Intelligent Decline
Richard Dawkins blisters the ID crowd.
And so forth. Good thing modern biology is more like British Parliament than an American Congress. The big stars are trained in the kind of George Galloway tactics that they need to wrestle their enemies in the public forum. Both Dawkins and his nemesis, the late Stephen Jay Gould, were capable debaters, thanks in part, certainly, to their constant gnawing on one another.
Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.
It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt as a rhetorical device before going on to dispel it.
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” You will find this sentence of Charles Darwin quoted again and again by creationists. They never quote what follows. Darwin immediately went on to confound his initial incredulity. Others have built on his foundation, and the eye is today a showpiece of the gradual, cumulative evolution of an almost perfect illusion of design. The relevant chapter of my Climbing Mount Improbable is called “The fortyfold Path to Enlightenment” in honour of the fact that, far from being difficult to evolve, the eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom.
And so forth. Good thing modern biology is more like British Parliament than an American Congress. The big stars are trained in the kind of George Galloway tactics that they need to wrestle their enemies in the public forum. Both Dawkins and his nemesis, the late Stephen Jay Gould, were capable debaters, thanks in part, certainly, to their constant gnawing on one another.
