2010

Good news! The Berlinski/Hitchens debate of a couple weeks ago, “Does Atheism Poison Everything?,” is now viewable online in full at C-SPAN. Berlinski is inimitably rapier-like yet courteous as always, though I don’t envy him having to fend off the sympathy vote for the ailing and recently sainted Christopher Hitchens (who looks eerily like Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker in Return of the Jedi). At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne notes the C-SPAN production, first smugly saying — apparently before he watched it — how enjoyable it is to see Hitchens “take apart” the “haughty” Berlinski. Then he offers an update to the same post, apparently now having watched the event, where he pronounces it a “reasonably good debate” Read More ›

The Nova series on PBS airs a documentary tonight titled, What Darwin Never Knew. You mean like, how life evolved? Naw, of course not. The focus is evolutionary developmental biology, or evo devo, and needless to say it turns out that what Darwin never knew actually confirms how much he did know. From the publicity material: The results are confirming the brilliance of Darwin’s insights while revealing clues to life’s breathtaking diversity in ways the great naturalist could scarcely have imagined.

British journalist Christopher Bookerhas a refreshing perspective in his latest column. He recently spent some time with scientists in France and considered their varied experiences with questioning Darwin: Three months ago I spent a fascinating few days in a villa opposite Cap Ferrat, France, taking part in a seminar with a dozen very bright scientists, some world authorities in their field. Although most had never met before, they had two things in common. Each had come to question one of the most universally accepted scientific orthodoxies of our age: the Darwinian belief that life on earth evolved simply through the changes brought about by an infinite series of minute variations. The other was that, on arriving at these conclusions, they Read More ›

Sometimes excuses just sound too convenient. Take, for instance, the California Science Center’s excuse for abruptly cancelling a showing of Darwin’s Dilemma last fall. According to top California Science Center (CSC) officials, the event was cancelled “because of issues related to the contract.” But emails obtained by Discovery Institute pursuant to CSC’s settlement of our lawsuit against them strongly show that CSC officials illegally discriminated against intelligent design (ID) and then tried to cover their tracks by claiming “contractual reasons” for the cancellation. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those familiar with the culture of intolerance fostered by many critics of ID. In this case, it’s especially important since that culture is being funded by over millions of taxpayer Read More ›

[Editor’s Note: Historian Richard Weikart is featured prominently in the just-released DVD, “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” exploring the painful history of Social Darwinism in Germany and America from the twentieth century to the present. To purchase a copy or find out more information about this documentary, visit www.whathathdarwinwrought.com.]

Michael Ruse recently criticized my work in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which examines the way that evolutionary ethics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries undermined Judeo-Christian views of ethics, especially the sanctity-of-life ethic. Ruse opposes my claim that evolutionary ethics as proposed by Darwin and other evolutionists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exerted a powerful influence on Hitler’s ideology.

Given his own views on the evolution of ethics, I’m wondering what Ruse has to offer us to counter Hitler’s own ethics. Ruse has written on several occasions that ethics is “illusory” and an “illusion” that is biologically innate, helping us survive and reproduce. Ethics and morality, then, are nothing but the products of evolution, having no objective basis. (This is also Darwin’s own view). So what moral fulcrum does Ruse (or Darwin) have for pronouncing Hitler’s policies evil or wrong? Hitler claimed he was acting in harmony with his own instincts, which taught him to love his racial comrades and hate and destroy those of other races. As I explain in detail in Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Hitler thought he was advancing human evolution by destroying “inferior” races, and for him promoting evolution was the highest good. Ruse, as far as I can tell, can only respond by appealing to his own “illusions” to counter Hitler’s “illusions.” It seems to me that this is hardly the kind of argument a good philosopher should be making.

Links to our 9-Part Series Responding to Nature‘s Evolution Evangelism Packet: • Part 1: Evaluating Nature’s 2009 “15 Evolutionary Gems” Darwin-Evangelism Kit• Part 2: Microevolutionary Gems: Lizards, Fish, Snakes, and Clams • Part 3: Microevolutionary Gems: Bird-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 4: Microevolutionary Gems: Flea and Guppy-Sized Evolutionary Change• Part 5: Microevolution Meets Microevolution• Part 6: Evolutionary “Gems” or “Narrative Gloss”?• Part 7: Muscling Past Homology Problems in Nature’s Vertebrate Skeleton “Evolutionary Gem”• Part 8: Of Whale and Feather Evolution: Two Macroevolutionary Lumps of Coal• Part 9 (This Article): Evolutionary Biologists Are Unaware of Their Own Arguments: Reappraising Nature‘s Prized “Gem,” Tiktaalik Download Our Full Response to the Packet as a PDF. The final “gem” from Nature‘s evolution-evangelism packet which remains Read More ›

Tonight is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, a wrenching time when we look back on our moral failures of the past year and ask God to accept our repentance as Avinu Malkeinu, our Father and our King. In this space we’ve sometimes considered the theological implications of accepting a Darwinian picture of how human beings came to be. By the lights of so-called theistic evolution, God may have hoped for something like human beings to emerge from the otherwise blind, purposeless process of Darwinian evolution, but to see him as our creator or designer goes too far. What is the moral meaning of such an idea?

One of the phrases in the Yom Kippur liturgy asks of God, “The soul is yours, and the body is your handiwork; take pity on your labor.” In the commentary on that verse by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the question is posed, “The Creator has mercy on his creation. This is one of the greatest foundations for any appeal for mercy, for how can he possibly continue to be angry at his creation? Even if we are unworthy of forgiveness on our own, God bestows mercy upon us as our Creator.”

Is it really a small thing to imagine that God is our creator only in the very limited sense that theistic evolutionists imagine? I don’t think so. Our claim on God’s unmerited forgiveness depends in large part on his having intended us, designed us, fashioned us — individually and as a race. Speaking personally, I as a father can’t remain cross with my kids even when they’ve really acted abominably not only because I love them and because they’re my kids, but because I share some of the responsibility for their being in existence in the first place. They represent, somehow, the fruit of my labor. How can I possibly keep being upset at them?

[Editor’s Note: Historian Richard Weikart is featured prominently in the just-released DVD, “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” exploring the painful history of Social Darwinism in Germany and America from the twentieth century to the present. To purchase a copy or find out more information about this documentary, visit www.whathathdarwinwrought.com.]

Pointing out Darwin’s anti-slavery sentiments has been a favorite tactic for many years by those wanting to deny Darwin’s racism. However, Adrian Desmond and James Moore raised this discussion to an entirely new level by claiming in their 2009 book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, that abolitionism was the driving force behind Darwin embracing biological evolution. This is especially remarkable because Desmond and Moore stated in their earlier biography of Darwin:

“Social Darwinism” is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality were written into the equation from the start–“Darwinism” was always intended to explain human society. (xxi)

This is not the place to rehearse all the reasons why abolitionism was not likely as important in shaping Darwin’s evolutionary views as Desmond and Moore claim. Many reviewers have already critiqued their thesis, and most historians of science seem unconvinced by it.

However, in all the brouhaha over Darwin’s Sacred Cause, I have heard very little discussion of what seems to me one of the most remarkable parts of the book.

At Discovery News (here and here), Bruce Chapman notes that Stephen Hawking’s dismissal of design in the universe has gone largely uncriticized in the US. Not so in his homeland. American media have tended to uncritical worship before Stephen Hawking and his new tome, a rebuke of The Grand Design. The Wall Street Journal has had three articles on it, one by Hawking. On CNN, Larry King was like a flustered peasant bowing before an oracle: he reads a question, the oracle speaks, he reads the next question… The English themselves are not in such awe. There has been a small parade of dismissive reviews, including some by bored scientists who found nothing new in Hawking’s argument that natural laws Read More ›