CAPITOL IDEAS:Darwinism at AEI
Bethell, Tom
C A P I T O L I D E A S Darwinism at AEI by Tom Bethell ARLY IN MAY, the American Enterprise Institute held a debate about Darwinism, a faith embedded in many debates, whether scientific,...
...That’s the intellectual climate surrounding this issue today...
...Both selfishness and (with a little mathematical ingenuity) altruism can be given a Darwinian gloss...
...Also on the podium were John Derbyshire, who writes books about mathematics and is the “designated point man” against intelligent design at National Review...
...It takes the war to the enemy, in other words...
...You scientists can do your thing, just let us do ours, which is study Genesis and pray...
...So the Darwinian theory is not falsifiable by any observation...
...There is no reason in the world to accept the materialist faith, but once you do, then something very much like Darwinism has to be true...
...George Gilder interrupted...
...Likewise Darwinism...
...Darwinism supposedly explains how organisms become more “fit,” or better adapted to their environment...
...believe that the theory is universally true...
...Derbyshire: “At National Review...
...The only one of St...
...Even though we don’t know how it happened, these critters must have been designed somehow...
...So have also imposed a rigid orthodoxy upon all whose hiring, credentialing, and promotion they can control...
...I would never have said such a thing...
...There is considerable confusion about the relationship between the two, so let me try to elucidate...
...You go around the country on your expense accounts, which is one of the things I kick them about...
...Derbyshire recalled that he said to Behe: “If a graduate student came to you and said: ‘You know, I’ve got this great idea for a possible evolutionary pathway for the bacterial flagellum...
...Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, Communists and libertarians, and almost anyone in between, have at times found Darwinism to their liking...
...Steven Hayward, a resident scholar at AEI, made this clear in his admirable introduction...
...They are not interested in any debate...
...The information precedes the proteins...
...Must have been that animals self-assembled a little bit at a time, in a long chain of accidental survivals...
...Free will is an illusion, and so on...
...As always, it was philosopher of science Karl Popper saw, the same was true of Freudianism...
...He 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7...
...Any existing psychological trait, from aggression to pacifism, can be deemed adaptive by inventing a justso story explaining how genes “for” that trait might have arisen...
...Which Life exists—we got here somehow, along with billions of other organisms...
...Which left me stunned...
...In the question period, I asked Derbyshire if he could think of any observation that would count as falsifying Darwinism...
...Arnhart, the author of Darwinian Conservatism (2005), has carved out a nice niche for himself by arguing that conservatives need Darwin...
...Where was this encounter...
...I sent Behe an e-mail...
...Maternal instinct is natural, but so is infanticide,” West writes, describing Darwin’s explicit position...
...That was a deal as far as the Darwinians were concerned...
...The main combatants were Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University, and John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle...
...Everything must be explained in terms of physics and chemistry and anything beyond that will be derided as “creationism...
...Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman says this is just plain false and lists several ID researchers...
...Spencer himself first used the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and Darwin thought it an “admirable” summation of his thesis...
...So how did it happen...
...It purports to explain how we got here without any need for God or gods...
...brings us to the Inner Sanctum of the materialist dogma: Mind itself is nothing but matter...
...At that meeting we had...
...Care toward family members is natural, but so is euthanasia of the feeble, even if they happen to be one’s parents...
...If an animal exists, it is “fit” (otherwise it wouldn’t exist...
...He quoted the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a self-described secular humanist, who said last year that our bodies are “miracles of design,” and faulted scientists for “pretending that they have the answer as to how we got this way...
...Richard Dawkins famously said that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist...
...castigated the idea that thought and speech, “originating in human minds, can be reduced to various secretions of the brain...
...Creationists for the most part say: “When it comes to origins, we take our guidance from the Bible...
...and George Gilder, the well-known writer who is also with the Discovery Institute...
...If it’s true, it’s also “trivial...
...If an organism possesses features that appear on the surface to be inconvenient —such as the peacock’s tail or the top-heavy antlers of a stag—the existence of stags and peacocks proves that these animals are in fact fit...
...He said: “I think miraculous creation would do it...
...A conference was arranged in which these young people showed up and wore nametags with pseudonyms and all papers were collected up at the end...
...It fits neatly inside any and every box...
...The curious can listen to the “audio” of the whole conference on the AEI website...
...Because every lution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, is now observation they ever make seems to corroborate the out...
...Derbyshire replied that a judge had equated intelligent design with creationism and that was good enough for him...
...The point is that in Darwinism a philosophical assumption, rarely explicit, circumscribes the “scientific” conclusions that are permitted...
...That answer at least points us in a useful direction...
...NEVITABLY, THE SUBJECT of intelligent design came up...
...But that, too, consists of nothing but atoms and molecules in motion, no...
...That is incorrect...
...There are parallels with the Soviet dissidents in the 1970s, who had to communicate by samizdat...
...Chapman, also present, recalls no such exchang HE SCIENTISTS DERBYSHIRE TALKS TO at Cold nisms become...
...The word comes first,” he said at one point...
...Could he verify this account...
...It is informed by science, not religion...
...There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this...
...John Derbyshire is imagining things,” he wrote back...
...Darwinism has over the years been championed by eugenicists, social Darwinists, racialists, free-market economists, liberals galore, Wilsonian progressives, and National Socialists, to give only a partial list...
...This is obscurantist...
...So the AEI discussion frequently veered off into related areas...
...It is aggressive and therefore potentially dangerous...
...From scraps of unearthed rubble, archeologists infer design when no trace of the designer remains...
...It “explains” everything, and therefore nothing...
...That, we know nothing about...
...So how did it happen...
...Nothing else exists...
...But as the I have left Gilder to the end...
...The assumption is this: Only naturalistic explanations can be allowed within biology...
...Derbyshire: “No, it was a plain no...
...But fitness is not and cannot be defined except in terms of So the Darwinian theory is not falsifiable by any observation...
...Discovery Institute people told me that last year a group of graduate students from prestigious universities wanted to learn more about intelligent design...
...It reports on new intelligent design research, but Darwinian tautology, most scientists probably do I have only started to read it...
...Tabout Darwinism and so he counseled that Spring Harbor Lab say there is no controversy with Behe...
...You don’t do any research...
...The miraculous appearance of an entirely new species...
...Would you recommend me to go along with that?’ And Michael said no...
...Life exists— we got here somehow, along with billions of other organisms...
...Your lab results and fossils don’t support your theory...
...For good Freudians, everything seems to confirm the theory because it is protected against falsification by its own logic...
...and therefore nothing...
...In Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (2006), and in his talk, West rejected the claim that Darwinism supports traditional moral teachings...
...No, he could not...
...Pursue it, and we might be able to clarify the Darwinian conundrum...
...The genes themselves do not have to be identified, nor does the imagined historical scenario have to leave any trace behind...
...Gilder, who was there, questioned whether He flailed at the “materialist superstition...
...The recent irruption of atheism can be traced to the Darwinian creed, for the well-publicized testimonials of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens all have recourse to Darwinism at various points...
...It barely qualifies as a scientific theory for that reason...
...DNA—a string of nucleotides—does not explain how the information (needed to construct proteins) got into that DNA in the first place...
...Take all the time you want, it won’t be enough...
...It is not possible to specify all the useful parts of that animal in order to give an exhaustive causal account of fitness...
...He makes his case by presenting conservative political ideas and arguing that Darwin’s theory of natural selection supports them...
...Political theory was uppermost at AEI—it is, after all, a public-policy think tank...
...It has been my experience that the more we know, and the more experimental work is done, the less and less plausible Darwinian mechaintriguing to hear him grope his way through ideas that he was discovering even as he spoke...
...Thomas Aquinas’s “proofs” that resonates with us today is the “argument from design...
...To say that a species now living is adapted to its environment is, in fact, almost tautological,” Popper wrote...
...He has been studying information theory for years, and one of his conclusions is that the information carried by a channel must be distinct and separate from the channel itself...
...Emphasizing the hopeless fluidity of Darwinism, Gilder joked that Arnhart has found himself “a beautiful Darwinism, a James Dobson Darwinism, a supply-side Darwinism...
...It is separatist in spirit...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 T O M B E T H E L L The underlying problem is that a key Darwinian term is not defined...
...Darwinism is best seen as 19th-century philosophy—materialism—dressed up as science, and directed against a theological argument for the existence of God...
...Darwinian mechanisms give rise to a “spontaneous order,” he said at one point, contrasting it favorably with the “utopian vision” of liberals...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing...
...We already have our faith and our Book and we are sticking to it...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S Darwinism at AEI by Tom Bethell ARLY IN MAY, the American Enterprise Institute held a debate about Darwinism, a faith embedded in many debates, whether scientific, religious, or political...
...West argued that the issue is not really amenable to a left-right analysis...
...Derbyshire displayed a distressing willingness to slander those he disagrees with...
...Darwin accepted these propositions, noting “the general delusion about free will...
...A scientist investigating how automobiles are made goes to a factory and learns that the assembly line originated in plans and blueprints, it can’t easily be ignored...
...Ah yes, the mind...
...Derbyshire responded: “Scientists embrace naturalism because science is a naturalistic pursuit...
...Naturalism implies the exclusion of mind, intelligence, or absolutely anything except atoms and molecules in motion...
...Intelligent design is not like that...
...Derbyshire even accused Michael Behe of Lehigh University of recommending to a hypothetical student with a research proposal that he not carry it out...
...It says to the Darwinians: “You don’t have the evidence to support your claims...
...What others say about natural selection, shared ancestry, and so on is of little importance to us...
...The question before the house: “Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes...
...The creationists could be ignored...
...Darwin’s Descent of Man, published 12 years after The Origin of Species, overflows with arguments embarrassing to conservatives and liberals alike...
...Derbyshire had given us a correct account...
...That is why it has made Darwinians angry, and why they try to identify it with creationism...
...They J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 4 5 C A P I T O L I D E A S which in turn originated in the minds of men...
...Organisms are way too complex to have arisen by chance...
...I’m sorry...
...It is axiomatic within the theory...
...Good Darwinians are not allowed by their own rules even to entertain the possibility that intelligence was involved in the origin or development of life...
...No research is needed to come to that conclusion...
...The impact of Darwinism on any and all political groups can be argued any way you want and it’s not very illuminating for that reason...
...Someone in the front row reminded him that there were no creationists present...
...I welcome experiments into evolutionary pathways...
...The students were afraid that their identities would be leaked to their professors...
...Incidentally ” , Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evoe “we can only defer to that consensus...
...National Review’s John Derbyshire right away sought to conflate it with creationism...
...It barely qualifies as a scientific theory for that reason...
...The truth is that Darwinism is so shapeless that it can be enlisted in support of any cause whatsoever...
...I think I could figure it out and I’ve got an idea for some experiments that would test this...
...A working scientist is by definition naturalistic...
...He said of the Intelligent Designers: “You don’t do any science...
...It “explains” everything, existence...
...Like Freudianism, it’s a philosophy—a worldview disguised as a science...
Vol. 40 • July 2007 • No. 6
