Yes - we sometimes forget the “laugh here” emoji in England. Still, on reflection it doesn’t seem an inaccurate estimate.
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Sorry, John, but I’m not sure. Are you referring to my comments or @jongarvey’s comments?
Joshua, all the ID leaders understand that Behe affirms common descent. And all the people who have actually read Behe’s books, as opposed to learning about his ideas from hearsay, understand that Behe affirms common descent. Maybe some anti-evolutionist Christians in churches don’t understand that, but I think we are trying to hold a higher level of discussion here than they hold at an elders’ meeting in the South Harrisburg Baptist Church.
The problem I have here lies in the premise, i.e., that it is important for a scientist to locate himself in a perceived “mainstream” of scientific thought. What does that mean? That a young scientist, looking nervously around for a tenure-track position, and anxious about employment, tenure, promotion, research grants, etc., should try to find out what sort of positions most scientists support, and base his theoretical convictions on that? What happened to the idea that the scientist is supposed to base himself on the data, the evidence, and sound reasoning, without any reverence for received doctrine?
I don’t know whether Wagner counts as “mainstream” or not. My point would be that if he is correctly placed by Denton as having more structuralist and less adaptationist leanings, then structuralist accounts of evolution are permissible for a Yale professor to hold. And that’s good, that a variety of accounts regarding how evolution works are in play. But are you trying to say, that structuralist accounts are OK, and adaptationist accounts are OK, but Shapiro’s account is not OK? Why? Merely because he is not “within the mainstream”? That’s a pretty feeble reason for saying someone’s science is defective. Why not show his empirical or mathematical errors instead? The mere fact that he is in the minority doesn’t make his view wrong.
I’m not even defending Shapiro particularly; maybe he overplays the idea of self-engineering; maybe it’s not as big a factor in evolution as he says it is. Nor am I saying that Scott Turner’s attempt to revive vitalism is correct (as opposed to interesting and worth looking at for anyone whose main interest is possible causes of evolution). I’m more concerned about the general attitude in these discussions that there need to be “gatekeepers” who have the authority to declare what does and does not count as legitimate evolutionary theory. Why not let the scientists fight it out with evidence and argument, and may the best scientist win?
I get weary of these pronouncements along the lines of “X doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to evolution; listen to me instead?” But who appointed the speaker as the gatekeeper? Did all the professional evolutionary biologists in the world get together, in a sort of Council of Nicaea of evolutionists, and write up an official statement, a unified declaration of what is and is not good evolutionary theorizing? Where did this conference occur? Where can I find that statement? And who did the Council of Evolution appoint as their representative, to declare what good evolutionary theory is on internet sites where people blog and wrangle? Have they appointed Larry Moran? Or you? Or Joshua? Or Glipsnort? Or Dennis Venema? Is everyone just supposed to defer because certain loud voices on the internet don’t like certain proposals about how evolution works, and angrily inveigh against them, or at least ridicule or belittle them?
I started in natural science, on a scholarship, but later switched to religion and philosophy. To a philosopher – a real philosopher, though most professors of philosophy these days are pathetic shadows of philosophers – the idea of worrying about what “the mainstream” of philosophers thinks is anathema. You think for yourself, you reason, you gather evidence, you present your facts and interpretations in the form of rational argument. You don’t care whether you have the support of 99 out of a 100 other philosophers, or only 1 out of a 100. You hold to your position until someone refutes it. The herd mentality, the groupthink, the seeking of security under the shelter of the predominant opinion, is alien to my makeup as an academic and a thinker. That’s why I find it hard to answer, without considerable agitation, your concern about whether or not someone is sufficiently “mainstream.” If the university has come to that – to an institution where whether the subject is global warming or feminism or evolution or anything else, everyone is so afraid to be outside the “mainstream” that there is in effect an orthodoxy with veto power over research and curriculum, then let’s close down the universities, cut off their public funding. Their whole value consists in the fact that they are potentially a place where peer pressure and conformity don’t matter at all, and only reason and evidence rule.
Wasn’t it you who said “No - forget the ID, but the language of “mainstream”, in every example I can think of, is about power, not knowledge or truth”?
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Not quite true. One of the frequent commenters here, Bill Cole (@colewd ) is a counterexample. He at least claims to have read Behe’s books and he at least claims that Behe does not affirm common descent.
No. Because the mainstream demands valid evidence and argument, which Wagner manages, but which Shapiro does not. Nor do I see any argument in favor of reviving vitalism, or even for taking another look at it.
Larry Moran has his head on pretty straight. He offers actual argument legitimately based on data, which, in my experience, is a great help in coming to correct conclusions. Joshua so far seems reasonably good at that too. In my opinion, so am I. Some of the other folks you have mentioned, not so much.
I take the rest of your screed mostly as virtue signaling, since you’re arguing against the actual position of nobody here.
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.” 
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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