FARMS Reviews "The Case for Divine Design"

The Case for Divine Design: Cells, Complexity, and Creation, by Frank B. Salisbury, is reviewed in the most recent FARMS Review (2008, Volume 20, Issue 1). The review article is "The Clockmaker Returns," by James L. Farmer. Dr. Salisbury is an emeritus professor of plant physiology, and Dr. Farmer is a BYU emeritus biology professor.

I have read The Case for Divine Design completely through once, mostly through a second time, and bits and pieces even more. I think the review is pretty straightforward and even-handed, and I generally agree with it. My one quibble is that toward the end Dr. Farmer seems to see Intelligent Design (ID) as only associated ("guilty by association") with Creationism. However, the fact is that ID grew out of creationism in response to court decisions that prevented the teaching of creationism in public schools.

Now for some of my own comments on The Case for Divine Design:

The main point of the book is to argue that science does not disprove God--not that there is scientific evidence for God (Salisbury rejects ID as legitimate science), but that the history of life is not known in sufficient detail to rule out divine intervention. It is in that sense that he seems to feel affinity toward ID.

He describes his worldview as follows (pg 22):

My belief also includes the idea that an Intelligent Creator, God, played a critical role in this process. I have no conclusion about what that role might have been. Did he engineer the first life on Earth and then let evolution take over, as deists and others believe? Or did he intervene in other ways intelligently creating every species? My attitude is that we simply lack enough information to speculate at this time.

It comes as no surprise that science cannot refute such a position.

Although I am less attracted to ID than Salisbury (and I am repelled by the ID movement), my own view is actually quite similar. Yet in spite of that core agreement, I have a few reservations about the book. First let me say that I appreciate the thought that Dr. Salisbury put into the book. There are a shortage of public LDS-scientist role models and his effort to communicate his years of thinking to another generation is to be commended, and his arguments are worth considering.

In a different FARMS Review article that was written by Dr. Salisbury, he suggested that the authors "are so busy defending evolutionary theory that it never seems to occur to them that there might still be problems with the theory." I think I would turn that around here: Dr. Salisbury is so busy trying to find problems with evolution that he misses some of its strengths. To be clear, he assures us that he is not a "bitter anti-evolutionist," and in an interesting end note, he writes that he "was personally deeply troubled" by Joseph Fielding Smith's book, Man, His Origin and Destiny. (He later met with then-Apostle Spencer W. Kimball, who told Salisbury "that he knew little about the science...and had no personal convictions on the matter," and that President Smith's book was "not to be considered Church doctrine" [quotations from the book, which paraphrased Elder Kimball].) Nevertheless, in my opinion his treatment of evolutionary theory is incomplete, as the following two examples illustrate.

1. Adaptationism and genetic drift. Salisbury repeatedly expresses concern that plausible "just-suppose stories"--especially in regard to the power of natural selection--are accepted too readily as final explanations. You could argue that holding a provisional position (and rejecting others) based on existing knowledge and pending additional information, is not a bad thing--and science is not about achieving metaphysical certainty anyway. But that aside, he seems unaware that scientists such as Stephen J. Gould have made similar criticisms. Probably the most famous example is a paper Gould and Richard Lewontin wrote in 1979 called, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," in which Gould and Lewontin argued for a pluralistic approach to evolution that does not entail explaining every detail in terms of natural selection.

This is relevant because Salisbury seems unaware of a significant alternative to natural selection: genetic drift, which is where the frequency of a particular gene can become the norm (or driven to extinction) due to chance events. Imagine an animal hunted to near-extinction; that species will have restricted genetic diversity going forward. In many cases, the reason certain genes will be most frequent in the recovering population will have nothing to do with natural selection. They will be predominant simply because animals with alternate versions happened to get killed by hunters.

This failure to consider genetic drift, in turn, leads him to puzzle over what in my opinion are probably non-existent problems. For example, Salisbury seems to wonder how natural selection can account for the gene that causes Huntington's disease, which kills people in mid-life (i.e. post-reproduction). Although I can imagine a genetic scenario that could lead to the Huntington's gene being spread by natural selection, it is also quite possible that natural selection has nothing to do with it. The gene might simply have spread by chance (i.e. genetic drift). Likewise, Salisbury worries about how a selectively neutral mutation in cytochrome c can spread until it becomes fixed (i.e. present in all individuals of a population). Again, this is the domain of genetic drift, which becomes a dominant factor in small populations.

Salisbury might accuse me of spinning just-suppose stories--which I guess I am, since I haven't looked into the scientific literature concerning the evolution of these genes. However, the point is that once we release ourselves from explaining everything in terms of natural selection and turn to other established evolutionary principles, some otherwise perplexing problems evaporate. Moreover, scientists have devised various statistical tests for differentiating between natural selection and genetic drift.

2. Genetic relatedness. Before genes were understood to be coded by DNA, copies of which are inherited by offspring, evolutionary relationships were determined primarily by comparative anatomy. In the second chapter Salisbury uses a literary device to express his internal deliberations and pondering by putting arguments in the mouths of "the Biologist" and "the Skeptic." The Biologist discusses the relationships inferred by anatomy and the fossil record, but the Skeptic argues (at least twice) that anatomical similarities do not prove genetic relatedness. Inexplicably, the Biologist never points out the evidences of genetic relatedness! The closest we get is a brief treatment of an evolutionary tree generated from cytochrome c sequences in the fourth chapter. He writes:

The conclusion is that, because humans and chimpanzees have identical sequences, they must be closely related, while humans and higher plants must be distantly related, since they have the fewest sequences in common. Stories such as this are compelling and are among the most impressive and plausible evidences that an evolutionist can produce, which is not to say that an Intelligent Creator could not have designed things that way.

This is quite unsatisfactory. Genetic sequences contain treasure troves of evidence suggesting common descent and genetic relatedness, and by and large the inferred relationships match those that were previously determined by comparative anatomy. He may be correct (for now) that we cannot demonstrate a genetic relationship between us and other hominans (for lack of surviving genetic material to study), but if the genetic trail goes cold at Homo erectus, it gets rather hot again with chimpanzees and gorillas. A genetic relationship with a cousin implies a genetic relationship with a common grandparent, even if the exact identity of the parents or grandparents remain uncertain.

In summary, I think that The Case for Divine Design makes some interesting points that are worth considering. However, in the examples I have discussed, as well as some I have not, I think the book raises needless doubt as to why evolution is the central organizing principle of biology. Given the wide range of material that the book covers in so short a space, readers should use the book as a springboard rather than an ending point.

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