Scientific American: “Dubitable Darwin? Why Some Smart, Nonreligious People Doubt the Theory of Evolution”

The Scientific American piece ends,

Is it possible that some future genius will discover an alternative that supplants Darwinism as our framework for understanding life? Will we ever look back on Darwin as brilliant but wrong?

Is it a crack in the Darwinist monolith? Maybe. But not, alas, much of a nod in the direction of Intelligent Design. It begins,

Last year, on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, Darwin’s stock soared higher than Apple’s. It’s 2010—time for a market adjustment.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett once called the theory of evolution by natural selection “the single best idea anyone has ever had.” I’m inclined to agree. But Darwinism sticks in the craw of some really smart people. I don’t mean intelligent-designers (aka IDiots) and other religious ignorami but knowledgeable scientists and scholars.

SciAm still can’t say “religious” without adding something like “ignorami.” Too bad for them, I’m afraid.

You may also like...

16 Responses

  1. Richard Ball says:

    Was that Scientific American or The National Inquirer? I wonder where the author would put someone like John Lennox?

  2. Charlie says:

    “IDiots”. That’s classy journalism, for sure.

  3. Mike Bordon says:

    Yes, very, very typical rhetoric. Christians have to be contained under the general heading ignorami. It’s as if once you believe in God… all your education and qualifications are no longer valid.

  4. Crude says:

    It’s indefensible, but the blogger probably couldn’t bring himself to post the problems many “knowledgeable scientists and scholars” have with Darwinism without taking that swing at ID proponents and religious people. I suppose we should be glad he had it in him to talk about these criticisms at all. To say nothing of even mentioning the possibility of supplanting Darwin/Darwinism.

  5. Tom Gilson says:

    Makes sense. Since he opened the door one way, it was necessary for him to slam it extra hard in another way. Wouldn’t do to let anyone think you’re departing from the party line, would it?

  6. Crude says:

    What was that old Spock line? “Only Nixon can go to China.”?

    I think it’s apt here.

  7. BillT says:

    I find the in initial question a little strange. Darwinism is just fine as a theory to explain things like the devlopment of species or to explain how biology works. What Darwinism doesn’t explain why anything exists at all. Life, the universe, anything. That’s where the strongest dissention from the Darwinian model comes from.

    Darwinists want their theory to be the theory of everything. If they wern’t so insistant that their biological model can explain things that have little if anything to do with biology like conciousness, beauty, emotions or the origin of life, who would really have a problem with it.

  8. eric says:

    BillT: What Darwinism doesn’t explain why anything exists at all. Life, the universe, anything.

    Right, because the theory is about how species evolve into/from other species. Is says nothing about the formation stars, planets, the big bang, or any other part of cosmology.

    Darwinists want their theory to be the theory of everything.

    In my experience the reverse is true: most of the scientists I know do not think the TOE has anything to do with cosmology. They are careful to make clear that evolution is a biological theory about speciation – for instance, describing it as change in the distribution or frequency of alleles in a population. That’s a pretty narrow description! In my experience its evolution’s detractors who claim evolution should explain life, the universe, and everything (hey, like you did!)…and who then complain that its a bad theory when it doesn’t explain these things.

    That’s just my experience, however – if you know of some quote by some prominent evolutionary scientist which states that the theory of evolution explains life, the universe, and everything (or even just the universe!) I’d love to know about it.

  9. Richard Ball says:

    I would say the ruling paradigm is that evolution does explain everything, but not biological evolution. Evolution of galaxies, evolution of stars, evolution of planets, chemical evolution, etc. etc.

  10. Bill says:

    “if you know of some quote by some prominent evolutionary scientist which states that the theory of evolution explains life, the universe, and everything (or even just the universe!) I’d love to know about it.”

    You mean like Richard Dawkins?

  11. Charlie says:

    http://www.alternativescience.com/evolution-theory.htm
    Writing in 1955, Julian Huxley said that;

    The concept of evolution was soon extended into other than biological fields. Inorganic subjects such as the life histories of stars and formation of the chemical elements on the one hand, and on the other subjects like linguistics, social anthropology, and comparative law and religion, began to be studied from an evolutionary angle, until today we are enabled to see evolution as a universal and all-pervading process.

    ….

    Furthermore, with the adoption of the evolutionary approach in non-biological fields, from cosmology to human affairs, we are beginning to realise that biological evolution is only one aspect of evolution in general. Evolution in the extended sense can be defined as a directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time, which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and an increasingly high level of organisation in its products. Our present knowledge indeed forces us to the view that the whole of reality is evolution – a single process of self transformation.

  12. Well eric… I’d say Charlie has given you the quote you were asking for.

  13. Tom Gilson says:

    It’s always important to be careful of equivocation. Evolution can mean change over time generally (stellar evolution, cultural evolution, the evolution of one’s thinking…), or change over time with respect to biology in natural history. It’s often treated as virtually equivalent to theories of common descent. It can refer to the idea that populations within species change in response to changes in their environment, or it can refer to the theory that life’s original existence (chemical evolution) and all of life’s variety can be explained through purely natural processes of random variation and natural selection. Based on what I’ve linked to here, even that definition is being stretched. “Evolution” is a very stretchable word.

  14. BillT says:

    I don’t think Eric wasn’t really looking for a quote. There are tons of them out there after all. Eric was engaging in a time honored tradition of relativistic thought, i.e., calling the truth a lie and a lie the truth. This quote is a good example ” In my experience its evolution’s detractors who claim evolution should explain life, the universe, and everything (hey, like you did!)…and who then complain that its a bad theory when it doesn’t explain these things.”?

    Right, the detractors of evolutionary theory are the ones creating a controversy that wouldn’t exist if they had just stayed quiet. You have to admire Eric though. He knows that if you’re going to tell a lie, it’s best to tell a really big one.

  15. Dave says:

    “evolution” merely means “to unfold, open out, expand” and is a null term used to contain the concepts of philosophical naturalism. Therefore, passage through time, i.e. the space-time continuum, is an “evolution” of events in time, therefore “evolution” is a fact.

    As Tom noted, we must be careful of equivocation. Tor the naturalist the unforlding of events in the universe is a purely natural process and, whether or not Darwin’s theory is correct, something very much like Darwin’s theory must be the case. The hidden assumption in this critique of Darwin, and the source of the sentence “I don’t mean intelligent-designers (aka IDiots) and other religious ignorami but knowledgeable scientists and scholars.” is the presumption of natualism. Even if Darwin was completely wrong and we could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt today the denigration of “intelligent-designers (aka IDiots) and other religious ignorami” would remain because the underlying presumpton of naturalism would remain.

    The dispute is not and never has been a dispute over evidence. Evidence and its interpretation has been the most recent weapon of choice in a war over assumptions, or first priciples, which has raged for as long as we have documentary records. Darwin merely supplied the final piece in the puzzle for 19th C. naturalism, the key to explaining away the all too obvious design implicit in living creatures.

    “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but evolved.” Francis Crick

  16. Richard Wein says:

    This is a dreadful piece of writing, and apparently just a blog entry, not something published in the “Scientific American”.

    It’s hard to take seriously a writer who opens with the unwittingly self-referential term “ignorami”. 😉