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May 16, 2004

The tactics of defeat

Seems like someone found this old post about ID & evolution by godless and decided to rebut it. Here is a representative quote:


Wow, I've never read a less informed defense of evolution by someone who appears so confident.
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Apparently, Gene Expression author "godless" isn't particularly familiar with typical descriptions of evolution. To quote some of Fred Reed's questioning of evolution....
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Where to start? Well, nowhere, Panda's Thumb is on the case 24-7, so I'm going to cool my jets. But what sort of "dialogue" can we ever have with individuals like the one I just quoted? The same sort of condescending faux-learned tone resulted in an eruption from me last week.

But there are other types I disagree with. Check out this interview with Dr. Tim Johnson, ABC News health editor. He's a believing Christian of the mainline sort. I certainly have issues with some of his opinions.

For example:


...As I have thought it through and read about it for many years, I've come to the conclusion that on balance I think it's more likely to have happened by design, even though there's been an enormous amount of chance involved.
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The initial explosive force of the Big Bang appears to have been just right to result in the formation of the universe. The most microscopic shift one way or another, and the universe would have either collapsed back on itself or expanded too rapidly for stars to form.
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I absolutely do. I think there's enormous evidence for the operation of natural selection in evolving life in general and human life in particular. The underlying genetic machinery--which allows mutations to happen in the first place and then to be preserved via natural selection passed on from generation to generation--is more plausibly viewed as having developed by design rather than by chance.

And so forth. Dr. Johnson seems to be a pretty moderate theistic evolutionist. I have some serious disagreements with him. I am skeptical of claims of design that issue out of the anthropic principle. But...well, frankly, Dr. Johnson resides in the same universe as I at least. He sees what's there, not what he wants to see, though the conclusions differ from those I would draw. I believe there is a sharp difference between Dr. Johnson, the individuals above, and of course, the obscurantists who form the core of the Intelligent Design movement. The likes of Dr. Johnson, and individuals like me who are Dawkinsian in our substance if not our style, can engage in a rational conversation.

For example...there is some recent evidence that an asteroid impact precipitated the Late Permian extinction event. In case you don't know, this one made the dino-destruction of 65 millions years past look like a minor perturbance in biodversity (look to the oceans if you google it). It was during this period that we saw the rise and decline of the Therapsids, a group of reptiles that figures importantly in our family tree. Most Therapsid groups disappeared, and dinosaurs quickly speciated into all their varied forms and came to dominate the subsequent Triassic. A few post-Therapsid groups became mammals, slinking in the shadow of the dinosaurs until the extinction even of 65 millions years turned the tables. The mammals quickly radiated into all the niches that were left empty with the die-off of dinosaurs during the early years of the Cenozoic-and the rest is history....

The narrative above is pretty standard, in fact, I'm sure many 4th graders have a grasp of the basics. The data is kind of vanilla after all these years. But what are the implications? That depends on what you believe in the first place. I have already labelled myself a Dawkinsian, so I won't even proceed any further. But what about Dr. Johnson? You can already see that he was ready to go anthropic during the interview. If I might speculate, perhaps he could imagine that God used the two asteroid impacts to shape our own ancestral lineage, that the long period in the shadow of the dinosaurs was somehow necessary to smooth the path toward primate sapiency. I don't know-I'm not God. But the fact is that the Therapsids managed to just hold on, they had to adjust to a new niche and developed the typical endothermic metablism and mammalian features that are so familiar to us during their Mesozoic "exile". Dr. Johnson might point out that the first "primate-like" creatures appeared at the end of the Mesozoic, just before the extinction event. Fortuitous?

I don't know, I wouldn't buy it, and I might want to get into a dispute about these interpretations. But...the fact is, they are just strange interpretations about facts that I would admit are real, the interpretation is also in line with majority thinking in the United States (much harder to beat up two bigger kids on the block at once than if you cut a deal with one of them and then turn on each other later). That is, there were two major extinction events, Therapsids did not become extinct, proto-primates showed up just before the Cenozoic, etc. etc. Dr. Johnson does not live in fantasy land. I won't go into the details of how and why Dr. Johnson and I disagree, the significance of our disagreemant, rather, I would like to emphasize that though I can't but help cringing at what I perceive to be ad hoc theological-philosophical retrofits on the basic superstructure of science and the facts that are housed within, these are but quibblings next to the bleeding ears that are precipitated by reading screeds like the one above. I once sat next to some Christians who were speculating about the implications of quantum mechanics for their faith...I thought it was kind of bizarre, just as bizarre as the New Agey types who babbled about Quantum Consciousness-but at least neither group rejected Quantum Mechanics a priori, even if I had issues with their application or conception of its relevance. Note, the individual I referred to initially was appealing to a freelance writer to show how an individual who is doing graduate work in biology simply doesn't understand evolution. Hubris? Perhaps, but surely there's a more appropriate Greek term.

In any case, I am willing to embrace tactics of defeat for final strategic victory over a more eternal enemy. I will simply accept that naturalistic evolutionary is not everyone's cup of tea as long as the hurricane of the fantasy-land outside the bounds of the scientific mind-space is kept at bay. It is all and well to disagree about the height of a mountain when you are a flying a plane over low ground, but you definately need to throw any pilot out of the cockpit that will not admit to any mountains at all.

Posted by razib at 01:37 AM