About Neil Thomas

Neil Thomas is the new poster boy for the ID movement. He has published a book "Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design" with the Discovery Institute (DI), and is writing a series of articles for their web site.

But who is he? They conveniently tell us:

Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied Classical Studies and European Languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up his post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. There his teaching involved a broad spectrum of specialisms including Germanic philology, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment and modern German history and literature. He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the German language used both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old German Democratic Republic. He published over 40 articles in a number of refereed journals and a half dozen single-authored books, the last of which were Reading the Nibelungenlied (1995), Diu Crone and the Medieval Arthurian Cycle (2002) and Wirnt von Gravenberg's 'Wigalois'. Intertextuality and Interpretation (2005). He also edited a number of volumes including Myth and its Legacy in European Literature (1996) and German Studies at the Millennium (1999). He was the British Brach President of the International Arthurian Society (2002-5) and remains a member of a number of learned societies.

There are some interesting points to note here.

Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham?

At a UK university, a reader is not the same as a professor; it is a position below that. So it is kind of odd that the Discovery Institute repeatedly call him Professor Thomas...

There is a list of emeritus positions at Durham University here, Curiously, Thomas is not there!

There is a list of notable people associated with the university on Wiki, and he does not even rate a mention there.

I am not suggesting Thomas was not at the University of Durham, I think he was, but he did not hold the rank of professor and is not currently Reader Emeritus of that university.

It looks like Thomas was born in 1949, see here, and to judge from his recent lack of output, he retired around 2005. He is, or will be, 73 this year. Why has he suddenly rejected evolution? Well, when people get old, their mental facilities can decline....

No Science Qualifications and Background

The second point to note about his biography is he has zero qualifications in science and zero background in science. This is a guy who is an expert in languages and history. Nothing here suggests he has a clue about biology.

Frankly, this is confirmed by reading his articles.

Why has he suddenly rejected evolution? Well, because he is utterly clueless about biology.

Thomas's Approach To Evolution

The DI have published a series of articles by Thomas. None of the discuss biology. In fact, I would go further to say that nothing in them suggests he has ready anything on either biology or evolution from after the nineteenth century.

The following quotes are taken from them, of which there are currently five, as of 24/Mar/22.

An erstwhile academic colleague recently remarked to me (in an uncharacteristically unscholarly disclosure) that he could not share my interest in “all this old 19th-century stuff,” explaining that he preferred to derive his knowledge of Darwinism from more up-to-date, 21st-century sources. Common experience on the other hand indicates that the trouble with this kind of Henry Ford (“history is bunk”) argument is that, whilst we may often want to be through with history, history is typically not through with us and that those who choose to ignore the lessons of history may sometimes be condemned to repeat its errors. In the case of Darwin, the most serious error one could commit is to ignore 19th-century caveats against acceptance of Darwinism in favor of less critical, recent expositions of his work. For most standard accounts nowadays paper over the many sources of opposition to which the Origin of Species gave rise in the minds of its earlier readers.

This very much sets the tone for his arguments. Note that he refers to the theory as Darwinism, not evolution. As far as Thomas is concerned, the theory of evolution has not changed in 150 years; he does not need to concern himself with a century and a half of research in biology and related subjects.

He goes on:

In most modern accounts of Darwin’s ideas, for instance, the impression is given that in “natural selection” he had made a Great Discovery whose self-evident brilliance was such that all immediately assented to it. This is simply not supported by the evidence, and it would be anachronistic to suppose that Darwin’s Origin of Species suddenly achieved that status of latter-day Nicene Creed wished upon it by some über-Darwinians of our own day. 

Is Thomas arguing about whether the modern theory of evolution is true? Or is he discussing its impact in the nineteenth century? He seems to vacillate between the two.

Darwin's theory was radical at the time, so of course it met with resistance. But that in no way suggests it is not true.

The fact is that over the succeeding decades, that resistance became fewer and fewer as the more and more evidence can to light, from all across biology, and so today the last few holdouts are ignorant theists who know precious little about biology.

Like Thomas...

The Fossil Record

Thomas makes a big deal about the fossil record. This is the nearest he gets to the actual science, and even this is lifted from Darwin's own book,

Notoriously, one of the shrewdest of Darwin’s “reticences” concerned the lack of fossil evidence to demonstrate his postulation of evolving body types and (he claimed) new species over vast swathes of time — a lacuna which he attempted to explain away via the exculpatory rhetorical strategy of blaming the poor fossil record for his inability to adduce confirmatory bone remains. Not without reason did Darwin refer to himself as a master “wriggler.” 

Obviously Thomas ignores the huge number of fossils found since Darwin, all of which support evolution, because, well he would have to read some actual science.

The fact is that the relative paucity of fossils does explain the lack of fossil evidence. If evolution was wrong we would have the same number of fossils as if it was right. We have what we have. And what Thomas neglects to mention is that every single fossil we do have fits evolution. There are no centaurs or mermaids - hybrids that would break the nested hierarchy; there certainly are potentially fossils that would break evolution, but we have never found any.

Suppose we had no fossils at all - would that disprove evolution? Of course not. There is a shed load of other evidence. So even in that situation, the lack of any fossils at all would not refute evolution. However, we are not in that situation. We have a lot of fossils, and they all fit evolution. In fact they fit so well palaeontologists can predict what fossils they will find where.

If Thomas was not such an ignorant creationist he would know that the fossil record is actually very good evidence for evolution.

Darwin Had Doubts

Apparently Thomas considers the fact that Darwin was unsure as a reason to reject modern evolutionary theory.

Although some modern legatees of Darwin are untroubled by such doubts — accepting natural selection unproblematically as something that just “happens” with a kind of agent-less automaticity1 — Darwin himself clearly was troubled. For after publication of the first edition of the Origin in 1859, he began casting around in his mind for supplementary theories, sometimes going so far as to reconsider evolutionary thinking he had once firmly rejected.

Of course, Thomas is wilfully ignorant of modern biology. He chooses to ignore over a century and a half of research in biology that has very much confirmed evolution. Darwin knew nothing about genes, for example, which was one reason for his doubts. Today, we understand them pretty well, and we know they support evolution.

Many Opinions

Thomas claims:

Hence in contradistinction to modern, supposedly hypercorrect interpretations of Darwinism, which insist on each element of what is somewhat reductively taken to be the Darwinian intellectual ensemble being in place, in the final decades of the 19th century and well into the initial decades of the 20th century Darwinism remained essentially an umbrella organization or broad church in which a variety of opinions were debated and what were in effect a number of “minority reports” issued.

I do not know if it is true that there were initially numerous interpretations of Darwin's theories, but it may well be. So what? As Thomas notes, the modern view is not like that.

Curiously he also seems to object to the modern view being a single interpretation!

The simple fact is that as more evidence has come to light, and our understanding of biology has improved. so the theory of evolution has been adjusted and more firmly established.

This is because it is true!