Science and Culture Today | Page 1351 | 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.

A key point of my book Darwin Day in America is that materialism did not begin (or end) with Charles Darwin.

One of the pre-Darwin champions of materialism I cover in my book is physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the provocative tract Man a Machine (L’Homme Machine), published in 1748. According to La Mettrie, “the human body is a machine which winds its own springs” and the “the diverse states” of the human mind “are always correlative with those of the body.” In other words, human beings are mechanisms whose rational life is completely dependent on physical causes. Those causes include everything from raw meat to heredity.

In what has to be one of the more interesting passages in culinary analysis, La Mettrie opined:

Raw meat makes animals fierce, and it would have the same effect on man. This is so true that the English who eat meat red and bloody, and not as well done as ours, seem to share more or less in the savagery due to this kind of good.

In a recent ID the Future podcast interview, Dr. Scott Chambers discusses the fact that the expansion rate of the universe implies an incredibly high degree of cosmic fine-tuning to allow for the existence of life. Just a few weeks ago, Newsweek columnist Sharon Begley also discussed the universe’s expansion rate. This issue has huge implications for the debate over cosmic design, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Begley’s article. Begley tries to steer the reader into believing the wildly speculative multiverse hypothesis–a pet philosophical favorite of materialists–while barely even hinting that the alternative, and much more elegant explanation, is intelligent design of the cosmos. For those who are informed on this subject, her article comes off as if Read More ›

This month the Council of Europe (CoE) adopted a resolution regarding “The dangers of creationism in education,” which calls intelligent design (ID) “a threat to human rights.” The CoE is a non-governmental body in Europe that aims to protect human rights, but its resolutions carry no force of law. Even if the CoE’s edicts did carry the force of law, it’s difficult to take this resolution seriously due to its assertion that questioning Darwin somehow threatens human rights. David Berlinski, a mathematician and Discovery Institute senior fellow who lives in Paris and has made many scientific critiques of Darwinian evolution, has given us an insightful analysis of the resolution, here. As Dr. Berlinski puts it, “if this is what a Read More ›

Last July, David Tyler wrote an insightful post at ARN stating, For over 30 years, the public have been led to believe that human and chimpanzee genetics differ by mere 1%. This ‘fact’ of science has been used on innumerable occasions to silence anyone who offered the thought that humans are special among the animal kingdom. ‘Today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same.’ However, this ‘given’ is about to be discarded. Tyler was quoting a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%,” which reported that “human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%.” The statistic of an alleged 1% difference between human and chimp DNA is Read More ›

The furor over Dr. James Watson’s comments on the supposed racial inferiority of black people–resulting from evolution–caused cancellation of at least one of the Nobel scientist’s speeches in England this week. He may even have lost his job at Cold Spring Harbor. This brings a new element into the story.

This week’s Human Events features a piece by Logan Gage which addresses, among other things, Hillary Clinton’s unsurprising take on evolution: Following liberal science writer Chris Mooney’s successful book “The Republican War on Science,” Clinton repeatedly lumps these issues together using the “war” metaphor. “Mrs. Clinton has used the phrase ‘war on science’ frequently on the campaign trail, and it has reliably drawn applause from Democratic audiences,” according to The New York Times. Her website declares she will “end the Bush Administration’s war on science.” But who is really politicizing science? In February 2008, comedian, economist, and actor Ben Stein will release a feature-length documentary film titled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” It chronicles the many scientists who have been harassed Read More ›

So, along with their October issue, Wired has published a Geekipedia supplement, 149 People, Places, Ideas & Trends You Need To Know, and nestled between innovation and internet radio is intelligent design. An intricate organ like the eye relies on specialized parts, none of which work without the others. It’s hard to imagine, they say, such a system evolving by natural selection (although the work of scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins provides some ideas on how it might happen). Their preferred explanation: an “intelligent designer” who drafted the blueprint for life. The Geek’s treatment is just a bit better than Wikipedia (not hard to accomplish), but needs some help. For instance, they claim: “And since it can’t Read More ›

Today (or yesterday depending on which side of the pond you’re on), evolutionary philosopher Jerry Fodor has stepped out and published an article that puts his entire career at risk, not to mention possibly kissing good-bye any chance he’ll ever get another research grant.

Michael Behe has just published another response to attacks on his book, The Edge of Evolution, this one addressing an exchange that he and Sean Carroll had in letters published in Science. Carroll had published a review in Science which Behe responded to here, as readers will recall. Science also published part of a letter Behe wrote, which Carroll then responded to. The back-and-forth between these two is well worth reading. For more on Behe’s responses to his critics, visit his Amazon blog.

Eminent evolutionist James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, is sparking controversy in Great Britain for suggesting that blacks are inferior to whites due to evolution. But there is nothing particularly extraordinary about Watson’s views. As I document in chapter 7 of my forthcoming book Darwin Day in America, there is a long history of evolutionists using Darwinism to justify racism — including Darwin himself.

Watson is past director and current Chancellor of the prestigious biological research lab at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Ironically, that lab has deep connections to Darwinian racism of years gone by. Early in the twentieth century it was the headquarters for one of the most virulent American eugenics groups, the Eugenics Record Office, which promoted forced sterilization and opposed immigration to America by ethnic groups considered lower on the evolutionary scale than Anglo-Saxon whites. Back then the lab was directed by Harvard-trained geneticist Charles Davenport. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Davenport held views about blacks and evolution hauntingly similar to Watson’s.