The Groupthink Syndrome

Speaking as an evolutionary biologist who argues regularly with other evolutionary biologists about almost everything, I can state that (at Cornell at least) none of the characteristics listed apply to any of the evolutionary biologists I know personally.

However, every single one of them apply (in spades) to some of the anti-evolution/YEC groups with which I have had contact over the years. Let me hasten to add that I do NOT include the Cornell IDEA club in this, as my interactions with them have always indicated to me that they have as healthy a skepticism about their own beliefs as I have about mine. But in general, I have found that most anti-evolution group members begin with the unshakeable position that no amount of empirical evidence can possibly make them change their beliefs. In fact, most such groups require a “confession of faith” in which such absolute adherence to dogma is required for group membership (the ICR is just the most notorious of such organizations).

Let me repeat once again a point that seems to be constantly overlooked: I have come to my current beliefs about nature and natural processes through a long process of investigation and interpretation of evidence. I have changed my mind about how I believe nature works many times since beginning to study it, and expect that this will happen again as more evidence is presented. This is what a scientist does, and so the list of characteristics heading this post quite literally is antithetical to both the spirit and practice of science as I understand it.

However, it seems to me to pretty accurately describe the behavior and mindset of many religously-motivated anti-evolution groups.

This syndrome, IMO, is commonly known as,”Follow the leader”.
I have never known a leader to have a guide, a pathfinder a path, nor a trailblazer a trail.
Blessings

Allen_MacNeill :
“I can state that (at Cornell at least) none of the characteristics listed apply to any of the evolutionary biologists I know personally.”

Obviously you don’t know Will Provine.

Obviously also you haven’t heard, participated or read any debates involving many key characters in the debate on a whole in a long time. And it would seem, by your comments, that neither do you read the typical sci magazines when focusing on the issue.

Quite surprising. You must be very busy indeed.

As for the ID side - it is not, inspite of the most common claims by darwinists, the same thing as theistic “creationism” - such as adhered to by your mentioned ICR.

Indeed, religiously-motivated anti-evo groups can be very stubborn as well. But at least those who adhere to the christian view have a good reason to be such, since they’re right about human origins.

Actually, Will Provine is my best friend: we co-teach the introductory evolution course at Cornell. And we disagree, sometimes pretty vehemently, on many topics in evolution. We also regularly invite members of the ID community to make presentations in our courses - indeed, in my evolution/design seminar this past summer, the founder and president of the Cornell IDEA club was one of the course organizers and moderator of the course website.

And contrary to your assertions, I have been engaged in debating anti-evolutionists for years - pretty much the same length of time I have been engaged in debating evolutionary biologists whose ideas I do not agree with.

What I have found as the result of such debates is that scientists are always ready, willing, and able to change their minds about their own sciences, so long as they are presented with convincing empirical evidence. Until then, however, they will continue to use the “rough and ready” - and tentative - generalizations that they have formulated as the result of past empirical investigation.

This is precisely what religiously motivated anti-evolutions do not (indeed, cannot) do, since their beliefs are not based on empirical evidence, nor are they open to question, much less skepticism. Here is where the difference between scientists and anti-scientists is most obvious. As T. H. Huxley (and Charles Darwin) said on numerous occasions, one should be most skeptical about one’s own most deeply held beliefs. Otherwise, one is likely to believe in something because one wants to, rather than because the evidence demands it.

For an example of how science is always “tentative”, see this essay:

http://arstechnica.com/journal.....10/13/5609

And, if you have the time, please find for me an equivalent statement of “skeptical tentativeness” presented as a defining characteristic of religiously motivated anti-evolutionism.

Dr. Dembski:

Once again you attack me personally, without knowing anything about my beliefs or history.

Please, for the record, which of my comments was “fatuous” and in what way?

And, for the record, I came close to having my evolution/design seminar “delisted” this summer, but with Will Provine’s help, it went on as planned…with Hannah Maxson (founder and president of the Cornell IDEA Club as a full participant and moderator of the course website).

I can understand your bitterness as the result of the Baylor affair, but does that give you the right to attack me in what virtually anyone would recognize as pure ad hominem viciousness? What happened to arguing propositions on their intellectual merits? Are you that much less of a gentleman and a scholar as my friend and colleague Hannah Maxson?

And, for the record, exactly what would “booting me from this forum” confirm - my “fatuousness” or “delusions”, or your inability to countenance opposing opinions in an atmosphere of collegial debate?

My own blog is online at
http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/
Please feel free to visit at your leisure, and post comments on whatever topic you wish. And, rest assured, so long as you adhere to the rules of “spirited academic debate” you will not be “booted” from that forum, and I will not characterize your self or your actions as either “fatuous” or “deluded.”

The fundamental criterion in science has always been “is there empirical evidence for the generalization?” If the answer is “yes,” then it’s admitted into the canon; if the answer is “no,” then it isn’t.

I would be the first to admit that “random mutation and natural selection” alone is insufficient to explain both the diversity of life on Earth and the exquisiteness of biological adaptations. However, the phrase “random mutation and natural selection” captures about as much of the full scope of evolutionary theory as “what goes up must come down” captures the full scope of general relativity and Newtonian gravitation.

As I always emphasize to my students, natural selection is not a process, nor is “random mutation” either “random” nor simply limited to “mutation.” As anyone who understands the underlying structure of evolutionary theory understands, the real source of all evolutionary change is not natural selection, but rather the “engine of variation” that provides the raw material that is passed from parents to offspring (and sometimes horizontally as well) and then parsed by the demographic processes we lump together under the heading of “differential reproductive success.”

It is the “engine of variation” that both IDers and EBers are really interested in, and which is only just now becoming amenable to scientific investigation. I believe that it is still an open question just exactly how this “engine” operates, and what its scope (and limitations) might be. That said, it is only empirical investigations that will unlock its secrets. Unless and until ID begins to perform empirical investigations that can unambiguously separate standard EB explanations from ID ones, the scientific community will continue to investigate (and to teach) the former.

And no amount of press releases or public debates or political maneuvering in school boards will change that basic principle.

William: The URL you requested is already listed in the previous comments. You might also be interested in my most recent publication:

“The Capacity for Religious Experience is an Evolutionary Adaptation for Warfare”, Evolution & Cognition, 10:1, pp. 43-60.

It’s also available as chapter 10 in Fitzduff & Stout, eds. (2005) The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflicts, Vol. 1, Praeger Security International/Greenwood Pubs., Westport, CT, pp. 257-284

Unfortunately, my introductory evolution textbook is still being written (under contract with Wiley) and my lecture series on evolutionary psychology from The Teaching Company won’t be out until next year. However, if you go back through the archives at my blog at:
http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/
you can probably get a good idea of where I stand on most of these issues.

And, for the record, let me publically apologize for the tone of my criticism of your comments found at:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispat.....l_fisk.php
Had I stuck to statements of fact (and analyzed simply your statements and compared them to the record), I believe that I might not have strayed into ad hominem territory. But the last couple of paragraphs were pure speculation about your motives and state of mind, and only you know what those are. Such speculation is out of bounds for any intellectual debate, and I therefore apologize for it and hope that you do not continue to hold it against me.

Henceforth, I will try to conduct myself as a “gentleman and a scholar” in our interactions (assuming there are any), and trust that you will do the same.

Allen

Unless and until EB begins to perform empirical investigations that can unambiguously separate standard EB explanations from ID ones, the layperson community will continue to push for the teaching of both regardless of the academic groupthink conclusion that ID is religion.

And no amount of press releases or public debates or political maneuvering in school boards will change that basic principle.

This is precisely why both Will Provine and I always invite both our students and faculty members (such as Michael Behe) to make presentations in our evolution courses in support of whatever side they believe in.

However, at present I can’t think of any empirical investigations that have unambiguously supported the ID position and falsified the EB position. For example, although I provide students with copies of Behe and Snoke (2004), they pretty quickly realize that it is not a report of an empirical investigation, but rather is simply a report of a computer simulation of a theoretical model.

And, although we teach an entire semester of evolutionary biology to our students, a significant fraction of the class continues to believe in either God-guided evolution or ID (around 30% of the class, to be precise). Furthermore, very few students actually change their minds between the beginning and the end of the course, according to a pre- and post-course poll (modeled on the 1982 Gallup poll). I believe that’s because we present the evidence as fairly as we can, and let the students make up their own minds. The fact that 60% of them come into the course believing in naturalistic evolution and slightly more than that leave the course at the end is testimony to something, but I’m willing to think it’s the persistence of belief in the face of evidence (on both sides).

“the raw material that is passed from parents to offspring (and sometimes horizontally as well) ”
********************************
Allen, how would one know this is “raw” and
how is it passed “horizontally?
Also, if you learn how the engine of a car functions, what does that tell you about
the driver, where he’s going, or how much
gas is in the tank?

Zero

The fact that 60% of them come into the course believing in naturalistic evolution and slightly more than that leave the course at the end is testimony to something

Testimony to the truth in that if authority figures repeat a lie enough times to a child he will eventually believe it.

Precisely, and this of course refers to the other 30% who are God-guided evolutionists and IDers, and to the 10% that are young-Earth creationists, right?

And the students who do change their minds, becoming naturalist evolutionists - have Will and I “lied” to them? Or have they, presented with the evidence from both sides (including lectures by Michael Behe, John Stannard, Hannah Maxson, and many others), changed their minds and decided that the evidence points to naturalistic evolution?

Zero:

The “raw material” to which I referred is the huge amount of genetic and phenotypic variation that is produced in every generation of a typical population of organisms. This is what differential survival and reproduction parses and what results in the phenomenon we call “natural selection.”

“Horizontal information transfer” is what viruses do: transfer information from individual to individual, regardless of direction (i.e. not just from parents to offspring).

And as to the analogy between the engine of a car and its historical trajectory (i.e. where is has been and where it appears to be going), that is precisely where the traditional split between microevolution and macroevolution apertains.

Microevolution is those processes by which populations change over time: natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift/draft, meiotic drive, etc. - these are the “engine” that drives the car, and all of them ultimately depend on the “engine of variation” that produces new genotypes and phenotypes (and which includes at least two dozen genetic and developmental processes in addition to “random mutation”).

Macroevolution is the actual patterns of change at and above the species level that have occurred over deep evolutionary time. The mechanisms of macroevolution appear now to be not simply reducible to microevolution in many cases. Rather, they involve historically contingent processes, such as mass extinction/adaptive radiation, endosymbiosis, developmental plasticity, and large-scale genome rearrangements that produce effects that are not capturable in the standard mathematical models of microevolution.

Allen, thank you.
Perhaps we might continue some of this
on your site sometime.

You mean, as a driver, I might learn
where I’m going by where I’ve been?

I’m just a carpenter. I once clipped a bird’s wing and learned he couldn’t fly. Does that make me a scientist?

Zero

Macroevolution could also be largely an unfolding of preexisting information. Just as an individual organism is the ontogenetic unfolding of preexisting information so too could macroevolution be the phylogenetic unfolding of preexisting information.

have Will and I “lied” to them

Possibly unwittingly but yes. Dogma taught as empirical truth is a lie. It doesn’t matter whether the dogma is religious or secular.

and this of course refers to the other 30% who are God-guided evolutionists and IDers, and to the 10% that are young-Earth creationists, right?

True. The thing of it is that one side’s dogma gets exclusivity in public education while any opposing dogma or even just criticism is legally censored.

I wonder what that 60% figure would be reduced to if there was a level playing field in public school where the other side gets a few minutes on the podium to present an opposing view, hmmmm? Not much interested in a level playing field are you, Allen?

Allen MacNeill

Thanks a lot for coming onto UD. It is easier to see what is truth, and what is dogma by interactions with those of an opposing view.

Unfortunately the ID / NDE debate comes with a history and it is easy, even within a family, for history to result in heated exchanges.

We all need to understand eachother and that we in ID like many of those in non ID EB really want to find out what are the processes that generate the variations upon which geographical and environmental selection pressures work.

I think it is true to say that many of us in the ID movement are of the opinion that organisms are built in such a way that their software modules would not be greatly enhanced through random mistakes. These potentially unproductive mistakes would seem also to cover transcription reversals, but of course would not include modules borrowed from other species in horizontal gene transfer and symbiosis.

I think the real difficulty we have is much more basic. The improbability and specificity of biomolecules and their highly interdependent nature within any conceivable early life candidate, would seem to preclude non-design models of origins. Dawkins calls this arguing from incredulity, but I think all of science generally works from a very sceptical base, except maybe when it comes to naturalistic origin of life and origin of biological designs.

I hope you pop in here at times to have your say.

Allen. I will bring this up again, just to remind others here how full of it you are.

You said this above about Dr. Dembski:

I can understand your bitterness as the result of the Baylor affair, but does that give you the right to attack me in what virtually anyone would recognize as pure ad hominem viciousness? What happened to arguing propositions on their intellectual merits? Are you that much less of a gentleman and a scholar as my friend and colleague Hannah Maxson?

BUTm uh oh!…this is your comment to Denyse and Bill in another post here on the website:

“This is precisely the reason why I find people like you folks on this website so utterly without moral or intellectual fiber of any kind…in particular William Demski. You assume a priori that Wilson is disingenuous and cynical in his call for cooperation between evangelicals and scientists to save the creation, and therefore ignore (and even heap abuse on) his message. This kind of behavior is what one expects from bigots…so I’m not surprised to find it here.

There is a reason why people like Dembski and yourselves are reviled by members of the “community of scholars”, and it doesn’t have to do with ID. It has to do with basic human decency, a trait which he and you have repeatedly shown that you entirely lack. A true scholar attacks the argument, but never the person. Shame on you…shame on you all.”

The best part of the quote there is where you attack Bill and Denyse as lacking any human decency and having not a shred of moral fiber, and in the very next sentence saying that a true scholar attacks the argument not the person. Which means what Al? You’ve proven you are 1. very very confused. 2. A hypocite, and 3. Not a true scholar since you just defied your own rule on what a true scholar is! (Lesson? Being a scientist doesn’t necessarily make you the smartest or smoothest guy around.)

Now, please stop speaking out of both sides of your mouth. You place your foot firmly in one side when you complain that you think Bill is better and isn’t a gentlemen when you YOURSELF came to THEIR website to say they were bigots with not a shred of moral fiber.

I mean, seriously Al, who DO you think you are? Do your students have to put up with this bologna too?

Don’t worry…anytime you spout your nonsense about being a gentleman, I’ll be sure to post the above quote to make sure everyone knows the great gentleman you are yourself!

I wouldn’t waste my time with Al here. I mean- he called us bigots- can we really expect him to have anything meaningful to say? I especially like how he calls us here at the site bigots, when he complains that Bill attacked him but knows nothing about him? Another example of doublespeak from the good professor!

To everyone else- my apologies for having to bring that all up again, but I’m not going to let Al come into a thread, whine about personal attacks, apologize for his personal attacks at Brayton’s site, then come here and attack Bill, Denyse, and “people like [us] on this website [UD]” as having no decency, no morals, etc.

It’s just silly. If you come into a forum attacking someone with a MAJOR overreaction and call them bigots, you have little to nothing of meaning to add to the conversation. If I start of my comment saying “You are all bigoted scumbags with no moral fiber…” then there’s no possible way to have a civil discussion. Allen has proven himself on at least 3 occassions incapable of being civil (at Brayton’s site and twice here at UD). When someone comes here and starts attacking the people and not their ideas or their actions, we should expose it.

I don’t know Allen, and with his VERY rude attitude here, I frankly don’t care to know him, but the quote above is accurate and that’s all I’m attacking. I’m attacking his actions and his comments. He can’t live by his own rules to attack a person’s ideas and not the person, but hopefully the rest of us can. And hopefully we can do our best to ignore those who call us bigots and worse, but do our best to let others know the true nature of those who called us bigots to begin with.

I’d like to finally second the comment that ID isn’t anti-evolution. That’s a distortion to trick the general public into equating ID with creationism (which I have nothing against, but let’s be honest on what ID is and what it isn’t.)

John A Hewitt, not an ID supporter, writes of his views on the Groupthink Syndrome.

“I spent spent many years working as a scientist but, during those years, I was very disappointed to find that professional colleagues were generally reluctant to engage in the kind of rational debate that is usually taken to characterize science.

Put bluntly, my experience was that many, though by no means all, real scientists commonly engage in various forms of deception. Even quite extreme acts such as the theft of other workers’ results, misrepresentation and lying are all common patterns of behavior.

Nowadays I realize that such experiences are quite common and that studies into the history and sociology of science indicate that, in varying degrees and despite the contrary propaganda, disingenuous or deceitful debating tactics have always been widespread in science. In practice scientific debate does not seem like a real search for truth. Rather it seems like a multiplayer game in which, though formal rules are asserted to exist, those rules are never enforced.

In science, the referees are never willing to blow their whistle and, as a result, many players just seek to win their game, whatever game they may perceive it to be, by any means, fair or foul.”

“…in general, I have found that most anti-evolution group members begin with the unshakeable position that no amount of empirical evidence can possibly make them change their beliefs.”

Speaking as a YEC myself, I would say that I’m open minded, but there is no evidence that would change my mind. That is, if presented with solid empirical evidence for evolution I would change my position, but such evidence does not exist. Certainly I’ve never seen any. (which is the basis of my belief that it does not exist)

The Groupthink Syndrome aplies perfectly to the Darwinian priesthood, specially points 4, 5 and 6.

Allen,

You say that most anti-evolutionists provide no empirical evidence. Maybe that is too broad a characterization but it is far from true.

The anti evolutionists is a misnomer for most of us as Gil Dodgen says most of believe in change in life forms over time. What we dispute is the mechanism for these changes.

We have seen no evidence for the gradualism mechanism as advocated by Darwin and his neo Darwin successors. The fossil record is empirical evidence enough to falsify that position.

Such mechanism as co-option, lateral transfer of genetic information, other massive changes to a genome such as gene duplication make nice academic discussions but we have yet to see examples where this could be the engine of allele changes or allele creation that is necessary to explain the diversity of life over the last 540 million years.

It would be nice if you could present such information some place and not just refer to a blog where it may or may not be embedded some place.

No one else who has come here has been able to do so and unless you have some definitive cites and examples we will have to say the same about your comment.

I recently went through a semester course of videos on biology that Berkeley posts on their website and the evolution section failed to do what I have asked so I assume the information does not exist or why would not Berkeley present it.

1. an illusion of invulnerability, shared by most or all the members, which creates excessive optimism and encourages taking extreme risks;

Which is illustrated nicely by Ernst Mayr who, after the first Wistar confernce proclaimed-

Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.

Then there is the fact that common descent is first assumed and then “confirming” evidence gathered. However there is still no way to test the original assumption!

2. collective efforts to rationalize in order to discount warnings which might lead the members to reconsider their assumptions before they recommit themselves to their past policy decisions;

This was observed (and carries on today) after “Darwin’s Black Box” was first published and irreducible complexity was popularized.

I could go on but it is obvious the conditions in the OP match anti-IDists to a tee.

I wonder if DR McNeil tells his students that we don’t even know what makes an organism what it is beyond the following (from geneticist Giusseppe Sermonti):

The scientist enjoys a privilege denied the theologian. To any question, even one central to his theories, he may reply “I’m sorry but I do not know.” This is the only honest answer to the question posed by the title of this chapter. We are fully aware of what makes a flower red rather than white, what it is that prevents a dwarf from growing taller, or what goes wrong in a paraplegic or a thalassemic. But the mystery of species eludes us, and we have made no progress beyond what we already have long known, namely, that a kitty is born because its mother was a she-cat that mated with a tom, and that a fly emerges as a fly larva from a fly egg.

Does he tell his students that the materialistic anti-ID position is nothing more than “sheer-dumb-luck”? If not, why not?

“My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life. If I am right it means that, even if there were no actual evidence in favour of Darwinian theory (there is, of course) we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories. ”

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1996) pp.287-288

Is this dogma or sound scientific reasoning? Would Dawkins justify this statement because the materialism requirement of science disqualifies ID?

Jerry wrote:

“We have seen no evidence for the gradualism mechanism as advocated by Darwin and his neo Darwin successors. The fossil record is empirical evidence enough to falsify that position.”

And here, I would pretty much agree with you. As Eldredge and Gould first pointed out in 1972, the fossil record does not support the gradualist model that Darwin implied and that later was institutionalized in the “modern evolutionary synthesis.” As Will Provine has pointed out, the “synthesis” was actually more of a “constriction,” as it tended to put primacy of place on mathematical models of allele frequency change in populations, to the exclusion of all other arguments.

What made Eldredge and Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium so controversial was that it shook the foundations of the “synthetic” (i.e. mathematical-model-based) theory and pointed out that theory should conform to empirical observations (i.e. the fossil record), and not the other way around. The accrimony that “punk eek” generated within the community of evolutionary biologists was certainly as intense as that between EBers and IDers today, and still lingers in some quarters. However, what seems to me to be the big difference so far is that supports of punk eek did the hard work of finding and presenting empirical evidence for the theory, and have now begun the exciting work of tying it to evo-devo mechanisms. That, in my opinion, is how science proceeds, and why to date I have such a low opinion of most IDers.

Jerry also wrote:

“Such mechanisms as co-option, lateral transfer of genetic information, other massive changes to a genome such as gene duplication make nice academic discussions but we have yet to see examples where this could be the engine of allele changes or allele creation that is necessary to explain the diversity of life over the last 540 million years.”

On the contrary, my good friend Lynn Margulis has spent the last three decades providing extremely detailed empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis that much significant macroevolutionary change has come about through what she and her son Dorian have called “acquiring genomes” (from the recent book of the same name. That is, the lateral combination of genetic systems from unrelated organisms by the process of symbiosis, especially endosymbiosis. The origin of eukaryotic cells is only example of how such lateral genetic recombination can produce an immense amount of genetic and developmental novelty, none of it explainable using the limited mathematical machinery of the “modern synthesis.”

If it sounds like I’m critical of the neo-darwinian “synthesis,” that’s because I am. And I’m not alone: Will Provine has shown repeatedly that virtually all of the central tenets of the “modern synthesis” of circa 1959 have been superceded or shown to be unsupported by the evidence.

Should this surprise anyone? After all, the “modern synthesis” is now almost a half century old. Has physics changed much since 1959? Chemistry? Developmental genetics? That’s the nature of science: it changes over time as the result of new discoveries. Theories get modified all the time, and sometimes what seems to be central to a discipline is what must be changed.

But none of this happens via press release or appeals to the lay public. Science is not democratic: no amount of voting or slick advertising can alter the value of the gravitational constant or change the AUG start codon for methionine. Science evolves as the result of the hard, often slogging work of researchers in the field and laboratory, who formulate and test hypotheses using empirical methods and statistical analysis. So far, the vast majority of IDers have not deigned to participate. Until they do, what they do cannot be considered science. Public relations perhaps, or some amalgam of PR and politics, mixed at times with religious proselitizing. But not science…

Joseph wrote:

“I wonder if DR McNeil tells his students that we don’t even know what makes an organism what it is…”

No, I must admit that I do not tell them that. Instead, I assign them Sean Carroll’s new book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and we spend a few weeks talking about precisely what Joseph seems to think we know nothing about: how a unicellular zygote becomes a multicellular animal.

And no, we don’t throw up our hands and say “It’s a mystery about which we know nothing.” Nope, we do our level best to figure it out, using the tools that experience has shown will serve best for that process: empirical investigation combined with rigorous statistical (and sometimes mathematical) analysis.

That’s how real science is done.

Zero asked:

“You mean, as a driver, I might learn
where I’m going by where I’ve been?”

An interesting analogy: from an evolutionary viewpoint, that is exactly right. The future is entirely determined by the past; events in the past constraint the trajectory of events in the future. That’s what cause-and-effect and the “arrow of time” are all about.

“I’m just a carpenter. I once clipped a bird’s wing and learned he couldn’t fly. Does that make me a scientist?”

Yep, especially if you wondered beforehand if clipping the bird’s wing might prevent it from flying. That’s the hypothetico-deductive method in a nutshell: observe reality (birds seem to use their winds to fly), formulate a testable hypothesis (wings are necessary for bird flight), make a prediction (therefore, if I clip this bird’s wing, it should be unable to fly), test the prediction (clip the birds wing and see if it can fly afterward), and compare the outcome of the test to the original hypothesis (can the bird still fly? If it can, your hypothesis has been falsified; if not, your hypothesis has been validated).

I am reminded of Ernst Mayr, in his last book What Makes Biology Unique, in which he argues that Thomas Kuhn’s work on Revolutions does not apply to EB at all. Of course, EBs are free to disagree, but I’ve only seen praise of his work…

Allen writes,
“However, every single one of them apply (in spades) to some of the anti-evolution/YEC groups”….

Forgive me for not understanding what “in spades” means, but I do direct you to the book “Three Views on Creation and Evolution” in which John Mark Reynolds-YEC-says in his part that the scientific evidence is not strongest for his position. Does that sound like invincibility? And the fact that he’s writing in a book with two other positions, does that not show a willingness to exchange views?

Have you read James Porter Moreland’s book Christianity and the Nature of Science on the scientific status of a creation hypothesis? Or Bruce Gordon’s essay, http://www.4truth.net/site/app.....ct=1740333, on the scientific status of design inferences? Have you responded?

Have you seen the one hour documentary on evolution on the Science channel? It’s like hearing atheism 101. No differing views are discussed… sure, not all EBs are like that, but I haven’t seen any condemn the show.
—
Al:
“…have Will and I “lied” to them?”…
Dave:
Possibly unwittingly but yes.
Me: Isn’t the essence of a lie the fact that you know it’s not true?
—

Sheut, you get bored with the website and suddenly you realize that you missed out on the heart of a great thread.

Dr. MacNeill, its been enjoyable to have your opinion expressed here, even though you did start out surprisingly “spirited”. I am puzzled that you seem to have encountered honest IDers quite a bit, yet you still seem to equate us with the “Bible first (my interpretation only please)” crowd down at ICR.

I am fairly typical of bloggers on this site — not a professional biologist, or scientist for that matter. I have a religious perspective, and I realize that it colors my interpretation of the facts. However, having a bias is much different than having a closed mind.

It seems, however, that your position is very ID friendly. I was most intrigued by your statement:

It is the “engine of variation” that both IDers and EBers are really interested in, and which is only just now becoming amenable to scientific investigation. I believe that it is still an open question just exactly how this “engine” operates, and what its scope (and limitations) might be.

As I read the view of IDers, this “engine of variation” is the main bone of contention that exists between the ID evolutionist and the NDE evolutionist. I respect that your position is that the nature of this “engine” is not well understood.

You have also introduced me to a few new terms, “endosymbiosis, developmental plasticity, and large-scale genome rearrangements”. I will be exploring the net to learn about these because I am not in a position to take your courses.

Lastly, you mention the issue of few people changing camps in your course, but more moving to evolution than otherwise. It brings me back to when I was in Bible College. I took a course called “The Pentatute”, which taught only Genesis 1. The position of the instructor was clearly young earth. It worked for many in the class, but brought me to the conclusion that I now had a thorough enough grasp of all of the available evidence to make up my mind. I have not held a young earth theology since.

However, I also recall a fellow sharing on one of these forums, this one I believe. His Ph. D. thesis was on ATP synthase. When he had finished his thesis he had concluded that NDE was in error, and that his religious conviction “athieism” was also in error. This knife certainly cuts both ways.

When Cornell offered your science course that was giving ID a seat at the table, this website was all abuz. We, in general, were very excited to see honest discussion about ID. I, for one, would love to see you be a regular poster on this site.

DaveScot wrote:

“Macroevolution could also be largely an unfolding of preexisting information. Just as an individual organism is the ontogenetic unfolding of preexisting information so too could macroevolution be the phylogenetic unfolding of preexisting information.”

This is an interesting hypothesis, and one that is potentially testable. For example, Lynn Margulis has suggested that most of animal developmental genetics, and especially sex, are the result of the peculiar mechanism by which animals make gametes and zygotes: meiosis, followed by the fusion of haploid gametes. Unlike in other organisms, sexual reproduction appears to be obligate in most animals (but c.f. whiptail lizards). Margulis has proposed that this is because the complexity of animal developmental genetics requires a much higher level of genetic fidelity during gamete production and fusion: as some IDers have rightly pointed out, genetic alterations in animals (e.g. “mutations”) are much more likely to result in non-viability than equivalent alterations in other organisms. Hence, a very complex mechanism (the entire prophase I through anaphase I apparatus) is required to minimize the deleterious effects of genetic changes, essentially by using comparison between non-identical genomes for error-correction.

And so, because of developmental genetic constraints, most animals are “required” to have sex as a prerequisite to reproduction. In the fullness of evolutionary time, this seemingly simple constraint has resulted in Darwin’s “mechanism” of sexual selection, and the immense complexity that accompanies the physiological and behavioral differences between the sexes in animals, including significant portions of our own behavior.

Is this “front-loading” or “the unfolding of a pre-existing plan?” Not exactly; there is no evidence that indicates that the peculiar mechanism of meiotic sex—>haploid gametic fusion—>diploid development was in any way “intended” to bring about such things as the reluctance of men to ask for directions or women’s seeming obsession with shoes. However, that’s the way contingency works in evolutionary biology: it sets things in motion that, in the fullness of time, bring about complexity piled on complexity.

As to the question of “lying” to students, I once overheard a conversation between two professors (while showering at the gym). One mentioned how he taught a particular concept, to which the other replied “Isn’t that just a little deceptive?” The other replied “Every educational act begins with an act of deception.”

And I agree. When we investigate the world around us, we are as scientists required to be as skeptical as possible, especially about our own most cherished preconceptions. Otherwise we may miss the anomaly that leads to a whole new field of investigation.

However, when we communicate this to our students (and to granting agencies, etc.), we have to sound much more certain about what we think we know than we are amongst ourselves. Why? Because the most common reaction to ambiguity is immediate rejection. Students who are constantly exposed to a litany of ambiguous statements quickly come to the conclusion that a teacher who deals only in ambiguities doesn’t know anything about the subject.

In other words, to make it possible to understand the flaws in a theory, one must first understand the theory. One cannot attack a position that is composed entirely of vague ambiguities. This is why Ernst Mayr always stated his beliefs in the strongest possible terms. He wanted people to understand as clearly as possible what he was asserting, so that if they disagreed with him (which many of us did), we would know exactly what it was we disagreed with, and how best to attack it.

BenZ wrote:

“I am reminded of Ernst Mayr, in his last book What Makes Biology Unique, in which he argues that Thomas Kuhn’s work on Revolutions does not apply to EB at all.”

And here I could not disagree more with Ernst Mayr. On the contrary, I believe that evolutionary biology has a larger than usual quotient of scientific revolutions of the type described by Kuhn. That is how I structure my introductory evolution course: we take a historical approach to evolutionary biology, pointing out the various revolutions and controversies that have accompanied them.

I believe that Ernst, especially in his later years, was trying his best to “hold together” a discipline that had exploded since he himself revolutionized it in the 1930s. That’s what happens when you get old and stop doing field work: you rely more and more on memory, and less and less on observation to draw conclusions. It’s already happening to me, as hard as I try not to fall prey to it.

Maybe this is why most Nobel prize winners in science are either under the age of 40, or did the work for which they were finally recognized when they were much younger?

So when Ernst Mayr wrote, in his 1998 book What Evolution Is in the questions in the back of the book, “Evolution is simply a fact”, he was stating it in clear terms? I’ve always admired Mayr, however, for his quote in the same book on the status of Christian ethics.

“That’s what happens when you get old and stop doing field work: you rely more and more on memory, and less and less on observation to draw conclusions.”

I have considered this, but I think Mayr at least has some merit to him–he tried to learn more Philosophy later in life and apply it to Biology so that I’m not so sure that this crituqe applies in full (I think he might have been reading up on the newest info and history of evolution).

Also, I am reminded of Richard Feynman in his book “Surely You’re Joking”…

“That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school–we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards.”

“I wonder if DR McNeil tells his students that we don’t even know what makes an organism what it is…”

Allen MacNeill:
No, I must admit that I do not tell them that. Instead, I assign them Sean Carroll’s new book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and we spend a few weeks talking about precisely what Joseph seems to think we know nothing about: how a unicellular zygote becomes a multicellular animal.

First I don’t think we know nothing about what makes an organism what it is. However we do know that although genes may influence every aspect of development they do not determine it.

For example we can take a gene from a mouse that controls eye development, stick in a fly genome lacking that gene and the subsequent fly emerges with fly eyes, not mouse eyes.

Allen MacNeill
And no, we don’t throw up our hands and say “It’s a mystery about which we know nothing.” Nope, we do our level best to figure it out, using the tools that experience has shown will serve best for that process: empirical investigation combined with rigorous statistical (and sometimes mathematical) analysis.

I never implied nor suggested we throw up our hands.

Your strawman responses are duly noted.

Allen MacNeill
That’s how real science is done.

Real science is concerned with finding out the reality behind what we are observing. And by ruling out ID a priori, especially seeing that the materialistic alternative is a science stopping “sheer-dumb-luck” scenario, one has to wonder if anti-IDists are conducting science at all.

As for “endless forms…”- real science seems to have refuted that:
Unified physics theory explains animals’ running, flying and swimming:

The findings may have implications for understanding animal evolution, Marden said. One view of evolution holds that it is not a purely deterministic process; that history is full of chance and historical contingency. It is the idea purported by Steven Jay Gould and others that if you were to “rewind the tape” and run it again, evolution would proceed down a different path, Marden said.

“Our finding that animal locomotion adheres to constructal theory tells us that — even though you couldn’t predict exactly what animals would look like if you started evolution over on earth, or it happened on another planet — with a given gravity and density of their tissues, the same basic patterns of their design would evolve again,” Marden said.

I guess neither you nor Dr Carroll received the memo…

Hey,

We have made progress. Allen has admitted that Darwinism and neo Darwinism does not drive all or most of the allele change and creation that has happened in the last 540 million years.

Allen, why such strong resistance to a critical analysis of Darwin and neo Darwinism in high school and college curriculums? Here we have you as an evolutionary scientist admitting that a lot of what is taught is bogus but will you step up to the plate and join us in getting criticism of Darwin into the curriculum. We can then put your other mechanisms in for examination also.

So those of us who have found Darwin deficient have to look elsewhere to direct our understanding, namely Lynn Margulis and her ideas such as “acquiring genomes” or other mechanisms.

Allen, I have read Sean Carroll’s book and found no evidence for naturalistic evolution other than the homology argument. It is a fascinating book but his defense of naturalistic evolution depend upon the existence of a pre-Cambrian organism with all the genes necessary for body parts, eyes, IC systems etc. already in place and I did not see any evidence other than assertion for such an organism or how such a complex organism could have developed in such a short time. His ideas also depend upon some mechanism which modifies the tens of thousands of switches and their firing patterns to get the “novel” evolution of new body plans, systems etc. Only speculation at best.

Homology and co-option just don’t get it done. These are just terms pulled out of the back pocket when one gets stuck. We will have to examine the other league to see if Lynn Margulis is really hitting the ball out of the park or just an aside for her speculation for the origin of eukaryotes?

Thank you for your comments. If we can keep it civil, we can learn a lot from each other. One of them is that many of us here are not creationists in any religious form and for me, one who in the past accepted the Darwinian explanation till I saw the evidence.