Posted on 04/29/2008 8:38:43 PM PDT by Soliton
On 18th April, the day Ben Stein's infamous film was released, Michael Shermer received the following letter from a Jew (referencing a past article that Shermer had written debunking the Holocaust deniers) whose identity I shall conceal as "David J".
Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!
Shermer wrote to Mr J to ask if he had by any chance just seen Expelled, and he received this reply:
Yes I have. You know, I respect you as a human being and you have done great work exposing psychics and frauds, but this is a very touchy issue that affects me and family emotionally. Our family business was affected because of Auschwitz because now, our family has nothing. It is gone. Things began to make sense once I saw the movie and I am just appalled. I have learned a lot from Ben Stein, a Jewish brother, who has opened my eyes up a bit.
It seemed to me that Ben Stein and his lying crew were more to blame than Mr J himself for his revolting letter. I therefore decided to write him a personal letter and try to explain a few things to him. It then occurred to me (indeed, Michael Shermer suggested as much) that there are probably many others like him, whose minds have been twisted in this evil way by the man Stein, and that it would be a good idea to publish the letter. I decided to wait 24 hours to see if he would reply, although I didn't expect him to. I am now publishing my letter to him, exactly as I sent it to him except that I have removed his name.
Richard
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Dear Mr J
Michael Shermer forwarded me a letter from you which suggests that you have unfortunately been taken in by Ben Stein's mendacious and/or ignorant suggestion that Darwin is somehow to blame for Hitler. I hope you will not mind if I write to you and try to undo this grievous error.
1. I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of your relatives in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I don't think that could really be said to justify the tone of your letter to Michael Shermer, who is a kind and decent man, as even you seemed to concede in your second letter to him, and the very antithesis of a Nazi sympathizer. Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States! Just look at those words of yours. Probably you regret them by now. I certainly hope so, but I'll continue to write my letter to you, on the assumption that you still feel at least a part of what you wrote.
2. Hitler's horrible opinions were not all that unusual for his time, not just in Germany but throughout Europe, including my own country of Britain, by the way. What singled Hitler out was the fact that he somehow managed to come to power in one of Europe's leading nations, which was also one of the world's most technologically advanced nations. Hitler had a lot of support in Germany. His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many (like Hitler himself) were Roman Catholic. Very few were atheists, and whatever else Hitler was he most certainly was not an atheist. It is sometimes said that Hitler only pretended to be Catholic, in order to win the Church's support for his regime. In this he was very largely successful. So, whether or not Hitler was himself a true Catholic (as he often claimed) the Church bears a heavy responsibility for what happened. And Hitler himself used religion to justify his anti-Semitism. For example, here is a typical quotation, from the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. Hitler's obscene anti-Semitism was able to hold sway in Germany because there was a deeply embedded history of anti-Semitism in Germany, and indeed in Europe generally.
3. Going further back in history, where do we think the toxic anti-Semitism of Hitler, and of the many Germans whose support gave him power, came from? You can't seriously think it came from Darwin. Anti-Semitism has been rife in Europe for many many centuries, positively encouraged by most Christian churches, including especially the two that dominate Germany. The Roman Catholic Church has notoriously persecuted Jews as "Christ-killers". While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?
4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.
5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).
6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their true intentions.
7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.
8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.
With my good wishes, and sympathy for the losses your family suffered in the Holocaust.
Yours sincerely
Richard Dawkins
"And still, the theory of evolution is silent on the subject of whether humans are endowed by a creator. Not all of those who accept the theory are silent, of course, and come down on all sides of the question. The nature of the endowment isn't really for science to decide."
I admit I care a whit about spelling!
I loathe evolution—I loathe ALL lies and frauds and Hegelian premises.
I love genuine science.
You refuse to acknowledge the difference between the two, because it would make your anti-God religion vulnerable to your faux Wall of Separation.
Admit THAT.
The subject was a curriculum for ID in science classes. Your suggested curriculum, as well as the above post, are laced with religion. You proved my point: ID is religion, not science. The reason there is no ID curriculum is one can't be formulated without exposing ID's religious underpinnings.(Sorry about the spelling error. I don't make very many, but I would prefer to have made none.)
I have very little time to deal with this topic further at present.
In closing for now, I maintain:
Not everything I stated is as laced with religion as you want to believe.
And not everything you advocate is as void of religion as you imply.
Careful bein’ so up front and honest, you might make some peoples wheels spin so fast they have to stop and oil em’
;)
OK, then what about ID is falsifiable (testable), and what facts are available to build the hypothesis. Macro-evolutionists can point to at least micro-evolution and make a guess that it may - in fact - work at higher levels. And given the amount of common DNA we can trace, it may be that there are relations between species.
So what facts are there for ID? Seriously, I want to know.
Have you ever heard of genetic algorithms? It's a means of solving huge problem-spaces very efficiently and effectively.
To summarize, it's an evolutionary means of solving a problem. You have a problem - you have a solution framework. Not the actual solution mind you, but a general description of what a solution could be (I need a specific electrical network, and I know it will have a series of connected R, L, and C components).
Then you seed a population of solutions with random answers. Some have more R components, some have all Cs, and so on.
Each solution is scored - how close did it come to a good answer? Then you pair the better solutions with each other, and create "child" solutions, which contain a mixture of the components of the two parents. And you add in the ability for occasional mutations (a component that neither parent had). Build the children, run again.
What you find is that you "evolve" a solution rather quickly, and can search HUGE problem spaces (like problem spaces with literally trillions of potential answers, and millions of very good answers) with just a few dozen generations.
Look it up - genetic algorithms are quite useful! And they follow a VERY evolutionary path, especially for incredibly complex and "soft" answer problem-sets. And it does it all with natural selection with occasional mutations.
See, if math and logic show a solution path is possible, and since we KNOW that life is basically a combination of DNA components (much like my RLC networks above), then there is a the logical - and scientific - jump to make from "it works with mathematics and logic, I wonder if it would work with genetics and species evolution".
So what is the logical or mathematical or scientific basis for ID?
It’s true that there’s no way to falsify the bare assertion that a cosmic designer exists. Nevertheless, the specific design arguments currently in play are empirically testable, even falsifiable,2 and involve testable predictions.
Consider the argument that Michael Behe makes in his book Darwin’s Black Box. There he proposes that design is detectable in many “molecular machines,” including the bacterial flagellum. Behe argues that this tiny flagellar motor needs all of its parts to function—is “irreducibly complex.” Such systems in our experience are a hallmark of designed systems, because they require the foresight that is the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents. Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection and random variations, in contrast, requires a functional system at each transition along the way. Natural selection can select for present but not for future function.
Notice that Behe’s argument, contra the assertions of Judge Jones and the ACLU’s expert witnesses, rests not on ignorance or on a purely negative argument against Neo-Darwinism, but on what we know about designed systems, the causal powers of intelligent agents, and on our growing knowledge of the cellular world and its many mechanisms.
Behe predicts that scientists will not uncover a continuously functional Darwinian pathway from a simple precursor to the bacterial flagellum and, moreover, any detailed evolutionary pathway that is articulated will presuppose other irreducibly complex systems. How does one test and discredit Behe’s claims? Describe a realistic, continuously functional Darwinian pathway from simple ancestor to present motor. The flagellum might still be designed, but Behe’s means of detecting such design would have been falsified.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/01/intelligent_design_is_empirica.html
I don't know too much about these genetic algorithms. Perhaps they could be put to use finding circuitous routs for the irreducible complexity of some of Behe's examples.
No, it doesn't, as discussed by Darwin himself. It may pose interesting questions about where moral restraint comes from, but it certainly doesn't remove it.
Something that is held to be true, but cannot be disproved,
But evolution can very easily be disproved. Discovering the famous Cambrian rabbit, or human bones mixed with dinosaur bones, would be a serious problem for the parts of the theory based on fossils. An animal that had gills and breasts would be an issue for the homology aspects. Finding out that humans were genetically more similar to cats than chimpanzees would have blown up the genetic part--a part that Darwin never even knew about. And yet none of that happened. Genetic science has only strengthened the theory, when it could have destroyed it.
Are you admitting that Evolution is a theological debate then?
I don't see how you get that out of my saying that evolution and science do not address theology, but in any case: no.
Tell me this, what good has Evolution, as a whole, done for society?
Why? What would that have to do with whether it was correct or not?
If not supernatural, then where did the designer come from? Evolutionary processes? Did the designer always exist? If so, that would transcend space/time as we understand it and put the designer on a supernatural plane.
Behe argues that this tiny flagellar motor needs all of its parts to function—is “irreducibly complex.” Such systems in our experience are a hallmark of designed systems, because they require the foresight that is the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents.
But this is provably false. And note that the scientific method teaches that if you can falsify a theory, then you have to either discard the theory or amend the theory. You only need one negative to destroy a theory!
How is this provable? Witness the use of genetic algorithms and chaos theory in problem solving when the solution space is "infinitely large". Where you can have literally trillions, quintillions, or actually mathematically provably infinite solutions, yet you can use genetic algorithms and chaos theory to find idealized solutions extremely quickly.
The fact that you can solve "infinite" problem-sets with evolutionary approaches would lend credence to evolution as at least a viable hypothesis. And it would also break-down Behe's assertion, for we know that ultimately anything living is a combination of 4 basic genes. And beyond that of just two fundamental particles of matter: quarks and leptons.
Knowing that we can solve infinite-space problems with evolutionary approaches, it does not stretch the mind too much to think that - in literally billions of years, with literally quintillions of generations of basic bacteria, the ones that evolved the genetic defects that gave rise to the flagellum would succeed.
All that said, what facts are present for ID to rest upon? Presented by you was Mr. Behe's conjecture that because there is complexity in life, that such complexity is a-priori evidence of a designer! Yet we see complexity in the repetition of Mandelbrot sets (indeed, they are even used to simulate artificial worlds) when in fact they are a naturally occuring numerical set.
So what facts - other than a philosophical belief that "because life is complex it could not have arisen via evolutionary approaches" - exist to support ID?
But this is provably false. And note that the scientific method teaches that if you can falsify a theory, then you have to either discard the theory or amend the theory. You only need one negative to destroy a theory!
In other words, it can't be tested but its been tested and proven false. At least you are admitting that ID is testable.
If not supernatural, then where did the designer come from? Evolutionary processes? Did the designer always exist? If so, that would transcend space/time as we understand it and put the designer on a supernatural plane.
ID doesn't address the designer. If you see a mouse trap on Mars and determine that it was intelligently designed, that still doesn't tell you about the nature of the designer. Its out of the realm of science at this point.
I think you are missing the point of irreducible complexity. There are systems in a cell that require all the parts to function. If one protein is missing or altered, the system will fail. Therefore the system can not evolve through random mutations and natural selection because that would require a gradual progression. The only way around this is for there to be a different function for the system at earlier stages in the evolutionary process.
If you (or anyone) can use an algorithm to show an evolutionary pathway to the flagellum with each intermediate step having a function that would be advantageous to the organism, then irreducible complexity would be falsified. Its been 12 years since Behe wrote Darwin's Black Box and no one has been able to come up with a solution so far.
Is the test of the theory who believes it, or who survives?
“A distinction between all these different belief systems and hard, replicable true science would go a long way toward making the whole discussion more honest.”
Good point. I personally believe in ID but do not consider it based on science because it cannot be tested in any scientific way. But the same is true of Evolution.
“Macro-evolutionists can point to at least micro-evolution and make a guess that it may - in fact - work at higher levels”
That is true.
But the extrapolation you describe from micro to macro can only be the subject of conjecture, not outright science observed under controlled conditions.
That’s why the actual Theory of Evolution can never be validated. Observing it in real time takes too long so no one can ever say with certainty that Evolution has been tested.
“Discovering the famous Cambrian rabbit, or human bones mixed with dinosaur bones, would be a serious problem for the parts of the theory based on fossils.”
You missed the forest because of all the trees.
The whole Cambrian explosion is a falsification of Darwin’s ideas.
In addition, the fossils that have been inconveniently found in the “wrong” place have been discarded as anomalies instead of data points.
Unless Mr. Bahe is the final authority on ID, ID has NOT been tested nor proven false; Mr. Bahe's claim that there is an irreducible complexity HAS been proven to be false. So his claim no longer holds up.
ID doesn't address the designer. If you see a mouse trap on Mars and determine that it was intelligently designed, that still doesn't tell you about the nature of the designer. Its out of the realm of science at this point.
ID makes one VERY specific claim about the designer: the designer MUST be supernatural! If the designer was natural, then we can assume that either the designer was designed (meaning we can end up with an infinite regression of designers, much like the infinite layers of turtles holding up the Earth and thus another supernatural origin at some point), OR that the original designer arose from natural processes, which could be evolution.
I think you are missing the point of irreducible complexity. There are systems in a cell that require all the parts to function. If one protein is missing or altered, the system will fail.
Oh, I get the claim, it's just that the conclusion drawn by the claim is false! We already know - from the hard, pure mathematical world of genetic algorithms and chaos theory - that we can start with an infinite problem-space and hundreds or thousands of failing solutions. And within a matter of a few dozen or hundred generations end up with solutions that START to work. And over a few hundred or thousand generations, with solutions that work really well!
Therefore the system can not evolve through random mutations and natural selection because that would require a gradual progression. The only way around this is for there to be a different function for the system at earlier stages in the evolutionary process.
No, you do NOT need a gradual progression - you need a proper set of mutations on an earlier basis. Much like genetic algorithms. They work beautifully when your solution-space is filled predominantly with discontinuous answers (infinite results, like dividing by zero - think of it as black holes or empty results). You have tiny little spikes of answers in your space (or tiny little planets). And in each of those spikes you have several VERY good solutions.
GAs (genetic algorithms) will allow you to NOT "gradually progress" from spike to spike, but to sometimes make the BIG jump from spike to spike. Mutations. Mutations can have a VERY powerful impact on the resulting children!
If you (or anyone) can use an algorithm to show an evolutionary pathway to the flagellum with each intermediate step having a function that would be advantageous to the organism, then irreducible complexity would be falsified.
No, that's not what's required. We know from GAs that we can have big jumps in results from a few mutations. So we can translate that over to create a hypothesis for scientific research.
And we do see micro-evolution happen all the time, which also lends credence to at least tha hypothesis that macro-evolution may occur.
For Mr. Behe's claim, though, what is the scientific basis for it? Other than his belief that something must be irreducibly complex and thus must have been designed?
100 years ago, the concept of an atom was itself the "irreducible complexity", for the word atom comes from the Greek atomos - something that cannot be divided! It was the irreducible complexity. Yet we know now that atoms are created of electrons, protons, and neutrons. And furthermore that those particles are made of quarks and leptons! In 100 years we've discovered two further layers of simplification that REDUCE the complexity of the atom (from 117 unique atoms - elements - to 6 leptons and 6 quarks).
To ancient man, a tree was of irreducible complexity; system-level processes such as the sap system weren't known or considered. Sap was part of the tree. And that didn't even consider the cells, or the sub-cell components. Or the atomic level. At one time, the tree WAS irreducible, but it is no longer.
We have several cases where Mr. Behe's assertions break down and in fact where we can show mathematical proofs where his assertion of irreducible complexity does not hold up. And as you know, a single negative is all that's required to break your hypothesis - you need to drop it or change it.
And his claim is also specious in that there are 3 distinct types of flagellum. If it is irreducibly complex, then how can 3 different and completely useful types exist?
So fundamentally, Mr. Behe's claim of irreducible complexity is false. It is an interesting philosophical claim, but we see that there can be reduction in his complexity (even within flagellum - some are more complex than others in terms of protein counts), and within the parts of the complexity.
And his claim is testable, and has been found lacking, for there are lower levels of complexity which DO exist (proteins, for example - just add an extra neutron to a few of the atoms within a protein and the protein dies - it is a complex and unique build of elements) within his own structure.
So evolutionists have micro-evolution, and a fossil record to point to as a set of data relating to evolution. What does ID have? What can ID supporters point to as a set of data that shows ID?
If tectonics and seismics didn't mess with the data points we could trust them all, but we can't.
That’s why the actual Theory of Evolution can never be validated. Observing it in real time takes too long so no one can ever say with certainty that Evolution has been tested.
One word: fossils.
One example: tectonic plate drift. Can you see the plates drift? Since you can't observe it, then they must not drift, right? We can use tools that span longer times than a single life (like survey techniques_, and at higher resolution like GPS measurements to observe something that cannot be directly seen by man in a single lifetime.
Science is built on the backs of earlier scientists. It is a multi-generational process, and using observed data from earlier researchers is valid and accepted, and allows for observations beyond the lifespan of a single person.
The absence of a fully observed process does NOT mean the process does not exist; it just has not been confirmed, meaning the theory is still a theory. That is what we're dealing with...
Being a lover of freedom, when the (Nazi) revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks...
Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly. - Albert Einstein
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