Posted on 11/11/2004 3:44:08 AM PST by Lindykim
Has Darwin Become Dogma?
500 years ago science revolted against theological dogma as the source of all knowledge. Today it is science that is trying to assume the mantle of the sole arbiter of truth. On magazine covers such as this month's National Geographic and in legal battles across the country, the scientific community has become absolute in its belief that evolution will answer all of the questions regarding our beginnings. They have become so dogmatic that anyone who questions this belief is considered a heretic who should be ridiculed into silence.
November 11, 2004
Dear Concerned Citizen, by Dr. Benjamin Wiker
Nearly a century and a half has passed since the publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species. Evolution has been taught as an undeniable fact in high school textbooks for well over a half century. Why all of the sudden do we find the cover of the November 2004 issue of National Geographic emblazoned with the question, "Was Darwin Wrong?" It's that like asking "Was Copernicus Wrong?"
So, what's up? When we turn to the first page of the article, we find the same question again, this time written across the gray feathered breast of a domestically bred Jacobin pigeon, the outlandish plumage of which reminds one of the costumes of the late Liberace. Flip to the next page and we find our answer, a resounding 'NO' printed in a font a third of the page high. But if the answer is such a large and definitive NO, why would the venerable National Geographic entertain (even rhetorically) the apparently foolish question 'Was Darwin wrong?"
If you read the article, you'll wonder what all the shouting is about. The author David Quammen paints a calm picture of an established science unburdened by serious criticism. The only critics, so we are told, are 'fundamentalist Christians','ultraorthodox Jews', and 'Islamic creationists', all of whom view evolution as a threat to their scientifically uninformed theology. Obviously, they aren't the ones ruffling National Geographics feathers.
Who else arouses the great NO? As it turns out, 'Other' people too, not just scriptural literalists, remain unpersuaded about evolution. According to a Gallup poll, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.
"Why are there so many antievolutionists?' they ask impatiently. Why indeed? Unfortunately, you won't find the real answer in the article, which merely offers a fluff and flash, unambiguous public relations presentation of evolution.
The real answer is this. To the question 'Was Darwin Wrong?' the proper answer is not a clamorous 'NO' but a well-informed 'Yes and No'. While there are merits to his theory, there are also serious problems, serious scientific problems.
Listen to these words: 'despite the power of molecular genetics to reveal the hereditary essences of organisms, the large-scale aspects of evolution remain unexplained, including the origin of species. So Darwin's assumption that the tree of life is a consequence of the gradual accumulation of small hereditary differences appears to be without significant support." Are these the words of a 'fundamentalist Christian', 'ultraorthodox Jew', or an 'Islamic creationist'? No, they are the words of Dr. Brian Goodwin, professor of biology, one of a growing number of scientists who find that the powers of natural selection are woefully insufficient to perform the amazing feats promised in the title of Darwins great work of producing new species.
But that was the great promise of Darwin. Small variations among individuals are 'selected' by nature because they make the individual more 'fit' to survive. Those more 'fit' characteristics are passed on to the offspring. Add enough little changes up over time, and the species becomes gradually transformed. Given enough time, evolution will have produced an entirely new species.
So it was that Darwin assumed that little changes in character and appearance (microevolution) would eventually yield, through natural selection, enormous changes (macroevolution). From a single living cell, given millions upon millions upon millions of years, the entire diversity of all living things could be produced.
That was the grand promise of Darwins theory. And Darwin wasn't wrong about microevolution. But the case for macroevolution is far from closed. In fact, biologist Mae-Wan Ho and mathematician Peter Saunders contend that, "All the signs are that evolution theory is in crisis, and that a change is on the way." Darwins theory is in crisis, they argue, because it has failed to explain the one thing that made its promise so grand; how new species arise.
I quote the words of Brian Goodwin, Mae-Wan Ho, and Peter Saunders because they represent the growing number of scientific dissenters from orthodox Darwinism (or more accurately, neo-Darwinism). National Geographic makes no mention of them. That would make the quick and confident 'No' into a rather sheepish "well, sort of".
They also purposely avoid mentioning the growing Intelligent Design movement, a group of scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians who have very serious doubts about many other aspects of Darwins theory. One suspects reading between the lines that the real reason that National Geographic suddenly 'doth protest too much' against doubters of Darwinism, is that the Intelligent Design (ID) movement has done so much to bring the scientific and philosophical problems with evolutionary theory into the public spotlight. They cannot draw attention to the ID movement, however, or people might become more informed about the difficulties that beset Darwinism. So, we return to the question, 'Was Darwin Wrong?" National Geographic says "NO". But readers who aren't satisfied with such simple answers should read the following books.
Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
Michael Behe, Darwins Black Box
Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots
John Angus Campbell and Stephen Meyer, Darwinism, Design, and Public Education
William Dembski, Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing
Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders, Beyond Neo-Darwinism
Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
Benjamin Wiker, Moral Darwinism Scientific Difficulties with Darwinism
The origin of life: Darwin conjectured that all life was descended from a single, simple form. But where did the first living thing come from? In a now famous private letter to Joseph Hooker, Darwin offered a conjecture: if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., that a proteine [sic] compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, then we could explain the origin of life as a lucky chemical reaction. Against this hope, origin of life researchers have fallen on hard times. While there were some initial victories in the laboratory, generating small amounts of pre-biological molecules, scientists are unable to generate anything more biologically interesting unless they artificially rig their experiments in ways that contradict the actual conditions of early Earth.
The problem is so acute that many origin of life scientists have given up, and are now turning their efforts to trying to discover ways that complex, life-seeding molecules may have been delivered from space. Alas, the problems facing such efforts are just as severe.
The fossil record: According to Darwin, evolution had to occur very slowly, through slight changes not by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, the fossil record does not support such gradual transformation. Instead, species seem to appear quite suddenly, fully formed, stay the same for millions of years, and then just as suddenly disappear. The most significant problem for Darwinism is the Cambrian explosion, where quite suddenly, about 550,000,000 years ago, all the major phyla of the animal kingdom appear in the fossil record.
The Truth About Inherit the Wind "Of course, such a simple choice between bigotry and enlightenment is central to the contemporary liberal vision of which Inherit the Wind is a typical expression. But while it stands nominally for tolerance, latitude, and freedom of thought, the play is full of the self- righteous certainty that it deplores in the fundamentalist camp. Some critics have detected the play's sanctimonious tone-"bigotry in reverse," as Andrew Sarris called it-even while appreciating its dramatic quality and well-written leading roles. The play reveals a great deal about a mentality that demands open-mindedness and excoriates dogmatism, only to advance its own certainties more insistently-that promotes tolerance and intellectual integrity but stoops to vilifying the opposition, falsifying reality, and distorting history in the service of its agenda.
In fact, a more historically accurate dramatization of the Scopes Trial than Inherit the Wind might have been far richer and more interesting-and might also have given its audiences a genuine dramatic tragedy to watch. It would not have sent its audience home full of moral superiority and happy thoughts about the march of progress. The truth is not that Bryan was wrong about the dangers of the philosophical materialism that Darwinism presupposes but that he was right, not that he was a once great man disfigured by fear of the future but that he was one of the few to see where a future devoid of the transcendent would lead. The antievolutionist crusade to control what is taught in the schools may not have been the answer, and Bryan's own approach may have been too narrow. But the real tragedy lies in the losing fight that he and others like him waged against a modernity increasingly deprived of spiritual foundations." Carol Inannone First Things
The Debate Rages On Although nearly 100 years have passed since the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, the debate rages on. In Grantsburg, Wisconsin a firestorm of critique was leveled against the school board this month for revising its science curriculum to include more than one model/theory of origin in the districts science curriculum. Current Wisconsin state law mandates that evolution be taught but the school board viewed the law as too restrictive.
Similar skirmishes are being fought around the country. Ever since the Scopes Trial, the ACLU has been an active player, bringing lawsuits against any group who questions the Darwin dogma in school curriculum. After a group of parents in Cobb County Georgia complained about the exclusive presentation of evolution as the sole theory of origin in three biology textbooks in 2002, stickers were placed in the science texts intended to remind students to keep an open mind. Now the ACLU is representing another group of parents in a lawsuit against that school district claiming that the stickers promote the teaching of creationism and discriminate against particular religions.
The Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania recently voted to include the theory of 'intelligent design' and other alternative theories to evolution in their science curriculum. Similar action was taken by the Ohio board of education this spring when they narrowly approved a similar plan. Critics charge it risks a return to teaching creationism.
To say that evolution has not answered all the scientific questions regarding our origins does not suggest you have to teach creationism in schools as a scientific theory. What should be taught is an honest assessment of what science does and does not know regarding our beginnings. The questions regarding our origins are too big for science alone to answer. People of faith should not allow themselves to be relegated to an anti-science position for questioning Darwin. Questioning the validity of theories is what science is supposed to do.
Benjamin Wiker Benjamin Wiker holds a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Vanderbilt University, and has taught at Marquette University, St. Mary's University (MN), and Thomas Aquinas College (CA). He is now a Lecturer in Theology and Science at Franciscan University of Steubenville (OH), and a full-time, free-lance writer. Dr. Wiker writes regularly for a variety of journals, including Catholic World Report, New Oxford Review, Crisis Magazine, and First Things, and is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Register. Dr. Wiker just released a new book called Architects of the Culture of Death (Ignatius). His first book, Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, was released in the spring of 2002 (InterVarsity Press). He is writing another book on Intelligent Design for InterVarsity Press called The Meaning-full Universe.
Send your letter to the editor to feedback@tothesource.org. © Copyright 2004 - tothesource
Can I ask Behe or Dembski?
Do you ever think about how your obstinate behavior here reflects upon on you, your family, your friends, your church? Would you want your friends to read your willfully ignorant and irresponsibly stupid posts here?
Or do you just prefer to think it is okay to lie for the lord? That all will be forgiven because, like the Communists, you believe the end justifies the means.
So they must follow your beliefs (naturalism) or they are quacks?
Maybe they were quacks before I even noticed.
That doesn’t answer the question and you know it…
No. Intelligent Design makes no predictions nor suggests a method of falsification. It fails to rise to the level of a theory.
But there are people who say he's a great man and a Nobel Peace prize winner. The latter point is even true.
I say that the people who glorify Arafat are ignoring the hard data of his life to advance some kind of Holy Warrior objective of their own. While people may disagree on this and that, reality isn't anything you want it to be.
Behe and Dembski are a pair of minor players from the fields of biology and information theory, respectively. They might never have been heard of if they hadn't hit upon the idea of playing up to the religiously credulous with their claims of intelligent design. Holy Warriors again. Objective data on the junk heap.
They have nothing to teach us. Their science is the science of throwing up the hands and saying, "God The Designer did it!"
I'm looking at the article, and I'm seeing some broad generalities that still require a "helpful monster" scenario. For example, "b. The type III export system is converted to a type III secretion system (T3SS) by addition of outer membrane pore proteins (secretin and secretin chaperone) from the type II secretion system." That still requires a multistep "leap" from the previous stage, as do several other steps.
I've been avoiding jumping into these discussions lately, but I wanted to make the point that "irreducible complexity" is not a term of art and that its use in practice is mathematically self-inconsistent. The use of this notion to "prove" anything betrays a fundamental non-understanding of the principles that nominally are behind it.
First, all biological systems must be reducible, since the laws of thermodynamics have not been repealed. And even if no person ever figures out a reduction, such a reduction does exist (see: Solomonoff, 1978). Furthermore, in the general case such reductions are intractable i.e. if you can not observe the transition path then it will generally be impossible to discern the reduction in most non-toy systems (see: Hutter, 2000). Though we can make really good guesses for some classes of system and under certain conditions (see: Feder et al, 1992), which is what we limit ourselves to in practice.
The second problem is that "irreducibly complex" sounds very suspiciously like an actual term of art, particularly in algorithmic information theory: Minimum Description Length (MDL) (see: Kolmogorov). The only obvious reason that they invented a new term for ID purposes rather than using a standard term that had been around for almost a half century in the field they were nominally borrowing from is that properties are ascribed to "irreducible complexity" that can trivially be shown to be nonsense when you call it MDL. This is the "mathematically self-inconsistent" part I mentioned above. It is pretty much literally as if I decided that "1+2=3" is convenient for my theory but I really need "2+1=4" for everything to work out, and so I redefine mathematics to support this notion. You can do it but it will be completely broken, which irreducible complexity is in fact. You can make the mathematics support it, but not any mathematics that actual mathematicians generally use.
BTW, the papers referenced have nothing to do with evolution or ID, but are actually seminal and fundamental mathematical papers (all relating to the broader field of information theory) that prove the general point that references them. It is sad that "information theory" ID theorists like Dembski actually have some type of pseudo-credibility with ID proponents when most of what they write is grossly inconsistent or outright disprovable with the core theorems of the field nominally being used to prove the point. (Dembski is one of the worst offenders of this and therefore attracts much ire from me.)
None of this speaks to whether or not there is a Designer, but most current ID theory that I'm familiar with is trivially disprovable with the standard theorem set of algorithmic information theory. Which is fine -- you just need to develop a better theory for ID -- but it does not exactly speak to the credibility of the people currently working on ID theory.
Oh, pleeeeeze. This sort of crap just makes us look bad.
What is your definition of "kind"? Be specific. For example, does the inability to interbreed imply a different "kind"? Can entities from two different "kinds" ever interbreed? What is the experimental test to determine if two entities are of different "kinds"?
What a brilliant idea. Somewhere right now a Berkeley liberal is applying for a Federal grant to run this experiment at the San Diego Zoo. Should make one hell of a special exhibit.
First, all biological systems must be reducible, since the laws of thermodynamics have not been repealed.
Huh?
Yes, everything is reducible in the sense that you're saying it (well, until you get to the Planck length, but that's another discussion), but not everything is reducible while still sustaining the life of an organism and the usefulness of the organ in question. The point of the irreducible complexity argument is that there are many systems that would require either "hopeful monster" leaps of many major mutations all working together at once to create them. If you try to put them together piecemail (as in one mutated gene at a time), you have to go through multiple unviable stages--which would violate the whole natural selection argument.
The rest of your post is so obtusely written that, given the monstrous error exhibited in your first argument, it's not worth the effort it would take to try to pull it together into something coherant enough to debate.
And on that note, I'm off to bed. If it's a slow news day and work day tomorrow, I'll pop back in. Goodnight, and thanks to all for the spirited debate.
"No one, however, has created a species."
Huh? This is simply incorrect. Humans have created many species. Sweet corn comes to mind . . .
Trivial. Check out the "Lincoln" threads in the Smoky Back Room. 37,000 and counting, last I looked.
Then neither is the fact that woolly mammoth went extinct in the last ice age replicable. Or that dodo birds ever existed. Or that George Washington had wooden teeth. Or that the earth was once the center of the universe. Or that Jesus walked upon the water. Or that Jesus was born of a Virgin. Or that Moses parted the Red Sea. Or that Adam and Eve were prevented from returning to the Garden because of a Flaming Sword. Or that there ever was a Garden. Or that Adam was created rather than evoluted.
In other words, according to this standard, nobody knows anything.
Creationists included.
False Assumption. There has never been proof that "species" are static and are not transitional forms from one species to another. There is no "entirely new species." All are in transition. This is what frightens you so, you are a transitional species. Not an end product. Only your hubris seeks to deny this fact.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.