.
Remarkably, evolutionists often use theological statements to oppose intelligent design. In Time magazine, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker writes: “Our own bodies are riddled with quirks that no competent engineer would have planned but that disclose a history of trial-and-error tinkering: a retina installed backward, a seminal duct that hooks over the ureter like a garden hose snagged on a tree…”
The designer was incompetent, in other words. No self-respecting deity would use such improvisations. Stephen Jay Gould often made the same argument. In his lengthy diatribe in the New Republic, “Unintelligent Design,” Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago relied heavily on presumptous claims about what an intelligent designer would or would not do.
This is theological criticism masquerading as scientific know-how. The fossil record itself discloses no such “history” of trial and error. That was all in Professor Pinker’s imagination. Eyes work perfectly well as they are. Engineers tinkering with cameras haven’t been able to produce anything remotely comparable or compact. Microbiologists haven’t come up with anything at all. By Darwin’s own criteria, our bodies, including the seminal duct, are well-designed. If they were not, we wouldn’t be here to comment on them.
First produce a better-designed body in your Harvard lab, Dr. Pinker. We’ll see what you and your colleagues come up with, then we’ll pay attention to your criticisms.
Time, August 15, 2005;
New Republic, August 22 & 29, 2005
—————————————————————————————————-
Darwin’s book had been in print for several decades before biologists began to see just how insubstantial his mechanism was. “For it may appear little more than a truism,” wrote eminent Columbia University geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, “to state that the individuals that are the best adapted to survive have a better chance of surviving than those not so well adapted to survive” [13]. Morgan won the Nobel Prize for his work on the chromosomes of fruit flies.
That problem has never gone away. Logically, no criterion of fitness can be identified that is independent of survival itself. In the end, Darwin’s theory of natural selection boils down to the bare claim that some organisms leave more offspring than others…
Consider the prodigious variety of the millions of sexually reproducing animal and plant species on earth, with their complex adaptations, modes of existence, life cycles, instincts, and means of providing for their young. We learn in school that the great naturalist Charles Darwin discovered the mechanism whereby this great profusion and complexity evolved. Darwin’s idea was “the single best idea anybody ever had,” said Daniel Dennett, reveling in his hyperbole.
But when that mechanism is more closely analyzed, we find that it amounts to the bare claim that some organisms leave more offspring than others. It surely does leave something to be desired.
The weakness of the Darwinian theory was also recognized by Sir Karl Popper, the preeminent philosopher of science in the twentieth century. The theory is “not testable,” but “metaphysical,” he wrote:
“To say that a species now living is adapted to its environment is, in fact, almost tautological… Adaptation or fitness is defined by modern evolutionists as survival alone, and can be measured by actual success in survival: there is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this” [15].
Any outcome in nature can be regarded as a “confirmation” of Darwin’s theory — even the extinction of species. It is sometimes reckoned that 99 percent of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. In that light, Darwinian evolution can be seen as the meager claim that species are well adapted — until they are not. When they fail to adapt, they are “unfit,” and cease to exist. So Darwin’s theory is once again confirmed. Feeble is the word.
[13] Thomas Hunt Morgan, Evolution and Genetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925), 120, 127.
[15] Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Routledge, 1992), 199.
—————————————————————————————————-
“Everybody has it in the back of his mind that the animals that leave the largest number of offspring are going to be those best adapted also for eating peculiar vegetation, or something of this sort, but this is not explicit in the theory… There you do come to what is in effect a vacuous statement. Natural selection is that some things leave more offspring than others; and, you ask, which leave more offspring than others? And it is those that leave more offspring, and there is nothing more to it than that. The whole real guts of evolution — which is how do you come to have horses and tigers and things — is outside the mathematical theory.”
C. H. Waddington
—————————————————————————————————-
Tufts University professor Daniel C. Dennett discussed the evolution of the eye recently in the New York Times. It is something that laymen have often found difficult to accept. After a brief discussion of the difficulties — “megabytes of information going into the visual cortex every second for years on end — Dennett swept them all aside: “But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work — all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled animals evolved more than a half billion years ago — we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while. We can’t yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.”
Mathematicial David Berlinski responded:
“It is perfectly plain that Dennett has given up reading the literature. There are eyes throughout the animal kingdom. It’s not at all obvious how any of them arose; and still less is it obvious that they arose by any known Darwinian mechanism. To explain the evolution of the eye by appealing to visual systems throughout the animal kingdom is a little like explaining the appearance of War and Peace by pointing out that Homer also wrote a war poem, and that Virgil also appealed to patriotic sentiments. True enough. But hardly to the point. There is no natural progression that we can trace throughout the paleontological record that begins with a light-sensitive spot and that ends with the eye. If for a moment one allows one’s Darwinian faith to lapse, then those so-called intermediates of which Dennett writes so optimistically do not look like intermediates at all. They look like variants against a central type. The Darwinian progression is, of course, entirely an inferential artifact.”
“This notion that there is somewhere a computer model of the evolutionary development of the eye is an urban myth. Such a model does not exist. There is no such model anywhere in any laboratory. No one has the faintest idea how to make one. The whole story was fabricated out of thin air by Richard Dawkins. The senior author of the study on which Dawkins based his claim — Dan E. Nilsson — has explicitly rejected the idea that his laboratory has ever produced a computer simulation of the eye’s development.”
Daniel Dennett, “Show Me the Science,” New York Times, August 28, 2005;
David Berlinski, e-mail to the author, August 31, 2005;
David Berlinski, “Has Darwin Met His Match,” Commentary, December, 2002, and letters, July 2003
—————————————————————————————————-
“By Chance, or By Design?”
Chapter 13, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science
