Vatican newspaper screws up the theory of evolution before criticizing it

Is the Vatican down with Darwin? I don’t think so.

Apologists often argue that many churches have no problem with evolution, trotting out the Catholic Church as an example.  Well, that’s not quite true. The Church has sort-of endorsed evolution, but it also endorses the historical reality of Adam and Eve as our ancestors, and also accepts human exceptionalism in the form of our having a soul that God somehow inserted into our ancestors. Further, in 2009, 27% of American Catholics described themselves as young-earth creationists, bucking their church in the direction of being more conservative. So I’m not really happy with the Church’s form of god-guided “theistic evolution,” nor their insistence on a two-person bottleneck of Homo sapiens that is completely contradicted by genetic data.

My view that the Church has problems with evolution is supported by an article that just appeared in  L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican City newspaper. Although it doesn’t speak officially for the Church, it does give us some notion of how the winds of official Catholicism are blowing. And for evolution they seem to be ill winds.The piece in question is written by Carlo Maria Polvani, identified by Wikipedia as a priest with science training:

Carlo Maria Polvani. . . is a Roman Catholic priest and currently a member of the Committee for the reform for the Vatican Media since his appointment in July 2014.

Polvani was born in Milan. He was educated in the Istituto Leone XIII and then in the Collège Stanislas, he earned a Baccalauréat Français Section Scientifique avec mention in 1982. He enrolled in McGill University, Canada in the Department of Biochemistry and received in 1985, a B.Sc. with honours and in 1990 a Ph.D Dean’s Honour List, for his research on the enzymatic mechanism of the Sodium Potassium ATPase.

But his piece, “Whyy are there no penguins at the North Pole?”, is replete with errors and misunderstandings, perhaps because Fr. Polvani didn’t really learn much about evolution during his training in biochemistry. The upshot of  the piece is that modern evolutionary theory is in deep trouble because it is not predictive—it can’t tell us what will evolve and what will not—and because of that it needs a New Paradigm. The title of the piece is its message: evolutionary biologists don’t have a good explanation of why there are no Arctic penguins!

If this wasn’t in L’Osservatore Romano, it wouldn’t be worth discussing, for it’s just one more antievolution piece from an ignorant person. But if this reflects some current in the Church, we should pay a bit of attention. But just a bit!

Evolutionists will cringe at the errors in Polvani’s article. Here’s some big ones, for instance, that crop up when the good Father is trying to explain natural selection:

When, however, mutations cause more competitive characteristics to emerge, they tend to express themselves in subsequent generations by disruptive selection (one phenotype eliminates another), stabilizing selection (a phenotype is established in a population), or directional selection (the particular characteristic of a phenotype is strengthened).

Umm. . . not exactly.  Leving aside the confusing phrase “mutations tend to express themselves,” the definition of disruptive selection is completely wrong. It’s actually selection for two discrete phenotypes at the same time, with the intermediate types being at a disadvantage. An example is the Pyrinestes finches in Africa studied by Tom Smith, in which birds are selected for either thick or thin beaks because of the presumed bimodality of seed types, and those with intermediate beaks leave fewer offspring. And the definitions of “stabilizing selection” (which really means that an intermediate type is favored and deviants in either direction from that type are disfavored) as well as of directional selection (one extreme of a phenotypic distribution is favored, like selection for increasing antibiotic resistance in bacteria)—are equally muddled.

In other words, Father Polvani doesn’t seem to understand what he’s talking about. But let’s get to the meat of his argument—those missing Arctic penguins. First he brings up Popper’s criterion of falsification: that if Darwinian evolution is a real scientific theory, it should be possible to show it to be wrong—to make observations that would falsify it. Polvani says that we can’t, implying that we can always make up a story to save the modern theory of evolution, rendering it impervious to refutation and thus invalid as a theory in the Popperian sense.

What, says Polvani, has cast doubt on evolution? The fact that we don’t see penguins at the North Pole! Yep, listen up:

The Darwinist position implies that statistically, the genotypic mutation of wings into fins would have also occurred in birds living in other areas on the planet, such as, for example, the rainforests of Sumatra, but since in that environment the phenotypic features offered no competitive advantages, the penguin did not establish itself there. The same Darwinist position, however, implies that in the Arctic zones, similar in many ways to those of the Antarctic, species similar to the penguin might have been expected. Instead, there are none. To explain this absence, many Darwinists frequently use a deductive or ‘top-down’ approach, pleading the existence of causes not yet explained experimentally in order to justify an unforeseen observation.

There would be no lack of Darwinists prepared to support the idea that the presence of predators like polar bears, who live exclusively at the North Pole, could possibly be the reason for the absence of penguins in the boreal zones. Although, this line of argument might even prove valid could such an experiment take place, it is nevertheless tainted by a tautological logic: in fact, one cannot base a theory on an observation and then, when such a process results in an unsatisfactory conclusion, invoke the theory to justify the observation. This limitation is reinforced by the fact that, as things stand now, the Darwinist position, contrary to other scientific theories, has nothing to brag about with regard to predictability, that is, the capacity to correctly predict future observations on the basis of theoretical postulates. Indeed, there is not a single biologist who can forecast if and when penguins might appear at the North Pole, not even assuming the hypothetical extinction of polar bears due to global warming.

Look, it’s true that we can’t completely explain the absence of penguins at the North Pole, or of any aquatic, non-flying birds there, because any number of things could explain this historical phenomenon (or non-phenomenon). The right ancestral species might not have been in the area, the ice pack, which is different from that in the Antarctic (Antarctica, after all, has LAND under the ice), might not have given advantage to flightless birds, there might not be enough fish around, or the right mutations might not have occurred even if there were potential “penguinoid” ancestors. Polvani’s argument is like saying that cosmology is invalid because we can’t explain why there aren’t more than nine planets.  Evolution is a historical science that depends on many unknowns—including the absence of mutations in species we don’t even know about—and it’s dumb to make us explain why species are missing. Is evolution deficient because we can’t explain the absence of marsupial primates?

But that doesn’t mean that evolution doesn’t make predictions, or is not falsifiable. There were ample predictions about the presence of fossil intermediates, intermediates that have since been found—and at the right position in the fossil record. That began with Darwin suggesting in 1871 that human ancestors would be found in Africa, and continuing through the prediction and discovery of mammal-like reptiles, reptile-like amphibians, feathered dinosaurs, and, recently Tiktaalik, a possible transitional form between fish and amphibians whose date and location were predicted almost perfectly.

Further, evolutionists predicted, before they were found, “dead” or inactive genes in the genome, for when a trait is removed by evolution it’s usually by the inactivation of its genes—not their complete removal from the DNA. And so, as I describe in WEIT, biologists predicted and found dead genes for yolk protein in humans (we no longer need yolk to nourish our young), and also inactivated olfactory receptor genes in porpoises and whales (they descended from animals who smelled in air, but no longer need those genes since they live in the water).

Evolution further makes what I call “retrodictions”—the ability to uniquely make sense out of previously puzzling observations. These include the presence of hind limb buds on embryonic dolphins that later disappear, and the transitory coat of hair (the “lanugo”) that appears at about six months during human gestation and then is lost.

Finally, there are many observations that, if made, would cast serious doubt on the veracity of evolution.  The most famous, of course, is the finding of fossils in the wrong places, but I have a list of a dozen others. Another is the presence in a species of a evolved trait that ia useful only for members of another species, like teats on a lion that can be suckled only by warthogs. Needless to say, none of these observations have been made. In my book I note, “Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That’s as close to a scientific truth as we can get.”

But Father Polvani still feels that he’s inflicted mortal blows on Darwinism, showing that it’s unfalsifiable. And he still seems to think there’s something else wrong with it, though he doesn’t specify what:

A reading of John Paul II’s 1996 Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences is enough to realize that few today doubt the evolution of life on Earth. This, however, does not alter the fact that the onus probandi (burden of proving) the precise scientific merit of the specifics of the Darwinist formulation of that theory still rests on the shoulders of its defenders.

I got news for you, Father Polvani: we’ve already shown its merit! We don’t have to do that any more!

Polvani goes on, giving a passing slap to Dawkins (of course):

In this context, it is rather paradoxical that proponents of scientific independence from the interference of religion — atheistic vehemence is manifest in Dawkins’ pamphlet The God Delusion (2006) — refuse to submit their thesis to a strictly scientific examination. Hence, merit goes to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for having rigorously investigated, in 2008, the scientific basis of the evolution of life. The main threat to the scientific integrity of the theory of evolution, in fact, does not come from an alleged invasion of the field by theology, but rather from the incapacity of a certain self-referential science to recognize when it is time for a paradigmatic change, as philosopher Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) indicated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1966), noting ironically that “only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers”.

Sorry, Father, but the main threat to public acceptance of evolution is religion, for all creationism springs from religion, and every bit of organized opposition to evolution comes from religionists. You’d have to be blind to think otherwise. I’m a lot more worried about religiously-based creationists (and yes, that includes the 27% of members of Polvani’s church) than I am about the supposed fatal weaknesses in evolutionary theory that demand a New Paradigm.

And by the way, Father Polvani, exactly why do you think it’s time for that New Paradigm of Evolution?

h/t: Felipe