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. 

The Washington Times Weighs In on Ball State

Getting in a little bit late in the game, The Washington Times waxes on the trials of Eric Hedin and Ball State University and, by and large, makes a hash of it.  They write:

At Ball State University in Indiana, for example, anti-religion activists are irritated that physics and astronomy professor Eric Hedin presented intelligent design in his classroom as a plausible theory of origins. The basic gist was that mankind and the universe did not spring forth out of a series of wholly random events and that some higher power guided the process.

For one thing, intelligent design is not a theory of origins. Intelligent design is not really a theory at all, in the scientific sense of the word. Intelligent design rests almost entirely on the premise that prevailing scientific theories are at a loss to explain certain processes that take place in the natural world.  Second, there is nothing in the scientific enterprise that argues that the universe sprang forth out of a series of wholly random events.  That is a non-scientific statement.  Onward.  They continue:

Progress depends on challenging the conventional wisdom. Most of the ancient world looked at the sky and assumed it was obvious that the universe revolved around the Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus said, no, the common belief was wrong and the planets, including Earth, revolve around the sun. A century later, Newton explained how gravity made it all work, which was accepted until Einstein came along with his breakthrough theory of relativity. Science never rests.

It is somewhat ironic that she chooses these examples of people who challenged the prevailing views because each one of these people had hard evidence that supported their positions.  This was also true of Charles Darwin, who's theory was revolutionary for its time and, with other researchers extending it, had been found to be one of the most robust theories in existence.  Now let's see what the theoretical constructs of intelligent design are. As Paul Nelson said eight years ago:

Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity” –- but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.¹

We are eight years down the road and intelligent design still consists of attacks on evolution rather than a attempting to design a full-fledged theorectical base. Jeffrey Shallit pointed this out a year back:

Here is a perfect example of this sterility: Bio-Complexity, the flagship journal of the intelligent design movement. As 2012 draws to a close, the 2012 volume contains exactly two research articles, one "critical review" and one "critical focus", for a grand total of four items. The editorial board has 30 members; they must be kept very busy handling all those papers.  (Another intelligent design journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, hasn't had a new issue since 2005.)

The 2013 volume has had, in eight months, only three articles and all three are based on arguments against evolution, not support for intelligent design.  The problem persists.  And as long as proponents of ID cannot provide their own tests of how this theory can be supported, it does not belong in the science classroom. Indeed, their only recourse in recent years has been to try to redefine science so that ID can be incorporated.  The problem here, is, as Michael Behe noted, when one does so, astrology is considered to be science.

Jo Ann Gora of Ball State did not close off discussion of competing scientific theories, she closed off acceptance of a non-scientific alternative to established science.


¹Nelson, P. (2004) The Measure of Design," Touchstone, pp. 64-65

More Concern in England For Science Teaching in Public Schools

The Independent has an article updating the concerns about science teaching and young-earth creationism in public schools in England. Andrew Williams writes:

Dr Michael Behe is the biologist whose theory of Irreducible Complexity forms the supposed scientific basis of ID. I asked him about the consensus in many quarters that it is not scientific. While genially admitting that I had "hit a nerve", he defended its credentials as a science. "Science is just using physical evidence and reasoning to come to a conclusion about nature," he says. "The definition of science is supposed to help us investigate nature and if it of itself becomes a barrier, it won't serve a useful purpose."

Does Dr. Behe remember that, a scant five years ago, he defined science in a courtroom as including astrology? How does that help us investigate nature and serve a useful purpose? Williams continues:

Dr Behe, though, makes a more serious allegation about any future requirement to teach evolution in primary classes: "It shows that certain people have an agenda to get children to think like them, to indoctrinate them on their side. And to prejudice young minds to one side before they're capable of understanding is the opposite of education."

Philip Bell, the chief executive of Creation Ministries International (UK/Europe), makes the same point. He goes on to say that when we consider the facts on which science is based, we do so from a worldview point. If we approach, say, the fossil record or DNA from the viewpoint that God created the world in the way literally set out in the Bible with a global flood centuries later, the science stands up.

It does? Why cannot it get the support of any mainstream scientists, then? When people like Bell say things like this, without a trace of admission that there are serious scientific problems with this viewpoint, all credibility goes out the window. Behe's viewpoint, where science can incorporate astrology is a post-modern deconstruction of science, while Bell's is a rejection of modern science outright. I am not sure which is worse.

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The Friendly Atheist on “The Whole Truth”

Since this seems to be the theme of the week, I noticed that the Friendly Atheist has a piece on how pushy atheists should be when confronting Christians or others who believe in a higher power. Referring to the atheism of PZ Myers and Chris Mooney, he writes:

Here’s the difference between the two sides: You know that courtroom phrase, “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”?

Both Mooney and PZ want to tell the truth about science and evolution.

Only PZ is willing to tell the whole truth — that the logical conclusion of accepting science fully is that you must dismiss any notion of gods, miracles, and the supernatural.

Mooney thinks it’s bad PR for us to admit that — and he may be right — but it’s wrong to let Christians keep thinking science and religion are perfectly compatible when they really aren’t.

There are two striking assumptions here that Mehta expects us to take at face value: that PZ Myers’ perspective is “the whole truth” and that the logical conclusion of accepting science is that you must reject any notion of the existence of the supernatural.

This odd conflation of methodology with worldview, is known as philosophical naturalism. It means that in my scientific endeavors, I must believe that a supernatural entity does not and cannot exist. In this case, my worldview may or may not be divorced from reality. Performing science with the assumption that there is no interference from a higher power does not mean that there is not one. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I would also make the case that it is intellectually dishonest. I contend that science cannot address the existence of God one way or the other. It simply is not equipped to do so. Astrophysicist Hugh Ross, who wrote The Fingerprint of God, which deals with the level of “tweaking” that the universe exhibits in order to sustain life on this third rock from the sun, believes that this points to the existence of God. As far as he and other progressive creationists and intelligent design supporters are concerned, while not a smoking gun, this level of inferential evidence is enough. Maybe, but it is a post hoc argument. It only looks tweaked because we are here to observe it. One of the main complaints about ID is that it has no theoretical construct to test for the existence of God. Michael Behe suggests that evolution cannot explain the flagellar motor or the blood-clotting cascade in humans. Even if, by some chance that is true, it still presents no support that God produced either in ex nihilo fashion.

By the same token, the statement that there is no god is a statement of faith. It is only the whole truth if you subscribe to the reductionistic view that all we can see is all that exists. Once again, science cannot address that question. To be completely honest, we must be scientifically agnostic. What we believe to be true is a matter of faith. PZ Myers and Herment Mehta believe in their hearts that there is no god. I believe that there is.

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Complexity Can Evolve Without High Cost

Was R.A. Fisher wrong? It has always been thought that with complexity comes a general lack of evolutionary adaptability. The consensus about human evolution is that early primates were able to exploit their environments because they had a generalized bauplan and could adapt to whatever came down the road. This was true from the teeth to the skeletal structure. Now, in an article for Phys.Org, research by Jianzhi "George" Zhang and colleagues has challenged the idea that the evolution of complexity carries a high cost:

When Fisher first wrote about the cost of complexity, he argued that random mutations---which, along with natural selection, drive evolution---are more likely to benefit simple organisms than complex organisms.

"Think of a hammer and a microscope," Zhang said. "One is complex, one is simple. If you change the length of an arbitrary component of the system by an inch, for example, you're more likely to break the microscope than the hammer."

Looking at pleiotropy, the idea that individual genes can affect a range of traits, the authors found something surprising:

For simplicity, mathematical models of pleiotropy have assumed that all genes in an organism affect all of its traits to some extent. But Zhang's group found that most genes affect only a small number of traits, while relatively few genes affect large numbers of traits.

What's more, they found a "modular" pattern of organization, with genes and traits grouped into sets. Genes in a particular set affect a particular group of traits, but not traits in other groups.

In addition, the researchers learned that the more traits a gene affects, the stronger its effect on each trait.

And how does this relate to the topic of this blog? The author writes:

The new findings help buffer evolutionary biology against the criticisms of intelligent design proponents, Zhang said. "The evolution of complexity is one thing that they often target. Admittedly, there were some theoretical difficulties in explaining the evolution of complexity because of the notion of the cost of complexity, but with our findings these difficulties are now removed."

One of the general complaints that has been made against those who espouse ID is that there is either a persistently simplistic model of evolution employed or an incorrect one. Recent works by Michael Behe, William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have focused on the presumed inability of evolutionary models to account for "specified complexity." They also make the specious argument that there can never be an increase in information under these models. Studies like these, which operate out of a predictive model, show otherwise.

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Darrel Falk Reviews Signature in the Cell

Darrel Falk of the BioLogos Foundation has also read Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. He strongly recommends the book on philosophical and theological grounds, arguing that Meyer has crafted a very readable book that addresses the philosophical nature of science and the scientific enterprise. Then the other shoe drops:

There is no question that large amounts information have been created by materialistic forces over the past several hundred million years. Meyer dismisses this without discussing it. What about at the very beginning, 3.5 billion years ago? Everyone doing the science, Meyer notwithstanding, would say the jury is still out. There are some very elegant feasibility experiments going on at the present time. However, it is far too early for a philosopher to jump into the fray and declare no further progress will be made and that this science is now dead. If the object of the book is to show that the Intelligent Design movement is a scientific movement, it has not succeeded. In fact, what it has succeeded in showing is that it is a popular movement grounded primarily in the hopes and dreams of those in philosophy, in religion, and especially those in the general public. With all due respect for the very fine people associated with the ID movement, many of whom I have met personally and whose sincerity I greatly appreciate, our hopes and dreams need to be much bigger than this. The science of origins is not the failure it is purported to be. It is just science moving along as science does—one step at a time. Let it be.

Indeed. It is indicative of the whole debate around ID that the debate is carried out in the public arena rather than the halls of science. Books like Meyer's are geared to the general public, not to the scientific community. William Dembski has, additionally, argued that by publishing books instead of articles, he can reach a broader audience. Maybe so, but he circumvents the review process when doing this, thus robbing ID of a much-needed credibility that it desperately needs.

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Steve Dutch Is Mad

Steve Dutch, professor of natural and applied sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, has written a column for the Green Bay Press Gazette in which he scolds Christian organizations for deception when attacking evolution:

The lies told by opponents of evolution are practically endless.

There are no intermediate fossil forms between major groups? A lie.

Methods for dating rocks are unreliable and give contradictory results? A lie.

Many scientists are beginning to doubt evolution? A lie.

These are not mere differences of opinion; they are deliberate misrepresentations or outright denials of published facts.

I have read more anti-evolution literature than just about anyone in this area, and I have done something most other readers have not — check it against real science. I can tell you flatly it is all junk.

Duane Gish? Ken Ham? Answers in Genesis? Discovery Institute? Philip Johnson? Michael Behe? Junk, all of it, with not a shred of scientific value.

I am often reminded of Ken Ham's smug response to scientists that confront him with data. He simply responds that we both have the same data, we just interpret it differently. The catch is that he does so without any scientific testing, rendering his conclusions scientifically invalid.

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Gordon Glover on Alien Intervention

There is a guest post over at Science and the Sacred by Gordon Glover. It dates back to the beginning of the month and I meant to post about it then but it got away from me. Gordon is, as usual, very thoughtful in the essay as he tackles the logic of Intelligent Design, using the same tactics one of the professors on my dissertation committee used: posit something perfectly harmless and then blow it full of holes. He writes:

On the surface, Intelligent Design seems to be a perfectly reasonable approach to studying complexity. In our everyday experience, there is certainly nothing controversial about attributing the purposeful arrangement of components to an intelligent agent.

This is often the idea that sucks most people into the acceptance of intelligent design. It is the argument that William Paley made in the 1820s—that so many things in nature showed the unmistakable signs of having been designed. This is the idea that Charles Darwin reverse-engineered once Charles Lyell provided him with all the time in the world, and Thomas Malthus provided him with a biological imperative.

Gordon uses the creation of Stonehenge to illustrate the problem of admitting ID into the arena of science. Problems in explaining how the stones got where they are abound and easy solutions are not forthcoming. That does not stop modern archaeologists from using the best available science to solve the problem. So where does ID enter?

But mainstream archaeology is content to treat these knowledge gaps in our understanding of the past as simply that, and NOT as proof that primitive man had some outside help. Besides, who or what else could possibly have intervened during the building of these ancient structures?

Oh, ye narrow-minded expert! Hath not thou considered the alien? Why bias your investigation of archaeological complexity towards earth-bound engineers?

Enter the alien enthusiasts. Not the dispassionate ones who merely concede the possibility of life outside of our solar system (a viewpoint that many scientists would share), but the hardcore fanatics. You know who I'm talking about. The ones who spend their summer vacations dressed up as aliens in Roswell, New Mexico. The true believer wants the world to acknowledge not just the probability of extra-terrestrial life, but that intelligent beings from outer space have physically visited earth and made contact with mankind. So they search out the mysteries of the ancient world looking for opportunities to preach their UFO gospel. There might not be any credible evidence of UFO visitations to planet Earth, but if there are questions that mainstream archaeology can't sufficiently answer, you can guarantee that alien believers will plug E.T. into these gaps. Does this strategy sound familiar?

Why, yes it does. It is the primary strategy that is used by those promoting Intelligent Design. This is the same strategy that allows a scientist like Michael Behe, one of the primary supporters of teaching Intelligent Design, to sit in front of a judge and say that under his definition of science, astrology would qualify. Just because we don't know why something happened, does not mean that we can posit an explanation that cannot be hypothetically tested and call it science.

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Josh Rosenau Calls Casey Luskin on the Carpet

Josh Rosenau of Thoughts from Kansas notes that Casey Luskin's recent apology for misreading Kenneth Miller comes off a bit lacking in factual integrity. Luskin wrote:

In a recent post, I noted that Ken Miller misrepresented Michael Behe’s arguments on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade in his book, Only a Theory. When I blogged at the end of last year about Miller’s similar mistakes at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Dr. Miller responded by making me aware of something I did not previously know: apparently Michael Behe wrote the section in Of Pandas and People on blood clotting.

Rosenau responds:

Under normal circumstances, it would suffice to congratulate Casey for finally acknowledging his ignorance, but alas, we must not pause to revel in that minor miracle. Like so many miraculous claims, it vanishes under investigation.

First of all, it is implausible that Casey wouldn't have been aware of Behe's involvement in Pandas. Casey, after all, has been involved with Behe, Pandas, and the broader ID movement for long enough that ignorance of any widely known fact in any of those three areas is a dubious claim.

Indeed, Casey was at the Dover trial when Behe discussed his involvement in writing parts of Pandas. He even used that involvement to browbeat reporters during the trial itself, writing:

"Behe was a contributor to Pandas, it was on the blood clotting cascade section (found in Chapter 6, "Biochemical Similarities")…"

I would like to think that Mr. Luskin forgot this little bit of information. We all forget things. Luskin's account of the differences between Behe's early work with Of Pandas and People and what showed up in Darwin's Black Box goes like this:

I contacted Behe about the differences between the two works, and he informed me that the differences between the treatment of blood clotting in Pandas (1993) and Darwin’s Black Box (1996) were the result of his refining, tightening, improving, and revising his arguments before publishing Darwin's Black Box. There's nothing wrong with Behe updating and improving his arguments.

That is fair enough. The rest of Luskin's post is an attack on the "random, undirected processes of mutation and natural selection" language that shows up in several places in Miller and Levine's textbook on biology. I do not have a copy of this book so I have no reason to doubt Luskin on this. There may be more than enough fuzzy memories to go around on this one.