Category: creationism

Secularism on the rise: new Gallup poll shows that 40% of Americans are young-earth creationists, 33% are theistic evolutionists, and 22% are naturalistic evolutionists

July 27, 2019 • 11:00 am

Over at a Gallup poll site, you can see the headline below reporting the newest iteration of Gallup’s sporadic—now yearly or biennially—survey of American belief in creationism. (It’s really belief in human evolution, so be aware that there are many who think that while other species evolved à la Darwin, humans alone required divine intervention. Do remember that Tennessee’s Butler Act, whose violation led to the trial of John Scopes in 1925, forbad the teaching of human evolution, not evolution in general. )

That headline seems scary, no? In fact, if you read here regularly, this is pretty close to long-term estimates of Biblical young-earth creationists gathered by Gallup since 1982 (the percentage has varied between a low of 38% two years ago and a high 47% in 1993). Here are the data taken since the first survey in 1982.

But in fact the headline is a big underestimate. In fact, 73% of Americans believe in creationism—if you count those who think that God guided an evolutionary process leading to the evolution of humans “over millions of years from less advanced forms of life”.  If God is guiding the process, then there has to be some divine, teleological intervention in evolution, just as Intelligent Design advocates propose. This could happen in several ways. God could, as Michael Behe apparently believes, create the right mutations at the right time, circumventing the naturalistic “random” mutations that most biologists accept but that, says Behe, can’t produce complex adaptations. Or there could be differential reproduction or extinction mandated by some undetected interventions of God. Maybe God tweaked the reproductive potential of those members of Homo who had bigger brains.

So the proportion of Americans who accept some divine hand in evolution is really 73%, and what is divine intervention except a form of creationism? Granted, it works hand in hand with evolution, but it’s a non-naturalistic theory. Thus, by saying that the figures are 40%, Gallup is underestimating the real figure by 45%.  On average, only 22% of Americans—a bit more than one in five—accept a purely naturalistic view of human evolution.

Although Gallup says that the figures for creationists and theistic evolutionists have held pretty steady, the long term-trend is really down a bit (their sum was 82% in 1982 and is now 73%).

One trend that is evident is the slow but ineluctable rise of naturalistic evolutionists, which has more than doubled (9%-22%) over the last 37 years. I’m betting this isn’t a statistical fluke, but a real increase of American acceptance of evolution.

Why is this happening? My theory, which is mine (but also other people’s), doesn’t require any perspicacity: it’s almost surely due to the increasing secularization of America. “Nones”—those who aren’t affiliated with a church—are now nearly a quarter of the American population, and about a third of young people. Granted, many of those are still deists, or even theists, and many are spiritual, but there’s no doubt that the unaffiliated are more willing to accept naturalistic evolution. If you don’t believe in a theistic God, then what reason do you have to oppose evolution?

You can see that in the demographic, educational, and religious breakdown given by Gallup:

These are the usual results: the lower the index of a person’s religiosity, the more likely they are to accept evolution. Young-earth creationism is higher among Protestants than Catholics (though more of the latter accept theistic evolution), and the “nones” are rife with evolutionists: 59% of them accept unguided, naturalistic evolution.

Do note that although the Catholic Church officially accepts evolution, 34% of them remain young-earth creationists, bucking their church’s dogma, while only 18% of them are naturalistic evolutionists. (The Church does broach some supernatural views of evolution, including the important tenet that all living humans are the lineal descendants of one pair of people: Adam and Eve.)

Finally, having a college degree strongly reduces your chances (by more than 50%) of accepting young-earth creationism of humans (though, curiously, it increases the probability of accepting theistic evolution), but that college degree also doubles your likelihood of accepting naturalistic evolution of humans.

The upshot? Creationism—both young-earth and “goddy interventionist” forms—is still the dominant American view of how humans came to be. But, slowly and surely, those who accept evolution in the same way scientists accept it are growing. Why, in 80 years, if the trend continues, nearly half of Americans will accept evolution! None of us will be around to see that, and our species might not even be around. But at least Americans are growing saner.

I’d love for some reporter to ask Trump, as well as the Democratic candidates for President, if they accept naturalistic evolution. I don’t think anyone has ever asked Trump about that.

Here, for those interested in such things, are the methods Gallup used to get these figures. And remember again that the data are about human evolution. If you left out humans in the questions, you’d see a lot fewer creationists, at least of the young-earth, Biblical type.

 

 

 

h/t: Barry

An annoying interview with David Berlinski

July 21, 2019 • 1:30 pm

I don’t often strive to be snarky, but I can’t resist saying this: if you look up “pomposity” in the dictionary, you’ll find it illustrated with a picture of David Berlinski. Trained in philosophy, biology, and mathematics, Berlinski has debased his formidable mind and uncommon eloquence by putting them into the service of creationism. For Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the creationist Discovery Institute, which is touting this 41-minute interview by Peter Robinson (sponsored by the conservative Hoover Institution) as some kind of intellectual tour de force.

Discovery Institute flack David Klinghoffer jumped the shark by asserting that “it would be hard to think of a living person more interesting than our Discovery Institute colleague David Berlinski.” That merely shows the limitation of Klinghoffer’s imagination—or perhaps the narrow scope of his knowledge.

But this interview isn’t a tour de force. It is a rehash, in fancy language, of all the talking points of intelligent design as well as the usual atheist-bashing tropes. Here you’ll find questioning of evolution because we don’t know how life began, the supposed problem of “irreducible complexity,” the claim that the episodic and jerky fossil record somehow disproves evolutionary theory, and the Stephen Meyer-ian argument that the Cambrian explosion disproves evolution.  The last contention—as well as Berlinski’s assertion that “human powers and capacities” are so unique, and so “one-off,” that they must be explained by something other than natural selection—puzzles me, for the usual alternative explanation is God. Yet Berlinski says he’s a nonbeliever—a “secular Jew” like me. I read his 2008 book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, and found it infuriatingly assertive yet shallow.

One wonders why, if he’s a “secular Jew” yet doesn’t like atheism, what on Earth made Berlinski, the son of Jews, into a secular Jew.  When I give talks that connect religion with creationism (a no-brainer except to rarified theologians), I often say that I know of only one evolution denialist who isn’t religious: David Berlinski.  You can see Berlinski discuss atheism and his own agnosticism in the last five minutes of this interview.

Berlinski won’t assume the mantle of “atheist,” for he dislikes atheism, but his whole schtick is to cast doubt on everything (even intelligent design) while not proposing any theories of his own. Thus he says he’s an “agnostic”: the coward’s way out of the question of faith. (Is Berlinski an agnostic about leprechauns as well?) This modus operandus gives him a leg up on almost everybody, for he gets to pick holes in arguments—in the case of evolution, nonexistent holes—without floating any positive assertions about why life is here and why it’s like it is.  Combine that with a William Buckley-an tendency to pontificate, snoot in the air, using fancy phrases and intellectual language, and you get a guy who’s managed to bamboozle a lot of people without making a positive contribution to intellectual discourse.

I was told that this wasn’t always the case. Before he jumped the rails, Berlinski wrote at least four books on science and math, including A Tour of the Calculus, which many regard highly (I haven’t read it). What a comedown that he’s spending his dotage throwing mud on one of the best-established theories in science. As H. L. Mencken wrote in his brilliant obituary of William Jennings Bryan, “He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. He was passing out a poor mountebank.”

My discussion on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and evolution

June 12, 2019 • 9:45 am

Lloyd Evans, an ex-Jehovah’s Witness (JW), runs a regular video series, the John Cedars Channel, in which he criticizes that bizarre religion and tries to support ex-JWs and to address those on the fence.

Last week I had a Skype conversation with Lloyd in which he asked me to respond to a number of anti-evolution statements made in JW pamphlets. (The religion is obdurately creationist.)

The statements that I was asked to address were rather convoluted as well as ignorant, but I did my best. The resulting video is below, and I haven’t watched it. I wasn’t really aware that I was going to be filmed, so I was wearing my usual Hawaiian shirt and may evince some annoying mannerisms. So be it: the biology is what’s important here.

ID craziness: Diarrhea and the appendix are signs of intelligent design

May 30, 2019 • 2:30 pm

It’s curious how adaptations that could have evolved by natural selection are nevertheless seen as evidence for Intelligent Design. Indeed, in the case of diarrhea and the appendix, as ID advocate David Klinghoffer maintains in the article below from Evolution News (click on screenshot), the evidence is not just an adaptation itself, evincing the wisdom of the creator, but supposed foresight: designing a feature in advance before it would be needed—something that natural selection couldn’t do. Unfortunately the article and associated video doesn’t show any such thing, nor does it show that ID is a more parsimonious explanation for diarrhea and the functionality of the appendix than is evolution.

Klinghoffer’s piece is about a recent book by Marcos Eberlin, a Brazilian chemist at the University of Campinas. (His Wikipedia entry states that “Eberlin is an advocate of intelligent design in Brazil, a pseudoscience on which he also lectures and he has signed the Dissent From Darwinism statement. He is a creationist also, and have said that evolution theory is a fallacy.”) 

So here are both Klinghoffer and Eberlin implying that that the Great Designer solves problems before they come up.  Klinghoffer’s blurb:

In his new book, Foresight, Dr. Eberlin develops a case for ID from the observation that so much in life and in nature appears to have been designed with a view to anticipating future problems and solving them ahead of time. Only minds can do that. Take the problem of eating adventurously and possibly consuming some bad food. The solution is diarrhea — the body’s “power wash” cycle, as he puts it. “It’s really nice,” he adds. “Diarrhea is a blessing.” You’ve probably never thought of it that way before.

But discomfort aside, the solution itself comes with a problem: it depletes the intestines of necessary microorganisms. The solution to that is the appendix, the supposedly useless, vestigial organ according to Darwinists, which in fact serves as a helpful reservoir of microorganisms.

And here’s Marcos Eberlin showing the creator’s marvelous foresight.

As for appendicitis, Eberlin claims that it’s only a problem in First World countries. I’m not sure if that’s true, and, if it is, why that’s so. Some hypothesize that in countries with less sanitation, the immune system gets used to challenges and there is thus less inflammation of this organ.  But the issue is whether the precursor to the appendix was, in net, deleterious in our ancestors, and, if so, that was the reason it shrank.

Let’s see if there’s good evidence for design here. First of all, diarrhea may well be a body’s way of flushing out toxic substances and microbes from the gut. There’s no problem with that evolving by natural selection, and this has been recognized by advocates of Darwinian medicine for a long time, as in the article below by Randolph Nesse (click on screenshot). I’m not sure that we know that diarrhea is an adaptation rather than an unevolved reaction of the gut, but at least there’s no barrier to seeing how a body’s expulsion of noxious substances could have been adaptive.

It’s also possible that the appendix serves as a reservoir of healthy gut bacteria to repopulate the intestine if it’s purged of its normal microbiome by something like diarrhea. This, too, has been suggested before, as in this paper in mbio six years ago. That paper proposes that “normal” gut bacteria are protected from purging by residing in a biofilm in the appendix, and then can reinvade the gut with healthy bacteria.

So it’s possible, and maybe even likely, that in general having an appendix is actually adaptive: you can repopulate your gut more easily with good bacteria if you have an appendix. And the “downside” of having an appendix—inflammation and death before it was possible to surgically remove it—may not have been something our ancestors faced often.

The question remains, however, whether the appendix is a vestigial organ—whether it is the remnant of a caecal pouch for digestion found in some of our relatives (some herbivores have pouches rather than an appendix). The important thing here is that vestigial organs can assume a new function. Despite that function, organs like the appendix could still be reduced remnants of a feature that once had a different (and useful) function, and thus, despite their new function, still serve as evidence for evolution. (There are, of course, many vestigial features that have no known function at all, like the muscles in human ears that can move them about or the “snake limbs” pictured below.)

It is one of the most common misconceptions about evolutionary morphology that to be vestigial, an organ cannot have a function. That’s not true: all that is required is that an organ be a reduced or degenerated remnant of a feature in an ancestor and have lost the function the presumably prompted its original evolution. It can still assume a new function.

One example: the reduced legs of snakes, which were once larger legs in their lizardlike ancestors. The males use these to stroke and stimulate the female during mating. They are clearly vestigial, as we know from both morphological and fossil evidence, but they still have a function.

Here’s a leg from the female of a ball python (Python regius), showing that the external leg is relatively short. (That’s a standard dissecting kit needle probe.) As Greg Mayer said, who provided the picture, “what you’re seeing is a claw; there’s a femur and pelvis inside.” This is clearly a vestigial feature, but it’s functional in males.

“… in snakes with vestigial limbs (e.g. Boidae), the pelvic spurs scratch or titillate the female in the vicinity of her vent.” —L. J. Vitt and J.P. Caldwell. 2009. Herpetology. 3rd ed. Elsevier, Amsterdam.

We’re not sure whether the appendix is a vestigial organ in the sense I gave above; the jury is still out. But what is absolutely clear is that there is no need to invoke the existence of a Wise Designer to explain both diarrhea and a bacteria-harboring appendix.

It’s entirely possible, for instance, that features of the gut causing diarrhea evolved as an adaptive response to toxins and bad microbes. Under many circumstances, the gut could repopulate itself from natural sources like food or contact with other individuals. But there might then be an additional advantage to those individuals who were able to sequester some of their gut bacteria on a wormlike structure of the gut: the appendix. That would be subsequent evolution by natural selection—no designer needed here, either. The whole sequence: appendix reduction—> evolution of diarrhea response—> co-option of the appendix to serve as a reservoir for “good microbiota”, can evolve by natural selection. And we don’t even need the first step should the human appendix prove not to be vestigial. Regardless of the sequence, no evolutionary “foresight” is needed.

We may not know whether the appendix evolved as a way to enhance microbe repopulation, or was the remnant of a caecal pouch that assumed this function as an adaptive byproduct. Some day we may have to revise our notion that the appendix is a vestigial organ, though I’m not ready to do that. But what is certain is that IDers like Eberlin and Klinghoffer are suffering from an extreme failure of the imagination in saying that diarrhea evinces an Intelligence On High, and that the appendix was put in place in advance to help those individuals who developed diarrhea.

 

h/t: Gregory

National Review: Conservatives should accept evolution

May 15, 2019 • 1:00 pm

Both the Left and Right have their issues with evolution. On the Right, many are evangelical Christians and reject evolution on religious grounds. Even Orthodox Jews like Ben Shapiro have found themselves flirting with Intelligent Design, and when I saw Shapiro implicitly attacking modern evolutionary biology I gave up all hope for him. The voting base for the Right may be fine with those who attack or deny evolution, but in the long run you’re going to look pretty stupid if you reject it. (It’s curious that I know nothing about Trump’s views on the issue.)

The Left, too, while accepting Darwinian evolution in general, has problems with evolutionary psychology—not that the discipline is perfect. But wholesale rejection of it, by those like P. Z. Myers, is intellectually dishonest and ideologically driven. Many also imply that evolution tells us that there is a spectrum of not just gender, but of sex itself, so that sex is not “binary”.  In fact, three organismal biology societies, including the Society for the Study of Evolution (of which I was once President), issued a statement saying that “sex is a continuum” which is infuriatingly wrong. In our species, and many others, evolution has in fact favored a binary: male and female.

Denial or rejection of evolution, then, is based on ideology: largely religious on the Right and Blank Slate-ism on the Left.

It’s refreshing, then, to see an article in National Review, a conservative journal, arguing that a.) evolution is true and b.) conservatives shouldn’t be afraid of it. The article is below (click on screenshot); it’s by Razib Khan, a geneticist and science writer. He’s been criticized for writing for questionable publications that purvey racism and bigotry, and on that grounds the New York Times let him go as a temporary columnist. He surely must be a conservative; in fact, he identifies himself as one in the first sentence.

But whatever his past, the piece in the National Review isn’t half bad (click on screenshot):

He does point out the forms of evolution denialism I highlighted above, but of course his article is motivated by conservatives’ rejection of evolution, and to that end he takes out after Michael Behe, whose Intelligent Design views are much admired by conservatives like Shapiro. In general, though, Khan highlights how evolution has made testable predictions, and how much we know about these days. In short, he tells conservatives that it’s true, and to stop fighting it.

But I have mixed feelings about stuff like this:

But evolutionary biology is nothing for conservatives to fear, because it is one of the crowning achievements of modern Western civilization. It should be viewed not as an acid gnawing at the bones of civilization, but as a jewel. The science built upon the rock of Charles Darwin’s ideas is a reflection of Western modernity’s commitment to truth as a fundamental value. And many Christians well-versed in evolutionary science find it entirely compatible with their religious beliefs.

Further, while evolutionary biology does not tell us what is good, the truth of the world around us can inform our efforts to seek the good — and in this sense, the political implications of evolutionary biology do not favor the Left. Today many on the Left reject the very idea of human nature, to the point of effectively being evolution deniers themselves. They assert that society and values can be restructured at will. That male and female are categories of the mind, rather than of nature. In rejecting evolution, a conservative gives up the most powerful rejoinder to these claims.

Those who reject human nature on the Left are not mainstream Leftists, but extremist Leftists, and the data show that many more people on the Left accept evolution in general, including human evolution, than those on the Right. But it’s wrong to imply that the Left consists of wholesale deniers of evolution. True, Blank Slaters do reject mainstream science (and not just evolution—also evidence that male and females have different brains and show different innate preferences), and that’s to their discredit.

Here are data from a 2013 Pew poll showing that the problem is greater on the Right than on the Left:

Khan also errs, I think, when trying to show that evolution is compatible with religion. He uses the old trope that “some scientists were religious, ergo harmony”:

But what about the metaphysical implications? Richard Dawkins would have you believe that evolutionary biology is fundamentally atheistic. But he is one voice. There are in fact evolutionary biologists who are religious, including Evangelical Protestants. The most influential evolutionary biologist of the first half the 20th century, R. A. Fisher, was an Anglican and a political conservative. The existence of people who are Christians and evolutionary biologists shows that there is a wide range of opinions on how evolutionary biology relates to religious faith.

True, but newer data also show that religious people are far less accepting of evolution than nonreligious people, and of course the large majority of scientists in elite universities are out-and-out atheists. Here are more data from that Pew poll:

Note that the biggest acceptors of evolution are “unaffiliated” people and white mainline Protestants, while the more conservative religious show less acceptance—especially white evangelical Protestants.

And for good reason: evolution in fact does fly in the face of many religious beliefs—not just in its flat denial of Biblical claims like the Creation and of Adam and Eve as the progenitors of all of us (I’m looking at you, Vatican), but in other ways too. Here are two slides I use in my talks about the incompatibility of science and faith (many of these points are taken from Steve Stewart-Williams’s excellent book, Darwin, God and The Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Thought You Knew):

The points in red are the ones I consider most important in promoting rejection of evolution by religious people. Ergo, conservatives are still going to have trouble accepting evolution insofar as they need to comport it with their faith. Nevertheless, Khan is absolutely right when he says this:

But looking forward, the energies of the Right are not most fruitfully spent on debating descent with modification and the common origin of life.

Amen!

Intelligent Design advocates finally sneak God back into their “science”

April 7, 2019 • 12:30 pm

 

The video below, in which Intelligent Design creationist Stephen Meyer explains ID to conservative writer and speaker Ben Shapiro, accomplishes two things—beyond demonstrating that Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, continues, despite withering criticism from scientists, to bang on about supposedly unevolvable “complex specified information” and the Cambrian Explosion as evidence for the Great Designer.

First, the video has eliminated any trace of respect I had for Ben Shapiro. Although I’m opposed to nearly all (well, let’s just make that all) of Shapiro’s political opinions, I thought his rhetoric was useful in challenging Woke college students who hadn’t thought through their views.

But now Shapiro has cast his lot with creationism, albeit the “sophisticated” form of creationism adumbrated by Meyer and his cronies. Shapiro is now beyond hope; it’s never not a good move for someone who pretends to be an intellectual to ally himself with thoroughly debunked pseudoscience.

Shapiro is, of course, an Orthodox Jew, but I thought that, contra Orthodox creationists, he had at least some respect for science. But he’s been moving towards ID creationism for some time, and now he’s clearly bought the whole hog.  You can argue whether babies have souls (Shapiro thinks “yes”), but it’s a different issue to say that evolutionary theory is deeply flawed, for that’s a matter of empiricism.

Second, the video nakedly reveals the ultimate goal of the ID movement revealed: to sneak God back into the science classroom. I discuss that below, showing that Meyer reveals what we knew all along: IDers conceive of the Designer as the Christian God. That, of course, was part of the Discovery Institute’s secret (but leaked) Wedge Document that, back in 1999, outlined a strategy to attack materialism in science and replace it, in both professional science and the science classroom, with Jesus. I quote from that document; emphasis is mine.

The very beginning of this [Wedge] strategy, the “thin edge of the wedge,” was Phillip Johnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe’s highly successful Darwin’s Black Box followed Johnson’s work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions. 

To get their creationism taught in the schools, IDers had the clever strategy of taking God out of the theory, at least explicitly. They then pretended that there was just some unspecified “mind” behind evolution, and that mind could be God, but it could also belong to space aliens or any overweening intelligence. But that was a lie: IDers wanted all along for the Judeo-Christian God to be the Designer. And you didn’t have to be a scientist to see this, for that was the decision of Judge Jones when he rejected the teaching of ID in Dover, Pennsylvania schools as a form of disguised religion. The replacement of “God” with “Designer” was clearly a duplicitous tactical strategy.

Those familiar with Meyer’s “theories” of ID, contained in his two books Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, will see them trotted out in the video below. I won’t waste time showing how they’ve been rebutted, but will just give you some links to read (you can see other criticisms in the Wikipedia entry for Meyer). Some good rebuttals of Meyer’s creationism can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

At 47:44, Shapiro asks Meyer how he connects ID theory to God. Meyer explains that “it takes a mind with conscious awareness to generate information in a digital form”, and that such a conclusion is at least “theistic friendly.” Meyer then says he’s writing another book about cosmology and physics—The Return of the God Hypothesis—using as evidence for God “anthropic fine tuning” and the idea of the “Goldilocks Universe”. And that evidence of design, as well as the origin of the Universe itself, cannot, says Meyer, cannot be explained by “an agent within the cosmos”, so space aliens are out.  Meyer concludes that theism itself is the best explanation of all the evidence from biology, cosmology, and physics.

So there we have it. Meyer is trotting out the same shopworn arguments—fine-tuning, the anthropic principle, and the Cosmological Argument—claiming that together they show that the designer is a theistic God. There’s nothing new in what he says, but I guess the ID people decided it’s time to bring God out from behind the screen to complete the Wedge Strategy.

Over at Evolution News, the flaccid house organ of the Discovery Institute, David Klinghoffer extols the video below, showing Meyer in discussion with author and speaker Eric Metaxas. Klinghoffer osculates Meyer’s tuchas copiously:

Meyer, a philosopher of science, talks about the move to the next frontier in the argument for intelligent design. His forthcoming book, which is going to be huge, is The Return of the God Hypothesis. [JAC: the book’s subtitle is Compelling Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God]. With Metaxas, who imperfectly disguises his own brilliance behind a hilarious comic persona, Meyer explains the origins of his thinking about design in cosmology and biology, tracing those back to a 1985 conference he just happened to attend in, yes, Dallas.

The YouTube notes say that this talk was “taped at the 2019 Dallas Science and Faith Conference at Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas sponsored by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.”  You’ll hear some of the stuff that pushed Meyer towards his new book, including our supposed impotence to understand the origin of life, the existence of “complex specified information” (again), our failure to understand consciousness, and so on.

Starting at about 42 minutes in, Meyer starts making the case for God as “the designing intelligence.” The evidence is pretty much the same as above: the supposed fine-tuning of the laws of physics, the existence of a “Goldilocks Universe”, and so on. These things, argues Meyer, are “built into the cosmos from the very beginning”, and so can’t be created by some within-the-Universe being like a space alien. Ergo, the designer is God.

Very clever, but physicists don’t accept the cosmological data as evidence for God. They remain solidly atheistic.

Seriously, if God wants us to accept Him, why can’t he just come down to Earth and do a few irrefutable miracles that can be witnessed, photographed, and so on? (On pp. 118-119 of Faith Versus Fact, I lay out evidence that would provisionally convince me that there is a God, and I believe Carl Sagan also sketched the kind of evidence that would convince him that God existed.) Why, then, is God invisible? Is He testing our faith by denying us evidence of His existence, so that only those who are able believe without evidence get saved?

But now I venture into theology, and that’s the realm of Meyer and his colleagues.  I’ll merely quote the philosopher Delos McKown: “The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike. ”

h/t: Stacy

Behe’s book sliced and diced again—by members of his own department

March 13, 2019 • 3:00 pm

If you go to the website of the biology department of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where resides the ID creationist Michael Behe, you’ll find this disclaimer:

To my knowledge, this is unique not only in science, but in any academic department, for here you see an entire department disowning the intellectual oeuvre of one of its members. The disclaimer is there because Michael Behe has tenure and can’t be fired, though he spends his life pushing a discredited form of gussied-up creationism. Rather than lose students who might think the entire department approves of Behe’s Biblically-based ideas, and thus embarrass their whole department, they put up the disclaimer. They tolerate him because they have no choice, but they don’t accept his work.

Although I’m unaware of any review in the popular press (save mine in the Washington Post) of Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, it has been reviewed in the scientific literature, most notably by Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski in Science. And, of course, all reviews by real scientists have been negative, for ID has been lame and discredited for years, emasculated by the Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District trial. (Behe testified in that case and embarrassed both himself and fellow IDers). Behe and his Discovery Institute can’t abide this criticism, and have struck back, but their blows are ineffectual. Just today their flaccid house organ, Evolution News, issued four distinct attacks on me alone. I’m bursting with pride!

Now today a new review appeared in the prestigious journal Evolution. The kicker is that it’s by two members of Behe’s own department: assistant professor Gregory Lang, who works on microbial evolution, and assistant professor Amber Rice, an organismal evolutionist. I don’t think they need fear loss of tenure for writing this, as all the department save Behe spurns intelligent design, but it is a delicious irony. You can read their very critical review, which pulls no punches about their creationist colleague, by clicking on the screenshot below (reference at bottom, pdf here).

It’s a good review (by “good” I mean “well thought out and well crafted”, not “approving”), and shows that there are critical thinkers and good writers in that department. It’s also muy negative, and I’ll give one or two excerpts to show that Lang and Rice pull no punches:

Darwin Devolves contains a few factual errors and many errors of omission that have been pointed out by others (Lents and Hunt 2019; Lents et al. 2019), but it is two critical errors of logic that undermine Behe’s central premise that degradative mutations cripple evolution. First, Behe falsely equates the prevalence of loss‐of‐function mutations to the inevitable degradation of biological systems and the impossibility of evolution to produce novelty. By selective presentation of data, he exaggerates the role of degradative processes in evolution. Second, as he has previously, Behe attempts to argue from analogy, equating proteins with machines and convincing us that machines cannot evolve. Calling a flagellum an outboard motor may have some merit as a teaching tool, but it is not reality. Showing that a hammer cannot evolve into a fishing rod tells us nothing about real constraints on protein evolution.

Many of their comments mirror mine and Lents et al.’s, but they add even more about the notion of “irreducible complexity” and Behe’s persistent but flawed analogies between organisms and human-designed machines.

And they faced the same dilemma I did: should I review this travesty of a book and draw even more attention to Behe’s views? But they, like I, decided that Behe needed a scientific rebuttal lest people think his views were acceptable to scientists.

. . . By reviewing Behe’s latest book, we run the risk of drawing attention—or worse, giving credibility—to his ideas. Books like Darwin Devolves, however, must be openly challenged and refuted, even if it risks giving publicity to misbegotten views. Science benefits from public support. Largely funded by federal grants, scientists have a moral responsibility (if not a financial obligation) to ensure that the core concepts of our respective fields are communicated effectively and accurately to the public and to our trainees. This is particularly important in evolutionary biology, where—over 150 years after On the Origin of Species—less than 20% of Americans accept that humans evolved by natural and unguided processes (Gallup 2014). It is hard to think of any other discipline where mainstream acceptance of its core paradigm is more at odds with the scientific consensus.

Why evolution by natural selection is difficult for so many to accept is beyond the scope of this review [JAC: my take is here]; however, it is not for a lack of evidence: the data (only some of which we present here) are more than sufficient to convince any open‐minded skeptic that unguided evolution is capable of generating complex systems. A combination of social and historical factors creates a welcoming environment for an academic voice that questions the scientific consensus. Darwin Devolves was designed to fit this niche.

I don’t think there will be amiable feelings in the biology building when Behe encounters these two. But he’ll be retiring soon—or so I hope, as he’s 67. In the meantime, he’s and the IDers are going to emit lots of tirades about his colleagues on Evolution News, as none of them can tolerate—much less learn from—criticism.  In the acknowledgments section, though, Lang and Rice play nice. After taking the guy’s book apart, they applaud his collegiality, demonstrating the maxim of my advisor Lewontin when dismantling someone politely: “give with one hand and take with the other”. To wit:

. . . Finally, we acknowledge Michael Behe—despite our academic differences, we maintain that Mike is an easygoing departmental colleague with whom we continue to share the day‐to‐day tasks of academia.

I can live with that, though I don’t really believe the “easygoing” part.

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Lang, G. I. and Rice, A. M. (2019).  Evolution unscathed: Darwin Devolves argues on weak reasoning that unguided evolution is a destructive force, incapable of innovation. Evolution. doi:10.1111/evo.13710