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Thing a Day 1: Razib Khan’s Latest Article Was Not Good
So the last time I wrote a post was July 17, 2018. Sure, I comment around here from time to time (last time: April 16, 2019), and I was on quite the streak of promotions. However, I feel I am not contributing much to the conversation around here, and given I submitted grades this morning and am more or less on my own clock now, I’m going to attempt -this week -to have a thing a day I say something about. Doesn’t have to be long. Doesn’t have to be profound. My goal is just to say something about five things this week. Once a day. We’ll go from there.
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Day 1: Razib Khan’s Latest Article Was Not Good
As I read Twitter this morning, I checked PoliMath — a tech worker on the West Coast with a background in conservative protestant circles, who I usually don’t see eye to eye with, but usually find worth contemplating. He tweeted:
https://twitter.com/politicalmath/status/1127973602211459075
“Excellent piece on evolution and conservatives from razibkhan My concern is that conservatives & Christians (well, really everyone) should never be afraid of truth. That and the fact that some of the leaders of “Young Earth” theory are con artists”
And linked to “Conservatives Shouldn’t Fear Evolution.”
It was not an excellent piece. It is, in fact, of a part with a whole bunch of articles I have read over the past year that are “excellent” pieces that state an interesting thesis at the top and then never actually sustain it. They barely even get to the point. And this is why it isn’t an excellent piece. Entirely apart from the correctness of the claim -the case isn’t actually stated in the article.
The proximate cause of the article is a new book by Michael Behe -which he links to other people discussing at a website called Why Evolution Is True to cover, rather than making any case himself. The case may be very good, but I’m suspecting that any conservative -especially the religious conservatives he is most trying to pitch his case to -is not going to just accept the word of the author of “Why Evolution Is True.”
He then states that Conservatives have nothing to fear from evolution and that it is a crowning jewel of Western Civilization.
This is an interesting thesis which will never come up again.
Instead, he pivots to a usefulness claim: that evolution can tell us about the world, and what it tells us is not good for the Left, because it establishes that human nature exists. Another interesting -if less powerful -point. Another point he won’t actually return to or further defend.
The rest of the article is a description of Darwin, Mendel, how the fusion of the two into the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis created Genomics, and what kind of science Genomics does.
At the very end, he disclaims any metaphysical claims by evolution, and makes a Feynman-style appeal for understanding nature as it is, and engaging in reality based politics. Which is fine. But misses the point entirely.
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Now, as a social conservative who is a bit wobbly on evolution — neither really committed to any form of creationism nor fully convinced of evolution — I’m probably Khan’s target audience. I can almost see why he thought this approach would be convincing: I’m basically unaware of the current state of the field, having stopped paying attention some time in college because I had other things to do and am not a biologist. My primary commitments, so far as they touch on the topic, are the religious ones, but if there exists a reading of the evidence that reconciled both evolution and the necessary metaphysical commitments of Christianity, I’d have no difficulty accepting it and carrying on with my life. I’m not attached to what is called a literal reading of Genesis 1 — being perfectly open to the literal reading of Genesis 1 that reads as a blatantly obvious -to an ancient Israelite — myth, that would have been understood, for example, as a cosmic rebuke of Marduk, or something.
So, layer on the empirical evidence that evolution is scientifically supported, genuflect towards socially conservative evolutionists — Mendel and Fisher — and assure them that evolution and Christianity or other social conservative goals are not in conflict. Et voila.
Alas, Khan’s assertions do not a case make.
The admitted fact in the argument is that evolutionists like Richard Dawkins claim that evolution entails atheism. Dawkins is a voice, but he is not the only voice. There are a lot of them. They had a bit of a renaissance a few years ago — the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse and all that. More people have heard of them than have heard of Razib Khan. So I’m not going to take his word for it.
I might be inclined to take the word of one of those Christians who also believes in evolution — one like C. Martin Gaskell — except that the reason I know his name is because when I was a graduate student, he was denied a job because he was an Evangelical who, despite claiming to believe in evolution, albeit of a theistic bent, was considered someone who didn’t believe in evolution.
No, Razib Khan’s word will not be sufficient on this point.
Furthermore, even if his word were sufficient, he would be making an argument that I imagine he would not otherwise countenance: God of the Gaps. This is his weaker case: that evolution is useful to conservatives because it doesn’t contradict social conservative’s commitments to human nature, and in fact it supports them.
Perhaps that is true. It has not always been so. Catholic antagonism to evolution descends from the old evolutionary arguments for eugenics, and for the treatment of humans as just another species of animal. Perhaps evolutionary theory no longer holds those commitments, but there is no reason to believe that a theory that once opposed us, and now happens to support us, will not in the future oppose us again, simply because it supports us now. Khan almost has the parts to make this case — science works towards less wrong positions, Darwin was wrong, Darwin supported the propositions social conservatives opposed, but combined with Mendel, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis no longer opposes social conservatives, and because science is self-correcting, it will not backslide.
I wouldn’t believe that argument without a lot more support, but at least it is an argument in favor of the weak claim. Khan never makes it.
It is the same problem as the God of Gaps. It places God in the place which science does not (yet) see, but does not disclaim science’s ability to one day peak into it. Thus his weak argument is rendered weaker.
But what of his strong argument — that evolution is a crown jewel of Western Civilization?
This argument hinges on the equally unsupported claim that evolution is true, and is the only theory that explains human nature, and many other natural phenomena. Alas, this is question begging. The whole source of dispute is that many Christians do not believe evolution to be true. They believe that much of the evidence for evolution — such as the genetic similarity of all earthly beings, the existence of human nature, and the massive amounts of information encoded in DNA — to be equally evidence of God’s work on earth. I am old enough to remember when the ardent Neo-Darwinian Synthesis position was that the majority of the data in DNA would be vestigial and “junk DNA.” It was the Discovery Institute Intelligent Design people who argued that the “non-coding DNA” would eventually be found to have purposes. Lo, when it did, all the Neo-Darwinian scientists altered their views — but few became Intelligent Design proponents.
And this is the problem that links Khan’s weak and strong arguments: the concern of the conservatives that resist evolutionary theory is that the evidence is not as strong as the proponents believe, but that because evolutionary scientists — a priori — ignore all non-material and non-natural explanations (those metaphysical commitments Khan says they don’t have), they are actually misunderstanding the world. Because they are misunderstanding the world from a particular metaphysical perspective, there is no guarantee that, in the long run, they will continue to — even accidentally -find the truth that is supposed to be the crown jewel of Western Civilization. Let alone that they will continue to be useful to the Right, broadly understood.
Khan has failed to address any of those concerns.
It was thus, not a good article. It failed to do what it set out to do.
I hope, in critiquing it this way, I have not similarly failed.
Published in Education
Most people are talking to themselves, not the people they think they are talking to.
It would be nice to keep up with the arguments in this field, but I don’t think I could wade through the inevitable self-righteousness.
I liked Khan’s article. It is well written and does what it seeks to. It talks about evolutionary biology being confirmed by genetic data. It talks about how it is supported by Christians and is not the property of Atheists, which is obvious to Catholics and Jews. It talks about how the Left is more at odds with evolutionary science and how we would do well to remember that human nature strongly influences us. It also tells us to not be side-tracked by the Young Earth folks.
The crown jewel of the West is the scientific method of which genetic evolution theory is a great early example.
We Sciencians well remember the Scopic Trials St. Darwin endured when Pope George the Seventh-or-thereabouts shot him full of arrows for saying that the galaxy didn’t revolve around the universe and if that doesn’t prove global warming, I don’t know what does.
What is it that it seeks to do? If it’s purpose is to talk about genomics, fine, it mentions that they’re a thing. If it’s trying to support the title I gotta agree with the sword man; it seems pretty short on actual arguments to that effect.
I have been missing me some Sabre!
That’s a good thing; you don’t want to get hit with the Sabre.
Off-topic, since I realize you are criticizing the article’s failure as argument, but still…
Luckily for me I went to Catholic school in the fifties and early sixties. There I was taught that evolution is no problem, as long as we recognize that God had a hand in it. (They maybe wanted to hang on to their pride in Father Mendel.) Made sense to me then and still does. So to me, all this is a false dichotomy.
I hope it is no offense to Muslims (and others) to point out that the claim that a holy book is God’s word, dictated directly contrasts with the claim that a holy book is, instead, merely “the inspired word of God.” That is, the Judao-Christian scriptures were written by inspired humans, not stenographers. That leaves room to be not literalist. And in no human field I am aware of is wiggle room not needed. I do not say it is absent in the Muslim world, but I don’t like it when heads are lopped of in the name of literalism. That stuff scares me, whether now or in 16th century Christian Europe.
As for the aggressive atheists: why bother with them? They can’t know the metaphysical reality any more than I can. There are three great virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity. If we could know, why would Faith be needed?
One thing to keep in mind is that Michael Behe supports common descent from a single ancestor. He just sees no evidence for a mechanism other than design to get from soup to cell to man. In my experience in science, I have not seen evidence for an un-directed origin of life.
There is evidence for common descent. There is plenty of evidence of age. There is also plenty of evidence that the whole game was rigged to produce life.
The authors of the Pentateuch had good reason to believe in a young earth. They inherited, of course, the ancient tribal tales of a common ancestor in Adam and Eve, who lived, according to the O.T. genealogies, about 4,000 or so years ago previously. And the breakthroughs in geology, genetics, DNA, paleontology, and evolution lay far in the future.
There is hardly any excuse, outside of piety, to believe in a young earth today. To my mind, the young earthers and skeptics of evolution are only a bit more credible than flat earthers.
Inflexible literal readings are what puts the ‘fun’ in ‘fundamentalism’.
Until the discovery of radioactivity, the best science indicated a young Earth, well under a million years old. The science to establish the age of the Earth did not exist until the 20th century.