Evolution Debate ...
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Re: RE: Evolution Debate ...
You apparently see nothing but what you want to see. I understand the concepts of Social Darwinism fully, starting all the way back with Spencer who originally put it together. If you're using that label to mean what it usually means, it's simply wrong at best, and at worst it's an amoral rationalization for mistreating people you disapprove of.
You haven't done any more than use the label though, so if you'd care to explain what you think it means we can try to deal with it a little more intelligently. But if you just continue to troll here, I see no reason to have any further exchanges with you.
WarHawk said:
You apparently see nothing but what you want to see. I understand the concepts of Social Darwinism fully, starting all the way back with Spencer who originally put it together. If you're using that label to mean what it usually means, it's simply wrong at best, and at worst it's an amoral rationalization for mistreating people you disapprove of.
You haven't done any more than use the label though, so if you'd care to explain what you think it means we can try to deal with it a little more intelligently. But if you just continue to troll here, I see no reason to have any further exchanges with you.
Well... He's proven he can write a coherent sentence, which the truly stupid can rarely do, so maybe it's just ignorance. :wink: And I'm just so impressed with his screen name and that image of the F-14... :roll:peapod said:
glu
There would have to be a demonstrable advantage to the species that did not, at the same time, impose a detrimental burden with any evolutionary change. A case could be made both for and against the evolutionary development of intelligence. Personally, I can’t see it as an evolutionary advantage. After all, blue-green algae has survived quite well for billions of years, and it has no intelligence at all.
However, the intelligence I was referring to is external to the universe. I was positing an intelligent cause for the universe because many of the components contain information, and the only source for information is intelligence.
Free choice. I frequently choose to do dumb things and daily I ask myself why I did them. That’s a good question. Could it be because of the influence of evil?
Children need guidance as part of their growing up. After all, they know nothing beyond instinct. If someone teaches a child wrong, then it needs to be taught right from wrong. They aren’t automatons any more than adults are.
The individuals condemn themselves by the choices they make. They are free to do that. Would you rather be an automaton? But I understand your viewpoint.
There would have to be a demonstrable advantage to the species that did not, at the same time, impose a detrimental burden with any evolutionary change. A case could be made both for and against the evolutionary development of intelligence. Personally, I can’t see it as an evolutionary advantage. After all, blue-green algae has survived quite well for billions of years, and it has no intelligence at all.
However, the intelligence I was referring to is external to the universe. I was positing an intelligent cause for the universe because many of the components contain information, and the only source for information is intelligence.
Free choice. I frequently choose to do dumb things and daily I ask myself why I did them. That’s a good question. Could it be because of the influence of evil?
Children need guidance as part of their growing up. After all, they know nothing beyond instinct. If someone teaches a child wrong, then it needs to be taught right from wrong. They aren’t automatons any more than adults are.
The individuals condemn themselves by the choices they make. They are free to do that. Would you rather be an automaton? But I understand your viewpoint.
peapod,
Hah!
I know I have little credibility amoung many of you and I happened to have a quote handy from someone you would respect. I thought it would be an easy way to debunk the myth of our unintelligent ignorant ancestors. :lol:
Hah!
I know I have little credibility amoung many of you and I happened to have a quote handy from someone you would respect. I thought it would be an easy way to debunk the myth of our unintelligent ignorant ancestors. :lol:
no 1
I just gave a quick example that contradicted your statement in regards to the genetic problems with Noah’s ark. However, I can go farther. The moose were taken from an area of close proximity, so there wasn’t nearly as much genetic diversity that there would have been if they had been picked from differing locations across the country. The article I read said that there had been no observations of unviable offspring. With just 2 people, there would be much more possibility of defects, but then consider the genetic diversity of the human population of the earth. All of that material would have been present in the first parents, making defects much less likely.
Consider dogs. A huge genetic diversity in them, as evidenced by all the different breeds. Cheetas, conversely, have an extremely narrow genetic range, leading scientists to believe that they came very close to extinction some time in the past.
The concept of original sin is something that was determined by theologians. I don’t believe it is anywhere spelled out in the bible. The fall of Man/sin of Adam is something that was expected to happen due to human nature and freedom of choice. Subsequent generations suffer the consequences of their own sins. But that’s a theological and philosophical discussion I don’t want to get in to.
No, they would have slept with their sisters.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
There it is. Part of the first day.
The subsequent 5 days deal with refinements to the earth.
I’ve already answered this so I’ll quote myself:
Quote:“And God said,”Let there be light”; and there was light.”
The verb used in the original Hebrew would be better translated as, “Let the light appear”. Unlike the verb used for the creation of the universe which referred to making something out of nothing, it refers to something which already exists. The atmosphere is cleared enough to allow light to reach the surface. End Quote
I answered this one too:
Again, if you go to the original Hebrew, the verb tenses refer to something that was already made, and they were just appearing on the surface of the earth as the atmosphere cleared enough to make them discernable.
I’ve mentioned this before too. The Catholic church accepted the big bang theory as the creation event in 1951, long before many mainstream scientists would accept the big bang theory at all. There is no contradiction with the creationist view, only with the fundamentalist view.
I just gave a quick example that contradicted your statement in regards to the genetic problems with Noah’s ark. However, I can go farther. The moose were taken from an area of close proximity, so there wasn’t nearly as much genetic diversity that there would have been if they had been picked from differing locations across the country. The article I read said that there had been no observations of unviable offspring. With just 2 people, there would be much more possibility of defects, but then consider the genetic diversity of the human population of the earth. All of that material would have been present in the first parents, making defects much less likely.
Consider dogs. A huge genetic diversity in them, as evidenced by all the different breeds. Cheetas, conversely, have an extremely narrow genetic range, leading scientists to believe that they came very close to extinction some time in the past.
The concept of original sin is something that was determined by theologians. I don’t believe it is anywhere spelled out in the bible. The fall of Man/sin of Adam is something that was expected to happen due to human nature and freedom of choice. Subsequent generations suffer the consequences of their own sins. But that’s a theological and philosophical discussion I don’t want to get in to.
No, they would have slept with their sisters.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
There it is. Part of the first day.
The subsequent 5 days deal with refinements to the earth.
I’ve already answered this so I’ll quote myself:
Quote:“And God said,”Let there be light”; and there was light.”
The verb used in the original Hebrew would be better translated as, “Let the light appear”. Unlike the verb used for the creation of the universe which referred to making something out of nothing, it refers to something which already exists. The atmosphere is cleared enough to allow light to reach the surface. End Quote
I answered this one too:
Again, if you go to the original Hebrew, the verb tenses refer to something that was already made, and they were just appearing on the surface of the earth as the atmosphere cleared enough to make them discernable.
I’ve mentioned this before too. The Catholic church accepted the big bang theory as the creation event in 1951, long before many mainstream scientists would accept the big bang theory at all. There is no contradiction with the creationist view, only with the fundamentalist view.
peapod
Yeah, Dawkins is always saying things like that. Sometimes he goes to ridiculous extremes to make a case for evolution and gets shot down on a lot of them. But he never gives up. Was it him who said “Nothing in science makes sense except in the light of evolution”? Or was it Gould? What a nonsensical statement. A realistic statement would have been “Nothing in science makes sense except in the light of evidence”.
Fact of the matter is, according to one evolution supporter (can’t remember who) the reason we still cling to Darwinian evolutionary theory is because there is no other. They know it’s been discredited, but until someone comes up with another naturalistic explanation, they’ll defend it to the death, because the alternative is, to them, unthinkable.
Yeah, Dawkins is always saying things like that. Sometimes he goes to ridiculous extremes to make a case for evolution and gets shot down on a lot of them. But he never gives up. Was it him who said “Nothing in science makes sense except in the light of evolution”? Or was it Gould? What a nonsensical statement. A realistic statement would have been “Nothing in science makes sense except in the light of evidence”.
Fact of the matter is, according to one evolution supporter (can’t remember who) the reason we still cling to Darwinian evolutionary theory is because there is no other. They know it’s been discredited, but until someone comes up with another naturalistic explanation, they’ll defend it to the death, because the alternative is, to them, unthinkable.
Ha! all you have done is "proven" that all you do is misquote and take out of context what someone has said. Why not try some "real" proof, you know like the scientific kind?? Here is just an example of your kinds lies, deceit, misrepresentation, and mis-quoting and taking out of context scientists. By the way...I can provide hundred of examples of your blunt tools. This is taken from the national science centre for science education.
DISCOVERY INSTITUTE MISREPRESENTS SCIENTIST’S WORK
Use of out-of-context quote is an attempt to discredit PBS’s Evolution series.
the Discovery Institute (DI) quoted Arizona State University anthropologist Geoffrey Clark as stating “we select among alternative sets of research conclusions in accordance with our biases and preconceptions--a process that is, at once, both political and subjective.” The DI goes on to assert that Clark suggested "that paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of a science.”
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) asked Dr. Clark to comment on the DI’s use of his statement. He replied:
In an effort to discredit the PBS Evolution series, the quotes attributed to me and circulated on the creationist Discovery Institute's website were taken completely out of context. I do not believe, nor have I ever argued, that paleoanthropology is not a scientific endeavor. The out-of-context quotes derive from a paper in which I argue a technical point to other scientists in the fields of archaeology and paleoanthropology: I encourage them to pay more attention to collecting data with an explicit conceptual framework firmly in mind, rather than just assembling factual information. As in all good science, anthropologists must regularly re-examine their approaches, and I never intended to imply that paleoanthropology is unscientific.
While there are many views of humans, and of the place of humans in the natural world, there is only one scientific view--that of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Dr. Clark is the author, co-author, or editor of over 200 articles, notes, and comments, as well as eight monographs and books, on human biological and cultural evolution. He earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1971.
“If the Discovery Institute wants to be taken seriously by the scientific community,” concluded Skip Evans, NCSE Network Project Director, “the first step they have to take is to stop lifting pages straight from the playbook of their scientific creationist predecessors. Quoting scientists out of context is one of the anti-evolutionists’ oldest tricks.”
The National Center for Science Education is a nonprofit organization, based in Oakland, California, dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools. On the web at www.ncseweb.org.
Plenty more where that came from....
DISCOVERY INSTITUTE MISREPRESENTS SCIENTIST’S WORK
Use of out-of-context quote is an attempt to discredit PBS’s Evolution series.
the Discovery Institute (DI) quoted Arizona State University anthropologist Geoffrey Clark as stating “we select among alternative sets of research conclusions in accordance with our biases and preconceptions--a process that is, at once, both political and subjective.” The DI goes on to assert that Clark suggested "that paleoanthropology has the form but not the substance of a science.”
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) asked Dr. Clark to comment on the DI’s use of his statement. He replied:
In an effort to discredit the PBS Evolution series, the quotes attributed to me and circulated on the creationist Discovery Institute's website were taken completely out of context. I do not believe, nor have I ever argued, that paleoanthropology is not a scientific endeavor. The out-of-context quotes derive from a paper in which I argue a technical point to other scientists in the fields of archaeology and paleoanthropology: I encourage them to pay more attention to collecting data with an explicit conceptual framework firmly in mind, rather than just assembling factual information. As in all good science, anthropologists must regularly re-examine their approaches, and I never intended to imply that paleoanthropology is unscientific.
While there are many views of humans, and of the place of humans in the natural world, there is only one scientific view--that of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Dr. Clark is the author, co-author, or editor of over 200 articles, notes, and comments, as well as eight monographs and books, on human biological and cultural evolution. He earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1971.
“If the Discovery Institute wants to be taken seriously by the scientific community,” concluded Skip Evans, NCSE Network Project Director, “the first step they have to take is to stop lifting pages straight from the playbook of their scientific creationist predecessors. Quoting scientists out of context is one of the anti-evolutionists’ oldest tricks.”
The National Center for Science Education is a nonprofit organization, based in Oakland, California, dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools. On the web at www.ncseweb.org.
Plenty more where that came from....
Contridictions is the problem with organized religion and the problem with the bible.
Genesis 1 states that the fruit trees were created before man, but Genesis 2 indicates that the fruit trees were created after man
Genesis 1 tells us that the first man and the first woman were made at the same time and after the animals. However, Genesis 2 states that the order of creation was as follows: man, then the animals and then woman.
Genesis 1:20 says that the fowl were created out of the waters, but Genesis 2:19 states that the fowl were created out of the ground.
Genesis 6:19-22 says that God ordered Noah to bring "of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort...into the ark." However, Genesis 7:2-3 states that the Lord ordered Noah to bring into the ark the clean beasts and the birds by sevens and the unclean beasts by twos.
Maybe but... Ex. 20:5 For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. and
ISA 14:21 Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities.
The bible has 2 or 3 wildley diferent anwers for anything you look up. The bibles are full of contridictions, so how anyone can believe it is the truth is just sillyness. The big thing for me is I have yet to meet someone who can explain the bible and the contridictions, in a logical sense. Know one has shown me a good reason to believe. I am opened minded so convince me, if you are up to it.
Other humans existed elsewhere, as evidenced by Cain's lament that he would be treated as a murderer in exile from the Garden of Eden... where he eventually picked up a wife.
On a side note:"I asked a Jehovah witness who came to my door what they would think if Aliens were real, and one of them(the older female) said if ever space travel became a possibility they would carry the Gospel message to the other planets - some of which may be millions or billions of years in advance of us. What would the beings there think of it? Would they not be surprised to learn the mother of their Creator was a Jewish girl by the name of Mary, and that their world was created by her Son saying Let it be?
That answer absolutly floored me, to say the least. Now wtf is that?
Like is that new worry for religion? Like if we meet "people" from other worlds (which we will whether it is tomorrow or a million years from now) are they scared the "aliens" will prove religion and God wrong once and for all, as there is a very strong possibility the end of organized religion would occur.
"Like is that new worry for religion? Like if we meet "people" from other worlds (which we will whether it is tomorrow or a million years from now) are they scared the "aliens" will prove religion and God wrong once and for all, as there is a very strong possibility the end of organized religion would occur."
"As far as intelligent life, the Christian author C.S. Lewis postulated the possibilities according to a Biblical cosmology. He supposed that intelligent species on other planets which predate human life on Earth, continue in an unfallen state of innocence before God. This lends a whole new perspective to the possibilities behind the Bible's angeology."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=961
Thought I would throw that out there for you.
"As far as intelligent life, the Christian author C.S. Lewis postulated the possibilities according to a Biblical cosmology. He supposed that intelligent species on other planets which predate human life on Earth, continue in an unfallen state of innocence before God. This lends a whole new perspective to the possibilities behind the Bible's angeology."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=961
Thought I would throw that out there for you.
Possibilties maybe, but that has nothing to do with science. I don't know how you can ask what the threat is jay, it laided out in this thread. The religious right is trying to undermine legitmate science, they try to achieve this my lies, mis-representation, and deceit. Now your a christian...whats up with that???? Surely you don't believe that the means justify the end??? When intelligent design can provide the "science" I am sure everyone will listen. Evolution has nothing to do with the so called moral decay in society, that is the most stupid statement I have ever heard, and its dangerous! I really don't get how anyone can say they have morals or ethics and think this kind of munipulation is okay coz its for the greater good.
Really? Who did I misquote or take out of context?
I googled Discovery Institute and found the article that was referred to. Seems to me that Clark was embarrassed that his quote had been used in an ID website article. The article you quoted was all about making Clark into a victim and “sneering” at ID. Too bad they didn’t actually read the article in which he was quoted. And why wouldn’t Mr. Clark use that opportunity to refute the claims made in the article rather than just trying to smear it? Anyway, it has good stuff and raises valid points. You can find it here:
http://66.102.7.104/u/discovery?q=c...?id=108+geoffrey+Clark&hl=en&start=1&ie=UTF-8
Anyway, back to the article you quoted. It sounds awfully like sloppy (and biased) reporting as described by J. W. Richards:
"Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ve heard of “intelligent design” (ID) and some of its leading proponents—Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski. Unfortunately, you probably got the mainstream media’s spin. It’s so predictable, I sometimes wonder if reporters aren’t using computer macros.
The reporter types control-alt "CE" and out pops the witty headline: “Creationism Evolves.” Control-alt "Scopes Trope" and out pops a lead referencing the old Spencer Tracy film "Inherit the Wind," a cartoon-like caricature of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial over evolution in the classroom.
Control-alt “Conspiracy” and, presto, a paragraph about the religious right and its scheme to smuggle Bibles into the science class as the first step toward establishing a theocracy. Next comes a quotation supposedly representing the view of all “serious scientists,” with the phrase “overwhelming evidence” thrown in for good measure. The story practically writes itself, and it possesses this virtue: it saves the reporter the bother of actually investigating what design theory really is."
You can find the full article here:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/vi...id=2571&program=CSC&callingPage=discoMainPage
By the way, thanks. I didn’t know about the Discovery Institute website. I also didn’t know that Darwinists refused to defend their theory before the Kansas State Board of Education. Why, if ID is so wrong, to they appear to be afraid to answer tough questions about the scientific problems of modern evolutionary theory?
Well thats good extrafire, that where you belong over at the discovery institute. It does not deal in facts or science. I will start with your first recommendation. This review was done by Kenneth R. Miller, I don't think I have to tell you who is. Here he reviews behe darwins black box. And I am still waiting for the observations and data to prove your claims.
Reviewed by Kenneth R. Miller
Perhaps the single most stunning thing about Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe's "Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," is the amount of territory that its author concedes to Darwinism. As tempted as they might be to pick up this book in their own defense, "scientific creationists" should think twice about enlisting an ally who has concluded that the Earth is several billion years old, that evolutionary biology has had "much success in accounting for the patterns of life we see around us (1)," that evolution accounts for the appearance of new organisms including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and who is convinced that all organisms share a "common ancestor." In plain language, this means that Michael Behe and I share an evolutionary view of the natural history of the Earth and the meaning of the fossil record; namely, that present-day organisms have been produced by a process of descent with modification from their ancient ancestors. Behe is clear, firm, and consistent on this point. For example, when Michael and I engaged in debate at the 1995 meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, I argued that the 100% match of DNA sequences in the pseudogene region of beta-globin was proof that humans and gorillas shared a recent common ancestor. To my surprise, Behe said that he shared that view, and had no problem with the notion of common ancestry. Creationists who believe that Behe is on their side should proceed with caution - he states very clearly that evolution can produce new species, and that human beings are one of those species.
Michael Behe is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, and not surprisingly, biochemistry, his own discipline, is at the heart of his argument. Simply stated, he claims that Darwinism, whatever it may explain at the organismic level, fails to account for the evolution of the complex biochemical machinery that is found in every living cell. He writes: "for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life. It is the purpose of this book to show that it does not." (2)
Behe engages in some rhetorical heavy-lifting to support this contention. In the first half of his book the reader is treated to a lively description of some of the most intricate of life's microscopic machinery - the cilia and flagella that produce cell movement, the cascade of blood-clotting proteins, the systems that target proteins to specific sites within the cell, the production of antibodies by the immune system, and the intricacies of biosynthetic pathways. Behe's descriptions of these systems are a delight to read. He is an excellent writer, and describes the complexities of the cell with the flair of a gifted teacher.
Why does the existence of these (and many other) systems rule out evolution? Because they are "irreducibly complex," meaning that if they are missing just one of their many parts, they cannot function. Behe writes that "Irreducibly complex systems ... cannot evolve in a Darwinian fashion." (3) Why not? Because natural selection works on small mutations in just one component at a time. If dozens or even hundreds of distinct proteins, precisely fashioned, are required to make a functional cilium, how could natural selection slowly and patiently craft them, one at a time, while waiting for the complex function of ciliary movement to emerge? It couldn't, so, according to Behe, the hypothesis that the cilium was produced by evolution is therefore disproved. If evolution did not make the cilium, then "intelligent design" must have. He writes: "life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity." (4)
If all of this has a familiar ring, it should. It is the classic "Argument from Design," articulated so well by William Paley nearly 200 years ago in his book Natural Theology. Behe is candid in his admiration for Paley, and although he takes care to point out some of Paley's mistakes, he leaves no doubt that he views the Argument from Design as his principal logical weapon against Darwinism. To Behe, the intricacy and complexity of natural systems at the biochemical level shows evidence of intelligent design.
At its core, Behe's argument is about the mechanism of evolution, which distinguishes him from "young-earth creationists" who deny the validity of the geological ages, the appearance of new species, and attempt to prove that the fossil record is either an illusion or a vast conspiracy. Behe will have none of this, and explicitly denies any connection with "creationism." (5) Nonetheless, he recognizes that his ideas do have theological implications as well as scientific ones. He is not at all modest about these implications, comparing the discovery of design to achievements of "Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur and Darwin." (6) And he believes that he knows why the scientific community has not embraced intelligent design to explain cellular complexity: "Why is the observation of design handled with intellectual gloves? The dilemma is that while one side of the elephant is labeled intelligent design, the other side might be labeled God." (7) So, according to Behe, design is rejected by the scientific community for the most non-scientific of reasons - its theological significance.
Behe has gone two centuries into the past to find the argument from design, dusted it off, and invigorated it with the modern language of biochemistry. But there are problems in this excursion. Not the least of these is the fact that the argument from design has been answered, not once, but many times by writers such as Dawkins, Gould, and even Darwin himself. The multiple parts of complex, interlocking biological systems do not evolve as individual parts, despite Behe's claim that they must. They evolve together, as systems that are gradually expanded, enlarged, and adapted to new purposes. As Richard Dawkins successfully argued in The Blind Watchmaker, natural selection can act on these evolving systems at every step of their transformation.
As factual examples we could choose any of the systems whose evolution is documented by the fossil record, a source apparently acceptable to Behe. The three smallest bones in the human body, the malleus, incus, and stapes, carry sound vibrations across the middle ear, from the membrane-like tympanum (the eardrum) to the oval window. This five component system fits Behe's test of irreducible complexity perfectly - if any one of its parts are taken away or modified, hearing would be lost. This is the kind of system that evolution supposedly cannot produce. Unfortunately for "intelligent design," the fossil record elegantly and precisely documents exactly how this system formed. During the evolution of mammals, bones that originally formed the rear portion of the reptilian lower jaw were gradually pushed backwards and reduced in size until they migrated into the middle ear, forming the bony connections that carry vibrations into the inner ears of present-day mammals. A system of perfectly-formed, interlocking components, specified by multiple genes, was gradually refashioned and adapted for another purpose altogether - something that this book claims to be impossible. As the well-informed reader may know, creationist critics of this interpretation of fossils in the reptile to mammal transition once charged that this could not have taken place. What would happen, they joked, to the unfortunate reptile while he was waiting for two of his jaw bones to migrate into the middle ear? The poor creature could neither hear nor eat! As students of evolution may know, A. W. Crompton of Harvard University brought this laughter to a deafening halt when he unearthed a fossil with a double articulation of the jaw joint - an adaptation that would allow the animal to both eat and hear during the transition, enabling natural selection to favor each of the intermediate stages.
Is there something special about biochemistry that prevents evolution from doing exactly the same thing to a microscopic system composed of proteins? Absolutely not. But evolution does make a testable prediction with respect to such systems. That prediction is that the degree of similarity in DNA sequences of organisms should correspond to their evolutionary histories. And, as the author is all too well aware, that prediction has been borne out a thousand times over.
Despite the close correspondence of gene sequence to fossil sequence, Behe demands that evolutionary biologists should tell us exactly "how" evolution can produce a complex biochemical system. This is a good strategic choice on his part, because the systems he cites, being common to most eukaryotic cells, are literally hundreds of millions of years old. And, being biochemical, they leave no fossils. Once burned, twice shy, Behe may be hoping to avoid the fate of his 1994 claim that there were no transitional fossils linking the first fossil whales with their land-dwelling Mesonychid ancestors (8). Less than a year after that prediction, the existence of not one, not two, but three transitional species between whales and land-dwelling eocine Mesonychids was confirmed. Nonetheless, it is quite possible to rise to the occasion and answer his challenge in biochemical terms. In fact, Russell Doolittle, whose investigations on the evolution of blood clotting are discussed in this text, has done exactly this. Behe is at great pains to disqualify this work, even though Doolittle has not only shown how such a complex system might evolve, but has also produced comparative studies showing how it probably did evolve.
In dismissing Doolittle's work, and in preempting any attempt to show how evolution might produce a complex biochemical system, Behe scoffs at the notion that a biochemical system adapted for one purpose might be adapted by evolution for a totally different function, despite physiological examples to the contrary in the fossil record. He dismisses, for example, the notion that the parts of a cilium, including proteins like dynein and tubulin, could have evolved by gene duplication even though similar forms of dynein and tubulin are used for other purposes in the cell. Most cell biologists will be unconvinced by his explanations of why the cilium could not have been assembled from proteins originally used for other purposes - especially since the cilium itself has been adapted for another purpose in one of the very tissues that Behe uses as an example of design - the vertebrate photoreceptor cell.
As the book draws to a conclusion, Behe attempts to develop the idea of intelligent design into a testable, scientific hypothesis. This is a lofty goal, but this is also where his argument collapses. Scientific ideas must be formulated in terms that make them testable. Indeed, Darwin himself proposed several ways in which his theory might be tested and disproved. And one of these ways - the contention that organisms contain biochemical parts that could not have been produced by Darwinian means - is the basis of Behe's criticisms of evolution. Being a trained experimental scientist, one would have expected that Behe would have seen the need to do likewise. Unfortunately, he did not.
Let's suppose, for example, that a fellow scientist were to take Behe's challenge to evolution seriously, and attempted to show how a specific biochemical system composed of multiple parts could have evolved. A hypothesis for design, formulated in genuinely scientific terms, must be disprovable, and this is exactly the kind of evidence that might disprove it. Incredibly, Behe has intentionally insulated "intelligent design" from this and any other scientific test. How has he done this? In the penultimate chapter of his text, he lists some of the driving forces associated with evolutionary change, including natural selection, genetic drift, founder effects, gene flow, meiotic drive, and transposition (9). Behe states that all of these agents can effect change in biological systems, and admits that they may account completely for at least some of the biochemical features of a living cell. So, if our colleague were to show how these forces could have produced, say, the bacterial flagellum, would he be entitled to say: "I have disproved design?" Not at all, according to Behe. "The production of some biological improvements by mutation and natural selection - by evolution - is quite compatible with intelligent design theory." (10) In other words, any evidence for the evolution of complexity is dismissed in advance as being irrelevant to the problem of design. "Design" exists only when and where evolution cannot explain it!
This sterile definition of design means that Behe is free to ignore any conceivable evidence for the evolution of any biochemical system. Such an idea, intentionally placed outside the realm of testability, is not science, whatever the pretentions of its advocates.
If Behe's formulation of intelligent design as science is illogical, his mechanism for how the work of the designer was inserted into living systems is almost laughable. Remember that Behe accepts the validity of the geological ages and the fossil record - an open-minded scientist can hardly do otherwise - and yet he claims that the complex biochemical systems he extols were fashioned by an intelligent agent. When did this agent go to work, and when were the genes encoding them engineered? He has an answer ready:
"Suppose that nearly four billion years ago the designer made the first cell, already containing all of the irreducibly complex biochemical systems discussed here and many others. (One can postulate that the designs for systems that were to be used later, such as blood clotting, were present but not "turned on." In present-day organisms plenty of genes are turned off for a while, sometimes for generations, to be turned on at a later time.)" (11)
This means that billions of years ago a humble prokaryote was packed with genes that would be turned off for hundreds of millions of years before they produced the eukaryotic cilium, and genes for blood clotting proteins that would pass more than a billion inactive years in genetic "cold storage." And what happens during those billions of years? As any student of genetics will tell you, because those genes are not expressed, natural selection cannot weed out genetic mistakes. This means that mutations will accumulate in these genes at breathtaking rates, rendering then hopelessly changed and inoperative hundreds of millions of years before Behe says that they will be needed.
Contrary to Behe's claims, the evidence of evolution in the fossil record is not irrelevant to his argument. It has forced him, for the sake of consistency, to cobble his acceptance of the earth's well-documented natural history together with the doctrine of intelligent design. The result is an absolutely hopeless genetic fantasy of "pre-formed" genes waiting for the organisms that might need them to gradually appear. This absurdity is the unavoidable result of trying to make "design" conform to that troublesome fossil record. The very same fossil record that provides the primary evidence for evolution.
However serious its scientific flaws, this interesting and colorful book is sure to attract attention. Michael Behe would like us to believe that he has discovered a new biological principle. But the real news in Darwin's Black Box is that a contemporary scientist has dipped back into the past and wrapped the remains of the Argument from Design in a shiny cloth of biochemistry. In this new clothing, the old idea may surprise a few unsuspecting readers who have not thought long or seriously about the mechanisms of evolution. They may be entertained by Behe's energy, and sustained by his enthusiasm. But ultimately, the careful reader will recognize this book for what it truly is - an argument against evolution that concedes nearly all the contested ground to Darwin's edifice, and then ends up teetering on little more than rhetoric and personal skepticism.
Reviewed by Kenneth R. Miller
Perhaps the single most stunning thing about Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe's "Biochemical Challenge to Evolution," is the amount of territory that its author concedes to Darwinism. As tempted as they might be to pick up this book in their own defense, "scientific creationists" should think twice about enlisting an ally who has concluded that the Earth is several billion years old, that evolutionary biology has had "much success in accounting for the patterns of life we see around us (1)," that evolution accounts for the appearance of new organisms including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and who is convinced that all organisms share a "common ancestor." In plain language, this means that Michael Behe and I share an evolutionary view of the natural history of the Earth and the meaning of the fossil record; namely, that present-day organisms have been produced by a process of descent with modification from their ancient ancestors. Behe is clear, firm, and consistent on this point. For example, when Michael and I engaged in debate at the 1995 meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation, I argued that the 100% match of DNA sequences in the pseudogene region of beta-globin was proof that humans and gorillas shared a recent common ancestor. To my surprise, Behe said that he shared that view, and had no problem with the notion of common ancestry. Creationists who believe that Behe is on their side should proceed with caution - he states very clearly that evolution can produce new species, and that human beings are one of those species.
Michael Behe is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, and not surprisingly, biochemistry, his own discipline, is at the heart of his argument. Simply stated, he claims that Darwinism, whatever it may explain at the organismic level, fails to account for the evolution of the complex biochemical machinery that is found in every living cell. He writes: "for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life. It is the purpose of this book to show that it does not." (2)
Behe engages in some rhetorical heavy-lifting to support this contention. In the first half of his book the reader is treated to a lively description of some of the most intricate of life's microscopic machinery - the cilia and flagella that produce cell movement, the cascade of blood-clotting proteins, the systems that target proteins to specific sites within the cell, the production of antibodies by the immune system, and the intricacies of biosynthetic pathways. Behe's descriptions of these systems are a delight to read. He is an excellent writer, and describes the complexities of the cell with the flair of a gifted teacher.
Why does the existence of these (and many other) systems rule out evolution? Because they are "irreducibly complex," meaning that if they are missing just one of their many parts, they cannot function. Behe writes that "Irreducibly complex systems ... cannot evolve in a Darwinian fashion." (3) Why not? Because natural selection works on small mutations in just one component at a time. If dozens or even hundreds of distinct proteins, precisely fashioned, are required to make a functional cilium, how could natural selection slowly and patiently craft them, one at a time, while waiting for the complex function of ciliary movement to emerge? It couldn't, so, according to Behe, the hypothesis that the cilium was produced by evolution is therefore disproved. If evolution did not make the cilium, then "intelligent design" must have. He writes: "life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity." (4)
If all of this has a familiar ring, it should. It is the classic "Argument from Design," articulated so well by William Paley nearly 200 years ago in his book Natural Theology. Behe is candid in his admiration for Paley, and although he takes care to point out some of Paley's mistakes, he leaves no doubt that he views the Argument from Design as his principal logical weapon against Darwinism. To Behe, the intricacy and complexity of natural systems at the biochemical level shows evidence of intelligent design.
At its core, Behe's argument is about the mechanism of evolution, which distinguishes him from "young-earth creationists" who deny the validity of the geological ages, the appearance of new species, and attempt to prove that the fossil record is either an illusion or a vast conspiracy. Behe will have none of this, and explicitly denies any connection with "creationism." (5) Nonetheless, he recognizes that his ideas do have theological implications as well as scientific ones. He is not at all modest about these implications, comparing the discovery of design to achievements of "Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur and Darwin." (6) And he believes that he knows why the scientific community has not embraced intelligent design to explain cellular complexity: "Why is the observation of design handled with intellectual gloves? The dilemma is that while one side of the elephant is labeled intelligent design, the other side might be labeled God." (7) So, according to Behe, design is rejected by the scientific community for the most non-scientific of reasons - its theological significance.
Behe has gone two centuries into the past to find the argument from design, dusted it off, and invigorated it with the modern language of biochemistry. But there are problems in this excursion. Not the least of these is the fact that the argument from design has been answered, not once, but many times by writers such as Dawkins, Gould, and even Darwin himself. The multiple parts of complex, interlocking biological systems do not evolve as individual parts, despite Behe's claim that they must. They evolve together, as systems that are gradually expanded, enlarged, and adapted to new purposes. As Richard Dawkins successfully argued in The Blind Watchmaker, natural selection can act on these evolving systems at every step of their transformation.
As factual examples we could choose any of the systems whose evolution is documented by the fossil record, a source apparently acceptable to Behe. The three smallest bones in the human body, the malleus, incus, and stapes, carry sound vibrations across the middle ear, from the membrane-like tympanum (the eardrum) to the oval window. This five component system fits Behe's test of irreducible complexity perfectly - if any one of its parts are taken away or modified, hearing would be lost. This is the kind of system that evolution supposedly cannot produce. Unfortunately for "intelligent design," the fossil record elegantly and precisely documents exactly how this system formed. During the evolution of mammals, bones that originally formed the rear portion of the reptilian lower jaw were gradually pushed backwards and reduced in size until they migrated into the middle ear, forming the bony connections that carry vibrations into the inner ears of present-day mammals. A system of perfectly-formed, interlocking components, specified by multiple genes, was gradually refashioned and adapted for another purpose altogether - something that this book claims to be impossible. As the well-informed reader may know, creationist critics of this interpretation of fossils in the reptile to mammal transition once charged that this could not have taken place. What would happen, they joked, to the unfortunate reptile while he was waiting for two of his jaw bones to migrate into the middle ear? The poor creature could neither hear nor eat! As students of evolution may know, A. W. Crompton of Harvard University brought this laughter to a deafening halt when he unearthed a fossil with a double articulation of the jaw joint - an adaptation that would allow the animal to both eat and hear during the transition, enabling natural selection to favor each of the intermediate stages.
Is there something special about biochemistry that prevents evolution from doing exactly the same thing to a microscopic system composed of proteins? Absolutely not. But evolution does make a testable prediction with respect to such systems. That prediction is that the degree of similarity in DNA sequences of organisms should correspond to their evolutionary histories. And, as the author is all too well aware, that prediction has been borne out a thousand times over.
Despite the close correspondence of gene sequence to fossil sequence, Behe demands that evolutionary biologists should tell us exactly "how" evolution can produce a complex biochemical system. This is a good strategic choice on his part, because the systems he cites, being common to most eukaryotic cells, are literally hundreds of millions of years old. And, being biochemical, they leave no fossils. Once burned, twice shy, Behe may be hoping to avoid the fate of his 1994 claim that there were no transitional fossils linking the first fossil whales with their land-dwelling Mesonychid ancestors (8). Less than a year after that prediction, the existence of not one, not two, but three transitional species between whales and land-dwelling eocine Mesonychids was confirmed. Nonetheless, it is quite possible to rise to the occasion and answer his challenge in biochemical terms. In fact, Russell Doolittle, whose investigations on the evolution of blood clotting are discussed in this text, has done exactly this. Behe is at great pains to disqualify this work, even though Doolittle has not only shown how such a complex system might evolve, but has also produced comparative studies showing how it probably did evolve.
In dismissing Doolittle's work, and in preempting any attempt to show how evolution might produce a complex biochemical system, Behe scoffs at the notion that a biochemical system adapted for one purpose might be adapted by evolution for a totally different function, despite physiological examples to the contrary in the fossil record. He dismisses, for example, the notion that the parts of a cilium, including proteins like dynein and tubulin, could have evolved by gene duplication even though similar forms of dynein and tubulin are used for other purposes in the cell. Most cell biologists will be unconvinced by his explanations of why the cilium could not have been assembled from proteins originally used for other purposes - especially since the cilium itself has been adapted for another purpose in one of the very tissues that Behe uses as an example of design - the vertebrate photoreceptor cell.
As the book draws to a conclusion, Behe attempts to develop the idea of intelligent design into a testable, scientific hypothesis. This is a lofty goal, but this is also where his argument collapses. Scientific ideas must be formulated in terms that make them testable. Indeed, Darwin himself proposed several ways in which his theory might be tested and disproved. And one of these ways - the contention that organisms contain biochemical parts that could not have been produced by Darwinian means - is the basis of Behe's criticisms of evolution. Being a trained experimental scientist, one would have expected that Behe would have seen the need to do likewise. Unfortunately, he did not.
Let's suppose, for example, that a fellow scientist were to take Behe's challenge to evolution seriously, and attempted to show how a specific biochemical system composed of multiple parts could have evolved. A hypothesis for design, formulated in genuinely scientific terms, must be disprovable, and this is exactly the kind of evidence that might disprove it. Incredibly, Behe has intentionally insulated "intelligent design" from this and any other scientific test. How has he done this? In the penultimate chapter of his text, he lists some of the driving forces associated with evolutionary change, including natural selection, genetic drift, founder effects, gene flow, meiotic drive, and transposition (9). Behe states that all of these agents can effect change in biological systems, and admits that they may account completely for at least some of the biochemical features of a living cell. So, if our colleague were to show how these forces could have produced, say, the bacterial flagellum, would he be entitled to say: "I have disproved design?" Not at all, according to Behe. "The production of some biological improvements by mutation and natural selection - by evolution - is quite compatible with intelligent design theory." (10) In other words, any evidence for the evolution of complexity is dismissed in advance as being irrelevant to the problem of design. "Design" exists only when and where evolution cannot explain it!
This sterile definition of design means that Behe is free to ignore any conceivable evidence for the evolution of any biochemical system. Such an idea, intentionally placed outside the realm of testability, is not science, whatever the pretentions of its advocates.
If Behe's formulation of intelligent design as science is illogical, his mechanism for how the work of the designer was inserted into living systems is almost laughable. Remember that Behe accepts the validity of the geological ages and the fossil record - an open-minded scientist can hardly do otherwise - and yet he claims that the complex biochemical systems he extols were fashioned by an intelligent agent. When did this agent go to work, and when were the genes encoding them engineered? He has an answer ready:
"Suppose that nearly four billion years ago the designer made the first cell, already containing all of the irreducibly complex biochemical systems discussed here and many others. (One can postulate that the designs for systems that were to be used later, such as blood clotting, were present but not "turned on." In present-day organisms plenty of genes are turned off for a while, sometimes for generations, to be turned on at a later time.)" (11)
This means that billions of years ago a humble prokaryote was packed with genes that would be turned off for hundreds of millions of years before they produced the eukaryotic cilium, and genes for blood clotting proteins that would pass more than a billion inactive years in genetic "cold storage." And what happens during those billions of years? As any student of genetics will tell you, because those genes are not expressed, natural selection cannot weed out genetic mistakes. This means that mutations will accumulate in these genes at breathtaking rates, rendering then hopelessly changed and inoperative hundreds of millions of years before Behe says that they will be needed.
Contrary to Behe's claims, the evidence of evolution in the fossil record is not irrelevant to his argument. It has forced him, for the sake of consistency, to cobble his acceptance of the earth's well-documented natural history together with the doctrine of intelligent design. The result is an absolutely hopeless genetic fantasy of "pre-formed" genes waiting for the organisms that might need them to gradually appear. This absurdity is the unavoidable result of trying to make "design" conform to that troublesome fossil record. The very same fossil record that provides the primary evidence for evolution.
However serious its scientific flaws, this interesting and colorful book is sure to attract attention. Michael Behe would like us to believe that he has discovered a new biological principle. But the real news in Darwin's Black Box is that a contemporary scientist has dipped back into the past and wrapped the remains of the Argument from Design in a shiny cloth of biochemistry. In this new clothing, the old idea may surprise a few unsuspecting readers who have not thought long or seriously about the mechanisms of evolution. They may be entertained by Behe's energy, and sustained by his enthusiasm. But ultimately, the careful reader will recognize this book for what it truly is - an argument against evolution that concedes nearly all the contested ground to Darwin's edifice, and then ends up teetering on little more than rhetoric and personal skepticism.
From the website of the national academy of science website
http://www.ncseweb.org/default.asp
When Arizona Sen. Karen Johnson (R-Mesa) co-sponsored a bill that would've required the state's science teachers "to present evidence that supports and evidence that does not support the theory of evolution," she received a flood of supportive e-mails.
"They were the best and nicest letters from people saying, 'We're so happy that you're finally taking this on,'" Johnson says, reflectively. The bill made it out of committee during that year, 2000, even after heated testimony from scientists. Then, extinction.
"University professors went wild," Johnson recalls. "They were livid that we would question this theory. They showed no willingness at all to have balance. ... The bill got clobbered."
Though Johnson has no immediate plans to sponsor new science-education bills this year, she agrees with some who say a changing political climate could encourage new efforts to get anti-evolution materials into public schools.
In a poll conducted after November's elections, CBS News found that 55 percent of Americans believed the standard creationist idea that "God created humans in present form." Only 13 percent believed humans evolved without the help of an all-powerful creator. Of those who voted to re-elect Bush, 67 percent believed in special creation by God--and half of the Bush backers surveyed said they'd support replacing the teaching of evolution with creationism in public-school curriculums.
To Johnson, a Christian fundamentalist, the teaching of evolution in the schools isn't simply unfair; it could be "faith-destroying," she says.
"It's hard for me to understand how evolution can get put into school science programs and get stuffed down the throats of those who don't want to hear it and who don't believe it anyway," Johnson says. "Children should choose what they want to believe. ... Science is basically the search for truth. The opposite of truth is myth. In my opinion, evolution is a myth. Those who adhere to the evolutionary theory, it's like a religion for them."
When Johnson talks to constituents, she's often struck by how few accept evolution.
"I can only find a few who think (the) theory of evolution has any merit," she says, "like professors at universities."
Indeed, the majority of America's university professors aren't willing to see evolutionary theory supplanted or confounded by religious mythology in the guise of scientific creationism.
After creation scientists rounded up a spurious group of scientists to sign a statement claiming evolutionary theory was in trouble, the staff of the National Center for Science Education decided to have a little fun with the idea.
In 2003, NCSE launched its "200 scientists named Steve agree" effort. More than 220 scientists with PhDs--including two Nobel Prize winners, eight members of the National Academy of Sciences and many authors of scientific texts--signed the group's statement: "There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism of evolution. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to 'intelligent design,' to be introduced into the science curricula of the public schools."
To clearly communicate the satire--scientific truth isn't arrived at through petitions or opinion polls--only scientists named "Steve" or "Stephanie" were allowed to sign the statement. That represents about 1 percent of the science community, according to Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education.
"Creationists are fond of amassing lists of PhDs who deny evolution to try to give the false impression that evolution is somehow on the verge of being rejected by the scientific community," says Scott. "Nothing could be farther from the truth."
Scott, a physical anthropologist, has been researching, speaking and actively fighting to keep religion out of science education for more than 20 years. She addresses legislative bodies, school boards and universities, talking about how the strategies of creationists have changed in order to gain acceptance from the scientific community and, especially, to get anti-evolutionary materials into public schools.
On the cutting edge of this effort is the "intelligent design" movement. Gone is talk of God and the Bible; proponents instead argue that the universe was crafted by intelligent, orderly forces--whether gods or extraterrestrials--of inexplicable origin.
Scott calls intelligent design "new wine in old bottles"--an evolved form of creationism.
After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an equal-time provision for teaching creationism in public schools in 1987, anti-evolutionists scrambled to find ways to get material into classrooms, says Scott. Now, proposals for science curriculum revisions are packaged as "critical thinking" or "teaching the controversy."
Intelligent design proponents argue for the teaching of " the strengths and weaknesses of evolution," similar to the wording of Johnson's bill at the Arizona Legislature in 2000.
This sounds logical and not explicitly religious, Scott says.
"Ask the average person on the street, 'Should we be teaching strengths and weaknesses of evolution?' They're going to say, 'Sure.' Ask them, 'Should we teach the strengths and weaknesses of heliocentrism?' And they'll say, 'Sure.'"
But ask a scientist about the "strengths and weaknesses of heliocentrism"--the theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and you'll get a blank stare.
"There aren't any alternatives to the Earth going around the Sun," Scott says. "Ask a biologist about the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, and you'll get that same blank look."
With intelligent design, gone are the controversies that made scientific creationism untenable.
"They avoid fact claims like the Grand Canyon being cut by Noah's flood or the Earth being 10,000 years old," Scott says. "Intelligent-design proponents make virtually no fact claims whatsoever and that gives them a more bullet-proof position."
Intelligent-design advocates package their message so well that even educators misconstrue evolution, considering it somehow controversial.
"There is no debate within science over whether evolution happened, only how it happened," says Scott. "To dissemble to students that there is an actual controversy going on is mis-educating them and also lying to them."
This can lead to some science teachers avoiding the subject altogether. But not teaching evolution in, say, a biology class is like skipping the Periodic Table of Elements in a chemistry class, Scott says.
"(Evolution) is what makes biology make sense, what ties together the facts that we know," Scott says. "If you don't have that substratum of common descent, you're just memorizing words."
Mathematician William Dembski, a leader in the intelligent-design community, never gets tired of debate.
"This is what I was made for," he says. "I'm charged ... I enjoy the rough and tumble of debate."
Dembski, a researcher at a religious university in Waco, Texas, has degrees in philosophy, mathematics, statistics and theology. He argues that intelligent design is not, as his critics contend, "pseudo-science" or "creationism in a cheap tuxedo."
Intelligent design functions at "a purely scientific level," Dembski says, referencing his books, Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. "You're looking for scientific detectability of intelligence in the natural world."
This search for a designer goes deeper than science--and involves the way humans view the world, he says.
"The elite in our culture are materialistic and atheistic," Dembski says. "Intelligent design challenges their materialistic science and materialistic evolutionary theory. If you look at discipline after discipline, it's been evolutionized--medicine, business, religion, literature. ... If we are right, all these superstructures built on evolution need to be questioned."
In September, Dembski and other design experts met at a conference in New Mexico--"Darwin, Design and Democracy V." They discussed, among other things, strategies for working intelligent design ideas into public school curriculums.
Challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools are on the table in Kansas, Missouri and South Carolina. In suburban Atlanta, a higher court ruling negated a school district's 2002 adoption of a warning sticker for science textbooks that labeled evolution as "theory, not a fact." In Dover, Pa., last month, the local school board voted that science teachers must inform students of the existence of "alternatives" to Darwin's theory.
These days, more than 80 years after the famed Scopes trial that ended a ban on teaching evolution in public schools, the topic is hotter than ever. Stories about evolution have been featured recently in Time, Newsweek, Wired and The New York Times.
In October, National Geographic ran a cover story by author and island biogeographer David Quammen, "Was Darwin Wrong?"
Quammen's answer: "No."
"If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that (evolution) is 'just' a theory," Quammen wrote. He listed other "theories"--the notion that Earth orbits the sun, continental drift, the existence of atoms and electricity. "Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact."
In The Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote, "When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ("The voice of the people is the voice of God"), as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science."
Though science is not democratic, appealing to a broad swath of spiritually needy humankind is what advocates of intelligent design do best.
"Increasingly, people with any sense of religious sensibilities believe there's an underlying purpose to the world," Dembski, an evangelical protestant, says. "Intelligent design is the only view opposed to the reductionist materialism that prevails in the academy and in the scientific view of the elites of the culture. Most of the unwashed masses, and I count myself among them, believe there's a sense of purpose. We're giving a voice to those people, saying 'The science backs you up.'"
Like those ancient critics of heliocentrism, Dembski references common sense to prove a design inference.
Say you're driving through South Dakota, Dembski says as example, and you come upon a rock formation with the faces of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.
"Are you going to think to yourself, 'Did wind and erosion do that?' No. But that's what the Darwinists are saying, that natural forces brought about this complexity. Obviously, Mount Rushmore is the result of intelligence."
The idea that the complexity of a human cell can only be the work of an intelligent designer harkens back to 18th-century Christian philosopher William Paley, who came up with the watch metaphor for intelligent design. A watch, Paley argued, was so intricate, "so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day" that it could not result from chance. "The watch must have had a maker," Paley wrote in Natural Theology.
The problem with Paley's argument was as evident to Darwin in the 19th century as it is to scientists today, who point to the evidence of the fossil record and its evidence of transitions from simple organisms to much more complex organisms. A cell is not a watch.
Paley's ideas were given some consideration in the 1800s, but by the beginning of the 20th century, he'd been thoroughly discredited, explains Karl Flessa, a professor of geoscience at the UA.
In his college paleontology course, Flessa includes a lecture on creation science. In it, he explains--with respect for divergent religious beliefs--why creationism and intelligent design are "junk-science."
"There is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence that indicates that all life is related through a system of ancestry and descent, that new species form out of old ones, that natural selection is effective in shaping organisms," he tells students. "Debate continues on some aspects of mechanisms, but no one doubts that evolution has occurred."
Flessa carefully examines and discredits creationist fallacies. For example, creationists invoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that disorder increases over time in a closed system, to argue against evolution. However, explains Flessa, the Earth is not a closed system, as it gets energy from the Sun.
As for the claim that amino acids, proteins, organs, and life itself are much too complicated to have come about through chance processes, "No one says they formed through chance," Flessa says, "only that they formed step by step, rather than a single, full assembly of a human from raw chemicals."
Flessa isn't trying to rob students of their religious beliefs--far from it. Many religions accept evolution.
"There are lots and lots of Christians who have absolutely no problem with evolution," Flessa says.
Roman Catholics teach evolution in their schools. A papal decree in the 1950s, reiterated since, allows that evolution is compatible with Christianity, that science and religion need not be at odds. Many Catholics believe in a creator or intelligent designer called God; yet they don't need to apply a literal reading of Bible's creation story in Genesis. The mechanism of natural selection poses no challenge to their faith.
Not so for fundamentalist Christians.
"We're looking at one portion of one religion that seems to want to structure this portion of science education," Flessa says. "They're not going after continental drift. They don't want to teach alternatives to the spherical Earth theory.
"They feel threatened by (evolution), as if it's a threat to fundamentalist Christianity," Flessa continues, "because they read the Bible as a scientific textbook."
Flessa tells his students that he has "no trouble if someone believes, as a matter of religious faith, that the universe, Earth and life were created in six days.
But "I do have trouble," he adds, "if someone wants to claim that such views are scientific, that there is evidence in the rocks and fossils for them, or that such views should be presented as science in public schools."
http://www.ncseweb.org/default.asp
When Arizona Sen. Karen Johnson (R-Mesa) co-sponsored a bill that would've required the state's science teachers "to present evidence that supports and evidence that does not support the theory of evolution," she received a flood of supportive e-mails.
"They were the best and nicest letters from people saying, 'We're so happy that you're finally taking this on,'" Johnson says, reflectively. The bill made it out of committee during that year, 2000, even after heated testimony from scientists. Then, extinction.
"University professors went wild," Johnson recalls. "They were livid that we would question this theory. They showed no willingness at all to have balance. ... The bill got clobbered."
Though Johnson has no immediate plans to sponsor new science-education bills this year, she agrees with some who say a changing political climate could encourage new efforts to get anti-evolution materials into public schools.
In a poll conducted after November's elections, CBS News found that 55 percent of Americans believed the standard creationist idea that "God created humans in present form." Only 13 percent believed humans evolved without the help of an all-powerful creator. Of those who voted to re-elect Bush, 67 percent believed in special creation by God--and half of the Bush backers surveyed said they'd support replacing the teaching of evolution with creationism in public-school curriculums.
To Johnson, a Christian fundamentalist, the teaching of evolution in the schools isn't simply unfair; it could be "faith-destroying," she says.
"It's hard for me to understand how evolution can get put into school science programs and get stuffed down the throats of those who don't want to hear it and who don't believe it anyway," Johnson says. "Children should choose what they want to believe. ... Science is basically the search for truth. The opposite of truth is myth. In my opinion, evolution is a myth. Those who adhere to the evolutionary theory, it's like a religion for them."
When Johnson talks to constituents, she's often struck by how few accept evolution.
"I can only find a few who think (the) theory of evolution has any merit," she says, "like professors at universities."
Indeed, the majority of America's university professors aren't willing to see evolutionary theory supplanted or confounded by religious mythology in the guise of scientific creationism.
After creation scientists rounded up a spurious group of scientists to sign a statement claiming evolutionary theory was in trouble, the staff of the National Center for Science Education decided to have a little fun with the idea.
In 2003, NCSE launched its "200 scientists named Steve agree" effort. More than 220 scientists with PhDs--including two Nobel Prize winners, eight members of the National Academy of Sciences and many authors of scientific texts--signed the group's statement: "There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism of evolution. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to 'intelligent design,' to be introduced into the science curricula of the public schools."
To clearly communicate the satire--scientific truth isn't arrived at through petitions or opinion polls--only scientists named "Steve" or "Stephanie" were allowed to sign the statement. That represents about 1 percent of the science community, according to Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education.
"Creationists are fond of amassing lists of PhDs who deny evolution to try to give the false impression that evolution is somehow on the verge of being rejected by the scientific community," says Scott. "Nothing could be farther from the truth."
Scott, a physical anthropologist, has been researching, speaking and actively fighting to keep religion out of science education for more than 20 years. She addresses legislative bodies, school boards and universities, talking about how the strategies of creationists have changed in order to gain acceptance from the scientific community and, especially, to get anti-evolutionary materials into public schools.
On the cutting edge of this effort is the "intelligent design" movement. Gone is talk of God and the Bible; proponents instead argue that the universe was crafted by intelligent, orderly forces--whether gods or extraterrestrials--of inexplicable origin.
Scott calls intelligent design "new wine in old bottles"--an evolved form of creationism.
After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an equal-time provision for teaching creationism in public schools in 1987, anti-evolutionists scrambled to find ways to get material into classrooms, says Scott. Now, proposals for science curriculum revisions are packaged as "critical thinking" or "teaching the controversy."
Intelligent design proponents argue for the teaching of " the strengths and weaknesses of evolution," similar to the wording of Johnson's bill at the Arizona Legislature in 2000.
This sounds logical and not explicitly religious, Scott says.
"Ask the average person on the street, 'Should we be teaching strengths and weaknesses of evolution?' They're going to say, 'Sure.' Ask them, 'Should we teach the strengths and weaknesses of heliocentrism?' And they'll say, 'Sure.'"
But ask a scientist about the "strengths and weaknesses of heliocentrism"--the theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and you'll get a blank stare.
"There aren't any alternatives to the Earth going around the Sun," Scott says. "Ask a biologist about the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, and you'll get that same blank look."
With intelligent design, gone are the controversies that made scientific creationism untenable.
"They avoid fact claims like the Grand Canyon being cut by Noah's flood or the Earth being 10,000 years old," Scott says. "Intelligent-design proponents make virtually no fact claims whatsoever and that gives them a more bullet-proof position."
Intelligent-design advocates package their message so well that even educators misconstrue evolution, considering it somehow controversial.
"There is no debate within science over whether evolution happened, only how it happened," says Scott. "To dissemble to students that there is an actual controversy going on is mis-educating them and also lying to them."
This can lead to some science teachers avoiding the subject altogether. But not teaching evolution in, say, a biology class is like skipping the Periodic Table of Elements in a chemistry class, Scott says.
"(Evolution) is what makes biology make sense, what ties together the facts that we know," Scott says. "If you don't have that substratum of common descent, you're just memorizing words."
Mathematician William Dembski, a leader in the intelligent-design community, never gets tired of debate.
"This is what I was made for," he says. "I'm charged ... I enjoy the rough and tumble of debate."
Dembski, a researcher at a religious university in Waco, Texas, has degrees in philosophy, mathematics, statistics and theology. He argues that intelligent design is not, as his critics contend, "pseudo-science" or "creationism in a cheap tuxedo."
Intelligent design functions at "a purely scientific level," Dembski says, referencing his books, Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. "You're looking for scientific detectability of intelligence in the natural world."
This search for a designer goes deeper than science--and involves the way humans view the world, he says.
"The elite in our culture are materialistic and atheistic," Dembski says. "Intelligent design challenges their materialistic science and materialistic evolutionary theory. If you look at discipline after discipline, it's been evolutionized--medicine, business, religion, literature. ... If we are right, all these superstructures built on evolution need to be questioned."
In September, Dembski and other design experts met at a conference in New Mexico--"Darwin, Design and Democracy V." They discussed, among other things, strategies for working intelligent design ideas into public school curriculums.
Challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools are on the table in Kansas, Missouri and South Carolina. In suburban Atlanta, a higher court ruling negated a school district's 2002 adoption of a warning sticker for science textbooks that labeled evolution as "theory, not a fact." In Dover, Pa., last month, the local school board voted that science teachers must inform students of the existence of "alternatives" to Darwin's theory.
These days, more than 80 years after the famed Scopes trial that ended a ban on teaching evolution in public schools, the topic is hotter than ever. Stories about evolution have been featured recently in Time, Newsweek, Wired and The New York Times.
In October, National Geographic ran a cover story by author and island biogeographer David Quammen, "Was Darwin Wrong?"
Quammen's answer: "No."
"If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that (evolution) is 'just' a theory," Quammen wrote. He listed other "theories"--the notion that Earth orbits the sun, continental drift, the existence of atoms and electricity. "Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact."
In The Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote, "When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ("The voice of the people is the voice of God"), as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science."
Though science is not democratic, appealing to a broad swath of spiritually needy humankind is what advocates of intelligent design do best.
"Increasingly, people with any sense of religious sensibilities believe there's an underlying purpose to the world," Dembski, an evangelical protestant, says. "Intelligent design is the only view opposed to the reductionist materialism that prevails in the academy and in the scientific view of the elites of the culture. Most of the unwashed masses, and I count myself among them, believe there's a sense of purpose. We're giving a voice to those people, saying 'The science backs you up.'"
Like those ancient critics of heliocentrism, Dembski references common sense to prove a design inference.
Say you're driving through South Dakota, Dembski says as example, and you come upon a rock formation with the faces of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.
"Are you going to think to yourself, 'Did wind and erosion do that?' No. But that's what the Darwinists are saying, that natural forces brought about this complexity. Obviously, Mount Rushmore is the result of intelligence."
The idea that the complexity of a human cell can only be the work of an intelligent designer harkens back to 18th-century Christian philosopher William Paley, who came up with the watch metaphor for intelligent design. A watch, Paley argued, was so intricate, "so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day" that it could not result from chance. "The watch must have had a maker," Paley wrote in Natural Theology.
The problem with Paley's argument was as evident to Darwin in the 19th century as it is to scientists today, who point to the evidence of the fossil record and its evidence of transitions from simple organisms to much more complex organisms. A cell is not a watch.
Paley's ideas were given some consideration in the 1800s, but by the beginning of the 20th century, he'd been thoroughly discredited, explains Karl Flessa, a professor of geoscience at the UA.
In his college paleontology course, Flessa includes a lecture on creation science. In it, he explains--with respect for divergent religious beliefs--why creationism and intelligent design are "junk-science."
"There is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence that indicates that all life is related through a system of ancestry and descent, that new species form out of old ones, that natural selection is effective in shaping organisms," he tells students. "Debate continues on some aspects of mechanisms, but no one doubts that evolution has occurred."
Flessa carefully examines and discredits creationist fallacies. For example, creationists invoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that disorder increases over time in a closed system, to argue against evolution. However, explains Flessa, the Earth is not a closed system, as it gets energy from the Sun.
As for the claim that amino acids, proteins, organs, and life itself are much too complicated to have come about through chance processes, "No one says they formed through chance," Flessa says, "only that they formed step by step, rather than a single, full assembly of a human from raw chemicals."
Flessa isn't trying to rob students of their religious beliefs--far from it. Many religions accept evolution.
"There are lots and lots of Christians who have absolutely no problem with evolution," Flessa says.
Roman Catholics teach evolution in their schools. A papal decree in the 1950s, reiterated since, allows that evolution is compatible with Christianity, that science and religion need not be at odds. Many Catholics believe in a creator or intelligent designer called God; yet they don't need to apply a literal reading of Bible's creation story in Genesis. The mechanism of natural selection poses no challenge to their faith.
Not so for fundamentalist Christians.
"We're looking at one portion of one religion that seems to want to structure this portion of science education," Flessa says. "They're not going after continental drift. They don't want to teach alternatives to the spherical Earth theory.
"They feel threatened by (evolution), as if it's a threat to fundamentalist Christianity," Flessa continues, "because they read the Bible as a scientific textbook."
Flessa tells his students that he has "no trouble if someone believes, as a matter of religious faith, that the universe, Earth and life were created in six days.
But "I do have trouble," he adds, "if someone wants to claim that such views are scientific, that there is evidence in the rocks and fossils for them, or that such views should be presented as science in public schools."
Oh and one more thing...it is about lies, mis-representations, and taken out of context....here is a nice example for you.
Quoting, Misquoting, Quote-Mining
Unlike the serious sciences (e.g., quantum electrodynamics, which is accurate up to 14 decimal places), evolution has become an exercise in filling holes by digging others. Fortunately, the cognitive dissonance associated with this exercise can’t be suppressed indefinitely, so occasionally evolutionists fess-up that some gaping hole really is there and can’t be filled simply by digging another hole. Such admissions, of course, provide ready material for evolution critics like me. Indeed, it’s one of the few pleasures in this business sticking it to the evolutionists when they make some particularly egregious admission. Consider the following admission by Peter Ward (Ward is a well-known expert on ammonite fossils and does not favor a ID-based view):
“The seemingly sudden appearance of skeletonized life has been one of the most perplexing puzzles of the fossil record. How is it that animals as complex as trilobites and brachiopods could spring forth so suddenly, completely formed, without a trace of their ancestors in the underlying strata? If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it.”
— Peter Douglas Ward, On Methuselah’s Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992), 29.
Pretty convincing indicator that the Cambrian explosion poses a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory, wouldn’t you say? Note that this is not a misquote: I indicate clearly that Ward does not support ID and there’s sufficient unedited material here to make clear that he really is saying that the Cambrian explosion poses a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory.
You’d think, therefore, that the evolutionary community might be grateful to evolution critics for drawing their attention to this problem, treating it as an incentive to get the lead out and figure out just what happened during the Cambrian. But that’s not what happens. Rather, evolution critics are charged with “quote mining,” misrepresenting the true state of evolutionary theory by focusing on a few scattered problems rather than toeing the party line and admitting that evolution is overwhelmingly confirmed.
This happened when I quoted from the above passage by Ward in a popular piece titled “Five Questions Evolutionists Would Rather Dodge” (go here). In due course I received the following email:
Dear Dr. Dembski,
I would appreciate the citation for your recent quote from Peter Ward, “The Cambrian Explosion so flies in the face of evolution that paleontologist Peter Ward wrote, “If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it.”
Thank you,
Gary Hurd, Ph.D.
Innocent enough request. The piece in which the quote appeared was popular, so I hadn’t given the reference. I wrote back giving the full citation. Next thing I read on the web is a piece (co-authored by Hurd) twice as long as my original piece focused on the sin of quote-mining (go here). And, as is now standard operating procedure, the original author of the quote is contacted for comment on being “quote-mined.” Predictably, the author (in this case Ward) is shocked and dismayed at being quoted by evolution critics for being critical of evolution. Evolutionists may not know much about what actually happened in the course of natural history, but they have this script down:
We [i.e., Gary Hurd et al.] emailed and then telephoned Peter Ward to ask him for a citation to this quote. He actually couldn’t recall where he had written this. Ultimately we had to ask William Dembski for the citation, which he promptly provided. We would like to thank him publicly for this courtesy. Professor Ward was not at all pleased, and wished us to convey to Dr. Dembski his displeasure at his writing being manipulated in this fashion. We consider this as done herein.
Word of advice: if you are an evolutionist and don’t want to be quoted by evolution critics for being critical of evolution, resist the urge — don’t criticize it. If tempted, even if the reality of evolution’s gaping holes is staring you in the face, close your eyes and repeat the phrase “overwhelming evidence” or “nothing in biology makes sense apart from evolution.”
Through long experience, this has been found to be the most effective way to rejoin your fellow sleepwalkers.
Wait it gets better here is a letter in reply from the actual person mis-quoted and his words taken out of context.
I was quite relieved that Jason Rosenhouse wrote his piece on William Dembski’s recent bloviations about quote-mining. Specifically, Dembski was challenging a portion of something written by Dave Mullenix and myself about a year ago published on Panda’s Thumb.* I had felt that I had an obligation to respond, but several commitments had prior claim to my time (and I simply took Monday off to go fishing).
My personal reaction to Dembski’s blog was surprise. I was far more critical of Dembski in my chapter for Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (Matt Young, Taner Edis (Editors), 2004 Rutgers University Press). But, Dembski hasn’t been able to respond to any of the critical studies found there. I was also rather pleased that our effort had been worth the attention of “the Isaac Newton” of whatever. I suspect that this is the consequence of two features of the different publications. My WIDF chapter demonstrated that Dembski’s standard claim that his “explanatory filter” was the long unsuspected theoretical basis for archaeology and forensic science is in fact absolutely false. However, throughout WIDF all the contributors were careful to only address the factual, and logical failures of the so-called “scientific aspects” of Intelligent Design Creationism.
In Dembski’s Five Questions: Number One, Dave and I showed that Dembski is dishonest. The intellectual argument in WIDF is one that Dembski is able to ignore because his followers won’t be bothered. The personal charismatic affront threatens Dembski’s money shot. Secondly, while Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism is selling quite well going to the second printing, the PT blog is reaching a daily audience larger than the current sales of WIDF. (Get on the ball yuz guys and buy the book)!
Dembski started an ARN discussion thread (and then left it) regarding his distortion of Peter Ward’s writing,. Some of the comments on that venue were of such high quality that I really did not see much to add. Specifically, the poster called “N. Wells” made two comments, the first, like Jason, reiterates our point that the Ward’s intent is entirely different from Dembski’s usage. The second illustrated the manner in which Dembski abused Ward as clearly as anything I could write.
There are still points of interest left to note on Dembski’s latest round.
Dembski, “Pretty convincing indicator that the Cambrian explosion poses a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory, wouldn’t you say? Note that this is not a misquote: I indicate clearly that Ward does not support ID and there’s sufficient unedited material here to make clear that he really is saying that the Cambrian explosion poses a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory.”
Second,
Dembski, “Word of advice: if you are an evolutionist and don’t want to be quoted by evolution critics for being critical of evolution, resist the urge — don’t criticize it.”
Here, Dembski seems to be approving of misrepresentation (oh well- lying) about science in the service of creationism. Few alternatives seem to exist. Among them are, Dembski is seriously suggesting that he is not distorting Ward’s clear intent and meaning. If this is so, then we must make some major changes in how to view Dembski’s mental competence. However, the possibility exists that he has merely chosen this as a way to amuse himself waiting for the end of his brief tenure at Baylor University before moving to the more appropriate seminary setting. Alternately, Dembski is merely attempting to draw attention to himself. If so he has been successful, but at the cost of what little credibility he may have retained as a serious scholar. Dembski’s latest round seems to leave no other alternatives.
My larger intent had been to critically challenge each of Dembski’s “Five Questions.” However, I ran out of enthusiasm. As Dembski observed,
“Next thing I read on the web is a piece (co-authored by Hurd) twice as long as my original piece focused on the sin of quote-mining (go here). And, as is now standard operating procedure, the original author of the quote is contacted for comment on being “quote-mined.”
The facts are that it took much longer to expose just the lies from one of Dembski’s “Five Questions Evolutionists Would Rather Dodge” that it took Dembski to write all five of them them. We had to read Dembski’s bilge, we read the quotes from the original sources (sometimes entire books we personally purchased). Ward was just one of many authors whose work had been stolen. We in fact contacted Ward merely to get the appropriate reference (which he could not remember). When I called him on the phone, he said that he couldn’t recall the proper citation even after I read to him the quote used by Dembski. It was then I mentioned that I would have to contact Dembski next and Ward asked me to convey his displeasure. However, it should be standard that the author’s of works misrepresented by creationists be contacted, and it should become standard practice that those abused authors defend their integrity by directly confronting the liars in print if not in person.
* I think that my nominating Dave as co-author was entirely appropriate as he made several substantive contributions directly leading to the paper’s writing, its content, and some language. The item would not, and could not have been written without his contribution which in my practice results in co-authorship. Dave, you need not be so modest.
Nah, they don't misquote and munipulate...uh huh! I like mustard on my biscuits to.
Quoting, Misquoting, Quote-Mining
Unlike the serious sciences (e.g., quantum electrodynamics, which is accurate up to 14 decimal places), evolution has become an exercise in filling holes by digging others. Fortunately, the cognitive dissonance associated with this exercise can’t be suppressed indefinitely, so occasionally evolutionists fess-up that some gaping hole really is there and can’t be filled simply by digging another hole. Such admissions, of course, provide ready material for evolution critics like me. Indeed, it’s one of the few pleasures in this business sticking it to the evolutionists when they make some particularly egregious admission. Consider the following admission by Peter Ward (Ward is a well-known expert on ammonite fossils and does not favor a ID-based view):
“The seemingly sudden appearance of skeletonized life has been one of the most perplexing puzzles of the fossil record. How is it that animals as complex as trilobites and brachiopods could spring forth so suddenly, completely formed, without a trace of their ancestors in the underlying strata? If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it.”
— Peter Douglas Ward, On Methuselah’s Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992), 29.
Pretty convincing indicator that the Cambrian explosion poses a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory, wouldn’t you say? Note that this is not a misquote: I indicate clearly that Ward does not support ID and there’s sufficient unedited material here to make clear that he really is saying that the Cambrian explosion poses a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory.
You’d think, therefore, that the evolutionary community might be grateful to evolution critics for drawing their attention to this problem, treating it as an incentive to get the lead out and figure out just what happened during the Cambrian. But that’s not what happens. Rather, evolution critics are charged with “quote mining,” misrepresenting the true state of evolutionary theory by focusing on a few scattered problems rather than toeing the party line and admitting that evolution is overwhelmingly confirmed.
This happened when I quoted from the above passage by Ward in a popular piece titled “Five Questions Evolutionists Would Rather Dodge” (go here). In due course I received the following email:
Dear Dr. Dembski,
I would appreciate the citation for your recent quote from Peter Ward, “The Cambrian Explosion so flies in the face of evolution that paleontologist Peter Ward wrote, “If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it.”
Thank you,
Gary Hurd, Ph.D.
Innocent enough request. The piece in which the quote appeared was popular, so I hadn’t given the reference. I wrote back giving the full citation. Next thing I read on the web is a piece (co-authored by Hurd) twice as long as my original piece focused on the sin of quote-mining (go here). And, as is now standard operating procedure, the original author of the quote is contacted for comment on being “quote-mined.” Predictably, the author (in this case Ward) is shocked and dismayed at being quoted by evolution critics for being critical of evolution. Evolutionists may not know much about what actually happened in the course of natural history, but they have this script down:
We [i.e., Gary Hurd et al.] emailed and then telephoned Peter Ward to ask him for a citation to this quote. He actually couldn’t recall where he had written this. Ultimately we had to ask William Dembski for the citation, which he promptly provided. We would like to thank him publicly for this courtesy. Professor Ward was not at all pleased, and wished us to convey to Dr. Dembski his displeasure at his writing being manipulated in this fashion. We consider this as done herein.
Word of advice: if you are an evolutionist and don’t want to be quoted by evolution critics for being critical of evolution, resist the urge — don’t criticize it. If tempted, even if the reality of evolution’s gaping holes is staring you in the face, close your eyes and repeat the phrase “overwhelming evidence” or “nothing in biology makes sense apart from evolution.”
Through long experience, this has been found to be the most effective way to rejoin your fellow sleepwalkers.
Wait it gets better here is a letter in reply from the actual person mis-quoted and his words taken out of context.
I was quite relieved that Jason Rosenhouse wrote his piece on William Dembski’s recent bloviations about quote-mining. Specifically, Dembski was challenging a portion of something written by Dave Mullenix and myself about a year ago published on Panda’s Thumb.* I had felt that I had an obligation to respond, but several commitments had prior claim to my time (and I simply took Monday off to go fishing).
My personal reaction to Dembski’s blog was surprise. I was far more critical of Dembski in my chapter for Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (Matt Young, Taner Edis (Editors), 2004 Rutgers University Press). But, Dembski hasn’t been able to respond to any of the critical studies found there. I was also rather pleased that our effort had been worth the attention of “the Isaac Newton” of whatever. I suspect that this is the consequence of two features of the different publications. My WIDF chapter demonstrated that Dembski’s standard claim that his “explanatory filter” was the long unsuspected theoretical basis for archaeology and forensic science is in fact absolutely false. However, throughout WIDF all the contributors were careful to only address the factual, and logical failures of the so-called “scientific aspects” of Intelligent Design Creationism.
In Dembski’s Five Questions: Number One, Dave and I showed that Dembski is dishonest. The intellectual argument in WIDF is one that Dembski is able to ignore because his followers won’t be bothered. The personal charismatic affront threatens Dembski’s money shot. Secondly, while Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism is selling quite well going to the second printing, the PT blog is reaching a daily audience larger than the current sales of WIDF. (Get on the ball yuz guys and buy the book)!
Dembski started an ARN discussion thread (and then left it) regarding his distortion of Peter Ward’s writing,. Some of the comments on that venue were of such high quality that I really did not see much to add. Specifically, the poster called “N. Wells” made two comments, the first, like Jason, reiterates our point that the Ward’s intent is entirely different from Dembski’s usage. The second illustrated the manner in which Dembski abused Ward as clearly as anything I could write.
There are still points of interest left to note on Dembski’s latest round.
Dembski, “Pretty convincing indicator that the Cambrian explosion poses a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory, wouldn’t you say? Note that this is not a misquote: I indicate clearly that Ward does not support ID and there’s sufficient unedited material here to make clear that he really is saying that the Cambrian explosion poses a challenge to conventional evolutionary theory.”
Second,
Dembski, “Word of advice: if you are an evolutionist and don’t want to be quoted by evolution critics for being critical of evolution, resist the urge — don’t criticize it.”
Here, Dembski seems to be approving of misrepresentation (oh well- lying) about science in the service of creationism. Few alternatives seem to exist. Among them are, Dembski is seriously suggesting that he is not distorting Ward’s clear intent and meaning. If this is so, then we must make some major changes in how to view Dembski’s mental competence. However, the possibility exists that he has merely chosen this as a way to amuse himself waiting for the end of his brief tenure at Baylor University before moving to the more appropriate seminary setting. Alternately, Dembski is merely attempting to draw attention to himself. If so he has been successful, but at the cost of what little credibility he may have retained as a serious scholar. Dembski’s latest round seems to leave no other alternatives.
My larger intent had been to critically challenge each of Dembski’s “Five Questions.” However, I ran out of enthusiasm. As Dembski observed,
“Next thing I read on the web is a piece (co-authored by Hurd) twice as long as my original piece focused on the sin of quote-mining (go here). And, as is now standard operating procedure, the original author of the quote is contacted for comment on being “quote-mined.”
The facts are that it took much longer to expose just the lies from one of Dembski’s “Five Questions Evolutionists Would Rather Dodge” that it took Dembski to write all five of them them. We had to read Dembski’s bilge, we read the quotes from the original sources (sometimes entire books we personally purchased). Ward was just one of many authors whose work had been stolen. We in fact contacted Ward merely to get the appropriate reference (which he could not remember). When I called him on the phone, he said that he couldn’t recall the proper citation even after I read to him the quote used by Dembski. It was then I mentioned that I would have to contact Dembski next and Ward asked me to convey his displeasure. However, it should be standard that the author’s of works misrepresented by creationists be contacted, and it should become standard practice that those abused authors defend their integrity by directly confronting the liars in print if not in person.
* I think that my nominating Dave as co-author was entirely appropriate as he made several substantive contributions directly leading to the paper’s writing, its content, and some language. The item would not, and could not have been written without his contribution which in my practice results in co-authorship. Dave, you need not be so modest.
Nah, they don't misquote and munipulate...uh huh! I like mustard on my biscuits to.
Intelligent men do not decide any subject until they have carefully examined both or all sides of it. Fools, cowards, and those too lazy to think, accept blindly, without examination, dogmas and doctrines imposed upon them in childhood by their parents, priests, and teachers, when their minds were immature and they could not reason.
[Some] 433,000,000 Mohammedans believe that the Koran was brought by an angel from heaven; 335,000,000 Hindus believe one of their gods, Siva, has six arms; 153,000,000 Buddhists believe they will be reincarnated; 904,000,000 Christians believe a god made the world in six days, Joshua stopped the sun by yelling at it, and Jesus was born of a virgin and nullified natural laws to perform miracles.
There is absolutely no scientific proof of any of these claims. Science has shown them to be contrary to all known facts. It is more intelligent to classify them as false. Religions are all based upon the primitive superstitions of ignorant, stone-age men who had no knowledge of science and thought the world was flat. The Catholic Church imprisoned Galileo for life and burned Bruno at the stake because they disagreed with these superstitious beliefs.
These primitive beliefs have been kept alive by a vast army of priests, preachers, and rabbis because it is to their great profit to promote them, first, by imposing them on the helpless brains of children, and second, by saturating the air, TV, press, and schools with their childish superstitions and unreasonable claims. They fool the ignorant and make the gullible and the intelligent alike pay tribute to them. Their multi-billion-dollar properties and incomes are exempt from taxes; they get half-fare on trains, buses, and planes; and receive billions of dollars in grants of taxpayers' money to help build up their political power, wealth, and luxurious living. Taxes could be cut 10 percent if churches paid their just share. That would mean a probable saving of 20 billion dollars a year to the people of the U.S. every year of their lives. Some priests also indoctrinated with superstition from childhood probably believe what they preach. It pays them handsomely to do so.
click here for more.
[Some] 433,000,000 Mohammedans believe that the Koran was brought by an angel from heaven; 335,000,000 Hindus believe one of their gods, Siva, has six arms; 153,000,000 Buddhists believe they will be reincarnated; 904,000,000 Christians believe a god made the world in six days, Joshua stopped the sun by yelling at it, and Jesus was born of a virgin and nullified natural laws to perform miracles.
There is absolutely no scientific proof of any of these claims. Science has shown them to be contrary to all known facts. It is more intelligent to classify them as false. Religions are all based upon the primitive superstitions of ignorant, stone-age men who had no knowledge of science and thought the world was flat. The Catholic Church imprisoned Galileo for life and burned Bruno at the stake because they disagreed with these superstitious beliefs.
These primitive beliefs have been kept alive by a vast army of priests, preachers, and rabbis because it is to their great profit to promote them, first, by imposing them on the helpless brains of children, and second, by saturating the air, TV, press, and schools with their childish superstitions and unreasonable claims. They fool the ignorant and make the gullible and the intelligent alike pay tribute to them. Their multi-billion-dollar properties and incomes are exempt from taxes; they get half-fare on trains, buses, and planes; and receive billions of dollars in grants of taxpayers' money to help build up their political power, wealth, and luxurious living. Taxes could be cut 10 percent if churches paid their just share. That would mean a probable saving of 20 billion dollars a year to the people of the U.S. every year of their lives. Some priests also indoctrinated with superstition from childhood probably believe what they preach. It pays them handsomely to do so.
click here for more.
Gee What a surprise 8O But than again it was never based on anything legitimate or honest. Its just true coz.