The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Ever hear the term "cognitive dissonance"? This first year psychology concept refers to the ways we handle two different mental states that are in apparent conflict. For example, Joe likes to smoke but knows that smoking is bad for him. He could quit smoking. That's one way to handle it. Another way is to simply deny the evidence that smoking is bad for him and continue to smoke. A third way is to adopt the belief that smoking helps him control his weight. Or that his particular brand is less harmful than others. These strategies vary a great deal in the extent to which they agree with facts or common sense, but they all have one thing in common: They reduce the anxiety Joe feels around smoking.

A zoo story

Last summer, when urban zoos competed with the beach, the London Zoo staged a "daring" show. For four days, August 26 through 29, it put three male and five female humans on display in the wooded habitat on Bear Mountain as homo sapiens. Spokeswoman Polly Wills explained that the exhibit "teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate."

The exhibit actually demonstrated the opposite.

A label was coyly affixed to the display: "Warning: Humans in their Natural Environment."

Associated Press enthused, "At London Zoo, you can talk to the animals — and now some of them talk back."

Hmm. No surprise there. Conveniently for the humans, they were separated from our primate relatives by an electric fence. Why, I wonder?

BBC News explained that the sapiens chosen for the display had to apply and give a 50 word pitch. (A pitch? Fifty words? Such high standards for language! Highly trained chimps, after six months of indoctrination and a grove of bananas, can barely manage to string together two sequential words, if that.

Indeed, one patron professed disappointment that the humans turned out to be wearing swimsuits beneath the cut-out, pinned-on paper fig leaves. Swimsuits? Paper? Pins yet? And where did they get the idea for those fig leaves anyway? Such airs.

And needless to say, all the humans went "home" at night and all the apes stayed behind lock and key. You can also be pretty sure that "home" for the humans was not a pile of leaves somewhere either.

Now what happened here psychologically is that when naturalistic beliefs (humans are just like apes) conflicted with evidence (pins, swimsuits, flats in London), onlookers chose Joe's second option—they simply denied the evidence and continued to assert the belief.

This shows why powerful beliefs like materialism are difficult to challenge. As long as the believer thinks he is getting something out of the belief, he can simply deny the evidence.

Kong: Would she really marry that gorilla?

Of course, the new King Kong movie has focused attention once again on how like/unlike us primate apes are.

Gorillas are a lot like humans—if they are really Hollywood stars. Otherwise, not, it seems. Researchers who study them tend to focus on what they see as similarities or interesting activities, missing the big picture. That fits in well with cognitive dissonance.

So does the dream of producing a human-chimp hybrid. Richard Dawkins, for one, has argued that if we could find an intermediate between humans and chimps, we would be more inclined to care about chimps:

Our chain of African apes, doubling back on itself, is in miniature like the ring of gulls round the pole, except that the intermediates happen to be dead. The point I want to make is that, as far as morality is concerned, it should be incidental that the intermediates are dead. What if they were not? What if a clutch of intermediate types had survived, enough to link us to modern chimpanzees by a chain, not just of hand-holders, but of interbreeders? Remember the song, 'I've danced with a man, who's danced with a girl, who's danced with the Prince of Wales'? We can't (quite) interbreed with modern chimpanzees, but we'd need only a handful of intermediate types to be able to sing: 'I've bred with a man, who's bred with a girl, who's bred with a chimpanzee.'

It is sheer luck that this handful of intermediates no longer exists. ('Luck' from some points of view: for myself, I should love to meet them.) But for this chance, our laws and our morals would be very different. We need only discover a single survivor, say a relict Australopithecus in the Budongo Forest, and our precious system of norms and ethics would come crashing about our ears. The boundaries with which we segregate our world would be all shot to pieces. Racism would blur with speciesism in obdurate and vicious confusion.

Quite apart from the absence of intermediates, evidence suggests that Dawkins has got the situation precisely reversed. The London Zoo story clearly demonstrates that people find it far easier to assume that humans are like apes than that apes are like humans. The leveling tendency would, in reality, go only one way—downward.

As it happens, recently released declassified documents show that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did in fact try breeding humans and chimpanzees, according to a recent article in The Scotsman:

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine".

Of course it didn't work. The fact that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and chimpanzees have 24 likely proved an inconveniences.

Humorist Andy Borowitz seems to have struck the right note

Hollywood, which has been buzzing with rumors of a torrid romance between the former "Friends" star and the giant ape, got the news today from an official spokesperson representing Tinseltown's latest power couple.

"Jennifer and King Kong will be married this June," said Sherrie Lasky, the couple's publicist. "We hope the press and the public will respect their privacy."

If we are going to have cognitive dissonance, it may as well be funny.

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Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She is also co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O’Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, while doing research for a book on human neuroscience issues, I ran into a really neat explanation of the brain, as follows:

Neurologist Paul MacLean first proposed in 1970 that the human brain has three parts, each one of which grew on top of the other, over evolutionary time:

- the reptilian brain (includes the brain stem and cerebellum)
- the limbic brain, associated with mammals, is responsible for emotions. It contains such structures as the amygdala and the hippocampus.
- the neocortex is best developed in primates and is associated with abstract thought, imagination, consciousness, and language.

This "three brains" hypothesis sounds neat — three nested brains — but it does leave the reptile without the ability to feel emotions other than aggression or perhaps fear.

Indeed, Maclean himself liked to say that "it is very difficult to imagine a lonelier and more emotionally empty being than a crocodile." For example, two behaviors that he did not think crocodilians could manage were care for offspring and playfulness.

Indeed, the vacant reptilian brain has even achieved a minor pop psychology status in business consulting as the last word in lack of creativity or caring.

One really good thing about the "three brains" hypothesis is that it can be tested. That's a key sign of a good hypothesis in science. Does the evidence reasonably show that crocodilians do not show emotions other than fear or aggression?

Doc Gater, who has wrestled and tagged hundreds of Mississippi alligators for conservation purposes, told me recently how he catches alligators in order to tag them:

Using a headlight on my head, I can see the eye shine of an alligator several hundred meters on a dark night. I then call the alligator for a closer look by mimicking the alarm call of a baby alligator and make splashing sounds with my hand in the water. The sound is irresistible and the alligator swims toward the boat. If I am working in a new area I can usually call about 80% of the alligators close enough for their heads to hit the boat.

When I call alligators by making the grunting call of a young alligator it attracts alligators of all sizes. It is unclear if they are simply curious or if they will defend the young. It is akin to the alarm call a newborn calf will make where the entire herd will indeed come and defend the young one.

So whether they are trying to be helpful or are merely curious, the alligators do not seem to realize that they are not supposed to care ...

Smith also told me, regarding the mother alligator's concern for her brood and the young alligators' awareness of each other:

Most mother alligators will viciously defend the nest containing incubating eggs and she has a very small home range (less than a third of an acre) during the 9-12 week incubation period. We know there is maternal care because the mother alligator MUST dig out the hatchlings and will often carry them to the water in her mouth. Also the grunting sound they make before hatching helps them all to hatch together and get the mother's attention. In fact if one puts less well developed eggs in a nest they too will hatch with the others, but with their yoke sacks still outside their bodies and will soon die. The young stay close to the mother and usually hibernate with the mother the first year or two. It remains unknown if the female alligator will actively defend the young after hatching, but her presence is certainly deterrence.

Alligators also seem to have something like a love life. According to gator expert Lindsey Hord, quoted in the southwest Florida News-Press, during mating season:

"You'll get higher visibility in males: Their mind is somewhere else, like teenage boys," Hord said. "They're showing themselves out. You'll see them in the middle of lakes and ponds with much of their body exposed. It's like saying to the females, 'This is my pond. This is how big I am.' "

And the 'gators seem to be attached to their home swamps as well. Smith notes,

Alligators also have an uncanny ability to return home after being moved. In Florida nuisance alligators are often relocated (as are bears in our parks), but were found to return in a few weeks. They finally concluded they MUST be relocated over 500 miles to avoid their return.

No one claims that alligators give to charity or solve equations, of course. But, based on evidence, it is reasonable to ask whether the reptilian brain is as lonely as proponents of the "three brains" hypothesis believe. And if the reptilian brain is not so lonely, is the "three brains" hypothesis really a satisfactory account of the evolution of the brain?

About the playfulness question, I haven't any information. If alligators are indeed playful, the over-curious human risks becoming a plaything. I have not heard of anyone so far who has volunteered for the basic research.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She is also co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O’Leary
ARN correspondent

A fungus called haptoglossa mirabilis uses a harpoon gun
to attack the rotifer (a microscopic animal) and nematode a simple type of worm that is one of the most common life forms on Earth. (Nematodes survived the destruction of Challenger space shuttle.)

The harpoon injects the reproductive cells (sporidium) of the fungus into the worm, and the junior fungi consume it within the next couple of days. They then germinate to form clusters of gun cells.

According to University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) researcher George Barron, the technology by which the fungus consumes the nematode is tiny but sophisticated:

The head of the harpoon is laminated. This means that it is compressible. As it is pushed up the barrel of the gun it will fit tightly and prevent leakage to maintain maximum muzzle velocity. As it emerges from the muzzle it pierces the cuticle of the nematode. At the head emerges it will 'decompress' and make a hole wider than the width of the bore. This will facilitate penetration by the everting tubular "hypodermic".

The gun cell is anchored to the substratum by a mucilaginous glue. It also has a swollen base. When the base is anchored the business end of the gun cell is then tilted upwards at an angle of about 30 degrees which is very suitable for contact with the nematodes and rotifers that graze bacteria in the vicinity of the cell.

The basal vacuole is the power pack for the cell. It is at high Osmotic Pressure. When the gun cell is released the pressure up front is removed and water flows in rapidly through the semipermeable membrane surrounding the vacuole. This squeezes the protoplasm and nucleus, like toothpaste, through the tubular hypodermic. The Haptoglossa gun cell is only about 15 microns long.

Just how do life forms such as haptoglossa acquire sophisticated equipment, given that they do not, so far as we know, have intelligence in the human sense? Darwinian evolutionists argue that such technologies evolve through a long, slow process of natural selection. However, a harpoon gun that Haptaglossa needs in order to reproduce itself can hardly wait years for Service Pack 2 before it works properly.

It was questions like this that prompted Gordon Rattray Taylor, a well-known British science journalist in the 1970s, to write a book, published in 1982 shortly after his death, in which he asked some probing questions about the traditional Darwinian explanations. He focused on a different creature that also uses a gun mechanism, as you will see from this excerpt from By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004. p. 93):

A Mystery of the Natural World A Worm Armed for War

Gordon Rattray Taylor was a well-respected British science writer, and Chief Science Advisor to BBC Television. Shortly before his death in 1981, he completed a book, The Great Evolution Mystery, in which he explained why he questioned Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. He relates, for example, the strange tale of the relationship between the pond hydra (Hydra) and the flatworm Microstomum.

The pond hydra is a tiny creature, shaped like a tube, with a mouth end and a foot end. It proceeds through life by rolling end over end. Some species of hydra hunt and protect themselves with a battery of poison guns: tiny stinging cells mounted on their surface that fire a coiled, poisoned hair, with a second hair serving as the trigger.

The hydra is usually safe from the flatworm, but every so often a flatworm seeks out and consumes a hydra. The worm somehow swallows the hydra’s poison gun apparatus without digesting it, and then positions the guns on its own surface. It uses the guns for its own protection; one species actually fires them like rockets at assailants.

As long as the flatworm has ammunition from a previous meal, it ignores hydras. However, when it is low on ammunition, it finds another hydra, eats it, and repeats the cycle.

Taylor asks how a creature with no brain or complex nervous system learns this routine. How does it remember and pass it on? He writes: "The theory of evolution by natural selection is powerless to explain how chance variation could have evoked such a closely coordinated programme."

Taylor believed that evolution occurs, and he also believed that random natural selection played a role in evolution. However, he came to doubt Darwinism, the idea that random natural selection and a few other naturalistic processes explain the life we see around us. Rather, he argued that "we seem to see a purposiveness of the kind which Darwinists refuse to believe in."* Taylor did not believe that this purposiveness—or purpose—was part of a divine plan. He thought it was implicit in the nature of life itself.

Whether the purpose Taylor spoke of resides in the nature of life itself or in something beyond life, many today find it increasingly difficult to ignore—which is why the intelligent design controversy has become so fierce .

(*See Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), pp. 14–15.For microstomum, search at.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who asked questions about Darwinism in a very modest way - and received a huge load of Darwinist fury in reply - asks for response: Is he stupid?

He writes:

I've been overwhelmed with e-mail and comments pointing out that I misunderstand a great many things about science. While this is certainly true, the vagueness of the accusations is robbing you of the joy of publicly humiliating me with razor-sharp specificity. Here's a chance to fix that.

Add a comment to this post that's brief and specific about what you think I got wrong in any of my blog writings. I'll publish all comments that are brief, specific and not too profane. For example, you might say, "Scott claims the moon is made of cheese." I'll publish that. But if you say, "Scott displays a lack of understanding about biochemistry," I won't publish that because it's not specific enough. Instead you might say, "Scott says biochemistry is a form of cooking," and that would be specific enough.

Brevity is key. Anything more than a paragraph will be deleted from this particular comment section. And I'll delete duplicates just to make it easier to slog through them.

Okay, go nuts.

Go here to offer a comment.

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

The Wall Street Journal points the finger at profs who encourage students to think about intelligent design, revealing along the way that world-class quantum chemist Fritz Schaefer was dissed by local bonzos on account of his interest in ID:

Some well-respected scientists have fostered the spread of intelligent design. Henry F. Schaefer, director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia, has written or co-authored 1,082 scientific papers and is one of the world's most widely cited chemists by other researchers.

Mr. Schaefer teaches a freshman seminar at Georgia entitled: "Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?" He has spoken on religion and science at many American universities, and gave the "John M. Templeton Lecture" -- funded by the foundation -- at Case Western Reserve in 1992, Montana State in 1999, and Princeton and Carnegie Mellon in 2004. "Those who favor the standard evolutionary model are in a state of panic," he says. "Intelligent design truly terrorizes them."

This past April, the school of science at Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, abruptly canceled its sponsorship of a lecture by Mr. Schaefer in its distinguished scientist series. According to David Seybert, dean of the Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Mr. Schaefer was invited at the suggestion of a faculty member belonging to a Christian fellowship group on campus. The invitation was withdrawn after several biology professors complained that Mr. Schaefer planned to speak in favor of intelligent design. The school wanted to avoid "legitimizing intelligent design from a scientific perspective," Mr. Seybert said. Faculty members were also concerned that top students might not apply to Duquesne if they thought it endorsed intelligent design. Mr. Schaefer gave his lecture -- entitled "The Big Bang, Stephen Hawking, and God" -- to a packed hall at Duquesne under the auspices of a Christian group instead.

I love it! "Faculty members were also concerned that top students might not apply to Duquesne if they thought it endorsed intelligent design." So top students are supposed to be the kind of people who need protection from scientists like Schaefer, who challenge them, and exposed only to those who don't? No wonder Darwinism is on the way out.

Couldn't be there last April? Here's a lay-friendly lecture by Schaefer on "The Big Bang and God."

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

In a screed against politicized science, best-selling novelist Michael Crichton
trashes SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, as merely a religion:

... the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

[ ... ]

Back in the sixties, SETI had its critics, although not among astrophysicists and astronomers. The biologists and paleontologists were harshest. George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard sneered that SETI was a "study without a subject," and it remains so to the present day.

Crichton notes the marked unwillingness of science boffins to criticize SETI:

The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage-similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example-meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks.

But Michael, SETI did not threaten materialism. Indeed, many believed that SETI would uphold it. Anyway, Crichton argues that the gullibility index shot up through nuclear winter, second-hand smoke, and now lands us with global warming. The real problem, he thinks, is consensus:

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Well then, the ID guys are either stars or dogs, depending on whether they are right in saying that information is a real input into nature.

Overall, a most interesting essay. Note his treatment of the much-maligned Bjorn Lomborg, who questioned global warming and became Scientific American's whipping boy:

Further attacks since have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That's why none of his critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That's why the facts don't matter. That's why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He's a heretic.

Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never thought I'd see the Scientific American in the role of mother church.

Oh, that's nothing new, Michael. Scientific American is a flagship congregation of the Assembly of the Churches of Darwin, and behaves accordingly. Thus, I am sure the mag slid easily enough into the role of persecutor of Lomborg.

Incidentally, I heard Lomborg speak at the 4th World Science Journalists conference and thought he made some sensible (and important) observations on how we need to make real-world decisions about how to understand and tackle global warming, or we risk further damage Third World countries. The treatment of him as been a disgrace. Unfortunately, there is such a thing as consensus journalism, as well as consensus science. But at least we know what to call them. We call them the rat pack.

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

The University of Kansas will sponsor a course that studies intelligent design, but only as a form of mythology, taught by department chair Paul Mirecki.

Mirecki said his course, limited to 120 students, would explore intelligent design as a modern American mythology. Several faculty members have volunteered to be guest lecturers, he said.

I bet. I wonder if anyone will be allowed to defend ID?

Here's Mirecki's background, which is an impressive array of studies of ancient myth and magic:

John Calvert, who got the new Kansas science standards through (for which this course is clearly payback), says,

... Mirecki will go down in history as a laughingstock.
To equate intelligent design to mythology is really an absurdity, and it's just another example of labeling anybody who proposes (intelligent design) to be simply a religious nut," Calvert said. "That's the reason for this little charade."

Well, charade or not, what's needed here is for some brave students to take the risk of questioning Mirecki on slightly more modern issues such as the apparent fine tuning of the universe for life and the high level of information in cells. He could likely do with some good questions.

On the other hand, beware the curse of King Tut's Tomb, or is it King Toot's Tome or King Tote's Tum, or ... well, anyway, keep a sharp lookout.

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, the legendary engineer with a fashion sense*, made the mistake of offering some thoughtful comments on the intelligent design controversy. Of course, P.Z. Myers, a classic Internet Darwinist attacked Adams in the usual graceless way that does so much to encourage people to consider ID, starting with

Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, has written a truly clueless whine about "Darwinism". It's a mess.

Then Scott hits back, pointing out that Darwinist Myers bumbled into precisely the trap he had set - he misrepresented Scott's views:

This blogger, who calls himself PZ, is evidently a highly educated scientist, extremely informed on the topic of evolution, and quite passionate. But for reasons that fascinate the trained hypnotist in me, that brilliance doesn't extend to comprehending The Dilbert Blog. (The curious reader might want to Google cognitive dissonance to understand how something like that can happen.) That makes him the poster child for my point that the average person (me) has no credible source of information on the topic of evolution.

[ ... ]

The people who purport to have evidence of evolution do a spectacular job of making themselves non-credible. And since I don't have any relevant scientific knowledge myself, nor direct access to the data, everything I know has to come from non-credible types. To me, it's like hiring a serial cannibal as a babysitter based on the fact that he PROMISES not to eat your kids despite having eaten all the other kids on the block. It might be a fact that he's telling the truth. The problem is that he's not credible. (The other problem is that he eats your kids.)

* The fashion sense, that is, of an engineer.

(Note: P.Z. Myers crossed my own screen a while back. Speaking of how to defend Darwinism, he announces:

Please don't try to tell me that you object to the tone of our complaints. Our only problem is that we aren't martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough. The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many schoolboard members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians.

Charming fellow, don't you think ...

Rumour control: The ID-supporting Discovery Institute is NOT paying Myers to act this way. Apparently, the service is free.)

(Additional Note: Dilbert has been, for many years, my favourite strip. Curiously, the workplace mentality at Dilbert's software company - far from originating in the Nineties computer industry, as many suppose - very much prevailed at a publishing company where I was a freelance book editor in the Eighties, well before most of us Canadian editors had ever seen a computer. For example, I recall that one Dilbert episode has employees trying to expand the size of their cubicles by piling stuff outside them. We actually did that ... until management sent round a memo telling us to stop. I tell you, if a spark had lit that place, ... hey presto! Dante's Inferno! ... )

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

The literary Darwinists purport to explain why natural selection preprograms you to like certain literature:

For the common reader, "Pride and Prejudice" is a romantic comedy. His or her pleasure comes from the vividness of Austen's characters and how familiar they still seem: it's as if we know Elizabeth and Darcy. On a more literary level, we enjoy Austen's pointed dialogue and admire her expert way with humor. For similar reasons, critics have long called "Pride and Prejudic" a classic - their ultimate (if not well defined) expression of approval.

But for an emerging school of literary criticism known as Literary Darwinism, the novel is significant for different reasons. Just as Charles Darwin studied animals to discover the patterns behind their development, Literary Darwinists read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it's impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts.

Author D.T. Max writes as if he (or she) would really like to be able to take all this seriously, but then keeps backing away. That's not surprising. Taking it seriously would indeed be a tough job. Get this:

Literary Darwinists use this "deep history" to explain the power of books and poems that might otherwise confuse us, thus hoping to add satisfaction to our reading of them. Take for instance "Hamlet." Through the Literary Darwinist lens, Shakespeare's play becomes the story of a young man's dilemma choosing between his personal self-interest (taking over the kingdom by killing his uncle, his mother's new husband) and his genetic self-interest (if his mother has children with his uncle, he may get new siblings who carry three-eighths of his genes). No wonder the prince of Denmark cannot make up his mind.

Well, that clears that up, I guess. One of the few things Hamlet never seems to think much about (pehaps to Ophelia's fatal frustration) suddenly becomes his primary motivation (the passing on of genes). Incidentally, David Sloan Wilson, co-editor of scholarly anthology The Literary Animal, on literary Darwinism and son of novelist Sloan Wilson, appears in the next item.

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

David Sloan Wilson, noted above, also wrote an essay about a course aimed at selling Darwinism to students in Binghamton, New York. (Note: This link is a .pdf, so you may not be able to use your back browser button to get back here.)

Much of it is pretty much what you might expect, but note the following:

Choosing the subject of infanticide, I say that superficially it might seem that organisms would never evolve to kill their own offspring, but with a little thought the students might be able to identify situations in which infanticide is biologically adaptive for the parents. I ask them to form small groups by turning to their neighbors to discuss the subject for five minutes and to list their predictions on a piece of paper.

After the lists are collected, I ask the students for some of their predictions to list in front of the whole class. They are eager to talk, and reliably identify the three major adaptive contexts of infanticide: lack of resources, poor offspring quality, and uncertain paternity, along with less likely possibilities, such as population regulation, that can be set aside for future discussion. I conclude by attempting to convey the simple but profound message of the exercise: How can they, mere undergraduate students, who know almost nothing about evolution and (one hopes) know nothing at all about infanticide, so easily deduce the major hypotheses that are in fact employed in the study of infanticide for organisms as diverse as plants, insects, and mammals? That is just one example of the power of thinking on the basis of adaptation and natural selection.

I'm hardly surprised that the students are eager to talk.

Wilson coyly writes that one hopes the students "know nothing at all about infanticide." All I can say is, oh come ON! Many of them know way more than is good for them about the modern version of infanticide, abortion.

Apparently, 52% of all U.S. women who end the life of one of their children by abortion are under 25, and abortion is one of the most common surgical procedures in the United States.

No wonder students get co-opted by a course like this into inventing excuses for prehistoric infanticides. It is for their own actions and those of their friends that they are offering the rationalizations. What I find most intriguing is that we are all supposed to read the account of prehistoric infanticides and act as though North American teens today have never heard of anything remotely like that.

Don't be surprised if this course or one like it is offered at a school near you. It will be offered with taxpayer funding, but you can be pretty sure that no course that addresses post-abortion grief will be offered with taxpayer funding at the same institution. Love 'em or hate 'em, the Darwinists are not kidding, m'kay?

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

by Denyse O'Leary, ARN correspondent

What do biology texts bought with tax money teach (or preach) regarding the origin of life?

Most parents do not bother to read the texts their teens study from. Many might be surprised if they did. Today, I want to offer a peek into some of the stuff you can learn from a major US science text about the much-contested origin of life.

In Chapter 4 of Biology, Sixth Edition, "The Origin and Early History of Life," we are told that one of the changes from previous editions is that "The discussion of ideas about the origin of life is now much more open-ended, stressing competing hypotheses and the key role of assumptions for which there is little data."

My first thought, of course, was, well - that's a relief. So they are going to come right out and admit that origin of life is a baffling problem, as OoL researchers have often admitted. Because I have edited a book chapter on the origin of life, and therefore read up on some of this stuff, I know that such observations are mainstream rather than "pseudo"-science.

Now, how does McGraw-Hill's Biology address the problem? For the most part, the authors admit the difficulties. However they do something else, which I think should be a source of concern to parents/students/taxpayers. In the Concept Outline, we are informed,

There are both religious and scientific views about the origin of life. This text treats only the latter - only the scientifically testable.

That sounds like a logical approach to me. The mere fact that the authors are knowledgeable about current science theories, however unsatisfactory, does not qualify them to address religious theories. So far so good. Cobbler, stick to thy last.

But the authors promptly break their promise, as we shall see.

Figure 4.1 shows a lightning strike, and the caption reads

The origin of life. The fortuitous mix of physical events and chemical elements at the right place and time created the first living cells on earth.

That, of course, is a vague statement of faith in materialism or, as it is sometimes called, naturalism. Materialism is an old idea that goes back to the time of Lucretius about two and a half millennia ago, as I point out in By Design or by Chance?.

It is philosophy, not science. Science asks for evidence, for details, for specifics, not for statements of faith in the power of physical events and chemical elements, like this one. And success at explaining the detailed specifics are precisely what is lacking in the current origin of life scenarios.

The authors admit that "The first cells are thought to have arisen spontaneously, but there is little agreement as to the mechanism," and that "there is very little that we know for sure," and that "there is as yet no one answer to the question of how life originated on earth,"

Right. But despite all that, we know that materialism is the answer? How? Is it because the authors' are entitled to promulgate that philosophy in the public school system, irrespective of evidence, whereas other philosophies are forbidden? But why? has the United States established materialism as a religion, in violation of the First Amendment?

The authors also inform us that "By the time this text is published, some of the ideas presented here about the origin of life will surely be obsolete."

I am so sure that they are right about this that I wonder why origin of life is even a current topic in undergrad science, except as an optional project for interested students, just as an examination of "irreducible complexity" should be. But, in fairness to the authors, if they are required, by an unlucky arrangement of the stars or the bureaucrats, to teach OoL, then I suppose they must.

But they might have spared us the following, in Section 4:2:

Special Creation. The theory of special creation, that a divine God created life is at the core of most major religions. The oldest hypothesis about life's origins, it is also the most widely accepted. Far more Americans, for example, believe that God created life on earth than believe in the other two hypotheses. Many take a more extreme position, accepting the biblical account of life's creation as factually correct. This viewpoint forms the basis for the very unscientific "scientific creationism" viewpoint discussed in chapter 21.

(p. 62) (Note: The other two hypotheses referred to above are extraterrestrial origin and spontaneous origin.)

Later, on the same page, the authors concede that special creation might even be true:

This is not to say that the first possibility [special creation] is definitely not the correct one.

But so? I thought we weren't going to get into religion at all. Wasn't that the idea? If we must get into religion, what does it mean to say that special creation is "very unscientific" but also possibly correct?

Is science now at war with correctness, in defense of materialism? But why?

Then, the rest of the chapter speculates as enthusiastically about the origin of life as the tabloids do about movie idols' affairs, pregnancies, and breakups.

Students will learn some useful things, but principally they will learn, I fear, how to build a theoretical castle in the air. If all this stuff is "scientifically testable", just how eludes me.

In those school systems where texts are bought with public funds, this is a strange use of public funds. I am glad that no one has sued, because I think litigation bad in principle. But I am somewhat surprised that no one has sued.

Origin of life is regarded by many capable scientists as exceedingly difficult to research:

"The origin of life on the surface of the Earth is a unique historical event whose character cannot be established by experiments in contemporary laboratories ... Many scientists have taken this position on the origin of life. Jacques Monod, the distinguished French molecular biologist, said as much in 1970 in his elegant book Chance and Necessity. There is no way, he argued, that an event as improbable as the emergence of life on Earth could be analyzed by science, which is able to deal only `with events that form a class. ... A decade later, Francis H.C. Crick, co-originator of the structure of DNA, put the argument more specifically: the chances that the long polymer molecules that vitally sustain all living things, both proteins and DNA, could have been assembled by random processes from the chemical units of which they are made are so small as to be negligible, prompting the question whether the surface of the Earth was fertilized from elsewhere, perhaps from interstellar space. 'Panspermia' is the name for that."

Maddox J., What Remains To Be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race , [1998], Touchstone: New York NY, 1999, reprint, p.131.

==================================

There are substantial problems with most current reasoning around how it happened:

In a dilute prebiotic soup, reactions would be very slow indeed. A wonderful cartoon I recently saw captures this. It was entitled "The Origin of Life." Dateline 3.874 billion years ago. Two amino acids drift close together at the base of a bleak rocky cliff; three seconds later, the two amino acids drift apart. About 4.12 million years later, two amino acids drift close to each other at the base of a primeval cliff. ... Well Rome wasn't built in a day.

(Kauffman S.A., At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity [1995], Penguin: London, 1996, reprint, p.35.)

==================================

The theories currently proposed derive more from existing habits of mind than fresh observation:

In his delightful 1998 essay "Extraterrestrials: A Modern View," [Guillermo] Gonzalez noted,

The kind of origin of life theory a scientist holds to seems to depend on his/her field of specialty: oceanographers like to think it began in a deep sea thermal vent, biochemists like Stanley Miller prefer a warm tidal pool on the Earth's surface, astronomers insist that comets played an essential role by delivering complex molecules, and scientists who write science fiction part time imagine that the Earth was ''seeded" by interstellar microbes.

Ward, Peter D., and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (New York: Copernicus Springer-Verlag, 2000) . p. 69.

==================================

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

Stuart Pivar has asked Glenn Branch at NCSE to remove "or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurence" from the wording of the "Steve" declaration:

Dear Glenn Branch,

Please consider my suggestion that the Steve List statement of purpose delete the words, "or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurence"
A main point in Goulds message to us regarding how evolution works is that natural selection is not responsible for form, playing only a minor, eliminative role in the selection among a choice of forms produced by other means. You might consider installing the words "or that natural structural processes and heterochony are the major mechanisms in its occurence"

Steve believed natural selection to be an implausible explanation for design, and that those who believe it are Darwin Fundamentalists like Dawkins, Steve's nemesis.

Stuart Pivar

please visit www.stephenjgould.org for Goulds own words on the subject.

I was copied on this communication, and will post any official replies I receive.

Update note, if you just got here: A friend of the late Stephen Jay Gould insists that Gould would not have signed (Darwin lobby) National Center for Science Education's "Steve" statement against creationism - not because he supported creationism but because he disputed the importance of natural selection. Background stories:the J site, advancing the claim; Pivar's comments to me, and NCSE's reply.

A number of people have provided Gould quotes supporting a major role for natural selection, for example:

Natural selection, an immensely powerful idea with radical philosophical implications, is surely a major cause of evolution, as validated in theory and demonstrated by countless experiments. But is natural selection as ubiquitous and effectively exclusive as the ultras propose? (From "Darwinian fundamentalism" (1977) )

But then Pivar replies with

... substantial changes introduced during the last half of the twentieth century, have built a structure so expanded beyond the original core, and so enlarged by new principles of macroevolutionary explanation, that the full exposition, while remaining within the domain of Darwinian logic, must be construed as basically different from the canonical theory of natural selection, rather than simply extended. (page 3) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory , 2002.

Actually, I wasn't surprised to find Gould quotes on both sides of the fence, with the ones on the non-Darwnist side much more guarded. While researching By Design or by Chance?, I'd heard vaguely that Gould was sympathetic to something like structuralism. My focus then was on his well-known opposition to ultra-Darwinism.

I asked Pivar, why was Gould not more forthcoming about structuralism, if he really supported it? He told me that Gould's first book gives a non-selectionist account of evolution, his mid-career books do not discuss it much, and the last book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory "says it over and over encoded in hyper-professionalese, too dense for the layman."

Well, few will dispute the "too dense" part; I recall a colleague of Gould's complaining about that in a review.

So why didn't Gould say more? According to Pivar,

he was a victim of the anti-antidarwinist forces engaged in genetics which depends on natural selection. Steve could not shoot his mouth off with the public hearing that there is no explanation for design. you could not and still cannot speak against natural selection in the academic situation without censorship, having nothing to do with intelligent design, having to do with the Darwinian synthesis which keeps the research infrastructure funded. no natural selection, no developmental genetics.

So Gould, for all his pugnacity, could not risk stirring up the Darwinists because it might weaken a joint effort against intelligent design theory? Pivar again:

There was an agreement not to discuss the weaknesses of evolution theory publically.

The reluctance to debate creationists has as much to do with the weakness of the argument science has to offer, as with the ostensible reason of the conferring status to creationism. I heard that the ancient pythagorans decided to keep secret the discovery of a fifth regular polygonal solid for fear of undermining the public sense of order.

Yes, I suppose the Pythagoreans thought the vulgar mob would riot on hearing the news. To judge from their recorded comments, many Darwinists likewise think that doubting Darwin compels us to establish a theocracy. Actually, we vulgars are a bit more resilient than that. We have lived through many paradigm changes.

Well, but then Darwinist bullying is famous. Lynn Margulis refers to the neo-Darwinian bullies in Shermer's acount of the World Evolution summit in June 2005. Indeed, it is painful to read,

There were no direct challenges to Margulis in the discussion period that followed, so I once again queried a number of the experts in this area after the lecture. The overall impression I received was that Margulis goes too far in her rejection of neo-Darwinism, but because she was right about the role of symbiogenesis in the origin of the first eukaryote cells, they are taking a wait-and-see approach. One scientist added that since Margulis was to receive an honorary doctorate that afternoon, it seemed inappropriate to challenge her in this venue.

The long knives stay in their sheaths, for now? Nice. If not, maybe structuralist Rick Sternberg can explain what happens next.

As I discuss in By Design or by Chance? Gould's ashes had only barely settled in the urn before the attack on his reputation began:

Gould was much less popular with his colleagues. He was often derided by other Darwinists. For example, leading evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides charged: "We suggest that the best way to grasp the nature of Gould's writings is to recognize them as one of the most formidable bodies of fiction to be produced in recent American letters."

Similarly, John Maynard Smith, a leading evolutionary biologist, said of Gould: "The evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists."

Gould's critics lost no time in their efforts to minimize his legacy after his death. Indeed, evolutionary psychologist David P. Barash, reviewing Gould's major professional work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, described him as a "literate bio-terrorist" whose work was not for "anyone with anything else to do with his or her life."

(... and much more, p. 110 ff)

I have heard vague rumors that there will be a conference soon examining structuralist theory. It should feature a serious examination of Gould's uncensored views, rather than a useless quote war. Many still live who knew Gould in his last years. I bet there is a book in this for an enterprising young scholar.

Journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy, and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007). Her blog is The Post-Darwinist, http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/.

Yesterday, I blogged on the fact that a friend of the late Stephen Jay Gould now says that Gould would never have signed the celebrated Steve list - a list of scientists named Steve who oppose creationism (and, presumably, intelligent design theory?). (If you were directed to this link, see Wednesday's post as well.)

Eugenie Scott, well-known lobbyist at Darwin lobby National Center for Science Education, has replied to my query as follows:

I'm trying to figure out how the parody "Project Steve" is making claims about the creative abilities of natural selection.... I think Steve would have gotten a chuckle out of it. He certainly did not support the creationists, either of the traditional form of the nouveau ID variety.

Scott seems determined to miss the point - and you really can't blame her, as the scandal develops. Essentially,

1) Gould did not credit natural selection with the ability to do very much at all, according to his chemical engineer friend Pivar. Is it at ALL likely then that he would have signed NCSE's statement, which reads in part, "Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence."?

That natural selection is a "major mechanism" may be Scott's view, NCSE's view, and the view of whatever US courts can be got to rule in its favour. And it is certainly Richard Dawkins's view from across the Pond .... but was it Gould's view? His friend says no. The list is named after Steve Gould, not Richard Dawkins.

2) If Scott's list, named after Steve Gould precisely for its political effect, was intended only as a parody, it is hard to see how a misrepresentation of the man's actual views would be any more appropriate.

3) It is irrelevant whether Gould opposed the creationists, if - as Pivar insists - his name is now being used to support a position that he would not have supported himself in his lifetime.

For his part, Pivar communicated with me this morning as well. He is standing by his insistence that Gould would never have signed NCSE's "Steve" list. Indeed, he repeats his contention that Gould opposed the idea that natural selection creates more than minor changes - such as changes in the shapes of the beaks of finches - throughout his life.

Here is what he said:

Steve Goulds life work featured the debunking of natural selection as the cause of anything more important than the differences in the beaks of finches, in his investigation of the causes of evolution. The Steve List is the appropriation of his name in the propagation of a theory which he opposed his entire life long. Every statement SJG ever made rejects natural selection, and none can be found in its support. Is this colossal misunderstanding innocent incompetence, or a soviet style paradigm takeover?

In the categorization of schools of thought in evolutionary biology Steve Gould is considered a Structuralist. Eugenie Scott is a Darwin Fundamentalist like Richard Dawkins, Steve Gould's lifelong foe.

If the Steve list myth enters history, then his life work was for naught.

Well, I will keep you posted. I commend Pivar for raising this issue. The dead are helpless when it comes to their reputation. Their friends must speak for them.

Last night I spoke with Stuart Pivar, sponsor of the J site, which crusades for a non-Darwinian structuralist theory of evolution, under Gould's name (Gould died in 2002).

[If you were directed to this story, also see the Tuesday story for further developments. See Wednesday's as well. - Denyse]

It turns out that Pivar, a chemical engineer as well as an art collector, was indeed a friend of Gould. He writes,

steve and ronda would spend weekends at my beach house. we were close friends for years. i officiated at his funeral service.

steve lifes work was to understand evolution. His message was that natural selection was merely an eliminative force with no creative role, capable of choosing for survival among preexisting forms which are produced by other natural structural processes.

What's more, he thinks that Darwin lobbyist Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education has hijacked Gould's legacy with its Steve campaign against intelligent design theory. Steve himself would never have signed the statement, he insists, because Gould did not see natural selection as a creative force, as Darwinists do!

Steve Gould (the Ursteve of the famous Steve list of the NCSE) clearly did not believe in natural selection as the primary cause of evolutionary change.

The 600 listed scientists named Steve claim the belief that evolution happened, and that natural selection is the mechanical process which causes it. Stephen Jay Gould would not have signed this list.

(Note: You have to find this key "Steve list" page on the sidebar; I can't link directly to its name. Also, the list says that natural selection is a major mechanical process, not the mechanical process. )

If so, this is a major upset in the current intelligent design wars that will surely damage NCSE's case for teaching Darwinism only in American schools.

-

"There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows."
(Francis Darwin (editor), The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (New York: D. Appleton, 1887), Vol. I, pp. 278-279.)

-

"Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned."
(George Gaylord Simpson [major mid-20th century Darwinian evolutionist], The Meaning of Evolution, revised ed. (Yale University Press, 1967), p. 345.)

-

"We have established scientifically some disquieting facts: (1) human beings have evolved from nonhuman life forms, meaning that (2) at one time we did not exist, and that (3) according to paleontological and astronomical evidence, at some time in the future we shall cease to exist. Furthermore, from a scientific standpoint, there is no discernible reason that we had to evolve in the first place, and there is no guarantee that we shall continue to evolve successfully; more hominid species have become extinct than have survived. The price of such knowledge has been the gnawing question of whether human existence has genuine meaning if it was constructed with cranes rather than supported by skyhooks, as Daniel Dennett says.

"The problem of meaning is easily resolved for those who embrace a preconstructed system of meaning such as religion. However, religion cannot help us find meaning in any honest sense unless it can assimilate the truth about where human beings have come from, and the only real knowledge we have about where we came from we have acquired through science."
(Barbara Forrest [current Darwin lobbyist who testified in the current Dover case], "The Possibility of Meaning in Human Evolution," Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 35.4 (Dec 2000), 861-889, p 862, notes omitted.)

This last comment, by Forrest, is interesting because it is incompatible with any "revealed" historical religion such as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, all of which insist that the most important knowledge of who we are and where we come from is received through revelation. Actually, Buddhism would claim that too, if we go by the importance attached to the Buddha's sermons This is fundamental to understanding the public opposition to Darwinism (as opposed to various theories in science advanced against it, such as Behe's concept of irreducible complexity).

-

From By Design or by Chance?:

Many of the greatest scientists of previous centuries, for example, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Newton, Faraday, and Kelvin, believed that the universe was intelligently designed, and that its design was detectable.21 So great was the influence of these men that key terms or units of science measurement are named after them (e.g., the Galilean moons of Jupiter, the Copernican solar system, and units of measurement such as the pascal, newton, farad, and kelvin.) Newton, who died in 1727, is widely regarded as the greatest Briton who ever lived.
(Denyse O'Leary, By Design or by Chance?: The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life in the Universe (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2004), p. 193.)

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

em>Opposition to Schonborn from Vatican science advisor:

Here's Professor Nicola Cabibbo, for twelve hears head of the 78-member Pontifical Academy of Sciences, an expert panel which advises the pope on science, in interview with National Catholic Reporter's John L. Allen Jr.:

When Cardinal Schonborn says that purpose and design can be clearly discerned in the natural world, would you agree?

Not scientifically. As a scientist, I cannot draw this conclusion. What I can say is this: If the will of God was to create man, he certainly organized things in a beautiful way to do it. Of course, we know by revelation that God wanted to create man, but we don't know how he did it. This is what science attempts to explain. There cannot be any clash or controversy between science and religion, because they work on different planes.

Does the scientific understanding of how life was created and how it evolved, in and of itself, demand belief in a creator God?

I would say no. Scientifically, we don't know. We know the universe is highly complex, and we have no reason to believe there is only one universe, the one we can see around us. Theoretically this could happen in two different ways: some interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest the idea of parallel universes, with histories different from our own. Cosmologists speculate on a multiplicity of "Big Bangs", giving rise to a multiplicity of universes. These are fascinating ideas and we find ourselves in a situation similar to that of Giordano Bruno when he proposed that stars are really suns, that there may be other planets and other solar systems, that the universe is much larger than previously thought. This was part of what got him into trouble! We really don't know. Science is incapable of supplying answers to ultimate questions about why things exist and what their purpose is.

Hmmm. It strikes me that the problem here is not a conflict between Cabibbo and Schonborn but between Cabibbo and the plain meaning of key passages in the Bible. Paul the Apostle says, for example, in Romans,

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Rom 1:18-20, NIV)

Most Christians would be more inclined to listen to Paul than to Bruno, a scientist and freelance theologian who was burned at the stake four centuries ago for heretical doctrines. (If you think having an alternative viewpoint is bad now, you should have lived back then!) Some of Bruno's science speculations hit pay dirt, as Cabibbo notes.

But more and more I am beginning to see why the Vatican will have to revisit this whole area. The only reason that science and religion can't be in conflict, in Cabibbo's formulation, is that they are on different "planes" and neither can apparently enable us to draw firm conclusions about the real world. But, faced with a choice, the Church should prefer current expert opinion to the wisdom of the ages?

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

In case you wondered why there is an intelligent design controversy, here is a quotation from a textbook of recent memory:

"Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless--a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit."

"Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us."

(Joseph S. Levine and Kenneth R. Miller, Biology: Discovering Life (D.C. Heath and Co., 1st ed. 1992; this language was not removed for the 2nd ed. in 1994), p. 152. Note: Apparently, this language has since been removed, but yunf!, what about all the previous students who thought that it is, like, science? )

I am utterly fascinated by the people who insist that we all ought to support this stuff with our tax money and - now that I am a member of The Writers' Union of Canada - I am thinking of applying for a Canada Council grant to study them! So please write in and make the case that I have a moral obligation to support philosophical materialism with my tax money, even though it is not the established religion of my country, let alone the one I belong to (as if that matters). By doing so, you will help get ME tax money in order to question the obligation.

Alternatively, if the Comments box does not fill up in the way that helps my case, I could try financing my opinions on publishers' advances ... hey, maybe that makes more sense because then no one who hates my ideas is forced to support them (which I wouldn't really want anyway), and in any event I am good at dealing with publishers and don't have trouble getting decent advances ... Now how shall we convert the Darwinists to that system?

Oh, and here's another good one, maybe even better:

Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled. There seems to be two reasons for their unease. Firstly, they feel it opens the door to religious fundamentalists and their god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanations. Secondly, they worry that a frank admission of ignorance will undermine funding, especially for the search for life in space. (Paul Davies, The Origin of Life , Penguin Books, London, 2003, p. xxiv)

(Note: I just finished shuffling through a bunch of textbooks' chapters on the origin of life, and I never saw anything there like this blanket admission that experts "are baffled". Having recently edited a textbook chapter on origin of life myself, I am not sure why it is a suitable subject for discussion at the high school/first year U level, except as a fun item for speculative projects (and I am all for that, as long as we understand the level of uncertainty we are dealing with).

I am not claiming that OoL is unresearchable or a miracle. But when you don't know and don't really know how to find out, it is better to admit the problem than to speculate.)

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Inside Higher Education News provides a look at how UCal Berkeley plans to defend promoting liberal (as opposed to conservative) religion on its evolution Web site. Professor Roy Caldwell* is reported by Inside as saying,

"I am a scientist, and I understand what science is. It is fact-based. It involves hypothesis testing. It is not faith-based," he said. The Web site was designed to help teachers - especially those who may feel pressure because of the current attacks on evolution - better explain the science. The information about religious views was included on the Web site not out of a desire to change anyone's religious beliefs, Roy Caldwell said, but because many teachers ask for advice on how to deal with this issue, since their students ask them about it.

The information about religious groups is strictly factual, he said. "The fact is that there are many people who recognize that religious faith and science are not necessarily incompatible," he said.

(*Note: One of the professors running the Berkeley site is Roy Caldwell, who is not to be confused with Larry Caldwell, the lawyer who is suing UCal Berkeley.)

Well, fair enough, Roy Caldwell, but does the Berkeley site also offer links to dissent from Darwinism, such as that of Catholic Cardinal Schonborn or similar statements by many American religious denominations? You can't get away with claiming that you are simply "providing information" if it is entirely one-sided and clearly involves a religious issue.

Larry Caldwell asks,

Whatever happened to the National Center for Science Education/ACLU mantra that teaching about religious beliefs on evolution may be appropriate in a comparative religion class, but never in biology class? Come to think of it, aren't the NCSE and ACLU currently using that very argument in their lawsuit against the Dover, Pennsylvania school district - that the mere mention of intelligent design in biology class purportedly violates the Establishment Clause (since NCSE/ACLU incorrectly deem intelligent design to be a religious doctrine, rather than a scientific theory)?

Yeah really. It sounds as though the UCal position may be evolving into a much simpler rule:

- Anything diehard supporters of Darwinism say is science - even when they are quoting from the Bible.

- Anything critics of Darwinism say is religion - even when they are quoting from peer-reviewed science journals.

- Any questioning of Darwinian evolution is suspect as criticism of science in principle.

Well, I guess we will see the whole gang in court - not that a court will settle the issue, of course. But that's the next round.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

California attorney Larry Caldwell, who is currently suing evolution groups over the use of tax money to promote liberal religious views over conservative ones, has drawn my attention to a clear instance of introducing religion in biology class, but this time, sure enough, the purpose is to promote evolution and an old.Earth, from a presentation at a recent Geological Society of America meeting:

Modern Biblical scholarship indicates that interpreting the Genesis texts as historical or scientific documents, as done by biblical literalists, is inappropriate. Genesis contains two different creation accounts; Genesis 1 dates from the Babylonian exile (6th century BC) whereas the Genesis 2 story dates from the reign of King Solomon (10th century BC). These accounts differ in such aspects as language, emphasis, and mode and sequence of creation. In addition, the Bible includes several other widely differing creation accounts (e.g., Proverbs 8, Psalm 74, Job 26). Inclusion of such varying accounts in the Old Testament indicates that the writers did not intend them as historical, scientific narratives.

I find this outrageous. Let me be up front about my own commitments: I don't particularly doubt current conventional dating of the Earth or common ancestry of apes and humans. I do think that Darwinism is a passe materialist ideology and am merely waiting to see whether ID or some kind of structuralism - or something else altogether - will replace it.

But, I don't think that biology teachers have any business doing the clergy's job for them by explaining to their students how to understand biblical texts! UNLESS, that is, the teachers are prepared to give equal time to those who promote other understandings of the same texts. How many biology teachers have any significant background in exegesis of the Bible anyway? How many even want to get involved? My guess is, about as few as the number of biology teachers who want to read the Dover disclaimer to their students.

I think that today's science curricula should include a history of science module that teaches models for addressing conflicts in society over science findings. Intelligent design is hardly the only such conflict; what about global warming, new biotechnologies, spyware, and bioterror/pandemics? Another thing: Should New Orleans really be rebuilt on its present site? No doubt there are other good questions I can't think of just now, that integrate science knowledge into social issues.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

In an interesting article in Current Biology (September 20), paleontologist Simon Conway Morris argues that human-life creatures would have arisen even if the dinos had not gone extinct:

The bolide misses and the dinosaurs go home for tea... You know the mantra: no K/T impact, no dinosaur extinctions, so no mammalian evolutionary radiations, so neither primates nor in due course apes and so ultimately no us. True, but trivial. Imagine a counterfactual Earth, with no K/T impact. Twenty million years later the planet still sails into major glaciations. Dinosaurs are doing fine, thank you, but look what's happening in the cooler temperate and polar regions. Warm-blooded critters are taking the initiative. Both birds and mammals are intelligent, social and have a tendency to make tools. This means that sooner or later a sentient species with technology will emerge: the demise of the heavy brigade is inevitable. Mass extinctions may accelerate (maybe postpone), but they never cancel.

This is, of course, the opposite of Stephen Jay Gould's position, espousing radical randomness of outcomes for evolution, as exprssed in Wonderful Life.

Morris also weighs in on whether extinctions are periodic:

Discussion of whether mass extinctions are cyclic ebbs and flows. At the moment most pundits say 'no', but the evidence remains intriguing. If correct, either biological diversity has some weird internal motor, or more likely the fossil record is telling us something about galactic history. Recall that presently the Solar System is embedded in what astronomers call the Local Bubble, but in the past-and future- when the Solar System encounters interstellar clouds, the heliosphere will shrink, with consequences such as a change in cosmic ray flux. Now that is beginning to sound interesting.

Yes, it begins to sound interesting. And in even speculating about a "weird internal motor", Conway Morris is beginning to sound like the ID advocates he has no use for. I suspect, along with the late David Raup, that critical to understanding evolution is understanding extinction.

(Note: You have to get CB through a library if you don't subscribe.)

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

I received this press release today:

News Release

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE on October 12, 2005

Contact: Larry Caldwell
Phone: 916-774-4667
lcaldwell@qsea.org

Lawsuit Alleges that Federally-Funded Evolution Website Violates Separation of Church and State by Using Religion to Promote Evolution

San Francisco, CA - A California parent, Jeanne Caldwell, is filing a federal lawsuit today against officials of the National Science Foundation and the University of California at Berkeley for spending more than $500,000 of federal money on a website that encourages teachers to use religion to promote evolution in violation of the First Amendment.

"In this stunning example of hypocrisy, the same people who so loudly proclaim that they oppose discussion of religion in science classes are clamoring for public school teachers to expressly use theology in order to convince students to support evolution," said Larry Caldwell, President of Quality Science Education for All, who is co-counsel in the suit with the Pacific Justice Institute.

Called "Understanding Evolution," the website identified in the lawsuit directs teachers to doctrinal statements by seventeen religious denominations and groups endorsing evolutionary theory. A statement by the United Church of Christ, for example, declares that evolution is consistent with "the revelation and presence of... God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit."

The website further suggests classroom activities that explicitly use religion to promote evolution. In one suggested activity, teachers are supposed to share with students statements by religious leaders on evolution, but only those "stress[ing] the compatibility of theology with the science of evolution." In another activity, students are assigned to interview ministers about their views on evolution, with the purpose of showing students that "Evolution is OK!" Teachers are cautioned, however, that this particular activity may not work if they live in a community that is "conservative Christian."

"While the government has a legitimate purpose in educating students about the science of evolution, it's outrageous that tax dollars would be spent to indoctrinate students into a particular religious view of evolution. There are many different religious views about evolution. How dare the government tell students which religious view is correct!" said plaintiff Jeanne Caldwell. "This is propaganda, not education."

The lawsuit alleges that the state and federal government are promoting religious beliefs to minor school children through the website in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The suit seeks injunctive relief to remove these government endorsed religious beliefs from the website.

The lawsuit also alleges that the website is being used to further the religious agenda of a private organization, the National Center for Science Education (NSCE), which has a "long history of religious advocacy" on the evolution issue. According to the suit, the NCSE, which helped design the website, provides religious "outreach" programs and "preaching" on evolution to churches, all aimed at convincing people of faith that there is no conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution.

"It turns out that the NCSE and its allies in the scientific and educational establishments don't mind having religious beliefs discussed in science class, as long as those discussions are aimed at convincing students to convert to the religious beliefs favored by the NCSE", added attorney Caldwell. "Their willingness to flagrantly violate students' constitutionally protected religious freedoms in order to sell evolution to our children is the height of hypocrisy.

###

I was also given a link to an astonishingly ugly cartoon that makes the mindless evo guy shake hands with the mindless religion guy, as if they were two child molesters agreeing to lie for each other. See "Misconceptions: 'Evolution and religion are incompatible'" The idea seems to be that two mindless ideas can work together fine. You know what? People like that can't win. (Anyway, who can take seriously people who shake left hands?)

There is also a link to a bunch of religious groups that don't see any problem with Darwinism. My friend, the Relapsed Catholic, calls them "the churches nobody goes to any more."

Virtually all religions teach that human beings were created for a purpose, which contradicts the key claim of Darwinism.

According to my information, the lawsuit alleges that officials are using government funding and resources to actively promote the religious beliefs held by a private organization, the National Center for Science Education, which has a "long history of religious advocacy" on the evolution issue. The contact is attorney Larry Caldwell, President of Quality Science Education for All, (http://www.qsea.org) or Pacific Justice Institute (http://www.pacificjustice.org/)

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Student Josh Dill kindly sends me an account of what happened when he started asking questions at Highline Community College in Washington State:

I recently left Highline Community college after receiving my AA. While at Highline I had an interest in Biology, specifically evolution and natural selection. A few of the classes I took were intro to Biology, where we discussed natural selection, evolution, and origin of life. I took Anthropology where we learned about human evolution, and our close relationship with chimpanzees, I even went to Central Washington University to the chimposium and observed the chimpanzees (not an assignment). I also took a class called 'Genetic Revolution' where we learned about the genome, genetic traits, protein synthesis, and I even did a presentation on human evolution to that class. I followed the textbook for the presentation in fear of my grade. This professor had written a few articles criticizing Intelligent Design. But after hearing "we are 98.8% chimpanzee" almost every single day, I used an article from National Geographic about lab rats and their genome. I applied the same method used in the chimp example and stated "we are 60% rat". The students laughed, but the professor didn't.

Naughty Josh. According to a learned rabbi we are also thirty percent banana. But you are not to draw any conclusions from that, do you understand? You are only supposed to draw the conclusions you are told to draw.

Anyway, Josh took to reading literature written by intelligent design theorists, a dangerous practice. He then booked a room at the end of the year and showed two videos, Icons of Evolution and Unlocking the Mystery of Life. Two biology profs attended. Here is Josh's account of what happened next:

I offered asked if they would like to say a few words in response to the videos (I did this out of respect to them coming to my event), but they declined and asked me to take questions from the students. I took a couple of questions from the students, but then an interruption came out, it was one of the professors.

He lambasted me with accusations of having a religious agenda, that I was just simply a creationist. He had immediately lost his temper with me and shouted at me in front of an audience of students. He accused me of misleading the students, "you should be ashamed of yourself ... what you're doing is criminal!"

He belittled me saying "just because you take a couple science classes doesn't give you the right!" I kept my composure and a good attitude. I tried to ask him science questions, after all, the event was intended to be about Intelligent Design, and evolution, not creationism or Christianity.

I asked the professor about embryology, he said "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny!" I questioned "well then why are the earlier stages, which we are not shown, different when those would be the ones that are the most important?" He said "yes they're different but that doesn't matter!"

I asked him to explain how natural selection can account for fossils in the Cambrian explosion where nearly thirty-five of the forty total phyla are found in a geologically short time span of ten million years with no precursors, and given the novel genes, thousands of novel proteins, and novel body plans needed for these organisms how can natural selection be applied? He avoided answering and asked me to take someone else's question.

He abstained from giving any explanation to how genetic material within our cells could have originated, he said "that's a different question, I'm talking about evolution!" He then looked at all the students and urged them that "the truth is that evolution is nailed down flat, its secure as gravity, I can't emphasize that enough."

The professor claimed that any scientist skeptical of Darwin's theory are only questioning because of religious motivations. I held up the list of names of 400 scientists who question the power of natural selection and asked him if he could account for every single one of those people, and he said "I would bet my pensions on it!"

I asked him how micro-evolution could be extrapolated to explain macro-evolution. He replied "well extrapolation is a good word, you have to use your imagination. Given the amount of time you have." I insisted that the probabilistic resources are not evident to allow for the scale of macro-evolution required by the theory of Darwinian Evolution. He didn't have an answer to this either. Now when I look back, I still can't believe he answered "you have to use your imagination." That should be a bit discerning to some scientists.

I think Josh means "disconcerting" here. (I'd be disconcerted too if I were paying good money to have these fellows teach me. As a writer, I am all for using one's imagination, but in my line of work we make a clear distinction between fiction and non-fiction.)

Anyway, after one of the bio professors attacked Josh's character, a political science prof stepped in and defended him. The meeting ended on that note, but there was an interesting followup:

A couple of weeks later, the professor that I had an exchange with e-mailed me and was interested in meeting me one on one to have a discussion. I agreed and was thankful for his interest. I figured that in a one on one meeting he wouldn't be as irate and personally aggressive as he was in our first encounter, but I was wrong. He stayed resolute in stating that I am a dishonest person, and that I shouldn't have done what I did. He accused me of encouraging students to rebel in their science classrooms. I never asked students to question their professors in class. I never encouraged disobedience or disrespect, but he insisted that it was wrong. He told me that I should have opened with a preamble, telling students not to bring these questions into the classroom.

Well, there you have it. If you are a student who questions Darwinism, do not bring your questions into the biology classroom. Just memorize and reiterate the party line, and find out the true state of the evidence somewhere else. No wonder there has been a boom in ID-related books lately ...

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

University of California at Santa Barbara's Art Battson has come forward to say that he is the person behind the Cambrian explosion page linked below, that was taken off the UCSB site by a neo-Darwinist profbot (it still works at the link I gave you). He has asked me not to mention anyone else by name. I won't.

Here is his story:

My new boss (PhD in anthopology with undergrad work in sociology who still takes neo-darwinism seriously) shut down my ORIGINS QUOTES AND COMMENTS website unannounced earlier this week. He told me he had received a complaint from somebody in a university in Illinois and that the material was not related to ID (Instructional Development). I told him it was indeed related to ID but he didn't laugh as much as I would have liked. The bottom line is that he removed the faculty/Staff Christian Forum website along with the Veritas Forum website while leaving other websites that are also unrelated to Instructional Development. (We all have rented space on the ID server for years.)

Battson plans to file a complaint about viewpoint discrimination. Meanwhile, my advice to anyone who has a special interest in the Cambrian explosion or other probably non-Darwinian events in the history of life, download or print out the page linked below. Based on the Sternberg case that drew in the US federal government and the Gonzalez case, which I plan to blog soon, this is stuff that traditional materialists/naturalists/Darwinists do not want you to know, and - to the extent that they have power at universities and science institutions - they may have means of preventing you, if not now, then later.

Let's be grateful that none of this involves a loved one's health or something like that. If the Darwinists must go down fighting, let's just make sure they do not take anyone with them.

Now here's the original story with key link:
Yesterday, I noted that the controversial Privileged Planet filmmaker, Illustra Media, is making a film about the Cambrian explosion of life forms about 525 million years ago, which ID advocates think will help sink the ship of Darwinism.

Here's a site at the University of California at Santa Barbara that provides revealing statements about the Cambrian explosion from well-known paleontologists. A sample comment:

The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life's history -- not the artifact of a poor fossil record.

Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I. (1982)
The Myths of Human Evolution
Columbia University Press, p. 59

Other hot topics in evolution are addressed here too.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Los Angeles-based filmmaker, Illustra Media best known for The Privileged Planet, whose showing at the Smithsonian took "uproar" to a whole new level, is now working on a documentary The Cambrian Explosion:

The Cambrian Explosion will examine what many consider to be, the single most powerful refutation of Darwinian evolution-the fossil record . When he wrote his book, Charles Darwin realized that the 19th century fossil record did not support his theory of gradual, step-by-step evolutionary change. Yet, he hoped that future generations of scientists would make the discoveries necessary to substantiate his ideas. Today, after more than 150 years of digging, fossil evidence of slow, incremental biological change does not exist. Instead, we find a pattern pf rapid, dramatic appearances of fully developed, complex organisms in the ancient rock strata of the world. A pattern that is best explained by the work of a transcendent intelligence.

Well, this should be interesting. What you never heard about the Cambrian explosion is mostly surprising. While I am here, I may as well shill books on the subject: Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life and Simon Conway Morris'sThe Crucible of Creation are both good reads, in my experience.
(Consumer intellectual safety warning: These books take opposite positions on key issues. Intellectual freedom required. The Darwinian thoughtbot suffered an engineered mishap this afternoon, while mistakenly left in O'Leary's thoughtful care, so no establishment-backed "we-tell-you-what-to-think" service is currently available, except possibly from the Comments box. No warranties available under the circumstances.)
(Notes: Emphases are Illustra's not mine. I don't currently have a link for this information. It came by post.)

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Jeff Jacoby weighs in at the Boston Globe on teaching about the intelligent design controversy:

How things have changed. When John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee in 1925, religious fundamentalists fought to keep evolution out of the classroom because it was at odds with a literal reading of the Biblical creation story. Today, Darwinian fundamentalists fight to keep the evidence of intelligent design in the diversity of life on earth out of the classroom, because that would be at odds with a strictly materialist view of the world. Eighty years ago, the thought controllers wanted no Darwin; today's thought controllers want only Darwin. In both cases, the dominant attitude is authoritarian and closed-minded - the opposite of the liberal spirit of inquiry on which good science depends.

My own view is that trying to legislate from the statehouse or the bench about what teachers should or shouldn't say is always a bad idea. Whether we are talking about intelligent design, sex education, or global warming, students lose confidence in the education system when they realize that they are getting a package in school, and that they cannot really ask about the things they hear about in the real world.

I am glad that when I was a kid, teachers felt free to bring up all kinds of topics in science class, including "Was there really a worldwide flood?" "Was there really only one big continent at one time?" [At that time, this was a controversial idea.] "What would happen if the Russians bombed Canada?" "What would happen if the Americans bombed Canada?" "How would evolution change humans over a million years?" "Is the paranormal real or fake?"

How come we didn't all end up screwed up or brainwashed? Because in those days the teacher was expected to be a professional of good character, whose performance was evaluated by peers, not by people looking for something to sue the school board about. I regret that students cannot have that kind of education today.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

On the subject of whether humans are almost chimps (or versa vice), Rabbi Belovski notes:

A while ago, I heard a radio broadcast in which a Californian academic with quite impressive credentials noted that as monkeys have over 90% of the genes of humans, they should be accorded rights in the same proportion. By this, he meant 90% of the healthcare facilities, social services etc. We may assume that in response, our simian friends will have to bear 90%% of the responsibility of humans - i.e. taxation and service in the armed. Presumably, in the future, we can expect to share hospitals wards, army barracks and dole queues with monkeys. Criminal monkeys will serve 90% of the prison sentences of their human counterparts and will be required to attend 90% of their quota of schooling. It may also means that a human who steals a banana from a monkey will be condemned to 90% of the consequences of robbing a fellow human. An old joke comes to mind - a monkey that has escaped from its cage is eventually found in a library holding a Bible in one hand and Darwin's 'The Origin of Species' in the other. When questioned about its behaviour it responds, 'I am wondering if I am my brother's keeper or my keeper's brother.'

A thought occurred to me on this theme - since bananas share some genes with humans, would it not be logical to accord them say 30% of the rights of people? Where is the line? Some people might even prefer sharing a prison cell with a banana than a monkey, although I think we can assume that the monkey would prefer to share with the banana!

There's also an adorable graphic of a girl chimp getting her hair done.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

I haven't been posting many columnist links recently, so let me redress the balance. Here are some opinion pieces that crossed my radar screen in recent weeks:

Bill Buckley: "The planted axiom being encouraged by the secular community is that an acknowledgment of biological evolution not only acquiesces in scientific certitudes, it cannot coexist with any thought of intelligent design." In the National Review, Buckley also asks, In the United States, the battlefront is in the schools, on the question of evolution and creationism. If a 14-year-old student is introduced to the contingent possibility that life evolved as it did because its creator so willed it, which of the following risks, from the hard-line evolutionists' point of view, is that student taking? 1) His intellectual disqualification by admitting creationism, for which there is no scientific no warrant, into his thinking? 2) A lifelong intellectual confusion, perhaps disabling in its consequences, which will keep him from prevailing as a responsible thinker and actor? Or perhaps, 3) a lifetime as an agent of teleological confusion, with the result that he will not only mislead himself, but also mislead others? "

Jonah Cohen:

"I am not persuaded by intelligent design arguments, not because the theory of evolution is unassailable - it most certainly has weaknesses - but because I don't think anyone has successfully answered the criticisms of intelligent design offered by Hume, Kant and Kiergegaard. If those secular fundamentalists who wish to gag intelligent design theories are so worried about future generations, let them demand, then, that we also teach Hume, Kant and Kierkegaard in our public schools - rather than censorship! Our students should be exposed to this great discussion in all its dimensions, so that they can make up their own minds." [I hadn't heard of this guy, writing in The American Thinker, but he's good.]

John Derbyshire
"And what should we teach our kids in biology classes, concerning the development of living things on earth? We should teach them Darwinism, on exactly the same arguments. There is no doubt this is consensus science." Incidentally, Patrick O'Hannigan, the Paragraph Farmer, deconstructs Derbyshire.

Sally Jenkins: First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design) is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly confused with the movement to teach creationism in public schools. The most serious ID proponents are complexity theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work in the world. Creationists are attracted to ID, and one of its founding fathers, University of California law professor Phillip Johnson, is a devout Presbyterian. But you don't have to be a creationist to think there might be something to it, or to agree with Johnson when he says, "The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."

Tony Snow: "Evolutionary theory, like ID, isn't verifiable or testable. It's pure hypothesis - like ID - although very popular in the scientific community. Its limits help illuminate the fact that hypotheses are only as durable as the evidence that supports them."

Jacob Weisberg:
"That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries.
... So, what should evolutionists and their supporters say to parents who don't want their children to become atheists and who may even hold firm to the virgin birth and the parting of the Red Sea? That it's time for them to finally let go of their quaint superstitions? That Darwinists aren't trying to push people away from religion but recognize that teaching their views does tend to have that effect?"

George Will: "The problem with intelligent-design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet-a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum."

There, half a morning's reading for you on the ID controversy.
P.S.: Many, many assorted and relatively anonymous loons have announced recently either that 1) armed and dangerous fundies are massing in the North Woods to march against civilization or, alternatively, that 2) God is at risk in this matter, and he's mad about it. Anyone who wants that sort of thing knows where to find it. Or if they don't, well, tuff.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

I like this cartoon, riffing off the baffling tax code. Of course, the difference between the tax code and a cell in your body is that you work fo the tax code and the cell works for you. Let's keep the hierarchy straight here. Does anyone really believe that the tax code is as functionally effective as the cell? Sir, your government commends your faith in this matter.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Recently, Phil Skell, a National Academy of Sciences member, published a critique of the usefulness of Darwinism in present-day biology, under the title "Why Do We Invoke Darwin?" in The Scientist.

In Skell's view, "evolution" is invoked in many science papers in much the same way as a bureaucracy hounded by political correctness might invoke Aztec cosmology - relevant to the politics, certainly, but not to the findings.

In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word - "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.

The huge response prompted a comment, "Let's Talk About This," from the editor of that publication:

Inadvertently, while I was still looking for evidence on the subject, The Scientist tested the quality of scientific discourse. The opinion of Philip Skell which ran in the Aug. 29, 2005, issue generated a staggering volume of comment. We have given over most of the Letters and Opinion pages in this issue to it, and even then we're not doing the reaction justice. The vast majority of the correspondence was negative, but it was also rational, reasonable, and detailed, with only a couple of letter writers resorting to abuse ...

Abuse? Oh my stars. The fact that so much negative opinion would follow Skell's completely obvious point tells us pretty much what we need to know about the cult of Darwinian evolution in biology today.

In both popular and semi-professional literature today, as well as professional literature, all kinds of silly ideas seep into public discourse because they claim to be natural consequences of Darwinian evolution. Just think of all the people who would be stuck for a pat answer to human dilemmas otherwise.

It is one thing to establish a religion when most people believe it, quite another to establish a religion when most people don't.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Blogger Mark Shea, who gets way more mail than I do, and responds to it more faithfully, answers the Darwinoids who camp on his list. He says, among other things.

We *never* look at the text of Hamlet, or Michaelangelo's David, or the code for Windows XP and try to give an explanation for these things as products of non-reason. The only time we do it is when we look at the staggeringly specified complexity of living systems. And we do so in obedience to a dogmatic philosophy of materialism. Here alone, in obedience to the priesthood of the Atheism of the Gaps, acolytes must crush their normal tendency to intuit the obvious by repeating the Spiritual Exercises of St. Francis Crick and reciting the creed: "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved."

Note that word, "rather". It speaks volumes about the metaphysic being promulgated.

As to examples of specified complexity in biology, there are not ten but ten billion. There is no living system that is *not* highly complex and highly specified.

Then I get a mysterious question: "Isn't a rattlesnake fang/venom system complexly specified? Yes or no? Do you know? Does the DI? Do they care?"

I'm not sure what that means. Is my interlocutor suggesting that this system is *not* enormously complex and extremely specified? Is he saying that a good God would never make venomous snakes? Beats me. Then, in crowning incoherence, DI [Discovery Institute, an ID think tank] is compared to Jimmy Swaggart. But that's not an ad hominem argument or anything.

Mark provides some useful responses from the Catholic philosophical tradition.

(Note: "Shut up, he explained" is from a Ring Lardner short story. It is often used as a sort of Zen koan to teach writing skills. A person who doesn't "get it" should not try to make a living as a writer. Their connection to the rest of humanity, while it may be both broad and deep, is not mediated through language.)

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

When a person has become a pure cultural commodity, you can say what you want about them. The thriller by Pulitzer Prize-winner John Darnton is perceptively reviewed by Books editor Marjorie Kehe of Christian Science Monitor. She remarks that

Darwin never really goes out of fashion. Just when you think that maybe he's slipping from public view a bit, there's some kind of a trial, public hearing, or cultural disruption that shifts him and his everlastingly disputed findings back into the spotlight.

So John Darnton probably made a wise choice when he tapped the ever-controversial naturalist to serve as one of the protagonists of his new novel The Darwin Conspiracy.

[ ... ]

Clearly Darnton did his homework and the biographical information woven in about Darwin is interesting, but here he more nearly resembles a character in an Indiana Jones film than a man still rocking intellectual and theological boats.

Fair enough, but my sense is that Darnton's salable idea only works when the worldview itself has come under fire. It wasn't so long ago that Richard Dawkins wrote:

Living organisms had existed on earth without ever knowing why for 3000 million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

(Ben Wattenberg quoted Dawkins to himself as saying this, on PBS's Think Tank (November 8, 1996), apparently reading from Dawkins's The Selfish Gene.

Wittenberg comments,

That sounds to me like a religious statement. That is a - that is near messianic language. And you are making the case that these other people have this virus of the mind. That tonality says, I found my God.

Dawkins's response is interesting.)

Even back then, Wattenberg felt compelled to protest. Today, a lot more people are asking questions about the Darwin cult in biology.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Fellow Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, the "Relapsed Catholic", wrote recently on Whittaker Chambers, the uncool 1950s guy who blew the whistle on a bunch of American country club Cools who were traitors to the country that had afforded them a fine lifestyle.

Kathy unerringly singles out a stunning passage in Chambers's journey of understanding:

...I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss's apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I like to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear -- those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: 'No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.' The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.

Shaidle goes on to say:

Today, some of us battle the same enemy Chambers did, just with a different name. Others among us insist, as they did then, that docility and appeasement are the answer -- on our part, naturally, since the real enemy is "us". Despite the book's apocalyptic tone, Witness does not depress, because we have Chambers at an advantage: we know how the story ended, decades after the author's death -- with the fall of a wall "experts" believed, right up to the moment the first sledgehammer struck, would never crumble. A civilization that could produce a book like Witness is one worth fighting for. Chambers' masterpiece teaches us not just why we should fight, but how one man fought: as a lonely, despised herald to the painful truth that eventually set millions free.

What I find interesting about this is the way people are beginning to connect the dots. What might design mean? What might no design mean? Whether you believe in God or not, evidence of design underwrites moral responsibility because it implies that there really could be truth, as opposed to competitive lies.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

This essay in the Boston Review, first published in 1997, seems eerily prescient now:

... current knowledge of genetic change is fundamentally at variance with neo-Darwinist postulates. We have progressed from the Constant Genome, subject only to random, localized changes at a more or less constant mutation rate, to the Fluid Genome, subject to episodic, massive and non-random reorganizations capable of producing new functional architectures. Inevitably, such a profound advance in awareness of genetic capabilities will dramatically alter our understanding of the evolutionary process. Nonetheless, neo-Darwinist writers like Dawkins continue to ignore or trivialize the new knowledge and insist on gradualism as the only path for evolutionary change.

The whole essay captures very well the issues in interpreting the history of life that have come to the fore, despite all attempts to obfuscate them.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

In an article in the London Spectator (August 27, 2005), British historian Paul Johnson brands British Darwinist Richard Dawkins the "ayatollah of atheism". Johnson writes,

The likelihood that Darwin's eventual debacle will be sensational and brutal is increased by the arrogance of his acolytes, by their insistence on the unchallengeable truth or the theory of natural selection - which to them is not a hypothesis but a demonstrated fact, and its critics mere flat-earthers - and by their success in occupying the commanding heights in the university science departments and the scientific journals, denying a hearing to anyone who disagrees with them. I detect a groundswell of discontent at this intellectual totalitarianism, so unscientific by its very nature. It is wrong that any debate, especially one on so momentous a subject as the origin of species, and the human race above all, should be arbitrarily declared to be closed, and the current orthodoxy set in granite for all time. Such a position is not tenable, and the evidence that it is crumbling is growing.

This is one of the best articles I have read for capturing the mood of the intelligent design community, the sense that bloviating boffins may convince people new to the controversy, but the more you know, the less you believe, and that disbelief will only grow.

In particular, Johnson mentions a current critique by Rutgers University philosopher Jerry Fodor of the least believable of all the efforts to prop up Darwinism, "evolutionary psychology" - the belief that current events can be best understood by a trip back to the Old Stone Age.

I am a post-Darwinist rather than a Darwinist, but if I were advising Darwinists, I would tell them: CUT that rotting branch pronto, before your whole tree is condemned by City Forestry! But of course, they won't listen, so they are probably doomed. (Shrug. Yawn. I wonder what the history of life really looks like, after the fog clears.)

Fodor says, among other things,

The canonical Evolutionary Psychology literature contains a number of ideas about how a creature's behaviour might be explained by attributions of motives that it doesn't have. I confess that they seem to me to be simply bizarre. Daniel C. Dennett suggests that, if Jones's behaviour is an adaptation, then it's (not Jones but) "Mother Nature" who is concerned about his contribution to the gene pool. But you might as well blame the Easter Bunny. There isn't any Mother Nature; and if unattached motives can't explain behaviour, neither can the concerns of fictitious persons. Richard Dawkins suggests that, if Jones's behaviour is an adaptation, then it must be (not Jones but) Jones's "selfish genes" that wish to maximize reproductive success. Steven Pinker seems to have swallowed Dawkins whole.

"Dawkins explained the theory . . . . People don't selfishly spread their genes, genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains . . . . Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves . . . . The confusion between our goals and our genes' goals has spawned one muddle after another."

It has indeed.

It could be worse. To give you some idea of the kind of rot that infests evolutionary psychology, last Sunday I sent up a completely ridiculous evo psycho puff piece in National Geographic News in which some worthy loon chose to hold forth on the relationship between Canada and the United States, in terms of evolutionary psychology.

It seemed to have eluded the quotable southern loon that Canada and the United States are both nation states, not tribes. As the eminent political philosopher, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) would point out, had she lived so long, there is nothing for genetics to do in understanding the current relationship between two nation states because they are specifically defined by territory and style of government, and not by inherited characteristics of their populations. So evo psycho is completely irrelevant, and any educated person should realize that.

Yes, yes, sweetie hoo, we all descend from the Old Stone Age, but they didn't have nation states back then. So it is unlikely that anyone from back then could advise or influence the ways in which Canada and the United States manage their relationship. I humbly suggest that you would even have difficulty explaining it to them.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Here's another Chuck Asay cartoon, lampooning the media in the ID controversy. Chuck shows a sophistication rare among cartoonists here, as he highlights the way in which media tend to hone in on the bizarre and miss the significant.

I certainly know what Asay means. Just recently, I have been fielding calls from Canadian media about the lawsuit in Dover, Pennsylvania (which I will get around to addressing if my inbox does not explode first). One and all, they seem to want to hear that gangs of weirdoes are marching down from the North Woods. Seem so disappointed when I tell them no.

Aw, don't worry, fellow hacks. Your hot patooties are SAFE. Honest. Order yourself another frappachingo (frappachatte? frappalatte? frappadammitall? Personally, I'd rather have a coffee, but hey ... )

Yeah, lots of people think there is good evidence that the universe and life forms show intelligent design. They're not happy when educational systems promote the opposite view. They're also not happy with paying taxes to support institutions that persecute scientists who are willing to research or even be fair to the idea.

Whatsamatter with them? Why don't they just bring their tax dollars humbly and obediently any more? Didn't used to be so uppity.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Bill Dembski, the unofficial leader of the ID pack and, sometimes, bad boy, has introduced a computer game that bops ugly mechanical pandas, clearly a swipe at the anti-ID Panda's Thumb blog. (If you click on it, you may not be able to get back using the Back Browser button.) I think Panda-monium is a hoot, and I fully expect that the Thumbsmen will reply with a game of their own, maybe scrubbing bacteria, for example, given that the bacterial flagellum is the unofficial logo of the ID community. Dembski offers the rankings for bopping pandoids as well.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Neuroscientist Christof Koch thinks that maybe consciousness will be explained in our lifetimes:

These are heady times for neuroscientists. Our growing ability to monitor the brain's activity at the cellular level with unprecedented precision and breadth, and precisely manipulate these networks opens the stunning possibility that the quest to understand the oldest of all epistemological problems will come to an end in our lifetime.

If you read the article, "The Inchoate Science of Consciousness" (September 12, 2005) carefully, it doesn't look as though they are getting very far, despite the hype.

For example, Koch writes, regarding an animal experiment,

Strikingly, the reintroduction of one specie of molecule into a single brain region rescued certain complex exploratory and social behaviors. While the β2 knockout animals move rapidly through a novel terrain with little exploration, animals in which nicotinic transmission has been restored in the VTA show more adaptive behavior that, if observed in humans, would be associated with planning and consciousness.

Well, sure, but we associate human behaviour with planning and consciousness because we know that humans plan and are conscious. We know that mice plan to some extent, though it is not clear whether they are conscious in the sense that humans are. And no one doubts that certain chemicals and brain regions are associated with consciousness, such that interference with them can cause its loss.

The real problem, it seems to me, is that there is only so far one can get with studying something like consciousness for the purpose of explaining it away as random actions within the brain. My guess is that one learns a lot of interesting, even useful stuff about mice, and then confronts once again, the huge gap between mouse consciousness and human consciousness.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

According to a recent article in National Geographic News, the development of the spear led to an era of peace among early humans. So thinks University of Michigan anthropologist Raymond Kelly, who argues, in "Spear Led to Era of Human Peace, Expert Says" (September 6, 2005),

The ability to kill from a distance and the use of ambush tactics significantly affected border interactions.

The size of a group was no longer a guarantee of success, and the potential of being seriously wounded or killed increased.

Kelly believes the change in circumstances forced early humans to come up with new ways to resolve conflicts and to maintain friendly relations.

But Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham disagrees, saying,

"Maybe it did, but it seems to me unlikely to have done so," said Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It is easier to make surprise attacks with weapons than without, and hard to defend against them."

I like folk tales as much as the next person, but don't think that these "just-so" stories of evolutionary psychology should be represented as science. Indeed, this article is a classic for demonstrating how appealing to "human evolution" allows people to talk complete nonsense without either themselves or their readers being aware of it.

For example, here's a gem from the same article, where Kelly holds out a "ray of hope" for peace, allegedly based on human evolution:

"The U.S. was at war with Canada in 1812 and with Mexico in 1848 but has managed to live in peace with its neighbors for the past 150 years," he said. "So we clearly have the capacity to maintain peaceful relations with neighbors over extended periods."

"These capacities are as much a product of [human] evolution as the capacity to engage in lethal intergroup violence."

As a Canadian, I find the sheer naivete breathtaking, and, in a man of learning, bordering on offensive. The main reason there are no wars between Canada and the United States is the overwhelming military superiority of the United States! The United States is the most powerful military force in human history.

Canada has almost no military power. Therefore, even though we do have some serious issues with the United States, war is out of the question for us, never mind what direction "evolution" supposedly points Canadians in.

Also, there's the fact that Canada's economy depends almost entirely on trade with the United States, AND our economy is now mostly American-owned. So if the Americans attacked Canada, they would, for the most part, be killing their own employees and service providers and destroying their own property.

And if we Canadians attacked the United States, we would be violating a fundamental rule around here, formulated in the days when the Hudson's Bay Company traded with the First Nations (Indians): Never shoot the customer, no matter how much of a pain in the neck he is.

Of course, an evolutionary psychologist would undoubtedly say that relations between Canada and the United States are the inevitable outcome of "human evolution." Sure. Just tell him about your complex historical circumstances, and he will explain them based on something chimpanzees do or early humans supposedly did.

Why does the Darwinist think this way: The Darwinist does not believe that human intelligence is a human version of the intelligence behind the universe. He believes that it is the evolutionary outcome of accidentally overdeveloped brains, possibly but not certainly selected by natural selection.

As a result, he cannot accept that humans actually have consciousness or free will, or that our current circumstances largely result from the exercise of these functions. Rather, he needs to find the answers in the unthinking behavior of non-humans and pre-humans. Otherwise, he thinks we have not found an answer. And, here's the kicker, any explanation of that sort, no matter how ridiculous, will always make more sense to him than any explanation based on the effects of intelligence, as a creative force in its own right.

As I say, entertain yourself with this stuff if you like, but don't call it science.

(Note: The only finding for which we have hard evidence from history is that superiority in weaponry can go either way. Europeans destroyed many native American civilizations because they had guns. Arguably, the diseases they brought destroyed more people than the guns, but it was the spread of guns, not disease, that drove colonial policy. On the other hand, a huge empire typically suppresses local warfare because it is overwhelmingly more powerful than petty warlords. So it can be a force for peace - until it gets into a war with another empire.)

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Bishop Donald Wuerl of the Diocese of Pittsburgh published an article in the Pittsburgh Catholic, in which he makes the point that great foundational thinkers in the Western tradition have generally come to the evidence-based conclusion that the cosmos is designed, without making use of theological arguments. Many were not Christians or theists.

On the one hand, in the years since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1855, some scientists offer the theory that the best explanation for the existence of all life is random selection and the natural evolution of species.

On the other hand other scientists support the theory of intelligent design. This explanation of natural phenomena goes back, in a well documented manner, to the time of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers. The great Greek philosophers and naturalists lived some 300 years before Christ and attempted to explain the cosmos solely from the light of human reason.

That's worth keeping in mind when we hear "culture wars" interpretations of the controversy.

It is not a conflict between fundamentalism and science; it is a conflict between the consensus position of Western civilization (in favour of design) and naturalistic materialism, which has attempted to gain a monopoly in science and suppress all evidence against itself.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

The recent Guardian profile of British philosopher Mary Midgeley, basher of ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins, is interesting for the way in which it seems to withhold praise for a generally admirable woman who made the mistake of questioning ultra-Darwinism during her philosophy career.

"I'm not anti-science," she maintains. "What I object to is improper science sold as science. I understand Dawkins thinks he was talking about the survival potential of certain lines rather than the motives of the genes themselves, but I believe he is mistaken. Scientists in this country have little cultural overlap with the arts and humanities and ... they are unaware of when they start bringing their own political and psychological views into the argument. There's nothing wrong with scientists having such views as long as they are aware of what they are doing ... Dawkins may argue that he is using selfishness as a metaphor but he must have been aware of how the concept might be interpreted and used. And Dawkins has to take some responsibility for that."

Obviously, naturalism (materialism) is an impotent ideology if any genuine criticism, on whatever ground, is seen as "anti-science." In fact, evolutionary psychology (EP), which Midgley rightly criticized in her disaproval of the "selfish gene", would be a big embarrassment to Darwinism IF the latter were itself more securely founded on fact.

You know the kind of thing we hear constantly from EP: If kids don't eat their greens, that's because "evolution" is protecting them from poisoning. Or if they do, well that must be because "evolution" is encouraging them to have strong bodies. Yeah right.

(Avoidance of chewy, non-greasy vegetables with complex flavours couldn't have anything at all to do with easy access to soft, greasy, sugary fast food in recent years. It must be shipped back hundreds of thousands of years in the past and called "evolution," ... possibly to assuage guilt?)

One reason I know Darwinism is on the way out is that Darwinists do not seem anxious to rise up, as a group, and drive this stuff off the scene. That fact alone implies that most arguments for Darwinism are similarly poorly founded.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

An American lawyer who is active in intelligent design issues has written me to say that the National Association of Biology Teachers, far from foreswearing atheism, has in fact merely moved some of its former upfront atheistic tenets to the supporting material under its current grand (and relatively innocuous-sounding) statement.

From the May 2004 version:

NABT endorses the following tenets of science, evolution, and biology education. Teachers should take these tenets into account when teaching evolution.

Essential Concepts of Biological Evolution

- The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of biological evolution - an unpredictable and natural process of descent with modification that is affected by natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, migration and other natural biological and geological forces.

Okay, well, wait a minute ... unless we know for sure that there is no meaning or purpose in the universe, how can we possibly know that biological evolution is unpredictable and (purely) natural?

A number of well-respected scientists who, incidentally, do not align with the intelligent design theorists, would dispute the view that evolution is unpredictable, notably Michael Denton and Simon Conway Morris.

Also, if one claims that biological evolution is unpredictable, it may also be untestable and unfalsifiable. That's too bad. I had hoped it would be more than nice graphics. I especially hoped that because I have just finished tickng off playwright Paul Rudnick on account of the fact that I thought his treatment of the subject is shallow. But if it's not science after all, maybe shallow wins.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Here is playwright Paul Rudnick's take on the intelligent design controversy in the New Yorker, featuring way, way too many gods. It's clever, and it picks up an interesting theme: Does intelligent design mean that there are many gods? Not likely, but my sense is that, in any event, clever is about all that Rudnick's work on this subject is. It doesn't tell me or remind me of a single thing I really needed to know. If anything, it demonstrates the bankruptcy of the current intelligentsia. Still, they must obsess about intelligent design, which will bury them.

I would love to see a play about something real and important in the ID controversy, for example, about the stirring struggles of, say, Richard Sternberg or Guillermo Gonzalez, to open a window of intellectual freedom in a world stifled by materialist dogma.

Sorry, Paul, cute is cute, but cute doesn't cut it.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Here's a kid tee perfectly suited to the Darwinist activist mom, though it is anybody's guess what it would do for the kid.

From what I have seen, most kids who ask "Where did I come from," are expecting the, um, Big Talk. They sort of know there is something to know or they wouldn't even be asking.

Telling them they come from a slime mold or something isn't going to cut it. Most likely response: "So what? Can we get to the part about how people, um, do it." (Even if slime molds "do it," who really cares?)

It all reminds me of the Canadian kid who recently asked the "where did I come from" question. His devoted dad huffed and puffed his way through the complete (and politically correct) lecture, only to have the little swine respond, "Wow, Dad, that's way amazing. But ... I still don't understand. See, the reason I asked is that our new goaltender, Chung An, comes from Vancouver ...."

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Okay, here's a Frank and Ernest on the intelligent design controversy. Now, much as I like F&E, I didn't find this one particularly amusing. Frankly, I think all the "unintelligent design" jokes have been told, so any hack who chooses to title a new piece on the subject "unintelligent design" or riff on that theme is definitely an unintelligent hack - and that is no one's fault but his own. Quit beating the corpses of cute but dead intros. Be original, be relevant, and if you are a comic, be funny. Earn your keep.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

The trouble with being a secular evolution saint is that, a couple years down the road, you don't get no respect at all. Have a look at "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism," a site (herafter called the J site) that uses Gould's name to market an anti-Darwinian self-organization theory of the development of life that I don't know if Gould ever endorsed. Gould died in 2002.

(The basic idea behind self-organization is the claim that order can take hold at the boundaries of chaos. Some argue that this accounts for the origin and development of life. The best-known exponent of the idea is Stuart Kaufmann , associated with the Santa Fe Institute but lately in Banff, Western Canada, according to his CV.)

The message at the J site is addressed to the 400 scientists who signed Discovery Institute's dissent from Darwinism. To them, J prophesies in a loud voice,

You are in accord with most evolutionary biologists who have long since relegated natural selection to micro-evolution at best. Leading among these was Stephen Jay Gould, although he was careful not to pronounce publicly for fear of its misuse by the Intelligent Design movement which is based on the claim that the only alternative to natural selection, or Darwinism, is God.

If anyone out there knows for sure why this is/is not an accurate summary of Gould's thinking, I hope they'll blog on it, so I can link to them. I have not read Gould's doorstop, Structure of Evolutionary Theory , in which he would have made such a point, if he ever did anywhere. It's no secret that Gould fell out with Darwinian fundamentalists (he may well have coined the term himself) like Richard Dawkins. But I've just never heard that he embraced self-organization theory as a consequence.

An urgent note is struck at the J site, regarding the crisis of Darwinism:

This may be the most important issue ever to face science. On its outcome depends nothing less than academic freedom in America. Some overzealous Darwinians have been using extreme means to suppress dissent. Some individuals who have published opposing views have been hounded and their careers threatened or smashed. This issue is soon to be tested in a number of legal cases which may rival the Scopes trial in impact. Most notably I call your attention to the case of Richard Sternberg vs. the Smithsonian Institute.

Okay, you got my attention, J. But then, following the prophecy is a warning:

While the list of 400 is impressive, its possible usefulness to scientific debate is compromised because it is published by the neo-creationist Discovery Institute, and includes individuals who believe that the vacuum caused by the failure of Darwinism should be filled by God, with no third possibility. It is impossible to determine who's who. Your name on this list may compromise your scientific credibility. If, in fact you believe in creationism, this letter does not pertain to you. Otherwise, you suffer guilt by association.

Funny, isn't it, that J claims to be concerned about intellectual freedom but then, in the very next paragraph markets the infamous notion of guilt by association, but let's move on.

We are told that intelligent design is winning the culture wars, with a theocracy shortly to follow.

You know, J, that theme's been, like, done, eh? Canadian literata Margaret Atwood beat the whole idea to death in The Handmaid's Tale thirty years ago, and she can write you into a corner any time. They even made her novel into a movie and I saw the Handmaid's neat red costume at a sci-fi exhibit in Ottawa a few years ago. And that's all that ever came of the theocracy.

We are then told that neo-Darwinism is a bust, because "Evolutionary biologists no longer believe that natural selection is the prime mechanism of evolution." They don't? That's not what most of them have been saying, but I better check my inbox.

Now J may be right, of course. They could know it's a bust and fail to admit it, the way directors of a failing company do. J goes on to mention something I had been meaning to draw attention to myself, and he almost beat me to it. But he says it in a kind of confused way, so I am going to say it in a clear way:

If you look at Michael Shermer's and Ricki Lewis's accounts of the "Woodstock of Evolution," the World Evolution Summit on the Galapagos last June, it is evident that Darwinian theory is indeed falling apart.

Now don't bother telling me that it is normal for scientists to have disagreements. Sure it is. But the reported disagreements were about such fundamental matters as the level at which natural selection occurs (yes, see Lewis's report), whether sexual selection even occurs, whether there really is a universal common ancestor, et cetera. Well, if after a century and a half, they are not even sure at what level natural selection occurs or whether sexual selection occurs or whether universal comon ancestry is true, I am not sure that what we are looking at is even a discipline, as opposed to a series of naturalistic speculations about the origin and development of life.

Apparently, at the gathering, evo-devo earth mother Lynn Margulis proclaimed the neo-Darwinian synthesis (= standard evolutionary theory, currently being rammed into kids' heads in schools, by law) to be dead - nonetheless proclaiming triumphantly, "I am a Darwinist". In the context, I guess she meant "I am a philosophical naturalist."

Which is precisely my point. If that's all that holds them together, it is not a science discipline; it is a band of believers.

Anyway, back to the J site: We are offered "The origin of species without Darwin or God." and a booklet called "Biological Self-Organization" which you can read online. There is also a book available, called Lifecode by art collector Stuart Pivar, who seems to have been a friend of Andy Warhol and is no slouch in biology. Lifecode is listed among self-organization books.

One problem with knowing what to make of all this is that an official Stephen Jay Gould site doesn't currently seem to be online, so I don't know that there is any public record of what the keepers of his official legacy would say in response. If I learn anything more of interest, I will post it.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

TheNobel laureates say pretty much what you might expect, about Darwin's theory being "indispensable," which of course it isn't - any more than Freud's theories were indispensable - but, what is interesting is that the linked Kansas Lawrence Herald article notes, about intelligent design,

That increasingly popular theory argues that some features of the natural world are best explained as having an intelligent cause because they are well-ordered and complex. Its followers attack Darwin's evolutionary theory, which says natural chemical processes could have created the basic building blocks of life on Earth, that all life had a common ancestor and that man and apes shared a common ancestor.

I have got so used to media bloopers on intelligent design that I have to rejoice at this, acknowledging that one out of three isn't bad.

YES, the intelligent design hypothesis argues that "some features of the natural world are best explained as having an intelligent cause because they are well-ordered and complex."

NO, Darwin's theory does NOT say that "natural chemical processes could have created the basic building blocks of life on Earth." Darwin was too smart to commit himself to anything as ambitious as an origin-of-life theory. He was only attempting to write, as the title of his key work indicates, On the Origin of Species. It was left to later researchers to reach a complete impasse on the origin of life.

NO, intelligent design theory does NOT entail rejection of common ancestry. In the context of ID, common ancestry stands or falls on its explanatory merits. Darwinism absolutely requirescommon ancestry because the possibility of design does not exist. ID does not require it because the design is considered an alternative (not a requirement, but an alternative). As a result, ID proponents differ from one another on the subject of common ancestry.

Anyway, hats off to the Lawrence Herald for getting at least one point right. Now let's work on some of the others ones, so we can have a real discussion.

As for the Nobel laureates, it is hard to believe that they would put their collective foot in their mouths by writing this:

Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.

but that's exactly what they did. (Note: If you click the link, you might not be able to use your back browser button to return.)

How do they know that the process is "unguided" and "unplanned"? They don't. It is merely a religious (well, anti-religious) assumption that they intend to impose on the school board. Even if no one believes it but them.

The good news is that, by writing this, they are helping to clarify what is really happening in Kansas. The school board is trying to get THAT stuff out of the system.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Well, if you don't believe in Darwin fandom, don't read this piece, in which Pulitzer Prize journo John Darnton writes,

Some years back, I was given a tour of Down House, Charles Darwin's country estate, and allowed to sit in the special chair in which he wrote "The Origin of Species" and other revolutionary works. The chair was one he had devised himself: High-backed, stuffed with horsehair, it had casters attached so that he could scoot around his study to reach his books, his working table and his microscope. He had fashioned a cloth-covered board to fit over the arms as a writing surface.

Once ensconced there, with the board lowered in place, I felt an indescribable thrill, like a child settling into the swing at a country fair when the bar descends to lock him in place. What a giddy ride Mr. Darwin has given us!

To listen to Darnton, you would think that Darwin was some kind of saint, and all his troubles came from the cruelty of the world around him. Historically, that's all bosh, of course, as such claims always are, when made about major historical figures. (If a child is killed by a drunk driver at five years old, maybe we can make that claim, but not otherwise.)

Interestingly, having treated Darwin as a sort of victim of his times in this article, Darnton is about to publish/has just published a novel, which promises to "reveal the secrets" of Darwin. According to a reviewer at Amazon, "this grandly ambitious novel goes a few steps further to intimate that he was a fraud - and a murderer." That's more than a few steps, in my view; it'll be interesting to see the reaction of those, like Dawkins, for whom Darwinism made it intellectually fulfilling to be an atheist.

This stage is not so surprising, really. As Darwinism slowly dies as a theory for understanding life, its founder is gradually being transformed into a folk figure, like Freud or Che Guevara - all the more recognizable - and a suitable subject for pure fiction - as he becomes more irrelevant.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Here's an encouraging development: A reasonable discussion of the question of evil in a science journal:

Theology and disaster studies: The need for dialogue
David K. Chester
Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, Volume 146, Issue 4 , 1 September 2005, Pages 319-328. Chester is at the Department of Geography, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK

Here's the abstract:

In hazard analysis the conventional wisdom holds that disasters are features of either human vulnerability and/or de-moralised nature. The notion of the 'Act of God' has been almost completely replaced. Using examples of volcanic eruptions and Christian theology, it is argued that many actual and potential victims of hazards continue to explain losses in theistic terms; even in societies where individuals are aware of alternative scientific and social explanations. In Christianity attempts to reconcile God's love, justice and omnipotence on the one hand and human suffering on the other, is termed theodicy, and it is proposed that recent developments allow more fruitful dialogue to take place between hazard analysts and theologians than has been the case hitherto. During the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990*2000) a consensus emerged that, if responses to disaster are to be successfully managed, then an awareness of local culture is vitally important. This consensus has continued, as research agendas are currently being formulated for the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. In many disaster prone regions, religion is an essential element of culture and must be carefully considered in the planning process, and not simply dismissed as a symptom of ignorance, superstition and backwardness.

Apparently, the author references classic publications on the subject by C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga, for example.

(Note: I can't see how to get this online for love or money, but this is the author's Web site.)

Why do I see this article as an encouraging development? Because, while covering the intelligent design controversy, I felt frustrated by a high level of backwardness and a double standard in dealing with theological argument in science journals.

For example, a scientist trashing Behe's or Johnson's pro-intelligent design writings, can carry on about the cruelties of nature, insisting there can't really be intelligent design because ... (insert problem here), and that's just fine.

But, one rarely sees a paper from a scientist trained in theology summarizing a variety of theological perspectives on the cruelties of nature or studying how they are commonly addressed. No doubt many editors would reject it on the grounds that it was "beyond the scope of science."

In other words, theology is within the scope of science when it is badly done by an amateur, on the fly, for the purpose of trashing a book he dislikes. Anyway, the volcanology journal seems to be a happy departure from that.

If people are going to point to evil or bad design as proof that there is no design at all in nature (a questionable assumption at best), experts in the study of cosmic dysfunction should be allowed to offer perspectives.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

You can sure tell that an idea is taking hold: All kinds of people offer an opinion who are not embarrassed by knowing nothing about it. Roger Ebert who, like A. O Scott , is reviewing the recently released pitchfork opera, The Exorcism of Emily Rose - which has nothing to do with intelligent design - opines:

The church is curiously ambivalent about exorcism. It believes that the devil and his agents can be active in the world, it has a rite of exorcism, and it has exorcists. On the other hand, it is reluctant to certify possessions and authorize exorcisms, and it avoids publicity on the issue. It's like those supporters of Intelligent Design who privately believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, but publicly distance themselves from it because that would undermine their plausibility in the wider world.

Now first, just for the record, the Catholic church is not ambivalent about exorcism; it is discreet about exorcism, and with good reason. Some people out there are obsessed by demons (not possessed, just obsessed). Avoiding publicity over the rare cases where exorcisms are done is prudent.

But on the main point, would Ebert like to say which supporters of intelligent design he is talking about? The major "literal interpretation of Genesis" group is Answers in Genesis. AiG has, famously, slammed the ID folks, for not relying on the Bible. I have interviewed and listened to many supporters of intelligent design, and those who are young earth creationists admit it.

It's no secret, I suppose, that a major source of controversy among actual ID scientists has been the demand by some that the few literalists in their midst (usually called "young earth creationists") be expelled, a demand that has so far been resisted. But those YEC scientists also admit that they are YECs. So I have a professional interest in knowing who Ebert is talking about - if indeed, he does himself.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Denyse O'Leary has been named "Recommended Canadian Author of the Year", in large part for her award-winning book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004)

"The award was a complete surprise, as I did not even know I had been nominated," O'Leary said, when informed, on arriving at the Ottawa Congress Centre the following afternoon. "I had only come up to give a workshop."

The CBA Canada booksellers determine the award by a private in-group poll. Results were announced on August 28, 2005.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Good question, where are all the space aliens that Carl Sagan though populated our galaxy by the thousands of civilizations? At one time, it was rude to express skepticism about their existence. That implied you weren't keeping up with the progress of science.

But now, even a science writer is permitted to wonder. "You never write, you never call," complains Tim Radford (August 25, 2005) - with considerable justice, because - as he engagingly points out - the idea that there could be alien civilizations inhabiting other parts of our universe was first proposed in 300 B.C.

Actually, though Radford doesn't mention it, in mediaeval times, people happily believed that life on other planets was much nicer than on Earth, a view that modern science unfortunately confutes. ("There's no life there, but if there is, it would be hell, not heaven.").

But then Radford goes on to say,

If life exists on Earth - a nondescript planet orbiting an undistinguished star in a neither-here-nor-there galaxy in an ordinary corner of the universe - then it ought to exist on at least some other planets around a proportion of other suns in at least a selection of other galaxies. There are at least 200bn galaxies, and each may be home to 200bn stars. Even if the evolution of a sentient, intelligent, technologically aware civilisation is rare, the firmament should still be fizzing with life.

Uh, wait a minute. As Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee have amply demonstrated in Rare Earth, Earth is quite an unusual planet. Not necessarily unique, but very unusual. As Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards have demonstrated in Privileged Planet, Earth occupies an unusual position in the galaxy. If we start with questionable assumptions ("nondescript planet" "undistinguished star" "neither here-nor-there galaxy"), we may well wait forever to get good answers.

One explanation that Radford introduces for the fact that the aliens never return our calls is that our signals are not getting through. The aliens too far away. The signal gets lost.

That could be all it takes to keep the neighbours from getting the message or putting a call through, say engineers such as Christopher Rose of Rutgers State University, New Jersey, in the journal Nature, and biologists such as Clive Trotman at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who did a similar set of sums in his book The Feathered Onion last year. You can't just broadcast a message saying, "Is anybody out there?" The signal dissipates as the square of the distance. By the time you get to Pluto, it's already vanishingly faint.

Okay, Tim. If we need to believe, that's a good enough reason I guess. But why do we need to believe? Tell me again, okay?

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Well, Richard Sternberg wasn't wrong when he figured his bosses at the Smithsonian were out to get him, after he permitted the publication of a peer-reviewed ID-friendly paper in a Smithsonian journal. As David Klinghoffer recounts in National Review, Office of Special Counsel attorney James McVay has found that (August 5, 2005):

Our preliminary investigation indicates that retaliation [against Sternberg by his colleagues] came in many forms. It came in the form of attempts to change your working conditions...During the process you were personally investigated and your professional competence was attacked. Misinformation was disseminated throughout the SI [Smithsonian Institution] and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false. It is also clear that a hostile work environment was created with the ultimate goal of forcing you out of the SI.

Klinghoffer's piece is a well-written summary of a persecution campaign that should embarrass the scientists involved.

Interestingly, Sternberg has never claimed to be an ID supporter, but he enjoys considering new ideas. As he told Michael Powell of the Washington Post, ""I loathe careerism and the herd mentality," he said. "I really think that objective truth can be discovered and that popular opinion and consensus thinking does more to obscure than to reveal." Powell's excellent piece on Sternberg reveals the shameful role that National Center for Science Education, a seriously mission-challenged organization, played in promoting the persecution. NCSE's alleged purpose is to promote Darwinism in the public school system, not hound a productive scientist at a research institution. (Note: For an interview with Sternberg, go here.)

But the most encouraging news is, Sternberg has just co-authored a paper. (Note: If you click this link, you may not be able to get back using the back browser button. ) So they didn't ruin his career after all. Here's the abstract:

Why repetitive DNA is essential to genome function
Biol. Rev. (2005), 80, pp. 227-250. f 2005 Cambridge Philosophical Society 227 doi:10.1017/S1464793104006657

James A. Shapiro 1,* and Richard von Sternberg 2,3

There are clear theoretical reasons and many well-documented examples which show that repetitive DNA is essential for genome function. Generic repeated signals in the DNA are necessary to format expression of unique coding sequence files and to organise additional functions essential for genome replication and accurate transmission to progeny cells. Repetitive DNA sequence elements are also fundamental to the cooperative molecular interactions forming nucleoprotein complexes. Here, we review the surprising abundance of repetitive DNA in many genomes, describe its structural diversity, and discuss dozens of cases where the functional importance of repetitive elements has been studied in molecular detail. In particular, the fact that repeat elements serve either as initiators or boundaries for heterochromatin domains and provide a significant fraction of scaffolding/matrix attachment regions (S/MARs) suggests that the repetitive component of the genome plays a major architectonic role in higher order physical structuring. Employing an information science model, the 'functionalist'perspective on repetitive DNA leads to new ways of thinking about the systemic organisation of cellular genomes and provides several novel possibilities involving repeat elements in evolutionarily significant genome reorganisation. These ideas may facilitate the interpretation of comparisons between sequenced genomes, where the repetitive DNA component is often greater than the coding sequence component.

While we are at it, what about the ID-friendly paper that NCSE and the Smithsonian boffins tried to ruin his career over?

Apparently, it has received way more publicity than it ever would have otherwise.

Good thing, too. Now that the bullies are (we hope) leaving town by a slow train, maybe we can start to have reasonable discussions about the way in which the Cambrian explosion fails to support the predictions of classical Darwinism.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

In a review of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, yet another pitchfork drama, reviewer A.O. Scott weighs in on the question of whether Emily Rose could in fact have been dancing with the devil, so to speak, prior to her death during an exorcism:

[Exorcist] Father Moore insists that Emily was in the grip of the Devil's minions, even as the prosecution presents an array of expert witnesses arguing that she suffered from a medical rather than a spiritual condition. Erin, in turn, unearths an anthropologist (Shohreh Aghdashloo) who studies demonic possession and is studiously noncommital as to whether it really exists.

The movie pretends to take the same tolerant, anything's-possible position. While not especially good - judged strictly on its cinematic merits, it ranges from O.K. to god-awful - it is still a fascinating cultural document in the age of intelligent design. Its point of view suggests an improbable alliance of postmodern relativism and absolute religious faith against the supposed tyranny of scientific empiricism, which is depicted as narrow and dogmatic.

The sincerity of a believer - Father Moore, in this case - is conflated with the plausibility of his beliefs. The doctors, meanwhile, seem so sure of themselves. But of course, the movie says, no one can ever be completely sure, and thus superstition becomes a matter of reasonable doubt. Meanwhile the clocks stop, the wind howls, and we are encouraged to believe - or at least not to disbelieve - our own eyes. Father Moore knows what he saw. So do I: propaganda disguised as entertainment.

Scott is clearly seriously confused about the nature of the intelligent design hypothesis. The ID theorists do not see design as a form of supernaturalism but simply as part of the nature of the existing universe. In other words, design is not a mere illusion, as materialists and naturalists would insist.

In fact, the universe could be intelligently designed without exhibiting any supernatural or spiritual forces at all. Obviously, the source of the design must be outside the universe in that case, but a design model without supernaturalism within the universe is quite plausible. A person who accepted such a model would be in conflict with the teachings of most Western religions, because they insist that some truly supernatural events have occurred. But the conflict is not with ID theory.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

A friend brought this one to my attention from Better Homes & Gardens ( January 2004, 111):

DARWIN'S FUSSY EATERS. The next time the kids are fussing about eating anything other than Mac and cheese, bear in mind that they may be hardwired to be picky. British scientists recently theorized that young children shun many vegetables and strange meats because of an evolutionary safeguard that protected them from toxic plants and food poisoning. Knowing this won't convince them to eat broccoli, but you can at least take comfort in the fact that it's not your cooking.

Wow. Evolutionary safeguards are pretty awesome. Not only did natural selection discourage kids from eating many nutritious vegetables and meats (or so we are told) but it actually managed the feat before macaroni and cheese had evolved.

Actually, I have nothing against evolutionary psychology because I like folk tales as well as anyone. But calling it a science discipline is another matter. Actually, it's part of the reason the public is skeptical of Darwinism. Read enough of this stuff and the same thoughts will occur to you as occurred to me and to Jerry Coyne, a Darwinist who would likely disagree with me on just about everything else:

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture. The latest deadweight dragging us closer to phrenology is "evolutionary psychology," or the science formerly known as sociobiology, which studies the evolutionary roots of human behavior. There is nothing inherently wrong with this enterprise, and it has proposed some intriguing theories, particularly about the evolution of language. The problem is that evolutionary psychology suffers from the scientific equivalent of megalomania. Most of its adherents are convinced that virtually every human action or feeling, including depression, homosexuality, religion, and consciousness, was put directly into our brains by natural selection. In this view, evolution becomes the key--the only key-- that can unlock our humanity. (Jerry A. Coyne, [Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago], "The fairy tales of evolutionary psychology." Review of A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, by Randy Thornhill & Craig T. Palmer, MIT Press, 2000. The New Republic, March 4, 2000.).

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

In a an August 29 article in The Scientist, eminent (now retired) chemist Phil Skell weighs in on the actual importance of Darwinism in modern biology, as opposed to the dramatic claims made - "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," "cornerstone of biology", et cetera.

Skell quotes A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one." He then comments,

I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.

He also notes,

In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word - "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.

He is careful to point out that just because Darwinism is useless does not mean that it is false, but rather that claims about its importance are justly met by skepticism.

I would add that persecutions of scientists like Richard Sternberg, simply for considering viewpoints other than Darwinism in interpreting historical biology, should be met not only with skepticism but disdain.

While Prof. Skell doesn't say so, the apparent reason Darwinism is currently so important in biology has nothing to do with science as such. Darwinism enables an atheistic naturalist to use the publicly funded biology curriculum to promote his or her religious and political views.

For example, on the web site of Florida Citizens for Science, a state Darwin lobby, note the link to "Zealots are determined to create a theocracy". This ignorant and spiteful politico-religious rant is largely unrelated to the issue of Darwinism vs. design. FCS should not link to it as an article "of interest" if it wants to persuade anyone that it represents the public at large. Otherwise, the group should change its name to Florida Citizens for Divisiveness (Not Diversity) in Religion.

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Just as cartoonists are discovering the fun in the intelligent design controversy, its concepts are creeping into popular newswriting.

For example, Newsweek devoted a recent cover story to a serious examination of spirituality in America.

One comment that newswriter Jerry Adler makes is,

If you experience God directly, your faith is not going to hinge on whether natural selection could have produced the flagellum of a bacterium. If you feel God within you, then the important question is settled; the rest is details.

As it happens, I vehemently disagree with the approach to religion that Adler describes, but that's a discussion for another time. I want to draw attention to the fact that Adler assumes that the average reader knows both the meaning and the significance of "flagellum of a bacterium." That certainly would not have been the case ten years ago. So, clearly, the intelligent design controversy is affecting popular culture.

Here’s another cartoon on the ID controversy, mocking mammoth science textbooks. As one who has helped assemble these monsters, I can tell you what the problem is: The textbook publisher has a number of constituencies to please. But the student is not of those constituencies. So the publisher naturally tries to cram in whatever any teacher lobby wants, because their opinion counts. I used to be an expert at this, actually. I would fill in huge charts, illustrating my misdeeds, as the book grew to the size of a doorstop for a government building.

My advice, if anyone wants it: Today’s textbook should morph into a slim introduction to the topic, with a CD-ROM/DVD (with additional material, tutorials etc.) in the back jacket, plus a Web site the student can consult. Of course the big fight would then be over how much attention to give to each topic, but at leastt he student is not burdened with that. How much does 50 extra megs of information weigh, after all?

Re cartoons on the intelligent design controversy: Too much of the stuff I see is off target, blandly predictable, or weakly political. My guess is, that will change as more cartoonists become aware of the depth of the controversy. Here is some stuff I thought was fun, not in any order.)

Gary Huck Toons for Teachers (This one’s a hoot, as the stunned fish plops/plods uncertainly plops/plods to his destiny ...).:

Larry Wright of the Detroit News encourages children to ask the Really Big Questions about intelligent design.

“Liberty News” asks how soon US President Bush will allow intelligent design to be studied in relation to ...

Canadian cartoonist John Fewings muses in a similar vein on Bush’s possible reasons for his support for teaching ID in the schools:

Steve Kelley knows who needs intelligent design the most:

This is one of my favourites, as Curious George ponders a possible personal future :

Gary Varvel of the Indianapolis Star captures the quandary of the simian lab assistants. (Everyone needs simian lab assistants.)

Tom Toles on “Intelephant design” is one of my faves - a sharp enough razor to cut with:

I don’t have to agree with you. I just want you to be funny.

Yesterday, I was told that the controversial proposed reforms to the teaching of Darwinism in Kansas have mostly been accepted.

(Note: If this is not the story you are looking for, see the Blog service note below.)

Briefly, earlier this year, the state of Kansas attempted to hold hearings on their new science standards on the teaching of Darwinism. Proponents of the Darwin-only perspective boycotted the hearings. Opponents testified at them, and appear to have prevailed—until the litigation starts, of course.

The heart of the Kansas controversy over what should be taught in schools is a conflict between a naturalistic definition of science and an evidence-based one.
Naturalism is a type of philosophy that argues that nature is all there is, has been, or ever will be. It is opposed not only to theism but to any assumption that nature incorporates design or purpose. (A Buddhist or agnostic, for example, may not believe in gods/God, but may accept that there is design or purpose in nature.) However, many prominent scientists are naturalists, and they have a tendency to think that science is the handmaid of naturalism.

The original standards read,

"Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us."

This sounds fine and innocuous, until you run into the following problem:

In practice today, "natural explanations" is a code phrase for "explanations that rule out design or purpose." The chief glory of Darwinism is that it purports to explain how life could come into existence, grow, and change without any design or purpose. No other theory of evolution will do that for you.

Therefore — here's the kicker — objections to Darwinism, even when founded on impeccable science evidence, are treated as, by definition, objections to science itself.

From the naturalist's point of view, that makes sense. If the purpose of science is to defend naturalism, no objections to Darwinism can be allowed. Objecting would be like going to Mass and telling the priest that you doubt the divinity of Christ. The key difference is that the Catholic Church is not a publicly funded institution to which one is legally obligated to send one's children. The public school, as it happens, is. Hence the intractable controversy.

So the minority report, which has just been accepted, has changed the standard to read

"Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation, that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building, to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."

Note that the new formulation does not allow for theories that are held only on account of personal faith, claims of divine revelation, sacred scriptures, therapy needs, tribal tradition, or any other non-science-based method of knowing. But the new formulation also clearly does not assume that naturalism must be defended. Therefore it would permit evidence-based critiques of Darwinism. For example, if the Cambrian explosion of life forms over a short period of time around 525 mya presents a problem for a strict Darwinian account of life (and Darwin himself thought it did), it would be okay for a teacher to say so.

For the most part, media coverage of the Kansas science standards controversy has been disappointing, partly because so few journalists had (or took) the time to study the underlying issues. However, you can read a series of four differing opinions about the merits of the proposed changes. You have to sign up with the Kansas City Star , but the opinions are worth reading.

By the way, one outcome of the fact that Cardinal Schonborn recently made it clear that the Catholic Church accepts the possibility of common ancestry but does not support Darwinism (evolution is an unguided purposeless event), is that teachers will have a strong defense against persecution if they legitimately discuss objections to Darwinism in Catholic schools. Here in Canada, that may be significant because Catholic schools receive whole or partial public funding in most provinces. Some publicly funded Catholic school boards are large and influential. The Toronto Catholic School Board has 95 000 students in 201 schools. It would be nice if large boards took the lead in providing teacher resources that promote a productive discussion of the issues.

I wish I had had the good sense to rush a prediction into print last week: That — now that Cardinal Schönborn has made clear that the Catholic Church does not support Darwinism — a number of people would be anxious to tell me that Darwinism is not, after all, really used to support the teaching of atheistic philosophies in the publicly funded school system. So why, they want to know, is there any problem that the Cardinal need be concerned about?

Fortunately, Craig Rusbult, over at the publicly archived American Scientific Affiliation list, has drawn attention to a good example of just that very use of Darwinism, in the National Association of Biology Teachers' efforts to define evolution:

For more than two years, from April 1995 to October 1997, the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) declared that "natural" does mean "without God" in their position statement on evolution, which stated that evolution is an "unsupervised, impersonal" process.

[...]

After first refusing to do so, the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) has dropped the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal" from its official description of evolution. The group's eight-person board of directors voted unanimously on October 11 to alter the wording of its two-year-old statement in support of teaching evolution — and the board did so just three days after it had voted unanimously not to make the change. Religion scholar Huston Smith and philosopher Alvin Plantinga had urged NABT to make the change, arguing that inclusion of the two words constituted a theological judgment about the nonexistence of God that went beyond the boundaries of empirical science.

While the fossil record may shed light on the process of evolution, the two scholars argued, it cannot answer the question of whether evolution is or is not directed by God. They argued that the statement was vulnerable, made NABT a legitimate target for creationists, and, since polls show that more than 90 percent of Americans profess belief in God, undermined Americans' respect for scientists, especially when scientists were drawing conclusions beyond the available evidence. NABT officials first unanimously refused, and then three days later unanimously reversed themselves. {from Christian Century, November 12, 1997, p. 1029}

So, believe it or not, the Association only reluctantly dropped the clearly atheistic language from its statement under pressure, not only from Christians in science but also from the chief Darwin lobby, National Center for Science Education. I wish I'd been a fly on the wall when lobbyist Eugenie Scott told NABT to quit punching a hole in the bottom of the boat ...

Cardinal Schönborn is nobody's fool and he knows exactly what he is talking about. He's talking about episodes like that. And that episode is instructive, but certainly not unique. Incidentally, Rusbult's online article linked above, provides many useful links.

(Note: This controversy relates to the intelligent design controversy - but should not be confused with it. The Christians who challenged the Association were not doing so on behalf of the intelligent design hypothesis (that evolution is sometimes design-driven, because design is the most reasonable inference for some aspects of life forms). They were simply challenging the decision of a national teachers' association to define evolution in a clearly and implicitly atheistic way. Obviously, if evolution is "unsupervised," there is no design, but even if it is supervised, the intelligent design hypothesis could be falsified.)

The New York Times, in the persons of writers Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, pretends amazement that the Roman Catholic Church has come out against the meaningless, purposeless universe of life forms advocated by Darwinists, and atheistic materialism generally. (Note: You have to register with the Times to see this, but hey, just do it, and get it over with.)

An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.

The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."

In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI's election in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about the church's position on evolution. "I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on," said Cardinal Schönborn.

He said that he had been "angry" for years about writers and theologians, many Catholics, who he said had "misrepresented" the church's position as endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.

No wonder outfits like the Times attract the term "legacy media." Why can't they get it? Of course the Catholic Church has never supported anything like the Darwinism mandated for U.S. school systems! And despite a century of indoctrination, most people just do not believe Darwinism, and are not about to start. Even a slow-moving institution like the Catholic Church is waking up to the fact that science, public policy, and education now reflect doctrines that most people doubt — doubt for good reason. They simply do not believe what Darwinists believe - that life is without design, purpose or meaning (see the post below), because the evidence suggests the opposite.

As a Roman Catholic myself, I am glad to see the Church weighing in against Darwinism, but note the following:

Opponents of Darwinian evolution said they were gratified by Cardinal Schönborn's essay. But scientists and science teachers reacted with confusion, dismay and even anger. Some said they feared the cardinal's sentiments would cause religious scientists to question their faiths.

That would be a strange outcome if it were true. Darwinism generally holds that evolution is without design or purpose; few religions agree. That is why so many huge conflicts erupt over the teaching of Darwinism in science classes. All that is happening here is that the Roman Catholic church is making clear that it sides with the majority on the question of design.

I am co-authoring a book, to be published by Harper San Francisco, on the neurological EVIDENCE for the spiritual nature of human beings, to be published Fall 2006.

The lead author is neuroscientist Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal.

http://hendrix.imm.dtu.dk/services/jerne/brede/WOPER_51.html

This project will keep me very busy, and require me to learn a great deal about the human brain (no kidding!).

Many of my posts hereafter will probably relate to neuroscience, but so far as I can see, any reasonable account of the human brain is unlikely to be Darwinian in character, so my posts will remain relevant to blog reader interests.

I will post any official information from the publisher about the forthcoming book, as it becomes available.

This is what I have for now: http://www.rabiner.net/

But you can be sure there will be way more later.

cheers, Denyse

The Roman Catholic Church, after years of silence and confusion on the subject, has begun to weigh in on Darwinism, and, from the sounds of things, this is not going to be good news for Darwinists. According to Cardinal Archbishop Christoph Schonborn of Vienna,

The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

Reading this was an amazing experience, because, for once, the difference between Darwinism and evolution is clarified. He goes on,

In an unfortunate new twist on this old controversy, neo-Darwinists recently have sought to portray our new pope, Benedict XVI, as a satisfied evolutionist. They have quoted a sentence about common ancestry from a 2004 document of the International Theological Commission, pointed out that Benedict was at the time head of the commission, and concluded that the Catholic Church has no problem with the notion of "evolution" as used by mainstream biologists - that is, synonymous with neo-Darwinism.

The commission's document, however, reaffirms the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of design in nature. Commenting on the widespread abuse of John Paul's 1996 letter on evolution, the commission cautions that "the letter cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe."

The rest of Cardinal Schonborn's op-ed is worth reading too, even though you have to register with the Times and get a password.

Michael Behe, a Roman Catholic biochemist and author of Darwin's Black Box, which advances intelligent design theory, comments,

I think this is enormously important. Not to put too fine a point on it, this essentially says in so many words that neo-Darwinism is wrong and ID is right. It says that the conclusion that life is designed is not a matter of faith, but a matter of physical evidence. It says the denial of that evidence is itself ideology; in other words, the denial of the evidence is the faith, the affirmation of the evidence is rational.

I strongly suspect that this op-ed was instigated by Pope Benedict himself. It seems very unlikely that Cardinal Schonborn would publish an op-ed in the New York Times expounding Catholic understanding of evolution, taking on the Darwinists, and quoting Benedict himself without at least the Pope's tacit approval, and more likely his active encouragement. I take this to mean that Benedict thinks this issue is very important, and is very interested in setting matters straight.

If so, it is about time, and past time. Many Darwinists have benefited from the fact that the Catholic Church supports the idea of evolution (seen ONLY as change in life forms over time, as guided by God), in order to advance the view that it supports Darwinian evolution, which is evolution not guided at all. Thus they have been able to promote an atheistic religion at public expense in school systems that are not supposed to be advancing any religion, without any objection from Catholics.

For an example of (perhaps unintentionally) misleading statements, see Case Western Reserve physicist Lawrence M. Krauss insists:

The Roman Catholic Church, ... apparently has no problem with the notion of evolution as it is currently studied by biologists, including supposedly "controversial" ideas like common ancestry of all life forms.

Popes from Pius XII to John Paul II have reaffirmed that the process of evolution in no way violates the teachings of the church. Pope Benedict XVI, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, presided over the church's International Theological Commission, which stated that "since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism."

Fair enough, but Darwinists claim that it all happened by chance. That's the point of Darwinism, as the key statements quoted below make clear. Schonborn explicitly contradicts the Darwinist view in the statement above, and endorses a view much closer to intelligent design.

In case anyone is wondering whether Darwinism truly insists that there is no design, purpose, or creator, consider the following key thoughts by Darwinian thinkers:

The functional design of organisms and their features would seem to argue for the existence of a designer. It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent. . . . Darwin’s theory encountered opposition in religious circles, not so much because he proposed the evolutionary origin of living things (which had been proposed many times before, even by Christian theologians) but because his mechanism, natural selection, excluded God as the explanation accounting for the obvious design.
— Francisco Ayala, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

The real core of Darwinism . . . is the theory of natural selection. This theory is so important for the Darwinian because it permits the explanation of adaptation, the design of the natural theologian, by natural means, instead of by divine intervention. (Mayr, E., "Foreword," in Ruse M., "Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies," [1982], Addison-Wesley: Reading MA, 1983, Third Printing, pp.xi-xii)

— Ernst Mayr Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist

"Darwin's theory uses the same invisible hand, but formed into a fist as a battering ram to eliminate Paley's God from nature. The very features that Paley used to infer not only God's existence, but also his goodness, are, for Darwin, but spin-offs of the only real action in nature-the endless struggle among organisms for reproductive success, and the endless hecatombs of failure." (Gould S.J., "Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand," in "Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History," Jonathan Cape: London, 1993, pp.149-150)

Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist

Clearly, Darwinism means the opposite of what the Catholic Church teaches about whether or not there is any meaning or purpose in the origin and development of life. The intelligent design controversy has never been about how old the Earth is, but about whether there is detectible evidence of design in the universe and life forms.

The Darwinists may be right in what they say, but who knows? For many years, any other story than theirs has been banned from science classrooms. As the "Privileged Planet" controversy shows (see the Blog service note at the end of this page), that's not about evidence.

To his credit, one person who clearly understood the difference between the Roman Catholic Church's understanding of evolution and the typical Darwinist's is ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins. Here is an item I wrote last year on the subject, that may never have been published by the B.C. Catholic. So, for convenience, I am reproducing it here. You will find Dawkins's attack on John Paul II in the article below:

So the Pope supports “evolution”? — Check it out!

by Denyse O’Leary

For several years now, the Christian schools started by British car dealer Sir Peter Vardy in underprivileged parts of Britain have rankled the progressive education establishment. Sir Peter insists on a disciplined approach to learning. His students perform better than students in free-and-easy schools. Sir Peter’s sin (embarrassing the education establishment) had to be punished, but given that he was mostly popular with parents, the establishment was not sure how to punish him.

Finally, the establishment got something on Sir Peter: His schools allow students to question Darwinian evolution, the religion of Britain’s smart set.

Darwinian evolution (Darwinism) is a theory whose express purpose is to explain how the whole of life, including ourselves, can arise without any design whatsoever. As arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins puts it, “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Dawkins is said to be Britain’s number one public intellectual, and he regularly attacks the Vardy schools.

In a Guardian article ridiculing the schools, journalist Tim Adams launched what he hoped would be a serious assault on their credibility: “Even the Pope,” he announced, “accepts Darwinian theory as truth.”

Now, if that were true, it would obviously be very bad news for the Catholic Church. But does the Pope really support Darwinian evolution?

Here’s what John Paul II actually said: In 1996, speaking to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he acknowledged that the theory of evolution was “more than a hypothesis” and that there were significant arguments in its favour. So the media rushed to report that he supported Darwinism, the specific theory of evolution that Dawkins describes above (blind, pitiless indifference).

But in reality, John Paul II went on to note that there are materialist, reductionist, and spiritualist interpretations of evolution. The materialist interpretations were, he said,“incompatible with the truth about man” and not able to “ground the dignity of the person.”

Basically, that means he does not agree with Darwinian evolution, because the whole point of Darwinian evolution is to deny special significance to man by saying that material nature is all there is.

John Paul II has made a number of other statements that make clear that any evolutionary theory that does not understand human beings as having a spiritual nature as well as a physical nature is simply wrong.

If any further evidence were needed that the Pope is no friend of Darwin, note that Dawkins has described John Paul II’s views as “fundamentally” antievolutionary, and as “obscurantist, disingenuous doublethink.” Hardly what you’d expect if John Paul II were smoothing the path for Dawkins and other Darwinists.

The question is not whether life forms change over time or how old the Earth is. The Pope was content to leave those matters to specialists. The question is whether the processes are blind, purposeless, and unguided. That is what Darwinism teaches. It is entirely at odds with a Catholic view, which assumes that God guides the processes of life.

If you have children in a Catholic school system, you might want to find out what they are taught about evolution. Are the teachers instilling Darwinism while reassuring parents that “the Pope supports evolution”? They might be.

While researching By Design or by Chance?, an overview of the intelligent design controversy, I was struck by how much our popular culture simply accepts Darwinism in an unthinking way, even though it is under serious assault right now on factual grounds.

One Toronto teacher taught Darwinian evolution for about 24 years at a Catholic school before he read a book by Catholic biochemist Mike Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (Free Press, 1996), in which Behe explains why Darwinism just cannot be true and why intelligent design explains life better. The teacher then began to encourage his students to think critically about Darwinism. (Note: That teacher will be teaching a course at the University of Toronto on intelligent design theory in the spring of 2006. If you are interested and live within driving distance of Toronto, you may wish to consider signing up.)

Today, when so many ideas contend for a place in our lives, we must be clear what our faith is, and what it isn’t. What the Church means by evolution is not what Charles Darwin meant, and there is no such thing as Catholic Darwinism. If you are a Catholic, you can accept evolution as a process guided by God, but you cannot be a Darwinist, as many intellectuals today are.

In other words, you are not the result of an unguided process. Take heart, however crazy life seems, there is a reason for your existence and you were meant to be here.

Excerpts from what Pope John Paul II has said about evolution:

- If we analyze man in the depth of his being, we see that he differs more from the world of nature than he resembles it. Also anthropology and philosophy proceed in this direction, when they try to analyze and understand man's intelligence. freedom, conscience and spirituality. (1978)

- The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator. (1985)

- It is therefore clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy, which view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity. (1986)

- ... theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person. (1996)

A school board in Bluffton, Indiana, seems to me a model of good sense, compared to some, in how it approaches the intelligent design controversy.

"The intent of this board directive is not to replace the teaching of the theory of evolution with the theory of intelligent design or any other theory. On the contrary, the intent is to discuss the scientific evidence - not religious evidence - for and against appropriate theories at all grade levels where this topic is discussed," Gerber read from his one-page statement.

Half of me feels bad about even mentioning Bluffton, for fear the Blufftonites will become the target of anti-freedom groups (see the post below) that will attempt to tie them up in costly litigation, even though there has been little or no local controversy.

High school principal Steve Baker told the board that for the last six years he had never received a phone call from a parent who thought too much or too little evolution or intelligent design was being taught at the high school.

Perhaps the local public is tired of bullying by the Darwin lobby, and just wants curriculum to reflect the range of science-based views on origins?

posted by Denyse O'Leary, author of By Design or by Chance?
http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Denyse O'Leary's Christianity Today article on the showing of "Privileged Planet" at the Smithsonian is now posted at

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/008/4.22.html

Excerpt:
"Jewish mathematician David Berlinski, a well-known critic of Darwinism, told Christianity Today, "I thought the uproar was indecent. I am in general appalled but not surprised by the willingness of academics to give up every principle of free speech and honest debate whenever they think they can do so without paying a price."

When I spoke to him last night, California attorney Larry Caldwell told me that it sure helps to be a lawyer. Especially when it comes to dealing with a series of non-fact-based allegations against one’s good judgement and character.

Caldwell, a parent who thinks that students should be taught the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the Darwinian theory of evolution, was accused by a leading Darwinist of, among other things, proposing odd little books for adoption by the school system, books that he had never seen!

The article was authored by Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, Inc. (NCSE). Scott's article, entitled “In My Backyard: Creationists in California,” appeared in the Spring print and online editions of the Academy’s California Wild magazine, and was linked on the NCSE website.

Caldwell filed suit, but the California Academy of Sciences has settled by agreeing to 1) permanently remove all on-line access to the Scott article, 2) publish a lengthy letter by Caldwell and 3) publish a retraction letter by Scott in the upcoming Summer 2005 edition of California Wild , which will be available in print and on the Internet in early July.

Caldwell says that his letter will correct a number of factual misstatements in the Scott article.

He also says that

Unfortunately, Scott and the NCSE have a long history of libeling people in the debate over how evolution should be taught in our public schools; my case is only the most recent example. Hopefully, it won't take any more libel lawsuits to teach them how to stick to the truth.

Other critics of Darwin's theory have been personally attacked on the basis of misrepresentations in similar cases where the Darwinists claim that the critics' professional statements or qualifications are false.

The difference between them and me is that I decided to take legal action. Darwinists need to get the message: engage in civil discourse without defamation or prepare to answer in court.

Personally, I am delighted by this turn of events. As a journalist, I initially found it difficult to cover the intelligent design controversy, on account of the swamp of false allegations about what intelligent design theorists thought, said, and did.

I wish I could be surprised that it took the threat of a libel suit to get a science organization to correct a record that should never have been so wrong in the first place.

Unfortunately, I am not surprised.

Here’s another example of the kind of stuff that irks me: David Berlinski, a secular Jewish mathematician who disputes Darwinism, has been called in some quarters, a creationist [http://www.2think.org/letters.shtml], about which he says, “Some readers seem to have been persuaded that in criticizing the Darwinian theory of evolution, I intended to uphold a doctrine of creationism. This is a mistake, supported by nothing that I have written.”

Similarly, ID theorist Michael Behe, a Roman Catholic biochemist, has been called a creationist [http://www.freeinquiry.com/behe-npr.html], even though he has told me explicitly that he thinks that all the information in the universe was probably coded in at the Big Bang. That would make him a theistic evolutionist, of course. His doubts about Darwinism are based on biochemistry, not religion, just as Berlinski’s doubts are based on mathematics, not religion.

As I understand it, creationism means the effort to align science findings with a sacred text (Bible, Koran, tribal tradition about origins). I don’t see anything wrong with such an enterprise, but anyone who does not acknowledge a given sacred text won’t care, so it’s not properly a public project.

However, while covering the intelligent design controversy, I met a number of scientists and mathematicians who had very good, non-religious reasons, based in their own disciplines, for doubting Darwinian evolution (from goo to you in a zillion easy steps).

I suspect some Darwinists resort to name calling and misrepresentation, in the hope that future evidence will vindicate a theory that they themselves have privately begun to doubt.

Whether Darwinism turns out to be right or wrong, it must face scrutiny without the help of all the name-calling. Maybe the California settlement will help in that process.

At the Write! Canada convention awards night (June 17, 2004), By Design or by Chance?, an overview of the intelligent design controversy, won two Canadian Christian Writing Awards, one in the category of books on culture and the other in the category of personal growth/Bible study & theology. The culture award was shared with Dianne B. Stinton of Nairobi, Kenya, for Jesus of Africa.

By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), by Toronto journalist, Denyse O’Leary, was first published in Canada, but the US edition followed a month later.

“What makes the wins especially gratifying is that we had such a strong field this year,” O’Leary said. “The number of books that honestly deserve prizes rapidly outstripped the number of prizes available. It seems that Christians in Canada are beginning to find their literary voice.”

For the first time, Quill and Quire, the Canadian book publishing industry’s publication, sent a reporter to the Write! Canada convention. The reporter interviewed O’Leary and others at some length on the growth of high quality writing among Canadian Christians.

Write! Canada is sponsored by The Word Guild (www.thewordguild.com), which aims at “connecting, developing & promoting Canadian writers & editors who are Christian.”

You can read excerpts from By Design or by Chance? at www.designorchance.com/press.html, and purchase it at http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/books/b088sk.htm

Last time, I wrote about the uproar over the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s plans to co-host the “national premiere and evening reception” for an ID-friendly film, The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe . The Smithsonian was to co-host with the ID-promoting Discovery Institute of Seattle in late June.

Well, the story has got a lot wilder.

Essentially, Discovery Institute had wanted to rent space from the Smithsonian to show the film, but the Smithsonian’s policy required it to cosponsor the film. The film passed all the usual screening processes.

I naturally wondered (and I was not alone in this) whether the Smithsonian was trying to be nice to the friends of beleaguered scientist Richard Sternberg (http://www.rsternberg.net), the science journal editor whose treatment at the Smithsonian caused him to appeal to the US government for help (because he had published an ID-friendly paper).

Sternberg himself is not an advocate of the view that the universe shows evidence of intelligent design, but ID advocates are no doubt grateful to him for not censoring a paper that had passed peer review. So the Smithsonian would look good if it co-sponsored an ID-friendly film. That would suggest that, despite appearances, they are not out to get Sternberg (http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006220).

We’ll never know now.

Alarmists who — so far as I can determine from reading their comments —have mostly never seen the film and do not know what it is about, besieged the Smithsonian, demanding that the institution withdraw co-sponsorship, despite its own rules.

For example, many alarmists have assumed that the film attacks Darwinian evolution. In fact, it has nothing to say about Darwinian evolution. It argues that the universe itself (not life forms) shows evidence of intelligent design.

Admittedly, a person who is committed to the view that life forms show no evidence of intelligent design will naturally not welcome evidence of design from the universe itself. But the fact that so many people were willing to raise heck with the Smithsonian about a film they knew virtually nothing about tells you how committed they are to Darwinism as a sort of secular religion. I called these people the “Darwinbots” and I stand by my judgement in this matter. Many of these people consider themselves liberals, but as I told them (http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2005/06/note-from-denyse-re-darwinbots.html), it is difficult to be further from classical liberalism than they are.

For example, when I instituted a new policy on my blog, that I will not, on principle, respond to anyone who has not seen the film because “I simply do not have time to correspond with anyone who will not make such a minimal contribution to a free society” and also will not tolerate “cussing, dissing, undefended accusations, rude words, et cetera”, the rain of posts stopped abruptly. I have only heard from two people since, who both indicated that they had indeed seen the film. Good for them, ... but if this is what Darwinism has come to, I can certainly see why so many American states now want to teach intelligent design as an alternative. I would too. (See http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2005/06/further-updated-privileged-planet.html, scroll down to the bottom for new policy)

In any event, the Smithsonian has decided to ignore its own policy and is not co-sponsoring the film [http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/2005/06/smithsonian-tries-to-disown-privileged.html] after all. It suddenly claimed to have found some fault with the film that was not evident when it was screened there by staff earlier ...

It has also returned Discovery Institute’s $16000 donation, which means (so far as I can see) that the Discovery Institute is getting the space for free. American taxpayer rights groups should be just wild with institutional joy now, because the Smithsonian is mostly government-funded.

Anyway, I decided to re-view the film and provide a detailed account at my blog, The Post-Darwinist [http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com]. That’s a lot of work because, unlike some, I want to be quite sure of what I am seeing, and saying.

But it is a good thing I started doing that (as a free public service), because I am finally beginning to understand what is going on.

The Smithsonian is the Church of St. Carl (Sagan) and it presented a big tribute to him in 1997 (he died in 1996). (See http://siarchives.si.edu/findingaids/fa01-153.html, scroll down to 1997.)

Sagan was that Cosmos astronomer that everyone who watches a lot of TV seems to know about. He wrote, “Because of the reflection of sunlight the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world ... but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. Look again at that dot. That’s here. Home. That’s us. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

Privileged Planet quotes Sagan—and then proceeds to blow up his ideas, showing that, actually, Earth is in a very special and favorable position. So the Smithsonian has a good reason to avoid association with Privileged Planet. Maybe the Darwin groupies were doing the institution a favor by screaming about it.

But that raises a very interesting question: Has the United States actually established a secularist religion which depends on Darwinism and on a whole cluster of ideas associated with it, including Sagan’s?

Put another way: Is secularism a state religion, of which the Church of St. Carl is merely a local parish? In that case, American taxpayers are essentially funding a state religion.

If you don’t happen to believe in the doctrines of the state religion, you have every right to object to the situation, and shouldn’t allow anyone to put you down for complaining about it.

The intelligent design controversy, far from going away, is getting hotter all the time because it is now moving beyond the stuff science profs squabble over. It is now raising fundamental political issues.

I will be going to the Church of St. Carl in Washington, D.C., on June 23, not to pray but to attend the Privileged Planet screening.

(Note: Scooping the The New York Times has been a lot of work, but fun. It annoys me that the Times now makes you sign up if you want to see the article that their reporter wrote as a result of reading my blog, though he did his own research too. But you can still see the original account and all the subsequent information for free at the blog. - cheers, Denyse)

In the middle of the burgeoning controversy over whether the universe and life forms show detectible evidence of intelligent design, the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is co-hosting — with the Discovery Institute — the “national premiere and evening reception” for The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe

The Privileged Planet: The Search for Purpose in the Universe is a documentary by Illustra Media featuring philosopher Jay Richards and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, arguing for the intelligent design of the universe. Both Richards and Gonzalez are associated with the intelligent design community, and have coauthored a book, also called The Privileged Planet. (See www.privilegedplanet.com)

I have just received an invitation to attend this event, which will be held on Thursday, June 23, 2005 at 6:00 p.m. at the Smithsonian, at Constitution and Tenth Avenues in Washington, D.C.

The documentary will be shown at 6:00 p.m. in the Baird Auditorium, with a reception to follow in the Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals.

Key question: Will Richard Sternberg, the Smithsonian scientist who was practically driven from his post because he permitted an ID-friendly paper to be published be invited? (See www.rsternberg.net) I hope so, and if he isn’t, I’ll give him my ticket and cover the event from the ceiling fan.

Details to follow.

Darwinian evolutionist H. Allen Orr has written a piece in the New Yorker“Devolution” The article is most interesting because, unlike the vast majority of hostile commentators, Dr. Orr, an evolutionary biologist, has actually felt it necessary to find out something about intelligent design theory before trying to trash it.

In fact, he informs us that

"Many scientists avoid discussing I.D. for strategic reasons. If a scientific claim can be loosely defined as one that scientists take seriously enough to debate, then engaging the intelligent-design movement on scientific grounds, they worry, cedes what it most desires: recognition that its claims are legitimate scientific ones.

"Meanwhile, proposals hostile to evolution are being considered in more than twenty states; earlier this month, a bill was introduced into the New York State Assembly calling for instruction in intelligent design for all public-school students. The Kansas State Board of Education … [a number of ID-related events are cited] In the past few years, college students across the country have formed Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness chapters. Clearly, a policy of limited scientific engagement has failed. So just what is this movement?"

It is convenient that Orr admits, up front, that stifling discussion of ID was a strategy and that the strategy has failed. Overall, he writes a surprisingly reasonable hostile account in which he makes absolutely clear that Darwinian evolution means evolution with no design or purpose and that that is the only type of evolution that is permitted to be taught in the school system.

Vast reams of media coverage of the school board controversies fail to articulate that simple fact. And if you do not know that fact, you will not know why Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness ( IDEA) chapters are springing up among students. In other words, it is not because students have taken a shine to the Religious Right. It is rather that, as Casey Luskin, IDEA Center co-president writes,

"The reason why so many students are interested in intelligent design is because they aren't hearing about it in their classes, or are hearing about it in an exceedingly one-sided manner. This peaks their interest because students are keen at smelling when there is information they aren't being told."

Luskin, an apparent enfant terrible, also challenges Orr on a sensitive point:

"I publicly invite Allen Orr to explain to us how his Darwinian view of life interfaces with his personal religious beliefs. Public disclosure of Orr's personal views would go much further towards reassuring people that it is possible to believe in God and evolution than would his mere citation to a statement by a pope who said that God and evolution are compatible. My e-mail address is casey@ideacenter.org. "

Any other Darwinist is welcome to do the same, I presume.

The other thing I liked about Orr’s comments is that he refrains from foolish scaremongering about the Religious Right. I presume that that is because he is a sensible person, but would add that the vast majority of Americans do not believe in Darwinian evolution, so presumably they are all the Religious Right, in which case ...

Luskin also notes that he has written to the New Yorker to complain that Orr has misrepresented ID theorist Bill Dembski, and has posted comments at “Refuted Before it was Written: A Guide to Allen Orr’s ‘Devolution’ Article in The New Yorker”
Dembski posted something brief on this at his own blog, Uncommon Descent and apparently plans to say more.

But overall, see how the Internet changes things? The New Yorker might majestically refuse to publish Dembski’s or Luskin’s response, but neither can prevent Dembski or Luskin from reaching whatever section of the public cares—at next to no cost.

The New Yorker must sell advertising to meet huge production costs, but a blogger doesn’t need to do much more than a journalist would. Legacy mainstream media has not grasped the significance of this, just as traditional manuscript illuminators did not grasp the significance of the new trade of printing. The illuminator generally thought that the printer was producing an inferior product, and in some ways that was true — but not in the ways that were important to the customer. The customer, for example, just wanted a Bible; he did not need an illuminated Bible. In the same way, you don’t really need hundreds of colourful ads for perfume and makeup. You just want a discussion of what’s going on, with links so you can follow up for yourself.

As a matter of fact, while we are on this subject, I came across another interesting statistic about the decline in the fortunes of legacy media. According to former publishing exec Russ Smith (who writes under the soubriquet “Mugger”), “In the post-Watergate 1970's, some 25 to 30 percent of Americans reported to the Harris Poll that they had a great deal of confidence in the press, more than they had in Congress, unions or corporate America. In the 2005 poll, the press ranked only ahead of law firms, with 12 percent reporting high confidence in the media.”

In one sense, this is easy to understand. Woodward and Bernstein revealed political misdeeds that were really happening! Dan Rather (pajamagate) and Newsweek (Korangate) were revealing their fantasies. We enjoy popular fiction, but we don’t believe it. And when it is fiction about us, we just lose interest after a while and turn to other sources.

American Association for the Advancement of Science CEO Alan I. Leshner Let fact and faith coexist outside schools wrote a fairly typical piece of bumph for a Kansas paper, equating doubts about Darwinism with trying to introduce religion into the school system. He warns,
Pressures are mounting to introduce nonscientific, anti-evolution rhetoric into science classrooms, alongside well-supported facts about life's origins.

(Origins? About life’s origins, as opposed to its development or evolution, there are in fact no well-supported theories. There is a huge variety of poorly supported ones. But let’s let that pass for now.)

Each time one of these boffins bloviates, it becomes clearer that Darwinism is the religion of the school system. That is the fundamental reason why questioning it is so controversial. As I said in By Design or by Chance?, Darwinism—whether true or false scientifically— is the creation story of atheism. It enables you to account for life without design. If it is true, fair enough, but if you are not allowed to question it, you will never know whether it is true.

Anyway, Leshner goes on to say, “ The United States is not alone in these struggles. In Brazil, where the country's Protestant evangelical population has undergone a fivefold increase since 1940, creationists have ramped up efforts to combat the teaching of evolution.”

Enezio E. de Almeida Filho writes from Brazil to reply,

Can someone correct Leshner's misstatement about Brazil? It is true that evangelical protestants have undergone 'a fivefold increase since 1940', however they have no relevant impact upon Brazilian society -- culturally speaking they are kind of 'second class' citizens [kind of pariahs] and have a hard time to have a say in important cultural issues, and remain mostly 'sociologically unseen' or unwanted by the rest of our society. These creationists haven't 'ramped up efforts to combat the teaching of evolution'.

Leshner should do his homework better: the Brazilian scenario is totally different from the 'cultural warfare' in the United States -- the only church openly promoting creationism in Brazil since its inception is the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a very small Christian denomination in Brazil. But even this very small segment of Protestants hasn't 'ramped up efforts to combat the teaching of evolution' but to'teach the controversy'.

Give me a break, Leshner, these little creationists are no threat to you nor Darwin!

Thanks Enezio. But remember, Leshner is using Brazil’s second class citizens as a bug-a-boo to frighten his fellow science boffins. Getting it right about them would spoil the fun. What is he going to say, after all? That people are beginning to doubt Darwinism because it is doubtful?

If you have been following the intelligent design (ID) controversy, you could paper a wall with announcements by boffins that ID makes no testable or falsifiable predictions. Of course, many of the same people do their best to keep ID-friendly papers out of journals. But now and then they slip up, and a paper gets published.

In his recent paper in Rivista di Biologia, “Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force?”, Jonathan Wells makes the following testable predictions regarding his hypothesis that the centrioles of cells generate a polar ejection force:

http://www.tilgher.it/(zblz3wi2x3gdp545ombvkm2i)/index.aspx?lang=eng&tpr=4&act=abs&id=3216

A. It [the hypothesis] predicts that spindle microtubules in animal cells begin to oscillate at the beginning of prometaphase, and that those oscillations rapidly accelerate until metaphase, at which point they decelerate or cease. By metaphase the oscillations may be of such high frequency that they would be difficult to detect, but the lower frequency oscillations early in prometaphase should be detectable by immunofluorescence microscopy and high-speed camera technology.
B. It predicts that the centriole contains a helical pump powered by dynein molecules located in the inner wall of its lumen. Improved imaging techniques may make it possible to elucidate
the complex internal structure of centrioles, characterizing more fully the helical structures in their lumens and determining the precise localization of dynein in their inner walls.
C. It predicts that the polar ejection force is regulated, at least in part, by intracellular calcium concentration. It should be possible to test this by observing chromosome behavior in the spindles of dividing animal cells while artificially raising the concentration of intracellular calcium during prometaphase or blocking its rise at the beginning of anaphase.

He adds, “If the hypothesis presented here withstands these and other experimental tests, then it may contribute to a better understanding not only of cell division, but also of cancer.”

Wells makes clear in the paper that his assumptions are based on the thesis that the centriole is a designed object, like a machine, and should be studied as one. Asked whether he considers the centriole irreducibly complex, he told me, “I suspect so, but I don't know. The fact that there seem to be no intermediates (you either have a working centriole, or you don't) strongly suggests irreducible complexity, but people would have to do experiments similar to those done on the bacterial flagellum (i.e., removing parts to find out if they're needed for function) to find out for sure.”

About getting his paper published, Wells noted that Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum is an English-language peer-reviewed journal published in Italy, “whose editor (Giuseppe Sermonti) is a geneticist critical of Darwinism.”

Yo, Darwinists. Get hold of that editor’s e-mail address and start showering him with abuse immediately. Why should an American, Richard Sternberg, be the only one who has to apply to the government to stop the persecution? You shouldn’t let the Americans be first at everything; it looks bad.

Apparently, 18 black Canadian squirrels were released at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. in the early 1900s. As anyone who has lived in Toronto would predict, they soon began to jostle the local gray squirrels at area bird feeders.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/18/AR2005051802251.html

The Post writer announces,

That's because those 18 squirrels -- whose coats of lustrous black set them apart from the native animals -- were the beginning of a shift that has changed the complexion of Washington's backyard critters. Now, probably because of a slight evolutionary advantage conveyed with a black coat, the descendants of these squirrels have spread all the way into Rockville and Prince William County.

Seriously: Scientists say it's a real-life example of natural selection at work, which has rolled on for a century here without much public notice.

"It shows the spread of a gene within a population," said Richard W. Thorington Jr., a Smithsonian Institution researcher working on a book that includes a history of the District's black squirrels. "That is evolutionary change before your eyes."

Wow. Seriously? Evolutionary change before my eyes? But wait a minute ... The Post writer then goes on to say,

The story of Washington's black squirrels -- which scientists say are just a color variation within the common gray squirrel species -- still has its shades of mystery.

Yes, that’s right, folks. The grey and the black squirrels are actually two coat-type varieties of the same species. They are about as different as black and white alley cats are from orange and white alley cats.

Here in Toronto, the two coat types have persisted together for many decades, doing a proportionate amount of damage to spring flower gardens and native bird feeders. But apparently in the Washington area a century ago, for some reason, only the greys were found, until a zookeeper acquired some of the black variety from Canada and let them go.

In a classic example of Darwinian just-so storytelling, we are informed, “Here's why some scientists believe the black squirrels were multiplying: In winter, their dark coats allowed them to retain heat from sunlight, leaving them less desperate for warmth than their lighter-colored cousins.”

Well, if that is the case, why do the supposedly disadvantaged grey-coat type squirrels survive at all in cities like Toronto that can become much colder than Washington? Yet their relative proportion of the squirrel population here does not seem to have changed much over the decades.

In reality, the black squirrels are multiplying in Washington because that’s what squirrels do, given a chance. In Toronto, the black squirrels tend to be somewhat more numerous than the grey, but unlike the Darwinists, I am not going to offer a just-so story as to why that is so. A genome map might possibly demonstrate that black is the dominant colour, but I don’t know of any such map in existence now.

Oh, by the way, do the squirrels even care which coat type they are? One scientist explains,

“... the squirrels don't appear to treat each other differently because they are black or gray.” “They don't seem to care,” he said.

Personally, I can’t imagine why the squirrels would even know, let alone care.

The key thing to see here is that the Darwinist wants us to understand that the process that (he hopes) can explain why pesky black-coat-type squirrels can get established in the Washington area alongside grey members of the same species can also explain the entire history of life. But he never demonstrates that point, he merely assumes it as an article of faith. And he then expects the rest of us to take these utterly trivial instances of animals adapting to an environment as evidence for his thesis. No wonder they are restless over there in Kansas.

Just when I wondered if legacy media could get any dozier about the controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design, a liberal media watchdog, Media Matters, http://mediamatters.org/items/200505130008] jumps into the fray and proves that the depths haven’t been reached yet.

The May 12 edition of Lou Dobbs Tonight featured Jonathan Wells for intelligent design, John Morris for creationism, and Michael Ruse for Darwinism:

On the show, Dobbs remarked, “The fact is that evolution, Darwinism, is not a fully explained or completely rigorous and defined science that has testable results within it. Like a – “ (At that point he was interrupted by a panelist.)

Shocked, just shocked, Media Matters informs us,

During a debate on "the origin of life," CNN host Lou Dobbs stated on his own authority: "The fact is that evolution, Darwinism, is not a fully explained or completely rigorous and defined science that has testable results within it." The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which advises the federal government on “scientific and technical matters,” disagrees with Dobbs’ “facts” about evolution.

Sure it does. With the exception of one lone member, Phil Skell, NAS is an establishment organization obediently yapping the party line—or to put it more politely, defending Darwinism as one of their big causes, oblivious to the questions that are growing all around us about whether mind really evolves from mud.

Media Matters, has it ever occurred to you ... like, is it even barely possible that ... oh, I am not going to complete this thought for you. Compare your ridiculous sucking up to an establishment organization with the insightful Michael Powell article above, and then go rend your hearts and not your press passes.

To find out more about my book on the intelligent design controversy, go to By Design or by Chance?

Amazingly, this Washington Post story avoids the cliches and the Darwinist super-yes-men, and talks about some of the real issues behind the intelligent design controversy, in a profile of Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, who did more than anyone else to force the issues into the open:

“Phillip is absolutely right that the evidence for the big transformations in evolution are not there in the fossil record -- it's always good to point this out,” Provine says. “It's difficult to explore a billion-year-old fossil record. Be patient!”

Provine's faith, if one may call it that, rests on Darwinism, which he
describes as the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. The English
scientist's insights registered as a powerful blow -- perhaps the decisive one -- in the long run of battles, from Copernicus to Descartes, that removed God from the center of the Western world.

“Give Johnson and the intelligent-design movement their due -- they are
asking terribly important questions," says Stuart A. Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity at the University of Calgary. “ To question whether patterns and complexity, at the level of the cell or the universe, bespeak intelligent design is not stupid in the least.

“I simply believe they've come up with the wrong answers.”

Wow, an intelligent discussion!

Here are some excerpts from a letter I wrote, thanking journalist Michael Powell:

"As one who spent three years researching and writing a book on the intelligent design controversy (By Design or by Chance? Augsburg Fortress, 2004), I was impressed with your willingness to actually look at the issues the ID folk raise.

...

"Michael, your signal achievement, in my view, is to get PAST the idea that the best way to understand the ID controversy is to hear what the detractors of the ID folk say and then print that as if it is some sort of satisfying truth.

"Not so. The issues are much bigger than the detractors of the ID guys, or even the ID guys themselves. Those ID guys could well perpetrate a tragedy they don't even understand, by promoting a materialistic conception of God (even if they don't intend to - witness the law of unintended consequences).

"But who knows? Generally, you will find, the ID guys are a much more interesting lot than their professional detractors, who - in my experience, tend to be super-yes-men, promoting establishment thinking that is actually quite unsound at many points, but the super-yes-men are the last to know. They are certainly not my favourite type, anyway, when I am looking for a really good story, which is why I find the dependence of so many journalists on the Darwinist super-yes-men so much less than praiseworthy."

Many people have worried a lot about genetic determinism—the belief that there are master genes that control our behaviour — crime, obesity, sexuality, honesty ...

There are two separate worries here: First, is it true? If so, free will does not really exist.

More practically, what if large numbers of people believe it is true, even if it isn’t? Then those people will act as if they, and we, have no free will. They will have a bad effect on society even if they are wrong.

Fortunately, recent developments in genetics are making clear that this sort of “reductionism” — reducing everything to a single factor — is nonsense. There are no single genes that control human behaviour. Popular literature often does not catch up with new science developments very quickly, so it might be helpful to summarize a couple of key points here:

Not very long ago, as MIT science historian Evelyn Fox Keller notes in The Century of the Gene, biologists thought that if we could read the human genome, it would explain everything there was to know about a person. As Francis Crick put in in 1957, “DNA makes RNA, RNA makes protein, and proteins make us.” This was the “central dogma” of biology for nearly fifty years.

Quoting another scientist from about 15 years ago, Keller says,

“Spelling out his ‘Vision of the Grail,’ Walter Gilbert wrote, “Three billion bases of sequence can be put on a single compact disc (CD), and one will be able to pull a CD out of one’s pocket and say, ‘Here is a human being; it’s me!’”

Then she adds, “Today, almost no one would make such a provocative claim.”

So why would almost no one make such a claim today? Both genes and organisms have turned out to be much more complex than anyone imagined. As Keller notes, “Indeed, the functional gene may have no fixity at all: its existence is both transitory and contingent, depending critically on the functional dynamics of the entire organism.”

As a recent article in the Guardian Education supplement explained, most genes do not do only one job:

“Rather than having a single major function, most genes, like roads, probably play a small part in lots of tasks within the cell. By dissecting biology into its genetic atoms, reductionism failed to account for these multitasking genes. So the starting point for systems biologists isn't the gene but rather a mathematical model of the entire cell. Instead of focusing on key control points, systems biologists look at the system properties of the entire network. In this new vision of biology, genes aren't discrete nuggets of genetic information but more diffuse entities whose functional reality may be spread across hundreds of interacting DNA segments.”

Put simply, if you have a tendency toward inactivity that causes you to gain weight, there isn’t a “gene” that makes you fat. Your tendency is likely the result of a system with hundreds of components, interacting with other systems with hundreds of components. The bad news is that it is more difficult to understand than a simple system. The good news is that it is much easier to influence than a simple system, because you can influence many different components. So biology is not destiny after all.

Of course, we can expect years of headlines about the “shoplifting gene,” the “compulsive spending” gene and so forth. Promising ideas die hard. That little word “gene” promises us absolution without ever having to say we’re sorry—or even admit that we did something bad.

Jonah Goldberg takes after the frightened whine of the Darwinists that if anyone is allowed to question Darwinism (the theory that life moved from mud to mind in 15 billion easy and obvious steps), we will soon find ourselves in a theocratic state. Why? We didn’t have a theocratic state before Darwinism, so why should we after it?

He writes, "I can take the somber, frightened "special reports" on National Public Radio, where you can literally hear the correspondents wringing their hands over the possibility that the "Darwin fish" affixed to their Volvos will be banned. I can even handle the dog-whistle shrieks of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd types about the looming Inquisition led by an alliance of the new German (wink, wink) pope and the Kansas Board of Education. [both the new Pope and the Kansas Board have questioned Darwinism recently - d.]

"But the most recent episode of NBC’s doddering “Law & Order” series is where I draw the line. The episode tells the story of a racist who committed murder nine years ago but who, in shame and remorse, subsequently found Jesus and was born again. In the nine years since he dedicated himself to Christ, he has led an exemplary life. But his guilt is discovered, and he decides to confess and show true contrition."

Goldberg’s screed mainly concerns a stupid TV program, as you will see. But the program is very much the kind of thing that people whose logo is a fish with rubber-boots feet would listen to for clues about their future. Advice to such persons: Tea leaves are more relaxing and just as useful. Honest.

This week seems to be a real bonanza for ID TV:

Last night (May 9, 2005) ABC News Nightline, hosted by George Stephanopoulos, featured William Dembski vs. Michael Ruse on the Kansas science standards hearings—but really about intelligent design theory in general. Interestingly, both Ruse and Dembski think that ID will prevail over time. That makes sense to me; most of the world does not accept naturalism, so forcing it on the public will not likely succeed, but See the show, and decide for yourself.

Also note Steve Meyer debating Eugenie Scott of the Darwin lobby. Meyer, remember, was the author of the ID-friendly article in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, on account of which his editor had to ask for protection from the Office of Special Counsel of the United States government. Ironically, Sternberg was not even a supporter of intelligent design, particularly.

A recent article in the Guardian’s Education supplement suggests that new findings in genetics have undermined Darwinist Richard Dawkins’s famous “selfish gene”to the point where it is a meaningless concept.

Rather than having a single major function, most genes, like roads, probably play a small part in lots of tasks within the cell. By dissecting biology into its genetic atoms, reductionism failed to account for these multitasking genes. So the starting point for systems biologists isn't the gene but rather a mathematical model of the entire cell. Instead of focusing on key control points, systems biologists look at the system properties of the entire network. In this new vision of biology, genes aren't discrete nuggets of genetic information but more diffuse entities whose functional reality may be spread across hundreds of interacting DNA segments.

M‘bye, Dawkins. Whoops, don’t forget those selfish genes of yours, even though they’ll forget you. Seriously, as a result,

Systems biology is reasserting the primacy of the whole organism - the system - rather than the selfish behaviour of any of its components.

Systems biology courses are infiltrating curricula in campuses across the globe and systems biology centres are popping up in cities from London to Seattle. The British biological research funding body, the BBSRC, has just announced the creation of three systems biology centres in the UK. These centres are very different from traditional biology departments as they tend to be staffed by physicists, mathematicians and engineers, alongside biologists. Rather like the systems they study, systems biology centres are designed to promote interactivity and networking.

This new trend should be good news for the intelligent design scientists, who tend to thrive better in interdisciplinary groups than in closed, reductionist ones.

Recently, an extinct group of tiny people, Flores man, was found and declared to be a new human species.

However, in the following puzzling development,

INDONESIAN scientists have found a community of Pygmy people on the eastern island of Flores, near a village where Australian scientists discovered a dwarf-sized skeleton last year and declared it a new human species, a newspaper says.

This latest discovery will likely raise more controversy over the finding of homo floresiensis, claimed by Australian scientists Mike Morwood and Peter Brown in September last year. They dubbed the new species "hobbits".

Kompas Daily reported yesterday that the Pygmy community had been found during an April expedition in the village of Rampapasa, about 1km from the village of Liang Bua where the "hobbits" were found.

Could it be something in the air down there that shrinks people?

Anyway, this discovery certainly ratchets up the row over origins because some scientists dispute that Flores man is really a new species at all, and are accusing its promoters of scientific “terrorism”.

A new ID blog, Telic Thoughts has hit the scene. I like it because the people involved seem to be mostly young guys who want to have fun. Check out the following, especially, “Stone tools and arguments against design”

A question I sometimes ask is this: If I came across a weathered wooden kitchen tool among the weird driftwood on a beach, how would I know it was a kitchen tool? I would likely suspect it was a tool even if I did not know what it was for. (I have seen many kitchen tools hung up for sale in those fancy new kitchen stores whose use eludes me.) Someone should study just how it is that humans infer design.

A science teacher of thirty years’ experience comments on “teaching the controversy” where evolution and ID are concerned:

“Two thoughts about "confrontational mode" from a veteran:

1. It is an important part of learning science to learn about the confrontation of ideas. Think back to 1900 and the Light-is-a-Particle vs Light-is-a-wave controversy. A confrontation of ideas is not the same as an enmity between persons. Honest and clever men and women sat on either side of that fence, and in the end the evidence forced a conclusion that neither side could possibly have imagined.

2. No less a teacher of teachers than the great Elgin Wolfe held that a perfectly acceptable answer in science to a difficult question is, "We don't know." He suggested that if students asked, e.g., where the first cell came from, we could simply say, ‘We don’t know. Maybe it will be your Ph.D. thesis which will enlighten the world on that subject.’ (Now, he also suggested that if students asked questions the answer to which the individual teacher did not know the answer, then the correct response would be, ‘I don't know, but I’ll find out from people who do know. You try to find out as well, and let's see which of us can get the answer first !’)

Good thoughts. My own much more limited experience in adult ed has been that students do not respect teachers who can’t/won’t/are not allowed to address the subjects that the students really know are controversial. The only difference between adults and teens, in this regard, is that the adults are too polite to display their disdain.

It used to be that the main problem areas were sex education and drug-proofing. Some people didn’t want the teachers to talk about what all the students knew about, or soon would. It shows how serious the origins debate has become when the same restrictions are now being applied to discussions of evolution versus intelligent design. If past experience is any indicator, the people who want to ban discussion of ID from the classroom will flop miserably, on principle, and deserve to.

Decades ago, when I was a live-in counselor at a group home for teen boys, I used to be amused at the way they'd "nark themselves off." Far from being the street-smart kids you might see on TV or the movies, some of these kids were virtually clueless.

On my very first day on the job, I walked into one of the bedrooms where a couple of they guys were hunched over working on something. I didn't think anything of it until one of the kids looked up, saw me, and shouted, "B-u-u-u-sted!"

The other shot back, "Shut up, man! He didn't know what we were doing!"

He was right, I didn't. Turns out they were assembling a home-made bong in anticipation of scoring some good weed. I confiscated the bong, and they didn't have access to the outside world for awhile.

But over the years I've found that it's not just clueless boy's-home teens that bust themselves. Sometimes it's people whom you'd think would have every reason to keep their mouths shut. But a wagging tongue can be tough to still.

For example, back in 1989 or thereabouts, California approved an extremely controversial set of science standards that were calculated to silence criticism of evolution in public school classrooms. This was evident if you happened to know anything about biology and the philosophy of science. But the writer of some of the most controversial sections, Kevin Padian a Berkeley paleontologist and NCSE activist, couldn't help but boast of his and proudly proclaimed, in print no less: "As for the religious right, the new Science Framework leaves them totally disenfranchised from the public educational system in California."¹

Bu-u-u-sted.

More recently, as I noted in my blog, "The Stricture of Scientific Resolutions," the Council that governs the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington provided another classic when it posted a statement regarding its publication of a major pro-ID paper by the Discovery Institute's Steve Meyer.

A brief passage from the statement is a marvel of self-indictment--all the more so when you consider that it's the result of serious deliberation among the Council's thoroughly self-conscious members. The passage reads: "The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity. Accordingly, the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings."

In other words, because the AAAS says ID is untestable and without support, Meyer's peer-approved paper does not meet the journal's standards--a breath-taking display of devotion to scientific ideals, and as blatant an admission as you could ask for that ID-friendly articles will not even be accepted for review, let alone publication. Is it any wonder then, as the anti-ID community constantly laments, that critics "simply doesn't understand how science how science works"?

All together now: B-u-u-u-sted.

The most recent gaffe, however, is a real kicker. In a post on the Website of the anti-ID Kansas Citizens for Science (KCFS), Liz Craig, an officer and media contact for the group blurted out the following regarding the conservative members of the Kansas State Board of Education:

My strategy at this point is the same as it was in 1999: notify the national and local media about what's going on and portray them in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.

There may no way to head off another science standards debacle, but we can sure make them look like asses as they do what they do.

Our target is the moderates who are not that well educated about the issues, most of whom probably are theistic evolutionists. There is no way to convert the creationists.

Wow.

Much has been made by ID foes--almost to the point of hysteria--of the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document," a funding proposal that allegedly reveals a sinister religious agenda. Moreover, the same Web site where Craig posted her comment has a thread in its discussion forums called, "Damning Quotes," the purpose of which is to "to keep track of, and maintain, various 'damning quotes' that have been made in regards to ID, and it's religious nature."

But the "Wedge Document" and all the quotes that KCFS have scraped together simply don't compare to the sheer malice revealed by the above statements. What kind of person can express delight at having disenfranchised an entire segment of the population? What does it take to profess devotion to scientific principles, yet devise policies that amount to laughable non sequiturs and enforce profoundly irrational and anti-scientific behavior? And although smears, slanders and slurs are a disheartingly common element of politics, they somehow seem all the worse coming from an organization that purports to defend the integrity of science--sort of like a cop gone bad.

Which brings me to one final remark: Bu-u-u-sted.

Note
¹ Kevin Padian, "The California Science Framework: A Victory for
Scientific Integrity," National Center for Science Education Reports, Vol 9, No. 6, Nov-Dec 1989, pp 1, 10-11.

Ideas have consequences. That was the title of Richard Weaver's 1948 book which opened with this observation: “Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.” The primary focus at ARN is on the Darwin vs. Design debate, but the reason we think it is such an important debate is because these are powerful ideas that have consequences in many other areas of life. Bioethics is one such area we would like to focus on in this month’s newsletter. What is the underlying ‘metaphysical dream of the world’ that was driving the decisions of those involved in the Terri Schiavo case? For the most part they remain unstated, but like a CSI forensic scientist we can piece together the clues with the help of our featured authors Jim Reitman and Wesley Smith to get a pretty good picture.

Perhaps more painful than any other object lesson to emerge out of the life and death of Terri Schiavo is this recurring realization: Once end of life controversies are relegated to the courts, all the colorful subtleties that comprise meaningful life making it worth pursuing, are bleached white by the caustic chlorine of the ethic of radical individualism, and its derivative Contractual Model of decisionmaking upon which both the courts, and increasingly the medical profession, lean all too heavily. It has become obvious over the last 40 years in a succession of legal controversies over the so-called “end of life” issues that the god of personal autonomy has now bullied its way into medicine and has all but totally extinguished the ethics of care.

Our featured author, Jim Reitman, has tackled three such “end of life” dilemmas in a series of articles promoting a rational alternative to the Contractual Model of decisionmaking, a Wisdom Model based on precepts found in Old Testament wisdom literature. Drawn from the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom Model reveals that ambiguity is the rule rather than the exception in “end of life” decisionmaking, and the added pain and disillusionment of suffering while life remains, typically makes a travesty of ethical individualism and the Contractual Model of decisionmaking: Personal preferences expressed in the face of uncertainty are “held hostage” by the pain of suffering and the contagion of despair. Such preferences are thus bedeviled by ambivalence and jeopardize true community and care. The Wisdom model looks suffering and ambiguity squarely in the face to reveal how these counterparts of suffering induce our profound disillusionment with self-sufficiency and draw our attention away from our own demands and toward a larger design for our lives. Such Wisdom cannot help but restore true community and care to end of life decisionmaking.

The first article deals with the issue of Physician Assisted Suicide and exposes how the radical individualism underlying recent legal precedence in end of life cases has insidiously emasculated the medical profession by ignoring moral deliberation, and eliminating the prerogative of true care and advocacy in end of life scenarios that come to the courts’ attention. The article makes it clear why the next step to Court Assisted Suicide in the Schiavo case was such a short step, revealing how both due process and equal protection for the medically disabled were trampled by the radical individualism that has imbued the “death with dignity” movement with such power that determines the outcome in such cases.

The second article tackles the dilemma of Medical Futility and exposes how the premise that advance directives can truly preserve autonomous choice has really become the “emperor with no clothes.” Even conservative theists have been hoodwinked into believing that Advance Directives, including the Durable Power of Attorney for Healthcare, can really protect the wisdom of community and care against the incursions of legally sanctioned radical autonomy. The Wisdom model illuminates why neither Schiavo’s parents, nor the governor of Florida, nor the medical profession (in their futile attempt to physiologically define the limits of meaningful life), nor the President, nor the Congress of the United States could withstand even the most tenuous and ambiguous of presumptive “previously expressed preferences.” The article also reveals why the very notion of expressed preferences is itself fatally flawed by the ambiguity and uncertainty that typically characterizes end of life decisions.

The third article exposes the deceptive and deadly philosophical underpinnings of the rationale for Partial Birth Abortion as a legitimate solution to the agonizing anguish of Fatal Congenital Anomalies discovered in utero by genetic testing. By revealing how the rationale itself is fatally flawed even in this seemingly logical and acceptable way to mitigate the suffering of bearing a doomed pregnancy to term, the article uses the Wisdom Model to subvert the rationale for abortion in any case, possibly excepting clear and present danger to the life of the mother (as in ectopic pregnancy).

Together, these three articles provide a sound rationale to question radical autonomy as ever constituting an adequate or legitimate basis for finding lasting meaning in so-called “end of life” dilemmas. The Wisdom Model provides a rational template to surface the issues that truly contribute to lasting meaning, and to develop the circle of community that helps discover that meaning over time, as disillusionment and the pain of suffering give way to redemptive purposes in that suffering.

Regular readers may recall that I am reviewing the November 2004 cover story in National Geographic, "Was Darwin Wrong?". NGs tend to hang around a long time in school systems, so a handy source of corrective information may prove useful. Later, I will put all the information on the By Design or by Chance? website as well. Meanwhile, you can find it at the end of each of my blogs, starting with "National Geographic Cheerleads for Darwin but Drops the Baton".

On pages 14–15, we see a moth that has an 11-inch proboscis, and that depends for its sustenance on an orchid found in Madagascar. The orchid sports an 11-inch nectar receptacle. Darwin, on observing the orchid, predicted the existence of the moth. Sure enough, 40 years later, two entomologists found it. NG identifies this relationship as an instance of co-evolution. So far so good …

The problem is, this level of co-evolution is not a good demonstration of how species become other species. Let's keep in mind here that Darwin did not offer to explain to us that the world is full of weird and wonderful things, such as two species that keep developing longer and longer appendages in order to keep up with each other's ever longer appendages. He offered to demonstrate how the whole panoply of life could become what it is today without any design at all. The moth and orchid are not a demonstration of anything like that.

The moth and orchid do provide a good demonstration of how species become extinct. Most species that have ever lived are extinct, for a variety of reasons, so it is worth considering probable causes. These two species have greatly increased their risk of extinction by becoming so dependent on each other. That is, if the moth becomes extinct, the orchid will too. It is too bad that National Geographic wanted to use these exotic life forms to demonstrate origin of species, when they make so much better an example of how radical specialization can help explain extinction of species.

The frustrating thing about the National Geographic cover story on evolution (November 2004) is that it lists a number of facts about the general history of life that are not in dispute (men have nipples and snakes have the remains of leg bones, for example) and then claims these facts as evidences for Darwin's theory in particular. (See pages 12–14.) But Darwin's theory is not distinguished by its ability to come up with an explanation for these effects; it is distinguished by its insistence that all life forms, with all their complexity, arose without any design whatsoever, as an outcome purely of chance mutations, acted on by natural law. As you might expect, the NG article carefully obscures that point.

To see what I mean about explanations, let's look at an alternative source: Some Christians interpret the first chapters of the Book of Genesis literally. I don't myself, but for now, let's do that. Without going any further than Genesis 2:6, I could explain why men have nipples: because Eve was taken from Adam's side, and she needed them even if he didn't. I can possibly explain why the snake once walked, but now doesn't: Perhaps it was a punishment for bad behaviour, though I suspect that the talkative creature in Genesis is no average snake …

Now, let me be quite clear about the point I am making here: All sources of received wisdom or inspiration attempt to explain the way life is; we pay attention to those explanations that accord with our global understanding of life and discount the others. So the mere fact that Darwinism can provide an explanation does not entitle the Darwinist to claim that the facts for which he can offer an explanation prove his theory that life forms develop over time without design. Other explanations must be considered as well. Are other explanations better or worse?

Here is an example: A key fact that NG cites in support of Darwinism is the five-digit limb that characterizes so many vertebrates, whether it appears as a hand, paw, flipper, or wing. Darwin is said to have "supplied the answer" (page 13). The five-digit limb, we are assured, was caused by "common descent, as shaped by natural selection." But was it?

If all these creatures have five-digit limbs simply because they are descended from a common ancestor, we will find that early embryos develop limbs using the same body segments. But they don't. Here is how biochemist Michael Denton describes limb development in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis:

"The forelimbs develop from the trunk segments 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the newt, segments 6, 7, 8 and 9 in the lizard and from segments 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 in man" (page 146). As I said in By Design or by Chance? this finding is more consistent with a design hypothesis than a Darwinian one. It looks very much as though a design is put into effect in each case, and the creature struggles toward its eventual shape using whichever materials are most convenient. It is the goal that is common here, not the source. And goals are associated with design, not chance.

None of this proves intelligent design, disproves common ancestry, or demonstrates that natural selection does not occur. But it does show that the "overwhelming" evidence for Darwinian evolution that we keep hearing about from Darwinists is largely an illusion. The illusion is created simply by appropriating a large base of assorted facts and stating that Darwin explained them, therefore Darwinism is true. No wonder there are now so many controversies over the compulsory teaching of Darwinism in the school system! It will be interesting to see when, if ever, the old mainstream print and broadcast media start to get the picture.

Regular readers may recall that I am reviewing the November 2004 cover story in National Geographic, "Was Darwin Wrong?" NGs tend to hang around a long time in school systems, so a handy source of corrective information may prove useful. Later, I will put all the information on the By Design or by Chance? website as well. Meanwhile, you can find it at the end of each of my blogs, starting with "National Geographic Cheerleads for Darwin but Drops the Baton".

Moving right along here, on page 8, we are told, "Evolution is both a beautiful concept and an important one, more crucial nowadays to human welfare, to medical science, and to our understanding of the world than ever before." First, let's keep in mind that by "evolution," National Geographic means Darwin's theory of evolution, according to which life forms evolved through time from an amoeba to a human without any intelligent design at all. (If you think there is any design at all, you are not a Darwinist.) The term "medical science" struck a chord with me because of a story I researched and briefly told in By Design or by Chance?, and will now present here:

Micah Spradling, who planned to become a doctor and specialize in prosthetics, had no problem in his Texas Tech classes with learning about the evidence for human evolution from lower animals. But he was surprised and concerned when his professor, Michael Dini, demanded in 2002 that he "truthfully and forthrightly" believe in it if he expected a letter of recommendation to medical school. The language is reminiscent of creeds and religious revivals. Worse, Dini was the only professor whose recommendation would be relevant to Spradling's career plans.
When it comes to medicine, Dini argued, on his Web site: "How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology?" Acknowledging that all the needed information on human ancestry is not yet available, he said that if physicians do not accept common ancestry of humans and lower animals, it is easy to imagine that they can make "poor clinical decisions."

Several area doctors took issue with Dini's claims and said that evolution has nothing to do with clinical decisions. "That would be like Texas Tech telling him he had to be a Christian to teach biology," said one. He asked: "How dare someone who has never treated a sick person purport to impose his feelings about evolution on someone who aspires to treat such people?"

The university backed Dini, arguing that the decision to write a letter of recommendation was a personal one. It also claimed in published documents that Dini was a devout Christian who had studied for the priesthood and that his criteria "are not discriminatory against Christians." The university's Honors College had also named him Teacher of the Year in 1998 1999. Michael Duff, in his column in Universitydaily.net, described Dini as "defending his profession against barbarians who would tear it down."

It came out that Dini was in the habit of talking about religion in his biology class. One student claimed that the professor wasn't "anti-religion" but that he "just believes that religion has no insight on evolution," a comment that gives more insight into the character of the class discussion than the student perhaps realized.

Liberty Legal Institute, which specializes in religious freedom, contended that Dini is a state-paid official using a state-funded Web site to discriminate. In January 2003, the US Justice Department investigated a complaint filed by the Institute.

After discussions between the university, the Liberty Institute, the Justice Department, and Dini, Dini changed his policy in 2003. He changed the wording slightly so that students must be able to explain the Darwinian theory of evolution in scientific terms, while not being required to explicitly profess a belief in it. Justice department lawyer Ralph F. Boyd, Jr., assistant attorney general for civil rights, said:
The new policy rightly recognizes that students don't have to give up their religious beliefs to be good doctors or good scientists. A biology student may need to understand the theory of evolution and be able to explain it. But a state-run university has no business telling students what they should or should not believe in.

Micah Spradling was not in a position to wait for the mess to be sorted out the following year. He transferred to Lubbock Christian University. He almost didn't get in because the classes were full, but when LCU officials were shown Dini's original policy, they relented and made a place for him.

So, is the main effect of Darwinism on medicine the fact that it bars entry to those who doubt it? Next time, we will look more at the state of the evidence for the key mechanism of Darwin's theory: natural selection.

National Geographic on why people don't believe Darwinism

Regular readers may recall that I am reviewing the November 2004 cover story in National Geographic , "Was Darwin Wrong?". NGs tend to hang around a long time in school systems, so a handy source of corrective information may prove useful. Later, I will put all the information on the By Design or by Chance? as well. Meanwhile, you can find it at the end of each blog, starting with "National Geographic Cheerleads for Darwin but Drops the Baton."

Moving right along, on page 4, we are informed that "Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory." So, we are told, is relativity, the sun-centred solar system, continental drift, and so forth. They are all theories. And the clear implication is: Shame on you if you do not accord Darwin's theory the same amount of credibility that you give to the fact that the Earth orbits the sun.

Indeed, we are informed that the overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of whether we could classify them as religious fundamentalists, reject Darwin's theory (45 percent are creationists and 37 percent are theistic evolutionists, according to Gallup figures cited by the magazine). Only 12 percent believe that "humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god" [which is what Darwin believed]. The magazine blames these low numbers on creationists who interfere with the teaching of science and on Americans' ignorance about science.

Nonsense. The reasons that so few people believe in Darwin's theory are:

1. It is incredible. We are asked to believe that a pondful of amoebas turned into the French academy (in George Bernard Shaw's famous phrase) with no design or guidance whatsoever. Now, that could be true. After all, some incredible things are true. But the fact that it is incredible makes it a tough sell that requires a lot of credible evidence.

2. It is unlikely. If there really is a God, He almost certainly does affect life on Earth. So we should expect to see at least some evidence of design, and most people say they in fact do.

3. Many facts in nature do not accord particularly well with Darwin's theory. Among the ones discussed in earlier weblogs are the Big Bang, the fine tuning of the universe, the relative rarity of planets like Earth, and the awesome complexity of life forms. The general drift of these findings clearly suggests a designed universe with the creation of intelligent life forms as the goal.

I tend to be suspicious when informed that the reason the vast majority of ordinary people disbelieve in a theory promoted by Top People is merely that the people don't know any better. Almost always, the people do know better. I never realized how much trouble Darwin's theory was in until I started to examine some of the well-written but shallow explanations of why we should believe it.

National Geographic's fancy pouters: Under all that fluff lurks a plain old "Do Not Feed" pigeon!

In recent blogs I addressed the editor's comments, but now let's look at the photos and text. To start, on pages 3 and 17 are some fine photos of fancy breeders' pigeons, and page 16 features an impressive bulldog. Pigeons, like dogs, can be bred to a variety of appearances. Darwin studied fancy pigeon breeding in order to see whether these captive creatures might help him understand how a pond full of amoebas can turn into the French academy.

The trouble is, they don't help us. When pigeons are taken from the wild, artificially segregated, and bred to produce a distinct type, two facts stand out:

a) The breeding decisions are acts of intelligent design, not Darwinian survival of the fittest. The fancy products of human design compare to the natural bird in about the same way as the fancy pet rat compares to the wharf vermin. Almost all the ways in which the human-bred type differs from the wild type make it less fit, not more fit. So Darwinian evolution is precisely what the fancy bred animal cannot contribute to.

b) Segregating birds (or dogs, horses or other animals) in this way enables characteristics that were always possible in the wild type to be artificially protected from the cruelties of nature. If the creatures are released into the wild, any survivors return to a generic type that still offers the fancy possibilities but expresses the ones most likely to promote survival.

Thus, your local urban park is overrun with Do Not Feed pigeons, not a variety of fancy pouters.

So we have not turned a pond full of amoeba into the French academy. All we have done is expressed some interesting possibilities in a protected setting.

Darwin hoped that after millions of years a natural selection process might cause a new type of bird to somehow arise from the pigeon without the input of intelligent design. Could it happen? Maybe, … but fancy breeding does not demonstrate that. Stay tuned. This gets to be even more fun later.

National Geographic and "faith which lies beyond"

Regular readers may recall that I am reviewing the November 2004 cover story in National Geographic, "Was Darwin Wrong?".

At the close of his truly amazing editorial, editor Bill Allen writes,

"Our magazine aims to explore the world, often by highlighting scientific concepts such as evolution. Is this approach necessarily at odds with faith, which lies beyond the possibility of scientific proof? No. … "
Now, the assertion that faith "lies beyond the possibility of scientific proof" is a theological statement. It's rare for editors of secular publications to make such statements. This one is actually a critical theological statement.

Leading Christian in science Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, specifically denounces the view that faith is not based on evidence in his recent book Dawkins' God Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Blackwell 2004). He takes aim at fellow Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, the world's most famous Darwinist who has long used Darwinian evolution as a platform for promoting atheism. McGrath made a special study of Christian theologians to find out if any of them thought, as Dawkins claims, that faith means belief without evidence. He did not find any.

The reason I make an issue out of this is that—perhaps unintentionally—editor Allen has defined faith in a way that undermines it by cutting it off from the world of evidence. A better definition of faith is given in By Design or by Chance?: "belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible" (William James). In that case, evidence becomes important rather than irrelevant. We'll soon see why that would be a problem for National Geographic's defense of Darwinism.

Regular weblog readers will recall that I am reviewing the November 2004 cover story in National Geographic (NG), "Was Darwin Wrong?". NGs tend to hang around a long time in school systems, so a handy source of corrective information may prove useful. Later, I will put all the information on the By Design or by Chance? website.

Editor Bill Allen thinks that the public is confused about what Darwinian evolution means.

In "From the Editor," he writes, "Some of the confusion stems from the phrase the 'theory of evolution.' When scientists say 'theory,' they mean a statement based on observation or experimentation that explains facets of the observable world so well that it becomes accepted as fact. They do not mean an idea created out of thin air, nor do they mean an unsubstantiated belief."

Allen himself sounds a bit confused. No theory becomes accepted as fact. Theories become accepted, period. A theory is an explanation for a pattern of events. No amount of confirmation can make the theory into a fact; it remains a well-confirmed theory.

But who on earth thinks that when scientists use the word "theory" they mean thin air or unsubstantiated belief? The core of the controversy, which is not based on confusion, is the fact that Darwinists attempt to suppress any theory of evolution other than theirs.

Life forms change over time. Various theories try to explain changes, large and small. The question is, what theory explains a change best?

As I said in By Design or by Chance?, "Evolution is the theory that all life forms are descended from one or several common ancestors that were present on the early earth, three to four billion years ago." That theory may be right or wrong, but it does not rule out design.

However, Darwinian evolution—the kind that is taught in school and is controversial—is a theory that "each life form has certain random mutations that make it either more or less fit to survive in a given environment. Over time, these random mutations create the vast array of life forms that we see, from sponges to elephants to people. There is no need for design."

The main reason for confusion, which seems more widespread in media than anywhere else, is that Darwinian evolutionists have largely succeeded in making their particular no-design theory about how evolution happens sound equivalent to the fact of the change in life forms over time. And they can make life very difficult for anyone who disagrees.

As biologist Stephen E. Jones notes, when questioned specifically about whether Darwin might be wrong, "' … evolutionists switch the question to the vaguer term Evolution. But that's not working as well as it used to, hence the tizzy of spin doctoring in major media.

If in doubt, doubt—but now you can check it out!

There have been masses of stories in the print media lately about intelligent design. Some are thoughtful. But unfortunately, in addition to its fair share of ideologues, the print media feature many hardworking and competent but overworked journalists with drop-dead deadlines who simply phone up a local ID opponent and ask for a juicy quote. It shows, too. The good news is that these legacy media practices help to demonstrate the real power of the weblog. Forget the print media. Check out what ID scientists themselves say ID is. A print medium can't let you do that, but a weblog can.

And stay tuned. It gets wilder by the week out there.

Dear Janelle,

These last few months have troubled me deeply. And I have a request that I hope you'll have the courage and strength to honor: If I ever become like Terri Schiavo, please don't put me through what she has endured.

After fighting cancer for 10 years; after suffering through multiple courses of toxic drugs; after two stem-cell transplants and 16 dismal weeks in a hospital room, tied to tangles of tubes, I've only scratched the surface of her misery. I feel as if I've scaled great mountains of suffering only to find I'm in the foothills of a range that towers beyond sight.

Dear, if I'm ever forced to scale that range, if I ever become like Terri — whether through the myriad drugs I'm taking, future treatments or the cancer itself — please don't pull my feeding tube. Instead, if at all possible, take me and my tube home, where I can live out my days with you and the kids, and where friends can come and go as they wish.

Put me in a place where I won't be in the way, but can still sense the activity of life around me. Talk to me; share your hopes, fears and failures with me. Read me books. I may not understand, but perhaps I'll sense the warmth of a lover's voice. And I promise I won't interrupt, or give away your secrets. And deep down inside, perhaps I'll groan a wordless prayer for you.

And please, please, please don't crush what's left of me by taking another lover while I still live. You're my wife, Dear, my only lover. Apart from God alone, you're the one person who daily breathes confidence and acceptance into my life. You're the one with whom I can feel unashamed and completely at home. I can absorb the loss of many things. But please don't rob me of that. Abide with me, as you have done so faithfully through our many years of trauma and tears.

This is my wish, Dear. I hope to live with you a good many years. I hope to grow old with you and see our grandchildren. But if I don't, know that I love you and that I always will. I promise ... just as I did a quarter century ago.

With all my love,
Mark

Note to the reader: If you wish to contact me about this article, you can do so at mhartwig@rmii.com.

Reprinted with permission from Boundless Webzine http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001064.cfm