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Even on his birthday, don’t say Darwin unless you mean it
From Darwin’s Notebook B, 1837
How Darwin’s name is taken in vain, with mini-reviews of some of the worst offenders
Don’t say Darwin unless you mean it. Above all, don’t say “Darwin” when you mean “evolution”. It’s like saying “Dalton” when you mean atoms. Our understanding of atoms has moved on enormously since Dalton’s time, and our understanding of evolution has moved on similarly since Darwin’s. Neither of them knew, or could have known, the first thing regarding what they were talking about, and both would be delighted at how thoroughly their own work has been superseded. (Dalton of course deserves further discussion in his own right, which I will be providing in a few weeks time.)
From John Dalton’s A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808)
Imagine if a lot of people decided that atomic theory was against their religion. We would see a parallel world of sacred science, in which molecules were “intelligently constructed”, and real chemistry would be referred to as Daltonism, or possibly, these days, neo-Daltonism. The scientific dissidents from Daltonism would invoke Dalton’s name on every possible occasion, and draw attention to the many inadequacies of atomic theory as he presented it in 1808. Dalton didn’t know anything about the forces that hold atoms together, which depend on electrons and quantum mechanics. In fact, he didn’t even know about electrons. He was muddled about the difference between a molecule of hydrogen and an atom of hydrogen. He thought that the simplest compound between two different elements A and B would have the formula AB, so that water must be HO, not H2O. And of course he knew nothing about the origin of atoms, a problem not solved until the 1950s, over a century after his death. Obvious nonsense, the lot of it!
Darwin was ignorant of transitional fossils, and in words still quoted by creationists deplored their absence as the greatest objection to his theory. He was equally ignorant about the origin of biological novelty, which comes from mutating genes. In fact, he didn’t even know about genes. And because he did not realise that inheritance occurred through genes, he could not explain why favourable variations were not simply diluted out. It would be decades after his death before we could even speculate coherently about the origins of life, and despite tantalising clues it remains a largely unsolved problem. But despite this, we have learnt an enormous amount since the publication of On The Origin of Species, and everything that we have learnt is consistent with, indeed requires, the key concepts of evolution and common descent.
So why is discussion of evolution still saturated with Darwin’s name? In part, I think, because that’s the way his opponents want it. By identifying evolution with Darwin, they continue to breathe life into the controversies of the mid-19th century. At the same time, it helps them pretend that modern biology is just one individual’s point of view, rather than a mature science based on the work of thousands of investigators. Very recently, creationists have taken to invoking Darwin himself for their cause, in such titles as Darwin’s Doubt and Darwin Strikes Back. This is an extremely powerful rhetorical tool; if Darwin was puzzled by [whatever], is that not a puzzle to us “Darwinists”? Closely related is the device of presenting creationism under the guise of even-handed debate, as when a creationist pseudo-textbook (which mentions Darwin on almost every page, but not in the index) calls itself Explore Evolution; the arguments for and against neo-Darwinism, or in the list below, where a creationist comic goes by the name, What’s Darwin got to do with it? A friendly discussion …
And while we’re on the subject of unhelpful language, don’t say “theory of evolution” when you mean the well-established facts of historical and continuing change over time, and of common ancestry. And if you find yourself in the position of explaining the difference between a scientific theory (coherent intellectual structure developed to explain a range of observations), and the use of the word “theory” in everyday use (provisional hypothesis), you have blundered into a morass. Back out again.
But back to Darwin. You can see what I mean if you just look at the names of the books written by the enemies of scientific biology, from Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer, 2013) back to Darwin’s Black Box (Behe, 1996) and beyond. There are other examples, such as The Darwin Conspiracy (Roy Davies, 2006), which portrays Darwin as a plagiarist, and, while checking its details, I discovered an even more lurid book of the same name by John Darnton, which portrays him as a murderer. To be fair, Darnton does not pretend that he is writing anything other than fiction, although surely he was writing with half an eye on the creationist market.
To further test my idea, I went online to Amazon.com, and typed “Darwin” and “Darwinism” in the search window (I regularly search on Amazon, but prefer to buy from The Book Depository or Wordery). Here are some of the books by creationists that I came up with; a lot of the names were all too familiar, but I never realized that Rick Santorum had actually got his name on a book. There were also references to “materialist neo-Darwinism”, but since I don’t pretend to know what a “materialist” is, and whether I or for that matter Darwin would qualify, I decided to let those ones go.
God vs. Darwin: The Logical Supremacy of Intelligent Design Creationism Over Evolution (M. S. King, 2015): “Ever since its inception, the edifice of Evolutionary Darwinism has rested upon a foundation of sand, propped up solely by media hype, public ignorance and extreme intellectual bullying.”
Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer, 2013) For the fashioning of this phrase in the creationist quote mine, see here. For Donald Prothero‘s devastating review of the book, see here.
Dehumanization: A Product of Darwinism (David Campbell, 2012)
The Dark Side of Charles Darwin (Jerry Bergman, 2011)
Evolution by Intelligent Design: Debate is Over – Darwinism is Extinct (Gabor Lingauer, 2011)
The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (David Berlinski, 2010; I have written about Berlinski here)
What Darwin Got Wrong (
The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin (Benjamin Wiker, 2009)
Exposing Darwinism’s Weakest Link: Why Evolution Can’t Explain Human Existence (Kenneth Poppe, 2008)
Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against NeoDarwinism, (Stephen C. Meyer, Scott Minnich, Jonathan Moneymaker and Paul A. Nelson, 2007; this fraudulently misnamed creationist pseudo-texbook is discussed further here)
Darwin’s Plantation: Evolution’s Racist Roots (Ken Ham and A. Charles Ware, 2007)
The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (Michael Behe, 2007; since Behe clearly believes that biological complexity is the work of a designer who operates independently of natural laws, I include him as a creationist, although he would deny this)
Darwin Day In America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science John G. West, 2007)
Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design (Thomas Woodward, 2007)
Darwin’s Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement (William A. Dembski and Rick Santorum, 2006)
Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design (Thomas Woodward and William Dembski , 2006)
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Jonathan Wells, 2006)
Reclaiming Science from Darwinism: A Clear Understanding of Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design, (Kenneth Poppe, 2006)
The Naked Emperor: Darwinism Exposed (Antony Latham, 2005)
Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing (William A. Dembski, 2004)
What Darwin Didn’t Know: A Doctor Dissects the Theory of Evolution (
Darwinism, Design and Public Education (John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer, 2003) Blurb: if science education is to be other than state-sponsored propaganda, a distinction must be drawn between empirical science and materialist philosophy.
Darwinism and the Rise of Degenerate Science (Paul Back, 2003) Blurb: many of the constructs of evolution are based on fantasies devoid of scientific credibility.
The Collapse of Darwinism: Or The Rise of a Realist Theory of Life (Graeme D. Snooks, 2003)
Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory (Michael A. Cremo, 2003)
The Case Against Darwin: Why the Evidence Should Be Examined (James Perloff, 2002)
Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (Benjamin Wiker and William Dembski (Jul 12, 2002) Abortion. Euthanasia. Infanticide. Sexual promiscuity. And it’s all Darwin’s fault.
Darwinism Under The Microscope: How recent scientific evidence points to divine design (James P. Gills, 2002)
Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Cornelius G. Hunter, 2002)
Darwin’s Demise (
Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Richard Milton, 2000)
What’s Darwin Got to Do with It?: A Friendly Discussion About Evolution (between a bright young creationist and a stuffy stooge; Robert C. Newman, John L. Wiester and Janet Moneymaker, 2000)
Darwinism Defeated? (J. I. Packer, Phillip E. Johnson and Denis O. Lamoureux, 1999) (Lamoureux says no, by the way)
Evolution Deceit: The Scientific Collapse of Darwinism (Harun Yahya and Mustapha Ahmad, 1999)
Tornado in a Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Darwinism (James Perloff, 1999)
Darwin’s Leap of Faith: Exposing the False Religion of Evolution (John Ankerberg and John Weldon, 1998)
Darwin’s Enigma (Blurb: No legitimate fossil evidence exists that shows one species changing into another
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Phillip E. Johnson, 1997)
Darwin’s Black Box (Michael Behe, 1996)
In the Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order (Ian T. Taylor, 1996) Blurb: Creation Moments is pleased to bring you what has been hailed as the classic work on the creation-evolution issue!
Darwinism, Science or Philosophy? (Phillip E. Johnson et al., 1994)
Darwin on Trial (Phillip E. Johnson, 1991)
Darwinism : The Refutation of a Myth (Soren Lovtrup, 1987)
And so on, all the way back to The Refutation of Darwinism: And the Converse Theory of Development; Based Exclusively Upon Darwin’s Facts (T Warren O’Neill, 1879)
Darwin, God, Alvin Plantinga, and Evolution II; Plantinga in the Quote Mine and Epistemological Creationism
Prof Alvin Plantinga, of Notre Dame University, is perhaps the most distinguished critic of current views on evolution. He claims that if our conceptual apparatus is simply the product of naturalistic Darwinian evolution, it will generally give rise to unreliable results. From this premise he argues that it is unreasonable to accept naturalistic evolution, since[1] if naturalistic evolution were true, our reasons for accepting it would be unreliable. There is nothing wrong with his logic, but his premise rests on a basic misunderstanding of how evolution works.
Disclosure: around the time of the Kitzmiller-Dover trial, Prof Plantinga and I had a long e-mail correspondence, now unfortunately lost during a University mail system upgrade. I remember, however, the final exchange. He said that Behe, Dembski, and Thaxton, advocates of three different versions of Intelligent Design, had produced arguments that required an answer. In reply, I said that I totally agreed; the answer was, in each case, that they were wrong. Prof Plantinga did not reply.
Disclaimer: I have no credentials when it comes to philosophy. But let me plead in mitigation that Prof Plantinga has no credentials when it comes to evolutionary biology.
According to Plantinga, a belief is warranted when it is produced by cognitive functions working properly, according to a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs. The design plan could be produced by an agent (God, or a super-scientist), or by evolution. This convoluted definition is necessary to bypass cases that puzzle philosophers, such as, is a belief warranted when it happens to be true but we hold it for bad reasons.[2] Plantinga’s position is encapsulated in the title of his 1993 book, Warrant and Proper Function.
I have three problems here. One is the choice of words; design plan and aim have connotations of foresightful agency, and it would be better to use neutral terms such as adaptationand tendency to produce. The second is circularity; how do we define proper function, if not in terms of giving warrant to beliefs when appropriate? The third, which is really a consequence of the second, is that it is useless in real disagreements, because it begs the question. For example, Prof Plantinga tells us that he possesses a sense of the divine, which he regards as a warrant. But how can he know that this is a warrant, unless he already knows that this sense is leading him towards the truth? And what, then, of Darwin’s objection (Part I); how can we have confidence in the beliefs that this sense induces, when those who claim to possess it differ so forcibly among themselves?
Plantinga is better when dealing with the limitations of our senses. He raises the interesting possibility that while they are not perfect, they are good enough, and that their deficiencies may represent a trade-off between speed and accuracy. This, I suggest, explains some shortcomings but not others. For example, in perspective illusions, such as the parked car illusion, we incorrectly perceive the image of the object further away from us as larger. This is a small price to pay for the ability to judge the real size of distant objects. There are other illusions, such as the disappearing dots, that have no obvious function, but are presumably byproducts of a generally efficient image processing system. There are, however, defects that can only be understood in terms of our evolutionary history. Thus, notoriously, the nerve connections to the mammalian retina run in front of the light-detecting cells, obscuring the view, and there is also a blind spot in each eye, where the optic nerve passes through the retina. If a freshman engineering student came up with such a design, we would gently suggest that he considered changing his major. After all, it doesn’t have to be like that; in the octopus eye, the parts are the right way round.
One of Plantinga’s examples inadvertently illustrates how evolution actually works. He considers[3] the case of an individual with extremely low blood pressure, and a fragile aorta. The low blood pressure restricts his physical activity, but if it rose to what is considered normal, his aorta would burst and kill him. So is the heart acting properly in keeping his blood pressure low? The answer would seem to be, yes, if and only if his design includes a mechanism by which a damaged aorta limits cardiac activity. (Much as our body temperature control system includes a mechanism that causes fever when we are fighting off disease.) For Plantinga, the heart/aorta example illustrates that we can only define proper function for an organ, including a human organ, in terms of a pre-ordained plan. On the contrary, I would claim, it illustrates the artificiality of imposing, on the complexity of biological forms, the simple criteria more appropriate to artefacts.
Now consider a primitive organism with very little in the way of blood vessels. Such an organism might have a very simple heart, encouraging circulation of fluid. There would be an adaptive advantage in channeling this blood flow, and once that happens, there would be further advantage in improving the performance of the heart. The heart and the circulatory system are under a selection pressure to improve, but only step by step. This is because there would be no advantage, and some cost, if one were to get too far ahead of the other. One can imagine further elaboration, if the creature develops separate organs for exchanging carbon dioxide in the blood for oxygen. Indeed, something like this seems to be what actually happened. A mutation in advance of the proper context would be lethal; a double-circulation heart could not function properly in a codfish. So if we are to apply the concept of proper function to organisms, it needs to be set in its evolutionary context (I do not expect Prof Plantinga to agree).
Throughout, Plantinga makes things far more difficult for himself by his rejection of the natural power of evolution. He makes heavy weather, as philosophers are bound to, of the “problem” of how we know that others have minds. As Plantinga reminds us, this is not a matter of ordinary logic or inference. After all, we are arguing from analogy with our experience of ourselves, i.e. from analogy with a single example. Indeed, unless we suffer from autism, we believe in other minds from the cradle, without arguing about it at all. So when Plantinga discusses how we come to have this belief, or why we should trust it, he can give no explanation other than Providence. However, we are social species, and both survival and mating opportunities depend on social competence. Thus there is strong evolutionary pressure to develop an adequate theory of other minds. There is good evidence that our brains contain “mirror neurons”, which respond to other people’s movements and gestures in the same way as to our own, bringing us as close as separate individuality allows to sharing other people’s sensations. But even without such knowledge of mechanism, we would be well aware, as philosophers have been since Aristotle, of the vital importance to each of us of insight into the minds of others.
The last chapter of the book is what drew it to my attention, with its claim that we cannot have warrant for believing in naturalistic evolution. For the most that naturalistic evolution could guarantee, is behaviour that increases fitness,[4] and Plantinga claims that there is no good reason to suppose that such behaviour requires true belief.
At this point, Plantinga commits a blatant act of distortion by quote mining, of the kind all too familiar to students of the creationist literature, but surprising in a scholar of his stature. He manages to invoke Darwin himself to support his position, with this excerpt from a letter to William Graham:
With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
The quotation is genuine, but the meaning is completely distorted, by suppressing its context. Consider the passage in full:
Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
So the question is very narrow and specific; whether we can trust minds evolved from those of animals when they lead us to believe that the Universe had a creator. In Part I, I gave two other examples of Darwin showing similar reticence, because of how our minds evolved. But in both those cases, Darwin is addressing exactly the same question as here, which must have preoccupied him over many years. There is no honest way of recruiting Darwin to support the view that our evolved animal nature makes our minds unreliable on any lesser topic. Yet Plantinga manages to say (p 219[5]), almost immediately after his truncated quotation,
Darwin and Churchland seem to believe that (naturalistic) evolution gives one a reason to doubt that human cognitive faculties produce for the most part true beliefs: call this ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ (emphasis added)
The expression “Darwin’s Doubt” may well be familiar; Stephen Meyer chose those words as the title of his recent book in which he presents a long since deflated[6] perspective (see here and here and here and, if you have access to Science, here) on evolutionary change in the Cambrian.
But let that pass.
It is repeatedly clear that Plantinga understands nothing about how evolution works. For example (p 204) he imagines a sadistic dictator “inducing a mutation” into his enemies, which condemns them to a life of pain, and converts their visual fields to a shadowy green screen. He then asks, if possessing this mutation is made a condition for those enemies to breed, whether defective eyesight is now proper function. In reality, it is impossible to induce mutations in individuals who already exist, and the kind of change involved would in any case, even if possible, take many generations. Compare this “mutation” with the distortion actually induced in some pedigree dogs, which have been bred to have faces so flattened that they have difficulty breathing. But this took repeated selection, and close control of bloodlines. (And I would add that the conflict in both these cases between natural and artificial selection once again shows the problems of applying the concept of proper function to organisms.)
In a deservedly much-mocked passage (pp 225 ff), Plantinga tries to describe how a deeply mistaken worldview could still enhance fitness. For example, what if someone thought that it was delightful to be mauled by a tiger, and, at the same time, that the best way to ensure being mauled was to run away from it? Such a combination of beliefs would lead to survival-inducing behaviour, even though each of the beliefs was mistaken. But for this to happen without going through a lethal intermediate stage, each of the mistakes would have to occur in a single step, and both of them would have to happen at once; an unlikely coincidence of events improbable enough in themselves. If Plantinga doesn’t see the problem, I suspect that he has failed to appreciate the step-by-step nature of evolutionary change.
The evolutionary approach, incidentally, defines a role for pain, as Darwin realised (see Part I), and this role is, precisely, to induce correct beliefs about what is harmful. Plantinga’s account of beliefs does not require such preliminaries, and so the problem of suffering is much more acute for him than for a Darwinian.
Back to Darwin’s letter. When it comes to the mundane realities on which survival depends, there are indeed circumstances where we would “trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind”. We know that monkeys are good at detecting predators, fear them, and signal that fear to each other. If we were in the jungle surrounded by monkeys, and they suddenly show signs of having detected danger, we would be foolish not to pay attention.
I have spoken of monkeys feeling fear. Yet a follower of Descartes would deny that animals have any feelings at all. How could I convince him? Perhaps by such evidence as the monkeys’ facial expressions and vocalisations, how these affect other monkeys, changes in activity in different regions of the brain, adrenaline release, blood flow, and skin temperature, all compared with the effects of fear in humans. Then what about less intelligent animals? Pursuing this route, we will soon find ourselves refining or breaking down the concept of “fear”, and embarking on a research programme, or indeed a family of research programmes, straddling the frontiers between ethology, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy. Such programmes are already well under way.
Our conceptual apparatus is indeed unreliable, but this is just what naturalistic evolution would lead us to expect. For the failings are most evident in areas where our errors would have inflicted the least damage on our fitness, and might indeed have enhanced it.
Such failings are numerous, and here are a few examples. Our common sense (or, as Bertrand Russell called it in Mysticism and Logic [free download here], our intuition) is most reliable on matters of immediate concern. Intuition tells me that I am sitting on a solid chair, in a room that is not moving, and only recently, in evolutionary terms, was it discovered that the chair is mainly empty space, and that the room that is moving eastward at several hundred miles an hour. I see patterns that are not there in reality; but better to see a tiger that isn’t there, hiding in the long grass, than to fail to see a tiger that is. As an infant, I understand physical events in terms of purpose and agency, rather than physical causation, and in some of us this tendency persists into adulthood. No surprise, since as an infant my very survival depends on interacting with other people, and getting them to care for me. I believe in the tribal gods, because this intellectual sacrifice qualifies me for membership of the group, with access to reciprocal altruism and reciprocal trust (see Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday for more on that last theme). And those last few suggestions may or may not be true, but are at least credible, and suggest further research programmes of their own.
Given these failings, how, if at all, can our scientific beliefs be warranted? In 1520, science taught that the Earth was fixed, in 1820 that species were fixed, and in 1920 that the continents were fixed. Few people would now expect to see these views reinstated. So did they have warrant at the time? If they did, how much is a warrant worth? If not, how can we claim that our current beliefs are warranted? These are interesting and important questions, but not, I think, the questions that Prof Plantinga addresses.
Moreover, the problem of warrant is most acute in the very area where Prof Plantinga seems most certain of his own beliefs, namely religion. Here, all believers would claim warrant. But their beliefs are so diverse that, as a matter of arithmetic, most (if not all) of them must be mistaken. Yet here, surely, is the area where an Abrahamic God, desirous of being loved and worshipped, would have been most concerned to design us with access to sound knowledge of His reality.
It is not the naturalistic evolutionist who should be troubled by the problem of reliability, but the Intelligent Design creationist.
Photo by Jonathunder through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AlvinPlantinga.JPG under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. An earlier version of this post appeared here on 3 Quarks Daily
[1] He devotes some 20 closely argued pages to this logical step, but I think I have captured the drift.
[2] If I understand him correctly, Plantinga would say that it is still warranted as long as we are in no position to realise that the reasons are bad.
[3] I have changed the details slightly, in order to make the situation more plausible.
[4] Plantinga generally refers to survival advantage, but fitness, the ability to survive and produce offspring that are themselves fit, is what actually matters.
[5] Page number references are to Warrant and Proper Function, print edition, OUP 1993.
[6] The “Cambrian explosion” isn’t what it used to be.
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.
Primate's Progress 
