The Atheist Convention in Columbus

(For those of you who did not grow up in the Orthodox Jewish community during the mid 90s, the title refers to a song, “the Atheist Convention in L.A.” The song is about a Muslim atheist, a Christian atheist and a Jewish atheist traveling to Los Angeles for an atheist convention. During the flight there is an accident and the plane begins to go down. The three atheists, believing that they are going to die, all begin to pray. The plane mysteriously manages to right itself and everyone on board is saved. The song ends with the three atheists each returning to their ancestral faith.)

This past Saturday evening, the Humanist Community of Central Ohio hosted Pharyngula’s Dr. PZ Myers as part of their banquet in honor of Darwin Day. The event was held at the Fawcett Center, just a few blocks away from where I live. As a reader of Pharyngula, I did not want to miss the opportunity. I did not want to attend the banquet, though, since it cost $25 for students and it would not have been kosher anyway so I contacted the Humanist Community to find out if I could come just for the lecture and they very nicely said yes, though they recommended a $5 donation, which was perfectly reasonable.

PZ Myers is an atheist in the Richard Dawkins mold, known for his hard-hitting polemics. I expected more of the same here. The PZ Myers I heard and got to speak briefly with afterward managed to surprise me. He was not the internet polemicist that I was familiar with, but a scholar, a biologist and a gentleman. He spoke magnificently, putting complex ideas across in ways that a lay audience could understand without talking down to them. What particularly gained him respect in my eyes was that he avoided taking potshots at William Paley, the nineteenth-century English theologian who authored the famous watchmaker argument for design, and actually praised him. I only wish that more people could see Dr. PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota-Morris and not just PZ Myers of Pharyngula; our cultural discourse would be all the healthier for it.

Here are my notes summarizing Dr. Myers’ lecture. As always any mistakes are mine.

Darwin and Design by PZ Myers

Charles Darwin went on his famous five-year sea voyage (1831-36) on the Beagle, during which time he formulated his theory when he was twenty-two years old. We are used to thinking of Darwin as an old man with a beard, but he was really not that much older than our college students when he began his work on evolution. Darwin did not immediately publish his thoughts upon his return to England. He spent more than twenty years doing further research, particularly on barnacles. This is one of the things that scientists today so love about him.

To put Darwin’s argument in syllogistic form:

If there is a variability in a population
If success correlates to variation
If excess reproduction occurs
If variation is heritable
Than the relative frequency of the different variants must change (adaption will occur)

It should be pointed out that, in practice, there is no difference between micro and macroevolution. It is all really one thing.

It is interesting to note that Thomas Huxley, later known as “Darwin’s bulldog” started off as an opponent of evolution, but was converted upon reading a draft of the Origin of Species.

Darwin was heavily influenced by William Paley and his book, Natural Theology. Paley wished to show how complex the natural world was and how this necessitated a creator. Paley acted as a sort of scientist, though coming from a theological perspective, and you have to respect him for that. A big chunk of the Origin of Species is a rebuttal to Paley. Darwin blew Intelligent Design out of the water in 1859.

Biologists can show how complex designs can come about from simple designs. This process is called Bricolage. This term is taken from the arts; one tinkers with existing designs and creates something new from it. What we see in the natural world is cobbled together from different pieces.

It is difficult to define complexity. For example, the driftwood debris at Olympia beach in Washington is complex, far more complex than a brick wall, but came about through a natural process. It would be very difficult to draw the debris and it serves a multitude of purposes, such as food for various organisms, yet it is all due to chance. Random things are much more complex than things that are designed.

Human beings are complex. Brad Pitt, for example is a metazoan. He possesses approximately 5 x 1013 cells and twenty thousand genes. 4% of these genes are for adhesion, 12% signaling and 6% act as switches. His brain consists of 1012 cells, 1011 neurons and 1014 synopses.

This is what creationists do; point out how complex life is and say that God must have done it. Of course simply saying that God did it is not very interesting. Much of what we see in such a complex metazoan as Brad Pitt is reproduced in simple organisms.

Choanoflagellates are single cell organisms that have a lot in common with sponges. We see that they are able to clump together and act as a singular organism. This could be a precursor to multi-celled organisms. The Choanoflagellate possesses things that were once thought to be unique to metazoans; they have receptors such as tyrosine kinases, cadherins and integrins. Trichoplax adhaerens are in a phylum all by themselves. Think of them as micro organic versions of the Blob. They possess genes found in complex brains like ours. In essence our brain is a glorified digestive system. What we think is special about us exists in simpler organisms, serving another purpose.

But evolution can also create things. Nylonase bacteria eat nylon, a product which did not exist before the 1930s. A Japanese nylon factory was dumping waste into the local river and sure enough within a matter of decades the bacteria had evolved to be able to eat nylon. What we have here is a frameshift where a previously useless protein turns out to be useful in binding to nylon. The bacteria were able to exploit this.

In conclusion, nature is not an engineer. The factors that play a role in change are chance, modularity, multifunctionality, incremental tinkering and contingency.

There was a question and answer session following the lecture where Dr. Myers again proved to be far more congenial and far more open to certain nuances than he is on Pharyngula. He acknowledged the need for multiple approaches such as trying to build bridges as opposed to the no holds barred method of attack usually employed by him and Dawkins. Myers noted that part of the problem with attacking organized religion is that many people out there have deeply religious relatives who are wonderful people whom they love. So when you attack religion people take it as a personal attack on their grandmother or the like. (This is somewhat disingenuous on his part as his attacks can get quite personal.) He talked a bit about the documentary Expelled. He had a great story about him trying to go see a pre-screening with Dawkins. Apparently Myers was recognized and kicked out, but nobody kicked out Dawkins. So they got the best of both worlds. He got expelled from Expelled, which allowed him to avoid having to sit through it, and Dawkins got to watch it and write a nasty review of it. As Myers sees it they made the right decision to actively oppose the film even though it made slightly more money, mostly from atheists going to see it, because at the end of the day the film was received negatively. This was a better outcome than if the film had been allowed to just pass unnoticed.

Ben Stein’s War: A Review of Expelled

I am a practitioner of Orthodox Judaism and a believer in evolution. My view as to the role of religion and science has been heavily influenced by the work of Rabbi Natan Slifkin and Dr. Francis Collins. Because of this I am fairly hostile to intelligent design and its promoters. So I came into Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled, with apprehension. I think Win Ben Stein’s Money was the greatest game show in the history of television, featuring Ben Stein’s dry wit and the spectacle of him putting his money where his mouth was, matching himself against the show’s wining contestants. I have tremendous respect for Ben Stein’s intelligence and the thought of him taking the stand on behalf of intelligent design was disconcerting to say the least.
Expelled is a film that will have a lot of people saying a lot of different things about it. Religious conservatives will likely declare it to be a stunning refutation of Darwinism and pretty much everyone else will see it as a pile of rubbish. Be careful about accepting at face value what you hear about this film; this is one of those films that one must see for oneself. The film is very open ended and one can imprint almost anything you want onto it; this is a weakness of the film, but also just might be its saving grace.

Judging just from the film, I am not certain were Ben Stein stands on the issue of intelligent design. He is clearly critical of what he sees as a Darwinian establishment that, from his point of view, has used strong arm tactics against all those who would dare to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy. Proponents of intelligent design are portrayed sympathetically as scientists who are the victims of a totalitarian Darwinian establishment, which seeks to quash all dissenters. This point is emphasized by frequent cuts to footage of the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. To be fair to Ben Stein he specifically denies that the theory of evolution caused the Holocaust. He just believes that evolution was a key enabling factor in the rise of the Nazis. Further than this I am not certain. Is Ben Stein an actual supporter of intelligent design or is he simply defending their right to dissent? For that matter what does Ben Stein mean when he uses the terms intelligent design and Darwinian evolution; does intelligent design mean that evolution came about through a creator and does Darwinian evolution mean that evolution happened without a designer?

This lack of clarity severally weakens the film, turning it into a hodgepodge of vague generalizations. We are given a parade of people representing either “Big Science” on the one hand or who are dissenters from it. The film never really clarifies what each of these people hold. I think the film would have benefited if each interviewees were asked if they believed in God and if so what sort of God they believed in and to what extent they were willing to accept the theory of evolution.

I believe that this film, despite itself, is useful precisely because it illustrates the problem that has plagued the whole debate over evolution, which unfortunately, all too often, has descended to rhetoric, vague generalizations and accusations. While Expelled has all of these same flaws, I did not find it to be mean spirited and Ben Stein, to his credit, conducts himself with a high level of class.

This ambiguity over what the intelligent design debate is supposed to be about plays itself out very nicely over the course of the film. In the film, the head of the Discovery Institute, which has spearheaded the intelligent design movement, denies that there is anything religious about his group’s work and that they are simply critical of certain elements of traditional Darwinism. Advocates of intelligent design claim that they are not arguing for the existence of God. Believing in some sort of High Power, might offer a solution to some of the issues they raise, but that is simply speculation and has nothing really to do with their work as scientists. On the other side, Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken opponents of intelligent design, when interviewed, is perfectly willing to acknowledge the possibility that life was seeded by some being of “higher intelligence,” but that this being must have also come into existence by some sort of naturalistic process. So what is everyone arguing about? I guess it is that intelligent design advocates claim that Darwin is flawed. But there are a lot of ongoing debates within the scientific community as to many of the details of evolution via natural selection, such whether it happened gradually or whether it happened through relatively sudden shifts. The advocates of intelligent design do not seem to be actually rejecting Darwinian evolution so what is all the fuss about?

Despite the fact that I disagree strongly with what I think the film is trying to say, Ben Stein still manages to be entertaining. Maybe this is just me trying to see the good in what Ben Stein has produced here, but I do think that he has accomplished something worthwhile.