The anti-evolutionist case: Fred Reed, “scurrilous” indeed

The student mentioned in yesterday’s post sent me four of the anti-evolution articles that she was impressed with. No offence to her—students are there to learn and learning to spot unreliable sources is particularly tricky—but they are far worse than I was expecting. Here are the two emails (with minor changes for readability) that I sent back this morning.

I’m posting them here for two reasons. In case any else needs alerting to the atrocious incompetence of Fred Reed’s writings (read my other posts to see that I don’t go in for exaggeration). And as an illustration of how to avoid being duped by a Kruger-Dullard, someone who mistakenly believes themself expert enough in an area to offer “scurrilous commentary” on the “foolishness” of others (to quote Reed).

It’s common sense. Before you trust someone in foreign terrain, you test them on ground you both know. When it’s my mother’s medical musings, where I have minuscule factual knowledge, I go for the statistical/experimental jugular: if a “trial” can’t possibly show what the authors think it proves, then they can’t tell bad science from good. They’re Kruger-Dullards.

In the case of biological (rather than cognitive) evolution, I’m competent only in the shallows: when the argument dives deep, the details drown me. Fortunately, Fred warms up with a potted history of science and some comments on what scientists think they’re doing. This is bread and butter stuff. And he gets diametrically wrong, attributing to scientists in general, and Newton in particular, the very opposite of what they say, believe, and do. A Kruger-Dunning delusive if ever there was one.

I started off with a general piece about two world views (ah, rival world views, like my first book) and, after a quick skim, this was my response (“smooth-tongued” picks up on a comment of the student’s about Reed’s writing style):

Hi ******,
Thanks for forwarding. I’ve skimmed one and I’ll take a look at the other three, but so far I’m not impressed. The writer understands some basic principles of science, but also makes several errors that are typical of highschool-level understanding: mechanism died with Newton, determinism died with Poincaré (replaced with chaotic determinism, or deterministic chaos), the digression into ethics and evolution misrepresents what evolutionary theory actually posits and covers and wholly ignores the contributions of cognitive science, where, incidentally, Chomsky has addressed the “problem of consciousness” and the significance of volition, which Fred presents as arch-problems that science has ignored. Not a promising beginning.
What’s really weird though is his premise that, if we divide the world into those who think we can know it all and those at peace with the inevitability of ignorance, then scientists fall in the know-it-all camp. The claim is quite bewildering. Knowing/asking/understanding are all biological processes. They are therefore limited just as every other biological process is. Just as there are speeds we can’t run at, and sounds we can’t hear, and wavelengths we can’t see, so there are questions we can’t conceive of and answers we can’t give. And even if that weren’t true, we’d never have enough time to answer all our questions. So ignorance is inevitable and anyone who gives the matter a moment’s thought knows as much. Enlightenment scientists were aware of this, reviving a tradition that goes back to Aristotle at least (suppressed under religious influence in the interim).
If somebody, especially a smooth-tongued somebody, tells me that they’re going to tell me the problem with science and then makes so rudimentary an error as to claim that scientists believe all questions to be answerable, then I conclude that they are either ignorant or dishonest. Either way, I’m disinclined to trust anything else they say. After all, if they get the basics wrong, they’re only going to get more confused when it comes to the details.
Let me know if you disagree. More as and when. Regards, Daniel

I’d intended to stop there, but there’s nothing like bollocks for breakfast and a quick click brought me to a critique of judicial rulings on intelligent design in science classes. My response:

OMG, this is appalling!

Next came Newton. There were others before him, but he, though he was himself a Christian, was the towering figure in the rise of mechanism, the view that all things occur ineluctably through mindless antecedent causes. He said (remember, I’m simplifying exuberantly) that the physical world is like a pool table: If you know the starting positions and velocities of the balls, you can calculate all future positions and velocities. No sprites, banshees, or Fates, no volition or consciousness.

This is the exact opposite of what Newton said. Descartes was the billiard ball physicist. Newton was accused precisely of reintroducing “occult forces” on a par with sprites.
OK, this guy is way too ignorant to be worth reading. I’m stopping here.
Regards, Daniel

The misunderstanding was so preposterous, there was no point going on. I regret to say, Fred Reed isn’t “simplifying exuberantly”. He’s an exuberant simpleton. And on science (at least), he writes pure rubbish.

(Hmm, this post is more ad hominem than I’d like. Sorry Fred.)

Language, Flat Earth, and Goldilocks: Three riffs on evolution

A blonde girl with big lips surprised me after my talk in Toronto yesterday. Double surprised me, in fact. I thought she’d been asleep but I guess she’d been listening with her eyes shut. I had just argued that language, analysed à la Chomsky, reveals the stages by which our minds evolved. Minds don’t leave fossils. So, the common wisdom says, we can only get at cognitive evolution indirectly, by examining artefacts, like cave paintings and tools. Finding that the capacity for language is itself a fossil bed of mental evolution turns the conventional wisdom on its head. But Eyes Shut had been reading articles by a journalist—not religious or christian, she hastened to add—who had found lots of problems with evolution and she found his case convincing. Her question: so what did I think about that?

The classic Kruger-Dunning conundrum! To know whether you can trust the journalist and his assessment of evolution, you need to judge his level of expertise. But to judge expertise, you need expertise. Which makes the journalist useless: if you’re expert, you don’t need to rely him; and if you aren’t, you can’t. But people engage in because charades. They don’t believe things because they’re true, but because they sound like what they want to hear. So, they assume that unreliable sources are reliable and, worse still, assume that they have gained expertise by reading them.

Eyes Shut seemed more open than this, but I know from experience how difficult Kruger-Dunning delusions are to dislodge. My mother is always Kruger-Dunning me. She insists on having unearthed all manner of esoteric truths in health and healing by reading about herbs, and electro-medicine, and magnesium, and potato skin soup fasts, and coconuts, and …. But without expertise, you have no way of knowing whether what you’re reading—electro-medicine, evolution, etc.—gives correct answers, or competent answers, or complete answers, let alone whether it asks the right questions to begin with. Anyone can make a case sound convincing by ignoring everything that’s inconvenient and, if you’re not expert, you don’t know what they’re hiding from you, or from themselves.

So far as evolution and language go, though, I can answer with some expertise. And the power of Darwin’s idea seems to me little short of miraculous.

For instance, I recently finished a paper that argues against the “geometric hypothesis”. In brief, think of the brain like a computer. Language is one of the tasks it can perform (like playing dvds, or word processing). My job is to discover the program that the brain runs which makes it fit for language. Hence, what are building blocks of the program and how are they put together? The geometric hypothesis says that some combinations of building blocks are ruled out, even though the computational system would have no trouble with them. The opposite view, which I believe in, is that there are no such restrictions: the brain welcomes all inputs. It’s like kosher versus treif: some combinations of food are fine for the digestive system (meat and milk, meat and fish, …), but you’ll never find them on a Lubavitcher buffet.

There are two ways to disprove the geometric hypothesis.

In one, you go off and describe hundreds of languages (in this case, we’re interested in pronouns, verbs, and words like this/that, here/there, hither/thither). You then pool all the data to see which types of languages the brain is capable of producing. Then you simmer away for years to boil the data down to a set building blocks all combinations of which are used by some language or other—hoping that the whole thing doesn’t blow up in your face like an ill-set pressure cooker.

Given the hundreds of languages you need to document, the hundreds of hours that go into describing each one, the hundreds of hours that go into conducting initial, then larger, then yet larger cullings of the data, and the hundreds of hours that go into devising and evaluating successive proposals, a reasonable estimate is that it has taken this approach some 100,000 “thought hours” to show that we’re not at a Lubavitcher buffet: the geometric hypothesis is wrong.

Here’s the Darwinian alternative. You consider whether geometries are evolutionarily necessary (they aren’t), whether they’re evolutionarily stable (they aren’t), and whether they offer informational, hence adaptive, advantages (they don’t). In fact, if we ever had geometries, evolution would expect us lose them. So, if it’s a sunny day and you have some good coffee, you can probably get all this thinking done under 10 hours.

Darwin didn’t have that much to say about language. Indeed, we can apply his ideas to the geometric hypothesis only because several scientific and mathematic revolutions separate us from him. For his ideas, in such radically foreign intellectual terrain, to deliver in 10 hours what nose and grindstone only churn out after 100,000 strikes me as close to miraculous.

* * *
“Thought hours” is a useful way of guaging the robustness of an idea and the concept came up again in my conversation with Eyes Shut, in a moment of superb irony. As said, it’s up to experts to assess critiques of evolution. However, if the problems are so obvious that an enthusiastic amateur can unearth them, then you’d think that theory would have been debunked long ago. There is, after all, no “scientific establishment” that protects bad ideas. There is only a scientific disestablishment, that finds the false and roots out the wrong. The bigger the ideas are, the more credit you get for making them fall.

However, Eyes Shut observed, it had taken centuries for people to stop believing that the earth is flat. “Evolution, your days are numbered” was the subtext, I guess. The comparison, though inapt, is fascinating.

Evolution and flat-earthism may be of great age, but, in its time, evolution has withstood hundreds of thousands of hours of criticism, modification and reform. Flat-earthism dies once you watch a ship vanish over the horizon: hull first, mast last. Age in thought hours, not years, is what matters.

What keeps me smiling as I type (and reread) this is the latest twist in the evolution of anti-evolutionism. Flat-earthers are the archetypal rejectors of progress, the possessors of undislodgeable delusion. Evolution, by contrast, is an idea so revolutionary that, long after it became the mainstay of the natural, social, and cognitive sciences, the religious still struggle to accept it. Yet at least one anti-evolutionist wants to equate evolution with the flat-earthism, the symbol of (religious) recalcitrance.

* * *
Before Toronto, I was at a mine in northern Quebec. The highlight was watching professional geologists in action. Scrutinizing tray after tray of dreary rocks, consulting the chemical analysis, plotting and comparing the drill sites, then having an animated discussion about how long this now upturned, underground volcano had been active and underwater, how long it had remained hot after it ceased erupting, why millions of years later it had withstood the pressures that had distorted the neighbouring geology.

Here’s how the discussion did not run:

“Let’s pretend that god created this bit of the earth so that it looks like there was a volcano here.”
“Yes, and let’s pretend that he put a basalt cap at this end so that we would think that the convection currents would have remained active longer.”
“Good idea, and let’s also pretend that this a magma chamber and that this is swarm of barren dykes.”
“Great because if we pretend that god did all of that, then we’ll know where to look for which metals.”
“Yes, but let’s just hope though that god made this pretend volcano like all those other ones.”
“True, you can’t be too careful. You know how god loves dykes. He might have just put them there to test us.”

Geology makes a nonsense of the bible. But so does physics. So do linguistics, genetics, and cosmology. And yet only evolution seems to hold a special place in the hostilities of the godly, as a shibboleth of the faithful.

I think it’s because evolution is the goldilocks science. Linguists are too abstract for anyone to care to question them. And geologists and physicists are too concrete for anyone to dare to question them (the bible belt likes its oil and mining companies and the GPS that guide them). But evolution is about us. It hits home. Plus you can deny it without personal cost. Deny physics, and your GPS navigator becomes black magic (“Begone Satan, I shall perform no U-turn in 100 yards”). Evolution is—as the faith-fooled bleat—“just a theory”.

And yet, as genetics advances, it builds a bridge between evolution and technology (think of the bible belt’s love of GM soya). The debunkability of evolution is declining market.

Besides, it’s only a matter of time before the religious discover a special fondness for evolution. As cognitive science finds the fossils that reveal why the mind creates gods, and why groups of minds create religions, the godly will suddenly proclaim that evolution provides the ultimate proof of god’s existence: he has programmed us to believe in him! Well, we’ll deal with irony when we come to it. First, let’s deal with his charade of making gold mines look like superannuated subaquatic volcanoes…

The Church of Anti-Evolution and the imminent rise of religious pro-evolutionists

In the rough-and-tumble rigour of right-thinking, free-thinking modernity, ancient man-made religions struggle to evolve a niche for their arthritic man-made deities. Change is tough when you keep a facade of eternal immutability.

Faced with the challenge, many have embraced anti-evolutionism with gay abandon. But what is this queer fascination in the anti-evolutionist camp? After all, many christians came out as prodarwinians when Darwin first published.

Perhaps something in their upbringing forces anti-evolutionists to fixate unnaturally on their own kind and makes them devalue or despise normal, heterogeneous relationships. But with anti-evolution quickly evolving into the shibboleth of the faithful, what the god-free and sensible need to get straight is: What is this Church of Anti-Evolution and when will it crumble?

Three aspects of anti-evolutionism are intriguing: its arbitrariness, its irrelevance, and its misdirectedness. The last of these is the most fascinating, as it entails that we will soon witness the birth that of a religious movement that is as diametrically opposed to anti-evolutionism as anti-evolutionism now is to evolution. Let’s examine the three aspects in turn.

First, the bible is overbrimming with defunct myths. Consider physics, geology, or even linguistics:

• Microwave background radiation—and the rest of the slew of modern astronomy—shrinks the tumescent sprawl of a grasping god. Yet few activists clammer for physics not to be taught in schools, as they do for evolution.
• Geologists’ rubble is far mightier than the hammer Abraham wielded against his in-law’s idols. Yet we rely inextricably on extraction of oil and minerals from within the earth and these are industrial applications of geological science are especially beloved of the Bible Belt.
• Linguistic reconstruction traces a non-biblical, non-babelical path for the origin of languages and shows, of course, that Hebrew is the child, not the parent, language. Babel thwarts god much more soundly than god thwarts Babel.

Evolution is, scientifically, a completely arbitrary hang up.

Second, DNA is what the faith-ridden should live in fear of. If all humanity descends from Noah, this should be clear in our DNA. Genes should reconstruct to a Middle-Eastern ancestor. But DNA points to Africa. Genetic diversity should be greatest in the Middle East and should peter out as we retreat from Ararat. But Africa greatly outstrips the Middle East in DNA diversity. And the few “post-flood” generations could not have given rise to the range of human genetic variation that is attested. The media would have been all over any hint of a genetic timeline close to the biblical one.

The godly can’t play the “just a theory” ploy for DNA as they do for evolution. “Sure, we use DNA technology to convict criminals, to exonerate the innocent, to screen for disease, to develop cures, to feed the world, to save lives, but it’s just a theory.” Just a theory, but one they adhere to religiously.

How about the compatibility ploy? For instance, Rabbi Shmuley huffs huffs that “the Biblical account of creation easily accommodates an evolutionary ascent” because “G-d created first the mineral, then the vegetable, then the animal, and finally human life forms” (previous post). (G-d, y-u’re such a j-ker, making it like laws of nature did all the work!) What’s the equivalent compatibility ploy for DNA? That god monkeyed with the genes of Noah’s offspring to locate human origins in Africa? (Such a j-ker, Mr G-d, such a big sh-t!) How hole-y can the holy writ get?

And this leads to aspect number three. It’s only a matter of time before the religious hit on the perfect solution to this conundrum: their old foe, evolution. If you need to account for post-flood genetic spread, then suped up selection is the perfect tool. We can all look forward to the spectacle of the faithful vehemently urging that natural selection does far more, not far less, than scientists said it does: it accounts for the genetic range across humanity in just a few post-deluvial generations. There’ll soon be “scientific” grounds for believing in a biblical origin of Africa’s genetic wealth (maybe that’s what became of the lost tribe…). And alongside the institutes for ‘creation “science”’ and “‘intelligent” design’, we’ll soon see ‘post-flood “evolutionary genetics”’.

How do you present a 180-degree turn as the immutable word of god? Well, evolution is full of surprises.

Church of Evolution: preview of a book unfinished, unpublished, and unread

Rabbi Shmuley (who, it transpires, is not an invention of 30Rock) has been kind enough to add me to his mailing list, and without me having to pray to Santa. The two of us have little in common but his bearded mutterings make for a lovely guffaw at breakfast. So, I stay subscribed.

His latest comes when I’m on holiday and have time to ponder profundities. The author of the forthcoming Church of Evolution (Santa, can you hear me?) asks: Does questioning evolution make you anti-science?

What quality of publication is so titillatingly titled a tract likely to be? Too impatient to wait for release, I’m going to hazard a guess based on the powers of logic manifest in Shmuley’s Huffington. Alas, Shmuley’s gordian beard is something even Ockham’s razor will strain to tame.

Look how many errors he can cram into a single sentence! “No scientist has ever witnessed evolution directly and science itself says that this is impossible given the vast amount of time needed for species to evolve.” One sentence, four errors. That’s more than an error every seven words.

1. Loads of scientists have seen evolution. And they are dwarfed by the number of non-scientists who have seen it, all too close and personal. As rodents, insects, bacteria, and viruses acquire resistance to our means to combat them, we are watching, and suffering, evolution in action.
2. Science, then, obviously does not say that seeing evolution is impossible.
3. What science actually says is that speciation takes more time than any one observer can give it (not the same as saying that you can’t catch evolution in the act).
4. And what’s with this demand for observables? Observables are fine, but deducibles are what science is about. Deducibles and explanations. If we are only to believe in observables, then we should all denounce the millennium. (All of that “year two thousand” nonsense that the Christians were going on about was clearly a big hoax. After all, no one has ever lived to see a millennium. Not even Methuselah…)

This doesn’t bode well for Shmuley’s Church. But maybe such errors are collateral damage in his higher purpose. So, why is he airing these and other errors in public?

Rabbi Shmuley is rallying to the defence of Republican presidential hopeful, Rick Perry, who recently cited gaps in current understanding of evolution as grounds for general scepticism, and Paul Krugman went all Nobel-laureate on him in the New York Times. Shmuley is the man for the task because has been “reading extensively on evolution” since the 1990’s, and has organised, moderated, and participated in debates against such venerable evolution-populists as Richard Dawkins.

Watching how Shmuley moves from gaps in theories to chasms in reasoning tells us much about the likely quality of Church of Evolution.

His basic case is that he and others have unmasked the truth that Dawkins and similar refuse to admit: “evolutionists have a tough time defending the theory when challenged in open dialogue”. (He doesn’t consider that debating an opponent who can cram four errors into a single sentence is like fighting off a locust swarm with a fly swat.) The fact Shmuley thinks this is worth saying, and that he goes on about it at length, reveals how unqualified he is to write about evolution.

An extensive reader on evolution cannot fail to observe that there are people currently publishing scientific articles about evolution. This is a deep and profound observation, so I’d better not let it pass by unbelaboured. Today, at this very moment, now in fact, there are scientists, yes real live scientists, who do science professionally, and these scientists are publishing research into evolution in a myriad of journals (or maybe it’s a panoply), and these very journals are dedicated to publishing nothing but the research of such scientists. What could this profound and inscrutable revelation possibly mean?

One explanation is that scientists know everything possible about evolution. Every single thing there is to know, they know it. They discovered it ages ago and they have no unanswered questions left. Not a single, niggling one. And so to fill the void in their lives, they publish the same unoriginal, non-finding over and over again, in different journals, whilst failing to see the gaps that Shmuley-Perry’s perceive.

No, that’s not it. The extensive reader on evolution must surely have figured out that the reason there are still scientists answering questions about evolution is because they themselves are still asking them. And why do people ask questions? They do so to make a rhetorical point. Or else to identify and fill a gap in their knowledge.

So, if you want to prove that there are gaps in evolutionary theory, you don’t need to extensive reading starting in the 1990’s. You don’t need to organize, moderate, participate in, or even attend debates about evolution. All you need to do is check to see whether there are scientists working on the theory of evolution and you know it’s not a done deal.

This is so blindingly obvious that one has to wonder why the author of Church of Evolution bothers to comment on it.

The reason is that gaps have special significance to the religious. They are fundamental currency for the godly. God, you see, is basically play-doh. Sure, they come in prepackaged parcels, but God and play-doh can be squeezed into any shape you want. And, in particular, as my pre-school niece will gladly demonstrate, there isn’t a gap you can’t squeeze play-doh into. So, show the godly a conclusion they don’t like and they grasp for gaps, just as the thirsty, given a tetrapak, grasp at straws.

But if the gaps really were god-shaped—that is, if the gaps really did undermine the scientific quest for understanding—then surely scientists would have figured this out by now and gone off and done something else. After all, some of them have phd’s and are bright enough to publish in journals. And scientists are really good at killing off ideas that don’t work (remember ether? how about phlogiston?).

So, the godly grasp at gaps in theories because they hope to squeeze god into them. But the easiest way to check for gaps—by asking whether there are scientists at work—is also the surest way to tell you that aren’t any god-shaped gaps going.

You don’t need to be “reading extensively on evolution” to reach this conclusion. Think about it. Does Road construction ahead mean ‘Road with flaws’ or ‘Road inconstructible’? Does it mean ‘No road can ever be built here’ or ‘Experts say a road can and should be built here’? Going on about gaps in theories is a sign that one’s extensive reading is outsized by the extensive gap in one’s understanding.

The moment towards the end of his Huffington where Rabbi Shmuley reveals that god-shaped gaps are what he’s really after, also reveals a second reason as to why he is ill-suited to assess the state of science. He writes that “the Biblical account of creation easily accommodates an evolutionary ascent, seeing as … G-d created first the mineral, then the vegetable, then the animal, and finally human life forms. The only question is whether or not this was guided.”

Where scientists seek explanations, all Shmuley offers is compatibility. His alternative—to graffiti “cos God said so” on every scientific paper that comes his way—explains nothing. Science moves forward when people find places where rival accounts become incompatible and then test them. Incompatibility is key to explanation. So Shmuley’s grand idea is useless. Anything compatible with everything explains nothing.

So, what does this bode for Shmuley’s future Church? If its author can squeeze four errors into a single sentence, rebuttal point-by-point will be pointless (remember the locusts). So we must ask instead: does Rabbi Shmuley have the logical wherewithal to assess the state of evolutionary science in the first place? Well, for one thing, he doesn’t realize that ‘Scientists at work’ is one of the best guarantees we can have for the validity of major ideas—just as ‘Road construction ahead’ means ‘Experts see this as the best way forward’. There is no road from gappy to holy. Moreover, after all his “extensive reading”, he still doesn’t know what evolutionary theory is for. We want explanations, and explanations arise from incompatibilities. Shmuley’s approach is compatible not only with the truth, but with every delusion imaginable.

The gap-happy Church of Evolution will doubtless enlighten us as to the evolving nature of anti-evolutionism and the forces that animate it. But pray for the trees that are felled to print it, for they will be pulp not once, but twice.