Prometheus Unbound

Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel, is drawing rhetorical heat from his fellow atheists outraged over his naming of Stephen Meyer’s, Signature in the Cell (2009), as one of the year’s top books. University of Chicago biologist, Jerry Coyne, calls the book that Nagel reviewed favorably for the Times Literary Supplement a “creationist screed”, and Stephen Fletcher, a UK chemistry professor, is flabbergasted by Nagel:

The belief that we share this planet with supernatural beings is an old one. Students of magic and religion have identified innumerable varieties of them – gods, devils, pixies, fairies, you name it. A familiar motif is that they operate at the very fringes of perception. While the scullery maid sleeps, they are busy in the kitchen making the milk go sour. For a society with no concept of bacteria, this is, perhaps, a forgivable conceit. But for a modern university professor to take this idea seriously is, I think, mind-blowing.

Here’s what Nagel said about Meyer’s book that has set some New Atheists into a tizzy:

Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.

That’s all it took. A modest blurb and—boom!—Nagel’s reputation as a respected philosopher may be in the process of dismantling. And Australian philosopher Russell Blackford, in one of Coyne’s blog threads, joined the pile on:

Sad to see Thomas Nagel bringing himself and his academic discipline into disrepute. However, he’s long had an anti-naturalist streak.

Will Nagel fight back? So far just crickets.

Yes. A very particular scientific observation, in fact. The author of the first chapter of Genesis clearly based his narrative on something that he had empirically observed: the world appears to be composed of two things:

• stage elements (light, darkness, sky, waters, land, and plants); and
• moving elements (sun, moon, stars, animals, and humans)

In other words, the world is a stage with actors. The Genesis 1 author then sets this stage-actor insight into poetic parallelism to build a creation story that accords with the Hebrew week:

Stage elements                                          Actors

Day 1: light and darkness                           Day 4: the sun, moon, and stars

Day 2: waters below and above                   Day 5: sea creatures and birds

Day 3: land and plants                                Day 6: animals and humans  

Once you know the poetic parallelism at work, it’s hard to ever forget the order of creation, or the organizing stage-actor principle underlying it, which one might put in Shakespearean terms as “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” In short, undergirding Genesis 1 is a still valuable empirical surmise of the universe as actually experienced. Unfortunately, fundamentalists attempting to harmonize Genesis 1 with science have missed Genesis 1’s singular empirical categorization, and where it lies: beneath the text’s poetry.

This past week a group of Evangelicals came onto the UCLA campus in Westwood and gave away 2000 free copies of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). But, as usual, there is a catch to such things. The edition of Darwin’s book was accompanied by a fifty page Introduction dissing the theory of evolution! Here’s the ministry responsible for the campaign, at its website, gloating over the success of its counter-intuitive evangelism strategy:

“You’re not supposed to be here today. We are not ready!” That was the reaction of one atheist at UCLA when we showed up on the 18th to give away 2,000 books. He was right. We originally intended to give the copies of On the Origin of Species out on the 19th, but because of the threats of book burnings, of “unilateral resistance,” and the many threats to tear out the Introduction, we changed our strategy. We are so glad we made this move. Atheists had planned to disguise themselves as students and collect multiple copies themselves to stop students getting the books.

The ministry is headed by Ray Comfort of “banana creationist man” fame (see here). The ministry also claims to have distributed over 170,000 copies of Darwin’s Origin so far, and they have gone onto some of the world’s most prestigious campuses to do so (including Oxford and Berkeley).

Needless to say, Richard Dawkins is pissed. And Dawkins is no slouch in the clever retort department. Perhaps the New Atheists will mount their own counter-evangelism campaign: distributing an edition of the New Testament with an Introduction by Richard Dawkins and with footnotes by PZ Myers?

Fruitfly research in France! Liberals are just so crazy!!!!

I think that these two questions, when answered with two yeses, represent the thrust of what Intelligent Design proponents are up to in their critiques of evolution, as William Dembski recently (and concisely) stated at his blog:

The theory [of evolution] purports to give a materialistic account of life’s development once life is already here, but it has a gaping hole at the start since matter gives no evidence of being able to organize itself from non-life into life. The fossil record, especially the sudden emergence of most animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, sharply violates Darwinian expectations about the historical pattern of evolutionary change. The nano-engineering found in the DNA, RNA, and proteins of the cell far exceeds human engineering and remains completely unexplained in Darwinian terms. Darwin lovers are quick to reject such complaints.  After all, as novelist Barbara Kingsolver declares, Darwin’s idea of natural selection is “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.”

Dembski seems to be critiquing evolution on solid grounds here. I know he is an Evangelical, and that he is thus highly motivated to make such critiques, but my question is this: do these lines of critique, with regard to evolution, have at least some validity? I think that they have. If I’m wrong about this, what, as an agnostic, am I missing?

Dembski, in the same blog post, continues:

Any theory that explains everything and that can and must be true is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest swindle ever foisted on gullible intellectuals. The intelligent design community takes the latter view, siding here with Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” Still, it’s easy to understand why so flimsily a supported theory garners such vast support. It provides the creation story for an atheistic worldview. If atheism is true, then something like Darwinian evolution must follow.

I’m not sure which side—the Intelligent Design side or the Darwinist side—will be laughed at, say, a century from now. I suspect that it will be the Intelligent Design hypothesis, at least in terms of its current critiques of evolutionary biology, but it’s hard for me, as a nonscientist, to say. My hunch is that the gaps in evolutionary theory that Intelligent Design currently exploit will be filled over the next century in ways that will make the evolutionary conclusion even more compelling than it appears to be now.

But notice that this is merely a prediction, a guess really. And whether you’re a scientist or not, when it comes to the future, that’s really all we have. In the meantime, a bit of humility might suit all of us—religionist, agnostic, and atheist alike. I think that Dembski often comes across as unduly arrogant and overconfident, as do, say, atheists like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. Everybody seems just so darn cocksure, as if the other side consisted of fools. But competing confidence poses should not be mistaken for anything other than that. Maybe at profound and fundamental levels, both sides have elements to their arguments that, a hundred years from now, will be shown to be not just wrong, but spectacularly so.

Let’s see what happens. And keep an open mind.

Sometimes we think that if we could just have a stunning visual demonstration of something we believe in, that it would convince the nonbelievers in our midst. So it is that alien enthusiasts fantasize about UFOs on the White House lawn, and Evangelical enthusiasts fantasize about Jesus coming in the clouds (“See, we told you so!”).

But what, then, do atheist evolutionary biologists, whose beliefs about evolution are resisted by large majorities of the human population, fantasize about? Well, if you are Richard Dawkins, you fantasize about the recovery of prehuman primate species as an example of something that would “change everything.” 

But would the recovery of, say, a Neanderthal from recovered genetic material, or the creation of a genetic hybrid between chimps and humans really “change everything”?

Though Richard Dawkins thinks it might, I’m not so sure. Most persuadable and reasonably educated people already know that the Earth is old, that evolution occurred (and is occuring), and that we share a common ancestor with other hominids. They’ve seen artist reconstructions of these creatures. They’ve seen images of their bones. And they have read what science writers have to say about them. I think it would be a shock and novelty to see, for example, a real Neanderthal baby in a human crib, and it would be a fascinating story following its birth—and it would have a Truman Show quality to it—but I just doubt that it would cause an earthquake in the psyche of most people.

I think that Dawkins is being a bit naive about how a piece of evidence functions in the minds of the determined-to-be unconvinced. I would guess, for example, that most fundamentalists, though rocked backward a bit by news of the birth of a baby Neanderthal, would ultimately be unswayed to believe in evolution by such an event. Fundamentalists are very, very good at ad hoc  reasoning, and would quickly come up with some bullshit to explain the cute little baby Neanderthal.

I can think of a quick rationalization that would preserve their worldview already: “See—the book of Revelation is full of monsters—and scientists are creating the very monsters that will mark the last days!”

See how easy that was?

Happy Halloween!

Barry Arrington is an intelligent design advocate, and he recently offered a detective analogy for thinking about the tensions between strict materialists and intelligent design advocates. His analogy seems pretty sound to me. Imagine a scene where someone is killed by a blunt object and two detectives are talking over the body:

Columbo:  “I am a materialist.  Therefore, given my premises I know for a certain fact that this person’s death must have been caused by blind, unguided natural forces.  Therefore, I already know that all of the data I find will support that conclusion.  Moreover, the certain knowledge I have before I ever even look at the data means I will never even have to consider the possibility that this person’s death was caused by the acts of an intelligent agent, and I can safely ignore any data that might tend to disprove my starting point or confirm an “intelligent agent” theory.  My theory is that a rock fell from above and hit him in the head.  Probably the rock was dislodged from the side of a hill by the wind or rain and rolled down the hill and smacked him.  Bad luck all around.  By the way, I call the rolling rock theory a “theory” only for form’s sake.  We both know it is a fact! fact! fact!  Bad luck all around.  Case closed.”

Holmes:  “I am not going to make up my mind in advance about whether this death resulted from blind, unguided and exceedingly bad luck or whether it is the result of the acts of an intelligent agent, that is to say, murder.  By the way, I am willing to assume materialist premises too, at least on a methodological basis, but you are wrong to say that assumption precludes the act of an intelligent agent. 

Then towards the end of the exhibit, because he and his buddies were laughing at the displays, they asked him to leave:

I’m of two minds about this. First, the museum is completely private property and those who own it have every right to set the terms of decorum for visitors. The museum receives no money from the state, so nobody’s rights were violated. On the other hand, it is symptomatic of many fundamentalists to be uptight around the diverse expression of opinions. But I think Jesus would have let the young atheist walk through, speak his peace, guffaw, and then Jesus would have kept the dialogue going. What’s that parable about the ninety-nine sheep, and the one sheep that had gone astray?

And, hey, I’m an agnostic, but maybe the dude in this video is an angel undercover. In other words, the museum curators may have been entertaining an angel unawares, and inasmuch as they were mean to him, “they were mean unto me.” But, of course, the atheist dude could also have used some manners, and maybe saved his mockery for the parking lot. You wouldn’t go into a church with a “there’s probably no God” t-shirt on, would you? And what is the Creation Museum, but ultimately a religious gathering place? It’s certainly not a place where science is seriously done.

And why, oh why, is PZ Myers so obsessed about hanging around religious gathering places? What would Freud say? It’s kind of creepy: A “Where’s Waldo” atheist who shadows religious goings-on all the time. What’s his problem? He really needs a bishop to battle, doesn’t he? God help PZ if he ever gets his wish and religion dies. Where would he go on summer vacation? I wonder if he stole something from the museum to burn on the Internet—a Catholic wafer sequel to last summer’s shenanegans.

Any thoughts?

In one respect, the tension between evolutionists and creationists is not over the nature of science, but over the nature of genre. In other words, did the author of Genesis 1 mean to write something in the genre of POETRY—or was he attempting to set down an account of HISTORY—of the literal beginnings of time? There is a very good reason to think that the author meant to write poetry, as a simple look at the structure of the text reveals, for the first three days of creation MIRROR the second three days of creation:

• On the first day of creation God said “let there be light,” as well as darkness, and on the fourth day of creation he made the moving inhabitants of those realms (the sun, moon, and stars).
• On the second day God separated the waters above the earth from the waters below the earth, and on the fifth day he made the moving inhabitants of those two realms (the birds and sea creatures).
• On the third day God made the dry land and plants appear, and on the sixth day he made the moving inhabitants of that realm (the animals and man).

In other words, the author clearly structured his creation story in such a way that the “stage elements” were created on the first three days (light, waters above and below, and the land and plants) and the “actors”—the things that move about—on the second three days (sun, moon, stars, birds, fish, animals, man). Put another way: the author poetically structured his narrative around things that “are” and things that “move”—between stage and actors. Shakespeare, if he had ever noticed this element to the first chapter of Genesis, would have liked it, for:

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players thereof.

And why would the author of Genesis structure his narrative thus? For one very good reason: He lived in a largely oral culture—that is, one low in literacy—and seems to have felt the need to make his story memorable—and thus easy to be told by a storyteller to a group. A simple memnonic device such as that described above would assure that the story could be recalled easily. If you just remember, for example, on what day the dry land appears (the third day), then you can remember on what day the “actors”—the animals and man—show up (the sixth day).

I’d like to note that I wrote this entire blog post without looking at the first chapter of Genesis. I didn’t need to. Once you know the “trick” of the story—its poetic structure—you can’t forget it. And there is an obvious benefit to reading Genesis poetically, for it frees one from all the knots of difficulty that the text implies from a literal reading (such as how the earth and plants could have arrived in the universe before the sun, moon, and stars). After learning that the structure of Genesis 1 is poetically motivated, it is very difficult to go back to an insistence on reading the text literally—and weakens the tension inherent in trying to arbitrate between the demands of science and the demands of faith in the Bible. Clearly, the author of Genesis did not intend for his story to be read literally.

But if one nevertheless still posits a literal reading of Genesis, even in the face of its evident poetic structure, one is in the peculiar position of claiming, not just that Genesis is right and conventional science wrong about the origin of the universe, but that God made the universe to match a small group of people’s oral poetic storytelling structure.

Is that really a viable position?

Yes.

Or at least that is the assertion of two science writers in a recent essay for Newsweek.

Read it here.

Money quote:

The stunning irony in the longstanding tension between science and religion in America is that many scientists who merely claim to be defending rationality from religious fundamentalism may actually be turning Americans off to science, doing more harm to their cause than good.

The short answer is yes.

To say that you reject not just particular individual gods (like Zeus, Vishnu, or Yahweh), but all gods (or the concept of God), necessarily entails that you must also believe that matter, energy, the laws of nature, and time are either eternal or self created from nothing. You must further believe that matter precedes mind (telos ) at the “beginning.” You must also believe that the universe is one (not two), and is thus, in some sense, a closed system. These are just some of the things atheists necessarily believe when they reject the concept of God altogether. It is a position for which empirical evidence cannot lend direct or final warrant to the atheist for believing.

This is why it is not fair of atheists to say that theism is inherently opposed to science, while atheism is its natural ally. It is true that empiricism and atheism, via their mutual commitments to philosophical naturalism, are kin to one another, and emerged in full force out of a specific historical context (The Enlightenment). Empiricism, afterall, cannot function at all if it allows for supernatural explanations of data. But unfortunately, empiricism cannot, in any final sense, adjudicate between theism and atheism, for empiricism cannot reach, with data, to the ultimate question—the ontological mystery—that divides theists from atheists:

Why is there something when there might have been nothing?

There are only three answers to this question: matter is eternal; matter is self-created from nothing; matter was created by some sort of mind (or telos ). All three answers invite question begging and cannot be warranted by empirical moves.

Michael White, a biologist with training akin to Michael Behe’s, explains why Behe’s anti-evolution follow-up book to Darwin’s Black Box is almost certainly flawed in its fundamental arguments:

[Sean] Carroll [in the magazine Science ] goes on to make this important point: “Behe seems to lack any appreciation of the quantitative dimensions of molecular and trait evolution.” This is because Behe, like me, is a biochemist—biochemists learn about the physics and chemistry of proteins. The kind of math we use to do our work consists primarily of differential equations that describe the kinetics and thermodynamics of proteins and nucleic acids. Biochemists generally do not study mutation rates, evolving populations, or the heavy statistics behind natural selection. That’s a whole separate field, called quantitative genetics, founded primarily by the pioneering scientists Sewall Wright and Ronald Fisher, whose work is usually not that familiar to biochemists. (As someone who did a PhD in a biochemistry department, but now works in a genetics department, and in a lab that does serious quantitative genetics, I have acutely, even painfully, experienced this difference in training firsthand.) Behe’s problem is that he’s tried to jump into this field without any serious background knowledge; it’s like a chemist or engineer trying to tackle research problems in quantum gravity – the chances of producing anything worthwhile are essentially zero. Behe’s efforts at modeling mutation and selection on protein function have thus been amateurish, and not taken seriously by people who work on these problems professionally.

Theologian N.T. Wright thinks about Charles Darwin in the light of Lucretius, Epicurianism, and 18th century Deism:

See the Panda’s Thumb’s take on this question here.

This month’s Wired is reporting on a shocking scientific finding:

A self-assembling molecule synthesized in a laboratory may resemble the earliest form of information-carrying biological material, a transitional stage between lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life. Called tPNA, short for thioester peptide nucleic acids, the molecules spontaneously mimic the shape of DNA and RNA when mixed together. Left on their own, they gather in shape-shifting strands that morph into stable configurations.

The article quotes one scientist on the implications of the discovery, not just for life’s evolutionary origins, but for creating completely different life forms in the laboratory:

According to University of Manchester organic chemist John Sutherland, who co-authored the Nature study showing how RNA’s ingredients could have formed, the new research is less important in providing primordial insight than in furthering the eventual creation of life in a laboratory.

“Ghadiri’s important and highly innovative new work potentially relates to the origin of life as we don’t yet know it,” said Sutherland. Life’s emergence took billions of years, a process now being compressed into the passage of a few human generations. “The possibility that humans could come up with an alternative biology that outdoes that which produced us is a mind-freeing and mind-bending concept,” he said.

Just three years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, in Part 1 of his First Principles, sought to make a truce between science and religion. His attempt began with this rather beautiful, open-minded, and calm appeal:

We too often forget that not only is there “a soul of goodness in things evil,” but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.

In other words, Spencer suggests that, as a general principle, there may be in things that appear erroneous some important grains of truth. From this Spencer insists that, when it comes to religion, the empiricist ought not to throw all the fanciful ideas born of religion out with the intellectual bathwater:

While many admit the abstract probability that a falsity has usually a nucleus of verity, few bear this abstract probability in mind, when passing judgment on the options of others. A belief that is proved to be grossly at variance with fact, is cast aside with indignation or contempt; and in the heat of antagonism scarcely any one inquires what there was in this belief which commended it to men’s minds. Yet there must have been something. And there is reason to suspect that this something was its correspondence with certain of their experiences: an extremely limited or vague correspondence perhaps, but still, a correspondence. Even the absurdest report may in nearly every instance be traced to an actual occurrence; and had there been no such actual occurrence, this preposterous misrepresentation of it would never have existed. Though the distorted or magnified image transmitted to us through the refracting medium of rumour, is utterly unlike the reality; yet in the absence of the reality there would have been no distorted or magnified image. And thus it is with human beliefs in general. Entirely wrong as they may appear, the implication is that they originally contained, and perhaps still contain, some small amount of truth.

Some small amount of truth. On this Spencer hangs his argument for the retention of at least some religion in a scientific age. For Spencer, beneath all the outward and diverse forms of religion there is a grappling by humans with an Ultimate Mystery that resists explication, and consists of only three possibilities, all of them equally mind-boggling: The universe is self-existent, and has always been here; the universe had a beginning, but it made itself; or something external to the universe made the universe. Religion, however complicated its forms, is a wrestling with this mystery, this truth. Here’s how Spencer puts it:

Respecting the origin of the Universe three verbally intelligible suppositions may be made. We may assert that it is self-existent; or that it is self-created; or that it is created by an external agency. Which of these suppositions is most credible it is not needful here to inquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of them is even conceivable in the true sense of the word.

In other words, both science and religion come up against an impasse, an aporia , when it comes to comprehending certain ultimate things (one of them being the origin of the universe). In Part 1 of his First Principles, Spenser then discusses other conceptual impasses (or aporias) in turn (such as the relation of matter and consciousness). Science can reach only so-far when it comes to even comprehending, in any ultimate way, such impasses, and must therefore yield the field to religious representation at a certain point. This thus strikes me as an early formation of Stephen Gould’s notion of science and religion being two “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). In short, Spencer was one of the first intellectuals after Darwin to attempt a Gould-like move to reduce the tensions between science and religion.

To read the rest of Spencer’s humane and sensible arguments for making peace between science and religion, see here.

And I like this image of Spencer. He’s kind of interesting looking:

Is a demographic vise closing in on the GOP?

Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist writing for Time magazine, thinks so, and puts in a warning: Republican “elephants” need to become less hostile toward Hispanic immigration (and Hispanics in general). They also need to become more youth friendly and more libertarian with regard to social issues (like gay rights). If they don’t, they will unceremoniously go the way of their Ice Age mammoth cousins (and into a chilly electoral oblivion).

Murphy’s article is titled, appropriately, “The Ice Age Cometh”.

Here, for example, is what he observes about the Hispanic vote:

It was a huge shock to the GOP when Barack Obama won Republican Indiana last year. The bigger news was how he did it. Latino voters delivered the state. Exit polls showed that they provided Obama with a margin of more than 58,000 votes in a state he carried by a slim 26,000 votes. That’s right, GOP, you’ve entered a brave new world ruled by Latino Hoosiers, and you’re losing. In 1980, Latino voters cast about 2% of all votes. Last year it was 9%, and Obama won that Hispanic vote with a crushing 35-point margin. By 2030, the Latino share of the vote is likely to double. In Texas, the crucial buckle for the GOP’s Electoral College belt, the No. 1 name for new male babies—many of whom will vote one day—is Jose.

In other words, even states like Texas can no longer be taken for granted.

So change or die.

It simply will no longer do for Republicans to just think about evolution in the context of school board politics.  They’ve got to think about their own evolution, and how to survive in a dramatically altered climate. In the past, Rush Limbaugh has claimed that he and his enthusiastic listeners (such as Dick Cheney) constitute a revolutionary vanguard “on the cutting edge of societal evolution.” How wrong he is, unless he means that he and his listeners are dinosaurs who are gallantly, and in the name of principle, laying their collective necks before the cutting knife-edge of a demographic swing that may well bring them, for all practical purposes, to a place of near permanent political marginalization and, ultimately, to an ignoble extinction.

Can we say “Limbaughtomysaurus” and “Cheneysaurus Rex”?

Biologist PZ Myers today fisks Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga’s essay (written last summer) in which Plantinga claims that evolutionary naturalism is not a coherent intellectual position because we can have no confidence that our brains have evolved to reliably discern truth from error, including the truth or error of evolution and naturalism.  They seem to be, in relation to one another, in a Catch-22. Our brains, Plantinga argues, if they evolved, have not done so for purposes of accurately discerning truth, but for accurately discerning mates, predators, and prey.  His alternative to the brain’s evolution by the pressures of natural selection is to have faith that God has put into us a “divine sense” that accurately perceives truth (especially Truth with a capital “T”). According to Plantinga, just as we have a sense for hearing physical sounds, we also have a sense for hearing and discerning the voice of God and truth. But if we are merely evolved animals, then we cannot rely on our judgments about the truth of things—including whether or not naturalism is a clear way of seeing the world. Thus, if we claim to be evolutionary naturalists, we ought to be driven into a radical epistemic skepticism. So Plantinga writes:

The problem, as several thinkers (C. S. Lewis, for example) have seen, is that naturalism, or evolutionary naturalism, seems to lead to a deep and pervasive skepticism. It leads to the conclusion that our cognitive or belief-producing faculties—memory, perception, logical insight, etc.—are unreliable and cannot be trusted to produce a preponderance of true beliefs over false. Darwin himself had worries along these lines: “With me,” says Darwin, “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

Myers’s response to Plantinga, while characteristically obnoxious in places (as Myers is wont to do), nevertheless struck me as at once sharp and practical. It seemed to cut through a lot of Plantinga’s Calvinist theological fog in a way that only a practicing scientist might do:

To which I say… exactly! Brains are not reliable; they’ve been shaped by forces which, as has been clearly said, do not value Truth with a capital T. Scientists are all skeptics who do not trust their perceptions at all; we design experiments to challenge our assumptions, we measure everything multiple times in multiple ways, we get input from many people, we put our ideas out in public for criticism, we repeat experiments and observations over and over. We demand repeated and repeatable confirmation before we accept a conclusion, because our minds are not reliable. We cannot just sit in our office at Notre Dame with a bible and conjure truth out of divine effluent. We need to supplement brains with evidence, which is the piece Plantinga is missing.

The latter part of this quote contains a particularly astute observation: “We need to supplement brains with evidence.” In other words, we need to bolster our theorizing and philosophizing with evidence precisely because our brains, untethered by encounters with the verifiable, are so unreliable and prone to the compounding of errors. Science, scientific methods, and relentless peer review, function, as it were, as the brain’s performance enhancing vitamin supplements or medicinals. They are human extensions of the brain, attempting to correct—or at least ameliorate—its worst imperfections and tendencies to error.

Plantinga, I assume, would argue that Myers bypasses his point, responding in a practical manner to an epistemic philosophical argument. Plantinga would probably reply to Myers that if you cannot trust the evolved human animal brain for accurately identifying truth (because it did not evolve to discover truth, but evolved for sexual selection and survival), then setting the scaffolding of science over-top of it as a corrective does not really solve the philosophical dilemma of how one ultimately concludes, even then, that you’re seeing the world right.

But Plantinga, if this were the direction of his response, would strike me as being driven into his own peculiar brand of unwarranted epistemic skepticism. It would mean that we would have to treat as a living possibility the idea that science does not give us particularly reliable or true information. Quite obviously, to any sane person, it does.

But I also suppose that Plantinga could then counter with this: How does an evolved monkey brain know what’s sane?

In such a bootstrapping epistemic chase-around, I would simply have to throw up my own monkey arms and side (this time) with the practical biologist over the cunning philosopher-theologian.

Ladies and gentleman, meet one of your ancestors from 47 million years ago, Darwinius masillae, a transitional mammal between lemurs and monkeys (anthropoids). In other words, meet a “missing link” that ultimately evolved into us. And isn’t she beautiful? People are nicknaming her ”Ida,” the ”Mona Lisa” of fossils (and brought to you by the History Channel!):

And here’s an artist’s rendition of the animal:

And here’s a close-up of the fossil:

According to PZ Myers, Darwinius masillae is “a female juvenile who was probably caught in a toxic gas cloud from a volcanic lake, and her body settled into the soft sediments of the lake, where she was buried undisturbed.”

But wait!

Is this an icky convergence of science and media hype for the purpose of promoting a television special?

As depressing as such a thought might be, Brian Switek, a smart young graduate student of evolution and ecology at Rutgers, and a respected science blogger, thinks this may be the case, but first he explains the science:

Scientists have long debated the question of what earlier primates the earliest anthropoids evolved from. There have been a number of hypotheses proposed, but they have generally centered around three groups: the adapids (an extinct group of lemur-like primates to which Darwinius belongs), the omomyids (an extinct group of tarsier-like primates), and the tarsiers (strange, large-eyed primates with living representatives). Each of these groups has been favored as the progenitors of anthropoids, but which one is the right one?

In order to solve his problem paleo-primatologists have been trying to figure out which of these groups is closest to the anthropoids. It might be impossible to identify a true anthropoid ancestor with certainty, but by figuring out the next closest related group (or sister group) scientists can create and test hypotheses about what an anthropoid ancestor might look like. These determinations are based upon shared derived characters, or particular traits shared by two groups and their common ancestor to the exclusion of other groups.

As outlined in the paper “Evolving Perspectives on Anthropoidea” (among others) included in the recent Anthropoid Origins volume, it presently appears that tarsiers and omomyids are the closest groups to anthropoids. This is based upon a combination of fossil, genetic, and morphological evidence. This makes the adapid primates, including Darwinius, a more distant side branch more closely related to living lemurs and lorises.

His bottom line:

I would have hoped that this fossil would receive the care and attention it deserves, but for now it looks like a cash cow for the History Channel. Indeed, this association may not have only presented overblown claims to the public, but hindered good science, as well. As Karen James has suggested, the overall poor quality of the paper and the disproportionate hyping of the find make me wonder if this research was rushed into publication so that the media splash would occur on time. The paper tried to cover so much, so quickly, and contained so many shortfalls that I honestly have to wonder why it was allowed to be published in such a state. Perhaps we will never know, but I am sickened by the way in which a cable network has bastardized a legitimately fascinating scientific discovery, with the scientists themselves going along with it every step of the way. I can only hope that Darwinius will eventually receive the careful analysis it deserves.

You can read his full post here.

Reading Switek’s post, I couldn’t help but think of one of the first filmic renditions of the overwhelming of science by media hype. I’m thinking of the scene in the 1930s version of King Kong, in which an animal of extraordinary scientific interest is turned into a money-making sideshow:

Also, I hadn’t registered this on previous viewings of King Kong, but if you look at the 3:30 mark on the above video, it seems that Kong is echoing Jesus’s crucifixion—for he’s attached to a kind of cross. Likewise, our poor specimen of Darwinius masillae is also, as it were, being held up and financially exploited before the world in a kind of stony crucifixion. And we are the ignorant spectators at little Ida’s sad, and now very public, death.

Forgive the media hungry scientists promoting this find in a premature way—and the History Channel—for they know not what they do?

No, they know exactly what they’re doing.

Here’s the e-mailed press release that Switek received early on in May (2009):

WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING

Ground-Breaking Global Announcement

What: An international press conference to unveil a major historic scientific find. After two years of research a team of world-renowned scientists will announce their findings, which address a long-standing scientific puzzle.

The find is lauded as the most significant scientific discovery of recent times. History brings this momentous find to America and will follow with the premiere of a major television special on Monday, May 25 at 9 pm ET/PT chronicling the discovery and investigation.

Who: Mayor Michael Bloomberg; International team of scientists who researched the find; Abbe Raven, President and CEO, A&E Television Networks; Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager, History; Ellen Futter, President, American Museum of Natural History

With Mayor Bloomberg mentioned, it really does sound like Kong come to New York! And Andrew Sullivan said something curious about this fossil today:

Norwegian paleontologist Dr. Jorn Horum of the University of Oslo led the team that has secretly studied the fossil for the past two years.

WTF? Why the secrecy? A year from now, there might be a lot of backtracking going on here. But by then, the money will already have been made, won’t it?

After explaining evolution to kids, Lord Winston ends his little talk here with a eugenics kicker about what might be in store for human evolution as we increase our ability to manipulate the genome. I actually found his tag-on last sentence in this clip a bit unnerving. What’s in store for humanity, indeed? A eugenic, post-human future? O brave new world that hath such men in it! Pleasant dreams:

I plan to get the book for my five year old daughter, who seems to be very attracted to science topics. Lord Winston’s book at Amazon is here.

And if you are curious to hear Lord Winston’s views on science v. religion, and what he thinks of Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, you can see a brief BBC interview with him here.

Oh, and did I mention that Lord Winston claims to be a believer in God?