Evolution

An AP story on the upcoming hearings on Kansas science standards contains a crucial error. According to the lead, the hearings “will have as many as 23 witnesses speaking in support of teaching public school children intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution.” In fact, few if any of the featured scientists are pushing for design theory in the curriculum. That’s not even on the table in the science standards. Indeed, some of those speaking, like Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti, aren’t even design theorists. They’re simply calling for students to learn the strengths and weaknesses in Darwin’s theory of evolution, rather than the air-brushed presentation of evolutionary theory they currently get. Why are some Darwinists so keen to obscure this Read More ›

Last year the producers of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer were seeking out the people hunkered down at ground zero in the debate over evolution: the National Center for Science Education.
As soon as the call to the Darwin defenders at the NCSE was placed and the interviews booked the Newshour turned their sites on the NCSE’s counterparts, the anti-Darwin scientists at the Center for Science Culture. But not without scheduling a lot of interviews and camera time with biblical creationists — and their dinosaur theme parks — in between.

After months of discussion with the producers of the Newshour about whether or not they would fairly represent the theory of intelligent design, and the larger debate over how to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, Dr. Stephen Meyer agreed to an interview . He spent several hours with Jeffrey Brown as PBS rolled up nearly two hours worth of tape. The Newshour with Jim Lehrer said they were going to do a story on intelligent design and we tried to help make it accurate. Needless to say our legs are tired from pushing uphill.

(ASIDE: The upshot of all this is a lesson to anyone who deals with the media. Meyer got not quite 30 seconds of airtime in a report that lasted 14:32 seconds, or about 13 minutes longer than your average network news segment. To get that thirty seconds he traveled several thousand miles and spent hours preparing and then conducting the interview. Enter into media relations at your own risk.)

Why did Dr. Stephen Meyer, arguably one of the central figures in the national debate over origin of life issues and what we teach in high school biology classes, get only a handful of seconds and a few measly sound bites?

The answer isn’t all that hard to fathom — it is as simple as alt-ctrl-scopes. That’s the universal macro for journalists reporting on the debate over evolution. Alt-ctrl-scopes brings up the old trope about evolution, that this is just religion vs. science.

If you’re a journalist writing about this issue what more needs to be said than was said at the Scopes Monkey Trial almost a hundred years past? Alt-ctrl-scopes, fill in the names and you’re done.

Apparently, for many modern journalists, nothing in the debate over evolution makes sense except in the light of the Scopes Trial. What was the case then in 1925, must be the case now. Too many reporters stick to this tried and true trope, and unfortunately The Newshour’s Jeffrey Brown did as well.

That’s not to say that Brown didn’t try to do a good story. I don’t think he set out with a nefarious agenda to undermine the theory of intelligent design, or to criticize the Center for Science & Culture. I think he was just incapable of getting past the inordinate amount of misinformation and propaganda that is being thrown at members of the media such as himself each and every day they deal with this story.

Early on in the story he says: “Students learn that natural selection is the key mechanism by which evolution takes place.” What he didn’t do was to define his terms so that viewers knew exactly what he was talking about when he says “evolution” or even natural selection.

The story moves quickly to the typical stereotype of religion vs. science saying that is an issue mostly focused on religion and faith. To bolster that they have lots of high school students who express their doubts about Darwinism in overtly religious terms. The story leaves no doubt that evolution is under an attack led “mostly by religious conservatives.” Interesting. David Berlinski would be surprised to hear that. So would Stanley Salthe. Or, Giuseppe Sermonti. Or any number of other non-religious scientists skeptical of the claims of Darwinism. Contrary to the Newshour’s premise at the outset, doubting Darwinism is not solely a consequence of religious belief.

The next step — after making sure the viewer is aware it’s purely a religious issue — is to use the political environment to keep the focus off of the scientific evidence and instead on peripheral things like the “red state rampage.” Or in this case where historian Ed Larson explains this is all just a part of the typical pattern of evolutionary discontent that arises with the election of a republican presidents.

Somebody forgot to get the word to Paul McHugh: Respectable intellectuals don’t doubt Darwin — ever! McHugh is a university distinguished service professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and former psychiatrist in chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In the new issue of The Weekly Standard, he provides detailed evidence that Darwin’s narrative of the origin of species is in crisis, and that civilized discourse about the growing controversy surrounding his theory is all to the good:

Those who would expel all challenges to the Darwinian narrative from the high school classroom are false to their mission of teaching the scientific method.

“Scientists as they engage in dialogue with others should abhor attempts to close off the conversation by excessive claims for any privileged access to truth. Scientists should tell what they actually know and how they know it, as distinct from what they believe and are trying to advance. If all of us, scientists and non-scientists alike, accepted that guiding principle, the 80-year history of attempts to use law to stifle the teaching of science — stretching as it does from the courtrooms of Dayton, Tennessee, to those of Cobb County, Georgia — could perhaps finally be brought to a close.

McHugh essay is not pithy. He actually takes the time to wrestle with some specific problem’s with Darwin’s theory. One example I hope will encourage your reading of the full article:

To the Editor:

Jim Holt’s piece “Unintelligent Design” is filled with the usual Darwinist canards about how various designs found in living things are suboptimal according to the writer’s undefined and untested opinions on optimality. That’s all standard fare — chock full of unexamined theological presuppositions (of the “God wouldn’t have done it that way” variety) and not worth a response.

Holt also trots out the usual nonsense about Pope John Paul II somehow accepting Darwinian evolution. The Pope’s 1996 message on evolution simply states that evolution (in the sense of common descent, not the materialist Darwinian mechanism) is “more than an hypothesis,” which is certainly a true statement about modern biology. Yet in the same message the Pope explicitly questioned the Darwinian/materialist explanation of human evolution, calling it “incompatible with the truth about man.”

But Holt does add one brand new and exciting element to the debate: a fabricated quotation from the Pope! No where in the writings of John Paul II has he ever said that evolution (that wonderfully ambiguous word) has been “proven true.” Indeed, the Pope has explicitly rejected the purposeless Darwinian mechanism that Mr. Holt seeks to defend:

Dr. Chris Macosko at the University of Minnesota sent the following letter to The New York Times responding to Bruce Alberts comments about Mike Behe’s recent op-ed in the Times, “Design for Living.” Since the Times’ didn’t see fit to publish this letter, Dr. Macosko agreed to let us publish it here. To the Editor: Bruce Alberts, president of the NAS, responded to Michael Behe’s Feb. 7th Op-Ed. As an NAE member, I take exception to Dr. Alberts‚ — statement that “modern scientific views are entirely consistent with spontaneous variation and natural selection driving a powerful evolutionary process”, since he forces‚ — consistency — by excluding the alternative: intelligent design. Are there scientific grounds for his exclusion? On the contrary; Read More ›

Defenders of Darwin’s theory of evolution typically proclaim that evidence for their theory is simply overwhelming. If they really believe that, you would think they would jump at a chance to publicly explain some of that overwhelming evidence to the public. Apparently not. The Kansas State Board of Education has proposed ten days of hearings featuring scientists who embrace evolutionary theory along with scientific critics of neo-Darwinism, but according to this article in the Lawrence Journal-World, evolutionists are crying foul:

some evolution proponents are suggesting that scientists shouldn’t participate in what they say will be an unfair hearing. “The deck is completely stacked,” said Liz Craig, a spokeswoman for Kansas Citizens for Science. “I don’t believe anybody’s going to participate… because it’s just ridiculous.”

Darwinists have a rather peculiar definition of an “unfair” and “stacked” hearing, however. The Kansas Board has asked for an equal number of scientists (10) to testify on each side. Scientists favoring evolution would be selected by professor Steve Case, chair of the state committee drafting revised science standards for Kansas and an ardent evolutionist. Scientists critical of evolutionary theory would be chosen by biochemistry professor Bill Harris, another member of the same science standards committee, and a supporter of intelligent design. Case would be allowed to cross-examine scientists critical of evolutionary theory, and Harris would be allowed to cross-examine scientists who defend evolutionary theory. In other words, the ground rules proposed are scrupulously fair and even-handed to both sides of the debate.

John Derbyshire is on The Corner arguing that we can never safely infer that certain biological structures were designed. To a reader who asserted that organizational complexity cannot arise from impersonal processes, Derbyshire replies, “How do you know it can’t? It is true that the genesis of organizational complexity is not currently well understood; but to leap from that to telling me we shall NEVER be able to find a natural-law explanation for it is just dogma.”

Derbyshire’s argument is worth confronting because it represents the opinion of leading Darwinists. Biologist Kenneth Miller, for instance, routinely makes just such an argument. Design theorist William Dembski responds thus:

Miller claims that the problem with anti-evolutionists like Michael Behe and me is a failure of imagination — that we personally cannot “imagine how evolutionary mechanisms might have produced a certain species, organ, or structure.” He then emphasizes that such claims are “personal,” merely pointing up the limitations of those who make them. Let’s get real. The problem is not that we in the intelligent design community, whom Miller incorrectly calls “anti-evolutionists,” just can’t imagine how those systems arose.

The problem is that Ken Miller and the entire biological community haven’t figured out how those systems arose. It’s not a question of personal incredulity but of global disciplinary failure (the discipline here being biology) and gross theoretical inadequacy (the theory here being Darwin’s).

The particular mechanism Miller has in view here is the bacterial flagellum. Click here and scroll down for a good, brief description and animation of the bacterial flagellum, and here for an enlarged view with its parts labeled. Biochemist Michael Behe made this little engine that could famous by showing that it was irreducibly complex, like a mouse trap: “If any one of the components of the mousetrap (the base, hammer, spring, catch, or holding bar) is removed, then the trap does not function.” With even four of these parts, it’s utterly useless. The mousetrap is irreducibly complex.

John Derbyshire of The Corner, and Darwinists on every street corner, insist that we should never cram God into the gaps of our scientific knowledge.

As if detecting design meant cramming the designer into the work itself: Imagine Leonardo da Vinci trapped inside the Mona Lisa.

Derbyshire proceeds apace: “History shows that these puzzles always get resolved sooner or later in a natural way, … sending the ‘God of the Gaps’ traipsing off to find a new place where he can hang his starry cloak for a while.”

Bracket off for the moment that this particular history of modern science is an urban legend.

Derbyshire’s argument falls apart all by itself, apart from the historical record. Because more and more things have been explained with reference to impersonal causes, Derbyshire argues, we can never assume that something in nature cannot be explained thus.

That simply doesn’t follow. Consider an analogy.

In a recent post at The Corner, John Derbyshire wrote that “we are actually quite close to a point where we CAN do evolution in the lab.” To make his point, Derbyshire cited an article by Carl Zimmer in the February, 2005, issue of *Discover* Magazine: “Testing Darwin: Scientists at Michigan State University Prove Evolution Works.”

We don’t buy it. Discovery fellow (and Ph.D. biologist) Jonathan Wells found the claims in Zimmer’s article laughable, and he was moved to write a satirical review that we are posting here. Although the tone is tongue-in-cheek, the quotes from Zimmer’s article are real, as is the force of Wells’ argument.

Darwinists at Michigan State University Prove Computers Work by Jonathan Wells

For centuries breeders have been modifying existing species by selecting desirable variations, yet this procedure has never produced a new species. Still less has it produced new organs or body plans. In 1859, however, Charles Darwin wrote that variation and selection explain the origin of species and all of life’s diversity, and his faithful followers are still looking for evidence that he was right.

As we saw in Derbyshire II, the pattern of the fossil record doesn’t fit the Darwinian prediction of a gradually branching tree of life, even where punctuated equilibrium is invoked to shoehorn the transitional intermediates into those gaps John Derbyshire puts such faith in.

The problem gets even uglier when Darwinists try to explain away the fossil record leading up to the Cambrian Explosion. What story do these strata tell? Animals didn’t exist; and then they did — not just dozens of species but dozen of phyla. If you want some idea of how large a category phyla is, consider that sharks, mice, humans and otters are all members of the same phylum.

If natural selection working on random genetic mutation built this menagerie of animals, it had to do it one extraordinarily tiny, functional improvement at a time, one generation at a time, over tens and even hundreds of millions of years. If we had even a tiny fraction of a fraction of the Precambrian life forms, we would have so many transitional forms we would be hard-pressed to draw the line between one phylum and another, so thoroughly would they bleed one form into the other. But we find no such fossil pattern in the Precambrian.

Derbyshire suggests that the precursors of the many Cambrian phyla were soft-bodied and so never fossilized: “[S]oft body parts hardly ever get fossilized,” he writes. “We are working from a pretty scanty data set here.”

The problem is, many soft-bodied creatures did fossilize, and they tell a different story from the one Darwin told. Consider this passage in which Meyer et al., marshall evidence from mainstream evolutionists working in paleobiology: