Because Nobel lau­re­ate Wern­er Arber is address­ing evo­lu­tion at the Lan­dau meet­ing of Nobel lau­re­ates, I thought I’d repost this piece from Jan­u­ary 21, 2009, which was first post­ed from the Texas Board of Edu­ca­tion meet­ing room. Enjoy.

In Novem­ber, the Texas Board of Edu­ca­tion met to con­sid­er their new sci­ence stan­dards. As I’ve men­tioned a major point of con­tention is a ref­er­ence in the cur­rent stan­dards to “strengths and weak­ness­es” of sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions, a con­cept only ever applied to evo­lu­tion, and with­out any clear expla­na­tion of what it means.

In the course of 6 hours of tes­ti­mo­ny, wit­ness­es con­stant­ly asked what these “weak­ness­es” were, and got no clar­i­ty. Final­ly, at an ungod­ly hour, Cyn­thia Dun­bar (the one who thinks pub­lic schools are evil and that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma is a s3kr1t Mus­sul­man) gave her expla­na­tion. In the course of doing so, she per­pet­u­at­ed bla­tant false­hoods about a Nobel Prize-win­ning doctor.

A con­cerned teacher observed that:

[Dur­ing the 2003 text­book hear­ings in Texas] Much of the tes­ti­mo­ny giv­en in sup­port of 3A, the strengths and weak­ness­es, was giv­en by the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute, who were here, giv­ing pre­sen­ta­tions on that. In that case, they were using this as a strat­e­gy for keep­ing open the idea of “teach­ing the con­tro­ver­sy,” which does­n’t seem to be as preva­lent with­in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty as it does with­in our com­mu­ni­ty at large.

Dun­bar replied:

D: OK, but the last tes­ti­mo­ny heard was that sci­ence is not some­thing that’s deter­mined by major­i­ty vote, there is a sci­en­tif­ic method.

I would like to have some­one of the mag­ni­tude of Dr. Wern­er Abn­er [sic] here. I don’t know if you know who he is. Are you famil­iar with him?

A: Not right off the top of my head, no.

Dun­bar: He is a Nobel lau­re­ate. He spent his life doing stud­ies in evo­lu­tion and genet­ics. I don’t think we could get him here, I think he’s in Switzer­land. But his, his years and years and years and years of research in genet­ics and evo­lu­tion are very, very cred­i­ble, and his end result recent­ly, I think it was in Sep­tem­ber, was that the genet­ic code, and genet­ic muta­tions are actu­al­ly built in to a lim­i­ta­tion that they can only go so far, which is con­trary to the ulti­mate result of nat­ur­al selec­tion and all of that. But that would not be some­one out­side of the sci­en­tif­ic community…

At which point the dis­cus­sion pro­ceeds to whether she wants reli­gious taught in sci­ence class

Lat­er, Dun­bar and a stu­dent from UT got into the same discussion:

A: My ques­tion would be: Where’s the data to prove the, I believe it’s four weak­ness­es, four lim­i­ta­tions. Where’s the data for that? It’s my under­stand­ing that the entire sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty does­n’t believe that they exist.

D: First of all, sci­ence is not based on major­i­ty rule,

A: Right

D: And there’s lots of data. Do you know who Wern­er Arber is? He’s a PhD and a Nobel laureate.

A: I believe I heard you talk­ing about him earlier.

D: And do you know who he is.

A: Not extensively.

D: Go Google him. Because he spent his life on evo­lu­tion and genet­ics. So there is data out there [on the weak­ness­es of evo­lu­tion], we don’t want that squelched. We want to be able to dis­cuss it. And as a polit­i­cal sci­ence major, I would hope that you of all peo­ple would want there to be open dis­cus­sion these types of issues with­in the classroom.

A: You keep talk­ing about the sci­en­tif­ic method. When these four weak­ness­es are applied to the sci­en­tif­ic method and they fail– I don’t understand –

D: His doc­u­men­ta­tion, if you go read it, I mean it’s very clear as to the geneti­cists and the doc­u­men­ta­tion of the muta­tions and all that. I mean it’s not any­thing that fails, it’s testable, it’s observ­able, it’s right there. But those are the types of the things that we want the stu­dents to be able to discuss …

So Dun­bar wants Arber’s response, eh? Tak­ing her advice, I did Google him. One thing I learned is that he did not pub­lish any­thing in Sep­tem­ber, but an arti­cle by Jer­ry Bergman was pub­lished about him in that mon­th’s issue of Acts & Facts, the newslet­ter of the young earth cre­ation­ist Insti­tute for Cre­ation Research. 

Set­ting aside every­thing I will lay out from this point for­ward, it is impor­tant to note that, based on Dun­bar’s com­ments and the ICR arti­cle, she clear­ly based her under­stand­ing of this sci­en­tif­ic mat­ter on a sin­gle arti­cle in a cre­ation­ist mag­a­zine, and is ignor­ing the tes­ti­mo­ny and guid­ance not only of the AAAS, the NAS, and her own com­mit­tee of experts, but Tex­an Nobel Prize-win­ners. Edu­ca­tion­al pol­i­cy should nev­er be made on the basis of cre­ation­ist pub­li­ca­tions, espe­cial­ly when those pub­li­ca­tions make demon­stra­bly false state­ments. The ref­er­ences to a pub­li­ca­tion in Sep­tem­ber alone demon­strate that she is rely­ing on the ICR piece, and var­i­ous shared mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions con­firm this.

In the arti­cle, ICR’s Jer­ry Bergman insist­ed that Arber is an ID sup­port­er, large­ly on the basis of an inter­view from the ear­ly 1990s, col­lect­ed by Ray Vargh­ese. Vargh­ese is at the cen­ter of a con­tro­ver­sy over Antho­ny Flew’s con­ver­sion from athe­ism to deism, and is accused of pass­ing his own words off as Flew’s in order to make him seem more Chris­t­ian than he is.

Arber also co-orga­nized a con­fer­ence on evo­lu­tion for the Pon­tif­i­cal Acad­e­my of Sci­ences last Novem­ber, at which he firm­ly stat­ed his sup­port for evo­lu­tion as sci­ence and his belief that it is com­pat­i­ble with reli­gious faith.

His own research shows no signs of doubts about evo­lu­tion, and indeed he has pub­lished work with such lumi­nar­ies of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy as Richard Lens­ki, and his own Nobel-win­ning work on restric­tion enzymes has been pow­er­ful­ly use­ful to evo­lu­tion­ary biology.

Cer­tain that ICR had mis­rep­re­sent­ed Dr. Arber, I con­tact­ed some of his pro­fes­sion­al col­leagues to see if they could make him aware of this appar­ent error in the ICR’s arti­cle, and in Dun­bar’s man­gled rep­e­ti­tion of the same points. One col­league replied that “That cer­tain­ly seems to me to be a mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Prof. Arber’s views on the mat­ter, and quite amazing.”

Dr. Arber also wrote back, with thanks for alert­ing him to the prob­lem. He includ­ed a state­ment he had sent to ICR refut­ing the arti­cle and Dun­bar’s inter­pre­ta­tion of it, adding that I was “wel­come to make use of this state­ment in rel­e­vant sit­u­a­tions.” He also point­ed out a com­mon prob­lem in deal­ing with cre­ation­ists: “I slow­ly learn to write my papers by tak­ing care to reduce the chance of mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion, but this is not easy.” Giv­en cre­ation­ists’ propen­si­ty for mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion and quotem­i­ning, it is indeed dif­fi­cult to pre­vent such misinterpretation.

Dr. Arber’s response to the ICR is below the fold. Eng­lish is not his native tongue, so the lan­guage is a bit stilt­ed at times. There should be no doubt, though, that Dr. Arber was mis­rep­re­sent­ed by the ICR and by Cyn­thia Dun­bar. Had he been at the hear­ings, as Dun­bar wished, he would sure­ly have denied that evo­lu­tion is rid­dled with weak­ness­es, and indeed affirms that “I stand ful­ly behind the Neo­Dar­win­ian the­o­ry of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion and I con­tributed to con­firm and expand this the­o­ry at the mol­e­c­u­lar lev­el so that it can now be called Mol­e­c­u­lar Darwinism.”

State­ment on my view on bio­log­i­cal evolution

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

I recent­ly got aware of an arti­cle enti­tled “Wern­er Arber: Nobel Lau­re­ate, Dar­win Skep­tic” that was pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber 2008 by the Insti­tute for Cre­ation Research and that is authored by Jer­ry Bergman, Ph.D. This arti­cle com­plete­ly mis­in­ter­prets my gen­er­al con­clu­sions that I base on sev­er­al decades of stud­ies in micro­bial genet­ics. A num­ber of cita­tions are tak­en out of their orig­i­nal con­text and sur­round­ed by com­ments and mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions by the author of the article.

The truth is that I have con­tributed to advance sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge on bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion by study­ing mol­e­c­u­lar mech­a­nisms of genet­ic vari­a­tion. Genet­ic vari­a­tion is clear­ly the dri­ving force of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion. A num­ber of dif­fer­ent spe­cif­ic mol­e­c­u­lar mech­a­nisms con­tribute to spon­ta­neous genet­ic vari­a­tion. Togeth­er with non-genet­ic ele­ments spe­cif­ic gene prod­ucts are there­by involved as vari­a­tion gen­er­a­tors and as mod­u­la­tors of the rates of genet­ic vari­a­tion. These are estab­lished facts that are based on exper­i­men­tal evi­dences and that are valid for the course of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion as it works today in liv­ing organ­isms. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, one can extrap­o­late into the past his­to­ry of life devel­op­ment on Earth. One can, e.g., pos­tu­late how the genes involved in bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion may have become fine-tuned to insure to liv­ing organ­isms a com­fort­able genet­ic sta­bil­i­ty and at the same time to the pop­u­la­tions of liv­ing organ­isms an evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment, includ­ing adapt­abil­i­ty to chang­ing liv­ing con­di­tions and an expan­sion of bio­di­ver­si­ty. In con­trast, there is, so far, nei­ther sat­is­fac­to­ry sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge nor the­o­ry on the ori­gin and ear­ly evo­lu­tion of life on our planet.

On sol­id sci­en­tif­ic grounds one can­not expect to dis­cov­er if a Cre­ator as defined by reli­gious beliefs and some­times referred to as intel­li­gent design or God’s Will, could be respon­si­ble for the ori­gin and sub­se­quent evo­lu­tion of life. Seri­ous sci­en­tif­ic inves­ti­ga­tions can nei­ther prove nor dis­prove the exis­tence of God or a pos­si­ble impact of God on evo­lu­tion­ary process­es. In our civ­i­liza­tion, both sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and reli­gious beliefs con­tribute essen­tial­ly to our ori­en­tat­ing knowl­edge, but these two sources of our world­view should not be intermingled.

In con­clu­sion, I am nei­ther a “Dar­win skep­tic” nor an “intel­li­gent design sup­port­er” as it is claimed in Bergman’s arti­cle. I stand ful­ly behind the Neo­Dar­win­ian the­o­ry of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion and I con­tributed to con­firm and expand this the­o­ry at the mol­e­c­u­lar lev­el so that it can now be called Mol­e­c­u­lar Darwinism.

Wern­er Arber
Pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus for Mol­e­c­u­lar Microbiology,
Uni­ver­si­ty of Basel.
Nobel Lau­re­ate Medicine/Physiology 1978