06.30.07
Dawkins review
July 1, 2007
Inferior Design
By RICHARD DAWKINS
THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION
The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.
By Michael J. Behe.
Now why should the Times assign Richard Dawkins to review Behe’s new book? Did Dawkins get that kind of treament?
It is clear the Times wishes to avoid serious discussion of evolution, and with deadly serious intends to make sure Behe gets smeared. This review shows the typical Dawkins style: when you argument is empty, use the appearance of intelligent haughtiness to ridicule your opponent. Pile up the ad hominem, and sneer in every paragraph. The result will work fine on the Darwin consumer, and noone will quite realize propaganda when they see it. Dawkins talks a good game on science, but he has made a bundle over the years with his own brand of pseud0-science, and gets away with it because it serves the interests of the establishment.
Before considering the faults in Behe’s argument, said to be obvious, it is worth considering that the design group was brought a series of clear objections to bear on Darwin’s theory, and a figure such as Anthony Latham in The Naked Emperor: Darwinism Exposed has made a laughingstock of Dawkins’ Climbing Mt. Improbable. Clearly, at the level of public discourse and its control, none of that matters, and the smear review will suffice on the part of those who control major media, and hence the statistical weight of opinion which no isolated dissenter can match. Thus the truth doesn’t matter heer. This debate, therefore, is not really about design attacking science, but the inconvenient appearance of a rival medium able to match the statistical weight of current controlled opinion, with conservative think tank dollars. Small wonder the Darwin establishment is worried, and turns up the shrill contempt decibel level to meet, not the counterargument, but the rival media bodies with matching clout.
I should say that I don’t follow the valid arguments of Behe on evolution as they slide past their cogency to design conclusions. The earlier critic of evolution, Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Behe’s model, more usefully pointed to the problems with natural selection, and left it all that. Behe should have adopted that approach.
But his basic argument, which has a long lineage, has never been properly answered. Remarkable. Noone can answer it. Read this review of Dawkins. He must use anything but rational argument to cover up the problem Darwinists have. His style is contempt and the sneer, with a hidden text, ‘we are the smart scientists, the brights, aren’t these people stupid’. But it is a whole generation raised on Dawkins that is becoming stupid, and the last gang left are the religious groups who can at least see through the game, whatever their religious obsessions. So who is the smart fellow,then, Mr. Dawkins.
The sad fact is that Dawkins’ success has induced a kind of shrill obtuseness, the style of the fundamentalist in a generation of dumbed down Darwinists and Dawkins fans.
Dawkins: I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first — “Darwin’s Black Box” (1996), which purported to make the scientific case for “intelligent design” — was enlivened by a spark of conviction, however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up. Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site: “While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.” As the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote recently, in a devastating review of Behe’s work in The New Republic, it would be hard to find a precedent.
These curious statements comparing the first and second book are absurd. Behe certainly doesn’t need pity from anyone. His objections to evolution, whatever the merits of his design conclusions, are solid. I think we should feel sorry for Mr. Dawkins. His cocksure promotion of Darwinian theory and the profits he has made from that over a lifetime have planted a timebomb in his false succes. When Darwinian selectionism crashes, he will be seen to be a fool indeed, a collosal idiot reaching the level of the tragic hero. You bet your life, a lifetime stacked on a series of errors, pointed to over and over in the past generation. If anyone cut himself adrift from the path of science it is Dawkins.
I can’t see how Behe has given up. To be sure, it is possible to wonder how anyone or anything could penetrate the mountain of denseness defended in the name of intelligence by Darwinists in the name of their paradigm. It can be discouraging. It is designed that way: make it impossible for the critic to get anywhere. Brainwasher’s lockdown ’succeeds’ finally, and the public, uncluding the Joe Q. Scientist Public, is deprived of the power of thought.
The question of Lehigh University is completely beside the point. The purpose of tenure is to protect free speech. Here it was protected. Dawkins’ objection here is a Loud Sigh, ‘Too bad universities can’t be totalitarian’.
For a while, Behe built a nice little career on being a maverick. His colleagues might have disowned him, but they didn’t receive flattering invitations to speak all over the country and to write for The New York Times. Behe’s name, and not theirs, crackled triumphantly around the memosphere. But things went wrong, especially at the famous 2005 trial where Judge John E. Jones III immortally summed up as “breathtaking inanity” the effort to introduce intelligent design into the school curriculum in Dover, Pa. After his humiliation in court, Behe — the star witness for the creationist side — might have wished to re-establish his scientific credentials and start over. Unfortunately, he had dug himself in too deep. He had to soldier on. “The Edge of Evolution” is the messy result, and it doesn’t make for attractive reading.
Maverick or not, Behe dissented on the question of natural selection and its abuse in Darwinism, and his argument to do with irreducible complexity raises issues that Darwinists, and certainly Dawkins, are unable to answer, hence the style of angered and contemptuous response. Giving lectures around the country, well, what problem? I don’t share Behe’s design conclusion but the issue of irreducible complexity won’t go away, a point that is obvious if you read the sham arguments in Dawkins’ own Climbing Mt. Improbable. Based, in the Dawkins manner, on assertion without proof, and fallacious computer analogues that show Dawkins simply cannot understand the issue, this supposed answer to ‘likes of Behe’ is in fact far inferior to Behe’s cogent points.
The problems with Darwinism were pointed to by Hoyle long ago, and the statistical problem of Darwinian selection is the same as it has always been.
The Dover trial was a sham, an easy piece for a crew of hired gun trickster lawyers. Intelligent design was cross-examined, but Darwin’s theory was left untouched. Any lawyer for hire such as those at Dover could, on demand, with a weekend’s research, produce the symmetric opposite result, if the establishment had so hinted that’s what they had wanted. Darwin on trial, that would be something to see. In fact, Hollywood figures were lurking in the courtroom for this trial scripted on the Scopes trial. The trial came prepackaged, it seems, for Hollywood.
We now hear less about “irreducible complexity,” with good reason. In “Darwin’s Black Box,” Behe simply asserted without justification that particular biological structures (like the bacterial flagellum, the tiny propeller by which bacteria swim) needed all their parts to be in place before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved incrementally. This style of argument remains as unconvincing as when Darwin himself anticipated it. It commits the logical error of arguing by default. Two rival theories, A and B, are set up. Theory A explains loads of facts and is supported by mountains of evidence. Theory B has no supporting evidence, nor is any attempt made to find any. Now a single little fact is discovered, which A allegedly can’t explain. Without even asking whether B can explain it, the default conclusion is fallaciously drawn: B must be correct. Incidentally, further research usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.
Dawkins’ methodological thinking is absurd here. Theory A, and Theory, are both speculations in a void, and design and natural selection are, in the words of Popper, metaphysical research programs.
Theory apart, Behe produced an extremely cogent problem for Darwinists, and he attempted to make his point clear, short of proof, by giving his mousetrap example. The response to this example has been an inundation of fallacious counterarguments, spread over the Internet, and a series of howling assertions that incremental steps by natural selection could construct the equivalent of a mouse trap, i.e. any given, without proof. The burdern of proof still remains with Darwinists, because irreducible complexity, however you cut it, stripped of design conclusions is a problem for Darwinists. Behe’s argument, but not necessarily his design conclusion, is not in fact particularly strange, it is a version of the standard objections always shown to the face of dogmatic Darwinists, objections they have never been able to answer. Now with the emergence of evo-devo we see that the original Darwinian position has to be wrong. In manifold cases we see that complex irreducile structures are programmed with genetic programming code of great complexity. We are left with the apparent irreducible complexity of that genetic computer code with its obvious teleological structure.
Behe correctly dissects the Darwinian theory into three parts: descent with modification, natural selection and mutation. Descent with modification gives him no problems, nor does natural selection. They are “trivial” and “modest” notions, respectively. Do his creationist fans know that Behe accepts as “trivial” the fact that we are African apes, cousins of monkeys, descended from fish?
The crucial passage in “The Edge of Evolution” is this: “By far the most critical aspect of Darwin’s multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept.”
What a bizarre thing to say! Leave aside the history: unacquainted with genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it — alone as far as we know — explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else it is, natural selection is not a “modest” idea, nor is descent with modification.
But let’s follow Behe down his solitary garden path and see where his overrating of random mutation leads him. He thinks there are not enough mutations to allow the full range of evolution we observe. There is an “edge,” beyond which God must step in to help. Selection of random mutation may explain the malarial parasite’s resistance to chloroquine, but only because such micro-organisms have huge populations and short life cycles. A fortiori, for Behe, evolution of large, complex creatures with smaller populations and longer generations will fail, starved of mutational raw materials.
If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change, this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational variation as natural selection. Now, if you sought an experimental test of Behe’s theory, what would you do? You’d take a wild species, say a wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that chivies rabbits underground: let’s call it a Jack Russell terrier. Or how about an adorable, fluffy pet wolf called, for the sake of argument, a Pekingese? Or a heavyset, thick-coated wolf, strong enough to carry a cask of brandy, that thrives in Alpine passes and might be named after one of them, the St. Bernard? Behe has to predict that you’d wait till hell freezes over, but the necessary mutations would not be forthcoming. Your wolves would stubbornly remain unchanged. Dogs are a mathematical impossibility.
Darwinists are strange people. The simple and obvious problems with Darwin’s theory ought to make a reasonable man change his view of things, and see the limits of Darwin’s theory. In fact, that was the original course of the theory, as the fact of evolution was embraced but the theory of natural selection waned into an eclipse. Its revival in the Synthesis has seen a more determined breed determined not to lose a second time.
Dawkins is famous for his ingenious way of turning the obvious upside down in order to maintain the paradigm. That requires changing the meanings of words. The context of the debate is the randomness of evolution, of natural selection, which is by definition in the context of the debate, random. But Dawkins by a sophistry and sleight-of-hand has actually thrown dust in the eyes of the critics by indignantly saying up is down, telling us that natural selection is non-random. That is not an argument, but a redefinition of the terms, to hide the obvious fact that the Darwin argument doesn’t work.
Don’t evade the point by protesting that dog breeding is a form of intelligent design. It is (kind of), but Behe, having lost the argument over irreducible complexity, is now in his desperation making a completely different claim: that mutations are too rare to permit significant evolutionary change anyway. From Newfies to Yorkies, from Weimaraners to water spaniels, from Dalmatians to dachshunds, as I incredulously close this book I seem to hear mocking barks and deep, baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs — every one descended from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by geological standards, instantaneous.
I do protest that dogbreeding is not analogous to evolution. We have insufficient grounds for concluding that microevolution leads to macroevolution, or speciation. It is clear in some cases, not in others.
Clearly both sides are confused on this issue, and we don’t know. There is clearly something irreducible about a ‘dog’, not absolutely so, but artifical breeding isn’t the right analog to real evolution, whatever the case with Behe’s claims, and Dawkins overheating counter.
If correct, Behe’s calculations would at a stroke confound generations of mathematical geneticists, who have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation. Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?
Population genetics is one of the more confusing sides of Neo-Darwinian thinking. At no point in this mathematical construct is the real issue of evolution ever made clear. In fact, the mathematical apparatus shows every indication of being a partial insight into microevolution, but not real evolution. It looks like physics, but natural selection can’t play the role of the ‘force’ process in this mathematical take on reductionist modelling.
Nothing whatever in population genetics consitutes a true science of macroevolution. Its complexity (for beginners) makes dissent difficult here.
The best way to find out is for Behe to submit a mathematical paper to The Journal of Theoretical Biology, say, or The American Naturalist, whose editors would send it to qualified referees. They might liken Behe’s error to the belief that you can’t win a game of cards unless you have a perfect hand. But, not to second-guess the referees, my point is that Behe, as is normal at the grotesquely ill-named Discovery Institute (a tax-free charity, would you believe?), where he is a senior fellow, has bypassed the peer-review procedure altogether, gone over the heads of the scientists he once aspired to number among his peers, and appealed directly to a public that — as he and his publisher know — is not qualified to rumble him.
Dawkins has a sense of humor. Behe should submit his thinking to the Darwin establishment, the one that terrifies grad students into a lifetime of submission, and silence.
I think the worst thing you could do is send a cogent objection to Darwin’s theory to a peer reviewed journal. You are absolutely certain to get the paradigm bludgeon treatment, or maybe the wall of silence treatment. People like Dawkins will make snide remarks, as he does with Behe and his tenous tenure at Lehigh.
Peer review is a total failure on the evolution question, and has made the normal dissent that might have lead to a natural passage beyond the dogmatism of Darwinists an impossibility. The possibility is left for people outside of normal channels to do the real work of questioning, as with Behe’s book.
Richard Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford. His most recent book is “The God Delusion.”