23Dec 2019 by Post

Alles Klar? Jerry Coyne on an “Argument from Incredulity”

Alex Kacelnik, archerfish, argument from incredulity, Evolution, guesses, inferences, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, larval wasp, Life Sciences, nature video, Popular Science Monthly, Stefan Schuster, University of Oxford, Why Evolution Is True
If you look at Jerry Coyne’s blog Why Evolution Is True from over the past weekend, you will find his rebuttal to what Coyne calls an argument from incredulity. He comments, “You will recognize this argument as the basis for Intelligent Design.” We have taken Coyne’s rebuttal, deleted the inessentials, and placed in bold all of the inferential steps, credulous guesses, and other leaps of imagination. It is astonishing that anyone would think the result a scientific argument, or, even, an argument at all. From “A creationist writes in espousing the Argument from Incredulity,” suitably modified: Let’s take the larval wasp…The way to address the incredulity argument is to postulate a plausible step-by-step process in which each step is adaptive…. In the case of the wasp, all that is required is that…
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04Dec 2019 by Post

No Harm, No Foul — What If Darwinism Were Excised from Biology?

Adam C. Soloff, Amir Marcovitz, appendectomy, bacteria, bats, behavior, cephalectomy, Daphne Major island, Darwin Devolves, Darwin's Finches, Darwinism, Darwinspeak, dolphins, echolocation, Evolution, Galápagos Islands, Hippocratic Oath, homeostasis, Illustra Media, Immune System, introgressive hybridization, Jerry Coyne, Marcos Eberlin, Michael Behe, Michael T. Lotze, Peter and Rosemary Grant, pharynx, Philip Skell, phylogeny, PNAS, primum non nocere, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Richard Dawkins, sound generation, tonsillectomy, turtles, whales
Some biologists might shudder at the thought of eliminating Darwinism from their scientific work. A “Darwin-ectomy” sounds more painful than a tonsillectomy or appendectomy. To hard-core evolutionists, it might sound like a cephalectomy (removal of the head)! If Darwinism is as essential to biology as Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne argues, then removing evolutionary words and concepts should make research incomprehensible.  If, on the other hand, Darwinism is more of a “narrative gloss” applied to the conclusions after the scientific work is done, as the late Philip Skell observed, then biology would survive the operation just fine. It might even be healthier, slimmed down after disposing of unnecessary philosophical baggage. Here are some recent scientific papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to use as test…
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