Michael Egnor

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula has responded to my open letter to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. In my letter, I strongly criticized the Darwinist organization’s endorsement of censorship and its disrespect for academic freedom. I reminded its members that they have a responsibility to the millions of taxpayers who fund their grants, and part of that responsibility entails a modicum of respect and a willingness to accept an open discussion of evolutionary theory in public schools.

Myers replies:

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) has announced its decision to boycott the State of Louisiana in retaliation for Louisiana Science Education Act passed last year by the Louisiana Legislature and signed by Governor Jindal. The effect of the new law is to allow teachers in Louisiana to use supplementary materials to teach controversial scientific theories without threat of recrimination.

In a letter to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, SICB president Dr. Richard Satterlie has announced that his organization will hold its 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City, rather than in New Orleans as had been planned. Dr. Satterlie wrote:

We will not hold the Society’s 2011 annual meeting in New Orleans…the Executive Committee voted to hold the 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City in large part because of legislation SB 561, which you signed into law in June 2008…SICB wrote to the Louisiana legislators opposing SB 561. After the bill passed both the House and the Senate, we joined the American Institute of Biological Sciences (ABIS) and other national scientific organizations in urging you to veto this legislation…[t]he SICB leadership could not support New Orleans as our meeting venue because of the official position of the state in weakening science education and specifically attacking evolution in science curricula. SICB is joining other scientific organizations in suggesting professional societies reconsider any plans to host meetings in Louisiana. As scientists, it is our responsibility to oppose anti-science initiatives. We urge you to take actions to repeal SB 561 in the upcoming legislative session.

Of course, the SICB’s censorship is the real “anti-science initiative” that “weakens science education.” The Louisiana Science Education Act strengthens science education by promoting academic freedom and promoting open discussion of scientific evidence, which are indispensible to science. It protects teachers who present various sides of scientific controversies, and doesn’t “attack evolution in science curricula,” unless one accepts Dr. Satterlie’s inference that open discussion of biological evidence inherently “attacks evolution.”

The SICB’s opposition to academic freedom in science classrooms and its interference in the right of the citizens of Louisiana to set educational policy for their children in their schools without interference by national scientific organizations is repellant. The lobbying and boycott conducted by the SICB is contrary to fundamental scientific ethics, which encourages free inquiry and respect for differences of opinion. Such unethical tactics demean the scientific profession. In fact, they show precisely why these academic freedom bills are needed.

This is my open letter to Dr. Satterlie and the SICB:

Dear Dr. Satterlie and the membership of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology,

In his essay for Forbes.com, Jerry Coyne takes me to task for my dissent from Darwinism. According to Coyne, “The tenets of evolutionary theory are simple: Life evolved, largely under the influence of natural selection; this evolution took a rather long time; and species alive and dead can be organized on the basis of shared similarities into a tree whose branching pattern implies that every pair of living species has a common ancestor. Among genuine scientists, there is not the slightest doubt about the truth of these ideas.” Coyne writes that I am “decades out of date” and show “no sign of knowing anything at all about evolutionary biology in the 21st century.” Indeed, “there is so much evidence” for Read More ›

In a recent post, Dr. Steven Novella took issue with an essay I wrote for Forbes.com. Dr. Novella objects to my observation that there the fossil record does not accord with Darwinian predictions of gradual transitions between species. The fossil record shows sharp discontinuity between species, not the gradual transitions that Darwinism inherently predicts.

Dr. Novella writes:

Darwin himself thought that the fossil record would show gradual continual change among species. What we found, rather, was relative stability punctuated by speciation events – species would remain mostly stable for about 2 million years on average, then disappear from the fossil record. Meanwhile, new species would appear. Gould and Eldridge termed this pattern punctuated equilirium [sic], and creationists have dutifly [sic] ignored them ever since. Egnor is also wrong on many levels. First, while species are generally stable, they do drift over their time on earth. Sometimes they even show gradual directed change.

Next, Dr. Novella makes the astonishing gaffe:

Dr. Steven Novella recently took issue with an essay I wrote for Forbes.com. Forbes has a fair survey of differing opinions on Darwin’s theory, which, of course, has angered Darwinists, who realize that the continued viability of Darwin’s theory depends on its insulation from criticism. They censor criticism of Darwinism in schools, and they aren’t happy to see the weaknesses of Darwinism discussed in the public forum, along with its strengths.

In my essay, I reviewed some of the scientific problems with Darwin’s theory, and I pointed out that Darwinism is itself a religious ideology. Darwin’s theory is the creation myth of atheism.

Dr. Novella begins:

Darwinist Dr. Jerry Coyne, in his New Republic article “Seeing and Believing; The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail,” quotes the National Academy of Sciences on the reconciliation of religion and science. The NAS statement is worth a post on its own.

Dr. Coyne notes:

The National Academy of Sciences, America’s most prestigious scientific body, issued a pamphlet assuring us that we can have our faith and Darwin, too:

“Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.”

Science and religion don’t address entirely separate aspects of human experience. There is one truth about the world. The truth about the natural world is obviously a part of metaphysical truth. Science addresses the truth about the natural world, and religion addresses the deeper metaphysical truth. There are no separate magesteria, despite Stephen J. Gould’s spin. If God made the world, then intelligent design is true, assuming that the artifacts of His designing intelligence can be recognized as such. If there is no God, and the world just came to be, then Darwinism is true, because ID and Darwinism are just the affirmative and the negative answer to the same question: is there evidence for design in biology?

This is clear: metaphysical truth determines scientific truth. If there is a designer (metaphysical truth), then intelligent design is true (scientific truth). If there is no designer (metaphysical truth), then Darwinism is true (scientific truth).

Darwinist Dr. Jerry Coyne, in his New Republic article Seeing and Believing; The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail”, asks if religion and science can be reconciled. He notes:

…[T]here are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward.

Dr. Coyne’ s description of the beliefs of many Christians of the literal truth of the Bible as “the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities” is a perplexing slur. I disagree with young-earth creationists on the time-frame of history and biology, but I don’t believe that their beliefs are “primitive.” They understand Christianity differently than I do, but on the really important question — ‘is there teleology in biology and in the natural world’ — they are exactly right, in my view. I reserve the appellation “primitive” for the utterly unsubstantiated Darwinist belief that human beings arose literally from mud by a random process of ‘survival of survivors.’ Unlike Darwinists, young-earth creationists get the important part — the obvious evidence for design in life — right.

That aside, Dr. Coyne’s sloppy use of the terms ‘religion’ ‘faith,’ ‘science,’ and ‘revelation’ muddle the real issues.

A survey conducted recently in England reveals that 51 percent of the British public believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of living things, and that intelligent design must be involved. The survey was conducted by the polling firm ComRes for Theos, a theology think tank.

The report of the survey of the British public, published in the Telegraph, noted:

In the survey, 51 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that “evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages”…A further 40 per cent disagreed, while the rest said they did not know…The suggestion that a designer’s input is needed reflects the “intelligent design” theory, promoted by American creationists as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

The irony is that only 10-20% of the British public attend church each week, which is significantly less than half of the portion of the British population who support intelligent design. A similar disparity is seen in the United States, where 80-90 % of the American public believe that design played some role in biology, whereas only 40-50% attend church regularly.
The meaning of this disparity between support for intelligent design and church attendance is obvious: support for intelligent design extends far beyond the segment of the population that is traditionally religious. Weekly church attendance is a minimal criterion to be labeled “fundamentalist” or devout. The inference to design in biology is held by the majority of both the American and British public, and for more than half of people who support design, the reasons are not devout acquiescence to religious dogma. For most supporters of intelligent design in biology, design is inferred empirically.

After generations of Darwinist indoctrination in public schools, more than half of the British public doubts Darwinism as an adequate explanation for life. One can understand the Darwinist panic in the United States and England at even minimal discussion of the weaknesses of Darwin’s theory in public schools. Even with a monopoly on scientific indoctrination, Darwinists are unable to convince even half of the public of the truth of their theory.

Of course, Richard Dawkins was appalled by the results of the survey. The Telegraph article quotes Dawkins:

Dr. Jerry Coyne is a prominent evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively about the Darwinism/intelligent design controversy, and he is highly critical of I.D. Recently in The New Republic, he published a review of two books: “Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution” By Karl W. Giberson and “Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul” By Kenneth R. Miller. Dr. Coyne’s review, entitled “Seeing is Believing” is long, and is an fine example of the convoluted arguments used by Darwinists to defend their ideology against the overwhelming scientific evidence that favors design in biology and against the American public who overwhelmingly favor (by a ratio of 3:1) discussion of the strengths and weakness of Darwinism in public schools. Dr. Coyne’s review is, in other words, a fine example of Darwinist ideological distortion of science and endorsement of censorship in education.

So I’ll review Dr. Coyne’s review in detail. I’ll quote Dr. Coyne, then reply.

Early in his essay Dr. Coyne writes:

… the history of creationism in America has itself been an evolutionary process guided by a form of natural selection. After each successive form of creationism has been struck down by the courts for violating the First Amendment, a modified form of the doctrine has appeared, missing some religious content and more heavily disguised in scientific garb. Over time, the movement has shifted from straight Biblical creationism to “scientific creationism,” in which the very facts of science were said to support religious stories such as the Genesis creation and Noah’s Ark, and then morphed into intelligent design, or ID, a theory completely stripped of its Biblical patina. None of this has fooled the courts…

Dr. Coyne misunderstands the history of this issue. Regardless of whether or not creationism has undergone an “evolutionary” process, ID isn’t on the historical continuum with creationism. Creationism is the opinion that Genesis is more or less literally true as science. Many Christians hold to that view, and they have my respect, but I (and the vast majority of I.D. advocates) disagree.
Intelligent design is the opinion that design is empirically detectable in biology, and that it is the best scientific inference to explain many aspects of biology, especially the genetic code and the complex molecular machinery inside cells. I wasn’t a creationist, ever. I was a Darwinist, for most of my life, until I looked closely at the evidence. Most ID advocates have had similar experiences. Most ID advocates were never creationists, and ID is not creationism nor is it derived from it. In fact, ID has been criticized by the creationist community. ID is an appeal to evidence in the natural world, not an appeal to Biblical revelation.

I must say that I’ve never understood the rhetorical force of the ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. The God of the Gaps sneer is invoked to imply the inexorability of materialism as a complete explanation in natural science. Any critique of materialist dogma in science from a design or immaterial perspective is derided as a ‘God of the Gaps’ argument. But the real issue is the gaps, which are plentiful and very wide.

Dr. Novella is fond of the God of the Gaps sneer, in the form of “Dualism of the Gaps.” I have not met a materialist as supremely confident of the complete explanatory power of materialism as he is. It’s ironic, as Dr. Novella claims the appellation “skeptic,” yet he shows no skepticism for his own materialist dogma. Profound skepticism for the views of opponents, combined with complacent credulity for one’s own views, is the stuff of ideological advocacy, not skepticism.

Dr. Novella responded recently to my post in which I clarified my views on the mind-brain problem. He accuses me of using a ‘Dualism of the Gaps’ argument. I’ve merely pointed out that the salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, incorrigibility, restricted access, continuity of self through time, and unity of consciousness (the ‘binding problem’) seem to be impossible to explain materialistically. Materialistic explanations for subjective mental states are not impossible merely because we lack experiments or evidence. Materialistic explanations for the mind are impossible within the framework of materialism itself, because mental properties are not physical properties. Nothing about matter as understood in our current scientific paradigm invokes subjective mental experience. The essential qualities on the mind are immaterial. Invocation of immaterial causation that incorporates subjectivity seems necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the mind.