| :East Valley Tribune; |
:Aug 7, 2005; |
:Perspective; |
:98 |
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Darwinists fear inquiry for good reason
- Jonathan Witt is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute and co-author of "A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Science Reveal the Genius of Nature" (IVP 2005).
President Bush has committed the unforgivable sin. Should high school science students learn anything other than the airbrushed case for Darwin’s theory of evolution? "You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas," Bush commented to a group of reporters in Texas earlier this month. "The answer is yes."
The horror! Bush and his fundamentalist cronies, we’re told, are trying to
drag us back into the dark ages where irrational faith trumps science every time. To avoid the slide into dogmatism, we mustn’t have our students thinking too critically about Darwinism, must keep science classes from considering alternative explanations like intelligent design. Even the position of leading design theorists — to simply teach students both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory — must be vigilantly opposed.
But with the president of the United States suggesting that Darwinism should enter the free market of ideas, the guardians of the status quo need other ways to protect Darwinism from competition. One way is to play a definitional game, arguing that intelligent design isn’t science.
They do this by claiming that design theorists infer design only when we are ignorant about the details of how something arose naturally. Opponents of intelligent design call this an argument from ignorance, something that doesn’t belong in science classrooms.
But when we examine Stonehenge, the great prehistoric temple in England, we infer design. Is this an argument from ignorance? No. It’s a reasonable inference to the best explanation, based on what we know about the features of designed things.
Consider the cell, a world of intricate circuits, miniaturized motors, and enough digital code to fill an encyclopedia. These are to Stonehenge what a gothic cathedral is to a Lego house. Design theorists study the explanations for these engineering marvels and choose the one that best accounts for the data — intelligent design.
The last thing the Darwin-only crowd wants is an open conversation about the scientific evidence. Instead, they prefer sweeping assertions like Darwinism underpins all of modern biology. This assertion, while bracing, has the unfortunate characteristic of being false. Even A.S. Wilkins, a leading evolutionary biologist, concedes this point. "The subject of evolution occupies a special, and paradoxical, place within biology as a whole," he wrote in the journal BioEssays. "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky’s dictum that 56;nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution’, most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas. Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."
Certainly Darwinism looms large in the field of experimental biology, but it’s not a cornerstone; it’s window dressing. Darwinism comes in after laboratory breakthroughs and gerrymanders Darwinism to fit the results. That’s very different from fruitful scientific models that lead to us doing things like putting space shuttles in orbit or inventing microprocessors.
A final tactic to shut down the open inquiry President Bush supports is to claim that there is no controversy worth mentioning. This isn’t surprising. As science historians have shown, vulnerable paradigms sidestep discussion of the evidence by claiming overwhelming consensus and by trying to marginalize the opposition. The nocontroversy tactic neatly sidesteps the mounting evidence against Darwinism, but it only works if people ignore the growing list of more 400 Ph.D. scientists openly skeptical of Darwin’s theory, as well as a recent poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute which found that only 40 percent of doctors accept Darwinism — specifically the idea that humans evolved through natural processes alone.
Thus we arrive at a model which explains more and more of the behavior we find among the Darwin-only crowd, and explains it in a most elegant fashion: Their paradigm is in crisis. It’s an enormous vessel, so it will sink slowly. Her many captains, of course, will go down with the ship.
