Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"Intelligent Design" creationists have long tried to de‐emphasize references to God in their writings, on the supposition that it's easier to sell IDC as "real science" without these references. In recent years we have seen a shift: not only did the leading IDC organization, the Discovery Institute, participate heavily in a fundamentalist assault on "Theistic Evolution," in a book by that title, but now, Stephen Meyer, Director of the DI's Center for Science and Culture, has come out with this book, explicitly invoking "God" as an alternative hypothesis for a variety of phenomena. Between TE’s attack upon mainstream Christian attitudes toward science and the present book’s attack upon mainstream science itself, the Intelligent Design Creationist movement makes it clear: its entire project is the promotion of religious fundamentalism. Meyer's hope here, obviously, is to frame debates about science as debates about God, and to muster support among those who believe in the latter for an assault upon the former. But debates about such things as the soundness of evolutionary theory cannot really be equated to debates about God. The proponent of evolution may think God exists, or not; if he does think that God exists, his theological difference with the ID Creationist is not about whether there is a God, but about God's nature. Is God the great ground of all being, the ultimate cause of all things, majestic and inscrutable? Or is God the proximate cause of all things, tinkering directly in every detail of life on an ongoing basis? God as ultimate cause is accepted by practically every believer; God as this all‐pervading proximate cause, on the other hand, is a much narrower, sectarian phenomenon. This ‐‐ a God who is far from being great and inscrutable, whose doings are the default explanation for anything we do not understand, and who diminishes in potency as our understanding increases ‐‐ is the God of Stephen Meyer's "God Hypothesis." So, let the reader of this book not be misled. None of this legitimately is about whether one believes in God or does not, and as much as some people would like to foment a culture war between believer and infidel, that simply isn't the division which defines the "sides" of this particular argument. Science can shed no light upon a God who is the ultimate cause of all things, and scientists and theologians are for the most part in remarkable agreement that that's so. The question here is whether God is a proximate cause of observable things in such a way that God's action may be scientifically postulated, hypothesized and empirically tested; and particularly whether there is anything in modern science, as Meyer contends, that points to that being the case. Haldane joked about God's inordinate fondness for beetles; Meyer, not getting the joke, is ready to use that sort of thing to make his case. So, do the findings of modern science reawaken the "God hypothesis?" Meyer's arguments take aim at a few areas where he thinks he can make this case: (1) the origin of the universe, (2) the characteristics of that universe, (3) the origin of living things, and (4) the causes of diversity among living things. He isn't entirely new to these things, having written two spectacularly dishonest books on (3) and (4): Signature in the Cell, about the origin of life, and Darwin's Doubt, about the Cambrian explosion. Rather than attempt to address all of these in depth, I will visit each area briefly and then give a somewhat longer treatment to (4), biological evolution as the cause of living diversity. On (1) and (2), the failure of Meyer's thesis is pretty obvious. He supposes that our universe having a definite beginning point is somehow supportive of the existence of his god, but it's hard to see how. He supposes that the fact that we observe a universe that has the characteristics to produce us is likewise supportive of the existence of his god, but it's simply not; it's as surprising as the fact that our legs are exactly the length required to reach the ground. While physicists toil to explain why the attributes of the universe are what they are, and whether those attributes are capable or incapable of being otherwise, there simply isn't any way of drilling down behind those events and attributes and establishing the existence of some intent behind them – certainly none which Meyer suggests. What would the research program be? That one can make philosophical arguments for there being some "first cause" (hazardous ground, given the way that the counterintuitive nature of theoretical physics tends to up‐end our very notions of time and causality) doesn't imply that such a first cause must be a god and doesn't convert philosophy into science. When it comes to (3), the origin of life, Meyer's treatment of the topic is mostly a rehash of his book Signature in the Cell. Here, he simply resorts to a long‐time favorite tactic of creationists: asserting that the fact that abiogenesis is a difficult nut to crack means that it is impossible to crack. Never mind the progress that is being made; it is always easy to pooh‐pooh scientific progress especially when there are unresolved questions remaining. The measure of the strength of Meyer's argument is in the scientific community's reaction to Signature in the Cell and Meyer's followups thereto. Have Meyer's views, in more than a decade since publication, attained any acceptability in scientific circles? Has he contributed insights to the abiogenesis problem that have inspired researchers to rethink even a single issue? Have Meyer's insights yielded testable and promising paths for research into his claimed theistic causes for the origin of life? Will anyone be surprised that the answers to these questions are all in the negative? And then it comes to (4), Meyer's quarrels with evolution. Here, he shifts from rehashing Signature in the Cell to rehashing his later book, Darwin's Doubt, a profound misrepresentation of paleontological and genetic evidence in relation to the Cambrian explosion (see my review on Amazon for more on this). But while the Cambrian explosion was the greatest adaptive radiation in the history of life on our planet, and does indeed present some interesting questions, Meyer overstates both its speed and the difficulty of explaining it. The excellent book by Doug Erwin and James Valentine on the Cambrian, though a bit technical for most readers, is a treasure trove of information about both the well‐understood and the poorly‐understood aspects of that marvelous period. Darwin's Doubt, like Signature in the Cell, caused no ripple in the scientific community beyond a few devastating reviews by practicing scientists which Meyer is still trying to relitigate here (he does not seem to understand, or be able to productively respond to, Charles Marshall, for example). But though DD is a failure, instead of backing down Meyer is doubling down. "Although the Cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking, it is far from the only 'explosion' of new living forms. The first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals, and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil‐bearing sedimentary rock." The only people who benefit from a statement like that are keyboard manufacturers: every time Meyer says something like this, coffee shoots from a thousand noses onto a thousand keyboards, ruining them forever. One has to marvel at the spectacular degree of ignorance Meyer expects of his readers. Take just one example from Meyer’s list: the mammals. The divergence of the line leading to mammals from its sister lineage, the sauropsids (represented today by reptiles and birds), is seen in the fossil record back in the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago. The synapsids begin with curious reptile-like creatures called pelycosaurs, similar to their basal amniote ancestors. These give rise to a number of lineages which approach the mammalian condition, and by 250 million years ago these groups, including the dicynodonts, were diverse and thriving. The end‐Permian mass extinction causes quite a hiccup in the whole affair (and a marvelous but, alas, brief heyday for Lystrosaurus), but the fossil story continues, leading gradually to the cynodonts, from whom the mammals descended. Multiple early lineages of true mammals arise, a few of which survive today and others of which, e.g., the multituberculates, do not. Along the way, there is rich fossil evidence of crucial transitions which account for the characters of mammals, such as the extreme modification and relocation of the jaw joint. A marvelous book on this subject is Thomas Kemp's The Origin and Evolution of Mammals. One can always ask for "more" fossils, of course; but the notion that "the first...mammals...appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors" as Meyer claims is completely bizarre. If Meyer is being honest, he is incompetent; if he is competent, he is dishonest. Meyer doesn't spend a lot of time on this fossil record issue itself; he just plants this absurd flag, hopes nobody will notice the fib, and moves on to conquer new lands. It becomes a jumping‐off point for a basic ID Creationist fallacy: the purported need for novel, separate, and ultimately, impossible explanations for the evolution of the "information" in living things. The ID Creationist argument, made previously by Meyer and others, runs something like this: biologists spent the pre‐genetic age examining the outer forms of animals, and developed a theory of phenotypic evolution which appeared, in those dark and primitive days, to make sense. But then it became evident, with the discovery of DNA's role in the synthesis of the proteins, that all of these phenotypic changes which biologists were looking at were only part of the problem. In addition to explaining how novel forms could evolve in phenotypic terms, it now was necessary to explain how genes could evolve to contain the information to make the proteins that account for those phenotypes. But, alas and alack! It turned out that the "information" aspect of the problem was unsolvable, because there simply is no way for this "information" to evolve and the only possible source of information in genomes, it turns out, is an intelligent mind. But this ID Creationist account is simply false. The first thing to realize about this approach is this: there is no substantial difference between the evolution of form and the evolution of the genes which produce that form. While it is true that changes to form will ordinarily correspond to genetic changes, these are simply two ways of looking at the SAME event. That we now can examine genomes gives us new insight into the particular causal mechanisms, but it does not introduce new explanatory hurdles to leap. In order to make this case that the "information" in living things constitutes a bar to evolution, Meyer relies upon some spectacularly false claims about the difficulty of genetic evolution made by Douglas Axe, a chemical engineer. Axe published a paper in 2004 which, by way of a worthless extrapolation, purports to show that the probability of functional mutations to DNA sequences which code for proteins is so low that no random mutation is likely ever to find one. This absurd view is rejected by every last scientist working in the field and has gained no traction in the decades since. To be clear about just how extreme the claim here is, this is what Meyer says: "It is therefore overwhelmingly more likely than not that a random mutational search would have failed to produce even one new functional (information‐rich) DNA sequence capable of coding for one new protein fold in the entire history of life on earth." This claim is known to be objectively false. How false, one might ask? The very same enzyme activity that Axe extrapolated could only occur in one in 10^77 sequences has been found twice by screening only 10^8 sequences (Shahsavarian et al., FEBS Journal 2/2017, p. 634-653). Sixty-nine orders of magnitude. That's not a small error. Note that this ill‐founded claim isn't a denial of the power of evolution merely to create significant novel forms or body plans or some such thing. This is a denial of the power of natural evolution to do anything, ever, at all. No new functions, structures, anything; not even, say, an incremental improvement in the metabolism of food in some nematode's gut somewhere. By this claim, for example, as the virus that causes COVID‐19 mutates, it cannot produce any functional novel variant; the virus, sadly, hasn't read Axe or Meyer. Even ID Creationism's lone biologist, Michael Behe, says evolution can do vastly more than this. The difficulty, of course, is that we actually witness these things happening in real time, as well as having the genetic evidence for them happening throughout the entire reach of the past. Novel genes have even been seen to arise de novo from non‐coding sequence – far MORE improbable than one functional gene evolving by mutation from another. That being the case, the scientific community, rather than rushing to solve this imaginary problem, has yawned. And so while the DI has spent an immense amount of ink attempting to defend the bizarre contentions of Douglas Axe, as channeled here through the spirit‐medium of Stephen Meyer's long‐dead credibility, that fact is that while the layman may find the questions technically difficult, the conclusion can only be that this calculation of the impossibility of productive mutation is not only wrong, but spectacularly so, and that Meyer's reliance on it is another case of rank dishonesty. What to make of this? I will recap here an analogy from my review of Darwin's Doubt. There is a tale, probably apocryphal, of engineers who studied the flight of bees. After examining bee flight and constructing a detailed mathematical model based upon known principles of physics, they reached a simple conclusion: bees cannot fly. Now, there are two ways of responding to such a finding, when you are quite sure of your math and physics, but you are still looking out the window at bees in the garden. You may shrug your shoulders and re‐evaluate; you may ask important questions like what aspects of this problem you may have incorrectly modeled, and where the mistake in your reasoning and/or your calculations may lie. But there is another option, and that is to rail at the bees. Stand athwart reality shouting "stop," on the strength of your model. It's fair to say that in areas ‐‐ such as the flight of the bees ‐‐ where our own senses provide the refutation of a bad mathematical model, we all recognize immediately the offense against reason which the man who rails at the bees represents. But what Meyer is doing here, though less obvious to the non‐specialist, is just the same, and the attitude it represents is just as unhinged and futile. And so, as regards the causes of the diversity of life, Meyer falls terribly flat. He offers up a non‐existent mystery of the lack of fossil ancestors, and he proposes to deepen the mystery by the impossibility of evolution. It's hard to believe that Meyer does not know that we have the fossils and that we know this "impossibility" to be no such thing. From such premises as these ‐‐ premises which he must, if he is not grossly incompetent, know to be completely false ‐‐ are his conclusions built. Once Meyer has completed his triumphal march through the mysteries of life, he moves along to a philosophical defense of the rightness of drawing such inferences as he does from these established facts. But the apt reader will of course have noticed that the triumphal march was itself rather shy on triumphs, and dodgy (to put it over‐mildly) on those facts. Whether Meyer is right that drawing his inferences from these premises would be philosophically defensible or not, it doesn't matter when none of the facts on which those premises stand actually check out. And here is the one place where Meyer’s poverty of insight is, perhaps, at least slightly surprising. One might think that the one thing a man who promotes himself as a philosopher of science might be able to do is to spin a bit of philosophy. But his thinking is so often disjointed and fraught with error. One that particularly stands out is his constant insistence that a loose analogy between human design and supposed divine design allows him to say that the latter is known to act in the world and is therefore "causally adequate" to account for real phenomena. Surely a philosopher ought to be able to understand the difference between analogy and identity, at least? Having shown that he cannot honestly relate the evidence, he now shows that he cannot engage in sound reasoning about it. What is left? But, with all of that said, let’s back up a moment and have a look at what Meyer has claimed, in the very title of the book, because there is a profound flaw in the whole affair right there. To say that God is a "hypothesis" of which we can celebrate the "return," as Meyer's title does, means that the action of God is not merely an inference which one may permissibly draw, but rather much more: that it is a hypothesis which we can test and scrutinize. This is a critical distinction because science is about what we can demonstrate, not what we may believe. Faith says "I believe," and science says, "I can show." A very great deal of the philosophical wind‐down which ends Meyer's book is devoted to discussion of inference, and whether he supposes the inference of divine action to be permissible, or particularly warranted, in particular matters. His foundations for these inferences are badly flawed, but what if they were not? Even if well warranted, they would not be science; they would at best be a set of thought-provoking ideas that might suggest new avenues of research, with new testable hypotheses which would allow divine action to be demonstrated. But Meyer proposes no such testable hypotheses. There is no exciting new research program, driven by these novel insights, which will now help unravel great mysteries. And, understand: the conversation over these things did not just begin – it has been going on ever since the foundation of ID Creationism decades ago. I have aged many a year since the first ID Creationist books, such as Darwin On Trial and Darwin's Black Box, came to market, and I have watched, through the decades, the same thing happening time and again: scientists asking ID Creationists to formulate and test their hypotheses. And the same thing happens every time: the ID Creationists argue that, without formulating or testing any well‐formed hypothesis at all, they have splendid grounds for inferring divine action, and that with that, their work is done. That’s not even good philosophy; but even if it were, it would not be science, good or bad, at all. And so the book which announces in its title the "return of the God hypothesis" ends without a single hypothesis in its grasp. What Meyer ends with is at best a loose conjecture. It is, of course, every person's right to draw such inferences from facts as he wishes to draw, even when those facts are wrong and the inferences shoddy. But it is not science, and if it would not pretend to be science, there would be little to argue about. Suggested reading on related topics: The Cambrian Explosion: the Construction of Animal Biodiversity, by Douglas Erwin and James Valentine: real work on the Cambrian, by real experts. The Origin and Evolution of Mammals, by Thomas Kemp: the not-so-mysterious, copious fossil record of mammals and their predecessors. The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane: a good summary of some real work on the origin of life.