Most religious people believe in the soul, an ethereal locus of consciousness that separates from the body upon physical death and travels elsewhere to receive its reward. To people who hold this belief, it's a natural next step to guess that the soul or spirit could sometimes leave a person's body while they're still alive and travel to distant places on its own initiative. Such is the belief in out-of-body experiences, the subject of today's Popular Delusions post.

Belief in OBEs is probably as old as humanity. The Bible alludes to a man who was "caught up to the third heaven", "whether in the body... or whether out of the body, I cannot tell" (2 Corinthians 12:2-3), and the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah claims to describe that famous prophet caught up out of his body and taken to heaven to witness prefigurements of Christianity. However, OBEs today are mostly the province of New Age believers, who usually refer to them as "astral projection".

Although many purported OBEs involve voyages to dreamlike, conveniently unverifiable "spiritual realms" (where meetings with Jesus, guardian angels, and other religious figures are guaranteed crowd-pleasers), the existence of the phenomenon is an eminently testable claim. All that would be needed is for a person having an OBE to travel to some distant location, view it, and then give accurate details of their experience that could not have been obtained through normal sensory channels. Alas, all such attempts have come up short.

One of the most famous was the planetary voyage of the psychic Ingo Swann, who was enlisted by ESP researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff to take an astral voyage to Jupiter. As reported by Swann, Jupiter was an eerie and compellingly beautiful place, with a surface of shifting sand dunes, enormous mountain ranges, and lakes or oceans in which icebergs floated. These marvelous discoveries were only slightly tarnished by the fact that none of them turned out to be true; Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface. Not to be deterred, Swann later claimed that he must have accidentally overshot Jupiter and traveled into another solar system entirely, and was describing a different planet which he saw there.

Other tests of OBEs, though more modest, proved equally flawed. The best-known were carried out by Charles Tart, such as this one on a subject who claimed she had experiences in which she left her sleeping body and floated up to the ceiling or through the walls of the room. Tart claims that his subject correctly perceived a remote target consisting of a five-digit random number during an OBE, but his methodology was less than rigorous:

The sleep laboratory consisted of two rooms... A large window was between the rooms for viewing, but in this experiment it was covered with a Venetian blind in order that the subject's room could be reasonably dark for sleeping. An intercom system allowed hearing anything the subject said. I monitored the recording equipment throughout the night while the subject slept and kept notes of anything she said or did. Occasionally I dozed during the night, beside the equipment, so possible instances of sleep talking might have been missed.

...The subject slept on a comfortable bed just below the observation window.... Immediately above the observation window (about five and a half feet above the level of the subject's head) was a small shelf (about ten inches by five inches)... This five-digit random number constituted the parapsychological target for the evening. I then slipped it into an opaque folder, entered the subject's room, and slipped the piece of paper onto the shelf without at any time exposing it to the subject.

So, to review: the number the subject was supposed to be psychically viewing was on a shelf five feet above her head throughout the night. She was neither recorded nor observed; the window into her room was covered by a blind, and Tart, who was sitting in the next room, helpfully notes that he dozed off several times during the night. Readers are invited to imagine a non-supernatural means by which the result could have been achieved.

This sloppy methodology, subjective judging, and flat-out inaccuracy pervades parapsychological research in general and on OBEs specifically. It shouldn't be a surprise that all the most striking claims of people gaining true information through OBEs are completely anecdotal, even hearsay - as in the famous case of the woman named Maria who allegedly saw a tennis shoe on a window ledge outside the hospital where she was having one. We have only the word of one person, a social worker named Kimberly Clark Sharp, that this OBE happened at all or that the shoe was there as described. Anecdotal accounts like this are impossible to test or verify. And so far, no rigorous, well-designed experiment has proven that people can acquire information this way at rates significantly greater than chance, much less that they can use it to do something genuinely useful, such as sending or receiving messages.

As with many other popular delusions, belief in OBEs is probably sustained in part by natural psychological phenomena which true believers have misunderstood (such as the role of sleep paralysis in alien abduction and haunting claims). The truth is, many people do have out-of-body experiences - that is to say, they have the experience of being outside their body. But that is not the same thing as saying that something actually leaves the body. Instead, these experiences appear to be nothing more than elaborate hallucinations caused by the brain misfiring.

I wrote on Ebon Musings about the brain's superior parietal lobe, also called the "orientation association area". Among its other functions, this part of the brain orients a person in three-dimensional space and calculates how to move through the world. In deep meditative states and other circumstances, the superior parietal lobe ceases its activity, causing a person to feel as if the physical boundaries of their self have been dissolved - they can no longer tell where their body ends and the world begins. It's easy to see how such an event could be implicated in an OBE. Another brain area, the angular gyrus, is involved in OBEs more directly. In at least one experiment, when electrically stimulated, it repeatedly caused them to occur in the patient.

No matter how impressive they may feel, out-of-body experiences are just tricks of the brain, and do not contain any sensory information not accessible to a person through normal means. A well-designed, repeatable experiment could prove otherwise, but an endless string of unverifiable anecdotes does not.

Other posts in this series:

• Popular Delusions

Ernst Haeckel died a hundred and fifty almost a hundred years ago [fixed - thanks, Alex!], but the creationists won't let him rest in peace. In this section, Wells again exhumes these old bones and takes a few kicks at them, and imagines that by doing so he's brought the entire edifice of modern evolutionary biology crashing down.

If you're not familiar with Haeckel, here's a bit of background. Ernst Haeckel was a nineteenth-century biologist, one who lived at about the same time as Charles Darwin. He's best remembered for his dictum "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", meaning that a developing embryo retraces the evolutionary history of its ancestors - i.e., a human fetus first passes through a fish-like stage, then an amphibian-like stage, then a reptile-like stage, and so on. Haeckel is also infamous for defending this claim by using his own drawings of developing embryos, which turned out to be faked to exaggerate the stages he claimed were there.

What makes this more than a hundred-year-old cautionary tale is that creationists claim that Haeckel's drawings are still presented in textbooks as evidence for evolution. Here's how Wells puts it:

"They're still being used, even in upper-division textbooks on evolutionary biology. In fact, I analyzed and graded ten recent textbooks on how accurately they dealt with this topic. I had to give eight of them an F. Two others did only slightly better; I gave them a D." [p.48]

Strobel chimes in, declaring that he too remembers being taught about these drawings as evidence for evolution, and that "anger was brewing inside of me" [p.48] as he realized that he had been duped.

I'll give Strobel the benefit of the doubt and assume he's confabulating memories. Wells, however, I don't intend to treat so charitably: again, he is lying, making statements which he must know are false. P.Z. Myers quotes one of the books which Wells disparages by claiming that it is "resurrecting Haeckel", Campbell's Biology:

The theory of recapitulation is an overstatement. Although vertebrates share many features of embryonic development, it is not as though a mammal first goes through a 'fish stage', then an 'amphibian stage', and so on. Ontogeny can provide clues to phylogeny, but it is important to remember that all stages of development may become modified over the course of evolution.

Myers also cites a post listing a large number of other college textbooks that point out the problems with Haeckel's hypothesis. Out of 15 books reviewed, only one presents recapitulation uncritically - and that one is from 1937!

All of Wells' indignation is a smokescreen, intended to cover up an uncomfortable point: namely, vertebrate embryos do pass through a stage, called the phylotypic stage or the pharyngula, in which they all look very similar. Haeckel's biogenetic law was a hypothesis intended to explain that observation. By criticizing one particular faulty hypothesis, Wells hopes to cast doubt on the observation itself.

Wells repeatedly attacks textbooks for making claims such as "the early embryos of most vertebrates closely resemble one another" [p.50], implying that this is an endorsement of Haeckel. In fact, this is a completely true statement, referring to the phylotypic stage. These patterns of embryological development are real, and they do not disappear just because one particular explanation of their origin is falsified.

To take the measure of Wells' mendacity, realize that when he gives "grades" to textbooks, he lowers the grade if the book contains actual photos of embryos. He considers this a "misleading" tactic when it comes to making the case for evolution. Why, we wouldn't want to show people what embryos actually look like, do we? It might give them the wrong idea!

This fact explains Wells' great annoyance over the term "gill slits", a lay term for branchial arches, which are a structure common to embryos at the phylotypic stage. Wells insists, despite the name, that these are not gills [p.51]. This is true, but unfortunately for him, he then goes on to undermine his own argument:

"In humans, the ridges become one thing; in fish, they become gills." [p.51]

It's correct to say that human embryos do not have gills. (That would be Haeckel's biogenetic law.) But the more important point is one that Wells, unintentionally I'm sure, has illustrated: vertebrate embryos pass through a stage where they are very similar, and the same structures that exist in the embryonic forms of many species develop into completely different adaptations in the adult forms of those species. This is a phenomenon that evolution provides a good explanation for. How, or whether, ID can explain it is a question never raised in this book.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 3

Jonathan Wells' second "icon" is Darwin's tree of life, which he says is a "dismal failure" [p.43] as an illustration of the fossil record.

With a lead-in like that, you'd expect a typical creationist jeremiad against transitional fossils. In fact, that's not what we get. The focus of Wells' complaint is about the Cambrian explosion, 550 million years ago. No transitional series more recent is treated here: not the origin of tetrapods, not the therapsids which illustrate the evolution of reptiles into mammals, not the beautiful and compelling whale transitional series, and certainly not the emergence of the human species. Wells never even mentions these compelling, and indisputably relevant, examples of evolutionary transition preserved in the fossil record. Instead, the source of his ire dates all the way back to the origins of modern phyla:

"Darwin knew the fossil record failed to support his tree. He acknowledged that major groups of animals - he calls them divisions, now they're called phyla - appear suddenly in the fossil record. That's not what his theory predicts." [p.43]

This is a lie. For the record, Darwin was well aware of the imperfection of the fossil record, and devoted an entire chapter of his book to explaining why we should not expect to see clear transitions preserved. If anything, he was too pessimistic, and our paleontological surveys have surpassed his expectations.

"Then at the beginning of the Cambrian - boom! - all of a sudden, we see representatives of the arthropods, modern representatives of which are insects, crabs, and the like; echinoderms, which include modern starfish and sea urchins; chordates, which include modern vertebrates; and so forth. Mammals came later, but the chordates - the major group to which they belong - were right there at the beginning of the Cambrian.
    This is absolutely contrary to Darwin's Tree of Life. These animals, which are so fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden..." [p.44]

Wells' argument is that the various phyla are so different in their body plans, they could not possibly have all diverged from a common ancestor in such a brief period of time. The best answer to this is a clever analogy originally proposed by Richard Dawkins to clear up just this sort of confusion:

Suppose you have a great oak tree with huge limbs at the base and smaller and smaller branches toward the outer layers where finally there are just lots and lots of little twigs. Obviously the little tiny twigs appeared most recently. The larger boughs appeared a long time ago and when they did appear, they were little twigs. What would you think if a gardener said, "Isn't it funny that no major boughs have appeared on this tree in recent years, only small twigs?"

Strobel and Wells would like their readers to believe that the various phyla were already radically different from each other at the time of the Cambrian explosion. This is not the case.

The phyla are like the twigs on Dawkins' tree. Originally, far back in the Cambrian, they were very similar to each other. But over great spans of geological time, they have diverged farther and farther, and what were originally slight differences became accentuated by evolution to fit the varying lifestyles to which they adapted. Today, the living representatives of these groups have major differences from each other, and looking all the way back, we can see how those differences developed from what were originally slight distinctions. In that sense, it's fair to say that the "fundamental body plans" first appeared in the Cambrian. But that's not the same thing as saying that the earliest members of these groups were radically different when they lived side by side.

When Wells speaks of "major groups", he subtly misleads the reader. Based on his examples, a lay reader might erroneously conclude that starfish, crabs, reptiles, insects, and the like all just suddenly appeared during the Cambrian. In fact, as already stated, most species of the Cambrian explosion were relatively similar, and none of them looked much at all like the modern groups that are thought to have descended from them. Here are several Cambrian animals that Wells claims represent "major groups" that are "fundamentally different in their body plans". Can you tell which one is the ancestor of what modern group?

(All images from the Smithsonian's Burgess Shale Fossil Specimens page.)

If you've given up, the first of these animals is called Aysheaia, and is thought to be an ancestor of the velvet worms (phylum Onychophora), segmented worm-like animals with rows of clawed feet. The second is Canadia, believed to be an ancestor of annelids (phylum Annelida), whose modern representatives include earthworms and leeches. And the last is Pikaia, believed, with some dissenters, to be an ancestor of the phylum Chordata - us. All modern animals with dorsal nerve cords - fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals - all of them were represented in the Cambrian by this tiny, one-inch-long free-swimming creature.

These supposedly vast phylum-level differences, in the beginning, were trifling things. It's only time and evolution that have turned these small twigs into great branches spreading far and wide.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 3

Having established Jonathan Wells' bona fides, let's get down to business. The first of his "icons" is the Miller-Urey experiment, a landmark study proving that the chemical building blocks of life could emerge relatively easily under conditions similar to those of the early Earth.

This is not, strictly speaking, an "icon of evolution" at all. Miller-Urey was an experiment about abiogenesis, the question of how life first arose from nonliving precursors. This is an entirely separate question from evolution, which is concerned only with how life adapted and diversified once it existed. The lines of evidence for each of those theories are parallel, but distinct. If an Intelligent Designer had zapped the first cell into existence in a puff of smoke, evolution could have taken over normally from there; and even if Miller-Urey was found to be false, misleading, or irrelevant, that would not in the least affect the abundant evidence cited by scientists in support of evolution.

Still, we press on. The Miller-Urey experiment is a famous result in which a chamber filled with methane and ammonia - called "reducing" compounds because they tend to take electrons from other molecules, giving themselves a more negative electric charge - produces large quantities of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, when exposed to an electric current. Through Strobel, Wells claims that this experiment was unrealistic:

"Well, nobody knows for sure what the early atmosphere was like, but the consensus is that the atmosphere was not at all like the one Miller used... The atmosphere probably consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor" [p.37].

In fact, the consensus among geologists is that the early atmosphere was not as strongly reducing as in the Miller-Urey experiment, but even weakly reducing atmospheres still produce significant quantities of amino acids. In addition, Wells completely neglects an obvious alternative: the origin of life may not have been in the open air at all. There were other sources of reducing compounds on the early Earth, most notably hydrothermal vents - the "black smokers" of the ocean bottom - and some researchers believe that life did indeed begin there.

Wells also omits another important point, which is that we have direct evidence that amino acid synthesis was occurring at the right time. Amino acids have been found in comets and meteorites, which contain pristine material dating back to the origin of the solar system; they have also been found in interstellar molecular clouds. This is more than just indirect evidence that amino acid synthesis was going on in the early solar system: it's possible that a comet or meteorite impact actually delivered the amino acids to Earth that became involved in the first life.

Wells goes on to assert that, even if the Miller-Urey experiment was a success, we'd be left with the problem of what happened next:

"You would have to get the right number of the right kinds of amino acids to link up to create a protein molecule - and that would still be a long way from a living cell. Then you'd need dozens of protein molecules, again in the right sequence, to create a living cell. The odds against this are astonishing" [p.39].

Again, Wells obfuscates the point at issue via his constant references to a "living cell". Cells as they exist today are enormously complex and unlikely to form from any simple chemical process, but cells today have had billions of years of evolution to increase in complexity. The first living thing would have been nothing at all like a modern cell, but merely a molecule (or a series of molecules - called a hypercycle) with the ability to make copies of itself. Such a creature would have been far, far simpler than the complex and specialized cells that exist in living things today.

Strobel does raise this obvious objection, but Wells brushes it aside, insisting that the odds of abiogenetic assembly of even a simple self-replicator are "simply insurmountable" [p.39]. Obviously, Wells has no knowledge of the total catalogue of self-replicating molecules or all the pathways by which each one of them can form. His argument here is pure assertion, unbacked by any conceivable evidence.

Of course, the origin of life is by no means a solved problem. There are still many important unanswered questions, and even if we found a plausible route from simple organic molecules to true self-replicators, we would probably never be able to prove that it was the route by which life came into existence. But Strobel and Wells are not merely sounding this note of caution; they are counseling surrender. They assert that they personally can't see any way to solve these problems, so we should give up and declare it a miracle.

"And if you try to invoke another explanation - for instance, intelligent design - then the evolutionists claim you're not a scientist." [p.41]

Let me be generous for a moment to Lee Strobel and Jonathan Wells: intelligent design is not, in principle, an unscientific hypothesis. The idea that life was created by an intelligent agent is an idea that could theoretically be put to the test; after all, we routinely consider the possibility of intelligent agents in other fields of science, such as forensics. (Was the death a result of natural causes, or was it artificial?) The problem lies with ID advocates, who refuse to do the work!

Testing any sort of hypothesis about an intelligent origin for life would require speculating about the nature, motivations, and capabilities of the designer, speculations which we can then use to make predictions about what life created by such a designer would look like. Then we would go out and test those predictions against the real world to see if they hold up. A hypothesis which was used in this way, to derive and then confirm some startling piece of knowledge about how life works, would be a revolutionary scientific advance that would win its discoverer tremendous honors.

But Wells and the other ID advocates have no interest in doing any sort of work like this. They don't do research, they don't make predictions, they don't write papers, they don't discover new things. Instead, they sit on the sidelines and complain about how scientists are being unfair by not accepting their beliefs uncritically. If they are not accepted as scientists, they have only themselves to blame.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

My recent post on Project Steve brought several comments arguing that it's pointless to take a survey of scientists, like this one from Freidenker:

Frankly, I have no idea whatsoever how many scientists accept or reject evolution, and furthermore - it doesn't matter: even if all scientists all over the world rejected evolution, the evidence for evolution is still there.

...to really survey the scientific community for evolution support is truly a stupid thing to do: popularity has no bearing on scientific validity.

Reasonable as this sounds, I believe it's misguided, and in this post I'll try to explain why.

If we were waging a debate in the peer-reviewed literature, trying to convince other scientists to accept evolution, then citing the evidence would be the thing to do. But this isn't a scientific debate; as we should all well know, creationists are not scientists, and have no interest in evidence. They're advancing a religious belief which they hold regardless of what the facts say. Moreover, their objective is not to freely convince scientists, but to bypass the process of peer review altogether, and to directly force their beliefs to be taught in schools by lobbying school boards and legislatures.

In short, creationism is not a scientific movement, but a public-relations movement. Their goal is not to change scientists' minds - for how could they possibly convince the experts? - but to influence the public's perception. And to be victorious, we have to fight them on the same ground.

If we try to make the case for evolution solely by citing the evidence, we're playing into the creationists' hands. They can easily respond by saying, "That's very interesting, but we have lots of evidence of our own. The [cell/bacterial flagella/bombardier beetle/blood clotting cascade/take your pick] is so complex it couldn't possibly have evolved on its own! There must have been a Designer. Teach the controversy!"

Against laypeople and the uninformed - and, unfortunately, school boards and legislatures include generous quantities of each - this is an effective line of attack. A person who lacks the expertise to evaluate the scientific evidence, and to see that the creationist case is hogwash, will come away with nothing but the impression that both sides have good evidence of their own, so why not be fair and teach them both? It's this superficial sense of fairness that the creationists count on.

To defeat this tactic, it's not enough to cite evidence that the creationists can counter with "evidence" of their own. What we need is to go further and show that there is no genuine controversy, that real, practicing scientists are all but unanimous in their support of evolution, and more, that creationists have avoided laying their case before the people best qualified to evaluate it.

That's why efforts like Project Steve, lighthearted as they are, make an important point. Ordinary people may not know much about the scientific method, but they respect the authority of scientists. Laypeople may be ill-prepared to decide the merits of dueling arguments, but when they see that all the scientists line up on one side, that is something they can understand. This is why creationists fight so hard to give the impression that plenty of real scientists support creationism - and we must not concede that point to them! It's vital to show that their list of "scientists who doubt Darwinism" is, in reality, just a minuscule and carefully cultivated minority of dissenters, one that's swamped by the overwhelming tide of working scientists who not only accept evolution but rely on it in their work every day.

Yes, we should present the evidence for evolution - strongly and comprehensively. We should always be ready to show the public the many wonderful transitional fossils we've found. We should always be ready with evidence of new mutations that increase genetic information, new and incipient species in the process of formation, and maps of gene trees that illustrate the nested hierarchy of descent. But to supplement all this evidence, we must also be prepared to prove that these arguments actually have convinced scientists, and that the creationists' arguments have not. Only this two-pronged strategy can effectively undermine the creationist case and win acceptance of evolution in the eyes of the public.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 3

Strobel's first interviewee is Jonathan Wells, author of the polemic Icons of Evolution. Icons attacks evolutionary theory by seeking to discredit what are, allegedly, its best-known supporting lines of evidence - its "icons" - such as the Miller-Urey experiment, Archaeopteryx, and the Cambrian Explosion.

We'll get to that soon, but first I have to address what, to Strobel, must have been a bit of awkwardness. Virtually unique among modern advocates of ID, Wells isn't a Christian of Strobel's preferred evangelical brand, but a Moonie - a member of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. That would be the same Rev. Moon who's notorious for performing mass weddings (with husbands and wives chosen for each other by Moon), who's spent time in prison for tax fraud, who claims to be the Messiah and the second coming of Jesus Christ, and who held a bizarre coronation ceremony for himself in a federal office building in the presence of lawmakers.

Strobel seems to find this rather embarrassing and does his best to slide past it, as you can see:

Science classes weren't heavily steeped in Darwinism when Jonathan Wells was a high school student in the late 1950s, but when he began studying geology at Princeton University, he found that everything was viewed through evolutionary lenses. Though he had grown up in the Presbyterian church, by the time Wells was halfway through college he considered himself to be an atheist. [p.33]

...While later living a Thoreau-like existence in a remote California cabin, he became enthralled by the grandeur of creation and gained new confidence that God was behind it. His spiritual interest rejuvenated, Wells explored numerous religious alternatives, visiting gurus, preachers, and swamis. [p.34]

This passage does not go into any further detail about Wells' current beliefs, but it has a footnote at the back of the book which says this:

What Wells called his "faith journey" even brought him to the Unification Church, partly because he shared its strong anticommunist stance. For critiques of this group, whose theology I thoroughly disagree with, see... [p.309]

If you didn't know, you might get the impression from this footnote that Wells was a Moonie at one time, but no longer. In fact, he still is one. Strobel is clearly uncomfortable with this, dismissing the topic with a curt "I hadn't come... to seek spiritual wisdom from Wells" [p.34] and then moving on. But in later chapters, as we'll see, he interviews other ID advocates who are Christians like him - and he seems quite comfortable seeking "spiritual wisdom" from those people, as he questions them extensively about their Christian beliefs and gives them ample opportunity to explain why they feel their faith is supported by the evidence.

But surely, all this aside, Wells' religious beliefs have no bearing on his science. It would just be poisoning the well to try to discredit his arguments based on his personal faith, right?

Well, yes, and then again no. Wells' religious beliefs are relevant to his scientific arguments in one important way, as he himself admits:

At the end of the Washington Monument rally in September, 1976, I was admitted to the second entering class at Unification Theological Seminary. During the next two years, I took a long prayer walk every evening. I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life, and the answer came not only through my prayers, but also through Father's many talks to us, and through my studies. Father encouraged us to set our sights high and accomplish great things.

...Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.

The cultish title of "Father" is shorthand for Rev. Moon, if you hadn't already guessed. But more importantly, note the sequence of events: First Wells decided to "devote my life to destroying Darwinism", then he decided (or rather, was chosen by Moon) to get a Ph.D. in biology to assist him in that goal. His attendance at a graduate program was not to survey the evidence for and against evolution so he could make up his mind about it. Instead, he viewed it as a "battle" in which his role was to resist at all costs the evidence presented to him, but to learn it well enough so that he could get a degree in it and thereby seem more credible in his apologetic role.

Like many prominent creationists, Wells' life story is religion first, creationism second. He decided for religious reasons that evolution couldn't possibly be true, then set out to find validation of that preconceived belief. Small surprise that he found exactly what he expected to find.

This doesn't necessarily invalidate what Wells has to say. But it does mean that, in arguing against evolution, he has a strong and ever-present conflict of interest. We should therefore treat his arguments with a greater measure of skepticism and critical scrutiny, just as a juror in a trial would be justified in being more skeptical of a witness who stood to benefit financially from the victory of the side he's testifying for.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of Case, which interviews the creationist Jonathan Wells, haphazardly mixes together claims from many different scientific disciplines and will probably take the most installments of any chapter to fully refute. But we'll begin with a simpler claim. As I mentioned previously, Strobel seeks to create the appearance of a scientific controversy raging over evolution. His primary piece of evidence is the Discovery Institute's infamous petition, "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism":

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.

The DI has found several hundred scientists and other professionals to sign this statement. But although Strobel highly touts the few luminaries on the list - and I'm not denying their existence - what he doesn't mention is that a significant number of signatories have no relevant scientific credentials at all. Many of them have degrees only in mathematics, engineering, physics or computer science, and while they may be expert in their own fields, those qualifications have little or nothing to do with evolutionary theory. Would we credit the opinions of biologists who signed a statement proclaiming themselves skeptical of the inflationary theory of cosmology, or chemists who doubted the Turing-completeness models of computer science?

But rather than leave it at that, let's crunch some numbers. I downloaded the DI's petition in PDF form, converted it to text, and then wrote a Perl script which scans the list and counts the signatories by affiliation. The categories I used were as follows: biology (a large category including everything from genetics to paleontology to embryology), chemistry, geology (including hydrology), medicine (all forms of medical specialties, including veterinary medicine), health and nutrition, agronomy/agriculture (including crop and soil science, forestry, and degrees related to farming and fisheries), physics and astronomy, mathematics, and engineering. These categories sufficed to classify the vast majority of signatories to the DI's list. Since the biology-related degrees are most directly relevant to evaluating the truth of evolution, my script was written to give that match top priority, and to choose a less directly related field only if necessary.

This work produced the following summary (you can also download the raw text of the petition and my Perl script):

Although there are some biologists on the DI's list, they're not a majority or even a plurality. In fact, the largest single category is chemists - a field whose bearing on evolution is tangential at best. Medical doctors, physicists, mathematicians and engineers make up much of the rest of the list.

Still, the DI petition does have some real biologists. The question is, what percentage of the world's scientists does this group represent? After all, if there were only a thousand biologists worldwide, 146 dissenters would be a sizable faction. If there were a million, 146 dissenters would be an insignificantly tiny minority.

To gauge the answer to this question, we can turn to a very useful data source. In order to demonstrate the true depth of scientific support for evolution, the National Center for Science Education put together an amusing counterpetition, dubbed Project Steve. They wrote up a strong, unequivocal statement supporting evolution and expressing opposition to intelligent design. Then they circulated it in the scientific community, with one catch: they would only accept signatures from scientists named Steve (or Stephen, or Stephanie, or some other variant of that name). How many Steves did the NCSE find?

The answer, as of this writing, is over one thousand. Using the same script as I used on the DI petition, here's the raw text and the breakdown of the Steves by specialty:

You can see for yourself that, unlike the DI's list, practicing scientists with degrees in biology make up nearly half of Project Steve. They form by far the largest single bloc and vastly outnumber the signatories from other fields.

To meaningfully compare the two lists and the sizes of the communities they represent, one final question presents itself: How many Steves are on the DI's list? To answer that, I wrote another script to scan for DI Steves, and here are the results:

Stephen J. Cheesman, Ph.D. Geophysics, University of Toronto
Stephen Crouse, Professor of Kinesiology, Texas A&M University
Stephen C. Knowles, Ph.D. Marine Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Steven Gollmer, Ph.D. Atmospheric Science, Purdue University
Stephan J. G. Gift, Professor of Electrical Engineering, The University of the West Indies
Stephen Meyer, Ph.D. Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University
Steve Maxwell, Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Medicine, Texas A&M University, H.S.C.
Stephen Sewell, Assistant Professor of Family Medicine, Texas A&M University
Stephen Lloyd, Ph.D. Materials Science, University of Cambridge (UK)
C. Steven Murphree, Professor of Biology, Belmont University

The numbers speak for themselves: the DI has only ten total Steves, as compared to 1083 for the NCSE, and only one in biology, as compared to the 523 NCSE Steves. From this evidence, one can easily extrapolate to the total number of scientists who stand squarely behind evolution as the best and the only scientific explanation for the diversity of life. The ratio of evolutionary scientists to creationists appears to be in the neighborhood of 500 to 1.

Are there some scientists who deny evolution? I don't doubt it. In a field as large and diverse as evolutionary biology, you'll always find a few naysayers willing to challenge the consensus view. And you'll always find scientists, even renowned ones, who are known for their quirks, eccentricities, and fringe views. (The late John Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist who believed in alien abduction, is a case in point.) Having a Ph.D is no guarantee of always being rational. But the lesson of Project Steve is that a tiny, carefully cultivated minority of dissenters in no way matches the overwhelming tide of real, practicing scientists who use evolution in their lab and field work every day. This conclusion holds all the more when those dissenters openly admit they were motivated by their religious beliefs to attack evolution before they ever learned about the evidence. Such is Wells' first interviewee, whom we'll meet next.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

In 2005, the constitutionality of teaching "intelligent design" was tested in court in the landmark case Kitzmiller v. Dover. The lawsuit was triggered by the school board in rural Dover, Pennsylvania, voting to require a statement to be read in science classes which said, in part:

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

The ensuing trial centered around the question of whether intelligent design was an inherently religious idea, and thus barred by the First Amendment from being promoted by public schools. For advocates of ID, as well as defenders of evolution, this was a crucial battle.

A ruling that ID was religion, although it would only be binding law in that region of Pennsylvania, would set a precedent that could influence courts across the U.S. and deal a fatal blow to the nascent intelligent-design movement. Conversely, a ruling that ID passed constitutional muster would almost certainly lead to a rash of copycat actions by school boards in conservative and rural districts throughout the country, greatly weakening the teaching of evolution.

One of the key issues at trial focused on whether intelligent design was just another form of creationism. The Supreme Court ruled in 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, that teaching creationism in public schools was unconstitutional because it represented an establishment of religion. Naturally, the Dover school board and their legal representation, the Thomas More Law Center, argued strenuously that ID was a brand-new and genuinely scientific movement that had nothing to do with creationism. As defense lawyer Patrick Gillen said in his opening statement:

The board believed that intelligent design was not creationism. They knew what that was, the Book of Genesis. They concluded that intelligent design was science. They looked at the text of Pandas and People. That's not the Book of Genesis.

...The evidence will show that Dr. Behe takes these positions and posits his thesis of irreducible complexity pointing to design not because evolutionary theory is inconsistent with his religious beliefs. It's not. Not because he believes in creationism. He doesn't. And as he'll explain, creationism and intelligent design are two very different things.

...Dr. Fuller will explain that intelligent design theory is not creationism. It is not inherently religious.

...Taken together, this expert testimony will confirm the defendants' judgment by showing that intelligent design theory is not creationism. Indeed, it does not even require the action of a supernatural creator, that intelligent design is not religion or inherently religious, that intelligent design theory is science.

The accuracy of this statement would be put to the test in one of the trial's decisive issues, which concerned Of Pandas and People, the pro-ID textbook mentioned in the board's statement. Pandas, it turns out, went through several editions: in its first (1983) edition, it was titled Creation Biology, then renamed in 1986 to Biology and Creation, then renamed again in 1987 to Biology and Origins, finally becoming Of Pandas and People. The plaintiffs subpoenaed the book's publisher, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, to obtain these prior drafts, and found something amazing.

The earlier drafts, as you might expect from the titles, made repeated references to creationism. But in the wake of the Edwards decision, the book underwent a revision: the term "creationism" was replaced - literally replaced, as in the find-and-replace function of a word processor - with the term "intelligent design". And in one draft, a transitional fossil was preserved:

Image credit, NCSE.

Clearly, intelligent design is just a retitled form of creationism. What more compelling evidence of this fact could you ask for than the term "cdesign proponentsists"?

The evidence of ID's creationist antecedents was cited in the strong ruling by U.S. district judge John E. Jones, which struck down the Dover board's policy as unconstitutional and lambasted them for deceptive practices in trying to disguise their religious beliefs as science. To this day, the ID movement has never responded to this devastating evidence - although they're hard at work on a new edition of Pandas, now retitled (again) to The Design of Life. How many times will they try this strategy before they learn that you can't get around the Constitution just by rebranding yourself?

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 2

Before embarking on his interviews, Strobel makes a statement about his investigative strategy:

In selecting these experts, I sought doctorate-level professors who have unquestioned expertise, are able to communicate in accessible language, and refuse to limit themselves only to the politically correct world of naturalism or materialism. After all, it wouldn't make sense to rule out any hypothesis at the outset. I wanted the freedom to pursue all possibilities. [p.28]

This is a favorite complaint of creationists, that scientists' insistence on natural hypotheses unfairly excludes whole classes of legitimate explanations. But in reality, the strict reliance on naturalism is not an arbitrary choice, but a necessary prerequisite for doing science.

At its most fundamental, science is a way of knowing, one that involves formulating testable hypotheses about the world and then checking to see if the evidence supports or disproves them. This is an incredibly productive strategy of undoubted power, one that in just a few hundred years has assembled a remarkably comprehensive picture of the world we live in and has given us tremendous power to shape that world in accordance with our desires.

The key to science is testability, or alternatively, falsifiability. We need to formulate our hypotheses so that they can be definitively put to the test. That way, we can winnow true ideas from false ones and gradually close in on the way reality truly works. If we had no way to do this, we would be stuck with an endless horde of competing ideas and no way to choose between them, and scientific progress would be impossible. (Readers will note that this is also a good description of the situation that does in fact exist among the world's religions.)

But what Strobel and his crew advocate is the inclusion of supernaturalism in science, in the form of an all-powerful creator whose motivations are unknowable and who can violate natural laws at arbitrary times and places to achieve his purposes. Clearly, this hypothesis is not one that can be tested in any meaningful way. In fact, it would foreclose scientific progress altogether by forcing us to always consider that the results of any test might be due to supernatural intervention.

Those who advocate a non-natural science never explain to the rest of us what that would look like. In fact, they don't seem to have any clear idea of it themselves. When the Templeton Foundation, which promotes conciliation between religion and science, offered funding to the advocates of intelligent design to test their ideas, they received no research proposals - a clear measure of the creationists' true devotion to scientific inquiry.

This is not to say that science conclusively disproves the supernatural. In principle, science can never totally rule out a supernatural explanation, precisely because they are not testable. But for the same reason, science cannot provide evidence for such explanations - unless they're formulated so that they can be either proved or disproved. For obvious reasons, creationists are mightily reluctant to offer hypotheses that can be put to the test.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 2

In the second chapter, Strobel spends some time telling us how he only became an atheist because he was thereby freed from "having to abide by those pesky rules of ethics and morality" [p.25]. I've already addressed this point, but I'll add that this claim casts further doubt on Strobel's claim to have once been an atheist. The reasoning he attributes to his past self lines up perfectly with Christian apologetic stereotypes, but is entirely dissonant with every atheist's deconversion story that I've ever read or heard of.

No person I've ever known has become an atheist just because they wanted to live a life of hedonism and debauchery. What would be the point? If you're determined to sin, you can do it perfectly well from within the church, as we have countless examples to demonstrate. None of these renowned hypocrites ever claimed to be atheists either during or after their misdeeds. In fact, you'd arguably be better off staying a Christian, since that faith promises forgiveness to those who repent their transgressions.

The imputation of deliberately insincere, bad-faith motives to atheists is a common theme in "ex-atheist" Christian apologists. I strongly suspect that at least some of these stories are fabricated in retrospect for the benefit of their believing audience - "I became an atheist because I wanted to rebel against God!" is a suitably shocking and lurid claim likely to conform to readers' preconceptions and sell books. On the other hand, it's also possible that it's only that subset of atheists, who deconvert for bad or irrational reasons, who are more likely to convert back to Christianity.

But there's a different assertion in this section that also merits skepticism:

My approach would be to cross-examine authorities in various scientific disciplines about the most current findings in their fields. [p.28]

Note: authorities. Not just qualified, practicing scientists whose professional interest is the topic in question (although several of Strobel's interviewees don't even meet that bar, as we'll see), but authorities - a term which implies a preeminent degree of achievement and expertise recognized as such by other workers in that field.

In earlier books like The Case for Christ, where the topic is early Christian history and theology, Strobel could legitimately claim to be interviewing authorities. After all, most of the people interested in that topic are Christian believers themselves, which is undoubtedly why they chose to pursue that line of work. But in this book, it is most emphatically not the case.

What Strobel tries hard to cover up is that the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists working in these fields - genetics, paleontology, developmental biology, taxonomy, and so on - firmly support the theory of evolution, and soundly reject the creationist alternative that he pushes in this book. To get around this problem, Strobel engages in a highly selective form of cherry-picking, interviewing some of the very few scientists who have given their support to creationism. (In fact, as we'll see, there are so few that he interviews one of them twice.) Like pseudoscientists of all kinds, he engages in this tactic to create the impression of a raging scientific controversy, when in fact, the scientific community and the published literature are all but unanimous in support of the mainstream consensus, and most of the dissenters are motivated by clearly discernible ideological reasons. I'll note some examples as we go along.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator