Evolution II

The Arguments

The first thing to say about this debate is that is is not, as some would have you believe, a straight fight between rationalists and theists; Darwinists and creationists. Not everyone who disagrees with aspects of Darwinian natural selection believes that God made the earth in seven days, and that Adam was the first man, a mere few thousand years ago. Nevertheless, Darwinists continue to describe any and all dissenters as creationists – making absolutely no distinction between extreme religious fundamentalists and those who favour the Intelligent Design argument. On evolutionist web sites such as Talk.Origins and EvoWiki you will constantly see the use of pejorative terms such as “pseudo-scientists”. One big give-away can be seen in the editorial policy:

EvoWiki:Editorial philosophy

This site is not “viewpoint neutral”, and we do not keep pro-creationism edits, or discuss the details of such edits and why we remove them. This may seem closed-minded or dogmatic to those unfamiliar with the details of the so-called “controversy”, but such creationist edits are invariably issues refuted elsewhere on the site and scientifically incorrect.

Another indicator is the disregard for the scientific qualifications or achievements of any scientist who is also a critic of Darwinism. The scientific credentials of Dr. Micael Denton, for example, are listed elsewhere on the internet:

Michael Denton is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Otago in New Zealand. His primary research focus is on the molecular genetics of retinitis pigmentosa.

The following is his bio according to EvoWiki:

Michael Denton is a fine-tuner and author of the book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny.

What seems to be a given, however, is that the vast majority of scientists working in fields directly related to the study of evolution have no doubt at all that it is a proven fact. It is a safe bet that almost all of that majority are also atheists and hard materialists (although there does seem to be a prevalent reluctance to discuss the subject in philosophical terms).

Nevertheless, many in the non-scientific community who dislike Darwin’s idea, do so because it is a soulless, uncompromising, morally bereft theory that tells us: “You are here by accident – pure random chance – and the only purpose for your otherwise meaningless life is to procreate and ensure that the species survives. The weak, the diseased and the non-conformists shall perish while the strong, the attractive and the ruthless shall prevail.” Many ordinary people tell themselves that there must be more to the meaning of life than the cold, bleak outlook of the Darwinists. We are told that there is no such thing as beauty, that it is merely a consequence of pattern recognition abilities developed by the brain for obvious survival reasons such as the requirement to recognise a threat in the face of an adversary or the shape of a fruit as a food source. The beautiful colours of a peacock and the eye-shaped patterns on its tail are dual-purpose survival tools for attracting mates and frightening off potential attackers. Music? Again, nothing more than auditory pattern recognition (a bird needs to be able to recognise the call of another of its own species). What about the higher emotions such as love? Simply the result of chemical transmitters in the brain – developed to aid the all-important reproductive process. Faith? Well, let’s see what Dawkins has to say about that:

“Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification.” Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene.

I have included on this site the whole text of a lecture which is a critique of that particular Dawkins book. It is not written by some religious creationist and the author, Ian Johnston, is at pains to point out the merits (in his opinion) of the science described by Dawkins in the book. Indeed Johnston has written other pieces in support of Darwinian evolution, including one entitled “The Illogic of a Creationist Argument“. However with reference to the above quote, he says:

“Dawkins’s goes on in this vein (speaking about religious faith) to endorse the term memeoids for “victims that have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential.” What sort of intellectual clarity is served by this renaming of an old phenomenon, adequately covered by the word zealot. And if Dawkins wants to offer a mature reflection of the effects of zealotry on inhumanity, he might want to consider some of the ways in which scientific or nationalistic or atheistic zealots have proven themselves every bit as capable of inhuman destructiveness as all other types. That, of course, might require him to abandon his desire to flog religion at every opportunity. In saying this, of course, I am not defending a religious view of life, merely objecting to a feature of Dawkins’ writing which is unnecessarily vituperative.” Ian Johnston

I would recommend a brief diversion from this page in order to read the whole text of Johnston’s lecture. Like Johnston, I am no defender of any religious faith but I do think it is important to show that bigotry is alive and kicking on both sides of the fence.

Back to the arguments, but first a side note: Throughout these pages I have attempted to provide links to further (hopefully better) explanations of the subject under discussion. Right now this is proving extremely difficult due to the war-like nature of the evolution debate on the internet. Try as I might, I see precious little unbiased commentary out there. I either get hard-line Darwinist sites or equally prejudiced religious propaganda. Therefore, in the paragraphs that follow, I am forced to attempt my own explanations of the some of the issues. Please excuse me if I am occasionally a little wide of the mark.

As I see it, the evolutionists believe themselves to be in a war, defending their position on three fronts. First front: statistical probability. Take the old but popular argument that, given enough time, a thousand monkeys tapping away at a thousand typewriters could and would produce a page of Shakespeare (or is that a line? or the complete works? – it depends on which version you happen across). On pure random chance alone, even the Darwinists agree that the laws of probability confirm that the idea is sheer nonsense. But, they say, natural selection is not about purely random chance. Stay with the thousand monkey example but now introduce a way of selecting the most promising combinations of typed letters – only those that make linguistic sense – and discard forever all combinations that do not make sense and the monkeys have a real (statistical) shot at completing the task. Natural Selection, they say, works that way, favouring the useful (only those that have survival value) and eliminating the useless. Thus, natural selection is a dumb algorithm and no inherent intelligence is required to get us from the original chance molecular combinations that produced amino acids, to the hugely diverse and complex life-forms that cover the planet today.

Others disagree. Even mathematical experts disagree which is why I’m not going to offer an opinion on the statistical argument in favour of natural selection except to say that, intuitively, it feels wrong. If politicians can employ the services of statisticians to “prove” anything they please, I’m sure that certain biased scientists – or theologists – are not beyond that either.

The second front is commonly referred to as the “missing links” argument. This one is particularly favoured by the religious creationists because, to them, the thought of humans having descended from monkeys is anathema. The more academic term is “transitional fossils” but what we are talking about here is the lack of fossils of animals part-way through a transition from one kind to another (from a reptile to a bird, for example). Evolutionists say that, although the fossil record itself is far from complete and that most transitionals just haven’t been found yet, there are still enough examples to destroy the creationist argument. In the reptile-to-bird example, the famous one is Archaeopteryx – discovered shortly after Darwin published his “Origin of Species” – which is held up to be a classic example of a dinosaur to bird transition. The big issue here appears to be that of categorisation, classification or taxonomy: in other words transition from what to what? The anti-evolutionists argue that the transitional fossils do not show the development of new “species”. They maintain that species appear without antecedents, fully formed. Needless to say, the scientific orthodoxy dismiss that argument with characteristic disdain. For a somewhat less vitriolic (though typically academic) discussion, I found this paper on the taxonomic issues.

The third front is the whole Intelligent Design debate itself. As usual, the Darwinists first line of defence is to claim that there is no debate; there is only what is obviously right (their own position) and what is pure delusion (anyone else). The second line is to attack the personalities of anyone claiming to have found evidence of design. In debating terminology, this is called an ad hominem attack and, to be fair, it is a device used by both sides although in my own trawl through the websites I have found it to be far more prevalent in the evolutionist pages. This article from The Philosophers Magazine Online is a brief discussion of exactly the point I’m making here. Finally, there is the all-out attack on the case for ID by attempting to destroy the theories and conclusions that make up that case.

So what is the case for Intelligent Design? For a brief overview, this link to the William Dembski summary of the Intelligent Design Movement is probably as close as it comes to getting it from the “horses mouth”. As mentioned earlier, the concept of “Irreducible Complexity” is central to the ID argument. Michael Behe describes it thus:

“A single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” Michael Behe.

Behe’s example from the non-organic world is a simple mousetrap: take away any one of its parts and you are left with a useless article. Behe is a biochemist and he maintains that there are examples of irreducible complexity in nature, any one of which presents a challenge to Darwinian natural selection. One is particular is the bacterial flagellum. However critics such as Kenneth Miller maintain that there are organisms – flagella, for example – that do not have all the necessary parts but are still performing a function. The response from Behe and his supporters is to point out that it may be performing a function but not the same function. As he is quoted in this article:

“However, taking away the parts of the flagellum certainly destroys the ability of the system to act as a rotary propulsion machine, as I have argued.” Michael Behe

In other words, take away the spring from the mousetrap and it may still perform an adequate function as a doorstop, but not as a mousetrap.

Behe, Dembski and others have an almost impossible task: to use science to cast doubt on a theory that almost everyone else working in this field already accepts as an inviolable truth. When the bible-thumpers attempt to argue on scientific grounds, they are easy meat for Darwinists. Time will tell whether other scientists, those who are not entirely convinced about all or part of standard evolutionary theory, have any more success.