This is Part 2 of 2. You may find Part 1 here .

The Third Problem

“Finally, your story has a practical problem,” Questor says: “Is the panda’s thumb a poor design?” — whereupon a panda peeks its head through the panel and confides, “I rather like it, you know” (page 78). In essence, she is attacking premise (4) of Teller’s argument, by a clever appeal to the literature. Questor is presumably a college biology professor, and Wiester, who provided “the science input” for WDGDWI, is a college biology professor. Where do they go to get the information on the panda’s thumb? The Encyclopedia Americana, which Questor quotes as saying that the panda’s thumb “enables the panda to eat bamboo efficiently” and to “handle stems with great dexterity” (page 78, charmingly illustrated with a panda twirling stalks of bamboo in drum-major fashion). Gould, in contrast, consulted D. Dwight Davis’s monograph The Giant Panda (1964), which he characterized as “the greatest work of modern evolutionary comparative anatomy” (Gould 1980: 22).

Regardless of the far-from-authoritative nature of their source, Newman and Wiester’s emphasis on the efficiency of the panda’s thumb reveals that they have again misrepresented Gould’s argument, apparently due to their conflation of two senses in which it is possible for design (or, if you prefer, “design”) to be suboptimal. In the first sense, a biological feature is suboptimally designed if it accomplishes its function not as efficiently as it (or a plausible substitute) might. Thus in the first sense, to say that the panda’s thumb is suboptimally designed is to say that it is not as useful for stripping leaves from bamboo as it (or a plausible substitute) might be. In the second sense, however, a biological feature is suboptimally designed if it is not designed as well as it might have been, that is, if the process whereby it acquired the ability to accomplish its function was not as efficient as it (or a plausible substitute) might have been. That there is such a sense of what it is for design to be suboptimal is testified to by the computer engineer’s word “kludge,” which refers to a clumsy and inelegant, but not necessarily ineffective, solution to a problem. In the second sense, to say that the panda’s thumb is suboptimally designed is to say that the process whereby it acquired the ability to strip leaves from bamboo was a kludge.

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I am writing in response to the article Bridging ideological divides: Why Christians still disagree about evolution and what we whould do about it, by Hans Madueme and Todd Charles Wood, Scientia et Fides 12(1), 2024, 189–213; open access here.

This article is written by two young earth creationists, who take 25 closely argued pages including 93 references to show complete misunderstanding of the relationship between observation and interpretation in evolution science, in order to claim a false epistemic symmetry between this science and the theological perspective which forces them to reject it; a more sophisticated version of the “two pairs of spectacles” thesis that has been with us since George McCready Price. So why am I bothering to review this article? And why, to my own surprise, do I find myself welcoming its appearance?

For three reasons. Firstly, because the authors, unlike “creation science” young earth creationists, accept the validity of the science in its own terms, rather than claiming that it is inferior to their own fantastical offerings. Secondly, because they lay out extremely clearly (and self-revealingly) their own epistemic position. And finally, because their recommendations, made regarding conversations within the evangelical community, are applicable (and indeed to some extent already applied) to the very practical problem of how to teach evolution science in places with a faith-based culture.

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Zachary Hancock is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan and specializes in evolutionary genetics.

Evolution by natural selection requires that there exists variation in fitness between individuals. This simple truism goes back to Darwin’s Origin of Species, but where Darwin relied on verbal arguments, the statistician and population geneticist R.A. Fisher sought to codify this basic fact mathematically.

In 1930, Fisher published The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, and within introduced the fundamental theorem of natural selection (FTNS). The FTNS is, in effect, a restatement of Darwin’s idea on the reliance of natural selection on variation. In words, the FTNS states that the rate of change in a population’s average fitness is equal to the additive genetic variance in fitness at that time. An implication of this is that when there’s a ton of variation in fitness, the population’s average fitness can increase rapidly by natural selection. But if there is very little differences in fitness among individuals, any subsequent fitness increase must be slow or absent entirely.

The basic idea behind the FTNS is quite simple, even if the derivation mathematically has caused many biologists to scratch their heads over the many decades since Fisher first introduced it. Some, like Warren Ewens (Ewens 1989), have argued that Fisher’s theorem is useless, while others, such as George Price (Price 1972), Alan Grafen (Grafen 2003), and Sean Rice (Rice 2004) have contended it is, indeed, a general theorem properly understood. Point here is that the FTNS has been a source of much debate for decades.

In 2018, two creationists wandered into this rather esoteric historic dispute. And as is characteristic of creationists, they did so without a clear appreciation of the field they were embarking to critique and with highly suspect motivations. Bill Basener—a mathematician and data scientist at the University of Virginia—and John Sanford—retired Cornell plant geneticist, inventor of the gene gun, and promoter of “genetic entropy”—together (and “BS” hereafter) published a paper in the Journal of Mathematical Biology titled “The fundamental theorem of natural selection with mutations.”

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Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.

Stephen Jay Gould’s discussion of the panda’s thumb in his essay of the same name, originally published in 1978, is often misrepresented as describing the false thumb of Ailuropoda melanoleuca as ineffective in practice rather than as inelegant in origin. A recent incidence of such misrepresentation prompted Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education to provide his discussion of a similar misrepresentation in a 2000 cartoon presentation of intelligent design, originally published on the Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science website in two parts on August 15 and 16, 2002. The following appears here in conformity with Metanexus’s republication policy and with Branch’s permission. Minor changes, primarily regarding punctuation, have been made invisibly, and a few updates have been included in square brackets. This is part 1 of 2.

Intelligent design, according to Michael Behe,

must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur, and Darwin. The observation of the intelligent design of life is as momentous as the observation that the earth goes around the sun or that disease is caused by bacteria or that radiation is emitted by quanta (Behe 1996: 232–233).

Such a great scientific achievement, of course, deserves a careful exposition in a suitably scholarly format. But instead what it received is What’s Darwin Got to Do With It? (henceforth, for brevity, WDGDWI), Robert C. Newman and John L. Wiester’s cartoon treatment of intelligent design (Newman and Wiester 2000).

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