David Klinghoffer

Slate startled us the other day by publishing an insightful essay asking whether political and worldview presuppositions drive the debate over climate change on both sides — not only for those on the Right, but for combatants on the Left too, including scientists (who are mostly on the Left). It’s an elementary observation that should be evident to anyone who follows the evolution debate, but of course a welcome surprise coming from a venue like Slate.

Author Dr. Daniel Sarewitz worries that because the ranks of scientists are so politically skewed, that threatens the trust that scientists currently enjoy among the public:

This exceptional status could well be forfeit in the escalating fervor of national politics, given that most scientists are on one side of the partisan divide. If that public confidence is lost, it would be a huge and perhaps unrecoverable loss for a democratic society.

I wonder, though, whether the loss of confidence isn’t already happening and whether that might be a healthy development.
Recently a pair of scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, considering various published news sources, tabulated the increasingly common use, by reporters and other writers, of authoritarian phrases like “science says we must,” “science says we should,” “science dictates,” and “science commands.” Typically, the phrases introduce a doctrinaire insistence that “science” demands our belief in catastrophic global warming, Darwinian evolution, assorted dietary or other health practices, and so on.

Science is seemingly so confident in itself that it now dictates belief in areas — from morality to eschatology — once deemed to be the special domain of religion. Once, it was religion that dealt in narratives of global apocalypse, life’s origins, and taboos on assorted foods and unclean practices. Now it’s science that tells us, for example, that the perception of ourselves as possessing free will is only an illusion. It’s our “selfish genes” that manipulate us through the meaty computer of our brains. Alternatively, science can tell us how to distinguish right from wrong based on considerations of human “flourishing.”

One needs to hammer and hammer away at the simple but crucial lesson of the scandalous Martin Gaskell case out of the University of Kentucky. A superbly qualified astronomer was rejected for a job because he expressed very modest Darwin doubts. Darwinists and their useful idiots are full of reminders to us to recall that a “consensus” of scientists compels our assent to Darwinian evolution. Yet with the Gaskell story being merely the latest instance, we see again and again how Darwin-doubting scientists are punished for speaking up in even the mildest way. A fortune in research money is at stake, as well as institutional reputations. Anyone who’s had the experience of being penalized by an employer for saying something Read More ›

Jerry Coyne is ticked off that readers are attributing significance in the wider evolution debate to Michael Behe’s current paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology, explicating the results of viral and bacterial evolution studies — notably the famous long-term study of Richard Lenski: As I predicted, the IDers completely ignore the limitations of this paper (see my analyses here and here), and assert, wrongly, that Behe has made a powerful statement about evolution in nature. What Coyne “completely ignores” is that Darwinists have accustomed themselves to waving Lenski as a banner that makes “a powerful statement about evolution in nature.” In The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins devoted an ecstatic and detailed discussion to Lenski’s work, enthusing: Creationists Read More ›

At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne pictures a newly rediscovered and rather unhandsome fly native to a particular rock in Kenya (and nowhere else) where it sports about in the bat guano deposited in a cleft in the rock. The fly has only vestigial wings — “evidence for evolution, of course,” notes Dr. Coyne. Isn’t it interesting how “evidence for evolution” tends to be, as in this example, evidence not for the building up of new functionality but for its loss, where the loss has some adaptive advantage? Losing information is one thing — like accidentally erasing a computer file (say, an embarrassing diplomatic cable) where, it turns out in retrospect, you’re better off now that’s it not there anymore. Gaining information, building it up slowly from nothing, is quite another and more impressive feat. Yet it’s not the loss of function, and the required underlying information, but its gain that Darwinian evolution is primarily challenged to account for.

That’s the paradox highlighted in Michael Behe’s new review essay in Quarterly Review of Biology (“Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution“). It’s one of those peer-reviewed, Darwin-doubting biology journal essays that, as we’re confidently assured by the likes of the aforesaid Jerry Coyne, don’t actually exist. Casey Luskin has been doing an excellent job in this space of detailing Michael Behe’s conclusions. Reviewing the expansive literature dealing with investigations of viral and bacterial evolution, Dr. Behe shows that adaptive instances of the “diminishment or elimination” of Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs) in the genome overwhelmingly outnumber “gain-of-FCT events.” Seemingly, under Darwinian assumptions, even as functionality is being painstakingly built up that’s of use to an organism in promoting survival, the same creature should, much faster, be impoverished of function to the point of being driven out of existence. Jerry Coyne’s Kenyan fly may then be the opposite of “evidence for evolution” of the kind that Darwinists really need.

So far the masters of evolutionary apologetics have ignored Behe’s damaging article. [Update: Coyne has now done so. More anon.] Trying to imagine what they would or will say if they can ever carve out the time from a busy schedule to read it, I posed a few questions to Dr. Ann Gauger, developmental biologist and senior research scientist at Biologic Institute.

Slate — yes, stet that, Slate — carries an excellent essay opening up the interesting question of whether political and philosophical presuppositions distort what we think of as mainstream science (“Lab Politics: Most scientists in this country are Democrats. That’s a problem“). Author Daniel Sarewitz notes that among scientists, self-identified Republicans make up a dismal 6 percent, while Democrats are 55 percent (the rest are independents and I-don’t-knows). Though Sarewitz doesn’t mention evolution, he ought to have done so. But never mind. While folks on the political right have been strangely slow to pick up on the political resonances of Darwinism, his illustration from the climate debate makes the same point:

Could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political — and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence — or causation?

NASA’s discovery of an arsenic-ingesting microbe in California’s forbidding Mono Lake looks, on the surface, like bad news for Darwinists hopeful to show what a no-big-deal it is for a planet to bring forth life unguided. The bacterium evidently uses arsenic for purposes that all other known organisms would use phosphorus, including incorporating it in DNA. A reporter for Nature News cites UC Santa Barbara geomicrobiologist David Valentine as observing that the discovery may mean “you can potentially cross phosphorus off the list of elements required for life.”

That’s interesting. Under Darwinian assumptions, the observation that such an alternative life chemistry is possible means that some planets previously assumed to be inhospitable to life, due to being poor in phosphorus, would now turn out after all to be potential theaters for life’s presumed spontaneous arising. That would seem to bump up the number of possible dice rolls available out there to jump-start an unguided chemical and biological evolutionary process on some other planet. Yet we still have no indication from SETI or anything else that intelligent or complex life exists anywhere but here. Which makes the existence of life on earth look just a bit more special than it did before, right?

Well, maybe yes or maybe no. Astrophysicist Guillermo Gonzalez, a senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, urges caution before drawing conclusions from the find:

In the ten years since the book first appeared, Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution (2000) has itself achieved iconic status among the primary texts in the literature of scientific Darwin-doubting. ENV will celebrate the anniversary all this month with a series of videos and interviews — Dr. Wells updating the “icons,” colleagues reflecting on the impact the book had on them, an enhanced website for the book, and more. For anyone interested in educating himself about the facts behind the slogans and propaganda that pass for much of the argumentation on behalf of Darwinism, Jonathan Wells’s sweetly reasoned, scientifically impeccable presentation gives the goods on peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, four-winged fruit flies, the tree of life, and other crusted barnacles that hang on and on and on.

A Berkeley PhD in molecular and cell biology, Wells is among the most lucid and accessible scientist-writers devoted to the modern project of critiquing Darwin. When I say the book is sweetly reasoned, I don’t only mean that it’s well reasoned but that there’s an appealing geniality, a sweetness, to the man’s writing that stands out in contrast to the donkey-like braying of a Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne, the sinister coilings of a Richard Dawkins, the ugly “humor” of a P.Z. Myers. Yes, you can get a sense of a person’s character, and perhaps too his credibility, from the words he uses.

Performing the service of crushing ten venerable chestnuts of evolutionary apologetics, familiar to generations from high school and college textbooks, Icons caused no little consternation among Darwin advocates. That was evident from the reaction of critics — who, however, hardly succeeded in laying a glove on Wells — but also from the fact that textbook publishers have to a limited extent taken his criticisms to heart. Haeckel’s phony embryo drawings, for example, are harder to find in brand new textbooks now than they were before, representing a telling strategic retreat.

As I was driving in to work, the local NPR station had on an interview with a guy who’s involved with gathering billions of seeds of various plant varieties into a “doomsday vault.” It is on a remote Norwegian island and intended as a precaution against the presumed devastations of global warming. There were few surprises in the conversation — the grim mood was well suited to the NPR target audience, which eats this stuff up — apart from one rather interesting question from a listener. The guest, Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, was asked why his group bothers with seeds. In the future, won’t we be able to reconstitute life from the digital code of DNA?

Not necessarily, explained Fowler. He offered a few cryptic but telling comments about the complexities of gene expression, and how simply knowing the DNA sequence of a plant (or animal) may never be sufficient to generate life. Why? Part of the answer, implying a strong challenge to materialist explanations of life’s evolution, is suggested in a recent and illuminating essay, “Getting Over the Code Delusion,” in the Ethics and Public Policy Center journal, The New Atlantis.

Rare is the technical if otherwise quite accessible article that gives chills like this one does. Steve Talbott, a senior researcher at the Nature Institute, takes aim at the still-widespread illusion that DNA maps the construction of a living creature. In a 1992 essay, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Walter Gilbert crowed that the time will come when a person will be able to say, of a human DNA sequence inscribed on a computer disk, “Here is a human being; it’s me!” How utterly naíve that has since been revealed to be.

Richard Dawkins calls DNA “a remarkable feat of digital information technology,” on the model of a computer albeit one that programs itself. Yet the burden of Talbott’s article is to show why the whole computer metaphor is inadequate. If you want a better one, the really apt metaphor would be drawn from the art of dance — or I’d say, music — with all that implies by way of purpose, agency, and expression.

In the Hebrew version of Wikipedia, the page on intelligent design translates ID with the phrase “tichnun tivoni,” which means something like “intelligent planning.” And so it’s translated regularly too in Ha’aretz and other Israeli news sources. The Wiki page is well supplied with the usual distortions that you’d expect from Wikipedia in any language, but never mind that. The question of how to translate “intelligent design” into the language of the Bible is an interesting one. Is there an actual Biblical phrase that captures the idea?

In the journal Azure, published by the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, an essay on the “Secret of the Sabbath” indirectly suggests an answer. Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz reflects on the passage from the book of Exodus about the construction of the Tabernacle in the desert. Following the Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites were in the wilderness on their way to the land of Israel. Rather than having them construct a permanent Temple to worship in, God directed Moses to oversee the construction of a large movable tent for the same purpose. To carry out the work of designing the structure, God chose Betzalel and endowed him with “wisdom, understanding and knowledge…to perform all manner of workmanship” (35:31, 33).

The phrase given above as “workmanship,” melechet machshevet, really means purposive creativity — or, if you will, intelligent design. A helpful insight in the debate with theistic evolution advocates emerges from this observation.

As Rabbi Lifshitz explains, drawing on a long line of earlier commentators back to the Talmud and Midrash, the connection with the Sabbath goes as follows. When God gave the Sabbath to the Israelites, in the form of the Fourth Commandment, he was exceedingly sparing on the details of what actually constitutes the “work” (melachah) from which they were henceforth to rest on the Sabbath.