BREAKING OF THE IONIAN ENCHANTMENT:

Anyone with a scientific and skeptical mind has been dubious of Darwinism all along, but what's notable now is that even the credulous, the Darwinists themselves, are shredding the theory, even if more often than not by accident:
Mothballed Science (Philip E. Johnson, December 2003, Touchstone)

The trouble started in 1998 when a moth expert named Michael Majerus published a book that Oxford University Press had, ironically, commissioned to commemorate Kettlewell’s achievement. Majerus disclosed enough of Kettlewell’s many departures from proper scientific practice to inspire a reviewer to examine the original papers and then to write in Nature that the situation was even worse than Majerus had suggested, so that “for the time being we must discard the peppered moth as a well-understood example of natural selection in action.”

Subsequently, Darwinists, including the reviewer himself, were horrified to learn that “creationists” were publicizing the Nature book review all over the Internet. (The word “creationist” in Darwinist usage has no fixed definition and is mainly an insult that Darwinists apply to anyone who challenges some tenet of Darwinism in an unacceptable or dangerously effective manner.) Even more ominously, shocking newspaper stories began to appear. For example, a headline in the London newspaper The Independent asked bluntly if the moth’s iconic status is based on fraudulent research.

I don’t have space to go into all the scandalous details, but one of the juiciest is that the moths, which are nocturnal, do not rest on tree trunks during the day but prefer to fly up into the branches. The textbook photographs were staged, often by pinning or gluing dead moths in place.

You can read the entire story in Judith Hooper’s wonderful book, Of Moths and Men. It is a bombshell. Dava Sobel, the acclaimed author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, describes the book on the dust jacket as a riotous story of ambition and deceit, about scientists who “arrange the evidence to arrive at the desired result.” Another jacket endorsement is by Ernst Mayr, the dean of living Darwinists. A Mayr endorsement is the nearest thing to a papal imprimatur that biology can provide.

The first reaction of biologists to the moth revelations is usually unconcern, because they assume that Darwinism is by now past all danger of refutation. A delayed panic typically follows, once the biologist realizes the likely consequences if publishers were to take the Nature reviewer’s advice and either drop Kettlewell’s bogus proof from the textbooks or admit all the embarrassing circumstances. For the Darwinists to hand the hated creationists a victory of that magnitude would be unthinkable, and possibly fatal.

For comparison, try to imagine the likely effect on the outcome of the Civil War if the Union Army had been forced at some point to abandon the national capital to the Army of Northern Virginia. The District of Columbia had little military value, and the northern states would still have had much greater resources than the Confederacy, but the symbolic effect, and eventually the tangible effect, of the setback would have been incalculable.

There is a colossal scandal in the peppered moth saga, and it goes far beyond anything that the over-enthusiastic Kettlewell may have done in the 1950s. The real scandal is that the most influential biologists overlooked the defects in the Kettlewell studies when they were first published, because the appearance of “Darwin’s missing evidence” was so convenient for them, and they continue to deny the facts today, to the extent of vilifying the messengers who bring them the bad news.

Even Michael Majerus, who provided the first disclosures that set off the scandal, has become a diehard defender of the official story, now that the delayed panic has set in.

Not black and white: a review of Melanism: Evolution in Action by Michael E. N. Majerus (Jerry A. Coyne, Nature)

Criticisms of this story have circulated in samizdat for several years, but Majerus summarizes them for the first time in print in an absorbing two-chapter critique (coincidentally, a similar analysis [Sargent et al., Evol. Biol. 30, 299-322; 1998] has just appeared). Majerus notes that the most serious problem is that B. betularia probably does not rest on tree trunks — exactly two moths have been seen in such a position in more than 40 years of intensive search. The natural resting spots are, in fact, a mystery. This alone invalidates Kettlewell's release-recapture experiments, as moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks, where they are highly visible to bird predators. (Kettlewell also released his moths during the day, while they normally choose resting places at night.) The story is further eroded by noting that the resurgence of typica occurred well before lichens recolonized the polluted trees, and that a parallel increase and decrease of the melanic form also occurred in industrial areas of the United States, where there was no change in the abundance of the lichens that supposedly play such an important role.

Finally, the results of Kettlewell's behavioural experiments were not replicated in later studies: moths have no tendency to choose matching backgrounds. Majerus finds many other flaws in the work, but they are too numerous to list here. I unearthed additional problems when, embarrassed at having taught the standard Biston story for years, I read Kettlewell's papers for the first time.

Majerus concludes, reasonably, that all we can deduce from this story is that it is a case of rapid evolution, probably involving pollution and bird predation. I would, however, replace "probably" with "perhaps". B. betularia shows the footprint of natural selection, but we have not yet seen the feet. Majerus finds some solace in his analysis, claiming that the true story is likely to be more complex and therefore more interesting, but one senses that he is making a virtue of necessity. My own reaction resembles the dismay attending my discovery, at the age of six, that it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas Eve.

Peppered Moths - in black and white (Kevin O'Brien, 30 Mar 1999)

****** Response from Majerus regarding use of his book ************

Dear D*****, thank you for your e-mail. I am afraid that I do not have much
time this week, but your interest and points do demand some brief reply.
Below, following each point I give a response. You may use these as you see
fit, but please do not put my e-mail address on any discussion group
listing.

>
>Could you tell me:
>
>Do you think Coyne's review accurately represents your book and the status
>of pepper moth studies?
>

No. The review in Nature does not reflect the factual content of the book,
nor my own views. Indeed, Coyne tries to put words in my mouth by saying I
should have used "perhaps" rather than probably, in relation to the
evolution of melanism in Biston involving pollution and bird predation. I
do not even say probably. Indeed, on page 155, I say that my view is that
bird predation is of primary import, possibly to the exclusion of
averything else.

>
>What do you think of Coyne's claims in the _Telegraph_ that "Dr
>Kettlewell's widely-quoted experiments are essentially useless" and that
>"There is a lot of wishful thinking and design flaws in them, and they
>wouldn't get published today"?
>

My response to this can be gleaned from reading Chapters 5 and 6. Bernard
[Kettlewell] was a first rate entomologist and scientist. His experiments
were meticulous and generally well designed. In my opinion, many of his
experiments were among the best that have been conducted on melanism and
bird predation. The 'design flaws' in some of the experiments, if you want
to call them that were primarily a result of practical expediency because
Kettlewell wanted to be able to see birds taking moths, and to film them.
The only real flaw may have been his resting site selection experiments,
where he MIGHT (we do not actually know) have used moths from different
populations (see pages 142-143).

The Tyranny of a Concept: The Case of the Peppered Moth (Craig Holdrege, Praxagora)

In the mid 1980s I had a peppered moth epiphany. A peppered moth researcher described in an article that during twenty-five years of research he had found exactly two peppered moths resting on trees. How could that be? How could the moths' color in relation to the tree bark figure so prominently in evolution if the moths almost never rested on trees? Something strange was going on here. What had I been teaching? I began a search of the primary literature and over the next decade the solid and gleaming edifice of the peppered moth story dissolved into a shimmering illusion. What the textbooks were presenting and what all of us teachers were teaching was simply not true. This led me to write an article on the peppered moth (Holdrege, 1999). During the process I discovered that a growing number of scientists were writing about the same problems I'd discovered. The time was ripe for the myth of the peppered moth to be shattered.

A free-lance science writer, Dick Teresi, having read my article in Whole Earth, became interested in the story and interviewed me for an article in the New York Times Magazine. The article was never published. (At the very moment it was to appear, the Kansas School board "outlawed" the teaching of evolution, and an article critical of a central Darwinian example might have given the appearance that the Times supports creationism. Creationists have latched onto the peppered moth in their efforts to discredit evolutionary thought.)

The rise and fall of Piltdown Man, a 20th-century hoax (Guy Gugliotta, November 9, 2003, Washington Post)

As scientific hoaxes go, few have matched it. Sometime early in the 20th century, someone -- it is still unclear who -- "salted" a gravel pit near the town of Piltdown, England, with what were purported to be the 500,000-year-old fossil remains of a human ancestor -- half human, half ape.

The timing couldn't have been better. Darwin's "Origin of Species" was barely 50 years old, the French and Germans had found Neanderthals, and the race was on to discover the storied "missing link" in the evolution from apes to humans.

"In Britain we had some early modern humans, but nothing really old," paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer said in a telephone interview from his office in Britain's Natural History Museum. "There were stone tools, though, so there was almost a national expectation that we should have something."

And suddenly, there it was. Piltdown Man made his appearance in 1912 and held a place of honor in the museum until Nov. 21, 1953, when a new generation of scientists announced that the famous fossil was a fraud. [...]

And why did it take half a century to figure out that Piltdown man was a phony? "The people who believed in it were very powerful," Stringer said, especially Arthur Smith Woodward, the museum's leading geologist at the time of the discovery. "You had to be very cautious about taking after people like this."

Dino Hoax Was Mainly Made of Ancient Bird, Study Says (Hillary Mayell, November 20, 2002, National Geographic News)

The principal part of a famously fabricated dinosaur fossil is an ancient fish-eating bird, scientists report.

The Archaeoraptor fossil was introduced in 1999 and hailed as the missing evolutionary link between carnivorous dinosaurs and modern birds. It was fairly quickly exposed as bogus, a composite containing the head and body of a primitive bird and the tail and hind limbs of a dromaeosaur dinosaur, glued together by a Chinese farmer.

Initial CT scans suggested that the fossil might have been made up of anywhere from two to five specimens of two or more species. Chinese and American scientists now report that the fabricated fossil is made up of two species.

The Archaeoraptor fossil introduced in 1999 as the missing evolutionarylink between carnivorous dinosaurs and modern birds turned out to be a composite of two different species previously unknown to scientists. The tail and hind legs belong to a crow-sized dinosaur, Microraptorzhaoianus; the head and body belong to a fish-eating bird known as Yanornis martini.

THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIONIST: Why Stephen Jay Gould is bad for evolution. (ROBERT WRIGHT, 12/13/99, The New Yorker)

Over the past three decades, in essays, books, and technical papers, Gould has advanced a distinctive view of evolution. He stresses its flukier aspects—freak environmental catastrophes and the like— and downplays natural selection's power to design complex life forms. In fact, if you really pay attention to what he is saying, and accept it, you might start to wonder how evolution could have created anything as intricate as a human being.

As it happens, creationists have been wondering the very same thing, and they're delighted to have a Harvard paleontologist who will nourish their doubts. Gould is a particular godsend to the more intellectual anti-evolutionists, who mount the sustained (and ostensibly secular) critiques that give creationism a veneer of legitimacy. In attacking Darwinian theory, they don't have to build a straw man; Gould has built one for them. When Phillip E. Johnson, the most noted of these writers, begins a sentence, "As Stephen Jay Gould describes it, in his fine book," this is not good cause for Gould to swell with pride.

Gould also performs a more subtle service for creationists. Having bolstered their caricature of Darwinism as implausible, he bolsters their caricature of it as an atheist plot. He depicts evolution as something that can't possibly reflect a higher purpose, and thus can't provide the sort of spiritual consolation most people are after. Even Gould's recent book "Rocks of Ages," which claims to reconcile science and religion, draws this moral from the story of evolution: we live in a universe that is "indifferent to our suffering."

Obviously, if the grounds for this conclusion are as firm as he says, then we have to live with it.

The Origin of Specious: And why reductionists are winning the Darwin wars (Harvey Blume, 9.23.02, American Prospect)

Stephen Jay Gould, who died of cancer at the age of 60 this past May, defined a place in American culture likely to remain vacant now that he is gone. He was, of course, the country's foremost opponent of creationism and champion of Darwinism, with a unique ability to bring the HMS Beagle and baseball batting averages together in a perfect paragraph or two. But what we may come to value most about him is the lonely stance he took in the Darwin wars.

In the heated, often venomous battle over Charles Darwin's legacy, Gould faced a redoubtable crew from the fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, genetics and philosophy. What's more, many of these individuals, including E.O. Wilson, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright, have literary and polemical talents rivaling his own. Science will decide the relative merits of their arguments over topics such as punctuated equilibrium, speciation and the nature of complexity. But the cultural stakes of the dispute are obvious already. Gould's opponents advocate one form or another of a digital Darwinism. Their grand syntheses are unimaginable without the computer revolution. Their reductionist emphasis -- and their hopes for a single, internally coherent theory of everything from mitochondria to the human mind -- draws heavily on the tools, methods and examples of digitalization. Gould's views, on the other hand, owed next to nothing to computers. His Darwinism would have sounded much the same without computer code, artificial intelligence (AI) or the Internet.

Gould was by no means oblivious or opposed to digitalization. He records, for example, that browsing a window display festooned with the "beeping, flashing, almost living and pulsating" offshoots of computer technology forced his "reluctant paleontologist's soul to a recognition that the revolution is already upon us -- the most profound change in human life since everything from trains to television brought us all together." And he did not laugh at the great geek dream that a silicon brain might one day be built that would far surpass the organic model. Gould saw that real AI would signify a break with nature as we thought we knew it, but that didn't bother him. He was a fan of breaks, ruptures and discontinuities; his insistence on their importance to evolution was a chief bone of contention with his opponents. But when it came to digital discontinuity, he lacked any compelling personal need to make it to the other side. The typewriter was his keyboard of choice, when pencil and paper didn't suffice. And he preferred face-to-face encounters to e-mails and the Internet.

Compare this modus operandi with that of, say, Dawkins. His book The Blind Watchmaker was delayed, he confesses with the sly grin of the confirmed hacker, because he felt compelled to first write "Scrivener," his very own word processor. He was "addicted," as he put it, to machine code, the most unevolved (not to say barbaric) and certainly the most demanding of all computer languages, the use of which requires familiarity with the hardware foibles of one's particular machine. It's not a great stretch to see how the author of Scrivener might also be the leading proponent of the notion that the gene -- as opposed to the organism or the species -- is the basic unit and driving force of evolutionary change. Dawkins waxes rhapsodic about the fact that organisms and computers are, beneath it all, code-driven things. "The machine code of the genes," he writes, "is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular-biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer-engineering journal."

Of course, in science, what inspires an idea has no bearing on its validity. Coding Scrivener might well have helped Dawkins understand the mechanics of the selfish gene. And about the inescapability of cultural influence on scientific work, all sides in the Darwin wars agree. As Gould put it, "The social embeddedness of science is not always a negative. Sometimes it helps you along to an insight you didn't have before." Dennett's complementary formulation is that progress "made in science is greatly abetted by the temporary hampering of the imagination [enforced by culture]." It would seem that on this issue, at least, a sort of Christmas truce prevailed among combatants. The problem, though, is that cultural influences as distinct as Gould's and Dennett's reinforce very different views of science. And when computers are the source of influence, as in Dennett's case, it's never clear where culture ends and science begins.

Dennett draws on the discipline of artificial intelligence not just for metaphors but for literal models of the human mind. AI, in his view, gives philosophers, at long last, a lab. If you want to try out a particular theory of mind, he admonishes them, don't sit around and theorize. Get out the manual, write the code, run the damn thing and see what happens. The philosophers, he might have written, have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to code it. Like Dawkins, Dennett believes that code is the great unifier. If Dawkins can write Scrivener, then over the eons -- during which time its products are launched, tested and debugged by natural selection -- nature can, and in fact has, coded up such things as monkeys.

God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap (NY Times, 1/04/05)

"What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
This was the question posed to scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers by John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of Edge, a Web site devoted to science. The site asks a new question at the end of each year. Here are excerpts from the responses, to be posted Tuesday at www.edge.org. [...]

Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, "The Ancestor's Tale"

I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Intellectuals Who Doubt Darwin: Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing Edited by William A. Dembski (Hunter Baker, 11/24/2004, American Spectator)

At one time, the debate over Darwin's theory existed as a cartoon in the modern imagination. Thanks to popular portrayals of the Scopes Trial, secularists regularly reviewed the happy image of Clarence Darrow goading William Jennings Bryan into agreeing to be examined as an expert witness on the Bible and then taking him apart on the stand. Because of the legal nature of the proceedings that made evolution such a permanent part of the tapestry of American pop culture, it is fitting that this same section of the tapestry began to unravel due to the sharp tugs of another prominent legal mind, Phillip Johnson.

The publication of his book, Darwin on Trial, now appears to have marked a new milestone in the debate over origins. Prior to Johnson's book, the critics of evolution tended to occupy marginalized sectarian positions and focused largely on contrasting Darwin's ideas with literalist readings of the Genesis account. Johnson's work was different. Here we had a doubter of Darwin willing to come out of the closet, even though his credentials were solid gold establishment in nature. He had attended the finest schools, clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, taught law as a professor at highly ranked Berkeley, and authored widely-used texts on criminal law. Just as Darrow cross-examined the Bible and Bryan's understanding of it, Johnson cross-examined Darwin and got noticed in the process. He spent much of the last decade debating the issue with various Darwinian bulldogs and holding up his end pretty well. [...]

TOP HONORS, HOWEVER, go to David Berlinski's essay, "The Deniable Darwin," which originally appeared in Commentary. The essay is rhetorically devastating. Berlinski is particularly strong in taking apart Richard Dawkins' celebrated computer simulation of monkeys re-creating a Shakespearean sentence and thereby "proving" the ability of natural selection to generate complex information. The mathematician and logician skillfully points out that Dawkins rigged the game by including the very intelligence in his simulation he disavows as a cause of ordered biological complexity. It's clear that Berlinski hits a sore spot when one reads the letters Commentary received in response to the article. Esteemed Darwinists like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett respond with a mixture of near-hysterical outrage and ridicule. Berlinski's responses are also included. At no point does he seem the slightest bit cowed or overwhelmed by the personalities arrayed against him.

For the reader, the result is simply one of the most rewarding reading experiences available.

The Dawkins's monkeys example is always musing to look at as an instance of an argument for Natural Selection that requires not just teleology but a continually intervening Intelligence:

I don't know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time. Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. Suppose that he has to produce, not the complete works of Shakespeare but just the short sentence 'Methinks it is like a weasel', and we shall make it relatively easy by giving him a typewriter with a restricted keyboard, one with just the 26 (capital) letters, and a space bar. How long will he take to write this one little sentence?

The sentence has 28 characters in it, so let us assume that the monkey has a series of discrete 'tries', each consisting of 28 bashes at the keyboard. If he types the phrase correctly, that is the end of the experiment. If not, we allow him another 'try' of 28 characters. I don't know any monkeys, but fortunately my 11-month old daughter is an experienced randomizing device, and she proved only too eager to step into the role of monkey typist. Here is what she typed on the computer:

UMMK JK CDZZ F ZD DSDSKSM S SS FMCV PU I DDRGLKDXRRDO RDTE QDWFDVIOY UDSKZWDCCVYT H CHVY NMGNBAYTDFCCVD D RCDFYYYRM N DFSKD LD K WDWK HKAUIZMZI UXDKIDISFUMDKUDXI

She has other important calls on her time, so I was obliged to program the computer to simulate a randomly typing baby or monkey:

WDLDMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P Y YVMQKZPGJXWVHGLAWFVCHQYOPY MWR SWTNUXMLCDLEUBXTQHNZVIQF FU OVAODVYKDGXDEKYVMOGGS VT HZQZDSFZIHIVPHZPETPWVOVPMZGF GEWRGZRPBCTPGQMCKHFDBGW ZCCF

And so on and on. It isn't difficult to calculate how long we should reasonably'expect to wait for the random computer (or baby or
monkey) to type METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Think about the total number of possible phrases of the right length that the monkey or baby or random computer could type. It is the same kind of calculation as we did for haemoglobin, and it produces a similarly large result. There are 27 possible letters (counting 'space' as one letter) in the first position. The chance of the monkey happening to get the first letter-M -right is therefore 1 in 27. The chance of it getting the first two letters — ME - right is the chance of it getting the second letter - E - right (1 in 27) given that it has also got the first letter - M - right, therefore 1/27 x 1/27, which equals 1/729. The chance of it getting the first word - METHINKS - right is 1/27 for each of the 8 letters, therefore (1/27) X (1/27) x (1/27) x (1/27). .., etc. 8 times, or (1/27) to the power 8. The chance of it getting the entire phrase of 28 characters right is (1/27) to the power 28, i.e. (1/27) multiplied by itself 28 times. These are very small odds, about 1 in 10,000 million million million million million million. To put it mildly, the phrase we seek would be a long time coming, to say nothing of the complete works of Shakespeare.

So much for single-step selection of random variation. What about cumulative selection; how much more effective should this be? Very very much more effective, perhaps more so than we at first realize, although it is almost obvious when we reflect further. We again use our computer monkey, but with a crucial difference in its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, just as before:

WDLMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P

It now 'breeds from' this random phrase. It duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error - 'mutation' - in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.

Evolutionary Psychology and Its True Believers (Andrew Ferguson, March 19, 2001, Weekly Standard)

It's become commonplace to point out that of modernity's three most influential thinkers—Marx, Freud, and Darwin—only Darwin enters the twenty-first century with his reputation intact. But Darwin has troubles of his own. The troubles come not only from the right, where creationists and other religiously minded conservatives nip around the ankles of evolutionary theory, but also from the left, where social scientists, and even some real scientists, worry about the ends to which Darwin's great idea might be put.

It's a particular kind of Darwinism that has the left-wingers worried. Twenty-five years ago it ran under the name sociobiology; since then it has been slightly modified and rechristened "evolutionary psychology." Under either name it is an ambitious enterprise that claims to explain the patterns of human behavior—everything from child-rearing practices to religion to shopping habits—as a consequence of Darwinian natural selection. Sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology, or neo-Darwinism; we can use the terms interchangeably) has become a favorite of such conservative polemicists as Charles Murray, James Q. Wilson, Tom Wolfe, and Francis Fukuyama. At the same time, polemicists on the left compare it to Nazism (polemicists on the left compare lots of things to Nazism, of course, but now they seem to mean it).

Right-wingers suddenly embracing Darwin, while left-wingers try furiously to contain him—we've come a long way from the Scopes monkey trial. This makes for one of the more unexpected disputes in recent intellectual history, though it's hard to keep the sides straight without a program. Luckily, a spate of recent books helps the layman put the bickering in perspective. And as good a place as any to begin is with Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, a collection of essays edited by Hilary and Steven Rose and published late last year.

Hilary is a sociologist, Steven a biologist, but both, more pertinently, are grizzled veterans of the 1960s New Left. So are their contributors, among them the postmodern theorist and architect Charles Jencks and the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Alas, Poor Darwin is merely the latest in a series of essay collections, going back to the late 1970s, that Steven Rose has edited for the purpose of placing sociobiology beyond the bounds of polite society. One of his earlier collections, Not in Our Genes (1984), drew such a blistering review from the sociobiologist Richard Dawkins that Rose threatened to sue for libel. These scientists don't fool around.

Rose sums up the sociobiological view neatly: "It claims to explain all aspects of human behavior, and then culture and society, on the basis of universal features of human nature that found their final evolutionary form during the infancy of our species some 100,000-600,000 years ago." Roaming the African savanna for thousands of centuries, homo sapiens adapted to environmental challenges through the process of natural selection, developing the genetic tendencies that shape our behavior today. The application of this view knows no limit. As Rose points out, sociobiology has got into our "cultural drinking water." It's not at all unusual to switch on, say, the Today show—if you're the sort of person who switches on the Today show—and see one or another pop psychologist tracing, say, the American male's love for golf to the evolutionary development of the species: The golf course's rolling landscape, dotted with water and clumps of trees, appeals to our genetic memories of the long-ago savanna.

"It is the argument of the authors of this book," writes Rose in his introduction, "that the claims of [sociobiology] in the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy are for the most part not merely mistaken, but culturally pernicious"—not just bad science but bad politics, too: right-wing politics. Roughly half the essays in the book are explicitly political, though the political objections bubble unmistakably through the others. [...]

As several essayists note in Alas, Poor Darwin, the ascendancy of evolutionary psychology in the late 1970s and 1980s coincided with the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism in our politics. "The political agenda," writes Rose, "is transparently part of a right-wing libertarian attack on collectivity, above all the welfare state."

Some of the essayists have another beef: Far worse than playing politics, sociobiologists are practicing religion . Perhaps the most amusing feature of the debates between sociobiologists and their critics is the ferocity with which each side accuses the other of harboring religious sentiments, as though nothing could be more contemptible. When they get really mad the combatants hurl imprecations like "true believer" and "choirmaster." Stephen Jay Gould calls sociobiologists "Darwinian fundamentalists." His opposite number, Richard Dawkins, says that critics like Gould are "demonological theologians." Dorothy Nelkin, a sociologist from New York University, is on Gould's side. She devotes her essay in Alas, Poor Darwin to arguing that sociobiology is merely religion in disguise and, for that reason (though she doesn't have to say so explicitly), illegitimate as either science or philosophy.

Given that every prominent sociobiologist, from Pinker to Dawkins to Wilson, has ardently declared his atheism, you might think Nelkin has a difficult case to make. Dawkins, who is the most outspoken in this regard, calls religious belief a "virus of the mind" and says that anyone who believes that the existence of the universe implies the existence of a creator is by definition "scientifically illiterate." Wilson is emphatic that religion and science are incompatible, and that the practical achievements of science make religion intellectually untenable. Sociobiology routinely dismisses religious belief as a delusion that long ago may have had some "adaptive function," helping humans to survive and flourish, but which is no longer necessary.

In what sense, then, is evolutionary psychology a religion? "Scientists who call themselves evolutionary psychologists," Nelkin writes, "are addressing questions about meaning, about why things happen, about the ultimate ground of nature. . . . More than a scientific theory, evolutionary psychology is a quasi-religious narrative, providing a simple and compelling answer to complex and enduring questions concerning the case of good and evil, the basis of moral responsibility and age-old questions about the nature of human nature."

Anyone familiar with evolutionary psychology will see her point. One of the first things a layman notices upon wading into the literature is the grandiosity of its claims. The titles of the books, by both popularizers and scientists, are spectacular. Wilson himself has written On Human Nature and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge; Robert Wright, who used to be a journalist before he moved on to much, much larger things, writes books with such subtitles as Why We Are the Way We Are and The Logic of Human Destiny. Other sociobiology titles: The Web of Life, Evolution and the Meaning of Life, The Origins of Virtue, and The Biology of Morality. The hyperbole is more than a publisher's marketing ploy. This is really the way sociobiologists think.

So of course the immodesty extends beyond the titles. "If the theory of natural selection is correct," Wright wrote, "then essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these [Darwinian] terms. . . . Slowly but unmistakably, a new world view is emerging," he went on. "Once truly grasped . . . it can entirely alter one's perception of social reality." Laura Betzig, editor of a collection of sociobiology essays called, typically enough, Human Nature, introduces the book like so: "It's happened. We have finally figured out where we come from, why we're here, and who we are."

Sociobiology is a theory of simply everything. Darwin's original version of natural selection was already comprehensive, claiming to account for almost all the physical attributes of the planet's animal and vegetable life. But evolutionary psychologists extend Darwin's principle to bear on the mental life and cultural practices of human beings. Like most religions, evolutionary psychology tells a story—a myth, in the sociological sense of the word.

The Ionian Enchantment (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson)

I remember very well the time I was captured by the dream of unified learning. It was in the early fall of 1947, when at eighteen I came up from Mobile to Tuscaloosa to enter my sophomore year at the University of Alabama. A beginning biologist, fired by adolescent enthusiasm but short on theory and vision, I had schooled myself in natural history with field guides carried in a satchel during solitary excursions into the woodlands and along the freshwater streams of my native state. I saw science, by which I meant (and in my heart I still mean) the study of ants, frogs, and snakes, as a wonderful way to stay outdoors.

My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus--all the species of crows--and ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms--plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old.

I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more accurately (since at that time I knew little of the Swedish master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great naturalist published the first edition of A Field Guide to the Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a scientific career. The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.

Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly--that is not too strong a word--I saw the world in a wholly new way. This epiphany I owed to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young assistant professor newly arrived in the provinces with a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me natter for a while about my lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr's 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.

The thin volume in the plain blue cover was one of the New Synthesis works, uniting the nineteenth-century Darwinian theory of evolution and modern genetics. By giving a theoretical structure to natural history, it vastly expanded the Linnaean enterprise. A tumbler fell somewhere in my mind, and a door opened to a new world. I was enthralled, couldn't stop thinking about the implications evolution has for classification and for the rest of biology. And for philosophy. And for just about everything. Static pattern slid into fluid process. My thoughts, embryonically those of a modern biologist, traveled along a chain of causal events, from mutations that alter genes to evolution that multiplies species, to species that assemble into faunas and floras. Scale expanded, and turned continuous. By inwardly manipulating time and space, I found I could climb the steps in biological organization from microscopic particles in cells to the forests that clothe mountain slopes. A new enthusiasm surged through me. The animals and plants I loved so dearly reentered the stage as lead players in a grand drama. Natural history was validated as a real science.

I had experienced the Ionian Enchantment. That recently coined expression I borrow from the physicist and historian Gerald Holton. It means a belief in the unity of the sciences--a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws. [...]

Still, I had no desire to purge religious feelings. They were bred in me; they suffused the wellsprings of my creative life. I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large.

Such, I believe, is the source of the Ionian Enchantment: Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger. It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization and intertwined with traditional religion, but it follows a very different course--a stoic's creed, an acquired taste, a guidebook to adventure plotted across rough terrain. It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind. Its central tenet, as Einstein knew, is the unification of knowledge. When we have unified enough certain knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable. The ancient Greeks expressed the idea in a myth of vaulting ambition. Daedalus escapes from Crete with his son Icarus on wings he has fashioned from feathers and wax. Ignoring the warnings of his father, Icarus flies toward the sun, whereupon his wings come apart and he falls into the sea. That is the end of Icarus in the myth. But we are left to wonder: Was he just a foolish boy? Did he pay the price for hubris, for pride in sight of the gods? I like to think that on the contrary his daring represents a saving human grace. And so the great astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar could pay tribute to the spirit of his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, by saying: Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.

The Evolution of Ernst: Interview with Ernst Mayr (Scientific American, 7/06/04)

Ernst Mayr: [...] The natural laws apply to biology just as much as they do to the physical sciences. But the people who compare the two, or who, like some philosophers, put in biology with physical sciences, they leave out a lot of things. And the minute you include those, you can see clearly that biology is not the same sort of thing as the physical sciences. And I cannot give a long lecture now on that subject, that's what the book is for.

I'll give you an example. In principle, biology differs from the physical sciences in that in the physical sciences, all theories, I don't know exceptions so I think it's probably a safe statement, all theories are based somehow or other on natural laws. In biology, as several other people have shown, and I totally agree with them, there are no natural laws in biology corresponding to the natural laws of the physical sciences.

Now then you can say, how can you have theories in biology if you don't have laws on which to base them? Well, in biology your theories are based on something else. They're based on concepts. Like the concept of natural selection forms the basis of, practically the most important basis of, evolutionary biology. You go to ecology and you get concepts like competition or resources, ecology is just full of concepts. And those concepts are the basis of all the theories in ecology. Not the physical laws, they're not the basis. They are of course ultimately the basis, but not directly, of ecology. And so on and so forth. And so that's what I do in this book. I show that the theoretical basis, you might call it, or I prefer to call it the philosophy of biology, has a totally different basis than the theories of physics.
Science nudges atheist toward God (Richard N. Ostling, 12/10/04, The Associated Press)

A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than five decades has changed his mind. He now believes in God — more or less — based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released yesterday.

Antony Flew, 81, has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said from England.

Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."

A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.

He argued early in his career that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were correct to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything. [...]

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"

The video draws from a New York discussion in May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.

The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.

Planet with a Purpose: If Earth is an organism getting ever more complex, doesn't that mean humans might have been made for a reason? (Robert Wright, BeliefNet)

When Charles Darwin unveiled his theory of natural selection, he said there was no inherent contradiction between it and religious belief. Maybe, for example, God had used natural selection as the instrument for creating intelligent life. One Anglican clergyman, in a letter to Darwin, suggested that this was actually a "loftier" conception of God than the old-fashioned idea of God creating humans the easy way, by just molding them out of dust.

Yet today many intellectuals think that if they're going to be true Darwinians, they should give up on any notion of divinity, any hope of higher purpose. Why? In no small part because of the widely read philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his influential 1995 book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Dennett insisted that evolution is "purposeless"—and that, indeed, this lack of purpose is part of the "fundamental idea" of Darwinism. More recently, he urged his fellow non-believers to unite and fight for their rights in a New York Times op-ed piece, depicting belief in God as contrary to a "naturalist" worldview.

I have some bad news for Dennett's many atheist devotees. He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose. Worse still, he did it on videotape, during an interview for my website meaningoflife.tv. (You can watch the relevant clip here, though I recommend reading a bit further first so you'll have enough background to follow the logic.)

Dennett didn't volunteer this opinion enthusiastically, or for that matter volunteer it at all. He conceded it in the course of a dialogue with me—and extracting the concession was a little like pulling teeth. But his initial resistance makes his final judgment all the more important. People who see evidence of some larger purpose in the universe are often accused of arguing with their heart, not their head. That's a credibility problem Dennett doesn't face. When you watch him validate an argument for higher purpose, you're watching that argument pass a severe test. In fact, given that he's one of the best-known philosophers in the world, it may not be too much to say that you're watching a minor intellectual milestone get erected.

Secularists too need a philosophical worldview and Darwinism has provided them with one, but its claim to being scientific is dwindling away so rapidly that its adherents risk being perceived as precisely the kind of credulous faithful they despise. Under such circumstances a paradigm shift seems certain.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 4, 2005 8:38 AM