I don’t find that to be a sound argument for the sole purpose of producing evidence for the theory of evolution. I do find Gould’s statement to be a solid response to the public sentiment that exists outside of the scientific community.
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Absolutely not. The passage I quote makes it very clear - the engineer is someone building “a grasping tool, a digging implement, a walking device, a propeller, and a wing”. Someone like, say, the students themselves. This is a pretty simple and effective strategy - contrast results and data with what is intuitively obvious to students, owing to the students’ own experiences. And then brainstorm as to how counterintuitive results bring us inexorably to a conclusion (in this case, common ancestry).
This has nothing at all to do with the section of the textbook being badly misrepresented.
But they do have experience building “a grasping tool, a digging implement, a walking device, a propeller, and a wing”.
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Opponent? Are you describing yourself as an opponent of science?
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Not good enough. If creationism (or whatever else) also predicts that specific observation, then it’s not evidence for evolution. In order to be evidence, an observation must be expected under theory X but unexpected under theory Y.
That might help in dealing with theistic hypotheses, but not with other sorts of anti-evolutionism.
This is a pure fantasy scenario, and not just because of the aliens. Nobody would present any of that as the chief evidence for evolution, including the people you mention.
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Dobzhansky’s 1973 article – whose title is one of the most cited aphorisms in modern science – stirs very different reactions from readers. Art, you see it as a casual, mocking rejoinder to Duane Gish et al. (who, with his band of rebels, was beginning to garner attention in the early 1970s with campus creation vs evolution debates).
Here is Eugene Koonin’s take, as an endnote in his 2012 book The Logic of Chance (p. 480):
This has been precisely my experience. Very few biologists (very few people, for that matter) who cite the essay have actually read it.
Wrong.
Take a look at Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True (2009). He dedicates an entire chapter, Chapter 3: “Vestiges, Embryos, and Bad Design,” to biological imperfection, prefacing the examples with this summary statement: “Stephen Jay Gould called these biological palimpsests ‘the senseless signs of history.’ But they are not really senseless, for they constitute some of the most powerful evidence for evolution” (p. 56, emphasis added).
John Avise wrote an entire book on how incongruous or “non-intelligent” genomic patterns prove evolution: Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design (Oxford U Press, 2010).
Here is how Dawkins introduces his discussion (p. 93, The Blind Watchmaker) of the backwards-oriented photoreceptors of vertebrates:
“Stephen Jay Gould, in his excellent essay on the panda’s thumb, has made the point that evolution can be more strongly supported by evidence of telling imperfections than by evidence of perfection.” (p. 92, emphasis added)
One chapter, right? How does that translate into the chief evidence for evolution? And none of your quotes say what you intend to convey.
Of course, the most powerful evidence for evolution would be the nested hierarchy of genomic data, followed perhaps by the more intuitively accessible biotic succession of the fossil record. That’s certainly what I would show any inquisitive aliens, at least to start with. Do you find any theology in that?
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Koonin’s interpretations of some of Dobzhansky‘s statements are, um, creative. I’ve read the essay and would not put those words in Dobzhansky‘s keyboard.
Great. I left a link above to several research articles that deal with macro evolution. Again I ask, @pnelson, show us the “God talk” that pervades the biological research literature.
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These words?
There’s nothing there about any “theory of divine design”. You’re imagining things.
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I disagree. The law of parsimony removes creationism from consideration.
We would have to throw out every single theory in science if we follow your logic. We could dream up a supernatural deity that exactly mimics every known theory in science. According to your logic, this would mean we have no evidence for any theory in science.
How do you deal with irrational and illogical arguments?
For biologists, it causes a nod of agreement. Comparative genomics makes absolutely no sense without evolution. Comparative anatomy makes absolutely no sense without evolution. The fossil record makes no sense without evolution.
Just as a few examples, why do we see an excess of transition mutations separating the human and chimp genomes? Why do we see more divergence in introns than in exons when we compare genomes between species? Why do we see fossils with a mixture of mammal and reptile features but no fossils with a mixture of mammal and bird features? Why don’t we see any rabbits in the Cambrian?
While it may be a tad hyperbolic, it is nonetheless true that nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.
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Follow the adjectives. Why “curious?”
From Neal Gillespie’s classic (1979) analysis of this (and many other such) passages in the Origin:
“‘On the theory of natural selection,’ on the other hand, all was clear…Intelligence and purpose should be more creative than nature showed itself to be. Nor could the idealist reply that continuity in nature reflected continuity in the divine mind. For Darwin, this merely repeated the fact without explaining it. Descent with modification not only explained the facts, but did so in such a fashion as to guide further research in a way that its rivals could not.”
N. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 71.
Homology of vertebrate limbs is curious against the background expectation that, if the limbs had been designed, they would not exhibit “the same pattern…the same bones, in the same relative positions.”
Theological arguments “occur most often where a case for evolution is being made: in the introductory chapters of books on evolution, for instance; in popular or semi-popular essays and books; or, in polemical writings, against creationists and other doubters of evolution. The arguments are given as good reasons for thinking that evolution, and not some other theory, best explains the origin and diversity of life.”
From here:
Two slides from my Biola MA lectures dealing with this topic:
I replied with a parody of the Total Recall schizoid embolism scene, but it failed the moderation test 
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A phylogeny of homologous features is exactly what we would expect to see with evolution. No need to mention a creator of intelligent designer.
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Then we are left with “whatever else”. Creationism is just one version of separate ancestry, so feel free to substitute that. In order to be evidence for evolution, an observation must be expected under common descent but not under separate ancestry.
Ah, an over-parameterized model. That’s not usually the problem with creationism. Rather, the problem is that the God hypothesis isn’t parameterized at all, making anything equally likely.
By showing that they’re irrational and illogical. Why?
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Balderdash.
The claim that it is “the introductory chapters of books on evolution” is “where a case for evolution is being made” makes no sense. If the case can be made in the introductory chapters, then the rest of the book would be largely redundant.
Rather it is in the introductory chapters that the historical context of the Theory of Evolution is established. And this historical context is that of Creation ex nihilo, Paley’s Natural Theology, etc, etc. That many of the Theory of Evolution’s predecessor viewpoints were theological does not render that Theory theological itself.
I am also high amused to watch your blatant and futile attempts at misdirection.
Art asked:
He did not ask about introductory chapters of textbooks or about essays, neither of which are part of the primary “biological research literature”.
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This is a bit removed from “The problem of God-talk in academic biology is far more pervasive than I have time to elaborate here.” The implication of this latter quote, in this discussion and also in some of the papers linked to, is that researchers routinely incorporate theological statements (“if it was designed by God, then …”) into their hypotheses and investigations. This is wrong - plain and simply, a totally unfounded assertion.
Similarly, all of the exciting progress being made in evolutionary biology today is completely disconnected from, and not reliant upon, any underlying theological ramifications of the reality of evolution.
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Of course they aren’t – I was explaining relative frequency. One is likelier to find theological claims, such as Gould’s “sensible God” who would not have made the panda’s thumb, in a popular essay or textbook, than in one of Gould’s papers on snail morphology.
But examples from the primary research literature are not hard to find:
“All available evidence indicates that photorespiration is a resounding waste of energy and has no obvious advantage to C3 plants (Mann, 1999; Leegood, 2002). Thus, most higher plants are poorly designed from an evolutionary point of view. Even taken in isolation, this simple fact should demonstrate to any reasonable person that organisms are not invariably ‘perfect’.”
From here:
George Williams (1926-2010) was arguably the leading neo-Darwinian theoretician of the latter half of the 20th century, whose work greatly influenced Richard Dawkins, among others. Williams’s 1992 Oxford University Press monograph on natural selection, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, Challenges, is a primary literature publication, used in graduate-level seminars (where I met it). Therein (pp. 72-73):
“There would be no blind spot if the vertebrate eye were really intelligently designed. In fact it is stupidly designed, because it embodies many functionally arbitrary or maladaptive features, of which the inversion of the retina is merely one example.”
I don’t know how many examples you want, but I could pile them up all day. There’s no point, however. Evolutionary biology is the most theologically entangled science going. QED.
The question to be asked is whether the mere use of a design metaphor (and it’s clearly a metaphor) counts as as “theologically entangled”. I would answer that it doesn’t.
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