James Tour: Friendship Across Disagreements

Actually, he does think it happened; he repeatedly credits random mutation and natural selection with the ability to do some things; he just doesn’t think they can do all that is claimed for them.

Tell that to Joshua here, who is certainly a scientist, and who informs us that “Darwinian” evolution was long ago replaced by neutral theory…

You’re now trying to change the topic to the schools, etc. Your statement is false, but as it would be off-topic to demonstrate that you are simply dead wrong about Discovery official policy regarding teaching either ID or creationism in the schools, I will wait until you or someone else starts a new discussion specifically on ID and creationism in the schools.

That he sees no reason to doubt common descent, and that he is not a creationist. But the book is worth buying and reading for more than that, so grab your copy now!

I couldn’t say, since I’ve never read a line of Jeanson. Does Jeanson believe there is historical genetic continuity from one-celled creatures all the way up to man? If so, then I’d say he accepted evolution. Not necessarily the currently dominant view of evolution among evolutionary biologists, but still evolution. On the other hand, if he says that “the dog kind” and “the bear kind” and “the whale kind” and so on were specially created, so that there was a jump from raw matter to living types without any genetic continuity from earlier creatures, then I’d say he does not agree with Behe.

Not among scientists I know. Not among me. Are you sure?

That’s how we’ve been teaching science for at least 25 years. It’s called “inquiry-based,” IOW hypothesis formulation and testing, something that none of Eddie’s heroes bother to do!

Based on my service on a public-school science curriculum committee, I would bet that today’s students are far better equipped to recognize things like IDcreationism as pseudoscience than their parents and grandparents ever were.

Behe also blatantly misrepresents the evidence (not mere claims) that shows what they have done.

That’s not by any stretch of the imagination a description of what Behe thinks happened. It is, as expected, just more " weaselling around with definitions, avoiding specifics, and concentrating on what he thinks didn’t happen".

I don’t believe Behe describes on that page his own view regarding what caused modern animals to evolve from their single-celled ancestors, and I don’t believe you were being honest when you suggested he did.

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No, I’m not sure. I should have said *neo-*Darwinian evolution, or some variant thereof.

Not that this negates my point, which was that despite Eddie’s weaselling, Behe does not accept evolution as usually defined.

That was Eddie, not me.

Still not there. My definition of evolution would be “descent with modification”. Works for Behe too. What we differ on would be the mechanisms of evolution.

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Sorry, fixed.

Depends on one’s definition. If one defined “evolution” purely in terms of common descent, as @John_Harshman does, then Behe accepts it. (EDIT: I just noticed that John has written his definition is “descent with modification”, not common descent. My mistake.)

Beyond that, it’s hard to know exactly what Behe thinks about the theory. As has been mentioned, he is quite adamantly opposed to what he calls “Darwinian” evolution, and at times has even correctly identified structures or systems that could not have arisen thru that process (as it is defined by most knowledgeable evolutionary biologists).

He, however, typically neglects to mention any of the well-established and supported non-Darwinian mechanisms by which these things have arisen which do not entail the intervention of a designer. It’s rather an odd position. I sometimes wonder if this is Behe’s way of keeping things square with his god. He’s not lying, exactly, because lying would be a sin. But he’s also doing his best to prevent believers from accepting non-directed evolution which might cause them to question their faith.

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I don’t think your definition is standard.

(It may be standard for “evolution” when applied to e.g. motorcycles, but not for biological evolution).

Indeed he doesn’t. And I wouldn’t think that complete rejection of evolution really has much to do with whether one is a creationist. After all, the YECs actually need evolution to work at hyper-speed in order to account for all of the post-ark diversity. It would be strange to refuse to call them “creationists” merely because they affirm that evolution can give rise to immense diversity in mammals in just a few thousand years. It’s probably better to define creationists in terms of what they do believe rather than by dancing around various definitions of what “evolution” is and what parts of that are denied by them, given that most creationists accept some variant of evolution.

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It’s definitely better because virtually every creationist misrepresents and/or misunderstands fundamental evolutionary biology!

Note to @Eddie: “evolutionary biology” here includes both theory and empirical work, typically done by the same people…

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I define creationism in terms of being a religious/political movement devoted to the promotion of particular forms of pseudoscience. That includes Intelligent Design Creationism. I accept that might not work if we were to consider ID and some of the other forms of creationism to be serious and legitimate scientific and philosophical positions. But I can think of no reasons to do so.

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What’s your basis for that belief? It was certainly Darwin’s definition. Now, the most common definition of “evolution” is the population genetic one, “change in allele frequencies in populations”, but that doesn’t cover common descent at all, so I’m not thrilled with it. What’s do you think is the standard definition?

FWIW, per Larry Moran, here is how Futuyma defined it in the 3rd edition of his textbook:

Biological (or organic) evolution is change in the properties of populations of organisms or groups of such populations, over the course of generations. The development, or ontogeny, of an individual organism is not considered evolution: individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are ‘heritable’ via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population, such as the alleles that determine the different human blood types, to the alterations that led from the earliest organisms to dinosaurs, bees, snapdragons, and humans.

It would seem to me that, according to that definition, pretty well everyone accepts that evolution occurs.

https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-is-evolution.html

Not the last bit, which is about common descent of dinosaurs, bees, snapdragons, and humans. That leaves out the creationists, but not Behe.

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I understood that, not as part of the definition of the process of evolution, but as an example of what falls under that definition. There is no reason to treat common descent as anything but an established fact when writing a university biology textbook.

That said, my favourite part of that definition has always been its inclusion of snapdragons.

Which is not how the creationists themselves define creationism; nor is it the common meaning of creationism when the word is employed spontanteously by the man in the street. The common meaning would make no reference to “pseudoscience,” or even to “science,” at all. The common meaning would be: “The belief, based on the book of Genesis, that living forms, or at least all the main types of living form, including man, were brought into being by special divine action, rather than being derived by descent from earlier forms as is claimed by theories of organic evolution.”

Can creationism become entangled with political activity? Yes. Was it originally understood by its adherents as a political movement, rather than a religiously-inspired belief about origins? No.

Note that this definition of evolution, however useful it might be among biologists, is not the sociologically relevant understanding of “evolution” when the topic of discussion is “creation vs. evolution.”

Indeed, Larry Moran’s whole article is premised on the notion that there is a “right” versus a “wrong” definition of evolution, when in fact, as is the case with all terms, the definition of “evolution” is determined by convention, convention arrived at by temporary or local needs and concerns. A definition of evolution couched in terms of “allele frequency”, for example, would have no use, or even meaning, in the era of Spencer and Huxley, whereas a definition along the lines of “descent with modification” would have been understood by any scientist of that era.

In popular discussions of origins, the relevant definition of “evolution” has nothing to do with allele frequencies or populations. It has to do with how distinctly different creatures such as dogs, bears, lizards, cacti, human beings, etc. came into existence. The creationist says that these beings (at least at the level of “basic kind”) came into existence by special divine action; the evolutionist says that they came into existence without any need for special divine action, as modifications of earlier beings. Thus, whereas for a population geneticist, any change in the frequency of an allele in a population counts as “evolution,” in popular discourse about origins, most such changes are not fundamental enough to count as “evolution.” Religious people who write about origins are not concerned about whether the change from brown to blue eyes happened by a natural mutation, but whether human beings arose from fish by natural mutations (plus selection, etc.). If you say that the development of red hair in European populations was caused by a natural mutation, creationists aren’t offended, but if you say that human beings arose from small tree-dwelling primates, they are.

It’s pointless for Moran or anyone else to say that creationists are using the “wrong” definition of evolution. They’re using a definition of evolution that is clear enough for their purposes, and is actually pretty close to what Darwin and the scientists in the first generations after Darwin (before Mendelian genetics was brought into the picture) meant by it. They don’t deny that red hair evolved, or blue eyes evolved, but they do deny that human beings had apelike ancestors (let alone fish ancestors). And that’s not because they are scientifically ignorant of Futuyma’s definition of “evolution”; it’s because they don’t think human beings came about the way Futuyma thinks they came about. Contra Moran, the dispute is not over misunderstood terminology, but over the actual history of life. The creationist has a different narrative regarding what happened, when things happened, etc. And no matter what people like Moran, Mayr, Futuyma etc. do now or in the future to modify the definition of the term “evolution” within professional biological literature, the creationist will continue to deny that human beings came from apes, fish, and unicellular ancestors.

(But Behe won’t. :smile: )

Thus sayeth Edward “Death to Irony Detectors” Robinson.

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