David Berlinski is babbling against evolution again (an abridged version has been published in the Wichita Eagle), and it's dreadful. This is a guy who is a competent mathematician with a degree from Princeton, and all he can do is whip out creationist lies in a lather of fury against Darwin. I've tried to dissect it as well as I can, while trying to choke back the nausea induced by such putrid arguments.

The defense of Darwin’s theory of evolution has now fallen into the hands of biologists who believe in suppressing criticism when possible and ignoring it when not. It is not a strategy calculated in induce confidence in the scientific method. A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington concluded that the events taking place during the Cambrian era could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design – hardly a position unknown in the history of western science. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists. Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceeding’s papers, but in the case of Steven Meyer’s "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once.

Publication of the paper, they confessed, was a mistake. It would never happen again. It had barely happened at all. And peer review?

The hell with it.

“If scientists do not oppose antievolutionism,” Eugenie Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, remarked, “it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak.” Scott’s understanding of ‘opposition’ had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: "Avoid debates."

There is a serious question of strategy here, and I go back and forth on it myself. Creationism is nothing but nonsense, and it has no legitimacy to debate. So should we debate it or not? Giving them a reasonable forum gives them more credibility than they deserve. Ignoring them allows them to shriek unanswered. I don't know which is worse.

We've been all over the Meyer affair. It was a bad paper snuck into a journal with the collusion of a fellow traveler in the ID game. Every scientist has had papers rejected; you patch up the flaws and resubmit. I think the Discovery Institute knows this particular paper is irreparable, so all they can do is assume a martyr's pose and whine about it.

Everyone else had better shut up.

In this country, at least, no one is ever going to shut up, the more so since the case against Darwin’s theory retains an almost lunatic vitality.

Don't be humble, David: I'll grant that it is a completely lunatic vitality.

Now Berlinski cranks up the gait and breaks into the traditional Gish Gallop of all creationists, rattling off garbage at a pace that's hard to match, when one is trying to be honest. It really is no fair that creationists do not have the handicap of being accurate or truthful.

Look – The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences – quantum electrodynamics, say – is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to thirteen unyielding decimal places. Darwin’s theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all.

We do not measure the validity of a theory by how many decimal places can be calculated for some arbitrary formula within it. Berlinski has a childishly naive view of how science works.

One piece of crap we should get out of way immediately is this "Darwin's theory" nonsense. We are not dealing with "Darwin's theory" anymore, but a much greater body of knowledge and concepts that has accumulated in the past century and a half, which includes one huge revision (the incorporation of genetics and population genetics) in the past, and which is being constantly updated right now. It is absolutely idiotic to criticize modern biology on the basis of one's misunderstanding of a preliminary proposal published in 1859. But this is the strategy that the IDiots have taken. It is insane.

This complaint that results in evolution have too few significant digits is also insane. One of the things even (especially?) physicists learn early in their training is to use an appropriate level of accuracy; using more digits than is warranted by the accuracy of one's measurements is unscientific. When you are dealing with a population of 10⁶ individuals, it would be ridiculous to use the Hardy-Weinberg formula to estimate gene frequencies in the next generation to 1 in 10¹³, and it would also require ignoring the noise and statistical properties of what we are measuring.

There's also a serious problem in the logic of his argument. Meteorologists also deal with complex phenomena and can't predict the weather for more than a few days in advance. This does not mean it is not a science, nor does it lend credibility to the idea that lightning is caused by the anger of Thor.

Look – Field studies attempting to measure natural selection inevitably report weak to non-existent selection effects.

Why shouldn't evolutionists debate creationists? Because creationists say things that are this stupid, that are wrong on multiple levels. If I were standing on a podium with Berlinski, at this point I'd be tempted to pick up a book (something massive, like Gould's Structure of Evolutionary Theory) and throw it at him.

On one level, this is not a damaging observation at all. We do not expect everything to have a strong selection effect, and we expect most phenomena to be selectively neutral. This is like criticizing physicist's understanding of gravity because we weigh less on the moon, and we aren't all crushed into a thin pulpy layer of slime by the force of Earth's gravity.

Another problem is that it is a fucking lie.

Strong selection effects have been measured, for example in bacteria in response to antibiotics, and in insects in response to insectides, for instance in measurements of the frequency of allelic variants of the acetylcholinesterase gene in mosquitos.

So what should I do in a debate with some sleaze like Berlinski, who pulls this kind of dishonest crap? Spend 20 minutes teaching the audience about Hardy-Weinberg, pull up the results of a half dozen studies, and get all technical and detailed? Or walk across the room, beat him unconscious with any one of hundreds of readily available books that demonstrate his dishonesty, and kick him until he pukes? The latter is very tempting.

Look – Darwin’s theory is open at one end since there are no plausible account for the origins of life.

It's open at the other end, since we don't know where life is going, either. And there are all kinds of gaps in the middle, because we aren't omniscient. So?

Science makes no claim of completeness. This is true of not just biology, but also physics, chemistry, geology, psychology, sociology…you name it.

And once again, in addition to completely missing the point, he's lying again. There are plenty of plausible theories of abiogenesis. The problem is in resolving which is the most likely, working out the details, figuring out how chemical evolution links up with biological evolution, and testing many of the ideas. All of the ideas coming out of the chemistry labs pursuing abiogenesis are far more robust and more productive and more plausible than the silliness hatched out of the Discovery Institute.

Look – The astonishing and irreducible complexity of various cellular structures has not yet successfully been described, let alone explained.

Give me a break. Irreducibility has been thoroughly debunked as a property that would invalidate evolution.

Look – A great many species enter the fossil record trailing no obvious ancestors and depart for Valhalla leaving no obvious descendents.

Name one.

It's not surprising that many leave no descendants: we expect that on a branching bush, many will be terminal twigs. But he will not be able to name a single species that has been studied that does not show deep, fundamental relationships to all other species.

Look – Where attempts to replicate Darwinian evolution on the computer have been successful, they have not used classical Darwinian principles, and where they have used such principles, they have not been successful.

This is precisely backwards. The major complaint biologists have about successful simulations, such as Avida, is that they rely too much on Darwinian selection. Berlinski's complaint here simply does not make sense.

Look – Tens of thousands of fruit flies have come and gone in laboratory experiments, and every last one of them has remained a fruit fly to the end, all efforts to see the miracle of speciation unavailing.

For a mathematician who likes to babble about the importance of 13 significant digits, he sure likes to pull bogus numbers out of his butt. In my little genetics class at a small, out-of-the-way university, we rip through 10,000 fruit flies in a single semester, easily.

And, as we have come to expect in this little essay, Berlinski combines both egregious misconceptions and outright lies in his claim. We do not expect fruit flies to become anything other than fruit flies in the mere century of research we have carried out. What does he expect, flies to give birth to cats?

Of course speciation has been observed. Multiple times. In nature and the lab.

Look – The remarkable similarity in the genome of a great many organisms suggests that there is at bottom only one living system; but how then to account for the astonishing differences between human beings and their near relatives – differences that remain obvious to anyone who has visited a zoo?

Similarity is not identity.

It really is that simple, Mr Berlinski. Are you that obtuse that this simple concept evades you?

Human and chimpanzee genomes are very similar to one another, but there are significant differences. Human and chimpanzee genomes also have some distant similarities with the Drosophila genome, but the differences are much greater.

Human and chimpanzee morphologies are very similar to one another, but there are significant differences. Human and chimpanzee morphologies also have some distant similarities with Drosophila morphology, but the differences are much greater.

But look again – If the differences between organisms are scientifically more interesting than their genomic similarities, of what use is Darwin’s theory since it’s otherwise mysterious operations take place by genetic variations?

What the hell…?

This doesn't even make sense; all I can imagine is that Berlinski, sitting in his little fantasy bubble, imagining how biology works without ever consulting reality, has drifted off into some bizarre alien plane where he is now warring with his own misconceptions.

The differences are interesting. The similarities are interesting. The differences and similarities are maintained and generated by evolutionary mechanisms (please, not "Darwin", who didn't even have a theory of genetics).

Does anyone understand what Berlinski is chittering about here? Is it possible that clouting him over the head with Gould's mega-book has caused brain damage?

These are hardly trivial questions. Each suggests a dozen others. These are hardly circumstances that do much to support the view that there are “no valid criticisms of Darwin’s theory,” as so many recent editorials have suggested.

Serious biologists quite understand all this. They rather regard Darwin’s theory as an elderly uncle invited to a family dinner. The old boy has no hair, he has no teeth, he is hard of hearing, and he often drools. Addressing even senior members at table as Sonny, he is inordinately eager to tell the same story over and over again.

But he’s family. What can you do?

Who is Berlinski to speak of "serious biologists"? I know many serious biologists. All take evolutionary biology quite seriously, and understand it quite well as a substantial, powerful tool.

And only gibbering creationists make this foolish mistake of yammering about "Darwin's theory" when they are talking about the whole of modern biology.

Berlinski has convinced me. Eugenie Scott is right and public, formal debates with these cretins should be avoided. I look at the strings of lies he'd be shitting out on the stage, and I don't see why I should subject myself or an audience to that kind of revolting spectacle.

And yes, I am angry. This is what us American biologists have to deal with?

Sweet galumphing Jebus. It has just been pointed out to me that Berlinski's latest book, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky, is a defense of astrology. Now I feel even worse about wasting time on this clown.