2010

John Derbyshire at National Review was AWOL for a while but I’m glad to see he’s back in action, abusing us in his accustomed style. He is one of those Darwinists like PZ Myers who’s always at least an enjoyable read notwithstanding that part of the enjoyment lies in the way the actual content tends to boil down to something little above the level of “Mommy, you’re stupid! You’re stupid, Mommy!” (This is our three-year-old Saul’s current best shot at a counterargument when crossed.) Thus it’s a relief to find that on his vacation from Darwin advocacy, John has learned nothing.

On James Lee, briefly famous gunman and hostage-taker at the Discovery Channel headquarters, Derbyshire chides those who took a glance at Lee’s Darwin-heavy manifesto and pointed out the obvious. Writes John, “It ought to be a well-established principle that you can’t deduce anything at all from a lone act of insanity, but when you have an axe to grind, the temptation can be irresistible.”

Who deduced anything? Not me. Observe, quote, correlate, yes. Deduce, no.
Yet John writes:

David Klinghoffer at the Discovery Institute, a creationist think-tank, chimed in with the observation that James Lee seems to have believed in the preposterous and utterly discredited theories of Charles Darwin, along with fellow Darwinists Charles Manson, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and of course Adolf Hitler. That doesn’t quite compute. Wouldn’t a Darwinist wish for his species to be successful, not go extinct? But no doubt the Discovery Institute people can discover a response to that.

Huh? I don’t know what a hypothetical Darwinist “would wish for,” I only know what these monsters drew from Darwin’s notion of inevitable ongoing warfare between superior and inferior races by which the species advances, which they translated into their own terms.

Assurances that we have nothing to fear from Darwinism are a familiar species of evolutionary apologetics. We’re told that Darwinian thinking doesn’t threaten morality, religion, or belief in life’s having an ultimate meaning. On the contrary, it enhances all things good and fair. Karl Giberson’s recent column in the Huffington Post, “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth,” deserves to be pinned under glass and put up on a wall as a near-perfect specimen of the genre.

Anyone who’s honest with himself knows this is all propaganda and wishful thinking, but it refreshes us nevertheless to hear Darwinists themselves confess — even trumpet — the truth.

Darwinian scholars and journalists have been writing with what must seem, to their brethren, an alarming frankness. One occasion for the flurry of articles is the recent sensational book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, who present the picture of our evolutionary human ancestors as enjoying polyamory as their standard reproductive practice. Group sex was the rule for them, so there’s no reason to expect marital fidelity from us, their heirs.

On the Scientific American website, psychologist Jesse Bering throws out the whole structure of sexual right and wrong with one blog post:

There are of course many important caveats, but the basic logic is that, because human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out “extra-pair copulatory partners” — having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one’s mindless genes — then suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, is an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.

Dr. Bering concedes with some feeling that in evolutionary psychological terms, empathy for the jilted sexual partner also plays a role. But in general:

Right is irrelevant. There is only what works and what doesn’t work, within context, in biologically adaptive terms.

In the current issue of Philosophy Now, Joel Marks declares himself a born-again amoralist. He used to be a moral atheist, but now, having divested himself of earlier illusions, he chirpily goes for what he calls “hard atheism” and, “In fact, I have given up morality altogether!” On the science backing up his position, he comments:

[Ed. Note: The previously published version of this post referred to Francisco Ayala as “of the BioLogos Foundation.” While Dr. Ayala has been a guest blogger with BioLogos, he is not directly affiliated with the foundation.]

Late last year, the eminent Christian philosopher and proponent of intelligent design, William Lane Craig, crossed swords in debate with the avid apologist for Darwinian evolution, Francisco Ayala. The debate was chaired by philosopher of physics Bradley Monton of the University of Colorado, an ID sympathizer, though a convinced atheist himself. Monton is the author of the book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. A fascinating ID the Future interview with Professor Monton can be downloaded here.

Following Dr. Ayala’s opening statement, Dr. Craig commenced his presentation by carefully setting out the definition of ID as the study of legitimate design inferences. Craig stipulated that, were Ayala to attempt to refute the inference to design with respect to biological systems, he would need to do one of two things. Either Ayala would need to directly challenge the legitimacy of the explanatory filter (presumably by demonstrating that it incorporates false positives) or demonstrate that the systems featured in biology do not meet the criteria of the explanatory filter. Setting aside the discussions pertaining to the tenability of universal common ancestry, Craig set about to argue that Ayala’s attempts to disqualify ID on scientific grounds were doomed because he had failed to demonstrate, in his published work, that the dual forces of random mutation and natural selection, are causally sufficient to account for macroevolution. He also argued that Ayala’s more numerous attempts to disqualify ID on theological grounds are completely irrelevant to the process of drawing a design inference from biological phenomena, because none of the arguments for ID aspire to show that the designer possesses the qualities of omnibenevolence or omnipotence. After all, Craig argued, a design inference is still warranted with respect to a medieval torture rack, regardless of the malevolent purposes of the system’s design. Questions pertaining to the nature of the designer are for natural theology, not for the scientific research program of ID. This is what distinguishes the modern concept of ID from the Watchmaker argument of William Paley’s Natural Theology.

Here come more threats to academic freedom, not unlike those seen by intelligent design proponents and Darwin skeptics. Over the years we’ve covered many, many cases like this where someone who expresses doubt about Darwinian evolution is harassed, fired, denied tenure, and so on. “The significance of this is a threat to academic freedom and it’s also a threat to academic science,” Siegel said. “If scientists have to produce work that meets a certain view to keep their jobs, researchers are going to stop publishing negative findings for fear of being fired.” No, they will simply stop researching period in the subject areas that get them in trouble. The average scientist can find lots of fruitful areas of research that Read More ›

There is little doubt that hostage-taker James Lee’s virulent Social Darwinism was the product of a tragically disturbed man. But can an entire culture fall for the pernicious ideology of Social Darwinism, especially its scientific and political elites? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes, as I have documented in my book Darwin Day in America, and as the new documentary “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” persuasively shows. Perhaps the most jarring fact about the troubling views of James Lee is that similar views have been espoused over the past century by leading scientists, politicians, and thinkers. Ideas do have consequences, and not just for seriously disturbed individuals like James Lee.

Reached today for comment about Stephen Hawking’s new book, the Universe said that Professor Hawking should receive no credit for the ideas. “You humans naively assume that ‘physicists’ exist, who discover theories,” said the Universe. “But I did it all. Me. The transitory entity known to you as ‘Stephen Hawking’ is merely an epiphenomenon of the laws of nature, otherwise known as Me, the Universe itself. Mindless physical stuff, the only thing that ever really existed, or ever will exist.” “Hawking, and that other guy — what’s his face, Dawkins — have been stealing my royalties for years. I’ve got some lawyers working on that.” “Anyway, I don’t know why Hawking and Dawkins, or Harris and Dennett and the rest Read More ›

In the previous post, I discussed a recent paper in Trends in Genetics, “Causes and evolutionary significance of genetic convergence,” which notes that that genetic convergence is not uncommon, even though only a “restricted number of substitutions” at the genetic level can create novel phenotypic traits. This data not only shows that functional genotypes are rare, but it also poses a much deeper problem for evolutionary thinking–one that challenges the very basis for constructing phylogenetic trees. The main assumption behind evolutionary trees is that functional genetic similarity implies inheritance from a common ancestor. But “convergent” genetic evolution shows that there are many instances where functional similarity is not the result of inheritance from a common ancestor. So when we find Read More ›

A line that’s being widely offered on James Lee, who took hostages at the Discovery Channel on Wednesday before being shot and killed, fastens on his debt to Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. The connection to Darwin, pushed heavily in Lee’s list of demands, goes on being ignored. (No surprise.) But there’s even more to the Darwin angle than I previously realized.

Lee’s manifesto has otherwise been dismissed as mostly “a big bag of crazy.” Not so fast. Lee was obviously disturbed, but the document he left behind makes sense in its weird way — providing that you’ve dipped a bit into the ideas of his guru. No, not Al Gore. Daniel Quinn, whose book My Ishmael Lee insisted must become the focus of daily programming on the Discovery Channel. With Quinn, evolution and natural selection are a theme that, in turn, helps makes sense of James Lee’s writing.

What seems crazy falls into place. For example, what is it that Lee had against farmers? (“All human procreation and farming must cease!” On his MySpace page, he denounces Genesis 1 as “obviously written by a totalitarian farmer.”) It’s very simple.

In Quinn’s telling of history, agriculture was the beginning of the end for humans. Or rather, our accustomed “Totalitarian Agriculture.” Here he is in a video interview talking about it with Alan D. Thornhill, then a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice University, now — rather interestingly — science advisor to the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Agriculture allowed the human population to grow and grow, since to feed more people, all you have to do is grow more food. Before that, human beings followed natural selection. We lived in tribes — a social form that is itself a product of natural selection, he emphasizes. This, and the more natural non-Totalitarian Agriculture, put an automatic cap on the number of us that could survive.

On August 21 Karl Giberson, physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College and one of several engaged in the ever-interesting juggling act of defending “faith and science” by means of a Darwinian apologetic, now has added to his litany of misconceptions a boorish attack on Al Mohler in The Huffington Post, “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth.” Since David Klinghoffer has provided an excellent summary of the issues involved in an earlier post to this site, Karl Giberson v Al Mohler on Darwin: The Grudge Match, they need not be restated here. The point here is to address Giberson’s principal objection, namely, Mohler’s assertion that “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged . . . .” Giberson wants to dismiss Mohler’s comments as merely an effort “to undermine evolution by suggesting that it was ‘invented’ to prop up Darwin’s worldview.”

Giberson’s complaint is easily addressed from his own standpoint. Since he seems to privilege the historians on this issue (rejecting Mohler’s comments as those of “a theologian and not a historian” is an odd dismissal since Giberson isn’t a historian either!), what have the subject specialists said on this matter? As will become evident, it really is very much a question of worldview. The central issue at hand isn’t whether or not Darwin embarked upon the Beagle “in search of evolution” but whether or not his mental attitude was prepared for it and what the nature of his attitude really was. In other words, had Darwin already formed a mental template of how natural phenomena would be interpreted once he encountered them on the Beagle? The issue certainly isn’t Genesis but the genesis of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). The historians tell us three major things in this regard.