|
[~][`] |
Scripture and Science "In
Conflict" Site Map
Back to Evolution Index
Origin of the Species
Darwinism's Rules of Reasoning
Philip E. Johnson
Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley
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).
[One of the interesting
aspects of this paper is Grasse's insight that evolution seems to rely on
mysterious "internal factors" directing change, rather than random chance,
as Darwinism requires. The few instances which have subsequently been found
of possible cases of mutation causing useful change in DNA sequences also
show evidence that the process was not random, but directed. If useful
changes are caused by existing control mechanisms, this obviously points to
design, not random chance. Not surprisingly this is anathema to the
Darwinist. PRS]
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 accessible 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 discovery 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
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).
|
|
