Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Mr. Darwin Can’t Get a Break
It can’t be easy to be Charles Darwin right now. (I mean, for reasons beyond the obvious.) A meticulous researcher and a serious and deeply respectful man, Mr. Darwin spent years carefully documenting and refining his seminal* theory of evolution through natural selection, delaying its presentation until similar discoveries by fellow British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace prompted him to go public and secure his claim as the father of evolutionary theory.
(And what is it with our British cousins, that they should produce simultaneously two men of such insight?)
Imagine for a moment if Galileo, whose encounter with the Catholic Church has been described in this fine piece by our own @Roderic, was today the target of pseudo-scientific sniping for Galileo’s enthusiastic support of the heliocentric model, and that a cottage industry of questionable academic rigor persisted in attempting to tear that theory down. Ponder a world in which the work of Isaac Newton (another big name in British science) was deemed risible by a gaggle of modern critics, despite his having discovered much of classical physics and — oh, yes — co-invented the calculus because plain old math wasn’t quite up to his needs.
Think about that, because that’s what Mr. Darwin has to put up with every single day.
Okay, there’s nothing wrong with questioning science. In fact, to do science is to question science: that’s what science is all about. But while doing science always entails questioning science, the act of questioning science is not always doing science (if that makes sense: it’s one of those p implies q does not imply that not-p implies not-q situations).
A couple of days ago the British newspaper The Telegraph ran a story about a criticism of Darwin mounted by the woke folks at Sheffield University in the UK. That story is paywalled at The Telegraph, but Breitbart is covering it here. The gist of the story is that the school deems evolutionary biology the stuff of white supremacy. The Telegraph quotes the school as writing “It is clear that science cannot be objective and apolitical…. [T]he curriculum we teach must acknowledge how colonialism has shaped the field of evolutionary biology and how evolutionary biologists think today,” and as calling for the “whiteness and Eurocentrism of our science” to be deconstructed.
It’s bad enough that Darwin’s work is attacked via pseudo-science from the right, as I mentioned recently in this piece (paywalled behind Ricochet) about the work of Stephen Meyer. Now the great naturalist is in the left’s crosshairs as well.
What caught my eye about the Breitbart piece (which was linked indirectly by Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit) was, first, that it is about Darwin, a man I admire and with whom I share a birthday, but also that it mentioned Sheffield University. That august institution came up here recently in this piece I wrote about a quack woke geophysics lecturer at Sheffield calling for an end to the structural racism of the geoscience field. Or something.
* I have read that “seminal” is no longer considered appropriate, when discussing contributions in science. I can’t imagine why not.
Published in Science & Technology
Darwinian evolution (and its descendants) just does not have the power to generate functioning systems from nothing, since it is unplanned and undirected. I’m perfectly willing to see a path of common descent, but someone rigged the game to keep drawing a royal flush at each deal. Nowhere is that more apparent than at the origin of life. Your first replicator is still an incredibly complex structure, and the first thing approaching a metabolism is going to have to involve very tight tolerances. Making this would involve years of painstaking careful synthesis by a team of top flight researchers. Each molecule has numerous locations it could bind the others, most of which are a total failure for the life to be.
Critical race theory is built on the premise that a certain group of people in this country are not capable of operating in a Euro-centric civilization. You could say they have not evolved enough, therefore American civilization is racist because they can’t succeed in it.
IFLS – I F***ing Love Science.
The sausage one was better.
This is why the smart lions go after the young or injured . . .
I’m sure it was. But it was also almost 300 words in response to one sentence of fewer than 20. Maybe you could give me a brief thesis statement?
;)
Are you asking for evidence that the passing on of traits from one generation to the next is achieved through the mechanism of genetics, and that genetic mutation results in variation across generations? Darwin needed variation and inheritance for his theory to work; DNA, of which he knew nothing, provided both.
It’s a closing observation. You mentioned ways in which you think Darwin’s theory differs from modern evolutionary theory, and I was suggesting that the foundation of his theory remains intact, though people sometimes overemphasize the details he didn’t get right.
Yes, we don’t know how life originated. Some share your view that it’s simply impossible that there is a naturalistic explanation. That argument of irreducible complexity has been going on for more than a hundred and fifty years, as examples of what couldn’t possibly have arisen through natural processes have gradually fallen by the wayside.
The problems with leaping to the divine to fill in the gaps in our scientific knowledge are numerous. One big one is that it doesn’t really answer anything. It purports to tell us who, but doesn’t answer the question we’re asking, which is “how?”
You say “nature couldn’t do it.” So I ask you, “how did a divine creator do it?” What was the mechanism?
It isn’t merely an argument from ignorance, it’s an argument that guarantees the perpetuation of ignorance.
That’s what I do when I hunt Zebras.
I am unaware that it has fallen by the wayside. I thought Abiogenesis was still a mystery to people but more and more knowledge has come online about how we went from apes to people.
What I wrote is that examples of so-called irreducible complexity have gradually been demonstrated to be plausibly natural is origin. Not all of them, obviously. But the track record for irreducible complexity arguments is not strong.
Fair point. Maybe abiogenesis is going to be the one that is irreducibly complex as the Christians say but they don’t have a good record.
The greatness of a given scientist is probably best measured in how much false knowledge is replaced with real knowledge.
The goodness of a given scientist is the willingness to nip at the heels of the fortunate great.
It is a fundamental error of the left to confuse the evil use of tools with tools being evil.
The science of evolution evolves.
Tier Zoo is pretty great.
Maybe not. It may be off-topic, but I can’t tell because you won’t tell me what evidence you’re even talking about.
I’m asking what evidence you were referring to.
Ok. In that case, I guess I’ve given my closing observations on that particular topic, since it seems you have nothing to say about them. (I’ve nothing to say about yours either.)
Who does that?
I don’t think I’ve ever even seen an argument from ignorance on the subject. Meyer, for one, is using a completely different argument form. So are Dembski and Behe.
Example?
These threads get confusing. I’ll try to clarify my comment.
Evolutionary theory — the adaptation of organisms based on variability of offspring, natural selection, and inherited traits — is well-supported by the evidence. The mechanisms of evolution are understood at the molecular level: we know how DNA works, how it encodes proteins, how mutations occur and influence genetic expression, how the genome is inherited in the offspring. These are the mechanisms required for evolution to occur. We know that organisms vary in fitness in a particular environment, and that this variability influences the reproductive success of organisms.
This is evolutionary theory in a nutshell. We have ample evidence that these processes work. That’s what I meant.
Is there any specific aspect of that with which you take exception? I’ll be happy to find documentation for you if there is, but I’d like to know specifically what, if anything, you feel skeptical about. For example, if you doubt that mutations occur, or that they can influence the viability of an organism in either a positive or negative way, I’ll try to document that for you. If you’re skeptical that traits are inherited, I’ll do my best to convince you of that. If you don’t believe in selective pressures within an environment, I’ll give that some attention.
Please see above. I’m talking about the evidence for the genetic mechanisms of genetic differentiation through selective pressures.
Well, the assertion that the eye has the characteristic of irreducible complexity is kind of a classic. The first documented instance of the eye being identified as something that could not have evolved incrementally, since its every component must necessarily be fully functional at every stage of its development, occurred in The Continuity of the Schemes of Nature and Revelation by Charles Pritchard in 1866. In fact, we have a great many examples of light-sensing organs, some lacking lenses, some lacking corneas, some little more than light-sensitive patches on skin. There are a great many “eyes” in nature, some extraordinarily primitive, some quite advanced, and many filling the ranges between.
There is a reason that sophisticated men like Michael Behe no longer cite the eye as a good example of irreducible complexity. Biology has outpaced the skeptics.
It’s worth noting, incidentally, that Behe himself said:
That is an acknowledgement that, while it’s possible that so-called “irreducibly complex” systems might arise through naturalistic processes, it just doesn’t seem very likely.
What the irreducible complexity folk offer is sometimes referred to as an “argument from personal incredulity.” That’s fine as a basis for doing further research, but a poor basis on which to make an enormous assertion of fact, such as that an all-powerful being answered all the tough questions for which science has yet to provide us a naturalistic explanation.
That was Richard Dawkins’ phrase for it. I’m not a fan of Richard Dawkins, as I think he makes exactly the same mistake as the intelligent design people, but in the opposite direction. I prefer “argument from ignorance,” which is precisely what the intelligent design people are doing when they invoke irreducible complexity, since what they’re saying is “since we don’t have a natural explanation for that process right now, we will posit a supernatural one that requires no further explanation from us.”
It’s unscientific, and the people who propound it are not doing science.
The answer, it seems, is “No, not that stuff.”
No one disagrees with that. The guys at Answers in Genesis agree with that.
Of course not.
Ok. Good example. (Far as I know.)
You’re not going to characterize an argument as an argument from ignorance on the grounds that the person making it is less than 100% certain there is no other explanation, are you? That’s not the argument from ignorance form of argument. That’s just probabilistic reasoning.
Whoa! Slow down there.
Are you saying that the argument to irreducible complexity is an argument from ignorance? Or are you saying the argument from irreducible complexity to intelligent design is an argument from ignorance?
I’m saying that the argument from irreducible complexity is a claim that a given function could not have arisen through known naturalistic processes. The moment that is used as a justification for a positive claim of a non-naturalistic explanation, it becomes an argument from ignorance.
Ok, so not the argument to irreducible complexity. Just the argument from irreducible complexity to intelligent design.
Good!
Now, first, I don’t recall Behe making an ID argument in Darwin’s Black Box. Just an argument to irreducible complexity, and from there no more than an argument against the gradualist (macro-)evolutionary paradigm.
Second, would you say that an argument from irreducible complexity to intelligent design goes more or less like this?
I’m waiting for replicated results.
Same. It isn’t science to assume humans evolved from micro organisms. It’s a theory and untested hypothesis at best. Until it is repeatable, it isn’t science.
I think it counts if it’s a theory that makes some testable predictions, or if it can be tested indirectly. You can’t repeat the theory that dodo birds lived in . . . wherever they used to live. But there are some ways to test it.
No, I merely have confidence that based upon how things have proceeded thus far that progress will continue apace.
This doesn’t even seem like an audacious claim given that the practical application of this knowledge has begun to bear fruit in forms like mRNA vaccine technology… Which is interesting because RNA’s likely role in the earliest forms of life is the subject of intense interest among evolutionary biologists.
You’re making a distinction, with your from and to, that I’m not willing to make. Science must proceed from the assumption that a naturalistic explanation exists, whether or not we can see it. Those who assert that there is no naturalistic explanation are abandoning science, whether they go on to claim a vague theistic creator, a straight Judeo-Christian God, or just wave their hands and say “well, nature couldn’t have done it.”
Both humility and self-discipline are required of scientists. The “and here a miracle happens” explanation is an option available to theologians, but not to scientists, because the assertion of miracles breaks the rules under which science operates: miracles can’t be replicated, can’t be explained, and can’t be falsified. A scientist faced with a seemingly inexplicable outcome should have the humility to acknowledge that there are natural processes he doesn’t understand, and the self-discipline to resist the urge to invoke magic and walk away from science.
The domain of science does not include the option of miracles.
One of the things that troubles me about the intelligent design argument is that it doesn’t actually answer the questions it is invoked to address. Those questions are questions of “how?” How did the universe come into being? How did life begin? How did organisms reach their current state of diversity?
What intelligent design tries to provide is a who. It says nothing about how, so much neglecting the question that I’ve never heard anyone even pretend to attempt to explain how the hypothesized intelligent designer might have implemented his design.
By presuming a who, the intelligent design advocates seem to believe that the how — the great question of science — is made irrelevant. Why do they think that? Perhaps because they intuitively understand that science stops dead with the invocation of a metaphysical creator: the assertion not only abandons science, but rejects the rules of science and makes any further inquiry pointless.
I have noticed that Intelligent designers are often more interested in G-d than the physical universe. That’s a problem.