Does Dr. Niles Eldredge Believe in Darwinian Evolution?
JUNE 12, 2011 2:50 AM
Dr. Robert Shapiro, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at NYU, (and self-declared agnostic) is one of the most outspoken critics of modern-day Origin of Life research. In fact he was unofficially dubbed “Dr. No,” by his students for his repeated criticisms of what he called the “deeply flawed” approach of many scientists as they search for a purely naturalistic origin of life. When asked for his reaction to a widely touted experimental “breakthrough” by a British researcher he was quoted as saying, “The flaw in this kind of research is not in the chemistry. The flaw is in the logic – that this type of experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early earth.” The particular details of that experiment are not relevant to our present discussion. What is relevant is the above highlighted phrase, and I ask the reader to contemplate its import and let it percolate through your brain. “The flaw is in the logic.”
Many laypeople in our times view scientists as sort of demi-gods. Dr. Niles Eldredge, a distinguished scientist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, put it this way, “Many scientists really do seem to believe that they have a special access to the truth. They call press conferences to trumpet new discoveries…and they expect to be believed – by their peers, and especially by the public at large. Throwing down scientific thunderbolts from Olympian heights, scientists come across as authoritarian truth givers, whose word must be taken unquestioned.” Speaking as a highly accomplished scientist himself, he unceremoniously shatters this misleading façade: “That all the evidence shows the behavior of scientists to be no different from the ways in which other people behave is somehow overlooked in all this.”
Simply put, they are subject to the same foibles as all other human beings. Some scientists are petty, underhanded, lustful, manipulative, and envious, while others may have developed sterling quality of character. And yes, a brilliant scientist can conduct a complex experiment calling on all his vast knowledge and skill, and then proceed to draw faulty conclusions, not due to a failure of his science, but due to a failure in his logic. Please focus on this crucial distinction. Logic is not science. Logic is a commodity which cannot be hoarded or monopolized by any particular occupation or profession. Logic is an intellectual tool available equally to both scientist and non-scientist. If the issue at hand is not a question of scientific data or knowledge itself, but a logical comparison, deduction, or conclusion involving scientific data or knowledge, scientific credentials are for the most part irrelevant. At that juncture, the scientist, historian, plumber, and taxi-driver are all on equal footing, provided their logic is sound. No one made the point better than Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, indisputably a genius of the highest order and one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century: “I believe that a scientist looking at non-scientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.”
It is my contention that many of the hottest areas of dispute in the so called “battle” between science and religion have relatively little to do with the actual science involved. They are to a great extentproblems of logic. We will now focus on Niles Eldredge himself. In his foreword to Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction (by Dr. Eugenie Scott), Eldredge states that there are two grand predictions made by evolutionary theory and that by experimentation and observation one can see these predictions confirmed:
What predictions arise from the notion of evolution – that is, the idea that all organisms present on earth are descended from a single common ancestor? There are two major predictions of what life should look like if evolution has happened…(1) more closely related organisms will share more similarities with each other than with more remotely related kin; rats and mice will be more similar to each other than they are to squirrels; but rats and mice and squirrels (united as rodents) share more similarities than any of them share with cats. In the end there should be a single nested set of similarities linking up all of life.
He then goes on to explain that this prediction has been borne out in the world of nature:
“This is exactly what systematic biologists and paleontologists find as they probe the patterns of similarities held among organisms – in effect, testing over and over again this grand prediction of evolution. Rats, squirrels, and mice share many similarities – but with all animals…they share a common organization of their cells. They share even with the simplest bacteria…the molecule RNA [and]DNA.”
On the surface it sounds quite reasonable. As life moved forward in its evolutionary journey from the first common ancestor, organisms on the same evolutionary branches will resemble each other more closely than those on divergent branches. It is a rather simple task to test this prediction. All we have to do is find those living things that are closely related and see if they share more similarities than with more distantly related organisms. But you may ask: How do we know which species are more closely related in order to test out the level of similarity? Eldredge has already given us the answer, “Rats and mice will be more similar to each other than they are to squirrels, but rats, mice, and squirrels (united as rodents) share more similarities than any of them share with cats.” This logic is so thoroughly and fatally flawed that it never even sees the light of day. Rats, mice, and squirrels, which are all closely related, are very similar to each other. And how did we know that rats, mice, and squirrels are closely related in the first place so that we could test out if they share similarities? We know they are related,because they are very similar to each other. In order to test his prediction, Eldredge has presupposed the truth of what he is testing for.
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