Posted on 05/29/2002 8:32:25 AM PDT by cornelis
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Berkeley’s Radical An Interview with Phillip E. Johnson
Phillip E. Johnson, J.D. (University of Chicago), is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught for 30 years. A frequent lecturer, he is also the author of Darwin on Trial, Reason in the Balance, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, and The Wedge of Truth (all InterVarsity), as well as of two textbooks on criminal law. Dr. Johnson is an elder in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and he now has a regular column in Touchstone, "The Leading Edge." James M. Kushiner interviewed Johnson while attending a conference on Intelligent Design at Yale University in November 2000. Touchstone: Dr. Johnson, tell us about your upbringing. Were you raised in a Christian home? Phillip Johnson (PJ): Well, I grew up in Aurora, Illinois. We went to Sunday school because it was good for us kids. We’d drop my dad off at the golf course on the way. My mother told me I had to stay until I got confirmed, then I could go my own way. During high school I went to a liberal Congregationalist church, but I never took Christian doctrine seriously. It was just part of the culture, like the Boy Scouts. It was about being nice. I went to Harvard at 17 and assumed I was leaving all that behind. I had every intention of simply adopting the Harvard philosophy, which was secular, pragmatic, and rational, because that’s what you did if you wanted to be a big deal. When did you go to Harvard? PJ: In 1957, which was a significant year, the year of Sputnik. Sputnik created a completely new situation in American higher education because it scared the government; they thought we were going to lose our scientific preeminence. So they poured an enormous amount of money into the universities, especially for science. That’s when the biological sciences When you were at Harvard, were you on the "left" or the "right"? PJ: I played at being the leftist, but I came from a conservative Midwestern background, so my instincts were always in that direction. I was just trying out my wings. But when I got to the University of Chicago Law School, I discovered that all the bright people weren’t liberals. I heard about Milton Friedman and George Stigler and other leading American economists whom I was never told about at Harvard. It was a bit of an eye-opener. But unlike many people who go to Chicago, I didn’t quite "eat the whole enchilada," which allowed me to be more flexible. I didn’t completely buy into the market ideology, though I respected it. I did well in law school, which put me in line to get top judicial clerkships, and then eventually became a professor. One of the biggest decisions I made in my life was choosing Berkeley instead of Yale. When I was a Supreme Court clerk, I was eagerly recruited by both, but I decided I’d rather live in Berkeley. The Berkeley law professors were more like me—public-school types. The Yale professors were a little too preppy for me. I thought, "Well, I’ll never be a member of the club there," so I went to Berkeley. I was a perfectly ordinary, middle-of-the-road secular rationalist, and a half-educated intellectual. I did well on tests but never worked very hard at my studies. I look back now and see that I didn’t really know very much. I probably was a pretty ignorant person. When did you go to Berkeley? PJ: I started teaching law at Berkeley in 1967. In the 1970s they had even more student unrest at Harvard and Yale than at Berkeley. After I was at Berkeley and saw the student revolution up close, I found it wasn’t very interesting. The leftist riots were old hat, and I got fed up with the irrational self-righteousness. This experience, which would have been the same at Yale, pushed me into a much more conservative set of views. How did you come to realize the secular view lacked something? Obviously, one of the most important decisions you made was to become a Christian. How did that happen? PJ: I became disillusioned during my thirties. The whole idea of the exciting campus ferment and student ideas became a disappointment. The academic career was also a disappointment. I think my motives for going into it, for everything I did, were rather shallow. I was basically an academic careerist seeking tenure, writing law review articles and a casebook. I had the career, but I was bored with it. I thought life ought to be more fulfilling than that. I was beginning to grow up. I had been very happily married for some years, and then my marriage went bad. My wife got a heavy dose of the ideas that were rolling around in the ’70s. She lost interest in our home and family and went off into artistic politics. After we split up, I took care of the kids. So I was disillusioned with my home life, my marriage, and my academic career. In terms of my religious views during this period, what I usually say is, "I was raised as a nominal Christian and then I became a nominal agnostic." I didn’t have any passion for it. In fact, I had read some of C. S. Lewis’s books when I was in college and law school and admired them. I thought that they were attractive but not for people like me in modern times. "Too bad they aren’t true" was my reaction. When my marriage ended, I wondered what I was going to do with the rest of my life. That’s when I had my conversion experience. This, I think, is true of many people; what leads you to a conversion is the loss of your faith in something else. My faith had been, "If you’re a bright person with the right credentials, you’ll have a happy and meaningful life." I expected that I would go from one distinguished position to the next, advance my career, be happy and satisfied, and that’s what life would be about. It seemed to me that wasn’t happening, and I was just going to be a law teacher for the rest of my life. It wasn’t very meaningful or as good as I thought it would be. So I lost faith during that pragmatic period. Instead, I thought, "What makes me think that what I have is better than the Christian life?" So I became a Christian when I was 38 and met my present wife, Kathie, at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. Our lives were centered in that church. Kathie had been raised in a nominal Methodist home, and her first husband, like my first wife, had been very anti-Christian. So you might say we were negatively evangelized by our first spouses. My conversion was gradual, not dramatic. The central issue for me was whether Christianity was real or imaginary. I lived in a society at the university that mostly assumed an easy-going agnosticism. So I felt it was necessary to come to a conclusion on whether Christian metaphysics were real or imaginary, or if I would be throwing my brains out the window and adopting a myth because it satisfied my personal needs.
How did you resolve that question? PJ: First, I took up jurisprudence, the philosophical roots of law. That was in the wake of the emergence of what we call the Critical Legal Studies movement, which was the postmodernist, deconstructionist, epistemological relativism and Marxism that were in the English departments and had just come into the law schools, especially at Harvard and Stanford. I found it quite interesting. I was asked by the Stanford Law Review to contribute a negative piece to a volume of articles by leading members of the movement because they wanted an outsider’s view. I spent a whole year on that, reading these dense 120-page law review articles, studying continental One of the leading examples of that was in the section on religion. In my article—my study guide of sham neutrality—I used as my textbook example the decision of the California Supreme Court on the government funding of abortions. The US Supreme Court said, "You have the right to get an abortion, but it’s not I used to refer jokingly to myself as the entire right wing of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which in their view was a contradiction in terms. Their critique was purely the instrument of a left-wing political program, which was chosen arbitrarily and presumed to be good. It was a faith commitment. I picked up the same critique these Marxist law professors were making and turned it against a different set of subjects. My aim always was to demystify the kinds of doctrines the Critical Legal scholars wanted to protect. It never would have occurred to any of them to apply this sort of critique to a case promoting abortion because in their book that was a good thing. So it occurred to me, "Well, this can just as well be used to a different purpose. Let’s deconstruct Marx." So that got me into jurisprudence and prompted a skeptical attitude towards rationalism. I see the fruit of that now, 20 years later, in the first chapter of The Wedge of Truth. The young man I wrote about, Philip Wentworth, goes to Harvard, where he learns to keep an "open mind," but all that’s really happened is that he’s gone with the fashionable crowd and adopted their fashion, as he meant to do from the start. (I recognize so much of myself in that story.) I became acutely aware that what we think is reasoning is very often rationalization. When you speak of rationality, there are two very distinct components. One is logical reasoning, which is about going from premises to conclusions, conclusions that should be as good as your premises. Thus, logic will get you into insanity if you’ve got the wrong premises. The other component of rationality is having the right premises. How do you get them and how do you determine that they are right? Not by logical reasoning, surely, because then you would be reasoning from other premises in order to justify them. There is an instinct, or revelation, or whatever you want to call it, that underlies your thinking, and the only interesting problem in philosophy is how you get that. After figuring that out, it was the death of rationalism, as far as I was concerned. The problem with rationalism is that it isn’t rational. It fails to give sufficient importance to the development of the choice of the right premises; it tries to justify them by circular reasoning. Once I was alert to that distinction, I was able to critique the things that previously I felt I had to take for granted. Such as? PJ: Eventually, the theory of evolution. Remember that my interest was in finding out whether the Christian gospel was rational. Of course, it wasn’t rational by the standards of the academic world. One of the good things about the Christian life was that it opened up a whole world of intellectual input that previously had been closed to me. I began to understand what was actually wrong with the academic culture, and to put a name on my uneasiness. It was the seed of what would later be a full-blown critique of Darwinism. It "evolved" in a directed and purposeful manner! I am now primarily dealing with people who have incorporated naturalist metaphysics into their definitions of science and reason. I’ve learned to identify that tendency, and I understand it very empathetically because I lived there for so long. I’m very different from most of the people I associate with now because they grew up in a Christian subculture, whereas my roots are in the academic subculture. I have a different set of experiences and thoughts. "Where do the givens come from?" was the question I often asked myself. Eventually, that led me to the whole question of the gospel, and the way Jesus deals with people. "Follow me," he said. He gave a new set of premises, a new foundation. One of the very interesting things about Jesus is that when he deals with people, whether they are believers or unbelievers, friends or foes, they are supposed to know who he is. It’s perfectly understandable: "I am who I say I am." When you see the truth, when you meet it face to face, you’re expected to know it. If you refuse it, you are refusing to see the truth. I found that very fascinating—"How can that be?" Much later I discovered Lesslie Newbigin, which was like meeting a long-lost twin brother from whom I had been separated at birth. We’d had totally different lives—he was an older man and a missionary—but I recognized in what he was writing the same line of thought that I had independently stumbled upon. Either the gospel of Christ is the centerpiece of a new order or it’s nothing. That was so fascinating to me. Then I saw how this was the right principle and starting point. In all of my writing, I concentrate on that starting point. "In the beginning was the Word." A few simple principles. If you stay with those, you’ll be all right. When you say "the givens," do you mean the revelation that we have in Scripture, or is it something larger than that? PJ: Something larger. The gospel is not the writing. It’s described in the writing, but the Book of Mark isn’t "the Way, the Truth, and the Life"—Jesus is. It’s apparent in the Christian gospel that he is a living presence with whom you can make contact today. I sometimes say, when speaking in Christian circles, that I’m convinced that Jesus was who he said he was and did what he set out to do, but I’m not always sure that Christianity is a good thing. People erect the structures, which are partly divine in origin and incorporate part of the truth, but they also manufacture part of it and bring cultural influences to it. Do you see anything of value in pre-Christian philosophical thinking? PJ: If you read the Socratic dialogues and some of the things Socrates said, it’s really eerie. Socrates says extraordinary things like, "If the perfect man ever lived on earth, you know what they’d do to him? They’d crucify him." Where did that come from? From insight? PJ: Yes. It’s the most profound kind of insight at times. The critique of the common understanding of justice, the conspiracy of the weak against the strong in Book Two of The Republic, is something I review every year in my classes. It’s the most profound analysis of human nature that you can get. On the other hand, there are a lot of dregs in Greek philosophy, too, so I wouldn’t swallow it whole. Humanly speaking, you have to understand all of their ideas in the light of tradition. Nobody should try to think entirely for himself; you learn an enormous amount from what has gone before. That there were other early important Christian thinkers was news to me. I didn’t know whom I was reading about when I first encountered the Fathers of the Church because the version of Christianity I knew goes from St. Paul to Augustine to Aquinas and then to Calvin and Luther. So I think it’s just wonderful that many Christians are rediscovering the church fathers. So as a Christian you moved from philosophical considerations to an attack on Darwinism. Why Darwinism? PJ: I wanted to know whether the fundamentals of the Christian worldview were fact or fantasy. Darwinism is a logical place to begin because, if Darwinism is true, Christian metaphysics is fantasy. That’s why it’s so marginalized and is considered to be of no intellectual interest. I was surprised last night when someone quoted Darwin as saying, "Well, if we’re going to talk about such-and-such, then you may as well ask about the origins of life." Darwin seemed to be putting the origin of life into a separate category of questions he wasn’t really addressing. PJ: Darwin was unsure about the origins of life, but he also made the initial speculation about life evolving I got the opportunity when I was on a sabbatical in London in 1987 or 1988 to read more about Darwinism. It was immensely interesting to discover that it’s all circular reasoning, deception, and pseudo-science. I had suspected that, but I saw that it was really true. It is a pseudo-science that simply works for confirming examples of a materialist philosophical system that’s held up by a priori grids. Was there anything you read that "made the light go on," so to speak? PJ: The first book I read while on sabbatical was Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker, which seemed fairly convincing on the first reading but full of holes on the second. Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis did much to alert me to the issues. But perhaps the greatest "Aha!" moment came when I was browsing in a bookstore in London with my wife. Kathie had been a bit skeptical of my developing interest in evolution. (I sometimes get in a little over my head.) She picked up a copy of Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Science—900 pages of pretty good popular science writing—looked up evolution, and there was a brief description of the theory, plus three pages of heavy-handed ad hominem denunciation of creationists for not accepting the absolute truth of this theory that was so obvious to all thinking persons. Then there was a brief section called "Proof of Evolution," in which the entire proof—all the proof that Asimov thought was necessary—was the peppered moth experiment. So Kathie thought about it and said to me, "I think you’re on to something." Such experiences have been repeated many times. The ignorance that’s involved, the indifference to the facts, is stunning. Anything that promotes the "Great Darwin" and the materialist understanding is uncritically received, unless it does something that’s politically incorrect. In short, my discovery that the reasoning in Darwinism is unscientific, illogical, and dishonest was tremendously important to me because it validates that "In the beginning was the Word" is really the correct starting point. I then got to know the people from the main-stream community and the creationist world who are critical of Darwinism. What I brought to the dissident movement—Nancy Pearcey has pointed this out—was a sense of strategy. People were caught in a rationalist mentality. They were thinking, "If we present facts and evidence, Stephen J. Gould will say, ‘Oh yes, you’re right and I’m wrong,’" and then the scientists would let them in. Well, I understand a little bit better how that world works, and I thought of it like a political campaign or big case litigation. So the question is: "How to win?" That’s when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy: "Stick with the most important thing"—the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do. They’ll ask, "What do you think of Noah’s flood?" or something like that. Never bite on such questions because they’ll lead you into a trackless wasteland and you’ll never get out of it. How did others become involved in the "wedge" strategy? PJ: I met Steve Meyer, who was in England at the time. Through Steve, I got to know the others, who were developing what became the Intelligent Design movement. Michael Denton stayed in my home for three days while he was in the United States. Meyer introduced me to Paul Nelson, and so on. One by one, these people came together. At that time there was a little funding to pay for people to come to Seattle occasionally for a conference. So they had me speak at one in 1989 to look me over. I soon became the leader of the group. I also was introduced to Stephen Jay Gould and his scientific people and attended a seminar in the Boston area where I debated him, which gave me more confidence in our work. That was before I published Darwin on Trial. Of course, I’m much more knowledgeable now than I was then, but even then I still could hold my own with the kingpin on the other side. The debate was a draw, which was all I needed because a draw was as good as a victory. Indeed, my philosophy is, when I do a serious debate, to play for a draw because I do not want my opponent and the audience going away saying, "That is one clever lawyer who can make you look like a fool in a debate." I want them to go away saying, "There’s more to this than I thought. We ought to do this again." All you have to do is get the right issues on the table and then you win. You don’t have to worry about it, because Darwinism is wrong, and it will self-destruct. By the time Darwin on Trial was published, I had pretty well worked out the strategy I thought would, in time, win this campaign, and I’ve been able to convince most of the young-earth creationists and the old-earth creationists that this is the right way to proceed. I had thought that I would be able to persuade the theistic evolutionists, but that was a total failure. It wasn’t until I got to know them that I learned how they think. They are guided by the principle that we’re not supposed to have any disagreements with the scientific establishment over science. Everything Richard Dawkins says is perfectly right and acceptable up to the moment he says, "And therefore there is no God." If he just didn’t say those last words, he would be fine. I discovered that there was a total lack of interest in evidence and in asking scientific questions. When I tried to tell them it wasn’t just the "And therefore there is no God" sentence that expressed Dawkins’s atheism, but his whole scientific explanation was grounded in it, they were very resentful that I even raised the objection. So they see a great gulf fixed between science and personal faith? PJ: Yes. For them, the enemy is the Christian fundamentalist. Well, aren’t you their enemy, too? PJ: When people start bashing fundamentalists, they start out talking about extreme literalists and so on. But the definition is in fact much broader than that. Anybody who thinks God is real in the sense that evolution is real is a fundamentalist. God is a Sunday morning truth or a Bible-study group truth. That’s the way the secular world has it. They’re willing to tolerate Christian faith among the students and faculty, provided they don’t bring it into the classroom and the work world, where we talk about what really happened. Theistic evolutionists are very content with maintaining that arrangement. They think that they could get along well with the secular world if it weren’t for those troublemaking fundamentalists—and everybody who makes trouble is a fundamentalist. I was the biggest troublemaker of all, so I found myself bitterly resented in the Christian academic world. Theistic evolution is the same thing as atheistic evolution with a certain amount of God-talk. They don’t see any merit whatsoever in alleging that God left us some fingerprints on the evidence. I should add that some of my close allies, colleagues, and friends are Christian college professors, so it’s not as if they’re all that way. So theistic evolutionists aren’t open to discussing Intelligent Design? PJ: We’ve tried many times, but I’ve found that they are even harder to reason with than the atheistic evolutionists. I’ve been able to get along with the atheistic evolutionists better. It’s disappointing. But aside from that, I would now say that the project of developing a central position, which could unify the Christian world on this issue, has been accomplished. We’re on the verge of success in the project of legitimating this issue in the secular academic realm. I don’t know exactly when to say we’ve been successful. Maybe when we get a serious article about us in Time or the New York Times. We’re still on the margins. We have this conference at Yale, but the Yale faculty aren’t really embracing it. We had the conference at Baylor and got very eminent people from the other side to attend, so we’re close to success on that front, but we haven’t reached it. We have reached success in the unification of people who disagree about a whole lot of other things but agree that the wedge strategy is correct. Are you happy with the broadness of the coalition in the sense of including Catholics and Orthodox? PJ: Very happy. I think Catholic support is very important. A lot of Orthodox are friendly to it, and I also consider the Orthodox to be major players in this. I greatly cherish their support. Our movement is by its very nature ecumenical. One of the reasons why this issue has always been a loser is that it’s only been taken up by Protestant fundamentalists. That has to change. It’s like the stereotype of the Scopes trial all over again. PJ: That’s a large reason for my redefining the issue. The mechanism of the wedge strategy is to make it attractive to Catholics, Orthodox, non-fundamentalist Protestants, observant Jews, and so on. This will be a long fight. Every month we’re moving ahead, even when we get a little bit of a setback. Once you absorb yourself in the issues and understand the way Darwinians think, you know that it’s wrong and it’s vulnerable, which is why they fight so desperately to maintain their monopoly on the public forum. You have said there is no natural explanation for the rise of genetic information. How important is that question in the debate? PJ: The Wedge of Truth is all about those issues. The scientific key is, "No natural processes create genetic information." As soon as we get that out, there’s only one way the debate can go because Darwinists aren’t going to come up with a mechanism. They’ll start out talking about the peppered moth, and when that self-destructs, then they’ll say, "Oh, self-organizing systems, or the fourth law of thermodynamics," and other nonsense, which is just covering up ignorance. Genetic information is the issue, but it isn’t the final issue. After you make that breakthrough, then you see other ways in which the theory is questionable. Darwinists will say, "Oh, well, maybe the mechanism has some problems, but the "fact of evolution"—common ancestry—is not in question. We distinguish the fact of evolution from the mechanism of evolution." But that’s a bogus distinction because the "fact"—common ancestry—incorporates the mechanism. It’s just a matter of "now you see it, now you don’t." They are saying the mechanism by which a father and mother give birth to children is the same mechanism by which our "bacterial ancestors" gave birth to human beings. They say it’s all a process of natural reproduction and naturally occurring variation in the offspring. Biologists affiliated with the Intelligent Design movement nail down the distinction by showing that DNA mutations do not create evolution in any significant sense. Instead, they make birth defects, so the whole thing is false from the get-go. There is no way you can establish that a bacterium is the parent of a complex animal. There is no mechanism to make the change, no historical or fossil evidence that such a change ever occurred, and there’s no way to duplicate the process in a lab. Once you get that in the debate, then we will be poised for a metaphysical and intellectual reversal that is every bit as profound as the one with Copernicus. People will say, "My gosh, we’ve been completely misled by this fundamental truth of the creation story of our culture. We can no longer understand the world that way." How do you change the way people regard the authority of science? Get them to think of it as a much more limited thing. Science is very reliable when scientists stick to the kinds of things that can be tested by refutable experiments, but much of what they tell us is outside that. When they have to fake the mechanisms, it becomes a very dubious philosophy. That raises the question of why so many very brilliant people were misled for so long and did such a good job of rationalizing these things. When the mechanism of Darwinism becomes discredited, it’s like a train that’s been turned around. You can say, "Well, that’s interesting, but the train is still in the same place. The world, Yale, Berkeley, are still there. The New York Times is still telling us what to think. So why isn’t everything different?" Well, it is different, but you can’t see it yet. The train is turned in the opposite direction. It’s going to start out very slowly, but it’s moving on the logical tracks towards something very different, and when we get there, our great-great-grand-children will see how different things are. What are some of the books and writers that were formative influences on you? PJ: I’ve told you I had read the popular Christian classics of Lewis and Chesterton and later, Lesslie Newbigin, and admired them. Michael Denton first introduced me to the fundamentals of the skeptical case about Darwinism. When I think about things, much of what I get comes from my amateur’s interest in history, especially military history. I’m always thinking things like, "This is like Napoleon in Moscow. He’s taken over the whole country, but he’s about to lose his army." The sweep of historical examples, rather than the philosophers, has influenced me. I’m a great admirer of the literary classics by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Victorian novelists, especially Austen and Trollope. These are writers who help you have a Christian mindset. I think one of the great tragedies is that the loss of Christian faith and the meaning it gives to people’s lives makes it impossible for them to really appreciate literature. With a play like Hamlet, for example, you have to inhabit the Christian metaphysical rooms to really grasp what the ghost is and understand that marvelous scene in which Hamlet decides not to kill the king while he is saying his prayers. Those are the formative influences: history and literary classics. I also give a lot of credit to the authors I fought against. Who are your heroes? PJ: C. S. Lewis certainly was an intellectual hero in that Oxford common-room atmosphere of his time, to stand up for what he believed was right. The other reason I find him so overwhelmingly admirable is that when he was discouraged about philosophical issues after he debated Elisabeth Anscombe, he went off and wrote the Narnia Chronicles. How could a man like that, with no experience with children, write enduring classics of children’s literature? It’s one of the most astounding feats of virtuosity in literary history. My wife is a collector of children’s literature—we have 25,000 volumes in our home—so I have a deep appreciation for it, and for the ability to communicate with young people. Many people are urging me to try my hand at that sort of thing but I’ve never gotten up the nerve. Maybe I will someday. What’s next for Phil Johnson? PJ: I’m phasing out my direct involvement in the battle over evolution because the next generation is perfectly capable of carrying the ball. Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer, Mike Behe, and the rest know more than I do and are very capable writers and debaters. My next project is to provide excellent worldview education for high school and college students. I see this as a fantastic opportunity to send thousands of these young people properly prepared into the best universities and graduate schools, with a mission to speak the truth and change them by prophetic utterance. I love the sense of having opened a young person’s mind to truth and reality and knowing that they can do a great work. Nothing is more satisfying than that. If they have a better idea, they will be successful over time in changing the world. That’s what I want to be directly involved in. My colleague John Mark Reynolds and I are working with donors and organizations to design educational programs. We are proud of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. The young people who are here at this conference are so eager to be intellectually empowered and capable of taking on these issues. I think we can teach them how to do that. They will be better educated than the students at secular schools. I see my work as not just being about a scientific theory—it’s about the definitions of knowledge and reality. I see it as empowering this young generation, and I also see it as being inherently ecumenical. That’s represented by John Mark being Eastern Orthodox and me being a Presbyterian elder. Wherever I go, whether to a Southern Baptist, Catholic, or Orthodox church, I feel accepted into the Body. The first thousand years of the Christian faith was the era of the great councils and of unity in the faith. The second millennium was the millennium of the schisms—the great East-West schism, the Reformation, and the splintering of Protestantism—and then the near destruction of the whole thing in the wake of materialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But I see that ground being recaptured. All those centuries of strife and conflict and hatred—the engine has run down. There are still people who want to keep it going—I’ve met some of them—but I think the overwhelming sense is that we’re tired of that. The third millennium has to be the millennium of reconstitution—from the bottom up. It’s about recapturing the sense of the mystical union of the Body of Christ at the grassroots level. I see that happening all the time.
The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning, and Public Debate by Phillip E. Johnson is due out in September 2002 from InterVarsity Press.
Copyright © 2002 the Fellowship of St. James. All rights reserved.
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Agreed.
Yes. Observable. This is an example of the reaction upon the explanation of Darwininian evolution.
Of course it is a picture of a Darwininian.
Hmmmm. Let's have a look at a chunk of just the intro:
The Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ.What is a transitional fossil?
The term "transitional fossil" is used at least two different ways on talk.origins, often leading to muddled and stalemated arguments. I call these two meanings the "general lineage" and the "species-to-species transition":
- "General lineage":
This is a sequence of similar genera or families, linking an older group to a very different younger group. Each step in the sequence consists of some fossils that represent a certain genus or family, and the whole sequence often covers a span of tens of millions of years. A lineage like this shows obvious morphological intermediates for every major structural change, and the fossils occur roughly (but often not exactly) in the expected order. Usually there are still gaps between each of the groups -- few or none of the speciation events are preserved. Sometimes the individual specimens are not thought to be directly ancestral to the next-youngest fossils (i.e., they may be "cousins" or "uncles" rather than "parents"). However, they are assumed to be closely related to the actual ancestor, since they have intermediate morphology compared to the next-oldest and next-youngest "links". The major point of these general lineages is that animals with intermediate morphology existed at the appropriate times, and thus that the transitions from the proposed ancestors are fully plausible. General lineages are known for almost all modern groups of vertebrates, and make up the bulk of this FAQ.
- "Species-to-species transition":
This is a set of numerous individual fossils that show a change between one species and another. It's a very fine-grained sequence documenting the actual speciation event, usually covering less than a million years. These species-to-species transitions are unmistakable when they are found. Throughout successive strata you see the population averages of teeth, feet, vertebrae, etc., changing from what is typical of the first species to what is typical of the next species. Sometimes, these sequences occur only in a limited geographic area (the place where the speciation actually occurred), with analyses from any other area showing an apparently "sudden" change. Other times, though, the transition can be seen over a very wide geological area. Many "species-to-species transitions" are known, mostly for marine invertebrates and recent mammals (both those groups tend to have good fossil records), though they are not as abundant as the general lineages (see below for why this is so). Part 2 lists numerous species-to-species transitions from the mammals.
- Transitions to New Higher Taxa
As you'll see throughout this FAQ, both types of transitions often result in a new "higher taxon" (a new genus, family, order, etc.) from a species belonging to a different, older taxon. There is nothing magical about this. The first members of the new group are not bizarre, chimeric animals; they are simply a new, slightly different species, barely different from the parent species. Eventually they give rise to a more different species, which in turn gives rise to a still more different species, and so on, until the descendents are radically different from the original parent stock. For example, the Order Perissodactyla (horses, etc.) and the Order Cetacea (whales) can both be traced back to early Eocene animals that looked only marginally different from each other, and didn't look at all like horses or whales. (They looked rather like small, dumb foxes with raccoon-like feet and simple teeth.) But over the following tens of millions of years, the descendents of those animals became more and more different, and now we call them two different orders.
There are now several known cases of species-to-species transitions that resulted in the first members of new higher taxa. See part 2 for details.
Why do gaps exist? (or seem to exist)
Ideally, of course, we would like to know each lineage right down to the species level, and have detailed species-to-species transitions linking every species in the lineage. But in practice, we get an uneven mix of the two, with only a few species-to-species transitions, and occasionally long time breaks in the lineage. Many laypeople even have the (incorrect) impression that the situation is even worse, and that there are no known transitions at all. Why are there still gaps? And why do many people think that there are even more gaps than there really are?
- Stratigraphic gaps
The first and most major reason for gaps is "stratigraphic discontinuities", meaning that fossil-bearing strata are not at all continuous. There are often large time breaks from one stratum to the next, and there are even some times for which no fossil strata have been found. For instance, the Aalenian (mid-Jurassic) has shown no known tetrapod fossils anywhere in the world, and other stratigraphic stages in the Carboniferous, Jurassic, and Cretaceous have produced only a few mangled tetrapods. Most other strata have produced at least one fossil from between 50% and 100% of the vertebrate families that we know had already arisen by then (Benton, 1989) -- so the vertebrate record at the family level is only about 75% complete, and much less complete at the genus or species level. (One study estimated that we may have fossils from as little as 3% of the species that existed in the Eocene!) This, obviously, is the major reason for a break in a general lineage. To further complicate the picture, certain types of animals tend not to get fossilized -- terrestrial animals, small animals, fragile animals, and forest-dwellers are worst. And finally, fossils from very early times just don't survive the passage of eons very well, what with all the folding, crushing, and melting that goes on. Due to these facts of life and death, there will always be some major breaks in the fossil record.
Species-to-species transitions are even harder to document. To demonstrate anything about how a species arose, whether it arose gradually or suddenly, you need exceptionally complete strata, with many dead animals buried under constant, rapid sedimentation. This is rare for terrestrial animals. Even the famous Clark's Fork (Wyoming) site, known for its fine Eocene mammal transitions, only has about one fossil per lineage about every 27,000 years. Luckily, this is enough to record most episodes of evolutionary change (provided that they occurred at Clark's Fork Basin and not somewhere else), though it misses the rapidest evolutionary bursts. In general, in order to document transitions between species, you specimens separated by only tens of thousands of years (e.g. every 20,000-80,000 years). If you have only one specimen for hundreds of thousands of years (e.g. every 500,000 years), you can usually determine the order of species, but not the transitions between species. If you have a specimen every million years, you can get the order of genera, but not which species were involved. And so on. These are rough estimates (from Gingerich, 1976, 1980) but should give an idea of the completeness required.
Note that fossils separated by more than about a hundred thousand years cannot show anything about how a species arose. Think about it: there could have been a smooth transition, or the species could have appeared suddenly, but either way, if there aren't enough fossils, we can't tell which way it happened.
- Discovery of the fossils
The second reason for gaps is that most fossils undoubtedly have not been found. Only two continents, Europe and North America, have been adequately surveyed for fossil-bearing strata. As the other continents are slowly surveyed, many formerly mysterious gaps are being filled (e.g., the long-missing rodent/lagomorph ancestors were recently found in Asia). Of course, even in known strata, the fossils may not be uncovered unless a roadcut or quarry is built (this is how we got most of our North American Devonian fish fossils), and may not be collected unless some truly dedicated researcher spends a long, nasty chunk of time out in the sun, and an even longer time in the lab sorting and analyzing the fossils. Here's one description of the work involved in finding early mammal fossils: "To be a successful sorter demands a rare combination of attributes: acute observation allied with the anatomical knowledge to recognise the mammalian teeth, even if they are broken or abraded, has to be combined with the enthusiasm and intellectual drive to keep at the boring and soul-destroying task of examining tens of thousands of unwanted fish teeth to eventually pick out the rare mammalian tooth. On an average one mammalian tooth is found per 200 kg of bone-bed." (Kermack, 1984.)
Documenting a species-to-species transition is particularly grueling, as it requires collection and analysis of hundreds of specimens. Typically we must wait for some paleontologist to take it on the job of studying a certain taxon in a certain site in detail. Almost nobody did this sort of work before the mid-1970's, and even now only a small subset of researchers do it. For example, Phillip Gingerich was one of the first scientists to study species-species transitions, and it took him ten years to produce the first detailed studies of just two lineages (see part 2, primates and condylarths). In a (later) 1980 paper he said: "the detailed species level evolutionary patterns discussed here represent only six genera in an early Wasatchian fauna containing approximately 50 or more mammalian genera, most of which remain to be analyzed." [emphasis mine]
- Getting the word out
There's a third, unexpected reason that transitions seem so little known. It's that even when they are found, they're not popularized. The only times a transitional fossil is noticed much is if it connects two noticably different groups (such as the "walking whale" fossil reported in 1993), or if illustrates something about the tempo and mode of evolution (such as Gingerich's work). Most transitional fossils are only mentioned in the primary literature, often buried in incredibly dense and tedious "skull & bones" papers utterly inaccessible to the general public. Later references to those papers usually collapse the known species-to-species sequences to the genus or family level. The two major college-level textbooks of vertebrate paleontology (Carroll 1988, and Colbert & Morales 1991) often don't even describe anything below the family level! And finally, many of the species-to-species transitions were described too recently to have made it into the books yet.
Why don't paleontologists bother to popularize the detailed lineages and species-to-species transitions? Because it is thought to be unnecessary detail. For instance, it takes an entire book to describe the horse fossils even partially (e.g. MacFadden's "Fossil Horses"), so most authors just collapse the horse sequence to a series of genera. Paleontologists clearly consider the occurrence of evolution to be a settled question, so obvious as to be beyond rational dispute, so, they think, why waste valuable textbook space on such tedious detail?
- Misunderstanding of quotes about punctuated equilibrium
What paleontologists do get excited about are topics like the average rate of evolution. When exceptionally complete fossil sites are studied, usually a mix of patterns are seen: some species still seem to appear suddenly, while others clearly appear gradually. Once they arise, some species stay mostly the same, while others continue to change gradually. Paleontologists usually attribute these differences to a mix of slow evolution and rapid evolution (or "punctuated equilibrium": sudden bursts of evolution followed by stasis), in combination with the immigration of new species from the as-yet-undiscovered places where they first arose.
There's been a heated debate about which of these modes of evolution is most common, and this debate has been largely misquoted by laypeople, particularly creationists. Virtually all of the quotes of paleontologists saying things like "the gaps in the fossil record are real" are taken out of context from this ongoing debate about punctuated equilibrium. Actually, no paleontologist that I know of doubts that evolution has occurred, and most agree that at least sometimes it occurs gradually. The fossil evidence that contributed to that consensus is summarized in the rest of this FAQ. What they're arguing about is how often it occurs gradually. You can make up your own mind about that. (As a starting point, check out Gingerich, 1980, who found 24 gradual speciations and 14 sudden appearances in early Eocene mammals; MacFadden, 1985, who found 5 cases of gradual anagenesis, 5 cases of probable cladogenesis, and 6 sudden appearances in fossil horses; and the numerous papers in Chaline, 1983. Most studies that I've read find between 1/4-2/3 of the speciations occurring fairly gradually.)
Predictions of creationism and of evolution
Before launching into the transitional fossils, I'd like to run through the two of the major models of life's origins, biblical creationism and modern evolutionary theory, and see what they predict about the fossil record.
- Most forms of creationism hold that all "kinds" were created separately, as described in Genesis. Unfortunately there is no biological definition of "kind"; it appears to be a vague term referring to our psychological perception of types of organisms such as "dog", "tree", or "ant". In previous centuries, creationists equated "kind" to species. With the discovery of more and more evidence for derivation of one species from another, creationists bumped "kind" further up to mean higher taxonomic levels, such as "genus", or "family", though this lumps a large variety of animals in the same "kind". Some creationists say that "kind" cannot be defined in biological terms.
Predictions of creationism: Creationists usually don't state the predictions of creationism, but I'll take a stab at it here. First, though there are several different sorts of creationism, all of them agree that there should be no transitional fossils at all between "kinds". For example, if "kind" means "species", creationism apparently predicts that there should be no species-to-species transitions whatsoever in the fossil record. If "kind" means "genus" or "family" or "order", there should be no species-to-species transitions that cross genus, family, or order lines. Furthermore, creationism apparently predicts that since life did not originate by descent from a common ancestor, fossils should not appear in a temporal progression, and it should not be possible to link modern taxa to much older, very different taxa through a "general lineage" of similar and progressively older fossils.
Other predictions vary with the model of creationism. For instance, an older model of creationism states that fossils were created during six metaphorical "days" that may each have taken millenia to pass. This form of creationism predicts that fossils should be found in the same order outlined in Genesis: seed-bearing trees first, then all aquatic animals and flying animals, then all terrestrial animals, then humans.
In contrast, many modern U.S. creationists believe the "Flood Theory" of the origin of fossils. The "Flood Theory" is derived from a strictly literal reading of the Bible, and states that all geological strata, and the fossils imbedded in them, were formed during the forty-day flood of Noah's time. Predictions of the Flood Theory apparently include the following:
- most rock should be sedimentary and indicative of cataclysmic flooding. There should be no rock formations that indicate the passing of millenia of gradual accumulation of undisturbed sediment, such as multi-layered riverbed formations. There should be no large lava flows layered on top of each other, and definitely not with successively older radiometric dates in the lower levels.
- terrestrial animal fossils should either not be sorted at all, or should be sorted by some "hydrodynamic" aspect such as body size, with, for instance, extinct elephants and large dinosaurs in the lowest layers, and small primitive dinosaurs in the upper layers. Terrestrial animal fossils should not be sorted by subtle anatomical details (such as, say, the number of cusps on the fourth premolar).
- marine animals are a puzzle, since it is unclear that a Flood would cause any extinctions of aquatic animals. If such extinctions did occur, aquatic fossils would perhaps be "sorted" by body size or ecological niche (bottom-feeder vs. surface swimmer). For instance, plesiosaurs, primitive whales, and placoderm fishes (relatively slow-swimming and quite large) should end up in the same layers. Ichthyosaurs and porpoises (smaller, faster swimmers with almost identical body shapes and similar diets) should also occur in the same layers.
- there should be no sorting of large rooted structures such as coral reefs and trees. There should likewise not be differential sorting of microscopic structures of the same size and shape, such as pollen grains.
- sorting, if it occurs at all, should be quite imperfect. With only 40 days for sorting, there should be occasional examples of individual fossils that ended up in the "wrong" layer -- the occasional mammal and human fossil in Paleozoic rocks, for instance, and the occasional trilobite and plesiosaur in Cenozoic rocks.
- sorting should not correlate with date of the surrounding rocks. If all fossils were created by Noah's flood, there is no conceivable reason that, for instance, lower layers of fossils should always end up sandwiched between lava rocks with old radiometric dates.
Finally, some creationists believe that fossils were created by miraculous processes not operating today. (Many of these creationists combine this idea with the Flood Theory, as follows: fossils were created during the Flood, but were "sorted" by a miraculous process not observable or understandable today.) Obviously, such a theory makes no testable predictions...except perhaps for the prediction that geological formations should not bear any obvious resemblance to processes occurring today.
- Modern evolutionary theory holds that the living vertebrates arose from a common ancestor that lived hundreds of millions of years ago (via "descent with modification"; variety is introduced by mutation, genetic drift, and recombination, and is acted on by natural selection). Various proposed mechanisms of evolution differ in the expected rate and tempo of evolutionary change.
Predictions of evolutionary theory: Evolutionary theory predicts that fossils should appear in a temporal progression, in a nested hierarchy of lineages, and that it should be possible to link modern animals to older, very different animals. In addition, the "punctuated equilibrium" model also predicts that new species should often appear "suddenly" (within 500,000 years or less) and then experience long periods of stasis. Where the record is exceptionally good, we should find a few local, rapid transitions between species. The "phyletic gradualism" model predicts that most species should change gradually throughout time, and that where the record is good, there should be many slow, smooth species-to-species transitions. These two models are not mutually exclusive -- in fact they are often viewed as two extremes of a continuum -- and both agree that at least some species-to-species transitions should be found.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting sentences, paragraphs, meaning above the individual word level here.
It is just you. Your language affliction is worsening. Maybe you should read and attempt to discern meaning before making yourself look like...
Post 453 mentions post 373. Post 373 has this in it---P.S. I recommend to read this article on talk.origins.
And if you can read simple things you'll see I quoted the article in blue, as I normally do. Guess what article contains ---cultures evolve but they don't evolve in the way that species evolve.?
My close relatives have many genes in common with me. If I act on their behalf so that they live and breed my genes will be passed on even if I don't reproduce myself. The second type is called mutual benefit altruism - I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. Both kinds of "altruism" have obvious benefits and it is not hard to see why they are selected for.However there is a third kind which is rarer. Some animals (principally primates) live in social groups which act together and have complex social lives within the group. In these animals group cohesion is important and there is selection for actions which preserve the integrity of the group as a whole. . .
I still don't see where your criticism applies.
Is this supposed to be meaningless? Does it depend upon your definition of "meaningless?"
No surprise there.
The last statement of the article (which is what I cited)says it all.
I see we agree that the article was nothing. Thanks!
Because how we deal with Truth is important. One side of this debate spends all its time either frantically waving away the facts or waving away the logical, reasonable implications of the facts. Our side embraces the facts, and reason is our friend. Don't be afraid of facts and logic.
The design parameter for a species is reproductive fitness, an important part of which is survival. The design selection process in nature takes care of itself, though the rather loose selection parameters permit quite a bit of divergence. As for "instantiation", it was my way of saying that biological evolution would be an implementation of a general mathematical pattern (mathematical patterns having little or no context on their own).
How are we defining consciousness for the sake of this discussion?
And "truth" to you is evidently what you say it is.
The question isn't whether or not QM behavior is happening in the brain, it is whether or not meaningful coherent patterns in an information theoretic sense can be encoded in the QM substrate in an environment like the human brain. The argument is that even if QM effects are affecting the brain, it necessarily amounts to nothing more than noise due to environmental factors preventing any kind of persistent structure.
In a broader sense, the only thing we really know about the computational process of the human mind is that it is finite state machinery (this is something that can be measured and tested without knowing the mechanics of the machinery). This narrows the scope a lot, and even if there was QM machinery at work, then it must be a fairly simple finite state version of it. Note that this eliminates the necessity for QM behaviors as an explanation, as any FSM model that uses QM can necessarily be expressed as an ordinary boring FSM by definition. This is a much classier and more rigorous argument, but I don't bring it out much because it requires a little deeper understanding of the relevant points. In a nutshell, any QM behaviors that affect cognition must be FSM in nature based on measurable properties of the mind, which means that the human mind (in all its glory), must be expressable on any universal Turing machine (like ordinary silicon processors). Therefore, the QM argument is probably a moot point in any case, and at best would only affect the computational complexity of certain types of computations in implementation. It would not prevent the implementation of equivalent systems in ordinary silicon.
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