Downsizing Darwin
Ian Pitchford (Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com)
Sun, 17 May 1998 22:44:12 +0000 The Boston Globe
| Opinion
Downsizing Darwin
By Paul R. Gross, 05/17/98
The oddest trend among culturati is the rise of
anti-evolutionism, which they call ''anti-Darwinism.'' However, this
is not just the old creationist maundering about a young Earth and
Noah's ark.
Among conservative intelligentsia, there is joy. Darwinism, they
declare, is dead; science itself has resurrected God. For example,
Robert H. Bork explains the lack of evidence for evolution in his
latest book: ''A compelling argument for why such evidence is missing
is provided by the microbiologist Michael Behe. He has shown that
Darwinism cannot explain life as we know it.'' Unfortunately, Behe - a
biochemist, not a microbiologist - has shown nothing of the kind.
Creationists and evangelical Christians love his book, but it contains
no new evidence for the venerable Argument from Design. Behe's version
of it was demolished by serious students of evolution. The ''missing''
evidence is missing only from Behe's book.
In addition the conservative journal Commentary has been printing
flamboyant critiques of science by a mathematician, David Berlinski.
He exhumes long-discredited creationist arguments and adds a few bones
of his own.
Across the country, college and university faculties seem to be
ignoring anti-Darwinist crusades bankrolled from outside the
institution. And the National Association of Biology Teachers, symbol
of resistance to creationism, has recently had second thoughts: from
its time-honored definition of evolution, two key adjectives -
''unsupervised'' and ''impersonal'' - were deleted. Do they now think
that the evolution of life on Earth is ''supervised,'' or
''personal?'' No. Teachers qualified in science admit that there is no
new reason to believe that. But they glance at the wall and see a
hand, writing. By removing the offensive words they hope still to
teach the facts, including the salient one: that to the best of our
knowledge, the diversity of life on this planet is the result of
organic evolution.
They're kidding themselves. The teachers are rationalists and
compromisers. But the trend is not toward recognizing the
compatibility of religion with science: it is for the defeat of
science wherever it conflicts with religion.
In 1850, Adam Sedgwick, Darwin's geology teacher, thundered that if
evolution is true, then religion is a lie, law is folly, morality is
moonshine. Therefore evolution must be false. His thunder survives and
rumbles again. Why?
Are there really deep flaws in biology and a conspiracy to hide them,
as the new anti-evolutionsts claim? Have genetics, biochemistry,
embryology, and paleontology failed to support the synthesis of
Darwin's natural selection with what we know about heredity? Are there
really no intermediates in the fossil record?
No. The modern evolutionary synthesis is as sound as the heliocentric
solar system. The soundness of Copernicus is tested daily in millions
of ''experiments.'' So is the soundness of misnamed ''Darwinism,''
which is really 100 years of biology and geology. To be sure,
scientific knowledge is impermanent; change is the rule. But the main
channels of science have been open for 300 years and one of them
became evolutionary biology.
A returning Darwin would find much of it incomprehensible, so far has
it advanced and changed. Don't take my word for it: study any good
textbook. So far, every creationist claim against evolution has
collapsed, to the unnecessary embarrassment of religion.
So the bluster is not really about fine points of biology or even the
truth of special creation. It is about politics. The real worry
remains Sedgwick's: that religion will be seen as lies, law as folly,
morality as moonshine; that the social order will come apart because
of science-fed doubt that God is watching, that the evil in our hearts
must take over. The worry could in principle be legitimate; but world
history gives it no support.
And that isn't the whole story. Much of the anti-Darwin furor is
resentment of science in general, a malady as much of the academic
left as of conservatives. It is the ''biophobia'' of some humanists
and social scientists. It decrees that biology has little or nothing
to say about human behavior.
Writing in The Nation on ''The New Creationism,'' Barbara Ehrenreich
and Janet McIntosh argue that: ''... the combined vigor of
antibiologism and simplified postmodernism has tended to obliterate
the possibility that human beings have anything in common, and to
silence efforts to explore this domain.'' Those -isms are trends of
the cultural left. A strange, informal collaboration of right and left
is in progress, undercutting evolutionary and other science in
education and in general. It does not bode well for our announced
national goals in science achievement by American kids.
Paul R. Gross, former director and president of the Marine Biological
Laboratory in Woods Hole and a former professor at MIT, is a visiting
scholar at Harvard University.
This story ran on page E07 of the Boston Globe on 05/17/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
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Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com
Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies
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