Recently, National Review‘s John Derbyshire took on George Gilder’s case against Darwinism and for ID.
To Gilder’s “Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance” (his subtitle, actually), Derbyshire ripostes against ID,
After being around for many years, it has not produced any science. George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science?
(Now, combining the figures in this way to get “thirty” is a bit dodgy.
I mean, in the same way, you could combine my age with my two daughters’ ages, and come up with a single human who is nearly 120 years old, but …)
It seems to me that ID is so different from Darwinism that if IDers want to make their case, they should probably not focus primarily on trying to get papers published in a hostile atmosphere, useful as that may be, but rather by asking different questions of nature.
As we journalists know well, people who ask different questions often discover different things.
Here’s one question that intrigues me: Why do some life forms not evolve, or so little that it hardly matters? The coelacanth and the cockroach come to mind, but there are others, including common ferns and cycads. Surely these life forms experience genetic mutations and changes in their environment.
If some life forms are especially well adapted over long periods of time, can general principles that are not mere tautologies (= they survived because they were fit and we know they were fit because they survived) be derived? If not, why not?
It strikes me that if IDers can make useful contributions by thinking about a problem differently from Darwinists, it is irrelevant whether a Darwinist allegedly “could have” made the same finding.
In the context, “could have” is a grammatical tense parallel to real time, not intersecting with it.