How Religion Distorts Science

2010.06.21   prev     next

    [ID people are] dishonest. They’re grossly dishonest about this stuff. That’s not really where they’re coming from. When they say this stuff, they say, “Oh, we’re taking an objective view. We’re taking a secular view of the universe in saying that there’s a designer behind it.” They’re misleading you. That’s not where they come from. Where they come from is typically a very religious background. What intelligent design is, is taking their religious beliefs, sanitizing them of any mention of God, and presenting them in this cleaned up format. The sole premise, the sole impetus for doing this stuff is their belief in God.
    There are some of the people in the intelligent design movement who are incredibly nasty, awful, and misrepresent science in ways that I cannot forgive. At the same time, when you get to know them, when you talk to them, they’re generally nice people. They’re your neighbors. They’re ordinary people. So I would say, right off the bat, no, this is not about demonizing the individuals. It’s about demonizing really, really bad ideas.
—PZ Myers

    Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It’s like, it’s very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You’re just not gonna get the right answer. Your whole world is just gonna be — a mystery. Instead of an exciting place.
    As my old professor Carl Sagan said, when you’re in love, you wanna tell the world. So, once in a while I get people that really, or that claim, they don’t believe in evolution. And my response, generally, is, why not? Really, why not. Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don’t believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones, or fossils. Here’s, uh, radioactivity. Here are distant stars that are just like our star, but they’re at a different point in their life cycle. The idea of deep time, of this, billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your worldview just becomes — crazy. It’s just — untenable. Self-inconsistent.
    And I say to the grown-ups, if you wanna deny evolution, and live in your, in your, uh, world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it. ’Cause we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can, uh — we need engineers, that can build stuff, solve problems. ... [I]n another couple centuries, that worldview I’m sure will be — it just won’t exist.
—Bill Nye

ABOUT three years ago, the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington published a paper by Stephen C. Meyer in which he detailed studies that show that amino acid sequences that fold up into predictable, stable, three-dimensional shapes live on extremely isolated islands in amino acid sequence space. This means that for a natural process to turn some small set of ancestral proteins into the vast array of proteins we see in biology today, it would have to rely on pure chance to get from one amino-acid-sequence island to another. And the odds against this easily can be shown to be far beyond anything our universe is scientifically reasonably likely to provide, even if all the matter in the universe was dedicated to producing random amino-acid chains, and had been doing so for the entire 15-billion-year life of our universe, and if producing any stable protein even once would immediately conscript that protein into use in a functional biology. This conclusion is strongly reinforced by more recent work of Douglas Axe (one of the researchers cited in Meyer’s paper).

Since a substantial percentage of the kinds of proteins in our bodies are related to functions for which single-celled life would have no use, this is not simply an origin-of-life issue — it’s an origin-of-recent-adaptations issue. Nor is this a minor data point against Darwinian evolution. It’s a huge and complete failure of the theory to be applicable at all to the life we empirically study in this world. Declaring Darwinism falsified in the face of this evidence is not committing the fallacy of “falsificationism.” This issue cuts to the very heart of how Darwinian evolution is supposed to work, and shows it to be clearly impossible.

So how can the bulk of the science community so glibly ignore or dismiss this discovery, and continue to teach Darwinism as a strong, scientifically proven fact? Why would they, upon reading Meyer’s paper, bring such a firestorm of protest against the Biological Society of Washington that it would subsequently renounce its own publication of that paper?

Perspective

Throughout the 1800s and 1900s (and still, though perhaps to a lesser extent, today), almost all scientists were raised in religion — simply because most people were raised in religion. And they believed it, to some degree or another, until they went to a university and discovered that their religion wasn’t true. Then they graduated and became scientists.

These scientists’ vision and interpretation of the world is deeply colored by their life experience. To them, any idea that life was deliberately designed, that individual species were genetically engineered by entities perhaps outside our universe, is simply intolerable. Such ideas are always interpreted by these persons as a giant step away from science, a huge plunge backward into the pre-scientific, religious phase of their early lives. And so any evidence against Darwin — no matter how utterly devastating to his idea that evidence might be — must be rejected, period. To these people, there is simply no other acceptable option. To them, science simply is the realization that Darwin was right.

When I look at my own experience, and ask myself how I am able to come to an anti-religious, anti-evolutionist position, I see that it’s a combination of these factors:

• I was raised in a religious vacuum (my parents talked about religion as little as possible), so I neither feel uncomfortable with the idea that all organized religion is made up, nor do I feel the need to reject any particular ideas which religions hold dear.
• I mostly avoided the professorial authority system of higher education, and instead read freely of whatever grabbed my interest, so I don’t feel obligated toward, nor intimidated by, the entrenched schools of thought in academia.
• The particular formative experiences and disappointments of my life have generated an individual who doesn’t give a flying fuck what other people think of his opinion — so if anti-religious anti-Darwinism alienates me from 99.99% of intelligent people, so what?

Our formative experiences shape our belief system in ways that only the most brutally honest among us can even glimpse.

Darwin famously predicted that “religion is doomed.” Here’s my prediction: Darwin was probably right that religion is doomed, although it will take a lot longer, and involve a lot more discovery (and a very different take on that discovery), than he imagined it would. But when religion, as a prominent social phenomenon, truly succumbs to that doom — then Darwinism is doomed. Religion is what’s keeping Darwin alive.

Update 2010.07.02 — amino acid intro added; other minor revisions

Update 2011.06.11 — Myers quote added

Update 2011.09.12 — More information about functional constraints on amino acid sequences.

Update 2012.08.28 — Nye quote added

See also:
Everything You Need To Know About Haldane’s Dilemma
&
Mosaics
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How Religion Distorts Science
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Antecessor Hypotheticum
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Zooman Science

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