Monday, May 10, 2010

Douglas Futuyma's Review of Jerry Coyne's Theology

Is there anyone out there who still thinks evolution is merely a scientific theory? If so they can read Douglas Futuyma's review of Jerry Coyne's book, Why Evolution is True, where Futuyma highlights a few of Coyne's theological proclamations, to add to the many Futuyma himself has made in past years. Of course, all of this theology sits squarely within the evolution genre.

In his book Science on Trial, Futuyma added his own creative touch to the long history of theological mandates for naturalism. Nature, explained Futuyma as though reporting a scientific measurement, is full of useless features, inadequate design, shoddy workmanship, and harshness or cruelty.

And, Futuyma explained, we find similarities and differences between the species where we should least expect a Creator to have supplied them. Is it not strange that a Creator should have endowed bats, birds, and pterodactyls with wings made out of the same bony elements that moles use for digging and penguins use for swimming?

Birds and mammals are warm-blooded and for better blood transport from the heart they have only one aortic arch instead of two as in amphibians and reptiles. But birds retain the right aortic arch while mammals retain the left one. Why the difference? Bacteria have "silent" genes that are never expressed and appear to have no function. The Panda's "thumb" is a clumsy design, and no caterpillars have compound eyes. Photosynthesis is immensely useful, yet no higher animals have this mechanism.

Futuyma argued strenuously that these and many other examples of shoddy design prove the species arose from natural causes. From our wisdom teeth to our need for vitamin C, biology reveals a lack of design. Take any major group of animals, explained Futuyma, and the poverty of imagination that must be ascribed to a Creator becomes evident. Why should there be more than a million species of animals and more than half a million of plants, and "what could have possessed the Creator," asks Futuyma, "to bestow two horns on the African rhinoceroses and only one on the Indian species?" Darwin's long sermon was getting longer.

Even worse than all this were the many evils in nature. Male elephant seals battle furiously for females and many die of bloody wounds. The peacock carries such long feathers that it can hardly fly. Sickle-cell anemia afflicts those who have inherited a disastrous gene. Species overproduce causing overpopulation. The lung worms infest snakes and schistosome worms kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. And more than 90 percent of the species in history became extinct. It was abundantly obvious to Futuyma that this world was not designed by anything but natural causes. How could a wise Creator allow for such evils?

Coyne's new book is now the next addition to Darwin's long sermon, and not surprisingly Futuyma is delighted. He writes in his review of Coyne's book:

Vestiges, embryos and bad design include the multitude of morphological and molecular features that are inconsistent with any concept of ID but fully explicable from, and predicted by, evolution. And "the biogeographical evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist."

Of course successful predictions made by evolution do not make it true. That would be a fallacy. Evolution is true, not because it has made successful predictions (particularly in light of its many false predictions), but because it must be true. For the evolutionists, the species must have arisen naturally. God never would have created this world. Religion drives science, and it matters.

11 comments:

  1. A bit more context....

    "....Coyne, Drosophila geneticist although he be, delights in marshalling evidence from classical anatomy, embryology, systematics and the biogeography of diverse organisms, as well as contemporary molecular and developmental studies."

    There seems to be a lot in there independent of metaphysics. I think you're again conflating arguments against design with evidences for evolution.

    "Coyne begins by describing the contemporary problem of opposition to evolution despite its importance and its status as ‘a theory that is also a fact’, and makes the usual and indispensable points about the nature of science, the testability of scientific hypotheses, and how hypotheses gain support from the correspondence between observation and predictions from a hypothesis. This is an important theme that he emphasizes throughout the book. The next three chapters, on the fossil record, ‘remnants’ (vestiges, embryos and bad design) and biogeography, present massive, well-chosen evidence for common descent and modification. Coyne emphasizes that fossils tell us of gradual change and of forms such as Tiktaalik that demonstrate intermediacy, expected time of occurrence and evolution of new characters from ancestral ones. Vestiges, embryos and bad design include the multitude of morphological and molecular features that are inconsistent with any concept of ID but fully explicable from, and predicted by, evolution. And ‘the biogeographical evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn’t exist’ (p. 95). There follow three process-oriented chapters, on natural selection, sexual selection and speciation (Coyne's special area of expertise), which all provide clear expositions of theory and evidence, and devastating points against ID. (For example, blood clotting, far from being ‘irreducibly complex,’ is based partly on the evolution of fibrinogen from a protein with a different function that was predicted, and then found, in sea cucumbers.) Chapter 8, ‘What about us?’, treats paleontological and genetic evidence on human evolution and briefly but clearly touches on patterns of genetic variation within and among human populations, and on gene–culture coevolution."

    So, we're supposed to be shocked to find potent arguments against design, in a book intended to counter ID/creationism?

    I'd still love to see a single piece of peer-reviewed primary literature (not book reviews, not in the news section, not New Scientist) that invokes not-designed as an argument for evolution.

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  2. I return to a point I have raised many times: who decides what is "scientific" and what is "religious"? Let's all adopt Dr. Cornelius' definition of science, which includes deities as scientific hypothesis.

    Dr. Cornelius has already stated that he is a creationist, and supports creation as a valid scientific hypothesis.

    ==== Dr. Cornelius wrote: ====
    “I have no religious argument or support for creation/ID. My support for creation/ID is from empirical evidence.” (Comment May 2, 2010 8:57 PM)
    =============

    OK, now creationism and the Intelligent Designer and associated deities are scientific hypotheses, following Dr. Cornelius' own definition of science.

    When Dr. Coyne considers arguments about what an Intelligent Designer would or wouldn't do, and when Dr. Futuyma reviews those arguments, these are scientific arguments by Dr. Cornelius' definition of science. Let us all agree to follow Dr. Cornlius' #1 definition of science, these are scientific arguments.

    Dr. Cornelius cannot honestly flip his own definition of science and suddenly declare that arguments about what a Designer would or wouldn't do are now "religious" or "theological". Dr. Cornelius cannot honestly flip his own definition of science, but of course he can dishonestly flip his own definition of science.

    Which is what he does here, when reviewing Coyne's book, as he also does every other time that any scientist asks him: What the hell can your Designer *NOT* do? Is there any data set it CANNOT accomodate?

    What free parameters describe your Designer? Is there any experimental way to narrow down the many, many, countless free paraemeters in your model of the Designer interacting with nature? How many free parameters are there in the model of a Designer interacting with matter that you claim to support, Dr. Cornliues? How could you even count the free parameters in your hypothesis?

    These are scientific questions, according to Dr. Cornelius' #1 definition of science, but they are religious questions, when he dishonestly flips to his #2 definition of science.

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  3. Rob:
    "I'd still love to see a single piece of peer-reviewed primary literature (not book reviews, not in the news section, not New aScientist) that invokes not-designed as an argument for evolution."

    You've seen plenty already, but you are too stubborn and too blinded by your gods of secular humanism and materialism to admit any of it.

    You also refuse to recognize anything that doesn't fit your lame world-view -like all the other Darwinists deniers of reality around here -like the even more blind and foolish diogenes, ritchie the kid that can't make 1+1 = 2 and etc..

    Sad.

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  4. Rob: "I'd still love to see a single piece of peer-reviewed primary literature (not book reviews, not in the news section, not New aScientist) that invokes not-designed as an argument for evolution."

    Hitch: "You've seen plenty already, but you are too stubborn and too blinded by your gods of secular humanism and materialism to admit any of it."

    Link? Prove me wrong.

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  5. Hitch has never responded to any scientific argument raised here, with even a single scientific fact, no experiment, no reference, ever. He has never demonstrated knowledge of one scientific fact. He is all insult, all the time.

    JoeG is just "design has been observed" repeated over and over, without details or attribution or any facts to back it up.

    BornAgain77 is all quotes from other creationists, re: "scientists are biased, atheists, bad people, blah blah." Like we care what creationists think.

    Dr. Cornelius quotes your post, then he writes "False" at the bottom, without explanation. He *always* avoids the most substantive arguments. He is all bare assertion, never backed up with facts. "False"!

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  6. Well people calm down. Unfortunately there is a new paper in PNAS where it is argued that way. Jerry is actually discussing it.

    http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/05/04/0914609107.short?rss=1

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  7. How the hell did Avise get that published in PNAS? He's in the NAS isn't he? They can publish anything they want.

    Philosophy < science.

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  8. Gack.

    "This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences"

    "This article is a PNAS Direct Submission."

    That is, it is a review (not primary), and it is not really peer-reviewed.

    I'd also argue that the paper is not arguing the science of evolution, but the philosophy/theology that results from ID vs. theistic evolution. His point is not flawed design, therefore evolution is true, but flawed design, therefore theistic evolution is a more theologically sound than ID, which would force us to explain a designer God that setup HIV resistance, miscarriages, etc...

    "Gross imperfection at the molecular level
    presents a conundrum for the traditional paradigms of natural theology as well as for recent assertions of ID, but it is consistent with
    the notion of nonsentient contrivance by evolutionary forces. In this important philosophical sense, the science of evolutionary genetics should rightly be viewed as an ally (not an adversary) of mainstream religions because it helps the latter to escape the profound theological enigmas posed by notions of ID."

    Does he have a point though? Does design have to explain to bad along with the good, in coherent manner? Interesting that many believers in theistic evolution see to have much less an issue with it than ID. Maybe ID is worse religion than it is science.

    Should the paper be stamped "Philosophy?" Yeah.

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  9. Gack. "Direct Submission" means NAS members can publish anything they want. Couldn't the NAS stop this kind of dreck some way or other?

    PNAS should not publish philosophy. They're the National Academy of Sciences, not the academy of philosophers.

    Philosophy < Science.

    The ID people have been going "Philosophy > Science" for 10+ years now, now Avise has to come along and feed the trolls!

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  10. Anti-Darwinists might find something of interest in a rather tedious but non-rhetorical evaluation of "Why Evolution is True" at the following website:

    http://cdevoclast.blogspot.com

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  11. X Prof:

    Now in my "Links" list above:

    http://cdevoclast.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete