A Word to the Wise — September 29th, 2010 by Douglas Axe
I was among the speakers at an event held at Southern Methodist University last week [1]. The purpose was to give students and others a glimpse of the growing scientific case against Darwin’s theory, so the talks were tailored to a non-technical audience.
Faculty members were welcome too, of course, and I’m told that a few were in attendance. Attesting to this, their denouncements began surfacing online shortly afterward [2]. It’s all very familiar. When you persist in challenging a cherished tradition like Darwinism, you come to expect this kind of reaction.
Some people are bothered by the craziness that surrounds the Darwin-v-Design controversy, but I take a more relaxed view. Don’t get me wrong. If I thought there were nothing but craziness, I’d be as frustrated as anyone. But serious science is being done on both sides of the debate, and that should give us confidence that a truer picture of biology will become visible as the smoke clears.
SMU biologist John Wise does serious science, some of it clearly bearing on the debate by advancing our understanding of the relationship between protein sequences and their functions (e.g., [3]). But he has generated some smoke as well in his denouncement of the SMU event [4].
If Wise has a legitimate complaint, it can’t be the mere fact that I and others have communicated to a general audience. It must instead be that we have distorted the science in the process. Should that prove to be true, we would of course want to acknowledge and correct the errors. But the tone of Wise’s response and the speed with which it was posted (within 48 hours of the event) suggest that Wise himself may have been less than careful with the science.
I’ll highlight one example—a particularly dense puff of smoke—and let you make the call. After claiming that I “discounted microevolution of drug resistance as non-adaptive and ‘detrimental to the organism’ in which it occurs,” Wise concludes [4]:
This is simply an irresponsible position to hold. If all scientists held such a position, thousands if not millions of people will die.
Hmmmmm.
Perhaps he is referring to comments I made during the Q&A period. I briefly described how bacteria can evolve resistance to an antibiotic called rifampicin by acquiring a single mutation that changes RNA polymerase, the essential molecular machine that transcribes their genes. Without the mutation the antibiotic jams the machine, causing transcription to grind to a halt. The mutation works by changing the shape of the machine at the critical spot where the antibiotic binds, which prevents the jamming.
It’s a great survival trick for the bacteria, but it does come at a cost. In other words, although it is adaptive in the presence of rifampicin, it is non-adaptive overall. Since Wise works on drug resistance proteins, I assume he is fully aware of this. I assume he would not be shocked to come across papers with titles like, “Biological cost of rifampin resistance from the perspective of Staphylococcus aureus” [5]. I assume he knows that the mutations that confer rifampicin resistance tend to be lost after the antibiotic is removed, and I have to assume that he also knows why this is so—that the mutations impair the ability of RNA polymerase to do its job, slightly but significantly.
And yet if he does know these things to be true, it’s difficult to imagine how he came to the bizarre conclusion that acknowledging them to be true is dangerously irresponsible. Again, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I have to assume that he doesn’t actually believe what he wrote. I assume he wrote in haste because he felt that a rebuttal was urgently needed.
But hasty, defensive responses won’t help Darwin’s theory. What it really needs is scientists who have enough confidence in it to welcome critical scientific scrutiny and respond to that scrutiny in kind. The scientific reasoning behind my claim that the Darwinian mechanism can’t explain the origin of protein folds, for example, has been published in peer-reviewed science journals [6-8]. So if Wise or any other scientist has anything to say in response, let them take their time to say it in a serious way.
If they do, they will certainly get a respectful hearing. At the same time they will show that Darwinism can still be defended the way scientific theories ought to be defended. As things stand now, though, you can hardly blame people for wondering how many Darwinists really believe it can.
[1] http://www.darwinsdilemma.org/smu/
[2] http://www.smudailycampus.com/
[3] doi:10.1128/JB.185.2.475-481.2003
[4] http://faculty.smu.edu/jwise/
[5] doi:10.1128/AAC.46.11.3381-3385.2002
[6] doi:10.1006/jmbi.2000.3997