Science Icon Fires Broadside At Creationists

Professor Ernst Mayr, the scientist renowned as the father of modern biology, will celebrate his 100th birthday tomorrow by leading a scathing attack on creationism.

The evolutionary biologist, who is already acclaimed as one of the most prolific researchers of all time, has no intention of retiring and is shortly to publish new research that dismantles the fashionable creationist doctrine of “intelligent design”.

Although he has reluctantly cut his workload since a serious bout of pneumonia 18 months ago, Prof. Mayr has remained an active scientist at Harvard University throughout his 90s. He has written five books since his 90th birthday and is researching five academic papers. One of these, scheduled to appear later this year, will examine how “intelligent design” — the latest way in which creationists have sought to present a divine origin of the world — was thoroughly refuted by Charles Darwin a century and a half ago.

His work is motivated in part by a sense of exasperation at the re-emergence of creationism in the USA, which he compares unfavourably with the widespread acceptance of evolution that he encountered while growing up in early 20th-century Germany.

The states of Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Oklahoma currently omit the word “evolution” from their curriculums. The Alabama state board of education has voted to include disclaimers in textbooks describing evolution as a theory. In Georgia, the word “evolution” was banned from the science curriculum after the state’s schools superintendent described it as a “controversial buzzword”.

Fierce protest, including criticism from Jimmy Carter, the former President, reversed this.

Prof. Mayr, who will celebrate his 100th birthday at his holiday home in New Hampshire with his two daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, was born on 5 July 1905 in Kempten, Germany. He took a PhD in zoology at the University of Berlin, before travelling to New Guinea in 1928 to study its diverse bird life. On his return in 1930 he emigrated to the USA. His most famous work, Systematics and the Origin of Species, was published in 1942 and is regarded still as a canonical work of biology.

It effectively founded the modern discipline by combining Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s genetics, showing how the two were compatible. Prof. Mayr redefined what scientists mean by a species, using interbreeding as a guide. If two varieties of duck or vole do not interbreed, they cannot be the same species.

Prof. Mayr has won all three of the awards sometimes termed the “triple crown” of biology — the Balzan Prize, the Crafoord Prize and the International Prize for Biology. Although he formally retired in 1975, he has been active as an Emeritus Professor ever since and has recently written extensively on the philosophy of biology.

Ah, BB ... we do have our little disagreements. But this is a big one, and we've both nibbled at it from time to time, without ever reaching any common agreement. You are assuming, incorrectly I think, that the whole is nothing more than a collection of its parts, and cannot naturally have properties which are different from them separately. In logic, this is known as a "category error",…

Dear Patrick, you have totally inverted my entire position on the “part-to-whole” problem which I have long been maintained here, as recently as my post of May 29th, “The Cosmos as Hologram.” You have stood my position on its very head, subjecting it to a 180-degree turn, to make me say what I never said. If you missed this article the first time around, you can read it here if you want to know where I stand on this matter:

The Cosmos as Hologram

My entire point in that exercise is that, if one could identify and examine all the parts constituting a given whole, and know absolutely everything about all the parts, still one would not know the properties of the whole of which they are constituting parts.

Which is precisely to say that any whole is more than the simple sum of its parts. Indeed, I have been jumping up and down, and screaming out loud in recent times, to draw attention to precisely this understanding.

Stephen Jay Gould’s (may he rest in peace) language of “emergence,” of “nonlinear” or “nonadditive interaction,” is exactly what I’m talking about in that essay.

There is no “category error” here.

If you and I have a “communication problem,” as seems likely, it seems to me it boils down to this:

Because I'm a Christian, a believer in God, you feel that nothing I say can be trusted -- because I'm "brainwashed."

What you fail to understand, however, is that I see science and religion as two separable enterprises. Still, it's true I do see science as the “junior partner” in this scenario; for there is more to universal truth than what science discerns.

But IMO FWIW science is absolutely necessary to human progress. It stands alone in its own field of expertise, and doesn’t “need” theological additions in order to be true in its own field. And shouldn’t have such additions – its method rules them out, in fact. (Thank you, Niels Bohr!!!)

But science is a “part” of a larger epistemic “whole.” The trick for the thinker is to understand the ways in which science and theology are “separate,” within their own respective fields of expertise – and to keep them separate for their respective purposes. Science analyzes existent reality; religion has a different purpose altogether, one that can be summed up under the head of transcendent reality.

Yet in the final analysis, together science and theology – Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft -- conduce to form – as parts – the larger whole that we human beings experience as Reality.

Thanks for writing, Patrick – even though in so doing you have stood everything I have ever argued at Free Republic on its head.

These arguments get difficult because so much is riding on them. You might have no trouble convincing anyone that a tapeworm is a cleverly designed piece of biological machinery, as long as in admitting it they weren't required to go to the next logical step and wonder how it came to be so cleverly designed. At that point half the audience must deny that there is anything clever about it at all. Its just a collection of natural processes cleverly put together, no, strike that, serendipitously put together and it works.

Every one of the natural processes that allow it to live are natural in nature, and the fact that they work together in such a way as to sustain its life is interesting, but not clever.

I find the existence of biological firmware, the little control algorithm built into any cell, to be absolutely astonishing. Any organism depends on its own little information system for its survival, but we must agree that its little control system is interesting, but not clever.

The ones I design are clever, mind you. I use naturally occurring materials and processes, and organize them into such a fashion as to make my little mechanism functional. We could almost design a tapeworm, they're pretty simple, and if we manage to do it, I assure you we would qualify as clever, as would our design. But the real ones naturally occurring in nature, having assembled themselves from soup wtih no plans at all, these are not cleverly made, merely interesting.

In similar fashion the electrical pulses and magnetic variations that make this communications possible all exist in nature in some form or other. We might say that these natural phenomena have been utilized in combination with an injection of intelligence to make them work together in a specific combination; any one piece missing and the computing network fails. We could imagine materials and forces coming together to form a cable, and others coming together to form a router, others somehow forming themselves into a satellite, separately, but serendipitously coming together over the eons to make our little network possible, or we could imagine a guy, or a host of guys, injecting their bit of intelligence and work to make it possible.

Believing in natural processes and believing in geeks are not mutually exclusive. And believing in both requires little faith, since we know thats how it works. Believing in either one exclusive of the other requires much more faith, really.

Thanks for writing, Patrick – even though in so doing you have stood everything I have ever argued at Free Republic on its head.

I really didn't miss the mark, BB. I said:

"You are assuming, incorrectly I think, that the whole is nothing more than a collection of its parts, and cannot naturally have properties which are different from them separately." [Emphasis in my original post.]

The emergent properties of large-scale entities can be greater than, and unpredicted by, their component parts, and this is the case whether we're discussing cells versus their individual molecules, or a jellyfish versus its individual cells, or a human brain versus its component neurons. Emergent properties are -- according to Gould -- natural consequences of the complex structure.

I skipped a step or two when I assumed you didn't accept this, and that you were commiting a category error by asserting that such properties couldn't exist unless they had some source other than the natural world. I may have leaped to unwarranted conclusions about your argument; and at the very least I didn't leave many clues about my thought processes.

My whole objection to your earlier posts was that you claimed that complex structures contained "information" which somehow demonstrated that more than chemistry was going on. What I was clumsily saying is that "information" is no more than an emergent property, and thus doesn't indicate any non-natural activity. So my last post wasn't all that off-point. At least in my mind it's very much related.

I did a Google on "emergent properties" and I discovered that there are wild debates raging among philosophers on this topic. That's not surprising, because it's really the same old stuff, but very nicely packaged in scientific terms. And frankly, the precise means by which emergent properties actually emerge is an open question, and the fact that such properties are largely unpredictable is also intriguing.

I understand "emergent properties" from my perspective, which is perhaps an oversimplified one. I know when I add a component to achieve a certain purpose, I may suddenly discover that other things are now possible that I hadn't originally intended. Serendipity is an important part of the process, as is the step by step; each step making the next one possible.

I don't get too wrapped up in the debates about evolution for that reason. In my world, evolution is an important part of the design process. And the "holy grail" would be to develop a system that could itself adapt to changing circumstances. There are people working on those kinds of systems; if they manage to do it, that would be a clever piece of design, I don't think anyone would say that, now that the system can adapt itself, that there is no evidence of intelligence. Really, the more adaptable, the more clever a design it is in my world.

I can't get past the firmware at the heart of every cell. And I can't simply dismiss a brain and a nervous system as a computer made of meat. I know it is that, but a computer has an operating system and an internal control system that allows it to function; without that its just meat. So I can't help but look at a brain and see something much more cleverly put together than anything I can do, although we are getting there. We are starting to figure it out, mind you, we are figuring out which parts handle which functions and where to intervene if we want to modify it. But as we learn these things about it, as the mystery yields, my admiration for its ingenuity increases.

why can you not wrap your mind around the idea of something in existance being better than you?

That appears to be your problem, not mine.

if it was based in our worldy SCIENCE, it could be pointed out with certainty. but it isnt.

Exactly. It isn't based on science, so it doesn't belong in a science class. I'm glad we can agree on something.

and btw, if Theology isnt a science because we cant prove God, then Biology isnt a science because we can define Life. and thus it reasons, neither is Anthropology because we can not reproduce it, nor Paleontology.

by your exclussion of a God, you exclude the premise of Life, therefore, you exclude the essence of Evolution, which is "grow, consume, reproduce , and die"

Another non-sequitur. I exclude only one more god than you do and that has no bearing on my view of the Theory of Evolution.

Theology is not a science because it makes no observations, makes no measurements, formulates no hypotheses that can be falsified, etc. None of that applies to the other fields you mention. See the difference? the acts of God are observable. the mearusements matter not, just as theoretical chemistry tends to not use them either. the hypothesis is that God is alive and well and is acting, even today. Paleontology does NOT have the ability to reproduce its hypothesis in a lab. people experience God all the time. just because you refuse God, does not mean that He has refused you. open your eyes beyond what you can see. observations cant be measured if its simply a smile. what is the net worth of a smile? try this. live without breathing. you can do that for a short time, no? think of "breathing" as "evoltuion." a means to life, but not life itself. conversly, you cannot breath without living, meaning without life, evolution is impossible. now that you (hopefully) understand why i would include God with science, i think you can take a step to Truth.

And I can't simply dismiss a brain and a nervous system as a computer made of meat. I know it is that, but a computer has an operating system and an internal control system that allows it to function; without that its just meat. So I can't help but look at a brain and see something much more cleverly put together than anything I can do, although we are getting there.

Certainly, the brain, and the mind, and consciousness, are among the most challenging topics I can imagine. At this stage, such problems seem almost unsolvable. But not entirely. I see no reason to think that, in principle, the whole business won't eventually yield to scientific inquiry. Most definitely I see no justification for abandoning all rational inquiry and then to go wandering off into the untestable, unverifiable realms of mysticsm. Science has a great track record. Nature can be understood. But it can sometimes take a long time.

Thank you so much for the ping to your discussion with PatrickHenry!

Indeed, what PatrickHenry attributed to you was by all appearances the exact polar opposite of what you have been saying for so very long!!!

However, in post 884 he attempts to explain his objection – which is, as you suspected, that he has presumed that you have presumed a supernatural cause for the information in biological life. This is a bit odd, since you have always openly evaluated alternatives, including the natural, such as the sun as a possible source of information in post 543!

On post 715 I draw the same type of objection wrt to the side of scientific materialism, that the answers given to my challenge both presumed a natural, biochemical, cause for a non-physical phenomenon. The challenge was this:

Just take two skin cells, one alive, one dead and describe the difference between them.

That difference is information which has a specific meaning wrt molecular biology and is defined at post 852. To paraphrase, the information is the communication itself and not the message alone and therefore is not “physical” though it may leave a message itself as a physical artifact, e.g. in the DNA.

This is a serious question before science at this time, more specifically the question is before physicists, information theorists and biologists who are engaged in “information theory and molecular biology”. And even when we allow that information (Shannon paraphrased as successful communication) is likely heritable - it remains the central question to be answered in “origin of life” theories.

For that reason, in terms of error, I would point to PatrickHenry’s claim:

My whole objection to your [betty boop] earlier posts was that you claimed that complex structures contained "information" which somehow demonstrated that more than chemistry was going on. What I was clumsily saying is that "information" is no more than an emergent property, and thus doesn't indicate any non-natural activity.

Information as an emergent property has not been demonstrated by science. Presuming that it has is circular reasoning. PatrickHenry would no doubt object to my declaring that “God exists because the Scriptures say He exists and He wrote them” as circular reasoning. But his (and others) reasoning in this matter is likewise circular.

Personally, it seems very clear to me, that the fact of a beginning clearly points to God as Creator – and therefore, first communicator. The beginning of time and the origin of information are IMHO two halts for scientific materialism and metaphysical naturalism.

They don't necessarily agree except in their alliance against scientific inquiry.

"Alliance against" is your perception, Doc. My perception is that the two major domains of human knowledge -- in the German language, Naturwissenchaft (the natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaft (generally philosophy, including metaphysics and epistemology) are both necessary and ultimately complementary. One of the greatest physicists who ever lived, Niels Bohr, seemed to think so. He didn't want to see the natural sciences cross the street into the other domain (and presumably the reverse situation was also illegitimate in his view); but neither did he think the other domain was useless. He just didn't think it was the business of science. (Metaphysical naturalism, by his lights, would probably be a good example of an abuse of science.)

I can't argue at all about The Ultimate Beginning Point. But from then on, it's certainly arguable that natural law governs. The universe exhibits too many well-observed regularities to think otherwise. The character of life, which makes a living cell different from a dead one, is the sort of thing which BB and I were discussing. She labels the difference "information."

I've been expressing a concern that she's reading too much into that word. If life is merely an emergent property of the constituent components (whatever that means, and I'm not at all certain what that may be) then it's arguably not a "message" slipped in by some supernatural agency. That's my only point. And I had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that BB had taken the opposite position.

I know that nature can be understood, and I agree that this is science's role and they are good at it. They should do what they do. The transcendental is beyond their scope, and doesn't really help them to do their job.

But as we figure these things out, and decode them, and learn how to use these processes in our own schemes and devices, I can't help but feel that we are learning from the master, so to speak. You could take something I've done and take it apart and figure out how to do it yourself, and parts of the design that aren't immediately clear might become clear as you start to build your own stuff. But figuring it out and even surpassing my design doesn't make me vanish.

This may seem strange, but you are going to come closer to understanding me than someone who looks at my work and figures its magic. There is a limit to what you can gather about someone by dissecting their handiwork, but there are also things you can't learn any other way.

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