The Most Powerful ID Essay I've Read

The Anchoress led me to Matteo at Cartago Delenda Est (like The Anchoress, and like Ales Rarus, a former lib-or-even-lefteral who turned Catholic and right -- lotta those on the Web, noticed?), who led me to Fred Reed at LewRockwell.com, who says this:

On his early questions about the origin of life:

Well, I thought, sophomore chemistry major that I then was: If we don't know what conditions existed, or what conditions are necessary, and can't reproduce the event in the laboratory, and can't show it to be statistically probable – why are we so very sure that it happened? Would you hang a man on such evidence?

On "what distinguishes evolution from other science":

First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. . . . Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to establishing how it had happened. Asking them for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.

As an example, it seems plausible to evolutionists that life arose by chemical misadventure. By this they mean (I think) that they cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I. Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. ...

Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can't see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn't have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But...is any of this established?

Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. . . .

Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. [This made me LOL] Nobody does – except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions – overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.

I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn't a Creationist. They refused to believe it. . . . "Creationist" is to evolution what "racist" is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the political correctness of science.

Reed describes what happened when he posed some of his questions about the origin of life to (unnamed) eminent evolutionists:

It was like giving a bobcat a prostate exam. I got everything but answers. They told me I was a crank, implied over and over that I was a Creationist, said that I was an enemy of science (someone who asks for evidence is an enemy of science). They said that I was trying to pull down modern biology (if you ask questions about an aspect of biology, you want to pull down biology). They told me I didn't know anything (that's why I was asking questions), and that I was a mere journalist (the validity of a question depends on its source rather than its content).

But they didn't answer the questions. They ducked and dodged and evaded. . . . They would neither tell me of what the early oceans consisted, nor admit that they didn't know.

This is the behavior not of scientists, but of advocates, of True Believers. I used to think that science was about asking questions, not about defending things you didn't really know. Religion, I thought, was the other way around. I guess I was wrong.

Then, Reed goes and asks a list of "Practical Questions" about "How do you get evolutionarily from A to B? Can you get from A to B by the mechanisms assumed?" The giraffe's long neck; color vision; metamorphosis, wherein a caterpillar pupates, dissolves into a soup, and then re-forms into a completely different structure:

Pupating looks like something you do well or not at all: If you don't turn into something practical at the end, you don't get another chance. . . .

Tell me how the beast can gradually acquire, by accident, the capacity gradually to undergo all the formidably elaborate changes from worm to butterfly, so that each intermediate form is a practical organism that survives. If evolutionists cannot answer such questions, the theory fails.

Here the evolutionist will say, "Fred, caterpillars are soft, squashy things and don't leave good fossils, so it's unreasonable to expect us to find proof." I see the problem. But it is unreasonable to expect me to accept something on the grounds that it can't be proved. Yes, it is possible that an explanation exists and that we just haven't found it. But you can say that of anything whatever. Is it good science to assume that evidence will be forthcoming because we sure would like it to be? I'll gladly give you evidence Wednesday for a theory today?

Note that I am not asking evolutionists to give detailed mechanics for the evolution of everything that lives. If they gave convincing evidence for a few of the hard cases – proof of principle, so to speak – I would be inclined to believe that equally good evidence existed for the others. But they haven't.

On the three facets of the theory of evolution:

Evolution breaks down into at least three logically separable components . . .

The first, chance formation of life ["life arose by chemical accident"], simply hasn't been established. It isn't science, but faith.

The second proposition, that life, having arisen by unknown means, then evolved into the life of today, is more solid. In very old rocks you find fish, then things, like coelacanth and the ichthyostega, that look like transitional forms, and finally us. They seem to have gotten from A to B somehow. A process of evolution, however driven, looks reasonable. It is hard to imagine that they appeared magically from nowhere, one after the other.

The third proposition, that the mechanism of evolutions is chance mutation, though sacrosanct among its proponents, is shaky. If it cannot account for the simultaneous appearance of complex, functionally interdependent characteristics, as in the case of caterpillars, it fails. Thus far, it hasn't accounted for them.

. . . when things do not happen according to script – when, for example, human intelligence appears too rapidly – then we have the theory of "privileged genes," which evolved at breakneck speed because of assumed but unestablished selective pressures. That is, the existence of the pressures is inferred from the changes, and then the changes are attributed to the pressures. Oh.

. . . There is an air of desperation about all of it. Transparently they begin with their conclusion and craft their reasoning to reach it.

And finally, the new kid on the block:

An interesting thought that drives evolutionists mad is called Intelligent Design, or ID. It is the view that things that appear to have been done deliberately might have been. Some look at, say, the human eye and think, "This looks like really good engineering. Elaborate retina of twelve layers, marvelously transparent cornea, pump system to keep the whole thing inflated, suspensory ligaments, really slick lens, the underlying cell biology. Very clever."

I gather that a lot of ID folk are in fact Christian apologists trying to drape Genesis in scientific respectability. That is, things looked to have been designed, therefore there must be a designer, now will Yahweh step forward. Yet an idea is not intellectually disreputable because some of the people who hold it are. The genuine defects of ID are the lack of a detectible designer, and that evolution appears to have occurred. This leads some to the thought that consciousness is involved and evolution may be shaping itself. I can think of no way to test the idea.

And in conclusion:

To evolutionists I say, "I am perfectly willing to believe what you can actually establish. Reproducibly create life in a test tube, and I will accept that it can be done. Do it under conditions that reasonably may have existed long ago, and I will accept as likely the proposition that such conditions existed and gave rise to life. I bear no animus against the theory, and champion no competing creed. But don't expect me to accept fluid speculation, sloppy logic, and secular theology."

Go read the whole thing, please. I've left out much that's devastating, and funny. Then come back here and give it your best shot. From now on, when anyone gives me a hard time for even entertaining ID, I'm throwing up my hands and sending them to Fred Reed.

It seems to me that evolutionists, if they were really good scientists, ought to welcome this challenge. If their theory is sound, it will only come out stronger.

- amba

P.S. Who is this Fred Reed, anyway? He's the author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, described on Amazon as "Brash, outrageously funny, incorrect political and social commentary by a Washington reporter fed up with practically everything." Author description: "Fred Reed is a Marine combat veteran, police reporter, amateur biochemist, former long-haul hitchhiker, and part-time sociopath living in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from the Yankee Capital."

Comments

[adam]

Hi Amba,

My undergraduate degree was in neuroscience and I plan to go for a PhD soon. I didn't spend too much time on evolution, but here's my impression of this debate.

I think it's very likely something else is going on besides just materialism in this world. Particulary, as the author pointed out, in the area of consciousness. This issue, more than any other, is the most challenging thing for science to cope with.

However, I think in some sense IDers may be barking up the wrong tree. My personal sense/belief (perhaps a loony one) was the divine (however you choose to define it) guided evolution to an extent via its mind/consciousness. Since quantum mechanics and evolution have a chance quality to them, I sort of think that "the divine" steered those chances in a particular direction.

However, obviously that steering was certainly not perfect given all the flaws we have in the world today: ticks, poisonous snakes, other parasites. Furthermore, I have it heard it claimed that when you look up close at biological organisms they more resemble a rube-goldberg machine than expert-engineering. From my experience studying molecular biology and neuroanatomy that's more or less the impression I got.

Also, from my training, I think most scientists freely admit that they don't know how life originated. With a field like evolution, the very complexity of life and the randomness of many processes make it impossible to prove that things happened in such a way. Also, since it happened in the past under unknown conditions it's pretty hard to test. So, evolution theorists can at best show that something is consistent with the theory. However, this doesn't mean that it can't be falsified, it just means it hard to falsify. For instance, the appearance of an organism, with absolutely no relation to any others with a different genetic code (not genes but the way in which virtually all cells translate the information on DNA) would be pretty strong evidence against evolution. The fact that so much data can be reconciled with it is pretty strong support that they've got something right. Also, it's a general point of science that nothing can be proved right, only proved wrong. It's always conceivable that some counterexample exists that we haven't yet come across.

In conclusion, I think the whole process of life is a big complicated mess of chance with some steering behind it to make sure that eventually that in the end it would produce a create capable of writing symphonies and discovering theorems.

[amba]

Adam,

We may never know for sure, but I bet you're onto something.

You'd be interested in the work of Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz. THE MIND AND THE BRAIN would be a good place to start. He's a neuropsychiatrist who's in the process of proving, in collaboration with a quantum physicist, Henry Stapp, that mind is not completely reducible to matter, and can influence it.

[Jill Fallon]

What a fabulous article. thank you so much for pointing me to it.
Quite the best thing on intelligent design that I've read.

[Chris Hallquist]

May I suggest:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html
In short: we've seen new species emerge, no one's proposing modern bacteria emerged directly from simple molecules, and "irreducibly complex" things aren't so mysterious.

The hostility, I suspect, is largely from how often people who don't know what they're talking about tout their lack of understanding as disproof. If he Reed would spend some time reading resources on evolution like the ones posted above and having non-hostile conversations with biologists, he'd get his answers.

Biologists are the main ones who get worked up about creationism because they're the main targets. But they're not the only ones: http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/?p=67

Final point: at present, we have no alternative to evolution that has any support. We can observe mutation, recombination, basic chemisty, etc. We've yet to observe any action by a non-human designer. We certainly don't understand everything, but we have to go with the best we've got, which is, by far, evolution.

[karen]

Thank you so much for the great article, amba!! I must confess, I'd never heard of ID before coming to your blog. I kinda agree with Adam, as much as a Catholic can. I believe God can do anything and if he created us, he can "steer" us along in evolving. I always have a hard time with timelines; how do they know how many billions of years or how many light years away anything is? I like science. I'm sure you saw my dopey comment on A's site about my chat with the nutritionist? He's a doctor, and very with it, it's hard to remember EVERYTHING bright people say--geesh. But, the fact that they can identify genomes and break it down to the few that influence our body's response to what and how we eat... and create a chip to implant, i guess to record responses... like Fred says, though... grown ups playing God. In this case it's doctors playing God. I think that's funny :)

[Funky Dung]

"like Ales Rarus, a former lib-or-even-lefteral who turned Catholic and right"

I'm thrilled to be linked, but I think you might have gotten the wrong impression of me. My theology is very "right", but my politics are very "moderate". I only registered Republican in an attempt to oust Sen. Arlen Specter in the the primaries. I didn't vote for Bush - either time. I don't like party politics, but if forced to pigeon-hole myself, I'd say I'm a Bob Casey, Sr. Democrat.

RE: Fred Reed, I've never heard of the fella. I wonder when I linked to him. *shrug*

RE: Intelligent Design, I don't buy it. It's pseudoscience and bad biblical exegesis. The only ID I believe is that God created the universe and the life in it. I don't much care how and evolution is just as good as any other method in my eyes.

[Funky Dung]

RE: the three posited propositions of evolution, why must one adhere to all three? I doubt all supporters of the theory do. I know I don't. Did life appear accidentally? No. God created it. Did it evolve by natural selection and mutation? Yes. Was that process truly random? No. It appears as such, but God "rolls the dice" for the process, so to speak. A process may seem entirely random but actually have a deterministic and predictable event generator - iuf only we had all the data (which we don't).

[Funky Dung]

Now I see - Matteo linked to Reed and you compared Matteo to me. *sigh* I guess it's time for coffee. ;)

[amba]

Funky Dung: I apologize. I was free associating a bit too much, and I knew it right after I did it :) ! I'd just been reading your blog, and I was trying to remark, far too briefly and indiscriminately, on the phenomenon just dawning on me that there are a lot of people articulately blogging who were once a lot more liberal, theologically and/OR politically, than they are now. And that making that turn back to faith and certainty (which certainly changes one's politics too, though not necessarily to extremes) seems to have liberated the voices of many, probably because such a change involves both a lot of thought and a lot of emotion. I know that my own turn to the right (which only took me to the center) did.

Next time I'll link to you more than in passing . . .

[Chris Hallquist]

It's also worth making a distinction between "God was subtly involved in the process" and "This cannot be explained without God." Eugene Volokh just had a good post on this: http://volokh.com/admin/trackbackdrum.pl?post=1118942329 (how do I link, btw?) It's like the difference between saying "God helped defeat Hitler" and saying "we should teach school kids that there's good evidence Hitler could not have been defeated without divine intervention."

[Willa Cartwright]

Hi,

Interesting points but with all due respect, here are some corrections. Firstly though, don’t take this as a me being on one side or the other. Indeed I’d welcome an opposing theory / idea / concept that would compete against the theory of evolution. Anyway, here are some corrections.

1. The theory of evolution is categorically NOT even related to the origin of life. Darwin’s theory does not, even for one second, discuss how life arose in the first place. What Darwin's theory proposed is how "speciation" occurred and that is all. The question of the origin of life is another field altogether. This is a mistake many people, including and specifically the ID’ers, do and say that evolution is talking about the origin of life. It’s a common mistake, but it is just not true.

2. Your point about the eye. You do mention that the ID‘ers do say the eye looks designed. Sadly though, the fact is that the eye of all mammals is badly flawed. It’s clearly undesigned and accidental in it’s construction. In essence, it’s inside-out. Which is why there are blind spots. On the other hand, many invertebrates such as octopus and squid have a better constructed eye. Infact, it’s so much like the human eye, but the major difference is that it is not inside-out. It doesn’t have a blind spot. So the question arises that if life is “designed”, why do some creatures have errors and some not?

3. There is a belief my many people who do not fully understand what Charles Darwin proposed as “speciation” through the mechanism of evolution. Indeed many believe that evolution is "some mysterious force that always makes the correct and best choice". This however, couldn't be further from the truth. At the end of the day it may help people to treat evolution as nothing other as a process. There is no direction, nor is there any plan. If evolution does exist, it can just as easily be described as biological opportunism.

Thanks

Willa

[big dirigible]

Holy Cow! Reed's essay has at least one error or misconception in damn near every paragraph. It's like an tract on finance written by someone who understands the gold standard, is a little vague on the silver standard, and has never heard of paper money. How would you begin to explain credit, deficit spending, interest, stocks, futures, options, hedges, PayPal, or junk bonds? You couldn't - the guy's just not in the running. He's barely begun to do his homework.

There are indeed some real puzzles in evolution, real weirdos I doubt Reed's heard of yet. As there are in any field of human endeavor. My own fields are physics and mechanics. Mysteries remain in both. I don't yet feel any dire need to invoke metaphysics to solve them.

Quite a bit of what the Sunday supplements call "evolution" is rubbish. Quite a bit of what the scientific journals call "evolution" is rubbish. Finding a silly pro-evolution statement in print, and pointing out that it's rubbish, is a far cry from demonstrating that it's all rubbish. Distinguishing what is and isn't rubbish is the work of a lifetime. It can't possibly be explored by typing into a little text box like this one.

[Rob]

Even I, ignorant as I am, found plenty of errors in this essay. For example:

The third proposition, that the mechanism of evolutions is chance mutation, though sacrosanct among its proponents, is shaky.

In modern times, at least, no one thinks that "chance mutation" is a particularly powerful evolutionary force. It's sex, baby, that's where the real action is.

I'm not sure when chance mutation was superceded, but I think it was at least twenty years ago...

[Meta-jester]

Rob, perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but I don't see how "sex" by itself can produce novelty in creatures. In any event, how would a Darwinist say sexual differentiation arose if not through random mutation?

Random mutations is problematic. It's impossible to name a random mutation that's had an salutary effect. If random mutations were helpful, radiation would produce creatures more reminiscent of B-movies ("50-foot Woman", "Godzilla", etc.) than the cancerous unfortunates of reality.

MJ

[amba]

"Random mutations is problematic." MJ, that's my problem with the theory of evolution in a nutshell.

[The Anchoress]

Through a very circuitous route, I am very glad to have found this piece.

[amba]

I am very glad you did.

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