Getting rid of "Darwinism"

Is the title of a new article by the esteemed science journalist Olivia Judson in the NYT.

What she didn't mention is that this esteemed science journalist wrote about that very issue on 11/24/05, as one of the very first posts on this blog. (Lucky #7, in fact)

Why she didn't defer to me is puzzling...

Paper: "From Dayton to Dover"

A thorough summary of the history of education-related court cases involving the teaching of evolution and creationism in public schools:

• Radan, Peter, "From Dayton to Dover: The Legacy of the Scopes Trial" (September 2007). Macquarie Law Working Paper No. 2007-6 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1012221

HERE is the download link. The paper explores the cultural backdrop against which the Scopes trial played out, including important immigrational considerations that are often neglected in such analyses. It is both a legal commentary and a philosophical one.

Darwin on Eugenics

It is oft-repeated amongst creationists that evolution = evil, because evolution = eugenics. When Tom Short came to UF and regurgitated this faulty line of reasoning, applying it to the effect that evolution = Hitler = genocide, I called him on it. I also called D. James Kennedy, a creationist pastor whose fraudulent claims are only exceeded by his hubris in delivering them, to the carpet for lying about Darwin and eugenics, all the while ignoring the clear link between Nazi Germany and the Lutheran and Catholic anti-Semitic philosophies.

I examined the non sequiturs in jumping from a description of the way that the natural world operates to a moral 'ought' about how we should or will operate in society. Simple parallels exist to show the fallacy of the logic:

1. Science describes gravity
   
2. Gravity causes things to fall down
3. Therefore, we ought to cause things to fall down

Is not substantially different from:

1. Science describes natural selection
2. Natural selection causes organisms to survive which are more 'fit' and weaker ones to go extinct
   
3. Therefore, we ought to cause organisms/humans to go extinct whom we deem are weaker [even though we have now started artificially selecting since our criteria for 'fitness' are not natural]

See the non sequitur? It is an accurate description of the world to say that all living things share common ancestors. It is not a logical conclusion to draw, a priori, that we ought thus do anything about it or to change it. End of story. To try to draw moral prescriptions from scientific descriptions is a failed leap in logic and is unsupported by the descriptions themselves.

Yet, since so many people love to do what is easy -- namely, to "defeat" evolution by throwing morally outrageous claims against it, it is useful to look at Darwin's own published thoughts on eugenics in The Descent of Man. Let's see what he said about it, although we must all always remember that just as the laws of motion are not equivalent to Newton, so evolution is not solely Charles Darwin, nor general relativity Einstein. These men founded the ideas, did the foundational work, and then died. The science of those things was not the person behind them, and the ideas have expanded and changed and developed throughout time. Nonetheless, let's see what the man thought, keeping in mind that just because the man thought it, doesn't mean evolution requires it.

In Chapter 5, he writes about the problem with vaccinations and how they allow people without natural resistances to survive to reproduce and pass on this lack of resistance:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

It sounds pretty evil, doesn't it? But at the same time, it sounds like he's not yet passing a conclusive ought in here, only saying that it seems that our actions to preserve the lineages of people with serious heredity flaws is "highly injurious to the race of man." So far, he hasn't prescribed any actions, only attempted to describe our humanistic efforts to preserve life. So...what does Darwin think of these actions? Well, the sentences directly after clarify it for us:

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil [emphasis added].

Well, you won't hear that from the mouths of the creationists. Darwin here tells us that if we try to preserve our genetic lineage without corruption, it will only be for a contingent benefit at the cost of an overwhelming present evil, and that we will deteriorate the noblest part of our nature.

His only "solution" to the "problem", then, is a very passive one, indeed:

We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.

He observes that some of the feeble/retarded/sick are unable to be married and have kids as easily as the mentally competent/healthy, and that there is thus already a natural check in place. He then says that we can just hope for this check to work, notice he says nothing here of enforcing a no-marriage policy.

Darwin's words on eugenics are not those of Hitler, not those of Stalin, not those of creationists. All three of the latter twisted science to serve their own goals and ends in an attempt to justify their immoral beliefs. All three of the latter distort science to preserve falsehoods. The immorality of creationism is its denial of truth, its fight to eradicate scientific fact from our culture, and their refusal to live in reality.
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Technorati tags: Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

On Hume, Skepticism, and Intelligent Design Creationism

In thinking about epistemological skepticism, I had a further thought (or two). Cornelius Hunter, over at idthefuture, as he makes the typical whine against evolution and godlessness in talking about intelligent design creationism (IDC):

Miller's misrepresentation of evolution was serious because his testimony influenced the judge, and was cited in the opinion. Evolutionist's arguments entail metaphysical premises, and this is how they can claim their theory is a fact. Without their religious arguments they would be left merely with empirical evidence which fails to support evolution as a fact because there is substantial negative evidence.

Evolution's use of metaphysical premises is well documented. And Miller relies on these heavily in his own writings. But so long as legal testimony represents evolution as just science, courts will continue to miss the elephant in the room.

Cornelius, show me your room, with your (apparently) metaphysically-neutral premises. I would love to see it. Please. Ironically, the sort of intelligent designer implied by IDC is far from metaphysically-netural, as it is implicitly supernatural: IDC claims that our place in the cosmos is "privileged" -- the anthropic principle -- this would require the "designer" to have tuned the very physical constants that any naturalistic designer would be controlled by, ergo, being supernatural or the next best thing to it.

Hunter also complains about the appearance of poor design and the implicit evil in designing parasites and things like malaria.

In addition, please hone in on exactly what is "religious" about the smackdown you received in court in Dover?

Speaking of religious, Hunter goes on to say that:

Obviously Darwin needed a naturalistic explanation for the species—his religious beliefs ruled out design.

There are a few problems with this:

1. At the time of his journey on the Voyage of the Beagle, he was certainly not a naturalist [link]
   
2. Darwin only lost faith in the existence of God much later in life, after his daughter's death, and only then became an agnostic [link]
   
3. Even he said that there was no incompatibility between theism and evolution, saying it was, "absurd to doubt that a man can be an ardent Theist and an Evolutionist" [link]
   

Hunter wants to say that induction, or the expectation of naturalism, is a bias that ought to be erased, in the vein of Moore's argument:

...today scientists will admit that no one knows enough about 'natural law' to say that any event is necessarily a violation of it. They agree that an individual's non-statistical sample of time and space is hardly sufficient ground on which to base immutable generalizations concerning the nature of the entire universe. Today what we commonly term 'natural law' is in fact only our inductive and statistical descriptions of natural phenomena. (James R. Moore, Christianity for the Tough Minded, 1973, p.79)

In considering what Moore, and others, attempt to do here, a few points should be made about "today's science" as it is supposed to be qualitatively different than "yesterday's". In particular, theists often seize upon the overturning of Newton's mechanical universe by relativity and quantum physics as some sort of "evidence" that miracles are more likely to occur. This premise is very poorly thought out. The sorts of evidence that were uncovered with paradigm shifts like quantum theory and general relativity did not conflict with the observations made prior to their time; they dovetailed with and explained all the data! OTOH, Hunter's view of IDC would render much of the observed evidence for random mutation and natural selection as the driving forces of evolution from genetics and biology false.

Also, the idea that we should have a sort of expectation of, or at least make room for, miracles in science is almost prima facie evidence of a misunderstanding of the nature of science and of miracles. It isn't just that the scientific method demands skepticism of miracles, it demands evidence to substantiate any claim, inversely proportional to how well-established a claim or observation is:

1. A miracle is by definition a rare occurance
2. Natural law is by definition a description of regular occurance
3. The evidence for the regular is always greater than that for the rare.
4. Wise individuals always base belief on the greater evidence.
5. Therefore, wise individuals should never believe in miracles.
(Norman Geisler, Miracles and the Modern Mind, 1992, p.27-28)

Geisler then goes on to present Hume's "Problem of Induction" (PoI):

Hume speaks of "uniform" experience in his argument against miracles, but this either begs the question or else is special pleading. It begs the question if Hume presumes to know the experience is uniform in advance of looking at the evidence. For how can we know that all possible experience will confirm naturalism, unless we have access to all possible experiences, including those in the future? If, on the other hand, Hume simply means by "uniform" experience the select experiences of some persons (who have not encountered a miracle), then this is special pleading. (ibid, p.28)

So at best, Hunter can say that our metaphysical bias must be that we demand an absolute uniformity of nature that is not warranted by induction. Granted. The question is -- does he have evidence of these breaks in uniformity? No.

While a naturalist may not claim that design (natural in appearance or otherwise) is a priori impossible, the absolute lack of explanatory value or mechanism on the part of IDC advocates is a sign that there is simply a lack of evidence in favor of their position. He can argue bias in interpretation all day long, but the dearth of evidence subject to interpretation speaks for itself.