Richard Sherlock has raised the bar for we LDS to possibly embrace Intelligent Design Theory (hereafter cited as ID) as a partner in arms for the LDS understanding of creation and God’s involvement in the Cosmos.[1] I don’t have time right now for an in-depth analysis of Sherlock’s ideas, but I find serious problems with many of them, and will touch on a couple in this first attempt at reviewing the issues. I shall add more as time permits. First off, kudos to FARMS for once again, allowing diverse viewpoints and the sharing of ideas. FARMS shows itself well as a good think tank for generating ideas as well as fleshing out arguments pro and con for many ideas and how they relate to Mormonism. I realize FARMS is not a monolithic block of singular thinking on all fronts. Them allowing this article in their publication of the FARMS Review proves that. I am, however, in strong disagreement on many areas of Sherlock’s assessment, or actually, his lack of assessing the correct situations.
I think what bothers me is Sherlock’s listing in his footnotes such works as Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, John F. Haught’s fine book God After Darwin, and yet never once using any of the contents of their works. It appears to me as if he is simply padding his footnotes to make it look like he is more familiar with a vast amount of literature than he really is. Miller and Haught directly refute Sherlock on numerous points which he never acknowledges. I also found that Sherlock is very lopsided in his reading of this issue. I understand the psychological factor of an LDS author wishing to use more of those sources which believe in a God (Intelligent Designer), than of the critics, but this demonstrates that Sherlock’s arguments and evidences are extremely vulnerable to refutation. And they actually have been refuted. I also am amazed at how Sherlock ignores the fundamental dishonesty of the entire ID enterprise in trying to sneak in under the radar as science, when in reality it is religion. Can LDS be comrads in arms in a common cause with a movement which actually rests on deliberately contrived deceit in court? I think not. The evidence for this is astonishing and seriously persuasive![2]
But I simply have to express my astonishment at how Sherlock can present Michael Behe’s “Irreducible Complexity” as if it is still viable and in agreement as a true scientific theory in line with how evolution works. Both Ken Miller, and Eugenie C. Scott, among others (and there are many), have shown this is a bogus scientific claim.[3] Ken Miller proved this in the Dover Court trial of 2004-2005, while Behe who testified after Miller, admitted that “neither he nor anyone else had actually developed any ‘quantitative criteria for determining the degree of complexity,’ a critical first step in making ID scientific. Devastatingly, he admitted that changing the definition of science to include ID would also bring astrology into the scientific fold. The judge quoted extensively from Behe’s testimony in his remarks, including the following damning admission: ‘There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred.’” [4] Are we LDS ready to admit astrology into our paradigm? Has Sherlock or any other ID advocate demonstrated any “pertinent experiments or calculations” about how “God” did it? Make no mistake about it, this is who the Intelligent Designer is thought of in the minds of ID advocates. So instead of God doing it all, what would it mean for the LDS to advocate casting horoscopes for scientific information instead of revelation to prophets? Does revelation to prophets inform us of scientific matters in the first place? Can astrology? Would any LDS scholar or scientist seriously think so and act upon such a line of inquiry? I suspect it is best to think completely through the ramifications of these issues with a lot more clarity than Sherlock has done.
But the real issue, for me, is Behe’s, and Sherlock’s uncritical acceptance of the unscientific and laughably silly idea of irreducible complexity as if it is valid and more important than Newton, Galileo, and many other truly great scientists. Behe is simply re-creating Paley’s watch argument using a different instrument and wording. It’s truly astonishing Sherlock doesn’t see this. But having read so one-sided in the literature and accepting and thinking the Creationist logic is valid, I can understand why Sherlock is blind to the problem. But what got my dander up is Sherlock’s unjustifiable pretending that there has been no proper responses from the scientific community. All Sherlock thinks is that the scientists have come up with mere “just so stories.” He further assumes that in the face of issues such as the origin of life, Cambrian explosion, blood clotting mechanism, complex biochemical processes, that the scientists propose “’It might have evolved like this’ – without ever showing that it did or without even giving in any precise detail an explanation of how it might have.”[5] This is because Sherlock has ignored the information in some of the very sources he claims he is familiar with. There have been responses, and information available even before Behe showed up on the scene. And certainly many direct responses from Behe’s claims about irreducible complexity. This claim of “just so stories” is amazingly inaccurate.
Behe (and now Sherlock, apparently) fundamentally misunderstand how evolution really works in the first place, and a reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species is very helpful in this regard. But, and I noticed this anomaly in Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, and now in the complete lack in Sherlock’s sources of anything written by Stephen Jay Gould. Yes, I know Behe mentioned Gould once or twice, but he certainly did nothing to show he has mastered Gould’s understanding of how evolution really works, and with specific examples. Sherlock says no scientist has given specific information, and it is precisely to Darwin himself, the grand old man, not to mention Gould, Miller, and others who have given astonishingly complete information, that we can turn to. All this is easily available to Sherlock, and Darwin and Gould are simply far too prominent a voice to claim he couldn’t have found them.
Gould’s first concrete example from the evolutionary record is how the “jaw bones become ear bones” in numerous ways.[6] And the issue of transition specimans is certainly an old Scientific Creationist issue, and reflected by Behe’s rewording and re-exampling of the logic inherent in irreducible complexity. As Gould asks, repeating the creationist logic (and the Intelligent design logic which uses the wording irreducible) “How, in other words, can new organs arise without apparent antecedents?... How… can new organs switch place and function without destroying an animal’s integrity as a working creature? How can we even imagine [Behe and Sherlock obviously can’t] an intermediary form in such a series? You can’t eat with an unhinged jaw.”[7] Here Behe would insert it is irreducibly complex because by taking one bone from it, it ceases to work. Gould’s answer is rather easily arrived it since Darwin discovered how evolution really works. “The key to the riddle [is]… multiple modalities and dual uses. You can pat your head and rub your stomach, walk and chew gum at the same time… feel and hear sound, chew and sense with the same bones.”[8] Behe’s assumption is that evolution works in complex structures…
by stringing together components one at a time, with each addition requiring a selective advantage. Behe’s view is that for a structure like the bacterial flagellum, consisting of over 50 proteins and enzymes, it is extraordinarily unlikely that so many elements – by chance – could be assembled one by one , and even more unlikely that there would be selective advantage to each addition. This piece-by-piece assemblage of the flagellum, one enzyme at a time, one after another, is also envisioned by William Dembski… Behe presents an incomplete picture of how natural selection operates: it is not the case that components of a complex structure must be added one after another , piece by piece, like stringing beads – the bacterial flagellum need not be a discrete combinatorial object. It is clear from the study of components of a cell that a great deal of swapping of bits and pieces takes place; each structure is not composed of unique proteins and enzymes, or even of wholly unique combinations of proteins. The cross-linking proteins of flagella, for example have other functions elsewhere in the cell… An adaptive advantage for a structural element may exist and cause it to be selected for – but for a different purpose and perhaps in a different cell component than that of the final, supposedly irreducibly complex structure under discussion. Natural selection can produce complex structures without having to separately string protein after protein together, in which each addition requires a separate action of natural selection…. Some of the components of an irreducibly complex structure could be assembled separately for some purposes and then combined for other functions – with natural selection being intimately involved during all parts of the process.[9]
Not only does Scott directly address specific examples of Behe, but Gould shows other examples of this multiple use and function and adaptation of various parts. The actual logic of how evolution works is powerfully set out to follow and understand – “If each gene does one, and only one, essential thing superbly, how can a new or added function ever arise? Creativity in this sense demands slop and redundancy… the watchwords of creativity are sloppiness, poor fit, quirky design, and above all else, redundancy… a little fat not for trimming but for conversion; a little overemployment so that one supernumerary on the featherbed can be recruited for an added role; the capacity to do several things imperfectly with each part.”[10]
Darwin demonstrated the same thing with the swim bladder, yet another concrete example. He showed the evidence of “numerous cases could be given amongst the lower animals of the same organ performing at the same time wholly distinct functions… two distinct organs, or the same organ under two very different forms, may simultaneously perform in the same individual the same function… there are fish with gill or branchiae that breathe the air dissolved in the water, at the same time, that they breathe free air in their swimbladders… the illustration of the swim bladder in fishes is a good one, because it shows us clearly the important fact that an organ originally constructed for one purpose, namely, flotation, may be converted into one for a widely different purpose, namely, respiration.”[11]
Gould points out something else important with Darwin’s example, just to drive the point home with authority. Darwin “had made a reasonable conjecture about one-for-two in arguing for supplementary respiration in swim bladders, and he had definite evidence about two-for-one in the presence of numerous living fishes with dual systems of breathing – gills and lungs. (The official taxonomic name of the lungfishes, Dipnoi, means “two breathing.”) “For instance, a swim bladder has apparently been converted into an air-breathing lung. The same organ having performed simultaneously very different functions, and then having been specialized for one function: and two very distinct organs having performed at the same time the same functions, the one having been perfected whilst aided by the other, must often have largely facilitated transitions.”[12]
And, of course, the reason this is so critical to understand is it is evolutionary logic, not creationist logic. There is a vast difference in the two! The true beauty of Darwin’s argument about the two phenomena, namely “one-for-two and two-for-one, are not really separate at all. Both are expressions of a deeper, more profoundly important principle - redundancy as the ground of creativity in any form. They are two sides of the same coin – and the coin, although priceless in intellectual value, is as common as a penny. The notion that organs are ‘for’ particular things, ideally suited for one and only one job, is a vestige of old-style creationism – the idea that God made each creature, fully formed and perfect in function. If each organ existed explicitly for a single role… but organs are not designed for anything; they evolved – and evolution is a messy process brimming with redundancy. An organ might be molded by natural selection for advantages in one role, but anything complex has a range of other potential uses by virtue of inherited structure – as we all discover when we use a dime for a screwdriver, a credit card to force open a door, or a coat hanger to break into our locked car… redundancy solves the otherwise intractable problem of evolution in mammalian jaws…intermediate forms as shown by direct evidence of fossils, not abstract conjecture [Sherlock really should have availed himself of Gould’s essay here before writing his own!] developed a second articulation between dentary and squamosal bones (the current mammalian jaw joint), and elements of the old articulation could then lose their former function and pass into the ear.”[13] It is more than remarkable that Gould points out that “the swim bladder performs at least three other important but secondary functions in many species of teleost fishes.”[14] The actual reality of how evolution works on structures, though lost on Behe and Sherlock, are not lost on Darwin, Gould, Miller, Alters, Scott, and other evolutionary scientists. “Persuasive redundancy makes evolution possible. If animals were ideally honed with each part doing one thing perfectly, then evolution would not occur, for nothing could change (without losing that vital function in the transition), and life would quickly end as environments altered and organisms did not respond. But rules of structure, deeper than natural selection itself, guarantees that complex features must bristle with multiple possibilities – and evolution wins its required flexibility thanks to messiness, redundancy, and lack of perfect fit.”[15]
On a similar note, Kevin Padian and Kenneth D. Angelczyk demonstrate that feathers did not have to evolve for flight, they easily could have helped insulate as well. The famous transition fossil of Archaeopteryx and even Sinosauropteryx show that functions, not just features and structures can be transitional, and hence have multiple use. “A structure that originally keeps an animal warm can develop a color pattern that advertises or hides its owner, and the same structure, if its components develop features that stiffen and interlock its filaments, can contribute to a workable airfoil. This ‘co-opting’ of existing structures and functions to new ones was termed exaptation by Gould and Vrba, and it is quite probable how most functional changes take place in evolution.”[16]
One more example ought to suffice to show the bankruptcy of ID on irreducible complexity. Take a modern city in the USA. If the sewage system of say, New York , or even Los Angeles (we are talkin an enormous sewer system here folks!) were suddenly removed, the city would simply cease to function for very long. However, this does not imply that at every single step, freeways and sewage systems were integral to the developing proto-cities. The fact that the system now operates as a cohesive whole, dependent on all its parts, does nothing to refute the evolution of the system. Behe’s statement or philosophy that “any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional” is an argument by fiat. Complex systems may frequently have antecedents that operate less efficiently or robustly with fewer parts. Now then the more complex the more efficient system has developed a dependence on the complexity, but this says nothing at all about the steps leading to its development.[17]
These are some of the reasons why I do not accept Sherlock’s call to arms. I shall elaborate more as I have the time.
Endnotes
1. Richard Sherlock, “Mormonism and Intelligent Design,” in FARMS Review, Vol. 18/2 (2006): 45-81.
2. The main discussion I possess was easily accessible to Sherlock, Barbara Forrest, “The Wedge at Work: How Intelligent Design Creationism is Wedging its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream,” in Robert T. Pennock, Ed., Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives, MIT Press, 2nd Printing, (2002): 5-53. A recent treatment of this is Karl W. Giberson, Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, HarperOne (2008): 111-119.
3. Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, Cliff Street Books, (1999): 130-164; Eugenie C. Scott, Evolution Vs. Creation, University of California Press, (2004): 116-131. See also Brian J. Alters, Sandra M. Alters, Defending Evolution: A Guide to the creation/evolution controversy, Jones & Bartlett Publishers, (2001): 118-137. Ken Miller has further elaborated on how unscientific irreducible complexity is, specifically focusing on Behe’s mouse trap idea, blood clotting mechanism, and bacterial flagellum on the cellular levels in his newest book Only a Theory, Viking, (2008): 26-87.
4. Karl W. Giberson, Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, HarperOne (2008): 115. Ken Miller’s new book Only a Theory, Viking, (2008) also discusses these significant issues.
5. Sherlock, Ibid., p. 67.
6. Stephen Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History, W. W. Norton & Company, first paperback, 1994: 97.
7. Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 96.
8. Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 97.
9. Eugenie C. Scott, Evolution Vs. Creationism, University of California Press, (2004): 118-119.
10. Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 98.
11. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Mentor Books, (1958): 175-176.
12. Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 117.
13. Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 118.
14. Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 118.
15. Gould, Eight Little Piggies, p. 120.
16. Padian, Angielczyk, “Transitional Forms versus Transitional Features,” in Andrew J. Petto, Laurie R. Godfrey, Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond, W. W. Norton & Company, (2007): 208.
17. Matthew J. Bauer, Daniel R. Brumbaugh, “Biology Remystified: The Scientific Claim of the New Creationists,” in Robert T. Pennock, ed., Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics, MIT Press, (2002): 315.
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