Should BioLogos produce science textbooks for college use?

Faith & Science Conversation
21

After reading many of your comments on these threads, I’m curious: Do you think it likely that disability-adaptive engineering technologists like Dr. Saito are unaware of what you just explained? Do you think he has put hundreds of hours into tools for the disabled which are entirely unnecessary? I ask because I have wondered if you also think it likely that the theologians and scientists who disagree with your viewpoints on these various topics are unaware of the published scholarship and scientific evidence.

Could you perhaps explain more of where you are coming from in this regard. My questions are sincere. I’m not trying to make some dogmatic statement veiled as a question. Rather, I have great interest in how we as Homo sapiens reach our conclusions, deal with disagreement within our communities, and what it takes to change our positions. (Ever since it was posed by a colleague, I have often pondered what I would do if I could visit myself in the past by means of a time machine. How would I convince the me of a half century ago to consider my present views on theology and science? Is there any shortcut to 50 years of learning in the relevant fields?)

By the way, as much as I love the ctrl+plus command for expanding the text on my screen, it falls far short of solving the impediments experienced by those of us with vision and dexterity limitations, especially those whose capabilities may change from day-to-day, even hour-by-hour. (Some days I can use a one-handed keyboard with adapted foot-pedals aided by predictive composition software----but when I’m unable to easily view disambiguation menus within the alloted space, even with using three monitors at a time, I have to rely on the intelligence of the software. Add Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, and text critical symbols, and Dr. Singh’s adaptive software algorithm’s become mind-bogglingly complex.)

As to science textbooks, I prefer them highly biased: towards the scientific method. Unfortunately, the science-denialism movement has tried to convince the general public that “Everybody has the same data. The differences come in the interpretation.” No, those who emphasize such mantras habitually IGNORE the data. And that is where the differences arise. In the academy of science, the theist, the atheist, the agnostic, and everyone else follow the evidence to very similar conclusions. If that does not happen, science is probably not the topic. If worldviews and interpretations determine the conclusion, the debate is probably on matters of philosophy and theology, not science.

23

Nope, not at all. You are the one who preached Altenberg over and over, and then I learned that Pigliucci organized the conference, maintained a blog, and wrote a book. The book is very enlightening on the bizarre involvement of pseudo-journalist Suzan Mazur in this affair.

26

I did an MA at ODU in 2001. My Buddhist department chair had us read a Don Richardson (very Evangelical dude, wrote Peace Child) article on “Do Missionaries Destroy Culture?” in a language and culture class. She argued there were good missionaries and bad missionaries and was very complimentary when it came to the Christian linguists/Bible translators she worked alongside of in Liberia. She even said she had to leave earlier than planned because she “lacked the spiritual resources” to deal with the kinds of things that she saw going on in tribal Liberia that she found “terrifying.” My very liberal sociolinguistics professor had all her classes download linguistic software from SIL because she said it was the best available and it was free and was not antagonistic or demeaning at all when I did a term project on the use of gender exclusive language in Evangelical churches. So I don’t think it’s fair to paint all of ODU with the same brush.

1 Like
27

You are correct. Not all professors at ODU in the 1970’s were that way. Regula Meier, BA, MA was both a German language professor and scientist. She had taught anatomy in Switzerland before coming to the College of William and Mary in Norfolk (ODU) in 1961. She is still a dear friend, and she always gives to me her late husband’s history books from Switzerland written in High German. I was her prodigy. I came to her in 1975 as a freshman and could speak fluent German. I also majored in the science of linguistics. Regula also asked me if we could study an article about evolution written in German and asked if it would bother me. I told her that we should read the article and I looked forward to it. My wife, Nancy, was also a professor of science at ODU. Do you know that she believes in Hugh Ross and Progressive Creationism-Non Common Ancestry? We never argue, and I say that her paradigm is as valid as mine. However, there were still some bigoted idiots there too. I know the school better than anyone here. I have a great love for it, and I am still well known on the campus after forty years. I was even offered a position as an instructor of German when I retired from my former position. I also taught German in the 1970’s there even before I finished my BA degree. I also had a cousin who was an English and History professor there too. His name was Alf Mapp, BA. He was later given an honorary doctorate there. However, there were some science professors that did not deserve the honor. Would I have gone anywhere else? No. But no institution is perfect. I know from a great deal of experience. Do we concur, Christy? Oh, I forgot to mention that I gave her Dr. Collins’ book entitled “The Language of God.” She liked it. :grinning: I was never a Young Earth Creationist. Also, Dr. Christy, you must not concur with me.

28

Bollocks! Back in 2012 I posted this link: Is there fundamental scientific disagreement about evolutionary theory? (about the pre-conference misrepresentations of the conference). I also posted this link: Altenberg 2008: What Happened? (about what the participants agreed on.) Both posts were from the blog “Rationally Speaking” by the organizer of the Altenberg conference, Prof. Massimo Pigliucci.

29

We are getting snow here in Hampton Roads, Virginia. I suppose I can mention that since has to do with weather.

30

It’s snowing in coastal Connecticut also.

32

You are moving the goalposts.

That is your option.

34

Suzan Mazur is a real nutjob. Pigliucci wrote quite a bit about her in "Nonsense on Stilts’ in his section on the Altenberg conference. She is not a good source of information.

36

You should know that creationists often quote scientists (and others) to twist their words and take them out of context. So a book full of quotations is no guarantee that it is a reliable source of information. I will post more later when I get the time.

37

I have read neither Mazur’s book nor criticism of it and I have no opinion whatever on her reliability. But the obvious answer to your last question is, “No”. Every decent lawyer, politician and historian knows that it is trivial to quote someone accurately without presenting their views reliably.

As for the subject matter, I don’t know why the Altenberg conference is such a big deal (nor why it comes up in the context of intelligent design). In an earlier post you described neo-Darwinism as being “under question”. Given your apparent definition of neo-Darwinism (e.g., it excludes genetic drift), it is under question in the same sense that the Roman Empire is under attack: it’s ancient history at this point. The borders were breached, the walls came down, the lands were conquered, and it was destroyed. The war is over and the empire is gone. Its legacy lives on, however. It has long since been replaced by multiple states – sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing – occupying the same territory and inheriting many of its views and much of its language.

I’ve been doing genetics for 16+ years, and in that time I must have heard or read easily a thousand scientific presentations that touched on evolution – in the wild, in the lab and in the genome, from evolutionary biologists, comparative genomicists, population geneticists and developmental biologists. They have dealt with epistasis, pleiotropy, facilitated variation, evolutionary capacitance, developmental programs, the neutral theory, the nearly neutral theory, horizontal gene transfer, epigenetic inheritance, endosymbiosis, the evolution of evolvability, punctuated equilibrium, multi-level selection and no doubt other things I can’t think of right now. All of these topics go beyond the simple models of neo-Darwinism, and many of them contradict the assumptions of those models. If you take neo-Darwinism to exclude all of these things, then neo-Darwinism is not merely under attack; it is long dead, because every single researcher studying evolution accepts that many of these processes occur in or affect evolution. That’s what evolutionary biology is today.

There is still plenty of disagreement about how important some of these processes and phenomena are, and about the best way(s) to understand evolution. There is also plenty of verbal sparring about whether these ideas represent a new synthesis or are merely ongoing modifications to the old synthesis.

Two things to note about the disagreements, though. First, no one is defending the old synthesis in its original form. Second, for the vast majority of evolutionary researchers, the core of the original synthesis survives. The reality of common descent, and the idea that adaptive evolution occurs through natural selection acting on random (in the biological sense) mutations, remain central to evolutionary biology, even as our understanding of the terms – common descent, natural selection and mutation – has grown much more complex. If the sin of BioLogos is that they are defending those ideas against those who reject them, then count me among the sinners. If they are actually denying genetic drift or the importance of developmental constraints, then that is a different matter. But I’ve been defending evolution online for many years, and I’ve never had occasion to introduce the Altenberg conference, and I doubt I ever will.

Personally, I’m skeptical that an extended evolutionary synthesis is possible if stops much short of the synthesis of all of biology, and that is not on the horizon. The original, neo-Darwinian synthesis worked as a synthesis because it harmonized two clear ideas in a fairly simple framework. The proposed EES, on the other hand, seems to be more a grab-gab of unrelated processes. Many of them are important, but they don’t lend themselves to a unified, simple framework. Evolutionary theory is becoming much more complex because biology is complex, and I don’t see a way to synthesize that complexity away. But I’m not an evolutionary theorist, and could easily be wrong about this. I don’t think, however, that these high level debates have much effect on most of the people actually studying evolution.

3 Likes
38

Steve, I am so glad you are here, and I am hopeful that you will continue to post here often. To understand weirdo Suzan Mazur and the bizarre story of her dealings with Massimo Pigliucci (organizer of the Altenberg Conference), you should read “Nonsense on Stilts: How to tell Science from Bunk” by Pigliucci. It’s so strange! ID likes her because she attacks standard Evolutionary Theory, etc.