Views

Political scientist and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Dr. John West has been asked to lecture at Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. on Monday, April 30th at 11a.m. Dr. West’s lecture will be “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: The Disturbing Legacy of America’s Eugenics Crusade.”

For those outside the D.C. area, the lecture will be audiocast live from www.frc.org (click on “Events”)

From the Lecture Summary:

Recently I shared my reading of David Brooks’ recent colum “The Age of Darwin.” The whole thing read like parody to me. I thought for sure that Brooks could not seriously write that, while we are generally post-modern people who are skeptical of metanarratives, we have and should abandon this view because Darwinism is the true metanarrative of life. I thought he was just pointing out the contradiction in academia between postmodern and Darwinian thought.

With thanks to one ENV reader named Oleg, I stand corrected. I had forgotten that Mr. Brooks shared his views on Darwinism in The New Republic in 2005:

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:

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?

This last weekend, I attended Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play “After Darwin” at D.C.’s Church Street Theater.

If you have not seen it already, you will enjoy playing with this random mutation generator. You will see how wonderful the Darwinian process is at taking your text and moving on to ever-greater levels of complexity.

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:

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 ›

I find myself in yet another odd alliance. I guess NRO‘s John Derbyshire would side with me over Leon Kass (whom, once again, I greatly respect for the solid anti-reductionist arguments he has made). Scientific observation can and should affect one’s view of what it is to be human. (Derbyshire and I simply disagree about the strength of Darwinian claims.) He lists “Biology” as one of the major things shaping his view of “the human condition.” He writes:

This past Thursday, October 26, Dr. Leon Kass, learned intellectual and former Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, presented a paper before an excellent group of intellectuals at the American Enterprise Institute (Stephen Barr, Eric Cohen, Joseph Bottum, Charles Murray, and Marcello Pera, among others). Dr. Kass had many good things to say about the false nature of scientific reductionism and how it goes against everything we know about reality from everyday life. He also denied that random mutations and natural selection were the whole story to life’s evolution. That said, I took umbrage with one major point Kass made.