ID Supporter Has Wikipedia Page Erased

Okay, this is just snotty.  Günter Bechly is a palaeontologist who was at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.  Recently, Dr. Bechly came out in favor of Intelligent Design.  For this crime, he has had his Wikipedia erased.  According to David Klinghoffer, at Evolution and Science Today (used to be Evolution News and Views):

Our distinguished paleontologist colleague Günter Bechly was erased from Wikipedia after he came out as a proponent of the theory of intelligent design. That, in turn, was after he had already been pushed out of his curator role at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, for the same reason. The editors at Wikipedia obscured their treatment of Günter, a world-class expert on dragonflies, by claiming his heresy on ID had nothing to do with the decision to excise him. Instead, they innocently proclaimed that it was due to the realization that he isn’t “notable” enough for the online encyclopedia.

I’ve already pointed out the problems with this contention, and noted that the editors of Bechly’s page and of the grossly distorted Intelligent Design page itself make little effort to hide the ideological axes they grind. There’s little mystery about what happened to Dr. Bechly, or to another ID advocate, Walter Bradley at Baylor University, whose Wiki entry was shredded to near nothing. This is one way the scientific consensus on evolution is maintained, by threatening dissenters. For a scientist, having your accomplishments erased is the ultimate punishment. Wiki editors meanwhile indulge atheist nobodies with extensive biography entries.

Aside from Klinghoffer's usual histrionic bluster about silencing people who disagree with “Darwinism,” (Ken Ham, Henry Morris, John Morris, Stephen Myer, Michael Behe and, yes, even Klinghoffer, himself, have Wikipedia pages) the timing is very suspicious.  Additionally, if you thought he was well-known enough to have a Wikipedia page, why is he suddenly not so?  His page needs to be restored. This just makes Wikipedia look bad and smacks of censorship.

David Coppedge, Redux

David Klinghoffer has a post for "Evolution, News and Views" in which he defends David Coppedge, the erstwhile NASA technician who claimed he was fired from his job at JPL because of his intelligent design support. Coppedge has a fifteen-minute video in which he recounts the affair.   In typical hystrionic fashion, Klinghoffer writes:

Of all the cases we've covered here where scientists and others have been persecuted for sharing ideas favorable to intelligent design, what happened to David Coppedge is arguably the most reprehensible. That's partly because Coppedge, working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab as a team lead on the Cassini Mission to Saturn, wasn't a PhD scientist with the space agency. He was a computer administrator, albeit a senior one, and therefore by definition a less powerful, more vulnerable player in the science world.

Klinghoffer either has not read the trial transcripts or chooses not to remember them. Coppedge sued NASA and it came out during the trial that he was a difficult employee who was hard to get along with.  My original post on this trial, and Klinghoffer's reaction to it, is here.  Newsvine wrote, at the time (link no longer works):

At trial, JPL attorney Cameron Fox contended Coppedge was a stubborn and disconnected employee who decided not to heed warnings to get additional training, even when it became clear the Cassini mission would be downsized and computer specialist positions eliminated.

Coppedge often was confrontational and insensitive to customers and colleagues, who had complained about his behavior and his advocacy of intelligent design, Fox said.

I remarked, then, that Klinghoffer was focusing on the wrong aspects of the trial, a situation in which the Cassini project was being downsized and Coppedge was well aware of this at the time.

As in the case of Richard Sternberg, the details are what matter.

Klinghoffer Responds to the Retraction

David Klinghoffer followed up his initial post about the grasping hand paper with a post involving its inevitable retraction.  Called Censorship in Real Time, he writes:

That was fast. The sound of one hand clapping? Now, it's no hands. Besieged by a furious mob of censors, the editors at the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE have retracted a paper on the "architecture" of the human hand that repeatedly invoked notions of "design" and a "Creator."

This was in the works so it is not a surprise that it happened. It is true that there was a good deal of hand-waving in the process but the claims had no place in a paper of that sort. Then Klinghoffer writes this:

I must note here that the theory intelligent design does not infer a "Creator," a religious idea that goes beyond what the scientific evidence says. ID infers a source of intelligence, and leaves it to others to argue about the identity of the source.

This comment is illogical on its face and cuts to the heart of the position that the Discovery Institute has tried to take.  Something either arose by chance or it was created.  It cannot be neither.  If it did not arise by chance, which is the position of many of the DI fellows on different aspects of our anatomy (eye, blood-clotting cascade), then it was created.  If it was created, then by whom or what?  ID absolutely does infer a creator.

While it is quite true that they do their best to deflect attention away from the Christian God as the source of these creations,  it was shown pretty conclusively at Dover that the two are linked at the hip.  This is further exacerbated by public pronouncements by prominent ID proponents such as William Dembski that ID represents the Logos of John's Gospel restated in information theory (1999) as well as their preferred choice of venues for conferences.

That being said, whether or not it is the Christian God or Cosmic Muffin,  it is a “creator.” 

That Didn't Take Long...

Sure enough, the Discovery Institute's David Klinghoffer has penned a response to the ruckus involving the retracted paper in PLoS ONE about the human grasping hand.  Called Mob with Pitchforks Forms as Science Journal PLOS ONE Acknowledges "Proper Design by the Creator", complete with picture of an angry mob from what looks like the 1930s. In this post, he recounts some of the comments that appeared in response to the publication of the paper:

Another self-identified editor: "As an editor of PLOS ONE, I am ashamed this ever got to be published, and I am ready to resign if this is not retracted immediately."

Still another: "There is no room in the scientific literature for Intelligent Design. This is more than just a 'language issue'."

More:

"Plos One must here intervene to avert damage from all Plos ONE publishers."

"I published three times in P One. Is my career ruined?"

"It is assumed by the scientific community that PLoS ONE is a science-driven journal. If so, this manuscript must be retracted."

"PLoS must remove this article in total, along with the Editor who handled the manuscript."

"I am appalled by this paper and its reference to a 'Creator'. This paper should be retracted immediately."

It goes on. The note of career anxiety -- no, panic -- is telling. These folks don't want to be rendered ritually impure by contact with a bit of injudicious language. Predictably, Twitter is aflutter. And the ever-useful website Retraction Watch has already reported on it. The paper's editor apologized: "I am sorry for this has happened. I am contacting PLoS one to see whether we can fix the issue."

To be sure, a good bit of this is hyperbolic. This paper ruined nobody's career. It did, however, give pause because, briefly, science is in the business of explaining the natural world in terms of natural causes. As Dennis Lamoureux once remarked (paraphrased), it is quite possible that the socks that are missing from my dryer were taken by fairies, but it is much more likely that they got sucked out the drain tube and that is something we can test.

The position that the grasping hand reflects the genius of the creator is broadly analogous to the claim made by Ray Comfort that the Banana must have been crafted by God rather than by evolution because it fits perfectly in the hand, although no such anti-evolutionary claim was made by the authors of the hand paper and Ray Comfort's claim was idiotic, in light of what we know of artificial selection of the banana.

The problem that is giving people the vapors is that the grasping hand claim is baldly non-scientific.  Science is simply not capable of determining whether or not the hand's ability to grasp is divinely bestowed or not.  That is a matter of faith.

Meanwhile, In Scotland...

On November 11, a hearing will take place in Glasgow to air a petition that will call for official guidelines that would bar teaching of creationism and ID in Scottish schools.  A local organization, C4ID (Centre for Intelligent Design) has responded to this petition.  The Scotland Herald writes:

The petition, to be heard on November 11, calls for official guidance to be issued in schools barring the presentation of creationist and Young Earth doctrines as viable alternatives to the science of evolution.

It has been backed by three Nobel-winning British scientists - Sir Harold Kroto, Sir Richard Roberts and Sir John Sulston.

Alastair Noble, director of C4ID, said his organisation believed the petition was based on imposing a "particular world view".

He ­acknowledged the idea of teaching "for and against" evolution would be controversial, but claimed it was consistent with scientific method.

But Paul Braterman, an honorary senior research fellow in chemistry at Glasgow University and committee member of the British Centre for Science Education (BCSE), a campaign to keep religion out of science classes, said C4ID was using "tired" arguments that were "merely a stalking horse for creationism".

Spencer Fildes, chairman of the Scottish Secular Society, said its concerns were about protecting science. "If you are in religious and moral education, then by all means you can philosophise about this," he said. "Students and children are welcome to discuss it, as long as it is contextual.

"Unfortunately, this does not happen, hence the reason why we have raised the petition."

This is more the David Klinghoffer arm of the ID argument, than the Stephen Meyer arm—and it tends not to carry as much traction because it specifically relies on the morality argument, which carries no weight in the science classroom.  This argument seems to regard science as some sort of "truth," to be compared to religious truth and it is nothing of the sort. 

Kenneth Miller: Darwin, Design, and the Catholic Faith

Kenneth Miller has a lengthy post for Beliefnet on evolution and faith.  There is no date on the page, so I don't know when it came out.  He writes:

Science is, just as John Paul II said, silent on the issue of ultimate purpose, an issue that lies outside the realm of scientific inquiry. This means that biological evolution, correctly understood, does not make the claim of purposelessness. It does not address what Simpson called the "deeper problem," leaving that problem, quite properly, to the realm of faith.

The rest of the argument is, in many ways, a boiled down version of the one he proposed in Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, where he argued that contingency is built into the system. He writes:

The neo-creationists of intelligent design, unlike Popes Benedict and John Paul, argue against evolution on every level, claiming that a "designer" has repeatedly intervened to directly produce the complex forms of living things. This view stands in sharp contradiction to the words of a 2004 International Theological Commission document cited by the Cardinal. In reality, this document carries a ringing endorsement of the "widely accepted scientific account" of life's emergence and evolution, describes the descent of all forms of life from a common ancestor as "virtually certain," and echoes John Paul II's observation of the "mounting support" for evolution from many fields of study.

More important, the same document makes a critical statement on how we should interpret scientific studies of the complexity of life: "whether the available data support inferences of design or chance cannot be settled by theology. But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence."

Miller is coming at this from the back side. It is a common misunderstanding that evolution is a random process. This is argued by Cardinal Schönborn (who he quotes in the post as calling evolution an “unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” ) as well as quite a few Discovery Institute fellows like David Klinghoffer and David Berlinski.  Here is the problem: natural selection is measurable and it is directional.  Therefore, if you want to argue that evolution is an “unguided, unplanned process,” than the forces that act on plants and animals in nature are unplanned and unguided as well. I doubt any Christian wants to go down that road theologically.   This is exactly contrary to what Miller is suggesting.  He argues that the events in nature are not random, as is generally conceived by philosophical naturalism, but are, instead, contingent in ways that we, perhaps, cannot understand.

The point he is making is that the scientific enterprise cannot examine this problem.  It is a theological one, not a scientific one.  It is not just that at a gross level we cannot use science to prove or disprove God's existence, but that even at a subatomic level, there is no certainty.  We act on faith, and, sometimes, that has to be enough. 

Another Conservative Drinks From the Wrong Bottle

Granville Sewell has written a piece for Human Events, titled Intelligent Design Theories Gaining Steam in Scientific Circles.  As nearly as I can tell, he has gotten everything wrong.  Lets start with who Granville Sewell is.  He is a mathematics professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and a long-time supporter of intelligent design.

First, the title is indefensible.  Whether or not he, himself, came up with it, there is no evidence whatsoever that intelligent design is gaining ground in scientific circles.  In fact, there is contra-evidence.  There have been no intelligent design-based articles published in any of the mainstream journals and the only journal that is devoted to it, Bio-Complexity, has had one article and two critical reviews published for the entire year of 2013.  The article is co-written by two members of the editorial staff, to boot.

 He writes:

Darwin thought he could explain all of this apparent design through natural selection of random variations. In spite of the fact that there is no direct evidence that natural selection can explain anything other than very minor adaptations, his theory has gained widespread popularity in the scientific world, simply because no one can come up with a more plausible theory to explain evolution, other than intelligent design, which is dismissed by most scientists as “unscientific.”

This is ignorant nonsense with an arrogant tone attached to it.  The theory of evolution has gained widespread popularity because, as a theory, it is incredibly robust, with over 150 years of evidence to back it up, coming from the fields of biology, palaeontology, biogeography, microbiology, molecular biology, geology and others.  Every year, the evidence for evolution continues to pile up as we fill in more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.  Witness recent discoveries that have shown that the first tetrapods evolved in the late Devonian in shallow seas, that feathers evolved and diversified in dinosaurs as a means of insulation before they evolved into a means of flight, or that the femur of Orrorin tugenensis shows transitional characteristics between late Miocene apes and the earliest hominins.  These are not minor adaptations.  They show selection and evolution across taxonomic levels and reflect predictions about what would be found in the fossil record IF evolution were true.

He writes: 

But, in recent years, as scientific research has continually revealed the astonishing dimensions of the complexity of life, especially at the microscopic level, support for Darwin’s implausible theory has continued to weaken, and since the publication in 1996 of Darwin’s Black Box by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, a growing minority of scientists have concluded, with Behe, that there is no possible explanation for the complexity of life other than intelligent design.

Really?

Contrast the publication record of Bio-Complexity with the journal Evolution which, in 2013 alone, published 200 articles. Furthermore, Journal Citation Reports lists 29 journals that have "evolution" in the title. This does not even count those that publish articles on evolution, such as The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Cell and Systematic Biology to name just a few.

With regard to the "growing minority of scientists,"  if he is referring to the "Dissent From Darwin" list put out by the Discovery Institute, that constitutes no evidence against evolution whatever.  When I analyzed the list a few years back, I found:

13 physicists, 1 plasma physicist, 10 biochemists, 24 chemists, 8 engineers, 7 mathematicians, 2 psychologists, 13 geneticists, and 5 medical doctors.

There are only five geologists on the list, and one lone palaeontologist on it. 

Like most ID writers such as David Berlinski, Cornelius Hunter and David Klinghoffer, he argues that there is dichotomy between accepting evolution and ID:

If you believe that a few fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone could have rearranged the basic particles of physics into Apple iPhones, you are probably not an ID proponent, even if you believe in God. But if you believe there must have been more than unintelligent forces at work somewhere, somehow, in the whole process: congratulations, you are one of us after all!

Here is one-dimensional, reductionistic thinking on display. it is either/or. There is no third option, the evolutionary creationist, who argues that the evidence for evolution of life, in all of its 3.5 billion year existence, can be explained as the work of a fantastically inventive and creative God, who took great joy in watching his creation unfold. It is also the thinking of someone who has taken no time to actually learn the basics of evolution and what the evidence is that supports it.  As long as this is the case, we will continue to be subjected to substandard prose such as this offering by Dr. Sewell. 

Gonzalez Won't Teach ID

Guillermo Gonzalez has made a public attestation that he will not teach intelligent design at Ball State University.  As the Muncie Star Press reports:

Gonzalez, who was hired by BSU this summer as an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy, is best known for his advocacy of intelligent design.

“As I communicated to members of the department during my interviews, I plan to continue my research on astrobiology and stellar astrophysics,” Gonzalez said in a statement issued this week.

The statement reported that he will not be discussing intelligent design in the classroom, and that he did not discuss intelligent design when he taught at Iowa State University, either

That may not be enough to soothe folks like Coyne and Harris but it is a huge step forward to placate the faculty at Ball State, I am sure. It is important for him to distance himself from the modern ID movement in this sense and for them to understand that. The anti-science comments made by the faculty at Iowa State are not without merit.

It is one thing for ID supporters to believe that the universe is created and guided by an intelligence. It is another for modern ID supporters to, having no theoretical constructs of their own, take pot shots at organized science in support of their ideas.  At least "mainstream" creationism, warts and all, has a testable framework. You can test the hypothesis "the earth was created six-thousand years ago." That's easy. Trying to test the hypothesis "God created the heavens and the earth," That's hard.  Add to that the fact that the public face of ID as purveyed by people like David Klinghoffer, Cornelius Hunter, William Dembski and David Berlinski is rabidly "anti-Darwinian," and you have a science credibility problem.  Gonzalez is wise to stay well away from that. 

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. 

Klinghoffer Responds to McBride Review

David Klinghoffer, who often writes histrionically for the Discovery Institute, has written a response to Paul McBride's review of Science & Human Origins called “Paul McBridge: Darwinist Hero of the Hour.” For some reason, he clings to this word “Darwinist,” as though it actually describes anyone who practices evolutionary biology. He really means it perjoratively, of course. He writes:

Yet there's a familiar pattern where these very same bloggers, including some scientists at reputable universities, shy from actually reading material from the intelligent-design community. At best, they'll find someone else who claims to have read it and rely on his say-so that the book or article is no good.

He could say that about me and, in this instance, be correct. I have not read the book yet. He claims that Darwinists are afraid of ID arguments. This is nonsense. There are very long reviews of Signature in the Cell by a number of “Darwinists.” I have read several Phillip Johnson books and reviewed them. The problem is that the arguments don't change.

William Dembski has written several books on how he thinks complex specified information applies to biology. When people shoot holes in the arguments, he just shuts the comments down. Further, he makes no attempt to have his articles published in biology journals.

Stephen Meyer's work Signature in the Cell is based partly on Douglas Axe's work and ideas, which are then regurgitated for the new book. Those arguments haven't changed.

Instead of getting a palaeoanthropologist to write a chapter on human origins fossils, they get a lawyer who has no training in the field to do it. I don't need to read Casey Luskin's arguments against human evolution in Science & Human Origins. I have read them before. They haven't changed—even in the face of new evidence.

I intend to read the book but for now I am content that Paul McBride has identified the principle problems. They are the same ones that were present in ID five years ago.

David Coppedge and David Klinghoffer

The Pasadena Star-News is reporting that the trial of the JPL employee that worked on the Cassini spacecraft and was accused of pushing intelligent design before he was sacked has begun. Brian Day writes:

David Coppedge, who was laid off from JPL in La Canada Flintridge last year, claims his termination was motivated largely by his belief in intelligent design, and his distribution of documentary DVDs on the subject in the workplace. The theory states that the complexity and order apparent in the universe points to the intervention of an intelligence, rather than the forces of nature and chance alone.

The aerospace company has denied wrongdoing. Coppedge's termination took place during a time when the Cassini program -- a spacecraft mission to Saturn which Coppedge worked to support -- saw about a third of it's employees laid off.

The NCSE has been following this case and has put up their own page of documentation here. Interestingly, the defense case seems to rest on two things: there was a 50% cut in funding in FY 2011 for the Cassini project so that layoffs were inevitable and that David Coppedge was very hard to get along with so that when the layoffs did occur, he was not exactly a moving target. The court recorder quotes Gregory Chin:

Chin received complaints from twenty five different managers about Coppedge's uncooperative attitude and poor interpersonal skills

...“Now you used the word “Personality issues”...what didn't they like about it?”

“His personality in terms of they did not like working with him. They felt he was insincere. They would talk to him. They would believe they would not listen to them and has already formed an opinion about what he is going to do and just ignore them. He was pleasant but they felt he was being insincere about it. And I guess that annoyed them.”

The complaint goes on to list a large number of people who either were frustrated with or chose not to work with Coppedge. As someone who has worked with a coworker who doesn't listen to what you say or to anyone else around them, I can tell you that this makes for an extremely tense and frustrating work environment. This is doubly so if this person is (as was in my case) someone that you have to interact with on a daily basis.

What further comes out in this transcript is that program management had come to Chin and asked that Coppedge be removed from the project:

Q: He said it would be best to get rid of David? A: I cannot be sure of those exact words, but I am paraphrasing. He said “What can we do to get David off Cassini?”

Critical to this testimony is that these conversations took place in the early 2000s and that one of his supervisors, Clark Burgess specifically protected him at the time. When the workforce downsized, and, as they put it, jobs became tight, there was talk of moving him on to other projects. The complaints about his intelligent design support did not appear until 2009. Whether or not he was obnoxious regarding those, if we are to believe the transcripts, there certainly was ample reason to let him go when the money got tight.

David Klinghoffer, of the Discovery Institute, has written on the subject here. Klinghoffer thinks that the case is about the wrong things. He writes:

The LA Times writer is referring to Judge Hiroshige's decision not to hear from a legal scholar (not a religion expert) on the larger context of anti-ID discrimination in academia. Crucially, no one but no one on either side is asking the judge to rule on the scientific status of intelligent design. JPL's legal team and Coppedge's lawyer William Becker have cast the trial very clearly as an employment discrimination case.

In the conclusion of his statement, Becker underlined that it's all about "an employee who was treated differently because of his interest in intelligent design; who acted in a manner he thought was appropriate to protect his rights and his job, and for just that reason his job was taken away from him." (You may wish to check the final transcript for the precise quote.)

Klinghoffer remarks that it is very peculiar that, in all of these criticisms about Coppedge’s conduct, no official records were kept. He writes:

Oddly, though, none of this appears ever to have been documented contemporaneously by any of these folks, in a workplace that was otherwise very good about putting such matters down in writing. Not in reports, emails, written complaints, nothing.

This is not odd, however, if you read the testimony, in which it is noted:

Burgess did not document many criticisms in Coppedge's annual performance to maximize Coppedge's chance to transfer to another project.

Burgess states:

“Part of the transfer scenario that I imagined would be—one thing that would be involved in that would be the review of the documents by his prospective new customer and I didn't want to put too much negativity into the ECAPS.”

The testimony then continues and it records that they were trying to protect Coppedge against further, documented complaints and had even bandied around the idea of terminating him long before the ID charge surfaced in 2009. Coppedge was even advised not to continue with this particular line of conversation with his fellow employees because, in concert with the preceding problems, he was told that it would not go well for him.

Damagingly, however, Chin admits he yelled at Coppedge and created a “hostile work environment” for him. He also called Intelligent Design religion and that he was not to promote his religion in the workplace. This gave Coppedge the ammunition that he needed for the lawsuit. That does not negate the problems that JPL had with Coppedge, however.

Klinghoffer ends his article by writing:

The real question before Judge Hiroshige comes down this: Who is David Coppedge? The Coppedge that JPL depicts seems completely at odds with the Coppedge that I've come to know slightly since coming down here to Southern California and that other people tell me about. The idea that this guy could "harass" anyone is just not credible to me at the moment.

Maybe, but even if the harassment charge doesn't hold water, it doesn't mean that he was a good employee or easy to work with. JPL's defense focused on the actual problem: that Coppedge was too hard to get along with, not the Intelligent Design ruse that the Discovery Institute and Coppedge are foisting in an effort to cry wrongful termination.

When the money got tight and layoffs had to happen, JPL did what any good business would: they let go of what they considered to be a problem.


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John Evans — “Science and Religion: A False Divide?”

I missed this when it came out. John Evans of the L.A. Times (not normally a newspaper I pick up) wrote an interesting column about the controversy between science and religion and his contention that the whole thing is overhyped. He writes:

On most issues, there is actually very little conflict between religion and science. Religion makes no claims about the speed of hummingbird wings, and there are no university departments of anti-resurrection studies — scientists generally are unconcerned with the vast majority of religious claims and vice versa.

There are, of course, a few fact claims in which conservative Protestant theology and science differ, such as the origins of humans and the universe. Here we find that typical conservative Protestants are likely to believe the teaching of their religion on the issue and not the scientific claim.

We could complain that they are being inconsistent in believing the scientific method some of the time but not always. Yet social science research has long shown that people typically are not very consistent. The people who are more consistent are those who are punished for inconsistency: philosophers, media pundits, political activists and politicians.

I have often marveled at how much emphasis this topic has taken up in the media and religious world. As I pointed out in my post on the Miss America pageant, that the contestants were asked whether or not evolution should be taught in public schools had very little relevance to them. All it did was single out the religious conservatives and also point out that science education had all but failed them in this area. For your average person, the creation-evolution controversy has little traction and most view it as a curiosity of modern society. Consequently, when my church friends ask me about it, I always ask them why it is important to them to learn the science behind the old earth model since such knowledge will needlessly complicate their lives. That doesn't seem to stop them, though.

Evans has one other nugget:

The greatest conflict between fundamentalists, evangelicals and science is not over facts but over values. While scientists like to say that their work is value-free, that is not how the public views it, and conservative Protestants especially have homed in on the moral message of science.

This is a slow realization for most scientists. I tend to view evolution in much the way that I view nuclear energy: regardless of what values we attach to it, it exists—independent of those values. David Klinghoffer, over at the Discovery Institute, argues that “Darwinism” has ruined society and caused evils of all sorts, as if somehow if we brand it as evil, it will just go away.

It is also not just that the vast majority of scientists tend to view science amorally, they view attempts to infuse scientific discourse with morality with repugnance. It is the few here and there that seek to venture beyond the bounds of science to argue for or against the existence of God and even if they are highly regarded in their fields (for example Richard Dawkins), their efforts to do this are not.

The problem is these few are very highly visible and, unfortunately, set the tone for the discourse and the understanding of the scientific enterprise. After all, if Richard Dawkins is an eminent evolutionary biologist and he claims, vociferously, that God doesn't exist, why shouldn't evangelicals attach morality to his science?

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David Klinghoffer, Evolution and Conspiracy Theories

Give David Klinghoffer credit for tenacity, or what Linus van Pelt called “mule-headedness.”  Not content to link Hitler and the Discovery Channel gunman to “Darwinism,” he now does so with the 9-11 conspirators in a new post for Evolution News and Views called “Darwinism and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.”  He starts out innocently enough, describing the 9/11 conspiracy theories and how they were debunked by Popular Science.  He even has a serviceable definition of conspiracy theorism:

The tendency, hardly limited to the faculty fringe, is to want to repudiate the intuitions of common sense in favor of recondite alternative understandings. These purportedly expose the true, secret inner workings behind the façade of society and nature and, in the process, cast the very sources of our intuition in the most sinister light. This is the essence of conspiracy-thinking.

He comments at length about a story in Slate by Jeremy Stahl, in which Stahl argues that it is very hard to dispel a conspiracy theory because those accepting it simply think you are part of the conspiracy. Then he drops the hammer:

What I found striking about the first installment in the Slate series, by Jeremy Stahl, is the parallels with what we know about the thought and writings of Evolution Truth activists: our ever-loving friends in the Darwin Lobby. You may recall the news of a few months back that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education, had collaborated with 9/11 Truth conspiracist James H. Fetzer in editing a special number of the journal Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals. That issue of the journal became so notorious for the incivility of its contributions that a whole fracas broke out and made the pages of the New York Times."

Interestingly, in typical DI fashion, the supplied link doesn't go to the New York Times.  It goes to an article by Casey Luskin, who then supplies the link in paragraph five of his article.  In that article, Mr. Luskin also notes that James Fetzer is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  That charge sticks like glue: James Fetzer's ideas are whackadoodle with regard to this issue and his ideas have been rebutted very soundly. But then Klinghoffer writes this:

When he burst on the scene a century and a half ago, in the Eric Hufschmid role, Darwin offered precisely a conspiracy theory: a radical overturning of common sense, in this case the understanding that nature reflects design. That was replaced now with an unseen and unseeable material mechanism that simply and comprehensively explained how everything we thought we knew about life's development was totally wrong.

This is nonsense. It would only be true if Darwin was the first one to come up with an evolutionary scenario for the diversity of life. He wasn't. Evolutionary scenarios exist as far back as John Ray and Darwin's contemporary, Jean Baptiste Lamarck and his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had their own.  Darwin didn't introduce a conspiracy theory, he illuminated one of the growing questions of biology: how did populations change over time.  He simply provided a mechanism.  The only reason Klinghoffer thinks that it is a conspiracy theory is that he has bought into one of his own: that evolutionists are covering up the fact that evolution has no empirical support.  As long as he continues to believe that evolution has no empirical support, then anything they write is part and parcel of this conspiracy theory.  It doesn't matter how much evidence there is.  It is like trying to explain something to someone while they are  holding their hands over their ears and saying “La la la, I can't hear you.”

He writes:

Once posited, it tells a story that accommodates any observation. This is the brilliance of paranoia. Though Meigs cites Marxism and fundamentalist creationism as parallels, Darwinism offers one just as apt. Whatever nature brings forth can be squeezed to fit the effectively unfalsifiable Darwinian mold, which always turns out to predict, in retrospect, whatever is found.

Interesting. Why does he not include intelligent design in this list? All he has to say is “God did it that way.” It does not matter what the observation is, that is just the way He did it. It is foolproof. This has been the constant roadblock for supporters of ID since its inception.  It is completely unfalsifiable.  There are no hypothesis tests you can run.

It is amazing that Klinghoffer, who plainly does not understand basic predictive historical science, would state that evolution is unfalsifiable when it clearly is (If we found a human skull in mesozoic strata or dinosaurs in the Cambrian, the party would be over for evolution), and miss the fact that ID is not.There is a conspiracy theory all right.  It is just not the one that Klinghoffer envisions. 

The Discovery Channel Incident: The Real Culprit

As if on cue, Classical Values points us to another culprit for the motives of the gunman at the Discovery Channel: Al Gore. Eric writes:

In the wake of the psychotic environmentalist gunman who took hostages at the Discovery Channel, a lot of people are wondering what it is with Al Gore and his vast power to do what the left so loves to accuse Rush Limbaugh of doing?

As Glenn puts it sarcastically in his roundup,

"Won't Al Gore please stop it with his extremist, eliminationist rhetoric before he inspires still more violence?"

It's painfully obvious that there's a double standard where it comes to eliminationist rhetoric.

It is certainly as possible that Al Gore is responsible for this behavior as Charles Darwin.The point is that you can fit just about any ideology into the manifesto that the gunman wrote. It makes Klinghoffer's argument all the more ridiculous.

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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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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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David Klinghoffer: Signature of Controvery

David Klinghoffer has taken it upon himself to defend Signature in the Cell, the book by Stephen Meyer on Intelligent Design. In a new online book Signature of Controversy, he has collected rebuttals of different individuals, including Stephen Meyer to the criticisms of the book. The Discovery Institute is providing it as a free download here. More on this later.

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Francisco Ayala Wins Templeton Award, Discovery Institute Responds

Francisco Ayala, the genetics and evolutionary biology professor at UC Irvine and former Dominican priest, has won the 2009 Templeton Award, given for work in "affirming spirituality." The story, by Mitchell Landsberg of the L.A. Times, notes:

As a young doctoral student in the 1960s, Francisco J. Ayala was surprised to learn that Darwin's theory of evolution appeared to be less widely accepted in the United States than in his native Spain, then a profoundly conservative and religious country.

Ayala brought a unique sensibility to the topic, because he had been ordained as a Catholic priest before undertaking graduate studies in evolution and genetics. What he believed then, and has spent his career espousing, is that evolution is consistent with the Christian faith.

On Thursday, Ayala, an acclaimed researcher at UC Irvine, won the 2010 Templeton Prize, awarded annually in recognition of achievements in affirming spirituality. The prize is worth $1.6 million, which Ayala said he would give to charity.

Ayala's work is very thought-provoking and deeply moving. He is an a brilliant geneticist and evolutionary biologist and has embraced both his faith in God and the science of evolution. He is also not supportive in any way of Intelligent Design. Recently, he wrote a review of Stephen Meyer's book Signature of the Cell, which appeared on the BioLogos page. His comment, in that review, is currently being echoed in Steve Matheson's ongoing review over at Quintessence of Dust. Ayala wrote:

The keystone argument of Signature of the Cell is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms. I agree. And so does every evolutionary scientist, I presume. Why, then, spend chapter after chapter and hundreds of pages of elegant prose to argue the point? It is as if in a book about New York, the author would tell us that New York is not in Europe, and then dedicate most of the book to advancing evidence that, indeed, truly, New York is not in Europe.

His award reception has caught the attention (of course) of the Discovery Institute's David Klinghoffer, who has responded. He writes:

Advocates of a supposedly religion-friendly Darwinism have seized on the idea of God’s acting through secondary causes. In his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, Ayala argues that since God acts through intermediate causation to create geological features (mountains, rivers), why may the same analysis not be applied to the evolution of life? In the latter context, he insists that the idea of God’s acting through “specific agency…amounts to blasphemy.” For such direct control would imply that God bears responsibility for all the cruelties, pains, and dysfunctions that have accompanied the unfolding of life’s history.

But there is a real and important difference between secondary causation of the kind that results in the formation of rivers and mountains, on one hand, and that which, according to the evolutionary model, results in life in all its forms. The operation of geological forces follows paths described by physical laws. Whatever role chance plays, the overall process is predictable. The religious believer may reasonably picture God, having authored those laws, as the creator of geological features, having planned and foreseen what those features would be. Similarly, He is the author of those laws that govern patterns in the weather, in the alternation of the seasons, of day and night, and so on. God could thus confidently tell Noah that “So long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:6).

Here, you can sense that Klinghoffer is setting up a dichotomy between what is real science (geology) and what is fake science (evolution). Here again is this meme that every scientist in all organized disciplines have gotten everything right and are performing honest science EXCEPT those evolutionists, who have gotten everything wrong. He even makes a point of mentioning that these geological laws are predictable. Then he brings down the hammer:

But life — including human life — is different. If Darwin and the vast majority of his modern advocates are right, then the path of life's evolution was inherently unpredictable — not wholly random, since natural selection plays its role, but generated by chance and governed by no plan, design, or teleology. Ayala himself has said this very clearly: “It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process — natural selection — without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.”

This is so basically wrong as to be almost unbelievable. The sheer force of evolutionary theory is the means by which it is able to predict results. It was predicted (by Darwin) that the earliest human precursors would be found in Africa because that is where our closest relatives (gorillas and chimpanzees) live. That is exactly where they were found. It was predicted that a tetrapod intermediate would be found in the shallow-sea Devonian deposits of the Canadian arctic because that is when such a creature should have arisen. In 2005, Neil Shubin found Tiktaalik. It was predicted that the likely explanation for the chromosomal number discrepancy between the higher apes and humans would be the discovery of two fused chromosomes in humans. that is exactly what was found. The examples are almost endless. Life is not different from geological processes. Both derive from environmental changes.

A short aside on semantics: He comments that evolution is controlled by "no plan, design, or teleology." How does he know this? Did he have a "road to Damascus" moment? In this, he has confused randomness and stochasticity, a critical mistake that seems to be common in attacks on "neo-Darwinism." A process that is random is truly random—there is no plan at all. Stochasticity means that a process is non-deterministic. There might or might not be a plan but we cannot discern it. The two are very different. All evolutionary creationists agree that God is behind evolution but that it might not be possible to determine exactly what His plan is or why. Under Klinghoffer's definition, there can be no God involved at all.

But that is not the real problem here. The problem is that evolution is not random, just as geological processes are not random. The same physical laws that govern how the terrain is going to behave under the influence of wind, water and temperature govern evolutionary changes. There is measured directional selection in organisms that live in different environments, just as there are measured directional changes in those environments over time. One does not happen without the other and both yield predictions, not just about what one will see in the future but what was present in the past. Because we know what shallow-sea environments look like today, we can spot them at geological periods in the past. Because we know that there were fish in early and middle Devonian shallow-seas and tetrapods in late Devonian shallow seas, we can predict what we will find in between.

Darwin wasn't showing that there was no God. He was showing that in trying to explain "descent with modification" of animals, the same physical laws that govern geology govern biology as well. The changes could be quantified in a biological sense and the theory could be used to answer hypothetical questions. This was exactly contrary to the message of William Paley, who argued that some things could not be explained in any other way than by production through divine fiat. This is, almost to a 't' the modern message of Intelligent Design. Klinghoffer continues:

The theistic evolutionary view of those like Francisco Ayala and Kenneth Miller (when he is in that mood) is just a revived variant of Gnosticism. According to that ancient heresy, a hidden, alien, passive Supreme Being coexists with a creator Demiurge, a blind watchmaker (to borrow the title of Richard Dawkin’s book), unconscious, indifferent, and morally irrelevant.

Klinghoffer plainly hasn't met any "theistic evolutionists" (or is it "evolutionary creationists?"). If he had, he would know this is just nonsense. No EC that I am familiar with is bashful about his worship of Jesus Christ or of incorporating that faith into his or her life and including the science as well. Does Klinghoffer know the intimate details of Ayala's and Miller's relationships with God?

So Orchids to Francisco Ayala, who has shown that his Christian faith and his science can walk hand in hand and onions to David Klinghoffer, for another Discovery Institute hatchet job.

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David Klinghoffer and the Evil of Evolution

David Klinghoffer has a post in which he recounts a radio program that he did in which one of the callers asked, apparently in his best preacher-style voice:

"David, would you not saaaay that Darwinism is a lie, from its top to its bottom, sprung straight from the pit of Hell!?"

Rather than answer the question directly, which he should have done, Klinghoffer, who has written some truly amazing drivel about evolution, equivocates. He writes:

There was sort of an awkward pause. I'm a pretty mild and soft-spoken kind of person. I didn't want to disagree with him, but I couldn't quite echo his sentiment, neither the style nor the substance. "Well," I offered, "that's not exactly the way I would put, though I like your formulation! What I would say is that it's a delusion with, um, some very negative social consequences." I felt bad about having to disappoint him.

A delusion? Thousands of scientists working around the world, putting together the pieces of the past and Klinghoffer, without a shred of scientific training, calls it a delusion? As far as the negative social consequences, society had no trouble creating mischief long before Charles Darwin came along. Klinghoffer is both a bad biologist and a bad historian. And what is it about the caller's formulation that Klinghoffer liked? Does he really think Darwinism comes from Hell? Amazing.

Hat tip to LGF.


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