Yes I think it’s noteworthy that overall religiosity of the population seems to be declining, and yet somehow we’re made to believe that in this cultural milieu of declining religious influence and increasing secularization, in the sciences specifically (historically the least religious, most evolution-endorsing academic field) there is “mounting doubts” about the “standard narrative” of evolutionary mechanisms.
Disregarding the obvious spin terms like “mounting doubts” and “standard narrative”, we are provided no actual data for this, just the occasional example of someone who appears to have done next to no study on the subject expressing barely coherent statements about “chance”. Giving an occasional example of such a person does not suffice to constitute a trend, much less does blathering about “chance” or “billions of instructions” inspire any confidence that the person actually understands what they’re talking about.
I was not speaking of growing support for creationism, or of growing sentiment against “evolution” understood as common descent. I was speaking only of growing doubts about standard accounts of the mechanisms of evolution. I assume this is what Goodall was speaking of, as well, since she accepts evolution as a process; it follows that her doubts must be doubts about whether it could happen entirely by random or chance or blind or unplanned etc. mechanisms.
In any case I was not claiming that a majority of scientists doubted the standard causal explanations, but only that the minority who had some doubts seemed to be growing. And I was speaking of a learned minority, not of unlettered hillbillies; I was speaking of people with a high degree of formal education in biology, physics, chemistry, primatology, linguistics, engineering, philosophy, etc. Whatever one might think of the views of the people I named above (and many others like them), they are neither academically untrained nor fools.
It’s certainly true that an increasing number of Christians are comfortable with evolution. It seems quite likely, however, that of that increasing number, the majority conceive of evolution as in some way guided, steered, nudged, or in some way laid out in advance by divine directive. The typical leader of “evolutionary creationism”, or “theistic evolution”, the sort of person who writes BioLogos columns or posts on sites like this one, usually does not think in those terms, but I suspect it’s a better than even bet that the “joe average” churchgoers think about “divinely guided” or “divinely determined” evolutionary outcomes – phrases that might stick in the throat of a Stump or a Venema but which come naturally enough to those churchgoing Christians who still some extent hold to a pre-Enlightenment, non-deistic, hands-on view of divine action.
Not hearing it myself. There will always be dissenters and mavericks, but from undergraduate poster conferences up through the ranks to the national academies of science, I perceive no discernable trend expressing doubt concerning the general sufficiency of recognized evolutionary mechanisms.
So far as Jane Goodall is concerned, decades of field work observing primates would not be expected to yield insight into molecular biology. People who have made seminal progress in one field are as entitled to opinions outside their specialty, just like anybody else. Very gifted individuals can sometimes offer valuable perspective outside their specialty based on their interest and delve into the literature, but that may be more an exception.
As a lay person in this area, my take is that Goodall’s comments concerning mutation are based on a rather uninformed understanding, and in particular swayed by the common misperception that a particular result.is too unlikely to be accounted for by a random process. Her pronouncements concerning population genetics do not carry weight, not only due to her lack of formal qualification in that area, but because they are insubstantial assertions. There is no contribution there for actual geneticists to really even engage with.
My schedule doesn’t allow lengthy discussion, so I’ll just make a few points:
1-- I already conceded that the “swelling chorus” was a minority. That doesn’t mean it’s not swelling. If the membership of your choir goes up from, say, 4 to 12, that may be small in comparison with the total number of people in your church (say, 300), but it’s still visible growth.
2-- I already conceded that Goodall’s remarks were inaccurate and sloppy, and indicated that she was not reading Collins’s writing in the most natural way. My point was that she is another intelligent scientist who senses a problem, not that she has put the problem well.
3-- Your remark seems to presume that molecular biology/genetics is the only relevant field for assessing putative evolutionary mechanisms. No doubt Goodall’s inaccurate remarks do frame things that way, so your response is partly reasonable. But there are other areas of biology relevant to evolution other than molecular biology and genetics, including developmental biology, physiology, ecology, etc. In recent years, we have had questions about the adequacy of the current package of mechanisms from people working in the developmental area (Newman and some others), and in physiology (Turner), and we have even had some questions coming from people trained in molecular biology (Shapiro). I make no pretense that these voices constitute anything near a majority. But they do seem to be popping up. I don’t think you would have found so much dissent in the golden age of the modern synthesis (Mayr, Dozhansky, Gaylord Simpson, etc.).
4-- I agree that some people (like Goodall) seem less clear or relevant in their objections than others. But it strikes me as interesting that so many obviously thoughtful and high-achieving people in fields both directly biological and otherwise are expressing doubts re mechanism. I’m merely indicating an interesting trend. Goodall’s particular remarks aren’t the best expression of that trend, so probably I chose a bad example, but I was springing off the Goodall reference (which I did not post myself) to make a more general point. The question is why so many obviously highly intelligent and well-trained people, including some trained in molecular biology, physiology and so on, find the portrait of evolution painted by Dawkins, Miller, Coyne, etc. unsatisfactory. This has nothing to do with the Bible or religious fundamentalism, as the people raising the objections are often apparently not very religious individuals at all (e.g., Chomsky, Margulis, Shapiro, Adler, and the group of MIT types who provoked the Wistar Conference), or if they are Christians, are decidedly not fundamentalists (Turner, Jaki, Sternberg). We’re talking about principled intellectual objections. I’m not suggesting that these dissenters are by themselves going to topple modern evolutionary thought. I do suspect that their number will increase over the next few years. Time will tell.
That’s all I have to say on this point – must get back to work.
It’s not a trend until you can show a time-series. What makes you think the number of people who have these vague feelings that standard biology is inadequate is any greater now than 20 or 50 or 100 years ago?
Unavoidably as generations come and go, a list of people who doubt evolution will grow. But so will the one of people who accept it. And the world’s population has increased a lot in the last 100 years.
So it gets a bit more convoluted because we then have to look at relative proportions. It seems to me the real question is whether the cohort consisting of people who have vague feelings of inadequacy about standard evolutionary mechanisms is growing as a percentage out of the whole.
And on a related note, we know that many of these so-called doubters about standard evolutionary mechanisms are various biology-theorists with their own pet theories they’re trying to advocate for.
It seems the Discovery Institute aren’t too happy about this either:
As Evolution Newshas covered before, Goodall’s answers to that question leave behind a darker legacy than you would gather from Templeton’s effusive encomium.
ID proponents bristle at the assertion that they are a veneer over religious dogma, and incessantly relply with “no, the design hypothesis does not involve the identity of the designer”. The conjecture, however, makes no sense unless subscribing to a theistic worldview. This Evolution News article provides another instance of this coupling. How should detection of design, supposedly within the confines of science, favor the explanatory power of traditional theism (the Judeo-Christian heritage) over pantheism, absent the layering of such presuppositions?
Goodall seems to lean towards some kind of pantheistic “life force” that imbues the world with “energy.” But it can easily be shown how this hypothesis pales by comparison with the explanatory power of traditional theism. And not only does theism better explain the structure of the universe, it provides a way to ground the exceptional nature of the human species that we instinctively intuit, even though brilliant scientists like Goodall have sadly conditioned themselves to reject it.
Is this not “cdesign proponentsists” language? William Paley’s watchmaker argument explicitly embraced the traditional theism Elizabeth Whately expressly references here. The Bible itself links design and creator with the simple expression that “God created man in His own image”. ID just appears duplicitous with its denial of the apologetic impetus.
Goodall wasn’s doing that. She was doubting a strawman version of the mechanism. If her two statements reflect her understanding of evolutionary mechanisms, she is clueless.
And you have pointed to zero evidence that would suggest anything of the sort.