v1.2.2 / chapter 28 of 28 / 01 aug 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* The controversy over Darwinism and Design continues to rage on. While it is often presented as a scientific dispute, examination of the practical realities suggests it is much more a quarrel between science and religion. The question is whether this argument really needs to be happening.
* For all the grand principles invoked by both sides in the struggle over Darwinism, the end result is an unending, shrill, petty, and tiresome quarrel. Darwin-bashers, now armed with Michael Behe's supposed conflict between irreducible complexity and evolvability, not to mention the opaque mathematics of Bill Dembski, shrug off the accusation that their core agenda is to reset science back to the era of the Reverend Paley, insisting instead that they are offering a "21st century doctrine of the information age", in contrast to Darwin's "antiquated Victorian ideas", and proclaim that Darwinism is really the "cargo cult science".
They accuse scientists of being hysterically and blindly defensive in the face of a clearly superior doctrine -- acting like fossils, scientific bullies, who are unwilling to consider a legitimate alternate point of view. Mainstream scientists find it difficult to conceal their exasperation with arguments that they see as based on doubletalk, sleight-of-hand, and propaganda, repeated endlessly in stone-deaf indifference to refutations. John Derbyshire once compared arguing with Darwin-bashers to playing "whack-a-mole" -- once all their arguments had been demolished, they'd just start up with exactly the same arguments all over again.
Scientists get particularly annoyed at the pretense of the Darwin-bashers that they are engaged in an honest scientific debate, while they hardly exert themselves to disguise their ideology and continue to play the "Darth Vader was a Darwinist" game, making the evolutionary science community sound as much a threat to society as crack cocaine or child pornography -- even claiming that such social blights are a product of Darwinism, or at least scientific materialism in general, which is labelled a "closet religion". Considering the furious hail of flak from the Darwin-bashers, it's not surprising that the scientists get exasperated. As H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist from the University of Rochester, put it:
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... evolutionists, after all, spend most of their public lives defending Darwin against endlessly recycled creationist arguments. So of course we appear hide-bound reactionaries. (So would physicists if the theory of gravity were dragged into court every other year.)
END QUOTE
The smears are not one-way, of course. Darwin wasn't a source of continuous feuding in the US before the 1960s, and one of the driving forces behind the running quarrel since then are the US "culture wars" between the Right and Left that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. The Right smears the Left, and the Left smears the Right just as loudly.
There is also the issue that, in the face of criticisms that Darwinism is an inherently antireligious doctrine, some advocates of Darwinism insist that it is. In particular, Richard Dawkins is an outspoken atheist who publicly denounces religions as superstition -- all of them, making no strong distinction between a Buddhist and a Jehovah's Witness, between the Reverend Rowan Williams and the Reverend Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps, in what have been called "cluster bomb" attacks -- and writes religion-bashing books with such subtle titles as THE GOD DELUSION.
Dawkins even insists that tolerance of religious beliefs is a sign of moral weakness, accuses agnostics of intellectual cowardice, sneers at attempts to reconcile religion and science, and claims that religion is on the balance an evil that the world would be better off to discard. His single-mindedness has won him the nickname of "Darwin's Rottweiler" as tribute of sorts to Thomas Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog" -- who, incidentally, Dawkins resembles.
One of Dawkins' agendas in writing his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER was to deny the hand of God in Creation by showing that organisms do not follow any specific Design. There is no evidence for a secret scientific conspiracy against religion, but there are certainly scientists, Dawkins being the leader of the pack, who are unambiguously hostile to it. At least nobody could accuse Dawkins of being the slightest bit secretive about his beliefs. Some of his critics might complain instead that he should be more so.
* There are those on both sides of the fence who find the feuding over evolutionary science unconstructive. Some religious conservatives who dislike Darwinism feel they have more important issues to fight over, such as marriage and abortion laws, and that squabbling over textbook stickers in the courts is a distraction from matters of substance. As one professor of religion put it: "Plenty of religious groups and associations have an official position on evolution, but have no official position on other important issues like torture."
It should also be noted that though the bulk of Darwin-bashers are religious conservatives, it is not true that all religious conservatives are Darwin-bashers. Many advocate various concepts of "theistic evolution", which in its simplest form just says that Darwinism and religion are not in conflict with each other, Darwinism being another feature of the "dream in the mind of the Creator" -- or as some have put it: "God intelligently designed Darwinism." Some go a bit farther, claiming that the Creator installed an immortal soul into human beings -- but even skeptics who sneer at such views as "unscientific excess baggage" have to admit they don't represent a challenge to Darwinism, can be regarded simply as a personal point of view, and being unproveable in any measurable sense are beyond productive argument anyway.
On the other side of the fence, many of those in the scientific community who have no fondness for religion see the argument of Dawkins' THE BLIND WATCHMAKER as overreaching. The only case it really makes is to reject the idea that the Earth's species had to have arisen through detail tinkerings by a Creator. As Gert Korthof pointed out, anyone whose belief in the Creator was not acquired by consideration of such tinkerings will find Dawkins' argument a shrug.
Some advocates of theistic evolution have replied that the entire scheme of nature shows a certain high-level order or "meta-order", defining a beautifully elegant system that spontaneously generates ever-expanding diversity, and so actually does demonstrate the hand of the Creator. After all, if it is proposed that the Universe is actually the product of an Creator's will, it is simple logic to then think that, being omniscient, He would have got the job right at the outset, that the system would be specified and adequate to implement His will, and He would not need to keep tweaking it -- in violation of His own laws.
Advocates of theistic evolution point out that this is exactly the reverse of the weak-beer "gap theology" argument: the evidence of creation is not hidden in obscure, irreducibly complex biomechanisms, but in everything that we see around us. Ken Miller has made such a religious case for Darwin in detail, as has Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian and head of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Both have worked to try to calm the quarrel between science and religious conservatives.
Well-known debunker Michael Shermer published a low-key manifesto in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN magazine in 2006 that delivered a pitch for "evolution for evangelicals" to balance "Darth Vader was a Darwinist" propaganda and make Darwinism more palatable to religious conservatives -- offering for example that Darwinian kin selection backs up Christian family and social values, and that the notion that the Creator needs to continually fiddle with the Universe to keep it working suggests a "God of cheap tricks", not an omniscient master engineer.
* Critics of religion may respond that while the devout may find all this a nice thing, it doesn't really have anything to do with the sciences. That is unarguable, but much the same set of circumstances apply to, say, football. A star football player might well be devout and claim his work is supported by his faith, but that would have absolutely no bearing on how the game is played or how it is administered. Nobody would have a sensible reason to complain that the star player's religious devotion posed a problem for the conduct of the sport -- any more than anyone would have a sensible reason to accuse football of being atheistic.
A spirit of tolerance inspires strong sympathy for Dawkins' beliefs that he has no need to apologize for his atheism any more than the devout have to apologize for their beliefs, and that public figures need to be held to account for their bigotry when they denounce nonbelievers. He is certainly correct to say that extremists should be denounced when they use religion as a mask to promote hate, intolerance, and trash science. However, that same spirit of tolerance is a two-way street, and his confrontational style and explicit contempt for tact tend to strain it.
In fact, unrestrained attacks on religion can be seen as inept, at least as far as the political war over evolutionary science is concerned. Neutrals in the battle -- who, of course assuming that the argument is supposed to be persuasive and not merely tiresome quarreling for its own sake, would seem to be the targets of persuasion -- end up being driven off or antagonized. More importantly, the case for Darwinian evolution stands with considerable strength on the basis of the evidence. Turning the argument into one over religion is simply throwing that strength away, and since the Darwin-bashers have such an easily-demolished case in the evidence, they are only too happy to turn the dispute into a religious war.
* The extremists in the feud over Darwinism insist that one can either choose science or choose God, and pour abuse on moderates who cannot see any real incompatibility between the two. The reality is that neither side can point to any law of science that either confirms or rules out the existence of God.
The only sense in which Dawkins and others of like mind proclaim an inherent conflict between science and religion is in insisting the two represent contradictory and opposed mindsets. The issue is philosophical, strongly disputed, and has little or no impact on the actual workings of the sciences. In practice, the sciences are agnostic. Nobody writes a scientific doctoral thesis on the question of the existence of God, no proper science textbook discusses the matter, no scientific journal accepts research papers on such topics, and there is no "scientific consensus" on the subject -- or for that matter any real effort to obtain one. Nobody seriously questions the scientific credentials of scientists such as Ken Miller and Francis Collins because of their theistic beliefs, and no scientists mention their attitudes toward religion when presenting their scientific qualifications. Although the science press may editorialize on the conflicts between science and religion as a topic of interest, if scientists wish to comment on religion, the usual forum is not the scientific press but the popular media, one example being a high-profile 2006 debate between Dawkins and Collins in TIME magazine.
On the other side of the same coin, if strong scientific evidence contradicts a religious belief -- the fact that humans are another species of primate as a prominent example -- that evidence was obtained simply because it was the evidence available, not as part of a deliberate policy of discrediting religious beliefs. If a particular religious faction is unhappy with the evidence, if that group wants doesn't like the idea that humans are another species of primate, no amount of indignation or attempts to muddy the waters are going to change the evidence in the slightest. As Dawkins puts it: "Don't shoot the messenger." The group will have to accommodate the evidence in some way sooner or later, and there's nothing useful the sciences can say about how they do so, except to sincerely wish them the best in the effort. If the group then decides that the evidence actually supports their religion, there's nothing much useful the sciences can say about that, either, other than to sincerely express relief.
If scientists want to take on religion, they are perfectly free to do so in any society that cares about civil liberties, and like what they say or not, nobody can credibly question their complete right to say it. However, no scientist has unambiguous basis for claiming that the sciences explicitly support general attacks on religion. If they wish to embrace religion, they are just as free to do so. As the devout Ronald Fisher put it in a sermon to his church:
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A man of science is engaged professionally on a particular sort of task. This is by such means as are available, particularly by observation and experiment, to acquire a better understanding of the world in which we find ourselves ... such a profession would seem by no means incompatible with religious beliefs, such as that this world is the outcome of the creative activity of a personal God, or that the Creator has an affection for his creatures ...
These are simple tenets ... certainly not incompatible with a life devoted to a better understanding of some aspect or other of the Creation of which we form a part. In my own case, it is the study of the mode of inheritance of the heritable characteristics of animals, plants and men ... In itself it is no more an irreligious activity than fishing, or making tents.
END QUOTE
* Unfortunately, evolutionary science is, as far as the public mindset toward it is concerned, something different from other domains of science. Few citizens express much distress over, say, ordinary physics or chemistry, though they're just as materialistic and agnostic as evolutionary science in themselves. Few would think of claiming that the teaching of physics is an atheistic attack on religion, complaining about its scientific materialism and the fact that it leaves no room for supernatural intervention. Nobody's pressing school boards to "teach the controversy" between alchemy and chemistry.
In fact, the general public will rarely even express an opinion on chemistry. They may say it's boring, they may admit they don't know anything about it. This is not the case with evolutionary science. People can be expected to have an opinion on it, one way or another, even when they flatly admit they've never done any real homework on the subject. Why the difference? Is it just because people generally find chemistry dull?
The answer's obvious: evolutionary science attempts to understand the nature of biological life and the human species, which means a "border war" with fundamentalist religions -- not just fundamentalist Christianity, but also fundamentalist Judaism and Islam, as well as organizations out of the religious mainstream such as the Hari Krishnas and some New Age groups -- with different beliefs about such things. These religions aren't in complete agreement in their notions, but they all find the Darwinian vision, mocked in a simple but not entirely inaccurate fashion as "from goo to you by way of the zoo", to be disgusting. This is why there's a feud over Darwinism but not weather forecasting ... at least, there's no report yet of a religious faction that wants to take on the weather forecasters, or for that matter of weather forecasters who write religion-bashing books.
To the sciences, religion is an extracurricular activity, something scientists can oppose or embrace as they like on their own time, but which has no more or less to do with the practice of the sciences than it does the practice of football. Whether there is a conflict between science and religion is up to religion. If there are religions that insist their scriptures should be regarded as science texts -- for example absolutely refusing to accept the unbreakable fact that humans are another species of primate -- there's going to be conflict.
The quarrel is as loud or louder than it has ever been, with no end in sight, no possibility of a winner: all the posturing and propaganda aside, neither Darwinism nor religion show the slightest signs of going away any time soon. The futility of the quarrel seems evident, but the only thing those who are sick of the war can do is try to keep a cool head -- and hope for better days.
* I ended up writing this document for the simple reason that the public dispute over Darwinism got too loud for me to ignore. I had to sit down and sort through the facts to see if the critics really had much legitimate basis for their attacks on evolutionary science, and if not what might be said in response.
I wrote this document essentially as an amusement and to settle things in my own head. I'm not sure that it could make much of an impression on anyone else, though I do hold some hope that conservatives inclined to do homework find it interesting. I have to point out, if it's not obvious, I have no formal qualifications in the sciences -- my background is in engineering, and I'm a technical writer by profession. I began with a low level of knowledge and only spent a year and a half writing the first release. This is a document by an amateur, and I'm sure there are some naive statements here and there that will have to be fixed in the future. That's what revcodes are for.
Writing this document was a learning experience less in the acquisition of details than in construction of an argument. Every now and then I would take off in one direction and then realize the foolishness of it -- for example, working up a long defense of Darwin's personal integrity, only to abruptly realize that I had no stake in defending him. Charles Darwin was a Victorian gentleman who I never met and who, being long dead, is completely immune to any offense or injury anyway.
In fact, I had to remind myself that I didn't have a personal stake in Darwinism to begin with. If I was presented with persuasive evidence that life, the Universe, and everything were the result of a scheme by alien white mice -- or whatever supernatural entity of choice -- I'd say: "Cool!" No joke, I would, I would be every bit as awestruck as I would be if a UFO landed in my back yard. Like they say, Darwinism is "just a theory", and much of it is open to reasonable doubt. The main reason I accept it is because it's the only available theory that happens to be honestly supported by the evidence. I have no reason to prefer that the Universe operate by a particular set of rules. Whatever way it actually works is fine by me.
I have to admit that the backup reason is that the criticisms against Darwinism are generally such hokum that it gets continuously harder to take any of them seriously, and ever more eye-glazing to even try to read them. I like to read up on scams, and not only is it all a package of scams, they're not even good scams. Given the staggering investment of effort by the Darwin-bashers, if Darwinism was anywhere close to the bad shape that they declare it is, they'd be able to come up with arguments that didn't sound like someone trying to bluff his way through final exams after watching the Movie Channel all night: If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bluster!
There is a certain humor to it. Darwin-bashers, for their habit of barking on loudly after their bafflegab has been shot full of holes, have been compared to the Black Knight in MONTY PYTHON & THE HOLY GRAIL, who continues to bluster as King Arthur lops off his limbs, one by one: "'Tis but a scratch!" "A mere flesh wound!" "Come back here, you coward, I'll bite your knees off!"
In the end, however, I was glad to be done with it. The subject in itself is extremely interesting, but the dispute over it is a tiresome shouting match, conducted in front of a general public that doesn't really care about the issue one way or another. To the extent I've bumbled into it, I am embarrassed. To be sure, some the folks on the Darwin side of the house -- Eugenie Scott of the NCSE, Ken Miller, and Michael Shermer being good examples -- are pretty level-headed; unfortunately, as is the case for any loud dispute, it's the obnoxious who dominate the argument, hotheads venting mindlessly at each other. It's all very discouraging.
However, instead of finishing on a sour note ... reflecting on the old
mockery that Darwinism is like thinking that a bunch of monkeys pounding on
typewriters could produce the Bible, I recall a very short fantasy story I
read when I was a lad, about a scientist who trained a group of chimpanzees
to type and let them go at it. They promptly produced the Bible, the
complete works of Shakespeare, and were pounding out the ENCYCLOPEDIA
BRITANNICA when the scientist flew off the handle and shot them all. Only
one badly-wounded chimp was still moving after the massacre; with his dying
breaths, he crawled up to the typewriter and punched out:
T H E E N D
* Sources include:
I spent a considerable amount of time surfing the internet for interesting background materials. It would be tedious to list everything I ran across, but I did find documents by Ken Miller, H. Allen Orr, Gert Korthof, Wesley Elsberry, Glenn Morton, and John Derbyshire particularly interesting. I not only liked Mark Perakh's comments, but also his extensive archive of jokes from and about the old Soviet Union. The comments on information theory and Intelligent Design were seeded from blog entries by a computer scientist named Mark Chu-Carroll.
I did a lot of cross-referencing to the online Wikipedia; it's good for picky details and certainly is the place to check for controversies -- if there's a controversy, it's going to be there. I also ran across large numbers of interesting comments from various players on websites, but alas their names didn't stick in my head and I beg forgiveness for uncredited liftings from their commentaries.
The PBS NOVA TV documentary series had an installment on the Dover trial that proved a useful and interesting resource. Of course, I have to give credit to my neighborhood prairie dogs, who are always amusing and also a good source of evolutionary inspiration.
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / 01 jan 08 / gvg / INTRO TO EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE, 22 chapters.
v1.1.0 / 01 apr 08 / gvg / Title INTRO TO EVOLUTION, went to 24 chapters.
v1.2.0 / 01 jun 08 / gvg / Added DR. TATIANA info, various polishings.
v1.2.1 / 01 jul 08 / gvg / Extensive small tweaks.
v1.2.2 / 01 aug 08 / gvg / A few more tweaks, went to 28 chapters.
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