Category: creationism

More email from evolution-haters

March 11, 2019 • 8:45 am

Well, maybe “evolution hater” is too strong a term for this woman from Virginia, who wrote me an email this morning. She said “there is no need to respond,” but given that she sent me an unsolicited email, I’ll send her the link to this post, along with the comments. Feel free to respond, but again—be polite. (I informed the retired Air Force officer who wrote me yesterday of the readers’ responses.)

Dear Professor Coyne,

I read with interest your review of Behe’s book.  As a nonscientist, I am not in a position to make any critical judgment on either view.  As the mother of five and grandmother of seven, I know what the younger generation is seeking- authenticity without vitriol, Truth without preaching and a genuine desire to tackle the “Tough” questions of our time- which include  open discussions of the Four big questions- Origin, Meaning, Morality and Destiny.

Personally, I find evolutionary theory sorely lacking in any meaningful answer to any of theses questions and the attempts to address them fall into the hubris and arrogance of scientism rather than the humility that stems from wonder at the order of the universe and a willingness to admit we do not know everything.There is no need to respond.

There was a postscript:

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing.  Pascal

My comments:

1.) It saddens me to see a non-scientist claim that they’re not capable of making a critical judgement of ID. The arguments are not that arcane and have been addressed in many popular venues. I think this is just intellectual laziness, or perhaps an unwillingness to engage with the criticisms of ID.

2.) Why is a scientific discussion, or promoting evolution, which happens to be true, “preaching”?  In fact, any attempt to say something that contradicts another person’s religious beliefs is always construed as “vitriol.”

3.) Evolutionary biology doesn’t really deal with the questions of “Origin, Meaning, Morality, and Destiny” except insofar as abiogenesis (the study of how life began) can be considered part of evolutionary biology, and insofar as some aspects of morality—its roots in our animal ancestors—can be examined scientifically.

But, of course, religion, while it may tackle these tough questions, doesn’t answer them. For example, what is the proper moral behavior? If you’re a Christian it’s one thing (actually more, depending on what kind of Christian you are), if you’re a Muslim it’s another thing, and if you’re a Scientologist it’s still another.  The fact is that evolutionary biology actually answers the questions it asks, while religion does not. (Is there a God? Who knows? If there is one, is it the Christian God, Allah, or Shiva? Who knows?) Or if religion does provide answers, there are better (and more consistent) answers provided by secular humanism and ethics.

4.) Once again we see the scientism canard leveled at people like me (at least I presume it’s me, since she’s reacting to my book review). Well, I admit that we don’t know everything, and I know of no scientist who disagrees. The thing is that in 100 years we’ll know more about biology and evolution than we do now, while theologians and believers won’t know one iota more about the divine. It is not the scientists who have hubris, but the believers. And any changes and improvements in morality will, as Steve Pinker argues, come not from religion but from humanism.

 

I get emails from Christian creationists

March 10, 2019 • 10:45 am

The email below arrived this morning from a retired officer in the U.S. Air Force who had read my critical review of Michael Behe’s new Intelligent-Design book in the Washington Post. (I am, by the way, pleased that virtually all the commenters at the Post accept evolution and reject ID—something I didn’t expect). Re the email: it always surprises me when somebody who doesn’t seem to know much about evolution or biology (or biochemistry in this case) decides to lecture me about The Way Things Are.  Even more presumptuous is that they think they’re going to make me a Christian without knowing much about my views and personal history. But of course that’s what evangelical Christians do.

Read and weep. Please feel free to comment (politely, please), as I’ve told this person that I’m posting his email and will send him the link in a bit.

Professor Coyne

After reading your Sunday Washington Post book review of “Darwin Devolves,” I can only ask you:  you would presume that there is a creator for the wrist watch on your arm, the computer on your desk … why would you not similarly presume that our world, with all its complexity, variety, functionality, and even beauty, that there would not be a Creator—God—for our world … the universe?

Who is the crazier and off-base?  The person who thinks that such variety, complexity, functionality and beauty just ‘evolved’ out of primordial mush (where did the primordial mush come from anyway?)  Or, the person who believes and understands that such characteristics of ‘creation’ could not have come about without design and creation?

How does that logic flow?  Order implies functionality; functionality implies design; design implies intelligence; intelligence implies a Creator?

I would think the clear solution to your dilemma is that ‘evolution’ since the world’s creation is a corollary to the larger plan of creation set in motion by God.  Once the original creation was complete and God’s plan set in motion, evolutionary events and activities take place as part of that larger divine plan.  Heck, the complexity—yet functionality—of genes and DNA that so much of your book review talks about needed ‘design’ for all that to work in some orderly fashion.

And as to your statement about “the Christian belief that homo sapiens is a special creation of God,” it is.  Humans are the only sentient beings, “created in the image of God” (“imago dei”) with both a soul and a corporal body.  Quite simply, God did not promise the cocker spaniel population (or any other creature on this earth) eternal life with Him after their time on this earth is finished.  If anything, the “spark” of life and the inevitability of death for us all should have you at least thinking a little more profoundly.

I offer you the famous quote from Saint Anselm, the father of modern scholasticism: “Lord, let me not understand so that I may believe; let me believe so that I may understand.”

Deo gratias
NAME REDACTED

I could adduce Hume’s principle about miracles about the issue of “who is the crazier and off base” here, but I did that in a response to this person, also pointing out sources of information about how life could have evolved from chemicals. I also asked this person, since he seems to know that there is a Christian God, why that god would work through evolution instead of creating everything de novo, as it so plainly states in Genesis.

But I am vastly amused at his assurance that we have souls but cocker spaniels don’t, and therefore dogs don’t go to Heaven. This, of course, was the deranged conclusion of Edward Feser that I wrote about in 2015. The Argument from Dogs is the silver lining in this cloud of ignorance.

My review of Behe’s book in the Washington Post

March 8, 2019 • 3:20 pm

Well, I read Michael Behe’s new intelligent-design book Darwin Devolves a long time ago, as I was asked to review it for the Washington Post. But I couldn’t say that, of course, for it would reveal that I had a prepublication copy, and that means I was going to produce a review. One can’t say that in advance. Up to this point, instead of giving my own take on the book, I gave the take of others: Rich Lenski, Josh Swamidass, Nathan Lents, and so on. At last my own review is out.

Well, we all agree: the book is, as ID books always are, junk science.

But Behe makes some truly outrageous statements in this one, especially his claim that mutations involved in distinguishing new families and similar higher-order taxa are those created by the Designer (aka God), while mutations creating lower level taxa like species and genera are random, non-Goddy mutations. To any biologist who knows how subjective groups like genera, families, and so on really are, this is arrant nonsense, bordering on lunacy.

Behe also claims (and I didn’t say this in my review), that the fossil record shows that “higher categories of classification such as phylum and class [precede] new lower levels of classification such as order and family” (p. 196), which is also ludicrous. All taxa begin as new species that result from the splitting of populations, and species themselves often continue to split and diverge to the point where groups of them (preferably with a common ancestry) can be called genera, families, and so on.

I didn’t get to mention that in my review, nor did I describe Behe’s ludicrous claim that disulfide bonds in proteins (cysteine-cysteine) are “irreducibly complex” because they hold proteins together but both of them must be in place before you get that bond. Ergo, God is required.  But there are plenty of single, free cysteine residues in proteins, which is a perfectly adaptive first step in forming those disulfide bonds. No irreducible complexity needed.

Sorry, but Behe’s book is dreadful. And that is what my review says. He and the Discovery Institute will be furious, but too damn bad. They’ve lied for Jesus too long.

Click on the screenshot to read my take on the book.

Behe and his publisher distort his reviews, pretend that they praise his work

March 8, 2019 • 10:15 am

Blurbs on books are usually selected by the publisher, but they’re always, at least in my experience, vetted by the author. Here, sent in a comment by reader Michael, is a reproduction of the back cover of ID-creationist Michael Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA that Challenges Evolution (you can also see these quotes on the Amazon site):

Note that there are two respectable reviewers here : my first student Allen Orr (now a professor at Rochester) and James Shreeve, Executive Editor for Science at National Geographic (Axe and Leisola and Carlson are IDers themselves and either creationists or affiliated with the Discovery Institute). Did Orr and Shreeve really praise Behe? Of course not: these are statements taken out of the context of the full review of Darwin’s Black Box.  Creationists, of course, are good at that. First they take biologists’ scientific statements out of context, making them seem as if they’re favoring ID, and now, in book blurbs, they blatantly pretend that Orr and Shreve are praising Behe. Let’s look at the sources of the quotations.

Here’s Orr’s review of ID and Behe’s views in the New Yorker in 2005 (click on screenshot), and the quote Behe and HarperOne (the publisher) use is below it:

The quote on the book cover:

Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University (and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute), is a biochemist who writes technical papers on the structure of DNA. He is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known.

What you don’t see from the excerpt is that Orr’s piece completely dismantles Behe’s Argument for Design from Irreducible Complexity (as well as Dembski’s “No Free Lunch” argument), so the publishers are pretending that Orr liked Behe’s work. I’ll let you read the New Yorker article for yourself to see how Orr demonstrates why Behe’s arguments for a Designer aren’t dispositive because there are always Darwinian alternative pathways, even though we may not know which one was taken. As always, the ID tactic that when you don’t understand how something evolved, to punt and say, “Well, that means God did it”, is simply a dumb and unproductive program. Where’s the independent evidence for God, or, in Behe’s cynical euphemism, “The Intelligent Designer”? Absent that, ID is an ungrounded speculation, rightly rejected by Judge John Jones as Christianity in disguise.

Orr’s final assessment of why biologists reject ID:

Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science.

Here’s Shreeve’s New York Times review from 23 years ago (click on screenshot):

The full quote excerpted on Behe’s book cover:

In ”Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,” he argues that the origin of intracellular processes underlying the foundation of life cannot be explained by natural selection or by any other mechanism based purely on chance. When examined with the powerful tools of modern biology, but not with its modern prejudices, life on a biochemical level can be a product, he says, only of intelligent design. Coming from a practicing scientist — he is a biochemist at Lehigh University — this proposition is close to heretical.

Unlike Orr, Shreeve is not a working biologist, but he still sees the problem of punting to God in our ignorance (he does tout complexity theory, despite the fact that, as Orr notes, good old natural selection provides plausible means for the evolution of systems that look irreducibly complex):

Mr. Behe may be right that given our current state of knowledge, good old Darwinian gradualist evolution cannot explain the origin of blood clotting or cellular transport. It doesn’t provide a mechanism for genetic inheritance either – but does that mean that James Dewey Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, shouldn’t have gone looking for one? Before an investigator declares the cell to be God’s last holdout, he must consider other natural causes for the origin of biochemical complexity, including the spontaneous organization of componenets [sic] suggested by complexity theory itself. Mr. Behe remarks on the vagueness of complexity theory itself. Mr. Behe remarks on the bagueness [sic] of complexity theory today – a curious charge, coming from a creationist – but what about its future, or that of paradigms as yet unconceived? Shouldn’t we leave something for our children and grandchildren to puzzle out besides which systems int he cell are intelligently designed and which are not? Because something is beyond our understanding today does not mean it will be beyond theirs.

HarperOne, the religious branch of HarperCollins Publishing, used the New Yorker and NYT quotes just to give an aura of authority to Behe’s work: “look, he was praised by the fancy New York media”. But he wasn’t, and if you read the full reviews you’ll see that neither reviewer accepts Behe’s contention that things that look (to Behe) irreducibly complex must have been the product of a Great Mutagenic Designer.

Only somebody who was intellectually dishonest would sanction the use of these misleading blurbs on their book. But of course Behe and the Discovery Institute are very anxious for this book to do well (it isn’t) because they see it as a pathway to public and scientific acceptance of Intelligent Design. Too bad they’re wrong.

 

Rich Lenski takes down Michael Behe and his ID creationism: Part IV

March 7, 2019 • 11:15 am

Rich Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State, has put up his fourth (and penultimate) post on his website (Telliamed Revisited) criticizing Michael Behe’s new Intelligent Design book, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution. You can see the post, which is his most thorough yet, by clicking on the website below. (I’ve posted takes on the first three parts here, here, and here.)

It’s a good read and easily comprehensible to the layperson who knows just a tad of biology. What Lenski describes is an experiment on the evolution of viruses in the lab. And that experiment demolishes Behe’s claim that if something looks “irreducibly complex”, it could not have involved natural selection acting on sequentially-occurring mutations, and therefore required the mutagenic intervention of The Great Intelligent Designer. (Behe, a pious Catholic, of course thinks that the Designer is the Christian God, but, to try to make ID look religion-neutral, he has hedged and said that the Designer could be some other “being” like space aliens. Why either gods or aliens would alter evolution by making mutations rather than creating species de novo is clearly beyond our poor powers of comprehension.)

The experiment also contradicts Behe’s contention that evolution almost always relies on adaptive but broken or inactivated genes (natural selection can sometimes favor such genes because they reduce fitness by making proteins that are no longer useful). Behe (who has distorted the evidence for this claim in his polar bear story) likes this view because it implies that evolution eventually stops without the Designer’s intervention, for if adaptive evolution always relies on inactivated genes, then it’s supposed to wind down. (That is not true, even if the vast bulk of evolution rested on “broken genes”, which it does not. And there are many adaptations we know of that involve changes in genes that don’t inactivate them.) At any rate, the viral evolution observed in Lenski’s lab certainly did not involve broken or deactivated genes.

I’ll let you read about the virus experiment yourself; here’s Lenski’s conclusion, and he tells me that there’s one more part to go in his series. Behe should be nursing a bruised tuchas now.

As Nathan Lents, Joshua Swamidass, and I wrote in our book review, “Ultimately, Darwin Devolves fails to challenge modern evolutionary science because, once again, Behe does not fully engage with it. He misrepresents theory and avoids evidence that challenges him.”

If you’ve followed the logic and evidence in the three systems I’ve written about—polar bears adapting to a new diet, bacteria fine-tuning and even evolving new functions as they adapt to laboratory conditions, and viruses evolving a new port of entry into their hosts—you’ll understand why Behe’s arguments against evolution aren’t taken seriously by the vast majority of biologists. As for Behe’s arguments for intelligent design, they rest on his incredulity about what evolution is able to achieve, and they make no testable predictions about how the designer intervenes in the evolutionary process.

Speaking of Lents, he’s written a longer piece in Skeptic Magazine about Behe’s book (click on the screenshot). If you’ve read the pieces by Lents and Lenski that I’ve highlighted on this site (e.g. here), you won’t learn much new, but it’s a good summary of the problems with Behe’s book, and a good place to refer curious readers who want a one-stop review of Behe’s nonsense..

As for Behe’s book, it’s not doing anywhere as well as his first two books, particularly Darwin’s Black Box. Although there are all five-star reviews from the benighted ID crowd, undoubtedly an orchestrated thing, they aren’t enough to get the book above the 2000 mark. Either readers are tired of ID or tired of Behe, but neither he nor the Discovery Institute can be pleased at the lame sales record. Note, though, that the book is #1 in both creationism (which is what it is) and Developmental Biology, which it certainly isn’t:

 

Retraction Watch highlights the paper I got retracted

March 6, 2019 • 1:30 pm

Yesterday we were headliners at the watchdog site Retraction Watch (RW). This time it was about the creationist paper by Sarah Umer that was published in The International Journal of Ethnology and Anthropology, a Springer journal.  I complained bitterly about it on a post on this site, and then kvetched to the journal itself. They blew me off. I persisted. Eventually, I got to the higher-ups, who took a while but eventually retracted the paper, though leaving it on the website (I was sore about that, too, but apparently that’s policy). You can read about the journal’s excuses and Umer’s defense of her creationist nonsense at the link below (click on screenshot):

First, RW pokes fun at the journal and its lame excuse for “mistakenly” publishing Umer’s paper:

It’s become a sort of Retraction Watch Mad Libs: Author writes a paper that is so far, far, out of the mainstream. Maybe it argues that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Or that vaccines cause autism. Truth squads swarm over the paper, taking to blogs and Twitter to wonder, in the exasperated tone of those who have been here before, how on earth it was published in a peer reviewed journal.

Then, in something that approaches — but does not quite qualify as — contrition, the journal in question retracts the paper, mumbling something in a retraction notice about a compromised peer review process, or that ghosts in the machine allowed the paper to be published instead of being rejected.

This week’s parade float entry is a paper in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology.

The journal’s excuse and RW’s reaction:

. . . .The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article [1], because it was published in error before the peer review process was completed. Further post publication peer review determined that the article is not suitable for publication in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology. The author does not agree to this retraction.

Now, mistakes happen, and editors press the wrong button, and all that, but…really? We’ve seen this sort of thing before, almost always with controversial papers. That suggests at least two possibilities: This happens a lot, but no one notices when the papers are mundane, or it’s a convenient excuse that publishers trot out when they realize they’ve published something that was “bull shit.”

The “bull shit” bit comes from Umer’s response when she was contacted by RW. Here’s what the benighted author said to the site:

We asked [Umer] to share the peer reviews her paper had received, so that we could understand how, in the journal’s words, it was “published in error before the peer review process was completed.” She declined to share the reviews, saying that doing so would be unethical, but said that

nevertheless the only reason it was accepted was because my paper raised questions against the standing theories and tried to counter it with logical reasoning.I believe that I received undue criticism from people who did not believe in a divine force. Divine Force is a belief in a super natural power that is controlling the world and the universe. It is a force that almost all religions of the world believe in, whether it is Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism etc. However, I have quoted a couple of physical anthropologists and pure scientist, who also doubt this theory. Therefore, I still stand with my claim and findings and strongly believe that the only way I can be proved wrong is if the anthropologists find intermediate species, which they haven’t  since 1859, the date of Charles Darwin’s theory.

Now in support of my article, I would say that maybe it is against many physical anthropologists and it openly refutes Charles Darwin theory of evolution. But none of the critics refuted me by informing me that they have found intermediate species that counter my argument and endorses Charles Darwin’s theory. Although, they claim that the article is bull shit and I immediately need to remove it.

Finally, I would say that we had this theory of evolution since 1859 and I openly refuted it in 2018. I think only future fossil findings can either prove Darwin right and me wrong or vice versa.

Somebody should inform Umer that “bullshit” is one word.

But look at that garbage! Divine Force? Seriously?

If you think Umer’s article has any merit, I urge you to read it for yourself, for it doesn’t lay a hand on evolution or Darwinism. And of course there are gazillions of “intermediate species” that counter Umer’s argument: intermediates between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, reptiles and birds, and early primates to the H. sapiens ape. If Umer doesn’t know this, she’s ignorant or blinded by her faith (surely Islam), but either way she had no business publishing that article, and Springer had no business accepting it.

As for taking the paper offline, Retraction Watch has corrected me by noting that leaving a retracted paper up is accepted policy. As RW notes:

Coyne would like to see the article removed from the journal’s site entirely, which would not be in keeping with guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics.

I stand corrected, and am satisfied—except I think that this effort should earn me my second Censor of the Year Award from The Discovery Institute. Come on, folks: I deserve it!

h/t: Nilou

The BBC touts creationism

March 3, 2019 • 8:45 am

Here’s a new 2-minute clip from the BBC’s faith-friendly “Heart and soul” series (click on screenshot). It’s a narration by Charles Duke, an astronaut who in 1972 became the tenth man to walk on the Moon. In 1968, though, he was an Earth-based observer of the Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the Moon without landing and returned safely to Earth. As the BBC notes:

On Christmas Eve in 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the Moon. It was the most watched television broadcast at that time.

Astronaut Charlie Duke was listening from Earth. He was a ‘Sunday Christian’ back then – but hearing the message of Genesis was part of the reason why he’s come to personally believe that God created the world in seven days.

If you listen for the two minutes, you’ll hear Duke say this at the end:

“I look back now and I believe not in evolution but I believe in a creation by God—of everything: the heavens, the stars (which he calls each by name), life on the earth and I believe that process is described in Genesis. So I’ve come from an old Earth, ancient days, to a young Earth. And I have a lot of arguments with people about that and I said, ‘Look—it’s a matter of faith! You can’t prove your point, and I can’t prove my point scientifically, so we both stand on a matter of faith. What do you believe? And belief is faith. I believe in God’s creation. I used to believe in accidental life and here we are, you know, four billion years later or whatever, but I changed my mind.”

Sorry, Mr. Duke, but I have scientific evidence in favor of evolution and scientific evidence that conclusively disproves your creationist view. Read my damn book, which overrides your book. Finally, belief is not the same thing as faith. I “believe”—in the vernacular use of the term—that the sun will come up today, but that “belief” means “confidence born of experience.” That’s different from religious faith like yours, which is “belief in the absence of convincing evidence.”  As for evolution being “accidental life,” well, that’s just deeply misleading.

So here we have the BBC showing someone who gave up their acceptance of an old earth and of evolution in favor of pure woo. Why did they put this up? Just to show one astronaut’s delusions? I don’t think so: the BBC loves to osculate faith and is getting worse about that all the time. Do they put it up to show how easily someone can slip into confirmation bias? I doubt it.  Will the BBC put on 2 minutes of an atheist evolutionist like me refuting Duke’s nonsense? Are you kidding me? It’s the Beeb!

As reader Laurie, who found this broadcast, wrote me:

How someone could have had any existence in space and NOT be cognisant of the deep time required to form the solar system?  Not that deep time connects “directly” (more of an indirect factor) to evolution; but, that belies the ten minutes Christians think it took to form the cosmos AND life here.  Jerks.