In 2001, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould explained why they always refuse to debate creationists. Their reasoning was that the creationists were simply seeking to to be allowed to share a platform with a real scientist, and thereby create a public impression that the two sides were more or less equal.
14 December 2001
Dear Editor
Like any flourishing science, the study of evolution has its internal controversies, as we both know. But no qualified scientist doubts that evolution is a fact, in the ordinarily accepted sense in which it is a fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. It is a fact that human beings are cousins to monkeys, kangaroos, jellyfish and bacteria. No reputable biologist doubts this. Nor do reputable theologians, from the Pope on. Unfortunately, many lay Americans do, including some frighteningly influential, powerful and, above all, well-financed ones.
We are continually invited to engage in public debates against creationists, including latter-day creationists disguised under the euphemism ‘Intelligent Design Theorists’. We always refuse, for one overriding reason. If we may be allowed to spell this reason out publicly, we hope our letter may be helpful to other evolutionary scientists plagued by similar invitations.
The question of who would ‘win’ such a debate is not at issue. Winning is not what these people realistically aspire to. The coup they seek is simply the recognition of being allowed to share a platform with a real scientist in the first place. This will suggest to innocent bystanders that there must be material here that is genuinely worth debating, on something like equal terms.
At the moment of writing, the leading ‘Intelligent Design’ website reports a debate at Harvard under the banner headline ‘Wells Hits a Home Run at Harvard’.134 Jonathan Wells is a creationist, incidentally a long-time devotee of the Unification Church (the ‘Moonies’).1 He had a debate last month against Stephen Palumbi, Professor of Biology at Harvard University. ‘Home Run’ might seem to suggest that Reverends (sic) Wells scored some kind of victory over Professor Palumbi. Or at least that he made powerful points and his speech was well received. No such claim is made. It doesn’t even seem to be of interest.
The ‘Home Run’ turns out to be simply the public demonstration at Harvard that, in the words of the web site’s author, Phillip Johnson, ‘This is the sort of debate that is now occurring in universities.’ There was a victory, but it occurred long before the debate itself. The creationist scored his home run at the moment the invitation from Harvard landed on his doormat. It came, by the way, not from any biological, or indeed scientific, department, but from the Institute of Politics.
Phillip Johnson himself, founding father of the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement (not a biologist, nor a scientist of any kind, but a lawyer who became a mid-life born-again Christian), wrote, in a letter of 6 April 2001, which he copied to one of us:
It isn’t worth my while to debate every ambitious Darwinist who wants to try his hand at ridiculing the opposition, so my general policy is that Darwinists have to put a significant figure at risk before I will agree to a debate. That means specifically Dawkins or Gould, or someone of like stature and public visibility.
Well, we can condescend too, and we have the advantage that evolutionary scientists don’t need the publicity such debates can bring. In the unlikely event that a significant argument should ever emerge from the ranks of creationism/‘intelligent design’, we will be happy to debate it. Meanwhile, we shall cultivate our evolutionary gardens, occasionally engaging in the more exacting and worthwhile task of debating each other. What we shall not do is abet creationists in their disreputable quest for free publicity and unearned academic respectability.
In all humility, we offer these thoughts to our colleagues who receive similar invitations to debate.
Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University
Richard Dawkins, Oxford University
I don’t have any problem with the evolutionist preference to avoid debate. I don’t seek to debate any evolutionist or any scientist. I don’t seek a platform with any of them. I certainly don’t wish to publish in their journals; I only submitted a few papers at the start to fulfill what I felt was an intellectual responsibility. Nature screwed up my plans to make MITTENS Appendix A in the first edition by holding onto it for weeks since I’d assumed they’d reject it on sight. But now that Nature and one of the genetics journals have confirmed what I always assumed would be their lack of interest, I’m free to continue ignoring them. It’s all good.
But now that what is more than “a significant argument” has emerged, albeit not from the ranks of creationism or intelligent design, even if they will be happy to do so, I don’t intend to debate any of them on the topic any more than I intend to go into the Octagon and beat up a little crippled child with Down’s Syndrome.
I have absolutely no need to debate anyone on this topic. Do you understand why?
It’s because the end game is has already begun. The outcome is already inevitable. The more evidence that is marshalled, the more numbers that are crunched, the more they desperately flail around for epicycles and excuses, the tighter the wire cuts into their necks. I’ve already seen a concept go from my blog to tens of billions of references around the world before. I know how it works. No one talks about religion causing war anymore. Everyone has heard of a Sigma Male or imagines he might be one. So I know I don’t need to lift a finger now that the book is published and the information is out there for everyone to gradually discover. Neither the genetic record nor the math is going to change, and now everyone knows exactly where, and how, to look for the truth of evolution by natural selection or any other means.
Interestingly enough, the first edition of Probability Zero sold more than the 1,250 copies of the first edition of The Origin of the Species.
So there is no need to debate anyone. There is also no point. Watch the videos or read the transcripts. There are four PhDs and two PhD candidates participating, who in seven hours and 45 minutes not only couldn’t identify a single substantive error in a book that I know still contains at least two very material errors, but quite clearly demonstrated that they don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand the degree to which their entire 160-year conceptual edifice has been wired for demolition.
Darwin doesn’t survive this. Kimura doesn’t survive. Ohta is next; in completing the genomic matrix I will, in passing, be able to determine the empirical truth or falsehood of her Nearly Neutral theory.
In their fear and loathing of AI, they’ve failed to understand what a powerful intellectual weapon it can be in sufficiently disinterested hands. They don’t understand that the entire corpus of their science and the entire published literature of their fields has already been scanned into the machines, and is there be analyzed at a level of detail that has never before been possible, at a speed that has never before been imaginable. There isn’t an argument they can cite that I don’t already know. There isn’t a model they can summon that I haven’t already analyzed.
And in the off-chance both I and the AIs somehow missed something relevant, I can be up to speed on it within fifteen minutes. That hasn’t happened yet.
In the last week, I’ve run analyses of all 723,000 generations of the LTEE at the 500-gen resolution and all 25,302,032,866 base pairs of the seven Great Ape genomes. They’re relying upon 2009 papers that are not only outdated, but are based on literally 5.5 percent of the total data viewed at 5 percent of the resolution I’ve got. They think the deck is stacked in their favor because they’ve spent decades studying the field and working in it; what they don’t realize that the informational advantage is tilted so heavily in my favor that the average Japanese kamikaze had better odds of sinking an aircraft carrier than they do of even denting MITTENS.
I give them about two weeks before some sense of the full, lingering horror that awaits them begins dawning somewhere deep within their psyches.