ICYMI:
When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship
Darwin's Doubt The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer HarperOne (HarperCollins), New York, 2013.
The power of scientific reasoning derives from the complex interplay between the desire to know, the ability to reason, and the ability to evaluate ideas with data. As scientists, we have learned how to make ideas dance with reality, and we expect them to be transformed in the process. We typically add to what we already know, often showing along the way that old ideas are incomplete or, occasionally, wrong. And so we collectively build an understanding of the world that is accurate, reliable, and useful.
In Darwin's Doubt, Stephen Meyer (who runs the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture) also tries to build. He aims to construct the philosophical and scientific case for intelligent design. I am not a philosopher, so I will not attempt to evaluate his philosophical argument that in principle it might be possible to recognize the action of a designer in the history of life. But I am willing to evaluate his scientific case for the participation of such a designer. It centers on one of the most remarkable events in that history, the relatively rapid emergence of animal phyla in the Cambrian.
Meyer's scientific approach is negative. He argues that paleontologists are unable to explain the Cambrian explosion, thus opening the door to the possibility of a designer's intervention. This, despite his protest to the contrary, is a (sophisticated) “god of the gaps” approach, an approach that is problematic in part because future developments often provide solutions to once apparently difficult problems.
…
Meyer's book ends with a heart-warming story of his normally fearless son losing his orientation on the impressive scree slopes that cradle the Burgess Shale, the iconic symbol of the Cambrian explosion, and his need to look back to his father for security. I was puzzled: why the parable in a book ostensibly about philosophy and science? Then I realized that the book's subtext is to provide solace to those who feel their faith undermined by secular society and by science in particular.
If the reviews on Amazon.com are any indication, it is achieving that goal. But when it comes to explaining the Cambrian explosion, Darwin's Doubt is compromised by Meyer's lack of scientific knowledge, his “god of the gaps” approach, and selective scholarship that appears driven by his deep belief in an explicit role of an intelligent designer in the history of life.
Marshall CR. When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship. Science 2013;341:1344. When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship
ICYMI: [Review] Stephen Meyer's Fumbling Bumbling Cambrian Amateur Follies by Donald Prothero
Stephen Meyer's Fumbling Bumbling Cambrian Amateur Follies
July 21, 2013
· In everything the prudent acts with knowledge, but a fool flaunts his folly. Proverbs 13:16
· Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
· The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. William Shakespeare, As You Like It
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a well-known phenomenon in psychology first named in 1998, but it has been recognized since before the Bible and Shakespeare. In a nutshell, it is (as Bertrand Russell put it)
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."
There is also another well-known psychological phenomenon: motivated reasoning. Our brains have many blind spots in them that allow us to reconcile the real world with the world as we would like it to be, and reduce the clash of cognitive dissonance. The most familiar of these is confirmation bias, where we see only what we want to see, and ignore or forget anything that doesn't fit our preferred world-view.
When this bias emerges in argument, it takes the form of cherry-picking: finding a few facts out of context that seem to support what we want to believe, and ignoring everything else that contradicts what we are trying to promote.
The entire literature of creationism (and of its recent offspring, "intelligent design" creationism) works entirely on that principle: they don't like any science that disagrees with their view of religion, so they pick tiny bits out of context that seem to support what they want to believe, and cherry-pick individual cases which fits their bias. In their writings, they are legendary for "quote-mining": taking a quote out of context to mean the exact opposite of what the author clearly intended (sometimes unintentionally, but often deliberately and maliciously). They either cannot understand the scientific meaning of many fields from genetics to paleontology to geochronology, or their bias filters out all but tiny bits of a research subject that seems to comfort them, and they ignore all the rest.
Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.'s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences.
Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It's comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony--they may be smart, but they don't have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.
Stephen Meyer's first demonstration of these biases was his atrociously incompetent book Signature in the Cell (2009, HarperOne), which was universally lambasted by molecular biologists as an amateurish effort by someone with no firsthand training or research experience in molecular biology. (Meyer's Ph.D. is in history of science, and his undergrad degree is in geophysics, which give him absolutely no background to talk about molecular evolution).
Undaunted by this debacle, Meyer now blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report that he's just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards.
But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their "expert" in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.
Let's take the central subject of the book: the "Cambrian explosion", or the apparently rapid diversification of life during the Cambrian Period, starting about 545 million years ago. When Darwin wrote about it in 1859, it was indeed a puzzle, since so little was known about the fossil record then. But as paleontologists have worked hard on the topic and learned a lot since about 1945 (as I discuss in detail in my 2007 book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters). As a result, we now know that the "explosion" now takes place over an 80 m.y. time framework.
Paleontologists are gradually abandoning the misleading and outdated term "Cambrian explosion" for a more accurate one, "Cambrian slow fuse" or "Cambrian diversification." The entire diversification of life is now known to have gone through a number of distinct steps, from the first fossils of simple bacterial life 3.5 billion years old, to the first multicellular animals 700 m.y. ago (the Ediacara fauna), to the first evidence of skeletonized fossils (tiny fragments of small shells, nicknamed the "little shellies") at the beginning of the Cambrian, 545 m.y. ago (the Nemakit-Daldynian and Tommotian stages of the Cambrian), to the third stage of the Cambrian (Atdabanian, 530 m.y. ago), when you find the first fossils of the larger animals with hard shells, such as trilobites.
But does Meyer reflect this modern understanding of the subject? No! His figures (e.g., Figs. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) portray the "explosion" as if it happened all at once, showing that he has paid no attention to the past 70 years of discoveries. He dismisses the Ediacara fauna as not clearly related to living phyla (a point that is still debated among paleontologists), but its very existence is fatal to the creationist falsehood that multicellular animals appeared all at once in the fossil record with no predecessors.
Even more damning, Meyer completely ignores the existence of the first two stages of the Cambrian (nowhere are they even mentioned in the book, or the index) and talks about the Atdabanian stage as if it were the entire Cambrian all by itself. His misleading figures (e.g., Fig. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) imply that there were no modern phyla in existence until the trilobites diversified in the Atdabanian.
Sorry, but that's a flat out lie. Even a casual glance at any modern diagram of life's diversification (Figure 1) demonstrates that probable arthropods, cnidarians, and echinoderms are present in the Ediacara fauna, mollusks and sponges are well documented from the Nemakit-Daldynian Stage, and brachiopods and archaeocyathids appear in the Tommotian Stage--all millions of years before Meyer's incorrectly defined "Cambrian explosion" in the Atdabanian.
The phyla that he lists in Fig. 2.6 as "explosively" appearing in the Atdabanian stages all actually appeared much earlier--or they are soft-bodied phyla from the Chinese Chengjiang fauna, whose first appearance artificially inflates the count. Meyer deliberately and dishonestly distorts the story by implying that these soft-bodied animals appeared all at once, when he knows that this is an artifact of preservation. It's just an accident that there are no extraordinary soft-bodied faunas preserved before Chengjiang, so we simply have no fossils demonstrating their true first appearance, which occurred much earlier based on molecular evidence.
Meyer's distorted and false view of conflating the entire Early Cambrian (545-520 m.y. ago) as consisting of only the third stage of the Early Cambrian (Atdabanian, 530-525 m.y. ago) creates a fundamental lie that falsifies everything else he says in the ensuing chapters. He even attacks me (p. 73) by claiming that during our 2009 debate, it was I who was improperly redefining the Cambrian!
Even a cursory glance at any recent paleontology book on the topic, or even the Wikipedia site for "Cambrian explosion", shows that it is Meyer who has cherry-picked and distorted the record, completely ignoring the 15 million years of the first two stages of the Cambrian because their existence shoots down his entire false interpretation of the fossil record.
Sorry, Steve, but you don't get to contradict every paleontologist in the world, ignore the evidence from the first two stages of the Cambrian, and redefine the Early Cambrian as the just the Atdabanian Stage just to fit your fairy tale!
Even if we grant the premise that a lot of phyla appear in the Atdabanian (solely because there are no soft-bodied faunas older than Chengjiang in the earliest Cambrian), Meyer claims the 5-6 million years of the Atdabanian are too fast for evolution to produce all the phyla of animals.
Wrong again!
Lieberman (2003) showed that rates of evolution during the "Cambrian explosion" are typical of any adaptive radiation in life's history, whether you look at the Paleocene diversification of the mammals after the non-avian dinosaurs vanished, or even the diversification of humans from their common ancestor with apes 6 m.y. ago.
As distinguished Harvard paleontologist Andrew Knoll put it in his 2003 book, Life on a Young Planet:
Was there really a Cambrian Explosion? Some have treated the issue as semantic--anything that plays out over tens of millions of years cannot be "explosive," and if the Cambrian animals didn't "explode," perhaps they did nothing at all out of the ordinary. Cambrian evolution was certainly not cartoonishly fast ...
Do we need to posit some unique but poorly understood evolutionary process to explain the emergence of modern animals? I don't think so.
The Cambrian Period contains plenty of time to accomplish what the Proterozoic didn't without invoking processes unknown to population geneticists--20 million years is a long time for organisms that produce a new generation every year or two. (Knoll, 2003, p. 193)
(It's interesting that Meyer talks about millions of years like an ordinary geologist might. I'll bet his Young-Earth Creationist readers, who refuse to concede the earth is older than 10,000 years old, are not to happy with him for this. This might explain why the book, which was artificially pushed up the best-seller list by a huge creationist publicity effort before it was published, has now dropped out of the best-seller list like a stone, once people see it's not supporting Young-Earth Creationism).
The mistakes and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations go on and on, page after page. Meyer takes the normal scientific debates about the early conflicts about the molecular vs. morphological trees of life as evidence scientists know nothing, completely ignoring the recent consensus between these data sets.
Like all creationists, he completely misinterprets the Eldredge and Gould punctuated equilibrium model and claims that they are arguing that evolution doesn't occur--when both Gould and Eldredge have clearly explained many times (which he never cites) why their ideas are compatible with Neo-Darwinism and not any kind of support for any form of creationism.
He repeats many of the other classic creationist myths, all long debunked, including the post hoc argument from probability (you can't make the argument that something is unlikely after the fact), knowing that his math-phobic audience is easily bamboozled by the misuse of big numbers. He wastes a full chapter on the empty concept of "information" as the ID creationists define it.
He butchers the subject of systematic biology, using the normal debate between competing hypotheses to argue that scientists can't make up their minds--when that is the ordinary way in which scientific questions are argued until consensus has been reached. He confuses crown-groups with stem-groups, botches the arguments about recognition of ancestors in the fossil record, and can't tell a cladogram from a family tree.
He blunders through the fields of epigenetics and evo-devo and genetic drift as if they completely falsified Neo-Darwinism, rather than as scientists view them, as supplements to our understanding of it. (Even if they did somehow shoot down some aspects of Neo-Darwinism, they are providing additional possible mechanisms for evolution, something he supposedly doesn't believe in!).
In short, he runs the full gamut of topics in modern evolutionary biology, managing to distort or confuse every one of them, and only demonstrating that he is completely incapable of understanding these topics.
In several places in the book, he shows his pictures of the Cambrian sections in China, or talks in the final chapter about visiting the Burgess Shale in Canada (a Middle Cambrian locality, millions of years after the "Cambrian explosion" was long over), as if to establish his street-cred that he at least got away from his office and computer once in a while. Visiting these famous places like a tourist doesn't qualify you to write a guidebook of the complexity of the fossils that were recovered there.
If he had actually done the hard work of learning about paleontology and doing the research in the field himself (as real scientists have), we might take him seriously. As it is, this book only demonstrates that Meyer can completely misunderstand, misinterpret and misread subjects like paleontology just as badly as he botched his interpretation of molecular biology. (For a good account by real paleontologists who know what they're doing, see the excellent recent book by Valentine and Erwin, 2013, which gives an accurate view of the "Cambrian diversification").
Finally, one might wonder: what's all the fuss about the "Cambrian explosion"? Why should it matter whether evolution was fast or slow during the third stage of the Cambrian?
Some scientists might find this puzzling, but you must understand the minds of creationists. They operate by a "god of the gaps" argument: anything that is currently not easily explained by science is automatically attributed to supernatural causes. Even though ID creationists say that this supernatural designer could be any deity or even extraterrestrials, it is well documented that they are thinking of the Judeo-Christian god when they point to the complexity and "design" of life. They argue that if scientists haven't completely explained every possible event of the Early Cambrian, science has failed and we must consider supernatural causes.
Of course, this is a lie. For one thing, Meyer's description of the "Cambrian explosion" is distorted and false, since he deliberately ignores the events of the first two stages of the Cambrian. Secondly, this "god of the gaps" approach is guaranteed to fail, because scientists have explained most of the events of the Early Cambrian and find nothing out of the ordinary that defies scientific explanation. Only a few details remain to be worked out. As our fossil record of that time interval improves and we understand it even better, there will be nothing left for the creationists to point to that might require supernatural intervention. This is a losing strategy for them in every possible way.
In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else!
Some people with creationist leanings or little understanding of paleontology might find this long-winded, confusingly written book convincing, but anyone with a decent background in paleontology can easily see through his distortions and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Even though Amazon.com persists in listing this book in their "Paleontology" subsection, I've seen a number of bookstores already which have it properly placed in their "Religion" section--or even more appropriately, in "Fiction."
References Cited
· Erwin, D., and J.W. Valentine. 2013. The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Biodiversity. Roberts and Company, Publishers, New York.
· Knoll, A.H. 2003. Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Life on Earth. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
· Lieberman, B.S. 2003. Taking the pulse of the Cambrian radiation. Integrative and Comparative Biology 43:229-237.
· Prothero, D.R. 2007. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. Columbia University Press, New York.
Meyer's Hopeless Monster by Alan Gishlick, Nick Matzke, and Wesley R. Elsberry
Meyer's Hopeless Monster
Meyer's Hopeless Monster, Part II
Meyer's Hopeless Monster, Part III
Review of Meyer, Stephen C. 2004. The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 117(2):213-239.
“Intelligent design” (ID) advocate Stephen C. Meyer has produced a “review article” that folds the various lines of “intelligent design” antievolutionary argumentation into one lump. The article is published in the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. We congratulate ID on finally getting an article in a peer-reviewed biology journal, a mere fifteen years after the publication of the 1989 ID textbook Of Pandas and People, a textbook aimed at inserting ID into public schools. It is gratifying to see the ID movement finally attempt to make their case to the only scientifically relevant group, professional biologists. This is therefore the beginning (not the end) of the review process for ID. Perhaps one day the scientific community will be convinced that ID is worthwhile. Only through this route – convincing the scientific community, a route already taken by plate tectonics, endosymbiosis, and other revolutionary scientific ideas – can ID earn a legitimate place in textbooks.
Unfortunately, the ID movement will likely ignore the above considerations about how scientific review actually works, and instead trumpet the paper from coast to coast as proving the scientific legitimacy of ID. Therefore, we would like to do our part in the review process by providing a preliminary evaluation of the claims made in Meyer’s paper. Given the scientific stakes, we may assume that Meyer, Program Director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, the major organization promoting ID, has put forward the best case that ID has to offer. Discouragingly, it appears that ID’s best case is not very good. We cannot review every problem with Meyer’s article in this initial post, but we would like to highlight some of the most serious mistakes. These include errors in facts and reasoning. Even more seriously, Meyer’s paper omits discussion or even citation of vast amounts of directly relevant work available in the scientific literature.
GIVING UP DARWIN
Giving Up Darwin
Computer Scientist David Gelernter Drinks The Academic Kool-Aid, Buys Into Intelligent Design
Computer scientist David Gelernter drinks the academic Kool-Aid, buys into intelligent design
David Gelenrter is a well known computer scientist at Yale, famous for his innovations in parallel computing, and is also a writer and artist. He’s a religious Jew, a conservative, and—as of two years ago—a denier of anthropogenic global warming, a view at odds with his scientific background. In 1993 he was also badly injured in the hand and eye by a mail bomb sent by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
That was a horrible thing to happen to him, but it can neither explain nor excuse Gelenrter’s science denialism, now manifested in an article in the Claremont Review of Books in which Gelernter tells us that Darwinian evolution is dead, and that Intelligent Design is the happening thing.
Giving Up Darwin
The article is being trumpeted all over Intelligent Design websites, and I’m baffled as to how someone of Gelernter’s intelligence could buy into thinly disguised creationism. Could it be his religion? I’d call him a “useful idiot” for the ID people, except he’s not an idiot.
My only explanation involves paraphrasing Steven Weinberg: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have smart people doing smart things and stupid people doing stupid things. But for smart people to do stupid things, that takes religion.”
Gelernter then goes on to parrot the familiar tropes of ID, the most prominent being that the Cambrian Explosion could not have been caused by evolution because there are no credible ancestors of the evolved taxa and that the whole thing simply took place too fast to be explained by neo-Darwinian processes.
Here he leans heavily on Stephen Meyer’s ID book
Darwin’s Doubt, which, says Gelernter, “convinced me that Darwin has failed.”
Presumably Meyer thinks that the Great Designer poofed the Cambrian Explosion into being, although Gelernter may see that designer as Yahweh. But Meyer’s book has been unanimously criticized by paleontologists as uninformed and tendentious, and, as I wrote before about it:
Intelligent Design advocates finally sneak God back into their “science”
Those familiar with Meyer’s “theories” of ID, contained in his two books
Signature in the Cell and
Darwin’s Doubt, will see them trotted out in the video below. I won’t waste time showing how they’ve been rebutted, but will just give you some links to read (you can see other criticisms in
the Wikipedia entry for Meyer).
Some good rebuttals of Meyer’s creationism can be found here:
Devolution
Devolution
Doubting “Darwin's Doubt”
Doubting “Darwin’s Doubt”
Stephen Meyer’s Fumbling Bumbling Amateur Cambrian Follies
13-08-07
Dembski's argument in Chicago -- New? Persuasive?
Dembski's argument in Chicago -- New? Persuasive?
Debating Darwin's Doubt: the prequel
Sandwalk: Debating Darwin's Doubt: the prequel
Meyer's Hopeless Monster, Part II
Meyer's Hopeless Monster, Part II
When Prior Belief Trumps Scholarship
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/341/6152/1344.1.full.pdf
I’ll note two more scathing reviews of the book that Gelernter touts so highly:
one by Charles Marshall and the other (a long review on Amazon)
by Don Prothero.
…
I’ve pondered at great length how a man can be apparently as intelligent as Gelernter, yet so susceptible to the blandishments of Intelligent Design—and so ignorant of the evidence that refutes it. All I can think of is religion. I may certainly be wrong here, but there’s some mental block that the man has against evidence that has convinced nearly every biologist alive.
Gelernter has no formal training in biology, and I suppose I could say he doesn’t have the credibility to even attack evolution (he does seem ignorant of the fossil record). But I hate to pull rank and use arguments based on authority. All I can say is that his ignorance is both woeful and harmful, and he is serving as a useful idiot-manqué for the Intelligent Design Creationist movement.
Intelligent Design Advocates Finally Sneak God Back Into Their “Science”
Intelligent Design advocates finally sneak God back into their “science”
The video below, in which Intelligent Design creationist Stephen Meyer explains ID to conservative writer and speaker Ben Shapiro, accomplishes two things—beyond demonstrating that Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, continues, despite withering criticism from scientists, to bang on about supposedly unevolvable “complex specified information” and the Cambrian Explosion as evidence for the Great Designer.
First, the video has eliminated any trace of respect I had for Ben Shapiro. Although I’m opposed to nearly all (well, let’s just make that all) of Shapiro’s political opinions, I thought his rhetoric was useful in challenging Woke college students who hadn’t thought through their views.
But now Shapiro has cast his lot with creationism, albeit the “sophisticated” form of creationism adumbrated by Meyer and his cronies. Shapiro is now beyond hope; it’s never not a good move for someone who pretends to be an intellectual to ally himself with thoroughly debunked pseudoscience.
…
Second, the video nakedly reveals the ultimate goal of the ID movement revealed: to sneak God back into the science classroom. …
To get their creationism taught in the schools, IDers had the clever strategy of taking God out of the theory, at least explicitly. They then pretended that there was just some unspecified “mind” behind evolution, and that mind could be God, but it could also belong to space aliens or any overweening intelligence. But that was a lie: IDers wanted all along for the Judeo-Christian God to be the Designer.
And you didn’t have to be a scientist to see this, for that was the decision of Judge Jones when he rejected the teaching of ID in Dover, Pennsylvania schools as a form of disguised religion. The replacement of “God” with “Designer” was clearly a duplicitous tactical strategy.
Stephen C. Meyer | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 43
Published on Mar 24, 2019
Stephen C. Meyer, geophysicist, Vice President of the Discovery Institute, and author of the New York Time's best seller "Darwin's Doubt," joins Ben to discuss philosophy, the origins of life, the overlap of science and religion, and much more.
