Yuck. Stephen Meyer addressed me on Twitter — that site really has become a cesspool. Anyway, he claimed I hide my evilutionist views behind complexity, so I had to address that. Because it was so stupid.
Also, I’m really annoyed when they drag out deceased scientists who despised them and prop them up as arguments against evolution.
West Virginia had a bill in the works to explicitly allow the teaching of intelligent design creationism.
Teachers in public schools, including public charter schools, that include any one or more of grades kindergarten through 12, may teach intelligent design as a theory of how the universe and/or humanity came to exist.
Never fear, Americans United is on the case. It didn’t pass, not yet at least.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State President and CEO Rachel Laser issued the following statement in response to the West Virginia Legislature adjourning without passing Senate Bill 619, a bill that would have authorized public school teachers to teach intelligent design creationism:
“We at Americans United are thankful that West Virginia public school students won’t be forced to sit through lessons on intelligent design creationism – an inherently religious doctrine that has no place in public schools. Public schools are not Sunday schools; their purpose is to teach students sound science, not preach religious beliefs.
“While the intelligent design bill failed this session, it’s alarming that the bill got as much traction as it did. The bill’s supporters blatantly ignored the Constitution’s promise to separate church and state – the protector of religious freedom – and would have flouted decades of court precedent that bars the teaching of religious doctrine in public schools, including an Americans United case that successfully proved intelligent design was simply creationism rebranded.
“If legislators insist on resurrecting this bill, Americans United is ready to defend the Constitution and protect public education and the religious freedom of West Virginia families. Using our public schools to impose religious doctrines like intelligent design on a captive audience of schoolchildren is part of the Christian Nationalist agenda to force all of us to live by their narrow beliefs. We need a national recommitment to the separation of church and state. Our public schools and our democracy depend on it.”
The creationists are persistent little buggers, that’s for sure.
I love it when creationists decide to attack evolution by way of developmental biology. Yes, come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. Our home is our terrible weakness, I’m sure you’ll be able to frolic and thrive in our little domain…heh heh heh <twirls mustache>
This fellow, David W. Swift, whose knowledge of development is maybe an inch deep and obtained entirely from information taken from basic textbooks, followed up by a conscious misreading of a few scientific papers with an eye to extracting only bits and pieces that support his conclusion, has decided that embryology is evidence against evolution.
It is quite well known that at a relatively early stage the embryos of a wide range of vertebrates look similar – a so-called ‘phylotypic stage’ – and this is generally regarded as evidence of common ancestry.
What is not well known is that before this stage the early embryonic development of vertebrates is very diverse – right from the earliest stages – which clearly refutes their common ancestry.
He’s partly right. It is well known that there are embryonic similarites between vertebrates, and of course that’s evidence for common ancestry. There is a lot of evidence for common ancestry, and that is one small piece of it.
He’s wrong when he says that it is not well known
that early development is more diverse. Any developmental biology textbook that discusses comparative embryology is going to tell you that. We developmental biologists ALL know that. It’s been a hot button topic of discussion for at least 50 years, probably longer. Mr Swift perused a select bunch of papers and just skipped over any that brought the topic up, so he could pretend he was the perceptive creationist who noticed, for the first time, a ‘weakness’ in evolutionary theory? Such arrogance. It’s especially annoying because he says nothing novel that he couldn’t have found prominently discussed in the scientific literature.
Also, the known evidence that early development is a complex process with diverse patterns of execution in different organism does not refute common ancestry. The creationists seem unable to get into their heads that a short-sighted process driven by chance as a core mechanism, running over millions and billions of years, is going to generate complexity and diversity by its very nature. Observing that something is complex and diverse is evidence that an evolutionary process created it, rather than an engineer.
That doesn’t stop him from expanding that claim into a whole tedious paper, published in the Discovery Institute’s fake journal, Bio-Complexity. The only difference between it and the short blurb on his website is the wordiness.
It is well known that the embryonic development of vertebrates from different classes (e.g., fish, reptiles, mammals) pass through a “phylotypic stage” when they look similar, and this apparent homology is widely seen as evidence of their common ancestry. However, despite their morphological similarities, and contrary to evolutionary expectations, the phylotypic stages of different vertebrate classes arise in radically diverse ways. This diversity clearly counters the superficial appearance of homology of the phylotypic stage, and the plain inference is that vertebrates have not evolved from a common vertebrate ancestor. The diversity extends through all stages of early development—including cleavage and formation of the blastula, gastrulation, neurulation, and formation of the gut and extraembryonic membranes. This paper focuses on gastrulation, during which the germ layers originate and the vertebrate body-plan begins to form. Despite its key role in embryonic development, gastrulation occurs in fundamentally different ways in different classes of vertebrates. The inference against common ancestry becomes progressively stronger as more is discovered about the genetic and molecular mechanisms that implement development. It is increasingly evident that these are of such complexity that it is unrealistic to think that undirected variations (random mutations) could produce constructive changes to development, such as those required to account for a diversification of development from that of a common ancestor, especially while retaining a similar phylotypic stage.
He’s focusing on gastrulation, which certainly is an interesting phenomenon. Gastrulation is a process by which animals form three embryonic layers from two, and there are multiple ways animals do it: by involution or a kind of folding/migration, or by delamination, or cells leaving a layer to reconstitute another one, and it’s also strongly affected by maternal investment. Animals that pack a lot of yolky goodies into their eggs have different patterns of cell division and movement than animals that produce small eggs with little yolk, so animal life history and ecology plays a significant role.
But that’s nothing new. It’s not a significant obstacle to comprehending evolution as the origin of the diversity (again, evolution is really, really good at coming up with diverse solutions, and also complicated Rube-Goldbergian strategies). Somehow, all these really smart scientists have been looking at this problem for decades, and they haven’t been leaving the evolutionary camp in droves.
For example, Bill Ballard was writing about exactly these issues for a long, long time. He was talking about it when I was a grad student and earlier. He has all kinds of papers specifically discussing the diversity of gastrulation in vertebrates, and he was particularly peeved at people who assumed that embryological homology can be traced all the way back to the earliest stages of development. These were vestiges of an “antique homological theory”, he said, that is, Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, and everyone needed to get over it.
It may be that the cells of representatives different classes of chordates or different phyla are behaving in such different microenvironments and being controlled by such different genes and forces that the analysis of their morphogenetic movements will be as difficult to compress into a single account as the description of their early embryonic stages has proved to be. It seems wise, in the meantime, to avoid assumptions of uniformity drawn not from precise observation but from antique homological theory. We should be cautious with the use of terms that have become more and more loaded with implied meaning while they were becoming less and less definable.
He doesn’t reject evolution because of this complexity, though. He suggests that “it may be” that cells in different organisms may be “controlled by such different genes and forces that the analysis of their morphogenetic movements will be as difficult”. Maybe there isn’t a clean, simple, single principle driving gastrulation, but a whole welter of divergent processes that will be difficult to sort out. That is not contrary to evolution at all!
Also, he wrote that in 1976. That was before evo-devo appeared on the stage, and maybe there will be some comprehensible unified principles establishing a unity in gastrulation, once we start combining embryology and molecules (hint, hint).
David Swift, writing in 2022, has no such excuse. In fact, he’s going to cite several well-known evo-devo scientists while completely ignoring their explanations. The bulk of his paper consists of pulling out drawings of the gastrula stage of various organisms, and saying, “See? They look different, therefore evolution is false.” He’s so focused on superficial comparisons with no deeper understanding that he shoots himself in the foot without even noticing. Pay attention to the last sentence in his diatribe.
In view of their morphological similarities, it is understandable that the phylotypic stages of different classes of vertebrates were interpreted as homologous and as evidence of common ancestry. However, this apparent homology is refuted by more detailed embryological evidence; despite their similarities, the phylotypic stages are formed embryonically in profoundly different ways. The straightforward conclusion to draw from this radical diversity of their early embryonic development is that it shows the vertebrates have not evolved from a common vertebrate ancestor. This conclusion can be avoided only if there are credible explanations for how such diversity of early development might have arisen from the development prevailing in a common ancestor (whether or not similar to present-day cephalochordates) in an evolutionary way, via changes that (i) had a realistic probability of occurring, (ii) maintained viability, and (iii) offered, in most cases, significant advantage that could be favored by natural selection. Further, to be taken seriously, such explanations can no longer be based solely on putative morphological changes, but must take account of what we now know about the genetic and molecular mechanisms through which embryonic development is implemented.
Holy crap, YES. We have to look at the genetic and molecular mechanisms. So why doesn’t Swift talk about them at all? He has one throw-away image that he doesn’t discuss, and he quotes important scientists like Rudy Raff, but he doesn’t seem to understand what they say at all — or more maliciously, edits out anything they say contrary to his perspective.
For instance, he ends the paper by citing Raff.
It is more than 20 years since Raff wrote: “One might reasonably expect mechanisms of early development to be especially resistant to modification because all subsequent development derives from early processes”, and the more we find out about how embryonic development is implemented at the genetic and molecular levels, the more it reinforces this commonsense conclusion. Many other authors have also commented on why we would expect early embryonic development to be resistant to change (for examples see Irie and Kuratani). Yet, when it comes to the diverse embryonic development of presumed homologous organs or body-plans, the usual assumption is that their early development must somehow have derived from that of a common ancestor, no matter how improbable the changes required, rather than accept the plain inference that the similar organs etc. are not homologous, at least not in an evolutionary sense. This expectation seems to reflect an ideological commitment to the theory of evolution rather than an objective assessment of the embryological facts.
You know by now that when a creationist partially quotes something from a real biology paper, it’s worthwhile to look to see what they intentionally left out. Here’s that Raff paper.
One might reasonably expect mechanisms of early development to be especially resistant to modification because all subsequent development derives from early processes. Traditionally, features of early development and conserved larval stages, even between phyla, have been regarded as strong homologous characters for the inference of phylogeny. The division of animals into protostome and deuterostome superphyla is based on the ideas that embryonic similarities are homologous and have been largely immutable over hundreds of millions of years (Raff 1996). A view of development from an evolutionary perspective is both more confounding and more interesting. Early development is highly evolvable, even among closely related species. The evolutionary portrait of ontogeny may be that of an hourglass, as shown in Fig. 1. In this diagram, embryos of two related species follow different early developmental trajectories, but converge on a similar phylotypic stage. It is important to note that the phylotypic stages of related organisms bear major features in common, but also have evolved significantly (Richardson et a1 1998). Divergence in post-phylotypic developmental trajectories yields variant adult species morphologies, as suggested by von Baer. The divergence of pre-phylotypic stage pathways can be extreme. For example, polyembryonic parasitic wasps have a bizarre early developmental pathway that does not resemble typical insect early development. Polyembryonic development produces 2000 embryos from one egg. Nonetheless, these secondary embryos develop via a characteristic insect phylotypic stage (Grbic et a1 1998)
I guess he only read the first sentence, because the rest of the paragraph is pointing out the value of the evolutionary perspective. He also mentions the developmental hourglass, which Swift includes in his paper, which Swift fails to point out is not a creationist revelation, but a routine illustration of the phenomenon of early divergence which every goddamn developmental biologist knows about.
Raff also goes on to explain why this does not refute evolution.
With respect to Van Valen’s view that homologues represent a continuity of information, we find that some of the processes that underlie the evolution of development can confound what we mean by ‘continuity’ as well. Should all this be a cause for despair? No. Biologists have historically used homologies to trace evolutionary histories and phylogenetic relationships. A deeper understanding reveals that this cannot be a tidy programme. That is on the face of it unfortunate, and has generated much hand wringing on the usefulness of the homology concept. However, where developmental homologies are difficult to identify because of process shifts in ontogeny, we are actually being told interesting things about evolution. Ambiguities in development of homologues in embryos reveal where and how evolutionary changes occur and thus, although confounding, are difficult Rosetta Stones needed to understand how evolutionary novelties arise
That’s the same point Ballard was making! The complications are interesting, they are informative about the evolution of the process, we shouldn’t expect a tidy, simple program of development.
Furthermore, one of the cool ideas that emerged from evo-devo is the observation that hey, different organisms are using the same molecules in early developmental processes, like gastrulation. Swift makes the error of talking about the epithelial-to-mesenchyme (EMT) transition, a common process in which cells leave their tidy sheet (epithelium) to migrate as loosely aggregated mesenchyme to new destinations. It occurs in all kinds of developmental processes, as well as in cancer. Here’s all he says about it.
Behind the above changes that occur at the cellular level are
of course the genetic and other molecular mechanisms that effect these changes. Progress has been made towards elucidating these, and some are depicted in Figure 18.
This is a strange self-own. He finally mentions molecules, and shows an image that lists a bunch of molecules, and I looked at it and was confused. Not because I didn’t understand it — those are all molecules I know very well — but because the diagram was ambiguous. What is this? Human cancer tissue, or a fruit fly embryo? Because it applies equally to all of them. Wnt/Frizzled (he misspelled it!), Delta/Notch, etc.…these are old friends. You can find them if flies and zebrafish and people. Read the Debnath paper Swift took it from, and as it goes through the molecules, it’s repeatedly saying things like “Snail was first identified in Drosophila melanogaster,” “Twist1 was first identified in drosophila,” “ortholog of human GATA6 acts as inducer of EMT in Drosophila endoderm,” etc., you mean Swift didn’t notice that we have molecular homologs of all these genes central to gastrulation that are present in multiple phyla? Curious blindspot he’s got there.
If you are seriously and honestly reading the developmental biology literature, as Swift is not, you can’t avoid this. It’s everywhere. Developmental biologists are taking these processes apart using the tools of molecular biology, and practically every paper acknowledges the way every organism is using the same molecules (and also ackowledging differences!) to carry out what may look like different cellular events. Nobody is shy about pointing this out, so it takes a kind of willful ignorance to overlook it. Here, for example, I pulled out a paper I’ve been reading about polarized shapes in epithelia. Notice the conclusion.
The recent demonstration that a similar, or even the same, Fz/PCP signaling pathway regulates both polarized cell shape changes in flies and CE in vertebrates suggests that this is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism. Strikingly, the conservation extends beyond the core Fz/Dsh signaling module in PCP and includes vertebrate homologs of other genes involved in Drosophila PCP [40–43]. Thus, although the end result of cellular polarization is distinct in different tissues and organisms, the underlying signaling pathways and mechanisms seem to be highly conserved. First, specific aspects of Fz/PCP signaling and their interaction with other PCP genes are likely to be similar between flies and vertebrates. Second, specific Fz/PCP-regulated processes such as activation of Rho, Rho kinase, myosin and JNK seem to be features that are shared between Drosophila and vertebrates. Taken together, therefore, there is growing evidence for the conserved function of Fz/PCP signaling and the conserved involvement of other primary genes in both epithelial PCP in flies and vertebrates, and in CE in vertebrates.
Swift is ridiculously stupid, lacking any real knowledge of the subject he’s writing about, yet it still manages to get published in an intelligent design creationism “journal”. They have no standards at all.
Ballard WW (1976) Problems of Gastrulation: Real and Verbal. BioScience 26(1): 36-39
Mlodzik, M. (2002). Planar cell polarization: do the same mechanisms regulate Drosophila tissue polarity and vertebrate gastrulation? Trends in Genetics, 18(11), 564–571. doi:10.1016/s0168-9525(02)02770-1
Raff RA (1999) Larval homologies and radical evolutionary changes in early development. In: Bock GK, Cardew G, eds. Homology: Novartis Foundation Symposium 222. John Wiley & Sons (Chichester) pp 110–120
Fuck panspermists, and fuck creationists. They are pretty much indistinguishable. It’s their fault I had to listen to Ann Gauger of the Discovery Institute misrepresent wackaloons like Chandra Wickramasinghe as representative of good evolutionary thinking, in a podcast titled Octopuses from the Sky: Scientists Propose “Aliens Seeded Life on Earth”. You can see why that caught my eye.
On this ID the Future from the vault, biologist Ann Gauger discuss panspermia, the topic of a peer-reviewed paper published recently by several very serious scientists. Panspermia tries to sidestep problems in origins biology by suggesting that, to quote the title of an old science fiction movie, “it came from outer space.” And yes, according to this explanation, maybe aliens even sent it our way. Maybe (honest — this is a real theory) the first octopuses came here special delivery, as encapsulated embryos falling from the sky. Anything but intelligent design, for these very serious scientists. Tune in to learn from Dr. Gauger what precisely drove these scientists to such an explanation.
They are also indistinguishable from Kent Hovind and Matt Powell, who have also promoted this idea that serious scientists seriously propose that squid seriously fell from comets to land on Earth. Gauger even claims that “some scientists say” bats came from outer space (I’ve never seen such a claim), because the fossil record of bats is very poor, so they couldn’t possibly have evolved.
That gives the game away. Bad scientists, panspermists and creationists, see any absence of evidence is evidence for their cockamamie ideas, and ignore all the evidence against them. Bats are poorly preserved as fossils, but we’ve got unambiguous molecular and genetic evidence that bats are mammals, not aliens, just as we have unambiguous evidence that octopuses are molluscs. There’s no reason to think that any complex organism fell from a comet. Anyone who argues otherwise is an ignorant loon. No, no one with any credibility in science thinks panspermia is a scientific idea; a few people have suggested it as a possibility — a remote possibility that complex molecules falling from space might have contributed to the evolution of protocells — but they all have to agree that no, there is no scientific evidence of such a thing, and further, most would agree that a more productive hypothesis, one with real evidence, is that life arose here on Earth from prebiotic chemistry.
To argue that scientists really believe that crap is deceitful scumbaggery that aligns Intelligent Design creationism with literalist Biblical creationism. They both lie.
adguacyth
Way, way back in 2004-2007, one of my prime targets for my ire was George Gilder, the pretentious twit who was one of the founders of the Discovery Institute. He was such an easy target, so full of hot air and ignorance, that it was fun to take potshots at him as he bobbed about like a zeppelin that had lost its steering. Then he faded away into backrooms where he could babble nonsensically with no one around to criticize him, and I lost track (and interest) in what he’s been doing.
But he’s back now. He came out with a shiny new book a few years ago — sorry I’m late, I didn’t care enough to notice — and he has a new hobby horse. It’s blockchain of all things. Here’s an entertaining review by David Gerard.
Gilder predicts that the Google and Silicon Valley approach — big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, not charging users per transaction — is failing to scale, and will collapse under its own contradictions.
The Silicon Valley giants will be replaced by a world built around cryptocurrency, blockchains, sound money … and the obsolescence of philosophical materialism — the theory that thought and consciousness needs only physical reality. That last one turns out to be Gilder’s main point.
Right, that’s why he was promoting Intelligent Design creationism so assiduously. No surprise here.
But Gilder never quite makes his case that blockchains are the solutions to the problems he presents — he just presents the existence of blockchains, then talks as if they’ll obviously solve everything.
Blockchains promise Gilder comfort in certainty: “The new era will move beyond Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states to blockchain hashes of history and futurity, trust and truth,” apparently.
Pure Gilder. He loves to talk. Unfortunately, much of what he talks about is his personal fantasy about how the world should work.
There are so many beliefs Gilder has that ought to make him a figure of contempt, but what I can’t figure out is why people pay any attention to him.
Gilder despises feminism, and has described himself as “America’s number-one antifeminist.” He has written two books — Sexual Suicide, updated as Men and Marriage, and Naked Nomads — on this topic alone.
Also, per Gilder, Native American culture collapsed because it’s “a corrupt and unsuccessful culture,” as is Black culture — and not because of, e.g., massive systemic racism.
Gilder believes the biological theory of evolution is wrong. He co-founded the Discovery Institute in 1990, as an offshoot of the Hudson Institute. The Discovery Institute started out with papers on economic issues, but rapidly pivoted to promoting “intelligent design” — the claim that all living creatures were designed by “a rational agent,” and not evolved through natural processes. It’s a fancy term for creationism.
Gilder insisted for years that the Discovery Institute’s promotion of intelligent design totally wasn’t religious — even as judges ruled that intelligent design in schools was promotion of religion. Unfortunately for Gilder, we have the smoking gun documents showing that the Discovery Institute was explicitly trying to push religion into schools — the leaked Wedge Strategy document literally says: “Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
Read the rest. It’s very thorough, and discusses Gilder’s ongoing machinations with people like Peter Thiel. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him drop off my radar, but my interest in him waned when his influence via the ID movement was discredited in the Dover trial. He’s been a cunning and influential little ratfucker since then, though!
Mano Singham has a few thoughts on the Intelligent Design creationism movement.
ID seems to have disappeared from view. One no longer hears from its most prominent advocates. There is not doubt that the 2005 Dover trial where the judge ruled that ID was essentially a religious belief structure and thus had no place in public school science curricula was a serious blow, exposing their entire stealth strategy of pretending that there was no underlying religious basis for their beliefs. In my 2009 book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that was a historical review of the fights against evolution from the Scopes trial in 1925 up to the Dover trial, I said that it looked like ID had run out of steam and had nothing more to offer, something that one of their leading theories, the late Philip Johnson, agreed with.
During the period when I was engaged with ID, I was invited by them to many debates and panel discussions so I met many of the key players (Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, J. P Moreland) and we had friendly exchanges. I never encountered William Dembski or David Klinghoffer though. After the Dover trial, Dembski washed his hands of the whole ID movement, especially expressing bitterness towards two religious groups whom he accused of undermining ID. One was the ‘theistic evolutionists’ (people who believe that evolution and belief in a god can be reconciled) who he said attacked ID because they felt that it was bad science and bad religion. The other was Young-Earth Creationists whom he accused of turning against ID when they realized that ID was not going to serve as a stalking horse for their literal interpretation of the biblical Genesis story of creation.
The tension between the intellectual approach taken by the ID movement and the YEC group was always apparent to those following the issue. When I spoke at ID-sponsored debates, it was quite something to see the people on the panel talk in sophisticated terms about science and religion and then later mingle with the audience and discover that they were biblical literalists to the core, right down to Adam and Eve, the serpent, heaven and hell. With one or two exceptions, they were nice to me even though they knew that I was not at all sympathetic to their ideas. They seemed to feel sorry for me that I would eventually be stewing in hell.
He’s right, you know. ID hasn’t literally disappeared, but it’s lost all the PR oomph it briefly held in the early 2000s — you can visit sites like Uncommon Descent and still find the zealots yammering ineffectually about it, but they’re all simply repeating the same tired pseudo-arguments over and over. When Stephen Meyer is your leading intellectual light, you’re in big trouble, because goddamn he is a tedious pompous bore with no substance to his arguments. ID is the same repetitive, ridiculous nonsense as young earth creationism, but with all the religious appeal cored out. And yes, it was exposed as a poor defense against scientific arguments in the Dover trial, and people realized it was a tissue paper shield, so why bother?
A lot of the ID proponents were motivated entirely by their religious ideology, trying desperately to hide it behind that pretentious pseudoscientific veneer. It didn’t work. Everyone saw right through it.
Nowadays, look where the money is going to see who won the ID vs. Open Creationism battle: it’s not the Discovery Institute, which has been branching into culture war nonsense instead (hi, Chris Rufo, I see you, you lying asshole). The winner is…Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, the brain-dead religious approach that doesn’t even try to make good scientific arguments. No wonder Dembski is pissed off at them. Kent Hovind is making cult leader money and getting attention on YouTube and that’s about it. Young Earth Literalism turned corporate is the one successful strategy the creationists have cultivated.
So what happened to ID? Science and philosophy made it irrelevant, and then the religious creationists murdered it.
Matt Ridley is definitely a smart guy, and he also writes well. I enjoyed some of his earlier books, like The Red Queen and Genome, but I became less appreciative as he became more openly libertarian, and espoused a Whiggish view of the world that was only a rationalization for why he was so wealthy and privileged (he’s kind of the British version of Pinker, only worse). He’s the 5th Viscount Ridley, don’t you know, he is to the manor born (Blagdon Hall, Northumberland, specifically), he’s a member of the House of Lords, he endorsed Brexit, he owns coal mines, he used to own a bank, but he ran it into the ground and it was taken away from him and nationalized. On climate change, he’s argued that global warming is going to be a net benefit, increasing rainfall and the growing season, and that human ingenuity will overcome any minor disruptions. He even coauthored a book with Anthony Watts and Bjorn Lomborg and a host of the usual denialist suspects, Climate Change: The Facts 2017, which ought to alarm anyone who wants to think he’s just being objective. I guess that comes of owning coal mines and being an enthusiastic endorser of fracking — when your prosperity is a product of spewing as much fossil carbon into the atmosphere as you can, your very smart brain will work very hard to find excuses.
That doesn’t explain why he’s become such a dedicated proponent of the lab leak “theory” for the origin of COVID-19, though. He’s not an epidemiologist, and it shows, but now he’s authored a book, with a post-doc, Alina Chen, titled Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Unfortunately for him, it has been dissected by the formidable Lindsay Beyerstein.
The lab leak theory, for the uninitiated, is the notion that the Covid-19 virus that has now devastated the globe is not of purely natural origin but rather escaped from a lab after it was harvested from the wild or engineered by Chinese scientists. It’s not actually a single theory but, rather, a grab bag of possible scenarios by which the virus might have been unleashed on the world—all of them implying some level of shady or incompetent behavior by Chinese scientists. And in trying to take each of these scenarios seriously, Viral’s authors have unintentionally exposed the entire farce of the lab leak discourse—showing both the exceptional flimsiness of the lab leakers’ narrative and also why this very flimsiness makes the lab leak conspiracy theory so hard to eradicate. By relying on an ever-growing arsenal of seemingly suspicious facts, each pointing in a slightly different direction, lab leaker discourse renders itself completely unfalsifiable.
Like I said, Matt Ridley is a smart guy, and he knows he can’t take a strong stance on any idea, whether it’s climate change (he calls himself a “lukewarmer”) or this lab leak nonsense, where he practices a performative neutrality. It’s his evasiveness that reveals his biases — he tries so hard to dodge around his beliefs that the shape of them is recognizable.
The book is structured around a set of themes, which I hesitate to call arguments because the authors decline to argue for anything in particular. (In this sense, the book aligns perfectly with what academics have been saying about conspiracy theories for years: that the theories rely on people poking holes in the official narrative without committing to a single plausible alternative.) First, the authors attach great importance to a mysterious pneumonia outbreak linked to the abandoned Tongguan mineshaft in Mojiang, China, in April 2012, which lab leak theory adherents see as a critical episode in the history of Covid-19, because researchers with the Wuhan Institute of Virology later found the bat virus RaTG13 in that same cave, and RaTG13 was briefly the closest-known wild relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. Second, the authors focus on the purported evidence of “preadaptation” of Covid-19 to human hosts. Finally, they examine gaps in the epidemiological record that purportedly call into question the current scientific consensus that the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, following a “spillover” event in which the virus passed from a live animal to a human.
That’s a good tell for recognizing that you’re dealing with a conspiracy theorist — they spend all their time trying to find errors or inconsistencies in good theories, which they can use to claim their unsupported, extremely wobbly, speculative alternative must be the correct answer, an illogic that they never quite grasp. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s exactly what creationists have been doing for decades. Intelligent design creationism, in particular, relies on Ridley’s strategy. They’re not about to give you positive evidence for what they’re claiming, they trust that finding gaps or even errors in modern biology will give their supporters sufficient excuse to lapse into what they’re biases predispose them to believe.
Ridley’s mistake here is that he gave away enough of his own beliefs that holes are being poked in them in turn. There is a heck of a lot of work being done on bat viruses now, which Ridley has no competence to address.
A series of recent discoveries, however, has undermined Viral’s central themes: Newly discovered wild bat viruses from Laos have proven not only more genetically similar to the Covid-19 virus than any previously known to science, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s RaTG13 sequence, but also directly infectious to humans via the same mechanisms that the Covid-19 virus uses to infect human cells. These findings make Viral’s breathless speculation about the Mojiang mine and the origins of RaTG13 completely obsolete. This discovery also suggests that whatever “preadaptation” was needed to make Covid-19 infectious to humans could have happened in the wild over many years of natural selection. The Laos bat preprint was published in mid-September, by which time it may have been too late to address it in the book.
Meanwhile, a reanalysis of early Covid cases published in November in the journal Science has confirmed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the likely site of a zoonotic spillover event. Another paper, which gets a brief discussion in the book, established beyond a reasonable doubt that, contrary to Chinese government denials, live wild-caught animals that could be prime viral vectors were illegally sold at the Huanan market through November 2019—including raccoon dogs, hog badgers, and Siberian weasels, all members of the carnivorous mustelid family, which is known to be susceptible to SARS-like coronaviruses.
Every time Ridley opens his mouth on the pandemic he exposes his own ignorance. Back in the fall of 2020, Ridley was arguing against basic health measures.
It is counterintuitive but the current spread of Covid may on balance be the least worst thing that could happen now. In the absence of a vaccine, and with no real prospect of eradicating the disease, the virus spreading among younger people, mostly without hitting the vulnerable, is creating immunity that will eventually slow the epidemic. The second wave is real, but it is not like the first. It would be a mistake to tackle it with compulsory lockdowns (even if called ‘circuit breakers’), whether national or local. The cure would be worse than the disease.
If you cannot extinguish an epidemic at the start, the best strategy is for the healthy to get infected first. Lockdowns ensure that the vulnerable and the healthy both get infected with similar probability.
Yeah, similar reduced probability. Ridley endorsed that lump of Libertarian poppycock, the Great Barrington Declaration, a massive bit of misguided stupidity that killed people.
The alternative to lockdown is not ‘letting the virus rip’, as Boris Johnson puts it. The Great Barrington Declaration, signed by over 20,000 doctors and medical scientists (but disgracefully censored by Google’s search engine), calls for focused protection: help the elderly and vulnerable stay at home, but let the young and invulnerable go out and achieve immunity for us all, while earning a living. The extraordinary truth is that a student catching Covid might be saving Granny’s life rather than threatening it.
In support of that claim, he cites the example of Sweden, which refused to enforce any lockdowns. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see what a mistake that was: Sweden has had more cases and deaths than neighboring Scandinavian countries.
Ridley doesn’t have to worry, though. He still has plenty of high profile supporters.
Just watched @MattWRidley fielding Zoom Qs about Viral book. Matt is SPECTACULARLY well-informed with detailed facts & figures. Also balanced & fair-minded. He’s an MP, why isn’t he Minister of Health? Wouldn’t need civil service briefing! Buy the book!
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) December 13, 2021
That man just keeps embarrassing himself. I wish he’d stop.
But that doesn’t stop them from misinterpreting them! Here’s a classic example of Evolution News & Views completely missing the point of an article to claim it supports their beliefs about junk DNA.
I am so punchy and tired today that I wrote out a script. I had to. So transcript below the fold:
The NY Times sent me an explainer for the lab-leak theory of the origin of COVID-19. It’s long. It’s very careful to present Both Sides at length. It’s what I’ve come to expect from the NY Times, a diligent, earnest explanation that gives equal weight to every position that requires some technical expertise to see through the bullshit to recognize that A) we’re in a realm of uncertainty, and B) that doesn’t mean every explanation is equally valid, and C) they’re giving disproportionate attention to a theory that has no supporting evidence. We don’t know every single intermediate step in the evolution of COVID-19, and can never know the full details of its origin, but that doesn’t imply that a claim that an intelligent Chinese designer intentionally constructed the virus in a lab.
So they cite a letter to Science signed by 18 people that says, “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.” The letter doesn’t include any evidence. It doesn’t explain why we should consider the lab-leak hypothesis reasonable, while citing a WHO report that considers a lab accident to be “extremely unlikely”, only to dismiss it.
They cite an article in the Wall Street Journal as evidence that the lab leak hypothesis is “plausible”. Did they read the same article I did? Because that article starts with a group of Chinese miners who came down with a serious respiratory illness after collecting bat guano in an abandoned copper mine. Unless you think the Wuhan biological warfare scientists store their samples in bat shit in old caves, that only tells us that bats harbor all kinds of interesting and potentially horrible viruses, not that the viruses are intentionally created. The WSJ and the NYT do share a similar disease, though, bothsideritis. Notice the one-two punch in this short quote: first they tell us that lab origin is extremely unlikely, and then swivel to say the question divides the scientific community.
“If the world wants to shut down work that was not gain-of-function because of a conspiracy theory, that’s a huge mistake,” Dr. Daszak said earlier this year. ”This virus, it’s extremely unlikely that it came from a lab. If we focus on the lab issue and ignore what really happened, we do so at our ultimate peril.”
One question now dividing the scientific community is whether such experiments could have created SARS-CoV-2, either accidentally or as part of a deliberate effort to see which viruses could evolve into ones dangerous to humans.
I don’t think the scientific community is divided. There are a few scientists who think the lab leak hypothesis is possible and should be investigated more (but they lack any evidence), while the majority are saying “Wha…? But we already know viruses evolve rapidly, and that there are vast numbers of unknown viruses lurking in natural reservoirs, so why are you asking us to waste time on the least likely explanation?” And so it will go, round and round, with major news organizations feeding the conspiracy theories and paranoia.
Meanwhile, the strongest piece of evidence the conspiracy theorists can muster is the claim that the Chinese have been dodgy about allowing investigators in. This is nonsense. The head of the Wuhan labs, Zheng-Li Shi, explains.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Chinese Academy of Sciences, has engaged in a long-term study on natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV[16–18] and is among the first institutions that identified the SARS-CoV-2 after the COVID-19 outbreak.[2,19] In addition, WIV discovered a virus sequence (RaTG13) that shows a 96.2% genomic sequence identity match with the SARS-CoV-2 genome, in its archived bat samples collected in 2013.[2] These results lay a foundation for understanding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, development of diagnostic methods, antiviral drug screening, and vaccine development; the findings also provide an important clue pertaining to the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. Sadly, WIV was at the center of the misleading speculations regarding the origin of the virus, which were not fully clarified until a recent joint study was performed by an international expert team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese experts.
The joint expert team has been working in three groups, the epidemiology, molecular research, and animal and environment groups.[20] The experts have been working together through video conferences, onsite interviews and visits, and extensive discussions. Over the course of 4 weeks, the joint team studied massive volumes of epidemic-related data and visited some facilities, including the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, the Wuhan Center for Disease Prevention and Control, and the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory (Wuhan P4 laboratory) run by WIV; in addition, they also visited the Huanan seafood market. The team interviewed local medical workers, laboratory researchers, scientists, market managers, residents, and recovered COVID-19 patients.
The joint team visited the Wuhan P4 laboratory, a facility which is the most widely speculated place of origin of the SARS-CoV-2. The Wuhan P4 laboratory is the first of such facilities to be constructed in China and runs high-level biosafety checks. The laboratory is a state-of-the-art design by French experts, jointly constructed by French and Chinese engineers and accredited by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS). It was designed to be a laboratory studying highly classified pathogens and an international collaboration research center on emerging infectious diseases. All activities in this laboratory on specific viruses were qualified by the China National Health Commission (CNHC). All administration and management have been strictly regulated and regularly examined and reviewed by these two Chinese authorities. It has been examined by CNAS and CNHC four and three times, respectively, since its opening at the end of 2017. Currently, this laboratory is approved to study the Nipah virus, Ebola virus, Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever virus, and SARS-CoV-2. This laboratory has played a pivotal role in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic by way of animal model studies and inactivated vaccine development, drug screenings and tests, and basic research for understanding SARS-CoV-2.
The WHO joint team has had extensive exchanges with the laboratory manager, scientists, and staff and has highly appraised the cooperation, transparency, and openness of the WIV leadership and staff. The team concluded, “They upheld a very stringent and high-quality management system. Also proceeding from the current evidence, we regard the lab leak hypothesis as extremely unlikely” in a statement released to the media on February 9, 2021, Wuhan.[5]
Shi summarizes their goals.
In the past several decades, more than 70% of emerging or reemerging infectious diseases are zoonoses and were transmitted to humans from their animal reservoirs through intermediate hosts. A huge number of unknown viruses exist in their natural reservoirs and continue to evolve, which results in the generation of new strains. Many of these viruses may have intrinsic characteristics that enable them to cross species barriers and infect humans. The rapid global economic development, including urbanization, land usage, animal domestication, and intensive agriculture, increases the chances of contact between humans and wildlife, thereby increases the risk of interspecies transmission of viruses carried by wild animals. To prevent future zoonosis, the best strategy is long-term and extensive surveillance based on science. We need to learn about unknown viruses, assess the potential risks of interspecies transmission, pinpoint the hotspots of animal-human interfaces, and eventually prepare diagnosis methods and use them for monitoring high-risk animal and human populations. With this prophylactic strategy, we can rapidly identify and limit the rapid spread of emerging pathogens at the very early stage and prevent the next epidemic. To this end, it is necessary to unify experts from different disciplines, including microbiologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, clinical specialists, ecologists, sociologists, and policymakers, to work together on the basis of science.
Exactly. The Chinese labs are right there at the forefront of studying how zoonotic diseases emerge from animal reservoirs. It doesn’t help if, when a population is infected with a disease of natural origin, they grab the torches and pitchforks and descend in a mob on the laboratories that are trying to control the disease. Yeah, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is studying coronaviruses, because they knew these were a potential source of human pandemics; do you want to shut them down? Do you really think that an institution that was studying viruses is therefore the source of a virus?
The New York Times earned my contempt over a decade ago with their he said/she said approach to Intelligent Design creationism. They presented then their notion of balance, with long articles that highlighted creationism with equal weight to scientific studies of evolution. It drove me crazy then, and this is exactly the same thing here. The idea that the COVID-19 virus was the product of intentional design can be dismissed with a simple statement: we have no need of that hypothesis. Instead, the NY Times will quote Matt Yglesias and Tom Cotton insisting that we do, and conclude with this:
So what’s the truth?
We don’t know. Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible. And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.
Let’s pretend they’re equally plausible, and then find an excuse to blame China. That’s what this was really about.
That’s a hard question, with a lot of different answers — I’m more accustomed to addressing a similar question, “why do people believe in creationism?”, and I agree with one of the assertions of this blogpost that says flat-earthers (and creationists) aren’t necessarily stupid. It’s true! The problem with these misbegotten questions is that smart people get derailed into defending them, at painful length. It’s tragic, because these are people who are deeply interested in what are scientific questions, and they’ve become committed to the wrong answers, because humans are better at deciding their presuppositions are correct, rather than in questioning whether they might be wrong. So I’ll accept half of this statement.
I, as many people in science communication, am fascinated with flat earthers. Here you have a group of people steadfastly rejecting evidence that’s right in their face. Today, I want to tell you why I nevertheless think flat earthers are neither stupid nor anti-scientific. Most of them, anyway. More importantly, I also want to explain why you should not be embarrassed if you can’t remember how we know that the earth is round.
The part I disagree with is the claim that they are not anti-scientific. Not stupid, sure, but the whole problem is that they are using their intelligence to promote anti-scientific perspectives. I think the author is trying too hard to be charitable and infer a shared respect for the scientific method. I also think she’s fitting the breadth of weird views into too narrow a range, even while acknowledging the diversity of flat earth beliefs.
But first I have to tell you what flat earthers actually believe and how they got there. The most popular flat earth model is that of a disk where the North pole is in the middle and the south pole is an ice wall on the edge of the disk. But not all flat earthers sign up to this. An alternative is the so-called bipolar model where both poles are on the disk, surrounded by water that’s held by a rim of something, maybe ice or rocks. And a minority of flat earthers believe that earth is really an infinite plane.
They mostly agree though that gravity does not exist, and that the observations we normally attribute to gravity come instead from the upward acceleration of the flat earth. As a consequence, the apparent gravitational acceleration is the same everywhere on earth. I explained last week that this is in conflict with evidence – we know that the gravitational acceleration is most definitely not the same everywhere on earth.
Here’s a problem: I’m not an expert on flat-earth belief, but I’ve seen the documentary Behind the Curve, and a scary number of YouTube videos, and I’ve never seen this claim that the flat earth is constantly accelerating upwards. Most of the stuff I’ve seen is people also freaking out over the idea that the earth is in motion, spinning and moving through the universe. It’s the notion of movement that is part of their objection.
They do often deny the reality of gravity (and also of space, in general), but the most common explanation is “density” — that denser objects sort of “sink” downwards, which kind of misses the question of what defines “down” in the first place. Their rationalizations are an incoherent mess, and there is a multitude of bad explanations. Should we give them credit for honestly trying to answer the question, but being hindered by a weak notion of evidence? Like creationists, flat-earthers do seem to only be aware of evidence from personal experience, and are unpersuaded by mathematical abstractions or theoretical considerations or observations that aren’t a product of simple eyewitness interactions.
Where I object is in the idea that their disagreement ought to be taken seriously philosophically, or that they are really trying to address a question scientifically…they just lack the tools to get the answer.
What’s wrong is that flat earthers’ claim they are leading a scientific argument. But there is no scientific argument about whether the earth is flat. This argument was settled long ago. Instead, flat earthers’ argument is about whether you should trust evidence that other people have collected before you. And it’s an important argument because this trust is essential for society and science to progress. The only alternative we have is that each and every one of us has to start over from scratch with birth. You see, flat earthers would eventually figure out the earth is round. But it might take them a thousand years until they’ve reinvented modern science.
This is why I think scientists should take flat earthers’ philosophical problem seriously. It’s a problem that any scientifically advanced society must address. It is not possible for each and every one of us to redo all experiments in the history of science. It therefore becomes increasingly important that scientists provide evidence for how science works, so that people who cannot follow the research itself can instead rely on evidence that the system produces correct and useful descriptions of nature.
Except there’s a fundamental misapprehension here that they want a correct and useful description of nature. They don’t. They have a conclusion already, and what they actually want is a rationalization that only looks scientific that delivers them to their desired answer. That is the opposite of scientific reasoning. They want validation, preferably in the form of buzzwords from physics or biology or whatever discipline they realize has more credibility than their uninformed speculations.
Ultimately, most of these people are trying to defend religious beliefs. Many of them are painfully overt about it — the Bible says we were created in 6 days, or that the Earth is flat and has corners — and openly declare that science is atheistic and not to be trusted. Scratch a creationist or a flat-earther, and you’ll typically find a religious zealot.
Again, that doesn’t imply that they’re stupid. The most effective supporters of their religious beliefs have been smart people who are very good at twisting logic to deliver their predetermined conclusion. Look at Philip Johnson, for instance: a clever, educated man who used lawyerly logic to support an unscientific claim of Intelligent Design creationism, and he was darned effective.
What I’m saying is don’t underestimate your opponents, don’t assume they’re ignorant yokels, but at the same time don’t give them credit for sharing your appreciation of rational, scientific thinking, because that’s not what they’re doing.
