On Scientists Using Metaphors They Don't Really Understand or Having It Both Ways At Once

I was asked to comment on the recent Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for which one of the three scientists awarded this years prize, Dr. Frances H. Arnold, claims to have used Darwinian theory to do the work.   Since the piece I was asked to comment on is by the atheist hack Hemant Mehta I'll start with what he referenced in the New York Times:

“I always wanted to be a protein engineer,” Dr. Arnold said in an interview. “Proteins are marvelous molecular machines, tremendously complex but responsible for all the functions of life. I wanted to be an engineer of the biological world.”

At first, Dr. Arnold attempted “rational design,” employing logic and knowledge of how proteins function to try to build new enzymes — proteins that act as catalysts for chemical reactions. But enzymes are large, complicated molecules — some consisting of thousands of amino acids — and it is hard to figure out how a shift in one twist of the molecule affects how it works.

In desperation, she said, she turned to evolution.

“I copied nature’s inventions, this wonderful process of evolution, to breed molecules like you breed cats and dogs,” she said.

For this “directed evolution” research, she inserted the gene that produced the enzyme she wanted to study into fast-reproducing bacteria. With mutations of the gene, she could then examine how well variations of the enzyme worked. She chose the one that worked best and repeated the process — just like evolution chooses the survival of the fittest over succeeding generations.

If that's an accurate account of what Dr. Arnold is claiming as comprising the "Darwinian" nature of her work, there are several big problems with it.  First "Darwinism" is natural selection, the theorized action of nature in creating new species by the selection of individuals to die or otherwise fail to reproduce or to maintain the percentage of "traits" in their species.  That is obvious from the title of On the Origin of Species to the last thing that Darwin wrote as a scientist on the topic.

But Dr. Arnold, herself, gives away that what she was doing was nothing like natural selection and that she, like most others, it would seem, don't really understand what Darwin, himself, was claiming to have discovered.

I copied nature’s inventions, this wonderful process of evolution, to breed molecules like you breed cats and dogs

"I" and "you" are not nature.  Nothing we do as an act of conscious intent to try to achieve an end can be called "nature" or "natural" in the sense that Darwin called his theory "natural selection" it is human selection, it is artificial.  The very simile that she used, "like you breed cats and dogs," gives that away.  Cat and dog varieties, bred by human beings are not the product of natural selection, they are the product of artificial selection as is what Dr. Arnold did.  And, it obviously needs to be pointed out, neither cat nor dog varieties are new species, they are artificially produced varieties of cats and dogs, even Darwin's use of animal breeding in his book was deceptive because he claimed to be showing the production of new species, not new populations of a species in which certain traits predominate.  He never did demonstrate human breeding producing a new species, the last time I looked, no one has ever done that.

I don't know about house cats as opposed to their wild progenitors but that dogs even can credibly be claimed to be a different species than the wolves they came from is doubtful because dog-wolf crosses are not only known, they are easily, sometimes naturally produced.  Dogs and wolves are probably most rationally seen as different varieties of the same species. I don't know the rules of how they distinguish among closely related species in bacteria so I can't comment on whether or not what she produced counts as new species. If the rules of determining species in bacteria differs from how you do it among, for example, species of mammals, it calls a lot more about such assumptions into question but I'm not getting into that right now.

Furthermore, as an ideological claim - though not even in his own elucidation of his theory - the actions of Darwin's asserted "natural selection" by his own assertion  is not a matter of intentional design, it is a matter of random chance mutations that result from other, chance circumstances to produce a variation in the rate of reproductive success, sometimes by the death of some variants due to the "traits" they have, sometimes by the "favored" variant leaving more offspring which breed with the offspring of the "unfavored" variants and leave the favored trait in the line of the previously "unfavored" variant.

As seen in a number of places in Darwin's own elucidation of his theory, he, himself created a problem when he called his theory natural SELECTION.  Selection is a conscious act which means that some conscious agency is making a choice.  To deny that problem by saying that Darwin's use of the term "selection" is merely metaphorical, that whatever it is you are calling "selection" as done by some unconscious entity only points to the fact that you haven't defined what that unconscious entity is or what it is doing even as you claim it has the same outcome as conscious selection.  If you think that's an unimportant problem, I point to you the very real selections made by eugenics committees in American states and Canadian provinces of who to cut off from the future through forced or coerced sterilization, the very intellectual and scientific framing of what they were doing, always, from the start and by explicit claims, based on Darwin's theory of natural selection. Eugenics is and was from its beginnings, by Francis Galton's own admission, inspired by his reading of On the Origin of Speices.

And, of course, that same eugenics leads to the selections Mengele made at the train stop at Auschwitz to select who was to be killed immediately, who was to be used for his experiments, who was to be worked to death.  Or the selection of who to kill, to start with.  There is everything about Darwin's use of the word "selection" that links it to the human, political and legal application of his theory of natural selection in the most non-metaphorical, most non-theoretical ways possible.  Darwin himself complained that "civilised man" was not making such selections in allowing those he deemed unfit to reproduce instead of die, explicitly comparing human societies to animal breeding operations in which those artificially, humanly, deemed of lesser quality were chosen for early slaughter.  There was never anything metaphorical about the term as used by Darwin when it came to that and even when he stuck closer to his sometimes claims about unconscious agency, he was never slow to make assertions about the supposed superior quality of those which survived his imagined culling.  The inept use of metaphor by scientists and others who are given such authority to bend fact asserting they are explaining nature is extremely dangerous and scientists should always be called on their inept use of metaphor because they so often prove that they, themselves, don't get what they're doing.   We put way too much faith in the care with which many of their claims are made and too much faith in their reliability in such matters.

Leaving aside Darwin's massive, basic and illogical inconsistencies aside, nothing about what Dr. Arnold did either is in line with what Darwin and his ideological successors proposed as being natural selection and nothing that Dr. Arnold did is anything but an act of intelligent design in which a person chose which lines of bacteria to keep and which to dispose of, choosing which would succeed, putting herself in the place of "nature." What Dr. Arnold did was Dr. Arnold Selection, not "natural selection".  What she did is an act of bacterial design and then bacterial husbandry.  You can't get from there to saying that nature did it any more than you can really get from sheep and dog breeders that Darwin used as a model and then claim that that proves "natural selection".  It might produce a plausible seeming argument if you are predisposed to ignore the fatal problems with that imaginary link but that doesn't make those problems disappear.

As for Hemant, I read his bilge and don't see that he understood either the claims made by Dr. Arnold or the creationists' claims against it.  His commenting community, stupid even for an atheist blog, certainly doesn't. To start with he scoffs at the entirely logical observation that you can't dispel the possible necessity of intelligent design in the origin and development of life in nature by an artificial, humanly designed science experiment.  Claiming what Dr. Arnold did discredits intelligent design is as stupid as claiming that what the animal breeders she cited did disproves the transmogrification of species.  Though what Hemant claims is, in fact, even stupider than that.  The simple fact is that you cannot use an intelligently designed experiment to demonstrate an absence of intelligent design.  The intelligent design of the experiment is as intrinsic a part of the experiment and its result as the materials or, in this case, organisms (artificially, intelligently designed and produced organisms, by the way) or the methodology used to produce them. It is an inescapable and fatal flaw in that line of ideological resort to lab science to deny intelligent design that intelligence and design are intrinsic to what is done, the results wouldn't be had without those.  Though, as can be seen even among some extremely sophisticated scientists, not to mention blog blatherers, you can unintelligently kick the legs out from your ideological position by trying to use lab science that way.

While I wouldn't express myself in the way the creationists did and am certainly a political and religious opponent of them, that does nothing to invalidate the valid points they made.  That you don't like them and think they have cooties doesn't invalidate those either.  I certainly don't care for the kind of people who are creationists, I certainly don't think you can turn their religious ideology - which, in the Biblical Fundamentalist form, I certainly reject - into science, but that doesn't mean they can't come up with valid criticisms of the claims of even Nobel Prize winners.  The primary requirements for a claim to be valid is that they get the facts they claim to be based on right and that their claim is in line with logical coherence.  I'm afraid in this case, Dr. Arnold's comes up short.   Though what she did was very real, her Darwinian claims about it are entirely wrong.

I do think that Arnold's automatic, unfortunately uninformed and illogical attempt to back-engineer artificial experiments intelligently carried out by a scientist to achieve a planned end into "natural selection" unwittingly shows a flaw in atheist-materialist-scientistic Darwinism that would seem to be almost inevitable, using artificial, intelligently designed things to both stand in as proposed explanations of natural phenomena and in entirely irrational assertion that "nature" as they conceive it, an unreasoning, unthinking, non-teleological something which is no "thing"  is an entirely adequate explanation that replaces God.

They do that by a logically incoherent dualism in which nature is both all of the things they like, while claiming all along that humans using their pridefully asserted intelligence can do things that are magically transformed into the unintelligent purposelessness of nature.  That nature is both unlike what humans intelligently do while being entirely like what human beings intelligently do, only you have to, somehow, remove the intelligence to get there.

Such leaps from artificial lab science to what happens in nature should probably be limited to the most simple and generalized phenomena of chemistry and physics, perhaps some simple physiological  aspects of biology.  And they should leave out claims about it that impinge on God.  Once you start trying to do it to explain complex phenomena or something as massive and unknowable as the billions of years of evolution, its atheist-materialist claims merely erect a quasi-religion within science but which is even more vulnerable to rational criticism than much of religion is.

That is obvious from the start of Dariwnism  as seen in that passage from the fifth edition of origin of species I've often discussed in which he, at the urging of Alfred Russell Wallace tried to remove the obvious implications of intelligence in nature which he asserted "selects" things and which is not teleological or even progressive, an assertion which is disproved by the constant and continual assertions of Darwin about the action of "natural selection" all through his work, most of all in The Descent of Man, something which all Darwinists seem to assert at one time or another.  Even those most angrily resistant to people pointing out that they are asserting intelligence and teleology to nature as they deny it.   You can call God "nature" or "chance" or "probability" or, as Hawking and Krauss did "the law of gravity" but it's just a different word even as their assertions prove they're talking about God no matter how much you angrily deny that's what they're doing.   Atheists, when they insert science into their ideological ranting are so often merely erecting idols,  material gods in the way of primitive fetishists and pagan statue worshipers.  They always do it out of the cultural biases of their particular tribe.

Atheists want to have it both ways in a number of things. They want to be able to claim that nature is purposeless while asserting purpose in nature, they want to claim intelligent design in science disproves intelligent design in nature, they want to set up all sorts of physical phenomena and mathematical entities and procedures as gods as a way to disprove God.   They want to claim their superior intellectual rigor while demonstrating they are as willing as anyone to cut corners and refuse to work out arguments to their ends.  They aren't alone in that, those habits are all far too commonly found among human beings but atheists love to believe they are not like other human beings who they love to believe are deluded while they are enlightened.  Conceit is another widespread human trait.  I'm sure Darwinists could cook up some just-so story to explain that.  Cooking up just-so stories is mostly what they do.