Darwinism

David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and the author of Science and Technology in World History (Vols. 1 & 2) decided to dissent from Darwinism, because In 2008, I published a critique of intelligent design theory in the peer-reviewed journal Earth Science Reviews. I concluded that intelligent design cannot be construed as a scientific theory, and that the apparent goal of the intelligent design movement was to restore Christian theology as the queen of the sciences.But I also argued that to the extent creationists were highlighting areas in which scientific theory was inadequate they were doing better science than biologists. We ought to stop pretending that science has all the answers. Science is Read More ›

I commend to all DonaldM’s backgrounder on this news, which broke last night, about the journal Synthese disowning the attack on Christian scholar* Frank Beckwith published in its pages by one of Darwin’s familiar broomsticks . If someone has to put a stopper in, Synthese might as well be first. It’s their journal, after all. But let’s not lose sight of two critical facts: First, the only real reason Synthese had to disown Forrest’s attack is that Beckwith is not an ID sympathizer, and Forrest had assumed he was. That is the substance of his rebuttal, and the true reason the journal had to act. Forrest would likely have been free to publish any factual inaccuracy she pleased about an ID Read More ›

Denyse O’Leary writes about Barbara Forrest’s fact-free attack on Frank Beckwith, which recently appeared in Synthese. While Denyse focused more on Beckwith’s response to Forrest’s scholarly article diatribe, it might be worth taking a closer look not only at Forrest’s article, but the entire issue of Synthese in which it is found. First Forrest. In the abstract for her article with the breathtaking title “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, Bar writes:

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties.

Okay, so we’re only 2 sentences into the abstract and we can already see that Bar has no clue what ID is about. Read More ›

File this under: Darwin conspirazoid’s paper disowned by respectable journal.

Of course it had to happen eventually.

I remember reading Barbara “ID is coming to GET you” Forrest’s 2009 attack-from-nowhere on  Beckwith (philosophy and church-state studies*).

Phrase “tinfoil hat” haunted me all that day, for whatever reason.

It’s one thing, of course, to publish a potboiler like her Trojan Horse, entertaining the Darwin faithful with dark tales of the big ID conspiracy. I mean, the faithful would vastly prefer space aliens, but the aliens haven’t been by lately.

And so what? Well, here’s what: A respectable journal, Synthese, has a habit of making every fifth issue a special, with outside editors. Unfortunately for the folks at Synthese, they left a recent issue (Vol 178, No22010) in the hands of the Darwin lobby, with NCSE employee Glenn Branch as co-editor.

Oops.

Oopser: One of their gems was Barbara Forrest’s “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, where Forrest once again whacks Beckwith with her magical Darwinbroom.

This might have been a mistake on her part, for two reasons. First, Beckwith is a gentleman and a scholar, but not a wimp. And second he is not, as Forrest assumes, an ID sympathizer. So he isn’t someone to whom the elementary principles of justice do not apply.

Anyway, he complained. The journal editors let him publish a 23-page rebuttal that mostly defends scholarly integrity, including his own, against the tangled Forrest of insinuations. It’s a zinger.

Better still, the editors have done “something unprecedented” – they have issued a disclaimer and, in Beckwith’s words, “distanced themselves from her literary misconduct”.

Good for them: I take a somewhat populist view: The public supports and respects scholarship when it means high intellectual combat.

But when it is the intellectual equivalent of machine politics (as it becomes when it gets lost in the Forrest), it’s not clear why support or respect is warranted.

So I see Beckwith as backstopping a form of corruption, and am thankful for it.

I guess someone who wasn’t an ID sympathizer had to be buzzed by Darwin’s broomstick before anyone could call these people for what they are.

Here are some brief excerpts from Beckwith’s rebuttal: Read More ›

A friend put me onto this human genetic research program (no, no, it all sounds reasonable, keep your shirt on; no one is looking for the  missing link andyou are him and the genetic police are waiting outside … wake UP, will you?): Ethnically diverse people are donating DNA to science, and the wealth of genomic data emerging from the project already is shedding light on human evolution.A decade ago it was a big deal to spell out the entire DNA sequence of a single human being. That event marked the success of the initial Human Genome Project. Now hundreds of human genomes have been decoded. Scientists who study human evolution are using the new data to make discoveries about how Read More ›

Scratch that. Partial answer just in. One already has. Here (Retreating Into Silence, March 6, 2011), Mark Steyn tells a prescient story: A prominent British imam has been forced to retract his claims that Islam is compatible with Darwin’s theory of evolution after receiving death threats from fundamentalists.This is not in Lahore or Cairo but in London, at what is described as “a prominent mosque which also runs one of the country’s largest sharia courts” – in other words, a religious institution that already enjoys the imprimatur of state approval, albeit not (yet) to the same degree as in Pakistan. The imam, Dr Hasan, has issued a groveling apology – “I seek Allah’s forgiveness for my mistakes” – but they Read More ›

Jane Harris-Szovan’s book, Eugenics and the Firewall (when social Darwinism hit the Canadian province of Alberta), has been getting lots of attention, here for example, and here. She notes,

If you’re wondering why only the left is interviewing me, then you need to learn a bit about who runs my province. [Not the left. – d., 😉 ] Still, l it makes me sad, that the Christian and right wing media are running away from this issue like ‘fraidy cats. I expected it, but I am sad that I was right.)

The embarrassment here is that eugenics in Alberta was spearheaded by evangelical Christians, including a premier whose soubriquet was “Bible Bill.” The left has a stake in exposing this scandal, not the Christian groups. But it’s time someone did, just to clear the air.

It’s interesting to reflect on how seductive the idea must have been back then. I doubt you’d get any prominent Christian leaders on board for compulsory sterilization today. Read More ›

First, a moment of prayer, led by Sister Sindya N. Bhanoo, from the New York Times (March 3, 2011): Charles Darwin has had a remarkable record over the past century, not only in the affirmation of evolution by natural selection, but in the number of his more specific ideas that have been proved correct. Now that the Beard has been appropriately honoured, we learn, shocka!: He may, however, have been wrong about invasive species, at least where amphibians are concerned. Darwin believed that when an invasive species entered a region where a closely related species already existed, it would most likely be unsuccessful because of a competition for resources.“Instead, we found the opposite pattern with amphibians,” said Reid Tingley, a Read More ›

Recently, we’ve been talking about the Templeton Foundation (, noting that it is spearheading an assault against science teachers who are slow in  paying the Darwin boys their accustomed shakedown.

Here’s Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne, on how the Templetons efforts to ingratiate themselves with the Darwin boys will never be enough. He introduces Sunny Bains’ 23 page report (.pdf), “Questioning the integrity of the John Templeton Foundation” (Evolutionary Psychology 9:92-115 2011):

Bains is a journalist and scientist at Imperial College London, and her report was supported by Sam Harris’s Project Reason (I’m on the board of advisors). I’ll just give her introductory precis, but if you want to comment on the issues, do read the whole paper. Curiously, it was published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, which of course causes me some cognitive dissonance!

I take it that Coyne is embarrassed by evolutionary psychology, that idiot child of evolutionary biology?

Ah yes, it is true. Coyne denies that the idiot child is his. We must accept his word as a gentleman on that, and I for one believe him. For one thing, in some fracas,

A couple of evolutionary psychologists went after me in the comments, claiming that I was tarring the field by criticizing some articles that were, after all, in the popular press. What these critics don’t seem to realize is that many evolutionary-psychology papers themselves—papers from the primary scientific literature—are also lame, dubious, or even laughable.

Actually, almost all EP papers can be described that way. But we will press on because just now we really want to hear the dirt on Templeton, and it’s Coyne’s own fault if he got himself into a hoo-haw with the Eepers. (Coyne, you are supposed to be playing this one for laughs, you know … )

Anyway, some useful stuff in Bains: Read More ›

First Things first thunkit? No, but is among the first to catch on. I see where, at their “First Thoughts,” blog, Joe Carter has picked up on Raymond Tallis’ outing of “Darwinitis”of the mind, in New Statesman. Tallis’s punctures into the balloons of neuro-this and neuro-that and “evolutionary psychology” resulted in interesting comments. It also got picked up at Arts and Letters Daily, billed as

Brain-science enthusiasts promise a more peaceful and prosperous world. Great, right? Maybe not. Raymond Tallis punctures neuromania…

Since the recent death of its point man, Denis “literary Darwinism” Dutton, it may now be possible to name nonsense as such and get picked up there much more readily.

If you want to see the type of thing Tallis is skewering:

Neuro-this (How evolution and neurology explain why people voted for Sarah Palin … ) Read More ›

A friend writes to say that he has a “very anti-Christian friend” who seems to have gotten herself high on “evolution” (= a fool for Dawkins). She wanted to know if any of my books would help. I recommended this one and this one, but ended by saying Re evolution: Do reassure your friend that it is okay to be an atheist and doubt current accounts of evolution. Many now do. Reviewing current accounts of evolution is like watching sausages get made, and hearing the details spelled out. It could throw you off meat altogether or else cause you to be much more selective in what you consume.

Raymond Tallis, nearly thirty years in clinical neuroscience, diagnoses the problem here (“A mind of one’s own”, 24 February 2011): The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness – from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self – is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between Read More ›

I was just reading Warwick University sociologist Steve Fuller’s comment* on the evolutionary psychologist’s insistence on deriving all human characteristics from kinship with apes:

Corresponding to this removal of metaphysical privilege is a tendency for Darwinists to treat the [128] most distinctive features of the human condition as by-products or pathologies, in either case implying that we hare lucky to have them in the first place, but they may prove to be our undoing in the end.

when, smack, into my mailbox arrives news that Darwin defender Christian de Duve believes that our evolved human traits will be our undoing in the end: Read More ›

A friend writes to advise me of a “vicious” review by Scott Atran of Sam Harris’s latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in the most recent issue of National Interest, which – he tells me – otherwise focuses on foreign and defense policy. Atran, an anthropologist connected with U Michigan, doesn’t like Harris anyway, I gather, because the latter wouldn’t dismiss the effects of laboratory research into telepathy and telekinesis. Atran, for his own reasons, doesn’t think that “science” is in any position to determine morality. Harris tells us: “I find reasons for hope” because “moral progress seems to me unmistakable. . . . Consider the degree to which racism in the United States has Read More ›

Cautiously introduced as a “guest voice” in the Washington Post, commentator David Klinghoffer talks about Alfred Russel Wallace, co-theorist of natural selection, as a voice for healing the current social divide between the elite sinless Monkeyman and the traditional popular Adam: Pro-Darwinian educators were frustrated this week to find that most public high school biology instructors in their teaching do not wholeheartedly endorse evolution. The teachers reflect a stubborn division across American culture. For the past three decades, Americans have been locked into a basically unchanging split of views on the subject, with only about 16 percent believing in Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution. Darwinism is, at bottom, a theory about us (trousered apes, meat puppets, etc.). Now, obviously, when Read More ›