Another Dishonest Creationist Quote
Post of the Month Runner-Up: February 2004
by catshark
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Subject: Phillip Johnson's dishonest quote
Date: 16 February 2004
Message-ID:
9s20301dcdb0r1akki0n27cdb4mj33frr7@4ax.com
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In looking at Phillip Johnson's book,
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Intervarsity Press, 1997), for possible use in the
Quote Mine Project, I discovered a particularly dishonest example that I thought should be brought to everyone's attention, even though it isn't really suitable for inclusion in the QMP. Although this is rather long, I think it is such a revealing example that it is worth the time to read it.
First of all, here is the context Johnson uses the quote in:
What is even more interesting is that the evidence for Darwinian macroevolutionary transformations is most conspicuously absent just where the fossil evidence is most plentiful -- among marine invertebrates. (These animals are plentiful as fossils because they are so frequently covered in sediment upon death, whereas land animals are exposed to scavengers and to the elements.) If the theory were true, and if the correct explanation for the difficulty in finding ancestors were the incompleteness of the fossil record, then the evidence for macroevolution- arv transitions would be most plentiful where the record is most complete.
Here is how Niles Eldredge, one of the world's leading experts on invertebrate fossils, describes the actual situation:
"No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change -- over millions of years, at a rate too slow to account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution."
Eldredge also explains the pressures that could easily lead a forlorn paleontologist to construe a doubtful fossil as an ancestor or evolutionary transitional. Science takes for granted that the ancestors existed, and the transitions occurred, so scientists ought to be finding positive evidence if they expect to have successful careers. According to Eldredge, "the pressure for results, positive results, is enormous." [DD p. 60-61]
Johnson does not use standard footnotes or bibliographies to document such quotes but, instead, he provides informal "Research Notes" at the end of the book, a
highly unusual practice for an attorney and one that can be used to hide a multitude of sins. He gives only this information about the above: "The quotation from Niles Eldredge about how evolution 'never seems to happen' is from his book
Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 95" [DD p. 125]. No mention of the snippet he quotes in the last paragraph is made, even though he is blatantly attempting to use it to accuse scientists of intellectual bias at best and outright dishonesty and cupidity at worse.
Of course, when a creationist quotes Gould or Eldredge, it is all but certain to involve Punctuated Equilibrium. This is no exception. The long quote from Eldredge is fairly standard quote mining, which I'll deal with elsewhere. It is the snippet that is particularly dishonest and which I want to address here.
As I think will become clear, it is little wonder that Johnson did not bother to give a cite for the snippet: "the pressure for results, positive results, is enormous". It comes from Eldredge's
Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria, p. 59. As might be anticipated, the general issue under discussion is stasis in the fossil record.
But, first, some context. In this section of the book, Eldredge is discussing his early career as a paleontologist studying trilobite fossils, working towards his Ph.D. thesis. He describes his extensive travels across the Northeastern and Midwestern United States collecting fossils of
Phacops rana, the particular species he was studying, and his initial puzzlement over the lack of obvious evolutionary change in the specimens he was collecting from different strata. By the then prevalent view, a slow but discernible accumulation of evolutionary change should have been observed. As he now recalls his confusion:
The European - North American collision that began about 380 million years ago did more than change the face of the globe: it also grossly affected the face of life in North America. Many of the Hamilton [trilobite] species that were to dominate American life for the next 8 million years were immigrants from Europe and Africa . . . But I knew nothing of this. . . . I chose to doubt my own ability to analyze trilobite anatomy. . . . [A]ll the trilobites really did look the same. . . . no real source of disquiet while I was driving across New York, perhaps, but soon to become a focus of desperation as the search broadened and the analysis deepened. (p. 58-59)
And now for the part where the snippet occurs:
Like all other humans starting out on some quest, on some project with a definite goal, scientists are determined to get results. Complicating the normal routine is the hassle of obtaining a Ph.D. A piece of doctoral research is really an apprenticeship, and the dissertation a comprehensive report that shows the candidate's ability to frame, and successfully pursue, an original piece of scientific research. Sounds reasonable, but the pressure for results, positive results, is enormous. If your choice is to look at evolution, and you've carefully picked out a trilobite species that meets all the criteria for a good example, and if your preliminary forays reveal a rather distressing sameness to the beasts from New York to Iowa, from the beginning of Hamilton time on up through its last gasp 8 million years later, a feeling of desperation is inevitable. For little or no change to be readily apparent over all that time and territory seemed then inconceivable -- given the goals, the aspirations and, really, the basic underlying assumptions I brought to the study in first place. Despair came full-blown late one particular afternoon in Alpena, Michigan, when, as my clothes were drying in a launderette, I took an exquisite specimen out of my pocket, pored over it with a magnifying lens and concluded it was the very same creature I had been seeing all through the Appalachians and all over the Midwest. (p. 59)
He then spends numerous pages explaining the exhaustive studies he made of the fossils he had collected and his rediscovery of the fact, previously noted in the literature, that the number of lenses making up the compound eye of
P. rana varied over time. He sums it up as follows:
Now, in the entire 8 million years of Hamilton time, the greatest (though not the sole) amount of modification wrought by evolution in the Phacops rana stock was the net reduction from 18 to 15 columns of lenses. Hardly prodigious, this degree of anatomical retooling falls well within the normal bounds of "microevolution" -- loosely speaking, the kind and degree of relatively minor change that marks the difference between closely related species, and the sort of change that can be seen in rudimentary form within a single variable species. The internal, within-species variation is then supposed to supply the raw stuff for the differences we see between species -- and ultimately on up through genera, families and the really larger groups of organisms.
But, at least in the Midwest where parts of the evolutionary story of the lenses first began to come clear, we see something out of whack with prevailing expectations -- two things, really. We have, it is true, a good but far- from-perfect record, and a less-than-perfect sampling of what really is there. But as we climb up those rocks and check those samples, over what must be, in sum total, a 3-or-4-million-year period, we see some oscillation, some variation, back and forth (the two subspecies coming and going with shifting substrate) -- but no real net change at all, and no change especially in the anatomical feature, those columns of lenses in the eyes, which end up showing the greatest amount of change within the entire lineage. This is the first element: simple lack of change. (p. 70)
He then proceeds to discuss how the results of this study was, for him, the genesis of the thinking that led to Punctuated Equilibrium. The important thing to note, however, is how this story is the
exact opposite of what Johnson would have you take from the snippet.
Eldredge was, of course, looking to obtain his Ph.D. and advance his career, so it is hardly surprising that he was feeling desperate to find out what was "wrong" about what he was doing; why he was not finding what he "should" under the best theory at the time. But pressure of this sort is hardly unique to scientists. Should we assume that, say, aspiring lawyers, faced with an inability to fit their knowledge within the questions asked on the bar exam, would take a "doubtful" course of action by cheating "if they expect to have successful careers"?
In fact,
despite having found differences in the trilobites he was studying, he did
not try "to construe a doubtful fossil as an . . . evolutionary transitional" in an attempt to salvage his career. Nor did he ignore contrary data in the face of his admitted "underlying assumptions". Instead, he faced up to the data, presented his results and eventually participated in extending, instead of "propping up", the prevalent view. While I prefer to believe that this was the result of Eldredge's personal honor and commitment to his profession, there could hardly have been a different outcome. Eldredge's conclusions and data would have been scrutinized closely, not only by the thesis examiners but, should he have tried to have had it published, as he was all but required to do, it would have been pored over by all the experts in the field. Trying to pass off a conclusion supporting the "received view" based on openly shared contrary data would have been the death of his career, not its salvation.
Johnson's preference at that point might have been for Eldredge and the rest of science to have thrown up their collective hands and declare all of life on Earth to be the inexplicable result of a mysterious (or not so mysterious) "designer", instead of seeking different answers within the broad theory. But for Johnson to use Eldredge's words in an attempt to cast aspersions on the motives of scientists is the height of cynicism, especially when the expressed objective of his book is to protect students who have a "strong Christian commitment" from the alleged "materialism" of science.
I do not think it amiss to suggest that, if Johnson truly wishes to encourage Christian commitment, he might better start where the Scriptures suggest: with personal example.
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J. Pieret
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We have done amazingly well in creating a cultural movement, but we must not exaggerate ID's successes on the scientific front.
- William A. Dembski -
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/feb04.html#run
