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Surprisingly Strong Support Seen Among Democrats and Liberals

A new Zogby poll on the eve of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday shows a dramatic rise in the number of Americans who agree that when biology teachers teach the scientific evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution, they also should teach the scientific evidence against it. Surprisingly, the poll also shows overwhelming support among self-identified Democrats and liberals for academic freedom to discuss the “strengths and weaknesses” evolution.

Over 78% of likely voters agree with teaching both the evidence for and against Darwin’s theory, according to the new national poll.

“This represents a dramatic 9-point jump from 2006, when only 69% of respondents in a similar poll favored teaching both sides,” said Discovery Institute’s Dr. John West. “At the same time, the number of likely voters who support teaching only the evidence that favors evolution dropped 7 points from 21% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2009.

“We need to change Darwin Day to Academic Freedom Day because just when Darwinists are celebrating evolution’s triumph, this poll shows that they have been losing the public debate over whether students need to hear both sides,” added West. “There appears to be a public backlash against the strong-arm tactics being employed by many Darwinists to intimidate scientists, teachers, and students who want to raise criticisms of Darwin’s theory.”

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.

This keeps getting better and better. First the University of Vermont announces that they’ve replaced Ben Stein with Howard Dean (yes, that Howard Dean) as their commencement speaker. Then UVM biology prof Nick Gotelli writes an opinion piece in the Burlington Free Press arguing that Stein is unqualified to be a commencement speaker because he has no peer-reviewed scientific scholarship. I kid you not: The real issue is not political correctness, but scholarship. I will leave it to my colleagues in the economics department to weigh in on Stein’s scholastic achievements as an economist. As far as the sciences go, I am unaware of a single publication by Stein that has appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. In the sciences, Read More ›

Over at Forbes.com they’ve just posted over 20 articles related to Darwin and evolution in advance of next week’s hoopla around the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. Kudos to editor Hana Alberts for compiling such compelling reading. As she notes in her introduction to the special report:

More questions than we’d like were raised long ago, and remain unanswered. Two of the biggest: If humans are no different than animals, what is the status of free will, of morality borne from the brain, not the body? Can and should we apply ideas about the “survival of the fittest” to economics, to population control, to law, to love?

These gripping uncertainties spring from our common desire to eliminate uncertainty, or the unknowns of the surrounding universe, by subjecting them to knowledge, scrutiny and documentation. And as a result, we gamely hope that we’ll stumble into some unequivocal truths about our place in the world, and why we are where we are.

To their credit, Forbes solicited articles from a variety of viewpoints, and the authors include CSC Fellows John West and Jonathan Wells, as well as Darwin skeptics like Michael Egnor and Michael Flannery, along with Darwinists like Michael Ruse, Larry Arnhart, Lionel Tiger and more. Here are a few highlights.

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 Darwinists are clearly not happy about the supplemental textbook Explore Evolution (EE), and given their showing thus far, they’re getting increasingly desperate to find ways to attack it. The latest review attacking EE was published in the journal Evolution and Development by Brian Metscher, a biologist in Austria. Employing what ID historian and rhetorician Thomas Woodward calls the “sledgehammer” approach, Metscher makes the grand sweeping conclusion that “[e]very talking point in the book has been dealt with already.” Metscher doesn’t specify precisely what those “talking points” are, but if EE is so wrong, surely Metscher can give us a scholarly refutation of the book. Instead Metscher cites to TalkOrigins and an internet Darwinist named Lenny Flank, who offers some Read More ›

[Note: For a more comprehensive rebuttal to critics of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

Alas, poor Richard. Out of a job, and still twitching from Ben Stein’s unveiling of his pro-intelligent design tendencies in Expelled last year, he apparently spends his time dogging Ben Stein’s heels. Here’s how a fawning university president gushed about getting an e-mail from Dawkins telling him to bounce Stein as a commencement speaker later this year.

Is the correspondence between you and Professor Richard Dawkins authentic?
Fogel: It is authentic; I admire his work greatly. I have read his work and I have been deeply instructed by it., as I said to him. I was really quite honored to have an e-mail from him directly.

What was the first e-mail from him about?

Fogel: It was to discuss his dismay and concern along the lines we have already discussed.

And also to give me some of his more person background that I had certainly been unaware of. I did not know that he was shown in the movie ‘Expelled’ and that he had been manipulated by the producers and that his words had been used out of context.

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.

Discovery Institute today announced the launch of Academic Freedom Day in honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday on February 12, 2009. “We’re celebrating Charles Darwin’s birthday by supporting what he supported: academic freedom,” said Robert Crowther, Director of Communications at Discovery Institute. “Like Darwin, we recognize the importance of having an open and honest debate between evolution and intelligent design.” In his revolutionary On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” This quote is the cornerstone of the Institute’s Academic Freedom Day efforts. The Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is sponsoring Academic Freedom Day, assisting student groups, clubs, Read More ›