Science and Culture Today | Page 1212 | Discovering Design in Nature

[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 ›

[NOTE: Today we welcome a new contributing writer to Evolution News & Views, Heather Zeiger. Ms. Zeiger graduated magna cum laude from the University of Texas at Dallas with a B.S. in chemistry and a minor in government and politics. She received her M.S. in chemistry, also from UTD; her research was in organic synthesis and materials.]

The most general definition of bioethics is the relationship between man and technology. This relationship takes on many forms, some in the context of fear, as exemplified by Bill Joy’s now well-known Wired article, “The Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Others are in the context of hope or even a type of salvation, as exemplified in Ray Kurtzweil’s work, including The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Although they are seemingly disparate positions, both are based on evolutionary premises. The hope is that humans will take control of their evolutionary advancement through technology. The fear is that survival of the fittest means that the machines will become more “fit” than us, thereby displacing us. Both views believe a new species will arise. The difference is that one assumes it is a better human, while the other assumes that it is a sentient machine that is better than human.

[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.]

One of the biggest errors in Ruse’s recent op-ed piece in Huffington Post is his claim about Darwin’s racism. While admitting that Darwin upheld conventional Victorian racial views, Ruse still tries to distance Darwin from any connection to racial extermination. When discussing Darwin’s Descent of Man Ruse claims, “Darwin was explicit that when the races met and (as so often was the case) the non-Europeans suffered, it came not from intellectual and social superiority but because non-Europeans caught the strangers’ diseases and suffered and died.” Yes, Darwin did claim that disease was an important cause of racial extermination when Europeans encountered other races. However, Ruse conveniently forgot that Darwin also mentioned (on the same page of Descent of Man) other causes of racial extinction: “war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and absorption.”

Scientists from Discovery Institute and Biologic Institute are heading to Texas to Southern Methodist University Thursday, September 23rd for a special evening event: 4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin Presents New Scientific Challenges to Darwinian Evolution. Following a screening of Darwin’s Dilemma they will answer questions from attendees.

Three years ago Discovery funded and organized a two-day conference on the SMU campus titled Darwin vs. Design and featuring several scientists including Stephen Meyer who will also be at this year’s event. At that event some of the faculty and other Darwin activists around Dallas said that such a discussion had “no place on an academic campus” and tried to shut it down.

We thought that created a teachable moment. So we called their bluff and offered an opportunity for Darwinist faculty to debate the scientists and scholars in attendance. Not surprisingly they did what smart cardplayers do when they have a losing hand, they folded.

A new documentary for cable television, What Hath Darwin Wrought?, offers an excellent, meaty introduction to the moral consequences of Darwinism. Discovery fellows David Berlinski, John West, and Richard Weikart, interviewed by TV personality Todd Friel, are all lucid and informative, sketching the relevant history from Darwin to Galton to modern “scientific” racism, to American and German eugenics, Hitler, and the rise of a revived eugenics in our own time.
Many of these themes have been discussed in this space before, but one new thought occurred to me — something I hadn’t quite grasped before watching this film. (It can, by the way, be purchased on DVD at the website, and will be showing on cable this fall.)

I’ve sometimes wondered about the appropriateness of applying the word “eugenics” to modern practices of selective reproduction or euthanasia. True, some sickos even in the shadow of Nazi horrors along the same lines have argued for the application of old fashioned eugenics for the supposed benefit of the human race. James Watson, Nobel Prize-winner, is one. But for the most part, things like “selective abortion,” “embryo selection,” and “designer babies” — sickly familiar today — are motivated not by any thoughts about human beings as a whole but simply by the convenience or pleasure of individual parents or other family members. Ninety percent of pregnant women in the U.S. who learn they are carrying a Down syndrome baby choose to abort. But that is not because there’s some kind of sinister government program seeking to erase such people from the globe to advance evolutionary goals.

[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.]

Earlier this summer, philosopher Michael Ruse wrote an op-ed at Huffington Post, where he claimed that my scholarship is “bad history.” He questioned the historical connections between Darwinism and Nazism that I demonstrated in my book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. He starts by mischaracterizing my position, claiming that I argue for a “direct line” from Darwin to Hitler. If he had read my book carefully–or the response to critics at my website–he would have found the following statements:

“Nazism was not predetermined in Darwinism or eugenics, not even in racist forms of eugenics.” (from the Introduction)

“It would be foolish to blame Darwinism for the Holocaust, as though Darwinism leads logically to the Holocaust. No, Darwinism by itself did not produce Hitler’s worldview, and many Darwinists drew quite different conclusions from Darwinism for ethics and social thought than did Hitler.” (from the Conclusion)

In the debates sparked recently by the New Atheist writers, bashers and defenders of faith have been united at least on one point: Ideas have consequences. The consequences of a particularly controversial idea — Darwinian evolution, a pillar of atheism — will be the subject of a provocative new documentary on cable TV.

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How hard is it to understand what we’re not teaching intelligent design means? It means exactly that. Yet for some strange reason there are Darwinist bloggers who insist on passing on false information. Over at The Stir, Julie Marsh uses Stephen Hawking’s recent assertions that the natural laws of physics preclude any intelligent designer as a springboard to jump on the Texas State Board of Education for teaching intelligent design. News flash: they aren’t teaching intelligent design, and no board members have proposed such a thing. Even the Darwin loving Dallas Morning News has clearly reported the Texas State Board of Education’s position against teaching intelligent design. “Should “intelligent design” – the cousin of creationism – be taught in science Read More ›

On September 2nd, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released an announcement regarding its new “Evolution Readiness Project,” whose self-stated goal is: to teach young children how Darwin’s model of natural selection explains the observation that organisms are adapted to their environment When they say “young children,” they mean fourth-graders. And when the project says “teach,” it really means to get students to believe in evolution. The project’s website explains that a main concern driving the project is that “it is unacceptable that 150 years after the birth of the theory of evolution only four out of ten Americans believe in it!” Given this express admission that they seek to get students to believe in evolution, what should we make of Read More ›