The Discovery Institute runs a website called “Evolution News” which declares itself the “intellectual home of the Intelligent Design community.” Although the vast majority of the scientific community considers Intelligent Design (ID) a pseudoscientific theory akin to creationism, the Discovery Institute insists that ID is a scientific idea, not a religious one and the Evolution News website pushes this claim very hard. Even US courts disagree, acknowledging that ID is far outside the scientific mainstream and must not be taught as science in public schools.
The Evolution News website is constantly attacking “Darwinists” and “evolutionists.” To be sure, scientists occasionally use the terms “Darwinist” and “Darwinism,” but usually in a very narrow context and never to define a community of scientists. The term “evolutionist,” on the other hand, is only used by those attacking modern evolutionary study, which is the unifying principle of all contemporary life science.
My writing on evolution has drawn the ire of creationists and ID proponents before, including Ken Ham. However, over a six week period, the Discovery Institute attacked me in ELEVEN many articles, nine lots of which where entirely dedicated to my articles, my recent book, or me personally. (I have collected the links to many of these articles here in the “media” section, but I stopped clicking on the Google alerts after a while.)
They also dedicated a podcast episode to attacking my recent article in the Wall Street Journal. About two minutes in to the podcast, the guest said, “I’m not going to get into any of the specific points he raised…” I wish he had, because the points I raised in that article and in my book have extremely interesting explanations if you understand the body as having a long evolutionary history. But if you view the body as the product of intentional design, some of our rather glaring flaws are puzzling, to say the least.
I have responded twice before (here and here) and I have decided to again, but this may very well be my last time. I never had the illusion that my counter-arguments would convince any of the folks at the Discovery Institute. I know that I can be overly confident, but I’m not so cocky to believe that, after all these years, I’ll be able to swoop in and quickly change their minds about the thing that their entire institute is all about. Instead, my rationale in responding is simply to make it clear that I am not dodging their critiques, nor am I left dumbfounded by them. It is probably little more than an overly developed sense of pride that drives me to defend myself.
Only two of their articles include specific scientific challenges to my claims, so these are the two that I will specifically discuss here. An MD wrote these two articles and many people find MDs to be very trustworthy and knowledgeable about biology. This is partly why I am motivated to respond.
In one very short post, the good doctor responds to an article I wrote about external testicles, a topic not covered in my book. I raise the real cost that external testes brings to men. The “reason” why testes are external in most (but not all!) mammals is that sperm development (and storage, as Dr. Egnor points out) is optimal at a slightly lower temperature than our balmy 37°C body temperature.
My point in that article is that there is no magic reason why that HAS to be so. To believe that external testes were intelligently designed to match the optimal temperature for sperm development is to pre-suppose that there is such a thing as the “optimal temperature for sperm development” as a fixed property separate from the cells and tissues that actually perform it. I said this in the article, but the doctor writes his post as though the ideal temperature of sperm development really is something fixed and the anatomy of the testicles is matched to that.
In other words, Egnor’s logic is exactly backwards, which is unfortunately very common among proponents of ID. They tend to approach their view of biology in the opposite way that mainstream biologists do. They approach biology through the lens of something they think is true (Intelligent Design) and then attempt to interpret evidence in accordance with that belief. Standard scientific practice works the other way around: we collect and consider evidence and then we attempt to figure out where the data is leading us. Although the cartoon below is meant as mockery, in my view, it captures the basic difference in the two approaches.
To expand on the issue of external testicles… the “optimal temperature” of any biological process is not set in stone as some fixed property. 35-36°C is the optimal temperature for sperm development because sperm development has evolved at that temperature. The enzymes and other components have evolved structures that are most functional at that temperature. Those that don’t believe in evolution frequently claim that this is circular logic, but it’s definitely not…
Consider exothermic animals (previously called cold-blooded). Because they don’t have a steady body temperature, most of their enzymatic processes are more robust than ours such that they can tolerate the wide temperature swings throughout the day and throughout the year. Even more to the point, we find that the “optimal temperature” for things like sperm development is highly variable among those animals. Those that live in colder climates exhibit different “optimal temperatures” than those that live in warmer ones. It’s not a fixed property. That’s how natural selection works – in response to environmental pressures, species adapt, if they can. Not surprisingly, there are virtually no exothermic animals with external testicles.
Another point to consider. Plenty of warm-blooded mammals (and all birds!) ALSO have abdominal testicles, for example sloths, elephants, and most marsupials. They do just fine. If the optimal temperature for sperm development is fixed at roughly 35.5ºC, wouldn’t these animals be in trouble? In fact, the optimal temperature for sperm production – in those animals – is different than it is for us. It is right where it should be because sperm production has been optimized for their body temperature by natural selection. This is the basic principle of adaptation.
The evolution of endothermy – warm bloodedness – is extremely interesting and the testes tell part of that fascinating story. In the reptilian ancestor of mammals, the testicles were inside the abdomen like they are in present-day reptiles. The explanation that currently seems most likely is that the testicles descended in order to escape an abdomen that was warming up as early mammals established their balmy core body temperature in the high 30s (celsius).
That just happened to be the solution that evolution came up with in most mammals, rather than tweaking the enzymes of sperm development to make them work well at the rising abdominal temperature. But it just as well could have worked out the other way, as it did for basically all other enzymes and body processes (including oocyte development, btw.). It was just a fluke and the point of this whole discussion is that evolution is aimless, random, and clumsy. I consider external testes to be a suboptimal solution because, of the available solutions to this challenge, it brought some new problems with it: both inguinal hernias and testicular damage are much more common than they would be if our testes had stayed inside.
But hey, at least now there is an article out there entitled, “Nathan Lents and the Wisdom of Testicles.” I rather like that!
***
Dr. Egnor wrote another post as well. This time, he took issue with my claims about poor mucus drainage in the maxillary sinuses, which is a chief reason why humans get the “common cold” and sinus infections way more than any other animal. (You can read different versions of my argument here, here, and here.)
On this point, Dr. Egnor makes more mistakes in his article that have nothing to do with evolution. What initially made me angry about this was not the article itself (although it is very insulting to me – I wonder what his mother thinks), but how a staff member of the Discovery Institute said that he had “shellacked” me, shown here:
Egnor accuses me of doing science “with the parking brake on,” whatever that means, and attempts to explain how I have the maxillary sinuses all wrong. But that is not the case and the very source that Dr. Egnor uses agrees with me, not him. Below I describe the four mistakes he made, all of which completely undermine his argument.
[Another Edit: The DI finally got around to answering this post. They did correctly point out one mistake I made in terminology, which they make a huge deal out of, and which I have corrected in the text below. Then they write a great deal more using selective and misleading quoting of their source to advance a new idea that drainage in the maxillary sinuses actually works by… actually, I’m not going to try to summarize their idea because it’s very convoluted and self-contradicting. The drainage pattern they describe would make Rube Goldberg blush. Needless to say, the drainage doesn’t work that way and if it did, it would be an even worse “design” than we thought.]
First of all, if a careful reading of his source reveals that most of it has to do with accessory drainage in the ethmoid, sphenoid, and frontal sinuses, not the maxillary sinuses. The three are quite different from the maxillary sinuses because they are higher than the point at which they drain, while the maxillary sinus must drain mucus upward. Talking about this as one big system is not appropriate because the drainage processes are different. Of course they do join up, but that’s further downstream than the issues I often discuss.
Although they are all connected through narrow passageways, they are each distinct chambers. Once again, just to be super clear, the source he quotes is mostly talking about the the ethmoid and sphenoid sinuses, when my original point was about the maxillary ones. Here is the full title of the paper he cites:
Secondly, Egnor claims that there are additional drainage points at the bottom of the maxillary sinuses that serve as the main drainage point for the chambers. This simply isn’t true. Now, to be sure, there are sometimes accessory ostia (openings) for drainage of the maxillary sinuses but the very name – accessory maxillary ostia – emphasizes the secondary nature of their function, compared to the large primary ostium which is indeed placed at the top of the chamber.
The third mistake that I must point is that most people don’t even have accessory maxillary ostia. Estimates vary, but this study found that 18% of cadavers had one accessory ostium. This study found just 5% of do. In fact, it appears that this secondary drainage point is opened as a result of chronic sinus infection. (The kind of infections made common by poor drainage in this cavity.) This study found that nearly 25% of people with chronic rhinitis had the additional openings. This study found it was 30%. The point is that most people don’t have any accessory openings in the bottom of the maxillary sinuses, as Dr Egnor claimed.
Lastly, Egnor claims that the primary maxillary ostium – the main drainage port – is only for “overflow” that occurs when the chamber completely fills with mucus, like the overflow hole at the top of a sink. This cannot be true, given the points above. However, by making this claim, Egnor contradicts even himself by emphasizing that drainage is not by gravity, but by ciliary action. Prior to this point, he had been emphasizing the role of additional drainage points at the bottom of the chamber, thus working in concert with gravity, but now he claims that cilia propel the mucus upward to the primary ostium (which is indeed what happens because that is the only drainage duct).
[Edit: the new post from the DI harbors many of these inconsistencies throughout the article. I spotted at least four times that they emphasize a point that actually contradicts an earlier point. When your goal is to score points on a debate, rather than get the science correct, that is bound to happen.]
The reality is that, when things are healthy and moving, cilia indeed propel the thin clear mucus upward to the primary drainage ostium, working against gravity but usually successful in doing so. However, when the mucus gets thick and filled with particulates, the cilia cannot win against gravity and drainage slows. The accessory ostia, when present, are tiny. Even the primary ostium is extremely skinny in humans compared to other animals (another flaw!), and eventually clogs up as well.
In summary, the primary ostium is not an overflow drain because all or most of the mucus drains through it (and the paper he cites says this). Secondly, in no other animal that I’m aware of, and definitely not in the other apes, is an ostium placed at the top of a sinus chamber. If Egnor were correct, we’d expect to see this weird convoluted system in other animals. In fact, chimps, orangutans, and gorillas all have a better arranged mucus drainage system than we do: it works more in concert with gravity and has wider drainage tubes. That’s probably the main reason why they don’t get colds and sinus infections as often as we do.
-NHL
The Human Evolution Blog 
Great review of the reviews. As an MD and graduate work in biology (ecological entomology before medical school), I can tell you that most MDs and DOs have a very poor education in evolution and many are creationists before they enter medical or osteopathic school. Medicine is based on science but it is not science; it’s medicine.
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Yes, exactly. I don’t mean it as a put-down to medicine or to MDs/DOs (though many take it that way), but it’s the truth – they really don’t learn science in med school. There’s way too much important practical information to also cover all the mechanistic stuff, let alone the discoveries (the real work of science) that led to what we know. In grad school, however, it was the opposite. We learn very little “practical application” and almost no medicine. We never even had textbooks. “The literature” was the textbook and everything was open book. Totally different approach. I would never want a PhD operating on me, but I also don’t want an MD teaching or writing about science (unless they do and learn it first).
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Nice one. If the DI is attacking you, you’re doing something right. A fortiori if AiG is attacking youfor the same thing as well.
Hippos and whales both carry their testicles internally, to the delight of those who would root cetacea on the hippo branch, rather than deeper within the Artiodactyla. I’m not convinced.
JBS Haldane use the poor drainage of the sinuses as one of his examples of the design faults that evolution has left us with.
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Reblogged this on Quaerere Propter Vērum.
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Hi, i was wondering from a design point do we actually need all these cavities? Could it have been designed so that they are not needed?
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I came across this tussle because the DI tweeted a link to it today, so I am now adding this (and the relevant ID postings) to my TIP “Troubles in Paradise: The Methodology of Creationism” http://www.tortucan.wordpress.com data field. It is relevant that the many technical matters you have brought up don’t get covered by the ID spin (no surprise) but instead fall back on a generalized philosophical design argument that presupposes an all or nothing set of biological components.
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Thanks, James. This is my first tussle with them and it has, somehow, lowered my opinion of the ID movement even further. Even when faced with clear, undisputed, anatomical, non-evolution-related MISTAKES in their articles, they refuse to correct or even acknowledge them. When it comes to be taken seriously as an honest science org, they are their own worst enemy. How can they expect to be taken seriously if they can’t even be honest about non-controversial things like anatomy?
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Be prepared for extended salvos with the DI on this in future, Nathan, since mind-changing is not one of their notable attributes, but combative repetition is. And just about every working scientist in principle can be the butt of antievolutionist sensibilities, especially if the larger Young Earth Creationist wing is taken into account. All of them share the same core methodology, however, which in a nutshell is “dogma first, evidence only when convenient.”
That the basic anatomy was mangled by the DI is only to be expected in that mindset. As I discovered when I surveyed the 20 or so antievolutionists who had tripped past the reptile-mammal transition evidence over the years (for my “Evolution Slam Dunk” book), literally none of them (including the DI gang of Bill Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer, and the venerable Philip Johnson before them) had thought to get a grip on the basic developmental anatomy of the mammal jaw first (which had been known, of course, since the 1830s to have the reptilian amniotic layout of the full complement of jaw bones in embryo, and only reconfiguring to our dentary-squamosal layout during maturation, a process all too blatantly tracked further and directly in the fossil record, including a transitional set of double-jawed intermediates, predicted entirely on evolutionary grounds).
As uncomfortable as it may be, working scientists whose findings are trawled by antievolutionists have to be prepared to stand their ground, though the experience can be a usefully educational one, as it affords opportunities to explain the biological basics to their audience and hopefully spark a few of them to embark on their own research to get the facts straight and rethink their presumptions accordingly (a task so much easier these days as most of the primary source technical literature is directly accessible online).
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great
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what if we will see a self replicating robot ( lets say even with dna)on a far planet? do we need to conclude design or a natural process in this case? remember that according to evolution if its made from organic components and have a self replicating system we need to conclude a natural process. but we know that even a self replicating robot is evidence for design
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What form of logic is this?
A self-replicating robot with DNA(an organic component) came naturally.
If such a self-replicating robot can harvest energy, reproduces, dies and relies on its environment for survival, such a robot is natural.
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Thank you for your book.
I do have a problem with eyes developing two times – one for vertebrates and one for non-vertebrates. Please see Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll – 2005 by W. W. Norton & Company, pages 66 – 73. Unless you meant that the two groups do have a common ancestor when eyes started to evolve.
While I can not find the image of a newborn’s throat versus a 3 month (or possibly older) infant that shows that newborns can not choke like the rest of us.
Just a thought, about the sinus opening being near the top. Would that position favor humans during their evolution if they spent a great deal of time in water? When we put our heads in water, the angle of our nasal passages limits the amount of water entering at the very beginning of the submersion. While apes would have water up their noses immediately. Of course, even if this is so, that still does not make the opening in the sinus in an appropriate place.
As soon as I saw your title, I knew I wanted to read your book.
Thanks again
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Dr. Lents, that is a lot of smoke at the DI about your book. I’ve noticed it too. We share some commonality here, because about 9 articles in August from DI were about me. That was just in one month!
I’m a scientist (and I affirm evolution to be clear). I’m putting this comment because @Patrick (an atheist) at Peaceful Science (http://peacefulscience.org/) suggested we invite you to an online discussion about all this with us. I agree that this could be interesting. While we both affirm evolution, I’m wondering how much of what you call “bad design” could also be understood as neutrality.
Any how, we have hosted several online conversations on focused questions with scholars. We call them “Office Hours” (https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/what-are-office-hours/563). Though we are still in early days, some really interesting things have come out of it. Though disagreements will arise, I’m sure, these are not debates and they are not adversarial. You come as an honored guest, and we enjoy a public conversation together over a few days. Maybe we will even learn something from each other. I’m sure I will.
Would you be interested?
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Sure. Please send me an email with whatever details I need. NLENTS@jjay.cuny.edu
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Nathan, Joshua, etc, the issues here sound right up my alley (investigating the methodology of creationism/ID versus science in my TIP “Troubles in Paradise” project), and any of you with a cam who care to come on for a chat on this I do an “Evolution Hour” weekly (Wednesday, 5 PM Pacific time), other times may be done by arrangement (time zones and schedules being often a snag for many). My email is RJDownard@aol.com, my TIP website is at http://www.tortucan.wordpress.com with links to my YouTube channel and such
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Hi again. I am happy to appear with you on the evolution hour. Wednesday 9/19 or 9/26 would be great. If not then, Oct 17 is also good.
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Sep 19th sound great. Any links you’d like in the video description you can email to me for inclusion (I always list links to the technical papers alluded to). The last months I’ve been analyzing the source methods lapses of creationists Christopher Rupe and John Sanford (the genetic entropy guy) in their 2017 “Contested Bones” book challenging human evolution, and add sidebars as warranted (such as Dinesh D’Souza’s screwball straw grasping on climate change, in today’s episode). So much woo to challenge, so little time!
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Your mom is right. Your entire tone is “off”. Why the need for all the rhetorical flourishes? Why has this “lowered your opinion” about ID? The responses to your book are not personal, nor offensive, nor insulting. They merely disagree with your assertion about the body being poorly “designed”, and offer some arguments for the counter-proposition. Nothing wrong with that. It’s how science works. If your argument is so powerful, then why can’t you simply slay them with the brilliance of your logic and knowledge? Listen to your mom. She is right. When your own mom is embarrassed about the way you argue on the internet, maybe time to reconsider how you are communicating. Say hi to her for me.
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I don’t get too pushed out of shape on mere style, its the data that matters, and Nathan’s point is that Egnor actually got the data field wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, either, for Egnor or the entire Intelligent Design brigade, who reflect the views of only about a dozen fact claimants, who together manage to miss 90% of the data field. Anyone coming into the ID lit cold might not realize that their wheel-spinning has been going on, and I can sympathize with Nathan, amazed that people professing to defend a scientific way of looking at things could end up doing exactly the opposite. Hopefully Nathan and I can explore more of this when he appears on my “Evolution Hour” show next Wednesday.
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Well, obviously this is in the eye of the beholder, because all of the people on my side say the exact same thing you say here, but flipped, that I am measured and restrained in my response and they are insulting and mean. In fact, lots of people encourage me to “take the gloves off.” For the record, my mom was not embarrassed by me. She just didn’t want to see me “stopping to their level” (her words), so I doubt you’d have a nice conversation with her about this.
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I think these issues of the duty of people (not just scientists, but obviously including them) to honestly defend science over non-science, good reasoning over bad, and all done civilly, are just the topics I am looking forward to discussing with you on “Evolution Hour” tomorrow. See you then Nathan!
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“You will notice that the article is all about the paranasal sinuses not the maxillary sinuses. Totally different structures! But since he’s an MD and this is a scientific article, this had the air of authority, but it was completely off-topic. I suppose that could have been mistake (but one that cripples their whole article), but when I pointed it out to them, they never corrected, never backed down, never responded. They kept going on attacking in other ways. That’s why there is no point taking them seriously. They made an obvious error, got caught, and then just pretend it didn’t happen.”
Oh dear. What a mess. You made a huge fuss, got right up there on your metaphorical high horse, made all these loud squawking noises: but it was you that was wrong! Completely wrong! So funny! Just go back and listen to yourself pontificating and laying it on thick! Now how do you respond. Oh, it was no big deal. “Just pretend it didn’t happen”! No problem: edit it out and keep on swinging.
Next time maybe listen to your mom.
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Give Dr. Lent’s some credit here. He acknowledged his mistake. That is not “pretending it didn’t happen”. If you’d like, we can step through greater absurdities that have not been retracted or acknowledge on the “other side.” Egnor’s last post at ENV was not unkind, but this is an ugly argument for the most part. With that ugliness, it is hard to acknowledge mistakes, and Dr. Lent’s did.
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Dr Lents dug his own hole, and then threw himself into it. Credit for what? This is exactly what his mom was trying to warn him about. If you don’t come across like a prat, then you can make an error and excuse yourself with dignity. But if you want to come across all superior, and carry on like that, then you better not make a mistake. Which he did. So now he strips out all mention of the actual error. Because ego. Yes this discussion has been ugly, and for that, look no further than Dr Lents rhetoric. Egnor’s tone has been completely unobjectionable. It’s always the evolutionists who adopt the superior, patronising tone. It’s not a good look. Dr Lents has egg all over his face on this one. Let’s hope it drains off.
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You have made some rather generic attacks on Nathan and defense of Egnor, but in such a way that your own position is rather unclear. Let’s try to clarify things. Do you, Plumber, accept that all life is related by natural branching common descent (in our own instance, that our species diverged from a prior one some 300,000 years or so ago, and that our lineage ultimately tracks back as mammals through the therapsids of the Permian Period, and beyond, into Cambrian chordata and ultimately back to whatever took place at the origin of life)? Do you accept that natural speciation occurs, and if so, what are its natural limits in your view? Regarding our human genome, do you contend that all (any, none?) of its present content (including Alus) was intentionally designed to be there, by some putative external intelligence (one or more?).
I think clarification on these points would be informative to better gauge what the issues are here that are being disputed. Egnor is not especially clear on these points (nor any in the Intelligent Design when push comes to shove), but we hope you will be more explicit, in the interest of informative discourse.
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Your obsession with me and my mother is really starting to creep me out. Come after me all you want but have the decency to leave her out of this. But honestly, I’d rather you just stay off my blog altogether. This is a place for discussion of science, not for critiques of my tone. If you don’t like my tone, just leave and don’t come back. I’m going to quickly delete all future comments that I deem as off topic.
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“Also emphasizing this point is that plenty of warm-blooded animals have abdominal testicles also, for example sloths, elephants, and most marsupials. They do just fine. The optimal temperature for sperm production is right where it should be because sperm production has been optimized for that temperature by natural selection. This is basic biology.” Engor sold say that this is a tautology…but then again it contradicts his original argument to begin with
https://evolutionnews.org/2018/05/nathan-lents-doesnt-understandrefrigeration/
“Lents writes: “35-36°C is the optimal temperature for sperm development because sperm development has evolved at that temperature.” The logic is: “X is optimal for Y because Y evolved at X.” Darwinian science never rests.
The fact that you point out external temperature is not set in stone matters not to him.
“My point in that article is that there is no magic reason why that HAS to be so. To believe that external testes were intelligently designed to match the optimal temperature for sperm development is to pre-suppose that there is such a thing as the “optimal temperature for sperm development” as a fixed property separate from the cells and tissues that actually perform it. I said this in the article, but the doctor writes his post as though the ideal temperature of sperm development really is something fixed and the anatomy of the testicles is matched to that.”
He ignores this paragraph to say this
“Gee… why would storage work better at lower temperatures? Lents is stumped. Maybe it’s entropy. Things last longer at lower temperature. This confuses Lents. ” again this ignores the problem. Why isn’t it lower?
“Consider exothermic animals (previously called cold-blooded). Because they don’t have a steady body temperature, most of their enzymatic processes are more robust than ours such that they can tolerate the wide temperature swings throughout the day and throughout the year. Even more to the point, we find that the “optimal temperature” for things like sperm development is highly variable among those animals. Those that live in colder climates exhibit different “optimal temperatures” than those that live in warmer ones. It’s not a fixed property. That’s how natural selection works – in response to environmental pressures, species adapt, if they can. Not surprisingly, there are virtually no exothermic animals with external testicles.” He ignores this paragraph too.
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Forgot to mention his response
“I tried pasting this paragraph into Google Translate, from Darwinian to English. It froze. ” crybaby…
“They do just fine. If the optimal temperature for sperm development is fixed at roughly 35.5ºC, wouldn’t these animals be in trouble? ” engor removes this part and hopes no one double checks…
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Yes, Egnor, like all those at the DI, ignore everything that challenges their position and then nitpick as much as they can because for them it’s about scoring points in a debate, rather than actually discussing science. It doesn’t matter how many times we call out the inaccurate things they say, they just keep repeating, repeating, repeating I guess hoping that we won’t notice their lack of sources or evidence.
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