Evolution: The Arguments
The first thing to say about this debate is that is is not, as some would have
you believe, a straight fight between rationalists and theists; Darwinists and
creationists. Not everyone who disagrees with aspects of Darwinian natural
selection believes that God made the earth in seven days, and that Adam was the
first man, a mere few thousand years ago. Nevertheless, Darwinists continue to
describe any and all dissenters as creationists - making absolutely no
distinction between extreme religious fundamentalists and those who favour the
Intelligent Design argument. On evolutionist web sites such as Talk.Origins and
EvoWiki you will constantly see the use of pejorative terms such as
"pseudo-scientists". One big give-away can be seen on the EvoWiki website home
page. At the bottom of the page are lists of links. Under the heading
"Scientists" are the names of scientists who all happen to be proponents of the
Darwinian view. Scientists who don't entirely agree (such as Michael Behe or
William Dembski) are not listed as scientists at all, but as creationists. So
the not-so-subtle inference is that scientists who agree with evolution are
"real" scientists whereas scientists who don't are creationists. What seems to
be a given, however, is that the vast majority of scientists working in fields
directly related to the study of evolution have no doubt at all that it is a
proven fact. It is a safe bet that almost all of that majority are also atheists
and hard materialists (although there does seem to be a prevalent reluctance to
discuss the subject in philosophical terms).
Nevertheless, many in the non-scientific community who dislike Darwin's idea, do
so because it is a soulless, uncompromising, morally bereft theory that tells
us: "You are here by accident - pure random chance - and the only purpose for
your otherwise meaningless life is to procreate and ensure that the species
survives. The weak, the diseased and the non-conformists shall perish while the
strong, the attractive and the ruthless shall prevail." Many ordinary people
tell themselves that there must be more to the meaning of life than the cold,
bleak outlook of the Darwinists. We are told that there is no such thing as
beauty, that it is merely a consequence of pattern recognition abilities
developed by the brain for obvious survival reasons such as the requirement to
recognise a threat in the face of an adversary or the shape of a fruit as a food
source. The beautiful colours of a peacock and the eye-shaped patterns on its
tail are dual-purpose survival tools for attracting mates and frightening off
potential attackers. Music? Again, nothing more than auditory pattern
recognition (a bird needs to be able to recognise the call of another of its own
species). What about the higher emotions such as love? Simply the result of
chemical transmitters in the brain - developed to aid the all-important
reproductive process. Faith? Well, let's see what Dawkins has to say about that:
"
Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told
the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such
dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases
they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further
justification." Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene.
I have included on this site the whole text of a
lecture which is a critique of
that particular Dawkins book. It is not written by some religious creationist
and the author,
Ian Johnston, is at pains to point out the merits (in his
opinion) of the science described by Dawkins in the book. Indeed Johnston has
written other pieces in support of Darwinian evolution, including one entitled
"
The Illogic of a Creationist Argument". However with reference to the above
quote, he says:
"
Dawkins's goes on in this vein (speaking about religious faith) to endorse the
term memeoids for "victims that have been taken over by a meme to the extent
that their own survival becomes inconsequential." What sort of intellectual
clarity is served by this renaming of an old phenomenon, adequately covered by
the word zealot. And if Dawkins wants to offer a mature reflection of the
effects of zealotry on inhumanity, he might want to consider some of the ways in
which scientific or nationalistic or atheistic zealots have proven themselves
every bit as capable of inhuman destructiveness as all other types. That, of
course, might require him to abandon his desire to flog religion at every
opportunity. In saying this, of course, I am not defending a religious view of
life, merely objecting to a feature of Dawkins' writing which is unnecessarily
vituperative."
I would recommend a brief diversion from this page in order to read the whole
text of Johnston's lecture. Like Johnston, I am no defender of any religious
faith (indeed, I shall include my own criticisms of religion later in this
section and again, further into this web site) but I do think it is important to
show that bigotry is alive and kicking on both sides of the fence.
Back to the arguments, but first a side note: Throughout these pages I have
attempted to provide links to further (hopefully better) explanations of the
subject under discussion. Right now this is proving extremely difficult due to
the war-like nature of the evolution debate on the internet. Try as I might, I
see precious little unbiased commentary out there. I either get hard-line
Darwinist sites or equally prejudiced religious propaganda. Therefore, in the
paragraphs that follow, I am forced to attempt my own explanations of the some
of the issues. Please excuse me if I am occasionally a little wide of the mark.
As I see it, the evolutionists believe themselves to be in a war, defending
their position on three fronts. First front: statistical probability. Take the
old but popular argument that, given enough time, a thousand monkeys tapping
away at a thousand typewriters could and would produce a page of Shakespeare (or
is that a line? or the complete works? - it depends on which version you happen
across). On pure random chance alone, even the Darwinists agree that the laws of
probability confirm that the idea is sheer nonsense. But, they say, natural
selection is not about purely random chance. Stay with the thousand monkey
example but now introduce a way of
selecting the most promising combinations of
typed letters - only those that make linguistic sense - and discard forever all
combinations that do not make sense and the monkeys have a real (statistical)
shot at completing the task. Natural
Selection, they say, works that way,
favouring the useful (only those that have survival value) and eliminating the
useless. Thus, natural selection is a dumb algorithm and no inherent
intelligence is required to get us from the original chance molecular
combinations that produced amino acids, to the hugely diverse and complex
life-forms that cover the planet today.
Others disagree. Even mathematical experts disagree which is why I'm not going
to offer an opinion on the statistical argument in favour of natural selection
except to say that, intuitively, it feels wrong. If politicians can employ the
services of statisticians to "prove" anything they please, I'm sure that certain
biased scientists - or theologists - are not beyond that either.
The second front is commonly referred to as the "missing links" argument. This
one is particularly favoured by the religious creationists because, to them, the
thought of humans having descended from monkeys is anathema. The more academic
term is "transitional fossils" but what we are talking about here is the lack of
fossils of animals part-way through a transition from one kind to another (from
a reptile to a bird, for example). Evolutionists say that, although the fossil
record itself is far from complete and that most transitionals just haven't been
found yet, there are still enough examples to destroy the creationist argument.
In the reptile-to-bird example, the famous one is
Archaeopteryx - discovered
shortly after Darwin published his "Origin of Species" - which is held up to be
a classic example of a dinosaur to bird transition. The big issue here appears
to be that of categorisation, classification or taxonomy: in other words
transition from what to what? The anti-evolutionists argue that the transitional
fossils do not show the development of new "species". They maintain that species
appear without antecedents, fully formed. Needless to say, the scientific
orthodoxy dismiss that argument with characteristic disdain. For a somewhat less
vitriolic (though typically academic) discussion, I found this paper on the
taxonomic issues.
The third front is the whole Intelligent Design debate itself. As usual, the
Darwinists first line of defence is to claim that there is no debate; there is
only what is obviously right (their own position) and what is pure delusion
(anyone else). The second line is to attack the personalities of anyone claiming
to have found evidence of design. In debating terminology, this is called an ad
hominem attack and, to be fair, it is a device used by both sides although in my
own trawl through the websites I have found it to be far more prevalent in the
evolutionist pages.
This article from The Philosophers Magazine Online is a
brief discussion of exactly the point I'm making here. Finally, there is the
all-out attack on the case for ID by attempting to destroy the theories and
conclusions that make up that case.
So what is the case for Intelligent Design? For a brief overview, this link to
the William Dembski summary of the
Intelligent Design Movement is probably as close as it comes to getting it
from the "horses mouth". As mentioned earlier, the concept of "Irreducible
Complexity" is central to the ID argument. Michael Behe describes it thus:
"
A single system composed of several well-matched,
interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of
any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."
Behe's example from the non-organic world is a simple mousetrap: take away any
one of its parts and you are left with a useless article. Behe is a biochemist
and he maintains that there are examples of irreducible complexity in nature,
any one of which presents a challenge to Darwinian natural selection. One is
particular is the bacterial flagellum. However critics such as Kenneth Miller
maintain that there are organisms - flagella, for example - that do not have all
the necessary parts but are still performing a function. The response from Behe
and his supporters is to point out that it may be performing a function but not
the same function. As he is quoted in this article:
"
However, taking away the parts of the flagellum certainly
destroys the ability of the system to act as a rotary propulsion machine, as I
have argued."
In other words, take away the spring from the mousetrap and it may still perform
an adequate function as a doorstop, but not as a mousetrap.
Behe, Dembski and others have an almost impossible task: to use science to cast
doubt on a theory that almost everyone else working in this field already
accepts as an inviolable truth. When the bible-thumpers attempt to argue on
scientific grounds, they are easy meat for Darwinists. Time will tell whether
other scientists, those who are not entirely convinced about all or part of
standard evolutionary theory, have any more success.