March 2010

I’ve followed the back and forth between Francisco Ayala and Steve Meyer with interest. I happened to have just read Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell when I first saw Ayala’s commentary/review on it at the Biologos Foundation website. My initial response was that Ayala obviously hadn’t read the book, and, as a result, made some embarrassing mistakes that any reader of the book would recognize.

Darrell Falk at the Biologos Foundation was apparently responsible for inviting Ayala to comment on Meyer’s book, and has been drawn into the debate.

He published the first part of Meyer’s response to Ayala, but not without first offering his “background comments” about the debate. (I think David Klinghoffer has said what needs to be said about that.) The Biologos Foundation is committed to the “science-and-religion dialogue.” In my opinion, however, they have a peculiar way of fostering dialogue.

Earlier this week, the Biologos Foundation posted part of Stephen Meyer’s response to a review of his book Signature in the Cell by evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala. Because Biologos decided to introduce its partial posting of Meyer’s response with a misleading and inaccurate preface, and because Biologos further decided to rebut part 1 of Meyer’s response before readers had a chance to read his entire response, we have decided to make the rest of Dr. Meyer’s response available on his website immediately. Just as readers were allowed to read Dr. Ayala’s critique in its entirety before reading Dr. Meyer’s response, we think it only fair that readers should have the opportunity to read Meyer’s entire response (which was written in Read More ›

Discovery Institute has invited Dr. Francisco Ayala to debate the thesis of the book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design with the book’s author, Dr. Stephen Meyer. Those who’ve been following the debate between Meyer and his critics know that there has been a bit of back and forth since Ayala was invited to critique SITC on the Biologos website. Meyer has responded this week, with the first of two parts on the Biologos site. Discovery Institute would like to initiate a full-fledged, official debate between the two, and so we have already sent the following invitation to Dr. Ayala. Dear Professor Ayala: I am writing to you in my capacity as the Director of Read More ›

Last updated 3/9/10, 7:00 pm.

As a former book review editor (at National Review), I take a professional interest in book reviews and all the things that can go right or wrong with them. I confess, though, I’ve never seen anything quite like the treatment of Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, on BioLogos, the curious website funded by the Templeton Foundation and specializing in Christian apologetics for Darwin. The site published what was clearly, unambiguously written to look like a review by biologist Francisco Ayala that, as Steve Meyer pointed out already, actually gave every evidence that Ayala had not read the book. (My colleague Dr. Meyer thinks Ayala did read the Table of Contents, but on this I must disagree.)

On what did Ayala base his views about Signature? This is a bit of a mystery. BioLogos president Dr. Darrel Falk is unstinting with fulsome praise for Ayala (“one of Biology’s living legends”). Falk claims he actually asked Ayala to respond to Falk’s review of Signature. Falk purports that in publishing Ayala’s review, he mistakenly failed to introduce it with the disclaimer that Ayala was reviewing Falk’s review, not Meyer’s book per se. Yeah, sure. Falk’s review did not provide Ayala with his absurd misrepresentation of Meyer’s argument. Instead Ayala gives every impression of having derived that from his own assessment of the book itself. As Ayala claims,

The keystone argument of Signature of the Cell [sic] is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms. I agree. And so does every evolutionary scientist, I presume. Why, then, spend chapter after chapter and hundreds of pages of elegant prose to argue the point?

Yet that is certainly not the keystone argument of Signature, and Meyer in fact spends only 66 pages (out of 613) on it. But that is not really the point here.

What’s notable is that Falk in his own review, whatever its other faults or merits, never claimed that Signature is all about proving that “chance by itself, cannot, account for the genetic information found in genomes.” Falk doesn’t mention the word “chance.” So where did Ayala get his mistaken notion? All one can say is, not from the book, which he patently didn’t read, and not from Falk. Indeed, Ayala in his essay does not mention Falk or Falk’s review. Clearly, Ayala wanted readers to think he was reviewing Signature in the Cell–or Signature of the Cell as he repeatedly calls it. Thus, for example, he commends Meyer for his “elegant prose.” The idea that Ayala was merely acting in good faith on Falk’s assignment of responding to Falk’s review is hardly believable.

Last week’s New York Times article on academic freedom legislation makes a false assertion that the Selman v. Cobb County Board of Education claimed it was illegal to single out evolution in a curricular policy. The NY Times article wrongly states: The legal incentive to pair global warming with evolution in curriculum battles stems in part from a 2005 ruling by a United States District Court judge in Atlanta that the Cobb County Board of Education, which had placed stickers on certain textbooks encouraging students to view evolution as only a theory, had violated First Amendment strictures on the separation of church and state. Although the sticker was not overtly religious, the judge said, its use was unconstitutional because evolution Read More ›

Earlier this year, evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala critiqued Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell, in an invited essay for the Biologos Foundation website. Dr. Meyer has now responded with the first part of a two-part response, “On Not Reading The Signature in the Cell.” In this first part, Meyer argues that Ayala unfortunately does not appear to have read Signature in the Cell, and so his effort to refute the book falls flat. Indeed, Ayala’s “review misrepresents the thesis and topic of the book and even misstates its title.” Read more here.

The evolution of antibiotic resistance is typically the result of small changes allowing for survival in a microbe or other organism under special circumstances where the organism faces extremely strong selection pressure due to the presence of some antibiotic drug. In other cases, it is the result of the transfer of pre-existing antibiotic resistance genes from one microbe to another, and the selection of such microbes in an environment containing antibiotics. Even in the first example, evolution does not produce a truly new function. In fact the change produced often makes the microbe less fit when the antibiotic is removed–it reproduces slower than it did before it was changed. This effect is widely recognized, and is called the fitness cost Read More ›

The recent front page New York Times article on academic freedom legislation offers a stark reminder that the intelligentsia is very worried about the prospect of teachers gaining academic freedom, as a bill presently in the Kentucky legislature would allow, “to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, including but not limited to the study of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” From 2008-2009, 12 academic freedom bills were submitted into state legislatures, including Florida, Alabama (2), South Carolina (2), Missouri (2), Michigan, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Iowa, and New Mexico. Now in 2010, there are 3 bills already, including bills in Kentucky, Missouri, and Mississippi. The Kentucky bill contains an excellent Read More ›

In the Texas Republican Party primary this week, voters in one part of the state narrowly rejected pro-teach-the-controversy State Board of Education member Don McLeroy. At the same time, voters in another part of the state (Dallas) dumped anti-teach-the-controversy Board member Geraldine Miller in favor of a candidate who has expressed support for teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.

The most interesting thing about incumbent Geraldine Miller’s remarkable defeat by newcomer George Clayton is the unintentional role the pro-Darwin Dallas Morning News may have played in her downfall.

It’s the question raised by yesterday’s New York Times article on the push for balance in classroom discussions of global warming, though, as Jay Richards aptly notes over at The American, the real point of Leslie Kaufman’s story is “to connect the teaching of evolution to the climate change debate.”

Now when I read anything on the environment in the New York Times, I try to keep a couple of deconstructionist qualifiers running in the back of my head: “This is what the New York Times wants me to believe about the issue” and “What are they trying to accomplish with this piece?” I know it’s cynical, but when it comes to environmental stories, I just don’t trust New York Times reporters to keep it straight.

Some things they want to accomplish with this piece:

(1) Divide and conquer skeptics of global warming orthodoxy and Darwinism, by painting the latter as ignorant religious zealots, in hopes of starting a fight among conservatives. No doubt they’re hoping that, say, Richard Lindzen will have to explain why he agrees with those nefarious creationists on the global warming issue, and that he’ll have to spend his time issuing statements of agreement with evolution.

(2) Make it harder for official bodies to encourage critical thinking on global warming, since attempts to do the same with regard to evolution have, in recent years, met with fierce resistance and only modest success.

This is the media analysis required with today’s journalism, though I would call it prudent rather than cynical.
Richards goes on to consider how the debate over evolution and the debate over climate change are alike — and how they differ: