Science and Culture Today | Page 1204 | Discovering Design in Nature

The Smithsonian Institution, a wonderful taxpayer-supported educational establishment, has a bad record when it comes to treating scientific Darwin-doubters with due respect for academic freedom and free speech. Now to this list of indictments add respect for intellectual property.

Readers will recall the Richard Sternberg affair, in which supervisors at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) persecuted an evolutionary biologist on staff just for editing a peer-reviewed research paper supportive of intelligent design. More recently, senior figures at the Smithsonian may have pressured the affiliated California Science Center to cancel a contract to show a Darwin-critical documentary, in what seems to be an instance of a public facility illegally regulating speech.

In both of those cases, the indications suggest it was the intention to squash a controversial viewpoint that motivated Smithsonian personnel. In the case of renowned lepidopterist Bernard d’Abrera, there’s no reason to believe that it was his Darwin-doubting itself that led to an act of startling brazenness.

Brazen…what? “Theft,” as d’Abrera calls it in his account published in a recent book in his series Butterflies of the World. He actually puts the word in quote marks since, he observes wryly, his attorney advised him that while it looks to the untrained eye exactly like theft, it wasn’t a criminal case, ending up instead in the Court of Federal Claims.

CSC research director Jay Richards takes aim at the latest pronouncement from Stephen Hawking today at The American: Stephen Hawking declared that our understanding of physics proves God did not create the universe. Is he right? Stephen Hawking holds the chair of mathematics at Cambridge University once held by Sir Isaac Newton. So when he declared that our understanding of physics shows that God did not create the universe, it was bound to get attention. Summarizing the thesis of his new book, The Grand Design (co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow), Hawking announced: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why Read More ›

In my prior post, I noted that for years I’ve owned a graduate assignment on evolutionary classification by LA County Museum of Natural History scientist Kirk Fitzhugh. After completing this “Classification” project, he went on to earn his PhD in biology and today is Curator of Polychaetes at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC). Fitzhugh was part of the internal discussions at NHMLAC that I’ve been writing about, in which participants at one point planned to tell the California Science Center (CSC), “We urge you to cancel this event.” Fitzhugh, however, is not nearly so private about his disagreement with ID as some of his NHMLAC colleagues. It’s important to note that Dr. Fitzhugh should have every Read More ›

In a previous post, we noted some fish-related problems with BioLogos’s page discussing the fossil record. But these aren’t the only marine mistakes on the page. BioLogos says regarding the evolution of whales: Recently, a 52-million-year-old whale fossil, Pakicetus, was found in Pakistan. It was clearly a small, wolf-sized whale, but it did not have the characteristic fat-pad, a structure that allows the whale’s jaw vibrations to be used for hearing. Also, its teeth were much like those of the terrestrial animals already thought to be related to whales. Aside from the fact that Pakicetus was discovered in 1983 (not exactly “recently”), there’s quite a bit more that should be said about this fossil. The claim that Pakicetus is a Read More ›

P.Z. Myers answered my eight questions about what New Atheists really believe. Myers provided his “fast and flippant” answers; yet he provides a fine synopsis of New Atheist atheology. More detailed book-length New Atheist apologetics (Dawkins, Harris, etc) are less fast but no less flippant.

My original questions are followed by Myers’ answers, then by my reply.

1) Why is there anything?

In explaining how the Darwinian “trick is done,” internationally famous lepidopterist Bernard d’Abrera recruits a name I haven’t heard much about since college: the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. In the latest volume of d’Abrera’s epic Butterflies of the World series, titled Butterflies of the Afrotropical Region, Part III: Lycaenidae, Riodinidae, he gives us Foucault in a supporting role you wouldn’t have expected.

The two make an odd pair. D’Abrera is the Australian butterfly expert and defender of traditional Linnaean taxonomy, Foucault the French Nietzschean and amoralist. But Foucault’s concept of the episteme, an a priori framework in which scientific and other thought is carried out, nicely describes the hermetically enclosed scientific world of the Darwinist as d’Abrera sees it. Foucault defined an episteme as

the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the “apparatus” which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterized as scientific.

An “apparatus” like this — Darwinism, for example — arbitrarily limits the horizon of scientific thought, while remaining blind to its having done so and looking for confirmation of the theory’s truth by citing the theory itself.

In a prior post, I discussed how BioLogos’s website has a page titled “What does the fossil record show?” which is conspicuously missing any mention of the Cambrian explosion, or any other explosions in the history of life. The page also has other errors and omissions. In a section titled “Evidence of Gradual Change,” it states: “At 500 million years ago, ancient fish without jawbones surface.” Actually, the first known fossils of fish are from the lower Cambrian, meaning that their date is probably closer to 530 m.y.a., near the beginning of the Cambrian period. A Nature paper reporting this find was titled “Lower Cambrian vertebrates from south China.” It noted: “These finds imply that the first agnathans may have Read More ›

I’ve written here before about novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, a self-described “furious” critic of Darwinian theory. An erstwhile butterfly researcher and curator at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History, Nabokov thought that butterflies possess powers of mimicry inexplicable on Darwinian assumptions:

“Natural Selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation.

In the same tradition of butterfly-induced Darwin heresy, meet Bernard d’Abera. A kind of latter-day Audubon of lepidoptera, D’Abrera is a philosopher of science, renowned butterfly photographer, one of the world’s most formidable lepidopterists — and if anything, an even more furious Darwin doubter than Nabokov. His series of enormous volumes, The Butterflies of the World, a heroic act of categorization and illustration, is almost completed with the recent publication of Butterflies of the Afrotropical Region, Part III: Lycaenidae, Riodinidae, in a revised edition including a lengthy assemblage of introductory essays. The latter comprise one of the most colorful, amusing, enraged, and wildly unclassifiable attacks on Darwinism that I’ve come across.

The book is huge — I’ve been carrying it around as I bicycle to work and my sore back attests to this — and gorgeously furnished in the systematic section with d’Abrera’s incredibly detailed butterfly photos. His pictures were taken both in the field and in the unsurpassed collections of the British Museum (Natural History) where he has been a longtime visiting scholar in the Entomology Department. Unfortunately, priced at more than $500 a copy, the book probably isn’t a realistic purchase for you unless you have a professional or at least very serious amateur interest in butterfly classification.

In a prior post, we saw how the LA County Museum of Natural History (LACMNH) contributed to the pressure on the California Science Center to cancel a pro-ID event sponsored by American Freedom Alliance. But there’s a little story to tell here about a fairly vocal anti-ID scientist at the LACMNH. When I was an undergraduate, a friend gave me a packet titled “Classification: Graduate Student Project,” which explained various methods of building phylogenetic trees. The packet is a three-ring binder collecting the pages of a project completed in 1983 by a then-graduate student at George Washington University, Kirk Fitzhugh. His name came up as I was reviewing e-mail correspondence related to the California Science Center’s cancellation of its contract Read More ›

The BioLogos website has a static page titled “What does the fossil record show?,” which would naturally lead one to expect that if you read the page, then you’ll learn what the fossil record shows. What’s odd about the page is that the page makes no mention whatsoever of the Cambrian explosion. This is despite the fact that Robert L. Carroll calls the Cambrian explosion “[t]he most conspicuous event in metazoan evolution”: The most conspicuous event in metazoan evolution was the dramatic origin of major new structures and body plans documented by the Cambrian explosion. Until 530 million years ago, multicellular animals consisted primarily of simple, soft-bodied forms, most of which have been identified from the fossil record as cnidarians Read More ›