Science and Culture Today | Page 1346 | Discovering Design in Nature

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

By the end of the nineteenth century, American scholars were already talking with excitement about the “new school of criminal anthropology” that sought to use modern science to identify the causes of crime. Leading the way was Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), whose book Criminal Man (1876) remains a landmark work in the field of criminology. Lombroso and his disciples contended that criminal behavior could be explained largely as a throwback to earlier stages of Darwinian evolution.

According to Lombroso, infanticide, parricide, theft, cannibalism, kidnapping, theft and anti-social actions can all be found throughout the animal kingdom, as well as among human savages. In earlier stages of development such behaviors aided survival and were therefore bred into animals by natural selection. As William Noyes, one of Lombroso’s American disciples, explained, “in the process of evolution, crime has been one of the necessary accompaniments of the struggle for existence.” While crime no longer served a necessary survival function in civilized societies, many modern criminals could be considered atavists—reappearances of characteristics from earlier stages of evolutionary development. According to Lombroso, such atavists were “born criminals,” exhibiting from birth the physical as well as behavioral characteristics of savages. Physical markers of such individuals included “abundant hair,” “sparse beard[s],” “enormous frontal sinuses and jaws,” “broad cheekbones,” a “retreating forehead,” and “volumnious ears.”

Darwin Day in America that is. The new book by CSC associate director John West is now available in bookstores and online. If you missed West at the Heritage Foundation yesterday you can now watch or listen online. Abolition of Man? How Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of ScienceWatch | Streaming MP3 | Save MP3 | Details

[This four part series responding to Paul Gross can be seen in: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.] An urban legend has cropped up among Darwinists that Michael Behe ignores indirect routes of evolution, commonly called “exaptation,” when he argues for irreducible complexity. In his review of The Edge of Evolution in The New Criterion, anti-ID biologist Paul Gross wrongly accuses that “Behe had failed to understand ‘exaptation’ (the use of an available part in function ‘B’ despite its original function ‘A’).” But in Darwin’s Black Box, Behe clearly accounts for exaptation and explains why it does not refute irreducible complexity: “Even if a system is irreducibly complex (and thus cannot have been produced directly), however, one can Read More ›

The intelligent new on-line Seattle regional magazine “Crosscut“, edited by David Brewster, carries a column (as Anika Smith pointed out yesterday) called “Bruce Chapman is Right,” written by “Mossback” liberal Knute Berger. It generally agrees with recent comments of mine on Dr. James Watson and the battle over eugenics.

I hate to cavil after such welcome praise, but I have to demur from Berger’s one demurral. That is, when he says that we should remember that many Christian and Jewish clergy backed the original eugenics program in America, some heavy qualification is needed.

Michael Behe has a new blog series up responding to Nick Matzke’s review of his book in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in three parts:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

As Behe notes, this review of Edge of Evolution is a real doozy, “a tediously disdainful review of The Edge of Evolution which revisits the blunders of previous reviews while adding new ones.”

It’s only when we get to Part 3 of his response that Behe reveals the identity of the reviewer to be none other than Nick Matzke, formerly of the NCSE. Behe thinks this is worth mentioning:

[This four part series responding to Paul Gross can be seen in: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.] In Paul Gross’ review of The Edge of Evolution he wrongly claims Behe’s argument for design is merely a negative argument against evolution. Gross asserts that Behe argues for ID by “offer[ing] some claim that Darwinism is wrong, with the (unwarranted) conclusion that life is therefore the work of an intelligent agent.” (emphasis in original) This misrepresents Behe’s argument. Behe does not say that because Darwinian evolution has flaws, therefore intelligent design is proven correct. As Behe writes in the afterward to the new edition of Darwin’s Black Box: [I]rreducibly complex systems such as mousetraps and flagella serve both as Read More ›

Former editor of Seattle Weekly Knute Berger saw the merit in Bruce Chapman’s recent blog post, Thank You, Dr. Watson, though, as he put it, I don’t agree with Chapman often, but he’s absolutely right that such thinking continues in scientific (and I would add corporate) circles. Despite our collective horror about the Holocaust — the extreme Nazi expression of eugenics — there is a general unwillingness to own up to the sorry legacy of eugenics in America and Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly sterilized, lobotomized, and institutionalized to “sanitize” society of the poor, disabled, gay, mentally ill, etc. A general sense of amnesia or an attitude that nothing we did was as bad as what Read More ›

The New York Times has not covered any news that might damage Darwinism, at least not since a writer on its Science page a few years back acknowledged that some of the standard textbook proofs employed to bolster Darwin’s theory are false. (That reporter is now in Iraq.) Instead, The Times seeks out ways to anticipate and undermine any reports that could hurt the Darwinist cause. The New York Times, in truth, is in the news making business. Accordingly, Mark Oppenheimer apparently was dispatched by The Times magazine to debunk the new book co-authored by Antony Flew, the famous backsliding English atheist who has decided that there is a god, after all–some kind of god, anyhow, an “Aristotelian god” of the kind that inspires deism, Flew says.

[This four part series responding to Paul Gross can be seen in: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.] In 2005, Michael Behe published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Design for Living. Paul Gross has now reviewed Michael Behe’s book The Edge of Evolution in The New Criterion, using exactly the same title as Behe’s 2005 New York Times op-ed, accusing Behe of making so many mistakes that “it would need a book longer than The Edge to restate the model together with its already noticed (in print and online) errors and omissions.” Yet as I will recount in this four-part response, Dr. Gross’s review has many mistakes, and many of his key criticisms of Behe Read More ›

The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski answers: