Science and Culture Today | Page 1440 | Discovering Design in Nature

CSC Senior Fellow John West is featured in Human Events this week, offering a reality check and a history lesson on the debate over Darwinian evolution. The debate over Darwinian evolution is typically framed by the news media as a clash between “right” and “left.” Conservatives are presumed to be critical of Darwin’s theory, while liberals are presumed to be supportive of it. As in most cases, reality is more complicated. There always have been liberal critics of Darwin. In the early 20th Century, progressive reformer William Jennings Bryan fought for women’s suffrage, world peace–and against Darwinism. More recently, left-wing novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a self-described “secular humanist,” has called our human bodies “miracles of design” and faulted scientists for “pretending Read More ›

Over at her new blog, Mindful Hack, journalist Denyse O’Leary is presenting different views of how Darwinism interacts with morality. Michael Shermer thinks Darwinian evolution easily accounts for “Christian morality.” John West, author of the recently published Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest, claims that Darwinism really implies moral relativism. Given how natural selection is invoked by Darwinists to explain behaviors ranging from rape to marital fidelity to selfishness to the Golden Rule, one is reminded of the maxim that “the theory that explains anything actually explains nothing.”

Recently Francis Collins, the renowned scientist and harmonizer of Darwin and faith, lectured before a packed auditorium at George Mason University in Virginia. One attendee and avid ENV reader, unimpressed with the harmonization, sent me this report:

SEATTLE — While conservatives are presumed to be critical of Darwin’s theory, many on the right, such as George Will, James Q. Wilson, and Larry Arnhart, have mounted a vigorous defense of Darwinism. As Discovery Institute’s John West explains in his new book, Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (Discovery Institute Press, 2006), their attempts to reconcile conservatism and Darwinian biology misunderstand both.

National Geographic‘s pro-evolution articles sometimes come off like advertisements for Darwin (for an analysis of a prior ad, see here). Its November, 2006 issue has an article, “From Fins to Wings,” by Carl Zimmer which quotes Harvard microbiologist Howard Berg saying “The basic idea of evolution is so elegant, so beautiful, so simple.” With such a ringing endorsement, I expected the article to urge me to buy evolution at the local grocery store! Zimmer’s article, however, was better than many past evolution-endorsements in National Geographic. Past articles used icons like Haeckel’s false “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” concept and antibiotic resistance to sell evolution. While Zimmer’s present article retains the fallacious “the human eye was poorly designed” icon, it improves the treatment Read More ›

Discovery Institute senior fellow and nationally acclaimed bioethicist Wesley J Smith is having it out with NRO’s John Derbyshire over human exceptionalism.

In the wake of US elections, which largely focused on international issues such as terrorism and the war in Iraq, there have been some who think that this somehow means that scientists should ignore evidence for intelligent design, such as the fact that digital code in DNA and molecular machines in cells exist. Canadian science writer Denyse O’Leary (first of Post-Darwinist, now of Mindful Hack fame) commented on our tendency in the US to think that elections here set the pace for everything else in the world. I hope no one will mind me saying this but many American intelligentsias are very, very parochial. Do they think they have a patent on the ID controversy? Do they think everyone knows Read More ›

David Sepkoski’s recent literature review (“Worldviews in Collision: Recent Literature on the Creation*Evolution Divide”) in Journal of the History of Biology provides another illustration of the fact that many science journals are biased against intelligent design. He uses pejorative language against ID, claiming its proponents engage in a “guerilla campaign,” calling specified complexity “Dembski’s hobby-horse,” and asserting that Stephen Meyer’s article contains a “confused interpretation of the Cambrian explosion” (though Sepkoski provides no specifics to bolster his point). Given the pejorative language, could the anti-ID bias in the scientific community be any clearer? Sepkoski’s omissions are more interesting than what he includes. He reviews no books by scientific proponents of intelligent design, such as The Privileged Planet, which was published Read More ›

Cornell Professor Emeritus Richard A. Baer has an opinion piece in the Cornell Daily Sun that is right on target in several areas but completely lost when it comes to freedom of scientific inquiry and intelligent design. Baer rightly points out instances where staunch Darwinists such as Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins have clearly crossed out of the realm of science and into philosophy by making dogmatically materialistic statements such as Sagan’s famous line that “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Baer explains that in his experience:

A far more serious problem at Cornell and at most universities is the many illegal border crossings that go on in the opposite direction: claims made by scientists, speaking as scientists, that are really theological, philosophical or ethical claims, rather than scientific ones.

TIME magazine this week has an interesting discussion between Richard Dawkins, author most recently of The God Delusion, and Francis Collins, author of The Language of God. It is worth reading. Two observations: