Further thoughts from outspoken Canadian journalist, David Warren, on Darwinism ...

David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen is another Canadian journalist who, having travelled and read widely, is skeptical of Darwinism. I sometimes publish some of his musings on the subject, often in correspondence with other thoughtful people:

Warren, a Catholic, quotes George Sim Johnston, Did Darwin Get It Right? Catholics & the Theory of Evolution, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 1998, pp. 22-24:

Now, it may be argued that Darwin's hostility toward Christianity is beside the point. Shouldn't a scientific theory be judged on its own merits, rather than on the motives and psychology of its progenitor? Yes, of course - if the theory is truly scientific and confirmed by empirical observation. Isaac Newton was as strange as they come; as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, Newton's private philosophical notebooks make one think of an ancient Babylonian magician. But Newton's scientific theories were rigorously formulated. They can be tested and shown to be true for most of material reality. But an ideology dressed up as science is a different matter. Theories like Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism have an explanation for everything (natural selection, economic repression, the unconscious) and so finally explain very little; they are elastic and vague enough to absorb almost any contradiction; when they run into falsifying data, they simply mutate. And since these theories began, consciously or not, as highly skewed readings of the available evidence, the biographies of their founders are very much to the point.

It is the job of a scientist to explain things without reference to a Creator. Great scientists like Gregor Mendel, who deciphered the genetic basis of heredity, operate this way, and when evaluating Mendel's work, we don't need to know what he thought about God. His rigorous mathematical analysis of his breeding experiments with peas can be tested and verified on its own terms. Mendel happened to be an Augustinian monk, but it makes no difference. A Christian physicist or biologist who runs into an intractable problem is not obliged to throw up his arms and say, "Well, God did it that way." Rather, he waits patiently for a natural explanation. If such is not forthcoming, he admits a scientific mystery and humbly hands over his data to philosophers and theologians, who may then talk about design and creation.

At the same time, a scientist who takes the (often covert) position, that because there is no God, any puzzling phenomenon can in principle be explained entirely by material causes is also out of bounds. As is the case with a Christian physicist who solves any mystery in nature by simply positing divine intervention, scientists who adopt this strategy are practicing bad philosophy rather than sound science. Many Darwinists take the position that because other material explanations (for example, Lamarkism; the inheritance of acquired characteristics) of evolution are false, Darwin's must be true. But they can only do this if they rule out of court nonmaterial first causes. As scientists, they are not qualified to do this. Science, which deals only with physical reality, can have nothing to say about what, if anything, is outside that reality.

...Twenty years before the publication of the Origin, Darwin was a convinced materialist who wished to rid nature of a Creator. In other words, his agenda was not strictly scientific; it was metaphysical - or, we might say, counter-metaphysical. Darwin's materialism was antecedent to, and not a result of, his scientific work. Even so, his philosophical biases would not be an issue if his theorizing had, like Mendel's or Pasteur's, been limited to secondary and proximate causes. But Darwin was stalking the First Cause. It was, he confessed in a letter, like committing "murder." And this agenda must be taken into account when judging the argument of the Origin, because virtually every chapter of that book contains hidden and unwarranted philosophical assumptions.

Warren also draws my attention to Governor Huckabee fielding a line drive from Darwinists.

Quoting a friend on the “random” part of “random mutations”, he notes:

Huxley in his presentation of Darwin makes a very critical point. He says that "random" means a mutation in the offspring that we observers could not have predicted from looking at the parents. In short, it means "unexpected" and "surprising," and it is defined purely and strictly in respect of human observers. Huxley's definition, in other words, has zero metaphysical or theological implications. From the mere fact that we human observers cannot predict an event, it is absurd to conclude that the event does not follow a regular pattern. Early human beings could not predict eclipses--so they appeared to happen at random. Yet this did not mean that eclipses did not follow a regular and predictable pattern. For Huxley, "random" simply referred to the limits of our knowledge; it did not mean that the course of evolution was itself random. The course of evolution could be the unfolding of an intelligent design or it could the result of a cosmic law of progress.

It is simply bad logic to jump from the Darwin/Huxley concept of random to conclusion that the process of evolution is itself random. People today forget the fact that those who embraced Darwin's theory in the 19th century saw it as scientific proof that progress was built into the universe--after all, if evolution led from microbes to Michelangelo, then who could possibly fail to see that the universe was constantly progressing, and not simply drifting randomly and without direction.

Here are some links to earlier Warren comments posted here:

Another Toronto journalist takes swat at Darwinoids

David Warren’s further correspondence with the Darwin fans

David Warren defends Mike Behe

The Mark Steyn show trial in Vancouver

Here's Canadian journalist David Warren at his best on the "human rights" show trial of Canadian commentator Mark Steyn for "hate crimes" in Vancouver:

This is a disaster also for Canada’s Muslims, for the views of fanatical Islamists are being presented as representative of them all. No single person has done so much to advance contempt for Islam in this country as Mohamed Elmasry, president of the “Canadian Islamic Congress,” the complainant in this case -- whose public assertions have included e.g. the view that every Israeli citizen is a valid target for Palestinian hitmen.

The bland acceptance of this jackass, by mainstream Canadian media, as the definitive spokesman for Muslim interests in Canada, cannot be blamed on the Muslim community. Innumerable Muslims have disavowed him, and yet are entirely ignored. Indeed: Mark Steyn has been among the few journalists distinguishing between camps. He would be: for he has plenty of Muslim supporters.

Yes, I have seen all that happen myself. And the point I most want to get across to fellow Canadians (said better and more pungently by David) is that Canadian Muslims, by and large, are not doing this.

Leftwing activists are doing it, using the few Muslims who actively cooperate with their system as a crowbar to pry Canada loose from the historic civil rights that have always been our pride and their bane. Non-Canadians can best help us by monitoring the situation, spreading the word, and making sure it does not happen where you are.

Anyway, Warren begins,

Show trial

The writings of Canada’s most talented journalist, Mark Steyn, went on trial in Vancouver on Monday, in a case designed to challenge freedom of the press. It is a show trial, under the arbitrary powers given to Canada’s obscene “human rights” commissions, by Section 13 of our Human Rights Act.

I wrote “obscene” advisedly. Before Canada’s “human rights” tribunals, a respondent has none of the defences formerly guaranteed in common law. The truth is no defence, reasonable intention is no defence, nor material harmlessness, there are no rules of evidence, no precedents, nor case law of any kind. The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists.

I wrote “show trial” advisedly, for there has been a 100 percent conviction rate in cases brought to “human rights” tribunals under Section 13.

For the rest go here.

By the way, three other things:

1. I am adding Free Mark Steyn - Free the press in Canada! as the top link in my blogroll to the right.

2. This "human rights" situation is the reason I disabled the comboxes at my blogs recently. The galloping rate at which "human rights" commissions will hear cases of people claiming to have been offended by something they read leaves me with little choice. As a writer, I must subject myself to that risk, but cannot ethically subject others - not until or unless these commissions are relieved of most of their current responsibilities - including all responsibility for policing Internet content.

3. For information, rely on the blogosphere, especially the links through Free Mark Steyn . Legacy media have been surprisingly slow to catch on, given how much they are at risk. My friend Parliamentary journalist Deborah Gyapong wrote on Monday,

For those who are not ignorant of what's going on, I wonder whether there is a weird Stockholm syndrome at work. Rather than see they are being held hostage by their fear of radical Islam, (and tiptoeing so as not to offend or blaspheme so foreign correspondents won't get kidnapped or worse) they have displaced their fear and loathing onto the people who write about it. They are like the bank robbery hostages or hijacked plane passengers who get pissed off at police for shooting their captors. They have identified with their captors, even formed a bond with them, for their own psychological survival. If the captors see that I like them, they will like me and I will come out of this okay they tell themselves.

Most of it, though, is massive ignorance I'm afraid. I don't think most journalists can even conceive that we have such a shadowy, parallel "justice system" that can hand out severe penalties without any of the normal protections in a criminal or even civil law court.

I replied,

Deborah, two things:

1. It IS the Stockholm syndrome (SS). Not a weird form but the real thing. SS always looks weird up close. Think of the police officer who dodges bullets to rescue a hostage, only to have her denounce him as a fascist and promptly shack up with the sociopath hostage taker on his trailer weekends, hanging on to every bit of bullshirt that comes out of his mouth like it was the gospel reading (which, for her, it is). Think of that when we hear legacy media types making oblique excuses for FGM, honour killings, forced marriage, and the like.

Not everyone gets SS, and it is significant that the syndrome was first identified in Sweden.

The people who are especially susceptible to SS start out with fixed and very convenient ideas about who the villains are and who the victims are.

They “know” things, where the rest of us would withhold judgement before doing some research. As the threat advances, they erect ever more barriers to discovering a reality they are entirely powerless to face. Capitulation feels so good because it preserves their worldview (at the expense of their sanity and well-being).

2. Not every journalist needs or wants freedom of the press. That is the single most dangerous misconception out there. Many of our colleagues would be very happy indeed with a situation that prevented them from feeling badly about not taking REAL risks with their coverage because the government doesn’t allow it - “to protect minorities” and all that. No one will be more unctuous in advancing such explanations than the person for whom they are a cover for sloth and cowardice.

Those interested in David Warren's entertaining views on Darwinism (he is a serial offender against the Received Dogma whose skepticism is matched only by his good sense and good humour, go here. (Note: This is a search string on the Post-Darwinist, so the first story you see will necessarily be this one. Scroll down to the next one for the "David Warren vs. received witlessdom" stories.)

Another Toronto journalist takes swat at Darwinists (or Darwinoids)

One of the most interesting journalists in Toronto is a friend of mine, David Warren, who - as if he did not have enough troubles - has gotten sick of bloviating Darwinists and decided to take them on. At least I am not alone. Far from it.

Writing to friends, Warren notes, "I have been remiss. I have allowed several months to do by without taking another kick at the Darwinoids. I endeavour to correct this oversight in my column for Sunday," whereupon he directs us to his recent column for The Spectator:

I get such apoplectic letters, whenever I write about "evolutionism," that I really can't resist writing about it again. This is not, of course, because I have any desire to tease such correspondents. Perish the thought. Rather, when a writer finds he has hit such a nerve, he can also know that he is approaching a great truth.

In this case, we must ask ourselves why so many people get so excited about an area of science that should not concern them. For most of these correspondents know precious little science, and haven't the stamina to engage in detailed argument. They are simply shocked and appalled that anyone would dream of challenging what they believe to be the consensus of "qualified experts," whom they assume are a closed camp of hard-bitten materialists, with no time for religious or poetical flights.

The answer to this question is clear enough. People without a stake in a controversy pay little or no attention to it. They will hardly be vexed by assertions of one party or another, when the result of the controversy cannot touch their lives. It is rather when a person does have a stake, that he begins to care.

It follows that my most apoplectic correspondents have a stake in evolutionary controversies. They imagine themselves to have an impersonal interest in defending science against "religious superstition," and the dangers to society that the latter might present. They in fact have strong and uncompromising religious beliefs of their own, which they are loath to have questioned.

Much of the "star chamber" atmosphere, that has accompanied the public invigilation of microbiologists such as Michael J. Behe, and other very qualified scientists working on questions of design in organisms and natural systems, can only be explained in this way. The establishment wants such research to be stopped, because it challenges the received religious order, of atheist materialism. Any attempt, or suspected attempt, to acknowledge God in scientific proceedings, must be exposed and punished to the limit of the law; or by other ruthless means where the law does not suffice.

Not to be missed.

An author friend asked Warren recently,

Suppose Lemaitre had offered his Big Bang idea in our current intellectual climate, rather than in 1931. Would he be denounced as a crypto-creationist, trying to dress up the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo in scientific garb? After all, a universe that has always existed does not need a God to create it; that is why the eternality of the world has been a cardinal tenet of those who do not need the hypothesis of God. Once the eternality of the world is no longer accepted, then we are right back to Leibniz' question, "Why is there something rather than nothing," and this question has dangerous theological implications.

and he replied,

For sure, Lemaître would have died an ignominious intellectual death in our time. But then, he never tried to call attention to himself, & even now, everyone has heard about Einstein & Hubble, & no one about the man who went "behind & beyond" them.

When I asked Warren if he realized that he would be vilified, as neurosurgeon Mike Egnor has been vilified, he merely replied,

Well, as someone says on your blog (maybe it was you), the way the news on ID gets out, is by all these Darwinoid idiots drawing attention to it. Pravda used to make the same mistake. Nobody realized there'd been a riot in Gorki, until Pravda denied anything had happened.

Yes, that was me, David. I said that the Darwinists have done far more to promote the intelligent design guys' theories than the evil Discos could ever have done. In fact, I remember listening to a Toronto Darwinist announcing to a media person that the Discovery Institute was very well funded. When I pointed out to him that Discovery's Center for Science and Culture (the ID think tank) is actually quite small - and that it relies largely on converting the negative energy generated by people like himself into positive energy - it was obvious that he didn't believe me.

How about that! There he was, actually demonstrating the phenomenon, and he still did not believe me. David, I am afraid there's no help for people like that.

Oh, and, Warren also writes,

Meanwhile, entirely unrelated, my time is taken up answering in detail the most ridiculous allegations against me, against Prof Michael Behe, & against God, by correspondents to the Tottawa Zit [Ottawa Citizen].

Let me give you JUST one example of the sort of sh*t I'm dealing with.

There was a show trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, two years ago, in which a local school board was prosecuted by the Darwinoids for having permitted the teaching of "Intelligent Design." This was publicized by the gliberal media as, "Another Scopes trial in America!" The defence called Michael Behe, so the plaintiffs brought very high-powered attorneys, to lure him into traps. One of them, a certain Eric Rothschild, made tendentious points on the definition of "science." Prof Behe wouldn't play, & noted only, & rather dryly, that if the official definition of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were used, almost every major advance in modern science would have to be ruled illegal. Rothschild then paraphrased Behe's position as, "So you believe astrology is valid science." Needless to say, Behe does not.

This was reported, in e.g. the New Scientist, as, "Behe forced to admit that astrology is valid science according to his definition."

And now, in letter after letter to the Zit, the Darwinoids have simplified this to, "Behe also believes in astrology."

Note: If you are looking for the story about the major film about the ID guys, starring Ben Stein, go here.

Top pundits: How can they consistently score higher than chance at being wrong?

They could start by striving to be the Big Expert everyone wants to quote in their paper or book for their show- and then believing their own hype.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist David Warren comments on the value (?) of punditry in predicting outcomes in the recent American election:

A piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend went right to the point, of pundits and their predictions. Jonah Lehrer cited a study done by a California psychologist, over a quarter century, of 284 pundits predicting political and economic trends. He did not concern himself with little things, only with big and simple ones, where the writer could be right or wrong, unambiguously -- so that results could be quantified. It came down to scoring 82,361 yes/no propositions.

As a pundit myself, let me claim I could have guessed the result. When making predictions, pundits scored significantly below random. That is to say, they would have done much better had they just flipped a coin, in each case, instead of trying to reason their way to an answer.

The good news is, anyone who took the consensus of the pundits, and assumed the exact opposite of their prediction in each and every case, would have scored significantly better than a random result.

For more, go here.

Sharon Begley for Newsweek suggests that if we can't shut pundits up, we can at least identify factors that are strongly correlated with being wrong:

At first, Tetlock's ongoing study of 82,361 predictions by 284 pundits (most but not all of them American) came up empty. He initially looked at whether accuracy was related to having a Ph.D., being an economist or political scientist rather than a blowhard journalist, having policy experience or access to classified information, or being a realist or neocon, liberal or conservative. The answers were no on all counts. The best predictor, in a backward sort of way, was fame: the more feted by the media, the worse a pundit's accuracy. And therein lay Tetlock's first clue. The media's preferred pundits are forceful, confident and decisive, not tentative and balanced.

[ ... ]

The media, of course, eat this up. Bold, decisive assertions make better sound bites; bombast, swagger and certainty make for better TV. As a result, the marketplace of ideas does not punish poor punditry. Few of us even remember who got what wrong. We are instead impressed by credentials, affiliation, fame and even looks—traits that have no bearing on a pundit's accuracy.

It's a good thing that the legacy media that inflate these balloons are on the way out.

It is all just so Darwin, isn't it? Much certainty, little evidence. Who would have guessed that predicting the future and postdicting the past could be practically indistinguishable?

Are pundits beating the odds - by scoring own goals - a legitimate argument for chance creation of information? No, because there is too little chance involved.

Warren is no fan of Darwin, and here are some of his articles on why not:

Coffee!! Oh, so now Darwinism explains why you think SHE'S beautiful? Where's my rolling pin?

Evolutionary psychology: David Warren on beautiful women
Darwinism and popular culture: Real biology vs. Darwinism

Human evolution: More on the Ida? I dunno ... files

Oppose Darwinism as scientific fraud? Well then, no birthday cake for YOU, David!

David Warren on how animals differ from machines, and other topics, including bizarre fur seal sex

The bizarre sex part got you reading, didn't it? Yes, well, buried in this pot pourri is a link to a truly bizarre story from the wild. But first, David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen often finds himself in discussions with Darwinists - people who believe that natural selection is an awesome creative force rather than a means of weeding out losers. He sometimes shares with me his correspondence with them.

On your points a. & b., I am trying to communicate a conceptual problem that you share with all Darwinoids, though not with all Darwinian evolutionists. It is a mistake that e.g. Aristotle didn't make, & it appears, no one made until modern times. It is the belief that animals are essentially inanimate.

Let me try to explain this again. Animals move. Their "source" of movement is not external to themselves, in the way the source of a mountain's movement is external to itself. They are not "laws of nature" but rather, laws unto themselves. They are, like us insofar as we are animals, under severe constraints from the laws of nature. In that sense alone they "obey" the laws of nature, which includes becoming extinct when they fly in nature's face.

If you want to say that they were, as it were, "created by natural laws," then you are going to have to create a few new natural laws such as "the will to life of all creatures." This talks its way around the problem, but leaves you with a law that cannot be tested.

No forces now known to physics can explain such behaviour as the actual independent "movement" of animals (in the broadest sense of "movement," including the growth & wiring & re-wiring of their bodies & brains).

That is just a big "given" in Darwinism, a fundamental problem that cannot be overcome.

>>Kelley makes the point that an intelligent engineer would have done a better job (if his objective were to prepare humans for the 21st Century). <<

This is the old Marxist & Stalinist argument, that an "intelligent engineer" could "easily" outdo nature. It leads to where Marxism & Stalinism led. (Nature won.)

"Intelligent engineers" design robots that can't even climb stairs reliably.

He adds, "We try to educate them. We really do." He also quotes Etienne Gilson (in, From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again): "We say that primitives take a watch for an animal, but only the genius of Descartes has been able to take animals for watches."

While we are here, Warren notes, in sex news from the Beeb, the odd case of a fur seal trying to mate with an adult king penguin noting (both parties male), adding "This has got everything: sexual selection, randomness, gradualism, gay activism." Perhaps the seal needs waterproof contact lenses. Also, male jumping spiders reflect ultraviolet B rays from their body to apprise females that they are available. Humans cannot see UVB and apparently scientists had assumed that animals couldn't either. It's unclear as yet just how the do see it. But where there is a will ...

Oh, and this too: Under the heading "Trying to explain intelligent design to a New Yorker", he writes,

Another way to explain this. I'm sure you have heard of baseball. This is a game with laws. The laws themselves have evolved somewhat, from cricket or whatever, whereas, so far as we can see, natural laws do not evolve but remain absolutely fixed. So in that sense it is a poor analogy. You will have to pretend that the laws of baseball, unlike the laws of nature, were fixed & immutable from the beginning of baseball in the first nanosecond after the Big Baseball Bang.

What you are saying is that "the laws of baseball" are responsible for creating Wee Willie Keeler, Roger Peckinpaugh, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson, ... & all the other famous New York Yankees.

Laws do not create things. They only regulate.

Only socialists believe that regulations can create anything.

You would be right in guessing that Warren is not a socialist.

While we are here, his comments on the uproar around the Expelled film linking German Darwinism and the death camps single out John Derbyshire, who - he thinks - is overreacting on the subject:

I am no great fan of Ben Stein, & would begin by clarifying, that science & murder are not natural bedfellows. More precisely, SCIENTISM & murder go together well, & scientism in the service of murderous regimes was a commonplace of the 20th century.

But science, in the sense of free empirical inquiry, is just a big open season. It offers no conclusive view of anything; by definition it cannot; it is just a vast, constantly updated manual on how things work.

I agree that Darwin would have wished nothing to do with Hitler. In his own mind, "survival of the fittest" was an observation, not an ideological prescription.

On the point of fact, the equally excitable Derbyshire probably doesn't realize that what Stein is saying is technically true. Hitler's death camps were run by people who presented themselves as scientists, acting upon racial "theories," & they often had scientific or medical credentials, some of them from quite respectable institutions. And Stein's immediate ancestors were indeed among their victims. So I quite understand Stein's excitability on the issue.

David Warren's further correspondence with the Darwin fans

I don't know what I would do without my regular fix of Toronto journalist David Warren, who - having made clear that he thinks Darwinism a crock - is constantly hearing from anxious Darwin fans, who don't know what they'll do if it isn't true.

If life cannot be produced accidentally by jiggling chemicals in a test tube, ... apparently life makes no sense to them - or something like that anyway.

Warren continues to offer boilerplate responses (one must live, after all). Indeed, he appears to know some of the same Darwoids as I hear from, to judge from their inimitable prose style:

"Atrociously bad, pig-ignorant garbage." ... "Mixture of gall & negligence." ... "Sheer brazen quality of this ignorance is a wonder to behold."

This is what's said ABOUT the likes of me, third-personally, by the more articulate correspondents advising my editors to sack me. The letters to me personally are, however, much ruder. As usual, among the charges, I am a "faggot," or at least a "closet fag."

[ ... ]

Many, many, of my apoplectic correspondents refer me to websites on "The God Delusion," & other standard sources for atheist proselytizing. Several correspondents refer to a website where Michael Behe's "claims" are "refuted" in a similar manner to the above (i.e. with a lot of more-or-less clinical abusive language).

And apparently, many of these ill-tempered illiterates have taken to styling themselves "the New Enlightenment."


Warren also muses on the "survival instinct":

This is where it becomes interesting: at the very point where post-modern Darwinist "evolutionary biology" throws up its hands (or alternatively, declares victory, & then cuts & runs).

I am hardly saying the instincts, including the survival instincts (really they are complex & plural), don't exist; I am only pointing out that they are non-material. Which is not to say that their operation does not correspond to particular, detectable parts of the brain -- i.e. the "amygdala," in the higher vertebrates: the emotion centres. Only that you won't find them there. It is the part of the brain that is working when survival & other emotional issues are at stake, but the instinct to live & not to die is in itself an arbitrary, "irrational" thing (i.e. super-rational; or if you prefer, the premise that precedes the logical proposition). It has to be "posited" in some sense. Once it is posited, we can begin to make some sense of the machinery. Until it is posited, the machinery makes no sense.

Already we are "lost in space," or rather, entering the territory of "Intelligent Design."

I said the survival instincts are complex & plural. Think I mentioned before watching a rabbit, once, simply give up the struggle against a Doberman, when the rabbit was out of breath, & out of cover. That is a common trait among many animals at all levels of the food chain (& it is further interesting that, from that point, animals often seem to experience neither panic nor pain). If you think about it carefully, you will see that it is behaviour that cannot possibly be explained in any conceivable Darwinist way. It can in no possible way advance the cause of rabbit survival.

But so are so many other things, inexplicable on strictly Darwinist assumptions. The survival instinct works both on the individual, as individual, & on the individual on behalf of his tribe or species or even allied species. Survival itself would be impossible without the most complex instinctual arrangements -- which are also minutely inter-dependent. All the convincing progress that has been made (by Tinbergen, contemporaries & successors) in understanding instinctive behaviour in animals has been possible only because various abstract, arbitrary, "immaterial" requirements have been assumed from the point of departure.

What I am saying is that the instinctive behaviour of animals -- conscious, semi-conscious, & entirely unconscious -- provide a parallel universe to the purely material, organic one, for the purpose of demonstrating the impossibility of development by trial & error. Not only does a machine not work when it is missing parts, or missing fuel, or has external obstacles in its way, &c; it also doesn't work when it is not driven.

Returning to the question of origins, the scandal is that the most primitive unicellular organisms discoverable on this planet are already monstrously complex, & already require genomic instructions that could fill telephone directories. Under some circumstances I'm willing to be a putz, & say, "yes, that's the product of trial & error, & it just happened to work out nicely," but this is too much for me. I am simply not capable of credulity on that scale.

But even supposing we started the day with just one happy-accident instruction, & built from there (this is where the 15 billion times 15 billion times 15 billion years for trial & error will come in really handy), I don't get why that first organism wanted to survive & reproduce? It has no way of knowing that the odds against it even existing are infinity to one. Why doesn't it just wink, & call it a day?

Even the ancient Greeks had trouble grasping why a man would want to live, given that life is full of pain. There is nothing self-evident about the survival instinct.

But some other day we may raise the stakes further by climbing from organism & instinct, to consciousness, & beyond.

Canadian columnist David Warren takes on a Darwinist, on the subject of whales

I love to present the views of Canadian columnist David Warren, a Catholic, like me, and a relentless critic of Darwinist nonsense - and never more timely, it seems. Here he is talking about the bowhead whale:

And then there's the bowhead whales. Imagine something that weighs more than a hundred tonnes, is seventy feet long, & one-third head. According to the engineers, they can crack through six feet of ice by head-ramming alone (never witnessed). But as I was discussing with a certain male offspring: check out their powerful blowholes. Maybe they could do better than six feet of ice, by blowing while butting at surprising angles, on the principle of the icebreaker's bow thruster; for the blowholes are V'd back on this animal, just as if designed for that very purpose. Plus, shaping the shock wave on their approach, at speed. They can make a mighty, deep noise with their vocalizations, too: so why not add some accoustic trauma for the poor defenceless ice. I don't think it has a chance with them.

Of course, they are tiny compared with one of Uncle Sam's submarines. But they can go where no sub has gone, do what no sub has done.

So how did it evolve? That's a slam-dunk for a Darwinist, you had these little whales needing to breathe & the bigger ones had a survival advantage, & the bigger butt-heads an advantage over the relative pin-heads. They had blow-holes anyway, but confer an advantage to the slightly-angled. And so on. Complete absence of evidence for this ancestry, but hey, the argument will make the clever freshmen STFU, especially when sutured together with jargon.

As the lad says (rude language warning), "That's the great thing about being a Darwinoid. You can pull pure hypotheticals right out of your ass, & then use them as if they were facts. You needn't trouble yourself with a soupçon of evidence. And if you can't fart out the hypotheticals on the spot, you just tell the freshman it is a young science, another Darwinoid will fart that out for you tomorrow."

And he adds,

The whales & seals of the arctic are generally very good at judging the thickness of ice from submarine lighting conditions & in some whale cases just possibly by echolocation effects. Like every other creature in nature they know what they are about in their own environment. This is because they are intelligently designed to survive in it. A blundering animal, who looks for a breathing hole by trial & error, in anything but the most extreme circumstances, would soon be extinct. Trust God on this: it is, after all, your national motto.

The bowhead blowhole is of a radically different design & angle from other whale blowholes. Again, trust God: there will be a reason for it. There is probably a reason (other than purely aesthetic) for the narwhal's tusk, but on that, at the moment, we must not only trust God but ask Him for a hint.

Our own hypotheses on bowheads, &c, are based on observed & testable features of the living animal, considered explicitly from a design point-of-view. This yields rich results, without fail: alike for us & for the Darwinoids, when they are examining the evidence "unofficially."

By comparison, the official hypotheses of the Darwinoids are based on zilch that can be observed or tested. Naturally, that makes our flatus more poignant than theirs, & explains why they need to remove us from the polite environment of the classroom, where children must be indoctrinated in the Darwinian form of "dialectical materialism" without such powerful distractions.

As we observed of the former Soviet Union, the Ideology of the State must be given lip-service in all textbooks & other official publications. Hence the flowery praise for Darwin in the prefaces of all these texts, which could as relevantly be replaced with praise for Marx or Lenin as the "pioneer of settled science." But unofficially, the Soviets survived as long as they did only by ignoring Marx, & doing whatever was thought necessary for the moment, when presented with actual empirical problems. I mean this analogy strictly.

Can't find by quick Google-search, but one of the things I remember from the past was the giant cut-out profiles of great socialist heroes in Marxist tank parades. Occasionally good old Charlie Darwin would be up there in the row with Karlo Marx, Freddie Engels & the rest. This is guilt by association of course. But it often works in the civil courts, so I'll toss it on the Darwinian pyre for kindling.

earnest Darwinists (or Darwinoids, as Warren prefers to call them, because they certainly do not represent the original idea, only a stale subsequent rant, heard way, way too often) have tried to shut Warren down. But if anyone ever did, it would probably be a partisan of some political correctness other than Darwinism - which is simply not as hot a topic here in Canada as it is in the United States.

Darwinism just isn’t as controversial here in Canada as in the United States - not principally because it is widely accepted but rather because the electorate is not divided along party lines, as it is in the United States - so few politicians could benefit from making it an issue.


Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Materialist myths: David Warren on anti-Christian rubbish taught in science classes

What I find really helpful about the Ottawa Citizen's David Warren is the historical context he kindly provides. We are so often a-swamp in materialist nonsense. For example, the idea that the culture of Christian Europe promoted the idea that the Earth is flat. I've blogged on this before, here, here, and here, (and this last is David again).

Still, David says it so much better:

One of the constants in the long clash between Scientism & Christianity has been the repetition & elaboration by the Scienticists of quite incredible myths & lies, that are still used in our public schools, media, &c, to mock & slander Christians & Christianity. I know about the potency of these myths & lies, for I myself was taught many of them, in school, saw them endlessly repeated in the press, heard them repeated by all liberal adults, & actually believed several of them until I came to riper years, & began to realize that public atheism requires the defence of a "bodyguard of lies." (And you will find them all repeated uncritically in Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, & all the current bestselling atheist tracts.)

Many of the specific lies descend from old Protestant broadsides against Catholics -- for instance, the lie that the mediaeval scholastics debated how many angels on the head of a pin, lurid & untruthful accounts of proceedings of the Spanish Inquisition, various folk myths about what Catholics do in Mass, the misrepresentation of the trial of Galileo, &c. All except this last were products of virulent anti-Catholic pamphleteering, in the 17th century. (The Galileo myth was invented later, for in the 17th-C the Protestants themselves were opposing the heliocentric theory, & often trying to suppress it as a popish "heresy" -- on grounds that the people propagating it were all Catholics & often monks & were well-received in the Vatican.)

But while Scientism has taken aboard all the old Protestant smears, & turned them into smears against Christians in general, it has also been industriously manufacturing its own myths, lies, & vitriolic sneers, from the philosophes of the Enlightenment, forward. (The Darwinists of the 19th century were even more inventive, in their determination to associate Christian belief with idiocy.)

Among the most universally taught & least subtle, lies taught to this day, is that Christians throughout the Middle Ages believed the world was flat; & that the Church taught this, & defended it as religious doctrine against Copernicus, Kepler, & Galileo. Yet the Church never taught the earth was flat, nor did any educated person, Christian or otherwise, ever believe it.

Indeed, the old Ptolemaic system -- universally accepted by intelligent Christians, Heretics, Atheists, Jews, Muslims, & even Hindus until the age of Copernicus -- was very clear on the fact that the earth was a sphere.

The American scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote an excellent history of the foundation & propagation of the "flat earth myth" in the 19th century, of which I've just become aware. (His earlier series of books on the historical development of doctrine & beliefs about the monotheist personification of the Devil may be familiar to some of you.) Russell is pedestrian in the best sense: a very thorough scholar who walks patiently through a broad range of evidence, insists on consulting original sources, & writes very clearly.

Here, anyway, is his own summary of his findings in his book, Inventing the Flat Earth (1991).

David Warren on Darwin as a member of a new priesthood ...

Here's one of Toronto journalist David Warren's observations on Darwin, Darwinism, and its place in the philosophy of science, from a note sent to friends:

It is a wonderful thought: that "science" has been, unconsciously & semi-consciously, performing gigantic null-hypothesis experiments for the purpose of disproving the Christian faith -- or, "the claims of the Catholic Church," if we want to get personal about it. This observation is true as stated. And it carries within itself an intimation of the triumph of Christianity over "The Enlightenment" -- perhaps the most impressive adversary (including Islam) that Christianity has yet faced.

The theme ties in with something I've [said] about Darwin (specifically, I don't mean "Darwinism" here), somewhere. That you read early & middle Darwin & cannot help noticing that he WANTS to find evidence in nature that will not merely challenge, but destroy Christian claims. And the unwarranted philosophical assumptions carried throughout his Origin of Species & Descent of Man confirm that he thinks he has found it.

This does not make Darwin special, but rather typical of a broad class, or faction, of scientists, from the earliest Cartesian & Baconian era to our own. Among the physicists & cosmologists, for instance, there is the constant effort -- leading to the circular "string theories" of today -- to prove the existence of a material infinity. The desire behind this is to eliminate God: to systematically remove any dark corner where God might be "hiding." And practically, to provide infinite space & time for some sort of random evolutionary process to account for all the observed peculiarities of our (now demonstrably finite) universe.

These are not, for the most part, raging atheists. The ones I got to know in e.g. the particle physics community in the 1980s were the exact equivalent in current society of what I've called "Victorian parlour atheists." They are, as it were, Fabians, not Revolutionary Communists. They think of themselves less as members of the Atheist Party, putting their lives on the line at the religious battlefront, than as an atheist "priesthood" or "clerisy," sneering at the superstitions of the common people. Just as Christians -- they suppose -- once sneered at primitive Pagans. Progress for them is progress towards a scientific materialism that they, exclusively, will be able to interpret to the masses.

And many, not of this faction, are deluded, often wan & nominal Christians who simply do not grasp that if e.g. Darwin's premises are true (N.B. not Darwin's evolutionary theory, but Darwin's philosophical premises), Christianity cannot be true; or assume that every unbridgeable chasm will be bridged later. This may even be the majority: for I have found in all countries where I've stayed that people cope very easily with flagrant contradictions in their lives. Because at some level they do not cope at all.

This isn't linked anywhere but here's the link to Warren's columns.

Journalist David Warren On today's "opinionator" hacks and on Darwinism

I was at a get-together of downtown Christian hacks, at which our guest speaker, Ottawa Citizen columnist, David Warren, who is not a Darwin fan, talked about how media had changed. He later wrote about it in a column, and I quote a key sample:

To my colleagues who could not be present, let me add the purport of a talk I gave, to a group of fellow-journalists in Toronto, on returning from the bush, Monday night.

In a long, rambling, extemporaneous memoir, I emphasized the traditional hack virtues of smoking and drinking and general loucheness against the prim political correctness of the current media mainstream. The beauty of the old-time hacks, I averred, was that they did not seek fame, only adventure, in contact with life. They could be as anonymous as mediaeval artists. They did not consider themselves to be intellectuals, and so their heads were free of stinking pride. Yet they had pride in craft, which the current ones seldom have. All our little Woodwards and Bernsteins today want fame, instead. And they want it smoke-free and soberly, they are professional fame-seekers.

That's been my experience too. One problem in encouraging a reasonable discussion of Darwinism or ID is that one is not dealing with people who just want a story that runs over the mast; one is dealing with third-rate pundits and opinionators. Facts matter so much less and ideology so much more now. I believe that it really does not matter to the opinionators that Darwinism is poorly supported by evidence at many points and absurd when applied to humans - as long as it serves ideological ends they support.

The problem is not that they have an opinion or a strong opinion or one I would dispute. The problem is the third-rateness of the whole thing. All third-raters have this in common: They parrot the views of an establishment (for example, the current Darwinist science establishment) with an air of certainty and profundity, and they do NOT want to know if those views might be mistaken, discreditable, or held for reasons unrelated to the evidence base. They lack the inner resources to deal with the consequences that might follow from the possibility that the true authorities in their own lives might be mistaken or misguided. Other people's authorities may be misguided or mistaken, but never theirs.

Some Warrenisms on Darwinism:

How and why it will die:

... It will gradually dissolve from a thousand little cuts from Occam's Razor. For the "God" of evolutionary biology -- incremental change by natural selection -- is not sufficiently inspiring to sustain the immense priesthood that has collected around it.

Why it fails to inspire:

What distinguishes Darwinism, in the end, is the nasty figurative edge to it, the popular use of it to communicate "nature red in tooth and claw". It became associated very early with Victorian atheism, and does the missionary work of the old Bloomsbury set that lost its Christian faith in the mid-19th century. It is an ideology that continues to reach beyond the strict realm of biology, into areas of philosophy and theology with which it has nothing to do. It sells a cosmos that is blind, random, purposeless.

It is a religion, sez I; a religion with prophets like Thomas Henry Huxley, and Herbert Spencer, and Richard Dawkins today. (And I'm not seeking tenure in any university, so you can't get me for uttering my heresies against it.)

Why Warren does not support Dover-style disclaimers against Darwinism, and other such strategies:

No law that compels a teacher to declare what he doesn't himself believe, can possibly be just. We need the same law to defend people who say "evolution is a crock".

And from his Idler column in Crisis, on what happened when he - speaking as someone who thinks creationism is "a crock," questioned Darwinism on the evidence,

You should have seen my mail. Not even for my “obnoxiously conservative” political views did I ever get so much abuse. And almost all either declaring or implying that I was selling the “young earth theory.” And from people unmistakably scandalized and outraged that I could doubt “modern evolutionary theory.”
Conclusion: Evolution has grown into a rival religion with which not only Christians and other religious, but even agnostics must now contend. For the Inquisitors in Spain were never so touchy as Evolution’s guardians and high priests.

Yes but hold on, Warren. The Inquisitors only had to defend the Church's position on theological controversies. Darwinists have to defend absurdities like "evolutionary psychology." Personally, I would rather be defending flying saucers. At least people couldn't know for sure from their own observations of human nature that flying saucers do not exist.

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 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 ?

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

O’Leary’s comments on Francis Beckwith, a Dembski associate, being denied tenure at Baylor.

Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Blog policy note:Comments are permitted on this blog, but they are moderated. Fully anonymous posts and URLs posted without comment are rarely accepted. To Mr. Anonymous: I'm not psychic, so if you won't tell me who you are, I can't guess and don't care. To Mr. Nude World (URL): If you can't be bothered telling site visitors why they should go on to your fave site next, why should I post your comment? They're all busy people, like you. To Mr. Rudeby International and Mr. Pottymouth: I also have a tendency to delete comments that are merely offensive. Go be offensive to someone who can smack you a good one upside the head. That may provide you with a needed incentive to stop and think about what you are trying to accomplish. To Mr. Righteous but Wrong: I don't publish comments that contain known or probable factual errors. There's already enough widely repeated misinformation out there, and if you don't have the time to do your homework, I don't either. To those who write to announce that at death I will either 1) disintegrate into nothingness or 2) go to Hell by a fast post, please pester someone else. I am a Catholic in communion with the Church and haven't the time for either village atheism or aimless Jesus-hollering.

David Warren: "Darwinism blocks our view of the past, as well as the present and future"

My friend Toronto-based journalist David Warren on why teachng Darwinism alone in schools is a bad idea:

On that term "evolutionary biology" -- it is important, for more than antiquarian reasons, to understand that evolutionary biology has roots deeper than Darwin, going down all the way to the Greeks. "Darwinism" blocks our view of the past, as well as the present & future. And I say, more than antiquarian, for again & again we find some insight in an older source that
has been overlooked & is ripe for reappraisal.

On my opposition to teaching "Darwinism" (as opposed to strictly empirical evolutionary biology) in schools - & may I add, on my insistence that history of science be taught broadly & openly, & not narrowly & ideologically -- let me add, that it is no small thing. Children have no
equipment to test the claims of their teachers until they have acquired the equipment, & few are genuinely sceptical by disposition. (I myself was sceptical from a very early age, & thus the bane of smooth-talking gliberal teachers, but I was also obviously some kind of freak.)

You cripple a child's potential for artistic, philosophical, & spiritual growth, by ramming a desiccated, politically-correct materialism down his throat from an early age. It is an attack on his very sense of wonder, & thus on his capacity for science, too. This is a seriously wrong thing to
do.

David Warren defends Mike Behe, and offers boilerplate responses to Darwinists

David Warren offers the "boilerplate" replies he must provide (to conserve time for useful activities) to the Darwinists who write him in defense of their idol. Here I print here a few:

- On "intelligent design," Behe & company have been content to demonstrate that evolution through random mutation & natural selection can't work, & have averred that they specifically do not account for independently-operating biological machinery from the molecular level up that is both incredibly complex & incredibly precise. It does not follow that they are simple "creationists." For once again the critics construe a negative as a positive. Behe would be no more content to say "God intervened miraculously" at every step of evolutionary transformation than Richard Dawkins would be. He is saying that since complex precise systems require design, we must look for mechanisms of design, instead of pretending that "design is unnecessary."

- On Behe personally, I am outraged by the constant slandering & misrepresentation of a good, honest, intelligent man who is doing his best to pursue the truth according to his lights. In his case & several others I have had a good look at how the Darwin party pursues heretics. Behe is not a smooth political operator, but he is up against some real pros.

- I myself happen to disagree with Behe, & more with some other ID advocates, on various little points, & I think they are foolish sometimes to promote ID as if it were an alternative "general theory," when it is instead an attempt to get around an unworkable general theory: i.e. to remove untrue theoretical trash from the observable scientific landscape. But that doesn't
matter: for what I am defending is their freedom to pursue their studies without heresy trials.

- On my "tone" generally, I doubt it has changed. The difference is that you were earlier reading things you agreed with, then later reading things you did not agree with. But be assured, people who disagree with me on other topics get just as vexed. My views on Darwinism have been fairly consistent in print & elsewhere over the last thirty-something years, going back to when I was myself an atheist; & so, my vexing of Darwinist true believers is not something new. (Take that in: I myself, like many other free-thinking types, first realized that random mutation & natural selection could not explain the origin of a single species, long before I ever "accepted Christ as my personal Saviour." You may say that I am a religious nutjob, but you cannot say that my views on evolution are the product of my Catholic Christian faith.)

And if you think this is fun, you might also try O'Leary vs. the Darwinbots.

University of Toronto intelligent design course wrap-up

A while back, there was a minor flap about the course I was teaching in why there is an intelligent design controversy, which wrapped up Tuesday evening (November 27, 2007) with a most interesting presentation by journalist and columnist David Warren, who writes twice a week for the Ottawa Citizen.

The things that I found most significant about the course:

- the calibre of the students. Beforehand, I really worried that students would grouse about hard topics. But they were wonderful! Their facial expressions implied that they were prepared to tackle serious propositions about origin of the universe, of life, of information, etc. What a joy!

My unrealized fears: Six week sentence in Hell - arguing with someone who expects guest lecturers at the peak of their professional careers to explain stuff he should have learned in Grade Six science or demonstrate why it is not true that green alien worms control our lives.

- the calibre of the guest lecturers. I came away with a renewed respect for people like Robb Mann, Don Wallar, Kirk Durston, and David Warren, who helped students understand the depth and magnitude of the things we understand, the things we only partially understand, and the things we do not yet understand about our universe. A clear warning against grasping at too easy solutions to our puzzling universe.

Anyone can shout: Darwin explains it! Fundamentalism explains it! I’m glad that I did not have to deal with fanatics while acting as the course’s lead instructor. Fanatics have their salons where, one would hope, they can splinter their tea tables in peace, and far, far from 100 Carr Hall.

Also, one interesting item recurred now and again - and I was glad because I learned a lot from it:

Some students doubted that we can conceive of design without a designer. They said, “Design means a designer and we all know that the designer is really the God of the Bible!”

Well, do we all know that? And if so, how do we all know that?

One student, who was aware of Eastern (vs. Western) views on these subjects smiled as the objection was raised, and I thought I knew why. But I am not sure I gave a good account of the matter at the time, so here I offer a more carefully considered account, admitting that it is difficult for some Westerners:

Westerners are raised in a culture where, generally speaking, if they have any religious convictions, the Bible is a primary source. The Bible introduces us to God as an actor in the stories in the Bible.

For what I am about to say now, I ask readers to set aside the question of whether the revelation of the Bible is true or false. Focus simply on seeing it as an interpretation of design in the universe.

If you had never heard of the Bible, how might you account for design in the universe? Here are two options:

- there is a “way” - the way things must be in order to work. Not a personal deity, but underlying laws Many such laws may remain to be discovered. Some may be incomprehensible to us.

- we are all - usually unconsciously - part of a cosmic mind that conceived this world and its design. The world itself is an illusion, but its design is real, and we must be in the right relation to it in order to be reunited with the cosmic mind.

I do not raise these ideas here to argue for or against them but to establish that design in the universe can easily be identified without a Designer. Hundreds of millions of people have lived and died assuming that that is so.

It will be interesting to see whether the course runs again in the spring.

Ottawa Citizen's David Warren vs. the Darwinoids

Here David Warren sends up the attempt - most recently fronted in the New York Times to expunge the word "Darwinism" from our vocabulary, so that evolution can mean whatever anyone anywhere wants it to mean, and therefore no nonsense can ever be confuted:

Olivia Judson, the house cheerleader for Darwinian evolution, was trying to retire the word “Darwinist.” Her typically breathless argument was that we know so much more about evolutionary processes today, than could be known in the age of Darwin, that the term has become useless.

Genes, for instance. Darwin knew nothing whatever about the genetic processes later discovered by the Polish Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel -- observations that would have wiped Darwinism clean out of biology were there not something else in Darwinism that people wanted to preserve.

Indeed, our “modern evolutionary synthesis” consists, in a candid view, of 100 parts of Mendel to zero parts of Darwin, and the whole idea of The Origin of Species -- that new species could emerge from the gradual accumulation of small random mutations “selected” by an impersonal nature for their survival value alone -- remains to this day utterly undemonstrable. It moreover flies in the face of the observed evidence, which is for dramatic, sudden, yet extremely complex changes.

“Darwinism” survives not as a science, but as an ideal: to eliminate God from any consideration of how nature works. It is intrinsically no more nor less rational than using God as the sole explanation for every event in view. The words, “Darwinism,” “Darwinian,” or as I prefer, “Darwinoid,” correctly describe those who continue loyal to this ideal, in the face of everything we now know about evolutionary biology.

I wrote on the same thing here, noting,

Darwinian evolution is in no fit state to be disproved. If it were, that would be progress.

To some, it means "cosmic Darwinism," to others, the "selfish gene" that creates "memes" that rule our minds, to others, group selection (long a no-no). To some, it still means a parsimonious, testable idea: Natural selection acting on random mutation to produce new species.

But there is only weak evidence that new species commonly arise that way. There are a number of ways that they might in fact arise, including gene-swapping, neoteny, and front-loaded design.

Some think that sexual selection, Darwin's other theory, should be included, but the problem is that at least one of its legendary icons (the peacock's tail) is in serious trouble.

Similarly, even common ancestry, long accorded the status of a religious belief, is showing cracks. For one thing, gene swapping, where it occurs, makes ancestry irrelevant, unless you mean where a given gene came from - information that may not be available or even important.

(Note: The image is from Real Clear Politics.)

Evolutionary psychology: David Warren on beautiful women

In "The mystery of beauty", Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren (August 2, 2009), skewers another "evolutionary psychology" shish-kebob:

One of the great attractions of popular Darwinism, as a financial investment, is its appeal to what we in the media refer to, in our jaded way, as the "tabloid audience." That is to say people who, through no fault of their own (lack of education, native dullness, mental injury, etc.) are extremely credulous. You can sell stuff to them that you just couldn't sell to -- you know, "people like us."

From another point of view, it may be a misfortune that our schools and media have been working, for decades now, on expanding this "tabloid audience." But that has been a subject for many other days. Today we're only looking at the business angle.

The incredible tabloid Darwinian story of this last week was about the evolution of beautiful women. "Scientists," led by Markus Jokela at the University of Helsinki (flag that name), have now "proved" that, for reasons of "sexual selection," women are becoming ever more beautiful, while men remain as ugly as we were in the caves.

I have never been able to figure out why Darwinists don't just denounce and get rid of this crap. Their theory has enough problems in real issues around bacteria and fruit flies, without this tabloid-friendly nonsense.

Surely this isn't all they have to go on? Or? Jathink?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Darwinism and popular culture: Real biology vs. Darwinism

David Warren (my favourite anti-Darwinian legacy media columnist), writes,

It is summer, and I have been reading the works of Skutch, in a desultory way, while myself pining for the fields. I want to recommend everything the man ever wrote: several dozen books and innumerable papers, including well more than a hundred remarkably thorough life histories of tropical birds. (He made his principal home for many decades in a remote valley of Costa Rica.) The most suggestive and “philosophical” of his books, are the essays collected in Origins of Nature's Beauty (University of Texas Press, 1992) and, Harmony and Conflict in the Living World (ditto Oklahoma, 2000).

I recommend such works especially to those who have had their minds cluttered and abused by the sort of ideological indoctrination offered today, in place of real science, by the Darwinist biology faculties in most of our universities. Skutch persistently shows that there is more happening in nature than evolutionary obsessives can begin to imagine. For Skutch's view of nature is founded in the traditional way, on direct observation, rather than in the post-modern way, on grand, arbitrary, utterly unprovable evolutionary hypotheses. That is to say, observation preceding theory, as opposed to theory preceding observation.

Perhaps the best shock treatment, for the confused young Darwinized zoologist, would be a close reading of Birds Asleep, Skutch's pioneering investigation of what birds do with about half their time (Texas, 1989). It will be noticed that the author cites no statistics at all, conducts no banding studies, but nevertheless supplements his own acute observations with apt references to an uncommonly broad range of published literature.

Doubtless, the need to defend Darwinism has resulted in massive loss of data on the real lives of creatures of our planet. There is much to repair, and some of us might well begin by reading non-Darwin-defending biologists.

More stories on David Warren here.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

David Warren: The monkey business

My reader may have been struck by an item of breaking news yesterday. Travis, the trained chimpanzee, star of Coca-Cola and Old Navy commercials, and of the pilot for a TV series, badly misbehaved at his home in Stamford, Connecticut.

For no immediately discernable reason, he attacked a favourite family friend, as she arrived in a car. She was seriously and permanently maimed. The 90-kilogram animal shrugged off a butcher-knife attack from his mistress, in defence of her friend. When paramedics arrived under police protection, the chimp attacked the police. He cornered one policeman in his cruiser, and was shot by him in self-defence. Travis then retreated into his house, where he was later found dead.

Apparently the woman lost both eyes, her nose, and part of her jaw in the attack.

Want a friend? Adopt a cat. Not an ape. There are zillions of cats at your local animal shelter. Most cats would love a good home. And they will not attack you. But if they did, it wouldn't matter. They are just kitty cats, okay?

As we used to say,

Cats are fine
Cats are great
Cats are clean
They clean your plate* ...

Go here for more from David Warren.

*When I was a child over fifty years ago, I used to watch my grandmother put out the dishes from dinner, for the domestic animals (dogs, cats) to lick clean, before we washed them. So there was no waste. We didn't do waste in those days.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Further thoughts: from that anti-Darwinian Toronto hack I was telling you about

From David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen, by private correspondence (but with permission), in response to comments from Darwinists:

Fear not, we (rational mediaevalists) only assign supernatural explanations to events which cannot be explained naturally. And really can't. We do accept all demonstrable facts. We are just more sceptical about the inferred ones. None of us has the fondest clue how God actually does anything, & our dogma indicates we wouldn't be able to find out if we tried. Hence our modesty, relative to the Darwinians. We're hardly likely to, say, publish a book entitled "The Origin of Species" that does not contain an explanation of the origin of species.

Once again I must remind you that Copernicus was a monk. (Like Mendel; like the 20th-century Belgian who "discovered" the Big Bang; & Galileo was a Catholic, too, whose patrons were all ecclesiastical; & Kepler for that matter; & Newton was a born-again Biblical literalist; & Einstein some kind of New Age fruitcake. Cosmology is not a field in which agnostics have made much of a mark. Whereas Darwin will rank among the great Victorian-atheist "system builders" -- e.g. with Freud & Marx.)

From my own experience, Warren is right about that. When I first encountered it, I was very much surprised by the extent to which Einstein and Bohr, in their conflicts about the fundamental nature of reality, were essentially arguing philosophy as well as science. It was not what I had been led to expect from the pop science media, which are currently obsessed by Darwinism, which truncates science from most philosophy. So, while I am here, let me shill another book, Shimon Malin's Nature Loves to Hide, whose first section provides an excellent account of that fundamental conflict.

In another post, Warren commented,

I continue appalled that a crude Darwinian materialism continues to be pumped by our schools into the heads of people too young to defend themselves. That it is presented as something morally and spiritually neutral, as “pure science”, when it is pure bluster.

Here is where a little autodidactic training in philosophy has served me better than any kind of scientific tutoring could have done. For I am able to spot the premise upon which the logical argument sits: and therefore grasp the argument’s circularity. Working from the premise that only strictly material causes are admissible in the study of biological effects, the Darwinians then demonstrate that all biological effects can be explained from strictly material causes.

But the human mind, which can tell the difference between something that is alive and something that is dead, finally rebels against this circularity. Darwinism provides no account whatever of the singular miracle of life. The very will to survive is inadmissable on materialist premises. Random collocations of atoms do not behave to a purpose. And as the physicists have realized -- such as Einstein, the man who said, “God does not play dice with the universe” -- the existence of material is itself a problem. The ultimate particle is not even a particle.

Conveniently, the whole of this essay is online.

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.

Canadian journalist David Warren’s further thoughts on Darwinism as a crock

From “Unmoved Mover”

I should like to add today, a footnote to the column I wrote on Sunday, in which I again confessed to being a heretic in the holiest shrine of scientism, where random mutation and natural selection are worshipped by the high priests, and from whose ivory towers we hear the academic chant: “There is no God, but Darwin.”

[ ... ]

What struck me, hard, in reading so much more apoplectic rubbish about Darwinism, which I drew down on myself with my Sunday column, was the refusal to look at the key, the hinge, of the whole argument. For I wrote: “We can now roughly date the origin of our universe, and 15 billion years more-or-less is proving much too short a time for random processes to produce a non-random result. Verily, 15 billion times 15 billion years is still not nearly enough time.”

This, in a nutshell, is the insuperable problem with random mutation, and natural selection, so far as they are taken not as factors in an evolutionary development, but as the determinants of it. ...

Warren has been inundated with apoplectic rubbish since he started to reflect thoughtfully on the Darwin religion. At one point, he wrote to friends,

Meanwhile I return to several billion emails on Darwinism (I exaggerate), to one of which I replied thus:

... I am with you on the inherent deficiencies of computer models, but at a loss to know how Behe relies on them in any way. He is a microbiologist. His first book advanced the thesis of irreducible complexity in a microbiological way; his second book tied this in with the other problems of Darwinism. He is not a statistician, & in showing the astronomically long odds against a purely Darwinian account of the origin of anything, he is surveying other people's work. Using a computer, as they do (including Darwinists themselves until they discovered what a mistake it was) -- to calculate odds, given assumptions -- that is not computer modelling.

Verily, Behe & many others have attacked the computer modelling that has been imported into Darwinism itself to get around statistical & other problems.. (They love to create computer models, which are programmed in a circular way, to produce evolutionary results in electronic space that supposedly mimic reality. The weakness being they have left out most of the known environmental factors, together of course with all of the unknown ones.)

[ ... ]

To my mind, we have several religions in play in the world around us: in the West, chiefly Christianity, Islam, & Darwinism (plus small minorities of Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, &c). It may be a little unfair to call this last Darwinism, for Darwin has supplied only its cosmology; the larger religion takes the implications of this cosmology to vindicate a more universal denial of God, & replacement of His function in the universe with blind evolutionary forces. The idea of necessary material progress, though seriously damaged by actual human experience, is built into this larger worldview as it has been since the 19th-C, together with economic determinism, not necessarily in the Marxist form. Yet Marxism has provided the background materialist assumptions to its economic thinking, & Freudianism the moral assumptions. But of the three great Prophets of Postmodernity, I have come to think Darwin is by far the most influential, today, since Marx & Freud have been fairly thoroughly debunked, & are increasingly replaced by unanswerable New Age vagueness.

The thing is, Darwinism is a form of magic. The fact that it is a form of magic believed by academics (the high priests of our day) does not and cannot make it more plausible, any more than “scientific socialism” (Marxist economics) became more plausible because the brainiacs believed in it.

And on the ID guys, Warren writes,

Now, ID ain't a universal theory, in the way Darwinism is. It consists of observing that, as random mutation & natural selection do not adequately explain the way creatures are designed, & indeed, do not even come close --
& as, in particular, random mutation does not happen in nature except within easily demonstrated restraints of self-correction -- we must look for other explanations if we are to explain the phenomena of common descent (which both the ID & Darwin people take to be demonstrated as true, in opposition to the Biblical Creationists).

What the ID people demand is not the right to "attribute everything directly to God." I've never met a Christian, let alone a proponent of ID, who is THAT simple-minded, who does not gather that God works through agencies. Instead, the IDers demand the right to explore, publicly, alternative explanations of "evolutionary descent" from the Darwinian one. And these must necessarily involve looking at the phenomena in new ways, in light of the fact they do manifest design principles, in the extreme.

Warren agrees with me on the significance of Edge of Evolution

Lastly, let me draw your attention to this essay on defending society against funadamentalist cults in science, where he notes, among other things:

As Paul Feyerabend, one of my scientific heroes, wrote in his 1975 essay, "How to defend Society against Science":

"In society at large the judgement of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. Science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer."

Likewise Freeman Dyson, whose most recent book, Many Coloured Glass, is only the latest fruit of a lifetime of dangerously independent thinking, in which he has shamelessly crossed over from one scientific speciality to another -- as all the great scientists of history did. He devotes a robust chapter to cataloguing the marvellous accomplishments of men who refused to be intimidated by the dull, heavy hand of professional authority in his own time. And he adds today: ...

(Go there. Why should I spoil it for you?)

Darwinism and popular culture: David Warren refuses to be bullied by Darwinists

From one of Warren's recent columns:

What struck me, hard, in reading so much more apoplectic rubbish about Darwinism, which I drew down on myself with my Sunday column, was the refusal to look at the key, the hinge, of the whole argument. For I wrote: “We can now roughly date the origin of our universe, and 15 billion years more-or-less is proving much too short a time for random processes to produce a non-random result. Verily, 15 billion times 15 billion years is still not nearly enough time.”

But, David, at this point you are supposed to say, "Well, anyhow, I guess Darwin dunit!! HoorAW!!!" Hey, you're good. You could win big prizes ...
Naw. You never liked crap. (Nor me neither. ) He goes on, merely speaking the truth:

Time and again it is said that the “God thesis” is not proven, while Darwin’s thesis is supported by an immense accumulation of biological research. But read almost any current biology text, and you will find that after ritual obeisance to Darwin and Darwinism in prefatory remarks, the rest of the book hardly mentions them, and the author(s) will keep slipping into the irresistible vocabulary of design, while trying to communicate how an organism works. Res ipsa loquitur, as we say in Latin. (“The thing speaks for itself.”)

He has reached the same conclusion as I have, that "Darwinism is a religion, and moreover, a false religion, in fear of free inquiry."

Well, but what would you expect of people who worship the shibboleth of randomness?