The Heretical Philosopher

In a recent post, Bill Dembski introduces what he calls a “Darwin Devotion Detector.” He describes it as “A tongue-in-cheek questionnaire that nonetheless provides real insight into the extent to which Darwinian ideas have captured our thinking.” From my perspective, it provides insight into Dembski’s misunderstanding of biological evolution.

It’s been a while since I last posted to this blog. This post may be longer than my usual posts, because the test has 40 questions. Each question suggests two possible anwers, and we are supposed to pick one. And it is supposed to be a forced choice — we are to pick an answer even if we don’t like either suggestion. The suggested answer marked with a “#” is the one that Dembski takes to indicate devotion to Darwin.

I’ll quote the questions and suggested answers. And then I comment. I won’t always go with a forced choice.

The questions

1.
•Evolution in the sense that all present-day organisms arose from one or a few ancestors (common descent) is now a proven fact.#
•Evolution in that sense is still an unproven hypothesis.

My comment is that scientific theories are never proven facts. There are scientific facts, such as measurements. But we don’t treat theories themselves as facts.

2.
•The theory of natural selection (i.e., retention of chance variations) adequately explains common descent.#
•Even assuming full-blown evolution to be a fact, the theory of natural selection does not adequately explain it.

I’m not a big fan of “natural selection.” This is partly because it is so easily misunderstood. And describing it as “retention of chance variations” is a misunderstanding. Properly understood, natural selection really amounts to a program of trial and error testing to find out what works. But, of course, natural selection by itself does not explain common descent. Rather, common descent is observed. The Christian folk like the story of Adam & Eve. But this story is based on what is observed with human reproduction. It presents the idea of the common descent of humans from early ancestors.

Similarly, the story of Noah’s ark supports the idea of the common descent of animals with a species. And they did not need “natural selection” to understand that, because they could observe this common descent.

What Darwin contributed to this idea, was that common descent was not restricted to a species line. That species could change over time. And the evidence does appear to strongly support this.

Hmm, I haven’t posted anything here for a while. And it is even longer since I last posted something about the Intelligent Design movement.

William Dembski now has a second edition of his book “The Design Inference” and this time Winston Ewert is listed as a co-author. I have not read the book. But I have read the excerpt that was posted at the Evolution News blog. And, from that excerpt, we can already see some of the ways that Dembski and Ewert are misunderstanding the theory of evolution.

Randomness

There are two common misunderstandings of evolution that we see coming from anti-evolutionists. The first of these has to do with the role of randomness.

The theory does talk of random mutations. The anti-evolutionists tend to see this as something like coin tossing, and having the good luck to come up with a suitable result. You can see this kind of thinking in Dembski’s subtitle “Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities”. What Dembski argues, is that the probabilities are too small, and therefore there must have been a design.

That’s not how I look at random mutations.