Richard Dawkins on Design Detection as Good Science

In The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins calls design detection a "genuinely important question":

[I]t is possible to imagine validly using some version of the argument from design, or the argument from irreducible complexity. Future visitors from outer space, who mount archaeological digs of our planet, will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bat wings and ears. It is an interesting exercise to think about how they will make that distinction. They may face some tricky judgements in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design.

 …

Given that the illusion of design conjured by Darwinian natural selection is so breathtakingly powerful, how do we in practice, distinguish its products from deliberately designed artifacts? Jacques Monod began his Chance and Necessity in similar terms. Could there be genuinely persuasive examples of irreducible complexity in nature: complex organization made up of many parts, the loss of any one of which would be fatal to the whole? If so, might this suggest genuine design by a superior intelligence, say from an older and more highly evolved civilisation on another planet?

It is possible that an example of such a thing might eventually be discovered. pp. 549-550. 

After discussing Francis Crick's theory of Directed Panspermia (seeding life on earth from outer space), and saying it raises interesting questions, he noted:

Crick was talking about superhuman, not supernatural, design. The difference really matters. On Crick's world view, superhuman designers of bacteria, or of the means to seed Earth with them, would themselves have originally evolved by some local equivalent of Darwinian selection on their own planet. p. 552.

Dawkins gives no serious attempt to explain how we would determine the identity of the designer scientifically. He does not say what a scientist is to do if she detects design but cannot identify the designer. He does not give clear criteria for distinguishing designed from non-designed objects. But he is clear that the question is "important" and gives no indication or reason why it would not be scientific.

For a video of Dawkins saying much the same thing to Ben Stein, go here.

Richard Dawkins Is Still Wrong About the Tree of Life

Following up on my last post, I thought I would post a bit more about Richard Dawkins's wishful assertions about the perfect tree of life that does not exist.

Here is a fuller statement by Dawkins from the video referenced in the last post:

... compare the genes of any pair of animals you like—a pair of animals or a pair of plants—and then plot out the resemblances and they fall in a perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree. … Moreover the same thing works with every gene you do separately and even pseudogenes that don’t do anything but are vestigial relics of genes that once did something.

In a video exchange with Craig Venter and Dawkins on the same panel, Venter said this:

 The tree of life is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren't really holding up...So there is not a tree of life.

Dawkins took issue with that:

 I'm intrigued at Craig saying that the tree of life is a fiction. I mean...the DNA code of all creatures that have ever been looked at is all but identical.

"The tree of life is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren't really holding up...So there is not a tree of life." - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/venter_vs_dawkins_on_the_tree_044681.html#sthash.d1qr99YQ.dpuf

Venter just smiled and laughed in response.

"The tree of life is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren't really holding up...So there is not a tree of life." - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/venter_vs_dawkins_on_the_tree_044681.html#sthash.d1qr99YQ.dpuf

"The tree of life is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren't really holding up...So there is not a tree of life." - See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/venter_vs_dawkins_on_the_tree_044681.html#sthash.d1qr99YQ.dpuf

And Larry Moran confirmed that Venter was right and Dawkins was wrong:

Everything that Ventor [sic] says is correct. He didn't need to quibble about the universality of the genetic code but it's true that there are variants.

His point about the tree of life is correct, especially in a discussion about the origin of life. It's unfortunate that Richard Dawkins repeatedly makes such an issue about the tree of life because he's on shakey [sic] ground when he does that. I assume that Dawkins hasn't studied the problem. However, he's in good company since most scientists don't understand the problems with the early tree of life.

Richard Dawkins Gets the Science Wrong . . . Again

Richard Dawkins continues to claim that the evidence shows a perfect tree of life-- a “perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree.”  But this is clearly not the case, as the post at that link shows, as well as this article from the New Scientist.  Why does he continue to assert this?  Can he really be that out of touch with current science?  Or does he just actively avoid reading the studies that do not confirm his bias?  Or is he being dishonest?  I think he really believes it is true, or he would not argue that it is the best evidence for evolution.

Richard Lewontin's "Billions and Billions of Demons"

I am happy to report that Richard Lewontin's review "Billions and Billions of Demons" is now available in full here. I have quoted from this review in several posts in the past:

One post contains the "divine foot in the door" quote that is in what I call "The Darwinian Fundamentalist Manifesto."

Another post discusses some great passages knocking Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the science establishment: "Sagan's suggestion that only demonologists engage in 'special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble,' is certainly not one that accords with my reading of the scientific literature."

Another post discusses Lewontin's acknowledgement that the first "wedge strategy" concerning teaching evolution was formulated on the other side of the culture wars: "The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children."

Another post discusses how Lewontin fits into a spectrum of worldviews and approaches to the scientific data.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

Darwinian Theory and Nihilistic Teenagers

There is an interesting article by Dennis Sewell, the author of a new book, The Political Gene: How Darwin's Ideas Changed Politics, in the Times Online. Some excerpts:

The Darwin double anniversary (2009 marks both the bicentenary of his birth and 150 years since the first publication of On the Origin of Species) has featured much vanilla hoopla: the Royal Mail issued commemorative stamps; Damien Hirst designed the dust jacket for a special edition of Darwin’s masterpiece; Bristol Zoo offered free admission to men with beards, and the Natural History Museum served pea soup made to a recipe devised by Darwin’s wife, Emma. The conclusion of dozens of lectures, articles and education packs for schools has been that Darwin wasn’t just a brilliant scientist, but a thoroughly good egg.

With hardly a mention that his name has been associated with some of the most infamous crimes of modern history, it is as if there has been an unspoken agreement to accentuate the positive. Certainly, the milquetoast Darwin played by Paul Bettany in the recent film Creation provided little hint that there might be a dark side to the great man’s bequest to posterity.

. . .

In April, 1,000 people gathered at sunset in Littleton, Colorado, to commemorate the victims of the Columbine high school massacre, 10 years on. Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was the first of the 13 children to be murdered, and whose son Craig narrowly escaped being shot, cannot understand why so little attention has been paid to the motivation of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their interest in Charles Darwin’s ideas. “Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

Darwinian theory helps us to understand the actions of Harris and Klebold in another way, as explained by Richard Dawkins:

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

In response to that, I observed:

Dawkins says we should not blame people, but "we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing." But given his contention that our mental constructs of good and evil are just useful fictions, what is the basis for identifying the units (persons) that are working from those that need "fixing or replacing"? Aren't they all working just as they "should" according to his "scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system," and his purely materialistic view of the origin of all life?

Finally, according to how Dawkins sees things, is not Cho Seung-Hui's evaluation of the moral significance of his own behavior closer to "that level of enlightenment" of which Dawkins speaks?

Every time I comment on such effects of Darwinism, I feel that I have to anticipate a misunderstanding. Please note: the ramifications of Darwinism do not undermine the truth of the theory. But they should inform our public policy, including how zealously we preach it to high school kids and whether we ban the evidence that does undermine the theory.

HT: Uncommon Descent

Transcript of the Interview of Richard Dawkins By Ben Stein in the Film Expelled

This is a partial text of the interview of Richard Dawkins by Ben Stein in the film Expelled. This is the key section in which Richard Dawkins acknowledges that it is possible to find evidence of design in biology, and that it could have been seeded here by a "higher intelligence" from elsewhere in the universe.

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BEN STEIN: How did it get created?

DAWKINS: By a very slow process.

BEN STEIN: Well, how did it start?

DAWKINS: Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.

BEN STEIN: And what was that?

DAWKINS: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.

BEN STEIN: Right, and how did that happen?

DAWKINS: I told you, we don’t know.

. . .

BEN STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution.

DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

. . .

And that Designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.


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The interview can be found on YouTube here.

Ridicule, Hatred and Contempt

From a great article on NPR.org on the rift among atheists:

[Christopher] Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the book God Is Not Great, told a capacity crowd at the University of Toronto, "I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right." His words were greeted with hoots of approval.

Religion is "sinister, dangerous and ridiculous," Hitchens tells NPR, because it can prompt people to fly airplanes into buildings, and it promotes ignorance. Hitchens sees no reason to sugarcoat his position.

"If I said to a Protestant or Quaker or Muslim, 'Hey, at least I respect your belief,' I would be telling a lie," Hitchens says.

Stalin and many other world leaders agreed with Hitchens and acted on it. We all know the results of that.

Hichens is a truly a wonderful example of a combination atheist and Darwinian fundamentalist. When you don't have facts and logic, I guess you have to rely on ridicule and contempt. Richard Dawkins does quite frequently.

Nick Matzke's Bad Logic

Tom Gilson has some interesting posts on the difference between Creationism and Intelligent Design. Here, here, and here. In one, he wonders: Maybe they really can't tell the difference, and suggests "worldview blindness" as a cause.

Nick Matzke, as shown in his comments, still refuses to see distinctions, but only the overlap. He is a passionate "lumper," as I discussed here. A refusal to see meaningful distinctions leads to bad logic, and Tom has pointed out Nick's pretty well. Whether you call it the "genetic fallacy" or something else, I find the logic pathetic.

I see so much bad logic in the scientific community, and I find it quite sad, actually. I suggested remedial education for Richard Dawkins. In many cases, it stems from a failure to define one's terms and engage in discussion with agreed upon terms and definitions. I honestly think scientists need more training in logic during their education.

This discussion raises the question again: At what point does stereotyping become bigotry?

Randy Olson on Richard Dawkins: "An Anti-Religious Form of Tourette's Syndrome

A rather humorous review of Richard Dawkin's new book, The Greatest Show on Earth is by Randy Olson, the director of Flock of Dodos. A portion:

Implying that your audience is stupid does not qualify as a great new angle. Yet this is precisely what Dawkins does. He opens the book by mentioning his two previous books about evolution, and then, with a nearly audible scoff, adds that back when he wrote those books (when people, apparently, were smarter?) he didn't have to argue that evolution actually happened. "That didn't seem to be necessary," he says.

By the first chapter he is comparing his predicament to a history professor forced to teach "a baying pack of ignoramuses" and dealing with a "rearguard defence". Today, he proclaims, "all but the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution".

It's really kind of comical. If "spot the condescensions" is a new drinking game, then bottoms up! There's one in just about every chapter. Though Dawkins says from the outset, "This is not an anti-religious book", he can't help but knock religion throughout, For instance, he writes: "God, to repeat this point, which ought to be obvious, but isn't, never made a tiny wing in his eternal life." Young Earth creationists are, he writes, "deluded to the point of perversity". You get the sense that Dawkins just can't control it. It's as if he suffers from an anti-religious form of Tourette's syndrome.