Ken Miller responds to Massimo (and vice versa)

Below is a detailed response to my latest post, which Ken graciously sent me for publication here. After that, you will find a few additional notes from yours truly.

Dear Massimo,

Thanks, of course, for the very kind comments about my presentation at Brown. At your invitation, I’m writing a few comments to clarify and correct what I think are some mistaken impressions and also to point out a few areas of genuine disagreement. You wrote:

"Ken … quickly summarized the reasons why intelligent design is not science, why it is no threat to the theory of evolution, and why therefore the latter but not the former should be taught in public schools. But then he changed pace -- just like in the book -- and proposed a muddied concept of evolution as an intrinsic property of the universe, bound to produce beings like us."

Massimo, evolution is a natural process, and as such it emerges from the laws of chemistry and physics. Since you embrace naturalism as philosophy yourself (as well as science), why would you claim that this is a “muddled concept,” unless you regard scientific naturalism itself as muddled?

No, I did not argue that it was “bound to produce beings like us,” but it is obviously true that in our one and only run through natural history, evolution, in fact, did produce “beings like us.” Why? Well, neither you nor I can be sure. But the way in which evolution explores adaptive space (as evidenced by scores of examples of convergent evolution — of which you are well aware) suggests to me that intelligence would eventually have evolved somewhere, even if primates (or even vertebrates) did not. If you’d like to disagree, and argue — as creationists do — that the evolution of our species was so improbable that it could never happen again (they argue, of course, that it didn’t even happen the first time), go ahead. But in scientific terms, there is no hard support for that view. In terms of the actual experiment, we’ve got exactly one example of biological evolution, and one case of self-reflective intelligence.

You said I claimed that creationists and other evolution deniers:

"… don't want to be the result of an accident of history, from which they derive the (non-sequitur) conclusion that there would be no meaning in their life."

Sorry, but that is not what I said. What I actually said and typed on a slide was that people object to human existence being seen as a “mistake” of nature. Well, we are not “mistakes” of nature — we are features of nature, since we were brought into existence as a species by natural processes. That’s not a mistake.

"But how is this view different from intelligent design, I asked Ken?"

You’ve got to be kidding. The essence of ID is that natural processes are NOT sufficient to account for the emergence of biological complexity and new species, including our own. The core of my argument is that natural processes are FULLY sufficient to do exactly that. And you don’t see a difference? C’mom, Massimo. The difference couldn’t be greater — except, of course, for one thing, which you then reveal in your blog entry:

"... I had the distinct impression that he forcefully, and effectively, refuted Michael Behe-like arguments from 'irreducible complexity' only to look a few levels down, to the quantum world and the basic laws of physics, to find the same God that Behe (a Catholic, like Miller) is content to find at the level of biomolecules."

Ah, now we see the real problem. It’s not that you object to ID itself at all. It’s that you object to the concept of God — and therefore to you the real problem with ID is that it finds a place for God. To me, quite honestly, the real problem with ID is that it is bad science, and I had thought you agreed. But after our dinner discussion, in which you repeatedly raised objections to faith itself, rather than to my views of science, it was clear that for you the real issue is indeed religious.

"After quite a bit of engaging back and forth (at dinner) I got the following response from Ken: well, the arguments may be similar..."

No, the arguments are NOT similar at all. If they were, Massimo, then why was I so effective is dismantling Behe’s arguments at Dover?

"...but it is the intention that is different. According to him, Behe tries to prove the existence of a designer through (alleged) irreducible complexity, while Miller contents himself with deploying what he admitted to be a form of the anthropic principle to merely show that the existence of God is not logically incompatible with science. This comes perilously closed to drawing a distinction without a difference, but I do see the subtle difference (again, in intention, not argument) that Ken is attempting to make."

It’s a distinction without a difference only if your intention in countering ID is primarily motivated by resistance to religion. Then, any scientist who is religious (like about 40% of the members of AAAS) becomes a threat who must be dismissed with scorn as not a true scientist — or, worse, as a creationist whose views are no different from the sycophants of the Discovery Institute.

"Since there is no empirical way to discriminate among the three (or four) possibilities [of how our universe came to be], Ken said, he feels justified in picking the one that has more meaning for him."

No, not any more than you feel justified in rejecting the one that you object to the most — which you clearly do. Rather, I simply pointed out that to a person of faith, there is indeed a way (even if it is one among many) to understand our universe that is perfectly consistent with science. And so there is, as you yourself admit. It’s just that you feel compelled to pick one that is not compatible with faith — a choice with no greater scientific justification than mine.

You then, of course, ridicule the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus — confirming, as you did repeatedly, that your primary concern lies in rejecting faith itself. Yes, Christianity may indeed be illogical and unjustified (as you believe) — but that does not address the issue at hand, namely whether there is a way that Christians can understand our evolutionary and cosmic history that is consistent with their faith. I think there is. But by spending so much time attacking that faith instead of addressing the issue, as you did in our conversation, you essentially ceded the issue of compatibility without realizing it. I’m afraid that your further comments confirm that:

"But, I pointed out, those alternatives -- even though empirically indistinguishable (at least at the moment) -- are not, so to speak, created equal. The latter two (or three, if you include string theory) are naturalistic and they do not pose anything other than nature to be operating in the universe. The first one, on the contrary, immediately begs the question of where the designer came from, how s/he operates and what his intentions are."

Oh, but your completely naturalistic explanations beg exactly the same question — it’s just that you don’t realize it. Specifically, they beg the question of where the mechanisms that generate multiverses or define the rules of string theory come from. You must either postulate another set of unknown causes, as any good naturalistic philosopher would, or chain yourself to an infinite regression of natural causes without end. The difference between us is that in scientific terms I am perfectly willing to admit that one cannot chose between these alternatives, at least today. You, however, are forced to reject one of them to confirm your own world view — and not for any scientific reason.

"…Ken presented evolution as a beautiful mechanism that produces stunningly compelling outcomes, to which I retorted that he was then facing the well known problem from evolutionary evil: natural selection is wasteful, it kills, it causes extinction, and it does so with the huge suffering of many parties involved. Isn't the designer responsible for these outcomes of his "beautiful" mechanism as well?"

This is a common — and logically flawed — argument against a creator. What you suggest is that a gracious God would have design a world in which there was no death, no pain, no suffering, no “waste,” and no extinction. Fair enough. But in that world, there would also be no room for a new species (since nothing would die to make room for it), no reason for evolutionary novelty (none of the competition that leads to natural selection), and no beauty (why produce beautiful flowers, plumage, or natural ornaments if survival is assured for every individual?). Furthermore, in the world you envision as ideal, there is no place for human courage, since there is nothing to fear, no place for virtue, since good is universal, and no reason to invent, discover, and create. Why bother to heal when there is no sickness, why help the poor and sick and disabled when they do not exist, and why face difficulties with courage when there are no such difficulties?

Like you, I do not endorse Steve Gould’s NOMA, and I made that clear. I think that science and faith have a lot to say to each other, and I made the point that any faith that cannot fully embrace science is not worth having. But (and here is where I think you completely misunderstand me and other religious scientists) that does not mean that one must then enlist — or distort — science in the service of faith. I don’t, and I would defy you to find a single example to the contrary.

Like you, I support the approach of Eugenie Scott, herself an atheist, but fully cognizant of the important role that scientists who are people of faith can and must play in the struggle for the integrity of science and science education. I would hope that you and I would stand shoulder to shoulder in that effort in the future, as we always have in the past.

You ended by quoting Feynman:

"I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion ... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith."

Respecting Feynman, whom I admire and regard as a role model for our profession, yes, there is a difference between science and faith. But the “certainty” he attributes to faith is that of an outsider who has rejected it. In reality, humility is the beginning of faith, a humility that sees the capacity to reason, from which we construct science, as a gift to be treasured and defended. A scientist like me doesn’t approach the world with certainty, as Feynman assumed, but with an understanding of the frailties and limitations of the human intellect, always imperfect, but always with the capacity to learn and strive.

Unlike you, I don’t regard my “alliance” to defend science with the likes of Eugenie Scott, Kevin Padian, Sean Carroll, Neil Shubin or other non-religious scientists as “uncomfortable.” Heck, I am very comfortable. The reason, perhaps, is paradoxically because I place rational scientific concerns above sectarian religious ones, and happily partner with anyone who values the scientific enterprise. I do very much wish that all of my secular colleagues could see things the same way. We’re going to end up going different directions on Sunday morning, but we can and should unite on the value of scientific reason. Amen.

Thanks for the opportunity to address your concerns.

Sincerely,
Ken

Additional thoughts by Massimo:

Ken does not seem to make up his mind between which version of the anthropic principle he feels comfortable with. In his response he leans toward the weak version: since we are here, obviously the laws of the universe must have been compatible with our evolution. Yes, but this is rather trivial, and it does nothing to purchase the existence of a creator of any kind. Only the stronger version of the principle does, and I reiterate that that has to be considered a form of intelligent design.

However, I do agree with Ken that there is a significant difference between his version (the designer put together the laws of the universe, science explains everything except the designer) and Behe-like arguments (science is not sufficient to explain the universe as we observe it, miracles -- in the form of the occasional direct intervention of the designer -- are necessary).

Ken's distinction between my characterization of what the creationists have a problem with (they don't want to be the result of an accident of nature) and Ken's own (they don't want to be a mistake) seems truly to be without a difference. The bottom line is that many people are deeply uncomfortable with entirely naturalistic explanations of their existence because they don't feel special enough.

As for objecting to bad science (in the guise of intelligent design creationism) vs. to faith itself, I object to both. To the first, on scientific ground; to the second on philosophical grounds. I know Ken is a religious person, so he has to reconcile his science with his faith. But that isn't the only possible approach, obviously, and -- I maintain -- it isn't the most rational either.

That said, I have repeatedly pointed out that I don't belong to the Dawkins school of vilifying scientists who are religious (nor religious people in general). I think the primary objective is the defense of sound science education, on which Ken and I obviously stand shoulder to shoulder. Criticism of religion and promotion of atheism are also important issues (to me), but they are philosophical in nature, and ought to be pursued separately from the science.

I do think, however, that Ken is on extremely shaky philosophical ground when he insists that naturalistic accounts of the origin of the universe are on the same level as deistic or theistic ones. Exactly, how is it that answering "nature" begs the same sort of question as answering "nature + an intelligent designer"? We know that nature exists and that it has laws, regardless of our limited ability to understand or explain them. To postulate an intelligent designer on top of that leads one to a whole different order of metaphysical assumptions.

As for Ken's counter to the argument from evolutionary evil, it seems to me that one has to engage in quite a bit of mental gymnastics to claim that a better universe (as in more fair and just, to reflect the Christian god's alleged traits) has to include suffering and death because otherwise there would be no evolutionary novelty or beauty. That god is all-powerful, so s/he could produce whatever beauty and novelty s/he likes without having to bring in cancer and earthquakes to make it possible.

Finally, my issue with faith doesn't have anything to do with humility or lack thereof. The problem that Feynman (and I) finds with faith is that it means that one believes in something regardless or even despite the evidence. This attitude is not only profoundly irrational (by definition), but also embodies one of the worst values we can possibly promote in our society. At the very least it leads to poor thinking, and at the worst it brings about the sort of uncritical acceptance of doctrines (religious or secular) that too often has had tragic consequences for humanity.

Why I disagree with Ken Miller

I am traveling back from Brown University (on Amtrak's Acela Express train, ah, the civilization of the Northeast!), where I participated in a panel discussion on evolution and religion together with Ed Larson (Pepperdine University, author of the Pulitzer winning Summer for the Gods on the Scopes trial), art historian Mary Bergstein (Rhode Island School for Design), and Brown's own Ken Miller, twice guest on The Colbert Report, author of a popular biology textbook and of the somewhat troublesome -- if much acclaimed -- Finding Darwin's God.

I have met Ken several times before, and I think he is one of the most effective advocates for the teaching of evolution, as well as an excellent critic of intelligent design. He is energetic, quick witted, and personally likable. Still, we have our disagreements, which were evident during the panel discussion, and which we explored further -- in the amicable spirit of inquiry -- afterwards at dinner.

Ken started his presentation with the same clear thinking and powerful impact on the audience that the first part of his book displays: he quickly summarized the reasons why intelligent design is not science, why it is no threat to the theory of evolution, and why therefore the latter but not the former should be taught in public schools. But then he changed pace -- just like in the book -- and proposed a muddied concept of evolution as an intrinsic property of the universe, bound to produce beings like us. He was trying to counter what he sees as the real crux of the problem within the context of the creationism-evolution controversy: it's not that people care about the science, it's that they don't want to be the result of an accident of history, from which they derive the (non-sequitur) conclusion that there would be no meaning in their life.

But how is this view different from intelligent design, I asked Ken? During his presentation at the panel and while reading his book I had the distinct impression that he forcefully, and effectively, refuted Michael Behe-like arguments from "irreducible complexity" only to look a few levels down, to the quantum world and the basic laws of physics, to find the same God that Behe (a Catholic, like Miller) is content to find at the level of biomolecules. (Behe's argument itself is just a new version of the old William Paley one from the early 19th century, except that Paley didn't know about bacterial flagella and looked for God in the complex structure of the human eye.)

After quite a bit of engaging back and forth (at dinner) I got the following response from Ken: well, the arguments may be similar, but it is the intention that is different. According to him, Behe tries to prove the existence of a designer through (alleged) irreducible complexity, while Miller contents himself with deploying what he admitted to be a form of the anthropic principle to merely show that the existence of God is not logically incompatible with science.

This comes perilously closed to drawing a distinction without a difference, but I do see the subtle difference (again, in intention, not argument) that Ken is attempting to make. He then proceeded to explain to me that there are essentially three ways to account for the uncanny set of physical constants that make our universe (and life in it) possible: a) it is the result of a willful creator; b) it was chance, we got lucky; c) it is just one instantiation of an infinite number of "multiverses," the multiple endlessly splitting universes that result from a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics. (There actually is at least a fourth alternative, stemming from some versions of string theory, according to which the universal constants simply had to be this way, and they are not a random sample from an infinite universe of possibilities.)

Since there is no empirical way to discriminate among the three (or four) possibilities, Ken said, he feels justified in picking the one that has more meaning for him. (How he gets Jesus, the Virgin Mary and all the rest from that, of course, is another matter. When I asked him why he believes those things rather than, say, the tales about the Olympian Gods, he replied that the latter are clearly a human-made cultural tradition. As if the Gospels or the Old Testament were in any way different.)

But, I pointed out, those alternatives -- even though empirically indistinguishable (at least at the moment) -- are not, so to speak, created equal. The latter two (or three, if you include string theory) are naturalistic and they do not pose anything other than nature to be operating in the universe. The first one, on the contrary, immediately begs the question of where the designer came from, how s/he operates and what his intentions are. (Another point of controversy during the panel was that Ken presented evolution as a beautiful mechanism that produces stunningly compelling outcomes, to which I retorted that he was then facing the well known problem from evolutionary evil: natural selection is wasteful, it kills, it causes extinction, and it does so with the huge suffering of many parties involved. Isn't the designer responsible for these outcomes of his "beautiful" mechanism as well?)

This exchange highlights how difficult it is to find a working model for a positive relationship between science and religion. As is well known to readers of this blog, I don't go for Dawkins-Hitchens-like strident atheism, though I certainly am an atheist and proud of it. I also don't go for Stephen Gould's famous "non-overlapping magisteria," which naively divides the sphere of influence of science and religion (respectively, facts and values), a philosophically untenable position (the sharpness of the fact/value distinction has been increasingly questioned in philosophy) and one that simply misses the point of the controversy (it is precisely because so many people insist in using their Bibles as science textbooks -- thereby crossing Gould's separation line -- that we have a problem).

The more I think about it, the more I agree with Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. She is an atheist, and her atheism is informed (though likely not solely determined) by her understanding of science. Yet, she knows that an all out science vs. religion war wouldn't be good for science, religion, or society (we've tried that, for hundreds of years). So I think the best that we can do is to come together with moderate religionists to further a common agenda of education and religious freedom (including the freedom to be openly atheistic). But this is an uncomfortable alliance because of the fundamental difference between the two worldviews, best summarized by physicist Richard Feynman in The Meaning of It All: "I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion ... the spirit or attitude toward the facts is different in religion from what it is in science. The uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty in faith." Amen.

Blogosphere beats peer review in the case of stealth creationist paper

Academia is notoriously resistant to change, which to some extent is a good thing. It was therefore no surprise that when Wikipedia became a phenomenon most academics scoffed at it as a passing fad, fatally flawed by its very core idea: anybody, and I mean anybody, can become a Wiki author and post new entries or edit existing ones. Surely, this will inevitably lead to chaos and complete unreliability, the critics said. But a few years ago a study of a sample of entries compared the accuracy of Wikipedia with that of the unquestionably prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica, and Wikipedia was at least as accurate, in some cases more.

Of course the "open access" model does have its limits and defects, and even Wikipedia has to maintain a certain amount of vigilance and label particular entries as contentious or unreliable if there is too much traffic and a lot of editing and counter-editing (typically concerning political issues or individual politicians). Still, from apparent chaos the system has allowed for the emergence of a reasonably reliable first-look reference source that truly exploits the power of the internet.

It seems that the next case will come from another sacred cow of academia: peer review. This is the system used by modern academics -- both in the sciences and the humanities -- to evaluate a scholarly paper before it is published, the chief gateway to insure the high quality of a publication, be it in philosophy, literary criticism, medicine, physics, or what have you. The way it usually works is that an author submits a paper for consideration to the editor of a journal in the appropriate field. The editor makes a first assessment of the manuscript and, if deemed suitable to the journal, sends it out to two or more reviewers, chosen from among people actively engaged in research and scholarship in the field addressed by the submitted paper.

A certain amount of time later (which can be irritatingly long for the authors), the reviews come back with a thumbs up or down verdict, usually accompanied by (anonymous, and sometimes nasty) comments for the authors -- so that they may revise the original manuscript and send it back to either the same journal (if so invited) or to another one. The process repeats itself until either the paper finds its way into a publication or is forever abandoned on the heap of wasted efforts.

The peer review system has its obvious advantages as a gatekeeper for academic publishing quality, but it has equally obvious drawbacks. First of all, the number of reviewers is fairly small, which means that the comments the authors receive may be reflective of the idiosyncratic views of those individuals, and may not necessarily constitute a good assessment of the general value of the paper. Second, often (though not always) the authors don't know who the reviewers are, but the converse is not true, which leads to the temptation of stabbing a rival (or a rival's student) in the back.

One can argue that the real peer review actually takes place over a period of years after the paper (or book) has been published, and it is the result of how, in the long-term, the community at large values the scholarship of the authors. Some papers and books are cited often, some become classics in their field, most are never heard of again -- which in itself is not necessarily an indication of poor quality, but may be a simple reflection of the fact that too many people publish too much.

What I will call the classic peer review system, the one that relies on a small number of editor-selected referees, however, is increasingly under challenge. In the physics community, for instance, it has been normal practice for years to post pre-publication versions of one's paper on internet servers, to get feedback from the rest of the community before formal submission. People can now refer others to these pre-prints by hyperlinks, almost as if they were actual publications, thereby blurring the distinction between formal and informal scholarship. Moreover, an increasing number of open access journals now encourages readers' comments and even rankings to be posted for each paper, occasionally allowing authors to respond and engage in an open dialogue with the community.

This is, I think, a trend that is here to stay, and that will likely completely change the meaning and practice of academic research over the next decade or so. Still, perhaps the most spectacular -- if somewhat under-reported -- case of open peer review showed how the blogosphere can be a more effective guardian of scholarship than a small number of overworked editors and reviewers.

What happened was that two people affiliated with Inje University in Korea, Mohamad Warda and Jin Han, submitted a paper to the prestigious journal Proteomics. The paper was entitled "Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence," something that should have alerted the Editor, Michael Dunn, and the reviewers that something was amiss (a proteomic paper on dualism and the question of the soul?). Warda and Han's review of the literature was meant as a criticism of the currently accepted theory that the mitochondria (the cellular organelles that are involved in the production of the energy that keeps the metabolism of the organism going) are the result of an evolutionary endosymbiotic event; in other words, that they originated from the engulfment of a bacterial cell by an ancestor of modern plants, animals and fungi.

Warda and Han wrote: "Alternatively, instead of sinking into a swamp of endless debates about the evolution of mitochondria, it is better to come up with a unified assumption. ... More logically, the points that show proteomics overlapping between different forms of life are more likely to be interpreted as a reflection of a single common fingerprint initiated by a mighty creator than relying on a single cell that is, in a doubtful way, surprisingly originating all other kinds of life."

It is difficult to make sense of the badly written phrase (no language editors at Proteomics?), but surely the reviewers should have been a bit surprised by the obviously unscientific phrase "a mighty creator." Regardless of whether one thinks that concepts like soul and divine creators make any sense at all (I don't), they surely do not belong to an ostensibly scientific paper. I am not at all suggesting that Dunn or his reviewers are intelligent design creationists: they simply missed the supernatural references, presumably because they were too busy and distracted by the mountain of very technical language surrounding that specific phrase (though how they missed the title is a bit more difficult to rationalize away).

The happy ending to the story is the result of the normal practice that Proteomics has, as do many other journals, of posting papers on their web site before they are actually printed. According to an article in the National Center for Science Education Reports, the first to note the oddity of Warda and Han's paper was Steven Salzberg, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, who blogged about it. That led to blog posts by Attila Cordas, Lars Juhl Jensen and PZ Myers, and eventually to the editor of Proteomics requesting a withdrawal of the paper by the authors, who complied.

Interestingly, the request to withdraw was not based on the creationist claim, but on the fact that the bloggers had uncovered another problem with the paper that had escaped reviewer and referees: the entire body of the article by Warda and Han had been plagiarized from other, already published, sources! Apparently, their only original contributions were writing in really awful English and references to the soul and the mighty creator.

The moral of the story is that the much maligned blogosphere ("you know, anybody can write whatever they want, and nobody's checking") in this case clearly surpassed the official, academically sanctioned system of peer review. My hunch is that this isn't going to be the last time this happens, and that we are looking at the dawn of a new era of academic practice, when papers will be scrutinized by thousands of reviewers within a matter of hours from publication. If we can harness this tremendous intellectual power in a reasonably orderly fashion, we will make the next leap toward a truly worldwide community of scholars and authors.

Second Rationally Speaking release for Kindle

Yes, yes, I'm really having fun with Amazon's Digital Text Platform. Then again, it's nice to be able to distribute one's essays in a new format and to a potentially wide audience, so bear with me, I'll get back to actual posts on the blog very soon. (However, also keep an eye for a third Kindle release coming up: I have decided to re-issue my 2000 book, Tales of the Rational, which is almost out of print in paper format.)

So, the new collection, Thinking About Science, is a set of essays on the nature of science and its sometimes fuzzy distinction from pseudoscience. These essays were originally published as a regular column in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, one of the best sources of information available on controversies surrounding pseudoscience. The column, entitled “Thinking About Science” (just like this collection) is still going at the time of this writing (early 2009), and I refer the interested reader to its future installments to follow the evolution of my own thoughts about how science works.

These essays look at science from both the point of view of a scientist and that of a philosopher. This reflects my own dual background, with original training in evolutionary biology and the later addition of philosophy of science. The two disciplines have always had a difficult relationship, ever since science originated as natural philosophy and became independent in the 17th and 18th centuries. Scientists of the time, like Galileo and Newton, thought of themselves at least in part as philosophers, and figures that we count today as philosophers, like Descartes and Bacon, thought of themselves as scientists. But today’s academy all too often relishes the division, with scientists like physicist Steven Weinberg brazenly writing essays entitled “Against Philosophy,” and philosophers like Paul Feyerabend calling for “a formal separation between science and state” to guard society from the evils of science. My columns are written instead in the spirit that science and philosophy have much to gain from each other, with philosophy providing a broad view of how science works, and even criticism of specific scientific enterprises, and science returning the favor by informing philosophical debates with the best understanding of the facts of the universe that we can achieve at any particular moment.

I hope people will enjoy the quest as much as I do, and that readers will come to value honest human intellectual endeavor both for its own sake and for the good it can do to the human condition. As David Hume aptly put it, “What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought.'”

Rationally Speaking enters the Kindle era

As some of you know, Rationally Speaking was an e-column I started writing back in 2000, which morphed into this blog by the end of 2005. The complete collection of essays from those five years is now available in electronic format for Amazon's Kindle.

The Kindle, of course, is the electronic reader that looks like a book (it uses natural light, no backlit screen), and if you don't have it you might want to consider getting one. I just did, which is why I decided to release the first volume of Rationally Speaking (implying that there will be others...) for the device. The Kindle2, which Amazon is shipping now, holds about 1,500 books, and one can subscribe to blogs, magazines and newspapers as well, usually at a much reduced price compared to the paper version -- not to mention of course the reduction in one's carbon footprint!

Pretty soon (as in the next couple of weeks) I will release a first volume of collected essays that have appeared in Skeptical Inquirer over the past few years, also in Kindle version. The most recent SI essays, as well as those I write for Philosophy Now, are always available from the sidebar of this blog.

Happy reading!

Jerry Coyne and the Extended evolutionary Synthesis

I guess it was only a matter of time before my colleague Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago lost his patience while reading one of several pieces that appeared in the press about the current and future status of evolutionary theory. After having commented negatively, in both Nature and Science, on a workshop on evolutionary theory that I organized last summer at Altenberg (Austria), Jerry has just published a blog post in which he criticizes highly respected science journalist Carl Zimmer. Zimmer’s sin is to have favorably quoted yours truly about the excitement generated by increasingly common discussions about updating the Modern Synthesis -- the current conceptual structure of evolutionary biology, dating back to the 1940s -- to what some of us have begun calling an Extended Synthesis.

Jerry praises Zimmer’s overall essay on Darwin in Time magazine, but he adds that his enjoyment was spoiled because “Zimmer seems to buy into something he calls the ‘extended evolutionary synthesis.’” I think Coyne is being a bit disingenuous here, writing as if he had never heard before of an extended synthesis and attributing the term to Zimmer. But he goes on to say: “It seems to me that a science journalist should do more than simply tell their readers that something new is in the air: a journalist should EVALUATE these new claims. If all one did was say ‘some evolutionists think ...’ and then describe their thoughts, any old claim could get press.”

Right, and I have amply criticized “journalists” who not only uncritically report competing claims but even make up stuff out of their fertile imaginations, like Suzan Mazur has most outrageously done with her inane “Scoop” series. However, talk of an Extended Synthesis isn’t “any old claim,” it is a serious discussion among credentialed scientists. Coyne, of course, most certainly has the right to disagree with his colleagues, but that doesn’t mean that the topic is not a respectable object of coverage by a professional journalist. (It is true that another skeptic of the necessity of updating the Modern Synthesis, Indiana University’s Michael Lynch, has actually compared -- in print in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- proponents of some new ideas in evolutionary biology to supporters of intelligent design creationism, but I think Jerry Coyne both knows better and has more style in his writings.)

Jerry rightly says that “It just isn’t true to say that every aspect of the Modern Synthesis is fiercely debated,” a claim he attributes to Zimmer in the Time article. Except that Zimmer was clearly writing about the extended synthesis claims, which are, in fact being fiercely debated, as Coyne’s own writings surely attest. At any rate, as Ryan Gregory (over at Genomicron) correctly states in his commentary on Coyne’s piece, “The point is that many people feel that we need to have a conversation about how well the Modern Synthesis covers [a variety of] phenomena, adding that “An extended synthesis would not involve an overthrow of current theory (hence, "extended").”

Coyne then brings up the poor old ghost of Richard Goldschmidt, the geneticist who famously criticized the Modern Synthesis while it was happening, in the 1940s. Goldschmidt, as it turns out, was wrong in his proposed solution to the problem (“hopeful monsters” and such), but he had identified a problem -- the incompleteness of the synthesis in terms of developmental biology and macroevolution -- that has characterized, on and off, evolutionary biology’s discourse ever since.

Jerry’s post continues with a list of issues he thinks are overblown: he says that nobody claimed that natural selection can completely explain species diversity (true, but my original point was that some macroevolutionary patterns are difficult to account for by simple micro-evolutionary extrapolation, as demonstrated in a series of papers by David Jablonski, also at the University of Chicago); he states that gene swapping isn’t important, especially in vertebrates (nobody claimed it is, in that group, but people are seriously reconsidering the whole idea of a “tree of life” as a result of what appears to be extensive gene swapping among today’s non-eukaryotes and early on in the history of life); and he asserts that nobody suggested that gene networks get rewired by any means other than natural selection (actually, Lynch himself has argued that a lot of genomic-level changes are not due to selection, and at any rate my original point was that network-level properties are making simple population genetic models increasingly inadequate as a full description of evolutionary change).

Jerry is “irritated” by what he calls “BIS–the Big Idea Syndrome,” where any new idea that comes about, be it modularity, evolvability, evolutionary capacitors, epigenetic inheritance, phenotypic plasticity, genetic accommodation, species selection, cis-regulatory evolution, and so on and so forth, “becomes the centerpiece of a claim that modern evolutionary theory is ripe for a revolution.” Again, nobody I know is calling for a revolution, but the above mentioned ideas and empirical evidence cannot simply be filed away as “more of the same.” Gregory’s post referred to above lists 16 new, broad empirical findings that occurred after the formulation of the Modern Synthesis, a very partial list indeed. Are these all simply variations on a theme established at the onset of the 20th century? At some point Coyne, Lynch and others need to do a bit more than just shak their heads and play armchair curmudgeon (Jerry’s word). They need to address the hundreds of papers and dozen or more books, written by a good number of respected colleagues, that have detailed why the Modern Synthesis needs updating and what this update is beginning to look like.

None of this, of course should give any comfort to creationists and their ilk (though I can’t wait to see the inane posts that will surely result from this exchange between Jerry and me!), because incompleteness and tentativeness are inherent features of scientific theories in all branches of science. Physicists have been discussing how to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics for decades, and they still don’t know what their next standard model will look like. This doesn’t mean that physics is dead; on the contrary, it is a tribute to the vitality of the scientific enterprise and to the people who passionately devote themselves to it. Jerry and I are probably wrong on some of the details of what we are saying. Time will probably show that he is much too conservative and I am much too liberal about what is needed in evolutionary theory and where it’s going to come from. But it is precisely this continuous dialectic within the scientific community that makes for eventual progress. Welcome to the excitement of science!

A brief (and certainly incomplete) guide to the literature advocating an extended evolutionary synthesis and/or making specific proposals for it:

Carroll SB (2008) EvoDevo and an Expanding Evolutionary Synthesis: a genetic theory of morphological evolution. Cell 134: 25-36.

Colegrave N and Collins S (2008) Experimental evolution and evolvability. Heredity 100: 464-470.

Gould SJ (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.

Hansen TF (2006) The evolution of genetic architecture. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 37: 123-157.

Hendrikse JLT, Parsons E and Hallgrimsson B (2007). Evolvability as the proper focus of evolutionary developmental biology. Evolution & Development 9(4): 393-401.

Jablonka E, Lamb MJ (1995) Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kirschner M, Gerhart J (2005) The plausibility of life: resolving Darwin's dilemma. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Kutschera U, Niklas KJ (2004) The modern theory of biological evolution: an expanded synthesis. Naturwissenschaften 91:255 – 276.

Love AC (2006) Evolutionary morphology and EvoDevo: hierarchy and novelty. Theory in Biosciences 124: 317-333.

Müller GB (2007) EvoDevo: extending the evolutionary synthesis. Nature Reviews Genetics 8: 943-949.

Müller GB, Newman SA eds. (2003) Origination of Organismal Form. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Odling-Smee FJ, Laland KN and Feldman MW (2003) Comments on Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Pigliucci M (2007) Do we need an extended evolutionary synthesis? Evolution 61(12): 2743-2749.

Pigliucci M (2008) Is evolvability evolvable? Nature Reviews Genetics 9: 75-82.

Robert JS (2004) Embryology, Epigenesis, and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press.

Rose MR, Oakley TH (2007) The new biology: Beyond the Modern Synthesis. Biol Direct 2:30.

Sansom R, Brandon RN eds. (2007) Integrating Evolution and Development: From theory to practice. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wagner A (2005) Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.

Wagner GP and Altenberg L (1996) Complex adaptations and the evolution of evolvability. Evolution 50: 967-976.

West-Eberhard MJ (2003) Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. Oxford, England, Oxford University Press.

What is academic freedom?

Time to put New York Times’ columnist Stanley Fish in his place, again. Fish is a rather interesting kind of animal: an academic through and through (he is, after all a professor of law at Florida International University and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and before that has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University), who nevertheless relishes harsh criticism of academia. I have taken him to task before for his comments on the “new atheism” and for his unbounded enthusiasm for much nonsense that goes under the umbrella of post-modernism and deconstructionism.

This past couple of weeks Fish has been busy attacking what he calls “academic exceptionalism,” the alleged sin of a large numbers of his own colleagues (but not, one would guess, his own) who think that “the university may pay my salary, provide me with a platform, benefits, students, an office, secretarial help and societal status, but I retain my right to act in disregard of its interests.” Let us set aside the obvious fact that both the social status and salary of academics are anything but stellar, that our platform is rather limited and usually ignored, that the students often struggle to achieve high-school level performance, the offices are on the dingy side, and the secretaries are few and overwhelmed (the benefits are, on the whole, pretty good, relatively speaking -- but that’s only because we live in a country where a huge number of people have no benefits at all).

Fish is incensed by the case of one professor Denis Rancourt, a faculty member at the University of Ottawa who started out his semester by giving top grades to all his students and gingerly proceeded to teach political activism rather than physics, for which he was actually hired. But guess what? Rancourt now faces dismissal from the school, and rightly so. Which not only shows that the system actually works despite “academic exceptionalism,” but that such a philosophy must be pretty rare indeed, because this is the first case I’ve heard of and I have never, ever, in my entire career witnessed any other claim by an academic that came even close to Rancourt’s bold idiocy. Then again, perhaps things are different at Florida International.

Fish’s underlying question is a good one: what, exactly, is academic freedom, and what are its reasonable boundaries? Fish cites a couple of outrageous court cases to argue that it is not a constitutionally-given right and that its scope should be rather limited. For instance, in US v. Doe (back in 1972) the courts rejected the claim by a researcher that his academic freedom meant that he did not have to answer questions about his research in a subpoena. I would agree: indeed, I think the results of scientific inquiry ought to be made public if the researcher or institution used even a penny of federal or state money, as is usually the case.

Then again, to argue that we should reject a concept like academic freedom simply because it’s not in the US Constitution is rather a narrow view, even on purely legal grounds. There is no Constitutional protection of journalistic sources either, and yet many in recent years have argued that there should be one (within limits), because of the good it does for society. Accordingly, several States have passed laws to that effect, and even Congress has considered the issue. Rights aren’t a God-given immutable set, they are won or lost by legal battles, legislative battles and the education of the people at large.

So what is academic freedom after all? It isn’t the caricature that Fish pretends so many academics put forth. It is certainly not a license to do whatever one wants regardless of the rules and regulations of one’s place of work. University professors are not free to insult their students (unless by “insulting” one means to present them with a view that is at odds with their metaphysical or cultural presuppositions); they cannot teach whatever they want (as the Rancourt case demonstrates); they cannot even simply refuse a direct order from the Department Chair or Dean to show up to a usually useless committee meeting, because there are administrative penalties to be reckoned with -- just like in any other job. (Contrary to popular perception, professors do have a hierarchical series of bosses, which usually include, from the bottom up: Department Chair or Head, Dean, Provost, President, and Board of Trustees; in the case of State universities, add the State Governor and Legislature. Also contrary to popular myth, professors can be fired, even if they have tenure, though the standards in the latter case are quite high.)

But academics do have an ethical duty to pursue scholarship (largely) in whatever way they see fit, with minimal interference from the university’s administration. Moreover, they should be allowed to teach their specialties within very broad educational parameters, not the far too much business-like views of so many (but of course not all) administrators. And perhaps equally importantly they should be able to address the public, as intellectuals, in whatever way and through whatever medium they deem effective (including blogs in the New York Times). The reason for this large (but not infinite) latitude is because -- as even Fish grudgingly admits -- academia is a different type of job from most others. It’s not just that the product (“education”) is hard to measure by its very nature; it is that the “clients” are not even (only) the students, but their parents (who usually pay handsomely for said education) and, more importantly, society at large. It is in society’s broad interest that we produce not only competent specialists but, ideally, citizens capable of critical thinking.

If Fish wishes to aim at a truly important target he should “think again” (the title of his blog) about university administrators who -- this time truly with a small number of exceptions -- seem to consider themselves the raison d’être for the existence of universities, which they increasingly run as a Wall Street-type business (oh boy!) or use as a trampoline for their own career and political ambitions. Administrators should be the smallest and most invisible gear of the university’s machine. They ought to work to maximize faculty’s ability to teach and do scholarship (in that order, not the usual reversed one) and of students to learn and grow. In order to do that, administrators should be invisibly busy trying to raise as much capital as possible and, well, administer it in the most efficient way possible. The reality, as anyone including Fish can easily tell you, is far from this ideal, and that is the real scandal. And by the way, exactly what did you do to improve things when you were a Dean at the University of Illinois, Prof. Fish?

What I find dangerous in writings like Fish’s (and not just these past couple of columns in the NYT) is that they represent an insane attack from within on academia, an already beleaguered institution, constantly under assault by all sorts of anti-intellectual forces. The same forces that brought us the Christian Right and George W., have made a mockery of reason and argument, and have ignored science in the pursuit of blind and destructive ideological agendas. The classical types of anti-intellectualism described by Richard Hofstadter have now been joined by extreme post-structuralism and deconstructionism, ironically themselves movements made possible by that very academia that they criticize with such gusto.

Time to take reason back from all ranks of anti-intellectualists. Time to defend rights like that of academic freedom, regardless -- or in fact precisely because -- they are not enshrined in the Constitution. Time to recognize the value of what more than a thousand years of struggle against church and government have wrestled from the clutches of power to benefit us as a society of (ideally) freethinking individuals, including Professor Fish.

Forbes on evolution and intelligent design

This is the year of Darwin (yes, yes, it’s also the year of astronomy, I know), and especially this week -- around the date of Chuck’s birth -- we are seeing a spike of events, radio and tv pieces, and printed articles. (Expect a second peak in November, for the anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species.) One of the most schizophrenic treatments of the topic surely is the one published this week by Forbes magazine. They have a number of solid pieces by recognized scientists and science writers (for instance by evo-devo researcher Sean Carroll, philosopher Michael Ruse, and writer Michael Shermer). But they also have four, I repeat four, insanely anti-intellectual articles by pro-ID writers: Ken Ham (the “CEO” of Answers in Genesis and founder of the oxymoronic Creation Museum in Kentucky), John West (the hack author of Darwin Day in America), Jonathan Wells (the infamous author of Icons of Evolution), and my colleague here at Stony Brook, Neurosurgery Vice Chairman Michael Egnor. I will ignore the first three because I have dealt with them on numerous occasions in the past, and concentrate instead on Egnor.

He begins his piece by stating that “As an undergraduate biochemistry major, I was uncomfortable with
Darwinian explanations for biological complexity. Living things certainly appeared to be designed.” That’s a bad enough reflection on undergraduate science education in the United States at the time (alas, it ain’t much better today, in this respect), but the fact that Egnor persists in such a naive way of thinking today, as a professor of neurosurgery is really a shame (for him and for Stony Brook).

Egnor goes on trotting out the same old tired creationist “objections” to evolution. The fossil record has discontinuities (yes, it does, and they have been shown over and over to be perfectly compatible with evolution, considering the time scales involved); biomolecules are so complex that they couldn’t possibly have originated naturally (an argument from ignorance, both in the philosophical sense and in the personal sense that Egnor is obviously ignorant about molecular evolution); the genetic “code” couldn’t exist without design, because only intelligent beings produce codes (an astounding example of taking a metaphor literally instead of looking at the perfectly explicable biochemistry of nucleic acids). Then Egnor proceeds by asking what he seems to think are devastating questions for “evolutionists.” Let’s take a look.

“Why do Darwinists claim that intelligent design theory isn't scientific, when both intelligent design and Darwinism are merely the affirmative and negative answers to the same scientific question: Is there evidence for teleology in biology?” This betrays Egnor’s ignorance of the nature of science. The question of teleology in biology is most certainly not a scientific question, it is a philosophical one. And “Darwinism” is not a negative answer to that question, it is a positive answer to the question of how adaptive complexity originated during the history of life on earth.

“Why do Darwinists--scientists--seek recourse in federal courts to silence criticism of their theory in public schools?” Because the issue is one of government-mandated separation of Church and State and school board-regulated criteria for what should be taught in science classrooms. The creation-evolution debate is not a scientific debate, it is a social controversy, and as such it naturally, if unfortunately, involves court challenges.

“What is it about the Darwinian understanding of biological origins that is so fragile that it will not withstand scrutiny by schoolchildren?” Are you kidding? Schoolchildren do not understand plenty of other solidly established science either. For instance, many children (and a good number of adults) seem to think of the world in terms of Aristotelian, not Newtonian (let alone relativistic) physics. Should we ban Sir Isaac from science curriculum as a result?

Egnor ends his piece with a long whine about how he has been vilified on the internet (well, join the club, dude), and how “fundamentalist atheists” have called for him to be fired. I don’t know how good a neurosurgeon Egnor is, but I assume he is good enough to have obtained his post at Stony Brook. As such, he should retain it. But if he were in my Department (Ecology & Evolution) I most certainly would call for him to be booted out immediately on the ground that he doesn’t understand the basic foundations of the science in which he is supposed to carry out scholarship and which he should be able to teach to students.

This isn’t a matter of “ostracism” or “intolerance” (rather ironic terms when they come from creationists), it is a matter of intellectual honesty. I don’t subscribe to the Dawkins-style attack on creationists (amply quoted by Egnor, of course), which he calls “ignorant, stupid, insane … or wicked.” Most creationists are none of the last three (though ignorance often does play a role. But then again, I’m just as ignorant of neurosurgery). But Egnor, Ham, Wells, West and especially the editors of Forbes should understand once and for all that evolution is to biology what relativity or quantum mechanics are to physics, what the big bang is to cosmology, or what the atomic theory is to chemistry. Evolution is a scientific fact as solid as they come, and a scientific theory as well established as any other scientific theory is. Creationism and its cousin intelligent design are primitive ideas that were reasonable enough in a pre-scientific society, but do not have a respectable place at the table of intellectual discourse anymore. It’s time to get used to it.

The end of solitude

I am intrigued and a bit puzzled by a recent essay penned by William Deresiewicz for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Deresiewicz complains about the fact that the electronic age is killing people’s appreciation for solitude. We are becoming incapable of being alone, and the proof is that everyone has a blog or a FaceBook page (oops, I've got both…). I am not going to dismiss Deresiewicz as yet another technophobe luddite, because his essay is more nuanced than that. Instead, I will comment on choice bits, hoping to engage people in a dialogue on the blessings and dangers of the electronic age.

Deresiewicz starts out with a three-way comparison among Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism (broadly intended as cultural eras), and it’s clear that the current “postmodern” climate isn’t his favorite: “if the property that grounded the self, in romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.” Well, maybe, but this seems much too sweeping a statement, and I for one certainly do not consider myself a postmodernist in any sense of the word! Still, Deresiewicz continues: “Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. … a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month.” Hmm, yes, that teenager does need her parents to restrain her a bit by buying a phone plan with a limited number of text messages allowed each month, but similar obsessive behaviors are easy to find among teenagers of any era, postmodernist or not, and usually these things gradually disappear as they enter into adulthood. I don’t know how much time teenagers of the romantic era spent writing poems to impossible lovers, but that can’t be that good for your health either, if it eats up most of your active time.

The following bit is perhaps the one where I disagree with Deresiewicz the most: “the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few … You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you.” Actually, if you can hear god at all, I suggest you need serious psychiatric treatment, and at any rate, if being alone is a spiritual experience reserved for few elected souls, then we don’t need to worry about the fact that modern technology is making it (allegedly) impossible for the masses.

Deresiewicz’s essay, as I said, is nuanced, and he does appreciate the advantages of modern technology, not just in terms of practical things, but also as far as social and personal psychological welfare are concerned. He mentions with approval the ability of minorities (say, gays) to connect with like minded people, or the ease with which we can keep in touch with friends and family who live thousands of miles away, but he still complains that the goal seems to be to just become known, to turn oneself into a “miniature celebrity” as he puts it. That is certainly one way to understand things, but perhaps what most people want is simply to communicate with others, to reach out to a larger swath of humanity, to feel like someone else is paying attention to them. Hardly the stuff that social commentators and mental health professionals should be worried about.

The really interesting part of the essay comes when Deresiewicz draws a parallel between the solitude-loneliness distinction and what he sees as the analogous idleness-boredom pair. Let’s start with the latter. Idleness is a state in which human beings can find themselves at times, say if they have the luxury of not working, or perhaps -- at the opposite extreme -- because they have been laid off from work. Deresiewicz sees idleness in romantic terms, and considers it a positive thing, a refuge from always having to be doing something. Boredom, by contrast, is a mental state that may overcome someone who is forced to be idle, and has an obviously negative connotation. The point is that idleness does not necessarily entail boredom; it can generate positive or negative emotions, depending on the circumstances and on one’s state of mind. (Full disclosure: I find myself always bored when I am idle, so I avoid the condition as if it were pestilence.)

The situation is analogous, for Deresiewicz, in the case of solitude and loneliness. He thinks that solitude is something that human beings should cherish, and that the modern equating of solitude with loneliness confuses a state of being that can be blissful with a negative emotion that it does not entail. If you spend a lot of time blogging, FaceBook-ing, texting, emailing, and so forth, then, you may be confusing loneliness with solitude, and put yourself in the situation of not being able to enjoy the latter for fear of the former.

This is, I think, a very good point, though it requires some further unpacking. I find myself in solitude for most of my day, for instance, closed in my office on campus or at home, writing papers, grant proposals, essays and books. I like it that way. I emerge during the day mostly to talk to my students and teach classes (and less productively, to go to faculty meetings and similar academic time sinks…). I do not feel lonely in the least, so I agree with Deresiewicz that there is a profound distinction between solitude and loneliness. That said, one of the reasons I don’t feel lonely is precisely because from time to time I can text my wife, skype my daughter, respond to a colleague’s email, or see what my friends in Italy or Tennessee are doing by checking their FaceBook pages. In this sense, then, a moderate use of technology is precisely what allows me to keep that distinction that Deresiewicz fears is getting lost as a result of technology.

Deresiewicz complains that “MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self.” Well, yes, but I doubt that’s a bad thing. While I also find MySpace too “loud” and hence prefer FaceBook, these are simply new tools to do precisely what the romantics used to do while writing journals and letters. The difference is that today many more people can do it, and do it in real time. Which means -- if one is inclined toward cultural optimism -- that current technology enables more people to engage in the very introspection that romantics like Deresiewicz keep lamenting as lost. By the way, I can't help noting the delicious irony that I found out about Deresiewicz’s essay because one of my “friends” posted it on FaceBook. So go ahead, blog away, and especially keep reading this blog, I’d like to get a few more hits than I did last week...

Speaking of Faith, the nonsense continues

I have commented before on one of the most annoying broadcasts from National Public Radio: Krista Tippett’s “Speaking of Faith.” Tippett is by far not the most egregious offender to rationality I can think of, and she really tries to be as open minded as possible (though remember Carl Sagan’s warning that being too open minded carries the risk of your brain falling out…). Still, perhaps because the show airs on my local NPR station on Saturday mornings and it is the first thing I hear when waking up during the weekend, I tend to be quite annoyed by it.

For instance, the January 29 show featured author Mary Doria Russell on the topic of “The Novelist as God.” Hmm, the link between being an author and being a god seems pretty tenuous (besides the obvious large ego involved), but proceed, please. According to the introductory notes by Tippett: “Our guest has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page. We discover what she discerned — in the act of creating a new universe — about God and about dilemmas of evil, doubt, and free will. The ultimate moral of any life and any event, she believes, only shows itself across generations. And so the novelist, like God, she says, paints with the brush of time.” Whatever. What really caught my attention is Russell’s invocation of cosmology and her twisting it to generate a superficially attractive but in fact entirely nonsensical metaphor regarding god.

Russell said that cosmologists think that the universe is expanding, but that eventually it will contract again, leading to an infinite cycle of expansion and contraction. This is actually not the case. The idea of the “big bang-big crunch” cycle was briefly entertained by theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking, but abandoned now that it seems clear that the universe’s expansion is actually accelerating.

But what annoyed me is not that Ms. Russell’s cosmology is out of date. After all, she is a novelist, not a cosmologist (though if you are going to talk about science on a nationally broadcasted radio show you might want to make the effort of getting the basic facts straight). It’s what she made of this alleged alternation of expansions and contractions that made me unfavorably contemplate all those who attempt to exploit the prestige of science to propagate their own metaphysical non sequiturs. You see, for Russell this cosmic cycle is nothing less than “God’s breathing”! What on earth could that possibly mean? Surely she doesn’t want to imply that god is an animal-like entity who actually breaths as part of its daily physiological functions. Besides, what would god breath, cosmic dust? And in and out of what, parallel universes?

Ok, I know, she meant this whole thing poetically and metaphorically. Right, but this is a metaphor for what, exactly? Metaphors are supposed to provide us with insight into complex matters. What sort of insight can one derive from thinking of the (false, as it turns out) expanding and contracting cycles of the universe as “God’s breath”? As for poetry, again, the best poetry isn’t made of the gratuitous juxtaposition of imagery, it is meant to let us appreciate beauty and construct meaning in life. I guess I fail to see the beauty of the idea of god’s breathing, and I certainly am not able to derive any meaning from that thought.

I’m sure Ms. Russell was a good paleoanthropologist before retiring, and is now an excellent novelist (including “The Sparrow” and “Children of God”). However, all I got last Saturday morning from listening to her and Krista chatting in my ear before breakfast was irritating fluff. Fortunately, the sound of my espresso machine soon drowned out the nonsense and I resumed my familiar quest of making sense of life rationally while enjoying what it has to offer, beginning with a nice cup of hot cappuccino.