"I put the ways of childhood behind me" — my remembrance of Dan Dennett

For five years through 2018, our humanist community, the Humanist Hub*, met every Sunday afternoon at our suite in Harvard Square for fellowship, music, and a speaker. Our advisory board included luminaries of humanism such as Rebecca Goldstein, Steven Pinker, and Dan Dennett. These friends of the organization regularly spoke at Humanist Hub events. One of the most memorable, for me, was Dan Dennett's talk in November 2017, "The Science of the Soul (and where to go from here)."

I was lucky enough to be asked to introduce Dan, and shared thoughts about what his work had meant to me. I've included my lightly edited script below. The video on Facebook includes more jokes (and laughs) and shows a typical Sunday program at the Hub. The program starts at 13:30, with music at 20:30, my remarks starting at 27:30, and Dan's talk starting at 37:20.

Science, intuition and the "strange inversion of reasoning"

A few days ago I wrote about scientific thinking as an antidote to intuition. Not just an alternative to it, but something like the opposite of intuition. The intentional, energy-consuming move to a systematic deliberative mode of thought is utterly different from the easy and instantaneous nature of intuition.

Some of our intuitions are clearly built-in. Many of the famous failings of our intuitive System 1, described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, seem to be hard-wired. Some are perhaps the unavoidable result of trade-offs that buy speed and decisiveness at the expense of accuracy and completeness. Others might be adaptive despite being occasionally delusional: I'm thinking here of optimism bias. Some days we just need some good old optimism bias!

But some of our most famous intuitions are more complex and a bit harder to attribute to brain wiring or adaptive tricks. These are intuitions that seem to affect how we see the whole world, all of existence, all day. I think it's intuition (and nothing else) that makes us feel that something complex, that shows design, must have come from a designer. That a universe has to have a beginning, and therefore a "beginner." That a mind like ours must somehow come from a bigger mind somewhere else. That seemingly uncaused events must have had a cause. Which are all probably related to a sense that the universe is haunted.

I'm not sure that these intuitions are all universally human—some are likely to be deeply cultural. But the point is that well beyond our intution that the sun moves through the sky or that the earth can't be a spinning ball, there are intuitions about the very fabric of existence.

Scientific thinking as the antidote to intuition

As I work on a book that will claim that evolution is easy, I have a parallel task of exploring the reasons we sense that it is hard or even impossible. Some of those influences are the result of efforts by religions to maintain dependence on supernaturalism or to defend ancient sacred writings. Some are the result of antipathy to science itself, framed in terms of culture war. But others are less clearly related—at least directly—to religions or tribes. Our brains are wondrous indeed but are known to be prone to various kinds of error. To be brutally frank: there are things that can seem obvious to us but that are false.

Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a life-changer for me. As soon as I read it in 2013, I urged colleagues to read it, even convening a book club at work. (The job of a journal editor is fundamentally about making decisions and judgments, and that's what the book is about.) One of the key messages of the book is that our fast thinking system (Kahneman calls it System 1) is both speedy and utterly important for survival. It's not about reflexes—it's still a kind of thought. But it's quick and dirty, often making guesses or approximations, and is prone to error. "Intuition" is a function of System 1.

Change is hard. Evolution is Easy. Episode 1 of many.

ARIEL: Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
—The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

I do apologize for this dull cliche, but I know I'm right about this: change is hard. I don't mean that it's hard to adapt after someone or something forces a change on you. That's true too, but it's not my topic here. I'm talking about this: you want to change, or you need to change, or both. You know what the change has to be. Maybe you know what the first step has to be. It's change, and it's hard.

Call it personal growth or self-improvement, or maybe it's habit-breaking or demon-wrestling. Whole libraries could be stocked with materials on how to change. Even when we know we're loved, and believe we're okay, we can see opportunities and challenges that require us to change.

I won't claim to have deep knowledge of the technical literature on how people manage to change. But I do have several decades of experience in the practice of personal growth and change. I have repeatedly faced my need to change, and one of the first lessons I had to learn was the fact that effecting change is a lot harder than it sounds. It's not that easy to face one's need to change but it's vastly more difficult to make it happen. Change is hard.

But evolution is easy.

Conversing with Casey Luskin

Last month I wandered over to Evolution News and Views (ENV), a Discovery Institute (DI) blog, and read a piece by Casey Luskin on the topic of human/chimp common ancestry. I saw some stuff I didn't like, and left a comment, and an interesting exchange ensued. You can read it yourself, but here are some of my comments.

Biologos and Christian unity: mission accomplished?

And so, last week, some of my friends from BioLogos and Calvin College participated in this Vibrant Dance thing. These are people I hold in very high regard, people pursuing goals that I consider to be among the most important projects a Christian scientist can tackle. But mistakes are being made, and in a previous post I pointed to one of the biggest ones: overemphasizing "Christian unity" in an environment of rampant dishonesty, an environment poisoned by apologetic propaganda.

Bread and circus: Signature in the Cell at Biola (Part III)

Here I'm continuing my discussion of the Signature in the Cell book-signing event at Biola University on 14 May. You'll want to read Parts I and II before reading on.

My second question to Steve Meyer was the one question I most wanted to ask him, both out of personal curiosity and because I thought the answer would help demystify many of his claims. The exchange that resulted was memorable – on that, everyone seems to agree. But the nature of my comments has been profoundly misrepresented by Meyer's hired guns. I hope that this will be crystal clear when I'm done here.

Love. Peace. Unity. Or?

Last month, I read that Biologos (a Christian "think tank" that advances evolutionary creation) and Reasons To Believe (a Christian "think tank" that advances old-earth creationism) were reporting on a dialogue between their two organizations that was intended "to discuss areas of agreement and disagreement" with a particular focus on "the biological record of the past 700 million years."

This is very interesting to me. My position is very closely aligned with that of Biologos, so naturally I often disagree with the opinions of Reasons To Believe (RTB). But as I've explained in detail before, my big problem with RTB has nothing to do with their preference for miraculous intervention during biological evolution. It has to do with their proclivity for the crafting and promulgation of falsehoods, and I have asserted that their statements on various aspects of evolutionary science amount to misconduct that calls for intensive reform.

And so I'm quite curious about how Biologos and RTB interacted. The joint statement reports that "significant progress was made in clarifying similarities and differences" and that the two groups seek to model Christian disagreement that is characterized by "civility, grace, and unity." The comments are full of joyous praise for the effort, and the statement cites classic proof texts calling for Christian unity and mutual respect.

And who could disagree with that? Well, I'm going to try.

Weasels, clouds and biomorphs, part III

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 design.

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....

–The Blind Watchmaker, page 21

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.

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.

–The Blind Watchmaker, page 37

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.

And so Dawkins tackles the concept of cumulative selection in chapter 3, and as we've already seen, he immediately faces a serious problem: the end result of an evolutionary process 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 Biomorph program was Dawkins' more serious attempt at modeling the development of complex structures by cumulative selection. It's important to understand just how central the program really is, and thus why it's so silly to make a big deal out of the Weasel exercise. Chapter 3 is the heart of the book, and the Biomorph program is the soul of chapter 3. The Biomorph program improves on Weasel in two very important ways:

1. It models evolutionary unfolding without a specific goal. The Weasel program "homed in" on a particular goal; the Biomorph program has no such constraint.

2. The entities that evolve in the Biomorph program, called biomorphs, "develop," and their development is controlled by a number of factors ("genes") which change (i.e., mutate) in each generation, so that mutations result in alterations to development and thus to new forms.

The biomorphs are tree-like structures, and they are drawn according to simple rules. (This post is decorated with a few that I made using a nice Java applet.) The rules control the branching of the trees (branch at a certain angle or at a certain point on the existing branch, or branch of a certain length, or whatever). The drawing of a biomorph, then, is a representation of embryonic development. And the rules represent the various processes in development.

It should be fairly easy to see how to model the effects of genes: a gene will influence a rule, by assigning a number to the rule (e.g., branch at a bigger or smaller angle). Reproduction is simple: the biomorphs are redrawn, based on the parent's structure, using the same rules influenced by the same genes. Boring? No: mutation acts to change the numeric value of the genes, randomly changing the value by either +1 or -1. The result is a set of offspring, each differing slightly from the parent by virtue of a single mutation.

So it goes like this. A parent is selected. The subroutine REPRODUCTION runs, and generates random mutations in each of the genes of the parent (there are 9 genes); the new genes are passed to the subroutine DEVELOPMENT, which draws new biomorphs based on the new genes. The result is a set of 9 offspring, each with a different version of one of the parent's genes. One is selected to be the parent of the next generation. Keep doing this, over and over and over, and you get the program EVOLUTION.

But how does selection work in this program? Recall that the major problem with the Weasel illustration was its goal-directed nature. In the Biomorph program, things are different:

...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

Selection, in other words, is done by you, the human who is "playing God."

That's the Biomorph program. Next time: what it demonstrates about evolution.

Weasels, clouds and biomorphs, part II

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.

– The Blind Watchmaker, pages 50-51, italics in the original

Hence the Weasel program.

But I noted last time that Dawkins spent a tiny amount of time and text on the Weasel program, and that he declared it to be "misleading in important ways." The most important, by far, is this: the selection that drove the Weasel program was goal-directed. A better simulation of evolution would be one in which selection is more capricious, more "in the moment." (Survival can be capricious; reproduction happens rather decisively "in the moment.")

Dawkins came up with just such a program, and I mentioned it in the previous post. It's a wonderfully simple simulation of the basic aspects of selection-driven evolution: it includes development, reproduction, genes, and selection, and generates "organisms" with shapes instead of a phrase in all caps. 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.

Weasels, clouds and biomorphs, part I

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

Dawkins immediately tackles the crazy misconception of evolution as a process that is akin to the impossibly improbable flying-together of the parts of a machine in a single step. Echoing Isaac Asimov, he calculates the probability of the spontaneous assembly of a hemoglobin molecule in a single step, and arrives at a number of predictably indescribable magnitude. It can't just happen.

In a 1987 BBC television show , he uses a much better metaphor: the opening of a safe by entering a combination. To open the safe, a banker (or thief) must correctly enter all of the correct numbers, in order, at the same time. His point is: of course it can't "just happen." The concept that Dawkins aims to communicate is this: from an evolutionary perspective, "success" doesn't happen all at once; it is accumulated. Evolutionary change is cumulative change; it's as though the safe opens a little when one correct number is entered, and allows the banker to reach in and get a little money. ("Small change" is the topic, remember.)

This is a very basic and very important aspect of the Darwinian mechanism, and yet it is maddeningly common to see it ignored or completely misunderstood. So in the first few pages of Chapter 3, Dawkins looks for an illustration of the difference between "randomly getting the whole thing right in one fell swoop" and "accumulating random improvements till the whole thing is assembled." He starts with the old saw about monkeys, typewriters and Shakespeare. Choosing a single phrase from Hamlet, "Methinks it is like a weasel," he first calculates the probability of a random character generator (a monkey) spontaneously banging out Hamlet's phrase. The calculation charmingly indicates that there isn't enough time in the universe for such a thing to occur. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, it's easy enough to get a computer (even a 1986-vintage machine) to churn out 28-character strings randomly, and so Dawkins describes a program that can do this. Then he introduces the occurrence of cumulative selection in the program, to illustrate its profound effectiveness compared to mere randomness.

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

Dawkins shows that this procedure can get from a random monkey-phrase to "Methinks it is like a weasel" in mere seconds. And the point is simply this: cumulative selection is more effective than mere "randomness" by incomprehensibly gigantic magnitudes. Dawkins makes it very clear that the Weasel program is meant to demonstrate nothing more than that. After pointing out that single-step selection would take a near eternity to type the phrase, he reiterates the simple purpose of the comparison, and the whole weasel exercise:

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.

– The Blind Watchmaker, page 49, italics in the original

Folks, that's all the silly weasel thing was ever about. So what's all the fuss then?

Well, some ID partisans are all agitated about whether Dawkins' program allowed mutations in positions of the string where the correct letter had been hit upon. They wonder: if cumulative selection had gotten us "Methinks it is like a measel", could 'measel' mutate back to 'measer' and thus take the program a step away from the target? And why does this matter? Well, for Dawkins' purposes it really doesn't matter, but the ID scholars seem to think there's a big speed difference. If you're interested you can read some nice work by Wesley Elsberry or Anders Pedersen that shows clearly that it simply doesn't matter.

But. Here's what's lost in all this. Dawkins never intended the silly little weasel exercise to be a persuasive argument for evolution as it actually occurs in the world. In fact, he is quick to point out why it's deficient (remember Bohr models of the atom in grade school?), noting that it is "misleading in important ways." And at that point, he abandons the Weasel program in favor of a simulation that is far better. That simulation, the Biomorph program, is the topic of the entirety of the rest of Chapter 3 of The Blind Watchmaker (and of my next post).

The absurdity of the ID fixation on the Weasel program is hard to capture with mere words. Perhaps this table will help put the two programs into better perspective.

	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

*All I did was Google the word 'weasel' or 'biomorph' at uncommondescent.com. The two uses of 'biomorph' were in comments by ID critics (one being Wes Elsberry). The uses of 'weasel' surely include insults that aren't references to the program.

The real focus of Chapter 3 of The Blind Watchmaker is the biomorph program. Seven figures, 23 pages, 22 more pages in two appendices which include a small user's manual for the program. The biomorph program constitutes the heart of Dawkins' book and his argument, so much so that the program is named The Blind Watchmaker. The Weasel program was a tiny stepping-stone for Richard Dawkins, a simplistic teaching tool meant to illustrate a single simple point. It's a hill to die on for the ID movement, and that says a lot about the state of that confused community.

Theistic embryology: the gathering storm

On Friday in the Christian Perspectives in Science seminar at Calvin College I gave a little talk on theistic evolution. The idea was to get some feedback on the simple ideas that I'll present at a symposium at the North American Paleontological Convention (NAPC) in Cincinnati in June. The symposium is titled "The Nature of Science and Public Science Literacy" and it's part of Education and Public Outreach Day at the NAPC. Here's the title and abstract of both the symposium talk and the seminar I gave at Calvin.

Why is there no controversy surrounding theistic embryology? Dissecting critical responses to theistic evolution.

Those who simultaneously express Christian belief and affirm evolutionary theory are said to espouse a position called "theistic evolution." The view holds the peculiar distinction of being reviled by both hard-line creationists (who call it "appeasement") and prominent atheist commentators (who deride it as fallacious). I argue that these critics typically fail to articulate objections that are specific to the view. Most creationist critics of theistic evolution object to one or both of these characteristics of the view: 1) its reliance on naturalistic explanation, a feature common to all scientific theorizing; or 2) its embrace of "random" causal events, a feature common to myriad scientific explanations. Most atheist critics of theistic evolution object to its openness to supernatural explanation, a feature of religious belief in general. Such criticisms, valid or not, fail to address anything specific to theistic evolution. In other words, attacks on theistic evolution are usually attacks on theism or attacks on evolution, but rarely represent specific criticisms of the theistic evolution position. To better understand the controversy surrounding theistic evolution, I propose that critiques of the position be considered in light of a lesser-known position we may (with tongue in cheek) call "theistic embryology." Theistic embryology describes the thinking of those who simultaneously express Christian belief and affirm basic theories in human developmental biology. Although the logic is indistinguishable from that of theistic evolution, the view is uncontroversial and the term "theistic embryology" is practically non-existent. I suggest that critiques of theistic evolution be subjected to the "theistic embryology test." Most critiques that claim to identify weaknesses in theistic evolution make arguments that are equally damaging to "theistic embryology" and so fail the test. Critiques that fail this whimsical test are likely to be arguments against belief, or against naturalistic explanation, and should be considered as such.

Quintessence of Dust anthologized again

Well, wow, for the second year now one of my posts has been selected for inclusion in the science blogging anthology, The Open Laboratory. Last year it was the teosinte review; this year the honor goes to the post on Darwin's tomatoes. This year's anthology includes 50 blog posts on various scientific topics, and it looks like an excellent collection.

Thanks to Bora for his hard work as editor of the series and to Jennifer Rohn who is editing this year's edition. And thanks to Elsevier, which has granted free permission to reproduce part of a figure from the Current Biology article that I discuss in the post.

Why I'm not a Behe fan, Part IIA: the malaria scam

In my 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'm dividing it into two parts, A and B.

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. First, he showed contempt for his (former) colleagues when he avoided the process of peer review. Second, his comment-free blog is lamentably characterized by misleading and disingenuous "responses" to criticism that look to be calculated attempts to protect what is nothing more than folk science.

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.

There's something interesting about the ID community's response to Jerry Coyne's review of The Edge of Evolution (henceforth EoE). Thomas Cudworth referred to it as "nasty" and Behe dismissed it as just so much ad hominem and "question-begging." Meanwhile, Bilbo (regular commenter here and contributor at Telic Thoughts) thinks that Behe is "carrying the day" on his comment-free Amazon blog.com, where he has responded to critiques by Ken Miller, Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll and others.

Well, in fact the review is a piece of crap, as is much of what Jerry Coyne has produced lately. (He's an equal opportunity thug, attacking his scientific colleagues with the same lack of grace and intelligence that he displayed in his recent diatribe against faith.) The piece represents at best a missed opportunity (to address Behe's claims in detail for a lay audience) and at worst a windfall for Behe and the ID movement, focused as they are on convincing the public that they are a persecuted scholarly minority. I'm not the only one who was horrified by Coyne's brainless screed; Jason Rosenhouse blasted it for all the same reasons.

As Rosenhouse predicted, the shoddy nature of Coyne's review enabled Behe to avoid a full-scale defense of his folk science. Behe has never bothered to rigorously justify his claims, and has never carefully engaged existing evolutionary data or theory, so Coyne's shallow account gave him a perfect opportunity to continue to pretend that his ideas can withstand real scientific scrutiny. And so we have ID propagandists whining about Behe's mistreatment, and laypersons reading ID blogs and concluding that EoE has sounded an unanswered challenge to evolutionary theory. It's a boon for ID.

The truth is that Jerry Coyne did identify the errors in the book. 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. Coyne's review addresses both, and Behe's responses failed to defend either.

The scientific claim is unsupported, and all available evidence contradicts it. And the "case study" is laughably misused in a ploy that a high school sophomore could see through. Let's look at the malaria ploy first, then examine Behe's central scientific claim and its implications in the second half of this article (part B, to be posted later this week).

EoE is actually a very small book, with very little to say. Most of the book is devoted to a recounting of the biology of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, and the "trench warfare" between the parasite and its host, Homo sapiens. The outcome of the struggle between the parasite and its host has provided a useful case study of evolutionary change, and specifically of the power of natural selection. Behe grants this readily; indeed, he concludes that random mutation and natural selection can account for the divergence of organisms at the species level (at least). In other words, Behe does not deny the reality of common descent, and acknowledges some role in evolution for natural selection acting on random mutation. (He uses the divergence of dog breeds as an example of what random mutation & selection can do (p. 200), leaving one to wonder why Richard Dawkins chose dogs as an example of why Behe is wrong. I'm guessing Dawkins didn't read the book too carefully, what with all his important work as a scholar.) But Behe's reasoning is stunningly dumb. It goes like this.

• In the fifty years since antimalarial drugs were brought to bear on P. falciparum, more than 10²⁰ (that's 10 to the 20th power, if the superscript isn't working) of the parasites have been born.
• In that time, the parasite has adapted to the drugs, through selection acting on random genetic variation, but hasn't developed any completely new proteins or biochemical functions.
• This means that the Darwinian process is unable to generate significant novelty in fewer than 10²⁰ tries.

That's the argument. And Behe uses it to identify the "edge of evolution."

Now, I hope it's already clear to most readers why the argument is spectacularly bad, but here are some comments.

• Most basically, it should be obvious that demonstrating the failure of X to happen in one particular situation is hardly proof that X cannot happen. To extrapolate from a single negative observation (even if it were representative of the scenario in question) to the blanket impossibility of the phenomenon is a foolish mistake.
• More specifically, it should be obvious that we need not expect dramatic new functions to appear during adaptation, since we need not even expect adaptation to occur at all. If functional innovation were as inevitable as adaptation, the dinosaurs would not merely have survived, they would have mastered apparation in additional to intergalactic travel (and world peace). Behe wants you to believe that evolutionary biologists expect dramatic evolutionary innovation to occur, at the level of molecular machinery, whenever selection is applied to a population. That's nonsense, and I think he must know that.
• It is important to keep in mind that Behe solidly affirms common ancestry, and knows that mutations account for the differences between lineages. This means that he acknowledges the existence of a continuous genetic tree of life, which means that he should be able to formulate scientifically credible approaches to his hypothesis. Pointing to the lack of innovation in one special (parasitic) scenario is hardly a substitute for a direct examination of the myriad exemplars of evolutionary novelty. In other words, the way to determine whether gigantic population sizes are needed for the stepwise generation of novel functions via random mutation is to: a) identify examples of such evolutionary innovations and to work on elucidating the genetic trajectories that could have led to their development; then b) work on determining the population sizes, mutation frequencies, and other parameters that apply to the trajectory. (I like to call this "science.")

The questions that I have after reading EoE (besides the disturbing question raised also by Dennis in a comment here) are these: does Mike Behe really think that evolutionary biologists expect P. falciparum to develop new molecular machines while adapting to antimalarial drug assault? Does he really think that the struggle between a primate and one of its parasites is a model for the generation of evolutionary novelty, of whole gene families whose origins often predate the Cambrian? Does he really believe that the failure of P. falciparum to give rise to a magic drug-dodging charm, or a microscopic invisibility cloak, is an argument against random mutation and natural selection in the evolution of biological novelty?

Probably not. He has another really bad idea: that random mutation doesn't provide enough variation for natural selection to generate novelty. And the mistakes are typical for him: sloppy (or non-existent) examination of the facts, and wild extrapolation from those he carefully selects. Part IIB will look at the rest of the mess.

Why I'm not a Behe fan, Part I

Michael Behe's name has come up around here a lot lately. During the lovefest over on Uncommon Descent, they mentioned him both as a scientist and as a Martyr, and here on QoD, a regular commenter named Bilbo has mentioned Behe a few times, noting that he finds Behe's argument in The Edge of Evolution compelling. 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. There are two issues I'd like to address here, both raised in the UD discussion or by Bilbo or both. I'll tackle them in two separate posts.

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. First, he showed contempt for his (former) colleagues when he avoided the process of peer review. Second, his comment-free blog is lamentably characterized by misleading and disingenuous "responses" to criticism that look to be calculated attempts to protect what is nothing more than folk science.

a. Behe exudes an arrogant contempt for the scientific community, exemplified by his neglect of peer review.

Michael Behe, I'm told, is quite a decent gentleman. I don't doubt this at all. He even seems to be a smart gentleman, and I gather that he's a gifted teacher based on his excellent writing. He doesn't tend to directly attack other people (though he can be pretty obnoxious), and he seems uninterested (in general) in Culture War. He doesn't deserve to be mocked, and I think he was treated somewhat unfairly by many critics of ID after the run-in with Abbie Smith at ERV. Mike Behe, it seems to me, is worthy of far more respect than are many of his fellow ID proponents.

But I have written before that Behe is properly an object of scorn in evolutionary biology. What I mean is that while I don't think he should be ridiculed or taunted, I do think he is mostly unworthy of professional scientific respect. Mike Behe has shown contempt for the scientific community in his writing on evolution, especially in The Edge of Evolution. This stance has quite appropriately alienated him from science and led scientists in relevant fields to view him, rightly, with suspicion and to dismiss him as ignorant and/or disingenuous. Behe has excused himself from the company of those who seriously study evolutionary science, and has done this by approaching the complex and fascinating analysis of evolutionary genetics with a malignant combination of arrogant condescension and pitiful ignorance. (Or, alternatively, his integrity has been somehow compromised.) You see, it actually doesn't matter how you couch your words when the message to an entire field of science (about which you know relatively little) is: "Hey, guys, give it up; I just figgered the whole thing out." In fact, in my opinion, there's something pretty creepy about a bland smile on the face of an undistinguished biochemist who claims to have overturned a century of work by some of the best minds in the history of biology.

There is only one new scientific idea in TEoE: Behe claims that random mutation rates are insufficient to generate the genetic diversity that is necessary for evolutionary change. That's it. That is an empirical claim, one that leads to some clear predictions. The claim is, at least in principle, testable. It's not theology, it's not metaphysics, and it doesn't have anything specific to do with "complexity" or any other doctrine of Intelligent Design. Behe's hypothesis, that random mutation cannot drive evolutionary change, is a scientific hypothesis of significant import that should have been carefully constructed and vetted by the professional scientific community. But as near as I can tell, the claim was never subjected to peer review. As far as I know, Behe has not completely formulated his hypothesis (by, for example, analyzing actual measurements of genetic variation in living organisms), and has not attempted to publish it in the professional literature or even to present it to a gathering of scientific experts. Instead, he wrote a popular book, aimed at a lay audience. His ideas are, in fact, almost completely without merit, but even if his radical hypothesis were worthy of scientific consideration, his choice to abandon the scientific community – and to eschew even the most basic review of his proposals by known experts – is an expression of arrogance and contempt that is difficult to overstate.

Richard Dawkins' New York Times review of The Edge of Evolution is pretty crappy; it's really not a review at all, and the hysterical Culture Warriors at the Discovery Intitute are right about that much. But one of Dawkins' final comments on the book summarizes why it is not a worthy contribution to science and why its author deserves to be dismissed as a critic of evolution:

If correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?

If you don't find the preceding to be a devastatingly damning criticism of Behe's project, then you either don't understand what those scientists actually did (and you're in good company), or you actually do believe that Michael Behe is the architect of the most cataclysmic scientific paradigm shift since Copernicus. The point is that a person (like me) who knows some evolutionary genetics is left with a more difficult choice: whether to believe that Behe is really that ignorant and arrogant, or to believe that he lacks a full commitment to scientific integrity. While considering those options, one tends not to dwell so much on etiquette and gentility.

b. I find many of Behe's responses to his critics to be suspiciously misleading, and I believe this provides a clue as to why he does not allow comments on his blog or participate in professional discussion of his proposals.

• When challenged by Richard Dawkins on his failure to have his hypothesis subjected to peer review, he redirected the discussion to a consideration of his publication record in general, and compared it to Dawkins' nonexistent contributions.
• Confronted with the reality of superfast evolution of domesticated organisms, he redirected the discussion to an irrelevant (but technical-sounding) consideration of "developmental plasticity."
• He mocked Sean Carroll's accurate claim that Behe's ideas (and errors) involve technically-challenging concepts and theories, obnoxiously implying that it is Carroll who is hiding indefensible claims behind difficult math and biology.
• Confronted with evidence that, at least in bacteria, beneficial mutation rates are a thousand times more likely than previously thought, he redirected the discussion to the irrelevant consideration of whether many or most beneficial mutations "break things" or not, and concluded (based on no evidence at all) that the report in question most likely involves "degradatory mutations."

Behe's critics make many mistakes. But his responses are indicative of a defender of folk science, not of a serious scientist in a rigorous debate.

In part II, I'll deal with the second issue raised by Behe's admirers:

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.

Of course there's a double standard!

Bilbo has become a regular commenter here, and he is a very welcome addition. He is a semi-regular contributor to the ID blog Telic Thoughts, and I've had the pleasure of meeting him in person. A layman who is willing to acknowledge his limited understanding of evolutionary science, he's thoughtful and direct.

I'll address his comments and questions regarding Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution in a separate post. Here I'll tackle his peevish accusation that I employ a double standard when I lambaste the punk Dembski but (allegedly) give a pass to the Atheist Ayatollah PZ Myers. The reference is to Crackergate, the brouhaha surrounding Myers' effort to desecrate a Roman Catholic communion wafer. (Greg Laden put together some good links, and the good folks at the Boar's Head Tavern are discussing the saga and its recent conclusion.)

First, it's not true that I haven't been critical of Myers' behavior. Over at Clashing Culture, where I blog on science and belief with three others, Mike (who also blogs at Tangled Up in Blue Guy) started a discussion of the then-unfolding dustup, focusing on the juxtaposition of Myers' offense with the death threats he subsequently received (one of which cost someone her job). The ensuing conversation was quite interesting, I thought, and included three comments by me. I didn't re-post them here, for various reasons, and I don't think it's necessary to do that (in full) now, especially since some of the references to other comments will be confusing. Instead, I'll just summarize with some excerpts.

On why PZ's "desecration" is not mere "criticism" or even "ridicule":

If PZ’s behavior is notable at all, it isn’t notable for being critical or dismissive of the beliefs of others. In fact, I would be opposed to an ethos that discouraged the critical appraisal of “beliefs” or that considered any kind of “desecration” to be somehow anti-social or hate-inspired. Some of the things I believe are nothing short of outrageous in the eyes of certain other kinds of believers. No, there’s nothing notable about attacking religious belief.

What would make PZ’s statements disturbing would be if it was apparent that he wasn’t aiming to attack or criticize ideas – or at least not solely intending such – but was plainly hoping to hurt people. [...] I’m afraid that I found PZ’s words to look too much like hate, too much like the kind of thing that is specifically and solely intended to cause harm. That the harm is not physical in nature is only relevant when comparing it to, say, a death threat...

It’s a fact that PZ’s denunciations occasionally veer into territory that is reasonably construed as hate speech, and his lusty participation in the Culture War (TM) necessarily leads him into questionable conduct. Truth, after all, is the first casualty of war, and Crackergate is incomprehensible outside the framework of Total Culture War.

On why mere unbelief can't justify desecration:

What’s worse, a death threat or a desecration threat? The answer is obvious, but the question is a lot more interesting than it appears, because (in this crowd, so far) the combination of transubstantiation and sanctification of mass-produced wafers is considered to be ludicrous. [...]

But let’s change the sacred cow, and see what happens. Let’s try a picture of Dr. King, or an account of his legacy, or a transcript of the “I Have a Dream” speech, and let’s do our desecration on his birthday, on the spot where he was assassinated. Or let’s try a Holocaust memorial, or a Jewish graveyard in Poland. Don’t worry: we’ll use water-based spraypaint for the swastikas so the desecration will be temporary. And of course no one will be injured. Can you think of anything else? I sure can.

On why, specifically, I thought PZ's stunt was reprehensible:

...my problem is with the occasional lapse into something more plainly destructive. PZ’s proposed desecration was not designed to “ridicule” an idea. It was meant to enrage, to hurt, to do damage. It wasn’t merciless criticism. It was hate. It wasn’t aimed at an idea. It was aimed at Catholics. People.

Now, for the record, I’m a Christian and I think transubstantiation is codswallop. I think it’s incorrect, and I could even explain why I think it might be a non-innocuous incorrect belief. If I had the time or inclination, I could write a lot of things about the Catholic eucharist that would be scandalous at best in the eyes of a good Catholic. If I was in a bad mood, I might ridicule the idea - I certainly don’t give it high regard.

None of those things, in my view, is even comparable to the stunt that PZ was discussing.

Mike, the vast majority of PZ’s brutal criticisms of religion are legit. They’re the kind of bare-knuckled roughing-up of ideas that I think is not just tolerable, but welcome. But every now and then, he steps in it. It’s one of the hazards of Culture War. The only way to win…is not to play.

So yes, Bilbo, I did condemn PZ's actions, and I was quite specific about why. I should add that PZ's recent post in which he announces the "desecration" (and shows the results) is worth reading. The desecration, in my opinion, was unnecessary and ultimately contemptible. But Myers' commentary is illuminating. As I've said before, the critiques and attacks of the New Atheists are good for the church.

But much more importantly, I assert that it doesn't matter whether I ever said boo about Crackergate. Because Bilbo, there is indeed a double standard, and the moral distinction I see between Pharyngula and Uncommon Descent is hard to exaggerate. (Not to mention the scientific difference: Myers has recently posted superb summaries of snake segmental development and evolution, and of epigenetics; UD just put up a hilarious pseudonymous post in which the writer extrapolates from a misattributed abstract about fruit fly gene formation to a calculation about how "man" could have "evolved from the monkey." Just posting the link is savage mockery.) Briefly:

1. As DarwinCatholic has already noted, the bloggers at UD are largely (if not exclusively) Christian, and Dembski is a professor at a Baptist seminary. These folks aren't just Christians; they're public Christians and apologists. PZ Myers is an atheist. Does anyone need a list of proof texts for why I think Christians should be held to higher – much higher – moral standards than pagans?
2. The sickest crap at UD isn't the usual dishonesty and shoddy pseudoscholarship. It's the religious propaganda, a toxic mix of normal everyday bullshit (about "Darwinism") and the pearls of our lives as Christians: scripture, our confessions, even the name of Jesus, the chief cornerstone. What's worse, I ask: Myers' desecration of a piece of matter that he reckons a mere cracker, or Bill Dembski's malicious use of Christ as a lame polemical device? I'm sure you already know where I stand.

Uncommon Descent is a moral cesspool, a festering intellectual ghetto that intoxicates and degrades its inhabitants. Kudos to you, Bilbo, for denouncing Dembski's idiotic post, but let's have no more talk of "double standards" when it comes to criticism of the ID movement's pervasive pathology. I'll see you at Telic Thoughts.

Weekly sampler 12

Shall we play a game? Recall Hugh Ross' fictional tale about the "team of physicists" that remade molecular genetics. Ross claimed, falsely, that:

They noticed that the quantity of "junk" in a species' genome was proportional to that species' degree of advancement.

The biological truth is the opposite: amount of DNA, "junk" or otherwise, is so uncorrelated with other aspects of biology that the situation was termed a paradox when it was first uncovered. Well...let's see the paradox in living color. In the next few Weekly samplers, I'll present you with some organisms (all animals) and we'll see how well you can guess their relative amounts of DNA (per genome) based on their "degree of advancement." Good luck! (Hint: use a quarter; it's easier to catch, and easier to find on the floor if you drop it.)

Which organism has the larger genome?
	This one?	Or this one?
1
2
3

Answers are here. Explanation can be found on the superb blog of one of the world's leading experts on genome size.

1. This story is 6 years old, but I never heard it till this week. A 52-year-old woman gets DNA testing to determine whether she can serve as an organ donor for her son. The tests reveal that she is apparently not the mother of two of her children. But...she is the mother of all of her children. How can this be?

She's a tetragametic chimera, meaning simply that her body is composed of cells descended from two genetically distinct embryos which evidently fused very early in development. Her ovaries are descended from one of those embryos, but her blood descends from the other. The result: she conceived children with gametes derived from one embryo, but her blood (which was used for the genetic tests) comes from the genetically-distinct other. Each of her cells has just one "parent", but as a whole she is derived from two distinct embryos, each of which arose from two distinct sperm/egg pairs; thus she, as a whole, is derived from four gametes instead of the typical two. Wild! And lots of fun for certain friends of mine who (like me) enjoy reflecting on human personhood and personal identity.

2. The newest issue of The Economist has an interesting piece on a large new European scientific collaboration.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Bring it on!

3. This View of Life is a nice-looking site that aims to be "a beginner's guide to a science-based understanding of evolution." I'd love to hear some feedback from anyone who's checked it out. (Via the ASA listserv.)

4. Read Ryan Gregory on the much-abused concept of Just-So Stories.

5. Earlier this week, I heard an interesting story on MarketPlace about "video games that are good for you." I think I'll ditch Text Twist and try this instead. The games "reduce stress and boost self-confidence." Do they have any that add time to the day?

6. At the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a site called BioInteractive is crawling with "free resources for science teachers & students." Lectures, animations, "virtual labs." It's a mixed bag, but very much worth a stroll. (Via Panda's Thumb.)

Who speaks for science? Or, why loud atheists are NOT the problem

Last Friday I mentioned a dispute surrounding the comments of some of the advocates of "framing" in science communications. The claim was that the engagement of pseudoscience – or what I would call folk science – is unwise, at least because the attention "enables" the purveyors of such swill. That's an interesting topic of discussion, but the debate has morphed, and the heat turned up on both sides, because the focus in now on the deliciously ironic expulsion of PZ Myers (but not his chum, the occupant of the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford) from the screening of a propaganda film. I think the discussion is now about something a lot bigger than just "enabling" pseudoscience.

In the unlikely event that you haven't heard about the PZ Myers-Dawkins-Expelled "fiasco," I refer you to Greg Laden's links and/or to the New York Times (no joke).

I'll skip the whole "framing" thing for now, except to note that it involves controversial proposals regarding effective means of communicating science to the public. Here is what Matt Nisbet, a blogger at ScienceBlogs (and a well-known advocate of "framing") wrote about the prominent roles played recently by PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins in the response to some new ID propaganda:

The simplistic and unscientific claim that more knowledge leads to less religion might be the particular delusion of Dawkins, Myers, and many others, but it is by no means the official position of science, though they often implicitly claim to speak for science. Nor does it stand up to mounds of empirical evidence about the complex relationship between science literacy and public perceptions.

Unfortunately, you couldn't focus group a better message for the pro-creationist crowd. And this message is already reaching well beyond the theaters, on display most recently with the PZ Myers Affair chronicled at the NY Times.

As long as Dawkins and PZ continue to be the representative voices from the pro-science side in this debate, it is really bad for those of us who care about promoting public trust in science and science education. Dawkins and PZ need to lay low as Expelled hits theaters. Let others play the role of communicator, most importantly the National Center for Science Education, AAAS, the National Academies or scientists such as Francis Ayala or Ken Miller. When called up by reporters or asked to comment, Dawkins and PZ should refer journalists to these organizations and individuals.

The call for PZ and Dawkins to shut up has drawn significant ire in the blogosphere; I would recommend Orac at Respectful Insolence and Brian at Laelaps as sources of principled resistance on that count, and I share their indignation at the call for self-censorship.

But there's been relatively little emphasis on why Nisbet wants PZ and Dawkins to shut up. I think it's pretty clear that Nisbet is saying this: PZ and Dawkins are outspoken atheists, and ruthless critics of religion, who make controversial and/or erroneous statements, and therefore ought not be speaking for science, at least because their anti-religious fervor can hurt the credibility of science in the public eye. And he's right on every count. But he's wrong to suggest, then, that PZ and Dawkins ought to be silenced. (That he seeks voluntary muzzling is, to me, completely irrelevant.)

I maintain that if we have an "outspoken atheists" problem, the way to solve it is not to silence the voices with which we disagree, but to engage them, debate them, even refute them. Here are some thoughts on how to do that.

1. Put Myers and Dawkins into a more complete context. They're both science writers of renown, because they're both brilliant thinkers and wordsmiths. But neither is a scientist of any significant distinction. Dawkins hasn't published in the professional literature in more than three decades, and Myers' last notable contribution to a science journal was in 1993. It's not an insult to either of these guys to simply note that neither is active in serious scientific research. (Sorry, but some of us who are still working our asses off in the lab get a little testy about how the title 'scientist' gets used.) It's hard to exaggerate the difference between the scholarly achievements of Francisco Ayala and Richard Dawkins; the exalted title of the latter surely contributes to a spectacularly inflated perception of his professional achievements. The exaltation of Richard Dawkins (as a scientist) is not unlike the hilarious fawning over the unremarkable accomplishments of a certain biochemist at Lehigh University, whose CV actually dwarfs that of the estimable atheist ayatollah.

Look, I like PZ, and I like Dawkins. I like reading their work, and everyone can learn from their writing. But let's help the world understand that PZ is a science blogger and college teacher, and that Dawkins is a science writer and not much more. If I were Allen Orr or Sean Carroll, I'd be just a little annoyed that the New York Times referred to PZ as an 'evolutionary biologist', and it wouldn't matter that I happen to agree with much of what he says.

2. Add voices, don't remove them. If science is as diverse as it claims to be, there are surely scientists (maybe even real scientists) who can repudiate the religious claims of the New Atheists. Perhaps whole societies and organizations (such as those cited by Nisbet) will add their voices, not just to the condemnation of ID propaganda, but also to the rejection of anti-religious vendettas launched in the name of science.

We don't need to silence Myers and Dawkins; we need to refute them if and when they claim to speak for science against belief. And we need to speak as scientists, in defense of the integrity of our profession and in defense of our fellow scientists who are being marginalized by atheological fervor, not as slick spinmeisters who know that our grant success rates depend on our silencing of a subset of our colleagues.

And if that doesn't convince you, just try to imagine what it looks like to outsiders when a community tries to shush one of its embarrassingly obnoxious members. It seems to me that this is easily seen (perhaps accurately) as outright dishonesty. Are there some scientists who are skeptics, and who are hostile to religious belief? Of course there are. So?

3. Hold the scientific community accountable for how it responds to misuse of its name. Instead of blaming Myers and Dawkins for doing what they do best, exert moral pressure on the rest of science to be clearer about what is and isn't a legitimate invocation of the authority of science. Christians, after all, are rightly suspected of moral failure when/if they fail to condemn outrages perpetrated in their name. Why should this not be expected of scientists? And while no human can find the time to answer every summons to repudiate the idiocy of fellow travelers, the world has a right to ponder whether relative silence signals tacit approval.

We have some loud atheists who like to pretend that it is science, and not unbelief, that is in conflict with belief. Shall we silence them? OF COURSE NOT. We should thank them for getting some important questions into the public square, then we should make it quite clear that their efforts have little to do with science, and everything to do with their perfectly legitimate but completely religious convictions.

Weekly sampler 8

It's snowing again. Cycling seems like a childhood memory. You'd think this would give me more opportunities to work on blog posts. Gah.

1. My friends and colleagues, Debbie and Loren Haarsma, were the subject of a nice local news story, focusing on their work as scientists and Christians. They have a superb new book out, which I've promised to review here sometime soon.

2. Is evolution too difficult or complicated for secondary students to grasp? This is a question that was discussed in the blogosphere recently, and even when religious/cultural debris is cleared away, I think the question is still a good one. (Add the religious/cultural influences back in, and you realize that teaching evolution at any level entails both the careful explication of the relevant principles and the careful dismantling of deliberately-introduced misinformation.) Some of the key concepts in evolutionary theory are decidedly non-intuitive. For example, I have the impression that it's just plain hard for people to get their heads around the notion of different species (let alone different families, orders, etc.) springing from a common ancestor. Maybe it's the ongoing influence of old errors (in this case, I think, orthogenesis), but I do wonder if common descent is one of those ideas that our kludgy brains just don't get straight off.

But of course that doesn't mean evolution can't be effectively taught to high schoolers. Algebra, after all, doesn't come naturally to most people, but I haven't seen anyone seriously propose that it be removed from high school curricula.

In fact, I think evolution is a lot like algebra. It takes time to teach right. It's a demanding subject, but it's within the capacity of high schoolers to understand. Levels of mastery and comprehension will vary significantly. Teachers who are poorly-trained and/or unprepared may do more harm than good. The main difference between evolution and algebra is this: there are no ministries or institutes devoted to hindering the work of algebra teachers. (Well, okay, there's MTV, but you get my point.)

3. And on that subject, PBS (WGBH Boston) has collaborated on the development of some resources for instructor professional development, with the aim of providing "the background and skills they need to counter pressures to present or address religiously based alternatives to the theory of evolution." The tools draw on materials from NOVA's "Judgment Day" episode on ID and Dover. I've only browsed, but there looks to be some very good stuff on the site. Maybe I'll comment further sometime.

4. Until this week, I was unaware of the ministry of Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Redeemer alone is an interesting and encouraging story, but now Keller has published a book in which he discusses (among other things) evolution. He was recently interviewed by First Things, and his comments were discussed extensively on the ASA listserv, where some errors (or simplifications) were dissected. It would be interesting to compare his thoughts with those of Tony Campolo: both accept evolutionary science, but "timidly" as one ASA commenter put it.

5. Oliver Sacks is now blogging (occasionally) at the New York Times, in a blog devoted to migraines. (Subtitled "Perspectives on a Headache." Ouch.) I'm not terribly interested in migraines, but if Oliver Sacks wrote an essay about sawdust, I'd read it with rabid anticipation. A recent piece on patterned visual sensations accompanying migraine auras begins with Sacks' description of his own experiences, and ends with musings on the potential universality of "self-organization," with the typical breathtaking Sacks prose beating the path. (Via Neurophilosophy.)