This paper was originally delivered at a plenary
session of the Southwestern Anthropological Association in
Berkeley, California in April, 1992. It was subsequently
published in the California Anthropologist and in
Rivista di Biologia (1994) (in Italian and English). A
similar lecture is included in the collection Darwinism:
Science or Philosophy? (Buell & Hearn ed. 1994).
My starting point is a book review which
Theodosius Dobzhansky published in 1975, critiquing Pierre
Grassé's The Evolution of Life.(1) Grassé, an eminent French
zoologist, believed in something which he called "evolution." So
did Dobzhansky, but when Dobzhansky used that term he meant neo-
Darwinism, evolution propelled by random mutation and guided by
natural selection. Grassé used the same term to refer to
something very different, a poorly understood process of
transformation in which one general category (like reptiles) gave
rise to another (like mammals), guided by mysterious "internal
factors" which seemed to compel many individual lines of descent
to converge at a new form of life. Grassé denied
emphatically that mutation and selection have the power to create
new complex organs or body plans, explaining that the
intra-species variation that results from DNA copying errors is
mere fluctuation, which never leads to any important innovation.
Dobzhansky's famous work with fruitflies was a case in point.
According to Grassé,
The genic differences noted between separate
populations of the same species that are so often presented as
evidence of ongoing evolution are, above all, a case of the
adjustment of a population to its habitat and of the effects of
genetic drift. The fruitfly (drosophila melanogaster), the
favorite pet insect of the geneticists, whose geographical,
biotropical, urban, and rural genotypes are now known inside out,
seems not to have changed since the remotest times.(2)
Grassé insisted that the defining quality
of life is the intelligence encoded in its biochemical systems,
an intelligence that cannot be understood solely in terms of its
material embodiment. The minerals which form a great cathedral do
not differ essentially from the same materials in the rocks and
quarries of the world; the difference is man's intelligence,
which adapted them for a given purpose. Similarly,
Any living being possesses an enormous amount of
"intelligence," very much more than is necessary to build the
most magnificent of cathedrals. Today, this "intelligence" is
called information, but it is still the same thing. It is not
programmed as in a computer, but rather it is condensed on a
molecular scale in the chromosomal DNA or in that of every other
organelle in each cell. This "intelligence" is the sine qua
non of life. Where does it come from?... This is a problem
that concerns both biologists and philosophers, and, at present,
science seems incapable of solving it.... If to determine the
origin of information in a computer is not a false problem, why
should the search for the information contained in cellular
nuclei be one?(3)
Grassé argued that the Darwinists who
dominate evolutionary biology have failed, due to their
uncompromising commitment to materialism, to define properly the
problem they were trying to solve. The real problem of evolution
is to account for the origin of new genetic information, and it
is not solved by providing illustrations of the acknowledged
capacity of an existing genotype to vary within limits.
Darwinists had imposed upon evolutionary theory the dogmatic
proposition that variation and innovative evolution are the same
process, and then had employed a systematic bias in the
interpretation of evidence to support the dogma. Here are some
representative judgments from Grassé's introductory
chapter:
Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of
bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been
created..... Biochemists and biologists who adhere blindly to the
Darwinist theory search for results that will be in agreement
with their theories.... Assuming that the Darwinian hypothesis is
correct, they interpret fossil data according to it; it is only
logical that [the data] should confirm it; the premises imply the
conclusions.... The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not
always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely
overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and
the falsity of their beliefs.(4)
Dobzhansky's review summarized Grassé's
central thesis succinctly:
The book of Pierre P. Grassé is a frontal
attack on all kinds of "Darwinism." Its purpose is "to destroy
the myth of evolution as a simple, understood, and explained
phenomenon," and to show that evolution is a mystery about which
little is, and perhaps can be, known.
Grassé was an evolutionist, but his
dissent from Darwinism could hardly have been more radical if he
had been a creationist. It is not merely that he built a detailed
empirical case against the neo-Darwinian picture of evolution. At
the philosophical level, he challenged the crucial doctrine of
uniformitarianism, which holds that processes detectable by our
present-day science were also responsible for the great
transformations that occurred in the remote past.
According to Grassé, evolving species
acquire a new store of genetic information through "a phenomenon
whose equivalent cannot be seen in the creatures living at the
present time (either because it is not there or because we are
unable to see it)." (5) Grassé
acknowledged that such speculation "arouses the suspicions of
many biologists... [because] it conjures up visions of the ghost
of vitalism or of some mystical power which guides the destiny of
living things...." He defended himself from these charges by
arguing that the evidence of genetics, zoology, and paleontology
refutes the Darwinian theory that random mutation and natural
selection were important sources of evolutionary innovation.
Given the state of the empirical evidence, to acknowledge the
existence of some as yet undiscovered orienting force that guided
evolution was merely to face the facts. Grassé even turned
the charges of mysticism against his opponents, commenting
sarcastically that nothing could be more mystical than the
Darwinian view that "nature acts blindly, unintelligently, but by
an infinitely benevolent good fortune builds mechanisms so
intricate that we have not even finished with analysis of their
structure and have not the slightest insight of the physical
principles and functioning of some of them." (6)
Dobzhansky disagreed with Grassé
fundamentally, but he acknowledged at the outset that his French
counterpart knew as much about the scientific evidence regarding
animal evolution as anyone in the world. As he put it,
Now one can disagree with Grassé but not
ignore him. He is the most distinguished of French zoologists,
the editor of the 28 volumes of Traite de Zoologie, author
of numerous original investigations, and ex- president of the
Academie des Sciences. His knowledge of the living world is
encyclopedic.
In short, Grassé had not gone wrong due to
ignorance. Then where had he gone wrong? According to
Dobzhansky, the problem was that the most distinguished of French
zoologists did not understand the rules of scientific reasoning.
As Dobzhansky summed up the situation:
The mutation-selection theory attempts, more or
less successfully, to make the causes of evolution acces- sible
to reason. The postulate that the evolution is "oriented" by some
unknown force explains nothing. This is not to say that the
synthetic...theory has explained everything. Far from this, this
theory opens to view a great field which needs investigation.
Nothing is easier than to point out that this or that problem is
unsolved and puzzling. But to reject what is known, and to appeal
to some wonderful future dis- covery which may explain it all, is
contrary to sound scientific method. The sentence with which
Grassé ends his book is disturbing: "It is possible that
in this domain biology, impotent, yields the floor to
metaphysics."
I began with the Dobzhansky/Grassé
exchange to make the point that whether one believes or
disbelieves in Darwinism does not necessarily depend upon how
much one knows about the facts of biology. Belief that the
various types of plants and animals were created by an extension
of the kind of changes Dobzhansky's experiments brought about in
fruitflies is at bottom a question of metaphysics. By
metaphysics, I mean nothing more pretentious than the assumptions
we all make about just which possibilities are worth considering
seriously. For example, Pierre Grassé was willing to
consider, and eventually to endorse, the possibility that the
so-called "evolution in action" which the neo-Darwinists were
observing is merely a variation within the limits of the existing
genotype and not a source of genuine evolutionary innovation. To
put the point in the language used by some contemporary
biologists, Grassé proposed to "decouple macroevolution
from microevolution." Such proposals have generally foundered on
the inability to establish sufficiently credible distinctive
macroevolutionary mechanisms. (For example, the widely publicized
"new theory" of punctuated equilibrium turned out to be just a
gloss upon Ernst Mayr's thoroughly Darwinian theory of peripatric
speciation.) Grassé differed from the Darwinists in that
he was willing to consider the possibility that science does not
know, and may never know, how new quantities of genetic
information have come into the world.
From Dobzhansky's viewpoint, to consider such a
possibility would be to give up on science. As Dobzhansky saw it,
we already know a lot about how plants and animal populations
vary in the everyday world of ecological time. Dog breeders have
given us St. Bernards and dachshunds, laboratory experiments have
produced monstrous fruitflies, mainland species have
differentiated after migrating to offshore islands, and the ratio
of dark to light peppered moths in a population changed when the
background trees were dark due to industrial air pollution. To be
sure, none of these examples demonstrated the kind of innovation
that Grassé had in mind. In the absence of a better
theory, however, Darwinists consider it reasonable to assume that
these observable variations illustrate the working in ecological
time of a grand process that over geological ages created
fruitflies and peppered moths and scientific observers in the
first place. By making that extrapolation Darwinists create a
scientific paradigm which can be fleshed out with further
research, and improved. For a critic to suggest the possible
existence of some factor outside the paradigm is helpful only if
he can also propose a research strategy for investigating it. To
Dobzhansky, therefore, Grassé's insistence that the
sources of new genetic information might be a mystery to our
science was pointless and harmful to the cause of science.
There is a political and religious dimension to
the issues Grassé and Dobzhansky were debating which must
also be considered. To say as Grassé did that, in the
domain of creation, "biology, impotent, yields the floor to
metaphysics" is to imply something important about the relative
cultural authority of biologists and metaphysicians. Whatever
that might mean in France, in the United States the scientific
establishment has been in conflict over evolution for generations
with the advocates of creationism. Although the scientists have
won all the legal battles, there are still a lot of creationists
around who are very much unconvinced with what the Darwinists are
telling them. How many there are depends upon how "creationism"
is defined.
The most visible creationists are the Biblical
fundamentalists who believe in a young earth and a creation in
six 24-hour days, and Darwinists like to give the impression that
opposition to what they call "evolution" is confined to this
group. In a broader sense, however, a creationist is any person
who believes that there is a Creator who brought about the
existence of humans for a purpose. In this broad sense, the vast
majority of Americans are creationists. According to a 1991
Gallup poll, 47 per cent of a national sample agreed with the
following statement: "God created mankind in pretty much our
present form sometime within the last 10,000 years." Another 40
per cent think that "Man has developed over millions of years
from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,
including man's creation." Only 9 per cent of the sample said
that they believed in biological evolution as a purposeless
process not guided by God.
The evolutionary theory endorsed by the American
scientific and educational establishment is of course the creed
of the 9 per cent, not the God-guided gradual creation of the 40
per cent. Persons who endorse a God-guided process of evolution
may think that they have reconciled religion and science, but
this is an illusion produced by vague terminology. A
representative Darwinist statement of "the meaning of evolution"
may be found in George Gaylord Simpson's book bearing that title.
In the words of Simpson:
Although many details remain to be worked out, it
is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the
history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic or, in a
proper sense of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors.
They are readily explicable on the basis of differential
reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern
conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random
interplay of the known processes of heredity. ...Man is the
result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him
in mind."(7)
"Evolution" is a vague term which can be used in
a variety of senses. When it means only that a certain amount of
natural change occurs in nature, it has no great philosophical
consequences. What Simpson was describing was something much more
specific, which I prefer to call the "blind watchmaker
hypothesis," after the famous book by Richard Dawkins. According
to Dawkins, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give
the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." (8) Dawkins wrote his book to convince the
public of something that Darwinians take for granted: The
appearance of purposeful design in biology is misleading, because
all living organisms, including ourselves, are the products of a
natural evolutionary process employing random variation and
natural selection. As Dawkins explains,
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind
because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no
purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection
overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by
a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and
planning.(9)
We might therefore say that the watchmaker is not
only blind, but unconscious.
The really important meaning of "evolution" is not that creation
was a gradual process that required billions of years. It is that
the process was supposedly undirected and purposeless. The
prestige of the scientific establishment, and of the intellectual
class in general, is heavily committed to the proposition that
evolution -- in the blind watchmaker sense -- is either a fact,
or a theory so well supported by evidence that only ignorant or
thoroughly unreasonable people refuse to believe it. If the
scientists ever had to retreat on this issue, the cultural
consequences could be significant. Persons who now have a
prestigious status as cultural authorities would be discredited,
and the political and moral positions they have advocated might
be discredited with them.
That is the fear of Michael Ruse, author of Darwinism
Defended. Ruse proclaims proudly that Darwinism reflects "a
strong ideology," and "one to be proud of." According to Ruse,
most contemporary Darwinians "show a strong liberal commitment"
in both their politics and their sexual morality. (10) Advocates of creation, on the other
hand, want to restore a "morality based on narrow Biblical lines"
with respect to marriage and sexual behavior. Ironically
Darwinism, which has at so often been associated with ideologies
of racial superiority, eugenics, and unrestrained competition, is
currently enlisted in the fight against that trinity of political
incorrectness: racism, sexism, and homophobia. Ruse concludes his
book with these stirring lines "Darwinism has a great past. Let
us work to see that it has an even greater future." (11)
Such statements are equivalent to the claims of creation-science
advocates that to doubt the Genesis account is to open the
floodgates for all kinds of immorality. I think that Michael Ruse
and Henry Morris are both right to insist that cultural
acceptance of Darwinism has had important consequences for
politics and morality. Recognition of this factor, however, also
has important implications for how we should regard Darwinism's
rules of reasoning. Are those rules designed to protect a
cherished doctrine from scientific criticism -- criticism that
might, wittingly or unwittingly, give aid and comfort to persons
who want to deprive the Darwinist establishment of its cultural
authority? If physicists were to start to proclaim that belief in
the Big Bang has had wonderful political and moral consequences,
and we must all work to see that the Big Bang has a wonderful
future, surely we would begin to wonder about their
objectivity.
Darwinism's rules of reasoning not only protect the cultural
authority of Darwinists. They also permit Darwinist writers to
take the mutation/selection mechanism for granted even when they
are describing evidence which directly contradicts it. This feat
of intellectual contortionism is strikingly illustrated by
Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life. Gould's
bestseller adds a great deal to our knowledge of the "Cambrian
explosion," meaning the sudden appearance of the invertebrate
animal phyla, without visible ancestors, in the 600
million-year-old rocks of the Cambrian era. Unicellular life had
existed for a long time, and some multicellular groups appear in
the immediately Precambrian rocks, but there is nothing that can
be established as ancestral to the Cambrian animals. As Richard
Dawkins described the situation, "It is as though [the Cambrian
phyla] were just planted there, without any evolutionary
history." (12)
In recent years the mystery has deepened, because it appears that
the Cambrian animal groups were far more varied than had been
imagined. The more distinct groups there were in the Cambrian,
the more chains of ancestors there ought to have been in the
Precambrian. Some remarkable Cambrian fossils found in a Canadian
formation known as the Burgess Shale were originally classified
in familiar groups. Gould explains that the discoverer of the
Burgess Shale fossils, Charles Walcott, tried to "shoehorn" the
odd creatures into familiar taxonomic categories because of his
predisposition to avoid multiplying the difficulties of what is
called the "artifact theory" of the Precambrian fossil record. As
Gould explains the problem:
Two different kinds of explanations for the
absence of Precambrian ancestors have been debated for more than
a century: the artifact theory (they did exist, but the fossil
record hasn't preserved them), and the fast-transition theory
(they really didn't exist, at least as complex invertebrates
easily linked to their descendants, and the evolution of modern
anatomical plans occurred with a rapidity that threatens our
usual ideas about the stately pace of evolutionary change). (13)
The two graphics in
Figure 1 (sorry, for reasons unknown, 'figure 1' is not present on this file) illustrate both the problem the Cambrian Explosion
poses for any theory of evolution, and the way a museum
exhibition attempts to control the damage. The Exhibition is
titled "Life Through Time: The Evidence for Evolution," and it is
at the California Academy of Sciences Museum in Golden Gate Park
in San Francisco. The lower diagram shows only the evidence, with
the phyla appearing on parallel lines and absolutely no evidence
of any common ancestors or transitional intermediates. The museum
exhibit represented by the upper diagram adds the common
ancestors and alters the vertical dimension representing the age
of the fossils, in order to give the impression that the
recalcitrant data constitute the required "evidence for
evolution." At the intersection point where the common ancestors
ought to be, the curators have placed magnifying glasses. Similar
devices are used elsewhere in the exhibit to mark tiny animals or
fossils. Unsophisticated museum visitors are likely to get the
impression that the invisible common ancestors are known to
science, but just a little too small for the naked eye to see. By
such means even a spectacular example of absence of evidence for
evolution can be transformed into evidence for evolution, and
even evidence for the creative power of natural selection.
The museum exhibit illustrates the Cambrian
Explosion with just a few well-known groups and thus understates
the difficulty in reconciling the facts with any known theory of
evolution. Reclassification of the Burgess Shale fossils has now
established some 15 or 20 Cambrian species that cannot be related
to any known group and therefore constitute distinct and
previously unknown phyla. There are also many other species that
can fit within an existing phylum but are still remarkably
distinct from anything known to exist earlier or later. The
general history of animal life is thus a burst of general body
plans followed by extinction. Many species exist today which are
absent from the rocks of the remote past, but they fit within
general taxonomic categories present from the very beginning.
Darwinian theory predicts a "cone of increasing diversity," as
the first living organism, or first animal species, gradually and
continually diversifies to create the various levels of the
taxonomic order. The animal fossil record more resembles such a
cone turned upside down, with the phyla present at the start and
thereafter decreasing. In short, the more we learn about the
Cambrian fossils, the more difficult it becomes to see them as
the product of Darwinian evolution.
Gould describes the reclassification of the
Burgess fossils as the "death knell of the artifact theory,"
because it adds so many new groups that appear without
Precambrian ancestors.
If evolution could produce ten new Cambrian phyla
and then wipe them out just as quickly, then what about the
surviving Cambrian groups? Why should they have had a long and
honorable Precambrian pedigree? Why should they not have
originated just before the Cambrian, as the fossil record, read
literally, seems to indicate, and as the fast-transition theory
proposes? (14)
A mysterious process that produces dozens of
complex animal groups directly from single-celled predecessors,
with only some words like "fast-transition" in between, may be
called "evolution" -- but the term is being used more in the
sense of Grassé's heresy than of Dobzhansky's Darwinian
orthodoxy. Each of those Cambrian animals contained a variety of
immensely complicated organ systems. How can such innovations
appear except by the gradual accumulation of micromutations,
unless there was some supernatural intervention? It is not only
that the Darwinian theory requires a very gradual line of descent
from each Cambrian animal group back to its hypothetical
single-celled ancestor. Because Darwinian evolution is a
purposeless, chance- driven process, which would not proceed
directly from a starting point to a destination, there should
also be thick bushes of side branches in each line. As Darwin
himself put it, if Darwinism is true the Precambrian world must
have "swarmed with living creatures" many of which were ancestral
to the Cambrian animals. If he really rejects the artifact theory
of the Precambrian fossil record, Gould also rejects the
Darwinian theory of evolution. [Careful readers will note that
the non-existence of the Cambrian ancestors is vaguely qualified
by the phrase "at least as complex invertebrates easily linked to
their descendants." I have learned to be alert to this sort of
qualification in Gould's writing, because it signals a possible
line of retreat. I have reason to believe that Gould would
repopulate the Precambrian world with invisible ancestors, and
thus re-embrace the artifact theory, if he were accused of
abandoning the mutation/selection mechanism and thus leaving the
evolution of complexity unexplained.]
Readers familiar with Gould's writings know that he has at times
expressed great skepticism concerning the neo-Darwinian theory
that Dobzhansky proclaimed so confidently. In a paper published
in Paleobiology in 1980, Gould wrote that, although he had been
"beguiled" by the unifying power of neo-Darwinism when he studied
it as a graduate student in the 1960's, the weight of the
evidence has since driven him to the reluctant conclusion that
neo-Darwinism "as a general proposition, is effectively dead,
despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." (15) In place of the dead orthodoxy Gould
predicted the emergence of a new macroevolutionary theory based
on the views of the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, another
heretic whose views were every bit as obnoxious to Darwinists as
those of Grassé. The new theory did not arrive as
predicted, however, and Gould subsequently seems to have heeded
Dobzhansky's admonition: if you can't improve on the
mutation/selection mechanism, don't trash it in public.
For whatever reason, Gould did not point out to his readers that
the utterly un-Darwinian Cambrian fossil record provides no
support whatever for claims about the role of mutation and
selection in the creation of complex animal life, or for
metaphysical speculations about the purposeless of the process
that created humans. Instead, he indulged freely in just such
speculation himself, rightly judging that his audience of
intellectuals would accept an atheistic interpretation of the
evidence uncritically. In the concluding chapter he commented on
a Burgess Shale fossil called Pikaia. Walcott classified Pikaia
as a worm, but a more recent study concludes that the creature
was a member of the phylum Chordata, which includes the subphylum
Vertebrata, which includes us. That for Gould means that Pikaia
might be our ancestor, which implies that, unlike many other
Burgess Shale creatures, it left descendants. If Pikaia had not
survived the mass extinctions that killed off so many other
Cambrian fossil creatures, we would never have evolved. The
existence of humans is therefore not a predictable consequence of
evolution, but a never-to-be-repeated accident. Gould concluded
this reflection, and the book, with the following sentence:
We are the offspring of history, and must
establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of
conceivable universes -- one indifferent to our suffering, and
therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in
our own chosen way.
Of course there is absolutely nothing in the
Burgess Shale fossils to support Gould's speculation that the
universe is indifferent to our sufferings, or to discredit the
belief that we are responsible to a divine Creator who actively
intervened in nature to bring about our existence. On the
contrary, the genuine scientific portion of Wonderful Life
provides ample grounds for doubting the expansive notions of
metaphysical naturalists like Theodosius Dobzhansky and George
Gaylord Simpson. But because of Darwinism's rules of reasoning,
even evidence which is thoroughly contrary to Darwinism supports
Darwinism.
Darwinian evolution will surely remain the reigning paradigm as
long as Dobzhansky's metaphysical rules are enforced. To say this
is merely to say that the neo-Darwinian synthesis is the most
plausible naturalistic and materialistic theory for the
development of complex life that persons philosophically
committed to excluding the Creator from the Cosmos have been able
to invent. The neo-Darwinian synthesis is a vague and flexible
conglomeration that readily incorporates any seemingly
non-Darwinian elements -- such as the molecular clock, or
punctuated equilibrium, or even the ability of bacteria to summon
needed mutations -- that appear from time to time. If
Dobzhansky's team makes the rules this conglomeration of
naturalistic ideas wins, because all the powerful critical points
made by such informed critics as Pierre Grassé are
excluded a priori from consideration.
To Darwinists evolution is by definition a single phenomenon.
Dobzhansky's fruitfly variations constitute evolution, and
evolution is also the grand creative process that produced
fruitflies and human beings in the first place. Of course new
genetic information originates by some combination of random
genetic changes and natural selection: how else could it
originate without the participation of some force unknown to our
science? Darwinism is the product of Dobzhansky's rules, and to
protect the theory contemporary Darwinists insist that those
rules are binding upon all who would ask questions about how
complex life came into existence. Does Darwinian selection really
have the creative effect that Darwinists claim for it? The
question doesn't arise. The power of natural selection to create
was settled long ago -- not by evidence, but by the cultural
power of those who made the rules. Anyone who questions those
rules -- even if he is President of the French Academy and the
most knowledgeable zoologist in the world -- is dismissed out of
hand. He doesn't understand how science works.
I have the honor of speaking today to an audience of
anthropologists in an age which is often characterized as "post-
modern." Surely this audience above all others ought to
understand how a priesthood can maintain its cultural authority
by enforcing rules of discourse that prevent consideration of
alternatives that the priests disfavor. I assume that this
audience also has some acquaintance with the literature of the
philosophy of science. If so, you are not likely to be fooled by
persons who proclaim that there is a unitary activity called
"science," which has fixed boundaries and is governed by a set of
rules that no one may question. Philosophers know better. Here,
for example, is the concluding paragraph of Larry Laudan's famous
article, "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem:"
Through certain vagaries of history, ...we have
managed to conflate two quite distinct questions: What makes a
belief well founded (or heuristically fertile)? And what makes a
belief scientific? The first set of questions is philosophically
interesting and possibly even tractable; the second question is
both uninteresting and, judging by its checkered past,
intractable. If we would stand up and be counted on the side of
reason, we ought to drop terms like "pseudo-science" and
"unscientific" from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases
which do only emotive work for us.... Insofar as our concern is
to protect ourselves and our fellows from the cardinal sin of
believing what we wish were so rather than what there is
substantial evidence for (and surely that is what most forms of
"quackery" come down to), then our focus should be squarely on
the empirical and conceptual credentials for claims about the
world. The "scientific" status of those claims is irrelevant.(16)
Surely Laudan is on the right track. For example,
whether mutation and selection can create complex organs like
wings and eyes is a question to be resolved by evidence. To
insist that belief in the creative power of natural selection is
"scientific," and doubt on the subject is inherently "religious,"
or even an instance of the thought crime known as "creationism,"
is simply to try to prejudice the inquiry with a tendentious use
of labels. Perhaps those who attribute creation to a Creator are
committing what Laudan called "the cardinal sin of believing what
they wish were so rather than what there is substantial evidence
for." On the other hand, perhaps this is still more true of
Darwinists, who are so eager to believe on slight evidence that
natural selection can do all the work of creation.
The points in dispute can only be settled by an unbiased
examination of the evidence. Those who have confidence in their
evidence and their logic do not appeal to prejudice, nor do they
insist upon imposing rules of discourse that allow only one
position to receive serious consideration, nor do they use vague
and shifting terminology to distract attention from genuine
points of difficulty. Still less do they heap abuse and ridicule
upon persons who want to raise questions about the evidence and
the philosophical assumptions that underly a theory. When an
educational establishment has to resort to tactics like that, you
can be sure that some people are getting desperate.
NOTES
1. Pierre P. Grassé, L'Evolution du Vivant (1973),
published in English translation as The Evolution of Living
Organisms (1977) (hereafter Grassé). The review of the
original French edition by Dobzhansky, titled "Darwinian or
`Oriented' Evolution?" appeared in Evolution, vol. 29, pp.
376-378 (June 1975).
2. Grassé, p. 130.
3. Grassé, p. 2.
4. Grassé, pp. 7-8.
5. Grassé, p. 208. See also p. 71:
"We are certain that it [evolution] does not operate today as it
did in the remote past. Something has changed.... The structural
plans no longer undergo complete reorganization; novelties are no
longer plentiful. Evolution, after its last enormous effort to
form the mammalian orders and man, seems to be out of breath and
drowsing off."
6. Grassé, p. 168.
7.George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning
of Evolution, pp. 344-45 (rev. ed. 1967).
8. Richard Dawkins, The Blind
Watchmaker (Longman, England 1986, p. 1. (Hereafter
Dawkins).
9. Dawkins, p. 21.
10. Michael Ruse, Darwinism
Defended (Addison Wesley, 1982), p. 280.
11. Ruse, supra, p. 328-329.
12. Dawkins, p. 229.
13. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful
Life (1989), pp. 271-273.
14. Ibid.
15. Stephen Jay Gould, "Is a New and
General Theory of Evolution Emerging?", Paleobiology, vol.
6, pp. 119-130 (1980), reprinted in the collection Evolution
Now: A Century After Darwin, (Maynard Smith ed. 1982).
16. Larry Laudan, "The Demise of the
Demarcation Problem," reprinted in the collection But Is It
Science? (Ruse ed. 1988).
These files are also available from Access Research Network
and,
The C.S. Lewis
Society