Par For The Course

Saw this at First Things: Pandering to Prejudices

You usually know that somebody is losing the argument when he loses his cool and resorts to bluster, abuse, caricature, and the invocation of authorities who agree with him. The New York Times Book Review, for reasons that surpass charitable explanation, gave Michael Behe’s most recent book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, to Richard Dawkins for review. Behe is a biochemist, author of Darwin’s Black Box, and a proponent of Intelligent Design. Dawkins is an atheist polemicist against religion, holds the ill-named Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and is author of The God Delusion.

Dawkins begins by saying he feels “sorry” for Behe, whom he describes as the “poster boy of creationists everywhere.” Never mind that Behe is not a “creationist.” No less than three times in the review, Dawkins alludes to the fact that Behe’s colleagues in his university’s biology department have publicly distanced themselves from his position. The other biologists at Lehigh University disagree with Behe. It follows that he must be a nut. Further, “Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J.B.S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith, and hundreds of their talented coworkers and intellectual descendents.” This is what is known as argument from authority.

This sort of intellectual dishonesty seems to be contagious. I picked up a copy of Skeptic magazine recently and I was horrified at the liberal use of shoddy rhetorical devices and ad hominem attacks which they were passing off as rational discourse. Maybe it is the effect generated from the (very enjoyable) Penn & Teller Bullshit television program, where humor and not-so-good natured put downs are the order of the day. But, the purpose of a television program is to be entertaining at least and maybe thought provoking at best. A magazine like Skeptic should aim considerably higher since the pages of a journal offer the opportunity for something a tv show could never deliver, namely the above mentioned rational discourse.

First Things continues:

All this raises interesting questions about the Book Review, which publicly claims to take care that a reviewer has no conflict of interest that would get in the way of a fair treatment of a book. For instance, is the author your brother-in-law? Apparently it doesn’t matter if a prospective reviewer has publicly and repeatedly heaped contempt on an author and his arguments.

First Things has a different review policy. We will on occasion choose a reviewer who is known to disagree, and disagree strongly, with an author. The purpose is to engage the argument and explain why it is wrong, with the author having a chance to respond. As the editors of the Book Review must know, Dawkins cannot engage Behe’s argument. It is not simply that he is not a biochemist. He is in principle disqualified because he is a militant atheist committed to a position of scientific materialism in which any reference to transcendent purpose or design is deemed to be delusional, meaning it is the product of a mental disorder.

It is hard to know what purpose is served by the Book Review in having Dawkins review Behe, except, possibly, to ostracize anyone who presumes to raise questions about prevailing Darwinist orthodoxies and, perhaps, to pander to the smug prejudices of the presumed readership of the Times.

Indeed, any polemicist like Dawkins would be a poor choice as book reviewer. It is in the nature of such people to just re-issue their own polemics rather than actually engage with material they disagree with. A review written by Dawkings is going to be about Dawkins and nothing else. The choice of the Book Review seems to indicate that they would prefer their readers to only read and know what Dawkins wants them to read and know. It sort of reminds one of those late medieval scholastics who made their pupils swear to never contradict Aristotle. "Stop thinking. We will tell you what is acceptable to think about."

More from First Things:

Just who does this Behe guy, “the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University,” think he is to disagree with the scientific establishment? Doesn’t he know that science progresses by conformity to conventional opinion, as Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin (!) have taught us? Dawkins’ clinching argument against Behe’s claims about the limits of natural mutation is that different kinds of dogs have descended from the wolf. Dawkins writes, “As I incredulously close this book, I seem to hear mocking barks and deep baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs.”

When you read things like this you really have to wonder if Dawkins is paying attention to what he is writing. After all, why are there 500 breeds of dogs? Largely because an outside force (i.e. man) has been directing their evolutionary path. This is an argument for "natural" mutation how exactly?

My own take of Behe, based on his earlier book Darwin's Black Box, is that he does a good job in taking apart some of the easy complacency built into the prevailing orthodoxy. There are very hard questions out there to which we do not have satisfactory answers. Behe contends the assumption that the answers to those questions will fall in line with the Darwinian orthodoxy is unfounded. On this Behe is correct, both from the view of formal logic and that of the scientific process. If Behe's negative critique is well founded, his positive postulation of Intelligent Design as the "answer" to all of these problems is far less persuasive, as it is more of a throwing up of hands instead of an actual answer. My own guess (and a guess it all it is) would be that something will come along which will modify the present Darwinian synthesis profoundly, possibly along scientific ideas that mirror the self-organizing philosophic premise of elan vital put forward by the French philosopher Henri Bergson.

That is why it is so damaging to the idea of science to have someone like Richard Dawkins out front and center. Dawkins is less interested in science than he is interested in attacking religion. For Dawkins, science is not the fruit of a free and open inquiry into the nature of the universe but a bludgeon he can use to bash those he calls delusional. Any use of science for ideological ends winds up perverting science. Dawkinism is in effect a new Lysenkoism.