I’ve looked at your web site, and I’m disappointed that you include no references to support anything you say. This makes it, to me, much less credible.
Follow the links in the articles and pursue the topic further in the articles under “Related Reading” at the bottom of each post.
I’m not concerned what you think about my research. You have not made an attempt to understand the basic findings.
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The first need in understanding basic findings is to figure out the argument for them, which requires some appeal to data. Not seeing that. Even the further reading seems to be nothing more than self-reference.
George and I are not arguing over whether nor ID is correct. We are arguing over what ID claims, and who counts or doesn’t count as an ID theorist.
Sometimes you don’t have to read 300 pages to know whether not someone is wrong. But if someone is making a new argument, that depends on a large number of components, none of which has yet been thoroughly considered, then that person may need a long book in order to make a convincing argument. Darwin conceived of his Origin as “one long argument” (his words). In fact, he rushed it out, and his original plan was for it to be longer. Back in 1859, if one wanted to know “what Darwin argued” one had to read his book to find out.
The ID author we are discussing, Michael Denton, also wrote a long book with an argument that required integrating many components. The whole book is again “one long argument” for a fine-tuning that stretches from cosmology to biochemistry, biology, and anthropology. If one wants to know what Denton’s argument is, one has to read it. If one wants to know whether Denton’s argument qualifies as an ID argument, one has to read it.
Whether or not Denton’s view of nature and evolution is correct is not what the discussion is about. You can’t say that Denton’s view is wrong before you know what Denton’s view is – that’s the point here.
George thinks he can know whether or not Denton qualifies as an ID theorist, without knowing what Denton thinks or why Denton thinks it – without having read Denton at all. Further, George thinks he has the right to argue confidently about this – without having read Denton at all.
That’s what the dispute is about – whether or not someone should comment on authors whose ideas they aren’t familiar with, because they have never taken the time read what the authors wrote.
Your comment, therefore, is not relevant to the dispute.
The author we were discussing was James Shapiro. He has several shorter articles that outline his argument, and I have yet to hear of anything in any book that deviates from what he has written in those articles.
If James Shapiro is saying that mainstream science is wrong when it says that mutations are random simply because not all mutations are copying errors then it doesn’t take 300 pages to figure out he is wrong. All it takes is that one sentence.
My apologies for the confusion. Your comment came immediately after an exchange of several posts with George, and I thought you were replying to my suggest that George read a few hundred pages of Denton’s book before characterizing Denton’s position. It’s too bad the reply system here isn’t nested, as it is on some web sites, you so can always tell what conversation you are in without having to scroll up and figure things out.
Yes, of course, if Shapiro mischaracterizes evolutionary theory regarding a particular point, one can deal with that one point without reading his whole book. I would never argue against that.
But if you read the remark I made about John Harshman’s comment in context, you will see that my point was that John was unaware of one of the central components, perhaps the central component, of Shapiro’s book. I don’t think that when one doesn’t even know a central part of an author’s argument, one can dismiss that part of his argument as the work of a “nut”. That part of the argument may be quite sane, and quite well-documented. After one has read it, one might of course say, “That’s nutty!” But not before.
In passing, let me say that it’s a bit unfair to expect me to deal with different objections coming from different directions when they all blur together in one huge discussion where everyone can cross over into other conversations. The argument that Shapiro made an error in characterizing evolutionary theory regarding randomness of mutations, and the argument that Shapiro is a nut, really need to be treated separately. One might make an error without being a nut. Having to deal with T. aquaticus commenting on my reply to John Harshman, especially when T. aquaticus’s comment follows directly after my reply to George Brooks, in a discussion which was also about whether or not someone has read a book (but a different book), can become quite a tangled affair. At the very least, it would help, in a non-nested system, if people prefaced their answers with statements like, “In your reply to John Harshman, you suggested that one needed to read a book before deciding whether or not the author was a nut. Well, I don’t say Shapiro is a nut, but regarding errors, I can safely say without reading Shapiro’s book that he has made an error.” That would help avoid conversational misunderstandings such as the above.
You make more money than I do, so I think you can spring for the low price of the Amazon paperback yourself. 
If being someone’s instructor implies “succeeding in getting someone to retract his overstatements and errors”, then I have definitely failed at being your instructor. We can agree on that much.
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Let’s look at this from a different angle.
Let’s say that there was this theologian named Jim Pashiro. He makes the claim that christian theology needs to be rewritten because he has discovered some letters written by a guy named Paul to an early christian church in Corinth. Since current christian theology ignores these letters and believes that Jesus actually taught Hinduism, then these new letters that Jim Pashiro discovered will completely change how we view christian theology. After writing up his ideas in a book you start to see person after person on internet forums talking about how Jesus taught Hinduism and that christian theologians were ignoring the letters written to Corinth by Paul.
How would you, as a theologian, feel about this situation? I am guessing you would feel a bit frustrated. Not only was Pashiro pointing to books in the New Testament that are accepted by all theologians and well understood, but Pashiro is misrepresenting some of the most basic tenets of christian theology. On top of that, Pashiro’s ideas are gaining popularity simply because they seem to challenge a religion that some people didn’t like to begin with, even though Pashiro’s claims have no merit.
In your frustration, might you call Pashiro a nut? I don’t think we could fault you for doing so. It’s not conducive to productive or polite conversation to call someone a nut, but surely you can understand why someone might use harsh language.
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Well, I wouldn’t call him a nut merely because he held a minority view, or merely because his interpretation differed from that of most of the learned. I’d call him a nut only if I thought his processes of reasoning were actually deranged.
I might, however, say he was wrong, that his evidence that Jesus taught Hinduism was based on only a few scraps of texts, mostly incomplete and of uncertain date, possibly quite late forgeries. I might ask him how it came about that all traces of the Hindu Jesus were obliterated from mainstream history. If he couldn’t satisfactorily answer the criticism, then I’d regard his ideas as speculative and not strongly enough grounded to warrant changing two thousand years of Christian tradition. But he might be wrong and sincere; he might even be wrong and intelligent; he might not be a nut. So I’d avoid that word, and concentrate on establishing whether he was right or wrong.
Remember also that I approach such speculative historical possibilities as a religion scholar rather than a theologian representing some particular denomination. To me, writing with my scholar’s hat on, as opposed to my personal Christian hat on, a proposal that Jesus really taught Hinduism would be like the proposal, aired back in the 1960s, that Christianity arose out of cult of sacred mushrooms: an interesting historical thesis for a religion scholar to examine, without indignation. One might decide that the proposal was utter rubbish – one might also decide that the person proposing it was a nut, in some cases – but indignation would be out of place, from the historian’s detached point of view. It would simply be a case of examining the textual evidence and assessing it in the normal scholarly ways.
So I would listen to Jim Pashiro with an open mind – reading the works which he himself declared to be the best of his works – and then would proceed to critical analysis. I wouldn’t start out with the intention of demolishing his ideas, but I wouldn’t give him a free pass on anything either. And in the end, I would try to give a measured historical judgment, allowing that he had made some good points, and that some of his texts (if they turned out to be genuine in age and not suspect in any way) might require scholars to reconsider parts of the history of early Christianity, while stating my view (if it was my view) that overall his work was not sufficient to demand a major rewriting of either Christian history or Christian theology. And I could probably do all that without ever calling him a nut.
The analogy has Jim Pashiro claiming that Jesus teaching Hindu is the mainstream theory held by nearly all christian theologians. I doubt that you would have much patience for someone who misrepresents your own position so that they could claim that you were wrong.
This is equivalent to the types of misrepresentations that James Shapiro uses with respect to the mainstream theory of evolution.
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I’m sorry I misunderstood the analogy. Certain phrases threw me off, and I didn’t quite get the scenario. But you didn’t need the complex analogy to make your point. I already granted you that if Shapiro has misrepresented evolutionary theory on certain points, it’s perfectly legitimate to list those points and challenge him on them.
I’m more interested in the bigger picture, what Shapiro is driving at rather than incidental rhetorical points he uses in framing his remarks. Let’s put aside for a minute any statements he makes in the negative, i.e., why mainstream evolutionary theory is wrong. Let’s say that he gets carried away and sets up a strawman to make his own views seem more daring than they are. Le’ts grant all that, for the sake of argument. Let’s instead consider positive assertions he makes, e.g., that the genome can be considered as a read-write storage system. He devotes over 40% of his book to that proposition, and his book represents his mature thought after decades of work in molecular biology, microbiology, and evolution. So, is there in your view any truth to the characterization that the genome is not (as Weissman supposed) a “read-only” entity, but a “read-write” entity? Is that characterization useful for understanding genomes, for understanding cells, and hence, possibly, for understanding evolution? Why not read that part of his book, and comment on it?
I’m quite willing to come to the conclusion that most of what Shapiro says that is true, is not new, and that some of what he says that is new, is wrong. But suppose that 10% of what he says is new (or at least, new in its application to evolutionary theory), and possibly right? Why throw out the baby with the bathwater? Would it be a huge investment of time for an advanced biologist, who can read this kind of discussion the way I can read the sports column in a newspaper, to read 60 pages of a book (small pages, because it’s a small-format book) that might have one widely applicable insight in it? Philosophers, historians, classical scholars, sociologists, political scientists, art historians, etc. are all the time reading books where only 10% of the book is useful to them. They are happy if an author adds one solid new insight to the discussion, even if the rest of the book is either flawed or redundant. And the books they typically read are double the size of Shapiro’s book, and the section of Shapiro I’m pointing out is only a portion of the book.
Maybe the read-write idea is already widely accepted, and was so even before Shapiro published the book in 2011. If so, you can tell me so. But if not, does it have some value for evolutionary theorizing? Does it provide an additional evolutionary mechanism, and if so, is that mechanism in some respects more “Lamarckian” than “Darwinian”? What do you think?
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His concepts do nothing to change the way we already understand genetics. All of the processes he discusses are already well known and are part of the mainstream theory of evolution. The core concepts of Shapiro’s book are found in this article, which I have read:
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From the abstract: " Adaptive variations also involved horizontal DNA transfers and natural genetic engineering by mobile DNA elements to rewire regulatory networks, such as those essential to viviparous reproduction in mammals. In the most highly evolved multicellular organisms, biological complexity scales with ‘non-coding’ DNA content rather than with protein-coding capacity in the genome. Coincidentally, ‘non-coding’ RNAs rich in repetitive mobile DNA sequences function as key regulators of complex adaptive phenotypes, such as stem cell pluripotency."
I have many problems with this. First, “natural genetic engineering” attempts to make the events he describes purposeful by definition, and there’s no evidence for such a thing. Otherwise, he’s just talking about random mutations that are sometimes adaptive. Standard stuff. Second, there is no evidence that the genome doublings he’s talking about — he’s referring to the two or three doublings in vertebrates — were due to hybridization or were in any way purposeful. Third, the non-coding genome sizes of “the most highly evolved” (whatever that means) organisms do not scale with complexity; they are in fact all over the place. See the onion test or, for vertebrates, the fugu/salamander test. Third, it has not been demonstrated that most non-coding RNAs have any real function rather than being artifacts of spurious transcription. And we have good reason to believe that most of the genomes of most eukaryotes is junk.
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Is he trying to do it “by definition”, i.e., by playing upon an ambiguity in words like “engineering”, or is he actually asserting the existence of purposiveness in organisms? Why not ask him directly whether he thinks that organisms display purposiveness? Why not make him clarify his assertion? You, know, something like, “Do you mean to say, Dr. Shapiro, that in response to environmental stresses, the organism acts in an intentional way to deal with those stresses? And that its subsequent internal rearrangements are purpose-driven?” That’s what I’d ask him, if I were a colleague of his. I’d ask it in review articles, at scientific conferences where he was speaking, in debates on university stages, etc. I’d keep asking it until I got a clear answer out of him. That’s what one philosopher does when another philosopher is being unclear. I don’t see why scientists can’t do the same thing when they find the expressions of their fellow scientists to be fuzzy or ambiguous.
If he answered, “No, I don’t think that natural genetic engineering implies any more purposiveness than any other genetic change”, that would lead to one kind of response; if he answered, “Yes, I mean to say that natural genetic engineering indicates a genuine, end-driven striving on the part of the organism”, that would lead to a different kind of response.
Someone asked me if I was enthusiastic about the “Third Way”. It depends on what is meant by the “Third Way”. If the goal is finding a way of talking about origins that is neither literalist Biblical creationism nor an assertion of purposeless accidents, then yes, I’m sympathetic with the quest to find a Third Way. But if the “Third Way” means being ambiguous about the question whether purposiveness has any role in evolution, if it means using terms like “natural genetic engineering” in such a fuzzy way that the reader can’t tell whether or not teleology is being asserted, then I don’t see it as very helpful.
I initially took Shapiro to be affirming some sort of purposiveness (which I thought he would clarify in future publications) behind natural genetic engineering. That is, I read him to be saying something like what Turner seems to be saying. If I have misread Shapiro, if his “natural genetic engineering” is meant as nothing but one more non-teleological cause of evolution, then I would be inclined to agree with people here that he isn’t really departing all that far from the mainstream, despite the teleological aroma of his terminology. In that case, it would appear that Turner’s view (insofar as I understand it) marks a greater departure from the mainstream. But if Turner is going to write something for us here, I will wait to hear what he has to say.
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No, that’s not what the Third Way means. It’s just a collection of largely unrelated notions that claim to replace or extend standard evolutionary biology. There’s a web site if you’re interested. Are you really interested in transferring teleology from God to the organisms themselves?
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I wouldn’t say you’ve read the website all that carefully. Here is the opening statement:
“The vast majority of people believe that there are only two alternative ways to explain the origins of biological diversity. One way is Creationism that depends upon intervention by a divine Creator. That is clearly unscientific because it brings an arbitrary supernatural force into the evolution process. The commonly accepted alternative is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation.”
Do you not see the contrast between Creationism and a significantly accidental process?
I’m intellectually interested in the possibility that evolution is at least partly directed by the internal strivings of organisms. It seems to me that this is a possibility which can be investigated scientifically, without reference to God.
That’s Shapiro, but I don’t think it properly characterizes all the other folks who appear on the web site. Have you seen any evidence that hereditary variation is not accidental?
That’s about where I am. But you don’t need a “Third Way” for that. You just need people thinking and talking in those terms.
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Moreover it has been part of evolution from the beginning. This is almost a synonym for natural selection and sexual selection.
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That depends on what “internal strivings” means. I think you may not have noticed the term, but it sounds really Lamarckian to me. We’re talking about changes in DNA sequence — mutations — driven by the needs or desires of the organism. Not natural selection or sexual selection (a subset of natural selection).
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