Robert Shedinger: Religion, Science and Evolution: Confessions of a Darwin Skeptic

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Sometimes one can tell. If a uniform process is not used to evaluate all claims, right away there is a possibility that something is wrong. So, for example, if up until now something has counted as “legitimate climatological science” (not necessarily correct in its conclusions, but legitimate in its methods) if it is published in Journals X, Y, and Z, and now someone want to get the world to regard Journals X, Y, and Z as no longer journals of legitimate climate science (even though the personnel running the journals is as qualified in research, degrees, publications etc. as always), and admits that the basis of this judgment is that those journals sometimes publish articles advocating a disliked minority position, one should immediately be suspicious that this someone desires to alter the process in order to exclude certain results.

Chris, have you any evidence that in the cases I mentioned (regarding polar bear counts and the Great Barrier reef), the numbers are anywhere near 99.99 and 0.01? If not, why are you inventing those numbers now?

And do you not think that sometimes the “bitter castout” might be right?

I have not said that dissenters are always right, or even usually right. But you seem to be arguing that professions can never be guilty of corruption, that officials within professions can never exercise unfair bias. And that’s naive. Emotions run very high on certain issues and subjects, and scientists are human beings with political and social agendas. I can tell you from firsthand experience that in religious studies the processes of research grants, hiring and other things are very much controlled by a group with a particular world view – left wing, feminist, deconstructionist, and if Christian, very liberal Christian – in almost every secular academic institution. But whenever anyone protests this bias, the authorities trot out all the same arguments you are using to justify squashing dissent and hiring only the like-minded. And if it happens in religion it can happen elsewhere. I’ve seen it happen in philosophy, English, and other subjects. To believe it never happens in science, when we already have evidence that it has happened in science (and you conceded to me in a private discussion that some climatologists had behaved inappropriately), would be naive.

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But where’s the evidence that they are?

Fundamentalist dog whistles.

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You’re right, Eddie, that I did not cite the literature. So I hereby provide a number with a citation:

99.9942%.

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Silly comment. There are hardly any fundamentalists in academic religious studies departments as it is. What is being excluded is not just fundamentalism but anything like traditional Christianity – Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. Religion departments are very largely staffed now by agnostics, atheists, liberal Christians, liberal or secular Jews, etc., and by people who on just about every social or moral issue you care to name – capital punishment, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, reverse discrimination even the point of hiring less qualified people, etc. – are on the political left. Even a moderately conservative person has very little chance of being hired. And if they are hired, university regulations such as campus speech codes may muzzle expression of forbidden thoughts. You don’t know this area, because you have never in your life taught in a university or even applied to teach in one. You live a private life outside of the university world. Your understanding of what happens in universities is entirely through hearsay; mine has been acquired through long, painful, and very costly experience.

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I did not speak of rejecting the warming. I spoke of disagreements regarding the percentage of warming that is caused by CO2 emissions. There is nowhere near 99% agreement on a particular number, e.g., you will not find anywhere any statement that 99% of the climate scientists agree that 88.9% of global warming is due to CO2 emissions. Pick any number you like, then show me where 99% of the climate scientists endorse that number.

I mentioned the Great Barrier reef and polar bear numbers, not the general issue of global warming. So why are you responding on the general question of global warming?

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Looks like you don’t know what a dog whistle is. How telling that you’re opposed to virtually the entire Civil Rights movement. De-segregation must have been a shock.

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A lie. Further, I said nothing about the civil rights movement. I’m in favor of that movement as originally conceived. I’m not in favor of later developments, e.g., hiring the non-competent in order to meet someone’s imagined “fair quota” of whatever special interest group is the cause celebre of the day.

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Yet you’re in favor of allowing incompetent pseudo-science like ID-Creationism into schools in the name of an “academic freedom” imagined fair quota. Pretty inconsistent there Eddie.

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You really think this happens? And you’re opposed to “later developments”! You’ve made your opposition to feminism clear.

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You’ve made it perfectly clear that YOU are a “bitter castout,” and you just wish you were right.

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No, I’m not. I’ve explicitly said several times I don’t want ID put on the biology curriculum. Why are you deliberately stating a falsehood?

I know it happens. I’ve seen it happen in university hiring, many times. I’ve seen women without completed Ph.D.s and no publications bump men with completed Ph.D.s and a long list of books and articles off a short list, and get interviewed, and I’ve seen it explicitly justified by the end of having more women professors in the department. Quota over qualifications. And it happens not only in the case of women over men, but blacks over whites, etc. The phenomenon of “reverse discrimination” has been discussed so often on this continent, and the justice of it so often questioned, that your lack of familiarity with it suggests a deep unawareness of our discussions here.

If feminism means that women should be treated as equal to men, then I’m a feminist. But the man-hating, “let’s get revenge for historical wrongs” feminism that is rife in Women’s Studies departments etc. in North America is cultural poison. Even some feminists have reacted against it.

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You have been making obtuse references throughout this conversation, Eddie. The cases of AGW skeptics I am familiar with do not raise any alarm bells, in my opinion. Perhaps you are thinking of different cases. If you care to provide links and details, I will take a look at them.

In the middle of a conversation about AGW you yourself raised these cases. If they are a non sequitur for me, they were a non sequitur for you first.

But I don’t think they were a NS for either of us. The research about the 2 habitats is very tightly linked to AGW.

Best,
Chris

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Have you seen this happen in the fields of biology or climate science?

Best,
Chris

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Yet you told me in another conversation, after looking at a detailed critique of the behavior of Michael Mann by an economist, that you agreed that Mann had behaved improperly. Have you changed your mind since then?

I don’t think you understand what claims I’m referring to. The claims in both cases are empirical, not about theoretical models. The polar bear expert, who has actually done some field work on polar bears, says that the numbers are not as low as the reigning opinion holds them to be. And the Australian reef expert, who has spent much time observing the reef, says the reef is not in the shape that some are claiming it to be. But both claim are offensive, because if the polar numbers aren’t as low as the alarmists are claiming, and if the reef isn’t in as bad a shape as the alarmists are claiming, then the reigning narrative has some flaws in it. And in both cases the people have been punished, career-wise. In science the normal way of dealing with measurement disputes is to go out and take another measurement, not to fire or otherwise damage the person whose measurement your theory finds inconvenient.

I always find your tone in these disputes odd. You are polite, yet one gets the distinct sense that you feel a sort of iron-willed tribal impulse to defend science and scientists. Yet your own field is information science, not physical or biological science. Nothing I have ever said has impugned the behavior of people in your field, let alone you personally. There is no need for you get defensive. Even if it turns out that biologists or climate scientists have behaved improperly in some cases, that does not reflect badly on your own work, or the workers in your field.

No, because I have not monitored this field, not being anywhere near it in applying for jobs etc. But if someone on the inside told me it was happening, I would not at all be surprised, given what I have seen in the humanities and social sciences. But in any cases, even if it never happens in the sciences, it happens elsewhere, and so my statement to Burke was correct.

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I saw nothing that indicated a widespread conspiracy to stamp out disagreement in the climate science community. That’s what I meant when I said I did not hear any alarm bells.

This is indeed correct. I have asked you to provide links so I can do some research.

So I guess I should only express tribal interests, and not be concerned with matters of truth and epistemology?

Moreover, so far as I know, you are not a biology research scientist. Yet you have spent tremendous effort recently defending the interests of two biology research scientists.

“I find your tone in these disputes odd.”

So you have no reason to raise this issue in a thread about biology.

Sure. But in this case, would it be relevant to a thread about biology and religion? For some reason I thought this thread was about biology and religion.

Best,
Chris

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I get it. But I was answering Burke’s question. As you know, these threads can rapidly get off-topic. It would be nice if you would spread around some of the blame for this case, so that Burke catches some of it, instead of responding to me alone.

On Dr. Peter Ridd:

You can find the interview there, and also you will find Jon Garvey’s excellent remarks about the case.

On Susan Crockford:

I have only read excerpts so far, and so will refrain from either affirming or denying her account. Also, I refrain from affirming or denying her charge that the non-renewal of her contract was due to her “breaking ranks” regarding the polar bear issue. Of course, her University would never admit that to be the case, even if it was. What interests me most about her book is that it purports to deal with data about polar bear numbers, and I think a healthy dose of data is always useful when theorists on both sides are shouting that the other guy is wrong.

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Agreed.

That’s a reasonable point, but I don’t care to adjudicate the dispute at the moment.

Best,
Chris

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I find that hard to believe, given your complete lack of interest in the immunology data in the case of Behe at Dover.

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In the course of his remarks in the acknowledgements, he says:

“Finally, my biology colleague Eric Baack will find little to agree with here. But I appreciate his sharing with me articles of interest, even if he motive for doing so has been to try and talk me out of my conclusions!”

My sense in reading this book was that his principal error was what I call a “disparity of scrutiny.” He tried very hard to scrutinize the works of actual biologists for some sort of deadly worldview-bias that would put everything they believe in question; but when reviewing the “work” of ID people, he mostly took them at their word. As anyone familiar with the corpus of ID literature knows, that is a very dangerous thing to do. Indeed, even the smarter ID-ers won’t do it (note, for example, Behe’s complete failure to cite Axe and Gauger in his latest book, despite the fact that the argument they make precisely supports him – clearly he had no confidence in the defensibility of their work).

There are a lot of places in the book where this is evident. For example, he makes the claim that the evolution of the mammalian jaw and ear ossicles from what he calls the “reptilian” (really basal amniote, but okay…) jaw bones is just scientists using “imagined scenarios, not documented evidence.” And he says the ossicles are in the inner ear. Now, a couple of things are pretty obvious.

(1) Shedinger NEVER bothered to check this out. Half an hour on Google would have shown him that this statement was profoundly erroneous.
(2) Shedinger got it from Wells. How can we tell? Wells repeatedly, in his writings, identifies the ossicles as being situated in the inner ear rather than the middle ear.

There are loads of other places where one can see this. He cites the 1966 Wistar Institute conference on mathematical challenges to evolution – an event which is utterly forgotten by everyone except the ID crowd, who keep dragging it out and promoting it, quite falsely, as having introduced a problem that biologists have never been able to solve – that the probability of usable mutations is too low for evolution to be possible. I have a hard time believing Shedinger even bothered to read the proceedings, which are rather dry and which mostly consist of biologists showing mathematicians that the mathematicians’ understanding of biology was not exactly first-rate.

As I said in that review I wrote at Amazon, it seemed to me to be a case of an honest man who had been completely duped by the DI. That may be; but my efforts to engage with him on this have resulted in his simply getting angry and refusing to address the substance in any way. Meanwhile, he’s started getting really wacky.

He wrote a while ago to the effect that a 1940’s statement by Dobzhansky that racial differences are largely the result of the differential impacts of selection upon human populations was responsible for “birthing” racist ideas. He has said that theories of sexual selection rely upon heteronormative assumptions about sex (neglecting to understand, of course, that whatever one’s cultural views about gender may be, it still takes two gametes from two sexes to do the biological-reproduction bit, and that only this sort of thing can actually be relevant to passing traits on from generation to generation, regardless of whether a peacock believes it is really a peacock or really a peahen).

And so my view of the man is getting a bit harsher. My sense is that he would very much like to be one of those intellectual gadflies who challenges everybody’s assumptions in clever ways and is then regarded as having enriched the discussion. It’s edgy to say that scientists are wrong, and racist, and telling fanciful stories about jaws and ossicles. It’s not edgy to say that, well, biologists really have got those particular questions nailed down pretty well. But the result is a kind of cargo-cult philosophy: lots of tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, pipe-smoking, armchairs, and big words, but no actual thinking.

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I was thinking about mentioning that, but I didn’t know the posters here got it from Shedinger, and I didn’t know that Shedinger got it from Wells. Phylogenetic analysis vindicated!

Incidentally, for anyone else reading this, the great thing about the mammalian ossicles (and a couple of other ear bones too that also come from the jaw) is that they have an excellent fossil record. You can actually see the transition happening.

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