Science and Culture Today | Page 1225 | Discovering Design in Nature

Any critically-thinking parent whose child has been forced to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will sympathize with petitions to ban discussions of global warming in public school science classes. Apparently such petitions are starting to crop up around the US. But I think this impulse, while understandable, is deeply misguided, as Vincent Carroll argues in the Denver Post. While it might be easier just to avoid subjects like man-made global warming (or Darwinian evolution), it’s hard to see how scientific literacy will be improved by avoiding them altogether. It’s much better to separate the data from the propaganda (a tall task, to be sure) and to help students learn to analyze the issue. As Carroll argues: Climate change happens Read More ›

In some ways, the career of a missing link mirrors the career of the celebutante. They break onto the scene with much fanfare and hype. Everyone is wowed–or at least, everyone pretends to be wowed so nobody can be accused of ruining the party. Besides, she’s useful for advancing lots of agendas. After a little while, people realize that the star doesn’t have all the talent everyone hoped for. Nobody wants to feign excitement anymore. Eventually, people are sickened of the original hype and become eager to see the celebutante fall. And then it’s the fallen celebutante that starts making headlines. Substitute the word “missing link” for “celebutante” and this is something like what we’re now seeing with “Ardi,” the Read More ›

Cephalopods, which include marine mollusks like squid, octopus, and cuttlefish, are now being reported in the Cambrian explosion fossils. As a recent BBC news article reports: “We go from very simple pre-Cambrian life-forms to something as complex as a cephalopod in the geological blink of an eye, which illustrates just how quickly evolution can produce complexity,” said [evolutionary biologist Martin] Smith. Keep in mind here that “evolution” is a placeholder term for an as-of-yet uncovered mechanism that produces animals like Cephalopods in a “geological blink of an eye.” Darwin’s Dilemma is not solved by vague appeals “how quickly” evolution can operate. All this follows on the heels of recent fossil findings that push phylum Bryozoa back into the Cambrian period, Read More ›

As Jonathan Wells recently observed, it’s being widely reported on internet news sites that biotech guru Craig Venter and his team have created “artificial life.” BBC News has a good description of what was really done: How a Synthetic Cell Was Created: 1. The scientists “decoded” the chromosome of an existing bacterial cell – using a computer to read each of the letters of genetic code. 2. They copied this code and chemically constructed a new synthetic chromosome, piecing together blocks of DNA. 3. The team inserted this chromosome into a bacterial cell which replicated itself. Synthetic bacteria might be used to make new fuels and drugs. (See “‘Artificial life’ breakthrough announced by scientists,” BBC News, May 20, 2010.) To Read More ›

Poor Alex Wilhelm huffs, and he puffs, and all he does is blow his credibility in his Huffington Post piece where he sputters up this laugher: “You will never meet a non-religious person who is a proponent of Intelligent Design.” Wilhelm, meet Bradley Monton. Meet Thomas Nagel. Meet Steve Fuller. Heck, meet me.It gets even better when he forgets the name of the person he’s attacking.

Once upon a time, political and philosophical conservatism was less concerned with practical, day-to-day politics and much more directed to developing a critique of modern civilization, seeking to save the culture from barbarism. In this series of posts, of which this is the final entry, we have been looking at the thoughts of Richard Weaver on Darwinism as a contributing factor in the drift to cultural decay. (You will find earlier entries, Parts I through V, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Today, the most broadly respected deans of conservative political reflection — George Will or Charles Krauthammer — are dependable Darwin defenders and enemies of Darwin doubters. So much for the icons of our day. It was not so when the movement was launched by Weaver with his book Ideas Have Consequences in 1948.

Weaver saw and clearly expressed the cultural costs of a Darwin-directed “world picture,” or vision or “metaphysical dream,” and he suggested the outlines of a scientific critique of evolutionary theory. Unlike Krauthammer or Will — but more like Buckley, Kristol, or Neuhaus — he would have grasped and appreciated the importance of the project that seeks to topple Darwinism.

The primary role of a conservative, in his view, was not to defeat Democratic officeholders or oppose liberal legislation. It was, somehow, to recover the integrated dream or vision that predominated until modern times. That is a thing that matters, or should matter, not only to conservatives but to everyone. Weaver saw that the fractured vision of modernity is bad for your mental health. That is why neurosis, despair, anxiety, depression, hysteria and the like were so common in his day and all the more so in ours.

Who wrote the following words: (A) Phillip Johnson, (B) Jonathan Wells, or (C) Michael Shermer? We should not, however, cover up, hide, suppress or, worst of all, use the state to quash someone else’s belief system. There are several good arguments for this: 1. They might be right and we would have just squashed a bit of truth. 2. They might be completely wrong, but in the process of examining their claims we discover the truth; we also discover how thinking can go wrong, and in the process improve our thinking skills. 3. In science, it is never possible to know the absolute truth about anything, and so we must always be on the alert for where our ideas need Read More ›

Richard M. Weaver, who died at age 53 in 1963, effectively launched modern philosophical and political conservatism in the United States. Everyone cites one of his titles, Ideas Have Consequences, but too few bother to read his actual works. In reading him now I’m struck by what a brilliant ally he would have made in the current debate over Darwinism. Though a philosopher and a professor of English stationed at the University of Chicago, he anticipated not only the major outlines of contemporary thinking about why the evolution debate matters. He also foresaw the outlines of the scientific critique of Darwinian theory. I’ve been writing about him the past week in this series (whose Parts I through IV are here, Read More ›

Several “Thomist” critics of ID have claimed that ID is either committed to, entails, or somehow relates to what they consider an unsavory “mechanistic” philosophy. While a number of ID proponents have explicitly denied this, the details are somewhat complicated. So I’d like to respond to this critique at some length in a series of posts.

Orthodox Catholics have long opposed the overreaching of a “mechanical philosophy” that came to prominence in the seventeenth century with René Descartes (1596-1650) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Christoph Cardinal Schönborn calls mechanism “the dominant form of reductionism in science.” ¹As critics of the Aristotelian philosophy that had come to dominate the thinking in medieval Europe, Descartes and Bacon banished formal and final causation from science for leading to dead ends and sterile explanations. Bacon continued to affirm that formal and final causes existed, while Descartes seemed to deny them altogether. In fact, Descartes departed so far from Aristotle’s “qualitative” way of describing the natural world that he reduced matter to mere extension. This foreshadowed a tendency in modern science to reduce every material object to mere quantity.