria:

At the upper end of the thermal niche, most (>95%) of the clones persist at 45 °C, signaling an expansion of their niche at least 2 °C beyond that of the ancestor (Fig. 1B). This observation contrasts with a previous study in which only one of six 42 °C-adapted lines expanded their upper thermal limit but suggests a degree of "preadaptation" to temperatures beyond the clones' immediate experience. Above 45 °C the analyses become complicated by the Lazarus effect, in whichdeclining populations suddenly recover, presumably due to major effect mutations. Indeed, the ancestral clone, which is habituated to laboratory conditions of 37 °C, does not persist at 43 °C but often recovers at 45 °C (Fig. S2). We do not yet know the molecular processes underlying the Lazarus effect, but two seem possible: either the fitness effects of mutations change as a function of the intensity of stress or the mutation rate increases under high stress (33, 34). We do not yet know which of these two mechanisms predominates.

Complicating matters even more are things like "negative epistasis" (mutations that counteract each other) and "antagonistic pleiotropy" (unintended consequences of a "beneficial" mutation on other parts of the genome).

In short, it was hard to find anything beyond a "suggestion" or a "scenario" that these bacteria improved their fitness in any way by genetic mutations, other than the gross observation that some of the clones managed to survive at 45 °C. But even the ancestor could do that sometimes through the "Lazarus effect." The authors also ignored the possibility that E. coli have ways to generate their own mutations under stress. That would be supportive of intelligent design, as would the notion that bacteria contain "a degree of preadaptation" to temperatures beyond their immediate experience.

Some experiment. What we learn from this paper is that under ideal conditions, with the best methods, scientists have a devil of a time trying to establish neo-Darwinian theory in a scientifically rigorous way. A look at their references shows a debt to Lenski's methods that similarly produced paltry results on one of the longest-running experiments in history trying to demonstrate evolution in a lab.

Is this a theory that deserves to rule the world?

Microevolution+Microevolution=? II

Nature's Microevolutionary Gems Part 2: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change
Casey Luskin 

In Nature's evolution-evangelism packet, two of Nature's "evolutionary gems" looked at birds. The first such gem showed "Differential dispersal in wild birds" -- but before we get caught up in the jargon, let's just cut to the main question: What sort of evolutionary change was observed? From reading Nature's evolution-evangelism packet, one is told that the "findings illustrate the large effect of immigration on the evolution of local adaptations and on genetic population structure" or that "evolutionary differentiation can be rapid and occur over surprisingly small scales." So exactly what was this rapid, large evolutionary change?
In one study it turns out that female members of the bird species Parus major (common name: "great tit") bred on the western end of the Dutch island of Vlieland tend to lay 1.15 � 0.14 eggs per clutch more than females bred in populations on the east end of the islands. You read that right. The birds native to the island are still reproductively compatible with "immigrant" birds. The fact that evolutionary biologists consider a difference of 1.15 � 0.14 eggs per clutch to be a "large effect" on a population shows just how desperate they are to find evidence of biological change in nature. (See Erik Postma & Arie J. van Noordwijk, "Gene flow maintains a large genetic difference in clutch size at a small spatial scale," Nature 433:65-68 (January 6, 2005).)

Another study cited in this "gem" promised to show "marked evolutionary differentiation" at "small spatial and temporal scales." Readers learned that over a span of about 35 years, great tits from the eastern part of the Wytham woodland in southern England saw a decrease in adult body size that amounted to a net average change of about 1 gram (less than 10 percent of total body mass). Fledgling birds likewise saw a small change in body mass. (Birds in the northern part of the wood did not experience such a change.) (See Dany Garant, Loeske E.B. Kruuk, Teddy A. Wilkin, Robin H. McCleery & Ben C. Sheldon, "Evolution driven by differential dispersal within a wild bird population," Nature 433:60-65 (January 6, 2005).)

Recall that Nature's introduction to the packet boasts that "all life evolved by natural selection" and claims that this is "a fact, in the same way that the Earth orbits the Sun is a fact." Nature claimed the packet would show "just what is the evidence for evolution by natural selection." But if such featured "evolutionary gems" are among the best that evolutionary scientists have to offer, which is what the packet implies, then that leaves a large gap between the observed data and Nature's grand claims.

Meanwhile, what treatment of microevolutionary changes would be complete without a discussion of Darwin's Galapagos finches? The packet explains that "When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, he recorded the presence of several species of finch that all looked very similar except for their beaks," further noting that "Darwin speculated that all the finches had a common ancestor that had migrated to the islands." We've all heard this story before -- but is there more too it?

According to the British Natural History Museum, "Mockingbirds from the Galapagos Islands, not finches, gave Charles Darwin his ideas about evolution. ... Darwin's finches are the better-known birds connected with helping Darwin come to his conclusions on evolution. However, it was the little-known mockingbirds that were the key." Likewise, historian of science Frank Sulloway debunks the finch myth, stating that, "far from being crucial to his evolutionary argument, as the legend would have us believe, the finches were not even mentioned by Darwin in the Origin of Species." (See: Frank J. Sulloway, "Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend," Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 15(1):1-53 (Spring, 1982).)

Island Biogeography observes that it is "unclear whether [the mockingbird] genus (Nesomimus) is sufficiently distinct morphologically to warrant separation from the mainland genus (Mimus)" (Robert J. Whittaker, Island Biogeography: Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation, p. 96 (Oxford University Press, 1998)), or as Explore Evolution explains, the mockingbirds "show only small-scale variations in existing traits."

Setting aside Nature's perpetuation of common myths about the Galapagos finches, modern-day field studies of these finch species are commonly cited as examples of evolution. So again we must ask, How much evolutionary change are we talking about? Here, the packet is somewhat forthright, acknowledging that we're in fact only talking about "small differences in the depth, width or length of the beak." The packet then refers readers to a study that investigated the genetic basis of these small changes in beak morphology. It's an interesting paper, but as the packet explains, these changes in beak morphology may be caused by mere "differing expression of the gene for calmodulin, a molecule involved in calcium signaling that is vital in many aspects of development and metabolism." (See Arhat Abzhanov, Winston P. Kuo, Christine Hartmann, B. Rosemary Grant, Peter R. Grant,, and Clifford J. Tabin, "The calmodulin pathway and evolution of elongated beak morphology in Darwin's finches," Nature, Vol. 442:563-567 (August 3, 2006).)

So what's at issue here is mere differential expression of a gene (rather than the evolution of an entirely new gene) causing "small differences" in beak morphology. For the Darwin-critic, this is interesting since such differences in beak shape are well-known throughout a variety of bird groups (such as Hawaiian honeycreepers), making it unsurprising that commonly observed forms of biodiversity have a small-scale genetic basis. None of this suggests how large-scale evolutionary change could occur. While the origin of the beaks (and the birds) themselves may remain unexplained, perhaps diverse beak morphologies are designed to evolve.

Microevolution+Microevolution=?

Nature's Microevolutionary Gems Part 1: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams
Casey Luskin

Early in 2006, the journal Science published a long article titled "Evolution in Action" purporting to give three examples showing the glory of Darwinian evolution. As I discussed at that time, what it really showed was "microevolution in action." Last year during the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin's birth, Nature tried to top Science by releasing a packet titled "15 Evolutionary Gems." The packet purported to show "just what is the evidence for evolution by natural selection." Yet much like the Science piece, many of the examples in the Nature packet entail trivial examples of small-scale evolution. This first installment of Nature's "microevolutionary gems" will look at the evidence cited there for evolution among lizards, snakes, clams, and birds.
Size Matters in Stickleback fish and Anolis lizards
One of Nature's "gems" was said to show "Natural selection in speciation." The study cited found that reproductive isolation between different populations of stickleback fish was established based upon the trait of body size: "Levels of reproductive isolation are well accounted for by differences in a single trait, body size." Since body size can be determined by genes or the environment, it wasn't entirely clear whether the selected traits were heritable. In fact, when individuals from different stickleback populations were manipulated in the lab to the "preferred" body size of a different "ecotype" (e.g. a member of the same species from a different habitat), mating occurred even though the sticklebacks had previously been from different reproductively isolated populations.

While this study is a nice demonstration of how assortative mating can lead to sympatric speciation (so long as we define "speciation" as mere "reproductive isolation" and don't expect significant morphological change), what this shows is that even after untold generations of reproductive isolation, these fish are still reproductively compatible so long as they like the "size" of their partner. And what sort of morphological divergence is observed between the different stickleback populations? A difference of 2-3 centimeters in length. It goes without saying that small changes in the size of stickleback fish are not going to explain the evolution of sticklebacks in the first place. Have we really witnessed differences that show large-scale evolutionary change is possible, or even "speciation"?

(See Jeffrey S. McKinnon, Seiichi Mori, Benjamin K. Blackman, Lior David, David M. Kingsley, Leia Jamieson, Jennifer Chou & Dolph Schluter, "Evidence for ecology's role in speciation," Nature, 429:294-298 (May 20, 2004).)

Another "gem" claimed to find "Natural selection in lizards." Well, it wasn't exactly "natural" selection. Somewhat like the way researchers once glued peppered moth on trees to see if they'd be eaten by birds, evolutionary researchers artificially introduced a predatory lizard to small islands in the Caribbean to see if there was any impact upon populations of smaller Anolis lizards native to the islands. And they didn't just introduce the lizards to the island. They also artificially released "curly-tailed" predatory lizards right in front of their would-be prey, the lizard species Anolis sagrei, to see how Anolis lizards would respond. Here's what your taxpayer-funded NSF grant dollars supported:

On four of the experimental islands, we conducted focal animal observations on individual A. sagrei to investigate their immediate reaction to the introduction of curly-tailed lizards. Lizards were approached and an experimental object -- either a live curly-tailed lizard (n � 24) or, as a control, an inanimate object of approximately the same size (n � 23) -- was placed 0.5-1.0m from the lizard on the ground and clearly in its visual field.
(Jonathan B. Losos, Thomas W. Schoener & David A. Spiller, "Predator-induced behaviour shifts and natural selection in field experimental lizard populations," Nature 432:505-508 (November 25, 2004).)

That the experiment was not entirely "natural" is no great reason to criticize it and in fact it does serve as a nice illustration of what natural selection might be able to do. Confirming prior studies, the Anolis lizards were found to undergo selection for both larger body sizes (in females) and longer limb (in males) because this allowed them to better escape the predatory "curly-tailed" lizards. And Anolis lizards may be small but they aren't stupid: they also started spending less time on the ground and perched higher up in trees to escape their newfound predators. I'm sure that the slower, smaller Anolis lizards didn't appreciate falling prey (literally) to this experiment -- in Darwin's words, such experiments show "Nature red in tooth and claw" at its finest. But we've still seen nothing beyond extremely small-scale changes in lizard sizes. Much like the peppered moth story said nothing about the origin of moths, what does this study tell us about the origin of lizards? Not much.

Toxic Examples of Evolution
It's long been discussed by critics of neo-Darwinian that the evolution of antibiotic resistance entails the evolution of essentially no new functional biological information in the genome. Nature calls "Toxin resistance in snakes and clams" an "evolutionary gem," but what's really going on in the studies cited?

In the case of snakes, a species of garter snakes predate upon certain newts which produce the toxin tetrodotoxin (TTX). The toxin "causes paralysis and death by binding to the outer pore of voltage-gated sodium channels and blocking nerve and muscle fiber activity." It turns out that by substituting valine for isoleucine in a gene for a particular protein involved in the sodium ion channel, a small amount of resistance to TTX is gained. A couple other amino acid substitutions in certain snake species also seem to confer additional resistance. Meanwhile, the sodium ion channels continue to perform their functions. So we see that toxin-resistance requires small-scale genetic changes that entail the origin of no new genes.

(See Shana L. Geffeney, Esther Fujimoto, Edmund D. Brodie III, Edmund D. Brodie Jr, & Peter C. Ruben, "Evolutionary diversification of TTX-resistant sodium channels in a predator-prey interaction," Nature 434:759-763 (April 7, 2005).)

As for the clams, the packet reports that "Resistance to the toxin in the exposed populations is correlated with a single mutation in the gene that encodes a sodium channel, at a site already implicated in the binding of saxitoxin." (See V. Monica Bricelj, Laurie Connell, Keiichi Konoki, Scott P. MacQuarrie, Todd Scheuer, William A. Catterall & Vera L. Trainer, "Sodium channel mutation leading to saxitoxin resistance in clams increases risk of PSP," Nature 434:736-767 (April 7, 2005).)


In both cases, we're talking about strong selection pressure causing a couple changes (or even just one change) in the amino acid sequence of structural proteins. No new functions or structures are evolving and all we've seen is the loss of the ability of a toxin to bind to its target -- a protein involved in sodium channels. This is similar to the breaking down of a function -- losing the ability to bind through a mutation. Interesting and important research for sure, but if we're trying to showcase "just what is the evidence" for the grander claims of Darwinian evolution, this will not suffice.

Evaluating Darwinism's evangel

Evaluating Nature's 2009 "15 Evolutionary Gems" Darwin-Evangelism Kit
Casey Luskin 

Last year, during the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin's birth, Nature released a free online packet titled "15 Evolutionary Gems." Its subtitle was "A resource from Nature for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection." It might have been better subtitled 'A evangelism packet for those wishing to spread the good news about Darwinism.' After all, when Nature announced the packet, they said they were heeding a prior call which "urged scientists and their institutions to 'spread the word'" about evolution and "highlight reasons why scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact." The packet is to be used not just in schools, but also in home evangelism or relationship evangelism. At least, that's basically what Nature said:
This week we are following our own prescription. Readers will find at www.nature.com/evolutiongems a freely accessible resource for biologists and others who wish to explain to students, friends or loved ones just what is the evidence for evolution by natural selection. ... In a year in which Darwin is being celebrated amid uncertainty and hostility about his ideas among citizens, being aware of the cumulatively incontrovertible evidence for those ideas is all the more important. We trust that this document will help.
("Announcement: Evolutionary gems," Nature, Vol. 457 (January 1, 2009).)


If all that weren't enough, the back page of the packet shows a picture of a smiling young Darwin with animals flocking about him (lizards, birds, monkeys, flowers, sponges, turtles, etc.), much like the pictures of Jesus posing with lions and lambs on some cheesy religious tract. You have to see the packet to believe it:Should we be surprised that Nature -- one of the world's top scientific journals -- is promoting evolution in this fashion? The respected historian of evolution Peter J. Bowler explains that Nature itself was originally founded in the late 19th century by T. H. Huxley and others for the express purpose of promoting a "campaign" to support Darwinism:

By exploiting their position in this network, Huxley and his friends ensured that Darwinism had come to stay. (Ruse, 1979a). They controlled the scientific journals -- the journal Nature was founded in part to promote the campaign -- and manipulated academic appointments. Hull (1978) has stressed how important these rhetorical and political skills were in creating a scientific revolution. The Darwinists adopted a flexible approach which deflected opposition, minimized infighting among themselves, and made it easy for others to join their campaign. Many, like Huxley himself, were not rigidly committed to the theory of natural selection; they were simply anxious to promote the case for evolution.
(Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, p. 185 (University of California Press, 3rd ed., 2003).)

The packet is simply an extension of Nature's "campaign" for Darwin. But it is quite useful in one important respect: the packet is from the world's top scientific journal and purports to show us "just what is the evidence for evolution by natural selection." So if the evidence isn't very strong, then that should tell you something.

As we'll see, far from being "incontrovertible," most of the "evolutionary gems" in the packet do not show any significant amount of evolution and might be best views as "microevolutionary" gems. A couple of the "gems" have little to do with evolution, but an evolutionary interpretation is added in after-the-fact.

Finally, the few "gems" that do deal with large-scale change face serious problems and might be termed "lumps of coal." For the "lumps of coal," their strategy is the same: ignore dissent and overhype the evidence.

At the end of this series, all the posts will be combined into a single PDF file which can be downloaded and distributed or printed off freely.

An Evangelistic Opening
Nature's evolution-evangelism packet opens with one of the most dogmatic statements imaginable in support of evolution. According to the packet, "Most biologists take for granted the idea that all life evolved by natural selection over billions of years ... natural selection is a fact, in the same way that the Earth orbits the Sun is a fact." Surely, if their claim is true (and not a bluff) then we will find no notable scientific dissent from the view that "all life evolved by natural selection."

Just a couple years ago science journalist Susan Mazur (who is no friend of intelligent design) wrote that "hundreds of other evolutionary scientists (non-Creationists) who contend that natural selection is politics, not science, and that we are in a quagmire because of staggering commercial investment in a Darwinian industry built on an inadequate theory." Two of those scientists might be National Academy of Sciences members Philip Skell and Lynn Margulis, staunch critics of the claim that "all life evolved by natural selection":

"Darwinian evolution -- whatever its other virtues -- does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic model, which opens up structural chemistry and leads to advances in the synthesis of a multitude of new molecules of practical benefit. None of this demonstrates that Darwinism is false. It does, however, mean that the claim that it is the cornerstone of modern experimental biology will be met with quiet skepticism from a growing number of scientists in fields where theories actually do serve as cornerstones for tangible breakthroughs." -- Philip Skell
"[The] Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric. 
-- Lynn Margulis

And of course there's the 800+ scientists  scientists who have courageously signed a statement agreeing that they are skeptical of the creative power of natural selection: "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."

But there's a deeper point here. If the claim that "all life evolved by natural selection" is "a fact, in the same way that the Earth orbits the Sun," then shouldn't it be as self-evident as the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun? But no one is making packets to evangelize for heliocentrism -- because in that case the evidence is so overwhelming that no one of any consequence disagrees.

Nature's evolution-evangelism packet seems like a politically motivated attempt to spread the good news about Darwin. And given the power that the journal Nature wields within the scientific community, its dogmatic treatment of natural selection serves to stifle academic freedom and dissent from Nature's viewpoint. This leads me to suspect that the journal might overstate the evidential case for natural selection. Over the course of eight subsequent posts, we'll see just how far these "gems" actually go to support the view that "all life evolved by natural selection" is "a fact, in the same way that the Earth orbits the Sun" is a fact.

File under "Well said" XXXVIII

"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war". John Adams

On Ruse V. Nagel and strawman?

Roasting a Straw Man: Evolutionist Michael Ruse on Thomas Nagel
Jonathan Witt 

If you're driving along and notice that a bright philosopher has just mangled beyond recognition the argument of another bright philosopher, a tap on the brakes and a bit of careful rubbernecking is in order.

If you then notice that the one who has done the mangling is Darwinist Michael Ruse, and what he mangled is an argument by eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel against Darwinism, then it's worth pulling over and taking an even closer look.

And if upon doing this you find that Ruse has not only badly mischaracterized Nagel's argument but is pouring lime powder on it beside an open grave, then it's time to get out of your car and call out something like, Hey buddy, cut that out. You don't have to do this. There's a better way.

The illustration does not exaggerate. Let's lay Ruse's characterization and dismissal of Nagel's argument beside Nagel's actual argument, then you decide.

The Ruse

The mangling occurred earlier this week at an Oxford University Press blog ("Darwinism as religion: what literature tells us about evolution"). And by the way, Ruse and Nagel are both atheists. Here's the key passage from Ruse:

Just as we have the proselytizing Darwinian New Atheists, so we have today a vocal anti-Darwinian party, consisting somewhat surprising not only of the evangelical Christians of the American South but of some of today's most eminent atheist philosophers, notably Thomas Nagel, OUP author of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (2012). As his subtitle reveals, Nagel's worry is less about the science and more about its supposed religious-cum-metaphysical implications, namely that Darwin plunges us into a hateful world without value and meaning.
Ruse makes Nagel sound a bit like someone who has just learned that, Gosh, scientists are telling us the earth actually revolves around the sun instead of the other way around, and goodness, mightn't that make us feel rather marginal and inconsequential? Do we really want to go there?

Now, maybe Nagel, following Matthew Arnold, does worry that, thanks to Darwinism, our world

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
But whether or not Nagel carries this worry, it isn't his argument against Darwinism, never mind Ruse's suggestion.

Nagel's Actual Argument Against Darwinism

Nagel's case against Darwinism is complex and nuanced. But it has at least two key parts. I'll only mention the first one, and do a bit more unpacking of the second one, since the second one comes closer to Ruse's straw-man characterization.

First, Nagel argues that modern evolutionary biology, a physical theory, cannot account for consciousness. Since evolutionary theory purports to explain the origin of humans, the theory's inability to explain human consciousness is a major strike against it. One finds this laid out plainly in the introduction to Mind and Cosmos.

Ruse is free to agree or disagree with that argument, but he shouldn't mischaracterize it as only the worry that "Darwin plunges us into a hateful world without value and meaning."

And here is a second pillar of Nagel's argument, in his own words, from Mind and Cosmos: "Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself."

Nagel makes the same point at a bit more length on the same page ofthe book:

The evolutionary story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position. ... Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends. (28)
Darwinian evolution might have selected for true and reliable reasoning about the natural world around us, but it might also have selected for all sorts of other ways of arriving at conclusions -- maybe a mix of several -- and who's to say which has predominated? So, for instance, perhaps natural selection opted for a line of primates with an ability to form convictions more readily than the evidence allowed, since in "nature red and tooth and claw," sometimes the worst decision is the delayed decision.

If Darwinism undermines the ground of reason, Nagel asks, what ground do we have to stand on to insist that reason reliably guides us to the supposed truth of Darwinism?

Darwin Anticipates Nagel

We have oceans of evidence for the human tendency to irrationality. And Darwin made extra room for irrational animal behavior through his complementary theory of sexual selection. So the concern that Darwinian evolution saddled humanity with profoundly unreliable faculties for reasoning about biological origins is hardly an idle worry.

Darwin himself didn't consider it an idle concern. John West points this out in a review of Mind and Cosmos:

This objection is not new. Indeed, it reaches back to Charles Darwin himself. Darwin published a lengthy tome, The Descent of Man, purporting to prove that his theory of unguided evolution could explain basically everything, including man's mind and morals. Yet in his private writings, he expressed a lingering reservation over the impact of his theory on the trustworthiness of reason. In a letter written in 1881, he disclosed that "with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
Remember, though: Nagel isn't arguing that we shouldn't trust our natural faculties. He's arguing that since we are properly confident of our natural faculties (even if they aren't foolproof and we are free to indulge in irrational behavior), then the fact that Darwinism logically entails that we can't trust our natural faculties is itself a strike against Darwinism.

Here's Nagel on page 29 of Mind and Cosmos:

The failure of evolutionary naturalism to provide a form of transcendent self-understanding that does not undermine our confidence in our natural faculties should not lead us to abandon the search for transcendent self-understanding. There is no reason to allow our confidence in the objective truth of our moral beliefs, or for that matter our confidence in the objective truth of our mathematical or scientific reasoning, to depend on whether this is consistent with the assumption that those capacities are the product of natural selection. Given how speculative evolutionary explanations of human mental faculties are, they seem too weak a ground for putting into question the most basic forms of thought. Our confidence in truth of propositions that seem evident on reflection should not be shaken so easily (and, I would add, cannot be shaken on these sorts of grounds without a kind of false consciousness).
He turns the line of his argument squarely against Darwinism:

It seems reasonable to run the test equally in the opposite direction: namely, to evaluate hypotheses about the universe and how we have come into existence by reference to ordinary judgments in which we have very high confidence. It is reasonable to believe that the truth about what kind of beings we are and how the universe produced us is compatible with that confidence. After all, everything we believe, even the most-far-reaching cosmological theories, has to be based ultimately on common sense, and on what is plainly undeniable.
So Why Did the Intelligent Ruse Mangle a Skeptical Nagel?

That's Nagel's argument in a nutshell. And he gives us what I've conveyed above all in the book's introduction and the chapter immediately following the introduction. In other words, Ruse didn't need to read far into the book to get this.

But if Ruse did get it, he didn't give it to us in his OUP post. Instead he gave us an unrecognizable mischaracterization of Nagel's critique.

Three possibilities. (1) Ruse isn't smart enough to understand Nagel's argument. We can reject that. Ruse is an intelligent man. (2) Ruse didn't read far enough into the book and relied on someone else for a summary of Nagel's position. Perhaps, but the argument is so central to Nagel's book that this explanation seems unlikely. Or (3) Ruse willfully misrepresented Nagel's core argument because it was so much easier to dispense with an attack on Darwinism from a distinguished philosopher and fellow atheist simply by mischaracterizing the attack.


I don't mean that Ruse necessarily did this consciously. It might have been wishful thinking working hand-in-glove with this or that pressing publication deadline. Who knows? The good news is that Ruse's philosophical position on that human enterprise called scientific reasoning allows plenty of room for the possibility of irrational behavior on the stage of science, so Ruse should be well positioned dispositionally to consider why he behaved as he did.