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I’ve been steadily critiquing the major new atheists for a few months now, and today I’m wrapping things up. I might do something on Ricky Gervais and Ian McEwan at some point, but that will examine new atheism in the arts. Presently, I am focused on those who represent themselves as men of science. . . those who, like Fauci, pretend to represent TheScience™. The roster includes Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the ultra-orthodox, new atheist website, TalkOrigins Archive.
In the following case study, I’ll be looking at Dawkins (who I’ve talked about before) and new atheist luminary Daniel Dennett, who wears Darwin’s beard and self-describes as one of the Brights—a romantic appellation he bestows equally upon Dawkins, his brother in arms, and all those who eschew “ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny — or God.”1 This status, as you will see, apparently absolves the Brights of the need to engage in scientific debate, and apparently confers upon them the right to engage in mudslinging.
Under consideration today are their 1996 reactions to challenges to Darwinism proposed by mathematician and molecular biologist David Berlinski. In this instance, Berlinski published a paper entitled “The Deniable Darwin” in the June 1996 issue of Commentary magazine. The responses to Berlinski’s critique are collected in a monograph bearing the same title and published in 2009. Among them we find Dawkins handspringing into the ad hominem with knee-highs and pom-poms:
David Berlinski’s article reminds me of the tactics employed by a certain creationist with whom I once shared a platform in Oxford. The great evolutionist John Maynard Smith was also on the bill, and he spoke after this creationist. Maynard Smith was, of course, easily able to destroy the creationist’s case, and in his good-natured way he soon had the audience roaring with appreciative laughter at its expense. The creationist had his own peculiar way of dealing with this. He sprang to his feet, palms facing the audience in a gesture of magnanimous reproof. “No, no!” he cried reproachfully, “Don’t laugh. Let Maynard Smith have his say. It’s only fair!” This desperate pretense that the audience was laughing at Maynard Smith, when in fact it was laughing with Maynard Smith at the creationist himself, reminds me of Mr. Berlinski’s pretending to misunderstand Jacques Monod and me to the extent that we disagree with each other over the issue of chance.
As for the identity of the creationist who tried to pull this little stunt on Maynard Smith, it was none other than David Berlinski. The audience, by the way, saw through his tactic instantly and treated it with hoots of derision.2
Difficult to find the science here, only the usual new atheist appeals to the ad hominem and intimidation by peer pressure, in this case, the audience. Now that we know new atheists have no trouble lying and phantasizing, one would be right to maintain the utmost scepticism when it comes to the veracity of the tale told out of school. I will get to Berlinski’s response in a moment. First I’d like to get Dennett’s response down, so we can wrap these up together:
I love it: another hilarious demonstration that you can publish bull—t at will—just so long as you say what an editorial board wants to hear in a style it favors. First there was Alan Sokal’s delicious unmasking of the editors of Social Text, who fell for the his fashionably anti-scientific “proof” that according to quantum physics, the world is a social construction. Now David Berlinski has done the same to the editors of Commentary, who fell just as hard for his parody of “scientific” creationism. They must really be oppressed by evolutionary theory to publish such inspired silliness without running it by a biologist or two for soundness. Two such similar pranks in a single month make one wonder if this is just the tip of the Zeitgeist. What next? A hoax extolling the educational virtues of machine guns for tots in the American Rifleman?
I love the rich comic patina of smug miseducation Mr. Berlinski exudes: Latin names for species mixed with elementary falsehoods in about equal measure, the subtle misuse of “Doppleganger,” the “unwitting” creation of a new term, “combinatorial inflation,” and the deft touch of “betraying” his cluelessness by referring to Kim Sterelny as “she.”
The hints are subtle but conclusive. No serious opponent of evolutionary theory would trot out the ill-considered remarks of the mathematician M. P. Schutzenberger—a line of discredited criticism quietly abandoned by others years ago—without so much as a hint about their standing. How could the heroic misunderstanding of Jacques Monod that enables our author to pit Monod against Richard Dawkins be anything but disingenuous? Could any actual professor of mathematics and philosophy “in American and French universities” misrepresent the import of the second law of thermodynamics with such poetic fervor, such blithe overconfidence?
Whoever this David Berlinski is, he is clever enough to fool Commentary, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if some evolutionists take him seriously enough to rebut him in detail. Even better, some earnest creationists may clasp him to their bosom. That is, one presumes, his larger joke. The only reason I am exposing it now (killjoy that I am) is to make it clear that so far as I know, we evolutionists did not put him up to it. We feel no need to burden our critics with such agents provocateurs, but they are welcome to him if they want him.3
If you look at the Tool Kit pictured above, you’ll note how Ad Hominem Nos. 1 and 2 are the most obvious here. No. 1 is handled with so little subtlety, it may be regarded as plain invective. The proud ignorance characteristic of Rhetorical Tool No. 2 is not overt, but holds insofar as both Dawkins and Dennett refuse to consider Berlinski’s argument on its own terms and merits: it’s all “bull—t” mixed in with gussied-up language (“smug miseducation”) all thrown together to smuggle in Jesus. Hence, they accuse him of being a creationist. Case closed. Except Berlinski is by no means a creationist, and he’s not remotely religious. As usual an irrational paranoia lurks behind new atheist behaviours.
Let’s see how Berlinski responded to these reverend doctors of TheScience™. We’ll start with his reply to Dennett:
Daniel C. Dennett is under the curious impression that the best rejoinder to criticism is a robust display of personal vulgarity. Nothing in his letter merits a response.
Still one general point deserves attention. Both Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins have fashioned their reputations as defenders of a Darwinian orthodoxy. Their letters convey the impression of men who expect never to encounter criticism and are unprepared to deal with it. This strikes me as a deeply unhealthy state of affairs. Ordinary men and women are suspicious of Darwin’s theory; Dennett and Dawkins hardly go far in persuading them that their intellectual anxieties are in any way misplaced.4
Berlinski’s reply to Dawkins is more detailed and there’s no need for a full transcription of it. Suffice it to point out that Berlinski disputes Dawkins’s tale out of school as follows: “The intellectual drubbing that Mr. Dawkins imagines I received, I recall in distinctly different terms. But why argue over the past? I have a videotape of our encounter, which I’d be happy to make publicly available.”5 He further makes an effort to re-explain his proposition about Monod; and Berlinski ends his reply by restating that he is not, nor ever was a creationist, and that in fact this issue was dealt with explicitly at the Oxford platform in question with Dawkins.
Berlinski ends his reply by restating that he is not, nor ever was a creationist
Engaging with another interlocutor in Commentary, Berlinski does address Dennett’s issue with his inclusion of M. P. Schutzenberger, stating, “Evolutionary biologists have a habit of ignoring the most pertinent criticisms of their theory until they can decently call them out-of-date”6—(add that manoeuvre to the limited tool kit). Berlinski then explains his purpose:
In fact, Schutzenberg and Eden enter my essay unobtrusively in largely a stage-setting role—Schutzenberg to call attention to a conceptual problem at the very heart of evolutionary theory and Eden to offer, for the first time, a quantitative assessment of the space within which evolutionary searches must be undertaken. Their papers are historically important, the points they make no longer controversial.7
In summary Berlinski is among the most objective, scientifically trained critics Darwinists could hope for, but they treat him like a heretic, jeer and generally wind up making themselves look like anything but Brights—unless that moniker is taken as a term of excellence among proud ape descendants for proficiency at name-calling, pulling faces, making vulgar gestures, and gossiping. It bears repeating8 here that this behaviour is to be found early on in the establishment and professionalisation efforts of scientists in the Victorian period. It’s also worth observing that it was not unique to them. In fact this sort of sneering and condescending is typical of established authorities and elites who feel so secure in their positions, that they can afford to abandon their principles and simply snort and scoff at those who disagree with them. That sort of action, however, engenders an equal reaction by those who feel slighted and humiliated. In the case of these popular new atheists, we can see how they have become the same sort of objectionable authoritarian orthodoxy that brought about the scientific reformation.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
See http://www.the-brights.net/vision/essays/dennett_nyt_article.html. Accessed February 26, 2024.
Berlinski, David. The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays. Ed. David Klinghoffer. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2009. pp. 68-9.
Ibid. pp. 69-70.
Ibid. pp. 110-11.
Ibid. p. 109.
Ibid. p. 111.
Ibid.
The historical information I’m referring to appears late in this long article, but for those interested in history, it’s well worth the read. See this short article—especially the notes—for still more on the subject.
Thank you for this long and carefully-considered analysis of a phenomenon I was hardly aware of. People like me think that we know what "science" means, but reading your posts I have discovered that I have held onto ideas I acquired almost by osmosis over the years. Covid and the stupid signs about "science is real" helped me realize that I had not been paying attention. Maybe I don't know what I am talking about, either, but I don't put up signs advertising the fact. Very good reading, and thanks for it.