Bruce Chapman

We had a “heads up” yesterday from Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith to expect a breakthrough on the issue of embryonic stem cells, and now he has published on it. Read more here.

One way you can tell an ideologue is if he ditches an old friend because the old friend no longer agrees with him. It has happened to me occasionally on the issue of Darwinism, and I rather relish it, frankly. I have been a card carrying member of the Centrist Establishment my whole adult life, so I experience a certain excitement in being stigmatized as an extremist by the Leftist Establishment. Me? An extremist? Why thank you so much!

The same thing is happening to Anthony Flew now, in double dosage, and I hope he, too, is enjoying the notoriety.

Judge John E. Jones, a former trial attorney and State Liquor Control Board member who now is a federal judge for central Pennsylvania, is also a new phenomenon on the federal bench: a judge who, having made a ruling (e.g., the Dover case), goes on speaking tours and television shows to promote himself, his ruling and — yesterday — a PBS documentary on his ruling. Yesterday morning he was on the Today Show. Soon we will be asked to consider his views on the Iraq War or the writers’ strike in Hollywood. Maybe he should retire and start a talk show for Air America (where he also has appeared). There must have been others who have broken from the long-standing Read More ›

The intelligent new on-line Seattle regional magazine “Crosscut“, edited by David Brewster, carries a column (as Anika Smith pointed out yesterday) called “Bruce Chapman is Right,” written by “Mossback” liberal Knute Berger. It generally agrees with recent comments of mine on Dr. James Watson and the battle over eugenics.

I hate to cavil after such welcome praise, but I have to demur from Berger’s one demurral. That is, when he says that we should remember that many Christian and Jewish clergy backed the original eugenics program in America, some heavy qualification is needed.

The New York Times has not covered any news that might damage Darwinism, at least not since a writer on its Science page a few years back acknowledged that some of the standard textbook proofs employed to bolster Darwin’s theory are false. (That reporter is now in Iraq.) Instead, The Times seeks out ways to anticipate and undermine any reports that could hurt the Darwinist cause. The New York Times, in truth, is in the news making business. Accordingly, Mark Oppenheimer apparently was dispatched by The Times magazine to debunk the new book co-authored by Antony Flew, the famous backsliding English atheist who has decided that there is a god, after all–some kind of god, anyhow, an “Aristotelian god” of the kind that inspires deism, Flew says.

The mainstream media in the United States–and some of the conservative press, for that matter–are loathe to own up to the racist and anti-Semitic history, and the anti-individual rights posture, of applied Darwinism. They want people to think that eugenics is not really traceable to Darwin, or to think that if some (many) of Darwin’s kin undeniably were leading early eugenicists, there no longer is support for their kinds of ideas among today’s Darwinists.

So thank you, Johnjoe McFadden, professor of genetics at the University of Surrey, for using the current flap over the views of Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, to set the record straight. And congratulations to The Guardian for printing the McFadden article.

The furor over Dr. James Watson’s comments on the supposed racial inferiority of black people–resulting from evolution–caused cancellation of at least one of the Nobel scientist’s speeches in England this week. He may even have lost his job at Cold Spring Harbor. This brings a new element into the story.

A professor at London’s Institute of Education, Michael Reiss, suggests that teachers respond vigorously to the apparently growing “creationist” tendencies of their students. He attributes some of the alarming trend to the influence of Muslim students in the UK.

The mistake here is in thinking that you can defend Darwinian theory by attacking “creationism” and by broad-brush associating intelligent design with the image of creationism. That approach will merely create a wall between teachers and students, however, and most teachers won’t want to take part in that.

The Catholic magazine, Crisis, is now online with an October article by two Discovery fellows, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt. Their book, A Meaningful World, appeared in 2006 and forms a backdrop for their current reflections. Very much on their minds from 2006 is also the Regensburg address of Pope Benedict–not the Muslim comments, but the references to Reason. It is another and interesting take on all the atheist fantasy tracts coming out of Darwin-land these days. Look at nature, Wiker and Witt say, but also look at the philosophy of science, the nature of genius, the beauty of mathematics and even works of art.

There is a long record of conflict and persecution in the history of science, as in any area of endeavor. Scientists are given to the same failings as other human beings: greed, status anxiety, envy, and fear. To believe the pious statements by professional organizations about the enlightened way “science works” is comparable to accepting the civics textbook renderings of “how a law is made.” There is a way, all right, that science is supposed to work (and laws supposedly are made), and then there is reality. One can be grateful that there are so many cases where science does proceed along the ideal path, but there is no excuse for trying to fool the public into thinking that great Read More ›