David Klinghoffer

Anyone who raises doubts about evolution in public discussions with non-scientists knows the automatic response you always get from the Three Monkeys crowd. Hands wrapped tightly over eyes, ears, and mouth, they chant: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — about Darwin!

That’s not exactly how it comes out. People will say things more like: But science has spoken! Scientists say! Science wins! Which sounds reasonable at first, until you reflect that it’s a little like a Roman Catholic fending off some challenge to his faith by pointing out that 98 percent of Catholic priests agree with Catholic doctrine, and who knows more about Catholicism than Catholic priests? So it must be true. (Or substitute rabbis and Jewish doctrine, pastors and Protestant belief, etc.) As James Le Fanu smartly notes in his new book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), there is a similar circularity to the “Scientists say!” case for Darwinian dogma:

The commitment to Darwin’s materialist explanation of the living world would, in time, become a qualification requirement for all who aspired to pursue a career in biology — where to express doubt (at least publicly) was tantamount to confessing to being of unsound (or at least unscientific) mind.

I’ve been writing this week in praise of Dr. Le Fanu’s extremely lucid, readable, and unapologetic narration of Darwinism’s increasingly obvious failure to account for the evidence of science, with an emphasis on recent advances in our knowledge about the brain and the genome. Then why is the meaning of these advances ignored, greeted with a great, booming silence?

We have a 2 year old, Saul, who is very attached to his comfort jacket. It’s like a security blanket for him, blue and quilted and thoroughly stained. He doesn’t wear it, since it is too small for him by now anyway. He holds it and sleeps with it, and if you try to take it away from him when he’s in bed — say, to put it in the laundry — watch out. He will be extremely ticked off, crying, fussing.

In an important new book, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), British physician and historian James Le Fanu speculates that Darwinism works that way for many people. It’s a “comfort blanket,” explaining everything about living creatures in tidy materialist terms without having to appeal to mysterious, unknowable forces outside nature. Maybe that’s why scientists and laymen alike get so very upset and even abusive when you try, however gently, to tug it out of their arms.

Darwinism hasn’t been aired out or laundered in about 150 years. It’s a closed loop, effectively unquestionable, despite the fact that major chunks of biological evidence are against it. Le Fanu, about whom I’ve been writing this series, focuses on DNA and the human brain. Darwinism stands for the belief that everything can be explained in natural terms, but these two features of biology unyieldingly defy such comforting explanations.

Consider the Hox “master” genes that determine the spatial configuration of the front and back ends of creatures as diverse as frogs, mice, and humans. The Swiss biologist Walter Gehring showed that “the same ‘master’ genes mastermind the three-dimensional structures of all living things….The same master genes that cause a fly to have the form of a fly cause a mouse to have the form of a mouse.” Stephen Jay Gould admitted the “explicitly unexpected character” of this discovery.

Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who served as director of Paris’s Musee d’Histoire Naturelle, held that there was an unknown biological “formative impulse,” an organizational principle of some kind, that directed the formation of diverse kinds of life. It is such an idea that James Le Fanu seeks to revive in his excellent new book, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon). It does appear that something is guiding life’s evolution toward intelligible ends. Dr. Le Fanu, in appreciation of whom I am writing this series, urges us to be comfortable with saying science does and perhaps cannot know the nature or source of that impulse.

Darwin, of course, sought to identify the principle or law behind evolution as mindless, unguided natural selection. But among the delights of Le Fanu’s book is his utterly apology-free take down of Darwin.

Long before today’s modern Darwin Lobby perfected the polemical art of the false dilemma — wherein you are either a Biblical creationist or a full communicant in the Church of Darwin, for there can be no other alternative — Darwin himself “portray[ed] those who might dispute his explanation as being Biblical creationists.” That included even Cuvier, about whose thinking on natural history Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species: “Nothing can be more hopeless than to explain this similarity of pattern [in body plans by supposing] it has pleased the Creator to construct all the animals in each great class on a uniform plan.”

When the novelist, biographer and literary critic A.N. Wilson came out recently as a Darwin skeptic, in comments to the New Statesman the book he mentioned as substantiating his skepticism is James Le Fanu’s new and outstandingly readable and informative book Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon). For the moment, this is probably the one book you should buy for your Darwin-devoted friends — if you are going to buy just one. In this little series, continued from last week, I am just trying to give a flavor of the book.

Le Fanu is a distinguished British physician and author of peer-reviewed medical journal essays. He exemplifies the Talmud’s note of advice that a person should “Teach your tongue to say ‘I do not know'” (Berachot 4a). Le Fanu knows a lot and wears his erudition very lightly, but his main point is that the more science reveals about the most important question a human can ask — What is man and how did he come to be? — the more we have to admit that we don’t know.

Le Fanu demonstrates this by masterfully recounting the epic crack-up of expectations that prevailed till recently for the prospects of three scientific enterprises. Darwinian evolution, genetics, and brain research were supposed to combine to give a compelling, coherent and united account of man’s origin and nature. They did no such thing and the prospect of their doing so in the future appears hopeless.

Among other things, for example, the Human Genome Project and the Chimpanzee Genome Project revealed the similarity in the genomic coding region of humans and chimps — 98 percent interchangeable, as we’re always reminded. Something like that figure includes other vertebrates as well, such as the modest mouse. Le Fanu readily agrees that this suggests evidence of common descent.

Though he’s fairly prominent character, I admit James Le Fanu was not till recently on my radar screen or that of anyone else around here that I know of. A British medical doctor who publishes in peer-reviewed medical journals like the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the British Medical Journal, a columnist for the London Telegraph, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for his book The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (2001), Dr. Le Fanu turns out to be a flaming Darwin doubter, too. He comes out with a vengeance in his new book, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves,” which hammers scientific materialism to bits. It really is a book you shouldn’t miss buying and reading.

What’s so notable? First of all, the man writes like an angel. Second, his book appears under the imprint of Pantheon, a very mainstream venue that I’ve never associated with conservative, religious, unconventional, or other dangerous types of authors. Third, while in his Acknowledgements, Le Fanu thanks a bunch of fellow writers who will be well known to readers of ENV — Michael Behe, Jeffrey Schwartz, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, and others — again, as far as I know his acquaintance with them was not personal but through reading their books and then thinking his own thoughts.

Le Fanu doesn’t mention intelligent design or Discovery Institute, which is just as well. It probably explains how he flew under not only our radar but that of Pantheon Books.

Why is it that Darwinian rhetorical strategies often remind me of a Monty Python sketch? In this case, the one about the philosophy department at the University of Wollamaloo, where every faculty member is called Bruce and the departmental rules include “Rule two: No member of the faculty is to maltreat the Abbos [aboriginal Australians] in any way a’all — if there’s anyone watching.”

So Michael Behe amusingly notes in his Amazon blog how public Darwinian responses to the main argument of his book The Edge of Evolution differ from responses in more technical forums. Or as Bruce might put it, Rule one: No member of the Darwin Lobby may admit that evolution poses seemingly unsolvable enigmas — if there’s anyone watching.

When The Edge of Evolution came out, reviewers such as Sean Carroll at the U. of Wisconsin and Jerry Coyne at the U. of Chicago were full of reassuring noises for their readers in Science and The New Republic respectively. Behe had shown the insuperable difficulties evolution faces in explaining how multiple mutations can add up to results even as basic as the most elementary protein features, notably binding sites.

Nobody but a pedant enjoys being pedantic. But putting Darwinist experts in their place, particularly those who testified before the Texas State Board of Education, requires pointing out in detail their misleading simplifications of the fields in which they are supposed to be expertly qualified. Discovery staff have carefully combed the testimony of Professors David Hillis and Ronald Wetherington, finding numerous significant instances of egregious falsehood. Making this clear puts one in danger of seeming pedantic.

But it’s important, in part because we hereby challenge Hillis and Wetherington to defend their statements, in light of the detailed and devastating analyses that are now available online here and here. Of course, they won’t respond, nor, I guess, will anyone in the Darwin Lobby. Which tells you about all you need to know.

As discussed in Discovery Institute’s rebuttal to Wetherington’s January 21 testimony before the Texas State Board, his simplifications are as gross and unprofessional as those of Hillis. He reminds me of the Monty Python sketch “How to Do It,” where three smiley-faced presenters explain in under a minute and a half “how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first,” explains John Cleese, “here’s Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.”

The whole issue before the Board was whether high school students deserve to be made aware of the debates in biology that go to the heart of whether Darwinian theory is remotely plausible anymore. A lot is at stake in those debates — nothing less than what it means to be human — so not skimping on the details would seem to be the appropriate course. This is not about obscure academic infighting. Yet again and again, Wetherington, like Hillis, assured the Texas Board that it was it all very simple and clear, there is no debate, it’s all been settled. Or as Cleese explains flute playing, “Well here we are. You blow there and you move your fingers up and down here.”

Everyone knows the scene in Annie Hall. Woody Allen as Alvy Singer is standing in line to see a movie and a pretentious twit of a Columbia professor behind him is going on in a loud voice about Marshall McLuhan. Alvy first berates the guy — “Aren’t you ashamed to pontificate like that? And the funny part of it is, Marshall McLuhan, you don’t know anything about Marshall McLuhan!” Then from behind a movie poster he pulls McLuhan himself, who agrees with Alvy: “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!”

Alvy then turns to the camera and wishes, “Boy, if life were only like this!“

Sometimes it is. This is a brief series about Darwinian “experts” who arouse the admiration of people who don’t know any better, and don’t particularly want to know, but who then turn out to have their facts all wrong. The first illustration is Professor David Hillis of the University of Texas. In his testimony to the Texas State Board of Education about teaching evolution, he referred to the research of Ralph Seelke, a University of Wisconsin biologist.

Seelke’s work tests evolution’s power to produce two necessary mutations in a case where the mutations, to produce a beneficial function, need to happen pretty much simultaneously. Realistically, it can’t happen. He finds that this represents an insuperable obstacle to evolution’s getting its job done. In his testimony, Hillis replied to a question from Board member Pat Hardy, with her touching faith in experts: “I was just curious about Dr. Seelke’s research. How does that demonstrate the weakness of evolution?”

As I was listening online to last week’s Texas State Board of Education hearings, two comments by Board members stuck with me. The TSBE was in its final deliberations on science standards and liberal Republican Pat Hardy delivered an encomium to “experts.”

She went on about how if you get sick and require the medical knowledge of an expert in the field, why then you’d better go to that expert and follow his advice! She pleaded with other Board members to listen to the “experts” on evolution, which would mean voting to accept the “expert” view that there’s no debate on evolution worthy of being shared with high school biology students.

The same day, Board member Don McLeroy, who was on the dissenting side from majority “expert” opinion, delivered a stirring rebuttal. With marked irony, he asked what right he had, as a mere dentist by profession, to doubt the experts? In fact, despite being “only” a dentist, he took the view that as a citizen and an elected school board legislator, he had the right to think for himself. Indeed he had the responsibility. That was the case even if it meant, after study and reflection, rejecting what many experts say.

Then again, you don’t have to look too hard for genuine credentialed experts on the Darwin-doubting side — quite a number of those testified before the TSBE. Yet it remains true that the skeptics on evolution represent a minority academic view.

As the world now knows, the TSBE ultimately voted with McLeroy and against the majority of experts, adopting science standards that specify the precise headings under which Darwinian theory most urgently needs to be questioned — or, in the Board’s preferred language, “analyzed and evaluated.”

To follow the experts unthinkingly is simply the prestige path for most people. Such docility also explains the resistance of certain constituencies, from whom you’d expert better, to thinking fresh thoughts about Darwinian evolution.

The power of a slogan is that if you say it over and over again enough times, the effect is like brainwashing on yourself and many of the people who listen to you. It crowds out thought, to the point where, when a particular topic comes up in conversation, the slogan-imprinted mind simply spits back the slogan.

You’ll see this at work among scientists, journalists, and the general public.

Take, for example, a slogan that dogs the evolution debate: “There is no debate,” along with its variant, “There is no controversy.” A Google search on those two, linked with the word “evolution,” produces 20,800 and 18,800 hits respectively. One of those hits, I noticed, was from a piece I wrote in Publishers Weekly about the market for books on Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design. The editor of Eugenie C. Scott’s book Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction at the University of California Press was Scott Crumly, and he had this to say to me: “There is no debate about evolution. ID is not an alternative to evolution. It’s bogus.”

I remember having tentatively posed to him the question of whether the sheer volume of books being published on the subject indicated otherwise. His response was vehement and contemptuous. It would have been funnier and more fitting if he’d said it in the far-off brainwashed tone of, say, Frank Sinatra and others in the cast of The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”