August 2009

When I wrote earlier on the Stalinist erasure of John McWhorter’s interview with biochemist Michael Behe on Bloggingheads.tv, I began by saying, “Wow.” I will say that again: “Wow.” Why wow? Because Bloggingheads editor-in-chief Robert Wright was, as I’d suspected, out of the shop when it happened — on a silent meditation retreat, in fact — and on returning he reversed his staff’s Orwellian move and put the interview back up. Way to go, Mr. Wright!
There are three orders of business here. First, congratulations to Robert Wright, whose very interesting book The Evolution of God I’ve commented on before. He writes sensibly in explanation of what happened, making clear that the censoring of Behe was indefensible without publicly condemning his subordinates, which would have been ungracious:

This diavlog has now been re-posted. The decision to remove it from the site was made by BhTV staff while I was away and unavailable for consultation. (Yes, even in a wired world it’s possible to take yourself off the grid. Here’s how I did it.) It’s impossible to say for sure whether, in the heat of the moment, I would have made a decision different from the staff’s decision. But on reflection I’ve decided that removing this particular diavlog from the site is hard to justify by any general principle that should govern our future conduct. In other words, it’s not a precedent I’d want to live with. At the same time, I can imagine circumstances under which a diavlog would warrant removal from the site. So this episode has usefully spurred me and the BhTV staff to try to articulate some rules of the road for this sort of thing. Within a week, the results will be posted, along with some related thoughts on the whole idea behind Bloggingheads.tv, here.

Just so you know, Wright is no intelligent-design fan, as he makes clear in The Evolution of God. He’s a Darwinist, including on evolutionary psychology where Darwinism becomes even harder to defend than in other areas, but a fair-minded one. He’s no theist either and writes frankly of himself as a materialist, but neither is he prejudiced against religion. An interesting person, a little bit in the William James mold. (James, by the way, had some intriguing reservations about scientific materialism.)

So saying mazal tov to Wright is point one. Point two is that this should be a lesson for him and everyone else, underlining the unthinking prejudice that Darwin-doubters face. Someone at Bloggingheads muzzled McWhorter for allowing a full and friendly presentation of Behe’s ideas on irreducible complexity. The interview went up and then was taken down in the space of about six hours. That’s fast. Not only was the interview erased but sufficient pressure was brought to bear on McWhorter that he wrote, or allowed someone else to write, an apology for conducting the interview in the first place!

Exactly one hundred years ago leading American paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott (right) was hiking along Burgess Pass in the Canadian Rockies when he found a slab of shale containing fossil crustaceans. His interest piqued, Wolcott made return trips to the Burgess Shale in the following years where he ultimately collected tens of thousands of fossils. Many of these fossils were extraordinarily well-preserved, and they were mysterious. They included strange forms like Anomalocaris, Opabinia, Wiwaxia, and Hallucigenia. These fossils revealed a mystery: like other Cambrian fauna, these strange soft-bodied fossils appeared in the fossil record abruptly, without evolutionary precursors. Darwin himself was aware of this problem in his own day, writing that the lack of fossil evidence for the evolution of Read More ›

The editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads TV, Robert Wright, has re-instated my interview with linguist John McWhorter on that website. Wright was away last week when the brouhaha occurred. It’s good to see that a steady editorial hand is back in charge.

I’ve just been through the weirdest book-related experience I’ve had since a Canadian university professor with a loaded rat trap chased me around after a talk I gave a dozen years ago, threatening to spring it on me. Last week I got the following email bearing the title “Invitation to Appear on Bloggingheads TV” from a senior editor at that site: Hi, Michael– I’d like to invite you to appear on Bloggingheads.tv, a web site that hosts video dialogues between journalists, bloggers, and scholars. We have a partnership with the New York Times by which they feature excerpts from some of our shows on their site. Past guests include prominent thinkers such as Paul Krugman, Paul Ehrlich, Frans de Waal, Read More ›

Wow. This is positively Stalinist. Robert Wright’s Bloggingheads.tv has abruptly removed an interview it put up hours before in which linguist Dr. John McWhorter talks with biochemist Dr. Michael Behe about Behe’s The Edge of Evolution. It’s a fascinating exchange. McWhorter starts off by saying that while his own writing has been primarily on race, other subjects interest him more. For example, it would seem, evolution.

He proceeds to reveal startling depths of enthusiasm for Behe, Behe’s book, and intelligent design. He talks about how he never previously believed in God and never wanted to until he read Behe, who of course in his own writing steers clear of theological ruminations (apart from noting that he’s a Roman Catholic). A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, McWhorter clearly has been thinking and reading about the subject for years. He makes a stimulating, well informed interviewer for Behe.

Sounds good, right? No, bad! Very bad! Bad McWhorter! Apologize now!

OK, I will!

Something evidently happened behind the scenes at Bloggingheads. So the interview was taken down, at which point an anonymous Orwellian Administrator posted as follows:

John McWhorter feels, with regret, that this interview represents neither himself, Professor Behe, nor Bloggingheads usefully, takes full responsibility for same, and has asked that it be taken down from the site. He apologizes to all who found its airing objectionable.

Now, you must go and watch the interview for yourself over at Uncommon Descent. Here’s the link where it used to be. You can disagree with Behe and McWhorter; think they’re both full of baloney if you like. But there’s no question that simply as an interview, a piece of casual, conversational journalism, the McWhorter exchange is exemplary. It’s fascinating. He admires the book, undoubtedly, even becoming passionate about it at points, but also poses challenging questions. There’s nothing to apologize for here. Yet clearly he was pressured into taking it down. By whom?

The irony is that Wright himself has stood out from other Darwinists for his honesty and openness. I blogged earlier on his offer of a “grand bargain” of peace between Darwin-believers and Darwin-doubters. Is our part of the bargain then to be seen and not heard? Or maybe not even seen. Wright seems to be away from email. One assumes this happened while he was out of the shop.

As of late there has been a lot of spittle passed between two camps in the Darwin-sphere. Things are getting really nasty, as so often happens among atheist factions.

On one side are the new atheists: Coyne, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Myers.

On the other side are the … well for want of a better word — the “framing” atheists: Ruse, Mooney, Kirshenbaum, Nisbet, Scott.

With the exception of a few theist Darwinians (an oxymoron, I know) like Ken Miller, the motivation of the combatants seems to be the same: how to best advance an atheist-Darwinian understanding of man and nature. The factions differ on tactics.

The new atheists advocate militancy. They believe:

I like Robert Wright and enjoyed his recent book The Evolution of God. One thing I value about him is his candor. Thus in his New York Times op-ed on Sunday proposing a “grand bargain” between religion and science (i.e., Darwinism), he can’t help but blurt out what would be asked in this bargain even of religious believers who think they’ve already managed to square God with Darwin. These believers, notably adherents of “theistic evolution,” with their minimalist view of the Deity, should be prepared to “scale back their conception of God’s role in creation.” If I’m reading Bob Wright correctly, even the theism-lite of theistic evolution can be reconciled with a full-bodied Darwinism only at the cost of further “scaling back” any remotely traditional estimation of God’s role in the history of life. Have I not said that to you before?

Wright is smart, honest and likable, yet, I think, misses some key points. For one, contrary to the first sentence in his essay, there’s no “war” going on between science and religion. There is, however, a struggle between two visions of science — one that keeps its mind open to evidence of purpose being worked out in detail (“intelligent design”) in nature, and one that rules out such evidence on principle (represented by a range of perspectives from theistic evolution to atheist materialism). The former vision asks questions of evolutionary theory that the latter can’t answer. How did the first life begin? Where did the information coded initially in the genome come from? Given that this same information is grossly inadequate to explaining the levels of organization that most interest Robert Wright and other believers in evolutionary psychology, namely those levels associated traditionally with the operation of the soul, and given that natural selection has only genetic information to operate on, how can Darwinian theory explain the development of those features of human life that set us apart from animals? For that matter, how does it explain certain levels of organization in animals that simply can’t be explained by DNA coding for proteins? In genetic terms, what exactly is being selected?

Over at my Beliefnet blog, we were discussing astrology. On evolutionary psychology and its peculiar parallels with that ancient art, David Berlinski had this to say several years ago in The Weekly Standard:

After attending public schools from kindergarten through my masters degree, I learned a few lessons about staying informed while studying a biased and one-sided origins curriculum. My large, inner-city public high school was rich in diversity, and I learned to appreciate a multiplicity of viewpoints and backgrounds. Unfortunately, this diversity did not extend into the biology classroom. There I was told there was one, and only one, acceptable perspective regarding origins: neo-Darwinian theory. As students head back to school this year, I want to share some tips I’ve learned to help students stay informed on this topic: Tip #1: Never opt out of learning evolution. In fact, learn about evolution every chance you get. Evolutionary biologist Patrick J. Keeling claims Read More ›

A recent Reuters article titled “IBM uses DNA to make next-gen microchips” explains, as the title suggests, that microchip manufacturers are finding it cheaper and more efficient to use DNA as a framework on which to build microchips. The news story is based upon a new article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology proposing that DNA can form a template for building microchips: “DNA origami, in which a long single strand of DNA is folded into a shape using shorter ‘staple strands’6, can display 6-nm-resolution patterns of binding sites, in principle allowing complex arrangements of carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, or quantum dots.” This article is part of a much bigger trend, as scientific journals are increasingly discussing biomimetics. The journal Philosophical Read More ›

To: Ben Stein
From: Walter Duranty
New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist (deceased, but never fired).
936,287,434 Seventh Circle
Moloch Township, Gehenna.

Dearest Ben,
My condolences on your involuntary departure from the New York Times. Down Here, we all find it very amusing.
Yea, we all know that you got canned by the Grey Lady- by e-mail, no less. The pretense: your ‘crime’ was to hawk the services of an on-line credit report company that the Times management thought unethical.
Of course, causing people who trusted you to lose money would have been your quickest ticket to promotion at the ‘Newspaper with a of Record.’

Pinch Sulzberger reduced the value of the stock of the world’s ‘Newspaper of Record’ by 6 billion dollars (1999 50 bucks /share; 2009 8 bucks/share; current market cap $1.1 billion) in substantial part by using the newspaper as his ideological cudgel. And he fired you for risking other people’s money? Remember the above the fold coverage of McCain’s faux ‘sex scandal’ that coincided with the Grey Lady’s ‘writer’s block’ about John Edwards’ real sex scandal? How about the brutal dissection of Sara Palin’s family that coincided with the omerta about Barack Obama’s dubious Chicago associates? Which ‘significant other’ was more important for voters to know about–Levi Johnston or Tony Rezko? Which relationship got the most press at the ‘Newspaper of Record’?

So the public figured: why pay two bucks for the Times, when you can get the content for free from the Democratic National Committee?

You were fired for ideological reasons — your criticism of Goldman Sachs, your skepticism of President Obama’s policies, sure, but most of all, because you didn’t fit.
‘Didn’t fit,’ you ask? Let me explain.