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Wednesday, January 19, 2005Instapundit picks up a Kevin Drum post about teaching evolution vs. intelligent design. According to Drum:Darwinism, however, is simply science. School districts are free to stop teaching science if they want, but if they do teach it, they have to teach Darwinism just as much as they have to teach Newtonian mechanics, Boyle's law, and the theory of relativity.There's a peculiar liberal tendency: They want to teach evolution in the schools, but should a species be on the edge of extinction, they want a task force on the ground to make sure that half of the evolutionary process - the dying out of inefficient species, freeing up resources for other species - is stopped. The second bit that I'd note is that Newtonian mechanics and Boyle's Law have something up on evolution: Predictive power. Using Newton's laws or Boyle's Law, you can actually assert what is going to happen within a closed system (sort of, but I really don't want to get in the areas at the margins where quantum mechanics starts giving Newtonian mechanics a tizzy). On the other hand, Darwinism (and the Theory of Relativity) are only theories. They seem to explain the limited data we have, but they aren't the only possibilities. Indeed, some fairly sharp types are starting to question aspects of the Theory of Relativity, too, which would have tickled Einstein pink. However, no one is to question Darwin, because he's sacrally scientific: Einstein just made the world go topsy-turvy; Darwin gave non-believers the feeling of having a leg up on believers. And in a way the average person could understand. That's because Darwin, himself, wasn't that spectacular. His journals and other writings show a moderately perceptive guy who was able to synthesize a lot of the things that were being said about science and society in his day and condense it into key phrases. I'm not saying that Darwinism is wrong. Though I don't "believe in it," I do see it as perhaps the most plausible theory out there. But I do think a lot of liberals take it overly seriously because their real concern isn't a plausible explanation for the multitude of species but a chance to stick their thumb in the eye of Christian conservatives. It's a bit odd, this canonization of a Victorian churchman. It's also a bit odd how the American liberal perceives Darwinism as working. Somehow, it takes place among, but not within species. At least not where humans are concerned. The same liberals who hail Darwin and insist upon evolutionary theory are loath to pass out handouts, say, of what Darwin thought of the "savages" in the Tierra del Fuego or about why Tahitians didn't need to be advanced because, hey, who needs industry when your breakfast falls out of the trees every morning. I don't really want to pick any fights here. As I said, I think Darwin's theory is plausible. But I'm not a Darwinist, anymore than I'm an Einsteinist. (Actually, I think evolution happens but that it might have been set in motion by an intelligent design - sort of a divine DNA perfection routine.) Evolution, at present, is a theory, and those who act as though "It's science - it's truth" show themselves to be, at bottom, part of another sort of cult which worships the an-sacral as unthinkingly as Catholics are purported to murmur their rosaries. Tomorrow, we could get evidence supporting the idea of intelligent design. We could get more info supporting the idea of natural selection. If you are a Darwinist, you will automatically hail the second and dismiss the first. But if you're a responsible science teacher, you'll cut out the article and talk with your class about what the data do and don't support. So long as evolution is just a theory, Darwinism as truth is just a cult. Kevin Drum and most of the MSM belong to that cult. But anybody who cares more about science than sticking it to the hicks takes evolution as it is - a theory that has not yet been proved or disproved, not holy writ. ID, for it's part, is at least a hypothesis: there's a core idea that can be disproved. Given this, I'd be teaching evolution as our best guess and mentioning ID as a second possibility with evidentiary problems (how do you prove intelligent design if you can't directly access the intelligence?). But writing off ID while trumpeting Darwinism as "the truth" isn't science, it's politics. 
posted by gbarto at 5:11 PM |
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