Darwin on Trial

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The cover of the book shows Charles Darwin

Darwin on Trial (ISBN 0-8308-1324-1) is a controversial 1991 book by the University of California, Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson. A neo-creationist polemic, Darwin on Trial is considered to be part of the central canon of the intelligent design movement, of which Johnson is considered "the father."

1 Introduction
2 Overview
3 Criticisms
4 Trivia
5 External links
- 5.1 Critical reviews
- 5.2 Johnson's writings

[edit] Introduction

Johnson, an evangelical Christian and "an academic lawyer with a specialty in analyzing the logic of arguments and identifying the assumptions that lie behind those arguments," had come to believe that the scientific theory of evolution was based on materialistic assumptions and empty rhetoric. In Darwin on Trial, he evaluates the evidence for evolution by natural selection using legal principles for assessing its probative value, and examines what he sees as the philosophical presuppositions of the scientific community.

Johnson states that he has no interest in discussing the Biblical account of creation in Genesis. Rather, the focus of the book is to examine whether evolutionary biologists have proven their case using evidence evaluated with an "open mind and impartially", that is, whether there is convincing evidence that the variety of life on earth came about through the purely material processes of natural selection. He suggests that they have not, that there are serious evidentiary holes in the theory, and that their conclusions are driven mainly by their prior assumptions and "faith" that there must be a naturalistic explanation for everything.

The book was initially ignored by the scientific community, but was ultimately reviewed, and panned, by Stephen Jay Gould in Scientific American. Johnson did earn the respect of physicist, and outspoken atheist, Steven Weinberg who, in his book Dreams of a Final Theory, calls him "the most respectable academic critic of evolution" (1992, p. 247).

[edit] Overview

Johnson, begins by recounting Edwards v. Aguillard, a US Supreme Court case regarding a Louisiana law requiring the teaching of "creation-science"; the law was ruled an "establishment of religion". While not an advocate of creation-science, Johnson states that an associated amicus curiae brief by the National Academy of Sciences improperly "defined 'science' in such a way that [it was impossible to] dispute the claims of the scientific establishment" and a rule it proposed against "negative argumentation [eliminated] the possibility that science has not discovered how complex organisms could have developed." He denigrates what he terms a common practice of proponents of evolution—the minimizing of any questions about evolution in response to criticism of the theory.

Next, the topic of natural selection is explored. Johnson points to Charles Darwin's heavy reliance on an analogy with artificial selection, which he says is misleading: Whereas natural selection is held to occur due to undirected, purposeless forces, the efficacy of artificial selection depends on the "intelligence and specialized knowledge" of breeders; moreover, when "domesticated animals return to the wild, [they] perish [or] revert to the original type" and "there are definite limits to the amount of variation that even the most highly skilled breeders can achieve."

He then considers and criticizes natural selection in various forms:

As a tautology: "those organisms that leave the most offspring, leave the most offspring." He cites statements by J.B.S. Haldane, Ernst Mayr, and George Gaylord Simpson, all prominent proponents of Darwinian evolution, that recognized and promoted the tautology before it was criticized by Karl Popper and subsequently deprecated due to its use by creationists against evolution.
As a deductive argument: If there are reproducing organisms, and offspring vary, and the variation can be inherited, and some variations are advantageous for survival, and competition exists, and overpopulation exists, then organisms will improve. He states that since many organisms do not change for millions of years there is something wrong with the argument; moreover, improvement is only in success at reproduction and "does not mean improvement as humans measure it."
As a scientific hypothesis: Natural selection is a proposition that has been throroughly tested and confirmed by the evidence; Johnson recounts evidence gathered by Douglas Futuyma, from the development in bacteria of resistance to antibiotics to the observed differential survival of darker moths due to the environmental effects of industrial smoke. He states that these are merely instances of "local fluctuations of genotypes," and extrapolation to macroevolution or even permanent microevolution is unwarranted.
As a philosophical necessity: Complexity exists; science is characterized by naturalistic explanations; natural selection is the only respectable naturalistic explanation of complexity; therefore, natural selection must be true. Johnson disparages "subsidiary concepts" of evolutionary theory such as group selection, kinship selection, and pleiotropy, which he says are "so flexible that in combination they make it difficult to conceive of a way to test the claims of Darwinism empirically," and sexual selection, of which he asks, why would an "uncaring mechanical process" (natural selection) "produce a species whose females lust for males with life-threatening decorations?"

In considering the question of saltation, Johnson anticipates the concept of "irreducible complexity", stating "many organs require an intricate combination of complex parts to perform their functions", and asking how they can be constructed (in the words of Darwin) by "infinitesimally small inherited variations, each profitable to the preserved being." He theorizes that it is necessary to posit "a chance mutation that provides this complex capacity all at once," something that would violate Darwinian evolution due to its extreme improbability. He recalls the case of Richard Goldschmidt, a geneticist at UC Berkeley, who questioned whether many features of modern organisms had feasible gradualistic explanations, and subsequently met with "savage ridicule" by neo-Darwinists. He also recalls mathematician D.S. Ulam whose calculations implied that there has not been enough time to accommodate evolution that is held to have occurred, and the neo-Darwinists Peter Medawar, C.H. Waddington, and Ernst Mayr who replied that, since evolution had in fact occurred, there must be something wrong with the calculations.

The fossil record is then considered, and Johnson states that stasis is the norm and not the exception, and that this explains why Darwin wrote (in The Origin of Species) that "all the most eminent paleontolgists [and] geologists [have] maintained the immutability of species." (Darwin appealed to the imperfection of the fossil record to support his gradualistic theory.) Johnson then quotes a 1981 statement by David Raup, "one of the world's most respected paleontologists," in which he claims that, "we actually may have fewer examples of smooth transitions than we did in Darwin's time [due to invalidation of some of them]." He also relays the claims of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould that prior to the introduction of their theory of punctuated equilibrium, evidence of stasis was generally ignored by most paleontologists as nonevidence; He disparages that theory as "making the process of change inherently invisible."

Next, Johnson focuses on the "vertebrate sequence"—the theorized evolutionary sequence from fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals, and also from reptiles to birds, and from apes to humans. He maintains that if "the evidence [is] evaluated independently of any assumptions about the truth of the theory [of evolution]," fossils identified by proponents of evolution as transitional forms do not match well with what one would a priori hypothesize, and are thus instances of imaginatively seeing what is looked for.

Johnson then considers molecular evidence, which he says does not agree with what proponents of evolution had expected to find. Johnson points to the molecular equidistance of cytochrome c of many complex organisms (ranging from rabbits to sunflowers) relative to the cytochrome c of bacteria. He scrutinizes Motoo Kimura's neutral theory of molecular evolution, intended to account for the molecular equidistance, and concludes that it "is merely another attempt to rescue the natural selection hypothesis from potential falsification by redefining it as a tautology." Johnson holds the discovery that "molecules themselves are pieces of intricate machinery that require the cooperation of numerous complex parts" to also be problematic for Darwinian explanation; he highlights the lack of any Darwinian theory that feasibly explains the origin of life.

Definitions of science that identify it with naturalism are then taken to task. Johnson argues that such definitions amount to a prior philosophical commitment, and that this conflicts with the hallmark of science, empiricism, because "no one has evidence that [natural selection] can accomplish anything remotely resembling the creative acts Darwinists attribute to it."

As the book nears its conclusion, Johnson calls Darwinian evolution "an imaginative story ... a creation myth" and states that "practically all the most prominent Darwinist writers have tried their hand at [basing a religion or ethical system upon it]." He also provides examples of the expression by some scientists of doubts regarding the scientific validity of Darwinian evolution being suppressed by the British Museum of Natural History and the scientific journal Nature. Lastly, Johnson implies that Darwinian evolution is pseudoscience because it "[searches] the world for confirming examples, which can always be found," but does not make "risky predictions which exclude most possible outcomes."

[edit] Criticisms

Critics suggest that Johnson is neither impartial nor open-minded. Evolution is accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community, including many theists who regard intelligent design as pseudoscience. They argue that Johnson reiterates many creationist arguments that are simply false, uses a god of the gaps argument, relies on equivocation, presents straw man version of mainstream scientific thought, and generally uses typical lawyers' "tricks" of argumentation.

In his review in the July 1992 issue of Scientific American, Stephen Jay Gould, whose writings are quoted frequently in the book, complained that the book does not fully cite sources and employs poor chapter transitions; held up Theodosius Dobzhansky as a counterexample to Johnson's assertion that naturalism undergirds Darwinism; criticized Johnson's decision to include recombination as a form of mutation and his assessment of sexual selection as a relatively minor component of Darwinian theory in the late twentieth century; pointed out an error in the use of the term "polyploidy"; stated that Johnson incorrectly refers to Otto Schindewolf as a saltationist, "attacks" outdated statements of Simpson and Mayr, and fails to point out that Henry Fairfield Osborn corrected his own mistake regarding Nebraska Man; and stated that Johnson overlooks "self-organizing properties of molecules and other physical systems" that, in Gould's opinion, makes the self-assembly of RNA or DNA plausible. Also, in contrast to Johnson's positions in the book, Gould states that Darwinism's bringing together of "widely disparate information under a uniquely consistent explanation" implies that it is a successful theory, that amphibians have features that imply a "fishy past", and that the genealogical tree of Therapsida is a convincing example of macroevolution.

In an epilogue to the second edition of the book, Johnson denounces Gould's review as a "hatchet job" that did not accurately describe the book, and an "attempt to distract attention from the main line of argument" that the Darwinian theory evolution is an idea that is driven by a prior commitment to naturalism. In "research notes" in the second edition, Johnson provides answers to most of Gould's criticisms, but acknowledges that his use of "polyploidy" was indeed incorrect, the error having been missed by his "diligent scientific consultants"; it is corrected in the text.

[edit] Trivia

The term "intelligent design" is used on pages 17, 119, 146, and 204 in the second (1993) edition. On page 204 he refers to its prior use in Of Pandas and People.