Science and Culture Today | Page 1257 | Discovering Design in Nature

P.Z. Myers has a recent post (“Morality Doesn’t Equal God”) in which he takes issue with Robert Wright, who is proposing a new kind of rapprochement between religion and science. Wright recommends that we move to a consensus on the view that purpose and moral law is inherent in nature, a view cleverly dubbed ‘Neism’ (Naturalism melded with Deism) by Joe Carter. I believe that Wright’s view is philosophically incoherent and even pernicious. His motives for imputing teleology and morality to nature are clear enough: Darwinism is faltering under scrutiny, as it denies teleology and fails to explain the moral law, and it will crumble unless it is welded to an ideology that invokes both. It’s ironic that Darwinism may well segue into a nature religion, which is probably its only way out of its inexorable slide into the materialist dust-bin (Marxism and Freudianism will shift over to make room). But mankind has had plenty of nature religions, and they have never failed to be intellectually vacuous and culturally pernicious. We don’t need another.

P.Z. Myers takes issue with Wright from the Darwinist perspective:

The new issue of American Spectator is out with a rave review of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. Writer Dan Peterson opens with the revelation that this book wasn’t just good — it was a game-changer:

When I learned that Dr. Stephen Meyer had written a new book on the evidence of design displayed in living cells, I expected to be impressed by it. I wasn’t prepared to have my mind blown — which is what happened.

We’ve heard before that Dr. Meyer’s book is more than dangerous to the Darwinist case; it’s comprehensive and devastating:

Meyer’s argument is a comprehensive one, rooted in multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines, and he is perhaps uniquely qualified to make it. His background is in physics and earth science, and he earned his PhD from Cambridge University in philosophy of science, with a thesis on origin of life research. Although not himself a biologist, the detailed facts of molecular biology Meyer presents in the book, on which he bases his principal arguments, are sound and accurate scientifically…

Signature in the Cell takes readers on a tour of scientific history from Darwin to Watson and Crick…

The imbroglio over editorial policy at Bloggingheads.tv would be of minor interest if it didn’t present such an evocative window on the psychology of the Darwin-believing community. Did you ever think about what actually drives these people?

To recap: Robert Wright, the site’s editor-in-chief, was out of the shop when his staff pulled down an interview, six hours after it was put up, between linguist John McWhorter and biochemist Michael Behe. Somehow, pressure was applied to McWhorter resulting in his actually issuing a public apology. He was forced to cringe and beg forgiveness. Anyone could see the reason he had given offense: McWhorter in the interview expressed undisguised admiration for Behe’s specialty in the intelligent design field, irreducible complexity. When Wright returned, he reversed the move and restored Behe/McWhorter. The lesson to be drawn is that were it not for Wright’s doing the decent thing, then intelligent-design advocate Behe would have remained censored. Whoever intimidated McWhorter would have won the day — illustrating a dynamic well known to ID sympathizers in the academic science world, and in intellectual life in general. When it comes to intelligent design, silence is the safe policy. The preferable strategy is to align your view with Darwinian orthodoxy.

The next act has involved more public pronouncements — this time from disgruntled science contributors to Bloggingheads: physicist Sean Carroll and science writer Carl Zimmer. The two participated in a conference call with Wright, demanding that he formulate a policy that would never again allow a “creationist” to speak for himself on Bloggingheads. Wright knows the difference between creationism and intelligent design — he articulated it nicely in a 2002 article in Time magazine. Carroll and Zimmer seemingly don’t. That or they prefer to use the more inflammatory language to refer to Behe, who merely disputes the mechanism of evolution.

As he wrote in a comment on Carroll’s blog, Wright wasn’t pleased either by the McWhorter interview or by another with Paul Nelson, but he was unwilling to capitulate and make the blanket promise that Carroll and Zimmer wanted, forever to exclude from attention anyone who dissents from evolutionary dogma. So both men wrote preening, self-congratulatory declarations on their blogs that they were through with Bloggingheads. They quit.

Carroll wanted “a slightly more elevated brand of discourse.” He wrote, “Certainly none of we [sic] scientists who were disturbed that the dialogue existed in the first place ever asked that it be removed.” Yet it should never have been posted. An ID advocate could speak on Bloggingheads if he has “respectable thoughts” on other subjects. But not on ID. That would create a “connection with a brand,” that brand would be shared by the “creationist” and Sean Carroll, and that would not be acceptable. Participants should be “serious people.” Some years ago he “declined an invitation” to a Templeton Foundation conference because “I didn’t want to be seen” at such an event. Harry Kroto was disappointed “that I would sully myself” by indirect Templeton connections. And no wonder: “we all have to look at ourselves in the mirror.”

Sean Carroll is one of those open-minded science types who are always generously offering the rest of us lectures on the importance of intellectual freedom and open inquiry–at least when the subject of discussion is buried in the annals of history. When it comes to people debating issues today, however, there are other things which must be taken into consideration.

Like whether Carroll agrees with them.
He is particularly upset about Bloggingheads.tv running a dialogue between John McWhorter and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe, a professional scientist. “Unfortunately,” he says, “I won’t be appearing on Bloggingheads.tv any more.”
So there.

Bloggingheads.tv is a site that bills itself as “a place where great minds don’t think alike,” a slogan that sounds suspiciously like a description of a place where great minds don’t actually think alike. Carroll’s problem with the site is that it included a dialogue with someone he doesn’t think like–namely, Michael Behe–and he doesn’t think this is something that a site designed for discussion between people who don’t agree should do.

Historian Richard Weikart’s provocative new book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, comes out today, illuminating the mercilessly coherent worldview driving Nazi policy in 20th century Germany. Weikart persuasively mounts his case that Hitler was not a madman; rather, he sought to improve the human race via “evolutionary progress,” an ethic that influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improved human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination. By embracing this particular brand of ethics, Hitler managed to perpetrate much greater evil than he would have had he been merely opportunistic or amoral. It’s an intriguing argument, which Weikart defended on yesterday’s ID the Future podcast. Take Read More ›

When I wrote earlier on the Stalinist erasure of John McWhorter’s interview with biochemist Michael Behe on Bloggingheads.tv, I began by saying, “Wow.” I will say that again: “Wow.” Why wow? Because Bloggingheads editor-in-chief Robert Wright was, as I’d suspected, out of the shop when it happened — on a silent meditation retreat, in fact — and on returning he reversed his staff’s Orwellian move and put the interview back up. Way to go, Mr. Wright!
There are three orders of business here. First, congratulations to Robert Wright, whose very interesting book The Evolution of God I’ve commented on before. He writes sensibly in explanation of what happened, making clear that the censoring of Behe was indefensible without publicly condemning his subordinates, which would have been ungracious:

This diavlog has now been re-posted. The decision to remove it from the site was made by BhTV staff while I was away and unavailable for consultation. (Yes, even in a wired world it’s possible to take yourself off the grid. Here’s how I did it.) It’s impossible to say for sure whether, in the heat of the moment, I would have made a decision different from the staff’s decision. But on reflection I’ve decided that removing this particular diavlog from the site is hard to justify by any general principle that should govern our future conduct. In other words, it’s not a precedent I’d want to live with. At the same time, I can imagine circumstances under which a diavlog would warrant removal from the site. So this episode has usefully spurred me and the BhTV staff to try to articulate some rules of the road for this sort of thing. Within a week, the results will be posted, along with some related thoughts on the whole idea behind Bloggingheads.tv, here.

Just so you know, Wright is no intelligent-design fan, as he makes clear in The Evolution of God. He’s a Darwinist, including on evolutionary psychology where Darwinism becomes even harder to defend than in other areas, but a fair-minded one. He’s no theist either and writes frankly of himself as a materialist, but neither is he prejudiced against religion. An interesting person, a little bit in the William James mold. (James, by the way, had some intriguing reservations about scientific materialism.)

So saying mazal tov to Wright is point one. Point two is that this should be a lesson for him and everyone else, underlining the unthinking prejudice that Darwin-doubters face. Someone at Bloggingheads muzzled McWhorter for allowing a full and friendly presentation of Behe’s ideas on irreducible complexity. The interview went up and then was taken down in the space of about six hours. That’s fast. Not only was the interview erased but sufficient pressure was brought to bear on McWhorter that he wrote, or allowed someone else to write, an apology for conducting the interview in the first place!

Exactly one hundred years ago leading American paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott (right) was hiking along Burgess Pass in the Canadian Rockies when he found a slab of shale containing fossil crustaceans. His interest piqued, Wolcott made return trips to the Burgess Shale in the following years where he ultimately collected tens of thousands of fossils. Many of these fossils were extraordinarily well-preserved, and they were mysterious. They included strange forms like Anomalocaris, Opabinia, Wiwaxia, and Hallucigenia. These fossils revealed a mystery: like other Cambrian fauna, these strange soft-bodied fossils appeared in the fossil record abruptly, without evolutionary precursors. Darwin himself was aware of this problem in his own day, writing that the lack of fossil evidence for the evolution of Read More ›

The editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads TV, Robert Wright, has re-instated my interview with linguist John McWhorter on that website. Wright was away last week when the brouhaha occurred. It’s good to see that a steady editorial hand is back in charge.

I’ve just been through the weirdest book-related experience I’ve had since a Canadian university professor with a loaded rat trap chased me around after a talk I gave a dozen years ago, threatening to spring it on me. Last week I got the following email bearing the title “Invitation to Appear on Bloggingheads TV” from a senior editor at that site:

Hi, Michael–

I’d like to invite you to appear on Bloggingheads.tv, a web site that hosts video dialogues between journalists, bloggers, and scholars. We have a partnership with the New York Times by which they feature excerpts from some of our shows on their site.

Past guests include prominent thinkers such as Paul Krugman, Paul Ehrlich, Frans de Waal, David Frum, Richard Wrangham, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, and Michael Kinsley.

Here is one of our recent shows, a dialogue between Paul Nelson, of the Discovery Institute, and Ron Numbers, of

Wisconsin-Madison:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/21107

I’m hoping that you might be interested in participating, as well. First-time participants often report how refreshingly unconstrained they find the format–how it lets them present their views with a depth and subtlety not possible on TV or radio. We’d love to have you join us.
If you’re available, please let me know, and we can see about arranging a taping. Thank you for your time.

He seemed like such a nice fellow, so after a couple days I emailed him back to say, sure, I’d be glad to. The editor responded, okay, sometime next week, your discussion partner will be John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute. I had never heard of McWhorter before, so googled his name, and saw that he’s a linguist who often writes on race matters. I didn’t know what to expect because I know some conservatives (which he seemed to be from his bio) don’t like ID one bit.

Everything was arranged for the taping Tuesday afternoon. When the interview started, I was surprised and delighted to learn that McWhorter was actually a fan of mine. He said (I’m paraphrasing here) he loved The Edge of Evolution and wanted the book to become better known. He said that this was one of the few times that he initiated an interview at Bloggingheads. He said he was familiar with criticisms of the book and found them unpersuasive. He said that Darwinism just didn’t seem to him to be able to cut the mustard in explaining life, and he had yet to read a good, detailed explanation for a large evolutionary change. He also said that he had never believed in God, but that EOE got him thinking. In return I summarized my arguments from EOE, talked about protein structure, addressed his objections that intelligent design is “boring” and a scientific dead-end, and so on. At the end of the taping I thought, gee, those folks at Bloggingheads TV are a real nice bunch.

Wow. This is positively Stalinist. Robert Wright’s Bloggingheads.tv has abruptly removed an interview it put up hours before in which linguist Dr. John McWhorter talks with biochemist Dr. Michael Behe about Behe’s The Edge of Evolution. It’s a fascinating exchange. McWhorter starts off by saying that while his own writing has been primarily on race, other subjects interest him more. For example, it would seem, evolution.

He proceeds to reveal startling depths of enthusiasm for Behe, Behe’s book, and intelligent design. He talks about how he never previously believed in God and never wanted to until he read Behe, who of course in his own writing steers clear of theological ruminations (apart from noting that he’s a Roman Catholic). A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, McWhorter clearly has been thinking and reading about the subject for years. He makes a stimulating, well informed interviewer for Behe.

Sounds good, right? No, bad! Very bad! Bad McWhorter! Apologize now!

OK, I will!

Something evidently happened behind the scenes at Bloggingheads. So the interview was taken down, at which point an anonymous Orwellian Administrator posted as follows:

John McWhorter feels, with regret, that this interview represents neither himself, Professor Behe, nor Bloggingheads usefully, takes full responsibility for same, and has asked that it be taken down from the site. He apologizes to all who found its airing objectionable.

Now, you must go and watch the interview for yourself over at Uncommon Descent. Here’s the link where it used to be. You can disagree with Behe and McWhorter; think they’re both full of baloney if you like. But there’s no question that simply as an interview, a piece of casual, conversational journalism, the McWhorter exchange is exemplary. It’s fascinating. He admires the book, undoubtedly, even becoming passionate about it at points, but also poses challenging questions. There’s nothing to apologize for here. Yet clearly he was pressured into taking it down. By whom?

The irony is that Wright himself has stood out from other Darwinists for his honesty and openness. I blogged earlier on his offer of a “grand bargain” of peace between Darwin-believers and Darwin-doubters. Is our part of the bargain then to be seen and not heard? Or maybe not even seen. Wright seems to be away from email. One assumes this happened while he was out of the shop.