What Would Happen If the Discovery Institute Started Enabling Comments?

Ann Gauger, writing for Evolution, News and Views, has a particularly vacuous post on What If People Stopped Believing in Darwin? For example, she writes:

What would change?

Well, textbooks would change, for one. And a newfound humility might briefly sweep the halls of academic biology. Biology students might feel free to express their opinions on origins. The world would see a new flush of academic freedom.

Guess what? It's happening right now, but it's happening slowly, not overnight. That's because more and more people are recognizing that evolutionary biology's explanatory power is inversely proportional to its rigor. Yet there is still an enormous amount of pushback from people strongly invested in the Darwinian story.

What is your evidence for this, Ann? On what basis do you write this? It certainly doesn't match anything that I read.  One of the principle reasons that nonsense like this gets written on this blog is that they can get away with it with no impunity because the DI specifically does not enable comments. In fact, they don't even publish the email addresses of the members.  One actually has to contact a middle man (Casey Luskin) who then passes on messages.

So how about it, DI?  How about enabling moderated comments for the articles on this blog? 

Science & Human Origins Conference in Idaho on September 20

 

According to the new Discovery Institute Website, there is a Science & Human Origins day-long conference at the Ray and Joan Kroc Center, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (population 45k).  It is being billed as a “Spokane area” event, since it is only thirty minutes from there. 

This conference, which costs $25-$35 dollars, will feature some of the usual suspects, John West, Casey Luskin, Ann Gauger and Richard Sternberg.  Luskin and Gauger were partly responsible for the book of the same name, which I began to read in the hopes that I would review it.  The problem is that it made my blood pressure skyrocket and I became a hateful person around the house so I had to give it up.  I will get back to it at some point, soon, I hope.  Anyway, if you are anywhere around that part of Idaho, it would be instructive to see how that branch of ID thinks.  

Donald Prothero Writes A Withering Review of Darwin's Doubt

On the Amazon page for the new Stephen Meyer book Darwin's Doubt, there is a review of the book by Donald Prothero, who is responsible for one of the best books on the fossil record in recent memory, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters.  Of creationists (sensu lato), he writes:

They either cannot understand the scientific meaning of many fields from genetics to paleontology to geochronology, or their bias filters out all but tiny bits of a research subject that seems to comfort them, and they ignore all the rest.
Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.'s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences. Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It's comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony--they may be smart, but they don't have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.

This credential mongering was, of course, true with the modern progenitors of all subsequent creationist works, The Genesis Flood and Scientific Creationism, both written by Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer with no training in any of the major earth or biological sciences.That they were accepted uncritically by masses of Christians is, to this day, astounding.  Onward.

Prothero, who is a palaeontologist, has found Meyer's book unimpressive:

Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their "expert" in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.

This is the same sort of experience I had with the abysmal Bones of Contention, written by Marvin Lubenow some years back, where every page had some sort of error on it.  I felt beaten down by the time I was finished and, despite having the best intentions of reviewing it, I never did because I couldn't stomach picking it up again.

Meyer's central focus of the book is the Cambrian "explosion," in which life seems to have proliferated and diversified during what Meyer argues is too short a time for evolution to have occurred.  After correcting Meyer's understanding of how long the Cambrian was, he addresses a persistent problem:

The mistakes and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations go on and on, page after page. Meyer takes the normal scientific debates about the early conflicts about the molecular vs. morphological trees of life as evidence scientists know nothing, completely ignoring the recent consensus between these data sets. Like all creationists, he completely misinterprets the Eldredge and Gould punctuated equilibrium model and claims that they are arguing that evolution doesn't occur--when both Gould and Eldredge have clearly explained many times (which he never cites) why their ideas are compatible with Neo-Darwinism and not any kind of support for any form of creationism.

It is immensely disappointing to see this kind of problem over and over in ID writings. This example is similar to the lack of understanding of natural selection and adaptive valleys and peaks that William Dembski exhibits in his writings.  He seems to make the same errors consistently to the point where people don't even comment on what he has written because he won't address any of the criticisms. This is common of most ID writers.  I am currently piecing through Science and Human Origins by Luskin, Axe and Gauger and am encountering the same errors that I took Casey Luskin to task for three years ago.

You should read the whole review in all of its caustic glory.  I will probably get around to reading it but have too many other things to read right now. 

Discovery Institute Science and Faith Conference

The Discovery Institute is running a conference titled Science and Faith: Friends or Foes? on October 12-13 at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. A quick look at the speakers reveals that the conference is heavy on the ID side, with Paul Nelson, Ann Gauger, Jay Richards and John West featured prominently. Attend at your own risk.

Science & Human Origins: A Not So Positive Review by Paul McBride

Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger and Casey Luskin have a new book out called Science & Human Origins. I have not had a chance to pick it up yet but it looks like the authors have learned nothing from the recent exchanges with folks like Dennis Venema and PZ Myers. The same faulty ideas still hold sway. Paul McBride has reviewed the book here. McBride points out an immediate problem that seems to characterize the ID camp in general. Ann Gauger writes:

I personally am convinced that unguided, unintelligent processes can’t do the job, not only because the neo-Darwinian mechanism is utterly insufficient, but also because we are beings capable of intelligence and creativity.

This is argument from personal incredulity and has no place in scientific discourse. If this is indeed how she feels, then it must color how she does her experiments and how she gathers her conclusions. If she is not open to this possibility, she has no business writing this book.

McBride remarks that chapter two, which is written by Douglas Axe, discusses his and Gauger's recent work where it was found that the time necessary to get one protein to evolve into another, contemporaneous protein is longer than the universe has existed. Other researchers have pointed out the logical error in this experiment but McBride's statement is succinct:

If Gauger and Axe couldn't get a single protein to evolve a novel function of their choosing then surely massive evolutionary changes are impossible. Actually, no. Gauger and Axe's experiment is a profound misunderstanding of evolution. The real question is not "Can X be turned into Y?" because that sense of direction requires preordination, which is not theorised to be a part of evolution. If we remove this preordination, the question becomes "Can X turn into something else?".

It is more than a little ironic that Axe and Gauger argue that, left to its own devices, evolution cannot foster new genetic material due to its randomness and then, to show that this is so, introduce an experiment in which evolution is directed and non-random. Didn't any of the editors catch this? Axe and Gauger do not seem to understand the concepts of exaptation and neutral mutations.

Casey Luskin wrote the chapter on the fossil record. McBride quotes Luskin:

There are many gaps and virtually no plausible transitional fossils that are generally accepted, even by evolutionists, to be direct human ancestors. Thus, public claims of evolutionists to the contrary, the appearance of humans in the fossil record appears to be been anything but a gradual Darwinian evolutionary process. The Darwinian belief that humans evolved from apelike species requires inferences that go beyond the evidence and is not supported by the fossil record.

Luskin isn't listening. He has shut his ears and refuses to listen to what people are saying about the evidence. As I will remark in my next BioLogos posts (and something McBride points out), the earliest Homo erectus individuals have cranial capacities of around 700 cc³, while the later ones have cranial capacities of up to 1225cc³. Does this overlap those of modern humans? Barely. And the suite of characteristics that are on display in your average Homo erectus are not modern human in any way. They are getting there, but they are not there yet. Then we have archaic Homo sapiens, such as Kabwe from what is now Zimbabwe, which is obviously evolved over Homo erectus but not quite modern human either. These people show up in Asia (Dali and Mapa in China and Ngandong in Indonesia), Europe (Petralona, Swanscombe, Steinheim, Atapuerca, to name a few) and they are obviously intermediate between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens in some way. Are they direct ancestors? Maybe, maybe not, but they are transitional. Luskin is arguing unilineal ancestry without allowing for the possibility of collateral ancestry.

The earliest modern remains that we have are from the site of Herto, on the Bouri Peninsula in the Afar triangle, in Ethiopia and they date to around 160,000. Even so, there are a few characteristics that link these remains to earlier, archaic Homo sapiens. There may be no absolute evidence that these represent our ancestors, but who is to say they aren't? We know that we have modern humans in the Near East at 100,000 that still show some signs of not being quite like us. By 40,000 they do. If these are not transitional sequences, what would qualify?

McBride's conclusion contains the following paragraph:

I have been left wondering why the Discovery Institute, or intelligent design advocates in general, or biblical literalists feel a need to try and accommodate science when they have a belief in a supernatural entity capable of breaking natural laws. In the case of this book, it has left them needing to make all kinds of awkward criticisms of fields in which the authors clearly lack expertise. A lawyer is not the right guy to challenge the world's palaeoanthropologists, nor the world's geneticists. Certainly, he shouldn't be trying to take them all on at once. It will end with him trying to smear the reputation of scientists rather than engaging with their ideas. Accusations that the entire field of palaeoanthropology is driven by personal disputes and that Francis Collins is a bad Christian are simply not compelling reading in a book that is putatively about scientific argument.

Leaving aside the issue of miracles, since I believe they can and do happen and are not restricted to the physical, observable world, McBride is partly correct in his assessment about the abilities of these authors to address the material. The problem is deeper than that, however. At least in the case of Luskin, there is an unwillingness to alter one's viewpoints in the face of additional evidence to the contrary. Here, there is a distinct similarity to the young-earth creationist camp, who have little to no scientific integrity. As McBride points out, Luskin's views have not altered since 2006. I pointed out these problems two years ago in a BioLogos post. I know that he read the post because we corresponded briefly about it. It is therefore, doubly disconcerting that he would continue to hold onto this “no transitional fossils” idea as if it were still defensible.

This is a book I clearly need to pick up and read, although I am quite certain it will just make my blood boil to do so.