Capitol Ideas: The Evolution Wars
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell The Evolution Wars T he conference "Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe," sponsored by the Wethersfield Institute, was held at the great hall of Cooper...
...The public has long been skeptical, of course...
...As Phil Johnson says, this claim is so weak that it is confirmed every time a baby is born...
...This may be characterized as the belief that nothing exists except for "molecules in motion" (in Lenin's apt formulation...
...In bringing the explanatory filter to bear on some artifact or event, randomness and regularity (chance and necessity) are given priority...
...The featured speakers on this occasion were less well known: Mike Behe, William Dembski, Stephen Meyer...
...Writing in the New York Review of Books, he spoke of scientists' "prior commitment to materialism," and he added, rather impishly I felt, that that materialism "is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door...
...Norman Macbeth wrote a gem of a book called Darwin Retried...
...Many scientists do, however, and some, such as Richard Lewontin of Harvard, have made the point explicitly...
...Another problem is that natural selection is supposed to work by small increments, over many generations...
...But how that change of dramatis personae took place, we don't know...
...Any theory that cannot be challenged by contrary evidence, however, risks becoming a dogma...
...More recently, the leadership of the anti-evolutionist cause has been taken up by another lawyer, Phillip Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley...
...On the walls were photographs of presidents from Lincoln to Clinton in mid oration...
...20 December 1999/ January z000 - The American Spectator...
...Be on the lookout for Dembski's writings...
...The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is funded with just this possibility in mind...
...Then the theory approaches unfalsifiability...
...His latest book is The Noblest Triumph (St...
...Guess which side has the more plausible claim to know the facts...
...The materialist superstition has affected our learning in all academic disciplines...
...The cell, it turns out, is about as remote from Ernst Haeckel's "simple little lump" of protoplasm as a semiconductor fabrication plant is from a child's sand castle on the beach...
...living bodies, for example...
...the Miller-Urey origin-of-life experiments (which never went anywhere...
...thesis for the University of Chicago, "On Common Descent," is just now being published in that university's Evolutionary Monograph series...
...Dembski, the youngest, with Ph.D.'s in mathematics and philosophy, recently published The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press...
...Nature incorporates within itself machinery that transforms random events into apparently designed outcomes...
...Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, devised an escape route for those who would rather do without...
...As we know, there has been a great deal of agitation and propaganda on behalf of the theory...
...He is in the midst of writing what should be an eye-opening book, discussing some of the best known textbook "icons" of evolution...
...Dembski asked us to consider a lottery...
...There's more rot there...
...Gould would not make the mistake of debating anyone with scientific arguments and a more skeptical version of the facts...
...Either way, we don't see it...
...His first book, Darwin on Trial, was published in 1991, and since then he has published others...
...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell The Evolution Wars T he conference "Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe," sponsored by the Wethersfield Institute, was held at the great hall of Cooper Union, in Manhattan...
...It's one of those areas where the experts don't encounter automatic assent...
...In fact, the reiteration of that dogma is precisely intended to marginalize and isolate skeptics...
...Gould says that it occurred too quickly...
...Berkeley and remains a post-doctoral student at that institution...
...That would be when the thing in question is contingent, complex, and specified...
...It is encouraging to know that one is not alone in doubting one of the great dogmas of the age...
...It is an encouraging sign that he has attracted to his side people of the caliber of Behe, Nelson, Wells, Meyer, and Dembski...
...Don't advocate atheism...
...The structure of that molecule is so complex that it couldn't have arisen by chance, Crick realized...
...The American Spectator December r999/January 2000 19 life here...
...The collapse of the idea ofprogress, so strong in Darwin's day, has no doubt played a role...
...Why was it not possible to say plainly what in fact is the case, Rosen said: that we just don't know how the species evolved, or even if they did...
...The supporters of the theory are at their most dogmatic when they tell us that it is a "fact," but when pressed they say that what they mean by evolution is "change over time...
...But it is beginning to look as antiquated as any other piece of Victorian machinery...
...When evidence is not allowed to "count" against a theory, it resembles a rigged trial...
...Detectives and insurance companies are trained to distinguish between design (murder, arson) and accident...
...Not that these people were creationists, I hasten to add...
...Less often do we hear the other side...
...Now they were to believe that all this had been unnecessary...
...They had learned to live with a nice, passive, no-thunderbolts deity, who minded his own business, allowed life to develop of its own accord by Darwinian methods, and certainly had the good taste to stay out of the "creationism" business...
...Does God have tocome in at that point...
...Or a "change in gene frequencies...
...If materialism is true, then evolution indeed must he true...
...Gary Nelson, the curator of ichthyology in the 1980's, would say that we know virtually nothing about the evolution of fishes, for example...
...He's a skillful operator—a field marshal in the culture war...
...They just wanted to insist that the origin of species was treated with scientific rigor...
...In private, some of them would allow that TOM BETHELL is TAS's Washington correspondent...
...Each successful mutation is supposed to confer a reproductive advantage on the organism as a whole...
...Phil Johnson's strategy is to show that the facts of biology do not fit the materialist preconception...
...The first is Paul Nelson, whose Ph.D...
...Evolutionary theory "assumes, rather than explains, the existence of the first life and the information it required...
...All have been traveling from conference to conference, raising questions about evolution...
...It is based on the premise of materialism, or naturalism...
...Crick has indeed fought the good fight and kept the (materialist) faith...
...All have received support from the Discovery Institute in Seattle...
...Then we are left with design...
...But as Michael Behe argued in his talk, what we see under the microscope does not encourage us to believe that that is what really happened...
...Martin's Press...
...Although a materialist himself, he sees the value of singing occasional lullabies to the congregation...
...But when the theory's predictions failed, as happened for instance with the discovery of the non-universality of the genetic code, or the divergence of animal development, common descent emerged unscathed...
...We can now see that supporting evidence for the theory has scarcely been unearthed at all...
...He was referring to the false choice that the culture obliges us to make: Either the Bible, or Darwin...
...He didn't think that science was supposed to be based on any kind of authority...
...You had to be there to get the full story...
...In a sense, the speakers at Cooper Union have been Johnson's proteges...
...Two others, not present, should also be mentioned (also Discovery fellows...
...The second is Jonathan Wells, who has a Ph.D...
...we don't know much about evolution...
...Although portrayed as a science, evolution is more truly an ideology...
...Their forlorn hope has been to receive admiring notice, perhaps even a Strange New Respect Award or two, from Harvard and Yale...
...The late Colin Patterson, a curator of paleontology at the British Museum of Natural History, questioned in the 1980's whether we really know anything about evolution...
...The audience of several hundred (not bad for paid admission on a Saturday morning) was quiet and attentive...
...The Evolution Wars are beginning to get interesting...
...This is what Stephen Jay Gould has done, in his recent book Rocks of Ages...
...Like nuns in miniskirts just as they went out of fashion...
...The Darwinian message, of course, is that living things only appear to have been designed...
...He also runs an e-mail discussion group, whose important role has been to bringonce isolated dissidents together into a (virtual) community...
...It is important to see how common descent might be tested...
...Not that Rosen had another authority in mind...
...He asks at the outset: If Darwin's theory of common descent were false, how would we know...
...So how did life arise...
...Say rather that religion and science are separate realms...
...18 December 1999/January 2000 • The American Spectator conform to due process, but, somehow, each hostile witness is excused in turn...
...That machinery is called natural selection, which the somewhat gullible writer Robert Wright has called "the most plainly beautiful creation of scientific thought yet...
...The problem with natural selection, as Stephen Meyer pointed out in his talk, is that it starts off by assuming the very things whose existence it seeks to explain, self-reproducing organisms...
...Evolution, then, is a straightforward deduction from a world view, rather than an observation...
...It could be won by chance (as lotteries are meant to work), or by necessity (only one person entered), or by design (it was rigged...
...How do we detect design in everyday life...
...All these and more involve either misleading claims, misrepresentation, or outright deception...
...Darwin's finches" on the Galapagos Islands (which prove nothing at all...
...The faculty of reason allows us to choose among these possibilities...
...The Victorian fantasy was one of small-scale simplicity...
...Haeckel's embryo drawings (turning out to be "one of the most famous fakes in biology," an embryologist recently wrote in Science), and so on...
...Meyer, with a Ph.D...
...Reviewing the literature in his study of this material, Wells told me, was "like being a dentist and discovering great pockets of tooth decay...
...Science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria," he intones, and we are back snoozing in the pews...
...Evolution is still dogmatically upheld, of course...
...Referring to Stephen Jay Gould's theory of evolution by fits and starts, punctuated equilibrium, Rosen commented: "Darwin said that evolution occurred too slowly for us to see it...
...Having done their best to shed that old rumpled seersucker, William Jennings Bryan stigma, along comes this slick lawyer from Berkeley to tell them that Darwin got it all wrong...
...The undisguised materialists, among them Richard Dawkins of Oxford, Daniel Dennett of Tufts, and William Provine of Cornell, who do not shrink from the implications of their own philosophy, make a greater contribution to clarity than the theistic evolutionists, who try to keep everyone happy...
...Organisms do exist, so they must have assembled themselves out of blindly whirling atoms...
...the camouflaged dark moths which survive better than the light-colored variety (true except when it isn't true...
...If it takes a thousand steps to build an eye, all must he completed before we get any vision at all...
...We can look back into the fossil record and determine that creatures that once existed no longer do...
...He died about ten years ago...
...It is privileged by evolutionary biologists...
...Behe is an associate professor of biology at Lehigh University (see TAS, September 1996, and this issue...
...He debates Jerry Falwell, the better to reinforce the "religion versus science" stereotype...
...Even the simplest industrial mechanism consists of parts which must all be present and correct at once...
...Within the body, the actual molecular machines that are involved turn out to he far more complex than Darwin and his allies ever imagined...
...The president of the Discovery Institute, Bruce Chapman, who has had the courage to help fund this movement, says that the question of evolution "not only has a direct bearing on the integrity of science, it also has immense importance for our culture...
...It is not a matter of "religion versus science," although the media do try to frame it that way...
...in developmental biology from U.C...
...He's thinking about including the most famous icon of all—the hominid series from knuckle-dragging ape to man...
...I have long taken an interest in this subject...
...Let sleeping Christians lie...
...Another curator, the late Donn Rosen, said to me one day: "Why does it have to be one book or the other...
...in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University, is an associate professor of philosophy at Whitworth College...
...When Dawkins derides "the shallows" of theology or the fantasy of religion, and when Dennett praises the "universal acid" of Darwinism, eating away "just about every traditional concept," the cold water in the face wakes us up and we do pay attention...
...Clever creatures somewhere else in the universe must have assembled the bits and pieces, and then sowed the seeds of A t the Cooper Union, Bill Dembski was discussing his "explanatory filter...
...He aims to drive a wedge between the two...
...Organizing matter into even the rnost primitive life-form turns out to he far more complex than was realized in the nineteenth century, and scientists to this day have made virtually no headway in solving the problem...
...But we do not have to confine ourselves to so dim a philosophy...
...The proceedings may seem to Good science encounters a bad philosophy...
...Meanwhile, within the biology departments of the Christian colleges, the accommodationists have been unhappy...
...That question turns out to be remarkably difficult to answer," says Nelson...
...He teaches at the University of Dallas...
...In some cases they have been bitterly resentful of Phil Johnson...
...The way to marginalize religion, Johnson has said, is to "put it to sleep with accommodationist rhetoric...
...We should recall the warning of Karl Popper, that such theories lie outside the realm of science...
...But intellectual opposition is growing rapidly...
...Close encounter with God narrowly averted...
...Now we are beginning to see a serious intellectual challenge to Darwinism...
...We can impute design to certain events even though human agency is ruled out a priori...
...An early dissenter from evolutionism, a Los Angeles lawyer by the name of Norman Macbeth, was a friend of mine, and on several occasions took me with him to meet the curators at the American Museum of Natural History in New York...
...Not necessarily...
...Panspermia," he called it...
...In some cases they must be rejected, however...
...Examples are the horse-fossil sequence, implying that it shows evolution (it doesn't...
...The new critics, including Behe, Dembski, and Meyer, make the claim that the science on which evolutionist claims are made has been sloppy, misleading, and in some cases downright deceptive...
Vol. 32 • December 1999 • No. 12
