For a long time I’ve thought that many of the senior science writers of the New York Times have outlived their usefulness. It might not be a function of age, but simply poor quality journalism. Regardless, the Times could use a serious shake-up in its science section.
Happily, one of their senior writers, Nicholas Wade, retired in 2012, but he still writes occasionally for the paper, and he recently published a shamefully bigoted and ignorant book on human races, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (see the critical reviews in the Times itself, as well as in the New York Review of Books by my first student, Allen Orr).
And in the December 22 Wall Street Journal, Wade once again shows his failure to grasp my own field in a review of Bill Nye’s new book on the evidence for evolution, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation. Wade’s review, called “Bill Nye, the Darwin Guy“, is deficient on a number of counts. I’ll highlight three (Wade’s piece is short):
1. What Wade considers the “most direct” and “most undeniable” evidence for evolution is dubious. Curiously, Wade touts that evidence as some molecular data on gene substitutions:
Mr. Nye writes briskly and accessibly. He favors short, sound-bitey sentences. He is good on the geological and fossil evidence for evolution, reflecting his background in the physical sciences, but devotes less attention to changes in DNA, which furnish the most direct evidence of evolution. A recent paper in the journal PLOS Genetics, for instance, describes the seven DNA mutations that occurred over the past 90 million years in the gene that specifies the light-detecting protein of the retina. These mutations shifted the protein’s sensitivity from ultraviolet to blue, the first step in adapting a nocturnal animal to daytime vision and in generating the three-color vision of the human eye. Such insights into nature’s actual programming language are surely the most undeniable part of evolution at work.
I haven’t read the PLoS Genetics paper, but I’ve been told that it involves using mutation-making technology to alter visual proteins, and then seeing which amino acids that have changed also alter the perception of different wavelengths of light.
But that kind of stuff has been going on for a long time, and it’s hardly “direct”. While it does support natural selection, it’s somewhat inferential and, more important, could be dismissed by creationists as simply showing “microevolution.” If you want direct evidence of natural selection producing microevolution, why not use the many observations we have of selection operating in the wild, most famously the Grants’ work on the Galápagos finches? Isn’t that actually more direct than looking at protein changes that have occurred over millions of time. Or how about the formation of new species of plants that we’ve seen occur in the last 50 years? Or the changes in lactose tolerance that have occurred in pastoral populations (those that keep animals for milk) in the last 10,000 years? What, exactly, does Wade mean by “direct”?
Further, why aren’t changes in fossils, showing both trait changes and the evolution of new “kinds” (e.g., amphibians from fish, birds from dinosaurs, land-dwelling artiodactyls into whales, etc. etc. etc.) just as direct as (and even more undeniable than) looking at historical changes in proteins? Or all the evidence from embryology, vestigial organs, and biogeography that I adduce in WEIT? Why isn’t that just as direct and undeniable as looking at changes in molecules that separate species? In fact, one could make the case that showing adaptive difference in protein function among species, as the PLoS Genetics authors probably did, don’t really count as decisive evidence for evolution. After all, couldn’t those protein differences have been put there by God? We weren’t there to see them happen, after all.
But one can’t make such a Goddy explanation for evidence like the fossil record or biogeography, and that’s why I downplayed protein-sequence evidence in my book. I was looking for the more undeniable evidence—stuff that creationists couldn’t easily counter. At any rate, Wade, excited by molecular biology, fails to realize that the case he cites might not be the most undeniable and direct evidence for evolution after all—and it could even be said to comport with creationism.
2. Wade sees a serious scientific problem in the supposedly short time during which life originated.
Mr. Nye’s analysis also glosses over bristling perplexity. He says that there are a billion years between the Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago and the first fossil evidence of life, plenty of time for the chemical evolution of the first living cells. But this fact is long outdated. A heavy meteorite bombardment some 3.9 billion years ago probably sterilized the planet, yet the first possible chemical evidence of life appears in rocks some 3.8 billion years old. This leaves startlingly little time for the first living cells to have evolved. Reconstruction of the chemical steps by which they did so is a daunting and so far unsolved problem. Mr. Nye might have done better to concede as much.
As we’ll see below, Wade almost seems to feel that there is something problematic in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution that might render it wrong. Abiogenesis—the origin of life from nonlife—is something that he, along with creationists, sees as such a problem. But the paragraph above is misleading. “Sterilizing the planet” means “killing everything alive on Earth.” While that might have happened, it didn’t mean that the chemical precursors of life would be eradicated. Also, there is controversy about whether that meteorite bombardment had the effects he said it did, or even when it occurred. We know that indubitable evidence for life appears about 3.5 billion years ago (I don’t trust his 3.8-billion-year figure), so that gives about half a billion years for the first cell (a bacterium) to appear. Is that really “startlingly little time”? Has Wade made any models that show it’s an unrealistic time? It’s 500,000,000 years, which is pretty long, and if the precursor chemicals were there beforehand, the time for the origin of life becomes even longer.
Wade also doesn’t mention that the “living cells” he mentions are prokaryotic cells like bacteria, lacking a nucleus and much of the chemical and structural complexity of “true” eukaryotic cells, which didn’t appear until 1.6 billion years ago—2.3 billion years after the “sterilization”. What Wade sees as a daunting problem isn’t an unsuperable problem. Yes, it’s unsolved, but there are many things about evolution that we don’t understand, like what proto-bats looked like. What does Wade want Nye to concede: that we don’t yet understand the origin of life? Fine, then, concede it, but add that we’re making great strides in solving that problem.
3. Wade suggests a compromise between evolutionists and creationists which is simply insane. This is the most infuriating part of his review. Here’s what Wade says will bring amity between the two groups (my emphasis):
Mr. Nye’s fusillade of facts won’t budge them an inch. Isn’t there some more effective way of persuading fundamentalists to desist from opposing the teaching of evolution? If the two sides were willing to negotiate, it would be easy enough to devise a treaty that each could interpret as it wished. In the case of teaching evolution in schools, scientists would concede that evolution is a theory, which indeed it is. Fundamentalists might then be willing to let their children be taught evolution, telling them it is “just a theory.” Evolution, of course, is no casual surmise but a theory in the solemn scientific sense, a grand explanatory system that accounts for a vast range of phenomena and is in turn supported by them. Like all scientific theories, however, it is not an absolute, final truth because theories are always subject to change and emendation.
Yeah, like that suggestion is going to get fundamentalists to agree to the teaching of evolution! Note to Wade: creationists aren’t stupid enough to buy your little plan. They don’t want evolution taught as the only theory that explains the origin and diversity of life, however that theory is characterized.
Further, scientists have already “conceded” (as Wade puts it) that evolution is a theory. But it’s not only a theory, for it’s so well supported by the data that, as I show in WEIT, it’s also regarded as a fact. (What I mean by “evolution” here are these five tenets: genetic change over time, populational change that is not instantaneous, speciation, common ancestry of all species, and natural selection as the cause of apparent design.) Will creationists really allow the scientific notion of “theory”, as well as a summary of the mountains of evidence that show evolution to be not just a theory but a scientific truth, to be taught to their kids?
Yes, there are some conceivable observations that could invalidate evolution, but we’ve had over 150 years to find them, with creationists working furiously on that job, and no such observations have appeared. To say that evolution is “always subject to change and emendation” is like saying that “the fact that DNA is a double helix, viruses cause Ebola, the Earth goes around the Sun, and the formula of water is H2O” are all theories “subject to change and emendation”. The fact is that some “theories” are highly unlikely to change because the evidence supporting them is wickedly strong, and to claim that they are somehow shaky or dubious is misleading. I would never countenance saying that any of these scientific notions are “just theories,” for the word “just,” as Wade knows well, implies that the evidence supporting them is somehow shaky.
Wade goes on to fulminate about the dogmatism of evolutionists, and touts the uncertainty of evolutionary biology by using the example of group selection, which, he says, is undecided and therefore makes all of evolution appear as “just a theory.” But group selection is a modern add-on to evolutionary biology, and it’s an unsubstantiated hypothesis. Group selection is not a theory in Wade’s sense, something “that accounts for a vast range of phenomena and is in turn supported by them.” It accounts for no phenomena and there are no observations that require us to accept group selection. To say that evolution is “just a theory” because we haven’t settled the question of group selection is like saying that modern particle physics is “just a theory” because string theory is sitting out there as an unresolved problem.
At the end, Wade reiterates his brilliant suggestion for a pact between evolutionists and creationists:
If popularizers like Mr. Nye could allow that the theory of evolution is a theory, not an absolute truth or dogma, they might stand a better chance of getting the fundamentalists out of the science classroom.
Sorry, Mr. Wade, but we already allow that. No observation in science is an “absolute truth or dogma,” but some things are so likely to be true that you’d bet your house on them. One of those things is evolution. In any vernacular sense of the word, evolution is simply true—as true as the fact that DNA is normally a double helix and a normal water molecule has two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.
Wade’s suggestion is ludicrous and, in the end, shows that he really doesn’t understand the nature of science and scientific truth. Nor does he have the slightest idea of how creationists really behave. They’ll no sooner accept his compromise then they’ll admit that there’s no God. After this piece, and Wade’s egregious book A Troublesome Inheritance, the man’s Official Science Writer™ Card should be revoked.
