Category: Intelligent Design Creationism Watch

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ accommodationism

August 21, 2019 • 8:45 am

Good luck: today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “wins”, has a caption with a link:

Maybe they need to try the Discovery Institute?

I can’t resist saying that religion has never revealed an empirical fact that science alone couldn’t find, despite God having many opportunities to do so. For example, Scripture could have said (assuming it was the word of God): “Thou shalt wash thy hands after a poo lest tiny animals you cannot see will make you sick.” For more such failures, read Carl Sagan’s The Varieties of Scientific Experience (chapter 6), a must-read.

Sad that the artist had to link to the DI, for it gives them the clicks they love. 

Come on, Pakistan, ban me again—I dare you!

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.”

Discovery Institute puts out video purporting to refute materialiam and atheism

June 27, 2019 • 1:30 pm

The Discovery Institute has put out a series of videos that, they claim, will do in atheism—and presumably lead us to Intelligent Design and then to Jesus. I hate to give publicity to a bunch of superstitious yahoos, but will put up one sample of what they consider to be a convincing attack on atheism. First, though, the blurbs about these videos:

From Evolution News, written by Jonathan Witt:

A new YouTube series, Science Uprising, challenges the notion that the smart money is on atheism. I was part of the creative team behind the project. One of our aims was to reach those “digital natives” who get much of their impression of the wider world from the Internet, including streaming services like YouTube.

This group tends to encounter well-articulated arguments for unbelief earlier than ever before, and they often encounter those arguments online. Science Uprising is part of an increasingly rich body of material that pushes back against anti-theistic online propaganda.

From the YouTube video site:

This episode of Science Uprising investigates claims by scientists and professors like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, and Daniel Dennett, who try to hijack science to promote materialism—the idea that physical reality is all there is. Hear from experts who challenge this view of science, and learn about scientists who have to hide behind a mask because they face intimidation and censorship from dissenting from materialism. People featured in this episode include Jay Richards, PhD, Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America, filmmaker, and author or co-author of books such as The Human Advantage, The Privileged Planet, The Hobbit Party, Infiltrated, and Money, Greed, and God; and Michael Egnor, MD (from Columbia University), neurosurgeon and professor of neurological surgery at Stony Brook University. Dr. Egnor is renowned for his work in pediatric neurosurgery.

Watch the 7-minute video below. I’ve put a few comments below it.

My comments:

1.) The video gives no evidence against atheism; that is, it adduces no evidence for the existence of a god. The gist of the video is that the implications of godlessness are unpalatable (e.g., the “purposeless of the universe”). Pity, but what exists—or doesn’t exist—doesn’t always comport with how we want things to be.

2.) Their evidence for god? The assertion that “Most people and cultures around the world have a profound belief that life extends beyond the physical—that compassion, ideas, joy and sorrow, aren’t made of matter.”  Since when has the ubiquity of a belief constituted evidence for its truth?

3.) Science is based on materialism, which they say is an unsubstantiated worldview. But materialism and naturalism (I prefer the latter term) are the only ways we’ve ever attained truth about the universe. Certainly faith and religion have given us no truth, as evidenced by the diverse and conflicting claims of the planet’s many religions. After years of trying, I’ve seen no “truth” about the universe adduced by religion itself that doesn’t require confirmation by science, but I’ve seen plenty of religious “truths” disconfirmed by science (creationism, the Flood, the Exodus, and so on).

4.) According to the video, scientists are stupid to claim that we have no (libertarian) free will. If that’s the case, say the dupes, “how can we be responsible for our actions?” I’ve already explained why determinism is still compatible with personal responsibility for our actions—and for punishment and reward—but not moral responsibility in the sense of “we could have done otherwise.”

5.) The implication of materialism is racism and murder (see the pictures).

6.) Our consciousness and a sense of self are illusory, say people like Dan Dennett and Sam Harris. This, claim the benighted, is not only incompatible with materialism, but conflicts with the claim that consciousness and self have real consequences. Well, these people don’t understand what “illusory” means, which is, in the Harrisian and Dennettian senses, “These things aren’t what they seem to be.” Further, if you’re a determinist, then consciousness and self are themselves the byproducts of natural processes—epiphenomena, if you will—and cannot exercise some non-deterministic, non-physical forces on our actions.

7.) And that’s about it, except that Michael Egnor (and the charlatan Rupert Sheldrake) make appearances. Egnor, misidentified as a scientist (he’s a neurosurgeon who doesn’t do science), says, “The deeper I look into the science, the more I realize what a catastrophe for science materialism/atheism really is.” Of course, Egnor doesn’t explain that statement. It is, in fact, theism and faith that have been catastrophes for science, as evidenced by the large number of people on this planet who reject the existence of evolution on religious grounds.

8.) At the end, the female narrator gets it exactly backwards when she says, “We want to follow the evidence, wherever it leads, and decide for ourselves.” Well, if they follow evidence that is strongly agreed on by all rational people, what they get is science—science that can work only without assuming a god. The kind of “evidence” that these people accept is evidence from scripture, from their preachers, and from their own feelings about how the world is or ought to be. That is not the way to find scientific truth.

Pity that the cowards at the Evolution News site don’t accept comments, but you can “like” or “dislike” the YouTube videos

 

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

Computer scientist David Gelernter drinks the academic Kool-Aid, buys into intelligent design

May 17, 2019 • 10:15 am

David Gelenrter is a well known computer scientist at Yale, famous for his innovations in parallel computing, and is also a writer and artist. He’s a religious Jew, a conservative, and—as of two years ago—a denier of anthropogenic global warming, a view at odds with his scientific background.  In 1993 he was also badly injured in the hand and eye by a mail bomb sent by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

That was a horrible thing to happen to him, but it can neither explain nor excuse Gelenrter’s science denialism, now manifested in an article in the Claremont Review of Books in which Gelernter tells us that Darwinian evolution is dead, and that Intelligent Design is the happening thing. (Click on screenshot below.)  The article is being trumpeted all over Intelligent Design websites, and I’m baffled as to how someone of Gelernter’s intelligence could buy into thinly disguised creationism. Could it be his religion? I’d call him a “useful idiot” for the ID people, except he’s not an idiot.

My only explanation involves paraphrasing Steven Weinberg: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have smart people doing smart things and stupid people doing stupid things. But for smart people to do stupid things, that takes religion.”

Read and weep:

Wikipedia describes the Claremont Review of Books like this:

A typical issue consists of several book reviews and a selection of essays on topics of conservatism and political philosophy, history, and literature. The New York Times described the journal as a “conservative, if eclectic, answer to The New York Review of Books.”

So it’s the National Review of book appraisal. But never mind: the content of Gelernter’s review is disturbing. He begins by telling us that Darwinian evolution is not only wrong, but dead:

Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory. Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview. Accepting the theory as settled truth—no more subject to debate than the earth being round or the sky blue or force being mass times acceleration—certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life. But what if Darwin was wrong?

Like so many others, I grew up with Darwin’s theory, and had always believed it was true. I had heard doubts over the years from well-informed, sometimes brilliant people, but I had my hands full cultivating my garden, and it was easier to let biology take care of itself. But in recent years, reading and discussion have shut that road down for good.

This is sad. It is no victory of any sort for religion. It is a defeat for human ingenuity. It means one less beautiful idea in our world, and one more hugely difficult and important problem back on mankind’s to-do list. But we each need to make our peace with the facts, and not try to make life on earth simpler than it really is.

Gelenrter then goes on to parrot the familiar tropes of ID, the most prominent being that the Cambrian Explosion could not have been caused by evolution because there are no credible ancestors of the evolved taxa and that the whole thing simply took place too fast to be explained by neo-Darwinian processes. Here he leans heavily on Stephen Meyer’s ID book Darwin’s Doubt, which, says Gelenrter, “convinced me that Darwin has failed.” Presumably Meyer thinks that the Great Designer poofed the Cambrian Explosion into being, although Gelernter may see that designer as Yahweh.

But Meyer’s book has been unanimously criticized by paleontologists as uninformed and tendentious, and, as I wrote before about it:

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.

I’ll note two more scathing reviews of the book that Gelernter touts so highly: one by Charles Marshall and the other (a long review on Amazon) by Don Prothero.

Gelernter also falls for many other discredited claims of ID. One is his assertion that “random mutation plus natural selection” are not sufficient to create new protein shapes, which is equivalent to the claim that these processes are not sufficient to create new protein sequences. He commits the same fallacies as do other IDers: assuming there is a pre-specified target protein that must be reached, multiplying probabilities together to convert a starting “gibberish protein” into one folded like a specified target. (By the way, evolution doesn’t start with “gibberish proteins”.) The fact is that there aren’t pre-specified target proteins: all that’s required for evolution to work is that a mutation changes a gene (and its protein product) in a way that that new gene leaves more copies than do other genes. It’s incremental form of improvement, not a narrowing-in on a specific target—a target that may not be reached because another adaptive target was reached instead.

Finally, Gelernter shows his profound ignorance of biology by making the tired old claim that there may be microevolution (changes within “kinds,” whatever they are) but there’s no evidence for macroevolution. And by macroevolution he means not just the emergence of drastically different forms of organisms, but “the emergence of new species”. As he says, “The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.”

Well, as I show in my book Speciation with Allen Orr, and in my popular book Why Evolution is True, we do have ample evidence for the origin of new species by evolutionary processes. We’ve even seen new species form within a human lifetime. (True, Darwin himself didn’t explain speciation because his species concept was wonky, but we’ve come a long way since then; we don’t need Darwin as a buttress for all evolutionary facts.)

And we also have evidence for really big macroevolution, for we have transitional forms between early fish and amphibians, between early amphibians and reptiles, between early reptiles and birds, between early reptiles and mammals, and, of course, between our early hairy and knuckle-walking ancestors and modern H. sapiens. We don’t know which genes were involved in most of these transitions, but that’s a red herring brandished by Gelernter. The fact is that we can see in the fossil record the gradual evolution of mammals from reptiles, and so on, showing that macroevolution did indeed take place. Does Gelernter think that the Designer was behind this macroevolution, producing the needed mutations at the right time? If that’s the case, why did the Designer screw up when making dinosaurs and a gazillion other species that went extinct because they didn’t get the right mutations?

At the end, Gelernter pulls back a bit and says that ID does have problems, including a lack of mechanism. He suggests his own mechanism, but it’s an unspecified form of teleology, one that, I suspect, goes by the name Yahweh:

If Meyer were invoking a single intervention by an intelligent designer at the invention of life, or of consciousness, or rationality, or self-aware consciousness, the idea might seem more natural. But then we still haven’t explained the Cambrian explosion. An intelligent designer who interferes repeatedly, on the other hand, poses an even harder problem of explaining why he chose to act when he did. Such a cause would necessarily have some sense of the big picture of life on earth. What was his strategy? How did he manage to back himself into so many corners, wasting energy on so many doomed organisms? Granted, they might each have contributed genes to our common stockpile—but could hardly have done so in the most efficient way. What was his purpose? And why did he do such an awfully slipshod job? Why are we so disease prone, heartbreak prone, and so on? An intelligent designer makes perfect sense in the abstract. The real challenge is how to fit this designer into life as we know it. Intelligent design might well be the ultimate answer. But as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go.

. . . I might, myself, expect to find the answer in a phenomenon that acts as if it were a new and (thus far) unknown force or field associated with consciousness. I’d expect complex biochemistry to be consistently biased in the direction that leads closer to consciousness, as gravitation biases motion towards massive objects. I have no evidence for this idea. It’s just the way biology seems to work.

No, Dr. Gelernter, that’s not the way it “seems to work”. Maybe it does to you through your Old-Testament goggles, but there’s no evidence for a directionality, much less a teleology, in evolution.

So ID might not be the final answer, but, says Gelernter, evolution certainly isn’t, either:

[Stephen Meyer] now poses a final challenge. Whether biology will rise to this last one as well as it did to the first, when his theory upset every apple cart, remains to be seen. How cleanly and quickly can the field get over Darwin, and move on?—with due allowance for every Darwinist’s having to study all the evidence for himself? There is one of most important questions facing science in the 21st century.

I’ve pondered at great length how a man can be apparently as intelligent as Gelernter, yet so susceptible to the blandishments of Intelligent Design—and so ignorant of the evidence that refutes it. All I can think of is religion. I may certainly be wrong here, but there’s some mental block that the man has against evidence that has convinced nearly every biologist alive.

Gelenrter has no formal training in biology, and I suppose I could say he doesn’t have the credibility to even attack evolution (he does seem ignorant of the fossil record). But I hate to pull rank and use arguments based on authority. All I can say is that his ignorance is both woeful and harmful, and he is serving as a useful idiot-manqué for the Intelligent Design Creationist movement.

David Gelernter. (Source)

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!