"He..strikes at randome at a man of straw."
– Richard Saunders, A Balm to heal Religious Wounds, 1652. Quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition
"An imaginary adversary, or an invented adverse argument, adduced in order to be triumphantly confuted."
– Second definition entered for "man of straw" in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition
It's been a month and a half since my last post in this series, and recently a friend asked me why I stopped. I can think of two reasons: first, I spent the month of March teaching a graduate course for the first time; second, I'm worried about how this is going to go. I'm worried because I can see that the book is poor scholarship – Meyer is either underinformed or overcommitted to his cause – and I can see that my critique will be considered within a religious milieu that hinders straightforward criticism and analysis. Ergo, I think this might not be very pretty. It would be a lot more fun to blog about any of 15 different papers from the last two issues of Nature.
But we need to finish, partly because I'll be on a panel of critics at an event with Stephen Meyer himself in Los Angeles next month. (Not just critics: "a powerful group of credentialed critics." More later.)
Chapter 8 is called "Chance Elimination and Pattern Recognition." It deals first with the notion of chance and then with subjects that are at the very heart of design thought – the dual consideration of improbable events and the genesis of phenomena that exhibit "patterns." The chapter is pretty good, but seems to contain seeds of significant future confusion.
Almost two years ago, I reviewed Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge of Evolution, here on the blog. I was unimpressed, to say the least, and remain of the opinion that Behe should not be considered a serious scientific thinker given his failure in that ludicrous book.
Since then, my posts have been referenced occasionally in the blogosphere, typically by people trying to explain Behe's surprisingly crude mishandling of probability in the context of genetics. One particular point has been singled out as a mistake on my part, and some ID defenders want that mistake to rescue Behe's argument. Let me describe the so-called mistake, then explain why I'm right.
The chapter is called "Of Clues to Causes" and it's about scientific explanation. That's an interesting and important topic, one that opponents of evolutionary theory rarely understand. Meyer's summary is predictably fluffy but not inaccurate. Those seeking an introduction to philosophical questions pertaining to scientific explanation should look elsewhere, since Meyer says little in the 22-page chapter. His main points:
The chapter is called "The Origin of Science and the Possibility of Design." It's short, unimportant and uninteresting. Its purposes, along with Chapter 7, are twofold: 1) to counter the claim that ID theory is "not science" and 2) to establish that "historical science" (that which deals with the past) is not all that different from "operations science" (as defined by Charles Thaxton and others), specifically because the theorizing of "historical science" can be considered testable.
Meyer's basic idea in chapters 4 and 5 is reasonably coherent. But I find further evidence in both chapters that Meyer is careless and underinformed on the subjects he addresses. (I explained before why I think this matters. If you think I'm not being nice enough to Meyer, consider providing me with the Rules of Engagement that apply when criticizing culture warriors who are proposing world-shifting new ideas.)
Chapter 4 is called "Signature in the Cell." It's an important chapter for two reasons. First, along with chapter 5 ("The Molecular Labyrinth") it lays out Meyer's central question by pointing to the specific features of cellular information systems in need of explanation. Second, it exemplifies an aspect of ID thought that I want to highlight. I'll discuss these two themes here, then add some further critiques in a second post.
The chapter is called "The Double Helix," and there's not much to say about it. Meyer provides a fairly standard narrative of the discoveries that led to Watson and Crick and molecular biology. Anyone who's read The Eighth Day of Creation, along with a decent genetics textbook and/or a memoir by one of the principals (What Mad Pursuit by Francis Crick is a personal favorite) will already know everything here. Two observations.
The chapter is called "The Evolution of a Mystery and Why It Matters." It's interesting and engaging, and I enjoyed reading it. The "mystery" in question is first described on page 35:
...most philosophers and scientists have long thought that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection destroyed the design argument. Yet I also discovered that Darwin himself admitted that his theory did not explain the origin of life itself. [...] His theory assumed rather than explained the origin of the first living thing. Since this limitation of Darwin's theory was widely recognized, it raised a question: Why were nineteenth- and twentieth-century biologists and philosophers so sure that Darwin had undermined the design argument from biology?
The chapter is called "DNA, Darwin, and the Appearance of Design." It's a poor start. Meyer sketches some key themes of the rest of the book in this sloppy chapter. Here are those themes (in my words) and some comments.
1. DNA stores information, using a code that is similar to that of a computer. We know a lot about how that works.
2. Life gives the appearance of design. No one disputes that. But the source of the design is, of course, controversial.
There's not much point in "reviewing" a prologue, so let's start instead with some impressions gleaned from reading the prologue and the first chapter while leafing through the rest of the book.
1. This is clearly a pop-science book and not a serious work of scholarship. That's not an insult, just an observation.
Interestingly, Meyer's book is getting a lot of attention right now. At the Jesus Creed, the excellent RJS is also blogging through the book. At Biologos, a guest piece by Francisco Ayala focuses mostly on theological issues. (I like Ayala a lot. I dislike his post a lot.) The ASA has finally decided to establish some blogs, one of which will host discussions of books. The first book under consideration is Signature in the Cell. (Unfortunately, only ASA members can comment, and that excludes me.) And PZ Myers is reading the book right now. He has already concluded that "there's no poetry in creationism." Well, that's a low blow. Meyer mentions Donne on page 16. What more did PZ expect? A personalized limerick? The Digital Cuttlefish?
So Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, a founder of the ID movement, wrote a book called Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. It came out last summer, and I ignored it. I ignored it because it didn't seem interesting or important or new, and there's always something interesting and important and new to read. (I recently finished The Road. Wow.) It didn't matter to me that the ID people said it was "groundbreaking" or "seminal" or "a blueprint for twenty-first-century biological science" since they said things like that about Behe's last book. And that is a terrible book, one that reflects very poorly on its author. It seemed reasonable to assume that the ID movement wasn't going to generate any serious new arguments, and that if they did it would be obvious. Signature in the Cell gave no indication that it contained anything new.
The Blind Watchmaker is a superb book by a masterful science writer. It's not just a book about evolution, or even about how evolution works. It's a book about how evolution explains design, and more specifically how natural selection accounts for design. As I wrote before, I consider chapter 3 to be the most important chapter of the book. The chapter is called "Accumulating small change" and it features two different computer programs that Dawkins uses to teach readers about the effectiveness of selection in evolution. Before we play with the Biomorph program in the next post, allow me to set us up by discussing the importance of the program in Dawkins' argument, and by outlining the logic of the program's desi
gn.
First let me try to convince you that chapter 3 really is the heart and soul of the book. The chapter is about gradual, step-by-step evolution resulting from natural selection. And as you might already know, natural selection is what Dawkins considers to be The Big Idea, the idea that answered Paley's seemingly insurmountable challenge. In chapter 2, Dawkins makes this clear. Here's how he starts.
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning. The purpose of this book is to resolve this paradox to the satisfaction of the reader....Chapter 2 famously focuses on echolocation in bats, and I would buy the book just to read Dawkins' description of the engineering feat that is the little brown bat. (He gleefully recounts the utter incredulity of an audience of biologists when the mere existence of such biological phenomena was first described.) And here's his conclusion.
–The Blind Watchmaker, page 21
I hope that the reader is as awestruck as I am, and as William Paley would have been, by these bat stories. My aim has been in one respect identical to Paley's aim. I do not want the reader to underestimate the prodigious works of nature and the problems we face in explaining them. Echolocation in bats, although unknown in Paley's time, would have served his purpose just as well as any of his examples. Paley rammed home his argument by multiplying up his examples. He went right through the body, from head to toe, showing how every part, every last detail, was like the interior of a beautifully fashioned watch. In many ways I should like to do the same, for there are wonderful stories to be told, and I love storytelling. But there is really no need to multiply examples. One or two will do. The hypothesis that can explain bat navigation is a good candidate for explaining anything in the world of life, and if Paley's explanation for any one of his examples was wrong we can't make it right by multiplying up examples. His hypothesis was that living watches were literally designed and built by a master watchmaker. Our modern hypothesis is that the job was done in gradual evolutionary stages by natural selection.Chapter 4 builds on chapter 3, and the rest of the book deals with how it might all work. Chapter 3 is Dawkins' attempt to show us the power of cumulative selection, and cumulative selection is The Blind Watchmaker. This is the heart of the matter, and Dawkins' argument (and his world) hinges on the success of this idea.
–The Blind Watchmaker, page 37
ocess is the generation of design, of biological machines that are complex and, more importantly, wildly improbable. In other words, such things "can't just happen." The human mind is prone to a serious error when faced with this challenge. The error is to envision complexity arising spontaneously from chaos, in a single step, and thus to conclude that such things cannot be explained naturally. The error is in bold, and Dawkins addresses it first with the simple and effective Weasel illustration. The illustration is highly effective as a corrective for that error, but it fails as a model of evolution, as I explained in the previous post.
...the selection criterion is not survival, but the ability to appeal to human whim. Not necessarily idle, casual whim, for we can resolve to select consistently for some quality such as 'resemblance to a weeping willow'. In my experience, however, the human selector is more often capricious and opportunistic. This, too, is not unlike certain kinds of natural selection.
–The Blind Watchmaker, page 57
Back in September I wrote about the silly preoccupation on the part of various anti-evolutionists with the so-called Weasel program, a simple exercise created more than 20 years ago by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the efficacy of cumulative selection in evolutionary scenarios. My main point was that the Weasel program had one very simple purpose (comparing "single-step selection" – which is purely random – to cumulative selection) and constitutes a trivial fraction of the argument in Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker.
One might think that Dawkins' basic message – that random one-step flying-together of a Shakespearean phrase or a hemoglobin molecule is impossibly unlikely compared to cumulative selection of intermediate stages – is so elementary that no intelligent person would need to consider it more than once. (Once seems like a lot to me in this case, but never mind.) And yet the error (if that's what it is) is shockingly common. (It forms one pillar of poor Cornelius Hunter's whole enterprise, for example.)
Dawkins understood this problem when he wrote The Blind Watchmaker, so before he unveiled the fascinating program that forms the heart of his case for the power of selection, he took one last stab at making the basic outline clear by going back to clouds. Wait...clouds? (Fans of Hamlet are already sighing blissfully; those who don't get the connection between weasels and clouds should read either Act III, Scene II of Hamlet or Chapter 3 of The Blind Watchmaker.) Yep. Dawkins pointed back at what makes cumulative selection work: the things that are evolving must be able to generate related offspring. And that's what clouds can't do.
Clouds are not capable of entering into cumulative selection. There is no mechanism whereby clouds of particular shapes can spawn daughter clouds resembling themselves. If there were such a mechanism, if a cloud resembling a weasel or a camel could give rise to a lineage of clouds of roughly the same shape, cumulative selection would have the opportunity to get going. Of course, clouds do break up and form 'daughter' clouds sometimes, but this isn't enough for cumulative selection. It is also necessary that the 'progeny' of any given cloud should resemble its 'parent' more than it resemble any old 'parent' in the 'population'... It is further necessary that the chances of a given cloud's surviving and spawning copies should depend on its shape.Hence the Weasel program.
– The Blind Watchmaker, pages 50-51, italics in the original
We'll look at that program in the next and final post. But if you want to play with a modern version, you'll find plenty of nice implementations out there. So much more fun than studying...or grading.
There's usually no point in piling on when the minions of the ID movement get their just deserts after some typically brainless culture-war test launch. Consider the responses (by, most notably, Ian Musgrave at the Panda's Thumb) to the most recent rendition of the ID movement's hilariously idiotic fixation on a particular computer program written by Richard Dawkins. It seems there is little to add. But I think something important is being lost in this conversation, probably because the level of the "conversation" is the level of the ID movement. So let's start with a little quiz.
1. True or false: Richard Dawkins' 1986 classic The Blind Watchmaker used a computer model (a simulation) as a key teaching device while explaining the effectiveness of cumulative selection in evolution. The program is the main focus of chapter 3 ("Accumulating small change") of the book.
Answer: True.
2. True or false: the computer program used for this purpose was made available to the public and has since been adapted for free use on the web.
Answer: True.
3. True or false: the computer program in question is called WEASEL (or similar) and it demonstrates the stepwise generation of a famous phrase from Hamlet.
Answer: False.
Now if this surprises you, then either you haven't read The Blind Watchmaker or you haven't read it in a long time. Because even if you've been influenced by the hysterical antics of the ID crowd, you could not long believe its claims about the Weasel program if you had recently read the book. If you haven't recently read The Blind Watchmaker, you might consider a stroll through some representative ID musings on WEASEL followed by a visit to Chapter 3 of the book (and, if you have a copy from 1989 or later, a visit to the two appendices.) The experience could be jarring for those who have a positive view of these arguments by ID apologists.
But if you don't have a copy of The Blind Watchmaker handy, I can help. First, in this post, I'll discuss the Weasel program and its place in the thesis of The Blind Watchmaker – in the context of the current ID fixation on the program. Then I'll introduce the program that Dawkins really did emphasize in the book, a program called EVOLUTION (or later, when it was expanded and made commercially available, The Blind Watchmaker Evolution Simulation program) but commonly known as the biomorph(s) program. In the second post I'll talk more about the biomorph program and its usefulness.
Chapter 3 of The Blind Watchmaker is a tour de force of expository scientific writing. Called "Accumulating small change", the chapter has a single and simple thesis, laid out in the first paragraph:
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence? The answer, Darwin's answer, is by gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original survival. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the power of this cumulative selection as a fundamentally nonrandom process.
– The Blind Watchmaker, page 43, italics in the original
We again use our computer monkey, but with a crucial difference in its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters... It now 'breeds from' this random phrase. It duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error – 'mutation' – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase... the procedure is repeated, again mutant 'progeny' are 'bred from' the phrase, and a new 'winner' is chosen.
– The Blind Watchmaker, pages 47-48, italics in the original
Actually it would be fairer just to say that, in comparison with the time it would take either a monkey or a randomly programmed computer to type our target phrase, the total age of the universe so far is a negligibly small quantity, so small as to be well within the margin of error for this sort of back-of-an-envelope calculation. Whereas the time taken for a computer working randomly but with the constraint of cumulative selection to perform the same task is of the same order as humans ordinarily can understand, between 11 seconds and the time it takes to have lunch.Folks, that's all the silly weasel thing was ever about. So what's all the fuss then?
– The Blind Watchmaker, page 49, italics in the original
| Weasel | Biomorph | |
| Number of times program is mentioned* on Uncommon Descent | 444 | 2 |
| Number of pages devoted to program in The Blind Watchmaker | less than 5 | 45, including two appendices |
I've mentioned before that we've had an intelligent design proponent (code named Timaeus) as an official guest on the ASA email list. The discussion has been mostly useful. One thing that became clear early on was the fact that Timaeus is not a scientist and has not read much science outside of the works of ID defenders. His repeated and enthusiastic citation of Michael Denton led some to request commentary on Denton's work, by knowledgeable scientists. This is my contribution.
Timaeus has made frequent mention of the work of Michael Denton, who has written two books that are popular among ID sympathizers. The first, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, was published in 1985 and is regarded as a major influence on the early ID movement. The second, Nature's Destiny, was published in 1998 and seems to be far less influential. I recently read Nature's Destiny, and offer here a review in two posts. In this post, I present an overview of the book and its arguments, with a general critique and comments on the portrayal of the book by Timaeus. The second post (if I find time to collate it) will contain more detailed comments on technical aspects of Denton's claims in areas of my expertise. In separate posts, I will comment on Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (henceforth abbreviated as ETC).
Overview
Reading Timaeus' characterizations, one might reasonably suppose that Michael Denton has written books that demolish "Darwinian evolution," in ways not seen before and not answered (or answerable) by evolutionary biologists. Timaeus asserts, for example, that Denton "rips the Darwinian mechanism to shreds, armed with thousands of references to the latest knowledge in biochemistry, genetics, embryology, physiology, comparative anatomy, etc." And that quote clearly refers to Nature's Destiny.
This is a very serious mischaracterization of Denton's work. Denton did attempt, in ETC, to undermine "Darwinian evolution" – unsuccessfully, as I will explain elsewhere. In Nature's Destiny, his project is wholly different. Nature's Destiny seeks to defend a law-based, teleological view of cosmic history in which the development of humanity is the ultimate goal. The view is non-Darwinian for sure, in the sense that such strong teleological conceptions are non-Darwinian by definition. But any claim that Nature's Destiny does damage to modern evolutionary biology is a significant distortion. In fact, I would be most interested in a conversation with Michael Denton, both because I find his work intriguing and because I would be quite curious to hear his response to Timaeus' triumphalistic pronouncements regarding his ideas. Specifically, I wonder if Denton believes that he has "shredded" the "Darwinian mechanism," and whether he would acknowledge that many of the challenges he raised in his first book have failed completely in the face of vast amounts of data arising from completely new biological subdisciplines. (More on this in a future post on ETC.) My point is not that I think Denton is a fool, but that on the contrary I'm pretty sure he'd be embarrassed by the propagandistic ends toward which his ideas are being employed. (Perhaps there is a clue here regarding his divestiture from the Discovery Institute.)
I found Nature's Destiny to be mostly interesting, occasionally informative, occasionally exasperating, and ultimately unpersuasive. Ominously, I found that the chapters I judged to be the weakest were the chapters on topics I know the best. I suspect that cosmologists, physicists, biophysicists and perhaps chemists would feel the same way. In any case, I hasten to add that I have not concluded that Denton is wrong or that his failure to assemble a convincing case is somehow evidence to the contrary. His book is far stronger than Behe's Edge of Evolution, and unlike that unacceptably misleading and inaccurate work of folk science, Denton does not invite speculation that he is willing to abuse science in the course of metaphysical argumentation. Nevertheless, there are times when he's clearly trying too hard, and this is one of my main criticisms of the work.
Nature's Destiny does not attempt to destroy "Darwinism." It attempts to defend a "teleological religious concept of the cosmos as a specifically designed whole, with life and mankind as its primary goal and purpose." (p. xi) As Denton describes in his autobiographical account in Uncommon Dissent and in the prologue, the book can be viewed as an updating and expanding of a classic work by Lawrence Henderson (The Fitness of the Environment, 1913) that describes the ways in which the cosmos (specifically its chemistry) is remarkably fit for life. As Denton puts it in Uncommon Dissent (p. 168), Henderson demonstrated that
there is clear evidence that some adaptive fitness is given from within. This is adaptation "for free" arising out of the intrinsic properties of matter...It may be that some forms of "Darwinism" cannot abide such talk, but those who think that consideration of nature's "eerie perfection" is somehow "anti-Darwinian" should read Simon Conway Morris. In fact, Conway Morris' Life's Solution is the book that every ID proponent should read after reading Nature's Destiny. Conway Morris' project overlaps with Denton's in obvious ways, and Conway Morris cites Denton twice, approvingly. But one never hears an ID propagandist brag that Conway Morris has "shredded the Darwinian mechanism." This, to me, is telling. I urge those who take Denton seriously to read Life's Solution. It simultaneously affirms Denton's basic view (that life is an inevitable result of the "laws" of the cosmos) while putting the lie to any claim that Denton or anyone else has undermined the theoretical foundation of modern evolutionary biology. If there is hope for ID as a serious intellectual movement, it lies in the deep cosmic concepts that unite the work of Simon Conway Morris and Michael Denton. But as long as ID propagandists believe that Denton has wrecked evolutionary explanation, they will purvey ignorance and confusion, and prolong the degeneration that gives us Casey Luskin and the disastrously bad Edge of Evolution.
X is a really good thing for life. It is likely that X must be this way to enable biological function.Or like this:
X is a really good thing for life. It seems there is no other way to do it, but somehow the cosmos found that way.The key word is "seems." That word occurs over and over and over again, as do "likely" and "appears" and "perhaps" and "it may be," and in one sense it is a credit to Denton that he is careful not to overstate his case. (His admirers often lack this wisdom.) For this reason, it felt somewhat strange to read the book after seeing Timaeus' chest-beating.
It is understandably typical for Christians to consider evolution as something that confronts and challenges faith. To say that North American evangelicals consider evolution to be largely incompatible with Christian belief is to state the painfully obvious. An evangelical who will just admit that common descent might be true is a progressive thinker, and much of the current discussion is dominated by attempts to push back on evolution by suggesting that it really isn't a completely accurate – or even minimally accurate – description of the development of life in God's world. Almost certainly because of perceived "incompatibilities," evangelical theological reflection on the implications of various scientific conclusions, specifically with regard to biblical interpretation, is regularly decried as dangerously inadequate. (Consider Peter Enns' recent review of a new book on the age of the earth by two of my most excellent colleagues. HT: David Opderbeck.) In other words, many thinking evangelicals are concerned about the lack of serious evangelical engagement of evolutionary theory.
But help is on the way. I've already mentioned Gordon Glover's wonderful Beyond the Firmament (and I reviewed it for the forthcoming issue of the Reports of the NCSE). I haven't seen Denis Lamoureux's Evolutionary Creation yet, but if it's as good as Mike Beidler says, then the landscape is looking a lot less barren. And now we have a very significant new voice in the conversation: my friend Daniel Harrell, associate minister at Park Street Church in Boston, a brilliant reformed preacher and gifted thinker whose ministry had a profound impact on myself and my family at a critical juncture in our spiritual lives. Daniel has written an excellent and interesting book on evolution and Christianity, and I give it my highest possible recommendation.
It's called Nature's Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith, and you can buy it at Amazon or CBD right now. I read it a few months ago and blurbed it, and sometime in the next few months I hope to review it here. In the meantime, look for occasional comments and quotes. But for now, here's an excerpt from the Introduction, presented with permission from the publisher. In fact, this is the bulk of the Introduction, but the final paragraph is the paragraph I would have chosen to capture the essence of Daniel's approach and his project.
Walking across the Boston Common one cold winter’s eve, I was approached by a gentleman, somewhat agitated, who recognized me from church. “Are you the minister who’s writing the book on evolution?” This didn’t sound good. “Uh, ... yes?” I replied, bracing myself. “Do you believe in the word of God? Do you believe that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, like the Bible says?” His articulation was semiautomatic—as was his tone. I assured him that yes, I believed the Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth in six days. I also believe that rivers clap their hands and that mountains sing (Ps 98:9) because the Bible says that too. But I don’t think that the Bible means six twenty-four-hour days any more than I believe that the Bible means that rivers have literal hands. He worried that I suffered from delusion (which as far as I am concerned is never outside the realm of possibility). However, I reminded him that there are two types of delusion. There is the delusion that believes something that is not true, and there is the delusion that fails to believe something that is true. If evolution is an accurate description of the emergence of life, as science attests, then believing it alongside the Bible should pose no threat. There’s no need to fear any honest search for truth because in the end, all honest searches for truth inevitably lead back to God. Historically, religious faith, particularly Christianity, served as the loom onto which the discoveries of science were woven. It was within a Christian theological framework that scientific disclosure found its transcendent meaning. Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, believers all, saw their work not as replacements for faith, but as extensions of it. The idea was that the best of science and the best of theology concerted to give human beings deeper insight into the workings of the universe and, subsequently, into the divine character. Scientific discovery was received with gratitude to the Almighty for the wonder of his creation. Scientists, alongside the psalmist, would proclaim, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Ps 19:1 NIV). The balance between faith and science (or reason) was established in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas, building on Augustine, established a delicate equilibrium between theology (reasoning down from faith) and philosophy, analogous to science (reasoning up from sensory data). Aquinas, unlike the Reformers who would follow, taught that human senses and rational faculties, as made by God, were competent for understanding reality, albeit from a limited standpoint. The limits were filled in by theology. Aquinas asserted that God acted through “secondary causes,” creating the world according to his laws and then giving nature room to unfold in accordance with God’s laws. Whatever was good science was good as far as God is concerned; science simply described what God had already done. However, if God operated mostly behind the scenes as the prime cause, then it wasn’t long before people started wondering whether he was there at all. In time, reliance upon divine revelation gave way to human reason in its Enlightenment form, and soon the supernatural was rendered superfluous. As science advanced, Christians reacted by retreating into a sort of Manichean dualism whereby science was demonized and faith grew reliant on a super-supernatural world where any ordinary explanation raised suspicion. With battle lines so starkly drawn, scientists were left to assume that any move toward Christian faith was akin to committing intellectual suicide. Conversely, the faithful relied on science for their medicine or the weather forecast, but much more than that was to attempt spiritual suicide. Let a spark of evolution in the door and you were liable to catch the whole house on fire. The controversy between Christian faith and evolution is exacerbated by increasing mounds of scientific data that lend weight to evolution. Paleontology, biochemistry, cosmology, physics, genetics—you name the discipline—each regularly puts forth newly discovered evidence in support of Darwin’s simple idea of descent with modification. While some people of faith choose to keep their doors closed, shutting out science is not necessary. Christian faith by definition defies human conceptions of reality (1 Cor 3:19). Its claims are grounded in extraordinary events that defy scientific explanation (most importantly the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus). But God is not only present where science is silent; he remains present even where science speaks loudest. The expansiveness of the universe, the beauty and complexity of organic life and the remarkable makeup of human consciousness—naturally explicable occurrences—are also interpreted by Christians as manifestations of God (Rom 1:20). Christianity consistently asserts that all truth is God’s truth, implying that faith and science, despite differences when it comes to explaining why, nevertheless should agree in regard to what is. Why bother talking about God if God has no relation to observable reality? An avalanche of books has been devoted to the controversy between Christianity and evolution. Don’t expect a contribution to that debate here. There are plenty of other places where that conversation occurs. Instead, I’d like to look at Christian faith in the face of evolution as essentially true as most scientists assert. Now I know that just because a particular theory makes sense of the way something could have happened, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it actually happened that way. But if evolution truly provides an accurate description of life on earth, and things did happen the way evolution describes, how might we rethink the way we think about what the Bible says? To rethink what we think about the Bible is not to rewrite Scripture, nor is it to capitulate to Christianity’s detractors. Instead, rethinking and reworking our theology in light of accurate data results in a more dependable and resilient theology. To be a serious Christian is to seek truth and find it as revealed by God both in Scripture and in nature. If God is the maker of heaven and earth, as we believe, then the heavens and earth, as science describes them, have something to say about God. Natural selection need not imply godless selection. To be reliable witnesses of creation can’t help but make us more reliable witnesses to the Creator.I hope you're intrigued. Go buy the book—you'll love it—then look for occasional conversations here about some of Daniel's ideas.
About 2 months ago, I finished a series on Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge of Evolution. I concluded that it was a terrible book, displaying significant errors of both fact and judgment. The book's main argument is a population genetics argument, and Behe seems to have little knowledge or understanding of that difficult subject. The book is a joke, and I believe it will someday be seen as one of the more disastrous mistakes made by the ID movement. But I think it's important to distinguish between Behe's errors (which reflect on his scientific credibility and on his decision-making habits) and his thesis. His book is full of mistakes, but that doesn't mean that his proposal is known to be false. So I'd like to make it clear what my verdict on his book actually is, then present an outline of one way to actually test Behe's hypothesis.
1. In The Edge of Evolution, Behe correctly identified a biological process – the generation of genetic variants that lead to evolutionary change – as a likely focus of deliberate design. Having concluded that common descent is true, he reasoned that the trajectory of change through the tree of life might be expected to show evidence of non-random direction. Design, as he and others in the ID movement conceive it, might be manifested in the pattern by which the tree of life came to be. (Some might go as far as to say that it must be manifested in such a way, but I don't think Behe suggests this.) My point is that there is nothing stupid, irrational, or unscientific about Behe's reasoning. So, Behe conceived a hypothesis, which I will restate as follows:
In a previous post, I started to explain a fact that some people (who don't know me) seem to find surprising or noteworthy. Michael Behe is a Christian who accepts common ancestry and an ancient cosmos, so you'd think I would be excited about the work of a fellow "theistic evolutionist." But I'm not. Two overall problems come to mind. (Basically, I find his conduct as a scientist to be unacceptable, and I find his proposals to be laughable failures.) I'm addressing the second one here. The discussion is quite long, so I divided it into two sections, Part A and this post, Part B, which will have to be split up. I'm sorry about the length; it would really take a whole book to carefully explain how Behe has misused genetics and probability.
1. Behe's fans say that he's a nice guy, and that the evolutionists are "crucifying" him. Both claims seem to be true, but they can't hide some serious problems with his conduct as a scientist.
Those issues are the subject of the first post.
2. Some of Behe's defenders think that he has effectively answered his critics. He has not, nor has he understood or acknowledged the most important criticisms of his crude claims.
Behe's recent book The Edge of Evolution (henceforth EoE) is the focus of this series, and as I exlained in Part A:
EoE makes exactly one specific scientific claim, accompanied by simplistic genetic assumptions and supported by a "case study." The scientific claim is that the mutations that drive large-scale evolution, and that are thought to underlie all evolutionary change (past and present), are non-random. And the "case study" is a long-winded account of the adaptation of the malaria parasite in the face of drugs intended for its destruction.Part A dealt with the laughable case study. But the heart of EoE is the claim that random mutation rates are insufficient – spectacularly insufficient – to support step-by-step evolution of complex features. The implication, then, is that the mutations that underlie major evolutionary change did not occur randomly.
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| Image from "Mutation rate variation in multicellular eukaryotes: causes and consequences," by C.F. Baer et al., Nature Reviews Genetics, August 2007. Click to enlarge (opens in new window/tab). |
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