Category Archives: Darwinism

As an article at The Conversation by Professors Ian Godwin and Yuri Trusov observes, "The tragic story of Soviet genetics shows the folly of political meddling in science."

There is much truth in the article, but its authors assume that during the era of Trofim Lysenko the Soviet government persecuted people who "embraced evolution and genetics." On this point, they quote "Australia's Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, [who] mentioned him [that is, Lysenko] during a speech at a meeting of chief scientists in Canberra."

They continue:

The emerging ideology of Lysenkoism was effectively a jumble of pseudoscience, based predominantly on his rejection of Mendelian genetics and everything else that underpinned [Nikolai] Vavilov's science. He was a product of his time and political situation in the young USSR.

In reality, Lysenko was what we might today call a crackpot. Among other things, he denied the existence of DNA and genes, he claimed that plants selected their mates, and argued that they could acquire characteristics during their lifetime and pass them on. He also espoused the theory that some plants choose to sacrifice themselves for the good of the remaining plants -- another notion that runs against the grain of evolutionary understanding.

In fact, the Soviet government embraced Darwinian evolution (which according to Darwin's own writings contained Lamarckian elements), and persecuted Mendelian genetics, which was considered to be a threat to Darwinism. For more, see the abridged excerpt below from Chapter 16 of my 2006 book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design:

American Lysenkoism

When Mendelian biologists criticized Trofim Lysenko, he simply evaded their arguments and declared that Mendelian genetics was unacceptable because it contradicted Darwinian evolution.1 By then, many Western biologists were accepting the "modern synthesis" of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics, but Soviet Minister of Agriculture Jakov Jakovlev supported Lysenko by declaring Mendelism to be incompatible with true Darwinism. In 1937, Prezent praised Lysenko for "marching under the banner of reconstruction of biological science on the basis of Darwinism raised to the level of Marxism," while he demonized the Mendelians as "powers of darkness."2

If government officials and Darwinist ideologues had not come to Lysenko's rescue, the Mendelians would probably have prevailed -- as they did outside the Soviet Union -- because they had better science on their side. Lysenko's Stalinist suppression of Mendelians in the 1940s made matters much worse, but the underlying problem was that the government-supported scientific establishment had chosen to support one side in a scientific dispute. For many years, biologists in the Soviet Union were persecuted by the government if they challenged the official view of Darwinian orthodoxy or defended Mendelian genetics.3

So, contrary to the claims of [American Darwinists], the scientific conflict underlying Lysenkoism was not Lamarckism against Darwinism, but classical Darwinism (which had undeniably Lamarckian elements) against the new Mendelian genetics. The present conflict between neo-Darwinism and intelligent design resembles Lysenkoism in the sense that the Darwinists are still opposing new ideas.

Darwinists would like us to believe that ID proponents -- like Lysenko -- want to use the government to oppose evolution. But as often happens, Darwinists have things exactly upside-down. Stalin and Lysenko were Darwinists who persecuted Mendelians, just as modern Darwinists persecute IDers (though, thank God, they haven't imprisoned us). In fact, Darwinism is at the root of the persecution in both cases. And like Mendelism, ID is better science than Darwinism.

So the lesson is legitimate: Don't allow the government to use its power to enforce a particular view on a scientific question. If only the government would stay out of the evolution-ID controversy!

Notes:

(1) Nils Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005), 86-89. Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 63. David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 208, 238-239. Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), Chapter 3.

(2) Roll-Hansen, 218-220. Medvedev, 46-49.

(3) Medvedev, Chapter 11. Loren R. Graham, What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), Chapter 1 and Conclusions. Roll-Hansen, Chapter 10.

Photo: Trofim Lysenko (left) at the Kremlin, with Stalin (far right), via Wikicommons.

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The Truth about Soviet Science and Darwinian Evolution Isn't as Darwinists Would Like Us to Believe - Discovery Institute

Update: Darwin Day is also Academic Freedom Day. Be sure to check back in here after midnight to find out who our 2017 Censor of the Year will be!

This year, Darwin Day falls on a Sunday -- tomorrow, February 12. Of all the Darwinist talking points, the most transparently false may be the claim that this 19th-century materialist theory of origins poses no challenge whatsoever to serious, sincere religious belief.

Oh, please! Do they really think we're that gullible? Well, maybe they are not wrong about that anyway.

As Tom Bethell (that's him in the video above) points out over at The American Spectator, many churches and synagogues, pastors, priests, and rabbis, have been captivated by the idea that they can have their cake and eat it too: enjoy the prestige and regard that come with assenting to evolutionary theory, while retaining the authority and regard that come with their clerical position.

February 12 is Darwin Day, and this year the international celebration falls on a Sunday. Look for theistic Darwinists to reassure churches that Charles Darwin believed in God, or at least that his theory of evolution harmonizes beautifully with Christian theology.

The reality is more complex.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin suggested the idea of a God who created a few original forms and then let the "laws" of nature govern the outcome. "It is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms," he wrote, "as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws."

But later he wrote privately to friend Joseph Hooker, "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal term of creation." And in 1862, he told Harvard botanist Asa Gray there seemed to be "too much misery in the world." He could not accept, for example, "that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created [digger wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice."

Darwin was careful to conceal his own loss of faith, and his surviving family members kept up the tradition.

[R]ealizing that a thoroughgoing materialism wasn't an easy sell, [Darwin] actively concealed this aspect of his thinking. In one notebook he reminded himself to "avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism."

...

One doesn't hear much about the materialism of Darwin and Darwinism, likely because there has been a longstanding effort to ignore and suppress it. Many of today's theistic Darwinists play this game, but they are hardly the first. So, for instance, Darwin's mounting hostility to Christianity was suppressed by his widow, who removed some inflammatory comments from his Autobiography.

Read the rest here. Veteran journalist Bethell's new book is Darwin's House of Cards: A Journalist's Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates. As a writer, he is a delight, praised by Tom Wolfe as "one of our most brilliant essayists." The tragedy of the clergy and their mass surrender to evolutionary thinking is that it is so unnecessary.

Yes, it requires some homework and independent thinking to realize this, but the cogency of evolution's main claim -- that blind churning produces brilliant novelties -- rests on remarkably little evidence. Bethell, as I've pointed out, has put to the rest "I'm not a scientist" dodge beloved by clergy, journalists, and other professionals unwilling to do that homework for themselves.

I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

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With Darwin Day Coming Tomorrow, Here's Tom Bethell on Darwin's Deception - Discovery Institute

Darwin Day is coming up -- February 12, this Sunday, marking the birthday of Charles Darwin and celebrated by us as Academic Freedom Day. Yes, that means we'll be introducing you to a new Censor of the Year. Feel free to submit nominations, but frankly we've already got a leading contender. Visit us again on Sunday when we'll reveal the winner.

With the historical context in mind, in any event, the following is interesting and relevant. English professor and historian Randall Fuller has a new book out called The Book that Changed America (Viking, 2017), referring to Darwin's Origin. The following comments are based on a review in Science by Myrna Perez Sheldon, "Darwin's American Ascendancy," and an interview with Fuller in National Geographic by Simon Worrall, "Darwin's Theory of Evolution Roiled U.S. on Eve of Civil War."

To understand the author's perspective, consider Fuller's response to Worrall's final question in the NG interview:

Great question! Though I tend to think that those figures you've mentioned are, hopefully, a last gasp of denial. It's certainly true that there's an increasing resistance to Darwin's theory. But that exists simultaneously with, almost every month, new data showing the validity and overall soundness of Darwin's theory. The question is, how long can one deny a growing empirical body of facts? [Emphasis added.]

I grew up in public school in the late 1970s in Missouri, and natural selection was taught as an accepted, and completely settled, scientific question. There have been periods between the 1920s and 2014 where the opposite has obtained. But that pendulum will always swing back again. Just recently Pope Francis reaffirmed the Catholic Church's conviction that evolutionary theory is valid.

The citation of Pope Francis is not accurate, but let it pass. Knowing the author's bias will justify our attempt to follow Darwin's dictum, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." Fortunately, we have two excellent sources with which to obey Darwin's advice. The first is Darwin Day in America by Center for Science & Culture associate director John West. The second is Tom Bethell's new book, Darwin's House of Cards.

We learn from the interview that Origin arrived on American shores quickly after its publication in November 1859, when the U.S. was on the verge of civil war. Hardly a month had passed after John Brown's futile raid on Harper's Ferry that escalated tensions between North and South. Fuller tells an interesting story about how the first copy landed at a house in Concord, Massachusetts, having been carried from Boston by a "red-hot abolitionist," Charles Loring Brace. Gathered on this "extremely cold, New England winter evening" were notable intellectuals gathered to discuss two topics: slavery, and Darwin's book. Attendees included abolitionist Franklin Sanborn (one of the funders of the raid on Harper's Ferry), along with two leading lights of transcendentalist philosophy: Bronson Alcott (father of novelist Louisa May Alcott and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson), and Henry David Thoreau. Now some 14 years past his first experiences at Walden Pond, Thoreau was "beginning a kind of second career as a scientist," Fuller says. What was his reaction?

Sheldon's review provides an important contrasting response:

Fuller makes a big point that American abolitionists initially embraced Darwin's views. How could this be, since Darwin did not discuss human evolution until The Descent of Man over ten years later?

A number of prominent American scientists at the time argued that God had created black people, brown skinned and white people separately, and each of them were different, had different capacities, and there was a hierarchy. Some went so far as to suggest that black people were a different species, and that they were not only different, but inferior. These scientists were praised in the South and provided the perfect rationalization for slavery. Darwin's argument that all living things shared a common ancestor provided the abolitionists with a great rebuttal of the dominant, American science of the time.

A couple of observations here. First, Fuller says that it was "scientists" who argued for polygenism (separate creations of races); he specifically points to Louis Agassiz as a leading polygenist. Second, the "dominant American science" belief "that God had created" separate races deviated sharply from Genesis, which speaks of a single creation of the first human pair. In that regard, Jewish and Christian believers of the period had exactly the same grounds for opposing slavery, believing that all humans had descended from "one blood" (cf. Paul's message to the Athenians, Acts 17:26). Fuller indicates that it was the American scientific community, not the religious community, that justified slavery on the grounds of "modern racial science." In all fairness, it must be acknowledged that pro-slavery churches found other pretexts for supporting slavery in their scriptures, just as anti-slavery churches found Biblical support for their views. Whether in labs or pulpits, there was plenty of racism to go around -- and plenty of abolitionism, too. The point is that Darwin did not bring any unique, new argument for abolitionism that was not already in the Bibles of the churches and in the Declaration of Independence, with its statement that "all men are created equal."

If the abolitionists found support for their cause in Darwin, however, it was short-lived. Within months, America plunged into its Civil War, shredding the optimistic idealism of Emerson and Thoreau in the clash of swords. The implications of Darwin's views also began dawning more clearly on intellectuals. In Darwin Day in America, John West explains how Darwin's cautious naturalism in Origin developed into full-fledged materialism with his publication of The Descent of Man in 1872. West quotes leading American scientists in the early 20th century who used Darwin to promote eugenics and race purity. "Bluntly put," he says, "the evolutionary process had led to the development of superior and inferior races." Consider that Darwinians to this day believe that different populations of humans must have remained genetically isolated for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years, providing ample opportunity for groups to advance in "fitness" over others. By contrast, any church holding to the "one blood" doctrine, even if prone to racist tendencies, would have to acknowledge human exceptionalism as a consequence of their doctrine of imago Dei (humans created in the image of God). No such leash could restrain natural selection's racist implications. Fuller acknowledges this, when asked why racism remains a problem to this day:

Today, you only hear the term social Darwinism with a very negative inflection. However, like all ideas, over time they become absorbed or, to quote you, become part of the cultural wallpaper. So I would hazard the guess that the idea of the inherent superiority of some races is still, unfortunately, with us today.

Tom Bethell pulls the rug out from under the notion that Darwin helped the anti-slavery movement. In Chapter 4 of Darwin's House of Cards, he documents growing evidence against universal common descent -- a single tree of life -- the very idea that Thoreau, Alcott, and the others felt gave scientific credibility to their abolitionist views. Had those people ruminated a little more, they might have realized how silly the argument was anyway. What? All men are equal because they had the same bacteria ancestors? In Darwin's tree of life, branches at the tips could deviate significantly from one another even if they shared a common root hundreds of millions of years earlier. That realization aimed the trajectory that Social Darwinism quickly took after The Descent of Man, bringing horrendous consequences documented in West's book.

This leaves Fuller -- evolutionist that he is -- in a precarious position. He knows that Darwinism led to some nasty consequences. Among the milder examples, he tells how P.T. Barnum, having "his finger on the pulse of his native country," dressed up a disabled man with microcephaly and exhibited him as "a missing link between gorillas and human beings." Fuller knows that Social Darwinism left "a very negative inflection" on the "cultural wallpaper" of America to this day. He knows about the unending controversies Darwinism created.

But evolution is a fact, isn't it? Certainly it's a called that by many, but the "growing empirical body of facts" Fuller thinks lends validity to Darwinian evolution is, as Bethell shows forcefully, a "house of cards."

Photo credit: http://www.cgpgrey.com [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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With Darwin Day Approaching, It's Time for a Look Back at Evolution ... - Discovery Institute

FEBRUARY 5, 2017

SINCE THE SCOPES MONKEY TRIAL of 1925, Charles Darwin has gone to court at least 10 times. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled against the teaching of creationism in public schools in Edwards v. Aguillard, and in 2005 federal courts ruled against intelligent design with Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover. In court, if not in the hearts of most Americans, Charles never loses.

But much of what is enthralling about Darwins life and work is lost when the public cheers or jeers in court. Complicated individuals become combatants. Sophisticated texts become ideological arenas. William Jennings Bryan versus Clarence Darrow, creation versus evolution, religion versus reason, the United States versus Modernity. Its all a rowdy tournament, noisy with cheerleaders. Last year, the ACLU celebrated the 10th anniversary of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover with A Concert for Science and Reason featuring Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman at the Appalachian Brewing Company.

Darwins first American trial was far more interesting. On the Origin of Species quietly crossed the Atlantic as a single book, thistle-green and gilded with two golden pyramids. The author had mailed it to his Harvard colleague Asa Gray, the premier botanist of his age. Gray in turn lent the book to his cousin-in-law Charles Loring Brace, the father of modern foster care. Brace then passed the book among his transcendentalist friends in Concord, Massachusetts Amos Bronson Alcott, Franklin Sanborn, and Henry David Thoreau. These five men were among Darwins first American readers, and his book impacted each of them deeply and differently. Its American reception wasnt a trial at all, but a seed planted into varied brains and a shared historical atmosphere, sprouting into lovely and prickly varieties of colors and shapes.

This is the story Randall Fuller tells in The Book That Changed America: How Darwins Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Fuller has long been attracted to the ways in which a single book, individual, or event affects a cluster of writers differently. His first book examined how critics from Van Wyck Brooks to Sacvan Bercovitch inherited Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his second book traced the divergent effects of the Civil War on writers of the era. Both were academic studies, making The Book That Changed America Fullers first trade book. But his methodology translates well for a broader audience as he dwells in the rich differences of individuality to produce complex and captivating characters, bound together in a shared story.

The common drama facing Gray, Brace, Thoreau, Alcott, and Sanborn did not solely reside between the covers of Darwins book, but lurked in the struggle with slavery that would soon explode into the Civil War. Grays copy of On the Origin of Species arrived in Boston Harbor in December 1859, mere weeks after John Brown was hanged in Virginia for his failed attempt to stage a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry. All five of these men were against slavery many had met Brown and some had even funded his insurrection and all could not help but read Darwins new account of human origins with this conflict in mind. [M]any other Americans, Fuller notes, linked Darwins theories with the controversy over race and slavery then raging throughout the nation. By the end of On the Origin of Speciess first year in the United States, South Carolina would secede from the Union.

Darwin himself had inherited the intense abolitionist convictions of his family, solidified when he witnessed slavery firsthand in Brazil during the voyage of the Beagle. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country, he reflected. But his theory also yielded ammunition for abolitionists. Given Darwins associations with social Darwinism, it might be surprising to discover that these American men found a powerful argument for human rights in On the Origin of Species. Before the book appeared, the still-emergent field of ethnology in the United States was dominated by the theory of polygenesis, the notion that the human races were separate species descended from different origins. This theory lent itself well to the racial hierarchies espoused by men like Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born Harvard geologist who resisted Darwins theories for his entire life and felt disgust toward the African race.

By contrast, Darwin offered a viable argument for monogenesis, humanitys common origins. Natural selection challenged the polygenesists sense of races as separate, static, and hierarchical. Reviewers for the American popular press consistently understood Darwin as having provided a theory that showed that black and white people were related, Fuller explains, and antislavery newspapers praised the new book for its implicit attack on the popular ideas of Louis Agassiz and other ethnologists. Charles Loring Brace (the man who brought Grays copy of the Origin to the transcendentalists in Concord) wrote the first work of Darwinian ethnography, The Races of the Old World (1863), a book which aimed to disprove theories of black inferiority by presenting a definition of race as fluid. (Yet like many other antislavery Americans, Brace also believed that the black race could never be integrated into the United States. He reasoned that their race had long ago adapted to Africa, and that they had been too abruptly transplanted into the United States to ever thrive there.)

Brace devoured On the Origin of Species. He reportedly read the book 13 times. With the magic-mushroom quality of works that unlock a paradigm shift in a readers mind, it began to color and morph everything he saw. While a missionary to New York Citys swelling immigrant population, he deployed Darwin when he confronted the brutal poverty of its Five Points neighborhood. Natural selection confirmed his conclusion that impoverished environments like Five Points (or slavery) exerted a profound and harmful influence on their inhabitants moral development.

As Brace struggled to make sense of this mass suffering, he also turned to Darwin to redeem it. If morality was molded by nurture, perhaps it was also partially shaped by nature. Perhaps some individuals were born with more moral temperaments than others. Couldnt morality, then, also work according to natural selection? Inborn virtue, he reasoned, might be an adaptive advantage, one that would prevent humanitys long-term degeneration. Moral individuals would overtake the immoral, and with it, the environments that aggravated this immorality. Povertys sting could be eased with the balm of long-term progress.

Braces reading of Darwin was selective, contradictory, and potentially harmful. Undoubtedly he would have witnessed how brutality and ferocity could provide a far sharper edge in the slums than morality. And what of the growing class of capitalists who stood to make a profit from cheap immigrant labor? Hadnt morality proven here to be an adaptive disadvantage within the environment of capitalism? Further, long-term species-progress offered little respite to those currently trapped in a slum. In the face of intense suffering, Brace leaned on natural selection to provide more than it could: a law of progress, scientific confirmation of Gods providential hand. He needed a credible hope that poverty would eventually wash out of New York in what he took to be Darwins cleansing cosmos.

Franklin Sanborn, a latecomer to Thoreau and Alcotts transcendentalist Concord, found more than an abolitionist argument in Darwin. He seized upon a historical mood. Sanborns insatiable drive to be le premier provocateur sent him careening alternatively down ridiculous and revolutionary avenues. He once used his own sewage to fertilize his garden. (Neighbors complained of the stench; Sanborn complained of their parochialism.) But he was also one of the Secret Six who supplied John Brown with funds for weapons. The restless Sanborn was most taken with Darwins portrait of a world that evolved through incessant struggle, a landscape that seemed to describe perfectly the United Statess own political unrest. As the battle with slavery grew ever more volatile through the 1850s, Darwin gave Sanborn a reason to view the growing conflict with optimism. Sanborn in turn embraced Brown as a will that catalyzed moral progress through conflict.

Despite their good intentions, Brace and Sanborn were not good readers of Darwin. They made the common mistake of overstretching his theory in the realm of politics and culture. Natural selection was not a theory of progress, but simply of change. It offered an explanation for the emergence of increasingly complex organisms but gave no guarantee of increasingly civil, intelligent, or moral ones. Cultural values of this sort had little role in the theory unless as evolutionary biologists or pop psychologists will sometimes speculate these values could somehow aid survival.

But desire inevitably colors the uses to which science is put, and alongside many orthodox Christians, Brace and Sanborn embraced what they saw as Darwins proof for providence. Whether for social Darwinism or revolutionary abolitionism, Darwin provided an ordering principle for a society that seemed to grow more complex each year.

Asa Gray was a scientist, and he would make no such mistakes. When Darwin sent him the Origin, he was as careful with the green book as when describing, dissecting, analyzing, and categorizing his North American flora. He saw clearly the strict limits that the author had hedged around his theory. When Gray listened to his idealistic young cousin Brace gush about Darwin, he protested. When you unscientific people take up a scientific principle, he admonished, you are apt to make too much of it, to push it to conclusions beyond what is warranted by the facts. As New England thawed from winter into spring, Darwins book floated its way through a wider audience that read it as eagerly as Brace. Harpers, The North American Review, The New York Times, and many other journals reviewed the Origin. Many reviewers applied the theory to race, others celebrated what they saw as its proof for progress, while still others deemed it atheistical. None were written by scientists. In a three-part series for the newborn but popular Atlantic Monthly, Gray would set the record straight as Darwins American ambassador and a voice for science.

Grays articles for The Atlantic clarified Darwins theory for a popular audience with admirable precision and simplicity. They promoted an antiracist agenda by arguing unequivocally for humanitys monogenesis. But Gray wanted to do more. He wanted to suggest how the book seemed to bring the world to life, Fuller says, to make it pulse with meaning and significance. But the question for Gray, a devout Presbyterian, was the same one that gnawed at many Christians and idealists who saw nature as creation, the reflection of divine law: what kind of meaning could one draw from Darwins universe of aimless chance and amoral conflict? Gray admitted that Darwins theory made little room for the idealist vision of nature which had given his life so much meaning. Then Gray himself began to doubt. He wrote to Darwin. Might natural selection be Gods tool? Darwin was skeptical. Nature was too cruel to be the contrivance of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

Gray is Fullers second-best portrait, a man who worries that he has opened a Pandoras box out of motives at once noble, rational, and human. He wants to refute polygenesists racism, to honor good science, to head a great tradition of American botany. But it costs him. Once the Origin of Species gained admission inside a readers head, it began to compete with all sorts of dearly held convictions, Fuller writes in disturbing language, as if the theory was not a magic mushroom but a brain-burrowing parasite.

By his third article, Gray began to pull away from certain implications of the theory. He argued that natural selection left the issue of first causes (that is, God) where they were before. He emphasized that natural selection explained a how for human existence, not its why. Grays strategic hedging at times failed to meet his own standards for scientific inquiry, but the simple truth, Fuller concludes, was that he found it impossible to live in the world Darwin had imagined.

The famously ethereal transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott was, like Gray, a better reader of Darwin, and like Gray, it depressed him. He saw clearly the threat that Darwins universe posed to his own Platonic idealism. He was annoyed that so many friends once enlivened by idealism Emerson, Sanborn, and Thoreau foremost were so smitten with the theory. He felt that Darwin was but the latest and greatest instance of sciences proclivity for soul-souring empiricism, a vinegar that stripped nature and humanity of beauty and grandeur. Like all materialists, Darwin looked at existence through a telescope from the wrong end, missing the heavens for their gas and atoms. An idealist as much by temperament as metaphysics, Alcott set aside the book after reading it and went on his cheerful way. He preached the gospel of idealism long after the Civil War when, ironically, an audience seemed hungrier than ever for the meaning it offered in a postbellum, post-Darwin landscape.

Henry David Thoreau managed what the other four could not: he read Darwin both accurately and joyously. Besides perhaps Gray, no American read the Origin of Species with as much care and insight. After Thoreau first encountered Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle in the early 1840s, he undertook his own voyage into Concord woods and filled thousands of pages with drawings and notes on its ecosystems, interspersed with transcendental meditations.

Fuller is best on Thoreau in part because he shades his portrait with its subjects own empirical delight in the heft and texture of experience. Consider how Fuller unfolds the pagan joy of the Concord notebooks: Thoreau admires the gossamer filaments that glisten in the sun when he tears apart a milkweed pod. He samples the bitter juice of unripe berries or amuses himself by measuring his strides as he slides across frozen rivers, Fuller describes. His interests branched apart, proliferated, carved new channels of thought. He delved into cartography and the magnetic variations of compasses. He studied geology, he continues, and

[b]y 1860, his third-story attic room had become a private natural history museum, stuffed with birds nests, arrowheads, and more than a thousand pressed plants. On shelves made from driftwood he had gathered at Cape Cod, he kept the skins of reptiles, assorted pelts, rocks and stones, lichens, moss, and the carcass of a Coopers hawk as well as its spotted bluish-white egg.

Fuller sketches Thoreau much as Thoreau sketched Concord.

But what kind of higher meaning could Thoreau draw from Darwins theory, if Gray had failed? It could never be one rooted wholly in idealist metaphysics, as Gray realized, a fact which sometimes bothered Thoreau. He often worried that his growing empiricism was the sign of an aging brain, cooling from the volcanic transcendentalism of his youth into the crusts of middle age. Until his final years, Thoreau oscillated uneasily between science and transcendentalism, materialism and idealism. He managed a tentative reconciliation by locating mystery and wonder within materialism [] a new kind of magic, a new source of awe.

Squeezing Darwins theory for each drop of awe it could provide, Thoreau accomplished what his mentor Emerson called creative reading, the process of growing an accurate interpretation into a transformative one. Darwin had his own visionary moments in which nature buzzed with lavish, marvelous fecundity. Thoreau amplified them, invigorating the material world with transcendental soul. We tend to think of Darwins theory as one of grim determinism, of pointless change and purposeless death, Fuller notes, but this misses Darwins deeper insight that lifes messy process, its extravagant creation and destruction, led to something worth celebrating. For Darwin as much as Thoreau, the emergence of human beings in all of their contradictions was cause for joy, and his depiction of life as a dynamic process of continual becoming was not far from what Emerson hit upon in extraordinary essays like Circles.

Fuller ends on Thoreaus young death from tuberculosis. Ironically, Darwins most creative reader would be the first to succumb to natures severity. Such an ending was saved from tragedy by Thoreaus pagan joy, firm until his final hours of peace and even mirth. When his aunt asked if he had made his peace with God, he replied: We never quarreled. When another asked if he was ready for the next world, his answer was even more characteristic: One world at a time.

Kenyon Gradert is a doctoral candidate in English at Washington University in St. Louis.

Originally posted here:

Darwin Americanus - lareviewofbooks

One of the many smart observations in Tom Bethell's new book, Darwin's House of Cards, pertains to the curious relationship of Darwinism and Creationism -- and how that bears on efforts to suppress investigation of the theory of intelligent design.

Darwinists seem to long for the good old days when their only opposition was from Biblical creationism. This is reflected in efforts to conflate ID with creationism, or to make the former a kind of forbidden science, off limits to discussion. As Bethell writes in his chapter on "Intelligent Design and Information Theory":

The longing, the romance -- perhaps "bromance"? -- makes sense, since for all that separates them, Darwinism and creationism have in common that they are both inferences from prior doctrines (respectively, materialism, or a particular way of reading the Bible). ID is different. Says Bethell, "Intelligent design is not a deduction from a philosophy but an inference from observed facts."

This is what's so enraging to Darwinists, and it goes some way to explaining why they lash out -- holding their own tongue, and punishing ID advocates and open-minded researchers for failing to hold theirs.

Bethell cites a telling lecture by University of Akron researcher Nita Sahai, "The Origins of Life: From Geochemistry to Biochemistry." (See the video by clicking on the image at the top.) You actually see her catch herself, as she's helped out by a colleague, first saying that her lab work simulating OOL requires "intelligent design" -- no, no, no, make that "careful selection."

Mr. Bethell also tells the story of the publication of The Privileged Planet. Arguably more interesting than the book itself, he says, is what happened to its astronomer co-author at the Iowa State University, denounced by

That monopoly was challenged on another campus, Baylor University, by mathematician William Dembski.

Not even discussed. That is about as telling a statement as there could be. ID, unlike creationism, challenges Darwinian evolution on its own turf. That is not acceptable. Creationism for the Darwinist is a welcome foil. On the other hand, ID, which practices science where Darwinism is ultimately an exercise in philosophy, must be silenced.

I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

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The Curious Romance of Darwinism and Creationism -- And Why Intelligent Design Must Be Silenced - Discovery Institute

Over at The Stream, Tom Bethell, author of Darwin's House of Cards, clarifies why Darwinists don't talk so much about one straightforward inference from their own commitment to materialism.

If mind is just a special configuration of brain cells, then mind is nothing but matter. How can neurons "decide" to do one thing rather than another? Nerve cells can't make decisions. So, materialism repudiates free will.

The consistent materialist sees this, denies free will and dismisses consciousness as a delusion. "Our sense of self is a neuronal illusion," said Jerry Coyne, a fully paid-up materialist and author of Why Evolution Is True. Molecular biologist Francis Crick said the same thing. "Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules," he wrote. Or as he put it more succinctly, "You're nothing but a pack of neurons."

How deeply do materialists believe this? Notice that many of them grow outraged at public intellectuals who reject Darwinian materialism. But why the outrage if beliefs, ambitions and will are "nothing but a pack of neurons." On that view the person skeptical of Darwinism can't help himself, so why get outraged at the poor fellow?

The materialists might concede that their outrage is irrational, a byproduct of evolution -- the fight-or-flight mechanism run amok. But that explanation opens a can of worms. If mind is a byproduct of an evolutionary process that maybe saddled us with various irrationalities, why trust human reason? Why trust it to lead us to the truth about biological origins?

In my decades as a journalist covering evolution and interviewing some of the world's leading evolutionary thinkers, I have found that materialists have no good answers to this question, or to many of the evidential challenges that have endured and grown since Darwin's time.

For me the conclusion is inescapable: Modern Darwinism is built on a foundation of sand -- a house of cards, threatened even by the outraged huffing and puffing of its defenders.

In short, there's no sense in placing faith in the kind of reasoning done by a brain that's a product of Darwinian processes.

Beyond this, as Bethell notes in the book, anyone with some common sense and self-knowledge must realize that denying free will is bunk. Our will, the freedom to make good or bad choices, is something we experience every waking moment. The assertion of materialism, which is the foundation of Darwinian theory, runs headlong into what we know about our own inner lives. It's self-defeating. So evolution's defenders naturally play all this down, while being unable to deny it.

I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

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Tom Bethell on Mind, Matter, and Self-Defeating Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Sarah Chaffee and Discovery Institute biologist Ann Gauger have been conducting a multipart conversation about the cell (see here and here). In a new podcast episode of ID the Future, they now turn to the mystery of apoptosis -- cell death.

Download the episode by clicking here:

It's an enigma in the light of Darwinian theory, explains Dr. Gauger. In shaping and maintaining the organism, healthy cells may in effect commit suicide, self-sacrifice, for the good of other cells and for the good of the organism. So the evolutionary formula here would not be "survival" but "suicide" of the fittest.

Where is the Darwinian logic in that? But you see, evolution doesn't rule anything out, which is a big problem with the theory.

Image: Apoptosis, by Egelberg (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

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Biologist Ann Gauger: Apoptosis (Cell Death) Is an Enigma for Darwinism - Discovery Institute

The popular media's attitude on evolution mixes several elements: loathing for the large part of the public that doubts the Darwinian narrative, preening at its own (presumed) superiority in grasping science, and a fawning reverence for evolutionary biologists. Added to this is an unwillingness to weigh the evidence for themselves, offering the excuse that the experts must know best, so why bother? Veteran journalist Tom Bethell's new book offers a marvelous implicit rebuke on each of these points, but on the last in particular.

In Darwin's House of Cards: A Journalist's Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, he records his own investigation of the evidence, including interviews with lions of science and philosophy such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Colin Patterson, and Karl Popper. Lo and behold, it's not beyond the intellectual reach of a reporter to get to the bottom of the controversy and to estimate the plausibility of Darwin's theory.

Not a religious apologist or a cheerleader for any competing view, but rather an old-fashioned skeptic, Bethell has been doubting Darwin since he was an undergraduate at Oxford University. I admit he's a longtime friendly acquaintance and a contributor to Evolution News, so I'm not unbiased. But others who, like me, have followed him for years agree in savoring his work.

That includes some eminent names. Novelist Tom Wolfe has called him "one of our most brilliant essayists," and Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard, a great writer himself, says, "As a journalist, Tom Bethell is fearless. As a storyteller and stylist he is peerless. All his gifts are on generous display in this fascinating and admirable book."

He has been writing about Darwin (among many other subjects, of course) for forty-plus years, beginning with an article in Harper's in 1976. Wry, unfailingly clear, never technical, yet astonishingly well informed, he has produced what might be the Platonic ideal of an introduction to an often challenging and certainly controversial subject. He covers the waterfront, probing the strength of Darwinian thinking with reference to common descent, natural selection, extinction, homology, convergence, the fossil record, biogeography, cladistics, Lenski's long-term experiment with bacteria, and much more.

He concludes that while confidence in the pillars of Darwinism -- common descent and innovation through natural selection -- hit their high-water mark at the centenary celebration of the Origin of Species in 1959, the evidence has steadily and increasingly gone against the theory. The whole edifice rested on a 19th century faith in Progress, propped up by a dogmatic commitment to materialism. As the former falters, the structure is in danger of collapse.

With an apt metaphor, he sums up:

His humor is dry, subtle, his focus expansive, and his attitude utterly unapologetic. A unique feature of the book is its interviews. Philosopher of science Karl Popper, for example, spent time at the Hoover Institution at Stanford when Bethell was there and explained that despite reports, he never really recanted his rap on Darwinism ("...not a testable scientific theory," "There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this").

Bethell's own view of evolution is as a thoroughly unjustified extrapolation from meager evidence. He recalls touring the Natural History Museum in London with senior paleontologist Colin Patterson, who

Patterson told me that as far as he could see, nodes are always empty in diagrams of the tree of life.

The vaunted fossil record is a mystery in evolutionary terms, with almost all known phyla having sprung into existence in a "twinkling" of perhaps five or six million years. "How sudden is that? Compared with the reported three-billion year history of life on earth, the Cambrian explosion is the equivalent of one minute in a twenty-four-hour day."

As time goes by, evolution explains less and less. Conundrums abound, and seem increasingly invulnerable to being solved -- with any formula, that is, that excludes design. Experimentation shows that organisms "evolve" -- only to revert to a mean, a predictable "Reversion to the Average," as famed breeder Luther Burbank put it. Species "inhabit 'plateaus' of limited space upon which variants are free to roam," says Bethell. Artificial selection, beloved by Darwin, can "push" varieties around the plateau, nothing more.

Stasis and extinction, not transmutation, is observed. In a chapter on systematics, Bethell visits paleontologist Gareth Nelson at New York's American Museum of Natural History, a leading expert on anchovies. Nelson had a selection of the tiny fish preserved in alcohol and arrayed on his desk.

You can almost hear the sigh in the scientist's voice. I love this kind of quietly mordant writing.

Evolutionary science is in a depressed condition, despite all that the media do to put a bright face on the situation. They never tell you what biologists say behind closed doors, in their technical literature, or to a journalist with the temerity to ask difficult questions. A random individual on Twitter tweeted to me the other day, "Natural selection is the only theory that fits the facts. That's why it's a theory and not a long-discredited hypothesis like 'intelligent design.' Get out of your bubble."

The naivety is heartbreaking, foisted on us by the credulous, pampered media. In fact, Darwin's theory, of boundless novelty generated via stuff blindly swishing around together, fits few or none of the facts. Get out of your own bubble, friend. Picking up a copy of Tom Bethell's wonderful book (published by Discovery Institute Press, thank you very much) would be a fine start, an act of self-liberation and great read, as well.

I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.

Link:

Tom Bethell's Rebuke to Fellow Journalists: A Skeptical Look at Evolution Is Not Beyond Your Powers - Discovery Institute

Download The Effect of Darwinism on Morality and Christianity PDF

It sometimes is claimed that one can be both a Darwinist and a Christian (Miller). Others argue that religion and Darwinism are incompatible because they are separate fields that should not be intermixed (Gould). In fact, the Darwinism worldview leads directly to certain clear moral and religious teachings about the origin, purpose, and ultimate meaning of life that are diametrically opposed to the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths. The problem is that Darwinists,

Some scientists are more open and forthright than Miller and Gould, some even concluding that "there is something dishonestly selfserving" in the tactic claiming that "science and religion are two separate fields" (Dawkins, p. 62). Most evolutionists fully understand what is at stake in the creation/evolution controversy. Futuyma admits that anyone who "believes in Genesis as a literal description of history" holds a "worldview that is entirely incompatible with the idea of evolution . . ." (pp. 12-13). Futuyma then claims that Darwinists insist on "material, mechanistic causes" for life but the "believer in Genesis" can look to God for explanations.

Historians have documented meticulously the fact that Darwinism has had a devastating impact, not only on Christianity, but also on theism. Many scientists also have admitted that the acceptance of Darwinism has convinced large numbers of people that the Genesis account of creation is erroneous, and that this has caused the whole house of theistic cards to tumble:

As a result of the widespread acceptance of Darwinism, the Christian moral basis of society was undermined. Furthermore Darwin himself was "keenly aware of the political, social, and religious implications of his new idea. . . . Religion, especially, appeared to have much to lose . . ." (Raymo, p. 138).

Numerous scientists have noted that one result of the general acceptance of Darwinism was acceptance of the belief that humans "are accidental, contingent, ephemeral parts of creation, rather than lords over it" and humans are not "the raison d'tre of the universe" as all theistic religions teach (Raymo, p. 163).

The Darwinism belief that humans (and all living things) are nothing more than an accident of history, "cosmically inconsequential bundles of stardust, adrift in an infinite and purposeless universe" is a belief that is now "widely embraced within the scientific community" (Raymo, p. 160). Darwinism was a major factor in causing many eminent scientists to conclude, in the words of Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, that the "more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" (p. 154). Darwinism teaches "that our lives are brief and inconsequential in the cosmic scheme of things" (Raymo, p. 110), and that life has no ultimate purpose because there is no heaven, hell, or afterlife and "nothing we know about life requires the existence of a disembodied vital force or immaterial spirits, or a special creation of species" (Raymo, p. 42). Raymo concludes:

One of the most eminent evolutionists ever, Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, taught that, "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind" (p. 345).

Raymo concludes that Darwin's theory was "not what we want to hear" because it is difficult for humans who have long thought of themselves as "the central and immortal apex of creationthe apple of God's eyeto accept that" we are, "unexceptional, contingent, and ephemeral in the cosmological scheme of things" (p. 129).

Raymo adds that since Darwinism has demolished the belief that the universe and human beings have an ultimate purpose, our educational system must inculcate young people in "cold and clammy truths like descent from reptilian or amoebic ancestors," Raymo then suggests that although it,

Cruel or otherwise, Raymo states that Darwinism "is a fact by every criterion of science" and that our "school kids do not need intellectual security blankets" (p. 144). The implications of Darwinism "perhaps the most revolutionary idea in the history of human thought" are clear.

Acclaimed Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins has written extensively about the implications of Darwinism. In a speech titled "A Scientist's Case Against God," Dawkins argued that Darwinism "has shown higher purpose to be an illusion" and that the Universe consists of "selfish genes;" consequently, "some people are going to get hurt, others are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason for it" (Easterbrook, p. 892).

Dawkins believes that people who believe life was created for a purpose not only are mistaken, but are ignorant: "Only the scientifically illiterate" believe we exist for a higher purpose. The scientifically literate know there is no reason "why" we exist, we "just do" as an accident of history. Dawkins also teaches that no evidence exists to support theism, and that "nowadays the better educated admit it" (Easterbrook, p. 892).

The central message of Richard Dawkins' voluminous writings is that the universe has precisely the properties we should expect if it has "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference" (Easterbrook, p. 892). Dawkins even admitted that his best-selling book, The Selfish Gene, was an attempt to get rid of what he regarded as an "outright wrong idea" that had achieved a grip in popular sciencenamely, the erroneous "assumption that individuals act for the good of the species," which he believes is "an error that needed exploding, and the best way to demonstrate what's wrong with it . . . was to explain evolution from the point of view of the gene" (Easterbrook, p. 892). Dawkins added that the reason why The Selfish Gene was a best seller could be because it teaches the "truth" about why humans exist, namely humans,

Dawkins obviously is proud of the depressing effect his writings have on people. Raymo even claims that the dominant view among modern Darwinists is that our minds are "merely a computer made of meat" (pp. 187-188), and that "almost all scientists" believe the idea that a human soul exists is a "bankrupt notion"; and consequently, the conclusion that our minds are "merely a computer made of meat" is considered by Darwinists "almost a truism" (pp. 192-193, emphasis his).

In Futuyma's words, "if the world and its creatures developed purely by material, physical forces, it could not have been designed and has no purpose or goal" (pp. 12-13). Furthermore, he notes that the creationist,

Is this pessimistic, antitheistic, and nihilistic view of humans widespread? One researcher claimed that "ninety-nine percent of the scientists whom I met in my career . . . support the view expressed by Dawkins [that anyone] . . . who denies evolution is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked" (Rrsch, p. F3). This oft' made claim is totally false: an estimated 10,000 scientists in the USA and about 100,000 creation scientists in the world reject Darwinism, and hold instead to a creation worldview (Bergman). A question every concerned parent and grandparent should ask is: "Do we want our children taught that life has no ultimate purpose, and that our minds are merely a computer made of meat?" The fact is:

Why do so many people believe the pessimistic, nihilistic, and depressive Darwinist view? One reason is they are convinced that science has proven Darwinism to be true. Sadly, however, many scientists are unaware of the large body of evidence supporting creationism. And numerous scientists recognize that, at best, the view common among elite scientists is unscientific. Shallis argues that:

Darwinists have indoctrinated our society for over 100 years in a worldview that has proven to be tragically destructive. And they often have done this by a type of deceit that began before the Piltdown hoax and continues today in many leading biology textbooks (Wells).

Acknowledgments:

Bert Thompson, Ph.D., and Clifford L. Lillo for their insight.

References

* Jerry Bergman, Ph.D., is on the Biology faculty at Northwest State College in Ohio.

Cite this article: Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. 2001. The Effect of Darwinism on Morality and Christianity. Acts & Facts. 30 (6).

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The Effect of Darwinism on Morality and Christianity | The ...

The evolutionary idea contributed proposed by Charles Darwin called Darwinism or Natural selection theory, explaining the mechanism of evolution is clearly stated in his book Origin of species.

The important postulates of the theory are: Over production, Struggle for existence, Variations, Survival of the fittest, and Origin of species.

A few Neo Darwinism Supporters are Romanes, Wallace, Fisher, Huxley, Ford, Haldane, Goldschmidt, Sewall Wright, Ernst Haeckel, August Weismann, Mendel, Dobazhansky , Kettlewell and Herbert Spencer.

The Neo Darwinism has the following ideas: Experimental evidences and Answers to the objections

Darwinism vsNeo-Darwinism

2. It considers all inheritable favourable variation

3. It does not explain the reason for variation

4. In Darwins theory, the basic unit of evolution is an individual

5. It does not consider reproductive isolation as a major factor in new species formation

6. In Darwins theory, natural selection is the survival of the fittest and removal of the unfit ones during the course of time

Neo-Darwinism

1. It is the modification of original concept postulated by Darwin and Wallace based on data obtained from genetic research

2. It considers only inheritable genetic variation (mutations) for evolution

3. It explains the reason for variations

4. In Neo-Darwinism, the basic unit of evolution is a population

5. It consider reproductive isolation as a major essential factor in speciation

6. In Neo-Darwinism, natural selection refers to the differential reproduction leading to the changes in gene frequency

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Difference between Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism | Major ...