I had a couple hours to read last night, but didn’t want to start a fat novel as I’m leaving the country soon and wouldn’t want to schlep it. I thus picked up an old copy of God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, which is a pretty quick read. After two nights I’m almost half done with it, but am a bit disappointed because a lot of the science is wrong or outmoded (the latter is, of course, not Hitchens’s fault), and the arguments seem pretty repetitive.
On the other hand, I realize that these arguments were badly needed at the time and made a big impact on nonbelievers and believers alike. It’s one of the books that kick-started the “New Atheism,” and the “New” bit, as I always say, was the use of scientific arguments to rebut religions faith claims. These arguments are amply in view in Hitchens’s book, and most of them are correct. And, of course, Hitch was a wonderful writer.
One of Hitchens’s arguments against creationism and its gussied-up cousin Intelligent Design is its invocation of vestigial organs like our vestigial tail, the appendix, wisdom teeth, and so on—all as evidence for evolution. There were also examples of features that were jury-rigged by evolution so that they’re not perfectly adapted to their function: things like the backwards placement of the retina in the human eye, our “blind spot” where the optic nerve comes in, and—my favorite—the placement of the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
When I pondered those examples, I realized that IDers and creationists argue that all of these features are really adaptive. The appendix, they say (correctly) contains a small number of cells that have immune functions, and the “backwards” retina of our camera eye is said by creationists to confer protection against an overload of short-wavelength light. But of course whether the immune function of the appendix outweighs the fact that it may become infected and kill you is pure speculation, as is the postulated “useful” function of the backwards retina.
And I haven’t yet heard of an adaptive explanation for nipples in human males, our wisdom teeth, the developmental sequence of our kidney, or our transitory coat of hair in utero (the “lanugo”), but I’m sure that if you look hard enough on the Internet, you’ll find IDers and creationists showing how these aren’t really “senseless signs of history”, but are actually adaptive. And if they’re adaptive, then they reflect God’s plan.
In the end, I realized that the true purveyors of the “adaptationist program” aren’t evolutionary psychologists, but creationists, who aren’t willing to admit that the vagaries of evolution has vouchsafed us with featurs that, if there was a god or a Designer, could have been designed better. Further, they don’t often realize that if a “vestigial” structure is useful in some way, that doesn’t disprove that it had an evolutionary origin. The “halteres”—balance organs of some insects—is one example. They are used for keeping a guided flight, but we know that they are the vestigial remnants of wings, derived from two of the four wings that flying insects used to have. And they’re useful!
I won’t dwell on this, as these things are discussed in detail in my book Why Evolution is True, and you can also see many examples of vestigial organs supporting evolution at Douglas Theobald’s great site, “29+ evidences for macroevolution” (there are multiple pages; vestigial organs, atavisms, and other features testifying to evolution are here).
Finally, I have never seen creationists even try to refute the biogeographical evidence for evolution, like the absence of endemic mammals, fish, and amphibians on oceanic islands (islands that rose, bereft of life, from the sea bed) as opposed to continental islands that were once connected to continents. Biogeography is the true Achilles Heel of both creationism and ID.
I’m often asked if I’ve though about rewriting or updating my first trade book, Why Evolution is True. My answer is always “no”—mainly because there’s enough evidence in that book to convince any rational person of its title’s assertion. But I suppose that if I did revise it, I would update it with more evidence for evolution, especially from fossils and molecular biology. I do present plenty of fossil evidence for evolution in the book, and also some molecular evidence. The latter includes the presence of “dead genes” (genes that were functional in our ancestors and in some of our relatives, but have been rendered nonfunctional in us by degrading mutations). Examples are our many dead “olfactory receptor genes, active in dogs but totally inactive in whales, or a dead gene that is key in synthesizizing Vitamin C in other mammals. That gene is defunct, an ex-gene that sings with the Choir Invisible, but its death doesn’t harm because we get the vitamin from our diet. I see no way that creationists or IDers can explain the fact that our DNA is largely junk, and much of that junk consists of dead genes. Loading our DNA with genes that don’t do anything, but still have to be copied during cell division and meiosis, is a lousy way to design a genome.
But now we have more such evidence, Here’s Ken Miller lecturing on some of the molecular/chromosomal evidence for evolution in humans and other primates from the structure of our chromosome 2.
I don’t mention this in my book, but it’s a convincing bit of evidence that we’re related to other primates.
There’s a lot of stuff like this, but I won’t belabor it now. The short take is that I don’t think WEIT (the book) needs to be revised because it would just pile additional evidence for evolution on the Everest of evidence that already exists. The fact is that evidence from a variety of different disciplines—paleontology, developmental biology, morphology (vestigial organs), biogeography, and molecular biology—all cohere to attest to the truth of evolution. IDers will admit of some microevolution, and even some macroevolution, but the more weaselly ones simply play a “god of the gaps” game, saying that there are adaptations that simply could not have evolved via a step-by-step Darwinian process of accumulating helpful mutations. (The bacterial flagellum used to be one, but has fallen in light of later research.)
Asserting that our ignorance proves the existence of a Designer has never been a good strategy for researchers. It is simply a “science stopper”, implicitly saying, “You don’t need to do any more research; I already know that this phenomenon is inexplicable by materialistic processes and therefore is evidence for supernatural design.” How many assertions like that have been debunked by later evidence? The answer is TONS OF THEM.
And I need hardly add that unless we have independent evidence for such a designer, we can simply ignore arguments that depend on its existence.
Jerry,
Updating your book would certainly be a time-consuming task (and maybe a slog, if you feel you have better things to do).
However, there is an appealing alternative: a new Foreword or Afterword that would be no more than five or six pages or so. That way, the main text can remain untouched.
And if you decide to do this, I will gladly buy the book again!
Barry
I’m not sure Viking/Penguin would go for that. Perhaps a slightly longer afterword.
Thanks for the excellent overview of some of the key points used in debate between different views on evolution. I get the impression that you believe this to be a wasted debate, the sense that controversy about ‘special creation’ is an irritating distraction from debates among evolutionists who want to get on with learning more about evolution and its truth. I am struck, in contrast to yours and other ‘New Atheist’ discourses, by Darwin’s solicitude on this subject – one of his rare statements in a letter written late in life: ‘My judgment often fluctuates…. Whether a man deserves to be called a theist depends on the definition of the term … In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God … I think that generally (and more and more so as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.’ Of course this is over a century ago when as we know Darwin was aware and, unlike Galileo, cared about the impact of his ideas on the world-view of theists (in Galileo’s case, of geocentrists), some in his own family. Have you any time, outside your obvious and generous regard for politeness, for exchanges with people who have reservations about atheism?
Yes, of course. And I have changed minds of those on the fence–and my book has changed more minds, for once you start seeing the evidence for evolution, and you’re say, a fundamentalist Christian or Orthodox Jew, you are on the slippery slope to doubting all the tenets of faith. All scientists are agnostic about God, but only in the sense that we’re agnostic about the Loch Ness Monster, or whether the Earth goes around the sun. I’m really not sure what you’re asking.
As someone who was an atheist before the Four Horsemen, I always appreciated what they were doing but never found the books to be that great, to be honest. I got far more out of George H. Smith’s “purple book.”: Atheism: The Case Against God. One of the best decisions I’ve ever made was to pick that book up from Borders in 1997-ish. By the end, I was an atheist. I then read Russell’s “Why I am not a Christian,” which, while not as thorough as Smith’s book, contained a set of additional persuasive arguments. By the time the Horsemen emerged, I had endured years of persecution for my views as an atheist and was excited for their books, but none of them seemed to add much of anything that wasn’t already covered elsewhere, or at least that was my assessment at the time. Still, I think they performed a valuable service for folks who were not already atheists.
Sorry, this is kind of tangential to your post. 🙂
+1 for the idea that creationists are the worst pan-adaptationists. I hadn’t thought about that before.
+2 for the dead parrot reference.
Aw, splendid post.
IMHO, Intelligent Design (etc.) fits a Hegelian dialectical synthesis :
The Book of Genesis (thesis) + modern biological science (antithesis, contradictory) -> Intelligent Design (synthesis / “thing-in-itself”, Kant).
The thesis above being from orthodox religion makes it the work of the Right hand of the Left (the Hegelian Left).
I note that the synthesis is kept in the abstract – whereas material evidence is treated as a concrete entity and maybe antithetical or subordinate to Spirit (as I understand Hegelian dialectic).
… thinking this out a bit more suggests a gnostic nature to Intelligent Design.
Instead of a gnostic religious cult doctrine on the periphery of the orthodox religious origin — as usual from antiquity — Intelligent Design is the doctrine of a gnostic scientific cult – because heresy is not at work, to my understanding.
That, believe, is a rarity, but not unprecedented.
The recurrent laryngeal nerve is also my favorite example to bring up re: evolution. It’s just so *smacks forehead* irrefutable!
I remember reading WEIT (the book) and being very pleased with the efficiency and clarity of the major points. Though it was preaching to the choir (still visible), I remember it as an enjoyable experience.
No, it wasn’t just preaching to the choir. I have to say that I’ve met a lot of people and gotten a lot of email from people saying that the book convinced them that evolution was indeed true. No, it didn’t turn all of America into evolution-accepters, but I am happy with the minds it’s changed.
Jerry,
Have you considered the Butterfly effect from chaos theory, in which the flapping of the wings of a butterfly could lead to a tornado? The minds you’ve changed could be the first breezes of a perfect storm.
Atheism aside, I’m guessing you communicated as a professor, Jerry, much as you do here (though, I don’t really know that). Anyway, I WISH I’d had a genetics professor who said something like, “Loading our DNA with genes that don’t do anything, but still have to be copied during cell division and meiosis, is a lousy way to design a genome.” It just sounds so irreverent which I find appealing. As a student it would have captured my interest.
It’s a striking statement, all right.
My favourite argument against creationism is the palmaris longus. Not only is it missing in one or both human arms in about a quarter of the population (apparently updated from a seventh a few years ago) but it can be transplanted to replace damaged tendons elsewhere with no rejection problem and with only a minimal impact on the pinch strength between the thumb and fourth finger.
Where it exists and is fully functional is in, wait for it, …monkeys.
I had never heard of it before. Wikipedia has a short article on it.
The main problem with the intelligent design argument is that even if true it gives you no clue a to the nature of the designer. To use their oft cited watch analogy — imagine a future paleontologist unearths an American B-17 bomber and a fellow paleontologist unearths a German Junkers Ju 88 bomber.
Both clearly show evidence of a designer, but what of the morality of their creator?
+1
Why assume a single creator? Wouldn’t features of both planes be designed by subcontractors? If so, the question of the morality of the creator is false. The real question is whether the moralities of the multiple creators are in agreement.
Why is the moral purpose of any creator a relevant question? What work is morality doing in either supporting or refuting intelligent design? An intelligent designer could be amoral or immoral and still able to design things that worked. The idea of a loving God (most of the time, unless you cross him) who dictates moral codes is just grafted on to His design skills. I suppose you would fear His wrath and obey His revealed moral codes more conscientiously if you contemplated all the things He built and imagined what He could do to you … but that is a separate, downstream question. You could have an intelligent designer who cobbled everything together and then butted out.
“You could have an intelligent designer who cobbled everything together and then butted out.”
That’s the God of the Deists, the rational God of the Enlightenment.
“Why is the moral purpose of any creator a relevant question? What work is morality doing in either supporting or refuting intelligent design?”
As spokesmen for God, the clergy claim authority to impose His Will. God has to be seen as morality personified for the imposition to work. There is ample evidence that the intelligent design movement wants to Christianize society. We are not talking abstract philosophers here. The movement wants power. The belief that the world is doomed unless everybody converts is not foreign to creationists, especially since the fate of mankind is intertwined with their creation story.
Reason proves that the designer must be omnipotent, omnipresent, exist in three persons… Christianity is so dismissive of other faiths that the problem seldom occurs to its followers, nor the atheists raised in its shadow. There can only be atheism or some Abrahamic monotheism, since paganism is obviously worthless or even demonic.
This is a good opportunity to thank our host for his wonderful book. I daren’t read my copy these days, but only because I (and people to whom I’ve lent it) have read it so often that the pages are starting to fall out.
I would greatly welcome a reissue, but I accept that it would depend on the economic calculations of the publishers. Do they have first dibs on re-publication, I wonder? There might be other publishing houses who would be honoured to reissue such a seminal work.
It’s available as an ebook on Amazon. Never worry about pages falling out again.
I agree. The original book – which I’ve bought in several copies as gifts over the years – says more than enough. As a lawyer I often had to decide when evidence was sufficient to “make” a case and WEIT makes the case utterly. Beyond any and all reasonable doubt. For my less literate but curious friends I’ve sent them your youtube lectures. I’ve given Hitchen’s book as gifts in a religious context.
YOUR efforts are way more valuable fighting the secular religions of our times. Which you do. And PARTICULARLY useful in the NZ context as there is precious little push back from religious MM’s malign influence on that lovely country and important anglosphere, Western ally.
And your defense of Israel. I’m going to a big party in suburban Connecticut tomorrow with many educated and uneducated people I know vaguely so I expect to be defending Israel a LOT!
The people there can read so I doubt I’ll have to defend evolution as well. If I do, I’ll buy them a copy of WEIT. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
An example of microevolution is of lions and tigers, those mighty stalkers of turnips and celery, which became carnivores after the Fall.
I have never heard of the creationist argument that our backwards retinas was for UV light protection. That seems particularly lame, given that other animals w/ their forward retinas are just fine. Of course how retinas evolved starts with very small and simple animals that were translucent, and so the direction of the retina would not matter. We are stuck with the ‘backwards’ program, and have evolved work-arounds as eyes evolved to greater complexity.
But the human appendix thing — I do reluctantly hand that one to the creationists. Whoever said it was vestigial because it is much bigger in other species was wrong, and it should not have been a claim that lasted as long as it did. The appendix is not vestigial although it is small in our species while being much larger in some other species. That organ is simply as big as it needs to be. There. A demonstration that in science we can admit to being wrong, and we can correct our mistakes. Meanwhile, creationists are still stuck with what they claim 100 years ago and more.
I once read a study of 360 different species of mammals, and there was no appendix in approximately 80% of them. If I remember correctly, 50 of the species studied had something on their colon that would be an eqiuvalent to the human appendix.
So the appendix is certainly not necessary for a mammal to lead a normal healthy life.
How many lives could have been saved from death by appendicitis throughout history if we were one of the mammals who lacked an appendix?
But you know, the Lawd works in mysterious ways!
+1
Something I found while writing my own anti-creationism book ( https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Word-Human-Reason-Perspective/dp/1629016381/ ) is that some lines of evidence for evolution are more effective than others. As you mentioned, creationists have their own explanation for the orientation of the human retina, so anyone who’s familiar with the creationist literature is unlikely to be persuaded by that line of evidence. This is also true of arguments based on pseudogenes and on the panda’s thumb (the anatomical feature, not the website). I think they also have an explanation for the lack of native land animals on oceanic islands–it’s that when Noah released animals from the ark and terrestrial ecosystems were repopulated, those islands were initially inaccessible.
But if you spend a while reading the creationist literature, you eventually notice there are some lines of evidence that they never talk about. I’ve listed some examples of that here: https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2018/10/John-Woodmorappe-vs.html#old-and-new-arguments My personal favorite such point is that the fossil record has repeatedly matched predictions that paleontologists had made based on the theory that birds are directly descended from dinosaurs. For example, several paleontologists predicted in the 1980s that dromaeosaurids and troodontids would have been feathered, although at the time there was not yet any direct fossil evidence for that; the prediction was based entirely on their hypothesized close relationship to birds. A little over a decade later, the discovery of animals such as Sinornithosaurus and Jinfengopteryx confirmed this prediction to be correct. Some creationists deal with the existence of feathered dinosaurs (even though their explanation basically amounts to “God wanted them that way”), but none of them have dealt with the fact that paleontologists were able to know that feathered dinosaurs existed before any had yet been discovered.
For a book to have an impact among professional creationists, these are the types of arguments it’s best to focus on. Although my book isn’t as well-known as yours, it’s one of the few anti-creationism books that professional creationists have cited in a non-disparaging manner, in the context of discussing the anatomical similarity between birds and theropod dinosaurs. https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=icc_proceedings I’ve also caused Answers in Genesis to delete one of their online articles, in response to my pointing out that they were contradicting themselves about whether Epidexipteryx should be considered a bird or a dinosaur.
Philip Senter knows how to make these types of argument better than anyone, and I’ve tried to emulate his success in my own arguments. If you decide to update your book or write a new introduction, I’d suggest taking a similar approach.
Thank you for calling attention to your book. The problem is summarized in Amazon:
Of course it’s going to convince more creationists than my book because you implicitly accept the existence of God. If you’re basing your book on evidence, as you say you are, well, then, you’re also basing it on the existence of a deity FOR WHICH THERE IS NO EVIDENCE. To my mind, that purpose (above) is the flaw in the book. Thanks for telling me how to rewrite my book, but I don’t think I’d change a thing about the tone were I to rewrite it, and certainly wouldn’t try to show how the evidence glorifies a nonexistent deity. And I did not write it to convince creationists, but people with an open mind, people on the fence.
Whether it’s worth implicitly accepting the existence of a higher power if it makes one’s anti-creationism arguments more effective wasn’t really the point I was making in my comment, and you didn’t seem to mind that about the book when you posted about it in 2018. ( https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/03/26/a-relatively-new-anti-creationist-book/ ) But I guess we can discuss it.
Isn’t it better to be pragmatic about this type of thing? Believing in the existence of a higher power doesn’t prevent a person from doing proper science, as long as one is able to leave one’s religion at the door when entering the laboratory. Creationist beliefs, on the other hand, have a tendency to corrupt nearly every area of science, even areas such as physics that aren’t obviously contradicted by a literal interpretation of Genesis (see the RATE project, or Russell Humphreys’ White Hole cosmology). I think the real enemy is creationism, not religion in general. If it will make one’s arguments against creationism more effective, what’s the harm?
No, if there weren’t religion, there wouldn’t be creationism. Of the hundreds of creationist I met, all of them opposed evolution on religious grounds. And people get their religion before they get their evolution, so they’re already immunized against it. Creationism might corrupt science, but religion corrupts nearly everything it touches, at Hitchens pointed out. If a book says it’s going to show that evolution really glorifies God, I wouldn’t be keen on it, as it shows that the authors do show cognitive dissonance, accepting evidence for one thing but harboring wish-thinking about another.
I’ve had my say here, so I don’t wish to discuss this further.
Hitchens’ book contains many factual errors, but that is unsurprising considering how the man worked. He wrote a lot, and proudly stated that he had written God is not Great in a few weeks. His method appears to have been to devour a few books, and blend them into a narrative. The result is typical for Hitchens: engagingly written, the issue at hand is a struggle between good versus evil personalities, laced with personal anecdotes (“my good friend X, whom I met…”). There is no original research, no fact-checking, no quantitative arguments. Dawkins had a more logical mind, and thus employs fewer clever-sounding arguments that do not turn out to be so clever upon inspection (“you can’t be reasoned out of something you have not been reasoned into”). His basic argument, that religious beliefs are irrational, has also aged better.
> I don’t mention this in my book, but it’s a convincing bit of evidence that we’re related to other primates.
Creationists are still whining about this chromosome 2 thing, especially that there are genes at the “fusion” site that should not be there.
I myself find the fusion theory quite evident, when you take a visual look at it.
Whether evolution happened or not is a dead question for me – It’s been answered.
I’ve come across some creationists who say that we shouldn’t even look at evidence, implying that to do so is to miss some deeper “truth”. Another position, often articulated, is that they think they must deny evolution happened because it seems intuitively obvious to them that accepting what they think of as scientific reductionism means that we must accept a purposeless, meaningless, amoral universe where everyone will ultimately debase themselves by lapsing into hedonism.
It seems to me that we need a philosophical position, or system, consistent with the fact of evolution, but which can respond to these concerns, and provide an alternative source of purpose and meaning.
In a sense there is some truth in the worry about the apparent meaninglessness in Darwinism when nature seems to be a soulless, mechanistic system, consisting only of particles and material objects mindlessly following the laws of nature. Of course, it might reasonably be said that it matters to a deer when her fawn is killed by a wolf in front of her and of course it matters to the wolf whether it might starve. But there seems to be a clear distinction between sentient creatures like deer and wolves with what seem to be non-sentient beings. It doesn’t seem at all likely that an amoeba could feel anything when it is threatened with death, nor could a bowl of petunias. This seems to imply a need for two different ways of thinking about the universe: the world of mechanistic process, contrasting with a separate world of sentience. Strictly speaking though, there is only one world, so it is better to think of this as seeing the same world at two levels of interpretation. If we think of the amoeba and the petunias as living below, and sentient creatures like the wolf and the deer as living above, what I’ve called an “Awareness Horizon” this starts to make sense of things and it puts sentience at the core of a unifying system that provides purpose and meaning to the universe. At some point in our evolutionary history, some creature, or lineage of creatures, acquired the capacity for simple awareness, or what scientists and philosophers call subjective experiencing. (I’ve called this point in evolution: The Nova Point). To say this point was important would be seriously to underestimate what it means. Unless this has happened elsewhere in the universe, this was the beginning of importance itself, the foundational point at which the universe itself began to matter, suggesting that sentient beings provide the universe with its importance.
If this vision of the universe is accepted, the implications are far reaching indeed. Because we know we evolved, and we are animals, we are bound to have instincts (or what we often typically think of as human intuitions) that evolved in response to the Darwinian theatre of battle in the mindless world below the Awareness Horizon, where everything is about the survival of the genes, and nature has no more consideration for the human animal than it does for the deer, I mentioned above. This means that we need an audit of some of the basic human intuitions (like the, admittedly profound, human intuition, alluded to above: that there must be purpose and meaning to the universe existing outside of our feeling that it must exist) to understand, as best we can, why they evolved, and whether they have any useful function today, and of course which if any might be dangerous to us as a sentient, self-aware species