Darwinian Doubts

Discovery Institute and The Wichita Eagle ^ | March 9, 2005 | David Berlinski

[Heartlander]

Darwinian Doubts

By: David Berlinski

March 9, 2005

Original Article
NOTE: The article below is the full version by Dr. Berlinski. The Wichita Eagle opted to shorten the piece to only 400 words.

The defense of Darwin’s theory of evolution has now fallen into the hands of biologists who believe in suppressing criticism when possible and ignoring it when not. It is not a strategy calculated in induce confidence in the scientific method. A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington concluded that the events taking place during the Cambrian era could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design – hardly a position unknown in the history of western science. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists. Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceeding’s papers, but in the case of Steven Meyer’s "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once.

Publication of the paper, they confessed, was a mistake. It would never happen again. It had barely happened at all. And peer review?

The hell with it.

“If scientists do not oppose antievolutionism,” Eugenie Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, remarked, “it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak.” Scott’s understanding of ‘opposition’ had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: "Avoid debates."

Everyone else had better shut up.

In this country, at least, no one is ever going to shut up, the more so since the case against Darwin’s theory retains an almost lunatic vitality.

Look – The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences – quantum electrodynamics, say – is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to thirteen unyielding decimal places. Darwin’s theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all.

Look – Field studies attempting to measure natural selection inevitably report weak to non-existent selection effects.

Look – Darwin’s theory is open at one end since there are no plausible account for the origins of life.

Look – The astonishing and irreducible complexity of various cellular structures has not yet successfully been described, let alone explained.

Look – A great many species enter the fossil record trailing no obvious ancestors and depart for Valhalla leaving no obvious descendents.

Look – Where attempts to replicate Darwinian evolution on the computer have been successful, they have not used classical Darwinian principles, and where they have used such principles, they have not been successful.

Look – Tens of thousands of fruit flies have come and gone in laboratory experiments, and every last one of them has remained a fruit fly to the end, all efforts to see the miracle of speciation unavailing.

Look – The remarkable similarity in the genome of a great many organisms suggests that there is at bottom only one living system; but how then to account for the astonishing differences between human beings and their near relatives – differences that remain obvious to anyone who has visited a zoo?

But look again – If the differences between organisms are scientifically more interesting than their genomic similarities, of what use is Darwin’s theory since it’s otherwise mysterious operations take place by genetic variations?

These are hardly trivial questions. Each suggests a dozen others. These are hardly circumstances that do much to support the view that there are “no valid criticisms of Darwin’s theory,” as so many recent editorials have suggested.

Serious biologists quite understand all this. They rather regard Darwin’s theory as an elderly uncle invited to a family dinner. The old boy has no hair, he has no teeth, he is hard of hearing, and he often drools. Addressing even senior members at table as Sonny, he is inordinately eager to tell the same story over and over again.

But he’s family. What can you do?

David Berlinski holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is the author of On Systems Analysis, A Tour of the Calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm, Newton’s Gift, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky, and, most recently, Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics. He is a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

[js1138]

I guess I was guilty of the looks like a duck fallacy.

[cookcounty]

"I guess a (paid?) sinecure at the Discovery Institute is the closest he could get to academic tenure at a real university."

Reverting to the old standby ad hominum. You must be down to the scrapings.

Tell me, If there are no Buddhists in the Baptist choir, does that mean no Buddhists can sing? Maybe you should discuss this with your fellow choir-boys over lunch.

As the Ward Churchill affair has reminded us, tenure at a "real university" about highly selective butt-kissing and little else. It's called "Survival of the Tightest."

[snarks_when_bored]

Ad hominem's are fair when a person who's not an expert presents himself as an expert.

[js1138]

But just for the record, David Berlinski is rather heavily featured in book reviews at ICR. So they must be comfortable having an astrologer as a science and religion advisor.

[metacognative]

Berlinski has no religion beyond hedonism.
Keep your records straight and your ducks in line

[js1138]

I thought he was Jewish. Someone said he was Jewish.

[metacognative]

I'm Irish...wuz that make me?
I was a darwin believer, but learnt better.

[js1138]

I'm not surprised that you switched beliefs.

[cookcounty]

"Ad hominem's are fair when a person who's not an expert presents himself as an expert." Yes, well, on this thread we have now seen him excoriated because he is merely a good writer and then told that he is a lousy mathematician because he writes poorly. If Evolution by natural selection is true, it has as much to do with mathematics as with biology ---maybe more.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Richard Feynman died in 1988.

My post #37 is from this century.

[snarks_when_bored]

"Ad hominem's are fair when a person who's not an expert presents himself as an expert." Yes, well, on this thread we have now seen him excoriated because he is merely a good writer and then told that he is a lousy mathematician because he writes poorly. If Evolution by natural selection is true, it has as much to do with mathematics as with biology ---maybe more.

I don't think I excoriated him, although, having read two of his books, I think I'm mildly qualified to characterize his writing style (I called it 'pseudo-literary', which to some people might not be a bad thing).

As for the connection between evolution and mathematics, there's a subject called 'mathematical biology'. But one difficulty which sets the subject matter of biology apart from that of, say, physics (which is the most mathematical of the empirical sciences) is that every biological entity is unique, whereas, for example, all electrons have essentially the same properties and respond to similar experimental situations in predictable and repeatable ways. Making general statements about the development of life on Earth isn't easy, and the sorts of statements that result don't have the mathematical scope and empirical generality that statements of physics have. Of course, it could be that it's precisely this difference which emboldens some folks to attack evolution while the same folks wouldn't have the temerity to attack physics (okay, there are the cranks, i.e., the special relativity deniers and the like, but they're easy to recognize).

[donmeaker]

..Australopithecus ramidus - 5 to 4 million years BCE
..Australopithecus afarensis - 4 to 2.7 million years BCE
..Australopithecus africanus - 3.0 to 2.0 million years BCE
..Australopithecus robustus - 2.2 to 1.0 million years BCE
..Homo habilis - 2.2 to 1.6 million years BCE
..Homo erectus - 2 to 0.4 million years BCE
..Homo sapiens - 400,000 to 200,000 years BCE
..Homo sapiens neandertalensis - 200,000 to 30,000 years BCE
..Homo sapiens sapiens - 130,000 years BCE to present

Ok, so its 9. I figured someone had done some work since last time I checked.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I thought you'd like this Feynman quote. It's almost 40 years old from one of his books but I haven't been able to find out which one.

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.)

Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

The accuracy that you mentioned resulted in only one case involving using the quantum Hall effect to measure the magnetic moment of an electron. The result was accurate to 11 places. But this is the only example of this kind of accuracy. Other attempts haven't fared as well.

And just to be persistent, here's a site that discusses problems with QED. Since QED is a graduate level course, the audience is pretty small.

[metacognative]

You need to read Marvin Lubenow

[Heartlander]

A little history…

[Agamemnon]

That would seem to make him ineligible for a high position at ICR.

OK, it was Snarks turn last time to lose his credibility over what he obviously didn't know. Now it's your turn.

Can you name one astrologer at ICR, or were you just trying to be fashionably sopho-moronic?

By the way, I never contested the fact that Darwin was published. He published quite a bit even as you have detailed, including Origins... out to the 6th ed. Did you get a load of some of those other titles? Or how about some of those pedestrian publications you larded that litany with? Had you bothered to check anything of what you posted, you'd have found that most of those things were the functional and intellectual equivalent of "Letters to the Editor."

Do you have the personal capability to cogently critique any of the pablum you linked to, or do you just slap up evo-spam links droning on in an attempt to bluster us all with a vast, vacant expanse of what in truth passes for little more than bulls**t? Sadly, you thought it was all so scientific. You and your other evo-drool bags oughta quit just being dullard spam link junkies and get into doing some real, cognitively substantive scientific research for a change.

I particularly liked this one: Darwin, 'Bucket Ropes for Wells', Gardeners' Chronicle, no. 2, 10 January 1852, p. 22.

"Bucket of Ropes for Wells.—I suffer from the serious misfortune of a well 325 feet deep. It is worked by two buckets, and a chain, which, from its great length, is necessarily very heavy. Would a wire rope (galvinised) answer? This, I presume, might be tight and thin; it would have to carry, at each end, a strong and heavy bucket, holding 12 gallons. The rope would have to work over, and, I presume, once quite round, a wheel only 14 inches in diameter. Would any of your correspondents have the charity to give the result of any actual experience of light wire rope; such would be of value, probably to others, as well as to myself. C.R.D."

Hey, don't look at me. You linked to it!

You seem to think that because someone is widely published, what they wrote was actually worth anyone's time to read. By that measure you'd be a likely mark for prolific writers like Helen Gurley Brown, or Mao Tse Tung, or graffiti artists who write on every bathroom stall wall they ever sat in!

But even, as you also readily admitted, trained scientists of his day didn't think much of his premise.

Naw, it wasn't until the social scientists co-opted the premise, and conned what should have been otherwise clear thinking scientists by appealing to their innate tendencies to develop inflated egos and delusional senses of their self-worth -- and the desire to be their own creators and masters of their own destines.

Funny thing is that these dupes continue to be defrauded by their own (most recently by von Zieten), because they want so badly for the premise to be true. Wishing it doesn't make it so. Nor does all the pining for it make it more scientific.

Darwinism is "scientism" -- mere premise. It has nothing at all to do with the real, objective study of science.

[DannyTN]

List of 9 "species between ape and man".

Australopithecus was a knuckle walking ape that looked very similar to modern chimps. Because of finds like Lucy which were misinterpreted to be an ape like creature that walked upright and had a flat face, Australopithecus was thought to be an ancestor of man. However we now know that Australopithecus did not walk upright at all and had a sloping face, like the rest of the apes.

Palaeoanthropology: Did our ancestors knuckle-walk?

Australopithecus Afarensis compared to chimp.

Robustus and africanus are not thought to be ancestral to man in any event. But a series of recent articles in the last five years such as the one linked above casts doubt on the whole Australopithecus line as being ancestral to man.

Meanwhile, in the Homo line up. Neanderthal is not thought to be ancestral to modern man at all but was a contemporary. Erectus fossils have been found that are as recent as 4000 years old. And one evolutionist admitted that Erecutus is anatomically within the range of normal speciation to be a modern man.

So what you basically have there is a list of extinct ape species and a list of Humans without any proof or evidence one came from the other.

[donmeaker]

Read an interview of him. He is a "Genesis as scientific text" nutball.

Got no time for that.

[metacognative]

Not very scientific, to not look at another's ideas.
That's why darwinites act like a religion.
NO BIBLES in Moslem lands either!

[donmeaker]

I have looked at his ideas.

I reject them. He is a nut. If you can't tell that, I don't want you as a driver training teacher.