Darwinists victims of their own bad education

The article in Nature
on intelligent design
makes evident a bizarre reality: the helplessness of the current scientific establishment toward the ID movement. Why are they being plagued by this movement? The solution is not to close ranks around Darwinian fundamentalism but to open up discussion, and that means really opening up discussion, not just to the two polarized propaganda positions, science-ID, but to the whole legacy of Darwin critique and commentary. Students have been trained as Darwinian parrots and are unaware entirely that Darwin's theory was always controversial, and that it has flaws repeatedly pointed to by scientists themselves, and that science is due for a major paradigmatic revision. Just at that point they have let the ID faction seize the initiative with results on both sides that are so scrambled and chaotic that noone can think straight. Darwinists have in many ways brought this on themselves. It ought to be common knowledge that Darwinism has problems. But instead of simple sanity here, we have this ultra-narrow Darwinist boilerplate syndrome put out by puclic scientific organizations. Doesn't everyone know yet that Darwinism is a flawed theory? Science has become a victim of its own propaganda, and the sheer inertia of those incorrectly educated has made change very difficult. The nemesis of an equal and opposite propaganda force, and the conservative thinktank dollars, is the paltry substitute for the reasoned critiques of many scientists, all of whom have been silenced by their inability to make themselves heard.

The refusal or inability of trained biologists, scientists, and teachers to deal with the real history of their own subject is nothing less than a scandal. This has produced a tremendous problem in the paradigmatic rigidity of their position. Scientists seem unaware of the weakness of their sceintific postures on evolution, and react with aggressive indignation to defend error. And their opponents, having read all the scientific critiques buried in the stacks of research libraries where students never see them, end up better informed than the science public.
The result is that Darwinists are trained to defend propaganda talking points, which aren't science, and seem bewildered by their critics, at least the ID critics who tend to be more sophisticated than the earlier waves of Creationists. Informal surveys show this writer than most students of science are unaware of, shall we say, the Kantian critiques of design arguments. Defending a position against design requires care not to provoke metaphysics in reverse, and most students here are simply incapable of dealing with the issue. Instead students are fed the false notions that Darwin's natural selection forever refuted design. The misleading character of that claim is going to prove the tombstone of science education if the estabishment here doesn't do some homework.
Thus the constant suggestion by science figures that all is well in the biology realm and that somehow these dastardly creationists are dealing in pseudo-science is true enough, but beside the point. They need to set their own house in order, and train their students to think critically on the subject of evolution, with something better that the watered down parodies of philosophy and science methodology now current. The alternative is the new pseudo-paradigm of a figure such as Dembski where intelligent criticism and religious pleading have hopelessly entangled the clarity of discussion in a new brand of sophistry.
The moment scientists confront the limits of Darwinism the obsessive quality of the Darwin defense syndrome might fall away toward a more intelligent appraisal of the limits of current theory, and this would rapidly take the wind out of the sails of those who wish to exploit the failure of science to indulge in self-criticism.


http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7037/full/4341062a.html