Why Darwin Matters Read online

  6. Francis Darwin (ed.), Autobiography of Charles Darwin.

  7. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in Works of the Creation (London: Samuel Smith, 1691).

  8. William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (London: E. Paulder, 1802).

  9. For a thorough discussion of Paley’s influence on Darwin, see Keith Thomson, Before Darwin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

  10. Letter from Charles Darwin to John Lubbock, November 15, 1859, in Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 2, p. 8.

  11. Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

  12. Ernst Mayr, “Species Concepts and Definitions,” in The Species Problem (Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science Publication 50, 1957). Mayr offers this expanded definition: “A species consists of a group of populations which replace each other geographically or ecologically and of which the neighboring ones intergrade or hybridize wherever they are in contact or which are potentially capable of doing so (with one or more of the populations) in those cases where contact is prevented by geographical or ecological barriers.” See also Ernst Mayr, Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).

  13. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 63.

  14. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 84.

  15. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

  16. Percival W. Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, Of Pandas and People (Dallas, Tex.: Haughton, 1993).

  17. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 280.

  18. For a brief analysis of whether punctuated equilibrium constitutes a paradigm shift in evolutionary theory, see my book The Borderlands of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For a lengthy summary of all critiques of punctuated equilibrium, and detailed responses to them, see the 300-page chapter on the subject in Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  19. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, “Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in T. J. M. Schopf (ed.), Models in Paleobiology (San Francisco: Freeman, 1972), p. 205.

  20. D. S. McKay et al., “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001,” Science 273 (1996), pp. 924–30.

  21. William Schopf, Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth’s Earliest Fossils (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  22. Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, p. 230. The irony is that the theory of evolution is arguably the most consilient theory ever generated, and Whewell rejected it, going so far as to block the Origin of Species from being shelved at the library at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  23. Personal correspondence, December 13, 2004.

  24. All three articles appear in the November 22, 2002, issue of Science: Jennifer A. Leonard et al., “Ancient DNA Evidence for Old World Origin of New World Dogs,” pp. 1613–16; Peter Savolainen et al., “Genetic Evidence for an East Asian Origin of Domestic Dogs,” pp. 1610–13; Brian Hare et al., “The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs,” pp. 1634–36.

  25. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

  26. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  27. Jack Horner, Digging Dinosaurs (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 168.

  28. Ibid., p. 129.

  29. Ibid., pp. 129–43.

  2. Why People Do Not Accept Evolution

  1. All quotes are from Bryan’s Last Speech: The Most Powerful Argument against Evolution Ever Made, a small booklet (price 25¢) published shortly after his death and reprinted in full in Skeptic Vol. 4, No. 2 (1998), pp. 88–100. The booklet was sent to me by my friend and colleague Clayton Drees, who found it in a used book store in Virginia. In the film about the trial, Inherit the Wind, in the middle of Bryan’s final moving speech he dramatically keels over dead in the courtroom to the gasps of his faithful followers and the chagrin of his evolutionary opponents. The reality was perhaps a bit less histrionic, but the real speech is much more revealing (in the film he is reduced to reciting the books of the Bible).

  2. I discuss the Scopes trial briefly in both Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe. For a complete history of the trial see Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

  3. Quotes in this section are from Stephen Jay Gould, “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Campaign,” Natural History (November 1987), pp. 32–38.

  4. J. V. Grabiner and P. D. Miller, “Effects of the Scopes Trial,” Science 185 (1974), pp. 832–36.

  5. V. L. Kellog, Headquarters Nights (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press. 1917). Kellog had joined the Belgian relief program before America entered the war and, through his contacts with professional scientists, gained access to the German General Staff in Berlin, from whom he gathered the material for his book. Gould’s 1987 reconstruction of Bryan’s intellectual reversal on the theory of evolution is unsurpassed (see note 3 above).

  6. Quoted in T. C. Riniolo, “The Attorney and the Shrink: Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, and the Leopold and Loeb Trial,” Skeptic Vol. 9, No. 3 (2002), pp. 44–48.

  7. Darrow’s defense echoes that used by the Menendez brothers’ attorney Leslie Abrams decades later, when she tried to get the boys off from the murder of their parents by arguing they were the victims of parental abuse.

  8. Historian Richard Hofstadter called this “probably the most effective speech in the history of American party politics.”

  9. Thomas H. Huxley, “The Origin of Species” (review), Westminster Review 17 (1860), pp. 541–70. Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 161. Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 78.

  10. Quoted in R. Bailey, “Origin of the Specious,” Reason (July 1997).

  11. The three-hour briefing was held on May 10, 2000. Quoted in D. Wald, “Intelligent Design Meets Congressional Designers,” Skeptic Vol. 8, No. 2 (2002), pp. 16–17.

  12. For a thorough discussion on the liberal resistance to evolutionary theory, particularly when applied to human behavior, see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).

  13. Evolution denial is the doppelganger of Holocaust denial, in that evolution deniers use techniques of rhetoric and debate similar to those of Holocaust deniers. For a full discussion see my book Denying History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). See also Massimo Pigliucci, Denying Evolution (Sunder-land, Mass.: Sinauer, 2002).

  14. Eugenie Scott and the National Center for Science Education track hundreds of specific incidents of teachers’ silence in the face of controversy. See www.ncse.org.

  3. In Search of the Designer

  1. Michael Shermer and Frank. J. Sulloway, “Religion and Belief in God: An Empirical Study,” in press 2006. We received a total of 1,002 responses out of 10,000 surveys obtained from Survey Sampling, Inc., Fairfield, Connecticut. The average age of respondents was 42.2 (SD = 15.9). Correlations and significance values were: being raised in a religious manner (r = .39, N = 985, t = 13.23, p<.0001), parents’ religiosity (r = .29, N = 984, t = 9.63, p<.0001), lower levels of education (r =−.21, N = 977, t =−6.67, p <.0001), gender (women are more religious than men, r = .15, N = 980, t = 4.90, p<.0001), coming from a large family (r = .12, N = 878,
p<.001), conflict with parents (r =−.09, N = 959, t =−2.66, p<.01), and age (r =−.06, N = 976, t =−1.80, p <.08).

  2. S. A. Vyse, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 84–85.

  3. Clarke’s laws are available online at http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.Laws.html. Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Clarke’s Second Law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” Clarke’s First Law was first published in “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” an essay in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future. The second law was originally a derivative of the first and it became “Clarke’s Second Law” later, after Clarke proposed the Third Law in a revised 1973 edition of Profiles of the Future because, he said, “As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there.”

  4. I first proposed Shermer’s Last Law in my column “Shermer’s Last Law,” Scientific American (January 2002), p. 33. I do not believe in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book warns: the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

  5. Voyager spacecraft speed and distances are available online at http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/flteam/weekly-rpts/current.html#RTLT.

  6. See Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Penguin, 1999), and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005).

  7. Unless we happen to be the first space-faring species, which the Copernican Principle (that we are not special) predicts is unlikely.

  8. Langdon Gilkey, Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (Minneapolis, Minn.: Winston Press, 1985).

  9. Langdon Gilkey, Maker of Heaven and Earth: A Study of the Christian Doctrine of Creation (New York: Doubleday, 1965). I am grateful to Michael McGough’s insightful essay on why Intelligent Design is bad theology: Michael McGough, “Bad Science, Bad Theology,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2005, p. C12.

  10. Cited in S. J. Grenz and R. E. Olson, 20th Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age (Exeter, U.K.: Paternoster Press, 1993), p. 124.

  11. Quoted in G. H. Smith, Atheism: The Case against God (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1989), p. 34.

  4. Debating Intelligent Design

  1. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1859). Published in the same portentous year as Darwin’s Origin of Species.

  2. As a secondary benefit, we can reinforce skeptics with additional intellectual firepower for use in their own debates with True Believers and Fence Sitters. And on a tertiary level, we can witness to both cohorts that skeptics and scientists are thoughtful, witty, and affable, and sans horns, rancor, and pathos. To wit, after my debate with Hovind I was handed several notes from Christians whose feedback led me to conclude that, at the very least, they were convinced that skeptics and scientists are not Satanists. Here are two:

  I am a believer of Creation. However, I wanted to tell you I respected your professionalism in your execution of what you had to say. I almost want to apologize on behalf of some Creationists present tonight.

  I cannot say that I agree with you, but I would like to thank you for your professional presentation, unlike your opposition.

  If you think I exaggerate the perception of skeptics as Satanists, a note given to me after the debate, from “an Evangelist Christian—Born again,” reiterated this fear: “I just want to tell you that we fight against a spiritual world and Satan will do anything to blind your eyes from the truth. I just ask you to consider this as a possibility! I will be praying for you!” A common question I get at such debates is: “Why did you give up your faith?” The question is asked out of genuine curiosity, but there is often a substrate implied in the voice and revealed in the eyes: “This couldn’t happen to me, could it?” When I answer in the affirmative that, indeed, it could happen to anyone who is intellectually honest in their search for answers to life’s most ponderous questions, I am sometimes accused of a false faith ab initio:“You were never really a Christian.” How convenient, and cognitively bullet-proof. But tell that to my annoyed siblings and non-Christian friends, who tolerated my nonstop evangelizing for seven years. The sentiments were quite real.

  3. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). Originally published in 1758. Emphasis added.

  4. Herbert Spencer, Essays Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891).

  5. I discovered the Fossil Fallacy not in my research on evolution deniers, but in my study of the Holocaust deniers, who demand “just one proof” of the veracity of the central tenets of the Shoah. For example, they ask: Where are the Zyklon-B gas pellet induction holes in the roof of the gas chamber in Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau? “No holes, no Holocaust,” they claim, a slogan even emblazoned on a T-shirt worn by Holocaust deniers. We have since found these holes, but the fallacy is in assuming that the Holocaust is a single event that can be proven by a single piece of data. Just as the Holocaust was thousands of events that occurred in thousands of places and is proven (reconstructed) through thousands of historical facts, evolution is a process and historical sequence that is proven through thousands of bits of data from numerous fields of science that together give us a rich portrait of the history of life. See my book Denying History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  6. Donald R. Prothero, “The Fossils Say Yes,” Natural History (November 2005), pp. 52–56.

  7. Isaac Newton (Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed., Andrew Motte, trans.), Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 273. Originally published in 1789.

  8. In his foreword to Niall Shanks’s book God, the Devil, and Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Richard Dawkins poignantly spelled this out in a clever fictional dialogue between two scientists. “Imagine a fictional conversation between two scientists working on a hard problem, say A. L. Hodgkin and A. F. Huxley who, in real life, won the Nobel Prize for their brilliant model of the nerve impulse,” Dawkins begins.

  “I say, Huxley, this is a terribly difficult problem. I can’t see how the nerve impulse works, can you?”

  “No, Hodgkin, I can’t, and these differential equations are fiendishly hard to solve. Why don’t we just give up and say that the nerve impulse propagates by Nervous Energy?”

  “Excellent idea, Huxley, let’s write the Letter to Nature now, it’ll only take one line, then we can turn to something easier.”

  9. For an extensive list of books by Intelligent Design creationists, and of books critical of Intelligent Design theory, see the bibliography.

  10. Stephen Hawking, “Quantum Cosmology,” in Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 89–90.

  11. John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. vii.

  12. Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

  13. Michael Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (New York: Free Press, 1998).

  14. John Barrow and John Webb, “Inconstant Constants,” Scientific American (June 2005), pp. 57–63.

  15. Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski, “The String Theory Landscape,” Scientific American (September 2004).

  16. Victor Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1995). Victor Stenger, “Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Us?” in Matt Young and Taner Edis (eds.), Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

>   17. See Andrei Linde, Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology (New York: Academic Press, 1990); Quentin Smith, “A Natural Explanation of the Existence and Laws of Our Universe,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy No. 68 (1990), pp. 22–43; Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1997). For an elegant summary of this field see James Gardner, Biocosm (Maui, Hawaii: Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003).

  18. Stephen Hawking, “The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Stephen Hawking 60th Birthday Symposium,” Lecture at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, United Kingdom, January 11, 2002.

  19. Stephen C. Meyer, “Word Games: DNA, Design, and Intelligence,” Touchstone Vol. 12, No. 4 (1999), pp. 44–50.

  20. Voltaire quoted in B. R. Redman (ed.), The Portable Voltaire (New York: Penguin, 1985).

  21. William Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

  22. William Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  23. William Dembski, “The Intelligent Design Movement,” Cosmic Pursuit, 1998. Available online at http://sapiensweb.free.fr/articles/2-dembski.htm.