September 2009

The Anti-Defamation League, the country’s leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers?

The ADL has objected to attempts to inject Nazi imagery into the health-care reform debate (“Such statements only serve to diminish and trivialize the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity”), the abortion debate (“Such analogies can only trivialize and diminish the horror”), the animal-rights debate (“the issue should stand on its own merits, rather than rely on inappropriate comparisons that only serve to trivialize the suffering of the six million Jews”), and in many other contexts.

But if Rush Limbaugh, for example, used “outrageous, deeply offensive and inappropriate” Nazi comparisons to stigmatize sponsors and supporters of health-care reform, why is it no less outrageous to compare people (like the late Irving Kristol, for example) who doubt Darwinian evolution to the moral cretins who deny the Holocaust? In his new book, currently the #22 best seller on Amazon, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Dawkins calls Darwin critics “history-deniers” and dwells on the comparison, even remarking that “The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust.”

Is that some sort of cruel joke? The evidence for Darwin’s account of evolution and, more so, its controversial mechanism of natural selection is a matter of inference, no matter how strong you think the inference is. The evidence for the Holocaust includes countless eye-witness accounts — a very different and superior order of evidence.
“People who reject the theory of evolution should be placed on a level with Holocaust deniers, argues an author in his controversial new book,” headlined the London Times when the book came out there last month. Yet not a peep from the ADL.

In his last book, The God Delusion, Dawkins used incredibly offensive language in characterizing the God of the Hebrew Bible, whom he called among other things, “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Now in a Newsweek interview he repeats the insult, saying: “The God of the Old Testament is a monster. It’s very, very hard for anybody to deny that. He’s like a hyped-up Ayatollah Khomeini.” Asked by Newsweek‘s Lisa Miller where this leaves the “90 percent of Americans [who] say they believe in God” and of whom “some portion…are intelligent people,” Dawkins replies, “But they wouldn’t disagree with what I said about the God of the Old Testament. They’d probably say something like, ‘Oh, that’s quite different. We believe in the God of the New Testament.'”

This places Jews among the portion of believing Americans who would have to be characterized as unintelligent. Miller calls Dawkins on this. He then says of Jews: “Well, sure enough. They’d say, ‘OK, we’ve moved on since that time.’ Thank goodness they have.”

Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. This is the first of several posts discussing it.

The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution.” The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework. Nonetheless, like the important work over the years of Michigan State’s Richard Lenski on laboratory evolution of E. coli, which has shown trillions of bacteria evolving under selection for tens of thousands of generations yielding just broken genes and minor changes, the new work demonstrates the looming brick wall which confronts unguided evolution in at least one system. And it points strongly to the conclusion that such walls are common throughout all of biology.

In the paper Bridgham et al (2009) continue their earlier work on steroid hormone receptor evolution. Previously they had constructed in the laboratory a protein which they inferred to be the ancestral sequence of two modern hormone receptors abbreviated GR and MR (Bridgham et al 2006). They then showed that if they changed two amino acid residues in the inferred ancestral receptor protein into ones which occur in GR, they could change its binding specificity somewhat in the direction of modern GR’s specificity. (All the work was done on molecules in the laboratory. No measurements were made of the selective value of the changes in real organisms in nature. Thus any relevance to actual biology is speculative.) They surmised that a gene duplication plus sequence diversification could have given rise to MR and GR. As I wrote in a comment at the time, that was interesting work, and the conclusion was reasonable, but the result was exceedingly modest and well within the boundaries that an intelligent design proponent like myself would ascribe to Darwinian processes. After all, the starting point was a protein which binds several steroid hormones, and the ending point was a slightly different protein that binds the same steroid hormones with slightly different strengths. How hard could that be?

The Problem of Evil is perhaps the most vexing problem in theology. There are many answers to it, which means that there is no single satisfying answer to it. What I’ve never understood about theodicy is this: why do atheists ponder the Problem of Evil?
Jerry Coyne has a recent post on theodicy. He (finally) admits

…I’m no philosopher…this is amateur philosophizing.

Damn right. For a man who recently sneered at Thomas Aquinas, this is progress.
Coyne:

According to a live-blogger at the Southwestern premiere of “Darwin’s Dilemma” earlier tonight, a Darwinist during Q and A challenged Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells by charging that the interviews in the film of noted paleontologists Simon Conway Morris and James Valentine (both evolutionists) were done a decade ago. “Are you aware that the interviews of Morris and Valentine were done 9 and 10 years ago?” the questioner asked. Apparently the implication was that the interviews were so old they no longer accurately reflected the views of Morris and Valentine. Except that the questioner was flat wrong. According to Illustra Media, with whom I checked tonight, the interviews were done specifically for this project in October and November of 2006 Read More ›

Well, the news out of Oklahoma about Stephen Meyer’s intelligent design presentation at the University last night is quite encouraging. Over three hundred people reportedly turned out for the lecture and discussion following. For all the potty-mouthed bluster that local Darwin activists offered up ahead of time, almost everyone in attendance, whether for or against ID, was civil and respectful during the presentation and discussion last night.

The local daily paper, The Norman Transcript, has two stories today, one about the event last night and one about the screening of Darwin’s Dilemma this evening.

Intelligent design is the most likely explanation of the origin of life, an author and speaker at the University of Oklahoma said Monday night.

Read More ›

ENV: How do the scientific issues you write about affect the way we live? Why should the Darwin question matter to people who don’t normally concern themselves with scientific theories?

DB: I think of the Darwinian debate in the way that Dickens thought of Jardynce v Jarndyce in Bleak House. It is awfully easy to be sucked into it, and once suckered, awfully difficult to get out. I have seen it so often. A man wakes and because has read a book or scanned an essay, he is persuaded that he can make a contribution. He is eager to make it. He offers his opinion on the Internet and is gratified by the prospect of the congratulations that he is shortly to receive. No one pays the slightest attention. He then discovers that to be heard, it is necessary that he amplifies his level of abuse. He does that, referring to the Discovery Institute as the Dishonesty Institute. Repeating the phrase as he moves his bowels affords him an unexpected pleasure. As his influence remains insignificant, his indignation mounts. In the morning, he scuttles to his computer to check his own postings; satisfied when he finds them, and beside himself when he fails. His appetite for conflict sharpens. He becomes determined to exaggerate every issue; and to magnify trivialities. Sooner or later, his Internet presence seems real, and his real life unreal. He ends in the state achieved by almost every Internet blogger: He commences to gibber repetitively. Glen Davidson, who posts to David Klinghoffer’s blog, has recently entered the gibbering state.

It is all very sad. I have warned about the phenomenon many times.

If you aren’t at the University of Oklahoma tonight or tomorrow for the ID events you can still follow the events online through live blog updates here.

Somehow, over the past few years the University of Oklahoma has become a sort of ground zero for debating evolution and intelligent design. Appearances by William Dembski, Richard Dawkins, Michael Ruse and John West have all drawn large crowds, and not a little controversy. Tonight Dr. Stephen Meyer will deliver a lecture based on his book Signature in the Cell in Meachem Auditorium at the University of Oklahoma at 7pm. Darwinists are planning to attend with the hopes of confounding Meyer during the question and answer time. Since biologists like Dawkins and Francis Collins have avoided debating Meyer I don’t think there will be much to confound him there tonight.Tomorrow night, the new ID documentary Darwin’s Dilemma will be screened Read More ›

ENV: You describe yourself as a “secular Jew” and “remarkably indifferent to the religious life.” Yet so much of your writing bears directly on whether religion has been intellectually defeated by secular, science-flavored ideologies. You can’t have given no thought to religious questions. Would you share with us your hunches and suspicions about spiritual reality, the trend in your thinking, if not your firm beliefs?

DB: No. Either I cannot or I will not. I do not know whether I am unable or unwilling. The question elicits in me a stubborn refusal. Please understand. It is not an issue of privacy. I have, after all, blabbed my life away: Why should I call a halt here? I suppose that I am by nature a counter-puncher. What I am able to discern of the religious experience often comes about reactively. V.S. Naipaul remarked recently that he found the religious life unthinkable.
He does, I was prompted to wonder? Why does he?

His attitude gives rise to mine. That is the way in which I wrote The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.

Is there anything authentic in my religious nature?
Beats me.

There are a lot of false urban legends promoted in academia about intelligent design (ID). They often start with myths promoted by misinformed critiques in scientific journals, court rulings, or even talks by activists at scientific conferences. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for this misinformation to then be passed down to college students, who may know very little about ID and lack the resources to correct their professors’ misinformed and misplaced attacks on ID. Not anymore. If you’re a college student, recently gone back to school and expecting to hear a lot of anti-ID views from your professors, we’re pleased to present this “Back to School Guide” for students as follows: The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent DesignThe Read More ›