Is there such a thing as natural selection?

Panda's Thumb put up a blog post with an interesting title a couple of weeks ago: "Natural selection reduced diversity on human Y chromosomes." Now I'm sure this is a very interesting article for other reasons, but I'm interested in the title of the article, which talks about "natural selection" "reducing" something in something else.

Natural selection, which is, apparently, some actual thing, is acting on some other thing. This brings up several questions having to do with ontological status of natural selection. What exactly is it? Is it some ghostly force? Is it a mechanism? How can it act on something else? In what way is it a subject that acts on other objects?

And this article title is hardly unique. Many scientists talk this way--in a way that reifies the abstractions they have themselves fashioned.

Now there seem to be two possible views here: First, there is the prescriptive view: that natural selection is a thing--it has some ontological status in the world and that it acts upon other things in the world. Second, and alternatively, there is the descriptive view: natural selection is not a thing in and of itself, but is rather a description of the way the world, in fact, behaves. Another way of putting it is that, under the prescriptive view, natural selection is something in the world, whereas under the descriptive view it is something in the mind of the scientist.

To talk about it in the way this article title does--and in the way many scientists do on many other occasions--assumes the first view. Do these people really believe that natural selection is a thing? Or is this just their careless way of speaking?

I imagine if you corner your scientific friend who speaks in this way, he will finally have to say that it is just a manner of speaking, in which case you can't really say that natural selection does anything.

Maybe, in regard to natural selection, it is just a way of speaking. But there is the same issue in regard to natural laws. Are they real in and of themselves? Do they have some prescriptive force on the things they are said to govern? Or are they simply descriptions constructed to fit a set of facts and events in the world?

I don't think it is too much to say that the general public thinks of things like natural selection and the law of, say, gravity, as things having prescriptive force. And it's partly due to the way scientists are always talking. I suspect that in this case there are more scientists who would take the prescriptive view. And this is certainly the way the layman thinks about scientific laws: that they govern things in the world, making them do this and that and prohibiting them from doing that and the other thing.

That is, after all, what laws in the real sense of laws--the things our legislatures pass--do: they govern things. They order this thing to happen and this other thing not to happen. The whole reason for calling regularities in nature laws is to produce this impression that there is something out there that makes things in nature act a particular way.

The prescriptive view of natural law is wholly unscientific. And by that I mean not that it violates any scientific principle (that would be positing a prescriptive law governing prescriptive laws), but that such a view lies outside the very purview of science. If scientists want to claim to be empirical, then they can't possibly believe in the prescriptive view because the prescriptive view is metaphysical. It is what the philosopher David Hume said about causation in general: it can never be arrived at by any empirical method: Nobody has ever seen a natural law. It is a metaphysical postulate that explains the way things happen. But it is wholly non-empirical.

This, in fact, is the whole objection to miracles: that they are claims that there are events that violate natural laws. The objection to miracles assumes the prescriptive view. And yet, I suspect that a number of the atheists out there who are always championing the integrity of science, and who would admit that, from an empirical standpoint, natural laws are merely descriptive, will turn right around and argue against the miraculous on the grounds that miracles violate prescriptive laws.

As Chesterton pointed out in his "Ethics of Elfland," the only way to view the world prescriptively is to view it as the result of prescriptive will. In fact will is the only thing that can really be prescriptive: It is the necessary condition for prescriptiveness. To use the term "law" in the context of science and then to deny that you are using it prescriptively is try to have your scientistic cake and eat it too. It's either careless or dishonest--or, perhaps more likely, thoughtless.

The way atheistic scientists talk is many times at odds with their stated positions. They say on the one hand that they are not engaging in metaphysics, but as soon as they say that, they render much of what they say unintelligible. Their very denials make gibberish of the truths they affirm.

It's one of the great ironies of the whole language of science and natural law (or for that matter natural selection) that it only makes sense from a position of theism.

Atheism: A faith in need of enlightenment

Atheist biologist Jerry Coyne is upset by recent poll results showing basically no significant change in the attitude of Americans toward the theory of Darwinian evolution since 1982. Nearly half of Americans still believe in young earth creationism. About two-thirds of the rest believe in some form of theistic evolution.

How can this be in an enlightened country? he asks. In fact, how can it be an enlightened country if it does not accept Darwinian evolution?

People like Coyne really believe that you just can't be an intelligent person and reject their atheistic form of biological development. And yet here we are, in the world's most technologically advanced country the world has ever seen. And we still reject it.

Rudolf Bultmann once articulated what the Coyne's of the world believe: "It is impossible," he said, "to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles."

Only one problem. We do use these things. We do avail ourselves of these advances. And we still believe, in large part, in this world of spirits and miracles.

Now people like Coyne are fond of saying that a scientific statement is a statement that is empirically falsifiable. Well now, here we've got one. Bultmann's statement can easily be falsified. In fact, it has been falsified over and over and over again. The survey that Coyne points to is only the most recent instance of this.

But they go on believing it anyway. Is this what enlightened people do?

The Darwinists get it wrong again: Letter from KY superintendent continues to spawn nonsense

Matt Young at Panda's Thumb, a Darwinist blog, describes my post on the correspondence between the Kentucky superintendent and State Education Commissioner in the comments section of his post on the issue. According to Young, I defend Mr. Line and demonstrate "just enough erudition to hide the anti-scientific tenor of the post. If you haven’t enough time or patience, I suggest you scroll directly down to the comment by Scott Goodman, who really hits the nail on the head."

And this:

At any rate, the author of the blog ran a post that defends Mr. Line and demonstrates just enough erudition to hide the anti-scientific tenor of the post. If you haven’t enough time or patience, I suggest you scroll directly down to the comment by Scott Goodman, who really hits the nail on the head.

Hmmm. Apparently pointing out inaccuracies, oversimplifications, and misleading statements is unscientific in the world of scientific dogmatism. That can't do a whole lot for the reputation of the science about which Young seems so concerned.

And speaking of scientific dogmatism, which is what I was targeting in my post, Young doesn't seem to want to make the basic distinction between criticisms of such dogmatism (what I do in the post) and criticisms of actual science (which I don't do in the post), which, of course, is exactly the kind of distinction scientific dogmatists don't like to make.

And to commend for his readership a comment in the comments section of my blog which itself stretches the truth is another measure of extent to which standards of intellectual integrity are regularly dispensed with when it comes to the defense of certain scientific dogmas.

The comment inaccurately refers to me as a defender of Intelligent Design, blatantly mischaracterizes my arguments, and criticizes me for statements I did not make. Not that I expect this to make any difference to Young, since these are rhetorical tactics regularly employed at places like Panda's Thumb.

So far, neither Young nor the commenters on my blog even bothered to address the actual arguments I made in the post (with one exception, and this one got it wrong--as he usually does). I fact, no one as yet come to terms with the arguments I made in my original analysis of the Kitzmiller decision's reasoning in uncritically employing a faulty demarcation criterion between science and non-science and in a blatant inconsistency at the center of that part of the decision.

Instead, we get cheap ad hominem attacks like the comment from Young that I am "the Discovery Institute’s point man in Kentucky." Huh?

How does he know this? He heard it from "his informant." Never mind actually checking it out or verifying whether it was true. Mere random Internet rumor will suffice. One hopes he takes more care in the books he writes about evolution.

My only connection with Discovery is that they have co-posted some of my blog posts that have to do with criticisms of scientific dogmatism. I do not take a position on whether Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory, as the commenter he refers to alleges. Never have. Nor have I ever done or been asked to do anything for Discovery in Kentucky.

But no misrepresentation is so far out that it cannot be justified by the fact that it is done in the defense of Darwinism.

KY school official's letter to superintendent only partially evolved

Just when the public education establishment thought it had stamped out all dissent in its ranks on the issue of evolution, low and behold it now finds a rogue male that has somehow separated from the herd.

Here's the Lexington Herald-Leader, reporting on this crisis:

A Western Kentucky school superintendent is arguing that a new test which Kentucky high school students will take for the first time next spring will treat evolution as fact, not theory, and will require schools to teach that way.

The letter, written by Hart County School Superintendent Ricky D. Line, has sparked an animated demonstration among the chattering classes here in the state--and has caused a number of skeptic and atheist bloggers to leave off grooming themselves long enough to cast the usual aspersions in the general direction of anybody who strays away from the tribe.

The letter prompted a response by officials on the highest branch of the education tree: State Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday and the Kentucky School Board. At first blush, the letter sounds pretty impressive. But after running it through our usual battery of observational procedures here at Vital Remnants, it becomes clear that a number of things don't add up.

The letter is signed by the Commissioner but, by his own admission, he relies on research provided by the Department of Education's "legal and curriculum staffs." Now I can't say too much bad about the lawyers at KDE: They, at least, got real actual academic degrees. But "curriculum staff"? Are these people with "education degrees"? As we have pointed out here before, you can get better academic credentials by mailing in a coupon from a cereal box.

The letter gives the superintendent a lecture on the use of the word "theory." Line had asserted that evolution was "just a theory." Holliday says that, in science, the word "theory" does not mean, as it does in common usage, "little more than a guess." Holliday takes him to task for using the term in its everyday use rather than its use among the higher species of hominids known as "scientists."

Apparently Holliday and the Board didn't notice that Line was not making a scientific statement, but speaking in common English, in which the common usage of the word was exactly as Line was using it. Line was not engaging in science when he wrote the letter: He was speaking in common everyday English to the State Commissioner of Education. But, of course, educrats have trouble with common English and strongly prefer jargon to plain speech.

"Theory" as Holliday defines it, is a scientific jargon word, with a different meaning inside the discipline, one which is surely quite useful there. But which, outside it, only offers education bureaucrats an opportunity to make pedantic points that have no real relevance to the discussion.

Lectures like this (which you hear every time you use the word "theory" in its vernacular sense in the presence of a Darwinist ideologue) are turned into an opportunity to enforce a dominance hierarchy in which those who dissent from the Approved opinions are kept in their proper place in the cultural pecking order by implying that those who disagree with the dominant paradigm are just not very smart. Either that or they just can't make a basic distinction between common vernacular speech and the technical vocabulary of an academic discipline, which, in itself is not very smart.

Secondly, in the process of giving this lecture, Holliday says:

In science, facts never become theories. Rather, theories explain facts. [emphasis in original]

That is, at best, an oversimplification. All you've got to do is to and talk to a quantum physicist, who (if he adheres to the Copenhagen interpretation, the original and still standard interpretation of the theory) will tell you that science is not in the business of explanation, but of prediction. Quantum theory, the most successful predictive paradigm in science, has, for all practical purposes, handed explanation back to the philosophers. Niels Bohr. Check it out.

Then there's this gem:

Additionally, science is not a system of belief. To ask if a scientist ‘believes’ in the theory of evolution is an improper question because the term ‘belief’ implies a position or opinion based on faith. A biologist would properly say he/she understands and acknowledges the evidence supporting the theory of evolution. Belief is an act of faith and is not necessarily concerned with the availability of supporting evidence. For this reason, beliefs are not considered to be within the realm of science.

Just go ask a real scientist if he "believes" in the theory of evolution. You know what will happen? In all likelihood, he'll say, "Yes." He won't give you some geekish lecture on the proper way to phrase the question in a scientific environment.

Fortunately the ignorance that prevails in the higher branches of the public education tree has not yet infected lexicography. Here are a few definitions of "belief" culled from standard dictionaries:

• American Heritage: "Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons"
• Merriam-Webster: " conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence."
• Webster's New World Dictionary: "A belief is an opinion or something that a person holds to be true."

Not only does this not comport with what you will find in almost any standard dictionary, it doesn't comport with the terminology commonly used in academics disciplines like philosophy, a discipline that does things like, you know, define.

And even if it were true that the term "belief" only referred to opinions based on faith, scientists don't talk like this. They commonly talk about "believing" that the theory of evolution (or replace this with any other scientific theory). So if scientists themselves talk this way, why are we giving pedantic lectures to school superintendents?

This is all nonsense. Under the most universal use of these terms science is belief based on reason and evidence and faith is belief based on divine revelation or authority. These terms are used this way all the time by people in and outside the discipline of science.

The irony here is that most people believe in evolution on the same basis they believe in religious faith positions: on the basis of authority. They don't have the least conception of what the scientific evidence for it is; they simply believe it on the grounds that the scientists they've heard about say it's true. The further irony is that many scientists, who claim to be all about reason and evidence, not only think there is nothing wrong with all the people who believe in Darwinism on the basis of scientific authority, but think it would be unscientific not to!

Besides, science proceeds as much by scientists' faith in their own hunches and intuitions as by reason and evidence, as anyone familiar with Einstein--or for that  matter Galileo (whose heliocentrism was not supported by the evidence of the time, as the Church rightly pointed out)--would know.

Finally, Holliday tries his hand at the law, with the help, apparently, of his legal department:

Moreover, the federal courts have ruled that creation science, a religious concept or belief, is not science at all. [See Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F.Supp.2d 707, 764 (E.D.Pa. 2005); McLean v. Ark. Bd. of Educ., 529 F.Supp. 1255, 1259 (E.D.Ark.1982) (dismissing “creation science” as “simply not a science”).]

It may be true or false that creation science is not science. But to appeal to a court decision--and a problematic one at that, is slightly strange. Courts may have the power to dictate what schools can and can't teach, but to appeal to them as the final arbiters of the definition of science is highly problematic to say the least. Philosophers of science can't even agree on where to draw the line between science and non-science. So how is a judge supposed to competently do it?

In fact, the reasoning in the Kitzmiller decision, at some points, inconsistent, and, at others, simply laughable. I wrote a response to the section on the ruling in which the scientific status of ID is discussed here.

Judge John Jones first simply assumes Karl Popper's demarcation criterion--that a necessary condition for something to be science is that it be potentially falsifiable. But Popper's demarcation criterion has long been considered problematic in the philosophy of science, since it excludes activities commonly acknowledge to be science. Anyone blindly applying it as Jones does has no business making authoritative pronouncements about what makes science different from non-science.

Jones argues that Intelligent Design does not meet this criterion because it is not falsifiable. He then turns right around and argues that it is false. If it's not false, then it is falsifiable, and if it is not falsifiable, then it cannot be false. But he just goes on hoping that no one will notice the blatant contradiction in his argument.

Such is the state of the Commissioner of Education's arguments. But remember: it's superintendent Line who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Sheez.

Ken Ham's Exclusionist Theology: Can you reject a literal six-day creation and still be orthodox?

I have propounded my own theory of human development on this blog many times. I believe, as I have said, that the evidence suggests that human beings are evolving into creationists. There are many indications that creationism is on the rise, and that Darwinists are headed for extinction, the victim of their own theory that it is only the fit that survive. I have called their fitness into question on the basis of a disorder known as "Darwinian Intolerance" (DI), a malady which I attribute to close intellectual inbreeding and whose acronym, I am amused to note, is the same as that of the Discovery Institute.

But a monkey wrench, so to speak, has been thrown into the legitimacy of my theory by a prominent creationist, who appears to have contracted a bad case of a related malady. Ken Ham, the proprietor of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, a facility whose right to exist I have defended on a number of occasions against the Darwin Police who have sought to shut the place down, appears to have descended to the same level of intellectual intolerance to which he himself has been subjected by his Darwinist detractors. He has gone after a fellow speaker at a home school convention for not being sufficiently close-minded about the issue of creation.

Jay Wile, who I had the great pleasure of having dinner with a couple times last week at the Southwest Home School Convention, is a science teacher and the author of a set of widely used science textbooks--and a creationist. He blogged about this at Proslogion, defending Peter Enns, a well-regarded Biblical scholar against Ham's charge that, because he does not believe in a literal account of creation, Enns is a "compromiser" and a theological "liberal."

One of the things you find out pretty quickly from talking with Wile is that he is a practitioner of the arts of critical thinking, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion, things which the New Atheists and other militant Darwinists officially oppose. And he had the temerity to actually apply them to statements which didn't really deserve them.

And to top it off, Wile's defense of Enns itself was attacked by the Hamites, as evidenced by the now 141 comments on this post.

One of the points Wile makes is that, if you are going to categorize everyone who does not believe in a literal 6-day creation as a compromiser and theological liberal, then you're going to have to deal with the consequences, which consist of calling people theological liberals who clearly are not.

Here's the argument:

• All people who reject a literal 6-day creation are compromisers and theological liberals
• C. S. Lewis (and Norman Geisler, and Gleason Archer, and William Lane Craig, [provide your own name from the list of prominent orthodox thinkers throughout the history of the Church] rejects a literal 6-day creation
• Therefore, C. S. Lewis (etc.) is a compromiser and a theological liberal

The major premise here, which is clearly the one on which the Hamites are operating, leads to obvious absurdity. It's enough to cause a retrograde kink in my theory of the linear evolutionary ascent of creationists over time.

I have a quick and easy way to determine whether someone is orthodox: Go over each point in the Nicene Creed. If they affirm them all (with the possible exception of the "filioque" clause, which was added after the Council and which, on that plausible ground, the Eastern Orthodox reject), then they're orthodox. That was the Church's way of doing it. Might as well get used to it.

[And we note that a literal six-day creation was not one of the things the early Church chose to make a criterion of orthodoxy]

And I have an equally quick way of determining whether they really believe in a literal reading of the Bible: Offer them a bottle of fine French wine. If they refuse on Biblical grounds (despite all those pesky positive portrayals of "wine" that cannot be explained away by tortuous cultural, moral, sociological, and theological reasoning), then they really don't believe in the literal interpretation they profess.

Is there something complicated about all this?

Where are the Thought Police when you need them?

What do evolutionary scientists do when they find a kind of amber that is supposed to be about 140 million years old in 320 year old rock? They deny the chemical evidence, says Jay Wile:

So what does an evolutionist do when a fossil find contradicts his treasured hypothesis? He just waves the magic wand of “convergent evolution.” Remember, similarities between species are strong evidence for evolution, except when the hypothesis of evolution cannot accommodate them. When that happens, the similarities are a result of “convergent evolution,” a process by which species have similarities based on sheer coincidence alone.

So in this case, the fact that the amber has all the chemical features of being made by an angiosperm must be ignored. Instead, because the amber appears “too soon” in the fossil record for angiosperms, we must assume that it was made by something other than an angiosperm. Furthermore, we must assume that the similarities between its chemistry and the chemistry of resin made by angiosperms is the result of sheer coincidence.

That’s the kind of mental gymnastics it takes to be an evolutionist today.

I didn't know anyone could say these things anymore. Isn't it illegal or something? Where are the thought police? Are they on coffee break?

I don't know what this country is coming to.

Darwinism of the Gaps: Is Hausergate evidence that bad science is heritable?

Evolutionary psychologists will now have to be moved down to a lower branch on the credibility tree thanks to a scandal involving a Harvard professor famous for his research purporting to show that morality is merely a "survival instinct" that has developed over a long period of human evolution. Marc Hauser, the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, was found by a professional conduct committee of "scientific misconduct" for falsifying data that supported his thesis.

The penchant for trying to explain every human characteristic according to the Darwinian theory is something that has gotten too little attention. When theists try to explain something they don't think science explains, they are accused of engaging in the "God of the Gaps" thinking. What no one seems to have noticed, however, is the reverse tendency: "Darwinism of the Gaps."

Darwinism of the Gaps is the tendency to try to explain any area of human behavior they think theism shouldn't be able to explain by supplying a Darwinian or genetic explanation that, no matter how unlikely or counter-intuitive, is to be preferred over the religious explanation--even if the religious explanation is perfectly reasonable.

Morality, which makes perfect sense according to theism, is just one of these things to be explained by Darwinism, and the criteria these explanations are required to meet seems to be uniformly low. In fact, the only operative criterion seems to be that they exclude the theistic hypothesis.

Even though the scandal has caused a lot of fur to fly among the scientific community, one has to wonder why. What is wrong with falsifying data? Particularly when the whole point of the data which Mr. Hauser falsified was to show that nothing can truly be said to be wrong.

And where does this Harvard committee get off wagging their institutional finger at someone like Hauser? I mean, how long have they been around anyway? Maybe they just haven't been around long enough to have evolved the appropriate moral respect for the falsification of data.

According a Wall Street Journal exposé on the issue, this isn't the first time evolutionary psychology has had to be given time out:

Not so long ago, the initial bloom already was off evolutionary psychology. The field earned a bad name by appearing to justify all sorts of nasty, rapacious behaviors, including rape, as successful strategies for Darwinian competition. But the second wave of the discipline solved that PR problem by discovering that evolution favored those with a more progressive outlook. Mr. Hauser has been among those positing that our ancestors survived not by being ruthlessly selfish, but by cooperating, a legacy ingrained in our moral intuitions.

It is one of the ironies of modern scientific thought that that those most convinced that we got here through a process of the Survival of the Fittest, a process involving competition, would have become so enamored of a theory that posits the Survival of the Nicest, a process involving cooperation.

It's a testimony to the fervor with which they hold to their theory that they would cling to two completely contradictory theses in order to maintain the Darwinian Faith. The irony is particularly marked given the additional Darwinist tendency to accuse those of other faiths of being irrational.

Then again, maybe the penchant for offering contradictory explanations for the positions you hold is an evolved trait which favors the survival of Darwinists.

It's hard to tell.

Should they ban Jeffrey Shallit for bone-headedness?

Jeffrey Shallit at Recursivity complains that he was banned at Doug Groothius' site for being "pugnacious" in making the following comment on a passage Grootius quoted from C. S. Lewis:

Lewis didn't know anything about evolution. He didn't understand that what he called "morality" is a fact about human evolution; that we are programmed by evolution and culture to regard certain behaviors of others as acceptable and other behaviors as less so. Once this is understood, Lewis's confusion simply vanishes.

I don't see what's pugnacious about it. On the other hand, maybe Groothius also has a policy against bone-headedness, in which case I could see how this might violate the policy.

How does Shallit know that Lewis knew nothing about evolution? Has he read Lewis's books to determine this? That can't be, since no one who has read Lewis's books could say such a ridiculous thing about morality.

But Lewis's statements about evolution were tempered with caution on the grounds that he wasn't a scientist. Shallit clearly has no interest in the similar caution about making forays into philosophy, where he clearly is out of his water.

He did, however, pen this poem:

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

In other words, Evolution (Lewis wryly capitalizes the word to indicate the religious fervor characteristic of its adherents) may be the thing that has brought about the complexity of things, but, by the admission of its own supporters, it has, by its very nature, no teleological principles, and therefore cannot be said to "progress," since progress, by definition, is the continuous movement toward some end.

Shallit, of course, thinks just such a thing.

Shallit is a computer scientist. And to someone who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The only question is why Shallit, who thinks morality is just behavior that has been "programmed" into us by evolution and culture, should have any moral objection to Groothius banning him from his blog.

Is it wrong? So what? Some of us have just broken out of Shallit's programmatic moral matrix. Once we have done that, he can have absolutely nothing to say.

And saying nothing would have made a whole lot more sense than what he did say.

Is monogamy natural to humans? Just ask a chimp

We have taken another specimen of evolutionary romanticism into captivity and have been conducting some logical experiments on it to see how it holds up. This one comes care of Christopher Ryan, who claims, care of CNN.com, that there is no reason to believe that monogamy is natural to humans.

His argument could count as evidence that rationality is not natural to humans.

Seismic cultural shifts about 10,000 years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries, it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists and covered up by moralizing therapists.

We're still trying to piece together the succession of Egyptian dynasties, but Ryan knows about specific cultural shifts 10,000 years ago. Hmmm. Apparently, Ryan has never heard the term "prehistoric."

Most "mainstream therapists," he says,

insist that long-term sexual monogamy is "normal," while the curiosity and novelty-seeking inherent in human sexuality are signs of pathology. ... This is a problem because there is no reason to believe monogamy comes naturally to human beings. In fact, for millions of years, evolutionary forces have cultivated human libido to the point where ours is arguably the most sexual species on Earth.

Notice what's going on here: We talk about all the evidence against marriage we can derive from early human society, about which we know little, and ignore all the evidence in favor of it from later human society, about which we know a lot. And the one thing we know about societies for which we do have histories is that marriage in some form is almost omnipresent.

Then, of course, we assume that primitive practices are somehow more representative of what human nature really is than more recent civilized practices:

Research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy and psychology points to the same conclusion: A nonpossessive, gregarious sexuality was the human norm until the rise of agriculture and private property just 10,000 years ago, about 5 percent of anatomically modern humans' existence on Earth.

And if the behavior of early humans is to be considered authoritative in determining what proper human behavior is to be, then going even further back ought to be even more instructive:

The two primate species closest to us lend strong -- if blush-inducing -- support to this vision. Ovulating female chimps have intercourse dozens of times per day, with most or all of the willing males, and bonobos famously enjoy frequent group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and conflict-free.

Well, gee, if chimps and bonobos do it, what are we waiting for?

I suppose we could just continue going back through the evolutionary chronology to see what we were doing when we were doing the bacterial backstroke in the primordial slime and come up with some great dating tips.

But we better not give Ryan any ideas.

Finally there is the appeal to anatomical romanticism, which we will have to forgo including here since this is a nice family blog. Suffice it to say it is not pretty. But the gist of his argument is that, if you look at certain male body organs, they are bigger than these same certain body organs among primates, and this is clearly indicative that men are meant to run around copulating freely with as many females as they desire.

Ryan's argument has all the intellectual sophistication of George Carlin's argument that since the human index finger is the same size as the human nostril, it was obviously designed for nose-picking.

It is also interesting that, whenever you invoke any kind of intrinsic nature or purpose to explain any natural thing, you are told by Darwinists that this thinking is a vestige of the old Aristotelian scholasticism, and that final and formal causes were abandoned during the scientific revolution. But then they import them in the back door to implicitly justify their arguments about what human anatomical features say about our natures.

If Aristotelianism is dead, the why are they talking about the inherent purposes of body parts?

If you want more comic relief at the expense of human nature, you can consult Ryan's book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality.

Making sense on Adam and Eve

My post on the Adam and Eve controversy has my detractors chattering in the comment box. Nothing less than total submission to their dogmas will do. Even skepticism is unacceptable. Here is James Chastek, making sense again, with his own very sensible comments on the Biologos discussion that started the dust up.

Evolution: A syllogism

Jay Wile's recent post on the falsifiability of evolution reminds me of the penchant that Darwinists have for quoting Karl Popper, who enjoys somewhat of a canonical status among them. He is their go to man on the demarcation question (the question in philosophy of science having to do with the determination of what is and isn't science), and his appeal to the falsifiability criterion is something of a refrain among Darwinists.

Popper believed that a scientific theory could never be proven, but only disproven. The scientist sets forth his theory and then makes attempts to find falsifying instances. This is, according to Popper, the appropriate activity of the scientist, much more so that finding confirming instances. Because of this, you find Darwinists readily saying (as they have on this blog) that you can't prove anything (scientifically).

The problem is, they will just as readily say, in other contexts, that evolution has been "proven." Put these two propositions together, and you get the following syllogism:

No scientific theory can be proven
Evolution is a scientific theory
Therefore, Evolution cannot be proven

Just thought I'd mention it.

A survivable trait?

While they're talking about how modern humans are still evolving, maybe someone could explain how the gay gene (as if there really were one) is passed on.

My Life With the Kentuckians: Is Dennis Cheek fit enough to survive the vetting process for education commissioner?

According to several news sources, Dennis Cheek, one of the candidates for the Kentucky Commissioner of Education, a man who is an experienced science and social studies teacher and school administrator, the director of the Office of High School Reform, Research, and Adult Education in Rhode Island, and who possesses two PhDs, once wrote a paper that questioned the evidence for whether human beings evolved from apes.

The revelation has caused a great deal of chattering among some in the education bureaucracy who wonder why he did not divulge this to the Board of Education, which is looking into his background.

Although the views Cheek expressed concerning human origins are in agreement with those of most people in the state, some of the more exotic and excitable species of Kentuckians are wondering whether he is well-adapted enough for the secularist environment of the state's education bureaucracy.

Richard Day, a dominant male in the education community and the one who dug up the old creationist paper, displayed openly aggressive behavior at his blog "Kentucky School News and Commentary" in response to the revelation about what he considers Cheek's checkered past:

What I can't figure is - why didn't Cheek inoculate himself against the sizable vulnerability represented by creationism? Did he bet it wouldn't be discovered? Did it not come up in Missouri where he was also a finalist for their top post?

Exactly why Day considers someone's past creationist belief a potentially disqualifying factor for a schools chief in a state which not only still has a creationist statute on the books, but is the home of the hugely successful creation museum is not self-evident. But the discovery clearly caused Day to climb the walls of his cage, and will certainly cause others among the professional education community to raise their tales and lower their heads.

Years of continued observation of the professional education community has made it fairly clear that they are not well-suited to understand the beliefs and values of the communities their schools were built to serve. They are known to become visibly anxious and erratic in their behavior whenever issues such as school prayer, the role Christianity has played in our nation's history, or human origins are raised. And the higher you go in their dominance hierarchy, the more unfriendly behavior they seem to display toward the common cultural beliefs of their students and their families.

Day's revelation followed an editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal, in which a species related to the professional education bureaucrats knows as "journalists" (a cultural subgroup that is now on the endangered species list) questioned Cheek's past involvement in the Templeton Foundation.

It is a measure of the cultural isolation of the editors at the Courier that they would be scratching their heads at anyone's involvement with Templeton, which the paper inexplicably calls "controversial and polarizing." In fact, it is a relatively mainstream organization one of whose purposes is to try to bring together diverse intellectuals of differing viewpoints to discuss the relation of religion and science.

The only people who find Templeton's innocuous objectives controversial are the more exotic subspecies of scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins, P. Z. Myers, and Jerry Coyne, who are known to inhabit a few isolated university biology departments.

That the Courier would consider the views of these outliers as somehow the norm may be due to the Courier's habit of imitating the radical secularism papers like the New York Times have come to exhibit.

Journalist see, journalist do.

But one wonders if the issue should really matter at all. Cheek, who has been involved with public education for many years, now says he has come to believe that humans really did descend from apes.

And after having observed behavior similar to that he is now encountering in Kentucky, it is easy to see why.

"Coyne's Confusion" on Discovery's blog

My piece, "Coyne's Confusion," was cross posted on the Discovery Institute's "Evolution News and Views."

Overheard in a book review, one Darwinian to another: "Shhh! Don't say that!"

In an interesting review of several new books on Darwin in the New York Review of Books, Richard Lewontin has good things to say about Jerry Coyne's book, Why Evolution is True. But he criticizes him for what he feels is giving too much away to Darwin's critics:

Where he is less successful, as all other commentators have been, is in his insistence that the evidence for natural selection as the driving force of evolution is of the same inferential strength as the evidence that evolution has occurred. So, for example, he gives the game away by writing that when we examine a sequence of changes in the fossil record, we can

determine whether the sequences of changes at least conform to a step-by-step adaptive process. And in every case, we can find at least a feasible Darwinian explanation.

But to say that some example is not falsification of a theory because we can always "find" (invent) a feasible explanation says more about the flexibility of the theory and the ingenuity of its supporters than it says about physical nature. Indeed in his later discussion of theories of behavioral evolution he becomes appropriately skeptical when he writes that

imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories.

While this is a perfectly good argument against those who claim that there are things that are so complex that evolutionary biology cannot explain them, it allows evolutionary "theory" to fall back into the category of being reasonable but not an incontrovertible material fact.

The text here is hard to parse at points, but he appears to be saying that Darwinists should not permit the slightest speck of doubt (to borrow a Chestertonian phrase) on their spotless machine. Lewontin even puts "theory" in double quotes, just to emphasize the term's status as scientific dogma.

And Lewontin is right, as a Darwinian dogmatist, to be upset at what Coyne seems to be admitting here (I'm relying on Lewontin's account, not having read the book), which is that any set of facts, if it can be given a Darwinian interpretation, must be given a Darwinian interpretation. This seems to be a common procedure: if a Darwinian interpretation is feasible, it is also, therefore, imperative.

Some theories get all the breaks.

How you can explain everything by evolution (and be a jerk about it at the same time)

Cartago Delenda Est points out this post from Uncommon Descent:

Evolutionary Psychology is my favorite intellectual pastime. I love to give intelligent positions where I can never be wrong, because I am always right.

For example:

Q. Dr. Harris, why would a mother run into a burning building to save her baby? What explains this altruistic behavior?

A. It’s quite simple you creationist moron. Genes control all our behavior and genes exist because of undirected, purposeless natural selection. She is simply acting out her genetic destiny. By saving her child she is preserving her genes – the very genes that control her actions. Genes create her actions and her actions create her genes. And don’t give me any of that “tautology” stuff.

Q. Dr. Harris, why would a mother not run into a burning building to save her baby? What explains this selfish behavior?

A. It’s quite simple you creationist moron. Genes control all our behavior and genes exist because of undirected, purposeless natural selection. She is simply acting out her genetic destiny. By avoiding the chance of death she remains alive to have other babies, or to take care of other children she may have, thus preserving her genes.

Q. So Dr. Harris, are you saying that Evolutionary Psychology can equally explain one thing and its opposite at the very same time? That doesn’t sound like science.

A. You don’t know anything about science. You’re a right wing fascist creationist moron.

If I'm not mistaken, I think that's called "unfalsifiability."

The 2nd most creationist country in the industrialized world is the most scientifically advanced. How can this be?

Denise O'Leary makes a good point: If creationism is such a threat to science knowledge, as Darwinists like to claim, then why is it that, in a study of 19 industrialized countries, the United States ranks second to last in its support of evolution (ahead of only Turkey) in its support for evolution, while it is ranks first in practically every science category?

The Great Scopes Myth: The convenient lie lives on

Time Magazine has a story the town of Dayton, Tennessee is still dealing with what is popularly termed the "Scopes Monkey Trial." The 1925 trial became a national obsession when the national media descended on the town, turned it into a circus, and then made fun of it.

The Time story continues to do what the media has traditionally done when reporting on the trial: falsify history:

Though Bryan and the creationists initially won this fight, the law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools was eventually overturned in the 1960s. [emphasis added]

The Butler Act which was the subject of the trial did not "prohibit the teaching of evolution." It did prohibit denying the literal account of man's origins, however, and the press took it from there.

And then, of course, there was Inherit the Wind, a play based on the trial that simply falsified history to make its preachy point which was then made into several even more preachy movies.

Oh well, the Great Scopes Myth (part of the larger Darwinist Myth) must be sustained in the national consciousness--all, ironically, in the name of truth.

Tolerance Police expel Ben Stein from University of Vermont graduation ceremony

University of Vermont president Daniel Fogel has uninvited Ben Stein, the star of the pro-Intelligent Design movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," as its commencement speaker in order to be inclusive. In order to be less divisive, the university is replacing Stein with ... Howard Dean.

Apparently former Columbia University speaker Ahmadinejad was unavailable.

The Evolution of the Gaps

The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth is fast upon us--February 12 to be exact--and the occasion will undoubtedly spawn prolific comment on his legacy. Add to that the fact that this year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and you have the makings of a real celebration. He was, after all, one of four or five great influences on modern thought, along with Sigmund Freud, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, and Karl Marx.

One of the more interesting comments on Darwin and his legacy is the recent article by Jerry Coyne on why science and religion can never be reconciled, in the most recent New Republic. Coyne reviews two recent books on Darwin, both of which argue that evolutionary theory and religious belief are reconcilable, and in the process makes his own case against the possibility of any reconciliation between religion and science at all.

I'll be making a few observations over the next couple of weeks about Coyne's article and the many reactions to it by important modern thinkers.

The "God of the Gaps" Argument
The first has to do with a comment Coyne quotes from Karl W. Giberson's book, Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution. Coyne quotes the passage approvingly:

The world is a complex place, and there is much about the universe that we still don't understand. We are centuries away from closing the many gaps in our current scientific understanding of the natural world.... But it is the business of science to close gaps, and it has long been the central intuition of theology to find a better place to look for God.... Promoting "design" in isolation from God's other attributes is a dangerous and ultimately self-defeating way to get God back into science. [italics mine]

There are several things going on in this paragraph, but the one I want to draw attention to is the italicized part. It is one brief statement of one of the assumptions behind the "God of the Gaps" argument against theism, an argument alluded to throughout Coyne's piece. This is an argument used frequently by Darwinists against anyone who would presume to believe in some account of nature that involves anything outside of nature.

According to this argument, there is a body of questions about the world, many of which are still unanswered. Fewer of these are unanswered now than in previous times, since Science answers more and more of these questions every day. Those of a religious bent, it is charged, have always taken refuge in God as the answer to unanswered questions. If there is an unanswered question, proponents say, "God did it." But Science will one day answer all these questions, we are told, and then there will be no need for the silly hypothesis of God.

In short, the God Hypothesis is only a sort of intellectual stopgap measure to plug the holes in our knowledge about nature that becomes less and less necessary as Science advances, and the outstanding questions decrease. Furthermore the plausibility of the Hypothesis even for explaining those things that are still unexplained by Science becomes suspect because it has so often been replaced by a scientific explanation.

The static analysis fallacy behind the argument
But there is an assumption behind the God of the Gaps Argument that is ridiculous on the face of it. In fact, it is a great example of the static analysis fallacy.

The assumption is that there is a fixed number of questions about the natural world, some of which have been answered and some of which have not, so that every question that is answered reduces the number of unanswered questions by the same amount, leaving the body of unanswered questions reduced by one, and leaving the need for the God hypothesis reduced by 1 divided by the number of unanswered questions.

Now this is obviously absurd, since science (as opposed to "Science") does not operate in a world in which there is a fixed number of questions. As science proceeds in its path of discovery, it discovers new questions which it never would have thought to ask before. Because of this there are some who would argue that the number of unanswered scientific questions is not diminishing at all: that, in fact, because of the rate of the appearance of new questions compared to number of questions having obtained answers, the number of unanswered questions is actually increasing all the time.

It's a bit like the situation with oil reserves. I don't know if the situation still holds, but several years ago, there was a debate about the availability of oil and how long the world had until it ran out. Someone came up with the exact number of years they thought we had until we ran out of oil. They simply took the amount of known oil reserves and divided it by the amount of oil consumed each year. Presto: a reliable prediction of how long we had.

But the analysis failed to take account of the discovery of new oil reserves each year. At any one time, there are so many gallons of oil reserves discovered. But the next year, they will have discovered more oil reserves. So any static analysis will completely miss the change in available oil and its affect on the analysis. In fact, someone pointed out, the rate of discovery of new oil reserves in any given year consistently outpaces the amount of oil used in that year so that at the end of each succeeding year, there is more available oil.

Again, I don't know if this situation still holds--and, of course, there is obviously a fixed amount of oil on the earth known and unknown--a situation, by the way, that does not necessarily apply to the number of mysteries in nature.

There is also the matter of the nature of the newer questions in relation to the old. I can't prove it, but I wonder if the questions scientists face get increasingly intractable. As they delve deeper into the mysteries of nature, do they realize how much deeper the mysteries are than they thought before? This seems to be a theme in some writing by physicists.

If you light a lantern in the darkness, you see the area that it lights--and the darkness all around. But if you make the lantern brighter, although you see more by its light, you also see more that is dark. The circle of light increases, but with the increase in the size of the circle comes an increase in its circumference outside of which one sees the increasing extent of the darkness. With the increase in the size of the circle comes the increasing realization of the amount of the darkness all round.

Science is a light in the darkness of physical reality, but as its light increases, so does its estimate of the amount of darkness that is in need of light.

What accounts for the argument's popularity?
So why does this static analysis maintain an air of plausibility to so many people?

My theory is this: that they infer from the fact that we can manipulate nature and predict its behavior better, that we must therefore be closing in on some ultimate terminus in which our powers to control nature--and to understand it--are perfect. A sort of Scientific utopia. But is this inference valid?

I can do things with my computer now that I could never have done 30 years ago. Through the development of new software applications, I can manipulate text and images, as well as facts and figures, in a way the people of a generation ago could never have dreamed. I can access information with a speed and facility that is simply astounding. I can manipulate these things much better than before, and I can order information with an increasing competence.

But is this increasing ability to control and order information commensurate with my knowledge of how I am able to do this?

I took computer programming classes in college in the early 1980s. There were a limited number of computer languages at the time, and even a beginning student could comprehend the scope of the tools available to him to learn and master computer programming. But as the ability to manipulate information on the part of the computer user has increased, so have the tools and technology that makes that manipulation possible. In fact, the level of complexity that goes into making such manipulation easier on the part of computer users far outstrips their limited understanding of how they are able to do it.

When the Internet was in its infancy, you had to know html, and you could make a competent web page if you learned some basic commands. But go try to figure out how some modern state of the art web page operates now--a web page that makes something you want to do easier--and you will discover that just knowing html does little to help you understand it. There is php, and java, and numerous other languages and tools that seem to multiply by the week.

It doesn't take you long to realize that even though you can do more and more incredible things with the tools that are available to you, you understand less and less about the incredibly complex world of computer technology that allows you to do those things--a world getting more complex and harder to understand by the day.

Of course there is someone--or various someones--who know these things, else they would not exist. These someones--intelligences we presume--are inventing new things all the time to make it easier for those of us who use computers to do more and more things. What is interesting, however, is that if you talk to any one of these intelligences, you quickly discover that, although they may be very sophisticated themselves, they still do not understand very many things about the world in which they operate, so terribly complex is that world becoming.

I suppose there are those who would respond that this analogy breaks down when you consider that the world of technology is one that is, in fact, getting more complex all of the time because there are people constantly developing more complexity, as opposed to the natural world, which does not have such intelligences doing this. But the whole irony here is that those who are most prone to invoke the God of the Gaps argument are the very ones who believe in a theory (Natural Selection) that, over time, creates a more and more complex world.

Isn't this, after all, the lecture we are constantly having to endure? That things "higher" on the evolutionary tree are only "higher" in the sense that they are more complex? And that the evolutionary movement in nature is from the less complex to the more complex?

Other problems with the argument
Of course, those who wield the God the Gaps Argument against theism probably need to be asked who they are trying to refute, since there are very few intelligent theists who argue that evidence for God is restricted only to the things that science has yet to explain. "We are to find God in what we know," said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "not in what we don't know."

And anyway, scientific explanation is not necessarily a full explanation. Often scientific explanation takes the form of appeal to prior, unexplained phenomena. Science doesn't even purport to give ultimate explanations for things. It only explains how, and cannot explain why, so even those things that are supposedly explained by science still inhabit the domain of things that await some more ultimate explanation.

In other words, not only are the gaps not diminishing, but they aren't even really gaps.