10.22.08
Dailykos and the evolution issue
DarkSyde at DailyKos comments on Darwin debate, and the Texas version thereof, http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/22/10302/493/344/637325
I have commented on this theme at Dailykos several times here, so far to no avail (having been banned from the site). Between the Texas Freedom Network, and this from a chairman of State Board of Education, and fundamentalist, there is a failure on both sides.
I can understand the frustration of scientists, but must insist again that this situation is partly their own fault. The debate, firstly, oscillates between two versions, the debate over evolution, and the debate over natural selection.
Defenders of science can reasonably expect the public to accept the evidence for evolution, but if they get greedy and ambitious for the metaphysical plus granted if you steal a base on natural selection, all your scientific protestations will be in vain and the whole horde from creationists to the ID movement will cry foul and rightly demand relief from stealth educational indoctrination. And, true, the creationists, seeing the flaws in natural selection theory will thence conclude (as the ID folks at Discovery do not) that evolution therefore fails also.
The debate is over science, but the thesis of natural selection, as dogmatically proposed, is poor science.
So why not just stop being a Dawkins propaganda front in the name of science, and just do science right.
Biology can be taught first class with the data of evolution presented as is, with natural selection clearly presented as still unsufficiently documented hypothesis.
The stance of science should be that we do not yet know how evolution works. This approach will disarm the obsessive religious interpretations proposed in self-defense against stealth scientism/atheism to counter the pseudo-scientific distortions passed as Darwinism.
The situation is not complex, but apparently it is too complex for the graduates of science education, abducted into the Dawkins club, there, among other things, to indirectly ply atheism under the banner of scientism/Darwinism, even as a few patsies arrive in public to announce that evolution and theology are compatible. This leaves an irony as to the issue under dispute, education.
Scientists need to create a decent humanism that can be something more than groupie Darwinism/atheism proposed by the Dawkins pied pipers.
Small wonder religionists protest. And they have remained an invariant opposition, because, whatever their own confused views, they understand enough to see that they are not required by real science to accept natural selection.
And I challenge Dailykos not to warp their political initiative with this false Darwinism. It is not needed to pursue their political work. The Darwin group is not really a liberal group. Why inflict this biased Darwinism on the left? Why not pioneer a new approach? It can be aggressively secularist, and promote science, but set the limit on the Social Darwinist pseudo-science of Darwinism, which has no place in the liberal pantheon.
The issue is urgent because of the alarming inability of scientists to learn anything from this situation. The reputation of science is at risk, as Philip Johnson made clear years ago, before the ID issue was set into motion, and without proposing as yet the ID gambit, in his Darwin on Trial, citing the arguments of scientists themselves critiquing Darwin’s theory.
What we saw at the time was the universal bloviation of ‘science experts’ incapable of getting the point, and determined, by delusion, or guile, to whallop the public with the standard Darwin propaganda line. I mention this because the DarkSyde article cites the Dover trial, where it was ID on trial. By a manipulation of public power resources, not science. A similar trial of Darwin’s theory was forestalled.
The power of propaganda is corrupting science. They know they can get away with lying, if they can handle the revolts now proliferating from the Bible Belt. They had better dispense with propaganda and do some science, enough science to see the limits of Darwinism.
Else, they will encounter nothing but religion at the End Of Science.