By: Robin Brande,
on 6/22/2011
Yeah, I thought maybe you would.
I was interviewed recently by the very curious, very kind Bridgette Mongeon over here. Take a listen!
By: Kirsty,
on 4/7/2011
How could Darwin still be controversial? We do not worry a lot about Isaac Newton, nor even about Albert Einstein, whose ideas have been among the powerful shapers of modern Western culture. Yet for many people, undisturbed by the law of gravity or by the theories of relativity that, I would venture, 99% of us don’t really understand, Darwin remains darkly threatening. One of the great figures in the history of Western thought, he was respectable and revered enough even in his own time to be buried in Westminster Abbey, of all places. He supported his local church; he was a Justice of the Peace; and he never was photographed as a working scientist, only as a gentleman and a family man. Yet a significant proportion of people in the English-speaking world vociferously do not “believe” in him.
Darwin is resisted not because he was wrong but because his ideas apply not only to the ants, and bees, and birds, and anthropoids, but to us. His theory is scary to many people because it seems to them it lessens our dignity and deprives our ethics of a foundation. The problem, of course, is that, like the theories of gravity and relativity, it is true.
At the heart of this very strange phenomenon there is a fundamental crisis of secularism. Secularism is not simply disbelief; it is not equivalent to atheism. Many supporters of secularism, like the distinguished Catholic philosopher, Charles Taylor, are believers. The most important aspect of secularism is that it is a condition of peaceful coexistence of otherwise antithetical faiths. In a secular state, diverse religions must agree that on matters of civil order and organization there is an institution to which they will all defer in what Taylor has described as “overlapping consensus.” They may disagree about God but they have to agree that in civil society they will adhere to the laws of the country.
But what happens when the overlapping consensus doesn’t overlap? This brings us to a very complicated problem: the authority of the specialist. In a democratic society, it is the responsibility of each of us to stay informed on issues that matter to the polity, and to make judgments, usually through established institutions, school boards, for example, or national elections. At the same time, our society usually sanctions the training of professionals, and forces them to undergo rigorous training, tests them to be sure of their qualifications.
Within professions, there will inevitably be learned and crucial squabbling and exploration, and new theories piled on top of old ones, or revising them. But these squabbles are part of what it is to be professional and they rarely reach the ears of the lay population. When science as an institution sanctions evolutionary theory (and squabbles about how it works), and its most distinguished practitioners insist that evolution is the foundation of all modern biology and by way of that theory make ever expanding discoveries about our health, a significant portion of the population accuse them of mere prejudice against doubters. People insist they don’t “believe” in Darwin, when they haven’t read him, don’t understand the theory to which they object, and seem unaware that evolutionary biology, though perhaps founded on Darwin, has long since made the nature of Darwin’s belief irrelevant to the validity of modern science.
Imagine a scientific community that allowed published papers to be reviewed by lay people, or simply published them without being reviewed by experts in the field. Imagine if The New England Journal of Medicine, or Nature, accepted papers which had not produced adequate evidence to make their cases, or distorted and misrepresented the evidence. Would that be a reasonable and democratic openi
By: Lana,
on 2/1/2010
John C. Avise is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. His new book, Inside the Human Genome: A Case For Non-Intelligent Design, tackles the philosophical question of why humans are imperfect on the genetic level if made by a Creator God. In this excerpt, Avise asserts that evolution is not random (as Intelligent Design proponents argue) due to natural selection.
Advocates of Intelligent Design contend that complex biological features cannot arise by chance, the implication being that chance equates to sentient forces. From a scientific vantage, however, the driving force of adaptive evolution–natural selection– is itself the antithesis of chance. Hereditary factors that promote organismal survival and reproduction in a particular environment tend to be precisely those that proliferate across the generations and thereby come to characterize natural populations. Whenever genetic variation and differential 
reproduction exist in nature (as they do in all known species), natural selection is inevitable, both logically and empirically. Biological traits that emerge from this inexorable operation may have the superficial aura of intelligent artistry, but that appearance is illusory (under a scientific interpretation). Natural selection can be a highly creative process (given a suitable supply of genetic variation to work from), but it is merely a mechanistic phenomenon– as inescapable and insentient as gravity.
This is not to say that evolution is devoid of important stochastic (i.e. chance) elements. Natural selection can sift only among the genetic variants available for its scrutiny, and two of the three primary sources of genetic variability– de novo mutation and recombination– occur essentially at random with respect to forging adaptations. The new mutations and recombinant genotypes that arise in each generation have no biased tendency to enhance either an individual’s genetic fitness (its reproductive success relative to other individuals) or the adaptive needs of a species. In other words, favorable alleles and more fit genotypes have no known mutational tendency to arise disproportionately when needed. In this important sense, the genetic fodder upon which natural selection acts can indeed be characterized as stochastic or chancy in origin.
The third source of population genetic variation entails a mixture of “chance and necessity.” Apart from de novo mutations and recombinant genotypes, the genetic variety available for natural selection in any generation is also a function of historical circumstance, that is, of idiosyncratic genealogical outcomes that have been affected by both stochastic and directive evolutionary processes across all prior generations. Evolution going forward can work only with the biological substrates–”ghosts of evolution past”– are not supernatural legacies, but instead they are real genetic lineages and real species that have been subjected for eons to the full panoply of evolutionary processes including natural selection (the directive agent of adaptive evolution) as well as idiosyncratic mutation, recombination, and genetic drift (stochastic forces in the sense described above).
The temporal nature of heredity also means that evolu
By: Kirsty,
on 6/26/2008
Few topics cause more controversy than the discussion about science vs religion. Here Thomas Dixon of Queen Mary, University of London examines the way the debate has been played out in the American political sphere in recent times.
Thomas Dixon is the author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, which publishes here in the UK next month.
During a televised debate last year between the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, the host asked if any of them did not believe in evolution. First one, then a second, then a third raised his hand. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee later elaborated on his opposition to evolution, mocking those who ‘believe they are the descendants of a primate’ rather than ‘ the unique creations of a God who knows us and loves us, and who created us for his own purpose.’
Although to most educated people – especially anyone unfamiliar with the historic strength and depth of creationist beliefs in the United States – these remarks may seem to reveal a shocking level of scientific ignorance, Huckabee knew what he was doing. He is just the latest in a long line of populist American politicians keen to tap into grass-roots religious beliefs. Huckabee, in short, was seeking the approval of that fifty percent of the American population who opinion polls consistently find believe in creationism and not evolution.
The most famous moment in the history of American anti-Darwinism came in 1925 in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. A local school teacher there, John Scopes, was prosecuted for violating a recent law banning the teaching of evolution. The Scopes ‘monkey trial’ became the focus for a circus of pro- and anti-Darwinism in Dayton that summer, avidly reported by the world’s press. The prosecution case was led by the Democrat politician William Jennings Bryan. Bryan spoke up for the ordinary Christian folk of America against the perceived arrogance and infidelity of the intellectual elite. ‘Does it not seem a little unfair,’ Bryan asked, ‘not to distinguish between man and lower forms of life? What shall we say of the intelligence, not to say religion, of those who are so particular to distinguish between fishes and reptiles and birds, but put a man with an immortal soul in the same circle with the wolf, the hyena and the skunk? What must be the impression made upon children by such a degradation of man?’
Although William Jennings Bryan was a Democrat and Mike Huckabee a Republican, they are from the same political stock, and both aspired to become President. Bryan was the (unsuccessful) Democratic candidate for the presidency on three occasions. Known as the ‘Great Commoner’ because of his belief in the absolute sovereignty of the people, Bryan predicted that local school board elections would become more important than national elections, because parents would care more about the education and morals of their children than about foreign policy or economics. Huckabee’s anti-evolution stance appeals to just the same kinds of populism and localism. Like Bryan eighty years before him, he suggests that the only proper policy is for taxpayers and parents to decide what their children are taught in public schools. What could be more democratic, or more reasonable, than that?
And here is the heart of the liberal dilemma about evolution and creationism. Those who would identify themselves as progressive, enlightened, and liberal, usually consent to the proposition that school curricula should be set in a way that is open to the democratic process rather than being handed down by an autocratic intellectual elite. It seems right that the voters should have a say. But, what when those voters are creationists? Does the liberal instinct in favour of democracy then give way to some more powerful desires – to preserve the division between church and state enshrined in the First Amendment, for instance, or to give due weight to scientific expertise?
Finally it is worth noting that something else that Mike Huckabee has in common with William Jennings Bryan is that, despite his popularity, he is not going to be President. And neither of the men who might in fact be the next President of the United States is likely to provide the kind of encouragement to creationists and proponents of ‘Intelligent Design’ that Huckabee would have offered.
John McCain, during the same debate in which Huckabee indicated his support for creationism, was asked for a yes or no answer to the question ‘Do you believe in evolution?’ McCain looked momentarily uncomfortable, no doubt thinking of that hefty fifty percent of the electorate who would answer ‘No’, before giving a pretty confident ‘Yes’ to evolution. McCain has given some indications that he is happy for ‘Intelligent Design’ to be taught alongside evolution, but it is clearly not a cause for which he has any enthusiasm. Barack Obama has generally avoided the topic too but, when pushed in a recent interview, stated that religious instruction should be provided by parents and that it is ‘a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don’t hold up to scientific inquiry’, by which one can assume he meant creationism and ‘Intelligent Design’.
So, although the next incumbent of the White House is certain to be someone who, unlike Bryan or Huckabee, believes in evolution (as well as God), the fact that the question is still asked of presidential hopefuls speaks volumes about the historical role of Christian fundamentalism in shaping American political culture.
