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COMMENTARY
January 12, 2005
The two-headed club
Okay guys this is it: my third and for the moment last kick at the evolutionary can (the first two appeared the last two Wednesdays). I can't resist I've received so much mail though it's beginning to go circular. Please nobody send me any more links to the standard websites for evolutionary apologetics: I must have read them all. The best is the "Talk Origins Archive" (an easy Google-search). Anyone who wants to see the scientific arguments for an evolution unambiguously descended from Darwin go there: enjoy. The thing is superbly well done. It is after all designed to provide any sceptic of Darwinism with death from a thousand pinpricks. For that is how the argument for "macro-evolution" is conducted (i.e. evolution above the taxonomic level of the species; as distinct from "micro-evolution" which is a snip for everyone in his right mind knows that creatures adapt to environment at the species level and can be bred this way and that). There are a thousand facts about life in nature that are not incompatible with "macro-evolution"; each of which could be explained in other ways with wit and patience. But biology is not physics nor chemistry and the evidence summoned lacks the hammerblow I enjoy in a "pure" science. We are dealing with a curry not with a truite-au-bleu. The very messiness of the evidence is a recipe for seeing what you want to see; for biology is patch as patch can. Though truth to tell even physics can be observed only locally. An example is that "constant-G" my friend Peter O'Donnell with some training in astrophysics is suspicious about. We are taught that the force of gravity is one of the constants throughout the universe. But this theory compels us to postulate that most of the universe must consist of some utterly unobservable "dark matter". If you ask me or you ask my friend that suggests we're going to find a problem with constant-G. I doubt "macro-evolution" will be defeated like that. I expect it will be more like live by the pinprick, die by the pinprick . It will gradually dissolve from a thousand little cuts from Occam's Razor. For the "God" of evolutionary biology -- incremental change by natural selection -- is not sufficiently inspiring to sustain the immense priesthood that has collected around it. My own wild slash as a sometime member of the "Occam's Razor gang" is that Darwinian evolution is unnecessary. If it didn't exist biological inquiry would not be slowed in any way. It might even be accelerated. The general notion that the whole living world is tied together in a "great chain of being" was available to the pre-Socratic Greeks and is casually acknowledged in Augustine. It is conveyed pre-Darwin in the poet Baudelaire's notion of "correspondences". It is implicit in Mendelian genetics. What distinguishes Darwinism in the end is the nasty figurative edge to it the popular use of it to communicate "nature red in tooth and claw". It became associated very early with Victorian atheism and does the missionary work of the old Bloomsbury set that lost its Christian faith in the mid-19th century. It is an ideology that continues to reach beyond the strict realm of biology into areas of philosophy and theology with which it has nothing to do. It sells a cosmos that is blind random purposeless. It is a religion sez I; a religion with prophets like Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Richard Dawkins today. (And I'm not seeking tenure in any university so you can't get me for uttering my heresies against it.) But having said that I must add that I champion freedom of religion. I think it is appalling that in several U.S. jurisdictions laws have been passed e.g. to compel teachers to read a disclaimer at the beginning of class saying that "evolutionary science" is just a theory and that (crackpot) "creation science" is an alternative theory. No law that compels a teacher to declare what he doesn't himself believe can possibly be just. We need the same law to defend people who say "evolution is a crock". Evolution is on the other hand not a "crock" in the way it is presented by non-ideological science writers. E.O. Wilson for instance (whose co-written book on The Ants was among the most wonderful Christmas presents I ever received) is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Richard Dawkins who makes a point of throwing evolution in the face of believing Christians. Prof. Wilson is a gentleman; Prof. Dawkins is a pig. And by the way it would be no skin off my nose if every aspect of Darwinism were by some miracle demonstrated to be true. I would then have to accept it as a genuine insight into "how" God works. I am agnostic on that point at the moment; my Christian faith is not in the "how" but in He Who Hows. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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