Podcast: Why I think the blogosphere beats legacy media cold, plus heartfelt regards to Larry Moran and PZ Myers

Here's a podcast on how I stopped writing on dead trees and learned to love the blogosphere. Toward the end I say nice things about Larry Moran and almost-nice things about PZ Myers. They are so good for business, I should nominate them for the Golden Pajamas.

The annoying thing is that the podcast ran just when I hadn't had time to blog much here. I will try to make up for that tomorrow. So many stories, so little time, yada yada ...

Darwinism can't be defended by mere silliness? Whodathunkit?

Years ago, when people would ask me how anyone could take seriously the pseudo-insights from evolutionary psychology, I would say that Darwinism today is where astrology was in the high middle ages: Truth, falsehood and nonsense all defend it equally. Its practitioners need only emit agreeable nonsense, and everyone who wants to get on in the world immediately acquiesces. (Unless he has a power base that suspects it is bunk.)

Mathematician Jason Rosenhouse, who hatres the ID folk, nonetheless thinks, as I do, that evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne signally failed to grapple with any real issues when he tried to trash Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution.

Coyne's little challenges here are a mixture of good points and bad points, but they are all jumbled together and the whole thing is presented with such malice that he even managed to turn me off, and I already think Behe is a snake. If he could piss ME off just think of the effect he is having on anyone who does not already despise ID.

Earth to Rosenhouse: Most of the world doesn't despise ID. People who doze gravel at a steep angle to pay your salary do not usually despise ID.

I seem to recall University of Toronto evolutionary biologist Larry Moran saying something similar.

(I shouldn’t need to say this here, but you have to meet a cogent argument with a cogent argument, and you can’t meet a cogent argument with dancing with the biologists. Well, you can, but ... )

Rosenhouse and Moran both think Darwinism can be fireproofed. Good job I don’t underwrite the policy.

Flunk all students sympathetic to intelligent design?

Recently, at the Post-Darwinist, I commented on the effort by UCal San Diego to warn frosh against ID via a compulsory lecture the way they used to warn against sex, drugs, and rock n' roll in my day. I remarked:

I have repeatedly asked the Discovery Institute (ID central) how much they are paying these people to promote ID by launching publicly funded campaigns against it. But the are slippery folk and I don't expect an answer any time soon. When I get the scoop, I will post it, in case an enterprising Darwinist would like to undercut the going price (it's a jungle out there, ya know ...) by offering an even more bone-headed approach.

Well! University of Toronto-based evolutionary biologist Larry Moran, of textbook fame - whose eagerness to please is legendary and was much remarked at the Toronto ID conference has graciously upped the ante. He has advised the Post-Darwinist's comments box that the solution is "flunk the IDiots." He follows up at his own blog:

I agree with the Dembski sycophants that UCSD should not have required their uneducated students to attend remedial classes. Instead, they should never have admitted them in the first place. Having made that mistake, it's hopeless to expect that a single lecture—even one by a distinguished scholar like Robert Pennock—will have any effect. The University should just flunk the lot of them and make room for smart students who have a chance of benefiting from a high quality education.

Now, that is a pre-emptive bid, and I suppose he will want to discuss, um, money with the Discos, who - I assume - are watching the Post-Darwinist for possible offers from other parties as well.

Persons wishing to help destroy Darwinism by unleashing illegal persecutions on doubters are entitled to outbid Moran. A word of advice: Be imaginative but economical. The word on the street is that the Discos are a stingy lot because they are used to getting a big bang for their buck, promoting intelligent design worldwide on a shoestring.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

I am woman? I am invincible?: I am having a hard time keeping a straight face, actually

Regular readers with the time to spare for this space may recall that we had a little ID conference at the University of Toronto a couple of weekends ago, and there I ran into an interesting biochem textbook author named Larry Moran, an evolutionary biologist who does not seem to be a Darwinist or a Darwinian evolutionist. (See below.)

He wants to be called an evolutionary biologist , which is fair enough to describe what he does for a living, but virtually every colleague who is a fanatical Darwinist on the issues under discussion will want the same thing.

Larry thinks (see the Comments box) that I somehow benefit from the busload of cranks prophesying in Darwin's name because I want to impugn "real scientists":

With all due respect, I think you're getting a lot of mileage out of lumping the kooks in with real scientists and covering them all with the "Darwinist" label. It allows you to attack and make fun of the kooky non-science in "The Universal Darwinism" while impugning real scientists by implication.

Well, of course, blowing off silliness about the infidelity genes or the God meme is certainly easier than slogging through actual news but - call me unlucky, I've always preferred the news beat. I send up the folly in my spare time, of course, but there would still be plenty of folly if the Darwin cranks packed themselves off to Quaoar for a very long vacation, and I'd still have to make a living on the side.

Larry, who apparently believes that all things work together for good for me, has sent me a link to one of his essays "Evolution by Accident", and I have now read it. He seems to be far more of a Gouldian than a Dawkins-ite.

He writes, in part,

Excellent arguments have been advanced to prove that most of evolution is due to random genetic drift and that's the position I take. Thus, in a discussion about the role of chance and accident in evolution I would say that most of evolution is accidental because of the frequency of drift vs. selection. Note that this says nothing about the perceived importance of these mechanisms. That's a value judgement. Some evolutionists think that adaptation, or evolution by natural selection, is the only interesting part of evolution. These evolutionists don't deny that random genetic drift occurs; instead, they simply relegate it to the category of uninteresting phenomena. Others, like me, think that random genetic drift is far more interesting than natural selection because drift is responsible for junk DNA, molecular phylogenies, molecular clocks, and DNA fingerprinting.

On Darwinism, he writes,

Technically, Darwinism can be construed to mean only evolution by natural selection so this is an acceptable way of avoiding the topic of drift. However, if you read closely, you'll see that these writers are often very sloppy about using ""Darwinism" to describe their interests. The term often fills in for all of evolution in a sort of rhetorical sleight of hand. Thus, this group of chance-deniers tends to eliminate chance from evolution by re-defining evolution so that it only applies to natural selection. As you might expect, those who choose to eliminate chance by redefinition are usually the same people that are only interested in natural selection (see above).

All of which reminds me of the huge uproar last year when Stu Pivar, a friend of the late Steve Gould, told me that Gould was rather an indifferent Darwinist, and Darwinists charged in to protect Gould's reputation from the imputation of heresy.

I wonder if some evo bios can only allow themselves the luxury of questioning a given dogma as long as they all close ranks when attacked. A sort of angry religion without God or good music or Jesus kitsch? Sounds like Hull to me.

Terminology wars revisited: Darwinists, Darwinian evolutionists, and evolutionary biologists

To the post Terminology wars: "Darwinist" vs. "Darwinian evolutionist", Larry Moran (the evolutionary biologist who objected to the term "Darwinist" during my talk at U of T last Saturday, has left a comment, saying that he also does not like the term "Darwinian evolutionist" and asks to be called an "evolutionary biologist."

I hope he won't mind that I am quoting most of his post, to draw attention to his concerns, and then responding below:

I was the person who objected to your use of the term "Darwinist." The word is loaded with all kinds of implications. To those of us who work on evolution it means a person who believes in natural selection as the most important thing in evolutionary biology. This would include people like Richard Dawkins and others who are often referred to as Ultra-Darwinians.

Many of us are not Darwinists in that sense and we would never refer to ourselves as "Darwinists" unless we were specificially referring to our acceptance of Darwin's theory of natural selection. The term "Darwinian evolutionist" is even more objectionable because it labels someone as an evolutionst who tends to side with the Ultra-Darwinian camp.

As it turns out, there's a lot more to modern evolution than just natural selection and the things that Charles Darwin knew in 1859. To call all modern evolutionary biologists "Darwinists" would be like calling all modern physicists "Newtonists" and ignoring the contributions of Albert Einstein and the development of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century.

There's a strictly scientific controversy over the importance of natural selection, and the proper use of the term "Darwinist." It is quite wrong to label all evolutionary biologists as "Darwinists" as though they were all stuck in the nineteenth century. As long as there are some evolutionary biologists who object, then their wishes should be respected. I object, and I'm not alone as Denyse O'Leary recognizes. There's a perfectly good alternative that nobody will object to. Call us evolutionary biologists or even evolutionists.

Okay, fair enough, Larry. I'll run "evolutionary biologist" up the flagpole for a while and see who salutes. I always try to use terminology to which people cannot reasonably object - so far as is consistent with making clear where they stand in a controversy. So I may have to tweak it a bit.

But now, here is my main problem: While working on my most recent co-authored book with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard (Harper 2007), I came across a number of people who - to judge from their published writings - are completely committed fans of Darwin. But they have no clear relationship that I can determine to biology as I think you understand it.

For example,

- Writer Matthew Alper thinks that there is a specific “God” Part of the Brain (2001), which would be news to neuroscientists who image the traces of spirituality using fMRI and CATscans.

- Psychologist Susan Blackmore thinks that there is a unit of thought that is equivalent to a gene. Don't ask whether there is any coherent explanation for a unit of thought. (Religious memes, by the way, are apparently deceitful.)

- Lawyer Joseph Giovannoli thinks that there is such a thing as a psychogene, but don't look for it on a map of the human genome. It is all in the mind/brain/head/somewhere up there anyway.

- Software developer Richard Brodie thinks that memes are viruses of the mind (in other sources, memes are equivalent to genes - but hey, things do evolve, right?). (Note: Richard Brodie writes to say that he does not think viruses of the mind like religion are memes. Apologies for error.)

I call these people Darwinists assuming they are complimented, not offended, to be linked with their hero. I am not trying to put them down when I call them that.

But, Larry, I can sort of see why you wouldn't want to be classed with them, if you actually do science for a living.

I am sympathetic to your wish to reserve for evolutionary biology a level of respect due to a serious academic endeavor, and I would be happy to help. I do think, however, that you and others in your field might want to consider clearly distancing yourselves from the Darwin circus. If you don't, no one can do it for you.

Actually, I think the Darwin circus is the primary reason for controversy around the teaching of Darwinian evolution in schools. I doubt that many people care about the wing powder of peppered moths, the coat colours of urban squirrels, or whether Galapágos finch beaks are fat or thin from one year to the next. But the prospect of giving people with a far-out agenda access to the education system is about as popular today as it has always been.

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Terminology wars: "Darwinist" vs. "Darwinian evolutionist"

At my talk at the University of Toronto last Saturday on the development of the intelligent design controversy, an evolutionary biologist in the audience informed me that evolutionary biologists don't like the term Darwinist, even though they in fact use it, apparently, despite denials on the part of some (scroll down to Edward O. Wilson). So in the talk I was very careful to say "Darwinian evolutionist," wherever I could remember to do so, but was not necessarily consistent.

(Note: If you came here looking for a story about Baylor prof Francis Beckwith's credentials, go here.)

One difficulty is that Richard Dawkins, for example, appears quite comfortable calling himself a "Darwinist," thus so should I be.

And when it comes to purely conceptual ideas like meme theory (a theory about how ideas spread from one person to the next via Darwinian natural selection), it is not clear that any actual evolutionary biology is involved. For that reason, I am reluctant to allow evolutionary biologists to determine terminology in the further reaches of universal Darwinism.)

If you like this blog, check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?. You can read excerpts as well.

Are you looking for one of the following stories?

A summary of tech guru George Gilder's arguments for ID and against Darwinism

A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

A summary of recent opinion columns on the ID controversy

A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

A summary of the Catholic Church's entry into the controversy, essentially on the side of ID.

O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being granted tenure at Baylor after a long struggle - even after helping in a small way to destroy the Baylor Bears' ancient glory - in the opinion of a hyper sportswriter.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

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