Capitol Ideas/E-Mail Evolution

...To this end he has teamed up with William Provine of Cornell in a series of debates—most recently at Stanford University...

...Darwin's Missing Evidence...

...Natural selection was supposed to explain how moths appeared in the first place, not how we get more of this variety or that...

...I have long believed that the dogma of evolution would one day encounter a more serious opposition, and I have been on the lookout for signs of that day...

...A decade ago, Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History said he knew of none at all...

...But Darwinism will be defended to the bitter end...

...Darwin somehow proved it, didn't he...

...Terry Gray too sees Johnson as playing a "high stakes game...

...But most evolutionists have seen merit in preserving the peace...

...Berkeley...

...of all the major groups of life, of all the minor groups of life, indeed of all the species—is weak or nonexistent when measured on an absolute scale...

...But of course you don't have to be hostile to religion in order to accept evolution...

...There has long been a resistance movement to this ideology, an opposition that has been scattered and disorganized...

...There is an envelope of variability beyond which organisms cannot be pushed...

...Most members of the group would seem to be young, or relatively so...

...But repeated attempts to demonstrate that plasticity in labs and greenhouses have failed...

...As to the wonders of nature, we take these things far too much for granted...

...The mutations we observe are not the ones we need [for evolution]," said Steve Meyer, who teaches at Whitworth College in Washington state...

...no need to stir the masses from their slumbers if they weren't causing trouble...

...The great problem with the theory of evolution is that it is supported by very little evidence...

...Provine dismisses as "effective atheists" those who add an undetectable deity to the purposeless processes of evolution...

...Let them cite Genesis and recite their prayers...

...Isaac Newton was no materialist...

...Darwin was also antagonistic to Christianity, a point that was concealed by his family until 1958...

...If Provine "proves Darwinism" he will "disprove theism," and on the evidence, Gray adds, "I'd bet on Provine...

...The "Calvin College accommodationists" have performed a disservice, he believes, by blurring the outline of a much sharper conflict...

...So natural selection is a veiled tautology...

...The Internet discussion persuades me that it may be coming close...

...to compare notes, argue, and talk things over...

...This has exasperated Johnson, who calls Gray's position "too vacuous for serious discussion...

...exulted the Scientific American...

...Gray believes "that God exists, that he has the power to create, and that there is no need for a 'blind watch-maker' mechanism," but he also believes that God's handiwork was implemented by evolution...

...The new generation of critics of evolution are going to cause more trouble...

...Defeat was not conceded, Nobel Prizes were duly awarded, but it was a setback...

...If it is true that matter is all there is—that the universe consists of nothing but molecules in motion in otherwise empty space—then God, or mind, or spirit, is eliminated from the picture by definition...

...Viable mutations with large effects have never, been observed," Jonathan Wells noted on the Internet earlier this year...

...Evolutionism is perhaps the most jealously guarded dogma of the American public philosophy...

...Johnson admires the evolutionist Provine, because he sees and accepts the atheistic implications of evolutionary theory...

...Thereafter it seemed reasonable to believe that if nature had "evolving machinery" built into it, evolution surely must have occurred...

...0 18 The American Spectator July 1994...

...Most of the participants apparently do not believe in evolution...

...We are of course endlessly bombarded with Just-So stories, such as the recent one about mammal-like creatures walking into the sea and turning into whales, but the speculative nature of these stories is usually concealed...

...Darwin's claim to originality was his discovery of a supposed mechanism of evolution: natural selection, summarized as "the survival of the fittest" by Herbert Spencer...

...They prefer to "keep the atheism implicit...

...Nonetheless, some (perhaps many) members of the group, notably Kurt Wise, are also explicit creationists...

...More blacks survived to leave offspring, and within a few decades they outnumbered whites...

...Darwin himself "never took any of the 'providential evolutionists' seriously in their pathetic efforts to put a Christian spin on his naturalistic system," Johnson replied, and in failing to see what is really at stake, Gray and others are helping . "to disarm the Christian intellectuals and pave the way for the triumph of metaphysical naturalism in science and in the universities...

...It passed muster in Victorian England, and throughout much of the twentieth century, because it silently incorporated the idea of progress...

...Yet we are led to believe that the necessary parts assembled themselves, and further, that billions .of these cells somehow came together to form sentient beings, with the power of reproduction, and without the intervention of any antecedent intelligence or designer...

...and Kurt Wise, a student of Stephen Jay Gould's at Harvard, who now teaches at a small college in Tennessee...

...We have, and can have, no criterion of fitness independent of survival itself...

...All are free to participate by sending messages that are reflected back to everyone else, but most are "lurkers," who receive but don't send...

...A few are in mainstream evolutionary science, and their identities are known only to me...

...For years, fruit flies were bombarded with X-rays in an attempt to "speed up evolution," but all the specimens died off, remaining fruit flies (some of them admittedly rather odd looking) to the end...

...Any sign of serious resistance to it has encountered fierce hostility in the past, and it will not be abandoned without a tremendous fight...

...It might give us an inkling of just how feeble the evidence for evolution is...

...I can't give you a breakdown," he told me, "but the majority are science or philosophy professors or graduate students, with the rest mostly enthusiastic amateurs...

...It is not a prerequisite of science...

...If the latter, how did they get here...

...But life got here somehow, so it must have been by some accidental combination of those molecules—by evolution, in short...

...The story of human origins finds its way into the headlines every six months or so, the better to rub in our alleged descent from apes...

...L-ogically, of course, if creatures did not evolve then they must have been created, presumably by a higher power that is invisible to us...

...He grew more so asthe clerics of his day retreated to an accommodationist position...

...Saigon abandoned, the Constitution itself slyly junked...

...Either all organisms bad parents (the theory of evolution in four words), or some did not...

...Only by redefining evolution to mean just such a change in ratios are its defenders able to claim that evolution is a "fact...

...The most famous example of natural selection in action is that of the peppered moths in Britain...

...Then came pollution, and the black forms, now perched on blackened tree trunks, were well camouflaged from predators...

...Natural selection depended on the belief that species could "depart indefinitely from the original type," to use Alfred Russel Wallace's phrase...

...Jonathan Wells, a Ph.D...

...candidate in the department of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley...

...Then came the Clean Air Act, and the light-todark ratio returned to normal...

...Another member of the group, Walter Remine, has recently published The Biotic Message, and together with Phillip Johnson's own Darwin on Trial, all these works should help persuade the intelligent layman that there is a great deal more to anti-evolutionism than Bible-Belt intransigence...

...God is brought in as a mere "subjective add-on to a naturalistic picture of reality...

...Living cells are so complex that we don't begin to know how to make them in our highest-tech labs...

...Johnson wants people to recognize that there really is a conflict between religion and science of the naturalistic variety, and so to take sides, either evolutionist or creationist, with no straddling allowed...

...Evolution, therefore, is not so much seen in the rocks as deduced from a philosophy...

...His willingness to debate Johnson, and to "make the atheistic implications of contemporary evolutionary theory explicit" is deplored by many of his colleagues in the naturalistic camp, Johnson says...

...But a more critical examination of the mechanism has cast considerable doubt on the whole business...

...Paul Nelson, a Ph.D...

...Lord knows, the people from the Institute for Creation Research had plenty of good will, and made many good points, but their arguments were often footnoted to the Bible, and their nature walks had a way of turning into prayer meetings: The Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...

...Among the regular contributors are Michael Behe, an associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University...

...With hardly a murmur of dissent, people who should know better seem to accept that life in all its profusion and complexity emerged from the random collision of particles of matter...

...A s Phillip Johnson has repeatedly pointed out, the most important support for evolution is an inconspicuous assumption of modern science: the assumption of naturalism, or (as it is sometimes called) materialism...

...Nelson (with co-authors) and Behe are writing books, which promise to be of outstanding quality...

...But now the computer revolution has had the unexpected effect of permitting this opposition to get together electronically...

...The gold standard could go (glad to be rid of that...

...Darwinian Citadel could afford to smile indulgently...

...But Darwin was, and he saw the need to conceal the point...

...This flourished in the last 150 years, but now is fading fast, and perhaps will take evolution with it...

...candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago...

...But there is no need to assume materialism in the first place...

...The discussion group has about a hundred members now, assembled over the past year by Phillip E. Johnson, a professor of law at U.C...

...His explanatory role is nil if everything can be understood as having happened without Him...

...The sharp horns of this dilemma account for the emotional potency of the issue...

...But in all these primate scenarios a mountain of speculation hangs from a scrap of bone, and with every new press conference the dating of relevant events is changed by a million years or so...

...Much of the Internet discussion in recent months has consisted of an argument between Terry Gray, a biochemist from Calvin College in Michigan (on leave at Texas A&M), and half a dozen members of the group...

...Admittedly, John Maddox, the editor of Nature, recently noted that "it may not be long before the practice of religion must be regarded as anti-science," and Oxford's Richard Dawkins has long wanted to throw cold water in the faces of the faithful...

...In his new book The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner says that "the case of the peppered moths gave evolutionists one of their first inklings of the speed of Darwin's process...

...But the most important point is that they argue against the reigning dogma intelligently, and with facts, not faith...

...to "avoid stating," as he said in one of his notebooks, "how far I believe in materialism...

...Light and dark variants of the moth existed, with the light-colored version much more common...

...What was missing from the earlier challenges was scientific literacy...

...If you reject evolution, or find it terribly implausible, then you are unavoidably faced with an alternative that some find desirable, others unpalatable...

...More recently, the chairman of the department of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History in 16 The American Spectator July 1994 New York said that "evidence, or proof, or origins...