The Anti-Darwin crowd and Derbyshire
I thought that Dinesh D'Souza's last book had been savaged by the more rational of the folks over at The National Review, but John Derbyshire's rottweiler review of Ben Stein's movie Expelled is in a class by itself. It's not often you get to watch one conservative savage another with such heartfelt venom.
Here is one of the Derby's concluding paragraphs, which gives a hint at the tone:
The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)
You can tell he's worked up butyou should read all of it to truly appreciate it. Though I can't say I disagree with him.
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Labels: Darwinism, Intelligent design, science
posted by Clemens @ 11:22 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I disagree with him, but only up to a point.
For a long time, Darwinism was a club used by progressives to advocate all manner of notions that non-progressives find horrifying. Eugenics was one of them that was fashionable way back in the early 20th century.
Likewise, Darwinism was a club used by Nazis to advocate all manner of notions that non-Nazis find horrifying. The Holocaust was one of them.
I'd like to throw in something about the good old Soviet Union, which among other things claimed to be the first state founded purely on scientific principles, but probably the one scientific idea they didn't abuse was Darwinism.
This takes us to the problem on both sides. Derbyshire completely ignores the fact that progressives and naturalists for a long time held that eugenics was a scientific idea. It even became the law in some states that the mentally retarded be sterilized.
Stein, on the other hand, has missed entirely that otherwise respectable sciences like Genetics were also used to justify the Holocaust, as well as eugenics and loads of other things besides. The fault lies not with the science (or lack thereof) but with the people who abuse that science. Darwin's Origin of the Species no more caused the Holocaust than Mendel's discovery of genetics. I'd go further and say that Darwinism caused the Holocaust no more than the Bible caused slavery. After all, loads of Bible-believing Christians abused the Bible to justify slavery, too.
If I remember correctly, the old Soviet Union, at least while Stalin was alive, didn't abuse Darwinism because Stalin rejected it in favor of Lysenko's theories. Of course, executing people who believed in Darwinism might be construed as abuse, but probably not the way you mean.
I just don't understand the anti-Science attitude. Well...maybe I can. As long as you are using opinions to make your arguments there is nothing that will end the debate.
Science (and math) requires evidence. ID advocates (of which, I suppose, technically I am one as a Deist) have no testable evidence. Therefore it is of little use to them.
--Joey
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