Science and Culture Today | Page 1270 | Discovering Design in Nature

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.

Astute readers will have noticed that Beliefnet runs two blogs that deal with evolution on a more or less frequent basis but in very different ways: this blog and Science and the Sacred, where former Human Genome Project head Francis Collins and other contributors from the BioLogos Foundation share their thoughts. An Evangelical Christian, Dr. Collins would like to find a reconciliation between Darwinian evolution including its randomly driven, unplanned, unguided mechanism of natural selection, with Biblical religion, which is premised on God’s creative guidance of life’s history.

I wish Dr. Collins all the luck in the world. He’ll need it. An Orthodox Jew, I find his to be an impossible quest, though attractive to believers who find it expedient to dodge the radical challenge to theistic religion posed by Darwinism.

Note: This post is the last in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, and Part 7 here.

Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument” for his theory, but Jerry Coyne has given us one long bluff. Why Evolution Is True tries to defend Darwinian evolution by rearranging the fossil record; by misrepresenting the development of vertebrate embryos; by ignoring evidence for the functionality of allegedly vestigial organs and non-coding DNA, then propping up Darwinism with theological arguments about “bad design;” by attributing some biogeographical patterns to convergence due to the supposedly “well-known” processes of natural selection and speciation; and then exaggerating the evidence for selection and speciation to make it seem as though they could accomplish what Darwinism requires of them.

The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution; that early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions; and that natural selection can accomplish nothing more than artificial selection — which is to say, minor changes within existing species.

Regis Nicoll at Break Point has an excellent article for those interested in understanding the relationship between faith and science (like so many seem to be these days *cough* Francis Collins *cough*): In a recent essay in The New Republic, evolutionary scientist Jerry Coyne asked, “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?” Coyne has no doubt that the answer is yes. Religion is so hopelessly inimical to scientific progress that any attempt to reconcile them is futile. As Coyne explains, “Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard.” And to make sure you are clear Read More ›

Note: This is Part 7 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, and Part 6 here.

Coyne writes that Darwin “had little direct evidence for selection acting in natural populations.” Actually, Darwin had no direct evidence for natural selection; the best he could do in The Origin of Species was “give one or two imaginary illustrations.” It wasn’t until a century later that Bernard Kettlewell provided what he called “Darwin’s missing evidence” for natural selection — a shift in the proportion of light- and dark-colored peppered moths that Kettlewell attributed to camouflage and bird predation.⁴⁰

Since then, biologists have found lots of direct evidence for natural selection. Coyne describes some of it, including an increase in average beak depth of finches on the Galápagos Islands and a change in flowering time in wild mustard plants in Southern California — both due to drought. Like Darwin, Coyne also compares natural selection to the artificial selection used in plant and animal breeding.

Dr. Jeffery Shallit has a post on his blog Recursivity that really caught my eye. He comments derisively on an essay by McGill University ethicist Margaret Somerville titled, “Facing up to the dangers of the intolerant university: Bird on an ethics wire.” Somerville argues that universities are increasingly becoming intolerant of viewpoints that fall outside of a narrow leftist-atheist ideology. She notes that healthy democracies depend on respectful sharing of opinions, and university censorship and exclusion of competing opinions — especially opinions on ethical issues that derive from religious traditions — leaves our public discourse dangerously impoverished.

Dr. Shallit agrees with some of her criticism of suppression of speech on campus, but he finds her essay “very shoddily argued.” He mainly objects to her suggestion that religious views be given a place in the public forum and her view that ethical decisions based on religious faith be accorded respect. Dr. Shallit asks:

With respect to religion, why should religious dogma, which maintains ridiculous and unverifiable claims, be treated in the same way as science and rational thinking?

Dr. Shallit’s view on the relationship between religion and rational thinking is notably short on rational thinking. The existence of God is not a “ridiculous and unverifiable claim;” it’s the conclusion reached by the vast majority of human beings living today and who have ever lived, and is a viewpoint held by most of the best philosophers, ethicists and scientists in history. While there are thoughtful arguments that can be made for atheism, the arguments advanced by Shallit and his comrades like Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Myers, and Hitchens are puerile. For example, the assertion that Christianity is disproven by assertions such as ‘If God created the universe, who made God?’ or ‘some bad things have been done by Christians, therefore Christianity is untrue’ would get a failing grade in any respectable introductory philosophy course. You’ll get more genuine insight from a paragraph of Aristotle or Aquinas than from a library of Dawkins and Dennett.

Subtle arguments about God being the ground for existence and about the role of Christianity in Western politics and culture aren’t “ridiculous and unverifiable;” these arguments are central to philosophy and to any informed understanding of history. New Atheist boilerplate trivializes the profound issues that religious belief raises, and the New Atheist contribution to meaningful discussion of these fundamental issues is …well… nil. For New Atheists, ‘rational thinking’ takes a backseat to ideological spittle.

But that’s not what caught my eye in Shallit’s post. Here’s what did.

An announcement from Professor David Snoke: “Grill the ID Scientist” Tuesday, June 9 7 PM, University of Pittsburgh Campus (room TBA) A network of scientists known as the Intelligent Design (ID) community continues to question basic tenets of Darwinism and origin-of-life scenarios. Not only are their views controversial in scientific circles — many in the evangelical world, who might be expected to embrace ID, are also not sold on the value of the ID program. This event brings together a panel of scientists associated with the ID movement. After a short presentation, the bulk of the evening will be given to questions from the audience. This event is aimed primarily at researchers, graduate students and advanced undergrad students in the Read More ›

Note: This is Part 5 in a 5-part series titled “A Primer on the Tree of Life.” Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here. The full article can be found, here. Molecules Contradict Morphology A final way that evolutionists overstate the evidence for common descent is by claiming that molecular phylogenies have confirmed or buttressed phylogenies based upon morphology. For example, in his book Galileo’s Finger, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins discusses evolution and boldly states, “The effective prediction is that the details of molecular evolution must be consistent with those of macroscopic evolution,” further claiming, “That is found to be the case: there is not a single instance of the molecular traces Read More ›

Note: This is Part 4 in a 5-part series titled “A Primer on the Tree of Life.” Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 5 here. The full article can be found, here. Homology in Crisis As Mayr suggests, there are other examples where genetic similarity appears in unexpected places. Biologically functional similarity that is thought to be the result of inheritance from a common ancestor is called “homology.” The concept of “homology” has been thrown into a crisis via observations, like those of Mayr, that the same genes control the growth of non-homologous body parts. Pax-6 is just one example. Another is the fact that the same gene controls the development of limbs in Read More ›

Note: This is Part 6 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, and Part 5 here.

Theological arguments are also prominent in The Origin of Species. For example, Darwin argued that the geographic distribution of living things made no sense if species had been separately created, but it did make sense in the context of his theory. Cases such as “the presence of peculiar species of bats on oceanic islands and the absence of all other terrestrial mammals,” Darwin wrote, “are facts utterly inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation.” In particular: “Why, it may be asked, has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands?” According to Darwin, “on my view this question can easily be answered; for no terrestrial mammal can be transported across a wide space of sea, but bats can fly across.”³⁴

But Darwin knew that migration cannot account for all patterns of geographic distribution. He wrote in The Origin of Species that “the identity of many plants and animals, on mountain-summits, separated from each other by hundreds of miles of lowlands, where Alpine species could not possibly exist, is one of the most striking cases known of the same species living at distant points without the apparent possibility of their having migrated from one point to the other.” Darwin argued that the recent ice age “affords a simple explanation of these facts.” Arctic plants and animals that were “nearly the same” could have flourished everywhere in Europe and North America, but “when the warmth had fully returned, the same species, which had lately lived together on the European and North American lowlands, would again be found in the arctic regions of the Old and New Worlds, and on many isolated mountain-summits far distant from each other.”³⁵

So some cases of geographic distribution may not be due to migration, but to the splitting of a formerly large, widespread population into small, isolated populations–what modern biologists call “vicariance.” Darwin argued that all modern distributions of species could be explained by these two possibilities. Yet there are many cases of geographic distribution that neither migration nor vicariance seem able to explain.