Intellectuals Who Doubt Darwin

The American Prowler ^ | 11/24/2004 | Hunter Baker

[nickcarraway]

Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing

Edited by William A. Dembski

(ISI Books, 366 pages, $28; $18 paper)

WACO, Texas -- At one time, the debate over Darwin's theory existed as a cartoon in the modern imagination. Thanks to popular portrayals of the Scopes Trial, secularists regularly reviewed the happy image of Clarence Darrow goading William Jennings Bryan into agreeing to be examined as an expert witness on the Bible and then taking him apart on the stand. Because of the legal nature of the proceedings that made evolution such a permanent part of the tapestry of American pop culture, it is fitting that this same section of the tapestry began to unravel due to the sharp tugs of another prominent legal mind, Phillip Johnson.

The publication of his book, Darwin on Trial, now appears to have marked a new milestone in the debate over origins. Prior to Johnson's book, the critics of evolution tended to occupy marginalized sectarian positions and focused largely on contrasting Darwin's ideas with literalist readings of the Genesis account. Johnson's work was different. Here we had a doubter of Darwin willing to come out of the closet, even though his credentials were solid gold establishment in nature. He had attended the finest schools, clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, taught law as a professor at highly ranked Berkeley, and authored widely-used texts on criminal law. Just as Darrow cross-examined the Bible and Bryan's understanding of it, Johnson cross-examined Darwin and got noticed in the process. He spent much of the last decade debating the issue with various Darwinian bulldogs and holding up his end pretty well.

PHILLIP JOHNSON, AND a number of others, raised enough doubts about the dominant theory to cause a number of intellectuals to take a hard look, particularly at the gap between what can be proven and what is simply asserted to be true. Since that time, authors with more technical backgrounds, like mathematician/philosopher William Dembski and biochemist Michael Behe, have published books providing even more powerful critiques of the neo-Darwinian synthesis based on intelligent design theory. Behe's work has been particularly disturbing to evolution advocates because he seems to have proven that organic machines at the molecular level are irreducibly complex and therefore could not have been the products of natural selection because there never would have been any intermediate working mechanism to select. Now, the two team up as Dembski edits and Behe contributes to a bracing collection of controversial writings titled Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing.

Dembski displays the intellectual doggedness of the group of contributors when he uses his introductory essay to ruthlessly track down and scrutinize the footnotes offered by those who would refute Behe's case. Reference after reference claiming to have decisively defeated Behe turns out to be inadequate to the task. What passes for refutation is instead a collection of question-begging and "just-so stories." Right away, Dembski sets the tone for the book. Nothing will be uncontested. The pro-evolution community will be made to fight for every inch of intellectual real estate without relying on the aura of prestige or the lack of competent critics to bolster their case.

The best way to read the book is by beginning at the end and perusing the profiles of the contributors. There, the reader will be able to select essays from representatives of a variety of disciplines, including mathematics, philosophy, biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, genetics, law, and medicine. The most enjoyable in terms of sheer brio are the essays by Dembski, Behe, Frank Tipler, Cornelius Hunter, and David Berlinski. Tipler's essay on the process of getting published in a peer-reviewed journal is particularly relevant and rewarding because it deals with one of the biggest strikes against Intelligent Design. ID theorists have had a notoriously difficult time getting their work published in professional journals. Tipler, a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane, crankily and enjoyably explains why.

TOP HONORS, HOWEVER, go to David Berlinski's essay, "The Deniable Darwin," which originally appeared in Commentary. The essay is rhetorically devastating. Berlinski is particularly strong in taking apart Richard Dawkins' celebrated computer simulation of monkeys re-creating a Shakespearean sentence and thereby "proving" the ability of natural selection to generate complex information. The mathematician and logician skillfully points out that Dawkins rigged the game by including the very intelligence in his simulation he disavows as a cause of ordered biological complexity. It's clear that Berlinski hits a sore spot when one reads the letters Commentary received in response to the article. Esteemed Darwinists like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett respond with a mixture of near-hysterical outrage and ridicule. Berlinski's responses are also included. At no point does he seem the slightest bit cowed or overwhelmed by the personalities arrayed against him.

For the reader, the result is simply one of the most rewarding reading experiences available. Berlinski and his critics engage in a tremendous intellectual bloodletting, with Berlinski returning fire magnificently. In a particularly amusing segment, Berlinski, constantly accused of misperception, writes, "For reasons that are obscure to me, both [Mr. Gross] and Daniel Dennett carelessly assume that they are in a position to instruct me on a point of usage in German, my first language." Though his foes repeatedly accuse Berlinski of being a "creationist," the tag has little chance of sticking to a man arguing for little more than agnosticism on the question of origins and who disavows any religious principles aside from the possible exception of hoping to "have a good time all the time." One suspects that the portion of the book occupied by the Berlinski essay and subsequent exchanges will gain wide currency.

For far too long, the apologists for Darwin have relied on a strategy of portraying challengers as simple-minded religious zealots. The publication of Uncommon Dissent and many more books like it, will severely undermine the success of such portrayals. During the past decade, it has become far too obvious that there are such things as intellectuals who doubt Darwin and that their ranks are growing. The dull repetition of polemical charges in place of open inquiry, debate, and exchange may continue, but with fewer and fewer honest souls ready to listen.

Hunter Baker is a Ph.D. student at Baylor University and contributes to the Reform Club.

[longshadow]

...."no true transitional fossil" has ever been found."

Truly inspirational; and tastefully done, I might add.

[Lurking2Long]

That's a comparison, son.

Sorry, "Dad", it's an analogy.

But you've been working overtime to shove *him* into many boxes due to your preconceptions (e.g. "humanist", etc.), I've noticed...

If the box fits, by all means, shove...

Say, what was that one about the mote and the beam again?

I've balanced the "beam" quite nicely, but I guess with you that's a "mote" point...

There's a point here, but I suspect you'll miss it.

I certainly did not miss the point, but you appear to be missing God.

Sometimes I feel closer to Galileo.

By all means, please keep channeling Galileo...at least HE knew he wasn't the center of the universe...

[Ichneumon]

Let's see...researchers who were debating whether or not two populations of mice were distinct subspecies conclude that they are not, contrary to an earlier conclusion because they have more up-to-date methods available. How is that redefinition of species again? Looks to me like they investigated an issue and came to a conclusion that a previous classification was inadequate. They didn't redefine species, they determined that a previous test of speciation was not adequate.

Even more to the point, how is that allegedly an example of "evolutionists" allegedly "redefining species"? Or is it G Larry's belief that anything anyone working remotely in biology does is somehow necessarily an example of "evolutionists" performing some nefarious thoughtcrime?

Does he even know for a fact that the researchers in question were "evolutionists" as such, or were doing the alleged redefining *as* evolutionists (as opposed to as ecologists, etc.)?

Methinks he incorrectly sees the biological sciences as just one big undifferentiated "blur" of conspiractorial "evolutionists"...

[Ichneumon]

It's not me whom you need to worry about being damned by...

Boy, will *you* be surprised when Odin makes final judgement on you in Valhalla...

(Occam as applied to Pascal's wager bump)

[Lurking2Long]

Yeah, like that underdog bald man who won out over the two kids teasing him about his baldness, when the Lord sent a bear to rip the kids to shreds and helped him "win out".

Zero points for context...100 points for originality...

[Ichneumon]

The wise man does not waste time trying to make sense of that which is senseless."

How true, how true... But not quite in the way that you meant it.

[general_re]

Hey, good taste is practically my middle name :^)

[Lurking2Long]

Boy, will *you* be surprised when Odin makes final judgement on you in Valhalla... The "razor" cuts both ways...

[Lurking2Long]

How true, how true... But not quite in the way that you meant it.

You, however, I did NOT give permission to quote me.

:')

[Ichneumon]

I listen to rock of all variations at my job for hours. You have no idea how wonderful it is to come home and listen to classical. Sometimes it seems like a highly spiritual experience.

I've had the opposite experience, sort of.

I enjoy most forms of music, but after seeing the film "Amadeus" for the first time (in the theater), I came out to my car, turned on the ignition, and the radio started playing the "pop rock" station I had been listening to earlier. My initial reaction was, "what is this crap they're playing, it just sounds like *noise*!" Then I realized they were playing a song I've always liked... After three hours of Mozart, the contrast was jarring.

I laughed and described my reaction to my movie companion, and she laughed and said that she had the same first impression of the music on the radio as well.

[Dimensio]

Zero points for context

What context? It's a pretty clear and unpleasant passage. They weren't threatening him with violence, they were mearly teasing him for his baldness, and for that "transgression", God sent she-bears to tear forty-two of them to shreds.

[Ichneumon]

I remember watching an educational program on television in which an Evolutionary Biologist discussed the possibility that, based upon application of the Law of Entropy to evolution, it could be argued that some mutations were not random at all and were instead directed to maximize energy resources within a given ecological system. He used examples of several types of grasses, and I forget which ones, that he claimed evolved from a common ancestor which he named, and that the distinct ways in which they evolved suggested that they were attempting to make better use of sunlight and that the various mutations of color, width of the leaves, height of the plant, etc. could all be explained as an attempt to maximize use of the sun's rays in their distinct geographical regions. He believed this suggested that the mutations were not random at all but were instead oriented towards the end of not leaving energy resources, i.e. sunlight, unused.

Since it sounds as if he was looking at the modern species, I don't see how in the world he could have determined whether the genetic differences between them were due to "directed mutation", as he hypothesizes, or "directed *selection*" (a redundancy -- selection is, by definition, directed) of undirected mutations.

It seems that there would be no way to differentiate between the two processes, looking only at the end results.

[longshadow]

super-script/sub-script error alert.

[RadioAstronomer]

Dang! :-(

[StJacques]

"Since it sounds as if he was looking at the modern species, I don't see how in the world he could have determined whether the genetic differences between them were due to "directed mutation", as he hypothesizes, or "directed *selection*" (a redundancy -- selection is, by definition, directed) of undirected mutations.

It seems that there would be no way to differentiate between the two processes, looking only at the end results."

That seems to be a valid observation to me. And I am trying to restate the explanation the evolutionary biologist gave as best I can, being some distance in time removed from watching that episode, which makes it difficult and makes me worry that I may get it wrong. But one thing I do remember is that he pointed out that, after the evolution of the various new species of grasses in distinct ecological regions, one of the common observations that could be made across these distinct ecological systems is that all of them possessed plant life, and his focus was on grasses, which left less of the energy available to them unused than before. He also went on to discuss the "megaflora" that was prevalent at the beginning of this process, when the principal ancestor of the new species of grasses was present, and then stated some hypotheses about why the "megaflora" did not survive, which essentially -- at least as best as I can restate this -- came down to the fact that they left too much energy within their ecological systems unused and were replaced by flora that made far more efficient use of that energy. And the disappearance of the "megaflora" he believed was the primary reason for the disappearance of the "megafauna" that has only been completed quite recently in the spanse of geologic time.

I have to confess that I am getting a little nervous discussing all of this in some detail because it has been quite a while since I saw this program, which I found fascinating, but the key point the evolutionary biologist made, and of this I am sure, is that his research suggested that natural selection may only explain the evolution of certain living organisms whose populations are under stress, while there may be an overall thrust to evolutionary development that is quite different.

[RadioAstronomer]

F=Gm¹m²/r²

[Ichneumon]

Ich, if you'd followed my posts at all, you'd know that I most firmly object to evolution on scientific grounds,

I know you object to evolution on what you *think* are scientific grounds. Unfortunately, all too many anti-evolutionists greatly overestimate their scientific ability and knowledge.

and frankly, could not possibly care less what you think about my intellect or knowledge or whatever.

I didn't expect you to.

Evolution is foolish on its face and the deeper you go, the more ridiculous it gets.

Okay, tell you what -- feel free to present what you think is your *best* scientific objection to evolution, the one that shows how "foolish" and "ridiculous" it is.

If it holds water, I'll apologize profusely.

If it doesn't, you get to apologize to me for attacking a scientific theory without really knowing what you're talking about.

Go for it.

[searchandrecovery]

I think there could be life on other planets. I think there could be life on other planets pre-earth, now, and post-earth. I don't think life is limited to earth. But, you know, who knows for sure - not me.

[Ichneumon]

You, however, I did NOT give permission to quote me. :')

Eek! (*runs for cover*)

[Ichneumon]

[Boy, will *you* be surprised when Odin makes final judgement on you in Valhalla...]

The "razor" cuts both ways...

Yes, my point exactly... That's the flaw in "Pascal's Wager".