Science and Culture Today | Page 1371 | Discovering Design in Nature

It is a rare day that I would dispute Bruce Chapman’s reading of anything. But today is one such day. Disagreeing with Ambassador Chapman’s and Richard Kirk’s interpretations of David Brooks’ recent column “The Age of Darwin,” I (perhaps mistakenly) thought that Brooks was pointing out the irony of our supposedly post-modern intellectual culture which waxes eloquently about having no grand, unifying metanarrative and at the same time bows down to the Darwinian fairytale, to borrow David Stove’s phrase.

Writes Brooks:

Michael Shermer and Paul Nelson will meet for their third debate over intelligent design and evolution (they’ve interacted previously at the University of Alabama and Penn State) this Thursday, April 26, at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. The debate will be held in the University Union’s Chumash Auditorium and begins at 8 pm (doors open at 7:30). The event is free to Cal Poly students; $10 at the door for the general public.

Nothing is quite so refreshing in times of censorship as a good satire. Fortunately, the ID Arts blog recently highlighted “Confession,” a brief story by James Hoskins published in Number One Magazine, the literary journal at University of Missouri, where Hoskins is a student.

Has Darwin successfully replaced Marx and Freud, and, of course, the Bible, as a narrative for Western civilization? David Brooks, House Conservative at the New York Times and often a writer of real insight, apparently thinks so. (He is another example of conservatives, like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, who do not want to be bothered to actually read the works of serious Darwin critics, let alone talk with them.) Richard Kirk replies effectively to Brooks in the new American Spectator.

Francix X. Clines, an excellent writer for The City Life and Editorial Observer sections of The New York Times, today (April 23, 2007) repeats what may be the most common mistake in trying to sell Darwinism to the public. In “Evolution, on Broadway and Off,” Clines writes of the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition on evolution:

The DNA exhibit shows how the chimpanzee’s DNA has been conclusively shown to be 98.8 percent the same as the visitor’s DNA. Hey, that’s no show stopper for the monkey-song chorus — it still allows a one in 100 chance they’re right.

In other words, you are silly for not believing in Darwinism because you have very similar genes which make the proteins in your body as the chimps do to make their proteins. Game over, right? Not so fast.

Every once in a while, in an epochal public debate, there’s a moment of clarity. Darwinism’s most recent moment of clarity came a short time ago, when prominent Darwinist and scientist Mike Dunford released the strategy developed by his colleagues in a policy forum piece published in the latest issue of the journal Science. The strategy is remarkable.
Dunford notes the emerging Darwinian strategy:

I think Matt [Nisbet] and Chris [Mooney] are right. We do need to spend more time (and thought) on communicating our views effectively, particularly to people who do not care about science.

It is interesting that the vast majority of those who criticized the recent Darwin vs. Design conferences in Knoxville and Dallas as unscientific didn’t even bother to attend the conferences. If they had, they would have seen very detailed and technical (at times almost too technical) science presentations from Jay Richards, Steve Meyer and Michael Behe. Here is a write up from Dr. Mark Krejchi who attended the Dallas conference and found it to be very much focused on the science of intelligent design. And, Dr. Krejchi knows a thing or two about science having a PhD in Polymer Science and Engineering followed by a couple of postdoc stints at Caltech (Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division) and Stanford University (Chemistry Read More ›

Was eugenics a misapplication of Darwin’s theory to society? I must respectfully disagree with part of neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s recent post at ENV, which seemed to suggest that it was. Egnor correctly pointed out that eugenics is based on artificial selection, whereas Darwin’s theory is premised on natural selection. But that fact doesn’t get at why eugenics was in reality a reasonable deduction from Darwin’s theory and is properly described as “Darwinian.” As I point out in Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest, Darwin believed that human progress was ultimately based on the struggle for survival, and he further maintained that civilized societies were courting disaster by continually counteracting the law of natural selection through vaccinations, welfare programs, and the like. Eugenics was framed explicitly as an effort to remedy these violations of Darwinian natural selection

Metal mousetrap parts

Okay, so one day a guy walks up to you and says irreducible complexity is no problem for a random, Darwinian-like evolutionary process. In fact, he can explain how a mousetrap could be made step by step. That’s great, you reply, tell me. Easy, says he. He has just finished a detailed analysis of the standard mechanical mousetrap and discovered that, except for the wooden base, all the parts are made of metal! What’s more, he’s even looked at non-standard mechanical traps, and their pieces are all made of metal, too! Also, after much sleuthing he’s noticed that the mousetrap spring has a lot in common with the spring inside his ballpoint pen — both are made of metal, and both are curled into spirals.

Fascinating, you reply, please go on. Go on? What, are you blind? Don’t you see? asks he. The mousetrap spring must have arisen from something like the pen’s spring, to make the beginning of the mousetrap. Then the spring duplicated to form the other metal parts, which were added one by one to make the trap we see today. What more could a reasonable person ask for?

Darwinist Dr. Reed Cartwright was highly critical of my recent observation that Darwin’s theory has nothing to do with experimental breeding of bacteria or with the biotech industry. In his original article, Dr. Cartwright asserted that Darwin’s theory was responsible for the experiments that unraveled the genetic code and for the entire biotechnology industry (!).

I pointed out that Darwin’s theory was a theory of random variation and natural selection, whereas experimental manipulation and breeding of bacteria were examples of purposeful variation and artificial selection. Darwin’s theory has nothing to do with either.

I have also noted that Darwin’s seminal contribution to medicine was eugenics. Dr. Cartwright saw the flaw in my linkage between Darwin’s science and eugenics: