Latest Discoveroid Research — 34 Years Old

This is breaking news about the very latest creation research from the ultra-advanced thinkers at the Discovery Institute. Okay, that lead sentence was, perhaps, a wee bit sarcastic, but we couldn’t restrain ourselves. You’ll understand when you see their latest post: Here’s What the NY Times Was Saying About Evolution in 1980.

Yes, dear reader, as their title claims, the Discoveroids have unearthed a newspaper article from 1980. This discovery is their very own Tiktaalik, and it’s presented to us by Granville Sewell. We last wrote about him when he told us about Two Darwinist Fallacies. This time he has exceeded even our low expectations, by going even lower.

Wikipedia informs us that Sewell is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” petition. He’s very keen on using the Second Law of Thermodynamics as an argument for creationism — see Discovery Institute Gives Us Their Best Argument. Additionally, there’s his Mt. Rushmore argument for intelligent design — about which we wrote Mt. Rushmore Is Designed, Therefore …. We call it the Argumentum de Rushmoro.

Let’s look at Sewell’s latest. He says, with bold font added by us for emphasis:

I recently re-read a November 5, 1980, New York Times News Service article, “Ideas on Evolution Going Through a Revolution Among Scientists,” that I had clipped long ago from a Houston newspaper. I was struck by how similar the comments about the fossil record, about micro- and macroevolution, and about the limitations of Darwinism are to things you might read, oh, right here on Evolution News & Views [the Discoveroids’ creationist blog].

Yes, it is striking how obsolete the Discoveroids’ understanding seems to be. Sewell tells us:

Sharing with students this type of mainstream scientific criticism of Darwinian theory is precisely the kind of speech that academic freedom laws seek to protect.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Okay, what’s the “mainstream scientific criticism” — from 1980! — the Discoveroids want to teach today? Most of Sewell’s post is a copy of what the Times reported 34 years ago. We haven’t verified his quoting, but here’s some of what he claims the newspaper said:

Biology’s understanding of how evolution works, which has long postulated a gradual process of Darwinian natural selection acting on genetic mutations, is undergoing its broadest and deepest revolution in nearly 50 years.

At the heart of the revolution is something that might seem a paradox. Recent discoveries have only strengthened Darwin’s epochal conclusion that all forms of life evolved from a common ancestor. Genetic analysis, for example, has shown that every organism is governed by the same genetic code controlling the same biochemical processes. At the same time, however, many studies suggest that the origin of species was not the way Darwin suggested or even the way most evolutionists thought after the 1930s and 1940s, when Darwin’s ideas were fused with the rediscovered genetics of Gregor Mendel.

What was the “paradox?” The article says that Darwin’s conclusion about common descent has been strengthened by (what were then) recent discoveries. Where’s the problem? Let’s read more about that long-ago meeting of “nearly all the leading evolutionists in paleontology, population genetics, taxonomy and related fields”:

At issue during the Chicago meeting was macroevolution, a term that is itself a matter of debate but which generally refers to the evolution of major differences, such as those separating species or larger classifications. Most agree that macroevolution is, for example, what made crustaceans different from mollusks. It is the process by which birds and mammals evolved out of reptiles. …

Darwin suggested that such major products of evolution were the results of very long periods of gradual natural selection, the mechanism that is widely accepted today as accounting for minor adaptations. … The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links.

“The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist,” declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments. Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear. There are very few examples — some say none — of one species shading gradually into another.

The fossil record doesn’t always support the idea of long, slow gradualism. That’s the Discoveroids’ hot news? But everyone knows that the 1970s and 1980s were the days when all the talk was about punctuated equilibrium (or “PE”). Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould both wrote about it.

PE is very much with us, but not everyone is impressed with the idea. Dawkins, for example, thinks it’s not a big deal. Although fossils of numerous intermediate species have been found since 1980, and will continue to be found, there seems little doubt that the fossil record sometimes does show long periods of relative stasis, followed by relatively abrupt speciation events.

But that may or may not be true for all species during those periods — that is, there could be local environmental factors (or sometimes global) changes that account for what is observed. Also, what may seem to be a lack of gradualism could be due to either the inherent imperfection of the fossil record, or to the fact that changes were occurring, but at a different location. Additionally, terms like “abrupt” must be placed in context. These things still take numerous generations to occur, and — today as in 1980 — there’s no reason to doubt that Darwin’s theory still explains the multitude of species we observe today and that have been observed in the fossil record.

So what’s Sewell’s point in dredging up a newspaper article from 1980? Is it when speciation events seem to occur “swiftly” that the magic designer — blessed be he! — was active in his workshop, churning out otherwise impossible mutations? We imagine Sewell thinks so, although he doesn’t really tell us. Disappointed? Don’t be. There’s more to the story.

Talented Discoveroid David Klinghoffer makes Sewell’s point for him in a subsequent post: Question for a Censor: Should a Teacher Be Punished for Telling Students What the New York Times Said About Evolution in 1980? Klinghoffer says:

The article from the New York Times News Service, published in 1980, documents very mainstream doubts about Darwinism from distinguished scientists, of a sort that, as Dr. Sewell points out, would be routine today here at ENV.

Notice how the slime slips in and becomes thicker and more putrid as it oozes from one Discoveroid post to the other? Sewell’s article was mostly a quote from the old newspaper. By the time Klinghoffer gets his hands on it, the Times “documents very mainstream doubts about Darwinism from distinguished scientists.”

No, it doesn’t! That 34-year old article, properly understood, shows how science is done. A theory will be tweaked from time to time, so that it is consistent with the evidence. Nothing wrong with that. There’s no sacred dogma in this business. But if the Discoveroids are now going to claim that as far back as 1980, all the mainstream scientists doubted Darwin’s theory, then … well, how shall we put it? We might as well tell the truth — the Discoveroids would be lying. Shocking, isn’t it?

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