Last week in Barstool Bits, I exposed Neil deGrasse Tyson’s orthodox and messianic desire to achieve a purely atheistic science community purged of all believers in a God or any higher power. This week, in analogy proper I’m turning to Michael Shermer, editor of the orthodox, new atheist magazine Skeptic to demonstrate how he deploys tactics from all three categories of the attack kit pictured below.
In a 2012 exchange with science and medicine historian and Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913)1 scholar Michael Flannery, Shermer replied to Flannery’s distinction between Intelligent Design (ID) and creationism as follows:
By contrast, Intelligent Design theorists offer no testable hypotheses at all, no natural explanations for natural phenomena. Instead, their answer to the mysteries of the mind is the same as that of all other mysteries of the universe: God did it. Although their narratives are gussied up in jargon-laden terms such as “irreducible complexity,” “specified complexity,” “complex specified information,” “directed intelligence,” “guided design,” and of course “intelligent design”—these are not causal explanations. They are just linguistic fillers for “God did it” explanations. It is nothing more than the old “God of the gap” rubric: wherever creationists find what they perceive to be a gap in scientific knowledge, this must be where God intervened into the natural world. If they want to do science, however, they must provide testable hypothesis [sic] about how they think God (or the Intelligent Designer—ID) did it.
Let’s pause a moment to bask a bit in the beneath-my-contempt contempt that oozes from the language. Note that Shermer is rehashing standard new atheist manoeuvres right out of what is by now a tired playbook. Ad Hominem Tools 1 & 2: insult your interlocutor and imply that he holds laughably silly beliefs, that all his ideas amount to is “gussied up. . .jargon-laden terms.” Apparently the “gussied up. . .jargon-laden terms” deployed by biologists, medical practitioners and physicists, not to mention by Shermer himself are exempt from this criticism.
Despite Flannery’s insistence that Intelligent Design is not necessarily the same thing as creationism, Shermer refuses to engage in conversation to learn more about the subject and instead insists on maintaining the conflation. Here’s Flannery’s clarification:
Stephen Meyer gives an accurate definition of ID as the theory that “holds that there are telltale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause — that is, by the conscious choice of a rational agent — rather than an undirected process.” And that’s it — no less and certainly no more.2
Never mind, Shermer tramples along without taking notice, implying that Flannery is a religious apologist beneath contempt. After all, all he’s really saying by saying that the God question is not on the table, is that “God did it.” Why does the subtext here suggest that Shermer suspects an undeclared and hidden agenda at work, one that threatens material science? Why doesn’t he accept the terms of the arguments for what they are? I’ve examined this question and provided some ideas regarding where this sort of advocacy might originate in “Darwinism Denies Inwardness.” Any crack in orthodox Darwinism means the coming apart of our progressive social order.
Since so much is on the line for a fanatic, Shermer goes to work with yet another item from the tool kit. . . Method Tool No. 1: invoke falsifiability or testability and claim that your knowledge and ideas are all grounded in testable and well-tested and established experimentation, replication and peer review, while your interlocutor’s knowledge is untestable. “If they want to do science,” he says, as if to say, If they want to chinwag over Cab-Sauv with the big boys, “they must provide testable hypothesis [sic].” Meanwhile he has dismissed the notion of irreducible complexity out of hand as lacking “causal explanation.” With that statement he betrays his ignorance of the subject. For one, irreducible complexity is very much testable and observable in nature; and it has been tested, observed and documented. More importantly it’s the sort of observation that subverts orthodox Darwinism and the mechanical accidentalist creed.
In fact irreducible complexity is both a thought experiment and a verified experiment that explodes orthodox Darwinism. It’s purpose is not to provide a material causal explanation except to imply that some internal inclination or force (possibly conscious, possibly morphological) is at work driving evolution and that natural selection alone cannot account for everything.
So Shermer employs Rhetorical Tool No. 2—use ignorance of a subject to set up a strawman and then move in with Rhetorical Tool No. 4, reframe the argument. Shermer’s strawman in this case is the notion of “God did it” explanations. However, if he were informed on the subject of irreducible complexity, he would understand well enough that it is far from “the old ‘God of the gap’ rubric.” With his opponent’s argument thus misframed as a childish Santa Clause and Tooth Fairy belief, it’s easy enough to claim a rhetorical win.
Meanwhile Shermer invokes the (jargon-free?) notion of exaptation but speaks broadly and abstractly on the subject:
For Darwinian gradualism to work, each successive stage of wing development would need to be functional, but stumpy little partial wings are not aerodynamically capable of flight. Darwin answered his critics thusly:
Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end we are justified in saying that it is specially contrived for it. On the same principle, if a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for that purpose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms.
Today this solution is called exaptation, in which a feature that originally evolved for one purpose is co-opted for a different purpose.
This idea is precisely what irreducible complexity disproves. No doubt in the world of could-be speculation and imaginary thinking, sure, why not?. . . some forms get repurposed. Irreducible complexity, however, looks at forms and behaviours that had to have emerged functionally complete with room for evolution by natural selection to further develop and improve. Stephen E. Robbins provides a decent introduction to the subject in his book Time and Memory:
Micheal Behe, an academic biologist, challenged the possibility of the algorithmic approach to design espoused by evolution (Darwin’s Black Box). Though Behe dealt heavily in the biochemical realm, he placed the problem initially in the intuitive context of a mousetrap. The (standard) mousetrap consists of several parts. . . .As a functioning whole, he argued, the trap is “irreducibly complex.” For the device to work as designed, all the parts must be present and organized correctly, else it does not function.3
Exaptation cannot begin to explain away this problem because there are too many coordinated parts to account for: “even if by chance the parts evolved simultaneously, there remains the enormous problem of organization of the parts.” Robbins asks, “How does this happen randomly? Each part must be oriented precisely spatially, fitted with the rest, fastened down in place, etc.” Moreover, “There are enormous ‘degrees of freedom’ here—ways the parts can rotate, translate and move around in space—which drive the odds against randomness to enormous proportions.”4 Let’s not forget that complex adaptations must also wire themselves to the perceptive apparatus and the reactive motor system. . . by chance.
To provide one biological example, consider the various species of hymenoptera that paralyse without killing the various critters chosen as receptacles for their eggs. Philosopher of science, Henri Bergson (1859-1941) discusses this subject with an aim to demonstrate how instincts work. But we may repurpose his observations to underscore the sort of irreducible complexity at work in nature. Here’s Bergson from Creative Evolution:
The Ammophilia Hirsuta gives nine successive strokes of its sting upon nine nerve-centres of its caterpillar, and then seizes the head and squeezes it in its mandibles, enough to cause paralysis without death. . . .No doubt the operation is not always perfect. It has recently been shown that the Ammophilia sometimes kills the caterpillar instead of paralyzing it, that sometimes also it paralyzes it incompletely. . . .Even supposing that the Ammophilia has come in course of time to recognize, one after another, by tentative experiment, the points of its victim which must be stung to render it motionless, and also the special treatment that must be inflicted on the head to bring about paralysis without death, how can we imagine that elements so special of a knowledge so precise have been regularly transmitted, one by one, by heredity?5
If we attempt to break it down by exaptation-like increments, the hymenoptera in question would always fail to paralyze its caterpillar. The method is an irreducible ten-step process requiring a precision that is not always productive: it simply includes too many parts that individually could serve no purpose. No doubt, a fanatical Darwinist will begin hand waving at such a heretical suggestion as he resorts to his limited toolbox to invoke a vague and unsubstantiated claim that he can confidently suggest that some explanation for this is possible. Perhaps the caterpillar went through previous morphologies that made a single, then a double, then a triple sting useful, and somehow the wasp kept up with these evolutions. Perhaps. But these explanations feel exactly like those I’ve encountered with religious folk defending their naive materialism and most superstitious of ideas. In short the explanations are not satisfying.
But since Shermer is ignorant of the argument of irreducible complexity and its examples, he can happily ignore them and explain further as follows:
Since modern birds probably descended from bi-pedal therapod dinosaurs, wings with feathers could have been employed for regulating heat—holding them close to the body retains heat, stretching them out releases heat.6
If I’m to be honest, I can’t believe what I’m reading here can be called “scientific.” This is literally made up, crackpot hokum rolled in ignorance and rhetorical hand waving. This is bottom of the barrel stuff. Wing-like appendages with feathers just sort of appeared accidentally and were accidentally found to be useful for heat retention and release, until it was accidentally discovered that the combination of feathers and heat-releasing flaps could also serve as a means of flight and by further incremental accidents, feathers just kept appearing and flight continued to improve? Is Shermer familiar with Darwin’s notion of natural selection? If yes, then where are the external environmental pressures that might have led to the transmutations he proposes? Why would heat-releasing flaps be necessary in the first place? I mean flaplessness would be the best for heat release, no? So why would the appendages get bigger rather than smaller, and why would they appear at just the right place to eventually become flight viable? If the need for heat retention were part of the advantage of these appendages, how would small stubby origins serve this purpose? And moreover, where’s the data? Where are the examples of this evolution in present day birds or lizards and in the fossil record? (And those are just a handful of the questions begged here.) Must be that jargon-free language like “bi-pedal therapod dinosaurs” I find most convincing. The basic strategy of the exaptation argument is to account for complex adaptations by failing to appreciate their complexity.
Needless to say how intellectually disappointing this sort of high-school level debating is. Reading such exchanges and watching debates with new atheists is moreover discouraging because it gives the overall impression that these folks are not interested in serious scholarship or intellection, that they are not Titans of knowledge, but instead ignorant and arrogant, smug and undeservedly wealthy bullies. And one is led to wonder at the cluelessness required to put one’s ignorance on display so shamelessly. Because only cluelessness or sheer disregard for authentic science and debate can account for the cultivated ignorance and underhanded strategies deployed by this cadre of false intellectuals.
What we witness here with Shermer is an irrational desire to win an argument through sophistry and not with hard data. His method is to denigrate and insult his interlocutor in an attempt to discredit rational ideas as religious without ever having to argue out the details and do the real work of philosophy and science. Worst of all, whilst engaging in bad faith argumentation, he poses as a man of science (much like Fauci), implying that our skepticism ought to be pointed in one direction alone, and most certainly not in the direction of TheScience™ and its institutional systems. Such true scepticism he brands as “radical skepticism”—another rhetorical trick meant to guard the brand of his magazine, which one might call “partisan scepticism.”
A great deal of my work here at analogy has troubled over how corrupt and unreliable TheScience™ and its systems truly are; so it ought to be clear by now why a healthy scepticism must apply. Like Tyson, Shermer betrays utter contempt for pluralism. To his not-so-sceptical (and most unimaginative) mind, there is only one way to see things. How, pray, is the stubbornness and finality of his stance any different from that of the medieval orthodoxy and the various inquisitional bodies he apparently rejects? In Shermer we have a believer and a fanatic, not a scientist; and in his followers, we have believers and fanatics too, not persons devoted to rational inquiry.
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 a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Wallace is famous for having come up with the idea of evolution by natural selection before Darwin. Consequently he supported and collaborated with Darwin until they had a falling out over the issue of an internal force or tendency driving evolution. Darwin took the stance that all matters of evolution could be explained by natural selection, whereas Wallace felt (along with most other scientists of the time) that this could not be the case. Wallace eventually became a proponent and defender of the rising spiritualist movement and has therefore been relegated to the trash bin of history by material naturalists for his heresy.
Robbins, Stephen Earle. Time and Memory: A Primer on the Scientific Mysticism of Consciousness. Jackson, Wisconsin: Self Published, 2012. p. 179.
Ibid. pp. 179-80.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Transl. Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1998. (Original 1911.) pp. 172-3.
Thank you, Asa, for bringing up that wonderful passage from Bergson's Creative Evolution. It's an inspiring, thought-provoking hypothesis he makes there about a possible relationship of "sympathy" between the ammophila and the caterpillar, that there may be some kind of instinctive, mutualistic relationship between predator and prey, so to speak, whom we can consider "no longer as two organisms, but as two activities [which] would express, in a concrete form, the relation of the one to the other."
Bergson wasn't a scientist, per se, but it seems to me that he did the kind of work that scientists should be doing but aren't especially nowadays: opening fields of inquiry into the mysteries of life, instead of shutting them down.