The Full Title of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"

"Those who argue at school board meetings that Darwin should be taught in public schools seldom have taken the time to read him."

And neither has Campolo... or, it seems, you.
I have read Origin, but not Descent, so I can happily correct you that Origin does not call for the elimination of negros, but only express great skepticism to the assertions about not wasting time and money on children with birth defects in Descent.

(reading the quote carefully it becomes clear that it's very hard to disentangle which claims are allegedly made in which book. Perhaps all the really strong stuff is supposed to have been said in Descent. Interesting that it should be so vague about that.)

The fact is that Darwin lived in the 19th century, a European during that great age of discovery. Naturally, by today's standards he was somewhat racist (not nearly as racist as Campolo claims -- Darwin was vocally encouraged social policy to be based on more than the concepts of struggle and selection in nature, and that sympathy should be extended to all races and nations). It would have been astonishing had he not been; remember the standards of the time (also notice that it is the use of the very use of the word "race" in the title of Origin that shocks us rather than the idea it conveys, which is little more than defining a "favored race" as "one which is preserved" -- the linguistic trigger around "race" did not exist then).
Also, Shakespeare was antisemitic, Newton believed in alchemy and Pythagoras was a numerologist mystic. Even people who are often right are also often wrong, so it shouldn't surprise us that our luminaries are open to some kind of attack. But if we're judging the ideas, let's be careful to do just that and not get confused with the personalities.
That said, Campolo's character seems pretty clear to me: he is a devious liar who intends to manipulate the ignorant into helping him remove evolution from the curriculum, regardless of whom's dead memory he must defame in the process.

Sadly MW does not have the excuse of ignorance.

Michael,

1) Intelligent Design is not a "theory". It's a non-theory. It basically says "This could not possibly have happened by natural means, only by miraculous means", which is a less arrogant-sounding way of saying "No one will ever come up with a naturalistic explanation for this". That's just giving up. If ID at least made some kind of testable predictions, I'd give it a chance. I admit that it is perfectly possible that the world was deliberately created by a vastly powerful intelligence, but it is not within the capabilities of science to explore this idea since it's not really falsifiable, it makes no predictions that could be used to disprove it.

2) Whether or not Darwin was racist, or any other terrible trait you can think of (let's say he was a murderer and a child molester) is not relevant to whether or not his model of how life evolves can account for the complexity of life. I don't think I need to teach you what the ad hominem fallacy is. Newton was kinda crazy, therefore his model of gravity is wrong? Or, even worse; Newton was kinda crazy, therefore "God" is the only way to explain the phenomenon he tried to model? Attack the model, not its inventor.

3) Evolution is not inherently racist. Sure, it could be used to guess that some human races are less different from our ancestors than others (which is ok, some race had to be first). But no one can legitimately say that the newer races are any more "human", or (as a related example) that handicapped people are any less "human". In fact, one could easily argue that with the rise of cooperative society and of human rights, we have to a great extent slowed down the rate at which our species evolves. That's because society aims to preserve all human life, to protect all human life from the kids of pressures that used to prevent animals from reaching reproductive age. Natural selection is rather cruel, as are many things in nature, and you'd have to be a particularly non-empathic person to think that we should kill people who do not match some vague physical criteria. (Besides, during evolution, it's the environment, if anything, that should determine who is "fit" and who is not). Sure, we are animals, but (for complex reasons) being human means empathizing with other humans and valuing human life. I don't see how the realization that we biologically evolved from dumber animals gets in the way of empathizing with other people. It doesn't, not for the modern person who knows that people of all races are all pretty much the same as far as how they think and feel.

"If ID at least made some kind of testable predictions, I'd give it a chance."

That's funny. I would say the same thing about evolution: It is completely non-falsifiable. Of course, that statement is falsifiable. Just tell me how evolution might be falsified.

In fact, it has already been falsified several times, but then they come up with a new theory, give it the same name, and then insist that evolution hasn't been disproven.

On a separate point, there's nothing defeatist about demonstrating that something can't be known under current paradigms. We might as well mock the mathematicians for 'giving up' on finding the last digit of pi. One of the great scientific discoveries of the past 50 years has been chaos theory, which is basically that some systems, like the weather, cannot be predicted with any means that we can imagine.

I think that it's fairly obvious that current paradigms are completely unable to explain how new species emerge. We can no more explain it than scientists 200 years ago could have explained how the sun burns.

Two centuries hence our ancestors will better understand species emergence, and they will view 20th century evolutionary theory with the same amusement that we feel for phrenology. I don't know if those future scientists will describe the system as intelligent. More likely they'll use some new paradigm that we can't imagine because we don't yet understand the terms in which it will be explained, just as scientists in the early 1800s could not have imagined nuclear fusion because they didn't know even the basics about atoms.

BB: "In fact, [evolution] has already been falsified several times"

Examples?

"[evolution] is completely non-falsifiable"

Yes it is. I'll give you three examples:
1) The fossil record turns out to be static or changes over time in a way which was at odds with evolution,
2) There are true chimeras discovered of creatures from diverse lineages (something like a mermaid or a centaur)
3) A mechanism is presented which prevents the accumulation of mutations

"I think that it's fairly obvious that current paradigms are completely unable to explain how new species emerge."

Argument from personal incredulity is a classic fallacy. What, aside from your feeling of disbelief, is obvious about natural selection failing to account for speciation?

"On a separate point, there's nothing defeatist about demonstrating that something can't be known under current paradigms. We might as well mock the mathematicians for 'giving up' on finding the last digit of pi."

I agree, if you demonstrate it. We should mock a mathematician who gives up on pi without first proving it is irrational. My problem is that nothing of the sort has been demonstrated (or even hinted at) about evolution.

"The fossil record turns out to be static or changes over time in a way which was at odds with evolution."

That was my first example of how evolution has been falsified. For decades, the theory said that evolution was slow and steady, and that the holes in the fossil record would eventually be filled in with further research.

Then they did the further research, and didn't find the smooth transitions among the fossils that they expected. So in the 1970s they finally acknowledged this and made a new theory called punctuated equilibrium, which says, basically, that the fossil record doesn't show smooth transitions. It's like a theory of the sky that says the sky is blue.

So evolution was disproved decades ago. But it has such political and religious significance to its supporters that they had to keep the name. So they put the old label on a very new (and rather weak) theory, and suddenly evolution hasn't been disproved.

"We should mock a mathematician who gives up on pi without first proving it is irrational. My problem is that nothing of the sort has been demonstrated (or even hinted at) about evolution."

As I understand it, that's precisely what ID is trying to do. But somehow that's evil, illegitimate research that all good people must shun. So which is it? Is ID evil evil evil, or is it a legitimate attempt to prove that the current paradigm is inadequate to explain what it claims to explain.

"What, aside from your feeling of disbelief, is obvious about natural selection failing to account for speciation?"

I've written about that topic at great length. Here's one of the longer and clearer explanations.

The short version is that evolution claims that DNA generates lots of meaningful information out of random noise. But we can demonstrate that that's impossible in any information system beyond the very, very small.

The key concept is possibility space, which is the total of all possible expressions within the system. To use a familiar example, in English that would be all the different ways that letters could be strung together. So the possibility space of a five-letter word is 26^5. That's the maximum number of five-letter words that could be made in English.

Compare the size of that possibility space to the number of meaningful expressions. In this simple example, it's the number of actual five-letter words in English. The chance of generating information from randomness is the the number of meaningful expressions divided by the possibility space.

And this is not specific to English. It applies to any information system. And if you compare a variety of information systems, then you'll see a trend as you move from the simpler to the more complex: As the information system becomes more complex, the size of the information space explodes exponentially, while the number of meaningful expressions increases linearly or slightly above it. And DNA is more complicated than any information system that we have invented.

I'm completely open to the idea that there could be some solution to this information-generation problem. But I don't understand how anyone could pretend that we already have the solution. Such a discovery would completely revolutionize mathematics and science. I hope that we discover it some day. But it's absurd to pretend that we have already discovered it, when we obviously haven't.

"evolution... is completely non-falsifiable..."

A lot of people say that, but it's not true. Evolution could be disproven by, say, a rabbit in the Precambrian. Evolution says that complexity arised gradually and can only go so fast, so if one fossil is vastly more complex than any other from the same time, that would pretty much disprove it. On the other hand, the predictions that evolution does make - about genetics, transitional forms, etc - are validated, while ID makes no prediction about what we would expect to observe if ID were true.

"...it has already been falsified several times, but then they come up with a new theory, give it the same name, and then insist that evolution hasn't been disproven..."

It's funny how many evolution deniers like to call evolution "Darwinism", so as to imply that the reason people like it is because they happen to like a story that a guy invented 150 years ago and that has not changed since... while at the same time they criticize the theory of evolution on the basis of how it has changed over time. Of course scientific models are adjusted over time! That's called scientific progress. And even when the change is drastic, the old theory might have been essentially correct. Einstein's relativistic mechanics include many insights that Newton's model missed, but Newton's insights about force and mass and momentum and energy are still fundamentally correct. Same for Darwin and the way that genetics and other new insights have been used to reformulate evolution. Evolution is very different from what it was 150 years ago, but it is not unrecogniseable, and its core - mutation and natural selection - is still the same.

Yes, it is not necessarily unreasonable to say that something is impossible - such as faster-than-light travel, or to cross all seven bridges of Königsberg without crossing any twice. But to say that it is impossible for people to come up with a naturalistic mechanism that could have produced a certain feature we observe - to say that no future paradigm of science will ever have the insights necessary to understand how a certain biological feature could be the natural consequence of previous conditions - is "giving up" more thoroughly, and more fundamentally, than saying "Under this model, which has been verified to a great extent, faster-than-light travel seems to be impossible" or "given the definitions of these mathematical objects, it is impossible for them to have both these properties at once" is not. If you show that Newtonian mechanics CANNOT POSSIBLY describe certain aspects of the orbit of Mercury, you don't from that conclude Intelligent Falling, you wait around until Einstein comes along and adds a new insight that explains how that quirky orbit naturally acts as it does.

Evolution does fail to explain some things, and indeed we might need a new paradigm before we can explain them. But ID does not qualify as a candidate; ID is a non-answer.

"evolution claims that DNA generates lots of meaningful information out of random noise"

No, evolution claims that DNA generates a lot of random noise, and that natural selection uses that to reveal pre-existing information about what kinds of features would help an organism survive in a given environment:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521642981/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-6133955-2075154#
(Pages 269-280; Search for "evolution").

I think there's a labeling issue here. I see ID as fundamentally skeptical about evolution, with a claim about intelligence more or less thrown in at the end. And that's consistent with the people I've read who you would probably classify as IDers. You're seeing ID as only superficially skeptical about evolution, and fundamentally about the intelligence claim. So we're talking past each other to a certain extent.

And that ambiguity causes big problems. The hysteria against ID means that it's effectively impossible for a scientist to be broadly skeptical about evolution. In fact, many evolution defenders skip right past the ID label and call everyone who is skeptical about evolution a creationist.

"No, evolution claims that DNA generates a lot of random noise, and that natural selection uses that to reveal pre-existing information about what kinds of features would help an organism survive in a given environment."

This is a point that evolution defenders seem to have trouble with: There is little or no argument about natural selection. That's not the issue at all. In my objection, I assume for purposes of argument that we have an absolutely perfect detection mechanism. No useful information is ever overlooked.

But a perfect selection mechanism doesn't solve the basic problem: You can't select what doesn't exist. Again: You cannot select what does not exist. And my claim is that the information never comes into existence, so there's no point in talking about how good the selection mechanism is.

The silly claim in evolution is that random mutation will create useful genes in a finite period of time. And I think that most scientists know that that's a silly claim, because good pro-evolution web sites are usually quite careful in explaining how the new information comes into existence. They can do the math, too. (They also understand mutation well enough to know that most mutations are entirely predictable.)

The scientists know that they don't know where the new information comes from. But, for a variety of reasons, they don't want the public to know that the scientists don't know. So we get a bunch of hysterical malarke about how anyone who questions evolution is a raving zealot who handles snakes and speaks in tongues. And it's damn irresponsible. Anybody who paid attention in algebra class ought to be able to see that random forces do not create new information.

BB: "Then they did the further research, and didn't find the smooth transitions among the fossils that they expected. So in the 1970s they finally acknowledged this and made a new theory called punctuated equilibrium, which says, basically, that the fossil record doesn't show smooth transitions."

Is the theory still based on the idea of natural selection working on unguided variation of the genome? If so, then isn't it essentially the same theory?
PE is not a revolutionary upheaval. It is like any minor embellishment in quantum theory which does not affect the principles of chemistry, even though chemistry is caused by the effects of QM.
Changes are still gradual (ie there are not discontinuities, the sudden "quick" changes are only quick on the geological scale of time we're using in this context), there is still a wealth of examples of transitional forms, and fossils are still found and dated in a way which is not only in accordance with, but highly suggestive of evolutionary change.
So the rate of change of the phenotype is not constant. How exactly does that cast doubt on evolution?

"So they put the old label on a very new (and rather weak) theory"
Why should PE not be considered evolution?
What's weak about it?

"[proof is] precisely what ID is trying to do."

It's not going to prove jack by lying about what evolution says, the evidence that supports it and defaming the character of Charles Darwin. I mean, I'm not talking about honest misunderstandings, unless IDers (including Campolo) genuinely have learning difficulties, there is no explanation other than that they are blatantly, boldly lying.

"Origin" simply does not say what Campolo says it does. What explanation for his misquoting can there be other than he is lying?

That's my main beef: Campolo is lying, and he's sullying the reputation of a dead man. Even if evolution is wrong and some intelligence designed the entire universe so that life may flourish in one tiny corner of it, it's still not OK to spread lies about a dead man being what amounts to a Nazi.

RE probability space: your argument might be relevant if every organism was born with a completely random genome. This is obviously not the case, and evolution makes no such claim... one of the things it explains is inherited traits after all. So instead of the probability of dropping the full genome fresh in one shot, what evolution says is that a) we get many, many goes at it (billions of individuals over billions of generations) and that b) even with so many shots, the dice is loaded in favor of meaningful and (biologically) beneficial shots, since those are naturally the genes that have more reproductive success.

Do you see the difference between what you said and what I said?

"And my claim is that the information never comes into existence, so there's no point in talking about how good the selection mechanism is."

Really? What is it that stops meaningful mutations from happening? How do the molecules know what's going to be useful, and that they mustn't encode it?
The proportion of mutations which are useful may be low, but there are many many mutation events every year, and the ones which are useful are aggressively favored by natural selection, and can spread over the course of a few generations.
Unless there's some... magic that guards the molecules against doing things that happen to be useful.

"Anybody who paid attention in algebra class ought to be able to see that random forces do not create new information."

I'm not showing off, but I'm willing to bet you some non-trivial amount of money that I'm better at algebra than you. So explain this to me, don't worry about leaving anything out that's too technical. Dembski is already refuted (by me, above but hand-wavy, also from various sources in much more detail and with more rigor).

If the forces that generate the random variations can't distinguish between information and noise, and the filter can select things which we can call "information", then I don't see the problem.

As with Dembski, Behe has been answered many times already. There exists a wealth of discussion about their theories on the internet. You can find refutations of their arguments very easily, I recommend doing so.
Although you're not an ID proponent, I think you are guilty of the characteristic that I most object to about IDers -- they are so uncritical of any material that they agree with that they continue to present 1970s arguments that were settled in the 1970s. Although it would be easy for you to check, say, Dembski's argument, you chose not to. It's within your range to do the research, but you don't.
This happens even when the claims are disgusting slurs on Darwin's character, where normally it would clearly be immoral to propagate such claims about anyone else without making sure.

mauyr: Have you actually read my blog post? I'm betting not, because you don't understand my argument. Some points on which you're confused:

1. The relevant target isn't an entire genome. It's a single unit of meaningful expression, or a gene.

2. "what evolution says is that a) we get many, many goes at it (billions of individuals over billions of generations) and that b) even with so many shots, the dice is loaded in favor of meaningful and (biologically) beneficial shots, since those are naturally the genes that have more reproductive success."

If you think that billions and billions of tries are relevant, then you obviously haven't even glanced at the math. Instead of bragging about how good you are at it, just go do some of it. You think a few dozen zeroes in the numerator is going to matter? There are hundreds if not thousands of zeroes in the denominator! And that's just for one small gene! Before you tell me I'm wrong, go put an actual pencil to actual paper and do some basic arithmetic.

BB:
1) Although I did read your linked article, I was responding to the body of your comment which did not mention the gene. So are you saying that your calculation works on the basis that for evolution to work, a complete gene must be spontaneously generated in one shot?

Evolution holds that small alterations (perhaps to a gene, perhaps in between them...) may produce small benefits to the phenotype. When I say natural selection is aggressive, I mean that it amplifies small benefits. You don't need to have fully developed feathers to enjoy the incremental benefits of warmth and camoflage along the way as they develop. And, in a world where the fully optomised modern version of a feather does not exist, there is no competition in that niche, and the relatively poor prototype feathers are state-of-the-art, world-beating innovations.

2) You have ignored the b) clause of my statement. The way to overcome the exponential genome-space is by allowing accumulation. Put down your wide-display calculator for a second and think about it. I thought Mike S. had some very pertinent remarks concerning using the gene as the unit of meaningful expression in the comment section of your blog article. It's altogether not reasonable to demand that evolution provide a complete gene in a single mutation.

mauyr: There are several problem with slow, incremental, evolution. Here are some of the big ones:

1. That's not what we see in the fossil record, and that's why the switch from slow evolution to fast is such a big deal. Also why I said that PE is such a weak theory.

2. Slow evolution makes sense if we pretend that we don't know much about slow vs fast mutations. But we do. We have millennia of information on the subject. And we know that gradual changes in a species, just like mutations, occur very often in some dimensions and practically never in others. Slow evolution only makes sense if we confuse the two.

3. Accumulation only works if we believe that every step along the way has some advantage over its predecessor. And that's fine if you're talking about changes along the easy dimensions, but it defies my imagination for the big changes, and those are where the dispute lies. Remember, a major point of slow evolution is to overcome the improbability problem. But then the theory requires us to imagine wildly improbable things, such as pre-wings that just happen to function as blankets, and just happen to appear in a species that can make use of wings and blankets. And we have to imagine these incredible coincidences of utility occurring over and over again.

4. Part of slow evolution's appeal is that it nearly makes sense if you start by imagining a super-powerful selection mechanism: "The selection mechanism sees something that kinda looks like a wing, and it preserves it because it might eventually turn into a wing." But that only makes sense if the mechanism already knows what a wing looks like and how it should function.

I spent a long time discussing all this by email with Mike S, who is a professional biochemist. We didn't persuade each other, but we did refine the issues. As I recall, by the time we were tired of talking about it, there were no more questions of fact. I wasn't going to argue genetics with a biochemist. But I did argue the interpretation of the facts.

To oversimplify, Mike said, "We can observe it and predict it to some extent, therefore we understand it." I responded, "We don't understand it until we can model it in the abstract, such as on a computer."

It's like asking whether we understand why the stars and planets move across the sky as they do. Scientists collected measurements for centuries, and some no doubt thought that those observations entitled them to claim understanding. Then somebody tried thinking in terms of spheres spinning through frictionless space and attracting each other with a force inverse to the square of the distance. And then we really understood.

With genetics we have lots of observations, and we can spot some patterns in those observations. What we don't yet have is the underlying principles that will unify the data. Yet the public believes that we have those principles, and that's the deception to which I object.

1) Punctuated equilibrium does not oppose gradualism -- it is a form of gradualism. As Stephen Gould (co-author of the original 1972 PE paper) remarked later in the journal Natural History

"Most of our paleontological colleagues missed this insight because they had not studied evolutionary theory and either did not know about allopatric speciation or had not considered its translation to geological time. Our evolutionary colleagues also failed to grasp the implication, primarily because they did not think at geological scales."

While the fossil record may show a "sudden" phenotype transition, the actual time for the transition might be of the order of 100000 years, or 10000 generations.

In other words, evolution still happens slowly, gradually and incrementally; it just doesn't happen steadily.

2) We don't have millenia of genotype information; we have millenia of phenotype information. Can you point me to articles about the slow vs fast mutations please?

3) "Accumulation only works if we believe that every step along the way has some advantage over its predecessor."
This is exactly the theory I'm defending.
"And we have to imagine these incredible coincidences of utility occurring over and over again."
Well it should be easy to present an impossible example, but no-one yet has. Blood clotting, the eye, bacterial flagella: all these are proposed by Behe as examples of irreducible complexity but are, when scrutinised, perfectly capable of being reduced.

4) This is a red herring, no modern evolutionist invokes this sort of magic. Refer to 3). This is where it's at.

That's quite a subtle argument about the nature of understanding there, but I'm not sure that modelling on a computer is a qualitatively different from just being able to predict somewhat.
If the ancients had modern computers and could have thrown hardware at their models of the heavens, they could have predicted a lot more, but without the insight of gravity.
For an idea to be properly insightful, I think it has to be simple.

To me, the theory of evolution has the simple enough to be insightful... now it just needs to be accurate! But you're never going to get astronomical style predictions with this kind of chaotic system, as you remarked earlier. The evidence we do have all points towards natural selection. If life has been directly guided by some intelligence, it chose an odd way to go about its business.

I remembered just now the falsification method offered by Darwin himself within Origin: he said that if you can find a species with a characteristic that exists purely for the benefit of an unrelated species, with no benefit to the species itself, that would be evidence of design, or at least some other force than natural selection.