Francisco Ayala, who recently debated William Lane Craig on the viability of ID, has written a review of Stephen Meyer’s prominent book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The publication of this book has led to a flurry of exchanges among proponents of evolution and ID, but that will have to be the topic for some other time. In this post I mainly want to focus on two key points that Ayala makes in his review, which he also used in his debate with Craig. An earlier post offers some of the responses from Craig, Bradley Monton (the moderator), and others following the debate, which may provide some background and context for my following comments.
A reader named Andrew has offered a couple of interesting comments on the post “Design Flaws” in the Human Breathing System. I think some worthwhile points have been made in our exchange, so I am copying his comments and my responses to this new entry. This will also allow me to include some of the images and animations cited; plus my second response hit the 4096 character limit for Blogger comments, so it wouldn’t fit in the comment box.
But this visit, together with some questions on optics and vision asked by my AP Physics students last week, reminded me of just how incredibly intricate our vision is, from the way the placement of our eyeballs gives us stereoscopic vision, to the manner in which our brain interprets and reverses the images so that we see right side up.
An “Inverted” Retina
But in contrast to our intuitive recognition of its wonders, the human eye is often cited as an example of something that is sub-optimally designed, or so flawed that it could not have possibly been designed by an intelligent designer. Now, I know that my own eyes are certainly not optimal—just take a look at how thick my glasses are—but the argument is that even the most perfectly seeing eye is flawed, due to a critical “mistake” in the design of the human eye that can only be explained by an unintelligent evolutionary process rather than an intelligent designer.
Two weeks ago, Campus Crusade for Christ at Indiana University sponsored a debate on the question, “Is Intelligent Design Viable?” The audio for the debate is available for download from the Apologetics 315 blog.
The two participants were Francisco J. Ayala and William Lane Craig, and the debate was moderated by Bradley Monton, an atheist philosopher of science who argues that ID is deserving of serious consideration as a scientific theory (even though he personally believes that it is false). Monton recently published a book called Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design.
Francisco Ayala is Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology as well as Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UCI, and author of a number of books such as Darwin and Intelligent Design, Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, and the Handbook of Evolution: The Evolution of Living Systems, in addition to nearly a thousand publications on evolutionary biology.
William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, and a noted philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist. He is respected among theists and atheists alike as one of the strongest defenders of the Christian faith, and he has debated a number of people in defense of the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some of his exceptional debate opponents include Anthony Flew, Peter Atkins, and recently a very prominent debate with Christopher Hitchens at Biola University on the existence of God. His website, Reasonable Faith, is a great resource for Christian apologetics and it is also a recommended visit for those who have serious questions or doubts about Christianity. See the debate’s Participant Information page for more on the accomplishments of both Ayala and Craig.
What was very interesting to me was that this is the first time that Craig is debating specifically on the topic of intelligent design in biology, and I was curious to hear how he would fare against Ayala, who has written numerous books and articles on biological evolution and and one specifically against intelligent design.
An update to the previous post on the intelligent prank Harvey Mudd students pulled on the Victoria’s Secret Pink Collegiate Collection competition. Here are the current standings (click on the image to view the full size screen cap):
HMC is still in the lead, of course, though now with over 2 million votes. But now the first letter of the top 23 schools spells out something that has even broader appeal to all Mudders (I was a Southie myself for part of my time at Mudd, and remember being blasted awake more than once by West Dorm antics). They also included a friendly shout-out to their little rival in Pasadena.
So can natural selection do this? But of course! Since intelligence carries significant fitness value, survival of the fittest dictates that it is only natural that the most intelligent will rise to the top.
Thanks to JF (who I’m going to assume is a fellow Mudder) for bringing this to my attention and for providing the up to date screencap.
The above image shows the recent standings of a contest promoting the Victoria’s Secret “Pink Collegiate Collection”. The idea is that VS will create “products” featuring the mascots of the top schools from this competition. You are only allowed to vote once a day for a particular school, and there are protections in place to prevent automated voting bots. In essence, this is a popularity contest, and natural selection dictates that schools that have the greatest number of students, alumni, and fans who care will naturally rise to the top of the standings.
But if you take a closer look at the standings, you may soon realize that something exceeding the natural course of things may be occurring. The most immediate discrepancy is the fact that Harvey Mudd College is not only at the top of the list, but it has over 500,000 votes more than the next school on the list. Now, HMC has a current student population of less than 700, and even if you add all the alumni, faculty and everyone in existence who has even heard of the school, you would still have a number far less than the current student population of some of the other schools on the list. Just this might be enough to clue you in that something unnatural is going on.
But there’s more. #4 on the list is Bob Jones University, and if you know anything about Bob Jones University, you know that it has no reason being voted near the top of any list associated with Victoria’s Secret. #5 on the list is Scripps College, which is a woman’s college neighboring HMC with a student population even smaller than Mudd. Now, Scripps students are certainly more likely to purchase Victoria's Secret merchandise than the majority of Mudd students, but it defies the imagination that they can rally together over half a million votes.
In addition, if you are more familiar with Harvey Mudd College, you may also recognize that the first letter of the names of schools #2-7 form the acronym WIBSTR, which carries special meaning to any Mudd student. See this link for an explanation of WIBSTR (I’m trying to keep this a ‘G’ rated blog).
Because we can see that the results of the competition cannot be accounted for within the limitations of the natural voting process, together with the significance of the complex and specified “WIBSTR” sequence, it would be very reasonable for a person to infer that this was an intelligently designed prank. With some additional revelation we can perhaps know who actually pulled this prank, but that is not needed to know that a prank has indeed been pulled.
But perhaps there will still be those who insist that the specific sequence of “WIBSTR” is just a happy coincidence, and no matter how improbable the standings, these results must be due solely to the natural selection process, because the CAPTCHA program used by VS in the voting process absolutely restricts voting to once per person per day, and nothing can go beyond these boundaries as defined by the VS programmers.
That being said, I for one wouldn’t mind buying something from Victoria’s Secret with a Mudd Wart on it.
For more information, read this article from the CMC Forum: “Harvey Mudd 1, Victoria’s Secret 0”
Something I read today that reminded me of the importance of seeing the big picture, and how seeming “improvements” in one area can have drastic implications in the overall picture.
Joseph Burdo, Assistant Professor of Biology at Boston College, wrote a comment entitled “Design Flaws” in response to a Wired magazine article on “10 Worst Evolutionary Designs.” Professor Burdo wrote:
“[Y]ou forgot about one of the best arguments against the "theory" of intelligent design: the shared opening to the esophagus and trachea in humans (and many other mammals). Hundreds of choking deaths occur in the US every year due to food obstructions in the trachea. Doesn't seem too intelligent to purposefully design such a hazard.”
If you’ve ever had food or water go down the wrong way then you’ve experienced this “bad design” first hand. This argument was also listed in a 2001 Scientific American article called “If Humans were Built to Last” by S. Jay Olshansky, Bruce Carnes, and Robert Butler. The authors suggested that a better design would feature independent tubes for breathing and eating.
But though it seems so obvious that a dual tube system would eliminate the possibility of choking, and seems like a much better design, consider some of the implications of this change. Have you ever had a bad cold, so bad that your nose became completely plugged up and the only way you could breathe was through your mouth? With our current shared opening between mouth, nose, and trachea, nasal congestion is an uncomfortable but minor nuisance. But if the nose was the only means of getting air to the lungs, then nasal congestion would potentially be a fatal condition! Instead of a few hundred people dying of choking each year, you would be looking at possibly millions of people dying from asphyxiation due to the common cold or allergy symptoms.
Richard Deem from the Evidence for God from Science website offers some more implications of the alternative design for the human trachea and esophagus system:
There would also be the problem of getting rid of liquid that accidentally enters the lungs. It would have to be pushed all the way up to the nose and expelled there (make sure you carry lots of tissue with you!). Under the current system, it need only go to the top of the trachea and the down the esophagus to the stomach. The two tube design would also restrict the amount of physical activity that humans could do. When we run, we take in air through our mouths, since the larger opening allows for a more rapid respiration rate. The only way to allow for a large respiration rate with one tube to the nose would be to greatly increase the size and openings in our nose. Not only would this look ugly, but the larger openings would present problems. Things could enter into such large openings and have direct access to your lungs (How would you like to inhale a fly into your lungs?). Larger nasal passages would also reduce the temperature of the air, since it could not be heated as effectively (important for cold climates). Another major problem would be speech and language. We need to use our mouths and tongue in order to produce speech. Air running over vocal cords, in the absence of a tongue, lips and teeth, would only be able to produce a very limited number of sounds (it might not affect Rambo, but the rest of us would have a difficult time communicating). Try it some time (hold your mouth open and don't move your tongue as you attempt to communicate). Of course the evolutionist might propose additional structures in the nose (like a tongue, lips and teeth-like structures).
So, here is what the evolutionists are proposing for a superior breathing apparatus. Our trachea would continue up to our nose, requiring our necks to be at least 1 inch wider. We would have huge noses with nose lips and a tongue protruding out. Of course, our faces would have to be much longer to accommodate the additional structures. Now, we would really be ugly! On second thought, it might be interesting trying to kiss with two sets of lips - nah, constantly expelling liquid out our nose would make it kind of gross. Aren't you glad you weren't designed by an evolutionist!
Even in a well designed and engineered system, it may seem as if you can improve one specific aspect of the system by changing a certain part, but what you quickly discover is that even minor changes lead to consequences that actually degrade the functioning of the system as a whole. In considering “bad designs” in nature, it’s critical to remember that living organisms do not function as a set of independent parts, but as cohesive and finely tuned wholes. Most arguments of “bad design” in nature fail to appreciate this intertwining cohesiveness.
Human throat image obtained from the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research (https://www.bcbsri.com/BCBSRIWeb/images/mayo_popup/Yourthroat.jsp)
A discussion of wikis would be missing something without at least some mention of the most widely accessed wiki in the world: Wikipedia. There is quite a bit of debate among educators about the use of Wikipedia for school assignments. Whatever policies may be implemented within the classroom, however, you can be sure that students will be looking at Wikipedia when they do online research, since it’s often one of the top few links to pop up with any web search on a particular topic. One of the other teachers in the Web 2.0 course I am taking described how a discussion of the positives and negatives of Wikipedia can be a “teachable moment” for students.
The majority of teachers at my school do not allow the citing of wikipedia as a source. I also caution my students against using wikipedia even as a starting point for their research on particular assignments. Though everyone who registers is free to contribute and correct mistakes, and most information on Wikipedia is generally accurate, the reality is that much misinformation exists on wikipedia, especially in more controversial issues in which the conventional wisdom is actually incorrect. Some examples:
My first foray in editing wikipedia was to correct a misrepresentation of an Augustine quote on the "Science and Religion" entry. Augustine was previously quoted as saying that Christians must beware of mathematicians because they may have made a covenant with the devil, but what Augustine was actually referring to was astrologers rather than mathematicians. I was able to spot the misrepresentation because I had background knowledge about Augustine, but if my students had seen that quote and didn't investigate more deeply, they may have concluded that Augustine was an example of how Christians are opposed to science and mathematics.
I think that where I am most concerned about the reliability of wikipedia is in those articles that deal with controversial issues or topics in which the majority opinion is erroneous or biased. For example, the current wikipedia entry on "Intelligent Design" contains much that is factually incorrect and biased against ID. However, corrections of these errors are often quickly reverted by those who appear to have an agenda against Intelligent Design and its proponents. This entry certainly does not follow Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" and "Verifiability" policies, but it is difficult to present the balancing facts because the great majority of people who are editing this entry hold--either knowingly or unknowingly--a biased or at least incomplete view of the topic.
William Dembski, one of the key proponents of Intelligent Design, has tried many times to correct erroneous information presented on the wikipedia page about him, but his corrections are repeatedly deleted such that what someone reads about him on Wikipedia is an inaccurate and biased portrayal. These serve as examples of how at times conventional wisdom or the majority position can be unreliable, and that this can make it difficult for a minority position to accurately assert itself.
One of the top students at our school wanted to make a point about wikipedia. His history class had to write a research paper on a particular topic. This student created a new page on Wikipedia addressing this topic, and it was so convincing that the information made up by this student was cited by several other students in the class in their research papers! It was only after the student explained what he had done that people realized how deeply they had been taken.
I think that the most useful aspect of wikipedia is the links to the sources used for the content posted on the page. Many of those links are indeed good quality, and students can see from the context whether the content that is presented on wikipedia is accurate or not. But even then, the neutrality of the content is not guaranteed, since pertinent information that may contradict what is presented in the wikipedia entry may be ignored.
If students approach Wikipedia with a skeptical eye and the understanding that it is not necessarily unbiased, accurate, or complete, then Wikipedia can be a useful resource. But the problems come when students rely too much on what they obtain from Wikipedia.
I’ve been neglecting to post more entries to the blog lately, but it hasn’t been due to writer’s block. I’ve been writing a great deal lately, but the majority of my writing has been in online exchanges on stem cell research (from which came the ESCR debate series) or on intelligent design and evolution. You can follow the two ongoing debates about ID here and here (my involvement in the 2nd thread begins with post #37). I’ve certainly been learning much from preparing responses for these debates, and they have enabled me to sharpen my understanding of the issues. I certainly hope to present some of the key points from these debates in this blog in the near future, but one of the consequences of engaging in these discussions is that once you start, it’s hard to stop without seeming like you are conceding the argument.
One thing I’ve been seeing from the ID debates is that the vast majority of the arguments that people offer against the theory of Intelligent Design stem from a basic misunderstanding of what the theory is about. This has emphasized to me why as a teacher it is critical to fairly and accurately present both sides of a debatable issue, so that students can arrive at their own reasonable and informed conclusion as well as be knowledgeable enough to respond fairly to arguments from those who hold opposing viewpoints. And this is why I have been sharing direct excerpts from these debates in this blog, so that people can see the actual arguments that are raised against the positions that I take, rather than my (potential) misrepresentations of the opposing arguments.
I want my students to follow the evidence where it leads, not where I or anyone else says that it leads.
One other thing I’ve been learning through these debates is the importance of character, even in an online discussion with faceless opponents and nameless audience. In spite of the rather impersonal nature of these online debates, we must always remember that we speak as Christ’s ambassadors, as if He were making his appeal through us. How we say things can be just as significant as what we say.
There can be some mean-spirited people in these online debates. Rather than relying on reason and rationality in their arguments , they resort to ridicule and insult to try to make their points. It can be tempting to descend to the same disparaging tone, especially when these defamatory remarks tend to draw popular support. But even if this kind of attitude can win the argument, it would not be a victory if we lose the real battle over the hearts and minds of those that we encounter. I draw encouragement from these words from 1 Peter 2:15-17, 21-25:
For it is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men. Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God. Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king.
To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.