Darwinism

It’s not the Church, exactly; it’s the fashions in who speaks for the church.

The work of biologists and astronomers “had no more ardent supporter” than Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), but

Although he was a giant of twentieth-century philosophy and (according to Pope Paul VI) a seminal influence on the Second Vatican Council, Maritain’s stock among Catholic thinkers was already in sharp decline at the time of his death. Deal Hudson has argued that the cause of this seemingly inexplicable neglect was the scathing critique of Teilhard de Chardin in one of Maritain’s last books, The peasant of the Garonne (1967). Read More ›

In “Zoologger: Clone army steals genes from other species” (New Scientist, 23 May 2011), Michael Marshall discusses the way clams steal genes from other clams. And how some life forms don’t have sex at all: The poster children for asexuality are bdelloid rotifers, tiny animals that have gone without sex for 80 million years. But they cheat: they steal swathes of genes from bacteria, fungi and plants. So … what about the assured results of scientific evolution theory? What can we certainly predict, other than that bdelloid rotifers will not become anything else, no matter whose genes they steal? But what would that mean for Darwinian evolution? For the theory of genes? Warning: Clam sex (or maybe not) discussed.

One of the major difficulties I have as someone with one foot planted in the theistic evolution camp is discussing the general concept of evolution or Darwinism.

A large part of the problem is with the simple definition of the words – where one person takes Darwinism to mean “a process totally unguided and unforeseen by God in anyway”, another means “a process of variation and selection, where both variation and selected may be or (with some TEs) in fact were ultimately or proximately guided and foreseen by God”, still another means “a process of variation and selection, where the ultimate causes of variation and selection are not considered because that’s outside of science” to otherwise, etc. Navigating this is a headache, and one that constantly reappears.

But another conceptual problem is this: The claim that atheism and evolution are utterly intertwined. Now, this comes in a few forms. Sometimes the claim is that if evolution is true – let’s say, if it’s true that the first man had biological precursors – then theism must be false. More popular is the claim that theism and evolution can both be true, but theism can also withstand the falsity of evolution. Atheism, on the other hand, has a dire link to evolution: If atheism is true, then evolution must be true.

This latter view seems popular, both in and out of the ID tent. And it’s a view I deeply disagree with. My reasons follow below the cut.

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Fight card here.

Basically, as David Anderson at creation.com tells it – and we did notice (April 25) the frequent fruit splats here too …,

Recently, a public dispute broke out between two different ‘camps’ of atheists on the Internet. It was not very edifying, but it was illuminating. It illustrated some of the ‘fault-lines’ that run through today’s atheist movements.

Fault between Read More ›

Denyse: First, step with us a moment into Scientific American’s past (a past it repudiates) where, in 1911, it enthusiastically editorialized about “The Science of Breeding Better Men.” How about this for an opening line: “ADA JUKE is known to anthropologists as the ‘mother of criminals.'” Well, how’s that for coming straight to the point? The solution?

The proper attitude to be taken toward the perpetuation of poor types is that which has been attributed to [Thomas] Huxley. “We are sorry for you,” he is reported to have said; “we will do our best for you (and in so doing we elevate ourselves, since mercy blesses him that gives and him that takes), but we deny you the right to parentage. You may live, but you must not propagate.”

Actually, her real name was “Margaret,” and the history was rather more complex than eugenics hysteria allowed for. In Canada, the worry surfaced as a fear that “the British race was ‘becoming small, dark, and emotional'” (p. 26). Maybe that’s code for “like the separatist-minded French-speaking Catholics of Quebec” …
(This is the third and final part of Uncommon Descent’s interview with Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Here’s Part I and here’s Part II.) Read More ›

Moving beyond (at last, one hopes) “The day we left the Darwin lobby in charge of the office”, the journal Synthese has a great new issue on scientific realism, dedicated to Peter Lipton (d. 2007): Scientific Realism Quo Vadis? Theories, Structures, Underdetermination and Reference here.

It includes Read More ›

The folk at Nature’s blog appear so anxious to get people to believe Darwinism dunit that some have resorted to making statements about the history of Christianity and science that are actually true. Get a load of this, from James Hannam, “Science owes much to both Christianity and the Middle Ages” (May 18, 2011): Read More ›

Justice at last, for the majestic Monarch. A new Illustra film chronicles North America’s remarkable butterfly in defense of the design of life. Preview here. David Klinghoffer notes from preview (ENV, May 18, 2011):
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Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall talked to Uncommon Descent recently about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canada in the mid-twentieth century.

Part I is here.

Denyse: You mentioned the silent American eugenics film The Black Stork (1917) (P. 16):

A young man and woman are considering marriage; eugenicist Harry J Haiselden warns that they are ill-matched and will produce defective offspring. He is right; their baby is born defective, dies quickly and floats into heaven.

Courtesy the Moral Uplift League in Baltimore. (Floats into heaven? Well, that gives an oomph to “uplift”, I guess.) Yes, I’d heard of that one, but long forgotten. Looked it up again. And, sure enough, here’s something, from a book called The Black Stork (Oxford, 1999) I’d never heard before – about the famed Helen Keller: Read More ›

Our favourite atheist philosopher Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), reflects on the Beckwith-Forrest-Synthese dustup which hit the New York Times last weekend. Noting that some philosophers have called for a boycott of Synthese because the journal’s regular editors disclaimed the tone of anti-ID pieces published in a special issue: Read More ›

Insurmountable problems, actually, or as Mike Behe would call them, the Edge of Evolution.

Ann Gauger writes to say,

The final podcast discussing the implications of Doug’s and my paper is available now. I also address the points raised by critics. I recommend it for those who might have found the paper too technical.

Here. (First pod is here.) Intro to this second one: Read More ›

Or anyway, the latest attempt at it. The Darwin lobby promotes uniformitarianism (long, slow gradual change caused by natural selection acting on random mutation), which is at odds with the evidence of rapid bouts of change followed by long periods of stasis.

Over at Access Research Network, David Tyler discusses “The unscientific hegemony of uniformitarianism” (05/16/11), and new approaches in progress. Read More ›

As David Klinghoffer puts it at ENV:

Over the weekend, Jonathan Wells’s The Myth of Junk DNA broke into the top five on Amazon’s list of books dealing with genetics — a list normally dominated at its pinnacle by various editions of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Not bad, Jonathan.The juxtaposition with Dawkins’ Selfish Gene is appropriate, notwithstanding the demurrals of biochemist Larry Moran et al. Dawkins and other Darwinists, such as Jerry Coyne, have indeed posited that neo-Darwinian theory predicts that swaths of the genome will turn out to be functionless junk. The Junk DNA argument has been a pillar of the Darwin Lobby’s efforts to seduce public opinion and influence public policy. Professor Moran wants to imagine that Dawkins never held that neo-Darwinism predicts junk DNA. But that’s not how other Darwinists see it. (Compare, for example, Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, page 316.)

So far, with none of them having actually read the book (though P.Z. Myers threatens to do so), the Darwin apologists’ response to The Myth of Junk DNA has followed along four lines of defense. Read More ›

Story here. Now put up your feet. Here’s the three-men-a-side debate that Dawkins says convinced him that Craig was an unworthy opponent. What you think? Offered alongside the one above at YouTube: Here’s why he says he “won’t debate creationists” and here he compares them to Holocaust deniers. How do you think a debate between Dawkins and Craig would go?

While writing “New York Times reports on Darwinist’s article disowned by philosophy journal,” I got the sense there was a similar case way back when that went unheralded.

(Note: Times writer Mark Oppenheimer linked to this blog from his blog, for clarification on the fact that the ID community was not conspiring against Forrest to vindicate Beckwith. He deserves much credit for wanting to know what is going on rather than punching out the usual snooze nooz.)

Suddenly, I remembered. In 2005 California lawyer named Larry Caldwell was active in education issues around teaching Darwinism in publicly funded schools. For example, he tried (but failed) to get some legal action against a university-sponsored Darwin promotion site that fronted Christian Darwinism – on the grounds that telling students which orientations of faith were compatible with Darwinism (and by implication which others were less so or not at all) violated the US Constitution’s Establishment clause. His case never went anywhere*

At any rate, here’s the story: Read More ›