Intelligent Design

Over at Uncommon Descent, Michael Flannery has an excellent post examining Adrian Desmond’s and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, in which the authors try to humanize Darwin by showing that he was driven by his passionate hatred of slavery. But is this accurate? Flannery points out that the main question really is, does the anti-slavery Darwin necessarily make for a “kinder, gentler” Darwin? Read it all at Uncommon Descent. Then check out Flannery’s own new book Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism.

From the new Zogby poll this week: QUESTION: Charles Darwin wrote that when considering the evidence for his theory of evolution, “…a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with Darwin’s statement?Strongly agree 45%Somewhat agree 31%Total Agree 76%Somewhat disagree 6%Strongly disagree 12%Total Disagree 19%Not sure 5% Three-quarters (76%) say they agree with Darwin’s statement, while about a fifth (19%) say they disagree. At a time when Darwin’s words and ideas are being showcased, it is interesting that his own support for academic freedom and freedom of scientific inquiry is largely being ignored by the media Read More ›

As their birthday gift to Charles Darwin, yesterday many PBS stations apparently re-aired the “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” movie that they first released in November, 2007. The “documentary” purports to re-tell the story of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, but it portrays an extremely inaccurate, biased, and one-sided view of the case. In this regard, below are some links to responses to the “Judgment Day” that Discovery Institute produced when it first came out in 2007: 

A recent Nature news article remarks about the production of the first self-replicating RNA molecules capable of catalyzing their own replication. Origin of life researchers are excited about this because they think it shows one possible step in their story about how life might have arisen via natural processes, without intelligent design (ID). One big problem with their story: under no uncertain terms did natural processes produce this molecule. One line from the Nature article says it all: “Joyce and his colleague Tracey Lincoln made paired RNA catalysts.” (emphasis added) One pro-ID chemist explained to me privately the precise design parameters that were required to produce the self-replicating enzymes and to use it to produce life: The take-home point here Read More ›

As I mentioned in previous posts in this brief series, the ID-bashing blog Little Green Footballs has done important work in sensitizing us to the sympathies expressed in parts of the Muslim world for Hitler and Nazism. One of the most sickening videos I’ve ever seen was noted recently on LGF. It was of a smiling, youngish Egyptian cleric in front of a slick TV backdrop, praising the Nazis for slaughtering Jews and saying he only hoped it would be Muslims who do this work, blessed by Allah, next time around. On an inset screen, the cleric nodded and gestured approvingly to old black-and-white newsreels from the death camps, of Jewish corpses being bulldozed, or pulled out of ovens as smoking skeletons.

LGF author Charles Johnson is troubled by the weakness of Western leaders who don’t want to see what we are up against in the war on terror, who shrink from a strong and confident stance in dealing with challenges from the Muslim world. However, Johnson never makes the connection between the Darwinism he defends and the sapping of Western confidence that he laments.

This may seem surprising to those who are familiar with the history of 19th-century colonialism. Darwinian theory fueled an arrogant contempt for other nations that seems the very opposite of liberal guilt and weakness. It was not some sort of “crude” distortion of Darwin’s thought but a straightforward application of it that led to the biologization of foreign policy in the age of imperialism.

About the Darwin-Hitler connection, I’ve written many times before (see here, here, and here, for example), quoting Hitler himself, his standard biographers, and Hannah Arendt. What emerges is that Nazism is indeed a kind of applied Darwinism, unintended by Charles Darwin himself, of course. Ideas have consequences, and some of them are unintended. Obvious, right?

Not to blogger Charles Johnson in Little Green Footballs, who jumped on me in a recent post for writing two sentences in a Jerusalem Post op-ed to the effect that “Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers. In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.” And that remains true, despite the fact that Hitler doesn’t cite Darwin as an intellectual influence. Citing influence wasn’t Hitler’s style, but it seems he absorbed his Darwinian worldview from the poisonous popular Viennese press. Richard Weikart goes into detail about this in his important book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which I’ve drawn much from.

Hitler certainly doesn’t cite Christian teaching as an influence either–but that hasn’t stopped critics of Christianity from tying that faith to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Yes, someone will object at this point, but what about the famous line at the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, “In defending myself against the Jews, I am acting for the Lord”? When Hitler invoked “the Lord,” this was not the God of Christianity, as the immediate context makes crystal clear. “Eternal Nature,” he writes in the preceding paragraph in the same chapter, “inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands.” He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin’s laws. Those are Hitler’s “Almighty Creator,” as he goes on to say, the “Lord” whose work he proposes to do by making war on the Jews.

The popular conservative blogger Little Green Footballs has it in for Darwin doubters and recently called me a near-liar merely for alluding in an article to the well-known Darwin-Hitler connection. He regards the very idea of such a connection as a “creationist” canard. “Klinghoffer’s claim,” comments LGF, “is just short of an outright lie.”

Normally, I think it’s best for friends of ID to avoid a defensive posture and generally let critics say what they want without our always feeling obliged to respond. But here, because LGF is otherwise such an interesting and valuable blog, and because he’s given me an occasion to raise important related questions, I am going to answer him after all.

As of this writing, if you glance at LGF’s tag cloud, you’ll see that he has devoted more items tagged to the topic of “Evolution” in the past 60 days (33 tags) than he has to that of “Militant Islam” (32 tags). That’s significant because LGF came to prominence in the first place after the blog’s author — whose name is Charles Johnson — had his political consciousness transformed in the wake of 9/11. Ever since then, he’s been an outspoken and influential critic of Muslim fundamentalism. He never misses an opportunity to chide liberals for weakness and naivety in the face of Islamic fascism.

I like his blog, including the lovely photos he used to post, shots of the Pacific Ocean from the coast around Los Angeles, a geography I love. He’s also a bicycle enthusiast, so we have that in common. But as I say, he’s not a fan of Discovery Institute (DI). One doesn’t get the sense that he’s contemplated the scientific issues involved very seriously. Instead, his thinking seems to proceed along the following lines.

[Editor’s Note: Douglas Axe is actually a molecular biologist, not a microbiologist. And it’s been pointed out that the quote I used from Axe’s piece that describes the Darwinian story as requiring 400 million years had a context — the supposed evolution of a proto-insect into a wide variety of insect life forms. However, the way I presented it makes it sound like the whole of Darwinian evolution was only supposed to require 400 million years, which wasn’t what Axe was saying.] As the number of celebrations of Darwin and his theory mount ad nauseam, one evolution researcher suggests that the emperor has no clothes. Douglas Axe, a microbiologist and director of the Biologic Institute, has posted an article pointing Read More ›

Original Article

It’s a big year for all things Darwin.  This month, two centuries after his birth, we commemorate the man and his accomplishments.  And in November, a century and a half after On the Origin of Species was published, we commemorate the beginnings of the theory by which we all know him.

But how exactly should we think of his theory?  Is it to be remembered the way we remember the man–as an important part of the past?  Or is it to be remembered as something more than that–as an intellectual seed that grew into something that thrives to this day?

Many, of course, would like to think of Darwin’s theory in these flourishing terms.  But the growth of something else makes this view increasingly hard to hold.  We refer here to the seldom discussed but steadily expanding body of peer-reviewed scientific work that refuses to square with Darwinism.

Take a look at the recent Genetics paper by Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt. [1]  They’ve done the math to calculate how long it would take for Darwin’s mechanism to accomplish a particular kind of functional conversion.  And their eagerness to “expose flaws in some of Michael Behe’s arguments” [1] shows that they think they’ve resuscitated Darwinism after Behe pronounced it dead. [2]

Have they?

A survey conducted recently in England reveals that 51 percent of the British public believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of living things, and that intelligent design must be involved. The survey was conducted by the polling firm ComRes for Theos, a theology think tank.

The report of the survey of the British public, published in the Telegraph, noted:

In the survey, 51 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that “evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages”…A further 40 per cent disagreed, while the rest said they did not know…The suggestion that a designer’s input is needed reflects the “intelligent design” theory, promoted by American creationists as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

The irony is that only 10-20% of the British public attend church each week, which is significantly less than half of the portion of the British population who support intelligent design. A similar disparity is seen in the United States, where 80-90 % of the American public believe that design played some role in biology, whereas only 40-50% attend church regularly.
The meaning of this disparity between support for intelligent design and church attendance is obvious: support for intelligent design extends far beyond the segment of the population that is traditionally religious. Weekly church attendance is a minimal criterion to be labeled “fundamentalist” or devout. The inference to design in biology is held by the majority of both the American and British public, and for more than half of people who support design, the reasons are not devout acquiescence to religious dogma. For most supporters of intelligent design in biology, design is inferred empirically.

After generations of Darwinist indoctrination in public schools, more than half of the British public doubts Darwinism as an adequate explanation for life. One can understand the Darwinist panic in the United States and England at even minimal discussion of the weaknesses of Darwin’s theory in public schools. Even with a monopoly on scientific indoctrination, Darwinists are unable to convince even half of the public of the truth of their theory.

Of course, Richard Dawkins was appalled by the results of the survey. The Telegraph article quotes Dawkins: