NB: i did not write this. it was written just a few hours ago by one of my friends and former classmates, who is now a PhD candidate at Berkeley in, guess what, evolutionary biology. it is a long read, yes, but basically covers every point that has been brought up in the evolution/ID debate over the past weeks in a manner more thorough than us non-specialist plebes can hope to achieve.
on to the text, which again i did _not_ write (but which i'm not quoting for ease of reading -- italic sucks). emphasis added by me, Toshi.
>>>>>>>>>>
Hi everybody,
Sadly, Cardinal Schönborn does not really understand evolutionary theory. He made this clear in his NY Times op-ed a earlier this year, where he argued that biologists claim evolution was a "random and unguided process". This is a definition of evolution you will not find in any textbook, except those written by Protestant and Islamic fundamentalists who advocate creationism, intelligent design, or Biblical/Quranic literalism. First, Schönborn belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what the word "random" means in science. "Random" does not mean that things happen with absolutely no cause, nor does it mean that the range of variation that can occur in organisms, or between organisms, is limitless (such as a lizard suddenly laying an egg that hatches into a bird). Both these ideas are ridiculous, as Schönborn, advocates of creationism/ID, and all biologists recognize. Mutations that occur in living things are constrained by a variety of genetic and developmental processes. What random means in biology is that it is impossible to predict in advance exactly which individuals, or how many, in a population will have mutations, or which mutations out of a potential number of mutations will occur. "Random" in this sense is analogous to "stochastic". This is analogous to house fires. You can't actually predict which houses will burn down in advance, but afterwards you can often figure out what was responsible in each case (smoking in bed, angry ex-spouse, the KKK, etc.). Second, evolution is not unguided. It is guided by natural selection. All kinds of mutations might occur, but only some are actually beneficial to the organisms that carry them, and those organisms which are unfit will die or otherwise fail to pass on genes to the next generation.
Schönborn doesn't have an informed view of how evolutionary biology has changed since Darwin. Darwin happened to be a brilliant man who is without parallel in the history of his field, but he's also neither the last word nor the unassailable authority on the subject of evolution. (He did believe in God; he also believed that God created the first life but then sat back and let natural selection do most of the work.) Darwin's contributions were to popularize the idea that life had evolved over eons (this idea predated Darwin by over a century), and to postulate a new mechanism that could explain this: natural selection. Since then there has been 150 years of research that has both validated Darwin's worldview and expanded the ability of evolutionary biology to explain what we see in the world today. He dismisses geneticists like Hugo de Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan, who rediscovered Mendel's work at the beginning of the twentieth century and founded modern genetics; Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Sewall Wright, Ronald Fisher, and Ernst Mayr, who combined what was known about genetics, populations, species, and paleontology to form the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology in the 1930's and 1940's; paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge who demonstrated that Mayr's theories from the Modern Synthesis match what is seen in the fossil record; Motoo Kimura who emphasized that not only natural selection but also genetic drift is responsible for evolution; and great theorists like William Hamilton and Richard Dawkins who applied Darwinism to understand social behavior in non-human animals and the evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction. This is the "neo-Darwinism" that Schönborn dismisses. Actually, it's a validation of and a significant improvement over Darwin's theory. Real evolutionary biology didn't begin and end with Darwin. Schönborn is obviously a very intelligent man, and I think he would not have said this if he knew more about evolutionary biology.
He also makes the mistake of conflating the origin of life with evolution. (ed/Toshi's comment: this is the same point i've been trying to make to Heath) We don't really understand the origin of life. We have a lot of interesting hypotheses, and we have a lot of hypotheses that have been discarded as we learn more about the early Earth. Ultimately what will prevent us from having a good theory of the origin of life is that it happened 3.5 billion years ago, and there's not a whole lot of evidence left behind in the rocks to help us distinguish between these hypotheses. This lack of evidence doesn't automatically mean that God created life (although that is what Darwin believed). Regardless, evolutionary biology is not about the origin of life. It's about how life has changed over time since it came into being.
Finally, Schönborn's logic is flawed. He implies that if Darwin was unable to explain something, it must be due to God. There's a lot that Darwin was unable to explain. The past 150 years of evolutionary biology, as we have seen, has expanded Darwin's ideas and added new ideas to them to explain many things Darwin didn't understand. We now have a truly integrative body of evolutionary theory that goes well beyond Darwin's theory, but Schönborn doesn't seem to be aware of this and dismisses it all as irrelevant. Actually, there are still things that present evolutionary theory can't explain very well. But it's a logical fallacy to draw a line in the sand in the year 2005 and say, if science can't explain it now, it must be due to God. If you had drawn the line in the sand in 1900 and said the same thing, you would have concluded that heredity was due to God. Schönborn doesn't want to acknowledge the possibility that yet-unconceived scientific theories might come along to explain the "gaps" in "Darwin's theory". He also makes another logical flaw in assuming that if some kind of intelligence is involved, it must be the Judeo-Christian God. He's entitled to his opinion, but if we're going to be scientific about it, you can't just a priori dismiss the possibility that the "gaps" are due to super-intelligent space aliens (as argued by the Raëlians), undetectable and invisible terrestrial beings, a suite of creators (one for plants, one for animals, one for bacteria), or deities from other religions (Allah, Hindu deities, Norse deities, the Native American tricksters Raven or Coyote, Izanagi-no-mikoto and Izanami-no-mikoto who created the Japanese archipelago and gave birth to the Japanese people). Although you may be tempted to throw out the last of these hypotheses because it is racist, science doesn't provide you with any grounds to distinguish between any of them.
I'm not a theologian, but since Schönborn isn't an evolutionary biologist, I will offer the opinion that ID is also bad theology. Schönborn isn't very clear whether he thinks God intervened multiple times in the history of life, but most Protestant ID advocates in the US do. This implies that God isn't actually powerful enough to get things right the first time, and has to keep intervening. If you find this idea unsatisfying, consider the alternative: God intervenes a lot to make all kinds of living things, but then mysteriously decides not to intervene to stop war, genocide, and human suffering. ID advocates like to use the bacterial flagellum as an example of something which couldn't possibly have evolved. They say it has 50 working parts and the removal of any part causes it to not function, but they've never tested this hypothesis. Those who have tested this hypothesis found that up to 20 parts can be removed and it still works as a flagellum, but beyond that it goes back to having a metabolic function which presumably predated the evolution of a flagellum. Perhaps we can conclude that God cares more about bacteria being able to move around than about the Jews and gays who were killed in the Holocaust. Whereas many fundamentalist Protestants and Muslims undisputably believe this, for our sakes I sincerely hope that Schönborn does not.
For these reasons there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers advocating intelligent design, and the only "scientists" who advocate it are those who are specialists in fields other than biology and dabble in ID as a result of their religious views.
David
on to the text, which again i did _not_ write (but which i'm not quoting for ease of reading -- italic sucks). emphasis added by me, Toshi.
>>>>>>>>>>
Hi everybody,
Sadly, Cardinal Schönborn does not really understand evolutionary theory. He made this clear in his NY Times op-ed a earlier this year, where he argued that biologists claim evolution was a "random and unguided process". This is a definition of evolution you will not find in any textbook, except those written by Protestant and Islamic fundamentalists who advocate creationism, intelligent design, or Biblical/Quranic literalism. First, Schönborn belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what the word "random" means in science. "Random" does not mean that things happen with absolutely no cause, nor does it mean that the range of variation that can occur in organisms, or between organisms, is limitless (such as a lizard suddenly laying an egg that hatches into a bird). Both these ideas are ridiculous, as Schönborn, advocates of creationism/ID, and all biologists recognize. Mutations that occur in living things are constrained by a variety of genetic and developmental processes. What random means in biology is that it is impossible to predict in advance exactly which individuals, or how many, in a population will have mutations, or which mutations out of a potential number of mutations will occur. "Random" in this sense is analogous to "stochastic". This is analogous to house fires. You can't actually predict which houses will burn down in advance, but afterwards you can often figure out what was responsible in each case (smoking in bed, angry ex-spouse, the KKK, etc.). Second, evolution is not unguided. It is guided by natural selection. All kinds of mutations might occur, but only some are actually beneficial to the organisms that carry them, and those organisms which are unfit will die or otherwise fail to pass on genes to the next generation.
Schönborn doesn't have an informed view of how evolutionary biology has changed since Darwin. Darwin happened to be a brilliant man who is without parallel in the history of his field, but he's also neither the last word nor the unassailable authority on the subject of evolution. (He did believe in God; he also believed that God created the first life but then sat back and let natural selection do most of the work.) Darwin's contributions were to popularize the idea that life had evolved over eons (this idea predated Darwin by over a century), and to postulate a new mechanism that could explain this: natural selection. Since then there has been 150 years of research that has both validated Darwin's worldview and expanded the ability of evolutionary biology to explain what we see in the world today. He dismisses geneticists like Hugo de Vries and Thomas Hunt Morgan, who rediscovered Mendel's work at the beginning of the twentieth century and founded modern genetics; Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Sewall Wright, Ronald Fisher, and Ernst Mayr, who combined what was known about genetics, populations, species, and paleontology to form the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology in the 1930's and 1940's; paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge who demonstrated that Mayr's theories from the Modern Synthesis match what is seen in the fossil record; Motoo Kimura who emphasized that not only natural selection but also genetic drift is responsible for evolution; and great theorists like William Hamilton and Richard Dawkins who applied Darwinism to understand social behavior in non-human animals and the evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction. This is the "neo-Darwinism" that Schönborn dismisses. Actually, it's a validation of and a significant improvement over Darwin's theory. Real evolutionary biology didn't begin and end with Darwin. Schönborn is obviously a very intelligent man, and I think he would not have said this if he knew more about evolutionary biology.
He also makes the mistake of conflating the origin of life with evolution. (ed/Toshi's comment: this is the same point i've been trying to make to Heath) We don't really understand the origin of life. We have a lot of interesting hypotheses, and we have a lot of hypotheses that have been discarded as we learn more about the early Earth. Ultimately what will prevent us from having a good theory of the origin of life is that it happened 3.5 billion years ago, and there's not a whole lot of evidence left behind in the rocks to help us distinguish between these hypotheses. This lack of evidence doesn't automatically mean that God created life (although that is what Darwin believed). Regardless, evolutionary biology is not about the origin of life. It's about how life has changed over time since it came into being.
Finally, Schönborn's logic is flawed. He implies that if Darwin was unable to explain something, it must be due to God. There's a lot that Darwin was unable to explain. The past 150 years of evolutionary biology, as we have seen, has expanded Darwin's ideas and added new ideas to them to explain many things Darwin didn't understand. We now have a truly integrative body of evolutionary theory that goes well beyond Darwin's theory, but Schönborn doesn't seem to be aware of this and dismisses it all as irrelevant. Actually, there are still things that present evolutionary theory can't explain very well. But it's a logical fallacy to draw a line in the sand in the year 2005 and say, if science can't explain it now, it must be due to God. If you had drawn the line in the sand in 1900 and said the same thing, you would have concluded that heredity was due to God. Schönborn doesn't want to acknowledge the possibility that yet-unconceived scientific theories might come along to explain the "gaps" in "Darwin's theory". He also makes another logical flaw in assuming that if some kind of intelligence is involved, it must be the Judeo-Christian God. He's entitled to his opinion, but if we're going to be scientific about it, you can't just a priori dismiss the possibility that the "gaps" are due to super-intelligent space aliens (as argued by the Raëlians), undetectable and invisible terrestrial beings, a suite of creators (one for plants, one for animals, one for bacteria), or deities from other religions (Allah, Hindu deities, Norse deities, the Native American tricksters Raven or Coyote, Izanagi-no-mikoto and Izanami-no-mikoto who created the Japanese archipelago and gave birth to the Japanese people). Although you may be tempted to throw out the last of these hypotheses because it is racist, science doesn't provide you with any grounds to distinguish between any of them.
I'm not a theologian, but since Schönborn isn't an evolutionary biologist, I will offer the opinion that ID is also bad theology. Schönborn isn't very clear whether he thinks God intervened multiple times in the history of life, but most Protestant ID advocates in the US do. This implies that God isn't actually powerful enough to get things right the first time, and has to keep intervening. If you find this idea unsatisfying, consider the alternative: God intervenes a lot to make all kinds of living things, but then mysteriously decides not to intervene to stop war, genocide, and human suffering. ID advocates like to use the bacterial flagellum as an example of something which couldn't possibly have evolved. They say it has 50 working parts and the removal of any part causes it to not function, but they've never tested this hypothesis. Those who have tested this hypothesis found that up to 20 parts can be removed and it still works as a flagellum, but beyond that it goes back to having a metabolic function which presumably predated the evolution of a flagellum. Perhaps we can conclude that God cares more about bacteria being able to move around than about the Jews and gays who were killed in the Holocaust. Whereas many fundamentalist Protestants and Muslims undisputably believe this, for our sakes I sincerely hope that Schönborn does not.
For these reasons there are no peer-reviewed scientific papers advocating intelligent design, and the only "scientists" who advocate it are those who are specialists in fields other than biology and dabble in ID as a result of their religious views.
David
