The Hump of the Camel

In my last post  I looked at how the real heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory is a mental concept, comparable to the Anthropic Principle, that enables one to conceive of design witout a designer. This is what makes the theory so malleable to any actual data.

I want to  carry on with the example I was using there of the first self-replicating molecule, as it’s relatively uncomplicated to imagine. The question, you’ll remember, is whether it makes any difference (for a theist) to consider such a complex and closely specified self-replicating molecule as the work of God-as-designer, or as the work of God-as-behind-a-rational-and-scientific-fluke-of-extreme-improbability. I concluded that the only real difference is that the latter demolishes what we know about chance from the rest of science.

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What did Darwin actually present in 1859? I suggest it wasn’t so much a scientific theory as a plausible new way of looking at things. It wasn’t his evidence that “swept away the illusion of design” but the mental flip that suddenly enables one to see how design could happen without a designer.

Darwin presented some evidence for descent with modification, but that in itself wasn’t new but common currency in the scientific community. His Big Idea was natural selection, and the only evidence he presented for that was a comparison with artificial selection. If a breeder can select for useful traits, why should not nature itself do so? It’s so obvious that it seems undeniable. Clearly some organisms survive better than others, so what dictates that? It can only be that they are better suited to live than the others. Carry that selection on long enough, and all the diversity of life might be produced.

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One thing you notice as soon as you participate in evolution discussions is that you don’t understand anything about evolution. This is true whatever your background. You notice in most of the criticisms of a biochemist like Behe or an origins-of-life PhD like Meyer that they somehow neglected to learn the rudiments of evolution. My own background was zoology and medicine, but it has never prevented the “You don’t understand the first thing…” accusations. Some people might argue that those with weak arguments prefer to say, “You wouldn’t understand…” than argue their case, but the alternative is to go back and try to reach that basic, essential comprehension.

So let’s start with the scientific definition of the theory, which is… well, it’s hard to be sure, because there seem to be so many. The broadest is “descent with modification”, but that’s hardly a definition as it would encompass Lamarckism, and other pre-Darwinian ideas like Lyell’s version of special creation. Continue reading →

Another interesting paper, again brought to my attention by an ID website (sorry). But again, I was interested in looking at the original in PLoS Genetics, which fortunately for us all has open access. The basic finding is a surprisingly high number of de novo protein-coding genes in the human genome, to the tune of 60. This was compared to chimpanzee and other primate sources. This, they say, is three times more than what was found hitherto – but then they looked harder.

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“Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in particular is hopelessly metaphysical, according to the rules of etiquette laid down in the Logic of Scientific Inquiry and widely believed in by practicing scientists who bother to think about the problem. The first rule for any scientific hypothesis ought to be that it is at least possible to conceive of an observation that would contradict the theory. For what good is a theory that is guaranteed by its internal logical structure to agree with all conceivable observations, irrespective of the real structure of the world? If scientists are going to use logically unbeatable theories about the world, they might as well give up natural science and take up religion. Yet is that not exactly the situation with regard to Darwinism? The theory of evolution by natural selection states that changes in the inherited characters of species occur, giving rise to differentiation in space and time, because different genetical types leave different numbers of offspring in different environments… Such a theory can never be falsified, for it asserts that some environmental difference created the conditions for natural selection of a new character. It is existentially quantified so that the failure to find the environmental factor proves nothing, except that one has not looked hard enough. Can one really imagine observations about nature that would disprove natural selection as a cause of the difference in bill size? The theory of natural selection is then revealed as metaphysical rather than scientific. Natural selection explains nothing because it explains everything. ”

Bill Dembski? Steve Meyer?  Dave Berlinski? Ken Ham? Albert Mohler? Clearly someone who is part of the conspiracy to get creationism taught in schools, trying to impugn the scientific credentials of evolution. Will they stoop to anything?