Interview: Mathematician David Berlinski explains why famous mathematicians have doubted Darwin

"Darwin and the Mathematicians", here, is David Berlinsk's final interview with Evolution News and Views. Berlinski, a Darwin skeptic of long standing, discusses the reasons famous mathematicians have doubted Darwin, along with entertaining anecdotes:

In the first part of the 20th century, Darwin v. Dissent had not yet acquired its riveting incarnation as a melodrama of intolerance. No heresy, no heretics is a useful proverb, and using, say, 1950 as a reference point, there were no heretics among the mathematicians because there was yet no heresy. Darwin's theory was not then considered totemic; and his touch was not widely understood to cure erysipelas. Darwin v. Dissent is of our time and place.

For more, go here.

Berlinski has a new book out, called The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays

(Note: The accumulation of evidence against Darwinism is the primary cause of the suppression of dissent, tacit co-operation of legacy media (which, themselves, would like to suppress independent media), growth of frantic Darwin lobbies, and incivility of so many Darwin sites. You've heard about climategate? Wait till Darwingate.)

David Berlinski: So that inconvenient math guy who lives in the oldest building in France is back?

Yes, apparently, David Berlinski is back: A mathematician determined to be honest enough to kill Darwinism, he says,

David Berlinski on the Darwinian Guild

An interview from Evolution News and Views:

ENV: Darwinism is fiercely guarded by a scientific guild. What does the guild have at stake in this? Prestige? Money? To some observers, the defense seems impermeable. Do you see cracks in the fortress wall opening up?

DB: Fiercely guarded, but not, mind you, effectively guarded. If the Darwinian Guild, to adapt your phrase (since science has nothing to do with it), was interested in rational self promotion, the Guild would have never allowed its members to display in public their characteristic attitude of invincible arrogance and sheep-like stupidity. Just listen to them as they limber up in the insult room: Dumbski, Little Mikey Behe, Stevie Meyer (a regression to school yard taunts irresistible at both the Panda’s Thumb and Talk Reason), the creationist playbook, creationist pablum, creationism in a cheap tuxedo, tired creationist canards, creationist cranks, ID'iots, creotards, creos, sky fairies, liars for Jesus. I've even seen Disco'Tute, this the invention of an elderly fellow at the Panda's Thumb who, like Polonius, imagines that he is the soul of wit. One lunatic named Quick or Quack — or is that simply the sound of his posts? — has become fond of the phrase mendacious intellectual pornography and has so overused it that his fellow bloggers have taken to attacking him. When they do, Quick as a Quack responds that they are guilty of mendacious intellectual pornography. The gabble is as unedifying as it is unending.

What is wonderful, I think, is the way in which membership in the Guild so runs to type, P.Z. Myers, to take the loudest case, reveling in his role as the hearty American rustic, a man prepared as circumstances demand either to desecrate the Catholic wafer or at dinner to immerse his feet in a platter of boeuf bourguignon. If in public he now refrains from withdrawing long spools of lint from his navel and examining them studiously that is because Richard Dawkins has advised him that at Oxford, it is no longer done.

When it is late at night and my old war wounds ache, I very much enjoy chasing down discussions on the Panda’s Thumb in which members of the Guild begin to abuse one another, their indignation discharging itself in a series of menopausal hot flashes, the discussion skipping from disagreement to disgruntlement to peevishness and finally to insult, until at last someone stands accused of being a lying scum for Jesus.

I offer nothing as invention. I have made nothing up.

What I find most remarkable about the Darwinian Guild is what is least remarked. There is not a single first rate intelligence in the bunch.

Hey, I never got the sense there was a first rate intelligence in the Darwin bunch either, though the idea was often promoted to me by people who need to believe it.

I know when someone is smarter than me. I am glad that people smarter than me are starting to say in clear terms: Darwinism is a bankrupt idea.

My own suspicion is that people fronting it are merely tax burdens.

If so, the big problem is practical: They need to front their failed theory into retirement. Fine, as long as we don't make it a "civilization" cause. After them, we can start dealing with the reality.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Introduction: Berlinski, the Devil, and the long spoon

He who sups with the devil must bring a long spoon. - proverb

Mathematician David Berlinski is an exception, and often noted as such. He does not fit the stereotype of the earnest, learned theist we expect a Discovery Institute fellow to be. An American living in Paris, a secular agnostic Jew, and both a mathematician and a novelist - so why isn't he caterwauling about the Visigoths at the gates, who think there is evidence for design in the universe?

Well, for one thing, he is way too smart. He is also a relentless foe of fashionable mediocrities. Thought enforcers mutter darkly against him.

No doubt there will be a law against him some day, but the bureaucrats will need to make good time. He was born in 1942. Meanwhile, ...

Well now, what of Berlinski's Devils?, that is The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions?

The book is not so much a defense of the God of the philosophers as a meditation on the vast, dim stupidities put up, in popular science works, to replace him. Although Devil’s would stand on its own as an excellent piece of writing and reasoning, in fairness it owes much to the sheer ridiculousness of the current conventions of thought it sends up, as we shall soon see.

Next: Part One: Taking the measure of the new religion of science


All parts:
Introduction: Berlinski, the Devil, and the long spoon
Part One: Taking the measure of the new religion of science
Part Two: Materialism conflicts with evidence more than theism does
Part Three: Evolutionary psychology - the saints' legends of scientism
Part Four: The duty Berlinski never accepted

David Berlinski: Darwinism ... you've got to be kidding!

Because I am writing a review of same, I have been rereading agnostic mathematician David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

Of course, Berlinski became notorious for his direct assault on scientism's sacred cow, Darwinian evolution - the miraculous process whereby mud becomes mind, science becomes superstition, and churches become empty. He writes,

The effort by Darwinian biologists to promote Darwin is simply explained. Within the English-speaking world, Darwin's theory of evolution remains the only scientific theory to be widely championed by the scientific community and widely disbelieved by everyone else. No matter the effort made by biologists, the thing continues to elicit the same reaction it has always elicited: You've got to be kidding, right? There is wide appreciation of the fact that if biologists are wrong about Darwin, they are wrong about life, and if they are wrong about life, they are wrong about everything. (p. 186 )

They've been wrong since the Cambrian explosion, actually.

Now, as I have said elsewhere, go buy the book. I will not spend all afternoon typing just so you don't have to.

Expelled Movie: Catholic columnist liked it, and its Jewish backbone, much better than he had feared

Columnist Christopher A. Ferrara, of New Jersey-based Catholic magazine Remnant, admits,

When I went to a local movie theatre to see “ Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” during its short run, I went with very low expectations, and more out of a sense of duty than anything else. The critics had uniformly savaged this documentary exposé of the academic tyranny of the Darwinian establishment, and even allowing for their liberal bias I had expected to encounter a schlock production along the lines of other such films produced with the backing of evangelicals and fundamentalists.

But the film about the ID guys wasn't as bad as Ferrara feared.

Actually, on that score, I could have told Ferrara to fear not. The film was made by professionals, not by people who save souls by emptying theatres. Anyway, he writes,

Imagine my surprise and delight when I realized that the critical savaging of this film was probably motivated primarily by fear—fear that “Expelled” might actually succeed in tearing down what the film, in a thematic allegory, likens to a Berlin Wall in academia, behind which are confined in lonely exile the hardy few who have dared to challenge the teaching of Saint Darwin by stating the obvious: that the emergence of life in all its unimaginable and irreducible complexity can only have been the result of creation according to an intelligent design. With Ben Stein, the lawyer, former presidential speechwriter and Hollywood celebrity as its front man and narrator, “Expelled” is a lavishly mounted and brilliantly executed piece of anti-Darwinian propaganda, in the best sense of the word.

and

It hardly needs to be explained how stunning a breakthrough this film is, even despite its flaws (including a rather painful-to-watch appeal to Jeffersonian liberalism as the antidote to Darwinism). I paid three times to see “Expelled,” for the sheer pleasure of watching over and over again such an unexpected bombshell of a movie, hardly believing that Stein would have lent his name to the production, since it surely means the end of his Hollywood career.

Of course, when someone's career "ends" because he says something that so manifestly needed to be said (witness all the establishment types insisting that it ain't so, ain't so, ain't so ... ), that's because he has outlived that career.

Ferrara also notes that the film ends with "a tableau of three Jewish intellectuals: Stein (valedictorian of his class at Yale Law School), nuclear physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder (formerly of MIT and now a professor at Hebrew University), and mathematician and philosopher Dr. David Berlinski" and he then goes on to talk about David Berlinski's excellent The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

Agnostic Berlinski is particularly hard on "Catholic evolutionists" in a Remnant interview with Berlinski in Paris (May 9, 2008), which he reproduces just below the rview of Expelled:

CF: Let’s turn to the Catholic Church, which is our focus here. Let’s talk in particular about somebody like Ken Miller who piously assures us that “as a Catholic, I have no problem reconciling the theory of evolution with my faith.” But then he’ll turn around and deny intelligent design. Now my question would be, isn’t that a disingenuous position?

DB: Well, I hesitate to talk about Ken Miller’s Catholic faith because I regard him as being disingenuous across the board…. As I understand Miller, he’s not denying intelligent design. He’s simply pushing it to a level such that it will never be an impediment to any particular dogma in the here and now. And he’s perfectly prepared to say that the cosmos is in some sense intelligently designed. He’s prepared to say that because the evidence is overwhelming that it is. He’s just determined not to see evidence of intelligent design in any process of living systems.

CF: And why?

DB: Because that would put him squarely in conflict with prevailing orthodoxy…. Like so many other people, Ken Miller wants to serve as many gods as he can.

CF: …. So that’s the issue. Where is there a place for God in the system of someone who says, at one and the same time, I am a Catholic, but life arose through a stochastic process? Where is there room for God in that system? A verbal affirmation?

DB: He [God] is very far away where he can do no trouble and interfere with no human activities, and that is exactly the point of the exercise: to retain the piety of devotion without any inconvenience of faith.

But the whole interview is worth reading, particularly when Berlinski addresses the unfruitful tautology of "survival of the fittest" (which makes few or no predictions) and compares it to the fruitful tautology of Newton's account of gravity.

Note: Blogging may be spotty for a few days because I will be teaching at Write! Canada and I have recently been apprised that I have 19 students, as of last count, in Freelance Survival 101, or whatever we are calling it this year. So I must prepare, prepare, prepare. I will likely blog, but probably only one entry at a time rather than five at once. Meanwhile, slainte and l'chaim and salaam and all that to all readers!

Note: Blogging may be spotty for a few days because I will be teaching at Write! Canada and I have just been apprised that I have 19 students, as of last count, in Freelance Survival 101, or whatever we are calling it this year. So I must prepare, prepare, prepare. I will likely blog, but probably only one entry at a time rather than five at once. Meanwhile, slainte and l'chaim and salaam and all that to all readers!

Fun with David Berlinski: The Devil sketches what we do not know

In The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, mathematician David Berlinski takes on the shape of what we do not know:

We know better than we did what we do not know and have not grasped. We do not know how the universe began. We do not know why it is there. Charles Darwin talked speculatively of life emerging from a "warm little pond." The pond is gone. We have little idea how life emerged, and cannot with assurance say that tit did. We cannot reconcile our understanding of the human mind with any trivial theory about the manner in which the brain functions. Beyond the trivial, we have no other theories. We can say nothing of interest about the human soul. We do not know what impels us to right conduct or where the form of the good is found.

On these and many other points as well, the great scientific theories have lapsed. The more sophisticated the theories, the more inadequate they are. This is a good reason to cherish them. They have enlarged and not diminished our sense of the sublime. (p. xiii-iv)

One pictures the devil sitting opposite, turning over his now-empty glass ...

Berlinski agrees with me that Derbyshire is over the hill as well as over the top

Mathematician David Berlinski thinks that John Derbyshire, who has been popping his cork over the Expelled movie ("creationist porn"), is merely over the hill:

Like so many men who have reached late middle age, John Derbyshire suffers the impression that the “the barbarians are at the gate.” Women no longer topple blood-ripe into his lap. A “gaggle of fools and fraudsters” is everywhere disturbing his tranquility. Things that he treasures are under ceaseless attack.

About intelligent design theory - for which so many scientists have suffered, as the film shows - Berlinski says,

In the United States, at least, creationism is a doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. Intelligent Design is otherwise. It is the thesis that living creatures appear designed because they are designed. It is said to be Darwin’s great merit that he successfully dissolved the appearance of design in life. Those who believe that the design of living systems is real believe correspondingly that Darwin’s theory is false, or, at best, incomplete.

Whether true or false, the issue is one of fact, and the inferences to which design theorists appeal are in common currency in subjects as diverse as political science, forensics and archeology. Seeing tallies scratched on a pre-historic ax handle, John Derbyshire — of all people! — might well conclude that they represent signs designating the natural numbers. The arrow of thought passes from the properties of an object to its classification as an artifact.

The question that Derbyshire has asked of an ax handle, design theorists ask of Derbyshire. Does he bear the marks of design?

Berlinski thinks that a talented writer like Derbyshire is entitled to make a fool of himself at least once.

American mathematician living in Paris on Europe’s anti-ID resolution ...

Here’s a podcast of mathematician and novelist David Berlinski, who lives in Paris, on the Council of Europe’s decision to ban the teaching of ID or creationism from the classroom. Berlinski’s own views of intelligent design are somewhat nuanced, as these self-interviews show, though his view of the Darwinist shock troops is not:

entirely low-market; the men who contribute to the blog all have some vague technical background - computer sales, sound mixing, low-level programming, print-shops or copy centers; they are semi-literate; their posts convey that characteristic combination of pustules and gonorrhea that one would otherwise associate with high-school toughs.

And here are links to some of his beautifully written essays.