18 April 2010 afternoon quickies

Jerry Coyne has “coined” a new phrase: The New Creationists to describe those who believe than an evolutionary process took place that didn’t have “god in the gaps” to cause some mutations, but still believe that humans were the goal of the process and that it was driven by some deity. Of interest to me is this:

After today I promise that I won’t link to the nonsense at HuffPo for a while, but a new piece, “Evolution Presupposes Design, So Why the Controversy?”, by philosopher Ervin Laszlo, is too good not to mock. It assembles a bunch of creationist and New Creationist arguments to argue that there’s really no debate about evolution versus creationism: the truth is somewhere in the middle. (I remember Dick Lewontin once writing something like, “It is an unexamined rule of intellectual life that if there are two diametrically opposed positions, the truth must be somewhere in the middle.”) Laszlo argues:

The creationist position would be the logical choice if — but only if — scientists would persist in claiming that the evolution of living species is a product of two-fold serendipity. But at the cutting edge, scientists no longer claim this. Post-Darwinian biologists recognize that the evolution of species is far more than the chance processes classical Darwinists say it is. It must be more, because the time that was available for evolution would not have been sufficient to generate the complex web of life on this planet merely by trial and error. Mathematical physicist Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probabilities and came to the conclusion that they are about the same as the probability that a hurricane blowing through a scrap-yard assembles a working airplane.

This argument, known as “Hoye’s fallacy,” has long been discredited by evolutionary biologists on the grounds that selection does not assemble complex organisms and traits all at once from simple precursors, but builds up things gradually, with each step conferring an adaptive advantage. This is discredited science, and Laszlo would have known it had he done a few minutes’ worth of Googling. (HuffPo columnists don’t seem to have mastered the use of Google.) Saying that evolution by selection operates through “trial and error” is surely misleading, for the trials are rewarded by being saved in successful genomes. Does Laszlo not understand this? If not, he has no business writing on evolution. If he does, he’s intellectually dishonest.

This “junkyard parts assembling an airplane” argument fails on a mathematical level as well; the assumption there is that it was inevitable that some sentient being was going to be created by the evolutionary process. This is a bit like shuffling a deck of cards, dealing one card each to a room of 52 people, then asking: “what is the probability that each person got EXACTLY the card that they got?” This must be a miracle! (answer: 1/(52!)).

Mike Huckabee

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