Argument Against Intelligent Design

I found this article on the web (here) with a good critique on Intelligent Design. After I have read Dawkins' books and understood the fundamental concepts of evolution, I have always wondered how anybody else could buy into something that is as intellectually bankrupted as intelligent design. I have a few encounters with acquaintances who were zealots when it came to promoting intelligent design and arguing against evolution. While I have never thought I could convince them otherwise, I think this article serves as an excellent rebuttal and explanation of why an intelligent person just cannot support intelligent design.


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The Great Mutator

By Jerry Coyne

I.

Browsing the websites of different colleges, a prospective biology student finds an unusual statement on the page of the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University. It begins:

The faculty in the department of biological sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

So far, so good. After all, every science department should adhere to rigorous canons of research. But then comes a curious disclaimer:

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department.It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

To my knowledge, such a statement is unique. Biology departments do not customarily assert publicly that they support a theory known for more than a century to be true. This is equivalent to a chemistry faculty announcing that "we are unequivocal in our support of atoms." Yet this disclaimer is perfectly understandable. For in this department resides Michael Behe -- that rara avis, a genuine biologist who is also an advocate of "intelligent design." And Lehigh University does not wish to lose prospective students who bridle at the thought of studying miracles in their science courses.

Intelligent design, or ID, is a modern form of creationism cleverly constructed to circumvent the many court decisions that have banned, on First Amendment grounds, the teaching of religious views in the science classroom. ID has shed many of the trappings that once cost creationists scientific and legal credibility, including explicit reference to God and the ludicrous idea that the Earth is only about ten thousand years old. Instead, God has been replaced by an unspecified "intelligent designer." Besides making the usual shopworn criticisms of evolutionary theory, IDers contend that some features of life are too complex to have evolved, and so required celestial intervention.

Behe has been an especially valuable ally of the IDers. Not only is he one of the few working scientists in their camp (he is a protein biochemist), thus giving them a smidgen of scientific respectability, but in 1996 he published Darwin's Black Box, a popular-science book that has become something of a manifesto for "intelligent design." In that book, Behe updated an old creationist chestnut: the assertion that some aspects of life could not have evolved by means of natural selection, because that evolution would have required untenable steps. Consider the eye, which consists of a number of interacting parts (such as the retina, the optic nerve, the lens, and the cornea) that work together to allow vision. How could such a complex feature have evolved gradually if it could not work unless all its components were already in place? Such features, said Behe, are "irreducibly complex": their evolution supposedly cannot be reduced to a sequential series of adaptive steps, as required by Darwinian natural selection.

Well, scientists already knew that "irreducibly complex" features can indeed be explained by natural selection; and Darwin himself had no trouble doing this for the eye in On the Origin of Species, describing a series of perfectly well-adapted living species, each of which had a slightly more advanced version of an eye. Behe's novelty was to extend this argument to complex biochemical pathways, the evolution of many of which we do not yet fully understand. It was in the complexity of metabolism, blood clotting, and immunology that Behe claimed to have found the hand of the Great Designer.

The reviews of Darwin's Black Box in the scientific community were uniformly negative, for two reasons. First, we do understand something about how these pathways might have evolved in stepwise fashion, though we are as yet admittedly ignorant of many details. (It is harder to reconstruct the evolution of biochemical pathways than the evolution of organisms themselves, because, unlike organisms, these pathways do not fossilize, and so their evolution must be reconstructed entirely from living species.) Second, in the scientific community a failure to understand something does not automatically count as evidence for divine creation. Science is littered with once-mysterious facts first imputed to God and later found out to be explicable solely through natural processes. This, in fact, is what Darwin's theory of natural selection did to the earlier idea that organisms were designed by a Creator.

More damaging than the scientific criticisms of Behe's work was the review that he got in 2005 from Judge John E. Jones III. After an ID textbook called Of Pandas and People was proposed for biology classes at a high school in Dover, Pennsylvania, a group of local parents brought suit against the Dover Area School District and some of its members. There followed a six-week trial in federal court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with the plaintiffs supported by the ACLU and a Pennsylvania law firm, and the school district defended by a right-wing Christian law firm. The case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District et al., dubbed by some "the Scopes trial of our century," included luminaries from both the scientific camp and the ID camp battling it out in front of Judge Jones. With his scientific credentials, Behe was the key witness for the defense.

Jones's 139-page verdict for the plaintiffs was eloquent, strong, and unequivocal, especially coming from a churchgoing Republican. He ruled that "intelligent design" is not only unscientific, but a doctrine based firmly on religion. Jones called the introduction of the clandestinely creationist textbook at Dover High School an act of "breathtaking inanity." He also found Behe's testimony wholly unconvincing, noting that irreducible complexity was not evidence against evolution, and that the biochemical systems touted by Behe were not irreducibly complex anyway. Behe's credibility was damaged also by his admission that ID's definition of science was so loose that it could encompass astrology, and by his fatal assertion that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.

But IDers, like all creationists, are never down for the count, because they see themselves as fighting for the Lord. So Behe is back now, with a new book and a brand-new theory that puts the Intelligent Designer back into biology. What has Behe now found to resurrect his campaign for ID? It's rather pathetic, really. Basically, he now admits that almost the entire edifice of evolutionary theory is true: evolution, natural selection, common ancestry. His one novel claim is that the genetic variation that fuels natural selection -- mutation -- is produced not by random changes in DNA, as evolutionists maintain, but by an Intelligent Designer. That is, he sees God as the Great Mutator.

II.

For a start, let us be clear about what Behe now accepts about evolutionary theory. He has no problem with a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, nor with evolutionary change over time, nor apparently with its ample documentation through the fossil record -- the geographical distribution of organisms, the existence of vestigial traits testifying to ancient ancestry, and the finding of fossil "missing links" that show common ancestry among major groups of organisms. Behe admits that most evolution is caused by natural selection, and that all species share common ancestors. He even accepts the one fact that most other IDers would rather die than admit: that humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and other apes.

Why does Behe come clean about all this? The reason is plain. There is simply too much evidence for any scientist to deny these facts without losing all credibility. "Intelligent design" is desperate for scientific respectability, and you do not get that by fighting facts about which everybody agrees. But with most of evolutionary biology accepted, what's left for a good IDer to contest? Behe finds his bugbear in evolutionary theory's view that "random mutation" provides the raw material for evolutionary change. And to understand his critique, we first have to grasp how mutation fits into evolutionary theory, and what scientists mean when they say that mutations are "random."

If evolution is a car, then natural selection is the engine and mutation is the gas. Although evolutionary change can be driven by several processes, natural selection is almost certainly the main one -- and the only one that can adapt organisms to their environment, creating the misleading appearance of deliberate design. Yet natural selection, which is simply the preservation of genes that give their possessors greater reproductive success than their competitors, cannot take place without genetic variation. Although Darwin had no idea where this variation came from, we now know that it is produced by mutation -- accidental changes in the sequence of DNA that usually occur as copying errors when a molecule replicates during cell division. We also know that mutation-generated variation is pervasive: different forms of genes produced by mutation, for example, explain variation in human eye color, blood types, and much of our -- and other species' -- variation in height, weight, biochemistry, and innumerable other traits.

Once the variation exists, those genes that enhance an individual's "fitness" are preserved, and those that reduce it are discarded. (Natural selection is not really a "process," but simply a description of the differential and adaptive survival of genes.) The polar bear, for instance, has a white coat (its hairs actually lack pigment but appear white because they reflect light), and since this color is unique among bears, the polar bear presumably evolved from a dark-furred ancestor. The likely scenario is that mutations occurred that produced individuals varying in their coat color. Bears with a lighter coat had an advantage over others, for they would be more camouflaged against the Arctic ice and snow and better at sneaking up on seals. Lighter bears would then outcompete darker ones at getting food and thus produce more offspring, leaving more copies of the "light-coat" genes. Over time, the population of bears would evolve lighter and lighter coats until they were almost invisible against the snow.

On the basis of much evidence, scientists have concluded that mutations occur randomly. The term "random" here has a specific meaning that is often misunderstood, even by biologists. What we mean is that mutations occur irrespective of whether they would be useful to the organism. Mutations are simply errors in DNA replication. Most of them are harmful or neutral, but a few of them can turn out to be useful. And there is no known biological mechanism for jacking up the probability that a mutation will meet the current adaptive needs of the organism. Bears adapting to snowy terrain will not enjoy a higher probability of getting mutations producing lighter coats than will bears inhabiting non-snowy terrain.

What we do not mean by "random" is that all genes are equally likely to mutate (some are more mutable than others) or that all mutations are equally likely (some types of DNA change are more common than others). It is more accurate, then, to call mutations "indifferent" rather than "random": the chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful. Evolution by selection, then, is a combination of two steps: a "random" (or indifferent) step -- mutation -- that generates a panoply of genetic variants, both good and bad (in our example, a variety of new coat colors); and then a deterministic step -- natural selection -- that orders this variation, keeping the good and winnowing the bad (the retention of light-color genes at the expense of dark-color ones).

It is important to clarify these two steps because of the widespread misconception, promoted by creationists, that in evolution "everything happens by chance." Creationists equate the chance that evolution could produce a complex organism to the infinitesimal chance that a hurricane could sweep through a junkyard and randomly assemble the junk into a Boeing 747. But this analogy is specious. Evolution is manifestly not a chance process because of the order produced by natural selection -- order that can, over vast periods of time, result in complex organisms looking as if they were designed to fit their environment. Humans, the product of non-random natural selection, are the biological equivalent of a 747, and in some ways they are even more complex. The explanation of seeming design by solely materialistic processes was Darwin's greatest achievement, and a major source of discomfort for those holding the view that nature was designed by God.

III.

In a series of rather disconnected and scientifically dubious arguments, Behe tries to claim that random mutations cannot possibly be the building blocks of evolution. His main argument involves malaria, in particular the evolution of humans to resist infection by malaria, and the evolution of the malaria parasite itself to counteract the evolution of human resistance and the development of anti-malarial drugs.

Malaria actually provides a superb example of natural selection, and its story has some intriguing quirks. The disease is caused by a protozoan carried by mosquitoes, who act as flying syringes that inject the microbe into the human bloodstream. There it takes up residence in the liver and then in the red blood cells, multiplies prolifically, and can ultimately cause anemia, kidney failure, hemorrhage, and death. Residence in red blood cells and the liver is adaptive for the parasites, because in those spots they are hidden from the immune system that usually destroys invading microbes. Yet the human spleen can also detect and destroy circulating parasite-laden cells. To counter this tactic, the malaria parasite secretes proteins that cause its carrier blood cells to stick to the walls of blood vessels, avoiding the spleen (this sticking is what causes hemorrhage).

Here, then, is an arms race between a blood-loving parasite and a human body seeking to destroy it. Yet the story is even more complicated and interesting. In sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria is rampant, a mutation has arisen in the gene producing hemoglobin that helps ward off malaria. The striking thing about this mutation, known as the sickle-cell mutation, is that it somehow reduces the chances of contracting malaria when its carriers have one copy of the gene (like most organisms, we have two copies of every gene, one on each of our two sets of chromosomes), but it causes sickle-cell anemia when the carriers have two copies. In sickle-cell anemia, the red blood cells form clumps because of the altered hemoglobin they carry, causing a syndrome of complications that invariably cause death before adulthood.

Thus we have the unusual situation in which heterozygotes, or individuals carrying both one "normal" and one "mutant" hemoglobin gene, are fitter than homozygous individuals, who carry either two "normal" genes (more susceptible to malaria) or two mutant genes (death from sickle-cell anemia). Evolutionary genetics tells us that in a case such as this one, both forms of the gene will remain in the population, ensuring some protection against malaria but also the continuing production of babies with sickle-cell anemia. Africans would be better off if everyone were a heterozygote, but that is impossible, because the two gene copies separate at reproduction and unite with other copies, necessarily producing some deleterious homozygotes.

This example shows that natural selection does not necessarily produce absolute perfection; it works with whatever mutations arise to create the best possible situation given the available raw material and the constraints of genetics. And finally, although the malaria parasite has been unable to counter-evolve resistance to heterozygotes for the sickle-cell gene, it has evolved, through mutation, resistance to various anti-malarial drugs devised by humans. This resistance has become so strong that some strains of malaria are completely resistant to drugs -- yet another example of successful natural selection.

Malaria, then, shows evolution acting on a number of levels. So how can it disprove Darwinian evolution? According to Behe, malaria shows that random mutation is insufficient to explain biological complexity. He disparages the defensive sickle-cell mutation and similar mutations, saying that they "are quintessentially hurtful mutations because they diminish the functioning of the human body" (does successfully resisting malaria really diminish the function of our body?) and that they are "not in the process of joining to build a complex, interactive biochemical system." And although the parasite and the humans are in the process of trying to outwit each other in an evolutionary arms race (including the development of drugs), Behe notes that this arms race has not prompted the evolution of biological complexity. Instead Behe sees the malaria/parasite battle as a mere "trench war of attrition."

In the end, after pages of rather tedious detail about malaria, Behe dismisses the evolutionary aspects of malaria as "chaotic and tangled," which, while showing random mutation and natural selection, are irrelevant to his main concerns: "In this book we are concerned with how machinery [i.e., complex organisms] can be built," he writes. "To build a complex machine many different pieces have to be brought together and fitted to one another." Behe buttresses his conclusion by describing how the AIDS virus evolved to outwit not only the strategies of the human immune system but also powerful anti-viral drugs. Again he sees little evolution of complexity: "HIV has killed millions of people, fended off the human immune system, and become resistant to whatever drug humanity could throw at it. Yet through all that, there have been no significant basic biochemical changes in the virus at all."

In light of evolutionary theory, these conclusions are truly bizarre. No sane evolutionist has ever claimed that an adaptation of a parasite to a host will produce complex biochemical changes. Evolutionary theory predicts only that parasites will adapt, not how they will adapt. In fact, both the malaria parasite and the HIV virus have undergone sufficient "biochemical change" to make them almost completely adapted to withstand both human drugs and the immune system. And humans have, through the sickle-cell mutation and other changes in hemoglobin, become somewhat resistant to malaria. Beyond that, what does Behe expect? A red blood cell with hands to throttle the parasite? A malaria parasite with a cunning brain to outwit the sickle-cell protein? HIV and malaria are doing pretty well at reproducing themselves -- sans new complex systems -- in their present environments. That is all evolution can do.

So what if the malaria parasite has not completely outwitted the sickle-cell mutation? No biologist, least among them Darwin, ever claimed that adaptation is always perfect. Every infection by a parasite, every disease, and every species that goes extinct represents a failure to adapt. Sometimes the right mutations do not arise or cannot arise because of the constraints of development; sometimes they do arise, but produce an imperfect adaptation. In his book The Causes of Evolution, the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane addressed this problem with tongue in cheek: "A selector of sufficient knowledge and power might perhaps obtain from the genes at present available in the human species a race combining an average intellect equal to that of Shakespeare with the stature of Carnera. But he could not produce a race of angels. For the moral character or for the wings, he would have to await or produce suitable mutations."

By disparaging the malaria system as mere "trench warfare" and characterizing the mutations involved as "not constructive" and causing "broken genes," Behe not only engages in sophistry, but shows an almost willful misunderstanding of Darwinism. Natural selection is not a one-way path to more complex adaptations or organisms. Organisms adapt to whatever environmental challenges they face, and those changes could require either small biochemical adjustments (as in the case of malaria), more extensive changes that require complex adaptation (as in the evolution of amphibians from fish), or even the evolution of less complexity. The tapeworm, for example, is considerably simpler than its ancestor: it has lost its nervous system, its digestive system, and most of its reproductive system, becoming in effect an absorptive sack of gonads. But it is nevertheless well adapted to its novel intestinal niche, where it can dispense with unnecessary features (its food, for one thing, is pre-digested). Using malaria and HIV to argue that random mutations cannot fuel the evolution of complexity is like displaying a crudely built footstool to prove that it is impossible to build a house with lumber, hammer, and nails.

IV.

The general reader, at whom The Edge of Evolution is aimed, is unlikely to find the scientific holes in its arguments. Behe writes clearly and engagingly, and someone lacking formal training in biochemistry and evolutionary biology may be easily snowed by his rhetoric. The snow falls most heavily when Behe writes about the complex biochemical adaptations of animals, such as the structure and the operation of cilia. Cilia are small, hairlike structures whose rhythmic beating propels microorganisms; they also help move things along in other species (cilia line the fallopian tubes of mammals, for example, where they sweep the egg into the uterus). Each cilium is built from more than two hundred different proteins, including those making up its structure and "motor proteins" that make it move. Moreover, when a cilium is damaged or a new one is built, an equally complex system of intraflagellar transport uses sixteen other proteins to bring new material from out of the cell for repair, rather like a molecular assembly line.

This description is entertaining and instructive, and those unacquainted with molecular biology will be wowed by the elegance of this adaptation. Indeed, such complex features were what lured many of us into biology, hoping to explain their evolution. But the purpose of Behe's exercise, beyond pedagogy, is simply to overwhelm the reader with nature's complexity, hoping to raise the question of how mutation and natural selection could possibly have built such a feature -- as if being wowed were the same as being persuaded. As Behe says, "The point is to see how elegant and interdependent the coherent system is -- to see how different it is from the broken genes and desperate measures that random mutation routinely involves." ("Broken genes and desperate measures" refers to the simple adaptations of the malaria parasite and its human opponent.) Surely, says Behe, a better theory is that cilia were created by the Intelligent Designer.

In Darwin's Black Box, Behe made exactly the same argument to show that a similar structure, the flagellum (a larger cilium that propels microorganisms), could not have evolved by natural selection. But in this case Behe's claim that no intermediate stages could have existed was refuted. Ken Miller, a biologist at Brown University (and an observant Catholic), showed how flagella and cilia could have had their precursors in mechanisms that the cell uses to transport proteins, mechanisms that are co-opted to construct flagella. Indeed, the whole problem of the evolution of cilia was argued before Judge Jones in Harrisburg, who ruled that there was no convincing evidence that evolution could not have produced this structure, making legal doctrine from something biologists already knew. In his new book, however, Behe simply ignores his critics, repeating his bankrupt claim that there is "no Darwinian explanation for the step-by-step origin of the cilium."

If ID were science, we could make an equivalent demand of its advocates. We could ask Behe to produce a complete step-by-step accounting of what God (sorry, the Intelligent Designer) did when He designed the cilia. And of course Behe would not be able to do that -- nor does he even try. IDers never produce their own "scientific" explanation of life. They just carp about evolution. And as evolutionists explain one thing after another, IDers simply ignore these successes and move on to the ever-dwindling set of unsolved problems in which they continue to see the hand of God.

Behe's arguments from the gaps in scientific knowledge are fatuous. It is certainly true that we do not yet understand every step in the origin of the cilium, but these are early days. Molecular biology is a very young field, and molecular evolutionary biology is even younger. The way to understand the evolution of cilia is to get to work in the laboratory, not to throw up our hands and cry "design." Perhaps we will never understand every step in the evolution of a complex feature, just as we cannot know everything about the development of human civilization from archaeology. But is the incompleteness of our knowledge a reason to invoke God? The history of science shows us that patching the gaps in our knowledge with miracles creates a path that leads only to perpetual ignorance.

V.

Beyond his own incredulity, Behe has two other arguments against the efficacy of mutation and natural selection in creating complex features:

First, steps. The more intermediate evolutionary steps that must be climbed to achieve some biological goal without reaping a net benefit, the more unlikely a Darwinian explanation. Second, coherence. A telltale signature of planning is the coherent ordering of steps toward a goal. Random mutation, on the other hand, is incoherent; that is, any given evolutionary step taken by a population of organisms is unlikely to be connected to its predecessor.

These arguments betray a profound, almost willful ignorance of the evolutionary process. It is indeed true that natural selection cannot build any feature in which intermediate steps do not confer a net benefit on the organism. As Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case." A century and a half later, there is still no such case. Behe certainly fails to make one.

But he does try gamely, claiming that complex interactions between proteins are features that simply could not have evolved. Proteins represent strings of building blocks -- amino acids -- and the cooperation between some proteins requires that sets of amino acids in one protein interact rather precisely with sets in another. (For example, the two strings of amino acids making up human hemoglobin, the alpha and beta chains, are closely aligned, and work together in a coordinated way to take aboard oxygen and later relinquish it in the right tissues.) Such precise protein-protein interactions, says Behe, could not have been formed by "numerous, successive, slight steps," because such Darwinian evolution would be wildly improbable.

To demonstrate the improbability, Behe does some math. He calculates the probability that such interactions between amino acids could evolve, assuming that a precise set of amino acids is required. Not surprisingly, it turns out that getting by mutation a set of three to four amino acids required for only one protein-protein interaction is very low (mutations in the DNA affect the building blocks of proteins, since DNA codes for a sequence of amino acids). It is especially low because Behe requires all of the three or four mutations needed to create such an interaction to arise simultaneously. Since any one mutation is very rare (on the order of one in a billion in any given generation at a specified DNA site), the chances that a specified group of changes could arise in one fell swoop is unimaginably rare. And this is for only a single pair of interacting proteins. When you consider the thousands of proteins in a cell that interact with others, some with as many as five or six others, evolution looks impossible.

Wrong. If it looks impossible, this is only because of Behe's bizarre and unrealistic assumption that for a protein-protein interaction to evolve, all mutations must occur simultaneously, because the step-by-step path is not adaptive. Yet Behe furnishes no proof, no convincing argument, that interactions cannot evolve gradually. In fact, interactions between proteins, like any complex interaction, were certainly built up step by mutational step, with each change producing an interaction scrutinized by selection and retained if it enhanced an organism's fitness. This process could have begun with weak protein-protein associations that were beneficial to the organism. These were then strengthened gradually, involving more and more amino acids to make the interaction stronger and more specific. At the end, you get what we see today: many proteins interacting strongly and specifically. What seems improbable in a single leap becomes much more likely when it evolves gradually, step by step.

A simple example shows this difference. Suppose a complex adaptation involves twenty parts, represented by twenty dice, each one showing a six. The adaptation is fueled by random mutation, represented by throwing the dice. Behe's way of getting this adaptation requires you to roll all twenty dice simultaneously, waiting until they all come up six (that is, all successful mutations must happen together). The probability of getting this outcome is very low; in fact, if you tossed the dice once per second, it would take about a hundred million years to get the right outcome. But now let us build the adaptation step by step, as evolutionary theory dictates. You start by rolling the first die, and keep rolling it until a six comes up. When it does, you keep that die (a successful first step in the adaptation) and move on to the next one. You toss the second die until it comes up six (the second step), and so on until all twenty dice show a six. On average, this would take about a hundred and twenty rolls, or a total of two minutes at one roll per second. This sequential way of getting twenty sixes is infinitely faster than Behe's method. And this is the way natural selection and mutation really work, not by the ludicrous scenario presented by Behe.

As for Behe's assertion that mutation and selection cannot produce "coherence," it is absurd. Coherence is precisely the product of natural selection working with mutation. Yes, mutations are random in the sense I have described, but to say that an evolutionary step taken by an organism is unconnected to its predecessor completely ignores the fact that during evolution organisms are adapting to something in their environment, and that this adaptation can involve a coherent, coordinated response of many features. Consider the evolution of whales from terrestrial animals, now documented by a superb fossil record. The fossils show a wolf-like creature gradually becoming aquatic, with the hind limbs being reduced and finally lost, the forelimbs transformed into flippers, and the nostrils gradually moving atop the head to form the blowhole. How can anyone say that these changes (which of course look planned at the end) are unconnected or incoherent? They represent a case of natural selection eventually turning a land animal into a well-adapted aquatic one.

Not surprisingly, Behe ignores the fact the evolutionists have indeed determined whether mutations are random. Instead, he asserts that randomness is simply assumed by biologists because "the dominant theory [evolution] requires it." That is, all evolutionists are dupes. But for several decades molecular biologists have tested in the laboratory Behe's assumption of non-randomness: that the probability of a mutation being useful increases when a species is exposed to a new environment. These experiments have all failed. As far as we can see, mutations really are random with respect to the "needs" of the organism. There is no reason to assume otherwise.

To get an idea of the power of truly random mutations coupled with selection, we need only look at the successes of animal and plant breeders over the past few centuries. In that time, they have turned the wolf into breeds as diverse as the greyhound, the dachshund, and the chihuahua, and the wild mustard into cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. Virtually every fruit, vegetable, and meat that we eat has been drastically remodeled by the artificial selection of wild ancestors. All these changes have been immeasurably faster than evolution in the wild, which takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years. And all of these changes have involved selection of random mutations. After all, commercial corn, greyhounds, tomatoes, and turkeys were redesigned by humans, not the Intelligent Designer, and since humans cannot produce miracle mutations, we are limited to selecting whichever ones arise -- that is, random ones. To think otherwise would require the extraordinary assumption that the Designer foresaw the intentions of breeders and supplied them with the appropriate miraculous mutations. The success of animal and plant breeding, far outstripping the pace of evolution in nature, is a severe rebuke to Behe's view that evolution cannot work unless God helps it along by producing nonrandom mutations.

VI.

As the philosopher Philip Kitcher shows in his superb new book, Living With Darwin, the theory of intelligent design is a mixture of "dead science" and non-science. That is, insofar as ID makes scientific claims (for example, that natural selection cannot produce complexity), those claims not only are wrong, but were proved wrong years ago. And ID is deeply unscientific in its assertion that certain aspects of evolution (mutation, in Behe's case) required supernatural intervention. Behe's attacks on evolutionary theory are once again wrongheaded, but the intellectual situation grows far worse when we see what theory he offers in its place.

The first problem is that Behe's "scientific" ideas are offered to the public in a trade book, and have never gone through the usual process of vetting in peer-reviewed scientific journals. This was also the case with Darwin's Black Box. In fact, Behe has never published a paper supporting intelligent design in any scientific journal, despite his assertion in Darwin's Black Box that his own discovery of biochemical design "must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science," rivaling "those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur, and Darwin." Surely such an important theory deserves a place in the scientific literature! But the reason for the lack of peer review is obvious: Behe's ideas would never pass muster among scientists, despite the fact that anybody who really could disprove Darwinism would win great renown.

So let us put some empirical questions to Behe, since his theory is supposedly scientific. Which features of life were designed, as opposed to evolved? How exactly did the mutations responsible for design come about? Who was the Designer? To what end did the Designer work? If the goal was perfection, why are some features of life (such as our appendix or prostate gland) palpably imperfect?

In response to the question of what exactly was designed, Behe's answer seems to be: pretty much everything, including cells, biochemical systems, and the features distinguishing major groups of organisms, such as wings and warm-bloodedness. Behe's criterion is basically twofold: a feature of life must have been designed if it consists of a "purposeful arrangement of parts" and is composed of at least three parts.

But when we see something that looks designed, how do we know whether that design is "purposeful"? Natural selection displaced divine design precisely because it offered a naturalistic explanation for things that appeared to be purposeful. And why three components? This appears to come from Behe's claim that three amino acids are unlikely to change simultaneously in a protein. Well, that claim is true, but it has nothing to do with protein evolution, much less with the evolution of complex features. As we know from the fossil record, the multiple features of organisms that make them look designed -- say, the feathers, legs, and wings of birds -- did not appear instantly and simultaneously, but evolved gradually. There is not the slightest connection between the likelihood of three binding sites appearing simultaneously in a protein and the likelihood of three features of an organism evolving. Conflating these issues, and hoping that the reader will not notice, must be a deliberate rhetorical trick on Behe's part, for surely even he is not that ignorant of basic biology.

How did the non-random mutations come about? Well, they were obviously created by the Intelligent Designer. In Darwin's Black Box, Behe made the outrageous claim that the Designer might have engineered the first cell to contain all the mutations for the evolution of every species that would ever exist. This claim is manifestly false: such a cell would have unmanageably large amounts of DNA, and we see no evidence of "future DNA reserves" in primitive organisms such as bacteria. Behe still raises this possibility in his new book, but he also floats another idea: that mutations might not have been built into the first organism but could have occurred later, foreseen by God. In other words, they were miracles. So you can choose between the two possibilities: either mutations occurred in one big miracle or in millions of little miracles. The first claim is religious and false. The second claim is religious and untestable. Neither claim is scientific.



Who, precisely, was the Designer? Here Behe weasels a bit, as he should given the federal judiciary's dislike of religion in the science classroom. He mentions that the Christian God is only one of several possibilities. But you can bet that it was not Brahma, or the Bushmen's Kaang, or a space alien. As Jones remarked in Kitzmiller v. Dover: "Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God." It is disingenuous of IDers to pretend that the Great Designer is unknown. Intelligent design has deep roots in fundamentalist Christianity, and its advocates are not fooling anyone.

And what were the Designer's goals? This is where Behe really gives away the game. He asserts that the goal was "intelligent life." Of course, what he really means is humans, presumably because Christians (Behe is a Catholic) feel that humans were made in the image of God: "What we sense, as elaborated through modern science's instruments and our reasoning, is that we live in a universe fine-tuned for intelligent life." And elsewhere: "Parts were moving into place over geological time for the subsequent, purposeful, planned emergence of intelligent life."

From God's mouth to Behe's ear! At this point we can simply stop asking whether Behe's theory is scientific, for he provides not the slightest evidence that evolution had any goal, much less one of intelligent life. In fact, every form of life on Earth, from humans to ferns to squirrels, can trace its ancestry back to the same single species that lived about three and a half billion years ago. In that sense, all species are equally evolved and equally removed in time from life's origin. Science long ago dispensed with the notion of the scala natura: a progressive ladder of life with humans at the top. Rather, each existing species is at the tip of a branch on the tree of life. So what scientific reason can there be for singling out just one species as the Designer's goal? How do we know that the goal was not butterflies or sunflowers? Plainly, Behe is adopting religious dogma as part of his theory. Yet he continues to assert that "I regard design as a completely scientific conclusion."

And what about the features of organisms that do not look well designed, such as the appendix, the vestigial wings of the kiwi bird, or the vestigial pelvis of whales? In Darwin's Black Box, Behe punted and said that the Designer's goals were unknowable: "Features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason -- for artistic reasons, for variety, to show off, for some as-yet-undetected practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason -- or they might not." But if we do not know why the Designer did things, how can we possibly know that his goal was intelligent life?



Finally Behe gets to theodicy: why is there pain and evil in the world if the Designer is omnipotent? How come He/She/It allows innocent babies to get sickle-cell anemia? Behe's answer is that "maybe the Designer isn't all that beneficent or omnipotent. Science can't answer questions like that." But questions about the goals, the powers, and the limitations of the Designer are precisely what must be answered if ID is to become scientific. After all, we do know something about the power and the limitations of natural selection, a process that can explain pain and things that seem evil.

Is Behe's theory testable? Well, not really, since it consists not of positive assertions, but of criticisms of evolutionary theory and solemn declarations that it is powerless to explain complexity. And it is certainly true that scientists will never be able to give Darwinian explanations for the evolution of everything. The origins of many features, such as the bony plates on the back of the Stegosaurus, are lost in the irrecoverable past. But neither can archaeology unearth everything about ancient history. We do not maintain on these grounds that archaeology is not a science.

Behe waffles when confronted with the testability problem of ID and turns it back on evolutionists, saying that "coming from Darwinists, both objections [the lack of predictions and the untestability of ID] are instances of the pot calling the kettle black." He then waffles even more when implying that ID does not even need to be testable: "Both additional demands -- for hard-and-fast predictions or for direct evidence of a theory's fundamental principle--are disingenuous. Philosophers have long known that no simple criterion, including prediction, automatically qualifies or disqualifies something as science, and fundamental entities invoked by a theory can remain mysterious for centuries, or indefinitely."

But who is being disingenuous here? Evolution has been tested, and confirmed, many times over. Every time we find an early human fossil dating back several million years, it confirms evolution. Every time a new transitional fossil is found, such as the recently discovered "missing links" between land animals and whales, it confirms evolution. Each time a bacterial strain becomes resistant to an antibiotic, it confirms evolution. And evolutionary biology makes predictions. Here is one that Darwin himself made: that the earliest human ancestors will be found in Africa. (That prediction was confirmed, of course.) Another was made by Neil Shubin at the University of Chicago: that transitional forms between fish and amphibians would be found in 370-million-year-old rocks. Sure enough, he discovered that there were rocks of that age in Canada, went and looked at them, and found the right fossils. Intelligent design, in contrast, makes no predictions. It is infinitely malleable in the face of counterevidence, cannot be refuted, and is therefore not science.

In the end, The Edge of Evolution is not an advance or a refinement of the theory of intelligent design, but a retreat from its original claims -- an act of desperation designed to maintain credibility in a world of scientific progress. But it is all for nothing, because Behe's new theory remains the same old mixture of dead science and thinly disguised theology. There is no evidence for his main claim of non-random mutation, and scientists have plenty of evidence against it. His arguments against the Darwinian evolution of complex organisms are flawed and misleading. And there is not a shred of evidence supporting his claim that the goal of evolution is intelligent life. In contrast to the feast of evidence that nourishes evolutionary theory, Behe gives us an empty plate.

The overweening strategy of IDers, and their creationist forebears, is to say that everything that we do not understand is evidence of the existence of God. I can imagine IDers of two centuries ago claiming that God made the sun shine, because until 1938 we had no idea where all that energy came from. It was not until quantum mechanics arrived out of left field that the physicist Hans Bethe was able to surmise, correctly, that the sun is a giant fusion reactor, converting hydrogen atoms into helium and energy. Who knew?

One of the great joys of science is that we never know what will happen next. Who could have guessed twenty years ago that dinosaurs probably became extinct after a giant meteorite collided with Earth and produced a "nuclear winter"? IDers would deprive us of this essential excitement, urging us to stop working when we come up against the hard problems and to ascribe our difficulties to God. They would have us join the herd of the benighted who proclaim so confidently that they have descried the bounds of our knowledge. But this attitude, this philosophy, was anticipated and unmasked by none other than Darwin himself, who was prescient not only about biology, but also about the nature of science: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

Grandpa Is Jay Chou Wannabe

I kid... He actually don't like the cap very much...

Punk Grandma

What the f**k are you looking at??!?!?

50 Homer Simpson Quotes

This is a tribute to The Simpsons Movie. Watch it if you have not done so, it is freaking hilarious and I could not stop laughing at the movie from start to end.

• Operator! Give me the number for 911!
• Oh, so they have internet on computers now!
• Bart, with $10,000, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like... love!
• Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.
• I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman.

• Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They're about to announce the lottery numbers.
• Well, it's 1 a.m. Better go home and spend some quality time with the kids.
• Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'Sir' without adding, 'You're making a scene.'
• Marge, don't discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel.
• Doughnuts. Is there anything they can't do?
• You know, boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like a woman. You just have to read the manual and press the right buttons.
• Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way.
• When will I learn? The answer to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle, they're on TV!
• Son, when you participate in sporting events, it's not whether you win or lose: it's how drunk you get.
• I'm going to the back seat of my car, with the woman I love, and I won't be back for ten minutes!
• [Meeting Aliens] Please don't eat me! I have a wife and kids. Eat them!

• What do we need a psychiatrist for? We know our kid is nuts.
• Marge, you're as beautiful as Princess Leia and as smart as Yoda.
• Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
• The only monster here is the gambling monster that has enslaved your mother! I call him Gamblor, and it's time to snatch your mother from his neon claws!
• When I look at the smiles on all the children's faces, I just know they're about to jab me with something.
• I'm having the best day of my life, and I owe it all to not going to Church!
• Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such and such.
• I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?
• Getting out of jury duty is easy. The trick is to say you're prejudiced against all races.
• It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day.
• Lisa, Vampires are make-believe, like elves, gremlins, and Eskimos.
• I want to share something with you: The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.
• Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.
• Remember that postcard Grandpa sent us from Florida of that Alligator biting that woman's bottom? That's right, we all thought it was hilarious. But, it turns out we were wrong. That alligator was sexually harassing that woman.
• Old people don't need companionship. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use.
• How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?

• Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover.
• Homer no function beer well without.
• I've always wondered if there was a god. And now I know there is -- and it's me.
• Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream?
• If something goes wrong at the plant, blame the guy who can't speak English.
• I'm never going to be disabled. I'm sick of being so healthy.
• I like my beer cold, my TV loud and my homosexuals flaming.

• [Looking at a globe map...country being Uruguay] Hee hee! Look at this country! 'You-are-gay.'
• All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals.
• Dad, you've done a lot of great things, but you're a very old man, and old people are useless.
• But Marge, what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder.
• I think Smithers picked me because of my motivational skills. Everyone says they have to work a lot harder when I’m around.
• Dear Lord.. The gods have been good to me. For the first time in my life, everything is absolutely perfect just the way it is. So here's the deal: You freeze everything the way it is, and I won't ask for anything more. If that is OK, please give me absolutely no sign. OK, deal.
• That's it! You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!
• Beer: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
• If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing
• I'm in no condition to drive...wait! I shouldn't listen to myself, I'm drunk!
• 'To Start Press Any Key'. Where's the ANY key?

Bill Maher -- The Decider

Bill Maher's stand up comedy... This is freaking funny, even though some of the jokes are rehashed from his New Rules segments from Real Time with Bill Maher.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6


Part 7


Part 8

Salvador Dali Statue

@ UOB Building, Raffles Place, Singapore

Lewis Black On Iraq

This is an old Back In Black Clip from the Daily Show... Here Lewis Black talks about the good news coming out of Iraq.




The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - The Most Trusted Name in Fake News

The French Connections

I am not a big fan of free-market capitalism, and many a times I have argued with my Libertarian friends that the free-market forces needs government regulation. While this article that appeared in The New York Times might not "prove my point" completely, it does add weight to my views.

===========================================================================
The French Connections
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 23 July 2007

There was a time when everyone thought that the Europeans and the Japanese were better at business than we were. In the early 1990s airport bookstores were full of volumes with samurai warriors on their covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese business success. Lester Thurow's 1992 book, "Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America," which spent more than six months on the Times best-seller list, predicted that Europe would win.

Then it all changed, and American despondency turned into triumphalism. Partly this was because the Clinton boom contrasted so sharply with Europe's slow growth and Japan's decade-long slump. Above all, however, our new confidence reflected the rise of the Internet. Jacques Chirac complained that the Internet was an "Anglo-Saxon network," and he had a point - France, like most of Europe except Scandinavia, lagged far behind the U.S. when it came to getting online.

What most Americans probably don't know is that over the last few years the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved - in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links - it's the United States that has fallen behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our "high speed" connections are painfully slow by other countries' standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

As a result, we're lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to Internet TV; the United States isn't even in the top 10.

What happened to America's Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the United States made the same mistake in Internet policy that California made in energy policy: it forgot - or was persuaded by special interests to ignore - the reality that sometimes you can't have effective market competition without effective regulation.

You see, the world may look flat once you're in cyberspace - but to get there you need to go through a narrow passageway, down your phone line or down your TV cable. And if the companies controlling these passageways can behave like the robber barons of yore, levying whatever tolls they like on those who pass by, commerce suffers.

America's Internet flourished in the dial-up era because federal regulators didn't let that happen - they forced local phone companies to act as common carriers, allowing competing service providers to use their lines. Clinton administration officials, including Al Gore and Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, tried to ensure that this open competition would continue - but the telecommunications giants sabotaged their efforts, while The Wall Street Journal's editorial page ridiculed them as people with the minds of French bureaucrats.

And when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband - if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that's much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.

It's too early to say how much harm the broadband lag will do to the U.S. economy as a whole. But it's interesting to learn that health care isn't the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach because they aren't prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things better.

A Critique On Postmodernism

I have often argued with my friends trained in the humanities that I think Postmodernism is a crappy bullshit theory and a stupid way of looking at reality, for they often confuse between opinion and fact. It looks like I am not the only one to feel this way. This is an interesting article I found online here, which summarizes my feelings quite well.

===============================================
Intellectual adolescence

FROM CYNICISM TO POSTMODERNISM | Contrarianism has a proud intellectual heritage, but in its postmodern flowering it merely became juvenile, complacently smashing up the entire interlocking crossword puzzle of human knowledge.

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom
Editors, www.butterfliesandwheels.com, and authors of Why Truth Matters (2006).

The very name “postmodernism” seems designed to stake out the territory of the latest hottest thing, the farthest point on the chart plus one. But there is a sense in which postmodernism seems not novel at all but just another example in a recurring pattern that goes back as far as we can squint. Postmodernism is notoriously elusive of definition, but if we take it to include, at a minimum, a suspicion of grand narratives, an urge to problematise everything (especially whatever seems least problematic), anti-foundationalism or relativism in knowledge as well as ethics, and a “playful” or “ironic” view of truth, then history presents a good many people who resemble postmodernists and schools of thought that resemble postmodernism.

There have always been people who look at the world and social arrangements, and decide to do everything by contraries. There have also always been people with a more nuanced view of the matter, but who have been represented by others as doing everything by contraries. Socrates the ironist was portrayed by Aristophanes as just such a philosophical over-turner of apple carts, one who inspired sons to rebel against their fathers, contradicting their every word and challenging conventional wisdom to the point of absurdity. Aristophanes’ Socrates in The Clouds was a caricature (and there is a story that Socrates was in the audience and laughed uproariously), but the caricature may have influenced the capital charges against Socrates that he did not believe in the gods that Athens believed in, but introduced new gods, and that he corrupted the youth of the city.

The outcome was bad for Socrates’ immediate well-being, but it probably (with Plato’s help) did a lot for his long-term fame. Doing things by contraries often works that way. It can be a serious effort to look behind appearances and think critically about custom and habit, and it can also be a way to get attention, whether admiring or disdainful.

The 6th century BC Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama also, according to the legend, did things by contraries, as did other ascetics and wandering sages throughout history, right up to Thoreau and Gandhi and Ted Kaczynski. Since most people want comfort and prosperity and (if possible) luxury, those who voluntarily turn their backs on that sort of life and choose poverty and discomfort are necessarily being contrarian. Diogenes the cynic, whom Plato called Socrates run mad, was another such: he held that the distinction between virtue and vice was the only one that mattered and that other conventional distinctions (public and private, raw and cooked, yours and mine) were worthless—in other words, he “problematised binary distinctions.”

Cynicism became a widespread movement or school of thought in the Hellenistic world. One New Testament scholar argues that Jesus was a home-grown Cynic and that many of the sayings that strike Christians as novel and unique are in fact neither, but rather good conventional cynicism: they generally amount to doing or advocating doing the opposite of the (socially, as opposed to cynically) conventional thing. Turning the other cheek, giving the shirt as well as the cloak, talking to a woman from Samaria, healing on the Sabbath, letting the dead bury the dead, rejecting the stoning of a woman taken in adultery—they’re all contraries.



HOWEVER, DOING things by contraries is an easier matter in pre-industrial societies than it is in modern (or postmodern) ones, in which economic and vocational complexity are associated with myriad shifting overlapping groups and micro-cultures, with varying norms and expectations. What is contrarianism in one context may be the most slavish conformity in another. At a family gathering or high school reunion or neighbourhood potluck, the post-colonialist sex-positive queer theoretical opinions may be thrillingly exotic, but back at the coal face, at department meetings or when teaching liminality and hybridity 101, they are not all that startling.

In other words, to the extent that the underlying project is that of being the one radical who will never be out-radicalled, of being the new Nietzsche or Freud by finding previously unproblematised power structures to problematise, then… the task can be a daunting one. It’s late in the game. The players have been here for a long time, they’ve gone over the ground again and again, they’ve turned up everything—all the gold and emeralds, even the coal and limestone and gravel, were dug up and carted off long ago. However long one looks, however patiently one digs and scratches and turns over, there may simply be nothing left to find. A nondescript bit of stone or scrap of bark isn’t going to do much good. The field is just played out.
The only recourse left seems to be to problematise the field itself. What is the field then? What is the ground the problematisers stand on? Knowledge itself, reality itself, truth itself; science and reason, the foundations of modern knowledge and practice. It becomes necessary to question or deconstruct or deny not just the criteria for science and reason, but science and reason themselves, as in this article from 2001:

This paper offers a postmodern “deconstruction” of basic physical theory, which is the cause and effect of classical physics specified by Newton’s laws of motion...This deconstruction of “Newtonian text,” which demonstrates that the presumed causality of external forces in classical physics indeed is a social construct (as postmodern sociology claims all theory to be), refutes the presupposition of natural science about the objectivist foundations of modern scientific discourse.1

An article on evidence-based medicine published in 2006 offers some even stronger claims:

Within the healthcare disciplines, a powerful evidence-based discourse has produced a plethora of correlates, such as specialised journals and best practice guidelines...Unmasking the hidden politics of evidence-based discourse is paramount, and it is this task that forms the basis of our critique...[T]he objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.2

This article was sharply criticised by the Guardian science columnist Ben Goldacre, among others, and the International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare published a reply to the criticisms which began with this explanation of postmodernism:

The postmodernist thinking that has characterised a number of academic disciplines in the last two or so decades of the 20th century—and is still alive and well in some quarters—has played an important role in creating new ways of developing ideas in the arts, science and culture. The relativism on which it is founded, and the “liberation” from sacred cows it seeks, have a place in healthcare and health science. At its simplest…postmodernism is a response to modernity—the period where science was trusted and represented progress—and essentially focuses on questioning the centrality of both science and established canons, disciplines and institutions to achieving progress. The nature of “truth” is a recurring concern to postmodernists, who generally purport that there are no truths but multiple realities and that understandings of the human condition are dynamic and diverse. The notion that no one view, theory or understanding should be privileged over another (or that no discourse should be silenced) is a tenet of postmodernist critique and analysis.3

It is easy to find instances of this kind of theoretical and epistemological egalitarianism. In anthropology, for example, approaches that are broadly postmodern are common, and are associated with a general move against what are seen as the totalising and oppressive aspects of Western science. Thus, Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross point out that many books have been published within the discipline, in which anthropology is seen

to facilitate colonialism and other repressive relationships…to contribute to the abuse of indigenous peoples by romanticised descriptions of their culture that failed to take account of their threatened status, and to permit racially and culturally alien outsiders to produce and market false, misleading, and even exploitative caricatures of other societies.4

Postmodernism provides an escape from anthropology’s supposedly reactionary heart. Since postmodernists can claim, variously, that there are multiple realities (all of them socially constructed); that truth-claims are necessarily embedded in particular language-games or discourses or power relations; that to suppose that language refers to the world at all is to be committed to a naïve “metaphysics of presence”; so it is possible simply to assert that anthropology must cast off its imperialist past, reject the scientific paradigm, and reinvent itself as a morally engaged discipline.

This might sound like hyperbole, but it is not. Louise Lamphere, for example, a past president of the American Anthropological Association, claims that there is an “urgent need” for an “engaged anthropology,” within which moral commitment trumps impersonal scientific concern, and where the communities that anthropologists work with are treated as equal partners in the research process.

There are a host of critical social issues that anthropologists are currently researching where our qualitative methodologies, in-depth field research, and knowledge of local languages and cultures gives us vital insights into the sources of social problems and also of potential remedies for some very pressing societal dilemmas.5

Similarly, Nancy Sheper-Hughes claims that a critical anthropology will “assert the subjectivity of knowable phenomena” and propose “reflection as a valid category and method of discovery” (author’s italics). Moreover, she argues that anthropologists should become “negative” workers, practice “barefoot anthropology,” and “disrupt expected academic roles and statuses.”6

This desire among anthropologists to radicalise their subject, and to reject the hegemony of scientific orthodoxy, can lead them to articulate positions that are highly counterintuitive. Frederique Apffel Marglin, for example, in her essay “Smallpox in Two Cultures,” writes about the campaign by colonial administrators in the 19th century and the Indian government in the 1970s to vaccinate the Indian people against smallpox. She does not stop at making the reasonable point that colonial officials and the Indian government were tactless in telling those who resisted vaccination that they were superstitious and irrational. Her aim is larger: “to challenge science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge which renders obsolete more traditional systems of thought.”

She mounts her challenge by problematising the binary opposition that Western medicine invokes—not unreasonably, one might think—between disease and health, death and life, and she contrasts it unfavourably with the traditional Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox.

In absolutely negativising disease, suffering and death, in opposing these to health and life in a mutually exclusive manner, the scientific medical system of knowledge can separate in individuals and in populations what is absolutely bad, the enemy to be eradicated, from what is good, health and life. In the process it can and does objectify people with all the repressive political possibilities that objectification opens.7

There is something rather stunning about a level of science-phobia that sees “negativising” disease, suffering and death, as harmful and repressive. It is extraordinary that Marglin, even for a moment, countenances the possibility that human suffering might be a source of joy and pleasure if only it weren't for the intervention of an oppressive system of Western medicine.

Marglin’s ruminations have had little, if any, impact on programmes of vaccination. Indeed, it was precisely such a concerted programme that eradicated smallpox, long considered to be the worst of the infectious diseases, from the world in the late 1970s. However, there are other cases where this kind of epistemic relativism and scepticism about the possibility of truth has had more sinister effects.

For one thing, there is pervasive confusion about what knowledge is; about what the standards of justification are, what evidence is valid and what is not, why it matters, and similar very basic issues. At a time when scientific literacy is of ever-increasing importance, a sophisticatedly ironic view of science and reason is not useful. It helps foster the endemic journalistic idea that for every “issue” there are precisely two sides and that both must be heard, which results in fake “controversies” in which one side has all the evidence and the other side has mere assertion, yet the putative controversy runs and runs.

There was for instance the pseudo-scandal in the UK about the MMR vaccine and its alleged implication in causing autism. In 1998 Andrew Wakefield, a research scientist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a paper showing that he had found traces of the measles virus in the intestines of twelve children with autism. He suggested that the MMR vaccine was dangerous, but he had no real evidence for the suggestion; nevertheless there was a panic about the MMR, a drop in vaccination rates, and an increase in measles—a dangerous disease.

Public scientific literacy is further threatened, especially in the US, by demands from some religious groups that schools teach intelligent design in addition to or instead of evolutionary biology. There is an ever-growing mountain of evidence in support of the latter and none in support of the former, yet the news media and even reputable publishers such as Cambridge University Press continue to treat the matter as a genuine controversy and the proponents of ID as epistemically respectable parties to a debate.

Another claim which has worked its way into the broader culture is that Einstein’s wife Mileva Marić was his unacknowledged collaborator for much of the most productive part of his career. There is essentially no evidence for this claim (nothing more than Einstein’s use of the word “our” in connection with his work in a few of his letters to Marić), as the physicist Allen Esterson has shown in great detail,8 yet advocates for Marić’s role, again, claim parity with historians of science and Einstein scholars unimpressed by speculation about what Marić might have done. The US public broadcaster PBS, part of whose mission is to be an educational service, features a documentary about Marić that Esterson has shown to be riddled with errors.9

Just two weeks ago, another television documentary made claims that DNA evidence and statistics show that a tomb in Jerusalem is that of “Jesus’s family.” Again, there is no real evidence;10 again, the claim is an absurd one that nevertheless gets a great deal of media and public attention, most of it all too serious and credulous.

The Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt noted a similar confusion last year, after the editors of the Daily Northwestern decided to run a column by electrical engineering professor and Holocaust denier Arthur Butz “‘in order,” they said, “to “facilitate a more educated debate over Butz’s beliefs.’”

That is akin to facilitating a debate between flat earthers and scientists or between people who said there was no slavery and historians of slavery. Butz’s beliefs are documented lies. Don’t take my word on it. Take that of the Royal High Court of Justice and two different Courts of Appeal.

Lipstadt sums up:

Let the likes of Butz and Irving go on talking to neo-Nazis and other deniers. That is their right. Neither the Daily nor any other paper has an obligation to publish such lies.11

But one of the consequences of epistemological relativism is such widespread confusion about what constitutes knowledge or a legitimate claim to knowledge, and what does not. Knowledge becomes confused with fairness, and fairness becomes the idea that both sides deserve a hearing, and not just a hearing but active publicity.



THE IMPULSE which leads postmodernists, and others, to valorise epistemological relativism is easy to understand. It is rooted in a commitment to egalitarianism. It is bad enough that Western countries grow fat on the poverty of everyone else; it simply cannot be tolerated that their scientists, philosophers, and centres of learning also determine what methods and tools should be considered the best for finding out about the world. After all, to allow that this was true would be to add epistemic power—the power to determine what counts as knowledge—to the economic, political and military power that Western countries already possess. The solution then is simply to privilege the knowledge claims of people who are in various ways marginalised and oppressed. After all, if nothing else, it is surely obvious that they will know more about their own situation than representatives of the forces that oppress them.

The trouble is, though, that it isn’t obvious. There is no reason to suppose that simply because people are downtrodden they will possess true beliefs about their situation and the world that has conspired to put them in it. Smallpox is a virus: the fact that some people consider it to be associated with a goddess doesn’t make it any less a virus. Similarly, an electrical storm is a natural weather phenomenon; the fact that some people have believed it to be a sign of the wrath of the gods, doesn’t make it any less a natural weather phenomenon. Put simply, the world has a reality that is independent of the claims that people make of it. Being oppressed and marginalised doesn’t automatically put people in a good position to get a grasp on it.



OF COURSE, the likely response to this from any halfway sophisticated postmodernist will simply be to deny that there is this kind of a mind-independent reality. Consider, for example, the work of French sociologist Bruno Latour. In his book, Pandora’s Hope, he seems to argue—though much of his prose is deliberately opaque—that the objects of scientific knowledge exist only to the extent that they are articulated through the manifold mediations which constitute scientific practice. Thus, for instance, he claims that the proposition “It refers to something there” indicates the safety, fluidity, traceability, and stability of a transverse series of aligned intermediaries, not an impossible correspondence between two far-apart vertical domains.12

Needless to say, it is supposed that this kind of contrarian thinking has a number of radical implications. Latour insists, for example, that existence is not an all or nothing property. Rather, an entity gains in reality the more it is associated with other entities which in their turn collaborate with it. Moreover, we should never say “‘it exists’ or ‘it does not exist’”13 (unless, it seems, we’re Bruno Latour, answering a question posed in our own book a few pages earlier about whether ferments existed before Pasteur made them up; then we can reply: “‘No, they did not exist before he came along’—an answer that is obvious, natural, and even, as I will show, commonsensical!”).14

Latour’s general way of proceeding is to employ an absurdly ornate and rhetorical writing style in order to muddy a number of conceptual waters, presumably with the hope that in this way the banal will be rendered profound. Particularly, he likes to blur the distinction between our knowledge of objects and the objects themselves (what Susan Haack calls “the passes-for fallacy”). Here is an example taken from his discussion of a paper by Louis Pasteur which deals with the discovery of a yeast related to lactic acid fermentation:

The capacities of the natural world are modified between the beginning and the end of the story. At the start of the paper the reader lives in a world in which the relation between organic matter and ferments is that of contact and decay…At the end the reader lives in a world in which a ferment is as active as any other already identified life form…15

It hardly needs saying that Latour simply asserts here what he needs to demonstrate: namely, that the external world is somehow affected by the process of coming to know about it. Presumably what he is pretending that he is not saying is that the world seems different once we know certain things about it. Very well, but this is just obvious. The rhetorical trick he employs to disguise this truism, or to give it the veneer of profundity, is simply to pretend that he is talking about the world itself rather than our knowledge or experience of it.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont complain precisely about Latour’s tendency to mix up statements about knowledge with statements about things in their Intellectual Impostures. Here is Latour’s offending statement:

Since the settlement of controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation, not the consequence, we can never use the outcome—Nature—to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.16

This is what Sokal and Bricmont had to say about this sleight of hand:

Note how Latour slips, without comment or argument, from “Nature’s representation” in the first half of this sentence to “Nature” tout court in the second half. If we were to read “Nature’s representation” in both halves, then we’d have the truism that scientists’ representations of Nature (that is, their theories) are arrived at by a social process, and that the course and outcome of that social process can’t be explained simply by its outcomes.17

Latour, then, employs a shoddy epistemology, a dodgy grasp of logic, and a fondness for an overblown turn of phrase, in the service of a contrarian project, the main aim of which seems to be to render the obvious mysterious and the banal profound.



THERE IS THE THOUGHT that the kinds of issues that we have been discussing in this essay are mainly local and parochial; that yes, these are important concerns within the academy, but that they are of little relevance to the lives of people outside of it. However, such a view is mistaken. There are good reasons for everybody to resist postmodernist nihilism about the possibility of truth and knowledge.

One compelling reason is that the pursuit and accumulation of knowledge is at least as likely to be liberating as it is to be oppressive or colonialist. Historically, the recognition of a sharp difference between justified assertion and mere assertion tout court has been a force for liberation and progress, and against arbitrary power and illegitimate institutions. Meera Nanda puts it like this:

Having grown up in a provincial town in Northern India, I considered my education in science a source of personal enlightenment. Natural science, especially molecular biology, had given me a whole different perspective on the underlying cosmology of the religious and cultural traditions I was raised in. Science gave me good reasons to say a principled “No!” to many of my inherited beliefs about God, nature, women, duties and rights, purity and pollution, social status, and my relationship with my fellow citizens. I had…found the courage to assert the right to fulfil my own destiny, because I learned to demand good reasons for the demands that were put on me.18

Contrarianism, nihilism, the overturning of tables and interrogation of all foundations have their uses, but they also have their risks. There is always risk in demolition work: one may destroy something of great value that cannot be replaced.

With all the special pains and miseries of human life, we have advantages not possessed by even the cleverest of animals. We can tell each other what happened when one of us was absent, we can discuss memories, we can plan the future; we can mourn, we can explain, we can imagine, mutually as well as singly. We have language, and we have writing and other forms of recording. This means that we can generate cumulative knowledge that is beyond the reach of any other animal on the planet. It took us millions of years to realise this talent and put it to use, but we now have a heritage of knowledge and science built up over centuries: a vast interlocking crossword puzzle, in Susan Haack’s metaphor. That heritage is of great practical benefit, of course, but it is also of great non-instrumental value, in the same sort of way as music and art, drama and poetry, cathedrals and Bamiyan buddhas.

If we are going to throw all this away, if we are going to play the contrarian card, then a cautionary principle applies: we have to have good reasons for thinking that what we are throwing away is not something of great value. In its adolescent excess, in its desire to shock, to titillate, to push against boundaries and convention, postmodernism come nowhere near meeting this cautionary demand.


OPHELIA BENSON & JEREMY STANGROOM
Editors, www.butterfliesandwheels.com, and authors of Why Truth Matters (2006).



Footnotes:
1. L. Frederick Zaman III, ‘Postmodern Deconstruction Of Newtonian Science: A Physical-to-social Transposition Of Causality’, Theory & Science, 2001, http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol002.001/05zaman.html, accessed March 1 2007


2. Dave Holmes RN PhD, Stuart J Murray PhD, Amélie Perron RN
PhD(cand) and Geneviève Rail PhD, ‘Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism’, International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare, 2006, 4 (3), 180-186.



3. Alan Pearson RN MSc PhD FAAG FRCN, ‘Scientists, postmodernists or fascists?’, International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, 4 (4), 385–391 http://www.badscience.net/?p=338#more-338, accessed March 1 2007


4. Tomas A. Gregor and Daniel A. Gross, ‘Guilt by Association: the Culture of Accusation and the American Anthropological Association’s Investigation of Darkness in El Dorado’, American Anthropologist, 106 (4), p. 688.


5. Louise Lamphere, ‘Perils and Prospects for an Engaged Anthropology: A View from the US’, Social Anthropology, 11 (2), p. 143.


6. Cited in Gregor and Gross, op cit, p. 689 & p. 690.


7. F.A. Marglin, ‘Smallpox in two Systems of Knowledge’, in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, eds. F.A. Marglin and S.A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).


8. Allen Esterson, ‘Mileva Marić: Einstein’s Wife,’ Butterflies and Wheels, March 6 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=182


9. Allen Esterson, ‘Einstein’s Wife: A challenge to PBS,’ Butterflies and Wheels, July 5 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=201


10. R Joseph Hoffmann, ‘The Bones of Our Lord,’ Butterflies and Wheels, February 26 2007 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=233
‘”Faccidents”: Bad Assumptions and the Jesus Tomb Debacle,’ Butterflies and Wheels, March 7 2007 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=235


11. Deborah Lipstadt, ‘Distortions are not Worth Debating,’ Butterflies and Wheels, February 21 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=174


12. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope, Harvard University Press 1999, p. 149.


13. Ibid., p. 159.


14. Ibid., p. 154.


15. Ibid., p. 117.


16. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, Profile Books [1998] 2003, p. 85.


17. Ibid.


18. Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward, Rutgers University Press 2003, p. xi.

Bill Maher: Elites

The term "elite" has a negative connotation in Singapore... and whenever I get into arguments with friends, I have been branded an "elite" just for subscribing to the view that we need capable people to lead our government. However, I always felt that most Singaporeans confuse between the term "elite" and "no empathy" (yeah, thanks a lot, Wee Shu Min)... This is one of Bill Maher's old "New Rules" segment, and I think he summarizes my point exactly (in a funny way albeit) on the importance of having capable people in charge of your country......

科学不是迷信

(刊登于联合早报2007年7月22日)

最近回国和朋友会面，常讨论的话题是科学在社会所应该扮演的角色。由于本身学术训练的关系，因此对于科学应该在社会扮演重要角色的看法非常坚持。然而，此立场也通常和朋友对于社会某些现象的看法对立。例如中医、风水、特异功能、星座学、另类治疗等等。对于以上 “学问”，本人的立场是它们都不是建立在严谨物理证据的基础上，在某种程度上就等同迷信。

当然，有许多朋友都不认同本人的看法，最常提出的反驳是就算科学为人类带来许多高科技产品，不过却无法解释宇宙所有的事物。因此，只依靠科学角度来理解和反对以上提到的现象过于霸道、思想狭隘和高傲，而对于科学执著才是迷信的表现。

本人不否认科学无法解释宇宙所有事物，不过却不认同利用科学理解世界的做法就等同思想狭隘和高傲。首先，许多人经常把科学误解成科技产品，认为所谓科学就是太空梭或者电脑。其实，科学是一套教导人们如何获取知识的指导原则。

所谓迷信，就是客观证据不足的情况下依然坚持不合理的信念。反之，任何科学理论都必须建立在可供观察的 (publicly observable) 客观证据上，绝对不会声称别人测量不出某些现象的证据是因为没受过训练，或是没有某种的特殊能力。然而，此借口却是以上提到的现象在受到证据不足的指责下经常搬出的理由。不理会客观证据的不足而坚持某些现象存在，难道就不比因为证据不足而不接受某些看法的行为来得更思想狭隘吗？

科学理论除了必须建立在客观证据上，所有形容该理论的概念、术语，以及现象都必须拥有操作定义 (operational definition)。也就是说，所有的科学理论都必须拥有能够被观察或者衡量的现实依据。这也是为何科学家都坚持把理论建立在客观证据的基础上。如果知识是建立在主观的意见和看法上，那么恐怕永远都无法有所进步吧？

本人之所以认为科学并非高傲和思想狭隘，是因为其基本的理念建立在我们对于整个宇宙的了解并不全面的原则上。对科学家而言，这个世界没有绝对的真理，而任何科学理论都有被推翻的可能性，只要能提出足够的证据。当然，支持某理论的证据越多，此理论被推翻的可能性就越低。就如同进化论，尽管此理论几乎成为真理了，不过只要有人能够找到属于寒武纪的人类化石，就足以推翻此理论。或许利用已故物理学者Richard Feynman生前的经典语录来形容一般科学家的想法最为贴切了： 我拥有近似真相的答案、可能被推翻的信仰，以及对于不同现象拥有不同程度的确信，不过我从来不会对任何事物拥有绝对的看法。

仔细想想，这种只承认客观证据所形容的现实，而不接受客观现实以外的揣测的思想不就和孔子所说的 “知之为知之，不知为不知，是知也” 和 “子不语怪、力、乱、神” 等看法相近吗？如果不愿意接受没有足够证据的现象也可归类于迷信的话，或许这世上没有不能归类为迷信的看法。