Capitol Ideas/Evolution Now
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas/Evolution Now" its policies suggests that it is not the decade of the eighties but the age group that the Carter administration has in mind. Apparently the administration senses that most of us...
...And with + that unaccustomed declaration of open-mindedness, I shall close...
...Authors of academic articles aren't really "censored," of course...
...Markets, in short, permit the circumvention of experts...
...Reagan is the optimist...
...I s materialism now in retreat...
...He sees America as one vast geriatric ward...
...Mind refused to go away...
...The human psyche seems to be constructed in such a way that old ideas are not discarded until new bnes are ready to take their place...
...But Darwin's theory, that the fittest animals survive, so leaving more offspring than those that are less fit, is not susceptible of disproof in any way...
...Carter sees us as inept and wobbling for Skid Row were it not for government's watchful eye...
...Unfortunately, no one has yet been able to tell us what is meant, objectively, by the notion of fitness...
...The great problem that Darwin and other early evolutionists had to explain was: How did life get from primitive blobs in the primeval soup to its present glorious state...
...they ask...
...Roughly speaking, for the 20th-century intellectual the second law of thermodynamics thus replaces the Apostles' Creed...
...The theory peaked, seeming to have vanquished all rivals, roughly at the time of the Darwin Centennial in 1959, when that poor lost old humanist, .Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry, did his best to declare evolutionism a religion...
...Whether the second law really is a law in any meaningful and scientific sense of the term may legiti mately be doubted...
...In this instance they see it as their unwritten duty to defend what they perceive as the modern enlightenment against religious assault, much as a good many of the journalists in the 1850s saw it as their duty to defend the church against newfangled science...
...I'm sure Lyn Nofziger, Reagan's press secretary, would be only too happyto provide a fuller bibliography on request...
...You may have noticed that if natural selection is not a scientific hypothesis, nor is creationism...
...The "validity" of that dissent is a secondary issue...
...Getting back to Darwin, the main defect of his theory of evolution--by which I mean his theory as to how evolution supposedly occurred, namely by natura4 selection or "the survival of-the fittest"--is that it is not a scientific theory at all...
...He argued that an "engineer's criterion of good design" is somehow an independent criterion of fitness...
...First of all, whether we like it or not, let us at least concede that there has been a certain amount of controversy surrounding the theory of evolution for Tom Bet/sell is The American Spect a t o r ' s Washington editor and a Washington editor of Harper's...
...See Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind for a well-known, strenuously promoted but ultimately futile attempt by the modern academy to perform this latter act of reductionism...
...On the other hand, journalism, which for the most part is a "market" system of periodical publication, is prepared to tolerate dissent so long as it enjoys sufficient buyers...
...A fact always threatens to come tumbling down on top of the theory, putting it permanently out of business...
...Stranger things have happened...
...But the new religious fundamentalism in the United States must be judged only a very distant cloud on the horizon so far as respectable academic opinion is concerned, because it is so lacking in intellectual pretension, and has also, of course, been kept firmly extracurricular and "off-campus...
...He was, naturally enough, opposed to the only one of these pastimes that is any fun...
...Interestingly cnough, the theory of evolution itself contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, as does each and every instance of life...
...They therefore tailor their views, if necessary, to avoid displeasing the high and the mighty on the editorial review boards...
...To say that life on earth conforms to God's plan, or some such thing, cannot possibly be falsified since we don't know what God's plan is...
...Reagan wants to free us to improve our condition...
...Lewis Lehrman has described the difference between Reagan's economics and Carter's as the difference between Prometheus and Malthus...
...This was immediately pronounced a gaffe by members of the news media, whose arrogance is exceeded only by their ignorance...
...6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980...
...Apparently the administration senses that most of us were octogenarians, all bedridden and senile...
...Genuinely scientific theories are susceptible of disproof', or falsification...
...He can simply believe in a creator, who occasionally intervenes in the material universe, disrupting the uniformity of nature...
...I personally don't object to the explanatory vacuum that is left when you throw out Darwin's evolutionary mechanism, but I find that most people do...
...Carter is the pessimist...
...As my friend Joe Sobran remarked, one begins to suspect that the news media simply define as a gaffe whatever they do not want discussed...
...So long as ~hey remain unfalsified they retain their honorific title "scientific...
...Scientific theories, in short, must dwell permanently in the shadow of defeat...
...Either way you look at the matter, there is a massive lack of evidence...
...Recent criticism of evolution has come from two very different directions...
...Academic freedom," I guess, is nothing more than a slogan intended to divert attention from such base thoughts...
...Well, to be honest Stephen Jay Gould did have a shot at solving this problem in another of his NaturaIHistory articles but he didn't come near to a solution...
...The function of the theory of natural selection has been to provide evolutionists and scientists generally with an apparent "machinery" of evolution...
...His program would turn America into the largest poverty hospital ever heard of...
...Reagan sees us as capable...
...C A P I T 0 L I D E A S EVOI.UTION NOW by Tom Bethell Governor Reagan, bless his heart, remarked at a press conference recently that he had doubts about the theory of evolution, and supported the idea that creationism should be given separate but equal billing in school biology texts...
...Actually, I've been looking for an opportunity to discuss this evolution business for some time now, so I'm grateful to the governor for giving me the necessary news peg...
...But it won't take much to undo Darwinism, I should imagine, because it is intellectually so feeble, and indeed precarious...
...and the media, as usual, were wide of it...
...He stands with Kennedy and views the citizens' income as government property to be returned to us only for socially useful purposes...
...To sum up br.iefly: Reagan, as usual, was close to the mark...
...What do you put in its place...
...Precisely because these journals aren't really read by anyone at all, a purely authoritarian system of publication prevails, based on credentials and expertise...
...But that doesn't satisfy them...
...Darwinism, however, is logically immune from falsification, thus useless...
...He believes we can do it, and he is unafraid of the outcome...
...It seems to me quite+possible that evolution in fact took place as a result of mechanisms that have never been elucidated at all...
...Carter is not so sure we can do much more than pollute our environment, cheat one another, and line up for welfare...
...They merely want to be published...
...Darwin furnished an (illusory) explanation, one that was couched in the language of progress...
...To that extent, then, I must disagree with Governor Reagan...
...Thought remained something other than silent speech...
...It's useless to pretend otherwise...
...On the other hand, I think it is just as likely that the theory of evolution--the theory that all organisms throughout history (save the first) have had parents--is simply not true...
...The resurgence of Islam suggests that something of the sort may be taking place...
...God knows," I tell them...
...And so his famous theory of natural selection turns out to be a tautology in dis...
...guise...
...Placed side by side, the economic programs of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter reveal antipodal views of mankind...
...Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his essays in Natural History, points out that Darwin no' doubt lingered for years before coming out with his theory of evolution because he was patiently awaiting (although he might not quite have realized it himself) the full-fledged arrival of the climate of materialism in the Western intellectual air masses...
...Oh, it hasn't amounted to much--an article or two in th~ American Naturalist, something recently in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, a few articles in the British journal Philosophy...
...The trouble is that Darwin omitted to provide us with a criterion of fitness that is independent of survival itself...
...Prometheus stole fire from the heavens and championed man against the gods...
...Carter wants to conserve it for pumping rocking chairs on the front porch, for roosting before the boob tube, and for other such dynamic purposes...
...Malthus scowled, shook his old head, and figured that the human race would run off the edge of the earth instantaneously were it not for crime, disease, war, and vice...
...Until it arrived, there was no chance whatever of his theory being accepted...
...Creationism is not a topic for biology books but rather for theological ones...
...about 15 years now...
...but the Harvard professor seems to have forgotten that engineers' ideas as to what 'constitutes good design vary according to the function of what is being designed, whereas in evolutionary theory organisms have no function beyond leaving offspring...
...By contrast, when one thinks of the theories of Newton, Einstein, Kepler, et al., one can think of numerous outcomes in nature which, if observed, would destroy their theories immediately...
...once their position is accepted, the theory of evolution is in an exposed postion, because anyone who is prepared to believe that the universe includes nonmaterial components, invisible to telescopes or microscopes, is by the same token delivered of the necessity of believing in flukey chains of life, chance combinations of molecules, Darwinian reasoning, etc...
...Increasingly militant fundamentalTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 5 ist religious groups seem to have simply taken it upbn themselves to declare materialism bosh...
...Moreover, no intervention, or disruption of the uniformity of nature has ever been observed...
...In the materialist scheme, mind is regarded either as less easily discerned matter, or a phenomenon somehow explicable in terms of behavior...
...One can't help wondering...
...Look at it this way: What conceivable animal could come lumbering over the horizon, so strangely made that it forced the scientists to conclude that Darwin had finally been proved wrong...
...No independent criterion of fitness has been proposed...
...The bishops would easily have swept it aside...
...This is because the mere existence of such a creature, however weird it might be, would always be sufficient to validate the lame claim that the fittest had once again survived...
...First of all, there has been a straightforward grassroots assault on materialism, the roughly 150-yearold ideological substratum or bedrock upon which almost all other intellectually certified ideas have since been constructed...
...No one has ever been able to suggest any combination of features that would have this effect...
...He wants to use it...
...In sum, Reagan views the American people as a source of energy...
...You had "fitter" models, and they naturally displaced those that were less fit...
...A few wisps and strands of criticism have appeared in the dense, uniform bamboo thickets of academic rumination that stand forever unread in the university library stacks...
...Materialism posits a "dead" universe consisting solely of empty space and particles of matter forever seeking greater disorder and randomness (entropy...
...To digress for a minute, that there has not been more criticism of Darwinism to date tells us how vigilant yet subtle is the censorship imposed by peer review...
...Carter will keep us in our beds...
...More interesting, therefore, has been the nervous, ever.so-tentative demurral against Darwinism, raised within the academic compound itself...
Vol. 13 • November 1980 • No. 11
