In part 5 of this 4-part series, we’ll conclude our critique of a popular article in which David Gelernter (who’s not a biologist) attacks evolution (part 1). We’ll look at the agendas of the various parties to get a better understanding of what motivates the players.

Warning: the Discovery Institute has an unsavory agenda

The Discovery Institute has several divisions, the most prominent of which is the Center for Science and Culture. This is the one advocating Intelligent Design:

The mission of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is to advance the understanding that human beings and nature are the result of intelligent design rather than a blind and undirected process.

Their mission isn’t to follow the facts like scientists but to advocate for their predetermined conclusion, like theists.

You might say that it’s a think tank, so obviously it’s going to have an agenda, but note the difference between advocating for policies (small government, tighter gun laws, etc.) and advocating for a supposedly scientific claim (Intelligent Design).

Scientific claims should stand on their own, supported by evidence, and not need advocates. And maybe even the Discovery Institute itself doesn’t see Intelligent Design as a scientific claim.

The focus of the Discovery Institute isn’t on following the evidence, nor is it convincing the scientific community. They’ve lost that battle, and they know it. Science works by scientists sharing ideas and debating among themselves, trying to find flaws in their own work and others’. There are popularizers (Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and many others) who help explain science to the public, but discovering new truths about nature happens within science.

The Discovery Institute doesn’t publish papers in conventional science journals; they bypass science and go right to the public. Give a grant to a university lab and they will fund new research, but give it to the Discovery Institute, and they will just do more PR.

It’s a smart move, in a Machiavellian sort of way. Getting the public convinced that evolution is nonsense so that they demand Creationism in schools is one step in the Discovery Institute’s leaked 1998 Wedge Strategy. Their goal was to replace naturalistic explanations in society with Christian ones and advance the conservative political agenda. They wanted to return to God as the foundation of Western civilization.

And the Creationism/ID movement has been effective. A 2018 study shows only 33 percent of Americans accepting evolution. Perhaps when they imagine “Making America Great Again,” they see Europe of the thirteenth century, long before meddlesome science started explaining things better than Christianity.

News update

We can see the agenda of the Discovery Institute made plain in an article from a few days ago in response to the press coverage of Gelernter’s article. They said, “We get encouraged to see voices in mainstream media catching up with the idea that there are serious scientific reasons to doubt evolutionary theory.”

Huh? They care about the mainstream media and not biologists? They’re publicly admitting that PR and not science is their goal! They want mainstream press coverage since they know that there is no debate within science. They’ve lost the argument in the only forum where it matters, they know it, and they’re admitting it.

Gelernter’s agenda

What was the point of Gelernter’s article? If it was just a book report on Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer himself would’ve been the better person to write it.

I wonder about his motivation. It’s obviously not a scientist’s honest search for the truth, because he unashamedly references only Intelligent Design (ID) sources. He’s comfortable rejecting the consensus in scientific disciplines to which he’s an outsider. He’s already rejected manmade climate change, so going public with his rejection of evolution isn’t that reckless. Time magazine called him, “A conservative among mostly liberal Ivy League professors, a religious believer among the often disbelieving ranks of computer scientists.”

The Christian community is doing to him what they did to atheist philosopher Antony Flew. Attacked as “the world’s most notorious atheist” (as he was identified in the subtitle of his 2007 book explaining his change of heart), Flew became a darling among Christians when he switched to deism. (I responded to Flew’s book here.)

Flew’s book was co-written with (more likely, written by) another author. The argument for his conversion was the standard Creationist views, none of which Flew, as a non-scientist, brought any value to. Flew was simply a marionette whose strings were pulled by his Creationist controller.

Similarly, Gelernter the Ivy League full professor is another nice catch for Creationists. Like Flew, he brings nothing to the scientific conversation, but then Creationism isn’t about the science. If Gelernter is willing to prostitute himself, for whatever puzzling reason, I can see why the Discovery Institute would celebrate that.

Gelernter vs. Intelligent Design

Curiously, Gelernter ends with an incisive critique of ID that is unexpected, given the lap dog praise of Meyer’s book in the body of the article. I’ve complained so much in this series of posts that, on this rare bit of agreement, I’d like to give him the last word.

He begins by saying that a single intervention by some Designer to start life or create the phylum that eventually produced mammals or create consciousness is one thing, but that doesn’t explain Meyer’s primary complaint, his contention that evolution can’t explain the Cambrian explosion.

An intelligent designer who interferes repeatedly, on the other hand, poses an even harder problem of explaining why he chose to act when he did. Such a cause would necessarily have some sense of the big picture of life on earth. What was his strategy? How did he manage to back himself into so many corners, wasting energy on so many doomed organisms? Granted, they might each have contributed genes to our common stockpile—but could hardly have done so in the most efficient way. What was his purpose? And why did he do such an awfully slipshod job? Why are we so disease prone, heartbreak prone, and so on? An intelligent designer makes perfect sense in the abstract. The real challenge is how to fit this designer into life as we know it. Intelligent design might well be the ultimate answer. But as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go.

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Image from Richard Stock, CC license
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We’re considering a popular recent article in which David Gelernter (who’s not a biologist) attacks evolution. This critique begins with part 1.

Maverick explanations are sometimes right

Let’s take a brief interlude. This argument isn’t from Gelernter but from a Christian friend of mine. His argument is that sometimes the scientific outsider is eventually shown to be right. His favorite example is that of Dan Shechtman, a scientist who proposed the idea of quasicrystals (ordered but nonperiodic crystals).

Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling made Schechtman’s life difficult. About his work, Pauling mocked, “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”

Shechtman prevailed and was eventually awarded his own Nobel Prize.

So here’s a case where a maverick scientific claim become the eventual consensus. Is there a parallel? Does quasicrystals vs. the consensus within materials science parallel Intelligent Design vs. the consensus within biology?

Nope. First, no one is surprised to learn that the scientific consensus can be wrong. The quasicrystal example teaches us nothing new here. And consider these additional differences.

• Evolution is the organizing theory within biology. Quasicrystals aren’t core to chemistry or materials science or even crystallography. The knowledge of quasicrystals doesn’t topple (or even jostle) chemistry, but evolution is biology’s foundation.
• Shechtman was a materials scientist doing work in that field. ID researchers are, almost without exception, not biologists. That is, Shechtman was an insider, and ID researchers are outsiders. Not only do the degrees tell you this, but ID researchers focus on laypeople. Any effort they make to publish research papers in mainstream scientific journals is trivial because they know they’ve lost that fight. Shechtman, by contrast, was exclusively focused on convincing fellow scientists.
• The quasicrystals research was a scientific endeavor. It had no religious agenda. ID/Creationism is a science-y marionette manipulated by Christianity.

It’s true that quasicrystals was a persecuted maverick idea that eventually prevailed, but since ID is so poor a parallel with quasicrystals, this example offers no hope that ID as a persecuted maverick idea could similarly prevail.

Here’s another way of looking at it. The typical evangelical Christian thinks that “evolution explains how life developed” is false and “Jesus is a myth” is also false. They’re lined up against the consensus of biologists in the evolution case but lined up with the consensus of New Testament scholars in the Jesus mythicism case. How do we resolve these debates?

These Christians need an objective algorithm that will look at these maverick-vs.-consensus controversies within science and decide which one is likely to prevail. They can test it against past cases where a maverick idea prevailed (quasicrystals, continental drift, Relativity, germ theory) and cases where it didn’t (cold fusion, homeopathy, ESP, 6000-year-old earth). Without science backing their theory, they’re not David defeating Goliath but rather Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

Darwin fanboy

Gelernter mentions Charles Darwin a lot. (He does know that Darwin is no longer a practicing biologist, right?) Here are a few of his references.

What if Darwin was wrong?

Meyer doesn’t only demolish Darwin . . .

Darwin himself had reservations about his theory.

Darwin himself was disturbed by [the absence of Cambrian fossils] from the fossil record.

The ever-expanding fossil archives don’t look good for Darwin.

I counted almost thirty instances of “Darwin” and the same number of the phrases Darwinian evolution, Darwin’s theory, Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism, and so on.

In understanding how evolution works or its impact on life today, biologists don’t refer to Darwin, consult what he thought, or even think about him. Darwin is important in the history of science, not present-day biology research.

Biologists don’t obsess over Darwin, but ID proponents and Creationists do. This is another clue that puts this article in with the other ID articles, not with the ones following the evidence.

Meyer fanboy

The name of Stephen Meyer (the Discovery Institute researcher to whom Gelernter is apparently an acolyte) appeared almost as often as Darwin’s. Maybe what Gelernter is promoting shouldn’t be called Intelligent Design but Meyerism.

Early in the article, we’re given the conclusion that evolution is finished. No speculation, no “here’s an idea you need to consider.” Nope, Meyerism is the new champ and evolution has fallen:

Fundamentalists and intellectuals might go on arguing these things forever. But normal people will want to come to grips with Meyer and the downfall of a beautiful idea.

The article starts with references to and recommendations for one of Meyer’s books as well as one book each from David Berlinski and David Klinghoffer. All three are senior fellows at the Discovery Institute, and all three books are presented, with Amazon links, at the top of the article. (Full disclosure: the Disco Institute is in Seattle, and I live in the Seattle area. On behalf of Seattle, I offer apologies to the rest of the world.)

Stephen Meyer’s thoughtful and meticulous Darwin’s Doubt (2013) convinced me that Darwin has failed.

After this praise, he went on to show that he had a thorough understanding of the theory that he was rejecting by listing the modern textbooks summarizing evolution that he had read by doing absolutely nothing. He gave no indication that he understood the glaring problem that neither he nor Meyer are biologists and yet were rejecting the scientific consensus in a field to which they were outsiders. He didn’t outline the evidence he’d need to see to falsify ID.

Whoops—there’s one more part. We’ll conclude in part 5 with a look at the unsavory agenda of the Discovery Institute.

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We’re considering a popular article in which David Gelernter (who’s not a biologist) attacks evolution. This critique begins with part 1.

Evidence for evolution

Gelernter makes the “okay, microevolution happens, but not macroevolution” argument in a clumsy way. Macroevolution is usually defined by biology textbooks to mean speciation—that is, not just change within a species but enough change to make a new species (or more).

That doesn’t sound like what he’s talking about here.

But mutations to these early-acting “strategic” genes, which create the big body-plan changes required by macro-evolution, seem to be invariably fatal. They kill off the organism long before it can reproduce. . . .

Evidently there are a total of no examples in the literature of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole and are not fatal.

What he’s apparently talking about is phylum-level changes, which is at a much higher level than speciation.

In the first place, I get my biology from biologists, so have them tell me that phylum-level changes are impossible.

Second, apparently you’re startled that there are no examples in the literature of phylum-level changes. Do you think new phyla have appeared in your lifetime? Do you expect someone to have documented the change? Or are you saying that we should have examples of the complete sequence of mutations, horizontal gene transfers, or whatever that created one or more new phyla? Whatever deal breaker you imagine for evolution is not clear. It sounds like your complaint is that we haven’t seen a thing we have no reason to expect to have seen—is that surprising?

He then quotes a researcher: “We think we’ve hit all the genes required to specify the body plan of [the fruit fly]. . . . [None is] promising as raw materials for macroevolution.” But this is from a presentation in 1982, which is 37 years ago! Biology is a fast-moving field. If you’re going to ignore the scientific consensus and avoid any sources but those that support your minority opinion, at least use recent findings.

He quotes another biologist who referred to a “great Darwinian paradox.” This paper is from 1983, so again we need to see what today’s biologists would make of the issue. And the paper isn’t even dismissive of evolution. (For those who want more, I’ll let you follow up with the rather involved biological argument in the source.)

Is Intelligent Design a viable alternative to evolution?

Gelernter says that Intelligent Design (ID) is the obvious response to the Cambrian explosion.

The theory suggests that an intelligent cause intervened to create this extraordinary outburst. By “intelligent” Meyer understands “conscious”; the theory suggests nothing more about the designer.

The subtext in that last phrase is that there is nothing in ID to suggest religion. But it’s hard to imagine what suggesting an intelligent Creator is if not religion. Sure, you can imagine super-smart aliens (rather than deities) behind life on earth, but the Christian will immediately wonder what created them, not satisfied until we’ve reached the Christian god.

Gelernter imagines skeptics wondering where the evidence for ID is:

To Meyer and other proponents, that is like asking—after you have come across a tree that is split vertically down the center and half burnt up—“but where is the evidence of a lightning strike?” The exceptional intricacy of living things, and their elaborate mechanisms for fitting precisely into their natural surroundings, seemed to cry out for an intelligent designer.

And we’re back to the childish “Golly, it sure looks designed!” Uh, yeah, and the earth sure looks flat.

Pushback

My favorite examples of evolution in almost real time is the bacteria that evolved to eat nylon and PET plastic. Remember that nylon didn’t exist before 1935 and PET plastic before about 1941.

My favorite example of the principles of evolution tested and proven to succeed is the discovery of Tiktaalik, a plausible transition between fish and land animals. Knowing the date that such an animal would’ve lived, paleontologists found exposed sedimentary rock of the right age. They searched, and there it was.

My favorite rebuttal to all ID arguments is: evolution is the consensus of the scientists who understand the evidence. Laymen (that is, scientific outsiders) are stuck with the scientific consensus as the best explanation. Of course, that consensus could be wrong, but it’s our best bet.

And my favorite summary of the power of evolution to explain life is from Richard Dawkins:

The ratio of the huge amount that [evolution] explains (everything about life: its complexity, diversity and illusion of crafted design) divided by the little that it needs to postulate (non-random survival of randomly varying genes through geological time) is gigantic. Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few.

The arguments from ID proponents aren’t arguments for their own theory (as they would be if coming from scientists actually trying to follow the evidence). All they can do is try to crap on evolution. I find none of these arguments convincing, and wouldn’t follow them if I did. I get my biology from biologists.

Worse, “Intelligent Designer did it!” raises far more puzzling questions than it answers. Who is this Designer (or Designers)? A god we know about or a new one or something else? You can’t just say that a Designer did it and then think you’ve resolved anything. You’ve now got a new, bigger problem: justifying your remarkable claim. Get to work.

The silver bullet argument that takes down Intelligent Design is the fact that there is zero evidence for such a designer. The religious or spiritual people of the world have come up with countless supernatural beings, but none of them are universally agreed to. The contradicting supernatural claims among religious people themselves show that religious claims can’t be justified.

Continued in part 4.

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David Gelernter is a well-known professor, but he’s not a biologist. Nevertheless, he has written an attack on evolution that has been praised by a number of conservative and Christian sites.

Though Gelernter isn’t ready to say that Intelligent Design (ID) is the replacement, he is sympathetic. (ID has many problems that he ignores, some of which are addressed in part 1.)

Let’s move on to the two primary arguments he uses against evolution.

Cambrian explosion

Gelernter is impressed by the Cambrian explosion, the period during which the 30-some animal phyla evolved.

In the famous “Cambrian explosion” of around half a billion years ago, a striking variety of new organisms—including the first-ever animals—pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70-odd million years. This great outburst followed many hundreds of millions of years of slow growth and scanty fossils, mainly of single-celled organisms, dating back to the origins of life roughly three and half billion years ago.

Because this is his key argument against evolution, I’d like to respond in depth. Even though science continues to learn new things about this period, there is plenty to push back against the idea that the Cambrian explosion defeats evolution.

• The duration of the explosion he gives (70 million years) is 13 percent of the time since it started. Is that too short for thirty phyla to develop? (Even if the duration is 20 million years, more typical of the duration given by biologists, the same question applies.) Surprise is only possible if we have a mismatch between how long it took and how long it should’ve taken—so how long should it have taken? And perhaps the explosion wasn’t as surprising as once thought. “The presence of Precambrian animals somewhat dampens the ‘bang’ of the explosion; not only was the appearance of animals gradual, but their evolutionary radiation (‘diversification’) may also not have been as rapid as once thought. Indeed, statistical analysis shows that the Cambrian explosion was no faster than any of the other radiations in animals’ history” (emphasis added). (An evolutionary radiation is a burst of diversity through speciation.)
• If creativity is his point about the Cambrian explosion, note that only nine of these phyla have diversified widely. These nine have each produced thousands to a million species. The remaining ones, not so much. For example, two phyla have about a hundred species each. Two other phyla have about twenty.
• The fossil record is an imperfect record, and the duration of the explosion is just a guess. Did other phyla develop beforehand but die out before they could leave a record? “The sparseness of the fossil record means that organisms usually exist long before they are found in the fossil record” (source).
• Did these phyla develop earlier than thought but without hard body parts that fossilize well? “Since most animal species are soft-bodied, they decay before they can become fossilized. As a result, although 30-plus phyla of living animals are known, two-thirds have never been found as fossils” (source).
• One hypothesis that explains the sudden beginning of the period of body plan creativity is that the ocean finally became transparent at that point, which meant that vision was now possible. This set off an arms race between predator and prey, with size, speed, armor, teeth, and more as competitive factors. Additional non-supernatural explanations are also possible.
• In the big picture, the Cambrian Explosion isn’t that big a deal. Sure, it’s important to us, because it’s the period of animal diversification, and we’re animals. But animals are just one of six biological kingdoms. And above kingdoms are three domains. This diagram may kindle a little humility.

Source: Wikipedia

• One example that shows there’s a lot more to evolution than the Cambrian explosion is the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event, which produced many more animal genera than did the Cambrian explosion. (The Ordovician Period followed the Cambrian Period.) The Cambrian explosion was noteworthy, but so were other periods of biological flourishing.
• Impressive though the Cambrian explosion may be, let’s not overestimate what it produced. The Cambrian period started 541 million years ago (Mya). Land plants didn’t appear until 470Mya. The first land tetrapods (vertebrates with four limbs) appeared 370Mya. Even the jawless fish of the Cambrian Period wouldn’t look much like what we think of as “fish.”

The ultimate evaluation of the Cambrian explosion comes from the people who actually understand the evidence, the biologists. And they still accept evolution. Non-biologist Gelernter’s puzzlement over the Cambrian explosion counts for nothing.

Synthesis of novel proteins

He next argues that evolution couldn’t make useful new proteins.

Your task is to invent a new gene by mutation. . . . You have two possible starting points for this attempt. You could mutate an existing gene, or mutate gibberish. You have a choice because DNA actually consists of valid genes separated by long sequences of nonsense. Most biologists think that the nonsense sequences are the main source of new genes. If you tinker with a valid gene, you will almost certainly make it worse—to the point where its protein misfires and endangers (or kills) its organism—long before you start making it better.

(“Long sequences of nonsense”? I thought ID proponents weren’t allowed to consider the idea of junk DNA.)

He likes the idea of nonsense sequences, by luck, switching on and creating useful new proteins because he has a ready response. The fraction of useful proteins out of all possible proteins is miniscule, so he can cross his arms here, confident that this route won’t yield the answer.

About a string of DNA nonsense being interpreted as a working gene to create a small (150-amino-acid-long) protein, he says:

Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million—you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.

Guaranteed? You’re saying that evolution has no mechanism to create novel proteins, and you can prove it? Then write your paper destroying evolution, and collect your Nobel. That you’re wasting your time trying to convince ordinary readers rather than scientists betrays your agenda.

And if the repurposing-gibberish route won’t work, we could (dare I say it?) consider the other route, the mutation of a working gene. Suppose that a gene is copied with one base pair wrong. This is technically an error in DNA replication, but this new gene might make a better protein.

Alternatively, the gene might be duplicated (gene duplication is a well-understood error in DNA replication). With two of the genes, one can make the old protein, leaving the other to possibly mutate and give a shot to a new protein. And if the new protein is worse? Then natural selection won’t select for it.

Looks like he needs to reconsider his guarantee that new protein synthesis never works.

Next up: Gelernter weighs evolution against Intelligent Design in part 3.

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