Friday, October 30, 2009

Worldview Weekend publishes joke: Sean McDowell on Dawkins' New Book

Sean McDowell has an almost boundless capacity to humiliate himself and not realize it. It's a comic golden goose! Anyway, showing his typical lack of discernment, Brannon Howse ran McDowell's review of The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. (Warning: do not drink milk while reading the review, lest you want to make cheese in your keyboard.)
I love a good challenge.
Remember that line, folks.
I would much rather read a difficult book that makes me think deeply about my convictions than one that provokes little thought. This is why I eagerly anticipated the release of The Greatest Show on Earth, by Richard Dawkins.

With The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, River Out of Eden, and many more, Dawkins has established himself as one of the foremost contemporary defenders of Darwinian evolution. As soon as a copy of his book arrived at my doorstep, I enthusiastically opened the Amazon.com box and jumped right into the book, hoping to be challenged to take another hard look at the evidence for evolution.

With this background information in mind, it's difficult to express how disappointed I was at the demeaning rhetoric and lack of substance that characterizes The Greatest Show on Earth.
Lack of substance? Were you reading the same book that I was?
First off, Dawkins utterly refuses to engage with any serious evolution skeptics.
Oh, I see. By "substance" you mean "wallowing in my own personal intellectual cesspool." That's the thing. This was not a book about you or your weird, intellectually bankrupt religious movement. If you had read and understood the book, you might have encountered the explanation of how the book got its title. A reader sent Dawkins a T-shirt that says: "Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth, The Only Game in Town." You are not playing that game, and therefore do not reside in said town, by which I mean his book. Your side has amply failed to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge. Do you really think that a social historian of Germany in the 20th Century should refer to Holocaust deniers or take them at all seriously? That's the magnitude of the concession you seem to be demanding from the onset. Or to use Dawkins' example, should a teacher of classics seriously have to consider the opinion of someone who says that the Roman Empire never existed? Heck no.
He ignores the work of Jonathan Wells (Ph.D. from UC Berkeley)
Your first superstar is the guy who said this at the Kansas monkey trial?
I became convinced that the Darwinian theory is false because it conflicts with the evidence...I think the earth is probably four-and-a-half billion or so years old. ... But the truth is I have not looked at the evidence. And I have become increasingly suspicious of the evidence that is presented to me and that's why at this point I would say probably it's four-and-a-half billion years old, but I haven't looked at the evidence...There are already scientists-- respected scientists in this country who do experiments on things that most people consider supernatural, such as prayer. When Newton proposed the theory of gravitation it was dismissed as supernaturalism because it was action at a distance. What constitutes supernaturalism in today's science may very well not be supernatural in tomorrow's science.
It turns out that Wells is the bozo who came up with the weird syllogism identified by Jerry Coyne (who McDowell cites favorably below) in his review of Wells's book:
Wells's book rests entirely on a flawed syllogism: hence, textbooks illustrate evolution with examples; these examples are sometimes presented in incorrect or misleading ways; therefore evolution is a fiction. The second premise is not generally true, and even if it were, the conclusion would not follow.
Now where did I first hear about this particularly weird idea that evolutionary biologists teaching from examples is evidence of evolution's fabrication? DAWKINS' BOOK! The example he gives is the "ascent of man" series, and while I can't find it right now, it's the only evolution thing I've been reading for the last week or so. That's where it came from. So he doesn't cite Wells by name. So what? I don't name the pig that became my bacon.
Stephen Meyer (Ph.D. from Cambridge)
The only person to publish Meyer's asinine "information theory" article lost his job after it was published because this editor had circumvented his journal's standards of review. Also, the paper was retracted by the journal. Strike two.
and William Dembski (double Ph.D. in math and philosophy).
Dembski? The guy who has no published research in peer-reviewed biology journals? None? None? None? The guy who stole Harvard's animations and redubbed the voice-over? Go for it. Dembski garners no respect from any biologist.
They have raised substantive questions for the mechanism of Darwinian evolution. Rather than responding to their critiques, Dawkins sets up countless straw man arguments and focuses solely on young-earth creationists (and not even the leaders among them!).
Why would you say that he sets up straw men (presumably about the intelligent design advocates, about whom he has been speaking) and then, in the same breath, say that he focuses only on young-earthers? (Anyway, they are mostly the same people--two words: cdesign proponentsists".)
Now, either Dawkins is unaware of their work, or he chooses to ignore it. The charitable response would be to assume he's simply unaware of the revolution in Christian philosophy, and the intelligent design movement. But this is hard to believe. Dawkins has refused to debate William Lane Craig, Stephen Meyer and many other leading Protestant thinkers.
Oh, that's just because it would look better on their resume than on his. They can go to any of his talks and ask a question, just like everyone else.
Dawkins is content to pick on arguments from decades ago rather than dealing with the current state of the debate. He is banking that most of his readers will not catch on. Sadly, he's probably right.
Are you going to talk about the book, the variety of arguments that he lays out, back by evidence and the research of numerous scholars? Heck, are you going to cite even a single example in support of the point that you think you are making?
This is especially ironic since he castigates evolution skeptics for not fully understanding evolutionary theory: "It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing" (155). It's a shame Dawkins ignores his own advice.
Dawkins claims the evidence is so strong for evolution that doubters are "ignoramuses" that can be compared to Holocaust-deniers. On page 9, Dawkins says, "No reputable scientist disputes it." How can he say this? Since 2001, over 800 Ph.D. scientists have signed the "Dissent from Darwin" list, agreeing with the following statement: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged." Why don't these scientists count?
Read carefully. No reputable scientist disputes it. These, Sean, must not be reputable scientists.
After all, some are from institutions such as MIT, Cambridge, Princeton, UCLA and many more.
What is with your academic name-dropping? It's sad. Lots of morons graduate from everywhere. Your assertion only means anything if you can say, "Everyone who graduates from X University is smart or capable of producing useful scholarship." Having been at some of these institutions for the last decade and a half, I can say without the slightest possibility of contradiction that this is total balls. I'm perpetually surrounded by idiots. In my new, top ranked institution, for instance, a new friend of mine was indignant when I pointed out that homeopathic medicine has no possible therapeutic effect besides placebo and no plausible mechanism by which to have any sort of effect. The fact that the day before I had taken 60 homeopathic sleeping pills in front of my class and made it to my meeting for him to be indignant at me seems to have made no impact on his perspective of the whole argument.

But let's pretend that every good school is populated by good students and excellent instructors, none of whom hold aberrant beliefs, and that everyone's boneheaded assertions must be given equal consideration, no matter how frequently or thoroughly they have been debunked. Have you heard of Project Steve? Do you see the people who are on there? Vets? Dentists? Professors of aviation? Philosophers of psychology? 800 people was all you could muster? The NCSE has almost 1200 scientists named Steve who agree that evolution is the best explanation and Project Steve has a higher proportion of people in the biological sciences than the Discovery Insitute has on their list! Your appeals to false authority are daft and pathetic. When you consider that Steves are about 1 percent of the scientific community, the degree of marginalization you enjoy is vast, yet you would have Dawkins waste time looking at the opinion of this insignificant sample of wierdos.
This example is indicative of what seems to be Dawkins approach in the book: state your views as strongly as you can and completely ignore substantive challenges.
What are they, Sean? Seriously. Name one that is substantive. Seriously.
My second criticism of Dawkins book is that he fails to advance any new evidence for evolution. He points to poor design (dysteleology), biogeography, vestigial structures, the fossil record, homology, and more of the same old arguments evolutionists have been proclaiming for years (William Dembski and I respond to most of these in our book Understanding Intelligent Design). I realize this may not be his point, since he is aiming for a lay audience, but it needs to be pointed out, especially in light of how strong he says the evidence for evolution really is. Consider one example of how his case is remarkably one-sided.
Dawkins approvingly cites Jerry Coyne (author of Why Evolution is True), who says that the evidence for biogeography so strongly favors evolution that he has never even seen a creationist attempt to answer it (p. 283). He obviously hasn't actually read many creationist books.
Of course not. His time is worth something. But do you honestly doubt that he has not heard every tired alternative explanation presented from religious folks in the crowds of people who have heard him speak over the decades?
As always, there is another side to the story. The biogeographical evidence does seem to indicate that organisms (finches, mockingbirds, etc.) have adapted to their unique environments. But this provides little substantive proof for Darwin's grand claim that ALL organisms trace back to a common ancestor through a process of natural selection acting on random mutation. Most evolution skeptics accept the biogeographical evidence; they just question its significance.

The biogeographical evidence indicates that organisms experience a loss of genetic mutation from populations that were isolated through migration or some other natural circumstance. Thus, the biogeographical distribution of species is not the result of new biological information appearing in a particular species (which is what macroevolution requires), but the shuffling or elimination of pre-existing genetic information. While Darwin's theory can explain minor biological adaptations within existing organisms, it cannot explain how mockingbirds-or any other organism-first appeared.
You miss the point and don't understand mutation. This is why he calls you evolution deniers. You refuse to recognize that novel mutations arise. This just misses...all biology. Just saying that additive mutations don't occur, or that somehow they don't accumulate over time as they are passed down from generation to generation, doesn't make them not occur or make anyone take you seriously at all! You are looking away from the glaring larger patterns and the genetic evidence. For instance, why are all the monotremes, all of them, including platypuses and echidnae, in Australia and New Guinea? These are mammals with multipurpose bird-like vents, through which eggs and waste are passed. Did Noah drop them off there? You have to resort to, "Well, it's just like that," which is not good enough. Common descent explains it. Are you saying that the monotremes are an example of "microevolution" (which is not really any different from evolution proper, but you folks somehow fail to see that lots of what you call microevolution directly results in what you call macroevolution--it's all evolution to us).
Much more could be said about The Greatest Show on Earth. Overall, it felt like Dawkins could have cut the book (437 pages) down by about two-thirds without losing any key material. He goes on multiple tangents that, at times, made it hard to follow his reasoning. Overall, I can't really recommend his book to anyone.
So, you didn't understand it? Or your criteria for a good book is that it is not challenging? This would go far to explain why your side has not made any headway or, indeed, shown any capacity to learn. Real science is hard, Sean.

Look, you address none of his arguments, just bitch about how your crackpot theory is treated. Tough, leathery ta-tas. You don't challenge a single point about the various methods by which the age of the universe has been determined, the many and diverse ways in which evolution has been demonstrated. The genetics, for crying out loud, which had the potential to deep-six the whole evolutionary project and only confirmed it spectacularly! You fail to engage with a single piece of evidence or line of argument. I thought you liked a challenge?

Overall, I can't really recommend your review to anyone.

HJ