Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Now that's just funny. A "Who's Who" of prominent scientists? In what alternate universe? How many of the names on that list do you suppose Nathan has ever heard of outside of lists like this? I suppose they think Richard Sternberg is a "prominent scientist", but if not for the Smithsonian controversy even those of us who keep up with this issue had no idea who he was. He was so obscure, in fact, that the head of the department at the NMNH where Sternberg was a Research Associate had never even heard of him and didn't know he existed and had an office in his own department until that controversy broke. Golly, that's sure "prominent."

The only names on the list with any prominence at all, even within their own narrow fields, are Phillip Skell, Henry Schaefer and Frank Tipler. And guess what? None of them are in fields that deal with evolutionary biology at all. Their opinion on evolutionary theory is no more authoritative than anyone else who has no knowledge of the issue. If you want a measure of just how obscure most of them are and how much effort the DI has to go through to make them appear more credible than they are, look no further than the list of credentials they give for each of them and the fact that they switch back and forth between citing where they got their degrees from and what organization they are affiliated with now, picking whichever one sounds more impressive.

And consider the fact that the majority of people on the list are in fields that have no relevance to evolutionary biology at all. A chemist or a physicist or a doctor has no more specialized knowledge of biology than a sociologist or a mechanic for that matter. This is not only an appeal to authority, it is an appeal to non-existent authority. Of course, the last thing the ID advocates should be engaging in is such appeals to authority, especially in light of the fact that well over 99% of scientists in the relevant fields accept evolution. If you're going to appeal to the authority of a tiny percentage of scientists, most of them obscure names in fields with no connection to evolution, it seems rather silly to reject an appeal to the overwhelming opinion of those scientists who actually work in the field.

And the statement itself, as I've pointed out many times before, is virtually meaningless. Here's the actual statement they are agreeing to:

"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

That has nothing to do with dissent from Darwinism. or support for ID. I would go even further than this statement goes. I'm not only skeptical of the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life we see around us, I flatly deny that those two things alone account for it. Random mutation is not the only source of genetic variation and natural selection is not the only means by which a trait can become fixed in a population. No evolutionary biologist would disagree with the statement above; even Richard Dawkins could honestly sign that statement. It is completely meaningless.

He then quotes this statement from the article:

"We know intuitively that Darwinism can accomplish some things but not others," said Egnor, who has signed the statement. "The question is what is that boundary? Does the information content in living things exceed that boundary? Darwinists have never faced those questions. They've never asked scientifically, can random mutation and natural selection generate the information content in living things."

Who is Egnor? He's a professor of neurological surgery, which means he's as qualified to speak on this issue as I am. Indeed, given the absurdity of his statement, I dare say I am more qualified than he. At the very least, I can recognize the nonsense here. First, like the others who signed the list, he is laboring under the misconception that random mutation and natural selection are the only relevant factors in evolution; that is absolutely false. Second, the phrase "information content" is meaningless in this context.

What he asks whether mutation and selection can generation the "information content", the only thing this can possibly mean is whether they can explain the emergence of new traits. The answer is yes, and we have observed it happening both in the lab and in nature. A textbook example is the nylon-eating bacteria, which evolved in just the last century the ability to digest nylon as a result of mutation and selection. We can see it in the development of all sorts of biochemical systems, like antifreeze proteins in arctic fish, that even ID advocates accept as resulting from evolution. It simply is not true that mutation and selection can't account for "new information" - meaning new genes that produce new proteins with new functions - in a genome.

Now here's Nathan's hilarious response to the quote above:

And who would? That's because the answer is NO. If it could answer those questions, we would have a plethora of fossils showing where animals mutated more poorly and were killed in "survival of the fittest." Instead we have animals and fish showing up and disappearing. This completely contradicts the entire basis for Darwin's theory - random mutation and natural selection.

I'll take non sequiturs for $1000, Alex. Animals that "mutated more poorly" died off and did not leave offspring; thus, the chances of a specimen with that "poorly mutated" trait are virtually nil. And we don't have animals and fish just "showing up", we find them showing up in very specific patterns throughout the fossil record, patterns that are not only required if evolution is true but can be used to make predictions within specific lineages that turn out to be true.

Tetrapods, for example, don't just "show up" out of the blue in the fossil record; they appear at the end of a long line of species that show a gradual adaptation to life on land. Those adaptations include the structure of the 4 limbs, which become more and more adapted to sustain weight outside the water, the shape of the skull and many more traits. We have a remarkable series of fossils showing how this transition between lobe-finned fish and land-adapted tetrapods occurred, with each successive species showing slightly better adaptation than the previous one.

Not only are these patterns consistent with evolution, they are required by it; if such patterns were not found, evolution would be disproved. But evolution not only explains this evidence, it also makes accurate predictions of new evidence. Scientists can look at the pattern of morphological intermediates, the ages of the rocks in which they were found and the environmental conditions in which they lived and predict which intermediate forms that are missing in the series must have existed, what they looked like, when they lived and the kind of environment they lived in.

Lo and behold, such predictions have been verified many times, most recently with the find of Tiktaalik roseae, a transitional form between lobe-finned fishes and tetrapods. Paleontologists predicted the traits it must have shown, that it would be found in early Devonian strata and in deposits laid down in a shallow river environment. And that's exactly what they found. The same has been true of transitions between land mammals and cetaceans, between theropod dinosaurs and birds and between therapsid reptiles and mammals. All of this, of course, the anti-evolutionists just wave away; their ignorance is simply impenetrable.