I largely agree with the point that Kristol makes here--but I disagree in one important respect. It is not a pseudo-scientific dogmatism--but rather a quasi-scientific dogmatism. The arguments of the supporters of evolution are not totally devoid of scientific reason--but neither do they live up to the highest standards of scientific objectivity. If you only look for arguments to support one point of view, you can probably develop a fairly convincing case to support that point of view--but that does not make it true.
Anti-creationism refers to opposition to a belief in creation, rather than support for a belief in evolution. The term is not mine. A form of the word appeared in an article that appeared in Discover magazine in June 1985, the year before Kristol wrote his Op Ed piece. Jared Diamond's " Voyage of the Overloaded Ark" included the following two paragraphs.
Scientists insist that creation science isn't science at all but disguised religious belief seeking illegal entry into our schools. Persuaded by an anti-creationist counteroffensive, Texas last year(that would have been 1984) rescinded a creationist-inspired law requiring that biology textbooks carry a disclaimer to the effect that "evolution is treated as theory rather than fact." Still, several textbooks submitted bu publishers for use in Texas schools this year(1985) have the cautionary words, and some make no mention of evolution at all. Teachers who unapologetically describe invisible atoms and the earth's revolution about the sun routinely waffle about evolution.
The stakes in this legal struggle are enormous. If creationists are right, our children are being misled with shaky scientific theory masquerading as fact. Worse yet, morality is being undermined, since adherence to the Bible's ethical precepts, Judge Dreen (mentioned earlier in Jared Diamond's article) and other creationists believe, hinges on an acceptance of its literal correctness. If scientists are right, our children are being denied instruction in the central concept of the biological sciences, and their training for possible careers in agriculture and medicine is being jeopardized, as is America's international leadership in these areas.
We were told "Jared Diamond, a confirmed Darwinian, teaches physiology at UCLA medical school." But in this article Jared Diamond was much more of an anti-creationist than anything else. Common courtesy would dictate that if you are going teach something in a science class that conflicts with the religious beliefs of some people, then you should try to make it as inoffensive as possible--but Jared Diamond insisted that we should take an in-your-face approach to teaching evolution, making it as offensive as possible. What would be so terribly wrong with teaching evolution as a theory?
According to Jared Diamond, if scientists are right, our children are being denied instruction in the central concept of the biological sciences. From the context, it is clear that Jared Diamond is referring to something related to evolution. But children are being taught evolution. I can only conclude that for Jared Diamond, the central concept was something children were missing when teachers waffled while teaching evolution. It would seem that for Jared Diamond, the central concept in the biological sciences was not simply evolution but the idea that evolution was a scientific fact that had to be accepted without question.Evolution is the most glamorous concept in biology, and one of the most glamorous concepts in all of science. But that does not make evolution a particularly important concept in biology. Cell theory is far more important. Genetics is far more important. I have a 1995 college text on Anatomy and Physiology by Fredric H. Martini that is over 1000 pages and there is no mention at all of evolution in the index. The idea that American leadership in medicine and agriculture would be jeopardized even if evolution were not taught at all in high school is frankly quite ridiculous--but the glamorous nature of evolution can make such a claim believable to people who don't really understand science.
According to Diamond, Darwin first convinced people of the fact of evolution, and second, offered a theory, natural selection, to explain what causes it. Later Diamond wrote "The scientific method consists of observing the world, deducing an explanation for phenomena, comparing predictions derived from these "models" with new observations, then modifying the explanation to account for discrepancies. Darwin's theories yielded thousands of predictions, some of which have been strikingly confirmed: genes, the dating of the fossil record, transitional forms between modern humans and apes. Other parts of Darwin's woek have proved wrong and have been modified, such as his acceptance of Lamarck's view that some characteristics acquired after birth could be passed on to one's offspring.
The prediction of genes has been strikingly confirmed--but that was Mendel not Darwin. Darwin's theory of heredity, Pangenesis, allowed for every cell of the body to contribute to the next generation. This would have permitted the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but it proved to be wrong. Darwin's dates for fossils were based upon the work of Charles Lydell. Modern science is in essential agreement with the dates, but has a view of geology that mixes the uniform processes favored by Lydell and Darwin with catastrophic events such as asteroid collisions. After fossil types were found that were intermediate between apes and humans, there would be nothing stunning about the success of a prediction that more would be found if enough effort were devoted to the hunt. In any case, if Diamond has such high regard for Darwin's theories, and the predictions that could be made based upon Darwin's theories, what would be so terrible about calling evolution itself a theory?
Diamond wrote "As UCLA biologist Richard Dickerson says, the term "creation science" is an oxymoron--a phrase that contradicts itself, like full-length bikini or jumbo shrimp." Whatever you may think of creation science, there is a problem here. The term "jumbo shrimp" only sounds like a contradiction in terms because shrimp has a secondary slang meaning as a small person. If we recognize that shrimp in this context refers to a marine decapod, then jumbo shrimp is no more ridiculous than jumbo olive. We need to be careful of words and expressions that can have multiple meanings. It can be easy to pick the wrong meaning for a term that is used once--and we can also fall into the error of using the same term with more than one meaning when we use it more than once.
Diamond continued, "A tragic consequence of the contemporary creationist movement is its damaging impact on science teaching in schools. One can no more master biology while denying the fact of evolution than one can understand chemistry while refusing to admit the existence of atoms. Though creationist pretend to seek equal status for creation science and evolution in school curricula, their actual effect has been the omission or dilution of evolution in textbooks and courses. Schoolchildren are cruelly denied the background needed for careers in the biological sciences. The U.S.S.R. offers a chilling example. The disastrous state of Soviet agriculture owes much to the late Trofim Lysenko, whose mad views om evolution led him to reject genetics, oppose the development of new wheat varieties, and block experimentation with hybrid corn."
Diamond then continued, " A less publicized result of creationism is the damage it has inflicted on religion. Like Judge Dreen, the creationists misguidedly link what they perceive as a widespread decay of morals in the U.S. with a belief in evolution and what they call scientific humanism. An instructive comparison is the damage the Roman Catholic church inflicted on itself by condemning Galileo for his astronomical views. The fact of evolution is no more destructive to religion and morality than is the fact of the earth's revolution about the sun. What is destructive now, as in Galileo's time, is allying religion with ignorance. How can one respect a movement that adheres to interpretations discredited centuries ago--by men at least as devout as today's creationists?"
Diamond also wrote, "The creationists either/or posture--literal creationism, or else atheistic evolution and licentiousness--is wrong. Many Catholics, Protestants, and Jews practice their religion and behave ethically and accept the fact of evolution."
What we see here is a quasi-scientific dogmatism which Jared Diamond pursues with quasi-logical reasoning. Biologists like Jared Diamond argue that they want evolution taught like the existence of atoms is taught. It is true that we learn that atoms exist, and we don't question what we learn. So in a sense we learn to accept atoms as a scientific fact. But no one insists that the existence of atoms is a scientific fact like biologists do with evolution. Indeed, in contrast to evolution which is taught as a scientific fact and not a theory--the existence of atoms is taught as a theory in the many high school chemistry texts that devote one or more chapters to atomic theory. So if we actually were to teach evolution like atoms are taught, we would never actually claim that it is a scientific fact, and high school biology texts would devote one or more chapters to the theory of evolution.
What is happening here? Creationists like to emphasize the uncertainty associated with the word "theory". Supporters of evolution think creationists are making an unfair connection between the scientific meaning of "theory" and the everyday meaning. There would seem to be two possible responses. Supporters of evolution could try to honestly explain scientific use of language, or they could take the position "If they are going to play games with words, then we are going to play games as well." The latter approach is part of a more general approach taken by supporters of evolution in which they consider themselves justified in using any tactic that has ever been used against them--and even while they proclaim the tactic to be terrible when it was used against them, they feel entirely justified in using the same tactic against their opponents. The Darwinian version of the Golden Rule seems to be "Do unto others as they have done unto you."
At first evolution supporters retained the use of the word "theory", but claimed that "theory" had a scientific meaning very different from what it actually had. When I took high school biology in 1962, I was taught that scientific ideas are called hypothesis, and only when the evidence for them had become overwhelming were they called theories. I accepted this at the time, and I reasoned that evolution pretty much had to be true, simply based upon the fact that it was called a theory. I should have known better. I knew about the "Big Bang Theory" and the "Steady State Theory" in astronomy. They couldn't both have overwhelming support since at least one of them had to be false. The Theory of Evolution was a theory in the same sense as the two theories for the origin of the universe. But that was not what I was told in my biology class, where we used a pre-publication edition of the Blue Version Molecules to Man textbook from the American Institute of Biological Sciences Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. This was not just confusion between two uses of a word--this was an outright lie about what the scientific definition of a theory was. We also sang songs O Christmas Tree with the words changed so that we were singing our praise of the A.I.B.S. and the B.S.C.S.--which certainly provides some evidence that evolution was being taught more as a religion than a science.
It seems to have been at a later time that evolution supporters decided to call evolution a scientific fact and concocted arguments such as the one Jared Diamond gave to the effect that (1) Teaching evolution like we teach atoms means we must declare that evolution is a scientific fact, even though that is not done when students are taught about atoms, and (2) Teaching evolution like we teach atoms means we must not talk about evolution as being a theory, even though we do specifically teach chemistry students about atomic theory.
Jared Diamond's argument about Lysenkoism makes some quasi-logical sense. Bad science can lead to very bad results as it did with Lysenkoism in the U.S.S.R. If we consider creationism to be bad science then we should protect ourselves against it in any way we can. But with a closer examination that is not totally one-sided, the argument falls apart. The Soviet agricultural disaster was not the result of a belief in creationism, but rather a belief in evolution--a mad view of evolution according to Jared Diamond. If you believe in evolution, the main conclusion that you should draw from Lysenkoism is not that we should reject creationism, but that we should reject mad views on evolution.
Lysenko was a Lamarckian who believed in evolution through the inheritance of aquired characteristics. I assume Jared Diamond believed in evolution through natural selection. But he vehemently argued that evolution was not just a theory, but a scientific fact. At the same time he viewed natural selection as a theory to explain what causes it. This pretty much communicates the idea that you must believe in evolution, but you are free to believe in any version of evolution you wish, including Lysenko's Lamarckiansim. So in the name of fighting against the type of disaster we saw in the Soviet Union, Jared Diamond made common cause with those who hold the very beliefs that led to that disaster. But there is more. The problem in the Soviet Union was not simply Lamarckian evolution, but the fact that this view of evolution was a part of the state religion, and dissenting views were not tolerated. Jared Diamond argued in favor of religions in America endorsing evolution--and the view of evolution which religions adopt when they do embrace evolution is very much a Lamarckian view, one where progress is pretty much inevitable, and new ideas are better than old ones. Jared Diamond also approved of religious intolerance by these Lamarckian religions when they testified in court against an Arkansas law that mandated equal treatment for creation and the religious belief that these religions had in evolution. We have not yet reached the level of intolerance that we saw in the Soviet Union, but we seem to be headed in that direction.Jared Diamond wrote about how religion has inflicted damage upon itself by adhering to scientific views that were discredited centuries ago. But what about the damage that anti-creationist science has done to itself by doing the same thing--adhering to a view of science that has not been accepted as true for centuries. The Earth does not revolve around the Sun. That would be a violation of Newton's 3rd Law of Motion: To every action there is an equal an opposite reaction. It would also be a violation of the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Instead, since the time of Newton, it has been recognized that the Earth and the Sun each revolve around the common center of mass--or at least that would be the case if other objects in space did not complicate matters. For scientists like Jared Diamond who wish to continue the "warfare" between science and religion of which Irving Kristol spoke, it makes a better story to pretend that Galileo was right and the church was wrong instead of the currently accepted scientific view that neither side was entirely correct.
The Catholic Church did damage itself with the Inquisition of Galileo, not because Galileo was right, or even because it mattered how the Sun and the planets moved, but rather because the Inquisition undermined free scientific inquiry in Catholic Europe, and when truly important work was done by Newton later in the 17th Century in Protestant England, Catholic Europe got left behind.
Jared Diamond complained about the creationist's view of either literal creationism and morality or else atheistic evolution and licentiousness. But the creationists' view on this matter is a legitimate religious position just as Jared Diamond's is. The public schools should respect both positions and not take sides in this religious dispute. I f we want to actually look at the question in a relatively neutral manner, we see that, yes, many Catholics, Protestants, and Jews do believe in evolution and behave ethically--but that does not mean that there is not a positive statistical correlation between a literal acceptance of the Bible and ethical behavior. Indeed, it would seem reasonable to suppose that people who believe in the literal truth of the Bible would be more likely to follow the teachings of the Bible than those who do not.
Along with the main article, Jared Diamond included an inset "IF THE CREATIONISTS ARE RIGHT, GOD IS A SQUID". He began with the paragraph:
Long before today's revival of creationism, thoughtful scholars and theologians used the awesome complexity they saw in nature to argue that living things could only be the work of an intelligent Creator. This "argument by design" was successfully refuted by Darwin who showed how the special variations found from one species to another (what biologists call adaptions) could have arisen by natural selection, his mechanism for evolution. Indeed, careful study of living creatures reveals innumerable features that would never exist if species had been designed ex nihilo, as creationists claim.
In THE ORIGIN Darwin argued that an all powerful Creator could create anything--and that makes it impossible to refute creationism, which means creationism cannot be falsified, and so it is not science. Anti-creationists still make this claim, but in a logically inconsistent fashion, they also make the claim that various features that do not appear to be examples of intelligent design do, in fact, refute creationism. Jared Diamond gives us a couple of examples., including the following paragraph:
Nowhere is the weakness of the design argument more flagrant than when we compare men and apes. Creationists passionately insist that these species have separate ancestries. If so, why did the Intelligent Designer give us 98 per cent of a chimpanzee's or gorilla's genes, and design only 2 per cent of our genes anew? We would be better off without some of this ape heritage. Take childbirth, for example. It's painful, dangerous, and sometimes fatal for women. The reason: the pelvis of the human female is better designed for bearing a three-and-a-half-pound infant--one the size of a newborn gorilla--than the typical seven pound human baby. These design flaws have an evolutionary explanation: we diverged from apes only about seven million years ago, so evolution still has a lot of work to do on the human pelvis.
A first point to note is that the difficulty with childbirth is due to the weight of the baby, not the size of the baby's head. As far as medical science is concerned, this point is much more important than the question of whether the human female pelvis was the result of evolution, intelligent design, or a curse on women. But the more importaant point for us is the idea that the female pelvis has a flawed design.
In 1859 Charles Darwin wrote a book whose full title was ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES THROUGH NATURAL SELECTION OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. Darwin later added an historical sketch. In a footnote we learn that Aristotle had similar ideas thousands of years earlier--only for Aristotle it was the preservation of parts which were like as if they were made for something, rather than favvored races. According to Aristotle, our parts our parts do not work together be made to work together, but rather are the result of an accident. But when such parts turn out to be as if they were made for some purpose, they are preserved. When they are not so constituted, they perish and still perish. What I call Aristotle's Principle tells us that whenever we see something that has been preserved, then it must be as if it were made for something--or we might say, it must appear as if it were the result of intelligent design. This means any Anti-Creationist argument that something could not be intelligent design, then it is also an argument against evolution--since such designs should not have been preserved, but should have persihed.
So why hasn't evolution gotten rid of the bad design for the human female pelvis? Jared Diamond does give a quai-logical answer to this question. There hasn't been enough time. That would be a reasonable answer except for the fact that seven million years is really quite a long time. If you believe the human brain can evolve from an ape-like brain in seven million years, then evolution should not have any problem getting rid of a too small openning in the pelvis in much less time than that.
Jared Diamond saw something that looked like a bad design in the human female pelvis. But instead of seeing this as a problem for evolution, he saw it as an opportunity to attack creationism. Had he seriously asked why evolution did not get rid of the problem, he might have seen the human female pelvis for what it really is. The human female pelvis is an example of bad design only if you think childbirth is the sole purpose for which it is used. The major function for the pelvis is in everyday activities like walking, running, lifting, etc. Humans take pregnancy to an extreme with big infants who have particularly large heads. The female pelvis is a compromise. It is weaker than the male pelvis since there needs to be an openning for chidbirth, but the design is one where weakening of the female pelvis for everyday purposes is pretty much kept to a minimum. A better design for childbirth would be a worse design for everyday purposes--and a worse overall design. As an additional point, there is no reason to think that evolution is going to make things easier for women in the future. If anything we might expect natural childbirth to become more difficult in the future as modern medicine helps women survive who might have died from childbirth in the past.
The reference to God being a squid comes from the following paragraph:
Of all our features, none is more often cited by creationists in their attempts to refute natural selection than the human eye. In their opinion , so complex and perfect an organ could only have been created by design. Yet while it's true our eyes serve us well, we would see even better if they weren't flawed by some bad design. Like other cells in our bodies, the retina's photoreceptor cells are linked to a network of blood vessels and nerves. However, the vessels and nerves aren't located behind the photoreceptors, where any sensible engineer would have placed them, but out in front of them, where they screen some of the incoming light. A camera designer who committed such a blunder would be fired immediately. By contrast, the eyes of the lowly squid, with nerves artfully hidden behind the photoreceptors, are an example of perfect design. If the Creator had indeed lavished his best design on the creature he shaped in his own image, creationists would surely have to conclude that God is really a squid. In fact, our imperfect eyes, only become understandable when we consider the possibility that they evolved from much more primitive ancestral structure.
Here we see a situation where the Principle of Aristotle could be applied, but in a slightly modified form. A squid has photorecptor cells with the photoreceptor end facting the light. In our eyes the photoreceptor end of the cell faces away from the light. Even if the squid eye were vastly superior, there is no way a human eye could evolve into a squid-like eye through small changes favored by natural selection. Esentially, both humans and squid have the basic design of their eyes locked in place. But in a much more primitive ancestral structure the situation would be different. Presumeably in such a structure, the photoreceptors end would face the light. A mutation could make them face away from the light, as in the human eye, but any such mutations should be eliminated by natural selection. If the human eye has a design that significantly interferes with performance today--would it not have been even worse in an ancestral form before adaptions had had a chance to take place which could minimize the difficulty? So how could an eye with the photorecptor end facing away from the light ever evolve in the first place? Certainly this would be an issue that deserves some careful consideration.
Jared Diamond makes an analogy to a camera with structures that block some of the incoming light. Such cameras actually do exist--they are called reflecting telescopes, and for more than 100 years every major telescope in the world has been a reflector. Blocking incoming light is a disadvantage of the design, but there are advantages that more than balance the disadvantages in many situtaions.
The design for the human eye is not just found in humans, but in all vertebrates. Vertebrates are one of the most successful groups of animals on the planet. It is hard to believe that a badly designed eye would be found in aa group of animals that includes almost every large animal on the planet, while the superior desing is found in the far more limited group of cephalopods(basically squid and octopus).
Structures that block incoming light sounds very bad, but at a cellular level most structures are almost transparent, so the problem is a lot less serious than it appears. But it would be nice to avoid such problems. It would also be nice to avoid having a blind spot. These are two disadvantages of the vertebrate eye. But there are also two advantages. By placing the photoreceptors very close to the outside of the eyeball, the effective size of the eyeball is greater than is they were placed in any other position. Probably of greater importance is the stability of the position of the photoreceptors. If the photoreceptors were placed in another position they might move relative to the eyeball, which could interfere with visual acuity.
Scientists are only human, and they can make mistakes. But what we see here is more than just one or two honest mistakes. What we see here is a consistent pattern involving either intentional misrepresentation by an anti-creationist scientist--or, at the very least, a willingness to accept anti-creationist arguments that merely seem plausible with little or no critical evaluation. It could be argued that this is no different than what many creationists do. If this were 1925 and supporters of evolution like Clarence Darrow were arguing for equal treatment in the public schools, this would be a reasonable point to make. I would argue with Clarence Darrow that supporters of evolution should be given the same access to the public schools as the supporters of creation are given--but I cannot see any justification for giving the supporters of evolution sole access to the public schools. It is clear from the Jared Diamond article that supporters of evolution cannot be relied upon to tell the whole truth in an unbiased fashion. Indeed, if jared Diamond is correct and Creation Sience is an oxymoron, so is evolutionary biology. In no legitimate science would we find a leading scientist dishing out the kind of garbage that we see in Jared Diamond's article. And it is not just Jared Diamond as I plan to demonstrate in later posts.
