Darwin’s Doubt in review; Meyer, Matzke, and some of their critics

Yesterday I wrote about Casey Luskin’s critique of Nick Matzke’s review of Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt, but not everyone knows (why should they?) who Luskin is, or who said what in which way about whom. So I’ve written this brief survey of the dramatis personae, and review of reviews of reviews.

Luskin is Program Officer of the DI’s Center for Science and Culture, of which Meyer is director, Berlinksi a Senior Fellow, and Kenyon a Fellow. According to his bio on the CSC website, he ‘is co-founder of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center, a non-profit helping students to investigate evolution by starting “IDEA Clubs” on college and high school campuses across the country.’ His 5 year stint with Scripps Institute of Oceanography produced one publication; he was one of several junior authors on a study of paleaomagnetic dating of sediments, which has attracted 17 citations. So, moderately useful routine work. No life science qualifications or experience.

David Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the CSC, mathematician and philosopher, and has written serious works in his own area, including a 1972 article on the philosophy of molecular biology. As the review I cited shows, he writes powerfully and amusingly, even when (as here) he is attacking a fictional straw man.

Dean Kenyon is a CSC Fellow. He was at one time a respected biologist, but in the 1970s was converted by Morris’s Genesis Flood to Young Earth Creationism. He was co-author of Of Pandas and People.

Nick Matzke is just finishing the formalities of his PhD at Berkeley,and will be moving to a postdoc at NIMBioS at U. Tennessee Knoxville in September. Web of Knowledge lists him as author of 19 publications, with a total of 330 literature citations to date.

[Added (h/t Christine Janis): an even more thourough and, therefore, destructive review, by Aaron P. Baldwin, is here]

Stephen Meyer, Director of the CSC and Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, holds a joint degree in physics and earth science from Whitworth, a private Christian liberal arts university, and a PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, and has taught at  Palm Beach Atlantic, a faith-based liberal arts college. He is now director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and author or co-author of a number of works of fiction, including Explore Evolution, a pseudotextbook that shows that the creationists have discovered Batesian mimicry, other works of fiction including Signature in the Cell, and, of course, Darwin’s Doubt. Which is where we came in.

Discovery Institute says Matzke can’t read, misuses cladistics

Yes, that is a deliberately ambiguous heading. Discovery Institute really does say that Matzke misuses cladistics. But the most prominent example that I can find of that particular misuse comes from a fellow of the DI itself.

Nick Matzke’s “hopeless monster” review of Darwin’s Doubt must have really got to the Discovery Institute. Evolution News and Views, one of their many glossy web publications dedicated to denying evolution, has singled it out for extensive criticism twice in three days.

On July 16, we had that well-known expert on the palaeontological literature, Casey Luskin (MS Earth Sciences), telling us that Matzke actually used to be paid money by the National Center for Science Education to present the arguments in favour of evolution, so obviously his opinion in its favour is biased. An interesting argument. I seem to remember being paid money myself, by four separate universities over the course of my career, to present the arguments in favour of the reality of atoms. Roll over Darwin, roll over Dalton. Worse, Nick is only a graduate student, so how dare he criticise a full-fledged PhD like Stephen Meyer (BS Physics/Earth Science, PhD Philosophy)?

By the way, congratulations, Nick, on your paper http://www.pnas.org/content/110/30/12355.abstract?sid=1ff5d4c5-1028-4866-a41a-27a34ac220c9 making the front cover of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. An elegant use of duplicated genes to reduce the error bars on the dating of nodes in phylogenetic trees.

Two days later, David Berlinski (PhD Philosophy) criticises Nick for saying Meyer should have used cladistics. Berlinski thinks these are worthless. Why? Because (true enough) we can twiddle a clade about its root node and this changes the order in which we list the termini. Which Berlinski thinks means that we are changing the meaning of the cladogram (utter bollocks). Check out his actual posting which includes the above diagram, meant to expose the stupidity of any one using cladistics.

One small irony is that I have only once seen cladistic reasoning misused in the way that Berlinski suggests. I refer to Of Pandas and People, which claims ( on p. 37) that molecular biology “contradicts the Darwinian expectation”, because it places all vertebrates at the same distance from arthropods, whereas (present-day) fish ought to be closer to them than reptiles are. Joint author of this piece of garbage, Dean Kenyon, fellow of the Discovery Institute.

To conclude, DI’s criticism of Matzke and his credentials reminds me of an old definition of Chutzpah; an ant climbing an elephants leg with intent to rape.

World Scientific publishing creationist “symposium” proceedings

[This post got over 50 hits from Singapore, home of WSPC, on its first working day up]

Librarians, do not buy this book. University-based readers, please pass on these concerns to your librarian. Why World Scientific expects anyone to pay $139 for the volume is beyond me, unless they regard university libraries as a captive audience for whatever misrepresents itself as significant new material. Readers with any working relationship with World Scientific, if you agree with me please share your concerns with your contacts there.

The misrepresentation starts with the volume’s self-description: Proceedings of the Symposium Cornell University, USA, 31 May – 3 June 2011

So was this event organized or sponsored by CornellUniversity? No. They just hired a hall. Was it a symposium? Only if you can dignify with that name a gathering of the faithful, called together by invitation and without prior publicity.

It gets worse.

The “new perspectives” turn out to be nothing more than a regurgitation of long-refuted arguments from well-known creationists. (All chapters, by the way, are open access here, so any reader with the patience can go to the book, and refute what I am saying here chapter and verse.)

Nick Matzke originally reviewed the volume here on pandasthumb. At that stage, it was scheduled for publication by Springer, who reconsidered in remarkably short order; for the subsequent history, and reaction from the Discovery Institute, see here. We do not know how it came about that the volume is now scheduled for publication next month by World Scientific, but this, together with another extraordinary pending publication, gives great cause for anxiety about the health of a once-respected publishing house.

[Disclosure; World Scientific were the publishers for my own first non-technical book, From Stars to Stalagmites]

There is little that I can add to Matzke’s review. The book is based on the crucial refusal by the Intelligent Design movement to understand the process by which random change (generating novelty) followed by selection (filtering for function) gives rise to significant new information. This despite the fact that this process can be seen at every level from the creation within a computer of genetic algorithms, to the path-optimising activities of an ant hill. The contributors’ names are generally all too familiar; many readers of this piece will not need to be reminded, for example, what Dembski does for a living. However, I did spot one name that may be less familiar outside the UK; Andy McIntosh, of the creationist group Truth in Science, well known to the British Centre for Science Education for its attempts to sabotage the teaching of evolution in schools, and famous to his friends for his eccentric interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Presumably, World Scientific were aware of the concerns surrounding this volume. Nonetheless, they decided to publish. I can think of only three possible explanations:

1)      An idealistic resolve to give due publicity to a particular point of view, however unfashionable. I think we can dismiss this, since World Scientific has not yet taken to publishing books about how aliens landed at Roswell, or the faking of the moon landings. Moreover, the Discovery Institute has adequate publication channels of its own.

2)      Creationist infiltration. I would like to dismiss this as an unfounded conspiracy theory, were it not for the existence of another upcoming publication, about which I have already expressed my concerns on this blog. (I am currently in correspondence with World Scientific about that publication, and will be giving an updated report later this week.)

3)      Utter incompetence. I would include in this category any cynical commercial decision to go ahead with full knowledge of the demerits of the work, since the damage to World Scientific’s reputation must surely outweigh the few thousands that would accrue from its publication.

Whatever the detailed explanation, I can only appeal to World Scientific, even at this late stage, to think again.

“Intelligible Design” and World Scientific: The End? So it seems – no it wasn’t

Update July 23: this book has been absent for a week from the WSPC web site. I am told that the matter is under consideration by WSPC management. In the circumstances, I have taken down my posts on the subject, and hope not to have to reinstate them.

Update: World Scientific asked me for a full review of the book. I have sent it to them, with a cover note saying that I hope never to have occasion to publish it. All that fine invective, never to see the light of day! But fair’s fair.

Update Sept 27; It’s back on the menu. Too puerile to require rebuttal, too insignificant to be worth publicising by protest. So I’ll leave it at that, and simply bear in mind that World Scientific’s imprimatur is now worthless.

“Intelligible Design”; an encouraging response from World Scientific; but hopes dashed

Update July 23: this book has been absent for a week from the WSPC web site. I am told that the matter is under consideration by WSPC management. In the circumstances, I have taken down my posts on the subject, and hope not to have to reinstate them.
Update: World Scientific asked me for a full review of the book. I have sent it to them, with a cover note saying that I hope never to have occasion to publish it. All that fine invective, never to see the light of day! But fair’s fair.

Update Sept 27; It’s back on the menu. Too puerile to require rebuttal, too insignificant to be worth publicising by protest. So I’ll leave it at that, and simply bear in mind that World Scientific’s imprimatur is now worthless.

“Intelligible Design” or Intelligent Design or Creationism; what is World Scientific playing at?

[Disclosure: World Scientific published my own first non-technical book, From Stars to Stalagmites, in 2012.]

Update July 23: this book has been absent for a week from the WSPC web site. I am told that the matter is under consideration by WSPC management. In the circumstances, I have taken down my posts on the subject, and hope not to have to reinstate them.

Update July 29: World Scientific asked me for a full review of the book. I have sent it to them, with a cover note saying that I hope never to have occasion to publish it. All that fine invective, never to see the light of day! But fair’s fair.

Update Sept 27; It’s back on the menu. Too puerile to require rebuttal, too insignificant to be worth publicising by protest. So I’ll leave it at that, and simply bear in mind that World Scientific’s imprimatur is now worthless.

The Creationist Obsession with Darwin; from Louisiana to Discovery Institute to Glasgow

From Louisiana through the Discovery Institute to Glasgow, examples of the creationist obsession with Darwin (and inability to quote him correctly) continue to accumulate.

You may have heard of the Louisiana Science Education Act (how’s that for protective colouring?), which allows creationism to be taught in the State’s publicly funded schools in the name of “academic freedom.” The law was apparently suggested to State Senator Ben Nevers by the Lousiana Family Forum, whose upcoming Leadership Academy, to be addressed by Governor Bobby Jindal, promises to “teach you how to defend Conservative principles within policy!” (Exclamation mark in original. I set the last two links at “No-Follow”)

And now here’s the bit that’s relevant to my theme, courtesy Zack Kopplin. To quote Sen. Nevers, the Louisiana Family Forum “believe that scientific data related to creationism should be discussed when dealing with Darwin’s theory.” So there are scientific data relevant to creationism (what, I wonder?), but a century and a half of evolutionary science are merely “Darwin’s theory”. As in, the Earth goes round the Sun in an elliptical orbit is “Kepler’s theory”, and stuff is made out of atoms is “Dalton’s theory”.

Stephen Meyers’ Darwin’s Doubt uses similar tactics, from the title on in. The contents give us three references to Darwin in its 23 chapter and section headings; “Darwin’s Nemesis”, “After Darwin, What?”, and “The Post-Darwinian World and Self-Organisation”. Darwin’s name also occurs seven times on the book’s front flap. This (free view on Amazon) presents one short argument, to introduce one very long book, based on compressing the Ediacaran and Cambrian radiations, ignoring everything we know about the events leading up to them (see Robert Hazen’s Story of Earth for a good brief overview), and comparing the resulting mystification with the problem of the origin of life. The index gives ten subheadings and 21 page references for Darwin, and sixteen subheadings and 43 page references to “Darwinian evolutionary theory”. These include six to “Agassiz’ challenge”; that’s Louis Agassiz, who was generously acknowledged by Darwin for his discovery of the Ice Ages, and died 1873. And I nearly forgot: twentysix subheadings and 38 page references for “neo-Darwinism”.  For comparison, Carl Zimmer and Douglas J. Emlen’s Evolution; Making Sense of Life (one of the few textbooks I have come across that is actually a pleasure to read) has 16 subheadings and 33 page references to Darwin. And for “Darwin’s theory”, “Darwinian theory”, or “neo-Darwinism”? None at all. Indeed, I cannot recall when I last came across those expressions, other than from a historian or a creationist.

And of course Glasgow’s own Centre for Intelligent Design, a Discovery Institute echo chamber, has done its poor best to support Stephen Meyer. How? By mangling Darwin to totally shift his emphasis, and refocus it on Meyer’s chosen pseudoproblem. You will find the full gory details here on my friend Robert Saunders’ blog, Wonderful Life. There is also more about Meyer’s book on the BCSE website; I discussed it here, but think Nick Matzke’s dismemberment may be impossible to improve on. Disclosure: I lectured about “Dalton’s theory”, though I didn’t call it that, to Alastair Noble, now the Centre’s Director, many years ago. I like to think my teaching has improved since then. But at least I wasn’t responsible for teaching him about biology, or geology, or complex systems theory, or elementary logic, so perhaps I shouldn’t blame myself too much for what he’s been up to since.