Potentially Interesting New Book by Eric Hedin

Conversation
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Good. Then you are now competent to describe what is in it. You weren’t, when you had read only the small number of pages available in the Amazon sample.

I never ruled out the possibility that he would discuss the course at several points. It was likely that he would discuss it at least for the rest of the Introduction, which concerns it, and possibly bring it up again throughout. But “it’s likely” is not the same as “it’s certain,” which is why several statements made here were premature.

Did he identify himself as a “creationist” at any point in the book? Did he define “creationism”?

I do not think that. I never said that. I said that imputing contents to a book one had not read was improper. Of course, once it becomes verified that he discusses something, it is totally proper for readers to discuss it as well.

I didn’t say you shouldn’t discuss what he discusses. I said you shouldn’t, and others shouldn’t, claim that he discusses X unless you have textual statements demonstrating that he discusses X. You now have such statements at hand, so your procedure is fine.

I look forward to reading his discussion of the course when I read the book myself, but thank you for modifying your previous statement in light of what Hedin actually wrote. The others here are convinced they can know what he said without reading it.

As for your detailed points, I cannot comment on them until I read exactly what Hedin wrote. Whether or not your characterizations of his arguments are correct may depend on contextual information that your brief summary cannot provide. I do intend to read the book, and after I’m done, I may respond to one or more of your points.

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Thanks for the summary @Chris_Falter. I have next to no interest in reading the book, though it’s laughably clickbaity title seems to be it’s main point of attraction. Can you tell me whether the book actually contains anything worthy of the title? I know that by me asking for it the title sort of becomes oxymoronic. But anyway, is there anything there that even comes close to living up those words? What is this “canceled science” some atheists don’t want you to see?

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And maybe that would have made it a better course, who knows?

There may be multiple issues being conflated here. In my previous comment, I was mostly concerned with the free speech aspect of this case and whether Hedin was violating any Constitutional principles.

Even if he wasn’t, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that Hedin’s course was just plain lousy. Ball State would then have been justified in cancelling it on those grounds alone, without themselves running afoul of any free speech or Constitutional issues.

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Yes, that’s possible, in the abstract, though if both Hedin and the student reports can be believed (Hedin has a long podcast interview online at the Discovery site, and the student evaluations are quoted in a number of Discovery news articles on the case that are also on the site), the course was very popular (so popular that it was often taught more than once per year), the vast majority of students said they found it intellectually stimulating, and Hedin got higher than average teacher ratings for Ball State (something like 4.3, I believe). As far as I can tell, the main thing that led to the cancellation of the course was the allegations of religious bias.

In any case, the purpose of my book notice was to alert people to the ideas of fine tuning and design discussed in the book, not to defend Hedin’s teaching at Ball State. If I may make a positive suggestion to help disentangle the teaching/constitutional question from the intellectual issues, Michael Denton is an author who, as far as I can tell, argues along the same lines as Hedin regarding fine tuning and design. So if one wants to read arguments of the Hedin type without the framing found in Hedin’s current book, one might do better to read one or more of Denton’s five books on fine tuning. They have no relation to any course Denton ever taught, and they are not written with any Christian apologetic framing, so there are no constitutional or “churchy” questions to distract one as one reads them.

The books are: Nature’s Destiny (1998), Fire-Maker (2016), The Wonder of Water (2017), Children of Light (2018), and The Miracle of the Cell (2020). The first one is the longest and fullest treatment of the overall argument; the last four are shorter, each focusing on one limited aspect of fine tuning, and with more up-to-date data. The first was published by The Free Press (Simon and Schuster), and the later volumes by Discovery.

Someone who thinks that Denton makes a reasonable case regarding fine tuning will probably think there is some merit to Hedin’s book as well, and reading Denton first might enable readers of Hedin to separate side-issues (about constitutional questions and Hedin’s personal religious beliefs) from the substance of the argument. On the other hand, one who thinks that Denton’s arguments for fine tuning are very unpersuasive will probably find Hedin’s arguments unpersuasive as well, and therefore could skip reading Hedin.

Just a suggestion, which may be of help to some people trying to decide whether or not to read Hedin.

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That was my conclusion from the samples. Since he also included Axe, did he ever note that Axe’s paper was the most outlying estimate of function in sequence space? That would seem to be an aspect of biology that an astrophysicist should be easily able to grasp.

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I couldn’t care less about your distortions of those usages.

What world do you live in where a person’s past statements have no bearing on the present?

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And, it should be mentioned, the papers among which it is an outlier include one by Axe himself.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14556184_Active_barnase_variants_with_completely_random_hydrophobic_cores

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Hedin treated Axe’s estimate as the only estimate of function in sequence space.

BTW, here is Hedin’s pound-your-head-on-your-desk discussion of protein probabilities:

Nothing more improbable than about one in 10140 could be expected to happen by chance in our universe. It is instructive to compare this limit with the probability of forming just one moderate-sized protein molecule (consisting of 150 amino acids in sequence) by chance. This has been calculated as 1 chance in 10164. This means that just this one protein molecule could not be expected to form by chance even if the universe were many billions of times older than it is and spent all its time and all its particles working on the problem.

This lottery fallacy is found on page 159.

And with regard to @Rumraket 's question:

The “cancelled science” is 100% ID.

I have already noted the philosophy of science (astrophysics-based fine tuning, beauty points to meaning) parts of the book that have value, IMO. That would be about 40% of the book in my offhand estimate. But science itself? Nope.

Best,
Chris

EDIT: superscript the exponents in lottery fallacy quotation

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That’s the kind of stupidity you’d find in a Youtube video by an uneducated apologist. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that video.

I’m not sure it’s even the lottery fallacy that is being committed. If there was a lottery being held in which every ticket reprinted a random sequence of 150 amino acids, then it is true that some number would be drawn each time, though most likely no one would ever win. But proteins do not form by amino acids floating around and randomly smashing into each other.

@Eddie, this is the book you’re telling us all to read?

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And it should be mentioned that Axe measured enzymatic activity in that one, so there’s zero excuse for his failure to do so in the 2004 paper.

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I didn’t “tell” anyone to read this book. I said it might be of interest to some readers here.

Note that even Chris Falter, who finds fault with the science in the book, says that about 40% of the book concerns philosophy of science and other matters, and that those portions of the book “have value.” If 40% of a book “has value” then I don’t think it’s wrong to indicate that some readers here might be interested in the book. A book does not have to be flawless or correct in all respects to contain material worth looking at. And a philosophy of science discussion about the limitations of science as an endeavor (limitations which many people here acknowledge, including Joshua) is surely related to the purposes of Peaceful Science, insofar as many of the “conflicts of religion with science” arise from overclaims by some scientists about what science can demonstrate.

What you mean is, you can’t be bothered to read the philological evidence I present. Your mind is made up, so philological evidence (how the word is actually used by a wide range of authors from all ideological and religious camps) is irrelevant to you. You are going to keep on using your own private, idiosyncratic definition of “creationism”, which suits your agenda. Well, go ahead, but your private definition has the blessing neither of philological science (in which I, unlike you with your science-only education, am formally trained) nor of the everyday usage of English-language speakers and writers.

The world is called “scholarship”. In that world, if one asserts that in source X John Smith says Y, one must demonstrate that in source X John Smith says Y, by quoting or at least by giving a page reference. You failed to do this, but chose instead to imagine what John Smith probably said, based on your conception of John Smith’s motives. And your conception of John Smith’s motives was based not even on reading earlier statements of John Smith in their original contexts, but on rumors about what John Smith supposedly said orally in a classroom in 2013 or earlier – rumors coming from a source known to be ideologically hostile to John Smith. This sort of attribution is not permitted in scholarship, but it’s not surprising that someone whose academic training likely has not included the writing of an essay since high school is not aware of the requirements of scholarship.

Of course, it is not surprising that someone who would decide that an Australian scientist who had studied the Great Barrier Reef is wrong about the Great Barrier Reef while refusing to read or listen to what that scientist presented by way of evidence, would also brush aside philological evidence without bothering to read it.

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I have not read Hedin’s book yet, but I wrote an article on the Hedin/Coyne/FFRA/Ball State incident at the time. This gives some of the background. Tethered Professor by Terrell Clemmons - Salvo Magazine.

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Thanks for letting us know about your article, Terrell. It’s good to hear an alternate interpretation of Hedin’s motives and activities, to provide a bit of balance to the discussion.

After I read Hedin’s book, I’ll try to make some time to write something about it.

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About Salvo: Salvo Magazine: A publication of The Fellowship of St. James, Salvo is dedicated to debunking the cultural myths that have undercut human dignity, all but destroyed the notions of virtue and morality, and slowly eroded our appetite for transcendence. It also seeks to promote the Christian worldview. The opinions expressed by individual contributors are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher.

Not exactly an unbiased source

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Congratulations. You have discovered that Salvo has a point of view. Commendable, isn’t it, when people are up front about their point of view and intentions.

In other news, I know how the genetic fallacy works.

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That screeching sound you hear are the goal posts. All you are trying to do is weasel out of admitting that Hedin is pushing creationism.

A million irony meters just exploded.

Is this your word for “fantasy”? What people say in the past matters.

We have reports of what Hedin actually said.

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To be convincing, a scientific book needs to cite convincing evidence worth looking at. Correct?

What’s neither commendable nor up front is for people to relay sweeping claims about evidence (as in your quote of John West) without the slightest pointer to the alleged evidence. Did you check the veracity of West’s claim about the evidence before you reported it to your readers?

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I have tried to be fair to Hedin by recognizing the value of his discussions of astrophysics-based fine tuning and his argument from beauty.

However, the book’s discussion of protein structures and biology is a genuine trainwreck. Moreover, it claims to be about science (see the title) when it’s not. On balance, I’d say the bad definitely outweighs the good, especially for a member of the general public who is not familiar with the science that Hedin distorts so egregiously.

Best,
Chris

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The John West quote was:

“Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests … They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren’t well explained by existing theories. . . . [T]he effort to promote thoughtful discussion of competing scientific views is pro-science. As Charles Darwin himself acknowledged, ‘a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.’”

I read this quote as a statement about philosophy of science education. Call it an opinion if you like, but what he was saying was that good science education would not arbitrarily limit itself to presenting only the consensus interpretation, but would also present competing interpretations of the evidence where competing interpretations exist. Perhaps you disagree with the opinion. That’s fine. In that case, you and he just disagree in your approach to science education.

But if you read it as something other than just a matter of differences of opinion on science education, could you identify what part of that quote you read as a sweeping claim about evidence?

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There was another one that you omitted:

“Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests.”

I don’t disagree with it. I vehemently disagree with the implicit claim that Hedin and West behave as though they believe that they want students to see ALL the evidence. This has nothing to do with “competing interpretations,” Terrell.

The objective facts are that they ignore the vast majority of the evidence, and the little evidence that they do present is cherry-picked. For some evidence that is particularly compelling, ID promoters Meyer, Dembski, and Wells literally misinform their readers about the objective evidence itself. Hedin cherry-picks the evidence in the parts of his book regarding biology in a very misleading way.

So, again, this is not a “matter of differences of opinion on science education,” it’s the fact that their actions are in complete violation of the philosophy they claim to follow.

Before you wrote,

“Balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of certain questions about origins and human existence is precisely what Dr. Hedin is doing in “The Boundaries of Science,””

Precisely how many of Hedin’s facts did you critically evaluate for accuracy and balance?

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