Those Defensive Darwinists

THE first court trial over the theory of intelligent design is now over, with a ruling expected by the end of the year. What sparked the legal controversy? Before providing two weeks of training in modern evolutionary theory, the Dover, Pa., School District briefly informed students that if they wanted to learn about an alternative theory of biological origins, intelligent design, they could read a book about it in the school library.

In short order, the School District was dragged into court by a group insisting the school policy constituted an establishment of religion, this despite the fact that the unmentionable book bases its argument on strictly scientific evidence, without appealing to religious authority or attempting to identify the source of design.

The lawsuit is only the latest in a series of attempts to silence the growing controversy over contemporary Darwinian theory.

For instance, after The New York Times ran a series on Darwinism and design recently, prominent Darwinist Web sites excoriated the newspaper for even covering intelligent design, insulting its proponents with terms like Medievalist, Flat-Earther and "American Taliban."

University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers argues that Darwinists should take an even harder line against their opponents: "Our only problem is that we aren't martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough," he wrote. "The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians."

This month, NPR reported on behavior seemingly right out of the P.Z. Myers playbook.

The most prominent victim in the story was Richard Sternberg, a scientist with two Ph.D.s in evolutionary biology and former editor of a journal published out of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. He sent out for peer review, then published, a paper arguing that intelligent design was the best explanation for the geologically sudden appearance of new animal forms 530 million years ago.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel reported that Sternberg's colleagues immediately went on the attack, stripping Sternberg of his master key and access to research materials, spreading rumors that he wasn't really a scientist and, after determining that they didn't want to make a martyr out of him by firing him, deliberately creating a hostile work environment in the hope of driving him from the Smithsonian.

The NPR story appalled even die-hard skeptics of intelligent design, people like heavyweight blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds, who referred to the Smithsonian's tactics as "scientific McCarthyism."

Also this month, the Kansas Board of Education adopted a policy to teach students the strengths and weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory. Darwinists responded by insisting that there are no weaknesses, that it's a plot to establish a national theocracy — despite the fact that the weaknesses that will be taught come right out of the peer-reviewed, mainstream scientific literature.

One cause for their insecurity may be the theory's largely metaphysical foundations. As evolutionary biologist A.S. Wilkins conceded, "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

And in the September issue of The Scientist, National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell argued that his extensive investigations into the matter corroborated Wilkins' view. Biologist Roland Hirsch, a program manager in the U.S. Office of Biological and Environmental Research, goes even further, noting that Darwinism has made a series of incorrect predictions, later refashioning the paradigm to fit the results.

How different from scientific models that lead to things like microprocessors and satellites. Modern evolutionary theory is less a cornerstone and more the busybody aunt — into everyone's business and, all the while, very much insecure about her place in the home.

Moreover, a growing list of some 450 Ph.D. scientists are openly skeptical of Darwin's theory, and a recent poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute found that only 40 percent of medical doctors accept Darwinism's idea that humans evolved strictly through unguided, material processes.

Increasingly, the Darwinists' response is to try to shut down debate, but their attempts are as ineffectual as they are misguided. When leaders in Colonial America attempted to ban certain books, people rushed out to buy them. It's the "Banned in Boston" syndrome.

Today, suppression of dissent remains the tactic least likely to succeed in the United States. The more the Darwinists try to prohibit discussion of intelligent design, the more they pique the curiosity of students, parents and the general public.

I'm perfectly happy to read Darwin and to let the theory be taught in schools, as long as it doesn't pretend to have a total monopoly on the truth.

It makes no such pretenses. Pretending to have a total monopoly on truth is the claim of some of the *creationists* (see post 140 for a recent example).

Why aren't Darwinists willing to entertain other possibilities in a similar way?

We're perfectly willing to entertain other possibilities. Whatcha got?

Why do they refuse to let anyone even open their mouths about them?

ROFL! Look, go right ahead and "open your mouth". No one's stopping you.

Why do they fire professors who dare to question Darwin?

They don't, unless the manner of "questioning" shows the professor to be a loon.

Why do they take school districts to court if they dare to question Darwin or even order an ID book for the school library?

Wow, you're *really* unfamiliar with the details of the Dover case, aren't you? Ask yourself this: If the facts were as simple and innocent as just "ordering an ID book for the school library", why did the guy who acquired the books for the library feel the need to outrageously perjure himself under oath about it?

Is Darwin so delicate he can't stand up to questioning?

Not at all. Evolutionary biology has stood up just fine to over 150 years of questioning. Scientists do the most harsh questioning of all, check out the science journals for plenty of examples.

Question it all you like.

What we *do* object to, however, is "questioning" of the Michael Moore / Cindy Sheehan variety, which dumps great loads of dishonest propaganda into the discussion (and the classroom) under the "we're oh-so-innocent" guise of "just questioning".

The death knell for darwinism has already started,darwinists just don't realize it yet.

ROFL! Yeah, we've heard *that* one before...

People have been predicting that was about to happen "any day now" for oh, 150 years now.

For some perspective, check out this web page on The Imminent Demise of Evolution. Anti-evolutionists have been continuously predicting that evolution was about to come crashing down any day now since 1840... That page contains quotes predicting the "any day now" crash of evolution from 1840, 1850, 1878, 1895, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1912, 1922, 1929, 1935, 1940, 1961, 1963, 1970, 1975, 1976, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002.

Sample:

"It must be stated that the supremacy of this philosophy has not been such as was predicted by its defenders at the outset. A mere glance at the history of the theory during the four decades that it has been before the public shows that the beginning of the end is at hand."
-- Prof. Zockler, The Other Side of Evolution, 1903, p. 31-32 cited in Ronald L. Numbers, Creationism In Twentieth-Century America: A Ten-Volume Anthology of Documents, 1903-1961 (New York & London, Garland Publishing, 1995)

But surely, you're finally right *this* time, eh? Dream on.

You guys crack me up.

The biochemical and molecular biological systems that make up living organisms don't lend themselves to gradual, random development over millions of years, life could not have started using that paradigm.

Strange, that's not what the research indicates. Perhaps you could point out a paper in the primary literature that I've missed...

Each biochemical system is a functioning unit that consist of very complex chemicals within a controllable environment and each system either works or it doesn't work.

I've got an idea -- why don't you go read the science journals for a change, instead of Behe's mass-market "I'm going to fleece the rubes out of their money" book? Then you'll stop saying goofy and incorrect stuff like this.

The twin magic wands of random mutation followed by natural selection could not have evolved such systems as the Krebs cycle and cellular transport in a piecemeal fashion.

Oh, gosh, really? Here's a previous post of mine concerning research into the evolution of the Krebs metabolic cycle (written a while back, and even *more* has been published on the topic since then):

What do you have concerning the development of the Krebs cycle?
Ooh, glad you asked, now I have a good excuse to post this cool animation of the Krebs cycle:
To read up on the evolution of the Krebs cycle (also known as the citric acid cycle), a good starting point is:
The puzzle of the Krebs citric acid cycle: assembling the pieces of chemically feasible reactions, and opportunism in the design of metabolic pathways during evolution, Melendez-Hevia E, Waddell TG, Cascante M, J Mol Evol. 1996 Sep;43(3):293-303
A portion of the abstract:
Study of the evolutionary possibilities of each one-taking the available material to build new pathways-demonstrates that the emergence of the Krebs cycle has been a typical case of opportunism in molecular evolution. Our analysis proves, therefore, that the role of opportunism in evolution has converted a problem of several possible chemical solutions into a single-solution problem, with the actual Krebs cycle demonstrated to be the best possible chemical design. Our results also allow us to derive the rules under which metabolic pathways emerged during the origin of life.
From the body of the article:
In the evolution of the metabolism, the achievement of the fundamental steps of the Krebs cycle was not difficult at all. Almost all of its structure previously existed for very different purposes (anabolic), and cells had to add just one enzyme (succinyl-CoA synthetase for the transformation of succynol CoA into succinate) to convert a collection of different pathways into the central cyclic pathway of the metabolism. This is one of the most clear cases of opportunism we can find in evolution.
[...]
The Krebs cycle has been frequently quoted as a key problem in the evolution of living cells, hard to explain by Darwin's natural selection: How could natural selection explain the building of a complicated structure in toto, when the intermediate stages have no obvious fitness functionality? This looks, in principle, similar to the eye problem, as in 'What is the use of half an eye?' (see Dawkins 1986, 1994). However, our analysis demonstrates that this case is quite different. The eye evolved because the intermediary stages were also functional as eyes, and, thus the same target of fitness was operating during the complete evolution. In the Krebs cycle problem the intermediary stages were also useful, but for different purposes, and, therefore, its complete design was a very clear case of opportunism. The building of the eye was really a creative process in order to make a new thing specifically, but the Krebs cycle was built through the process that Jacob (1977) called 'evolution by molecular tinkering,' stating that evolution does not produce novelties from scratch: It works on what already exists. The most novel result of our analysis is seeing how, with minimal new material, evolution created the most important pathway of metabolism, achieving the best chemically possible design. In this case, a chemical engineer who was looking for the best design of the process could not have found a better design than the cycle which works in living cells.
Also see (link goes to full text):
A mitochondrial-like aconitase in the bacterium Bacteroides fragilis: Implications for the evolution of the mitochondrial Krebs cycle, Anthony D. Baughn and Michael H. Malamy
While on the subject, I can't resist providing a link to this nifty site I ran across while digging up the above links. It's a multi-page animated tutorial on cellular respiration (including the Kreb's cycle), and it's a great introduction to the whole subject.
That same website has other cool biology tutorials, hit the "outline" link at the bottom to see an index.
Yet more reconstruction of the evolution of the Kreb's cycle:
The Molecular Anatomy of an Ancient Adaptive Event: Protein engineering identifies the structural basis of a 3.5 billion-year-old adaptation, Antony Dean, American Scientist, Volume: 86 Number: 1 Page: 26 DOI: 10.1511/1998.1.26
In short, the Krebs cycle arose as a relatively minor modification to pre-existing cellular biochemical processes which were being used for amino acid synthesis and early iron-based metabolism.
Since the next question will undoubtedly be, "where did the iron-based metabolism come from", next we will visit:
The universal ancestor was a thermophile or a hyperthermophile: tests and further evidence, Di Giulio M., J Theor Biol. 2003 Apr 7;221(3):425-36
...which is only one of the recent confirmations of this model of the origin of life as we know it:
On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells, William Martin and Michael J. Russell, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B, DOI 10.1098/rstb.2002.1183
A related observation is:
"The oldest of these proteins was ferredoxin, a biosynthesis enzyme that contains iron-sulfur clusters and that transfers electrons (hydrogen-atom equivalents). This protein he reconstructs as having a negatively-charged tail; this can stick to positively-charged objects like mineral surfaces with their metal ions -- which is consistent with the view of Gunter Wachtershauser that life originated from iron-sulfur-associated chemical reactions on mineral surfaces, and that the Krebs Cycle dates from this time. Note that the Krebs Cycle's members are all acids -- negatively-charged ions -- meaning that they can stick to mineral surfaces."
-- from this webforum discussion
In short, life most likely originated in iron monosulphide pockets around hydrothermal ocean vents.
Finally, since someone is bound to mention the creationists' favorite biochemist Behe, it seems appropriate here to point out one of Behe's many whoppers. In his book "Darwin's Black Box", he wrote:
"There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems."
[...]
"In effect, the theory of Darwinian molecular evolution has not published, and so it should perish"
What planet is *he* living on? There have been countless statements by biochemists expressing their bafflement at how Behe could make such a transparently false claim.
One web author points out that a simple MEDLINE search turns up *thousands* of such papers -- so what's Behe's excuse? But my main reason for bringing up this particular web page is that it's a really decent compilation of links to papers on various aspects of molecular evolution, and a good starting point for finding answers to the kind of question you pose. That page is Behe's empty box: alive and published -- Some published works on biochemical evolution.

Can someone please find me an anti-evolutionist who actually *knows* anything about the topic he's attempting to "lecture" us on?

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