Tomorrow, I’m recording a discussion for British Christian radio (how do I get myself into these things?), on the show Unbelievable with Justin Brierley. I’m talking with Perry Marshall, who some of you may remember yapping around these parts a while back, and who has a book out called Evolution 2.0, which I had to read.
Yes.
I read it.
Dear gob.
Just to help you picture this: he’s an electrical engineer and SEO guy with only the most superficial, and often wrong, knowledge of biology, and he has written a book in which he explains how all those biologists have got everything wrong. I was most entertained by the parts where he explains how there is all this amazing stuff in biology that we never tell anybody about, and one of his examples was something I lectured my cell biology class about last week, and a couple of the examples were things I talked about in my freshman biology course this morning.
In other words, his stunning revelations that will revolutionize evolutionary biology were all known mechanisms that are so well established that we teach them in basic college courses, and often simply take for granted. And he gets them wrong. Wrong wrong wrongity wrong.
But he’s frenetically glib about it all, which is apparently a useful attribute if you’re trying to sell car stereo speakers. It’s not at all impressive when you’re pushing pseudoscience.
I am looking forward to reading a summary of this interview, but I really have little stomach for listening to interviews like this these days.
Ahh yes, see this quite often, often in relation to news items. “Why isn’t anyone talking about X?” they say, when I’ve seen multiple stories already, and a quick search usually turns about dozens, if not hundreds of others on the topic. They mistake their own ignorance for things being kept secret, or suppressed.
That prize though.
Didn’t realise we had such a thing as Christian Radio over here.
As a double-E I facepalm every time one of my engineering colleagues steps outside their comfort zone and makes everyone else… uncomfortable.
I always enjoy ‘Unbelievable’ and I’ll look forward to this one PZ. It’s usually very civilised and polite, (sounds like a nice chat with Justin over tea and cakes) but it hopefully gives the largely Christian audience something to think about.
Add me to the list of people who had no idea that Britain had a Christian radio station.
Britain’s Christian radio and TV station is called the BBC.
Ah yes, the old “I never personally learned about it therefore nobody did” problem. It should be a codified subset of Theory of Mind: most people develop theory of mind by age 5, but some people never fill it in entirely, throughout their adult lives. I’m sure the Dunning-Kruger effect is implicated somewhere in there.
PZ, so what is the 70-Year-Old Nobel Prize-winning discovery that rendered old-school Darwinism obsolete as claimed by the author on the website you linked to?
I watched Perry’s video. It has the usual mix of logical fallacies you see in creationist arguments. He really abuses the “DNA is like software” analogy. Here is an excerpt from a review of the book, posted on Amazon, by one John Mertus.
“But his most egregious mistake is to compare DNA to computer code. Sure there are similarities but a gene encodes a protein. That protein then interacts within the body with other proteins. Similar genes in different organisms usually produce the similar functions but sometimes vastly different functions. The effect of genes cannot be calculated without knowing the global organism. Thus his whole “theory” that cells design themselves fails. They don’t have the information locally.”
As for his “prize”, Marshall has set up conditions that cannot be met, in the style of Kent Hovind. Then he can parade this around as “proof” that nature cannot make a cell without divine help. He is basically asking for someone to show him something that does what only living organisms can do, but his conditions require that it not be associated with a living organism. This “catch-22” presumably keeps him safe from ever having to pay up.
#9: Would you believe…McClintock’s work on genetic instability? It’s evidence of design!
Interview’s over. It was painful. Marshall knows nothing about biology, and as #10 points out, he keeps trying to shoehorn biological observations into his electrical engineering model, and they don’t fit, therefore, electrical engineering is a better analogy for biology than biology is. Drove me nuts, complained along those lines a few times, to no effect on Marshall’s brain.
I also called him on his misinterpretations of McClintock and the ENCODE experiment. Would you believe…
Gah. Not even the True Believers in ENCODE would claim that!
It’s really time to dispense the Galileo Gambit strongly and with predjudice with something like the following:
Since the advent of the modern scientific process (ie way since Galileo), no outsider (someone with no training in the area in question) has EVER made a contribution to a field that somewhow was missed by that entire field. Evah. So STFU and go away.
#13
Also, from a Bayesian viewpoint, the base rate for REAL Galileo’s is REALLY SMALL. But cranks and crackpots are plentiful.
scienceavenger @ # 13: … no outsider (someone with no training in the area in question) has EVER made a contribution to a field that somewhow was missed by that entire field. Evah.
Pls read up a bit on Abbot Gregor Mendel.
Oh, I saw this book when I was browsing Cyber Monday deals on “science” books (scare quotes used because of how few of them were actually books about science). Even reading the blurb on it made it painfully apparent that the guy had no absolutely no clue what he was talking about and appeared to have stumbled onto ID and decided it was a hot new idea.
Mendel apparently studied, among other things, “practical philosophy” (i.e., science) at the University of Olomouc under Johann Karl Nestler, a researcher of heredity and selective breeding.
I don’t know if that was the necessarily the most advanced training anyone could possibly have received in the field at the time, but it also doesn’t really scream “untrained outsider” to me.
@Don Quijote #7:
Given all the claims of anti-Christian bias in the BBC, they’re clearly not making a very good job of it.
PZ@12
Wow, now I’ll have to listen to the interview and see how he spins McClintock’s discovery of transposons (jumping genes) into evidence of creationism.
I’ve been checking the Unbelievable site to see if they ever posted your session with Perry. I haven’t seen it yet. It’s possible I’ve just missed it though.
Gee, PZ, maybe you convinced Justin that Perry is indeed misinformed. Most likely though, you embarrassed Perry to the point that the session didn’t fit the narrative that they were try to convey so they won’t post it.
If someone does have a link to the session, please post it. Thanks much.
Brierley said it would be a few weeks.