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Uncommon Knowledge: The Deniable Darwin
Is Charles Darwin’s theory fundamentally deficient? David Berlinski makes his case, noting that most species enter the evolutionary order fully formed and then depart unchanged. Where there should be evolution, there is stasis. So, was Darwin wrong?
David Berlinski is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, a contributing editor at Inference: International Review of Science, and author of many books. Berlinski discusses his book The Deniable Darwin and lays out how Charles Darwin has failed to explain the origin of species through his theory of evolution.
Recorded on June 3rd, 2019 in Fiesole, Italy
Published in General
What a fascinating interview, Peter! I could swear I read a book by Berlinski on Darwin and his taking issue in particular with the Cambrian Explosion; I can’t find it listed in my books, so it must have been someone else. He argued many of the same things, particularly the unwillingness for science to look into the many questions that arise. David Berlinski is a delight!
A very fascinating and wide ranging discussion.
Would be a great thing to read about growing up as a child of this man.
The Berinski book you seek may be THE DEVIL’S DELUSION.
The book I’m trying to identify should be on my Kindle, only I can’t find Berlinski listed.
It’s been a while since I read about this, but I think it was the Pre-Cambrian explosion. A huge percentage of known animal species appeared all at once, for some reason. Very few new species appeared before or after that.
If natural selection, evolutionary pressure, etc work as Darwin predicted, this would make no sense.
I’ve been impatiently awaiting this interview since Blue Yeti mentioned that you’d recorded a conversation with Berlinski. And, Robinson, you did not disappoint! I hope you’ll have him back soon – and if it means sending you guys all the way back to Europe, so be it says this fan.
He has to be your most impressively evasive guest. I wonder if you might be able to sink a shot with him on religion against the evangelist athesists with T.S. Eliot:
Peter,
I consider Dr. Berlinski brave and wise for taking the stand that he has. Darwin was referred to as the new Newton but he really wasn’t very bright. The title of the book is ‘The Origin of the Species’. Yet, it is precisely speciation that Darwin gets wrong. Although the Stephen J. Gould (& Niles Eldridge) work in the 1970s really sealed the deal against strict Darwinism, amazingly in 1860 when Darwin had just introduced the theory its flaws were well known. It is said that Darwin was approached by a paleontologist from the British Museum at the time who informed him that the fossil record didn’t support his view of speciation. Darwin is reputed to have told him that “they will find the fossils”. They never did and Gould & Eldridge put the final nail in the coffin of strict Darwinism. However, like Count Dracula, strict Darwinism doesn’t seem to die. It is Dr. Berlinski that must endure the banal attacks of those that cling to Strict Darwinism.
One other thing. In the 1880s, Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton created the theory of Eugenics. He used his cousin’s theory in pure form unchastened by the conflicting evidence. The price of blind ideology can be very high. Nazi doctrine was almost pure Eugenics. If I were to intellectually map the period from 1860 to 1940 it would look like this.
Marxism > Bolshevism > Stalinism
Darwinism > Eugenics > Fascism
Mr. Hayek has provided us with the argument that takes Marxism apart and won’t allow us to waste our time on this false doctrine. We still can’t quite accept the same treatment for Strict Darwinism. They are both killers and should be treated as such.
Regards,
Jim
Heads up, we have another show on intelligent design coming in a couple of weeks with David, Stephen Meyer, and David Gelernter on together. It’s mind-bending.
David’s comment that the Muslim family is the mirror image of the Jewish family – Does that resonate with some of our Jewish members? With cultural roots in the same part of the world, it seems plausible to me that it could be so, but I have not lived in either tradition.
Hooray! Looking forward to it.
Forgive me, but I was under the assumption that 99.9 percent of Doctors were all gung-ho for Darwinian evolution.
Can you be more specific about what you mean by the phrase “all at once”? The Cambrian period lasted anywhere from 13 million to 25 million years. Do you mean in the first day? First week? First year of the Cambrian period? The first ten years? The first million years? More?
If an “explosion” of different species proliferates over 13 or 25 million years, should it really be called an explosion?
How many variants or breeds of dogs are there today – from Great Danes, Irish Wolfhounds to Chihuahuas? Permit me to answer. It’s approaching some 500 recognized breeds – some clearly more intelligent than others. How did all those variations occur in the span of roughly 18 to 30,000 some years when dogs were domesticated from a pack of wolves in Northern Europe based on DNA analysis? How many and what were the genetic factors at play? Now extrapolate those genetic variations over 20 million years or even 300 million years for other species. What kind of, and how many species variations would you anticipate seeing? And what kind of variations would you see when certain physical traits or characteristics help some groups survive and propagate and others to die off?
We know that other primates don’t have the gift of speech like humans do, particularly because of brain development over perhaps a million or a couple of million years. But chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos do have social structures, hierarchies, use tools, and even go to war with other groups of their own species and exhibit rudimentary forms of communication. Was Koko, the gorilla adept at basic sign language? You can judge that for yourself.
Dolphins clearly communicate and cooperate with one another to capture fish, even inventing new techniques to corral fish when one or two dolphins use their tails to rough up the sandy bottoms of shallow water into a wide circle of sand-clouded water that the fish then try to jump out of into the waiting mouths of the other dolphins in the group. Presumably they take their turns on being a sand disturber or a fish catcher.
Why do skeletal structures of fish, birds, and mammals have startling similarities even down to the number and type of bones in fins, wings, and mammalian hands? What accounts for that if not evolution over millions of years from branches sprouting from common ancestors?
Is the fossil record incomplete? Yes it is. Is the fossil record the only method on discovering links between species? No, it’s not. Not since the introduction of genetics, microbiology and the study of chromosomes, and the discovery of DNA.
Someday, Kenneth Miller, a Catholic and an evolutionary biologist…and I’m pretty sure a Republican should be invited to chat with Peter…hey, and you can toss in Brett Weinstein, too (he’s a very reasonable fellow). It sure would be nice to see what they have to say about Dr. Berlinski’s thoughts on this matter.
The hammer, anvil, and stirrup in our ears are left over from gills.
If our Bodies are designed, then the creater was a moron. I am sitting with a sore back today. Our backs are not well designed.
A bunch of animals that could leave fossils.
It is clear that natural and sexual selection work. It is well understood by biologists. We can watch it happen in fast breeding organisms. Why it is such a threat to faith is beyond me.
My God rules over a 50 billion + Light Year wide universe, and still knows my soul. I don’t need to limit Him by saying He can’t use any means he wants.
All one species. Same number of chromosomes.
I don’t expect to see a different number of chromosomes. A mutant with a different number of chromosomes can’t breed, unless there is another mutant with which it is capable of breeding with the same number of chromosomes and they meet each other and don’t eat each other. What are the odds of all that?
Theories are fine. Unprovable theories are a matter of faith.
Yes they are.
Evolution underpins our understanding of all biology. It is supported by evidence.
But, that does not help. No amount of evidence will overcome an article of faith.
Very true. But evolution and Darwinian evolution are not the same thing. Darwin wrote a book called, “Origin of Species” in which he tried to explain where new species come from. Not how we breed a wolf into a beagle, or how some species adapt to their environment over time. He wanted to know how we got wolves in the first place.
While evolution clearly happens, it appears that most of Darwin’s hypotheses were wrong. Which is understandable, since we didn’t understand genetics when he wrote his book 160 years ago (Hint: We still don’t understand genetics.).
I spent 4 years in genetic research, and my only publications are in genetics. I’ve been considering a post about evolution, but I’ve been too lazy to do the research. Maybe I’ll get around to it soon.
But my view is that we still have no idea how new species appear. We’re starting to figure out some of the REALLY RUDIMENTARY principles of genetics, and we’re getting better at manipulating the species we have (which scares me, but that’s yet another post).
So I agree – evolution happens. I personally don’t see a compelling argument against it, although I’m open to listen to anyone’s ideas on this topic. But Darwin was wrong, about most of what he wrote. He is famous because his theories were handy to political leaders of the 1900’s, who used his writings for purposes that would have horrified Mr. Darwin, I suspect.
But he didn’t know where new species come from. We still don’t, and we’re really not even close. Genetic research is exciting because it’s in it’s infancy, and we have so much to learn. Someday we may figure all this out. Or maybe we won’t. I’m not sure. But I AM sure that people will continue to pretend to have all this figured out. Be careful of those people.
We haven’t figured it out yet. Mr. Darwin certainly didn’t.
Unless chromosomal fusion occurred:
Newton was wrong too. So was Freud. So was Aristotle. So were a lot of people.
The attacks on Darwin are not is the vein you talk about. They are meant to attack evolution altogether. Darwin laid the foundation, and changed our ways of thinking.
As to the question of where do species come from, I have to say that it is fuzzy because the term is fuzzy. Wolves and Dogs can interbreed. Therefore, are they the same species? Dogs have different brains and eyes than wolves. A dog and coyote can breed. They sure act differently.
I think part of the issue is that the whole concept of species is unclear.
I like him saying he does not believe in a deceptive designer.
Why oh why, does it threaten people so much to think God set up natural forces to make creation? The whole Universe is just perfect for us to be here, at best we can tell, beyond all odds.
You can blame your sore back on Adam.
And/or Eve.
If you feel the temptation to read a book by David, Susan, surrender to it. The Devil’s Delusion and The Deniable Darwin are both brilliant, but so are all his books. I’m especially partial to David’s introduction to mathematics, One, Two, Three. Note that he’s written several novels as well.
Creationism is so tiresome.
Dr. Berlinski is brilliant in a variety of ways but his greatest trick is in how well he begs the question… What’s mystifying to me is: why do people embrace this? If God is what he claims, he could have done anything he wanted, one would suppose. If that is the case, God was rather slap-dash and wasteful in the path he took in arriving at what is presumably the point of this all… that being us.
So, why is Darwinian evolution true regardless of the existence of the Almighty? The fossil record tells us it is, of course. Throughout the history of the Earth we can see biological history etched into the very stones of the planet, marked by periods in which the vast, vast majority of the creatures which we can find evidence for simply vanish.
At the K-T Boundary we find evidence of a great catastrophe: it is a location in time at which it is estimated that some 75% of all animal species which inhabited the planet suddenly died. (As time goes by, we may find that estimate only increases as the number of fossil species we discover goes up.) What is remarkable about this is not the fact that so many species vanished, but the fact that so many of the species we see around us today were simply not there.
If you view the K-T Boundary (the fifth such great extinction) as a barrier through which only a number of species could squeeze (an evolutionary keyhole, if you will) the creatures you find in the immediate aftermath are all similar in their anachronism; they don’t exist today and today’s creatures (with some notable exceptions) cannot be found.
From whence did the species we see in the modern era come? What of the whales? Elephants? What of the humans? The answer of course lies in the fact that modern creatures all had parents, who in turn had parents and so on and so forth, such that if you could by some magick have every generation’s creatures link hands (or paws) with their mothers ad infinitum you could look from one end of history in modern time all the way back to the KT Boundary through innumerable individuals and see the gradual changes which occurred over each generation – and just as importantly, the places where some important splits occurred – revealing an unbroken chain of life that ultimately links us back to the animals which crawled through that keyhole.
It is of course crude to say that “Humans = Fish + Time”; you have to toss in plenty of other things like “sexual reproduction,” “selection pressure,” “random extinction events” and the like, but the point remains: Whether by hook or by crook we are all members of the same tree of life, separated though we are by space and time.
The fact that this happened is not in dispute outside of some circles of fundamentalists. The question is: How? The mechanism is the question, not its having happened. As it is understood now, traits are heritable due to information being encoded in our DNA which is passed down to our offspring via our gametes. There are other means of reproduction, but within this paradigm – children born of parents who in turn inherit their genetic information from their parents – our answers ultimately will lie.
Hold on to your wallet if somebody begins to tell you something else happened… or at least get them to show their work. Darwinism is even nice enough to make predictions of what we should find and where – or more precisely when – and then delivers the goods.
The ability to make predictions and have those predictions borne out by facts is the mark of a strong scientific theory, and not one which should be discarded cavalierly.
I’m with you on that. The idea that everything appeared 6,000 years ago or something – I don’t get it.
But I don’t think we understand how all this works. Maybe some day.
Lastly, I must point out something which is flatly wrong.
In the last 5 minutes of the interview Peter asks David about the Second Law objection. The answer to this is as simple as looking up; @peterrobinson, please hear me! I wish you could go back and ask this question again.
The Earth is not a closed system, it is powered by an external source of energy called “the Sun.” When examined from the perspective of the entire solar system, entropy has increased, even if in relatively small, local areas order has increased at the price of greater entropy elsewhere.
In fact, life increases entropy. Turbulent systems dissipate heat faster. Life is the universe’s way to running itself down faster.
Nerds.