I get Christian email: more irreducible complexity

September 14, 2010 • 6:46 am

Because of my book, I often get emails from religious people.  Some of them damn me to hell or accuse me of overweening arrogance, and some have real questions about biology.  But a third class is very common: under the guise of asking a biology question, and praising my book, someone affirms his faith, challenging me to disprove it. I call these “brickbat” letters, from a famous epistolary exchange in 1937 between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.  Fitzgerald had written to Wolfe, ostensibly to praise him but really offering some pretty severe criticism about what he saw as Wolfe’s overly baroque prose.  Wolfe began his letter of defense with this: “Your bouquet arrived smelling sweetly of roses but cunningly concealing several large-sized brickbats.”

Yesterday I received a brickbat email from a British Christian, and am highlighting it not only to demonstrate class 3, but also to show a recent but very common objection to evolution.

Dear Jerry,

Unwarranted familiarity—I’ve never met the guy.

My name is [REDACTED]. I am a student at [REDACTED] University in England. I study Architecture so am by no means a biologist.
I am also a Christian.

First of all I would like to apologise for Christians who give you a hard time for holding to Evolution. It is not Christ like to be unkind or aggressive.

I have some questions about the theory of Evolution. I am truly asking with an open mind, because the bible is clear that Christianity is not true then it is foolish. It literally says that.

I would have tried to email Richard Dawkins, but he comes across a little more aggressive that you, so I felt you would give me a more reasonable answer.

I apologise if my language is unscientific, but I am not a scientist. I am just good at drawing. I have two main Questions.

Questions
1.At what point did male a female come into the world?

I ask because it seems as though you would need the male and female organisms to develop at the same moment in order for them to then reproduce bringing more male a female organisms.

Ten or fifteen years ago I never got this question, but recently I’ve heard it at least half a dozen times.  It’s an argument from “irreducible complexity,” but applied to whole organisms—sexes in this case—instead of organs or molecular pathways within organisms.  The import is that because males and females are both needed to produce offspring, they could not have been produced by evolution, for what use is one sex without the other? Ergo a creator; ergo Jesus.

You could also make this argument for obligate mutualists, such as the algae and fungi that together make up lichens.  Neither species can exist on its own—they function only together, as an amalgamated “species,” with each constituent providing vital support for the other.  Since neither species can live without the other, how could this have evolved? God must have made it.  Ergo Jesus.

If you’ve followed the arguments against intelligent design and irreducible complexity, you’ll know the response: things that look irreducibly complex could have evolved from simpler constituents in a step-by-step process, with each step conferring selective advantage over the preceding one. In the end, things look as though adaptive intermediates could not have existed, but that’s because those intermediates are effaced in the evolutionary process. (A common example is the construction of a stone arch.  It looks as though you couldn’t build it by putting stone on stone, because the intermediate stage of “half an arch” would have collapsed.  But of course there was an intermediate stage, one in which the arch was supported by a scaffold. When the arch is finished, the scaffold is removed, effacing the method of construction.)

And this is the answer to the sex question.  What we see as male and female metazoans (multicellular animals), or male and female multicellular plants, are the end products of a long evolutionary process, probably beginning with one-celled organisms.  And each step of that process could have been adaptive.  Here’s the latest thought on the evolution of different sexes, which involves four steps.

  • One celled creatures that could mate with each other and produce offspring; there were no males or females, so each individual could mate with any other. (I won’t explain theories on why sex evolved in the first place, as they are many and complex.)
  • “Mating types” evolved: genetic differences between individuals ensuring that successful matings could occur only between individuals of different types.  Individuals still look alike. (These mating types are, for example, seen in the one celled Paramecium.
  • The different mating types became specialized: one type became large and immotile (the ancestor of the “egg”) and the other smaller and motile (the ancestor of the “sperm”).  (The condition of gametes being of very different size is called anisogamy.) There is a substantial body of evolutionary theory showing how this evolution of different mating types into physically different mating types might be favored by natural selection.
  • Finally, multicellularity evolves: the naked gametes become the reproductive parts of organisms that have evolved differentiated cells and tissues.

Biologists have plausible theories about how each step of this process might have been favored by natural selection.  All intermediate stages could have been adaptive.  Now we’re not sure if the different sexes of multicellular organisms really evolved in this sequence (though I suspect they did), but constructing such an adaptive scenario immediately disposes of the “irreducible complexity” argument.  If you posit that the lack of a plausible Darwinian pathway proves Jesus, the best answer is that there are plausible pathways.

But we also have some empirical data. (Remember how Darwin disposed of the “irreducible complexity” argument against the evolution of eyes by showing that one can put together existing eyes of animals, from simple eyespots to complex camera eyes, in a plausible evolutionary chain?)  We can see intermediate stages of a sex-evolution pathway in nature. I’ve already mentioned Paramecium, and have posted before on the green algae Chlamydomonas and Volvox demonstrating a plausible transition from one-celled to multi-celled organisms.

And there’s other evidence, too. You can show theoretically that if there are different mating types that are not physically different from each other, they can evolve physical differences only if those physical differences are genetically linked (i.e. nearby on the DNA strand) to those genes determining the initial mating types.  This was confirmed in a paper this year in Science (reference below) by Ferris et al.  If the sexes had been created, you wouldn’t expect such linkage, but it’s a requirement for the evolutionary transition.

These are early days in studies of the evolution of sex, but so far there’s no insuperable problem in explaining it.  I fully expect that we’ll understand it much better in a few decades.

NOTE: There was no question #2.

3. Can you proof [sic]that Jesus Christ didn’t rise from the dead?

For me Jesus Christ rising from the dead is the single greatest proof of God. The history does seem to back it up.

No, I can’t. Neither can I prove that hordes of invisible leprechauns don’t roam the bogs and fens of Ireland. (There are lots of stories, too, that back up that assertion!)  But I don’t worship leprechauns, or spaghetti monsters, or Zeus, or the pantheon of Hindu gods—or any of the entities that can’t be disproven.  As for the history, well, we all know how accurate the Bible is.

Perhaps readers would like to respond to this young man in the comments, as I’m going to refer him to this post.  Be nice!

The letter continues:

I have noticed you often talk about errors in design which disprove God. However the bible is under no illusions that the world is perfect. In fact it describes the world as you do. Very accurate and yet with flaws. Not a perfect world.

As I mention in the book, it’s not just that the world is imperfect, or that organisms have “bad” designs: it’s that those bad designs are exactly what you’d expect to see if evolution were true. How does the Bible explain the vestigial limbs of whales, or all those “dead genes” in our genome that are functional in our relatives?  If you want to explain these things by invoking God, you’re forced to see God as a Divine Trickster, who cunnningly made things to appear as if they evolved.

Just wanted some answers. There are lots more questions, but these seem more blatant to me.

Please do respond.

I would like to suggest that people not agreeing with you isn’t a total disregard for science. We can see water boiling and that sort of stuff, whereas there are a lot of unknown factors in evolutionary theory. You cannot know that conditions haven’t changed, so although I respect your position to assert what you believe, you must acknowledge that conditions could well have changed.

Thanks for reading this.

God Bless

NAME REDACTED

p.s. You seem very nice. How do you explain Anthony Flew?

Answer: Somewhere around the beginning of May, 1922, Mr. and Mrs. Flew had a little dinner, a little wine, a little music, and then. . .

___________

Ferris, P., B. J. S. C. Olson, P. L. De Hoff, S. Douglass, D. Casero, S. Prochnik, S. Geng, R. Rai, J. Grimwood, J. Schmutz, I. Nishii, T. Hamaji, H. Nozaki, M. Pellegrini, and J. G. Umen. 2010. Evolution of an expanded sex-determining Locus in Volvox. Science 328:351-354.

Cat travel week: Istanbul

September 14, 2010 • 5:46 am

After yesterday’s post on the convent cats of Mystras, Greece, I realized that I have further holiday snaps of kittehs that I can foist on you.  For the rest of this week, then, until Friday, I’ll show cats I’ve encountered on my travels.

The first dollop is from Istanbul. Two years ago I was invited to Middle East Technical University in Ankara to talk about Darwinism. (This was the biggest audience I’d ever had: over 1200 people.) After Ankara I went to Istanbul, where I’d been in 1972, to revisit that fabulous city.

Like Greece, Turkey is full of kittehs: they are everywhere in the city, including the mosques and museums.  Here’s a beautiful kitten in the graveyard of the Prince’s mosque (Şehzade Camii’), where dozens of cats roam free.  I would have dearly loved to take this little guy home with me, but he was already wild and shy, and I couldn’t approach him.

A cat resting in an appropriate niche at the Archaeology Museum, near Topkapi Palace:

And Old Softy again with his ubiquitous box of cat food.  This is in either the Blue Mosque or the Aya Sofia.  I’m not sure whether feeding cats in a mosque is a breach of etiquette.

Seduced by kittehs!  The owner of the Troy Rug store has three cats which lounge and sleep on rugs in front of his place.  I stopped to pet and photograph them (and, as you can see, to give them a snack), and you know what came next.  I returned the next day and, after strenuous bargaining, bought a small Anatolian silk rug woven with animal designs.  The owner told me the cats draw in a lot of business!

A book you’ll want to read

September 13, 2010 • 12:35 pm

The Warmth of Other Suns:The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson, was published about a week ago, and has received nothing less than spectacular reviews.  The “Great Migration” was the northward movement of blacks from the South, seeking a better life, starting after the First World War.  We still see traces of that migration here in Chicago, with much of the South Side reflecting where those migrants settled.  Wilkerson’s story is told through the experience of three individuals; all the reviews laud its combination of scholarship and intimacy.

Wilkerson was formerly the New York Times bureau chief in Chicago, and is now a professor at Boston University.  While in Chicago, she won a Pulitzer Prize, the first for an African-American woman in journalism.  I haven’t yet read her book (you can bet I will soon), but given the fascinating but relatively unexplored subject and the book’s rave reviews, I’ll bet she’s in for another Pulitzer—for general nonfiction.

From the New York Times review:

“The Warmth of Other Suns” is Wilkerson’s first book. (Its title is borrowed from the celebrated black writer Richard Wright, who fled Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1920s to feel the warmth of those other suns.) Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in today’s shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah’s couch.

The Times has published two other pieces on this book: an appreciation by Janet Maslin and an account by Charles McGrath of its writing.

Other rave reviews come from The Wall Street Journal, Barnes and Nobel.com, and The Chicago Tribune.

Monday felid: the cats of Mystras

September 13, 2010 • 8:28 am

I found this on my computer yesterday; I hadn’t seen it for years, and thought I’d post it.

I love Greece and have been there several times, including spending nearly three years when I was aged 5-7 (my father was an Army officer stationed in Athens).  About ten years ago I went to the Peloponnese (the southern “island”, cut off from the mainland by the Corinth Canal) for a month’s vacation.  It was a swell trip, especially since it was mid-September and the tourists had mostly gone but the water was still warm.

One of the bonuses of Grecian travel is, of course, the profusion of kittehs, which are everywhere—especially near the sea where they can get fish scraps.  This shows you what a softy I am, but when I travel there I always carry a box of dry catfood in my daypack, since some of the cats are underfed.  While visiting the fantastic site of Mystras near Sparta—a site filled with Byzantine ruins—I came across an active nunnery.  While resting my bones on the porch, a cat came out. Then another, then another.  The nuns kept cats—hungry ones! I pulled out my box of cat food, and the rest is history.

Ο Θεός να ευλογεί τις γάτες!

Aussie Christians nix ethics classes

September 13, 2010 • 6:50 am

We tend to think that, among English-speaking nations, the U.S. is the worst in cramming religion down the throats of its kids.  And because Australia is so far away, and the U.S. so politically insular, we Americans are largely ignorant of religious doings in the antipodes.  Well, from the land that brought us Mel Gibson and Ken Ham, I submit for your approval a particularly noxious specimen of religious tomfoolery.

New South Wales (NSW) is Australia’s most populous state; it sits at the southeast corner of the continent and contains Canberra, the nation’s capital, and Sydney.  And it’s home to a really bizarre incursion of faith into the schools.  By law, all public schools provide up to one hour per week of “special religious education” (SRE) to the children.  This is not outside of school hours: SRE happens during regular school time.

And this is not education in the tenets of the world’s faiths: representative of a single “approved” faith (most of them Christian, of course), come into the classroom and simply proselytize the kids.  The churches regard it as a golden opportunity to get their hooks into young and impressionable meat—in the schools.

About 85% of the kids take advantage—if you can call it that—of this in-school preaching.  What do the other 15% do? Also by law, they are not allowed to receive any other instruction, presumably because that would give them an “unfair” advantage over the faithful.  They are supposed to do “homework, reading, and private study.”

In response to parental complaints, the NSW minister of education recently approved an alternative activity for the students opting out of SRE: an “ethics complement”.  Students are supposed to learn critical thinking, hash out matters of right and wrong, and engage in junior-grade philosophy.  Classes explicitly avoid inculcating specific moral precepts in the kids. This was just given a trial in ten NSW schools. Here’s a 5-minute video showing one of the ethics classes.

Sounds great to me, and although it’s early days, the program certainly deserves support, especially because the majority of other kids are having religiously-based morality drilled into their heads.

As you might expect, the churches are furious about these classes.  A consortium of Christian churches, including the Anglicans, Catholics, and Baptists, have published a document giving all kinds of reasons why ethics classes are a bad idea: the kids in religion classes don’t get to take ethics (though they contend that “competent teaching of Christian SRE . . contributes to the development of ethical thinking”), and—get this—they don’t sufficiently brainwash kids into taking particular moral stands:

The lessons in ethical thinking, as most likely a component of the Philosophy in Schools curriculum, are not a ‘complement’ to SRE, as advocated in the SJEC proposal, in the sense that they are antithetical to both the Christian faith and all faiths that have a “higher court of appeal.”

They even manage to drag the spectre of Darwin into the picture:

Dr Lipman himself says that Philosophy for Children (P4C) is heavily dependent on American pragmatism and a sociocultural theory in cognitive development “Philosophy for Children (PMC) didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. It built upon the recommendations of John Dewey and the Russian educator, Lev Vygotsky, who emphasized the necessity to teach for thinking, not just for memorizing.” . .

John Dewey’s total rejection of Christian faith is well documented. In its place, he proposed a theory of mental evolution heavily dependent on Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. Teachers are not instructors but ‘facilitators’ guiding students through problems they pose to try out various pragmatic solutions to discover what works for them.

O noes! Darwin! But the real reason the churches don’t like ethical education is patently clear in this extremely scary  2.5 minute video, where advocates of SRE discuss their opposition to ethics classes (YouTube has forbidden embedding, but do watch it—it’s very short):

Video: Christians with meat hooks

By the way, a miracle happened when I viewed this video (see lower right):

Have you ever seen a more blatant and naked grab for the minds of children? Here’s the statement by Murray Norman, Presbyterian Youth general manager:

The value of SRE in our local schools is that we get to go in and share with young people about Jesus.  We get to share from the Bible, and they get to meet Jesus personally there. The threat that the ethics program creates is it’s actually providing competition with SRE, and that has a massive potential to reduce the effectiveness of us telling young people about Jesus throughout the state.

And pay attention to this statement from Peter Adamson, Presbyterian Youth SRE and “camping director” (would you put your kids in a tent with this guy?):

In the case of this particular program [the ethics program], what we know from the outline which we’ve been given—and we’ve only been given an outline—is that in actual fact it comes from a particular background.  It comes from an evolutionary background. Just as some scientists believe that animals evolved, so many social scientists think that our morals and our values have evolved as well.

Secular Aussies: rise up against this stupidity!  The religious loons are in ur schools, warping ur children!

There’s a website devoted to this issue, Statereligionvic’s posterous.

Freedom of what?

September 12, 2010 • 6:19 am

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1791:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In the last few weeks we’ve heard plenty from our government about freedom of religion:  that government can neither engage in public religious activity nor treat different faiths differently under the law. This is all fine, and I agree with it.  What we haven’t heard much about is freedom of speech.  I’ve listened carefully to all of Obama’s statements (including his last press conference) about the NYC mosque/cultural center and the loon in Florida who wants to burn Qur’ans.  I’ve read General Petraeus’s statements about how immolation of Qur’ans could endanger our troops in Afghanistan.  And I haven’t heard one word about the freedom of speech also guaranteed by this Amendment. (Correct me if I’ve missed something.)

True, Petraeus said, in response to critics, that he was not commenting on free speech, and I suppose Obama would respond likewise.  Nevertheless, it would behoove them, when urging compliance with one of our bedrock principles, to remind people of another: our right to say what we want about faith—or anything else.  Would it have been too much trouble for Obama to say this?:

“Well, you know, there are some folks down in Florida who want to stir up trouble by burning Qur’ans. And our Constitution guarantees them the right to do that.  But there’s a difference between what we have the right to do and what is the right thing to do.  And this is simply the wrong thing to do.”

Instead he said this at his press conference on Friday:

The idea that we would burn the sacred texts of someone else’s religion is contrary to what this country stands for.  It’s contrary to what this country—this nation was founded on.  And my hope is, is that this individual prays on it and refrains from doing it. . .

In fact, this country stands for our right to burn the sacred texts of any religion we choose, and to criticize faith as strongly as we wish.  Obama went on:

And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.  And as somebody who relies heavily on my Christian faith in my job, I understand the passions that religious faith can raise.  But I’m also respectful that people of different faiths can practice their religion, even if they don’t subscribe to the exact same notions that I do, and that they are still good people, and they are my neighbors and they are my friends, and they are fighting alongside us in our battles.

Yes, that’s a noble sentiment—in the last sentence. The rest is pandering to religious America. Shades of George W. Bush!

Remember when Obama said this during his inaugural address, which got us heathens all excited?:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.  We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.

Apparently Obama forgot not only about freedom of speech,  but also about those non-believers.  If we’re one nation under God, I’m not part of it.

Sean Carroll reviews Hawking

September 11, 2010 • 1:24 pm

Over at The Wall Street Journal, physicist Sean Carroll reviews The Grand Design, the new book by Stephen Hawking (Leonard Mlodinow is a coauthor).  Carroll gives a good summary of what the book is about and how Hawking’s speculations fit into the received wisdom of cosmology, but—curiously—fails to pass judgment on whether the book is worth reading.  He doesn’t damn it, but the approbation is limited to the phrase “short and sprightly.”  In light of other negative reviews, it would have been nice to get Carroll’s overall assessment.

A wonderful novel

September 11, 2010 • 11:24 am

I’ve recently finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006) by the French writer Muriel Barbery, and give it an enthusiastic two thumbs up—wiggling vigorously.  It was a huge best seller in Europe; not so much in the U.S.  It’s hard to describe, and to save space I’ll refer you to Michael Dirda’s nice review in The Washington Post.

Short take: it describes the parallel lives of Renée, an ageing and unfairly looked-down-upon concierge of a Paris apartment building, and Paloma, a precocious and suicidal 12-year old girl living in the same building.  Interwoven with their stories, which sporadically intersect, are lucubrations about philosophy and art, delivered without pomposity. (Barbery is a professor of philosophy.)  You could consider it an “intellectual” novel, since it deals in part with ideas, but it’s not in the least turgid or didactic. In fact, it’s wonderful, and I recommend it highly. It’s one of those books that, unlike zombie novels, can change your life.

It was given to me by a friend, a college English teacher, who every couple of years sends me a book with the following message: “If you don’t like this, you can’t be my friend.”  (The last one was Middlemarch by George Eliot.)  So far I remain her friend.

I’m sure we all have books we consider so special that we press them on friends, eagerly awaiting their positive reviews.  And how disappointing if they don’t share our ardor!  I’ve had this experience most often with the novels of Thomas Wolfe (the one from North Carolina!) and The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott.  But come the holidays I’ll once again be pressing Capote’s A Christmas Memory on you.

It’s time again to discuss what we’re reading. Feel free to post on a book you’ve just read and liked (or not liked).  What books would you consider a test of friendship?  These comments, by the way, are not a futile endeavor—at least for me. I have a big list of reader-suggested books for future consumption.