08.07.08

More on: Toward a postdarwinian liberalism

Posted in Evolution at 2:59 pm by nemo

Comment at The Row Boat (from theauthor of Alternet article), re: post and webpage
Toward a postdarwinian liberalism

Thanks for the comment. I will link to it at the essay and my blog. While I share the reservations about ID, I don’t find the obsession with natural selection on the part of Darwinians to be all that scientific either. The near cult religion on selectionist Darwinism should not be crammed down students throats in the name of religion-free science.
We need to hear from the scientists whose critiques were purloined by the religious groups, ID-ists among them (a good example being Philip Johnson’s book), e.g. Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, or an older developmentalist like Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: Refutation Of A Myth.
The purpose of the article cited about the eonic effect (’let’s change the subject to the eonic effect’) was to change the subject to history, and to suggest a different way out of the intractable debate: a Kantian discipline to challenge both parties to a concealed metaphysical debate. In the final analysis natural selection has been made into a talisman of metaphysics and parents have a right to protest the indoctrination of their children by the type of half-educated technical specialists who have themselves been ill-served by the Darwinian PR disguised as science education that currently reigns.
A kind of Kantian neutrality, ‘nobody gets nothing’ as to theories, might help to enforce the discipline of what we don’t know.
Meanwhile, consider if Toynbee were made the man who ‘answered all the questions about history’, and were made obligatory in schools on the basis of science. We would protest to leave history alone, and keep it the diffuse study that it in fact is. A similar approach ought to be as obviously necessary for the study of evolution. Most students of science are visibly confused about their own subject matter because of the Darwin straightjacket thrust upon them. Scientists are very contemptuous of religious people, but their own poor training makes them as bad in their own way.

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