Designed by Natural Selection

Stands to Reason ^ | Gregory Koukl

[Khepera]

Could it be the evolutionists who are being irrational?

About a year and a half ago, I gave a response to an article in the L. A. Times about a book called The Moral Animal--Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright. This response resulted in my commentary called " Did Morals Evolve? " There are some interesting things in this book I want to comment on. Wright's argument is that it is possible to explain all of man's mental and moral development in terms of evolution, "survival of the fittest," and natural selection. One thing he acknowledges is essentially the same point of view held by one of the world's most famous evolutionists, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins makes the point in his watershed book, The Blind Watchmaker , that the world looks designed. He asserts it looks designed--but isn't. He believes natural selection can be invoked to account for all of the things that appear to be consciously design.

Robert Wright unabashedly makes the same point. He uses design language in his descriptions all of the time. He talks about nature wanting certain things and natural selection designing particular things, but then is careful at different points to add the disclaimer that this design is just a manner of speaking because Mother Nature doesn't actually design anything. Natural selection doesn't design anything. There is no mind behind this, no consciousness. It just looks that way. However, since it looks designed, he feels comfortable using design language to describe natural selection as a designer, which is no conscious designer at all.

I think his work might be more honest if he didn't use design language, but it's interesting that he is at least willing to acknowledge that nature does look designed.

Incidentally, I am one who believes that natural selection is a legitimate explanation for many things. I think we can see natural selection at work in the natural realm that does influence the morphological distinctives of populations. The shape of the body is ultimately going to be determined by the genetic makeup of the creature, but whether that phenotype gets passed from generation to generation will be determined by environmental factors--natural selection. And that will then begin to characterize larger groups of the organism.

Basically I believe in what is known technically as the Special Theory of Evolution, or micro -evolution, because it has been demonstrated without question to have occurred. We can observe it happening. This doesn't go against my Christianity or my conviction that God created the world. Darwinian evolution requires macro -evolution, or trans-species evolution.

Any design creationist of any ilk, whether old-earther or young-earther, can hold to this. For example, a population of mosquitoes can be almost entirely wiped out by DDT, except for those few who may be naturally and genetically resistant to that strain of DDT. Then they reproduce a whole strain of mosquitoes that are resistant to that strain of DDT. But this is unremarkable. When I hear these kinds of descriptions of minute changes and small variations within a species attributed to natural selection, I have no problem with that in itself.

The so-called scientific argument is sustained simply by a bald assertion that nature did it, and not by evidence that God could not have done it.

I do have another question regarding the assessment, or acknowledgment, that the world looks designed. If it looks designed, it could be equally explained by either the unconscious "design" of natural selection, as the author argues, or the conscious design of a Creator. If someone looks at the natural realm and observes that it looks designed but thinks that it can be accounted for by natural selection, then they are identifying empirical equivalency between two different explanations. Empirical equivalency means the observable data can be explained by two alternatives equally. In this case, the observation of design can be attributed to natural selection or conscious design. The evidence is equal for both. That's what it means to say that the world looks designed but natural selection can account for it. My question is, why opt for the evolutionary explanation if there are two different explanations that will equally do the job? When you have a question that needs resolution and two empirically equivalent solutions, you must look for some other information to adjudicate between the two. Is there something that can be said for one system over the other that would cause us to choose it as the paradigm which better reflects how the world came to be? What is the compelling evidence that would cause us to opt for a naturalistic explanation over some kind of theistic explanation? Frankly, I know of none. There is only a predisposition to look for a naturalistic explanation that leaves God out. If that is the case, then it needs to be acknowledged.

Why go for natural selection rather than for God? Because God is religion and natural selection is science. Science is seen as fact--and religion as fantasy. If we have a set of physical facts that can be accounted for by a theistic explanation, then you have to have some other information that may cause you to want to dismiss the theistic option. I'm asking "where is the evidence that makes the God option an intellectually untenable one, without bringing in a mere philosophic assumption (namely naturalism)?"

One might rightly ask, where is your evidence that God did it? I can give lots of it. I could give independent evidence that is unrelated to religious authority claims. I can give other evidence why it is reasonable to believe and would be intellectually and rationally compelling to believe that there is a conscious mind behind the universe. I could give cosmological and moral arguments that God is the best explanation for the existence and nature of the universe. Many of these rely on scientific evidence.

Given two options to explain the apparent design features of the universe, one seems to be a bald-faced authority claim -- the non-religious, so-called scientific one.

We have two options--one scientific and one religious--that equally explain the observation of a designed universe. The so-called scientific argument is sustained simply by a bald assertion that nature did it and not by evidence that God could not have done it. However, the design claim that I am making can be further substantiated by other evidence for the existence of God. When push comes to shove, if you are rational, it is more reasonable for you to adopt the conscious design explanation--the God claim. Most people are not going to do that because it is not scientific.

Why does that matter? Because science knows the answer. How do they know the answer? Because God doesn't exist. How do they know that? Because nature did everything. But how do you know that?

That is the question we are trying to ask and there are no rationally sustainable answers forthcoming.

[apologist]

Wellllll... A sufficiently powerful & intelligent being could indeed magically create all the fossils in the world and place them in such a way as to make things look like it had all evolved. He could also have created the whole universe Last Thursday, complete with our false memories of time before that, etc. etc. ad absurdum. The Invisible Diabolically Subtle Trickster hypothesis is always an option, in any scientific question.

Strawmen are easy, aren't they? Koukl is an old earth creationist, and nowhere suggested that God recently created the earth, complete with predefined fossil arrangements, with the intent to fool some into thinking that complex and less-complex organisms must share a common ancestry.

That, of course, explains nothing.

Indeed. How can a non-existant concept explain anything?

But Koukl then claims he has independent evidence that there really is such a magical God-person out there. Unfortunately he forgot to actually tell us what that evidence was. Must've been an oversight.

The piece, like many of his short commentaries, was obviously intended to discuss a philosophical point, not lay out a treatise on the evidence for a designer... a topic he's addressed at other times.

[Publius6961]

And how do you suppose God came to be? I'm sure it must be very, very extrordinary. [sic]

You are absolutely right.
Mind-boggling extraordinary.

Perhaps more so than the “evolutionists’” Book of Genesis...

First there was nothing...
Then it exploded.

[Virginia-American]

From Behe's response:
What is a book concerning evolution supposed to contain if not quotes from evolutionists? Quotes from accountants?

The answer, obviously, is accurate quotes.

Unless I'm missing something, Behe doesn't apologize or promise to be more accurate in the future; he blames it on someone else, and then claims that converting ellipses to periods must be standard practice. Give me a break!

It is extremely difficult for me to understand why Coyne thinks his idea is anything other than a doubt about the efficacy of Darwinism

Maybe he should have asked him...

It appears to me at least that Behe's incomplete quote is dishonest, because it implies a doubt about (neo-)Darwinism (equals evolution in the mind of the public), not about the neo-Darwinian synthesis (equals gradualism in the minds of specialists). To be blunt, he's playing word games based on the ambiguous term (neo-)Darwinism.

(From Behe's response to the charge of crank or pseudo-science)

Here are some relevant sentences from pages 232-233: "The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell—to investigate life at the molecular level—is a loud, clear, piercing cry of ‘design!’ The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur and Darwin.... The magnitude of the victory, gained at such great cost through sustained effort over the course of decades, would be expected to send champagne corks flying in labs around the world. This triumph of science should evoke cries of "Eureka" from ten thousand throats, should occasion much hand-slapping and high-fiving, and perhaps even be an excuse to take a day off.... Why does the scientific community not greedily embrace its startling discovery?"

So unambiguous, so significant, but he can't be bothered to ssubmit his alleged results to normal scientific peer review!

[Doctor Stochastic]

Lack of falsifiability. Lack of publication in peer-reviewed journals. And from personal experience (attending a Big-Name-in-ID's seminar), lots of attacks on critics but little substance. Confusion of complexity with order is common. Complaining that their opponents are attacking their religion rather than answering objections.

[lews]

-- Lack of falsifiability --

Please explain to me how ID is not falsifiable and Darwinism is. My experience has shown exactly the opposite, that Darwinism is not falsifiable and yet ID is.

-- lots of attacks on critics but little substance --

Once again, the same can be said of Darwinism. The Coyne review of Behe's book is a perfect example.

[lews]

So, let me see, an editor changes an elipses to a period and that justifies dismissing all of the scientific evidence of irreducible complexity contained in his book.

I have seen allot of poor arguments in my time, but, that has to rank right up there with the worst of the worst.

Conyne a respected peer in the field reviews Behe's Darwins Black Box and that is all he can come up with! Sounds like much ado about nothing to me.

If there was scientific evidence to refute Behe, why did Coyne not present it? He instead resorts to the traditional name calling and ad hominem attacts employed by Darwinists so that they don't have to confront the evidence.

Now that is dishonest.

[Khepera]

I didn't write the piece I just posted it.

[jennyp]

Why is it that Darwinists always try to revert to religion when discussing ID? ID is not about religion, it is about scientific evidence that is contrary to Darwinism that implies a designed nature to life.

Dawkins and others of the Church of Darwin will unashamedly say that there is the appearance of design in nature then attempt to reason it away with evolution. However, if the mechanism of evolution doesn't hold water you are left dealing with the issue of a designed universe. That is what ID is all about. It points out that the Darwinian mechanism cannot account for the variation of life we see it today. Being that there is no other rational idea for the formation of the universe and life you must accept the concept that maybe a designer exists.

ID doesn't move past that point. It doesn't try to say who the designer is, that would be a discussion for the theologians to take up.

The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (the ID movement's sugar daddy) disagrees with you (at least circa 1998 - now the "S" word is no longer invoked on their website, probably out of embarrassment :-):

Life After Materialism

For more than a century, science attempted to explain all human behaviour as the subrational product of unbending chemical, genetic, or environmental forces. The spiritual side of human nature was ignored, if not denied outright.

This rigid scientific materialism infected all other areas of human knowledge, laying the foundations for much of modern psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Yet today new developments in biology, physics, and artificial intelligence are raising serious doubts about scientific materialism and re-opening the case for the supernatural.

What do these exciting developments mean for the social sciences that were built upon the foundation of materialism? This project brings together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences in order to explore what the demise of materialism means for reviving the various disciplines. 

How to join Discovery Institute

-- CRSC website, circa 1998

[jennyp]

Wellllll... A sufficiently powerful & intelligent being could indeed magically create all the fossils in the world and place them in such a way as to make things look like it had all evolved. He could also have created the whole universe Last Thursday, complete with our false memories of time before that, etc. etc. ad absurdum. The Invisible Diabolically Subtle Trickster hypothesis is always an option, in any scientific question.

Strawmen are easy, aren't they? Koukl is an old earth creationist, and nowhere suggested that God recently created the earth, complete with predefined fossil arrangements, with the intent to fool some into thinking that complex and less-complex organisms must share a common ancestry.

No, it's just a simple case of Occam's Razor, as steve-b pointed out in a different sub-thread here. The evidence points to evolution, but it's equally compatible with an infinitely devious trickster god, or a very devious & skilled group of cobbler's elves.

Your task is to come up with positive evidence for these elves/tricksters. There is not an epistemological equivalency here!

[Dominic Harr]

Hi.

I'm curious to ask if ya'll agree with:

• Things happen for reasons. Effects have causes.

• Millions of small changes over hundreds of millions of years equals big changes, including changing one species into another.

This, to me, is the shortest, simplest possible explanation of the concept of 'evolution of species'. I'm curious to hear your opinion on these basic points.

I do not believe that there is anyone anywhere in the world who currently understands exactly how speciation/evolution works.

But the basic theory seems extremely simple and correct, based upon those points mentioned above.

Yet I'm certain you disagree, and would be interested in your feelings on how those points relate to the topic.

[lews]

Please read the web page carefully and identify who the "designer" in ID is. It is intentionally not identified because that is a theological issue. Hence, your statement that they don't agree is not correct.

[balrog666]

... all of the scientific evidence of irreducible complexity contained in his book.

Was there a definition of irreducible complexity included in his book?

[lews]

-- Was there a definition of irreducible complexity included in his book? --

His book is available at Amazon, I have included the link below. I suggest you get the book and let Behe speak for himself. I think you will find it quite fascinating.

Even if you don't agree with his ultimate conclusion, you will at least be more knowledgeable on the position of ID.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684834936/qid=1026248530/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-6051331-3968106

[balrog666]

You chose not to answer my question. Allow me rephrase it:

Did you read any definition of "irreducible complexity" in his book?

Do you understand the concept of "irreducible complexity" well enough to explain it to someone who doesn't?

[lews]

This is the gist of it...

One of the systems Behe uses to illustrate irreducible complexity is the bacterial flagellum. This system is composed of a series of components that are dependent on each other and incapable of functioning without all components of the system being present.

As it relates to evolutionary biology the implication is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism of small genetic change over time could not account for the developement of the system because of the interdependent nature of the components. The idea is that the flagellum would have to appear as a complete assembly requiring a genetic leap that cannot be accounted for by the Darwinian mechanism.

That is irreducible complexity in a nutshell. However, for a more complete presentation I would still recommend you pick-up a copy of the book.

I hope that helps you.

[medved]

* Millions of small changes over hundreds of millions of years equals big changes, including changing one species into another.

Funny thing is, it turns out the whole thing about the millions of years is a bunch of BS, which most people take on faith merely because they've been hearing and reading it all their lives.

Evolution, and the Redneck Watermelon Truck

The story goes that two old boys named Luke and Ray-Bob had themselves a truck and were buying watermelons in Fla. and Ga. for $2 and trucking them to Chicago and Detroit and selling them for $2. After awhile, they noticed that they were not making any money; naturally enough, they had a big business meeting and came to the conclusion that they needed a bigger truck.

Evolutionists, of course, are using time in precisely the same manner in which the two rednecks are using truck size, and there is no real reason for anybody to take them any more seriously than they would take the two rednecks.

Now, You couldn't easily prove that Luke and Ray-Bob couldn't possibly make money buying and selling for $2 since they could always say they merely needed the next size bigger truck. There is one thing which would really demolish their case however: that, God forbid, would be for somebody like Algor to get elected president and immediately outlaw the internal combustion engine; after THAT, guaranteed, nobody would ever make money trucking watermelons from Florida to Chicago and selling them for what they paid for them.

Likewise, If comebody could provide a coercive case for the fact that American Indians dealt with dinosaurs on a regular basis, then the time-frames which evolutionists so love to use as a magic wand to enable their doctrines would be demolished, the entire doctrine of evolutionism, broken. Not that there is any lack of logical proofs that no amount of time would suffice for macro-evolution but, without those time scales, no version of evolution is even thinkable, much less possible.

---

In this regard, evolutionists and geologists would appear to have developed a sort of a dinosaur-in-the-livingroom problem over the last few years. Take the case of Mishipishu, the "Water panther" for instance.

Petroglyphs show him with the dorsal blades of the stegosaur and Indian legends speak of him using his "great spiked tail" as a weapon. Remarkably, the Canadian national parks which maintain these pictographs are unaware of the notion of interpreting Mishipishu as a stegosaur, and refer to him only as a "manatou", or water spirit.

Vine Deloria is probably the best known native American author of the last half century or so. He is a past president of the National Council of American Indians, and several of his books, including the familiar "Custer Died for Your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian affairs.

One of Vine's books, "Red Earth, White Lies", is a book about catastrophism and about the great North American megaufauna extinctions which occurred around 12000 years ago (using conventional dating). In this book, Vine utterly destroys the standard "overkill" and "blitzkrieg" hypotheses which are used to explain these die-outs.

Vine informs me that "Red Earth, White Lies" is one of several books which arise from decades of research including conversations with nearly every story-teller and keeper of oral traditions from Alaska down to Central and South America. He tells me that, if there was one thing which used to completely floor him early on in this research, it was the extent to which most of these tribes retain oral traditions of Indians having to deal not only with pleistocene megafauna, but with dinosaurs as well. In "Red Earth, White Lies", he notes (pages 242-243) that:

Indians generfly speak with a precise and literal imagery. As a rule, when trying to identify creatures of the old stories, they say they are "like" familiar neighborhood animals, but then carefully differentiate the perceived differences. I have found that if the animal being described was in any way comparable to modern animals, that similarity would be pointed out; the word "monster" would not be used.

Only in instances where the creature bears no resemblance to anything we know today will it be described as a monster. Since no dinosaur shape resembles any modern animal, and since the reports are to be given literal credibility I must suggest that we are identifying a dinosaur. Thus, in the story of large animals at Pomme de Terre prairie in southwestern Missouri, a variant of the story suggests that the western animals were megafauna and the creatures who crossed the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and invaded the lands of the megafauna were dinosaurs. The dinosaurs thus easily displace the familiar, perhaps Pleistocene, megafauna and move west, where we find their remains in the Rocky Mountains today

In numerous places in the Great Lakes are found pictographs of a creature who has been described in the English translation as the "water panther" This animal has a saw-toothed back and a benign, catlike face in many of the carvings. Various deeds are attributed to this panther, and it seems likely that the pictographs of this creature which are frequently carved near streams and lakes are a warning to others that a water panther inhabits that body of water. The Sioux have a tale about such a monster in the Missouri River. According to reports, the monster had ". . . red hair all over its body . . . and its body was shaped like that of a buffalo. It had one eye and in the middle of its forehead was one horn. Its backbone was just like a cross- cut saw; it was flat and notched like a saw or cogwheel" I suspect that the dinosaur in question here must be a stegosaurus.

---

Then there is the case of the Brontosaur Pictograph on rough stone.

This petroglyph, in fact, first came to light with the Doheney Expedition to Java Supai, the report of which comes not from the National Enquirer, but from the Peabody Muscum of American Ethnology at Harvard University.

Then there is the case of the man and brontosaur petroglyph at the Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah:

A book on Indian rock art sold atthe park visitors center notes:

"There is a petroglyph in Natural Bridges National Monument that bears a startling resemblance to dinosaur, specifically a Brontosaurus, with a long tail and neck, small head and all." (Prehistoric Indians, Barnes and Pendleton, 1995, p.201) The desert varnish, which indicates age, is especially heavy over this section.

Then again, there is the picture which the people at Bible.ca snapped of Don Patten with the petroglyph of the triceroptops:

And the pterodactyle at San Rafael Swell in Black Dragon Wash, Utah:

Like I say, it's never been easy to be an evolutionist, and it's not getting any easier.

[medved]

I'm saying it's not the same thing as a formal pre-publication review process.

A normal person wishing to understand what has become of academia in recent years, has several starting points, including of course DeSouza's "Illiberal Education", Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind", and a far more intense and all-encompassing book in the Quirck/Bridwell book "Abandoned: The Betrayal of the American Middle Class Since WW-II".

Martin Anderson's "Imposters in the Temple" is another item to add to that little list.

The basic job of colleges and universities should be teaching. There still are schools at which that holds true, but they are an exception at present. Anderson describes the trivial pursuits which have replaced teaching as the major objective of many if not most professors, in many if not most schools:

"For most professors, the surest route to scholarly fame (and some fortune) is to publish in the distinguished academic journals of their field. Not books, or treatises, for these are rare indeed, but short, densely packed articles of a dozen pages or so.

"The successful professor's resume will be littered with citations of short, scholarly articles, their value rising with the prestige of the journal. These studious articles are the coin of the realm in the academic world. They are the professor's ticker to promotion, higher salary, generous research grants, lower teaching loads, and even more opulent office space.

"...These are supposed to be scholarly pieces, at the cutting edge of new knowledge.

"But now I must confess something. Many years ago when I read these articles regularly as part of my academic training and during my early years as a professor, I was bothered by the fact that I often failed to find the point of these articles, even after wading through the web of jargon, mathematical equations, and turgid English. Perhaps when I get older and wiser I will appreciate them more, I thought. Well, I am now fifty-five years old, and the significance of most academic writing continues to elude me."

"In recent years, I have conducted an informal survey. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, I ask scholars about their academic journal reading habits. For example, I recently asked a colleague, a man with a solid reputation as a scholar, what he considered to be the most important academic journal in his field of study. An economist, he immediately replied "The American Economic Review".

"Let me ask you a question", I said. "Take, say, all of the issues of the last five years. What is your favorite article?"

"...Sure enough, he answered like all the rest. There was a silence of a few seconds, and then he cleared his throat a bit and, looking somewhat guilty and embarassed, said "Well, I haven't been reading it much lately." When pressed, he admitted that he could not name a single article which he had read during the last five years which he found memorable. In fact, he probably had not read any articles, but was loath to admit it.

"...There are exceptions of course, a handful of men and women in every field who do read these articles and try to comprehend any glimmers of meaning or significance they might contain. But, as a general rule, nobody reads the articles in academic journals anymore.

"...There is a mystery here. For while these academic publications pile up, largely unread, on the shelves of university libraries, their importance to a professor's career continues unabated. Scarcely anyone questions these proofs of erudition on a resume.

"...One reason why these research articles are automatically accepted as significant and important is that they have survived the criticism of "peer review" before being published.

"...Some of the manuscript reviews are done 'blind', with the author's name stripped off, while others are not and the reviwer knows exactly whom he or she is evaluating. Given what is at stake in peer reviewing... it would not be unreasonable to worry a little about corruption sneaking in.

"But these questions are not explored. The fact that some fields of study are small enough that the intellectuals involved in them are all known to eachother, or that friends review friends, or that reviewers repay those who reviewed their own writings favorably in the past -- all these potential problems are ignored...

Anderson, of course, is describing a sort of a ritualized and formalized version of what college frats sometimes refer to as a "circle jerk".

[medved]

Evos have made ignoring and pooh-poohing evidence of dinosaurs within the age of man into a sort of an art form; nonetheless, there is simply too much of this kind of evidence at this point in time for any rational person to ignore all of it. You could make a pretty airtight case based on the ica stones if you wanted to; I see the stegosaur as the most airtight of all such cases. You have one or two outright accurate depictions on petroglyphs such as Agawa Rock, and then you have any number of ideogram type petroglyphs showing the water panther (stegosaur), nonetheless ALL of these show the characteristic dorsal spines of the stegosaur:

The oral traditions of the water panther using its "great spiked tail" as a weapon pretty much seal it; the stegosaur is the only animal which ever lived which fits the bill.

[dheretic]

Your "problem" would not apply to a monoethnic colony world. Such a one-world government would be as natural for that planet as the federation government of the 50 states we call the United States of America. Nations are not effective ways to compare political ideas, a truly natural state is simply a basic police/military/court-administrative body. It has no social welfare, education, medicare or what have you wings to it. As such the people are free to be the people. However such a government is incompatable with a Christian society just as it would be to a leftist-oriented atheist society. Such societies believe the government should champion a complex higher ideal or morality and thus they will always devolve into chaos or mediocrity. A major part of the reason why the US is stagnating in some areas is that it is stuck with the false dichotomy of having to choose between the religion right and atheist left. Between those two sides, the parasites have a field day sucking dry those with innovative minds and talents.

On the subject of social parasites versus creators I would submit that Marilyn Manson is less of a social parasite than any televangelist or green shirt (brown shirt meets environmentalism). Say what you will about him, but he creates jobs and raises tax revenues peacefully by providing a means to collect sales tax. He lives on the product of his musical and business skills, not the kindness of strangers which is what most televangelists and green shirts do. I have more respect for the merchant or creator that creates jobs than I do for the majority of academia, clergy and xyz-rights activists.

[balrog666]

Not what I had in mind at all. Is there any kind of concise or "scientific" definition of the term? If not, where does the "science" part come in?

A definition by example as you proposed is no different than saying "I can't see how this structure evolved, therefore it didn't" which is the same thing as saying "I know it when I see it" or, more explicitly, "trust me".

Sorry, but I'm from the Randi school that says "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Also, from the science school that requires at least some nod in passing to the scientific method. I see neither here.