David Klinghoffer

Picture a majestic T. rex receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments in its undersized forelimbs, or an elegant octopus crucified on an old rugged cross with four crossbars instead of one.

Such images are what Kenneth Miller presumably has in mind with his comforting Darwinist thought that intelligent creatures were guaranteed to pop up even in the course of an evolutionary process of purely unguided, purposeless churning. You see, he tells us, evolution was bound to “converge” (as theorized by Simon Conway Morris) not necessarily on a human being but on — well, as Miller has said, it could have been “a big-brained dinosaur, or… a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities.” Just for fun, let’s grant the scientific merit of “convergence” — though many Darwinists, in fact, do not. My argument here is not with Miller’s science but with his imagination.

A Roman Catholic and a Brown University biologist, Ken Miller is one of those theistic evolutionists who want other religious believers to feel there’s nothing in Darwin to offend religious sensibilities. He and others (such as Obama’s favorite geneticist, Francis Collins) invite us to imagine God being delighted with such creatures, noble and impressive in their way, as the culmination of the evolutionary process that He chose not to guide. But what if the intelligent creature that resulted from all the purposeless churning, and that was intended to reflect God’s own image, had been something really horrible.

That’s the scenario that an author I enjoy, a committed Darwinist and atheist — H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) — allows us to contemplate. In his terrifically imaginative horror stories, most set in a spooky, antiquated New England, the great theme is that humanity is but a tiny, unimportant speck in an unimaginably vast universe that has cast up innumerable varieties of extraterrestrial beings, some of which have colonized our planet. Darwinists love him. If you follow PZ Myers’s blog, you’ll know PZ linked the other day to an “Unholy Bible” — Holy Scriptures tweaked along Lovecraftian lines (Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning Cthulhu created R’lyeh and the earth”).

Many of Lovecraft’s creatures are so repellent that when a human being encounters them, he’s as likely as not to die right there on the spot from the sheer terror. Here’s a description of one, depicted in the form of a little statue at the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu”:

Yesterday, ENV spoke with Michael A. Flannery about his new book Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press). While credited as evolution’s co-discoverer, Wallace fell away from the Darwinian faith and came to espouse a view remarkably suggestive of intelligent design. Now, the rest of the interview.

ENV: Scientifically, how does Wallace’s culminating work, World of Life, stand up today as compared to Darwin’s Origin of Species?

MAF: That’s a complex question. Darwin’s Origin is really a metaphysical treatise supported by some biological speculations and those speculations give it the appearance of science. The thing that makes this question so difficult to answer is that for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was Thomas Henry Huxley’s brilliant public relations campaign on behalf of Darwin’s theory, Darwinism has lodged itself as the reigning biological paradigm and Origin is its magnum opus. All this means is that everyone has probably heard of (if not read) Darwin’s Origin, but few would even know who Wallace is, much less know his World of Life. That’s a big reason I wrote this book in the first place.
But that said, Darwin’s book had major problems from the start. For one thing, the title simply doesn’t deliver. It purports to be a book on the origin of species but tells us nothing of the origin of life itself, the very root of origins. Nevertheless, the book has had an influence far out of proportion to its actual value in moving science forward. For example, I can’t think of a single medical advance that is dependent upon it. In fact, Louis Pasteur, who exploded the old view of abiogenesis (biological life from nonliving matter), proved biogenesis — namely, that life must come from life — and gave us germ theory of disease, was a vocal opponent of evolution. Most of the so-called evolutionary “advances” in science we hear about have nothing to do with Darwin’s central theory of macroevolution, that random mutation eventually would produce speciation; they are really just examples of microevolution (species variation) which was wholly uncontroversial even in Darwin’s day. We could have gotten that from Wallace’s World of Life.

In contrast, Wallace’s book is a more complete and comprehensive work. It assumes common descent but argues that it is guided and infused with design. Its principle thesis presents what I call intelligent evolution, the idea of common descent based upon natural selection strictly bounded by the principle of utility in which nature is viewed as having design and purpose within a theistic context. Wallace understood that the origin of life could be addressed more simply as a problem of cellular complexity. Haeckel, an early and ardent Darwin supporter, had a very simplistic idea of the cell as merely a mass of protoplasm. Darwin held similar reductionist views. But Wallace knew better; the cell was a far more complex and intricate system. Wallace discusses this at length in The World of Life, thus making it far more prescient than the Origin.

To judge from previews, the new Darwin biographical movie Creation will emphasize the challenge Darwinian theory posed from the beginning to religious belief. Yet the life of evolution’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, suggests that properly understood, and that’s a major proviso, evolution needn’t upset faith at all. On the contrary, Wallace reasoned from what he knew about life’s history to a belief that an “Overruling Intelligence” guided life’s development, much as intelligent design (ID) does today. Science historian Michael A. Flannery calls Wallace’s evolutionary thinking a “preamble” to ID.

An opportunity to evaluate this provocative claim is now before us in the form of Flannery’s new edition of Wallace’s great work, A World of Life (1910), which slims the dense and massive volume down to a manageable size and includes an illuminating introduction by Flannery. His book is Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press).

Wallace famously arrived at his own version of evolutionary theory while Darwin was still sitting on his. When Wallace made contact and shared his thoughts, Darwin panicked and rushed to make his theory public so as not to be scooped. Yet the two men did not formulate their ideas in exactly the same way. As Flannery writes, “Wallace emphasized the ‘principle of utility,’ namely, that ‘no organ or attribute can exist in a natural species unless it is or has been useful to the organisms that possess it.'”

This emphasis led to the increasingly rapid unraveling of Wallace’s confidence that natural selection by itself could account for the most interesting features of life: major items like sentience, the complexity of the cell and of the hemoglobin molecule, the origin of life itself, and more discrete features like a bird’s wing and feathers (evidence of a “preconceived design,” Wallace wrote) and the “unnecessarily elaborate” patterns and coloration of butterfly wings. Vladmir Nabokov — novelist, lepidopterist, and Darwin doubter — would make that same observation in the middle 20th century, as I’ve noted in this space previously.

Adding to all this Wallace’s comfort with the idea of common descent, it starts to sound like a mix of Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and William Dembski. ENV was intrigued, naturally, and caught up with Flannery to pose a few questions.

CSC director Stephen C. Meyer launched his important new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and Evidence for Intelligent Design, with a speech today at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In Signature, Dr. Meyer exposes the increasingly evident hopelessness of materialist explanations of life’s origins and makes a fresh, powerful, and seemingly conclusive new scientific argument for intelligent design.

Dr. Meyer began by noting that in this Charles Darwin dual anniversary year, we should keep in mind that Darwin’s presumed “primary legacy is that he refuted the design argument.” That argument, in turn, had long been regarded as the most compelling that exists for religious belief. The phenomenal success of the New Atheist movement, represented by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens & Co., is based on the premise that Darwin successfully explained “the appearance of design without real design.” But what if the premise is mistaken?

In Washington, Dr. Meyer alluded to the business of the capital city, comparing the complex path by which a bill introduced in Congress becomes a law to the far more complex path by which genes encoded in DNA are translated into proteins, the building blocks of life.

“The biological information in DNA runs the show in biology,” Meyer said. Explaining where it comes from is the enigma faced by life-origins researchers.

Materialist solutions of the enigma all face insuperable challenges, Meyer continued. For example, theories that hypothesize the operation of “pre-biotic natural selection presuppose what needs to be explained in the first place, namely the existence of self-replicating organisms,” without which no advantageous feature that is selected could be retained and passed on. It is a “question-begging explanation,” Meyer said.

Yesterday, ENV interviewed molecular biophysicist and Discovery Institute fellow Cornelius Hunter on his new web-book Darwin’s Predictions. Our conversation continued:

ENV: A typical instance of a failed prediction would be that Darwin himself expected the geology and paleontology would confirm that the earth is at least 400 million years old, because that’s how long he thought it must need to evolve its repertoire of species. We now know that while the earth and life are much older than that, the time frame for the development of most animal body plans or phyla in the Cambrian explosion occurred in a geological flash of probably of less than 10 million years. What do you think is the most devastating failed prediction you discuss? How would you crystallize it simply, perhaps as cocktail-party ammunition?

CH: That’s a difficult question, there are so many. Of course today DNA is a popular topic, so the finding of long stretches of identical DNA in distant species is a good one. Evolutionists have worked hard to figure out how this could be, but have not even come up with a good epicycle yet.

Then there is the evolution of contradictory behavior patterns, such as altruism. Evolution has undergone a big makeover in the past fifty years in trying to explain such behaviors. The evolution narrative has become incredibly creative in explaining every behavior imaginable. Loyalty, sacrifice, honor, suspicion, obligation, shame, remorse, moral indignation — the list goes on and on of the incredible powers of evolution.

But I think my favorite is that the minor, adaptive, changes that we do observe in populations is now known to be responsive to environmental pressures. Organisms have complex cellular mechanisms that intelligently and rapidly respond to environmental changes. Again, it is fundamental to the theory of evolution that biological variation be blind, not responsive, to environmental pressures. The only epicycle available to evolutionists is that evolution created phenomenally complex mechanisms so that evolution could occur.

ENV: I can imagine a Darwinist objecting that these predictions are outdated. Theories naturally develop, and as they do they, scientists throw off new predictions — predictions that in Darwinism’s case, the theory can in fact pass. Your response?

The testability of scientific ideas by making predictions about reality is a favorite theme with Darwinists and the atheists who love them. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins endorses a new atheist Ten Commandments, whose seventh commandment reads: “Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be read to discard even a cherished belief it if does not conform to them.” Incidentally, that would replace the old seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

Dawkins hails evolution’s “strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratrum, the theory would be blown out of the water.” He contrasts this with the Bible’s record of predictions. In another New Atheist tract, God: The Failed Hypothesis, physicist Victor Stenger writes, “We have no risky prediction in the scriptures that has come true.”

So with Darwinian activists, quite a lot hangs on predictions and testability. Intelligent design advocates argue that their idea is empirically testable, and Stephen Meyer lists a variety of applicable tests in his new book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The heart of Dawkins’ argument for atheism is a critique of the design hypothesis. If it’s true that ID can be successfully tested by making predictions about empirical reality, what of Darwinian theory? Is it enough to say, as J.B. Haldane quipped, that Darwinism would be falsified if fossil rabbits were discovered in the Cambrian strata?

Molecular biophysicist and Discovery Institute fellow Cornelius Hunter puts Darwin to the test in a new website that is really a free, easily printed book in itself: Darwin’s Predictions. His argument? Darwinian evolution indeed makes predictions — which, however, routinely fail. This requires evolutionary scientists to come up with increasingly baroque additions to and speculations upon their theory to make the data fit with the theory. It all becomes increasingly, suspiciously complicated. For example, Darwinism has a very hard time explaining altruism. Selflessness, especially toward those outside one’s family, is not what you’d expect from the evolutionary scenario. Darwinists strain to come up with explanations, resulting in many serendipitous just-so stories that are less and less tethered to scientific fact.
ENV interviewed Dr. Hunter about Darwinism’s confounded expectations, which Hunter illustrates in areas including DNA coding, molecular processes, the genomes of similar and distant species, mechanisms of biological change, animal and human behavior, and more.

Is it somehow petty, offensive, exploitative, and beyond the pale to point out how the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter, who murdered a guard on Wednesday, writes about evolution in his sick manifesto? Should it be considered beneath one’s dignity to quote the man and let his words speak for themselves?

James von Brunn, the suspect in question, is a white supremacist, a bitter anti-Semite, a Holocaust-denier, a wacked out conspiracy theorist, who served more than 6 years in a federal prison for attempted kidnapping. All this is fair game to report. Everyone agrees to that. But the fact that he writes of “Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool” — that’s somehow inappropriate to note in public?

That seems to be the message from the media, which has ignored the fact, and from some readers who have responded to my blog on the subject. I realize the topic is uncomfortable for all sides in the evolution debate. So let’s try to step back and consider this rationally.

It’s historically undeniable that Darwinian thinking forms a thread linking some of the most reprehensible social movements of the past 150 years. I and many other people, including professional historians (which I’m not), have written about this repeatedly and from many different angles. By all means check out my own most recent contributions on the theme of “Darwin’s Tree of Death.”

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.

I’m a big fan of Rod Dreher. His Crunchy Con blog rarely fails to enlighten me, so I’ve been looking forward to his reflections on faith and science, generated by his current visit to Cambridge University as a Cambridge-Templeton fellow. Rod blogged today in response to a lecture and discussion in which evolution came up. He writes that “Darwinism wasn’t initially opposed by Christians” and credits William Jennings Bryan with rallying the faithful against evolution. This is worth some further elaboration. How soon did opposition to Darwinism develop? Among whom, and why?

The question matters because if anti-Darwin sentiment only developed 60 years after the Origin of Species appeared, that might suggest it came from historical causes rather than reflecting fatal flaws in the evolutionary idea itself. With the passing of those historical circumstances, opposing Darwin today might then seem hopelessly outdated.

Darwinism means belief in the mechanism of unguided natural selection as fully capable of producing life’s countless forms, thus supplanting any meaningful notion of design in biology. The idea was controversial from the start, scientifically and morally. In fact, early critics of all stripes, Christians and others, clearly perceived the worldview to which Darwin gave scientific-seeming confirmation. And they trembled.

On the new Faith and Evolution site, Benjamin Wiker reminds us that purely scientific resistance to natural selection arose quickly, including from some of Darwin’s closet scientific allies — even Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discover of evolution:

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.

A pair of dueling websites, one that just went live, are engaged in an important argument over whether religious believers should continue to be fed the “opium of the people.” That’s the famous phrase Marx Karl used to deride all of religion. One kind of faith actually deserves the description, however. It’s called theistic evolution, a convoluted justification for thinking that belief in God and belief in Darwin’s mechanism of blind, churning, unguided, and purposeless evolution can be meaningfully reconciled.

The new website is Faith and Evolution, from Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. It features all kinds of resources — writing and video, debates, questions and answers, and much else, including a number of contributions from yours truly. Do check it out and let me know what you think.

Faith and Evolution presents a striking contrast with Dr. Francis Collins’s theistic evolution site BioLogos, courtesy of the Templeton Foundation. Dr. Collins and his associate Karl Giberson also blog here at Beliefnet. At F&E, you’ll find my analysis of Dr. Collins’s ideas on religion and evolution. One very useful thing about F&E is that it highlights debates both on the science of evolution and on the social impact of Darwinism, whereas BioLogos is more like a single-perspective sermon.

Collins and Giberson are sincere Evangelical Christians — as far as I, a Jew, can tell — and undoubtedly innocent of all guile, but they represent an insidious trend in religious and intellectual life. This genuine opiate of the masses works as a stupor-inducing fog, enveloping the debate about intelligent design versus Darwinism. The fog lulls you with the thought that between the idea of design in nature, and that of no design in nature, there is actually no need to make a choice.

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.

Some readers thought I was unfair in a previous entry explaining the difference between my perspective on evolution and that of my fellow Beliefnet blogger Dr. Francis Collins over at Science and the Sacred. Am I really not being fair? Well, let’s test that hypothesis by picking out one idea from Dr. Collins’s book and from his website BioLogos. It’s his treatment of the idea that somehow a moral law in every heart points us to the existence of God.

Because BioLogos — or theistic evolution, however we may designate the general approach — surrenders so easily to naturalism, it must be willing to accommodate Darwinism’s explanation of where that moral law comes from. Dr. Collins thinks radical acts of altruism may defy an evolutionary explanation, or maybe not. Thus quoth BioLogos:

Even if a purely natural account of moral development could be found, the simple fact that morality has evolved is something that would be expected in a world created by a just and loving God.

On the contrary, it would be another indication that religion is superfluous in our quest to grasp the answers to life’s ultimate questions. Dr. Collins merely holds it out as a possibility that an evolutionary understanding of moral development could possibly be solidified. But other prominent Darwinists seem confident, as Darwin himself was, that the evolutionary explanation is already in hand.

A recent forum “Evolution and the Ethical Brain” explored the issue in honor of Darwin’s 200th birthday. You can watch the video online or read the transcript. It was sponsored by the opulently endowed Templeton Foundation, which by the purest coincidence also funds Dr. Collins’s BioLogos. With New York Times columnist David Brooks leading the amiable discussion, three evolutionary scientists explored their conclusion that morality is a human capacity whose development is no more mysterious than the evolution of adult lactose tolerance.