Science Icon Fires Broadside At Creationists

London Times vis The Statesman (India) ^ | 04 July 2004 | Times of London Editorial

[PatrickHenry]

Professor Ernst Mayr, the scientist renowned as the father of modern biology, will celebrate his 100th birthday tomorrow by leading a scathing attack on creationism.

The evolutionary biologist, who is already acclaimed as one of the most prolific researchers of all time, has no intention of retiring and is shortly to publish new research that dismantles the fashionable creationist doctrine of “intelligent design”.

Although he has reluctantly cut his workload since a serious bout of pneumonia 18 months ago, Prof. Mayr has remained an active scientist at Harvard University throughout his 90s. He has written five books since his 90th birthday and is researching five academic papers. One of these, scheduled to appear later this year, will examine how “intelligent design” — the latest way in which creationists have sought to present a divine origin of the world — was thoroughly refuted by Charles Darwin a century and a half ago.

His work is motivated in part by a sense of exasperation at the re-emergence of creationism in the USA, which he compares unfavourably with the widespread acceptance of evolution that he encountered while growing up in early 20th-century Germany.

The states of Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Oklahoma currently omit the word “evolution” from their curriculums. The Alabama state board of education has voted to include disclaimers in textbooks describing evolution as a theory. In Georgia, the word “evolution” was banned from the science curriculum after the state’s schools superintendent described it as a “controversial buzzword”.

Fierce protest, including criticism from Jimmy Carter, the former President, reversed this.

Prof. Mayr, who will celebrate his 100th birthday at his holiday home in New Hampshire with his two daughters, five grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, was born on 5 July 1905 in Kempten, Germany. He took a PhD in zoology at the University of Berlin, before travelling to New Guinea in 1928 to study its diverse bird life. On his return in 1930 he emigrated to the USA. His most famous work, Systematics and the Origin of Species, was published in 1942 and is regarded still as a canonical work of biology.

It effectively founded the modern discipline by combining Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s genetics, showing how the two were compatible. Prof. Mayr redefined what scientists mean by a species, using interbreeding as a guide. If two varieties of duck or vole do not interbreed, they cannot be the same species.

Prof. Mayr has won all three of the awards sometimes termed the “triple crown” of biology — the Balzan Prize, the Crafoord Prize and the International Prize for Biology. Although he formally retired in 1975, he has been active as an Emeritus Professor ever since and has recently written extensively on the philosophy of biology.

[af_vet_1981]

Just as church and state must be kept separate, so must liberals and education. It's as simple as that.

[balrog666]

Souls - three for a dollar! Today only!

[edsheppa]

The good professor is engaged in a fool's errand. For one thing, "Intelligent Design" is irrefutable; this is one reason it is not scientific. For another, he will find it very hard to "refute" the longing that draws people to it; hint, it has nothing to do with science.

[edsheppa]

However, you must know that secularists [couple evolutionary theory with abiogenesis].

I am definitely a secularist but do not couple evolutionary theory with abiogenesis. That makes you wrong.

Furthermore, most do not - just poll the "secularists" posting to this thread and you will see. That makes you wronger.

[Recovering_Democrat]

I believe one can look at a set of facts about the universe and reasonably conclude it was created. Just like the folks in my post #34 above. I am not outrightly rejecting evolution, but I do not necessarily embrace it either. I am willing to put it at the table of ideas and let the chips fall where they may while the two sides express their hypostheses.

Some (most?) science "educators", however, are not even tolerant of the creationist's point of view.

[balrog666]

I believe one can look at a set of facts about the universe and reasonably conclude it was created.

That's funny, many creationists conclude that without the need for any "facts".

Some (most?) science "educators", however, are not even tolerant of the creationist's point of view.

That's because it's not science. And, of course, "creationism" tends to cover about 103 different creation myths - why should they choose yours over any others to waste time on in a science class?

[Recovering_Democrat]

That's because it's not science.

To quote Ronald Reagan, "There you go again"...negating without engaging. The gentlemen and gentlewomen noted above are, I dare say, more qualified than either one of us to discuss a variety of issues on an expert level or, if needed, in a layman's terms.

I merely stated they should have a place at the table, and some bigotry is keeping it from the table. Such attitudes are akin to what happened in the 1920s, when small-minded, threatened, fearful attitudes kept evolution from competing in the arena of ideas.

[Recovering_Democrat]

That's funny, many creationists conclude that without the need for any "facts".

How do you know that? Are you privy to the inner thoughts of all thinking people? One who asserts that must have the omniscience of a Creator. ;-)

[GarySpFc]

The flat-earth MYTH was a creation of evolutionists to discredit Christianity. See: http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/RUSSELL/FlatEarth.html

[bondserv]

Ernst Mayr Recounts 20th Century Evolution Battles   07/02/2004
A leading 20th century apostle of Darwinian evolution, Ernst Mayr, turned 100 recently.  His mind still sharp, he recounted in the July 2 issue of Science¹ the battles that led to the neo-Darwinian synthesis in the 1940s.  Surprising though it may be to some, there was no consensus on speciation, natural selection and other key evolutionary concepts for eighty years since Darwin published his book.  Only in the 1940s did a compromise called the neo-Darwinian synthesis satisfy the majority of Darwinians.  Neo-Darwinism still reigns today, despite strong minority positions such as punctuated equilibria and Gaia, along with a number of sects that deny certain aspects of the Synthesis.
    Mayr lays the background of his youthful acceptance of evolution:

Curiously, I cannot pinpoint the age at which I became an evolutionist.  I received all of my education in Germany, where evolution was not really controversial.  In the gymnasium (equivalent to a U.S. high school), my biology teacher took evolution for granted.  So, I am quite certain, did my parents--who, to interest their three teenage sons, subscribed to a popular natural history journal that accepted evolution as a fact.  Indeed, in Germany at that time there was no Protestant fundamentalism.  And after I had entered university, no one raised any questions about evolution, either in my medical curriculum or in my preparations for the Ph.D.  Those who were unable to adopt creation as a plausible solution for biological diversity concluded that evolution was the only rational explanation for the living world.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Nevertheless, he continues, “Even though creationism was not a major issue, evolutionary biology was nonetheless badly split by controversies,” namely, “the causation of evolutionary change and the validity of various theories of evolution.”  These seem pretty all-encompassing.  He describes some of the early battles:

• Philosophy of science:  “... the philosophy of science at that time was totally dominated by physics and by typology (essentialism).  This philosophy was appropriate for the physical sciences but entirely unsuitable as a foundation for theories dealing with biological populations....”
• Sub-issues:  “...the paradigm of Darwinian evolution was not a single theory, as Darwin always insisted, but was actually composed of five quite independent theories.  Two of these were readily accepted by the Darwinians: the simple fact of evolution [sic] (the ‘non-constancy of species’ as Darwin called it) and the branching theory of common descent.  The other three--gradual evolution, the multiplication of species, and natural selection--were accepted by only a minority of Darwin’s followers.  Indeed, these three theories were not universally accepted until the so-called Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1940s.”
• International rivalry:  “Superimposed on these conceptual differences were others that arose because of the preferences of evolutionists in different countries.  The evolutionary theories considered valid in England or in France were rejected in Germany or the United States.  One powerful author in a particular country often could determine the thinking of all his fellow scientists.”
• Discipline rivalry:  “Finally, different evolutionary theories were often favored by scholars in different branches of biology--say, genetics, or developmental biology, or natural history.”
• Gradualism vs. saltationism:  “We naturalists thought that evolution was indeed a gradual process, as Darwin had always insisted.  Our material provided hundreds of illustrations of widespread species that gradually changed throughout their geographic range.  By contrast, most early Mendelians, impressed by the discontinuous nature of genetic changes (‘mutations’), thought that these mutations provided evidence for a saltational origin of new species.”
• Biodiversity:  The founders of population genetics accepted natural selection, but “Several historians have mistakenly thought that this synthesis within genetics had solved all the problems of Darwinism.  That assumption, however, failed to take account of an important gap.  One of the two major branches of evolutionary biology, the study of the origin of biodiversity, had been left out of the major treatises of Fisher, Haldane, and Wright.”  Mayr claims that this problem had been solved by European taxonomists.
• Paradox and Schism:  “Thus, evolutionary biology around 1930 found itself in a curious position.  It faced two major seemingly unsolved problems: the adaptive changes of populations and the origin of biodiversity.”  For instance, “As a student in Germany in the 1920s, I belonged to a German school of evolutionary taxonomists that was unrepresented in the United States.  Our tradition placed great stress on geographic variation within species, and particularly on the importance of geographic isolation and its role in leading to the origin of new species.  It accepted a Lamarckian inheritance of newly acquired characters but simultaneously accepted natural selection as facilitating gradual evolution.  We decisively rejected any saltational origin of new species, as had been postulated by DeVries.”
  
• Object of selection:  “The two belief systems had only one inconsistency--the object of natural selection.  For the geneticists the object of selection had been the gene since the 1920s, but for most naturalists it was the individual.  Elliot Sober showed how one could resolve this conflict.  He pointed out that one must discriminate between selection of an object and selection for an object.”

Mayr claims that the taxonomists and the population geneticists had solved parts of the problem; all that remained was to get the parties together.  That compromise was achieved by Theodosius Dobzhansky with Mayr’s assistance.  He claims the neo-Darwinian synthesis that resulted has been remarkably stable, even through the discovery of DNA and the revolution in molecular genetics, but part of that stability has been due to enforcement: “At a meeting in Princeton in 1947, the new paradigm was fully acknowledged and it was confirmed again and again in the next 60 years.  Whenever an author claimed to have found an error in the Synthesis, his claim was rapidly refuted.”
    In his conclusion, Mayr notes that new battles have arisen over allopatric vs. sympatric speciation, the enormous amount of biodiversity, and non-allopatric genetic mechanisms such as “speciation by hybridization, by polyploidy and other chromosome rearrangements, by lateral gene transfer, and by symbiogenesis.”  He regrets he will not be able to continue exploring the new frontiers of evolutionary biology.

---

¹Ernst Mayr, “80 Years of Watching the Evolutionary Scenery,” Science, Vol 305, Issue 5680, 46-47, 2 July 2004, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1100561].

Did you know that believers in natural selection were in the minority in the 1920s, and that many evolutionists believed in rapid, saltational change instead of gradualism?  You heard one of the living legends of Darwinism, Ernst Mayr, say it himself.  Notice how nothing has changed.  Early 20th century evolutionists disagreed on the mechanism of evolution (natural selection, Lamarckism or other) on the pace of evolution (gradual vs. saltational), and on mechanism of speciation.  Those seem like pretty major issues.  How can Darwin’s hunch rise above the status of hypothesis without answers to these questions?  The only things they agreed on were: (1) evolution is a fact, and (2) things change.  The same controversies go on today; evolutionists fight over how species split into two, how fast things happen, and the role of natural selection, but they all dogmatically claim, still, that (1) evolution is a fact (a statement of belief, not science) and (2) things change (too vague to be called science; even creationists acknowledge that things change).
    Mayr’s account sounds less like a scientific law emerging from the evidence, and more like a victory of two major factions of storytellers over rivals, until they agreed to give a little and meet in the middle (thesis vs. antithesis -> Synthesis).  The new talking points to feed the students became: “Father Charlie was right about gradualism and natural selection, but Mendel has helped forge an even better story: mutations provide the raw material for variation, then natural selection preserves the fittest.  We will call this neo-Darwinism.”  Students, liking anything that is neo, thought this is cool.  The official sound bite for reporters became, “We may have some disagreements about the mechanism of evolution, but all scientists agree evolution is a fact.”  These short, pithy mythoids suffice to keep most peasants compliant.
    Those interested in the relation of Mendel to Darwin will find this paragraph interesting:

When Mendel’s laws were rediscovered [sic] in 1900, there was widespread hope that they would lead to a unification of the conflicting theories on speciation.  Unfortunately, it turned out that the three geneticists most interested in evolution--Bateson, DeVries, and Johannsen--were typologists and opted for a mutational origin (by saltation) of new species.  Worse, they rejected gradual evolution through the natural selection of small variants.  For their part, the naturalists erroneously thought that the geneticists had achieved a consensus based on saltational speciation, and this led to a long-lasting controversy between the naturalists and the early Mendelians.

Long-lasting, all right; it was about 47 years before the Darwinians found a way to incorporate Mendel’s inconvenient laws into their story.
    Textbooks present Darwinism as if it were so intuitively obvious that late 19th century scientists instantly saw the light and embraced it, and lived happily ever after.  As we know from frequent reports on Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory in these pages, controversies still rage about the mechanisms of evolution, the pace of evolution, and the mechanism of speciation.  Nothing has changed except the power of the Darwin Party to enforce their views.
    How tragic to hear that the Reformation was dead in Germany by the time Mayr went to school.  The country where Martin Luther had taken his brave stand on the Word of God had cast off its heritage for a radical revolutionary, Ernst Haeckel, who replaced it with the Word of Charlie.  The early Protestant reformers had the will to withstand the Catholic counter-reformation, but their heirs, asleep at the switch, let the Darwinian revolution take over with hardly a word of protest.  So now the revolution has become the mainstream, controlling the propaganda outlets, the universities, the schools and the official creation myths of the culture.  The rallying cry for the Darwinian revolution is “just-so storytelling by faith, not by lab work.”  Instead of A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, the official anthem is (to the tune of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow), “We all take Charlie for granted (3X), which nobody can deny.”  Try to deny it and face the wrath of the counter-reformation (see 08/19/2003 headline).
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[jennyp]

The ICR loonies are supposed to be scientists? Real science is an investigation of nature. It has a spirit of inquiry. It isn't what you studied, it's what you do.

Good one!

[GarySpFc]

If the scientific method is applied to a set of facts, then it is science. Theology is a science.

How do you recocile the supernatural nature of theology with the fact that the scientific method only applies within the natural universe?

Who are you to say the scientific method only applies to the natural world? Let's see, first we can go to Webster's or any other dictionary and see theology is a science, however, since you "by faith" only accept the natural world, then we will use the definition of natural theology.

natural theology noun(1677) : theology deriving its knowledge of God from the study of nature independent of special revelation Merriam-Webster, I. (1996, c1993). Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary. Includes index. (10th ed.). Springfield, Mass., U.S.A.: Merriam-Webster.

[balrog666]

Who are you to say the scientific method only applies to the natural world?

What can you measure outside of the natural world?

[jennyp]

The guy who runs the Creation/Evolution Headlines page (is his name David Coppedge?) is like the Michael Moore of creationism. (Which is a compliement, actually. I could've called him the Noam Chomsky of creationism!) His blue text seems to do a decent job of summarizing the articles he highlights, if you ignore the gratuitous "[sic]"s & strange decisions about which phrases to bold. But his analysis (the green text) is totally agenda-driven & paranoid, interpreting every word as part of a worldwide desperate coverup by some competing religious cult.

It's a little sad to see someone who obviously has a bright mind use it in the service of denying the plain reality of what's going on.

Case in point: The Mayr article. Mayr is describing a momentous time in biology when several strands of thinking - which undoubtedly seemed to work & make sense within certain limits - were unified & clarified & in some cases refuted by a better theoretical framework.

That is an exciting, heroic, and utterly moral story. If Coppedge would just take away his apologetical blinders & drop his emotional defensiveness just a bit, he'd find there's a wonderful world of honest scientific exploration out there, happening right before his very eyes.

[balrog666]

Dear John,

As you know, We've been working real hard in our town to get prayer back in our schools. Finally, the school board approved a plan of teacher-led prayer with the children participating at their own option. Children not wishing to participate were to be allowed to stand out in the hallway during prayer time. We hoped someone would sue us so we could go all the way to the supreme court and get the old devil-inspired ruling reversed.

Naturally, we were all excited by the school board action. As you know, our own little Billy (not so little, any more though)is now in the second grade. Of course, Margaret and I explained to him no matter what the other kids did, he was going to stay in the classroom and participate.

After the first day of school, I asked him "how did the prayer time go?"

"Fine."

"Did many kids go out into the hallway?"

"Two."

"Excellent. How did you like your teachers prayer?"

"It was different, dad. Real different from the way you pray."

"Oh? Like how?"

"She said,'Hail Mary mother of God, pray for us sinners...'"

The next day I talked with the principal. I politely explained I wasn't prejudiced against Catholics but I would appreciate Billy being transferred to a non-Catholic teacher. The principal said it would be done right away.

At supper that evening I asked Billy to say the blessings. He slipped out of his chair, sat cross-legged, closed his eyes, raised his hand palms up in the air and began to hum.

You'd better believe I was at the principal's office at eight o'clock the next morning. "Look," I said. 'I don't really know much about these Transcendental Meditationists, but I would feel a lot more comfortable if you could move Billy to a room where the teacher practices an older, more established religion.

That afternoon I met Billy as soon as he walked in the door after school.

"I don't think you're going to like Mrs. Nakasone's prayer,either, Dad."

"Out with it."

"She kept chanting Namu Amida Butsu..."

The following morning I was waiting for the principal in the school parking lot.

"Look, I don't want my son praying to the Eternal Spirit of whatever to Buddha. I want him to have a teacher who prays in Jesus' name!"

"What about Bertha Smith?"

"Excellent."

I could hardly wait to hear about Mrs. Smith's prayer. I was standing on the front steps of the school when the final bell rang.

"Well?" I asked Billy as we walked towards the car.

"Okay."

"Okay what?"

"Mrs. Smith asked God to bless us and ended her prayer in Jesus' name, amen just like you."

I breathed a sigh of relief. "Now we're getting some place."

"She even taught us a verse of scripture about prayer," said Billy.

I beamed. "Wonderful. What was the verse?"

"Lets see..." he mused for a moment. "And behold, they began to pray; and they did pray unto Jesus, calling him their Lord and their God."

We had reached the car. "Fantastic," I said reaching for the door handle. Then paused. I couldn't place the scripture. "Billy, did Mrs. Smith say what book that verse was from?"

"Third Nephi, chapter 19, verse 18."

"Nephi what?"

"Nephi," he said. "It's in the Book of Mormon.

The school board doesn't meet for a month. I've given Billy very definite instructions that at prayer time each day he's to go out into the hallway. I plan to be at that board meeting. If they don't do something about this situation, I'LL sue. I'LL take it all the way to the Supreme Court if I have to. I don't need schools or anybody else teaching my son about religion. We can take care of that ourselves at home and at church, thank you very much.

[dimk]

It is easy to try and make a big issue of inter school rivalry and specific famous authors ability to influence others in their profession. None of this is specific to biology or evolutionary theory.

Basically in any science or in Mathematics there are different schools of thought and methods that people feel comfortable with. All sides usually have very strong supporting evidence and sounds logical structure to support their claims. The rivalry is usually very good for the scientific research since usually all sides look for an irrefutable evidence of their correctness. In many cases such evidence is found and then rivalry seizes except for a few dissenters.

Evolution(non-consistancy of species) is a fact been experimentally shown. Species change, its an experimental fact not statement of belief.

gradual evolution
multiplication of species
natural selection

I am not a biologist, and my experience with all of these concepts is from using Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming to evolve programs for image analysis and mineral identification. All of them work, populations of programs do evolve when faced with evolutionary pressure, gradual evolution is the most effective in programming evolution since mutations usually just create lots of useless junk that hinders not speeds up the process.

yes evolutionary theory is an unfinished theory meaning that there are tons of thins to discover. However is the best workable theory. Nothing in Creationists point of view explains why Flys when stopped from breeding until old age start living longer from generation to generation. Evolutionary theory predicted that and many other things. The whole branch in Computer Science dealing with Evolutionary algorithms is completely based on mimicking the natural world and it works quite well and in accordance with what theory predicts.

[xm177e2]

didja ever notice the creationist scientists are just asking for a place at the table

Same for the homeopaths, the scientologists, the aura readers, the etc...

Science is not a democratic process, you do not get to "win" a place at the table. If all of your "research" is clumsy, illogical, and based on wishful thinking rather than evidence, you will not get a place at the table, no matter how many scientific illiterates you can get on your side.

[Dimensio]

Who are you to say the scientific method only applies to the natural world?

I am someone who has studied the definition of the scientific method.

[Dimensio]

I believe one can look at a set of facts about the universe and reasonably conclude it was created.

If this is the case then it shouldn't be terribly difficult for the observations to be documented, tests to be constructed and a falsification criteria to be constructed. What, exactly, would falsify the notion of a "created" universe? Moreover, what does the creation of the universe have to do with biological evolution?

[PatrickHenry]

What, exactly, would falsify the notion of a "created" universe?

Nothing, really, which is why it's not a scientific notion. On the other hand, if a natural process can be described which accounts for the allegedly created item, the question then becomes why, given that a natural explanation exists, would it be flat-out rejected in favor of a supernatural "explanation"? In other words, why reject that which is comprehensible, in favor of that which, by definition, is incomprehensible?