The Curious Case of the Bombardier Beetle
A classic manoeuvre in the new atheist tool kit is to accuse opponents of lacking imagination. The gist of this sophistication is that one who presents arguments refuting atheist imaginings lacks imagination. In other words an imagination is a talent best used to colour in the lines of new atheist doctrine. Colouring outside those lines is a failure of imagination. It follows that these atheists fail to imagine an imagination that could imagine outside their sphere of reference and therefore claim that one who does so, lacks imagination.
Take new atheist Mark Isaak who wrote a typical article on the subject of exaptation and the Bombardier beetle for an online blog at TalkOrigins Archive—an ultra-orthodox website founded and funded by new atheist preachers Wesley Elsberry, John Wilkins and Kenneth Fair who inform us that:
The primary reason for this archive’s existence is to provide mainstream scientific responses to the many frequently asked questions (FAQs) that appear in the talk.origins newsgroup and the frequently rebutted assertions of those advocating intelligent design or other creationist pseudosciences.
The website in general is dedicated to arguing in favour of Darwinism, but does so uncritically. Darwinism is conflated with “evolution” proper (in other words, there is only one way to view evolooshin); and Darwinist explanations are represented as always triumphant.
In an article by Laurence Moran for example we are informed that “evolution is a theory,” but “also a fact.”1 Perhaps this partly true, partly false statement is due to careless phrasing. What he ought to have written was that evolution is a fact, while Darwinism is a theory among other possible theories still being worked out. Meanwhile John Wilkins tells us Darwinism withstands the test of philosophical inquiry. In his words, “evolution is not lacking from a philosophical perspective.” He claims to have arrived at this view after studying philosophy, something I propose new atheists generally don’t do. So kudos to Wilkins. Except he doesn’t seem to have studied much. Instead like a high school student, he read material with a determinedly biased eye. He gives this away when he says, “Not all of them [philosophical critiques] are related to creationism, but all apply to antievolutionary arguments by those working from a humanities slant.”2 It’s unclear which philosophers he’s talking about. In any case, antievolutionary? And humanities slant? Enough said.
Let’s get on with Isaak’s piece because it pertains to irreducible complexity, exaptation and the limited new atheist tool kit of argumentation, all of which I introduced last month in this piece on Michael Shermer. It was Michael Behe (father of irreducible complexity) who brought up the Bombardier beetle as a example of the phenomenon. Hence the effort to refute its standing as such. The uniqueness of these beetles in Isaak’s words is “their ability to defend themselves against predators by firing a mixture of boiling-hot toxic chemicals from special glands in their posterior. In at least one species, the spray even takes the form of a pulse jet. [Dean et al., 1990]” Here’s how it works:
Secretory cells produce hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide (and perhaps other chemicals, depending on the species), which collect in a reservoir. The reservoir opens through a muscle-controlled valve onto a thick-walled reaction chamber. This chamber is lined with cells that secrete catalases and peroxidases. When the contents of the reservior [sic] are forced into the reaction chamber, the catalases and peroxidases rapidly break down the hydrogen peroxide and catalyze the oxidation of the hydroquinones into p-quinones. These reactions release free oxygen and generate enough heat to bring the mixture to the boiling point and vaporize about a fifth of it. Under pressure of the released gasses, the valve is forced closed, and the chemicals are expelled explosively through openings at the tip of the abdomen. [Aneshansley & Eisner, 1969; Aneshansley et al, 1983; Eisner et al, 1989]
After briefly reviewing and correcting some misconceptions about the beetle and this mechanism, Isaak takes up Duane Gish’s challenge stated thus: “‘How are you going to explain that step-by-step by evolution by natural selection? It cannot be done!’ [quoted in Weber, 1981]” Of course it can be done. As Isaak puts it, upon imagining a fifteen step process of gradualist mutations, “Most important, nature is not constrained by any person’s lack of imagination.” No doubt this statement is true and could easily be turned on Isaak. After all he’s just making up a scenario, not providing hard evidence. And he’s honest enough to explain that “The scenario above is hypothetical; the actual evolution of bombardier beetles probably did not happen exactly like that.” So he admits that what’s going on is a battle of imaginations. Nevertheless imagination employed to support Darwinism he deems more intelligent than imagination employed in challenging the theory. And so his imagination is heavily subject to confirmation bias. Were he being honest, he would concede that the problem of irreducible complexity poses a serious (and elegant) challenge to Darwinism.
For instance despite his schema of fifteen mutations, he admits “that all of the steps above are small or can easily be broken down into smaller steps.” He feels this problem (of failing to account for each minute transformation) not to be a flaw in his cogitations, allowing for generalisation and lack of thinking the subject through; but instead, this inability to nail down anything with scientific accuracy is a positive because it allows him to suggest that the smaller the increments, the better, proving that “The bombardier beetles’ mechanism can come about solely by accumulated microevolution.”
There are many convincing sides to his argument, especially the fact that he indicates other related beetles that can be found exhibiting what were potentially stages of evolutionary development. But what he doesn’t explain is that these assumed early stages might just as easily represent later stages of development. And that all we’re doing is exercising our imaginations.
But this item is niggling. The real issue here is how one is meant to relate to one’s imagination. If we “swim about” in “natural selection” as Dawkins suggests (in The God Delusion) and surrender our imaginations to natural selection, we can always find a clever method to keep up the conceit. This is simply how the analogical mind works. And were we to allow our imaginations to swim around instead in irreducible complexity, no doubt we would find support for that perspective instead.
Indeed at every step in Isaak’s imagined beetle development one is left to wonder at the appearance of various morphological mutations. What brings them about in the first place? Gradualism is necessary, and is hardly scientifically established, as discussed here. And even if we grant gradualism as a first principle, Darwinism is powerless to explain how these chance mutations come about, and by what means they are passed along the generations. So far all we’ve got is genetics; and major genetic mutations are not passed along. Hence the need to posit evolution by gradually accumulated micro-mutations. So the actual mechanism of evolutionary development remains a mystery, which by the way is why Darwinism is not a fact, but instead a theory.
Odd too that, like Shermer, Isaak doesn’t attempt to explain what external environmental pressures might cause the biological transformations he proposes. That’s what Darwin’s natural selection is all about, after all. The productive fun of the Darwinist conceit lies in the challenge it presents to the imagination to weave narratives that might account for various biological phenomena. But to play the game, one truly has to go the long mile and do one’s homework. I mean if you’re going to take the time to sit down and write out a refutation of irreducible complexity, you ought to draw upon evidence of some kind and link your narrative to actual prehistoric environmental and ecological conditions. And then you have to do the careful work of thinking things all the way through. Without this work, all one is doing is lazy sermonising—preaching to the converted. We truly should not deem such activities scientific. And yet it is typical of new atheist argumentation.
In fact Isaak is quite literaly making the phenomena fit the model—the inverse of what science is supposed to do.
In any event, let’s humour the Darwinists and allow for two unestablished assumptions: (a) gradualism and (b) hereditary genetic micro-mutation. The most convincing part of Darwinism is the concept of natural selection, because we can see the process in action with human selection of dogs, horses and birds. With respect to his made-up evolution of the Bombardier beetle, Isaak claims that “all of the steps are probably advantageous, so they would be selected.” He hedges there with the word “probably,” which is interesting. Stage 9 for example states, “Muscles adapt which close off the reservior [sic], thus preventing the chemicals from leaking out when they're not needed.”3 How would this muscle adaptation give the bug a survival advantage over those without it? Isaak no doubt would hand wave and say I’m missing the point. If he worked hard enough, he could find an alternative that would be advantageous enough for natural selection. Never mind that there are other stages in his series that are equally questionable. And my reply would be that he’s missing my point. If it’s just an exercise of the imagination, then he must acknowledge imaginary alternatives because ultimately we’re not really operating in the realm of empirical science. In fact Isaak is quite literaly making the phenomena fit the model—the inverse of what science is supposed to do.
But there’s still more to trouble Isaak’s breakdown of the microevolutionary sequence. If we start breaking down his fifteen points into smaller increments, as he suggests, we will ultimately arrive at mutations that clearly serve no advantage to natural selection. This is one of the takeaways from Behe’s mousetrap analogy. It’s not just that the various parts of the mechanism have to develop, but that they have to assemble in a functional and advantageous manner; and the more moving parts and the more sensitive, the more improbable assembly by chance becomes.
The Plank in Eye Evolution
The eye is a great example. Oddly one finds it brought up triumphantly time and again by Darwinists as though the matter were settled. But the development of the eye was one of those complex things that deeply worried Darwin, and to this day has not been adequately accounted for via gradualism and microevolution. Isaak tells us that “Darwin explained how, under his theory, a few photosensitive cells might evolve gradually into human eyes. [Darwin, 1872, chpt. 6]” Indeed he did make this suggestion in The Origin of Species. And one can even view Neil deGrasse Tyson’s animated version of this resolved mystery on his Cosmos reboot.
Nevertheless, the eye continues to be a sore point for Darwinism for more than one reason. First of all the eye is a sensory organ—and the locus of perception—not just a mechanism like the Bombardier beetle’s boiling chamber. (Setting aside the fact that the beetle has to have some motor control of its defence mechanism.) For the eye to have any relevance, it must be wired to the brain, and there somehow bring about perception and sense-making. So “a few photosensitive cells” don’t cut it. With the eye we get a distinct sense of emergence from an inner tendency. Those photosensitive cells could not have developed appropriate nerve endings after the fact. And if nerve endings came first, then why? Surely that’s not a chance occurrence. These are the types of questions one is prompted to ask after swimming around in irreducible complexity. But such questions are anathema to those seeking easy confirmations of Darwinism.
Philosopher of science Henri Bergson addressed the trouble with the evolution of the eye, not only pointing out how unresolved the question was in the early twentieth century, but also how a deeper problem with Darwinism lay in its philosophical inconsistency:
Let us place side by side the eye of a vertebrate and that of a mollusc such as the common Pectan. We find the same essential parts in each, composed of analogous elements. The eye of the Pectan presents a retina, a cornea, a lens of cellular structure like our own. There is even that peculiar inversion of retinal elements which is not met with, in general, in the retina of the invertebrates. Now, the origin of molluscs may be a debated question, but, whatever opinion we hold, all are agreed that molluscs and vertebrates separated from their common parent-stem long before the appearance of an eye so complex as that of the Pectan. Whence, then, the structural analogy?4
At first glance it may be difficult to see where Bergson is leading with this. So let’s skip to his conclusion. First he explains how accidental variation according to Darwin’s Origin of Species must be insensible and minutely incremental because sudden massive mutations resulting in monstrosities do not transmit. Therefore the eye would have to have evolved by “small differences due to chance, and continually accumulating.”5 As noted above but perhaps better expressed by Bergson, “one point is certain—the organ will be of no use and will not give selection a hold unless it functions”6:
However the minute structure of the retina may develop, and however complicated it may become, such progress, instead of favoring vision, will probably hinder it if the visual centres do not develop at the same time, as well as several other parts of the visual organ itself. If the variations are accidental, how can they ever agree to arise in every part of the organ at the same time, in such a way that the organ will continue to perform its function? Darwin quite understood this; it is one of the reasons why he regarded variation as insensible. For a difference which arises accidentally at one point of the visual apparatus, if it be very slight, will not hinder the functioning of the organ; and hence this first accidental variation can, in a sense, wait for complementary variations to accumulate and raise vision to a higher degree of perfection. Granted; but while the insensible variation does not hinder the functioning of the eye, neither does it help it, so long as the variations that are complementary do not occur.7
“Unwittingly,” Bergson explains, “one will reason as if the slight variation were a toothing stone set up by the organism and reserved for a later construction.”8 This is where exaptation comes into the picture to save Darwinism. But Bergson’s insight holds:
This hypothesis, so little comfortable to the Darwinian principle, is difficult enough to avoid even in the case of an organ which has been developed along one single main line of evolution, e.g. the vertebrate eye. But it is absolutely forced upon us when we observe the likeness of structure of the vertebrate eye and that of the molluscs. How could the same small variations, incalculable in number, have ever occurred in the same order on two independent lines of evolution?9
We’re talking about high improbability here and Darwinist logic has to stretch so far, it collapses. Here’s the clincher where the eye is concerned: “How can accidental causes, occurring in an accidental order, be supposed to have repeatedly come to the same result, the causes being infinitely numerous and the effect infinitely complicated?”10
Now for the philosophical trouble that one senses in Darwinism but can’t quite put one’s finger on: philosophical and rational inconsistency concerning the underlying principles at play. Bergson notes that accidentalism (though Bergson uses the terms “mechanism” and “mechanical adjustment”11 ) and finalism are both inadequate and philosophically dubious, and yet both are at play in Darwinism.
Adaptation is a form of mechanical accidentalism that implies either a positive or negative influence coming from the environment and causing selection pressure on a species to change.
Finalism, on the other hand, implies a teleological development toward a predetermined end form.
Of accidentalism, Bergson notes, “if the adaptation is passive, if it is mere repetition in the relief of what the conditions give in the mold, [Bergson asks us to picture a wine glass in place of the natural environment in which a liquid (in place of the organism) finds its shape] it will build up nothing that one tries to make it build.”12 That’s accidentalism.
He addresses finalism as follows: “if it is active, capable of responding by a calculated solution to the problem which is set out in the conditions, that is going further than we do—too far, indeed, in our opinion—in the direction we indicated in the beginning”13—i.e. finalism, seeing the end result as the purpose of the adaptation, the fallacy of believing that butterflies for example developed eye-like images on their wings for the express purpose of repelling birds.
The philosophical quagmire of Darwinism lies in this:
that there is a surreptitious passing from one of these two meanings to the other, a flight for refuge to the first whenever one is about to be caught in flagrante delicto of finalism by employing the second. It is really the second which serves the usual practice of science, but it is the first that generally provides its philosophy. In any particular case one talks as if the process of adaptation were an effort of the organism to build up a machine capable of turning external circumstances to the best possible account: then one speaks of adaptation in general as if it were the very impress of circumstances, passively received by an indifferent matter.14
But getting back to the eye. . . In an essay called “Has Darwin Met his Match?” David Berlinski discusses a 1994 paper by Dan E. Nilsson and Suzanne Pelger, claiming that via a computer simulation, they had determined that “‘A light sensitive patch will gradually turn into a focused-lens eye’ in only a few hundred thousand years.”15 The chief problem however is that “What Nilsson and Pelger in fact described was the evolution not of an eye, but of an eyeball, and they described it using ordinary back-of-the-envelope calculations.”16 To be more precise “what they succeeded in showing was simply that an imaginary population of light-sensitive cells could be flogged relentlessly up a simple adaptive peak, a point never at issue because never in doubt.”17 As is too often the case with Darwinist thinking, scenarios are dreamt up and centre around fantastic could-bes and see?-it’s-possibles, instead of being grounded in hard falsifiable fact (as they claim). Berlinski concludes:
Despite a good deal of research conducted over the last twenty years, the mammalian visual system is still poorly understood, and in large measure not understood at all. The eye acts as a focusing lens and as a transducer, changing visual signals to electrical ones. Within the brain and nervous system, complicated algorithms must come into play before such signals may be interpreted. And no theory has anything whatsoever of interest to say about the fact that the visual system terminates its activities in a visual experience, an episode of consciousness.18
Isaak and Wilkins are not especially visible popularisers of new atheism, but they are clear examples of those fanatical believers—a sort of informal clergy—in the movement who one would expect to display portraits in their homes and offices of Tyson, Shermer, Harris, Dawkins and Dennett (certainly of Darwin). Reviewing their efforts, I present here a case study, illustrating the abject lack of serious thought and scholarship among this group. They take after their parentage, after all. And just like we’ve seen with my articles on Tyson, Shermer, and Harris, they are contemptuous of those who would disagree with them, betraying a general philistinism in formulations like “humanities slant.” Add to that a fundamental philosophical mushiness and an unscientific pursuit of bias confirmation along with their dismissal of all other ways of interpreting data as “unimaginative,” their lack of curiosity, their cognitive inflexibility, their name-calling and hand waving, and we’ve got a stable model of their close-minded, doctrinaire and dogmatic behaviour.
The advantage of stepping away from the most well-known among the new atheists for a spell is that it enables me to confirm my claim—in response to those scientists I know who’ve said to me, “Most scientists don’t think that way”—that the corruption extends much further than just a handful of populist science writers. We’re talking about a movement with immense influence on education, government and the scientific project itself. I think the views one finds at the TalkOrigins Archive are typical of a wide swathe of public opinion, that such attitudes are alive in public institutions, and in offices of governance. The very existence of a preacher class in the church of new atheism points to a wide, informal following afoot in the secular world. I meet TalkOrigins orthodox folk all the time. And I suspect that recent phenomena like the belief that we’re all inherently selfish; that lockdowns are a no-brainer; that masks too are a no-brainer; that segregation of the unvaccinated is a no-brainer; that the world is burning due to catastrophic global warming; and that woke sensibilities mustn’t be criticised—are all rooted in this militant atheism which relegates the inner world to a hazmat bag like a vestigial organ.
At the risk of repeating myself, I feel the need to bring this all back home to Ted Hughes’s observation that “The inner world, separated from the outer world, is a place of demons. The outer world, separated from the inner world, is a place of meaningless objects and machines. The faculty that makes the human being out of these two worlds is called divine.” And the faculty that works to keep them apart is called new atheism. If we’re going to have any chance of reclaiming our civilisation from the current wreckage, the major project ahead of us will be to demonstrate the poverty of the present paradigm along with its role models and return public attention to the inner world and its role models.
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.
See http://talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html.
See http://talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil.html.
See http://talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Transl. Arthur Mitchell. (Originally, 1911). Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2017 (First, 1998). p. 62.
Ibid. p. 63.
Ibid. p. 64.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. pp. 64-5.
Ibid. p. 56.
See ibid. pp. 54 and 57.
Ibid. p. 58.
Ibid.
Ibid. pp. 58-9.
Berlinski, David. The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays. Ed. David Klinghoffer. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2009. p. 292.
Ibid. p. 293.
Ibid.
Ibid.
This is a great essay, but I wish it had a different title. Perhaps because Bartool Bits has 'gone on the offensive' recently, this came across initially as an extension of that project... because I'm swamped with work, I skipped this essay until now, and I entirely misread what it was about solely because of the title! Of course, much of that issue falls on my shoulders. But I thought I'd make this note in case it's helpful.
Also, and this may or may not be helpful too, I think the problem you're engaged with is deeper than 'New Atheism', and while this movement provides the celebrity faces, I often wonder if engaging on this front serves only to shore up the opposition. After launching a lot of volleys in the late 2000s against the New Atheists, I had an epiphany and concluded I was playing into their hands at that time by doing so. The circumstances are somewhat different now, but the philosophical challenge is just as difficult. As just one example, Christopher Hitchens was a boon to magazine publishers because hatred for him shored up his celebrity credentials, so they let him say really remarkably hateful and racist things. Arguing against him always risked enhancing his platform.
You have to write what you have to write, I know - but sometimes the angle of approach makes an enormous difference as to who can be reached.
These are idle morning thoughts, I hope something in them is helpful, or at least interesting.
Stay wonderful!
Chris.