Science and Culture Today | Page 1373 | Discovering Design in Nature

As Rob Crowther noted earlier, Dr. Ronald K. Wetherington, anthropology professor at Southern Methodist University, has penned an article in the SMU Daily Campus defending himself and other faculty who object to a conference on Darwin versus Design that will be held on the SMU campus this weekend. Wetherington wants to assure readers that he and other objecting faculty are all for debate, so long as it’s in the proper time and place. In fact, he notes that the university actually sponsored an evolution debate back in 1992.

In 1992, mind you! Wow, how could we have forgotten that? Congratulations! It’s just too bad that that the SMU students of today were not even in grade school back then.

There have been a couple of stories out in recent days about the pope’s views on science and religion as revealed in a new book. Given their bias and preoccupation, it probably was inevitable that some in the media would try to discern more than is present in a 2006 paper of the Holy Father’s that runs in a new German language book. Largely missing is the context. In case you forgot, last September, as he does each fall, Pope Benedict XVI met with his former theology students and discussed a topic of mutual interest. Two years ago the topic was Islam and the West; this year it was science and religion. The meeting, held at Castel Gondolfo, was well-covered in the media and the papers that were delivered were later turned into the present German language volume. (Almost all the meeting participants, understandably, were German speakers, having studied under the pope when he was Fr. Dr. Ratzinger.)

The media, of course, wanted to know what the pontiff and others had said about intelligent design, but ID was not the topic of the meeting. Philosophy, rather, was the focus. Hence, the breathless report by Reuters now that the paper by the pope fails to back ID is, well, silly.

Noted novelist Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday at age 84. Although Vonnegut described himself as a secular humanist, last year on NPR he voiced his skepticism of Darwinism. Calling our human bodies “miracles of design,” he faulted scientists for “pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.” When asked whether this meant he “would favor teaching intelligent design in the classroom,” he replied: If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it’d be on my mind all the time as to how the hell we really got this way. It’s a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can’t Read More ›

The Physics Department at SMU criticizes intelligent design as bad science and has a number of invidious things to say about the supposed motivations of ID proponents. In a campus bulletin it then suggests that, in contrast, there will be a “good science” program on Friday–a showing of the film Inherit the Wind! Apparently, they are not joking. The film (and the play that preceded it) is a 1950s-era attack on McCarthyism. The Scopes Trial is roughly a metaphor for anti-communist hysteria. The film as a whole is not history at all, since (for example) it seriously scrambles and exaggerates actual events. A few years ago Ed Larson’s award-winning book Summer for the Gods explained the real and very different Read More ›

A helpful correspondent directed us to the following statement on the website of Southern Methodist University, the location of the upcoming Darwin v. Design conference this Friday and Saturday: Founded in 1911 by what is now The United Methodist Church, SMU opened in 1915 with support from Dallas leaders. The University is nonsectarian in its teaching and committed to freedom of inquiry. (emphasis added) SMU faculty who want the Darwin v. Design conference banned from their campus might benefit from re-reading—and heeding—this statement.

Fifteen years ago debating intelligent design at SMU was done with “no intimidation” and “no censorship.” So, a decade and a half ago, intelligent design was discussed on campus allegedly without threat of censorship. How many times has that happened since then? Not so many. The truth of this may be hard for some at SMU to grasp because, frankly, truth is something a bit more elusive, according to SMU professor Ronald Wetherington in a piece published in the SMU Daily Campus. Truth, according to Wetherington, “grows and changes.” Perhaps it is subjective to the consensus of the era? Regardless of what professor Wetherington thinks about science, truth, or intelligent design, at the end of the day there is still Read More ›

Darwinist blogger Orac recently took issue with my observation that Darwin’s theory plays no important role in medicine. Orac, a surgical oncologist, insisted that Darwin’s theory is very helpful in modern cancer research. He wrote: Now, using the principles of evolution, Maley et al have found one potential indicator of which patients with Barrett’s esophagus will progress to cancer and which will not. Basically, they adapted a diversity measure from ecology and evolution known as the Shannon diversity index. I’m going to have to leave it to my evolutionary biology colleagues to tell me more whether this was appropriately done, but for purposes of this paper the authors treated each sample ot as a single organism but as thousands of Read More ›

The May-June 2007 issue of American Scientist contains John Dupré‘s review of Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology by Alex Rosenberg. Dupré fears that Rosenberg’s adherence to strict physicalist reductionism (“Darwinian Reductionism”), where “everything is ultimately determined by what happens at the physical level–and that this entails that the mind is ‘nothing but’ the brain,” is based upon a failure to understand why most philosophers of biology have abandoned such reductionism rather than a new revelation. As Dupré points out, most philosophers have abandoned this view because, among other reasons, genes have a “many/many” relationship with phenotype. More specifically, his [Rosenberg’s] portrayal of the genome as a program directing development, which is the centerpiece of Read More ›

This morning’s Dallas Morning News features a bold op-ed by Bruce Chapman and John West calling for critics at SMU to employ the method of Charles Darwin himself: engage in the discussion.

The article, “Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us,” is a response to the SMU science professors who called on their university to ban the conference from campus.

Rather than “ludicrously comparing ID proponents to faith healers or even Holocaust-deniers,” as one columnist did last week, Chapman and West suggest that critics of intelligent design “engage ID scholars in a serious discussion.” They pointedly ask, “what is so frightening about allowing it [the evidence for design] to be heard at SMU?”

The published letters of Charles Darwin reveal a man who debated about design in a manner that seems “more tolerant and humble” than one encounters in the current debate, says Anthony Barnes in a book review in The Independent (U.K.). It could also be noted that Darwin was treated better by his critics 150 years ago than his followers — the dominant neo-Darwinists — treat their critics today. Darwin himself obviously thought a lot about religion, but, like his successors, he had what seems like a rather puerile understanding of theology and philosophy. He told the American botanist Asa Gray that Darwin’s own nose, which he considered large and unattractive, was evidence against design. “Will you honestly tell me that Read More ›