Darwin Day Celebration in Knoxville

On Saturday, February 16, there will be a Darwin Day celebration at the Frank H. McClung Museum on the University of Tennessee Campus.  Here is the information.  The event will be from 1:00 to 4:00 and is open to the public.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction: Galapagos Creationism Center to be Built

The Adventist News Network is reporting that a new creationism center will be built on the Galapagos Islands:

A large incentive project for scientific research will soon become a reality in the Galapagos Archipelago, located 1,200 kilometers off the coast of Ecuador. Construction on the Creationist Center, maintained by the Adventist Church through its institutions, will begin in August. Geovanny Izquierdo, president of the Church in Ecuador, confirmed the date for construction this week. The 741 square meter piece of land is located in the center of Santa Cruz, the most populated island in the archipelago. The building will include, initially, the Creationist Center, some administrative rooms for the Loma Linda Adventist College and new headquarters for the Central Adventist Church.

There is something deeply ironic about this. Of course, it wasn't just the Galapagos Islands that allowed Darwin to develop the theory of Natural Selection. His travels to Patagonia also paved the way for it. Nonetheless, this is almost like the U.S. presence in Guantanamo Bay or an embassy on foreign soil.  They will certainly be viewed as a curiosity by the incoming scientists.

The Slander of “Darwinism”

Kenneth Miller has written yet another extraordinary essay, this one on the nature of the term “Darwinism” and how it is pejoratively used by those insistent on trashing evolutionary theory.  He writes:

He could have just said he didn’t believe in evolution, or that evolution had flaws. Or, he could have said that a book with a whole unit on evolution was just too much. But William Buckingham, of the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania, didn’t use the “E” word when he explained his objections to the biology textbook selected by the science teachers at Dover High School. Instead, he invoked a term that didn’t even appear in that textbook. Prentice Hall’s Biology: The Living Science, he claimed, “was laced with Darwinism from beginning to end.” Surely, he must have thought, “Darwinism” was a disqualifying slander that everyone could understand.

Buckingham, who was singled out for special re-probation by Judge Jones at the end of the trial, was at once ignorant and pejorative.  He was ignorant in that Darwin was not the only one to develop the idea of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace being the other one. He meant to be pejorative (in the same way that all of the Discovery Institute writers intend) because he knew that the term “Darwinism” carries with it the baggage of animus and atheism.As Miller notes, when an entire branch of science is referred to by its founder's name, then it takes on the air of an ideology, rather than a legitimate field of study.  The ideology can then be characterized as agenda-driven, attempting to tear out the heart of morality and decency.  None of this, of course, is true but the perception is rampant.  Miller also points out something of which I hadn't thought:

The overuse of Darwin’s own name facilitates another line of attack, by pretending that the field relies entirely on Darwin’s own work, fashioned in an age before the modern sciences of genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology emerged to confirm and expand his ideas. This allows the pretense that evolution is a stolid, unchanging field, with few new ideas that might refresh its 19th century heritage. Any scientist would scoff at this, of course, knowing the vigor that new discoveries constantly infuse into evolutionary biology. But to laypeople, unfamiliar with the rapid pace of scientific discovery, this can be a persuasive argument.

This would be no different from referring to modern physics as “Newtonism”  despite the vast advances that have been made since Newton's time.  Miller laments that these perceptions are hard to fight against because they appeal to emotions rather than empirical thought. Further, there are those of the atheist perspective who argue that, as humans, we are no better or special than any other species on the planet.   For this, though, he has an answer:

We are the children of evolution in every sense, part of Darwin’s fabled “tangled bank.” We must never forget that. But we must also remember that we are the only creatures to emerge from that thicket and make sense of it all. “Darwinism” does not diminish us. Rather, it puts the human experiment into a truly scientific perspective. We are not just hairless bipedal primates. We are creatures capable of the fugues of Bach, the verses of Yeats, the stories of Twain, the creations of Dalí and, for that matter, the mathematics of Gödel, Ramanujan and Turing.

In contemplating the lessons of evolution for our species and our culture, this is how we should overcome the mindless use of “Darwinism” as a slur. Some may feel demeaned by our evolutionary heritage, but I would argue that the more appropriate emotions are joy and delight. Joy that we are approaching a genuine understanding of the world in which we live, and delight at being the very first stirrings of true consciousness in the vastness of the cosmos. Far from diminishing us, knowing the details of Adam’s journey ennobles each of us as a carrier of something truly precious—the genetic, biological, and cultural heritage of life itself. Evolution describes not the death of Adam, but his triumph. That is the great truth of our story.

Masterful.

A New Darwin Biography Gets Fisked

Jerry Coyne, a somewhat outspoken atheist and author of the book Why Evolution is True, has written a review of a new book on Darwin titled Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker by A.N. Wilson.  Coyne is baffled:

Given that many of Wilson’s earlier biographies have been admired for their style and insight, and not criticized for pervasive errors, this new project is baffling. Where Darwin’s other biographers have seen a sensitive and kindly man, a scrupulous scientist who willingly credited his predecessors, Wilson finds a greedy “self-mythologizer” desperate to become famous, even if it required ignoring or plagiarizing his forerunners and fellow naturalists.

In every portrayal of Darwin I have ever read, he is constantly generous, respectful, and professional. Coyne suggests that the problem does not lie with Darwin but with Wilson, who evidently makes many errors in this book:

In the most embarrassing error, Wilson claims that the first 50 pages of an important Darwin notebook have been lost forever, asserting that Darwin destroyed them to hide his intellectual cribbing from his contemporary Edward Blyth. In reality, Darwin simply placed those pages in a folder for later use, and they can easily be found online. Whatever Wilson was doing during the five years he spent researching and writing this book, it bears little relation to what we call “scholarship.”

According to Coyne, the same problem that lies at the heart of the book is the same philosophical problem that affects every anti-evolutionist: Darwin simply had to be incorrect about his ideas.  He simply had to be:

Why the sustained animus against Darwin? I think Wilson’s issue is not really Darwin but his ideas. “Darwin was wrong,” is how he opens the book, referring to the theory of evolution. Wilson plainly dislikes evolutionary biology, but, lacking scientific credentials, is not in a position to provide a thorough scientific critique of the field. Instead, he seems to have written a biography — a task he is at least in principle qualified for, having written 20 books on history — as a platform to launch an assault on evolution. Darwin’s character is simply collateral damage.

This kind of book is frustrating on so many levels.  The author has no knowledge of the subject matter so he makes unsophisticated attacks, and he is philosophically opposed to the subject matter so he deems it “bad.”

I once likened this sort of thing to bugs and a bug zapper.  Evolution is such a tempting target that even people that are absolutely unqualified to address it simply can't stay away.  We have seen this with Nancy Pearcey, Eric Metaxas, and others.  It is unfortunate that the reading public find these people informative on the topic.  As someone (probably not Mark Twain) once said: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  Are these people absolutely lying?  Maybe not, but if they continue to repeat the same misinformation time and time again, even after they have been corrected, what difference does it make?

Another Republican Gets Evolution Wrong

This time, it is Rush Limbaugh, who, in one of his daily shows, questioned the wisdom of evolution.  Writing about the unfortunate incident in which the gorilla, Harambe, was shot to protect a human child, Rush stated:

A lot of people think that all of us used to be gorillas, and they're looking for the missing link out there. The evolution crowd. They think we were originally apes. I've always had a question: If we were the original apes, then how come Harambe is still an ape, and how come he didn't become one of us? "Well, that's why they're all missing link, Mr. Limbaugh. Your question is absurd." Here's one more from Ashley Byrne from PETA. "You know, the gorilla's endangered, he was 17 years old. They've had him for quite a long time."

Rush, if my children came from my wife, why is my wife still alive? This notion that evolution is strictly linear has been known to be wrong since the time of Charles Darwin, yet it is perpetuated by people who don't like evolution but won't learn anything about it.  This is why we have systematics.  As a refresher to Rush, here is a diagram that I concocted during one of my back and forths with someone about my BioLogos post on hominins of the Middle Pliocene:

In this example, there is no straight lineal relationship between any two forms.  In fact, the one salient feature of systematics is that it can only delineate taxonomic sister groups, it cannot delineate ancestor-descendant relationships.  There is no such thing as the "missing link."  Viewed within this prism,  it becomes apparent that transitional forms abound in the fossil record.  Think of the form Gerobatrachus hottoni, otherwise known as the “frogamander.”  It has the basal characteristics of both frogs and salamanders and represents the stem group to both of those forms.  Everything that follows in each node, leading to salamanders and frogs, is transitional.

This is how modern evolutionary theory is practiced.   It would sure be nice if some news people would learn this.

What Happens When You Get Cited by Young Earth Creationists

This is an issue that has plagued Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the past, when you get misquoted by a young-earth creationist.  Now, Dave Hone has written a column for the Guardian about how this has affected him personally:

Recently, I spotted a short creationist essay that had cited a paper of mine on various recent pterosaur finds and which was supposed to be some kind of response to an article written for the Observer. The creationist piece attempted to argue that these new discoveries helped support the idea that these pterosaurs were made by a creator. Oddly enough, I was left rather unconvinced, not least because of the obvious mangling of some fairly simple and very well-known history that contradicts the arguments presented in some delightfully ironic ways.

For a long time, pterosaurs were regarded as rather inept fliers and little more than unusual gliding reptiles, but this view has been overturned with more modern studies. In his piece on how our understanding has changed with new research, palaeontologist Dr Mark Witton wrote in the Observer that in the past, pterosaurs had been regarded as little more than “gargoyles with lanky limbs”. Our valiant creation-support correspondent then asks “Was th[is] description… a result of mere evolutionary speculation? Based on seeing pterosaur fossils occur in strata below other flying vertebrates, perhaps evolutionists reasoned that pterosaurs evolved first and therefore represented evolution’s initial, clumsy attempts to produce large flyers.”

Ah. Now, you see, there are a fair few issues here. Although the idea of changing species had been around for many years, there’s a good reason that biologists give so much credit to Darwin and On the Origin of Species for laying down the foundations of natural selection and ideas about changes over time. Darwin’s work was published in 1859, but pterosaurs were discovered around 1780 (see Wellnhofer, 2008; a point made in Witton’s piece but mysteriously overlooked). Early thoughts about them could therefore hardly have been influenced by “evolutionists” as there can’t really have been many around. Indeed, early researchers had considered pterosaurs might be marsupials and amphibians, or perhaps swimming animals (Wellnhofer, 1991) before most settled on flying reptiles.

Because the writer does not have the background to properly assess the prehistory of pterosaurs, he makes rudimentary, silly mistakes that destroy his own argument. This is, sadly common in young-earth creation circles and I have dealt with it with regards to the inept posts on AiG's site by David Menton and Elizabeth Mitchell, in which, clearly not knowing anything about the fossil record, they make suspect claims about the individual fossils that do not bear up under close analysis. 

Another hatchet job by AiG.

A Darwin Day Cartoon

Ardziv Simonian,  at Exodus (A travel site), has put together a cartoon in celebration of Darwin Day.  It is a humorous look at the life of Charles Darwin and can be found here.

Petition to Ban Creationism and ID

A petition has been submitted to Whitehouse.gov that calls for the banning of young earth creationism and intelligent design in the public schools.  Here is the text of the petition:

Since Darwin's groundbreaking theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, scientists all around the world have found monumental amounts of evidence in favor of the theory, now treated as scientific fact by 99.9% of all scientists.

However, even after 150 years after the establishment of evolution, some schools across the US are "teaching the controversy," including Creationism and Intelligent Design. Both of these so-called "theories" have no basis in scientific fact, and have absolutely zero evidence pointing towards these conjectures. These types of loopholes in our education are partially to blame for our dangerously low student performances in math and science.

Therefore, we petition the Obama Administration to ban the teachings of these conjectures that contradict Evolution.

The petition has 24,345 signatures so far and needs 100,000 for the Obama administration to even look at it. The problem is that a Whitehouse.gov account is required and, anymore these days, people are skittish about giving the government any more information than they have to. Even if it got the signatures and was contemplated, it is doubtful that such a ban would be approved.

Io9 Misses the Point

George Dvorsky at io9 thinks that the new Pope believes in evolution, but then gives us absolutely no evidence to back that claim up. He writes:

The answer is actually yes. And in fact, the Roman Catholic Church has recognized Darwinian evolution for the past 60 years. It openly rejects Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creationism saying that it "pretends to be science." But the Church’s unique take on the theory, what it calls theistic evolution, still shows that Catholics have largely missed the point.

He then proceeds to document the church's position on evolution all the way up through Pope Benedict VI. Consequently, we know no more about Pope Francis then we did. That is not the principle problem with this post, however. The principle problem is a maddening inability to distinguish between proximate and ultimate causes. About theistic evolution, he continues:

But it's here where the Church falls flat. This is the classic argument made by all reconciliationists — the idea that religion and Darwinian natural selection can work in harmony together. It’s a “want my cake and eat it too” proposition that largely ignores the potency of Darwin’s dangerous idea as a God killer.

Darwin’s theory provides for a stand alone system. Evolution is fully autonomous process that does not require any guiding “rationality” (Benedict’s term) to function. It’s an agonizingly slow, brutish, and insanely methodical process, but it works.

Moreover, it has given rise to the concept of scientific naturalism — the idea that the material world and all the phenomena we see around us can be explained without having to invoke an architect or overseer. All the evidence currently points to this conclusion, and until science reveals any hint of supernatural meddling — which it has not – we will continue to have to accept naturalism as the ongoing scientific paradigm.

Here is has invoked Daniel Dennett's argument that acceptance of evolution necessitates a rejection of belief in God, something that Darwin himself never wrote or said at any point in time. The idea that it might be a "God Killer" is unique to modern atheism. He is correct that Darwinian evolution explains past and present biodiversity very well but so what? Modern cosmology explains the universe quite well too and yet there are Christians who practice it. The same is true with geology (Davis Young, Carol Hill) where known laws set out by Lyell and others are the basis for the modern understanding of how the earth behaves. These are no more or less self-contained than evolutionary theory.

By invoking a "Cake and eat it too" dichotomy, Dvorsky has practiced a philosophically naturalistic reductionism that sees the belief in God and evolution as a zero-sum game, which it is not.

Barry Fagin: Darwin Day reminds us of intellectual integrity

Barry Fagin reminds us of why evolutionary theory is such a good one and why it has withstood the test of time. He writes:

Evolution is a fact, but it is also a theory, in its most beautiful, scientific sense: A unifying set of ideas that withstands challenges from alternative explanations, connecting with existing knowledge in a consistent and powerful way.

There are maybe half a dozen or so truly great Theories in the history of humanity. These bold ideas are not only supported by an unimaginably vast quantity of evidence, but are also stunningly beautiful. Isaac Newton gave us the Theory of Gravitation in Principia Mathematica. Two centuries later, Albert Einstein made it even more beautiful with his Theory of General Relativity. In between the two, Darwin gave us Origin of Species.

Evolution predicted that genetic information should be transmitted through a discrete, copying process that should be almost exact but with some errors. Scientists later discovered DNA, the molecule that did exactly that. It has accurately predicted what certain fossils should look like and how old they would be when found. Today, it identifies the most fruitful paths for new drug development. Without the knowledge produced by the Theory of Evolution, advanced genetic medical therapies would not be possible.

He is quite correct. Even creationists such as Todd Wood recognize the power of this theory as an explanatory framework and the evidence behind it. It is evident, even from the comments, though, that there are many who hold on to outdated or wrong conceptions of the theory. That is a shame.

Letters of Alfred Russel Wallace Online

The collected letters of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, have been put online by the Natural History Museum.  Wallace was the subject of a chapter in the David Quammen book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. The chapter was called "The Man Who Knew Islands." Where Darwin used the Galapagos Islands and the terrain of South America to devise his theory, Wallace used the islands of Indonesia.  The site is billed as having:

• iconic correspondence between Wallace and Charles Darwin about evolution by natural selection
• important observations and discoveries made when in the Malay Archipelago (1854 - 1862)
• fascinating discussions on a variety of subjects, scientific and social such as glaciology, anthropology, epidemiology, astrobiology, socialism, land reform and spiritualism

Wallace was a spiritualist and began to infuse his scientific writings with spiritualism, a development which dismayed Darwin, who had gone to great lengths to show that natural selection could be thought of in scientific terms, alone.

Yet Another "Beside the Point" Post From the Discovery Institute

Michael Flannery pens yet another tiring post about the theology of Charles Darwin, as if, somehow, the religious persuasions of Darwin have any bearing on evolutionary theory.  He writes:

Darwin frequently claimed to be in a theological muddle. He often assumed this posture in letters to close friends and colleagues. But when it came to taking a stand on religion, the separation of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to have emboldened him. This is evident in his staunch support of American freethinker Francis Abbot (1836-1903), founder of the Free Religious Association and editor of its radical weekly voice, The Index. In the December 23, 1871, issue Darwin gave a rare and unequivocal glimpse of his religious beliefs. Responding to Abbot's radical manifesto Truths for the Times, he wrote that he admired Abbot's "truths" "from my inmost heart; and I agree to almost every word," adding, "The points on which I doubtfully differ are unimportant." So what exactly were those "truths" to which Darwin gave his complete -- even passionate -- approval?

It is fairly well known that Darwin rejected the idea of a personal savior due, in large part to the death of his beloved daughter Anna.  Darwin made no secret of this and no secret of the fact that he thought that intelligence and religious understanding had evolved.  Flannery continues:

Darwin's secular humanism and radical materialism was no late additions to his thinking either. In the spring of 1838, long before he had unveiled his theory to the world, Darwin asked in his private notebook, "Why is thought, being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, it is our admiration of ourselves." Ironically, by dethroning god Darwin committed the greatest hubris of all: admiring only his theory and pacing his faith in man.

In light of this there would seem to be only three choices for theistic evolutionists. First, simply accept the incompatibility -- learn to live with the contradictory idea that a God of purpose and intentionality has created and sustained a universe of (in John Herschel's famous phrase) "higgledy-piggledy." After all, God can do what He wills.

His other two options are humanism and nihilism.

This is nonsense. Albert Einstein contributed more to the study of relativity and quantum physics than anybody before or since. Yet we know that, despite his belief in a higher power, he also rejected a personal God. Should all physicists adopt his theological perspectives as well? Of course not. His theological views are divorced from his studies in physics, just like our study of evolutionary biology have no bearing on our theological views, unless it is to show us the grandeur and inventiveness of God's creation. Some who accept evolution are Christians, some are deists, and some are atheists, just as there are some of each that practice physics.

He closes with this gem:

But then why trust the theory that emanated from Darwin's mind any more than those of a monkey's? Whether it's his theory of evolution or his ideas about god that emanate from it, the monkey is still on Darwin's back.

Aside from being insulting, I wonder if Mr. Flannery is aware that the idea of natural selection was co-authored by Alfred Russel Wallace. Would he also fit Wallace into his thinking?  Furthermore, I wonder if he is aware of the 150 years of evolutionary research that have not only corroborated Darwin's and Wallace's theoretical constructs but extended them to include population mathematics, genetics, biogeography and a whole host of disciplines.  Probably not.  Like David Klinghoffer and David Berlinski, also from the Discovery Institute, he seems trapped in the late 1800s. 

More Trouble For the “Ark-n-Park”

The financial troubles continue for the Creation Museum's Noah's Ark display, or as Barry Lynn affectionately calls it, the “Ark-n-Park.” Yes, I used the possessive because AiG is up to their eyeballs in the project. Liz Goodwin, of Yahoo, writes:

When you walk into the Creation Museum, one of the first things you see is an exhibit of a doe-eyed human child crouched next to a velociraptor dinosaur. The two seem not at all surprised that their epochs have collided. Homo sapiens and velociraptors missed each other by a good 65 million years, according to most scientists, but in the world of the Creation Museum, humans and dinosaurs were created on the same day 6,000 years ago, coexisting peacefully in the Garden of Eden. A thousand years later, a 600-year-old man ushered them onto Noah's ark.

Velociraptors, huh? You mean these things? The ones with retractable claws and sharp teeth? The best killing machines in the dinosaur world?



She continues:

The group initially announced that it expected to break ground on the park in 2011, before eventually pushing that date back to 2014. But in June, in an interview in the Creation Museum's “Noah's Cafe,” Ark Encounter vice president Michael Zovath told Yahoo News that the group no longer has a date in mind for the construction to begin. It has been unable to raise sufficient amounts of money, despite pleas to the Creation Museum's visitors to donate to the project.

“Fundraising is really tough,” Zovath said, blaming the recession. “It's not moving so fast as we hoped.” The private LLC that is building the park would need to raise another $20 million before it can break ground, he said. So far, it's taken in $5.6 million in donations and $17 million in private investments.

To add to the bad news, the Creation Museum is having its lowest attendance year yet. Last fiscal year, 280,000 people visited, compared to 404,000 the first year it opened in 2007. Zovath thinks that potential visitors have been less willing to travel to the museum because of the poor economy.

Yah, well, that is probably true. The economy has had that kind of effect on a lot of businesses. I suspect that the project will eventually be built. After all, as Murphy once said:“No one can kill a bad idea.” She ends with:

Sometimes, the museum tackles evolution and its huge disagreement with science head-on, through exhibits on Charles Darwin and the Grand Canyon. At other times, certain displays seemed to entirely ignore the scientific consensus on an issue. A show on finches, a small type of bird that helped Darwin first hypothesize that one species of animal could turn into many different species, doesn't mention their key role in his scientific discovery. "Scientists are puzzled how so many finch species could arise, displaying such a vast array of traits," the exhibit reads. "The Bible provides the explanation. In the beginning of time, six thousand years ago, God created every kind of bird, including the finch kind, and He gave them the ability to 'multiply upon the earth.'"

No, actually, they aren't puzzled
at
all.

This is the kind of thing that makes me a very hateful person. Darwin's explanation for why the finches were different has been around for 150 years. But aside from the fact that Darwin used the finches because it was a good illustration of selection in different environments, the above statement is nothing short of a lie. A lie written with a straight face and behind which there is no compunction to tell the truth. It is this moral turpitude that allows them to say that there are no transitional fossils as well.

This is why I have no respect for Ken Ham or what he does. If the Ark-n-Park doesn't get built, that will be one less blight on the landscape.

Rediscovery of a Lifetime

According to a story in Planet Earth Online, a large cache of fossils has been rediscovered at the British Geological Survey, some of which produced quite a surprise. Adele Rackley writes:

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a palaeontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London was in the BGS archive looking for carboniferous fossil-wood specimens when he made the discovery.

"I spotted some drawers marked "unregistered fossil plants", he recalls. "I can't resist a mystery, so I pulled one open. What I found inside made my jaw drop!"Inside were hundreds of fossil plants, polished into thin translucent sheets known as 'thin sections' and captured in glass slides so they could be studied under a microscope.

Falcon-Lang's jaw dropped even further when he began to take out the slides. One of the first he looked at was labelled 'C. Darwin Esq.'

These were, in fact, some of the fossils that Charles Darwin had brought back from the trip aboard the Beagle. They had been given for safe keeping to Joseph Hooker and, somehow, just slipped through the cracks. It does give one a picture of the enormity of how much was being discovered even at that time. There is, in fact, a dirty secret in that most museums display only a fraction of what they actually have in their vaults, much of which is uncatalogued. Remember that the next time that someone tells you that the fossil record has gaps in it.

Transgenerationally Acquired Resistance?

A new article by Rechavi et al, in the journal Cell (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2011.10.042) is reporting on research involving the introduction of a flockhouse virus into a nematode, which then triggered an immune response to suppress the virus. This response, apparently was then transmitted to its offspring in a non-Mendelian fashion. As the authors put it:

We have described here a series of genetic experiments that provide support for the existence of non-Mendelian, multigenerational inheritance of extrachromosomal information. This information is transmitted in the form of small RNAs, viRNAs, which are induced by an episode of viral replication and which are propagated through the germline in a non-template-dependent manner. Our results therefore support the Lamarckian concept of the inheritance of an acquired trait.

This will, no doubt, raise eyebrows and spawn a number of independent tests to confirm the results. Cornelius Hunter hopped on the bandwagon, writing:

This is of course reminiscent of the pre Darwin theory proposed by Jean Baptiste Larmarck that evolution occurs via traits developing not via random change but in response to need, and then the passing of these traits to later generations. Evolutionists harshly criticized, ridiculed and blackballed Larmarckism in the last century but now even they are finding it difficult to deny the accumulation of evidence.

Three things Hunter overlooks here is that Lamarck came up with his theory of acquired inheritance in absence of any other model out there to explain biological descent with modification, he was looking at large order traits such as appendage length, hair color and whatnot and that, despite some growing evidence for epigenetic evolution, there is still a vast amount of evidence for evolution based on the well-heeled processes of mutation, selection, drift and flow. It should, nonetheless, be interesting to see what comes of this.

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The Charles Darwin Two Pound Coin

Great Britain has released a coin that has Charles Darwin's head and that of a chimpanzee looking at each other. It is in honor of his 200th birthday. Here is an image of it.



Unless you live in a large city, my guess is you will have to order it online. I know I will have to.


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The Mendacious David Klinghoffer

To borrow a phrase: Either David Klinghoffer isn't very bright or he doesn't think his readers are. Over at Evolution News and Views, he has taken the tragic circumstances at the Discovery Channel involving the unhinged gunman who took the station hostage and turned them into an anti-evolution tirade in a post titled "James J. Lee, Hostage-taker and Darwinist". The gunman made a list of demands, many of them written in terse, angry tones. One such demand demanded we stop showing programs of the "

...birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed."

Another demand reads:

"Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??"

The point here is that the gunman clearly had a psychotic break with reality. What precipitated this can only be guessed. It is not the first time a mentally unstable person took hostages and it will not be the last.

But what got our esteemed Dr. Klinghoffer upset was demand number 7, which reads:

"Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!"

He mentions Thomas Malthus three times, always in the context of overpopulation. One of the influences of Charles Darwin was the essay that the Reverend Malthus wrote about human overpopulation. Darwin understood that the reason that overpopulation HAD NOT happened was because there was competition for resources. Malthus' essay on population growth¹ was a hypothetical model only. The gunman wasn't concerned about evolution. That was not what was driving his anger. Overpopulation and pollution were driving his anger. That is obvious on the face of it—to everyone except David Klinghoffer, who then uncorks this:

My purpose here, of course, isn't to suggest that Darwinism drives people mad or anything like that, but merely to point out, as I've done in the past, the strange attraction Darwinian theory exerts on some people who are crazy, or wicked, or both. This is a truth that's suppressed again and again, yet it remains true.

This is a blatant misrepresentation of what the gunman's concerns were and if Klinghoffer doesn't know that he should. If he does, and I suspect he does, then that is mendacious behavior. His point may not be to suggest that Darwinism drives people mad but it is to suggest that there is a connexion between adherence to the theory and the kind of behaviour exhibited by the gunman.

Toward the bottom of the piece, he lists a litany of names of people supposedly informed by Darwin who have gone on rampages and killed multiple times before being either arrested or themselves, killed. That all of these individuals are mentally unbalanced is something that Klinghoffer conveniently leaves out. He also mentions both Hitler and Stalin as being inspired by Darwin, connexions that are easily rebutted, something else that Klinghoffer fails to notice.

But just for the sake of argument, lets say he is right and that "Darwinism" is an ideology that leads people to violence against their fellow man. I wonder what other ideologies might do the same thing? As I mentioned in a post several months back, Jeffrey Schloss has addressed this issue. He writes:

The historical record amply and indisputably confirms the fact that references to Darwin and to ideological principles attributed to the evolutionary process were frequently employed by the intellectual architects of the Reich, at the very least in this way. That Darwin was used (or abused) in Holocaust thinking seems uncontestable. But it is also not necessarily very interesting. Darwin has been used in this way for many other social movements very different from fascist eugenics: e.g., racial egalitarianism, feminism, anti-feminism, Marxism, and free enterprise capitalism. Big ideas can be used, or misused, for all manner of big causes, and Darwinism – like the Bible – has been claimed to justify or inspire many.

Klinghoffer seems to think the connexion between Darwin and Hitler is worthy of mention. What about the connexion between Christianity and Hitler? Richard Steigmann-Gall, in his article Apostasy or Religiosity? writes:

Many bishops of the Lutheran state churches saw in Nazism the explicit fulfillment of a Protestant politics. In 1931 the Lutheran Landesbisch of Mecklenburg, Heinrich Rendtorff, proclaimed:

"Many members of the Protestant Church today live with their complete thought and feeling in the National Socialist movement. The Protestant Church is therefore obliged, by its calling, to seek out the individual and to serve him, to seek him in his own circle, which means especially in the National Socialist movement.... The National Socialist movement passionately affirms social thought and brotherhood. Therefore it stands for a concern which is also one for the Protestant Church.... The Protestant Church must, for the sake of its calling, hear and thankfully greet the great intent coming out of the National Socialist movement."

After Hitler's appointment, Rendtorff was no less enthusiastic: 'The Protestant communities of Mecklenburg should know in this hour that their state church in its faith says ajoyful and strong yes to German Volkstum ... to the German nation'. Even many confessional Lutherans who would later join the Confessing Church subscribed to these political views. The most noteworthy in this regard was Otto Dibelius, the General Superintendent and later Bishop of Brandenburg. After the NSDAP's electoral breakthrough in September I930, he certified the Nazi movement as Christian: 'The National Socialists, as the strongest party of the right, have shown both by their programme and their practical deportment in Thuringia that they have a firm, positive relationship to Christianity ... We may expect that they will remain true to their principles in the new Reichstag.' After the seizure of power Dibelius continued to view Nazism this way, even to the point of excusing Nazi brutality.²

From this account, it is clear that the organized church was not just aware of Nazism but had wholeheartedly embraced this ideology that was responsible for the killing of over 6 million jews. What are we to make of this? If "Darwinism" is responsible for Hitler, than surely "Christianity" is as well. Are we to take from this that both ideologies are evil and we should actively fight against them and their followers?

Or is it just possible that Schloss is right: that just because someone misapplies a scientific theory or even an ideology is not necessarily a reflection on those that promulgated it or even of the theory or ideology, itself. Darwin was no more responsible for the killings at Colombine than was Jesus for the gassing of the Jews. I, somehow, don't think that Klinghoffer would be willing to place the blame for racism, genocide and the evil of the twentieth century at the foot of Jesus Christ. Nor should he. The problem is not with the ideologies but with Klinghoffer's facile argument.

¹Malthus, T. (1817). An essay on the principle of population, as it affects the future improvement of society. With remarks on the speculations of mr. Godwin, m. Condorcet, and other writers. By TR Malthus.
²Steigmann-Gall, R. (2000). Apostasy or religiosity? The cultural meanings of the Protestant vote for Hitler. Social History, 25(3), 267-284.

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Panda's Thumb Reminds Us...

...that it is "Happy Lamarck Day." Lamarck is remembered chiefly for incorporation of an ingenious but ultimately failed hypothesis on why things evolved that involved organisms passing on traits that they had subsumed within the course of their lives. He knew organisms changed and evolved, but like so many, he struggled for a mechanism. As Panda's Thumb points out in a related post:

Two misconceptions:

• He was not a pseudoscientist or a quack, but was the great figure of invertebrate biology (he coined the word “invertebrate” and the word “biology”).
• He was not the originator or major advocate of inheritance of acquired characters (miscalled “Lamarckian inheritance”). He accepted it and used it in his mechanism, but he had nothing to do with its wide acceptance.

Like Darwin, Lamarck has been widely misunderstood and should also serve as a reminder that there were many researchers during the late 1700s and early to mid 1800s that were coming to understand that natural organisms evolved. It was not until Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that a workable mechanism was devised. These are facts that largely get lost on most anti-evolution proponents.

David Klinghoffer Practices Reductio ad Hitlerum Over at HuffPo

David Klinghoffer has written another article over at the Huffington Post (cross-posted at the Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views) on the connexion between Hitler and Darwin. This ought to be some sort of corollary to Godwin's Law. He writes:

While barbarism has been going on for as long as there have been human beings, there was something different about the 20th century. The world had never seen anything quite like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. And it was not only a matter of the technology available to them. Treating people as vermin to be exterminated was a new thing under the sun. Eugenics programs in United States and later Germany were warm-up acts for the mass slaughters that were to come.

Hitler's ideas, Dr. Berlinski carefully notes, "came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin." A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology "weren't reading the Gospels."

Darwin elaborated a picture of how the world works, how creatures war with each other for survival thus selecting out the fittest specimens and advancing the species. In this portrait of animal life, man is no exception. Any animal that strives to preserve the weak, as man does, is committing racial suicide. "Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind," Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, a policy "highly injurious to the race of man."

The reason that "honest accounts" omit Darwin is that Hitler did not think evolution applied to humans. I have commented on this here, here and, most importantly, here. In 1942, Hitler said, in a speech:

“Where do we get the right to believe that humans have not been, from the very beginning, what they are today? A look into nature shows us that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments occur. But nowhere in a species does a development occur that is further from the origin which people must have made if they evolved (developed) from their ape-like condition to that which they are now.”

That Darwin was responsible for Hitler and Stalin is a persistent meme at the Discovery Institute and creationist movements. It is ironic that the man, himself, did not accept evolution as it applied to humans. Hitler, in this speech, clearly argues that the animal kingdom and humans are separate creations. Further, Hitler went out of his way to systematically eradicate groups of people that he thought were inferior. This is counter to how evolution would proceed. Had Hitler actually proceeded along biologically evolutionary themes, he would have assumed that nature would eventually cull out the inferior "races." In proper evolutionary theory, there is no such thing as "helping it along."

Equally ironically, if Stalin had applied Darwinian evolutionary principles to his agricultural program, the Soviet Union would not have suffered from such bad famines during his reign of terror. He specifically adopted Lamarckian evolutionary principles and the regime purged those that accepted Darwinian ideas. The results were a total disaster.

But the principle problem with this piece (and this is a problem with all of Klinghoffer's pieces on this subject) is that it is also Reductio ad Hitlerum. It is clear that the early 20th century saw a rise in biological determinism and eugenics. It is also clear that some people took some of what Darwin (and others) wrote and warped it beyond what it was intended ever to mean. As Jeffrey Schloss writes:

The historical record amply and indisputably confirms the fact that references to Darwin and to ideological principles attributed to the evolutionary process were frequently employed by the intellectual architects of the Reich, at the very least in this way. That Darwin was used (or abused) in Holocaust thinking seems uncontestable. But it is also not necessarily very interesting. Darwin has been used in this way for many other social movements very different from fascist eugenics: e.g., racial egalitarianism, feminism, anti-feminism, Marxism, and free enterprise capitalism. Big ideas can be used, or misused, for all manner of big causes, and Darwinism – like the Bible – has been claimed to justify or inspire many.

When we follow this line of thought, it continues to go very wrong for Klinghoffer's argument. Schloss continues:

In fact, the Bible and the Christian tradition themselves were used to justify the anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. Martin Luther’s fierce denunciation of Jews (“everyone would gladly be rid of them,” “we are at fault in not slaying them”)51 was frequently referred to by Hitler and other influential anti-Semites. Luther was lauded as the “greatest anti-Semite of his time,” and the infamous Kristallnacht on the night of November 9/10, when my own grandfather was taken to a concentration camp, was celebrated with the applauding observation that “on Luther’s birthday,the synagogues are burning in Germany."

It seems that if we are to lay the fault of the genocide in Germany at the feet of Charles Darwin, we would be well to lay it at the feet of Martin Luther as well. The problem is that the simplistic idea of blaming Charles Darwin for the genocide of the 20th century perpetrated by the Nazis reflects a rather one-dimensional view of history and a complete misunderstanding of the complex events that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Is it true that ideas have consequences? Yes, but should we hold a man responsible for his ideas if those ideas are badly misinterpreted? Early 19th century Christians justified the subjugation of Blacks based on the story of the three sons of Noah and the misguided idea that one of the sons, who was less favored, gave rise to the Blacks. Shall we blame the Bible for racism?

You cannot hold a man responsible for his ideas if the abuse of those ideas lead to events or movements that he would have condemned. Darwin did not endorse the killing of the "weak members" of the human race. He simply knew that humans were capable of emotions that would lead to the preservation of those who would not ordinarily survive. Darwin, himself, was perfectly aware of the differences between humans and lower animals and how humans were to behave to each other. He wrote in his autobiography:

If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.

Darwin would have condemned the modern eugenics movement and the rise of Nazi Germany. This is something that never occurs to Klinghoffer.

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The Evolution of On the Origins of Species

Ben Fry has come up with an interesting take on how Charles Darwin's book On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection changed over time. As Mr. Fry notes:

Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin's ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime.

It is a little hard to figure out exactly what is going on at first blush but if you spend some time with it, it holds a wealth of information. Each column is a chapter of the book and you can see how things were added based on the color-key at the bottom from the first through the sixth edition. Neat.

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