Uncommon Dissent Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing

 John Wilson

  FOREWORD

For years now, the New York Review of Books has been sending a direct-mail letter that asks—in bright red letters—“Are you an intellectual?” I was glad to see that the subtitle of Uncommon Dissent is Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing. “Intellectual” is a perfectly good noun that has fallen on hard times, particularly among conservatives, where it is almost always used pejoratively.

An intellectual may be, but is not necessarily, a specialist. Not all academics are intellectuals; not all intellectuals are academics. To be an intellectual is to possess a hungry mind and a willingness to question received opinion. But, contrary to a fashionable perversion of the intellectual’s calling, intellectual is not a synonym for skeptic. Healthy skepticism is indeed essential to the intellectual life, but it must not become an end in itself. There is a reality to which we are all accountable, a reality that invites our understanding.

Since you have picked up Uncommon Dissent, there’s a good chance that you would have to answer yes to the NYRB’s question. And you may already know that the book you’re holding is dangerous; it may get you into trouble. By questioning Darwinism, you place yourself in the company of all the cranks who have violated the taboos enforced by our current opinion-makers.

 In many settings, the contempt of the enlightened won’t affect you. If, however, you are teaching at a college or university, the costs may be considerable. (False dramatics? Not at all. The art of blackballing is practiced with great skill and ruthlessness in academia.)

Of course, the ferocity of resistance merely underlines the need for informed dissent. The almost comically hyperbolic arrogance of the Darwinian establishment, well documented in William Dembski’s introduction  to this volume, is representative of a larger malaise. As Steve Fuller observes in his new book, Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science,

Popper’s view that a non-scientist might criticize science for failing to abide by its own publicly avowed standards is rarely found inside academia today. For those who have inherited Kuhn’s Cold War belief that normal science is a bulwark in a volatile world, it comes as no surprise that philosophers today would sooner criticize creationists for violating evolutionary strictures than evolutionists for violating more general scientific norms—an activity for which Popper had been notorious.

But there’s another, subtler danger to which almost every reader of this book is potentially vulnerable. The role of dissenter can be costly, but it can also be powerfully seductive. How easy it is, after reading a book such as this, to puff oneself up with pride, to wax dogmatic about the “crumbling edifice of evolutionary theory,” and to fall into the very arrogance that is characteristic of Darwinism at its worst.

If you really are an intellectual, and not what Solzhenitsyn calls a “smatterer,” you will finish this book with more questions than answers. You won’t simply accept the assertions of the authors gathered here, themselves a very diverse bunch; you’ll subject them to the same sort of searching critique they have brought to bear on Darwinism.

You will wonder, for starters, what precisely is meant by “Darwinism”—or “evolution,” for that matter, a notoriously slippery word. Is it the notion that life is merely a cosmic accident, the product of chance and natural selection? If so—and that is an essential aspect of the doctrine of some of the most visible proponents of Darwinism—there’s no reason not to toss it overboard.

But what about common descent? “Evolution,” Richard Dawkins writes in his introduction to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003, “is one of the most securely established facts in all science. The knowledge that we are cousins to apes, kangaroos, and bacteria is beyond all educated doubt.” Isn’t there abundant evidence that—in this limited but hardly insignificant sense—evolution is real, however open to dispute the adequacy of natural selection as its engine may be? (Even Richard Dawkins is right once in a while.)

What about scientists like Simon Conway Morris, the distinguished Cambridge paleobiologist whose book Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans  in a Lonely Universe argues that the evolution of life reveals a pattern, an underlying direction, in which he finds “the richness of a Creation”? Nothing of this “complexity and beauty,” he adds, “presupposes, let alone proves, the existence of God, but all is congruent.” Is he right? If so, why? If not, why not? Part of your job as a reader of Uncommon Dissent is to read it in dialogue with books such as Life’s Solution or Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, a newly published collection of essays edited by Keith B. Miller.

Since I have given you the beginnings of a reading list, let me conclude with one of my favorite books on Darwinism—one that is unfairly neglected in the literature. It is a small children’s book, Yellow and Pink, written and illustrated by William Steig, who died in the fall of 2003 at the age of ninety-five. Steig, whose cartoons appeared in the New Yorker from 1930 on, was best known for his children’s books (including Shrek!, the basis for the hit movie).

Yellow and Pink was first published in 1984 and was reissued in 2003 just a few months before Steig’s death. It is the story, as the opening lines tell us, of “two small figures made of wood, … lying out in the sun one day on an old newspaper. One was short, fat, and painted pink; the other was tall, thin, and painted yellow.” They are wondering how they came to be there—indeed, how they came to exist in the first place.

Pink looks at his companion—“He found Yellow’s color, his well-chiseled head, his whole form, admirable”—and he decides: “Someone must have made us.”

Not so, counters Yellow: “I say we’re an accident, somehow or other we just happened.” And they begin a debate, each forcefully pressing his case.

I don’t want to reveal the rest of the plot and spoil it for you. But I will say this: on the issue at stake, Steig’s little fable is far more penetrating than whole stacks of books that have accumulated in my study. I hope you will put it on your own bookshelf, not far from Uncommon Dissent. 

(...)

Because of the myth of invincibility that now surrounds it, Darwinism has become monopolistic and imperialistic. Though often associated with “liberalism,” Darwinism as practiced today knows nothing of the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill. The proponents of “Darwinian liberalism” tolerate no dissent and regard all criticism of Darwinism’s fundamental tenets as false and reprehensible.

Yet according to Mill, “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” Mill expanded:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground,  and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.5Charles Darwin was Mill’s contemporary and fully accepted Mill’s classical liberalism. In the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”6

By contrast, many of Darwin’s contemporary disciples have turned stifling dissent into an art form. Because the myth of invincibility must be preserved at all costs, it is not acceptable to place doubts about Darwinism on the table for vigorous discussion. Rather, the doubts must be disqualified and repressed. To see this, consider the response by Darwinists to Senator Rick Santorum’s “Sense of the Senate” amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:

It is the sense of the Senate that (1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and (2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject.7An eminently reasonable amendment, no doubt. Indeed, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly for it (91-8). Even Senator Ted Kennedy, rarely an ally of Santorum’s, voted for it. What’s more, by merely reflecting the “sense of the Senate,” this amendment was nonbinding. And yet, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Center for Science Education, and the American Civil Liberties Union (to name but a few) were up in arms over this amendment. Why? Because evolution was singled out for special treatment and opened to critical scrutiny. Why, detractors of the amendment demanded, wasn’t general relativity or the atomic theory of matter singled out for similar treatment?

Comparisons of evolutionary theory with well-established theories of physics and chemistry display wishful thinking. The reason those theories were not singled out for critical scrutiny is, of course, because they are well established and evolutionary theory is not. This book will detail the weaknesses of Darwinian evolutionary theory and, going even further, argue that the preponderance of evidence goes against Darwinism.  Regardless of one’s point of view, it’s actually quite easy to see that Darwinism is not in the same league as the hard sciences. For instance, Darwinists will often compare their theory favorably to Einsteinian physics, claiming that Darwinism is just as well established as general relativity. Yet how many physicists, while arguing for the truth of Einsteinian physics, will claim that general relativity is as well established as Darwin’s theory? Zero.

Once Darwinism becomes a target for critical scrutiny, its proponents change the target. Thus, when David Berlinski criticized Darwinism in his December 2002 article in Commentary (titled “Has Darwin Met His Match?”), biologist Paul Gross took him to task for making “Darwinism” the topic of controversy. According to Gross, only “those who do not know much evolutionary biology” refer to something called “Darwinism.”8 Evolutionary biology, we are assured, is far richer than the caricature of it called Darwinism.

Despite such protestations, Darwinism is in fact the right target. It is no accident that in debates over biological evolution Darwin’s name keeps coming up. Repeated references to Darwin and Darwinism are not made simply out of respect for the history of the subject, as though evolutionary biology needed constantly to be reminded of its founder. Darwin’s theory constitutes the very core of evolutionary biology; he therefore looms larger than life in the study of biological origins. Indeed, nothing in evolutionary biology makes sense apart from Darwinism.

To see this, we need to understand Darwinism’s role in evolutionary biology. Darwinism is really two claims. The less crucial claim is that all organisms trace their lineage back to a universal common ancestor. Any two organisms are n-th cousins k-times removed where n and k depend on the two organisms in question. This claim is referred to as “common descent.” Although evolutionary biology is committed to common descent, that is not its central claim.

Rather, the central claim of evolutionary biology is that an unguided physical process can account for the emergence of all biological complexity and diversity. Filling in the details of that process remains a matter for debate among evolutionary biologists. Yet it is an in-house debate, and one essentially about details. In broad strokes, however, any unguided physical process capable of producing biological complexity must have three components: (1) hereditary transmission, (2) incidental change, and (3) natural selection.

Think of it this way: We start with some organism. It incurs some change. The change is incidental in the sense that it doesn’t anticipate  future changes that subsequent generations of organisms may experience (neo-Darwinism, for instance, treats such changes as random mutations or errors in genetic material). What’s more, incidental change is heritable and therefore can be transmitted to the next generation. Whether it actually is transmitted to the next generation and then preferentially preserved in subsequent generations, however, depends on whether the change is in some sense beneficial to the organism. If so, then natural selection will be likely to preserve organisms exhibiting that change.

This picture is perfectly general. As I already noted, it can accommodate neo-Darwinism. It can also accommodate Lamarckian evolution, whose incidental changes occur as organisms, simply by putting to use existing structures, enhance or modify the functionalities of those structures. It can accommodate Lynn Margulis’s idea of symbiogenetic evolution, whose incidental changes occur as different types of organisms come together to form a new, hybrid organism. And it can also accommodate other forms of incidental change, including genetic drift, lateral gene transfer, and the activity of regulatory genes in development.

Evolutionary biologists debate the precise role and extent of hereditary transmission and incidental change. The debate can even be quite sharp at times. But evolutionary biology leaves unchallenged Darwinism’s holy of holies—natural selection. Darwin himself was unclear about the mechanisms of hereditary transmission and incidental change. But whatever form they took, Darwin was convinced that natural selection was the key to harnessing them. The same is true for contemporary evolutionary biologists. That’s why to this day we hear repeated references to Darwin’s theory of natural selection but not to Darwin’s theory of variation or Darwin’s theory of inheritance.

Apart from design or teleology, what could coordinate the incidental changes that hereditary transmission passes from one generation to the next? To perform such coordination, evolution requires a substitute for a designer. Darwin’s claim to fame was to propose natural selection as a designer substitute. But natural selection is no substitute for intelligent coordination. All natural selection does is narrow the variability of incidental change by weeding out the less fit. What’s more, it acts on the spur of the moment, based solely on what the environment at present deems fit, and thus without any foresight of future possibilities. And yet this blind process, when coupled with another blind process (incidental change), is supposed to produce designs that exceed the capacities of any designers in our experience.

 Leaving aside small-scale evolutionary changes, such as insects developing insecticide resistance (which no one disputes), where is the evidence that natural selection can accomplish the intricacies of bioengineering that are manifest throughout the living world (such as producing insects in the first place)? Where is the evidence that the sorts of incidental changes required for large-scale evolution ever occur? The evidence simply isn’t there. Robert Koons (chapter 1) helps us appreciate what’s at stake by imagining what would happen to the germ theory of disease if scientists never found any microorganisms or viruses that produced diseases. That’s the problem with Darwinism: In place of detailed, testable accounts of how a complex biological system could realistically have emerged, Darwinism offers just-so stories about how such systems might have emerged in some idealized conceptual space far removed from biological reality.

Why, then, does Darwinism continue to garner such a huge following, especially among the intellectual elite? There are two reasons: (1) It provides a materialistic creation story that dispenses with any need for design, purpose, or God (which is convenient for those who want to escape the demands of religion, morality, and conscience). (2) The promise of getting design without a designer is incredibly seductive—it’s the ultimate free lunch. No wonder Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, credits Darwin with “the single best idea anyone has ever had.”9 Getting design without a designer is a good trick indeed.

But all good tricks need some sleight of hand to deflect critical scrutiny. With Darwinism, that sleight of hand takes the form of myths. Darwinism depends on several subsidiary myths to prop its primary myth—the myth of invincibility. Artfully invoked and applied, these subsidiary myths have been enormously successful at censoring all doubts about Darwinism. Altogether, there are four subsidiary myths, and it is instructive to see how they work in detail:

(1) The myth of fundamentalist intransigence. According to this myth, only religious fanatics oppose Darwinism. What else could prevent the immediate and cheerful acceptance of Darwinism except fundamentalist intransigence? Darwinism, to the convinced Darwinist, is a self-evident truth. Biologist Paul Ewald, for instance, writes: “You have heritable variation, and you’ve got differences in survival and reproduction among the variants. That’s the beauty of it. It has to be true—it’s like arithmetic. And if there is life on other planets, natural selection has to be the fundamental organizing principle there, too.”10 If Darwin’s theory is as sure as arithmetic, what could prevent people from seeing its truth?

 Perhaps the failure of people to accept Darwinian evolution is a failure of education. One frequently gets this sense from reading publications by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, and the National Association of Biology Teachers. If only people could be made to understand Darwin’s theory properly, they would readily sign off on it. But since Darwinists hold a monopoly on biology education in America, something else must be hindering Darwinism’s acceptance. Accordingly, a mindless fundamentalism must reign over the minds of a vast majority of Americans, leading them to dig in their heels and resist Darwinism’s truth, which otherwise would be plain for all to see.

Thus, what many Darwinists desire is not just more talented communicators to promote Darwinism in America’s biology classrooms, but an enforced educational and cultural policy for total worldview reprogramming, one that is sufficiently aggressive to capture and convert to Darwinism even the most recalcitrant among “religiously programmed” youth. That’s why Darwinists like Daniel Dennett, to all appearances a participant in and advocate of democracy, fantasize about quarantining religious parents. It seems ridiculous to convinced Darwinists like Dennett that the fault might lie with their theory and that the public might be picking up on faults inherent in that theory.

For the Darwinist, the myth of fundamentalist intransigence justifies all forms of character assassination, ad hominem attacks, guilt by association, and demonization. An increasing cultural groundswell against Darwinism has meant that Darwinists are no longer able to simply ignore their critics. Instead, they routinely begin their responses to critics by labeling them as creationists, which in the current intellectual climate is equivalent to being called a holocaust denier, a flat-earther, or a believer in horoscopes. Creationism, properly speaking, refers to a literal interpretation of Genesis in which God through special acts of creation brings the biophysical universe into existence in six literal twentyfour-hour days, somewhere in the last several thousand years. When Richard Dawkins replies to David Berlinski’s criticisms of Darwinism (see chapter 14), he will call Berlinski, who is a secular Jew, a “creationist.” This is not only name-calling, it is also incorrect. Recently Berlinski remarked: “I have no creationist agenda whatsoever and, beyond respecting the injunction to have a good time all the time, no religious principles, either.”11 If Berlinski can be branded a creationist, then woe to those who actually have religious convictions and oppose Darwinism.

(2) The Myth of Prometheus. This myth is the flipside of the previous one. If only religious crazies oppose Darwinism, then it is only  the intelligent and courageous who embrace Darwinism and fully accept its consequences. In the original myth, Prometheus brought fire to humanity and thus gave human beings control over nature (a power previously reserved to the gods). Prometheus did this at great personal cost, incurring the wrath of the gods, who chained him to a mountaintop and decreed that birds of prey should forever tear and consume his liver. By opposing arbitrary limitations that the gods imposed on humanity, Prometheus symbolized liberation from ignorance and superstition. In place of comforting myths that assure us of a special place in the great scheme of things, Prometheus teaches us to spurn the gods and stare the ultimate meaninglessness of reality in the eye without flinching.

Darwinists enjoy styling themselves as Prometheus’s heirs. Accordingly, they are humanity’s benefactors, conferring scientific insights that tell us the grim truth about our biological origins and thereby liberate us from our benighted fundamentalist past. Darwinism views the organic world as a great competition for life in which all living forms are ultimately destined for extinction. This is a bitter pill, but it is the best medicine we have. Fundamentalism, by contrast, is an opiate that causes us to sleepwalk through life, accepting fairy tales about our biological origins as well as fairy tales about any life beyond death. (Conflating the language of fairy tales with the language of ordinary religious belief is a favorite among more extreme Darwinists such as Steven Weinberg.)

The myth of Prometheus has been a public relations bonanza for Darwinists, helping them to score some of their best propaganda points. Take, for instance, the movie Inherit the Wind, a fictional portrayal of the Scopes monkey trial in which the forces of reason in the guise of Darwinism struggle against the mindless fundamentalism of a backwater town. The movie portrays Darwinism as the defender of scientific truth and intellectual honesty and also as the great liberator from religious bigotry. Given only this movie, who in their right mind would not support Darwinism? Notwithstanding, the actual Scopes trial, as Edward Sisson recounts in chapter 5 of this book, provided a quite different picture. Clarence Darrow, the Darwinist attorney who defended Scopes, carefully arranged the trial so that Darwinism was never subjected to cross-examination.

Although the myth of Prometheus has lofty pretensions, for many Darwinists it provides an excuse for elitism and snobbery. Accordingly, they divide the world into the moronic masses who reject Darwinism and its consequences, and the smart people (themselves) who believe it. Take Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett’s latest attempt to make atheism more alluring to the wider culture. They propose the word “bright”  to serve the same role with respect to atheism as the word “gay” serves with respect to homosexuality. Dawkins writes:

Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, of Sacramento, California, have set out to coin a new word, a new “gay.” Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy.… Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright. Bright? Yes, bright. Bright is the word, the new noun. I am a bright. You are a bright. She is a bright. We are the brights. Isn’t it about time you came out as a bright? Is he a bright? I can’t imagine falling for a woman who was not a bright. The website www.celeb-atheists.com suggests numerous intellectuals and other famous people are brights.… A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic world view.… You can sign on as a bright at www.the-brights.net.12Since an atheistic worldview is best nourished on Darwinism (it was Dawkins, after all, who said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist), it follows that “brights” are also Darwinists. Perhaps in the future we shall see articles and books about “Darwin’s Bright Idea.”

(3) The myth of victory past. A scene in the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup illustrates this myth. Groucho Marx, president of Freedonia, presides over a meeting of the cabinet. The following exchange ensues between Groucho and one of Freedonia’s ministers:

Groucho: “And now, members of the Cabinet, we’ll take up old business.”

Minister: “I wish to discuss the Tariff!”

Groucho: “Sit down, that’s new business! No old business? Very well—then we’ll take up new business”

Minister: “Now about that Tariff …”

Groucho: “Too late—that’s old business already!”

This exchange epitomizes Darwinism’s handling of criticism. When a valid criticism of Darwinism is first proposed, it is dismissed without an adequate response, either on a technicality or with some irrelevant point, or is simply ignored. As time passes, people forget that Darwinists never adequately met the criticism. But Darwinism is still calling the shots. Since the criticism failed to dislodge Darwinism, the criticism itself  must have been discredited or refuted somewhere. Thereafter the criticism becomes known as “that discredited criticism that was refuted a long time ago.” And, after that, even to raise the criticism betrays an outdated conception of evolutionary theory. In this way, the criticism, though entirely valid, simply vanishes into oblivion. With the internet and an emerging intellectual community that refuses to be cowed by Darwinist bullying, that scenario is beginning to change, but historically that is how Darwinists have handled criticism.

Michael Behe’s challenge to Darwinian evolution provides a recent case study in the myth of victory past. Certain biochemical systems are molecular machines of great sophistication and intricacy whose parts are each indispensable to the system’s function. Such systems are, as Behe defines them in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, irreducibly complex. What’s more, as Behe also notes, such systems resist Darwinian explanations. Indeed, the biological community has no detailed, testable proposals for how irreducibly complex systems might have arisen through Darwinian means, only a variety of wishful speculations. Biologists like James Shapiro and Franklin Harold, who have no “creationist” or “intelligent design” agenda, admit that this is so.13 Nevertheless, it is routine among Darwinists to declare that Behe’s ideas have been decisively refuted and even to provide references to the biological literature in which Behe’s ideas are supposed to have been refuted.But what happens when one tracks down those references in the biological literature that are said to have refuted Behe? David Ray Griffin, a philosopher with no animus against Darwinism or sympathy for Behe’s intelligent design perspective, remarks:

The response I have received from repeating Behe’s claim [that the evolutionary literature fails to account for irreducible complexity] is that I obviously have not read the right books. There are, I am assured, evolutionists who have described how the transitions in question could have occurred [i.e., how, contra Behe, Darwinian pathways could lead to irreducibly complex biochemical systems]. When I ask in which books I can find these discussions, however, I either get no answer or else some titles that, upon examination, do not in fact contain the promised accounts. That such accounts exist seems to be something that is widely known, but I have yet to encounter someone who knows where they exist.

(...)

As this book shows, the public is right to remain unconvinced. This book divides into four parts. The first part shows why Darwinism faces a growing crisis of confidence. Robert Koons starts the ball rolling with his chapter “The Check Is in the Mail.” In this chapter Koons details how Darwinism substitutes theft for honest labor by insulating Darwinian theories from all possible criticism. Koons argues that the real motivation for Darwinism is to be found in a thoroughgoing metaphysical attack on the idea of agency, both human and divine, that has been ongoing for two hundred years. He also suggests that by undermining the idea of reasonable and responsible agency, Darwinism helped prepare the way for a variety of destructive experiments in social engineering.  Next comes Phillip Johnson’s well-known essay “Darwinism as Dogma,” which originally appeared back in 1990 in First Things. This essay masterfully disentangles Darwinism’s interweaving with materialist philosophy. And finally, there is Marcel-Paul Schützenberger’s 1996 interview with La Recherche, conducted shortly before his death, in which he recapitulates his ideas about functional complexity and the challenge this feature of biological systems poses to Darwinism. The original interview was in French and was translated into English by David Berlinski for the journal Origins & Design. It has been further edited here for style and clarity.

Part two focuses on Darwinism’s cultural inroads. Nancy Pearcey starts things off with a sweeping overview. The effect of reading her essay is dizzying as she documents how Darwinism has inveigled itself into one academic discipline after another. Next comes Edward Sisson’s brilliant analysis of how the professionalization of science has rendered science incapable of correcting itself in the case of Darwinism. Essentially, the critic of Darwinism faces a prisoner’s dilemma in which perpetuating Darwinian falsehoods, either by actively promoting them or by silent complicity, is the best strategy for advancing one’s career. J. Budziszewski’s chapter on natural law is a much needed corrective to an emerging literature that seeks to combat postmodern ethical relativism with a distorted version of natural law based on Darwinism. And finally, Frank Tipler’s chapter on refereed journals shows how the peerreview process increasingly stifles scientific creativity and enforces orthodoxies like Darwinism. Although the chapter was specifically commissioned for this volume, Tipler’s analysis has such huge public policy implications for the practice and funding of science that his chapter has now also appeared as an article on the web.25Part three examines the dynamics of converting to and deconverting from Darwinism. Often, in the writings of Darwinists (e.g., Ronald Numbers’s book The Creationists), one gets the impression that the more educated people become, the more reasonable Darwinism seems. Part three shows that this is not the case. Michael Behe, raised as a Roman Catholic and trained as a biologist, accepted Darwinism as he began his scientific career. Only later, as he reflected on what he had been taught about evolution, did his doubts about Darwinism arise and finally lead to a full deconversion from Darwinism. Michael Denton, by contrast, never accepted Darwinism. Though early in his life he rejected Darwinism because of his religious faith, Denton continued to reject Darwinism even after he had shed his religious faith and learned an awful lot of biology. James Barham began as Christian fundamentalist, turned to a  hardcore atheistic brand of Darwinism, and then, after thinking deeply about the nature of biological function, turned to a naturalized form of teleology at odds with both fundamentalism and Darwinism.

Finally, part four examines the nitty-gritty of why Darwinism is a failed intellectual project. After reviewing and overturning many of the key evidences used to prop Darwinism, Cornelius Hunter shows why Darwinism should properly be regarded not as a positive scientific research program but as a reactionary metaphysical program whose justification depends intrinsically on naive assumptions about what God would and would not have done in designing biological systems. Next Roland Hirsch overviews many of the recent advances in molecular biology and biochemistry, showing how Darwinism has failed either to anticipate or to explain them. After that, Christopher Langan carefully examines the nature of causality and shows how Darwinism depends on a superficial analysis of causality to hide its fundamental conceptual problems. Finally, we come to the chapter that inspired this book, David Berlinski’s June 1996 Commentary essay, “The Deniable Darwin.” In exposing Darwinism’s failure to resolve biology’s information problem, this essay provoked an enormous response (over thirty published letters pro and con). In addition to the essay, this chapter includes some of the key letters by Darwinists critical of Berlinski’s essay. It also includes Berlinski’s replies to these critics.

In commending this volume to the reader, I wish to leave Darwinists with this closing thought: You’ve had it way too easy until now. It is no longer credible to conflate informed criticism of Darwinism with ignorance, stupidity, insanity, wickedness, or brainwashing. Informed critiques of Darwinism have consistently appeared ever since Darwin published his Origin of Species (cf. the work of Louis Agassiz, St. George Mivart, Richard Goldschmidt, Pierre Grassé, Gerald Kerkut, and Michael Polanyi). Unfortunately, because Darwinism’s myths are so entrenched, such critiques have until now been unable to reach a critical mass and actually overthrow Darwinism. That is now changing. We’ll know that a critical mass has been achieved when it becomes widely acceptable among intellectuals to challenge Darwinism. When that happens—when it becomes acceptable to say that the emperor has no clothes—Darwin’s actual theory will assume the modest role in science that it deserves and Darwinism’s grandiose pretensions will become dissertation fodder for nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history. In other words, Darwinism will be history.