Three years ago, I published a series of four articles (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) engaging with Dave Farina who had published a video critique of Michael Behe’s three books, Darwin’s Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves. Farina, though not holding a terminal degree in any field, is a popular YouTuber. He is a rather sad example of today’s low-quality Darwin defenders.
Now, I am no credentialist, and I would not draw attention to Farina’s lack of a terminal degree were it not for the fact that he styles himself as “Professor Dave,” despite neither holding a doctoral degree in any discipline nor having a professorship position. Farina’s lack of an advanced degree does not even by itself form my opinion of his competence in the subjects that he addresses on his channel. To me as an expert, however, in some of the subjects Farina engages with, it is painfully apparent that Farina lacks expertise on these topics. I am not the only one to have this impression of Farina’s material. I know Professor James Tour arrived at a similar conclusion regarding Farina’s interaction with Tour’s own subject matter.
When Farina posted his reply video to my article series, I was distinctly unimpressed by his handling of the literature he was citing and with his interaction with my written material. His rhetoric was also disproportional to his command of the subject matter. I was therefore disinclined to engage any further with him. Our prior engagement on Twitter also revealed him to be impossible to have a serious scholarly interaction with. For example, he wrote, “Get ready for the top search result for your name on both Google and YouTube being me taking a big steamy dump all over your dumb science denying apologist face.” These are not the words of an intellectually serious person.
Though the errors in Farina’s presentation are easy for the trained eye to spot, not everybody has the academic expertise to identify his many mistakes. Occasionally I have had people ask me for my thoughts on Farina’s critique of me. I have therefore decided that a response to Farina’s video might be instructive for some. In this and subsequent articles, I will address each of Farina’s points from his video.
Farina’s Failure to Acknowledge Mistakes
In my previous article series, I had highlighted multiple items on which Farina is straightforwardly wrong. Rather than engaging with these points or acknowledging correction, Farina chose to simply drop them entirely, focusing instead only on those items which he thought he could rebut. Doubtless many of the viewers of his video will not have bothered to look back on my original article series to see how many of his earlier points Farina subtly drops entirely from his response — points that, as I showed in my previous series, were straightforwardly wrong.
Perhaps the most significant howler in Farina’s previous video — which, again, he entirely dropped in his rebuttal — is his mistaken claim that scientists observed a flagellum evolve in real-time. Behe had asked in a 2016 article,
[W]hy doesn’t [Kenneth Miller] just take an appropriate bacterial species, knock out the genes for its flagellum, place the bacterium under selective pressure (for mobility, say), and experimentally produce a flagellum — or any equally complex system — in the laboratory? (A flagellum, after all, has only 30-40 genes, not the hundreds Miller claims would be easy for natural selection to rapidly redesign.) If he did that, my claims would be utterly falsified. But he won’t even try it because he is grossly exaggerating the prospects of success.
Farina commented,
Hilariously, [Behe] is oblivious to the fact that this precise experiment was carried out the year before. Here’s the paper. Gene deletion produced two strains of bacteria with no flagellum. They then introduced selective pressure for motility by depleting the nutrients in the colony. Within 96 hours, both strains had regenerated flagellar motility by a pathway involving two successive point mutations in genes that served other purposes.
As I noted in my original article addressing Farina, the paper that Farina cites does not do this at all.1 I stated in my earlier essay that I am skeptical that Farina even took the time to read the article, beyond the title, before citing it. Farina has done nothing with his more recent rebuttal to assuage these concerns. All that the researchers deleted was the flagellar master switch protein, FleQ, in Pseudomonas fluorescens. After a few days of incubating the bacterial cells on Petri dishes, they reacquired their ability to grow flagella. The genetic basis for this reactivation of the flagella is that another master switch protein, NtrC, that is a structurally similar homolog of FleQ — responsible for turning on genes involved in nitrogen metabolism — already had the ability, to some extent, to cross-bind to the promoter usually bound by FleQ. When produced in excess, as a result of a broken regulator, NtrC was thus able to drive flagellar synthesis. As a consequence of this mutation, the bacterial cell lost its ability to regulate its nitrogen metabolism genes.
Thus, contrary to the Farina video’s claims, this paper does not document the de novo evolutionary origins of a bacterial flagellum at all — far from it. In fact, Behe has already addressed the paper here. Once again, Farina failed to address or even mention these points in his more recent video where he is supposedly responding to my rebuttal. He just dropped this example and refused to admit that he was completely wrong.
Another significant error that Farina dropped entirely relates to the malarial parasite. In particular, Farina had previously stated that “it’s quite amusing to note that if Behe considers [antimalarial] drug resistance to be impossible to evolve, it means that he believes in a god who deliberately bestowed plasmodia with resistance to our drugs in order to ensure that we continue to contract malaria. Gee, what a swell guy.” As I wrote in my previous essay addressing this aspect of Farina’s critique of Behe, though, this betrays a misunderstanding of what Behe argues in The Edge of Evolution. He does not deny that malarial parasites have acquired resistance to chloroquine and other antimalarial drugs. Quite the contrary. Rather, he notes that malarial resistance to chloroquine has arisen and that it occurs approximately once in every 1020 cells. He then uses this data to extrapolate to a case requiring twice as many co-dependent changes to bring about, and he points out that this problem is far more acute in the case of more complex organisms like large mammals, with much smaller population sizes, longer generation turn-over times, and lower mutation rates. Casey Luskin called out Nathan Lents who made the exact same error about Behe, and Farina seems to have basically mimicked Lents’s total error in full. This is a straightforward error on Farina’s part, and Farina fails to even acknowledge it.
Another example that Farina quietly dropped in his rebuttal, though this one is more of an error of interpretation rather than of fact, is his claim that there are animals that consume photosynthetic algae “which appear to be on their way to becoming photosynthetic themselves via endosymbiosis.” In support of this contention, Farina cited a paper on “Horizontal gene transfer of the algal nuclear gene psbO to the photosynthetic sea slug Elysia chlorotica.”2 As I noted in my original response, the paper discusses the acquisition of plastids by the sea slug Elysia chlorotica by ingestion of the photosynthetic algae Vaucheria litorea. Though more than 90 percent of the proteins required for plastid metabolism are encoded in the nuclear genome of the algae, the plastids are nonetheless still able to photosynthesize within the sea slug. The paper determines that the essential plastid proteins are supplied by the sea slug itself, and that the genes that support photosynthesis have been acquired through horizontal gene transfer. But this does not involve the evolution of any new complex traits. The genes and proteins already existed but were simply transferred from one organism to another. Farina did not revisit this example in his response video.
A further claim Farina failed to revisit is his statement in his previous video that “There are the unicellular algae that evolved in the lab to become permanently multicellular,” citing a paper by Herron et al. (2018) — “De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation.”3 In the study, populations of the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii were subjected to selective pressure by the introduction of the filter-feeding predator Paramecium tetraurelia. They found that two of the five populations developed multicellular structures. However, the multicellular populations lacked motility and the multicellular structures did not evolve multiple cell types. Moreover, as the authors of the paper note, “The ability of wild-type C. reinhardtii to form palmelloids [i.e., multicellular structures] suggests that the founding population in our experiment already possessed a toolkit for producing multicellular structures.” While the strains that evolved in the experiment are obligately multicellular (meaning that being composed of multiple cells is an essential and permanent part of their life cycle), the authors suggest that the genetic basis of the evolved multicellularity phenotype “involves the co-option of a previously existing plastic response.” If this is the case, the authors note, “the shift from a primarily unicellular (but facultatively multicellular) to an obligately multicellular life cycle may have required only a change from facultative to obligate expression of the genes involved in palmelloid formation.” In other words, the transition from being able to exist as single-celled organisms, while forming multicellular structures under certain conditions, to being permanently multicellular may have involved a shift from being able to turn the relevant genes on or off to the genes being permanently locked on. In essence, at best this cannot be an example of evolving something new, but simply an example of a pre-existing trait being turned on permanently. Nothing new actually evolved.
Soldier Mindset
Failing to acknowledge mistakes when they are pointed out to you is one of the surest signs of “soldier mindset” — a mindset more concerned with defending one’s side than with arriving at the truth and refining one’s map of reality. A true scout mindset, by contrast, invites the correction of errors, because truth takes precedence over preserving appearances of scoring rhetorical points. In my next article, I will appraise Farina’s commentary on the Lenski experiment.
Notes
- Taylor TB, Mulley G, Dills AH, Alsohim AS, McGuffin LJ, Studholme DJ, Silby MW, Brockhurst MA, Johnson LJ, Jackson RW. Evolution. Evolutionary resurrection of flagellar motility via rewiring of the nitrogen regulation system. Science. 2015 Feb 27;347(6225):1014-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1259145. PMID: 25722415.
- Rumpho ME, Worful JM, Lee J, Kannan K, Tyler MS, Bhattacharya D, Moustafa A, Manhart JR. Horizontal gene transfer of the algal nuclear gene psbO to the photosynthetic sea slug Elysia chlorotica. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Nov 18;105(46):17867-71. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0804968105. Epub 2008 Nov 11. PMID: 19004808; PMCID: PMC2584685.
- Herron MD, Borin JM, Boswell JC, Walker J, Chen IK, Knox CA, Boyd M, Rosenzweig F, Ratcliff WC. De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation. Sci Rep. 2019 Feb 20;9(1):2328. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-39558-8. PMID: 30787483; PMCID: PMC6382799.