THE FLYING MONKEY BRIGADE

At the beginning of the week L.A.W. posted the article “Darwinism Isn’t Science”, in which I criticized the Michigan State Board of Education for mandating the teaching of Darwinism in biology classes as fact rather than conjecture as to how life evolved on Earth.  The board was plainspoken about the impetus for this decision.  They did not want Intelligent Design to also be taught as a competing explanation for evolution.  In fact, the board wanted to stamp out completely any possibility that children learn in public schools that Darwinism is not fact.  Hence they ruled, for example, that the Darwinian principle of natural selection is, rather than may be, the primary mechanism of evolution.

THE LYSENKOISTS

Of course, the members of the state board of education are political creatures and so politics influences policy.  They were certainly reacting to the atrocious intrusion of federal power into local school curriculum by U.S. District Court John Jones who declared by judicial fiat in last year’s Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision that Intelligent Design is not science and so is banned from public school science classes.  Without regard to the merits of his lengthy opinion about the status of Intelligent Design as science, Jones’s ruling assaults the First Amendment and the sovereignty of the states.  It stinks of Lysenkoism, in which the government dictates what will and will not be permitted in public discourse about science.

So, one might argue that it was politically prudent of the state board of education to scrub Intelligent Design from the biology curriculum in light of the expansive power of federal courts today.  No doubt the defense of a state’s sovereignty to sort out its own affairs, such as public education, is a lost cause in the current judicial environmental.  Yet, the board did not merely do that.  They went beyond Kitzmiller to enshrine Darwinism as the one and only explanation for how evolution occurred.  The problem is that as a matter of science it is not*, and so the board members who backed this decision in a unanimous vote are as much Lysenkoists as Judge Jones is.  They let politics and ideology dictate what constitutes science rather than sound broadly-accepted philosophical principles.

THE FLYING MONKEY BRIGADE

If there is any doubt that Darwinism has been wrapped into a particular ideology, consider what happened here at L.A.W. this week.  The flying monkey brigade of one such ideologue was loosed upon us and invaded the comment section of the “Darwinism Isn’t Science” article, because we had the temerity to question the exclusivity of Darwinism as the scientific explanation for evolution.  The ideologue is Ed Brayton, host of a ScienceBlogs website called “Dispatches from the Culture Wars”.  Much of the squawking of the flying monkeys was nothing but the recycling of jabs Brayton took at us at his website.  A cursory perusal of his website will clarify their agenda behind Darwinism.  For example, Brayton had this to say the other day:  “No, not every [Intelligent Design] advocate is also an anti-gay bigot, but there certainly is a great deal of overlap there. While there is no necessary relationship between the two positions, they do tend to appeal to the same audience of protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals. But the battle against both goes hand in hand for me.”

So it is this political animus against Christians that set the tone of Brayton’s minions in their comments here at L.A.W.  It is an irrational animus that blinds both Brayton and them to any reasonable distinctions that might be made by those who disagree with their agenda.  Case in point, L.A.W.’s criticism of the recent decision of the Michigan State Board of Education to mandate Darwinism as fact in public schools.  They do not grasp the possibility that a person can demur from teaching Darwinian natural selection as the mechanism of evolution in biology classes for rational reasons that have nothing to do with Intelligent Design, the supernatural, or religion.  Hence, the repeated refrain by Brayton at his website and his cohorts in L.A.W.’s comment section that I am stumping for Intelligent Design when I did nothing more than report what the state board of education was opposing.  For them the world is black and white.  Either you are a rational man of science, liberal politics, and secular culture or you are a hateful Bible-thumping wretch salivating to extinguish the flame of the Enlightenment.

THE FELLOW-TRAVELERS

While Brayton and his gang are extreme, their intolerance of a theistic worldview infects mainstream science, politics, and culture.  It manifests itself in the mainstream with a low-grade paranoia that any challenge to a secularized public square must entail a theocratic impulse to regiment society to the will of pastors and priests.  It justifies itself in the mainstream as a noble and enlightened defense of the wall separating church and state (which in fact our Constitution never built).  And so a panel of education officials in Lansing declares that Darwinism is the theory of evolution in our public schools to keep religion out of them, with a Lysenkoist ignorance of the actual grounding of the claims of Darwinism in science, a slavish abdication of independent thought to academic authorities jealous of their prerogative to dictate what constitutes science, and an obliviousness to a First Amendment that strips the government of the power to impede free speech and the free exercise of religion.

They do so, contrary to reason and law, because they are on a crusade to cleanse the public square of religion.  The members of the state board of education are not the shock troops, that’s the mission of the likes of Brayton and his flying monkey brigade to intimidate laymen from voicing their doubts about what some try to traffic as science.  Instead their fellow-traveling board members hold the ground so yielded by the general public and secure it with the bulwark of bureaucracy.  Therefore, what they do is more enduring and so more corrosive of our liberties.  That is why it is important to examine the state school board’s seemingly routine policy decisions, like this one.  It is Lysenkoism.  It falsely mandates Darwinism as the only explanation for evolution.  Thus, it prohibits within the public square of the classroom free inquiry as to how evolution transpired.  And so the state school board’s decision undermines the tolerance of divergent worldviews vital to sustaining a genuinely liberal society.
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* Darwinism isn’t science.  At least it is not a scientific theory of evolution, despite all of the howling to the contrary by Brayton’s boys here at L.A.W.  (See the footnote of our previous article on this subject for the distinction science makes between theory, hypothesis, and conjecture.)  One might say that the theory of evolution is the scientific explanation for the fossil record – i.e., the fossil record is the result of the descent of all organisms from a common ancestor through modification of form.  It is a sound explanation and no facts exist to refute it.  I will say however that it is not theory, in the sense that general relativity is a scientific theory, but it is a complex of hypotheses, in the sense that the standard model of the Big Bang is.

That said, Darwinism and its progeny are sets of conjectures as to the mechanism for evolution – in other words, what caused organisms to change form over time.  The only hard facts of evolution are the fossil record of past organisms and the biology of present ones.  These facts, at least our present understanding of them, do not let us draw any firm conclusions as to how organisms evolved over the past four billion years.  This is not say that evolutionary biologists are full of nonsense or that none of the conjectures they have put forth make any sense.  It is nothing more than the recognition of the gap between an explanation and its verification through observation or experimentation.

For example, the Galapagos finches are cited as verification of the Darwinian claim of evolution through natural selection.  We have indeed observed within historical time variation in those finches, especially their beaks in response to environmental pressures.  However, all this really tells is something already known.  Many species of organism are elastic within certain boundaries as to form, as the beaks of Galapagos finches have changed back and forth depending upon the available food source.  What we have not observed is a finch’s beak turning into a set of teeth so that it can start chewing, let’s say, grass and leaves.  In short, we have not seen a species “jumping” the boundaries of its form’s elasticity.  The fossil record certainly shows us it must have happened, but we have no theory as to how.  Only conjecture.

This is why mandating the teaching of Darwinism as the theory of evolution, rather as a conjecture as to how it might have occurred, is a gross scientific error on the part of the Michigan State Board of Education.

Comments

[Rich]

"There is nothing wrong in philosophical and religious beliefs determining a person's understanding of science."

6000 year old earth
Great flood
Flat Earth
Geocentrism
Demonic possesion
This blog.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Actually, Bill, it was purely by accident. But note, rather than seek evidence you jumped to a conclusion. And Bill, in case you hadn't noticed, your posts are vacuous. That seems to be the major problem with them. They simply ramble on and on about nothing. And yet, you seem convinced that you are actually saying something. Something of import.

Micro-evolution. Canard. I was talking to Robert Susman yesterday, and I dare say he knows a thing or two more than you about evolution. You see he's written and published on primate evolution and locomotion. When he writes articles, he provides evidence. He doesn't ramble about pseudo-philosophical arguments. He gets to the matter at hand.

I don't want my children learning pseudo-philosophy as science. I'd like them to stick with science and not the utterly vacuous ramblings you've posted. The evolution of the eye is fascinating. Darwin wrote about it. There has been much evidence concerning the evolution of the eye. To merely dismiss all that work, seems on your part arrogant and unwilling to learn. Michigan got it right.

I'll assess your pseudo-philosophical ramblings: bunk. I think Rich showed that well. You dodged and weaved whenever facts were introduced. No evidence. Bogus arguments. Yeah, I'd prefer my children didn't learn that as science.

[plunge]

"when the argument is that Darwinism (including all of its progeny) has not met the standards of a scientific theory."

You claim this, but the vast vast majority of scientists disagree with you. Shouldn't it give you, at the very least, humble pause? Which is more likely: that every single one of those scientists part of some vast conspiracy of lies, or you are mistaken?

People here have made arguments that refute your claim that it is not scientific, and you have refused to engage or respond to these arguments. One would have to conclude that you don't really have any response to them.

"ID is irrelevant. Arguing that it is false is no argument that Darwinism is true."

You yourselves proposed that we "teach alternatives." Now you claim that pointing out that the only known alternatives aren't scientific isn't relevant?

"The proof that Darwinism fails to meet that standard is that it does not explain how everything has evolved."

What standard? Biology is not the claim to understand everything. The fact that we remain in the dark about how this or that evolved is irrelevant to whether evolution is good science or not, just as the inability to predict with 100% accuracy what the weather will be like next week does not mean we should junk all our meterological models in favor of ouija borads.

"Example, human consciousness. Explain how that evolved in terms of Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, punctuated equilibrium, non-directed evolution, and any other conjecture out there."

As the cite says, it's a little hard to start explaining something when we don't really know how it works or what exactly it is yet. Holding that against evolution is just silly.

But much more importantly here is the way you are shifting back and forth between possibility and actuality. First you claim that evolution is unsound because it cannot explain X. Someone then points out that there are alots of plausible ways X could have evolved. You respond not by conceding that X is evolutionarily plausible, but instead by changing the subject and claiming that it isn't historically proven that X is what really happened. Well, no, but that's not the nature of the challenge you originally posed.

"If any strand of Darwinism is in fact a scientific theory, then it can explain how human consciousness evolved."

How do you know that it could never do so? Certainly it has done a great deal to explain, for instance, the evolution of the brain, which is surely related. The mere fact that we don't have all the answers is hardly grounds to stop working on the issue.

"That said, whatever I am or am not does not bear on my argument that the state school board is in error. To state otherwise is to commit the ad hominem fallacy."

That's true, but that's not what anyone has done. They have responded on point to your arguments, and you have mostly ignored these responses in any substantive way. Pointing out that your arguments against evolution are very common creationist claims is not ad hominem, especially not when someone proceeds to point out why they are mistaken.

"Finally, you can continue to ignore that declaring Darwinian natural selection is THE mechanism of evolution, as the state school board did, is a scientific error."

But it's simply false to claim that it did. NS is one of the major driving forces of _functional_ change, but it is not the only mechanism of evolution.

"Whether natural selection is or is not that mechanism, science has not established it as such with the level of certainty to declare it a fact."

It most certainly has in the case of common descent, which fits the NS pattern virtually to a T in every respect.

"Of course, a person who subscribes to a philosophy of naturalism, or at least a methodological naturalism regarding science, can for perfectly rational reasons believe that natural selection (or some variant or as a key part of a complex of causes) can be the only explanation for evolution."

It, again, is not the only mechanism, but it certainly is the only explanation that we know of that can be demonstrated scientifically. If there were other alternatives, perhaps you could inform us what they are, since you claim that ID and creationism aren't what you are supporting instead.

"At the end of the day, what should be taught in public school science classes is science, not beliefs about what theists or secularists want science to support."

Indeed: which is why science classes are rightly teaching what virtually every biologist agrees is good science: evolution.