Science and Culture Today | Page 1211 | Discovering Design in Nature

Reached today for comment about Stephen Hawking’s new book, the Universe said that Professor Hawking should receive no credit for the ideas. “You humans naively assume that ‘physicists’ exist, who discover theories,” said the Universe. “But I did it all. Me. The transitory entity known to you as ‘Stephen Hawking’ is merely an epiphenomenon of the laws of nature, otherwise known as Me, the Universe itself. Mindless physical stuff, the only thing that ever really existed, or ever will exist.” “Hawking, and that other guy — what’s his face, Dawkins — have been stealing my royalties for years. I’ve got some lawyers working on that.” “Anyway, I don’t know why Hawking and Dawkins, or Harris and Dennett and the rest Read More ›

In the previous post, I discussed a recent paper in Trends in Genetics, “Causes and evolutionary significance of genetic convergence,” which notes that that genetic convergence is not uncommon, even though only a “restricted number of substitutions” at the genetic level can create novel phenotypic traits. This data not only shows that functional genotypes are rare, but it also poses a much deeper problem for evolutionary thinking–one that challenges the very basis for constructing phylogenetic trees. The main assumption behind evolutionary trees is that functional genetic similarity implies inheritance from a common ancestor. But “convergent” genetic evolution shows that there are many instances where functional similarity is not the result of inheritance from a common ancestor. So when we find Read More ›

A line that’s being widely offered on James Lee, who took hostages at the Discovery Channel on Wednesday before being shot and killed, fastens on his debt to Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. The connection to Darwin, pushed heavily in Lee’s list of demands, goes on being ignored. (No surprise.) But there’s even more to the Darwin angle than I previously realized.

Lee’s manifesto has otherwise been dismissed as mostly “a big bag of crazy.” Not so fast. Lee was obviously disturbed, but the document he left behind makes sense in its weird way — providing that you’ve dipped a bit into the ideas of his guru. No, not Al Gore. Daniel Quinn, whose book My Ishmael Lee insisted must become the focus of daily programming on the Discovery Channel. With Quinn, evolution and natural selection are a theme that, in turn, helps makes sense of James Lee’s writing.

What seems crazy falls into place. For example, what is it that Lee had against farmers? (“All human procreation and farming must cease!” On his MySpace page, he denounces Genesis 1 as “obviously written by a totalitarian farmer.”) It’s very simple.

In Quinn’s telling of history, agriculture was the beginning of the end for humans. Or rather, our accustomed “Totalitarian Agriculture.” Here he is in a video interview talking about it with Alan D. Thornhill, then a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice University, now — rather interestingly — science advisor to the director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Agriculture allowed the human population to grow and grow, since to feed more people, all you have to do is grow more food. Before that, human beings followed natural selection. We lived in tribes — a social form that is itself a product of natural selection, he emphasizes. This, and the more natural non-Totalitarian Agriculture, put an automatic cap on the number of us that could survive.

On August 21 Karl Giberson, physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College and one of several engaged in the ever-interesting juggling act of defending “faith and science” by means of a Darwinian apologetic, now has added to his litany of misconceptions a boorish attack on Al Mohler in The Huffington Post, “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth.” Since David Klinghoffer has provided an excellent summary of the issues involved in an earlier post to this site, Karl Giberson v Al Mohler on Darwin: The Grudge Match, they need not be restated here. The point here is to address Giberson’s principal objection, namely, Mohler’s assertion that “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged . . . .” Giberson wants to dismiss Mohler’s comments as merely an effort “to undermine evolution by suggesting that it was ‘invented’ to prop up Darwin’s worldview.”

Giberson’s complaint is easily addressed from his own standpoint. Since he seems to privilege the historians on this issue (rejecting Mohler’s comments as those of “a theologian and not a historian” is an odd dismissal since Giberson isn’t a historian either!), what have the subject specialists said on this matter? As will become evident, it really is very much a question of worldview. The central issue at hand isn’t whether or not Darwin embarked upon the Beagle “in search of evolution” but whether or not his mental attitude was prepared for it and what the nature of his attitude really was. In other words, had Darwin already formed a mental template of how natural phenomena would be interpreted once he encountered them on the Beagle? The issue certainly isn’t Genesis but the genesis of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). The historians tell us three major things in this regard.

If someone opposed to abortion were to take hostages at an abortion clinic, you can be sure the newsmedia would tenaciously track down and publicize every anti-abortion association and comment of the criminal in question. But when a gunman inspired by Darwinism takes hostages at the offices of the Discovery Channel, reporters seem curiously uninterested in fully disclosing the criminal’s own self-described motivations. Most of yesterday’s media reports about hostage-taker James Lee dutifully reported Lee’s eco-extremism and his pathological hatred for humanity. But they also suppressed any mention of Lee’s explicit appeals to Darwin and Malthus as the intellectual foundations for his views. At least, I could find no references to Lee’s Darwinian motivations in the accounts I read by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC. Read More ›

Bruce Chapman has an insightful bit of commentary about today’s tragic events at the Discovery Channel offices. It was both scary and pathetic at the Discovery Channel in Maryland today when an environmental terrorist took hostages in an attempt to force the television network to show more programs on Malthus and Darwin and to rail against over-population and global warming. Oddly missing from initial news accounts was any mention of Darwin. But, in James J. Lee’s manifesto, emerges this clear demand: “Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!!” Read More ›

We are thankful that James J. Lee, the hostage-taker who invaded the Discovery Channel building today in Maryland, did no physical harm to his hostages, who have now been safely freed. Lee, a radical environmentalist, was shot and killed. While expressing relief that police action averted a greater possible tragedy, it’s worth noting the contents of the late Mr. Lee’s reported manifesto, a list of demands he published online, directed at the cable channel. Demand number 7 reads:

Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!!

For the sake of the planet, Lee urges the sterilization of “filthy” human beings and suggests airing “forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation.”
Somehow it’s not surprising that he was an opponent of religion as well. Demand number 4:

A recent article in Trends in Genetics, “Causes and evolutionary significance of genetic convergence,” addresses the apparently “convergent” appearance of genes or gene sequences and how unguided evolution can explain this. The paper defines convergence as the “independent appearance of the same trait in different lineages.” Thus, genetic convergence is the independent appearance of the same genetic trait in different lineages. The article starts by explaining how widespread convergent evolution is: The recent wide use of genetic and/or phylogenetic approaches has uncovered diverse examples of repeated evolution of adaptive traits including the multiple appearances of eyes, echolocation in bats and dolphins, pigmentation modifications in vertebrates, mimicry in butterflies for mutualistic interactions, convergence of some flower traits in plants, and multiple Read More ›

In public debates (and personal discussions) with Michael Shermer and Massimo Pigliucci, I’ve met an argument, advanced by both skeptics, which opens interesting and largely unexplored territory in the ID vs. naturalism controversy. In a new article, the science writer and astronomer John Gribbin steps into the same territory, a speculative region familiar to fans of science fiction, not to mention philosophy students with time on their hands and imaginations liberated (perhaps) by alcohol. Back in my early teens, when I lived on a steady diet of science fiction and first saw Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, I could have discussed these ideas well into the night. A short blog post will have to suffice today.
This figure (below), from Massimo Pigliucci, helps to describe the issue:

Both Pigliucci and Shermer have grasped that causation by a higher intelligence does not necessarily entail causation by a benevolent God — and the former possibility, they think, might follow as a reasonable inference from physical evidence. This was the point, incidentally, of Richard Dawkins’s speculations, at the end of the movie Expelled, about extraterrestrial intelligence possibly causing the origin of life on Earth. These physical effects might appear to us as “magic,” meaning inexplicable by our current science. Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — is the wonderfully pithy bumper sticker version of the argument.