More ID Distortion of Sources

One of the longstanding problems with many ID advocates is their misuse of the work of scientists. Since they've never had any actual ID research to point to, they have instead frequently put out lists of articles that allegedly support their arguments from the mainstream literature. More often than not, the cited articles don't support their arguments at all. Many times, in fact, scientists have publicly ripped them for distorting the meaning of something they've written for their own purposes; Sahotra Sarkar is the latest to do so. Dr. Sarkar is a molecular biologist from the University of Texas. And it's not the first time they've done it to him:

When testifying before the Texas State Board of Education in 2003 (in a battle over textbook adoption that we won hands down), I claimed that my work had been maliciously misused by members of the Discovery Institute. Questioned by the Board, I referred them to "publications" (that is, web-pieces with no peer review) by Stephen Meyer. The episode had its effect. For a while these miscreants left my work alone. But no longer. I quote from an Expert Report, again by Stephen Meyer, presented to the court during the recent Dover, PA, creationism trial.

Here is the relevant quotation (verbatim) from their blog:

"Studies in molecular biology and information theory have shown that the assembly instructions inscribed along the spine of DNA display the characteristic hallmarks of intelligently encoded information: both the complexity and specificity of function that, according to Dembski's theory, indicate design.[51]"

I now quote what Reference [51] is:

"51. See Sahotra Sarkar, Biological Information: A Skeptical Look at Some Central Dogmas of Molecular Biology, in THE PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY: NEW PERSPECTIVES 191 (Sahotra Sarkar ed., 1996)."

My paper is fairly widely known because it was one of the earliest ones expressing skepticism about informational metaphors in molecular biology (and has been reprinted in my Molecular Models of Life [MIT, 2005]). The trouble is that it says nothing of the sort that Meyer claims. I don't mention Dembski, ID, or "intelligent" information whatever that may be. I don't talk about assembly instructions. In fact what the paper essentially does is question the value of informational notions altogether, which made many molecular biologists unhappy, but which is also diametrically opposed to the "complex specified information" project of the ID creationists.

Notice how my work is being presented as being in concordance with ID when Meyer knows very well where I stand on this issue. If Meyer were an academic, this kind of malfeasance would rightly earn him professional censure. Unfortunlately he's not. He's only the Director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Naming a liar when we see one is all that we can do.

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To understand what the DI often does in these cases, it is important to understand that evolution is not a single theory but a bundle of many theories. There is a general model (common descent) and within that model are dozens and dozens of theories about particular aspects of common descent. Those theores range from general issues like the tempo and mode of speciation and the primacy of natural selection vs. non-selective mechanisms, to more narrow issues about specific lineages (example: did birds evolve from theropod dinosaurs or ornithischian dinosaurs?) to even more narrow questions that involve things at a very detailed level in one specific field of research. There are many of these smaller theories where there are very active controversies, where no consensus has formed among scientists and where they still actively engage in research and debate over which of two (or more) competing explanations is correct.

Both answers, of course, will be well within the boundaries of evolutionary theory, but ID advocates will shine the spotlight on these academic disputes to make two arguments. First, they'll use this as evidence that scientists really don't know how evolution works and therefore evolution is suspect. Second, they'll treat any disagreement with one of these minor theories as disagreement with evolutionary theory in general. That is exactly what they've done with Sarkar's paper. They play on the fact that the title of his paper is aimed at disputing "central dogmas of molecular biology", conflate that with "central dogmas of evolution", and pretend that Sarkar is disputing common descent when he is doing no such thing.

The problem, in this case, is that while Sarkar is critiquing a fairly narrow theory within his field (namely the use of information as a metaphor for genomic "instructions"), his argument, if true, shoots down a major component of ID arguments. So this is really the last paper that they should be crowing about. If Sarkar is right, it means a rearrangement of a few ideas in molecular biology but has no impact on the validity of common descent, but it pretty much makes Dembski's arguments irrelevant in their entirety because it makes "information theory" completely inapplicable in an evolutionary context.

Meyer knows this, of course, but I suspect he also knows that virtually no one who reads his work is likely to look up the references, or to understand them if they did, or to believe folks like me when we point out the truth. But he should probably be thankful that he was withdrawn as an expert in the Dover case, since this citation appeared in his expert report for that trial. Had he taken the stand, the attorneys would certainly have drilled him on his claims, just as they drilled Behe on his claim that Michael Atchison provided peer review of his book and many other things.

P.S. PZ Myers has a post about this as well and it has generated some amusing disputes. Charlie Wagner, an annoying troll that I remember as far back as my days on Compuserve (well over a decade ago now), tried valiantly to exonerate Meyer but made quite a fool of himself in the process. This will come as no surprise to Troy Britain, if he's reading this, or to anyone else who has ever dealt with Wagner.