My op-ed piece in The Calgary Herald – Albertans right to reject Darwinian evolution
| August 17, 2008 | Posted by O'Leary under Darwinism |
My op-ed piece published in The Calgary Herald, Saturday, August 16, 2008, responding to radio host and commentator Rob Breakenridge, with links to sources:
In rebuttal – Theory needs a paramedic, not more cheerleaders
Denyse O’Leary
Re “What is it about evolution theory that Albertans don’t get?” (August 12, 2008), Rob Breakenridge has cobbled together key talking points of the American Darwin lobby. The resulting column is an excellent illustration of why one should not write about big topics without basic research.
The 2005 Judge Jones decision in Pennsylvania, to which Breakenridge devotes much of his column, has not crimped the worldwide growth of interest in intelligent design. That is no surprise. A judge is not a scientist, and Jones cannot plug gaping holes in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolution is—contrary to its (largely) publicly funded zealots— in deep trouble, for a number of reasons.
The history of life has not been the long, slow “survival of the fittest” transition that classical evolution theory requires. Life got started on Earth soon after the planet cooled. All the basic divisions of animal life took shape rather suddenly in the Cambrian seas, about 550 million years ago. Later, there was, for example, the “Big Bang” of flowers and the Big Bang of birds, where many life forms appear quite suddenly.
Modern human consciousness is one of these leaps, judging from the superb cave paintings from recent millenniums. The creationists whom Breakenridge derides may be wrong on their dates, but not on much else.
Breakenridge hopes that we can enlighten backward Albertans by teaching more “evolution” in Alberta schools. But that won’t help. Textbook examples of evolution often evaporate when researchers actually study them (instead of just assuming they are true).
For example, the peacock’s tail did not evolve to please hen birds; hens don’t notice them much. The allegedly yummy Viceroy butterfly did not evolve to look like the bad-tasting Monarch (both insects taste bad). The eye spots on butterflies’ wings did not evolve to scare birds by resembling the eyes of their predators. Birds avoid brightly patterned insects, period. They don’t care whether the patterns resemble eyes. Similarly, the famous “peppered moth” of textbook fame has devolved into a peppered myth, featuring book-length charges and countercharges.
And remember that row of vertebrate embryos in your textbook years ago? It was dubbed in the journal Science one of the “most famous fakes” in biology—because the embryos don’t really look very similar. And Darwin’s majestic Tree of Life? It’s now a tangleweed, or maybe several of them.
We seldom see evolution happening. Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution (2007) notes that for decades scientists have observed many thousands of generations of bacteria in the lab. And how did they evolve?
Well, they didn’t. Worse, when evolution is occasionally observed (and widely trumpeted), it often heads the wrong way. For example, bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance by junking intricate machinery, not by creating it. Cave fish lose their eyes. But we don’t need a theory for how intricate machinery gets wrecked. We need a theory for how it originates and how it develops quite suddenly. Evolution, as we understand it today, apparently isn’t that theory.
We aren’t going to improve science education by teaching Darwinian fairy tales.
Breakenridge informs us that in a recent Angus Reid poll, “A shockingly low 37 per cent of Albertans supported the position that humans beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years.” Well, good, let’s drive the numbers lower still. That position is an article of atheist dogma. Evidence for it is hailed as a truth we must all embrace; evidence against it is shrugged off as a temporary setback. Try doubting the dogma, and you could end up starring in Ben Stein’s Expelled, Part II.
Breakenridge also frets, “An even greater number of Albertans—40 percent—agreed that humans were created by God within the last 10,000 years.” That’s easy to explain. It was the only other option (barring “don’t know”). The ever-popular “God uses evolution” choice wasn’t offered.
Forced to choose between excluding God and including him, I’d pick option two, even though I accept NASA’s estimate of our Earth’s age (4.5 billion years) and consider common ancestry a reasonable idea.
My guess is, Albertans diverged from the national norm because they considered the question more carefully than some folk. History, anyone?
This summer a meeting of key evolutionists took place at Altenberg, Austria, to revise the theory. So, Albertans, if you haven’t started believing it yet, don’t bother. Right now, the theory needs a paramedic, not more cheerleaders.
Denyse O’Leary is a journalist and blogger who is the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy and co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
(Note: I put this opinion piece up because I was beginning to receive correspondence about it, but could not find a link to the Herald, and in any event wanted to link readers to my sources. Thanks to Jane Harris-Zsovan for the scan.)
39 Responses to My op-ed piece in The Calgary Herald – Albertans right to reject Darwinian evolution
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Joseph,
you said
“If you do not understand that a result is not a process then we can just agree to disagree.”
What makes you think I don’t know the difference.
And by the way it is possible that a result could be a process. You could have initial processes, intermediate processes and final processes and anything after the first could be a result or the whole thing could be just one big process. Take your pick as to the best semantic explanation.
Now if you want to argue that natural selection does not exist (not just improperly defined) then we can agree to disagree. To me it is a no brainer even though there has been much misunderstanding about what it is exactly. All I know is that population allele frequencies change over time and they often do so as a result of environment changes and the outcomes are not random in the sense that any frequency is just as likely as another.
And the modern view would substitute genomic elements for alleles but nothing has really changed. Somehow one has to explain the millions of species/variants that exist in the world and resort to some design event for each will get ID nowhere except confirmation that ID is really creationism in disguise, just not necessarily the 7 day variety.
Jerry,
A result can/ may be part of a process but that does not make the result a process in and of itself.
Now if you want to argue that natural selection does not exist (not just improperly defined) then we can agree to disagree.
The following is right in line with my way of looking at NS (see comment 19):
Also I don’t care what any explanation leads to. All I am interested in is the reality behind our existence. There is only one…
“That article was amazing. There’s no question of evolution, just dumb idiots who oppose it.”
“Shut up”, they explained.
—–”Joseph: To StephenB “Can NS be a cause if it is a result?”
I wouldn’t think so, which is why I characterized the two points of view the way I did. It should be obvious that if a thing merely describes a series of events, then it cannot be the cause of those events.
—Jerry: “I see an amazing mechanism that represents great design.”
—-Joseph: “Natural selection is a result, not a mechanism. It doesn’t design anything.”
Here, I think Jerry is simply saying that natural selection is a mechanism that has been designed to do what it does.
StephenB,
It is not natural selection that is the great design. It is just one of the parts or one of the sub processes of the great design. Now watch everyone jump on me because I described it as a part.
Micro evolution is the great design and consists of many things including the physical structure of the cell, all the cellular processes for duplication and validation, variation generation within the genome, sexual reproduction and recombination, genetics in all its forms (which includes natural selection), epigenetics and whatever else affects the structure of the gamete and the morphology of the offspring. There are probably a lot of other processes.
All of these things let organisms adapt to changing environments whether it is the next island, the next ice ace, the next drought, a new predator etc. The end result is often a new variant that is better adapted to the environment. Over time this new variant may not be able to reproduce with the original species if it is still around.
Sometimes I do not use the precise word to express exactly what I mean so there may be some confusion in what I am trying to say.
Joseph,
The passage you quoted is not quite correct. The author admits that natural selection is a process (or whatever it is) that produces changes. However, there is no certainty that all will return to the original state or initial gene pool. In the process of adapting, the gene pool might lose valuable information and may not have the ability to return.
Natural selection tends to cull out alleles from a gene pool and as such the new population will not have the capability to return to where it was before unless another population exists that has the missing information. Then it could return through gene flow. Also if a sub population gets separated then this population the it may not have the ability to produce the original gene pool.
This continual loss of information through natural selection may eventually produce a population(s) that some day does not have the ability to cope with a new environment and the species may then go extinct.
—–Jerry: It is not natural selection that is the great design. It is just one of the parts or one of the sub processes of the great design. Now watch everyone jump on me because I described it as a part.
If you read the comment that prompted my response, you will discover that the purpose of my post was to exonerate you from the charge of saying that natural selection can “design anything.”
The only other point I have made on this thread is to acknowledge that Joseph is right about a point of his own: Provine and MacNeil believe that natural selection has no causal power, and you believe that it does. It’s a perfectly legitimate disagreement and there are plenty of people who will argue either way. That’s one of the things that is so entertaining about evolutionary theory–its fluidity.
StephenB,
I believe if you probe both Provine and MacNeill, they will both agree with much of what I say. They recognize that evolution is a two faceted theory and only one really counts in the debate.
Natural selection is very most important in the facet that doesn’t count in the evolution debate but which is important for life on the planet. The natural selection process if given enough time will dig out of a gene pool, variations that are better than the current set of alleles when an environment changes.
As I said, very important for life but meaningless in the evolution debate. The facet that counts, macro evolution, is not effected by natural selection alone because the new capability is not present in the current gene pool and no process known including natural selection can dig it out or cause it to come into existence. Darwin once thought all the capabilities were present within the organism and could be teased out by natural selection over time. This was based on his experience with artificial selection. Obviously not true but to the uninformed it makes a great argument.
What is important for macro evolution is new variation and not just any old new variation but massive new variation that causes new systems to arise. That is why Allen MacNeill emphasized his 47 varieties of it. Because without the massive additions to the gene pool, macro evolution is not reachable. That is why many here emphasize that it is variation that is key to the evolution debate and natural selection is not an important factor. So when Provine says that ns is not important for evolution, I will bet he means macro evolution. This is also what the Edge of Evolution is about.
It doesn’t say that natural selection will not be involved but if ns has no new variation to work on, there will be no macro evolution and if ns does not work then the new variation will wither away. So for the general theory of Darwin, variation is king but ns must still be there. For the special theory of Darwin, ns is king and new variation is unimportant. But the changes are small and not important for the evolution debate.
Nevertheless, the special theory is important for life on the planet because it allows the millions of variants to thrive. Otherwise when you look out the window, it would be a very sterile world.