Evolutionary Science, not Darwinism

Agreed. Most ID people in the public do not know he is a theistic evolutionist of a sort.

Right now the four of us are pretty safe bets. We disagree on points too, so you get to see what the internal debate in science can be like. That’s great, right?

If we were out of line (at least Moran and myself), there would be fire and brimstone on us by now. We are both visible enough that any large errors we make would be pounced on by our colleagues. That is a good signal to you what we are doing is legitimate.

Of course, it is hard to assess quality outside your field. That is your guide.

Well, I consent to replace “all” with “virtually all”, then. And if Behe’s books left any doubt, he has made numerous statements in podcasts, in articles, and elsewhere indicating that he accepts common descent, even including the descent of the human body from simpler ancestors. (Whether he accepts universal common descent – from a single ancestor rather than several – I don’t know, but that isn’t material to the point here.)

Well, if you won’t read the book where a trained physiologist makes such an argument at length, you aren’t likely to see any argument, are you?

I don’t claim that Shapiro’s view of evolution is correct, but you can hardly say he fails to present evidence. The documentation presented in his book regarding microbial changes is massive, and he has more on his website. You may not agree with his interpretation of the evidence, but you can’t say he is speculating with no empirical foundation. And unless I’m mistaken, unlike some evolutionary theorists who work mainly from blackboard equations and computer models, he has dirtied his hands in the lab, working with the organisms he is drawing conclusions about. I think that deserves some respect, even if his conclusions are flawed. I believe that another commenter here – maybe Glipsnort, maybe T. aquaticus, I don’t remember – conceded that Shapiro had done real empirical work.

Could be. Or perhaps you underestimate the abilities of creationists to ignore unpleasant facts.

Do you have an argument for a re-examination of vitalism?

Never said that. What I said is that Shapiro doesn’t manage valid evidence and argument. In order be valid, evidence must actually support the conclusion. I’m not sure why you think that lab work is more legitimate than theory; of course they — and field work — go hand in hand. The question is whether his lab work actually supports his ideas (which I would speculate don’t appear prominently in his published journal papers).

I’m not concerned about creationists, at least not about most of them. Of course there are some extremely bright ones, like Paul Nelson, whose views should be listened to with attention. (And of course Nelson knows that Behe accepts common descent.) But if you are talking about the average florist or nurse or cab driver who goes to a fundamentalist church, and cites Behe, without having read him, as evidence against common descent, I have no interest in responding to people like that. We are trying to have an educated discussion here, and that involves getting straight what authors have written, and anyone who can’t be bothered to get such things straight won’t be contributing anything useful to the discussion. You and I can aspire to a higher standard.

Why would you want the argument of a non-biologist, when you could have the argument of a highly-trained biologist, who has been thinking about the specific question of vitalism for 15 years or more? Even if I had finished reading Turner’s book, the most I could give you would be an intelligent layman’s summary. And if I made some slight biological blunder in my exposition, you might use it to discount my rendering, the way the biologist “melanogaster” on BioLogos dismissed all 500 pages of Meyer’s book because Meyer incorrectly used the term “ribozyme” on one page of the book and thus showed his supposed incompetence to be writing about evolution at all. I’d rather you got the argument from a person you admit to be professionally qualified, from someone you deem a peer. If you won’t admit that Turner makes a reasonable argument, you certainly won’t admit that I do.

Well, I stopped off at the library on the way home last night and checked out Purpose and Desire. I got through about 150 pages (both reading and skimming) before giving up. No, Turner does not present a good case for re-considering vitalism. He presents a very weak case for treating homeostasis via vitalism, with arguments based largely on metaphor and appeals to intuition. He offers no real definition of what he means by vitalism or concepts like “desire” in this context. His second case, for treating evolution through the lens of vitalism, is based on the existence of a tautology at the heart of modern evolutionary theory. His account of that tautology is muddled – he seems to mean that adaptation is defined as whatever is produced by natural selection, and natural selection is defined as the thing that produces adaptation – but there is in reality no tautology there. He really does seem to be confused about the core of adaptive evolution.

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Well, I’m not asking you or anyone to agree with Turner, but only to hear out his case. The only thing I would add is that I have carefully read, not skimmed, more than 150 pages of the book, and over a much longer period than one evening, and it strikes me as more carefully argued and more nuanced, and less confused, than your half-skim, half-read has caused you to think.

I don’t agree with all that Turner says myself, by the way. But when I read a book, I’m not looking for a new champion, a new doctrine, a new religion, a new certainty. I’m looking for a few new insights which may add to my understanding. So it’s fine with me if half of what Turner says doesn’t hold up, as long as something useful emerges from his discussion.

In any case, thanks for making an effort to look at the book.

Should they? Which ones?

But I’m talking about people like Bill, who have read Behe but still manage to misunderstand him because they want to. I’m not as confident as you are that such people are rare.

Because it’s easier than reading the book. If you want to convince me to read the book, present some argument that makes it worth reading. “He’s a biologist” is not a good argument.

Now you’re just sounding paranoid. I promise I won’t discount your rendering. I might question it to be sure that it’s what the book says.

Which book of Meyer’s? I read Darwin’s Doubt, and it was execrable all the way through, not from any trivial errors.

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OK, well that convinces me not to read the book. Eddie, are you going to present any sort of argument in its favor?

Incidentally, if you want a good popular book to enlarge your world, I suggest a bit of real biology, like Jonathan Losos’ book Improbable Destinies. I read it on Mung’s recommendation, though I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t known Losos’s work already, Mung being an unreliable narrator.

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Start with Nelson, who did his Ph.D. at Chicago under Leigh van Valen, an evolutionary theorist. He has a massive knowledge of the history and philosophy of evolutionary theory, as well as a considerable knowledge of various branches of biology, since he took numerous grad and undergrad course in biology while studying philosophy of biology. He sometimes presents poster sessions at secular evolution conferences in the USA, and he was at the Royal Society’s major conference on evolutionary mechanism in England a year or two ago. (Actually, several people from Discovery were there – ID folks like to keep up on current discussions among the leading evolutionary theorists.)

They are rare, in fact non-existent, at the Discovery Institute, which is the administrative center of the ID movement. Everyone there knows Behe accepts common descent. I also know scores of other key ID people, beyond those working at Discovery, and all of them know that Behe accepts common descent. No one with any significant leadership role in ID is under any illusions on this point. What the people in churches think, what some bloggers think, etc., is another matter.

The Meyer book was Signature in the Cell. “Melanogaster” pointed out two minor slips in the book (as if minor slips aren’t found in all kinds of scientific books), and said that no one who made such slips could possibly be both competent and honest, and so Meyer had to be either scientifically unqualified or a liar. He was asked to show how those two slips destroyed the argument of even the paragraphs they were in, let alone the whole chapter or the whole book. He would not respond, but over the next two or three years on BioLogos proceeded to remind readers that ID people were scientific incompetents and/or liars, constantly recalling the alleged slips from the Meyer book. This is the sort of thing that ID sympathizers have to contend with constantly on blog sites. So if I sound paranoid, just remember the old saying, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.” :slight_smile:

I was already asked by T. aquaticus to summarize the book. I told him I wouldn’t summarize a book I hadn’t completely read, and that in any case I would rather he heard the case made by someone with more knowledge than I had, rather than through me as an intermediary. That’s the answer I’m giving you now.

It would take me two or three unpaid hours to work up a good short summary of the book. I don’t have a faculty member’s salary behind me – any time I devote to such a task is subtracted from the time I need to earn money through part-time teaching and class preparation for that. It’s unreasonable of those with professor’s salaries (and several months off teaching during the summers to read the latest books in their fields) to ask someone else to do hours of writing to save them reading time – especially when, in my view, if their field is evolutionary biology they should be reading new books on evolution anyway, to broaden their intellectual horizons.

All you need to know is that he argues for a qualified revival of vitalism – not the old metaphysical vitalism which he considers rightly discredited – and for a richer understanding of homeostasis – and that our theories of evolution will continue to be inadequate until we have a better theory of life itself – and that homeostasis is one of the key concepts needed for such a better theory of life. In the course of that, he reviews the history of the idea of homeostasis from its origins, and much of the history of evolutionary thought from the 19th century to the present. This should give you an idea whether or not the book will interest you. I know that if I were a full-time professor of evolutionary biology, the book would interest me, as would all synthetic works on evolution, and I would be seeking out and reading such books. But only you can decide whether a particular book is worth dipping into.

I like @Pnelson a lot, and encourage engaging with him. But @eddie, you are leaving out some material facts. He is a philosopher, not a biologist. There are more, but suffice to say your bias is showing through.

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I never said that Nelson’s Ph.D. was in biology. It was in philosophy, specifically philosophy of biology. But he did study under an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, who was his doctoral thesis supervisor. He also took numerous courses in biology during his undergrad and grad years, so he is not clued out about basic biology. In any case, I would match his knowledge of the history and philosophy of evolutionary theory against that of anyone I know. He knows stuff all the way back to Darwin and he goes to evolutionary biology conferences today. He reads technical articles from peer-reviewed journals voluminously, and he pays attention to what the big guns are writing and saying. Even Larry Moran thinks he’s intelligent and informed.

For the record, I also think he is intelligent and informed.

True, and he is also upfront that ID has failed to produce a scientific theory of ID, and have to move past poking holes in evolutionary science.

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What, credentialism? As you recall, I asked which of Nelson’s views should be listened to, and you respond by giving me none of them. Incidentally, I think I may have argued with him once at a party, if I recall about the Euthyphro dilemma. I don’t think he said anything worth repeating (if it was him).

Exactly.

Yes, you do still sound paranoid.

I don’t think you know that. I think it more likely that if you were a full-time professor of evolutionary biology you would more likely get from a brief description the that book was probably nonsense. I’m not actually a professor, but I’m an evolutionary biologist, and it sounds bogus to me based on your description.

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Out of curiosity, who was his advisor?

I answered that above.

I have a lot of trouble getting straight answers here. No, you did not. “An evolutionary biologist” is not an answer. Now, I would suspect that his advisor would have been Bill Wimsatt, who’s a philosopher of science, not a biologist. I can’t think of an evolutionary biologist at UC who would have been his advisor. But I could be wrong*. Do you actually know who his advisor was?

*Now that I think on it, Leigh Van Valen would have been a possibility; he would do any weird thing just for the fun of it.

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@Eddie is an interesting case study. He has no problem with common descent, and doesn’t actually endorse any specific ID arguments. To his credit, he even freely admits he can’t follow the science.

Still, he really like the ID movement. I think he feels they are unfairly treated and ignored. Having them more fairly treated, independent of any the actual details of what they say, has been a consistent goal of his.

@eddie, what exactly are you hoping for here? Many words exchanged. Not much progress.

And of course I told you that it was Leigh van Valen, above, when I originally described Nelson. So it’s not that you have trouble getting straight answers from me, but that you miss some of them. :slight_smile:

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Oops, sorry. My bad.

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