by Phillip E. Johnson
1994


MY STARTING POINT is a book review that Theodosius Dobzhansky published in 1975, critiquing Pierre Grasse's The Evolution of Life.{1} Grasse, an eminent French zoologist, believed in something that he called "evolution." So did Dobzhansky, but when Dobzhansky used that term he meant neo-Darwinism, evolution propelled by random mutation and guided by natural selection. Grasse used the same term to refer to something very different, a poorly understood process of transformation in which one general category (like reptiles) gave rise to another (like mammals), guided by mysterious "internal factors" that seemed to compel many individual lines of descent to converge at a new form of life. Grasse
denied emphatically that mutation and selection have the power to create new complex organs or body plans, explaining that the intra-species variation that results from DNA copying errors is mere fluctuation, which never leads to any important innovation. Dobzhansky's famous work with fruitflies was a case in point. According to Grasse,The genic differences noted between separate populations of the same species that are so often presented as evidence of ongoing evolution are, above all, a case of the adjustment of a population to its habitat and of the effects of genetic drift. The fruitfly (drosophila melanogaster), the favorite pet insect of the geneticists, whose geographical, biotropical, urban, and rural genotypes are now known inside out, seems not to have changed since the remotest times.{2}

Grasse insisted that the defining quality of life is the intelligence
encoded in its biochemical systems, an intelligence that cannot be
understood solely in terms of its material embodiment The minerals that
form a great cathedral do not differ essentially from the same materials
in the rocks and quarries of the world; the difference is human
intelligence, which adapted them for a given purpose. Similarly,
Any living being possesses an enormous amount of "intelligence," very much
more than is necessary to build the most magnificent of cathedrals. Today,
this "intelligence" is called information, but it is still the same thing.
It is not programmed as in a computer, but rather it is condensed on a
molecular scale in the chromosomal DNA or in that of every other organelle
in each cell. This "intelligence" is the sine qua non of life. Where does
it come from? . . . This is a problem that concerns both biologists and
philosophers, and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it....
If to determine the origin of information in a computer is not a false
problem, why should the search for the information contained in cellular
nuclei be one?{3}

Grasse argued that, due to their uncompromising commitment to materialism,
the Darwinists who dominate evolutionary biology have failed to define
properly the problem they were trying to solve. The real problem of
evolution is to account for the origin of new genetic information, and it
is not solved by providing illustrations of the acknowledged capacity of
an existing genotype to vary within limits. Darwinists had imposed upon
evolutionary theory the dogmatic proposition that variation and innovative
evolution are the same process, and then had employed a systematic bias in
the interpretation of evidence to support the dogma. Here are some
representative judgments from Grasse's introductory chapter:
Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded
extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created.... Biochemists and
biologists who adhere blindly to the Darwinist theory search for results
that will be in agreement with their theories.... Assuming that the
Darwinian hypothesis is correct, they interpret fossil data according to
it; it is only logical that [the data] should confirm it; the premises
imply the conclusions.... The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not
always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook
reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity of
their beliefs.{4}

Dobzhansky's review succinctly summarized Grasse's central thesis:
The book of Pierre P. Grasse is a frontal attack on all kinds of
"Darwinism." Its purpose is "to destroy the myth of evolution as a simple,
understood, and explained phenomenon," and to show that evolution is a
mystery about which little is, and perhaps can be, known.

Grasse was an evolutionist, but his dissent from Darwinism could hardly
have been more radical if he had been a creationist. It is not merely that
he built a detailed empirical case against the neo-Darwinian picture of
evolution. At the philosophical level, he challenged the crucial doctrine
of uniformitarianism which holds that processes detectable by our
present-day science were also responsible for the great transformations
that occurred in the remote past. According to Grasse, evolving species
acquire a new store of genetic information through "a phenomenon whose
equivalent cannot be seen in the creatures living at the present time
(either because it is not there or because we are unable to see it)."{5}
Grasse acknowledged that such speculation "arouses the suspicions of many
biologists . . . [because] it conjures up visions of the ghost of vitalism
or of some mystical power which guides the destiny of living things...."
He defended himself from these charges by arguing that the evidence of
genetics, zoology, and paleontology refutes the Darwinian theory that
random mutation and natural selection were important sources of
evolutionary innovation. Given the state of the empirical evidence, to
acknowledge the existence of some as yet undiscovered orienting force that
guided evolution was merely to face the facts. Grasse even turned the
charges of mysticism against his opponents, commenting sarcastically that
nothing could be more mystical than the Darwinian view that "nature acts
blindly, unintelligently, but by an infinitely benevolent good fortune
builds mechanisms so intricate that we have not even finished with
analysis of their structure and have not the slightest insight of the
physical principles and functioning of some of them."{6}

Dobzhansky disagreed with Grasse fundamentally, but he acknowledged at the
outset that his French counterpart knew as much about the scientific
evidence regarding animal evolution as anyone in the world. As he put it,
Now one can disagree with Grasse but not ignore him. He is the most
distinguished of French zoologists, the editor of the 28 volumes of Traite
de Zoologie, author of numerous original investigations, and ex-president
of the Academie des Sciences. His knowledge of the living world is
encyclopedic.

In short, Grasse had not gone wrong due to ignorance. Then where had he
gone wrong? According to Dobzhansky, the problem was that the most
distinguished of French zoologists did not understand the rules of
scientific reasoning. As Dobzhansky summed up the situation:
The mutation-selection theory attempts, more or less successfully, to make
the causes of evolution accessible to reason. The postulate that the
evolution is "oriented" by some unknown force explains nothing. This is
not to say that the synthetic . . theory has explained everything. Far
from this, this theory opens to view a great field which needs
investigation. Nothing is easier than to point out that this or that
problem is unsolved and puzzling. But to reject what is known, and to
appeal to some wonderful future discovery which may explain it all, is
contrary to sound scientific method. The sentence with which Grasse ends
his book is disturbing: "It is possible that in this domain biology,
impotent, yields the floor to metaphysics."

I have begun with the Dobzhansky/Grasse exchange to make the point that
whether one believes or disbelieves in Darwinism does not necessarily
depend upon how much one knows about the facts of biology. Belief that the
various types of plants and animals were created by an extension of the
kind of changes Dobzhansky's experiments brought about in fruitflies, is
at bottom a question of metaphysics. By metaphysics, I mean nothing more
pretentious than the assumptions we all make about just which
possibilities are worth considering seriously. For example, Pierre Grasse
was willing to consider, and eventually to endorse, the possibility that
the so-called "evolution in action" which the neo-Darwinists were
observing is merely a variation or fluctuation that is not a source of
evolutionary innovation. To put the point in the language used by some
contemporary biologists, Grasse proposed to "decouple macroevolution from
microevolution." Such proposals have generally floundered on the inability
to establish sufficiently credible distinctive macroevolutionary
mechanisms. (For example, the widely publicized "new theory" of punctuated
equilibrium turned out to be just a gloss upon Ernst Mayr's thoroughly
Darwinian theory of peripatric speciation.) What was different about
Grasse was that he was willing to give unprejudiced consideration to the
possibility that science does not know, and may never know, how new
quantities of genetic infommation have come into the world.

From Dobzhansky's viewpoint, prejudice against such a possibility is a
virtue, because to accept that kind of limitation would be to give up on
science. As he saw it, we already know a lot about how plants and animal
populations vary in the everyday world of ecological time. Dog breeders
have given us St. Bernards and dachshunds, laboratory experiments have
produced monstrous fruitflies, mainland species have differentiated after
migrating to offshore islands, and the ratio of dark to light peppered
moths in a population changed when the background trees were dark due to
industrial air pollution. To be sure, none of these examples demonstrated
the kind of innovation that Grasse had in mind. In the absence of a better
theory, however, Darwinists consider it reasonable to assume that these
variations illustrate the working in ecological time of a grand process
that over geological ages created fruitflies and peppered moths and
scientific observers in the first place. By making that extrapolation
Darwinists create a scientific paradigm that can be fleshed out with
further research, and improved. For a critic to suggest the possible
existence of some factor outside the paradigm is helpful only if he or she
can also propose a research strategy for investigating it. To Dobzhansky,
therefore, Grasse's insistence that the sources of new genetic information
might not be "accessible to reason" was pointless and harmful to the cause
of science.

There is a political and religious dimension to the issues Grasse and
Dobzhansky were debating, which must also be considered. To say as Grasse
did that, in the domain of creation, "biology, impotent, yields the floor
to metaphysics" is to imply something important about the relative
cultural authority of biologists and metaphysicians. Whatever that might
mean in France, in the United States the scientific establishment has been
in conflict over evolution for generations with the advocates of
creationism. Although the scientists have won all the legal battles, there
are still a lot of creationists around who are very much unconvinced by
what the Darwinists are telling them. How many there are depends upon how
"creationism" is defined. The most visible creationists are the biblical
fundamentalists who believe in a young earth and a creation in six,
twenty-four hour days; Darwinists like to give the impression that
opposition to what they call "evolution" is confined to this group. In a
broader sense, however, a creationist is any person who believes that
there is a Creator who brought about the existence of humans for a
purpose. In this broad sense, the vast majority of Americans are
creationists. According to a 1991 Gallup poll, 47 percent of a national
sample agreed with the following statement: "God created mankind in pretty
much our present form sometime within the last 10,000 years." Another 40
percent think that "Man has developed over millions of years from less
advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's
creation." Only 9 percent of the sample said that they believed in
biological evolution as a purposeless process not guided by God.
The evolutionary theory endorsed by the American scientific and
educational establishment is of course the creed of the 9 percent, not the
God-guided gradual creation of the 40 percent. Persons who endorse a
God-guided process of evolution may think that they have reconciled
religion and science, but this is an illusion produced by vague
terminology. A representative Darwinist statement of "the meaning of
evolution" may be found in George Gaylord Simpson's book bearing that
title. In the words of Simpson:

Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that
all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by
purely naturalistic or, in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word,
materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of
differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern
conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of the
known processes of heredity.... Man is the result of a purposeless and
natural process that did not have him in mind.{7}

The prestige of the scientific establishment, and of the intellectual
class in general, is heavily committed to the proposition that evolution-
as George Gaylord Simpson used the term-is either a fact, or a theory so
well supported by evidence that only ignorant or thoroughly unreasonable
people refuse to believe it. If the scientists ever had to retreat on this
issue, the cultural consequences could be significant. Persons who now
have prestigious status as cultural authorities would be discredited, and
the political and moral positions they have advocated might be discredited
with them. That is the fear of Michael Ruse, author of Darwinism Defended.
Ruse proclaims proudly that Darwinism reflects "a strong ideology," and
"one to be proud of." According to Ruse, contemporary Darwinians "show a
strong liberal commitment" in both their politics and their sexual
morality.{8} Advocates of creation, on the other hand, want to restore a
"morality based on narrow Biblical lines" with respect to marriage and
sexual behavior. Upholding Darwinism is therefore an important way of
protecting political liberalism, feminism, and the sexual revolution of
the 1960s. Ruse concludes his book with these stirring lines "Darwinism
has a great past. Let us work to see that it has an even greater
future."{9} Such statements are equivalent to the claims of
creation-science advocates that to doubt the Genesis account is to open
the floodgates for all kinds of immorality. I think that Michael Ruse and
Henry Morris are both right to insist that cultural acceptance of
Darwinism has important consequences for politics and morality.
Recognition of this factor, however, also has important implications for
how we should regard Darwinism's rules of reasoning. Are those rules
designed to protect a charter of liberty from scientific
criticism-criticism that might, wittingly or unwittingly, give aid and
comfort to persons who want to deprive the Darwinist establishment of its
cultural authority? If physicists were to start to proclaim that the Big
Bang has had a wonderful past, and we must all work to see that it has a
wonderful future, I am sure we would all lose confidence in their ability
to assess objectively the arguments of Big Bang critics.

Darwinism's rules of reasoning not only protect the cultural authority of
Darwinists. They also permit Darwinist writers to take the
mutation/selection paradigm for granted even when they are describing
evidence that directly contradicts it. This feat of intellectual
contortionism is strikingly illustrated by Stephen Jay Gould's book,
Wonderful Life. Gould's best seller adds a great deal to our knowledge of
the "Cambrian explosion," meaning the sudden appearance of the
invertebrate animal phyla, without visible ancestors, in the 600
million-year-old rocks of the Cambrian era. Unicellular life had existed
for a long time, and some multicellular groups appear in the immediately
Precambrian rocks, but nothing can be established as ancestral to the
Cambrian animals. As Richard Dawkins described the situation, "It is as
though [the Cambrian phyla] were just planted there, without any
evolutionary history."{10}

In recent years the mystery has deepened, because it appears that the
Cambrian animal groups were far more varied than had been imagined. The
more distinct groups that there were in the Cambrian, the more chains of
ancestors there ought to have been in the Precambrian. Some remarkable
Cambrian fossils found in a Canadian formation known as the Burgess Shale
were originally classified in familiar groups. Gould explains that the
discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils, Charles Walcott, tried to
"shoehorn" the odd creatures into familiar taxonomic categories because of
his predisposition to avoid multiplying the difficulties of what is called
the "artifact theory" of the Precambrian fossil record. As Gould explains
the problem:

Two different kinds of explanations for the absence of Precambrian
ancestors have been debated for more than a century: the artifact theory
(they did exist, but the fossil record hasn't preserved them), and the
fast-transition theory (they really didn't exist, at least as complex
invertebrates easily linked to their descendants, and the evolution of
modern anatomical plans occurred with a rapidity that threatens our usual
ideas about the stately pace of evolutionary change).

Reclassification of the Burgess Shale fossils has now established some
fifteen or twenty species that cannot be related to any known group and
therefore constitute distinct and previously unknown phyla. There are also
many other species that can fit within an existing phylum but are still
remarkably distinct from anything known to exist earlier or later. The
general history of animal life is thus a burst of general body plans
followed by extinction. Many species exist today which are absent from the
rocks of the remote past, but they fit within general taxonomic categories
present from the very beginning. Darwinian theory predicts a "cone of
increasing diversity," as the first living organism, or first animal
species, gradually and continually diversified to create the higher levels
of the taxonomic order. The animal fossil record more resembles such a
cone turned upside down, with the phyla present at the start and
thereafter decreasing. In short, the more we learn about the Cambrian
fossils, the more difficult it becomes to see them as the product of
Darwinian evolution.

Gould describes the reclassification of the Burgess fossils as the "death
knell of the artifact theory'" because it adds so many new groups that
appear without Precambrian ancestors.

If evolution could produce ten new Cambrian phyla and then wipe them out
just as quickly, then what about the surviving Cambrian groups? Why should
they have had a long and honorable Precambrian pedigree? Why should they
not have originated just before the Cambrian. as the fossil record, read
literally, seems to indicate, and as the fast-transition theory
proposes?{11}

A mysterious process that produces dozens of complex animal groups
directly from single-celled predecessors, with only some words like
"fast-transition" in between, may be called "evolution"-but the term is
being used more in the sense of Grasse's heresy than of Dobzhansky's
Darwinian orthodoxy. Each of those Cambrian animals contained a variety of
immensely complicated organ systems. How can such innovations appear
except by the gradual accumulation of micromutations, unless there was
some supernatural intervention? It is not only that the Darwinian theory
requires a very gradual line of descent from each Cambrian animal group
back to its hypothetical single-celled ancestor. Because Darwinian
evolution is a purposeless, chance-driven process, which would not proceed
directly from a starting point to a destination, there should also be
thick bushes of side branches in each line. As Darwin himself put it, if
Darwinism is true the Precambrian world must have "swarmed with living
creatures" many of which were ancestral to the Cambrian animals. If he
really rejects the artifact theory of the Precambrian fossil record, Gould
also rejects the Darwinian theory of evolution.{12}

Readers familiar with Gould's writings know that he has at times expressed
great skepticism concerning the neo-Darwinian theory that Dobzhansky
proclaimed so confidently. In a paper published in Paleobiology in 1980,
Gould wrote that, although he had been "beguiled" by the unifying power of
neo-Darwinism when he studied it as a graduate student in the 1960s, the
weight of the evidence has since driven him to the reluctant conclusion
that neo-Darwinism "as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite
its persistence as textbook orthodoxy."{13} In place of the dead orthodoxy
Gould predicted the emergence of a new macroevolutionary theory based on
the views of geneticist Richard Goldschmidt, another heretic whose views
were every bit as obnoxious to Darwinists as those of Grasse. The new
theory did not arrive as predicted, however, and Gould subsequently seems
to have heeded Dobzhansky's admonition: if you can't improve on the
mutation/selection mechanism, don't trash it in public.

For whatever reason, Gould did not point out to his readers that the
utterly un-Darwinian Cambrian fossil record provides no support whatever
for claims about the role of mutation and selection in the creation of
complex animal life, or for metaphysical speculations about the
purposelessness of the process that created humans. Instead, he indulged
freely in just such speculation himself rightly judging that his audience
of intellectuals would accept uncritically his casual assumption of
metaphysical naturalism. In the concluding chapter he commented on a
Burgess Shale fossil called Pikaia. Walcott classified Pikaia as a worm,
but a more recent study concludes that the creature was a member of the
phylum Chordata, which includes the subphylum Vertebrata, which includes
us. That for Gould means that Pikaia might be our ancestor, which implies
that, unlike many other Burgess Shale creatures, it left descendants. If
Pikaia had not survived the mass extinctions that killed off so many other
Cambrian fossil creatures, we would never have evolved. The existence of
humans is therefore not a predictable consequence of evolution, but a
never-to-be-repeated accident. Gould concluded this reflection, and the
book, with the following sentence:

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this
most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes-one indifferent to
our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to
fail, in our own chosen way.

Of course absolutely nothing in the Burgess Shale fossils supports Gould's
speculation that the universe is indifferent to our sufferings, or
discredits the belief that we are responsible to a divine Creator who
actively intervened in nature to bring about our existence. On the
contrary, the genuine scientific portion of Wonderful Life provides ample
grounds for doubting the expansive notions of metaphysical naturalists
like Theodosius Dobzhansky and George Gaylord Simpson. But because of
Darwinism's rules of reasoning, even anti-Darwinian evidence supports
Darwinism.

The statement defining the agenda for this symposium asserts that an a
priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism is necessary to support
Darwinism. Methodological naturalism- the principle that science can study
only the things that are accessible to its instruments and techniques-is
not in question. Of course science can study only what science can study.
Methodological naturalism becomes metaphysical naturalism only when the
limitations of science are taken to be limitations upon reality. If the
history of life can involve only those natural and material processes that
our science can observe, then either Darwinism or something very much like
it simply must be true as a matter of philosophical deduction, regardless
of how scanty the evidence may be. Add to this the requirement that
critics of a paradigm must propose an alternative-and we have the
metaphysical rules of Dobzhansky.

I do not doubt that Darwinian evolution will continue as the reigning
paradigm as long as Dobzhansky's metaphysical rules are enforced. To say
this is merely to say that the neo-Darwinian synthesis is the most
plausible naturalistic and materialistic theory for the development of
complex life that is now available. That proposition in turn is virtually
a tautology, because the synthesis is a vague and flexible conglomeration
that readily incorporates any seemingly non-Darwinian elements-such as the
molecular clock or punctuated equilibrium-that appear from time to
time.{14} If Dobzhansky makes the rules, Darwinism wins; but what happens
if we evaluate the theory by Pierre Grasse's rules? I have argued my
position on the evidence at book length in Darwin on Trial, and I will not
go over that ground again now. My concern on this occasion is merely to
speak about how we can conduct a fair and illuminating discussion of this
subject.

I propose that we avoid using the word evolution altogether, or at least
that we carefully specify what meaning we have in mind when we do use the
term. The problem is that "evolution" has many meanings, some of which are
controversial and some of which are not. Nobody, including the
creation-scientists, denies that selection by human intelligence can cause
a degree of variation, of the kind seen in the breeding of domestic
animals or fruitfiles. Nobody denies that mutation and selection have
caused variation in nature, as with the varieties of shapes and colors in
the famous finches of the Galapagos islands or the shifting ratios of dark
and light peppered moths in the midlands of England. As we have seen,
Pierre Grasse denied that these observations illustrate "evolution,"
because they merely bring out the capacity for variation in an existing
genotype and do not involve the introduction of new genetic information.
If we are going to discuss this argument, it can only confuse matters to
make statements like "The evidence of biogeography provides ample evidence
of evolution." Of course it does, but does it illustrate the kind of
evolution that nobody disputes or the kind that many of us, including
eminent biologists, do dispute? Biogeography does tell us that certain
marsupial mammals exist only in Australia, for example. What else does it
tell us about the process that created them?

I have found it helpful when discussing Darwinism to speak not of
"evolution" but rather of the "blind watchmaker thesis," after the title
of the famous book by Richard Dawkins. This book is the outstanding
contemporary defense of the part of Darwinism that is really interesting:
the claim that natural selection can accomplish wonders of creation, and
not merely a degree of diversification. According to Dawkins, "Biology is
the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been
designed for a purpose. "{15} This is essentially what Pierre Grasse had
in mind when he compared living organisms to things like cathedrals and
computer programs that are designed by human intelligence for a purpose.
Of course, Dawkins argues that this appearance is misleading, because the
features that appear to have been designed were in fact produced by the
purposeless, unintelligent processes of mutation and selection.

Whether this argument is supported by evidence when it is considered
without prejudice is the fundamental point at issue. Prejudice enters the
discussion if, for example, we define "science" as requiring an a priori
assumption of metaphysical naturalism. In that case, the blind watchmaker
thesis simply has to be true as a matter of philosophical deduction, and
the scientific evidence is relevant only to illustrate a doctrine that we
know to be true in advance.

My first proposal is that we should define terms carefully and use them
consistently, trying at all times to illuminate points of disagreement
rather than to dismiss them with semantic devices, such as the use of
argumentative definitions of "evolution" or science.' My second point is
that we should give careful consideration to the appropriate role of
theological arguments in scientific discussions of Darwinism. I am
referring here not to those creationists who invoke the Bible, but to the
important role that a theological argument -"God wouldn't have done it
this way"-plays in Darwinist apologetics. For example, Stephen Jay Gould's
famous argument in The Panda's Thumb takes this form: A proper Creator
would not have made the Panda's thumb from a wristbone, or used homologous
components in orchids. To quote Gould:

Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of
ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If
God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power,
surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned
for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are
jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must
have evolved from ordinary flowers.{16}

And of course "evolution" implies the blind watchmaker thesis, which
implies that we live in a purposeless cosmos that cares nothing for our
sufferings. David Hull makes a similar argument in his review for Nature
of Darwin on Trial. On the time-honored theory that the best defense is a
good offense, Hull defends the blind watchmaker thesis by attacking the
divine creation alternative. The world is full of waste and cruelty:

therefore God didn't create it and therefore the blind watchmaker
presumably did. I could leave the matter there, but I enjoyed Hull's
chamber of horrors so much that I will quote the relevant passage:
What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by
the species on Darwin's Galapagos islands? The evolutionary process is
rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and
horror. Millions of sperm and ova are produced that never unite to form a
zygote. Of the millions of zygotes that are produced, only a few ever
reach maturity. On current estimates, 95 per cent of the DNA that an
organism contains has no function. Certain organic systems are marvels of
engineering; others are little more than contraptions. When the eggs that
cuckoos lay in the nests of other birds hatch, the cuckoo chick proceeds
to push the eggs of its foster parents out of the nest. The queens of a
particular species of parasitic ant have only one remarkable adaptation, a
serrated appendage which they use to saw off the head of the host
queen.... Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of
natural history may be like, He is not the Protestant God of waste not,
want not. He is also not a loving God who cares about His productions. He
is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job. The God of the
Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is
certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.
Simpson tells us that the world is purposeless because Darwinian evolution
did all the creating. Gould and Hull tell us that Darwinian evolution must
have done the creating because the characteristics of organisms imply a
world devoid of purpose. A wise and benevolent creator would not employ
homologous parts; would not waste millions of sperm and ova when one pair
would suffice; would not countenance the deplorable ethics of the cuckoo;
and would not even allow the variations in finches and turtles that Darwin
observed in the Galapagos. These particular examples don't seem persuasive
to me, but lurking behind them is the well-known argument from evil and
undeserved suffering that forms the background to some of the world's
greatest literature, from the book of Job to Paradise Lost to The Brothers
Karamazov. Yes, the world is full of waste and suffering, and also
nobility and beauty. If that is all that is necessary to establish
Darwinian evolution, then Darwinian evolution is established. But do we
call this kind of reasoning science?

I am not going to address the philosophical arguments against theism on
this occasion, because my position is that speculation about what God
would or would not have done should play no part in scientific discussion.
If others want to bring theology into the picture, that is fine with me,
but I want them to recognize that the will of God is not a subject over
which biologists have professional jurisdiction. If we are going to debate
theology the theologians are going to have a place at the table, and that
includes creationist theologians. If Darwinists want to avoid the
situation predicted by Grasse, where biology yields to metaphysics, I
suggest that they agree to put Theological speculations aside.

Leaving theology out of the discussion doesn't mean that scientists should
assume contently that God does not exist and go on to build philosophical
theories on that foundation. What it does mean is that scientists should
try to find out as much as they can about how the world works through
empirical investigation, recognizing that an appropriately humble science
may be unable to come to confident conclusions about matters that are
difficult to observe. Science should be more than just a weapon that
metaphysical naturalists wield in their arguments with theists. It should
be a self-critical search for as much of the truth as it's methods of
investigation can ascertain, which may or may not include the truth about
how new quantities of genetic information have come into the world.

NOTES

{1} Pierre P. Grasse L'Evolution du Vivant (1973), published in English
translation as The Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) (hereafter
Grasse). The review of the original French edition by Dobzhansky, titled
"Darwinian or 'Oriented' Evolution?" appeared in Evolution, vol. 29 (June
1975). pp. 376-378.
{2} Grasse, p. 130.
{3} Grasse. p. 2.
{4} Grasse, pp. 7-8.
{5} Grasse, p, 208. See also p. 71: "We are certain that it [evolution]
does not operate today as it did in the remote past. Something has
changed. . . . The structural plans no longer undergo complete
reorganization; novelties are no longer plentiful. Evolution, after its
last enormous effort to form the mammalian orders and man, seems to be out
of breath and drowsing off."
{6} Grasse, p 168.
{7} George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (rev. ed, 1967), pp.
344-345.
{8} Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (Addison-Wesley, 1982), p.280.
{9} Ruse, pp. 328-329.
{10} Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Longman, UK, 1986), p. 229.
{11} Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (1989), pp. 271-273.
{12} Careful readers will note that the non-existence of the Cambrian
ancestors is vaguely qualified by the phrase "at least as complex
invertebrates easily linked to their descendants." I have learned to be
alert to this sort of qualification in Gould's writing, because it signals
a possible line of retreat. I have reason to believe that Gould would
repopulate the Precambrian world with invisible ancestors, and thus re
embrace the artifact theory, if he were accused of abandoning the
mutation/selection mechanism and thus leaving unexplained the evolution of
complexity.
{13} Stephen Jay Gould, "Is a New and General Theory of Evolution
Emerging?" Paleobiology, vol. 6 (1980), pp. 119-130. Reprinted in the
collection Evolution Now: A Century After Darwin (Maynard Smith, ed.,
1982).
{14} Stephen Jay Gould has complained that vagueness in the definition of
the neo-Darwinian synthesis "imposes a great frustration upon anyone who
would characterize the modern synthesis in order to criticize it." Gould,
"Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?" pp. 130-131, in the
collection Evolution Now: A Century After Darwin (Maynard Smith, ed.,
1982).
{15} Dawkins, p. 1,
{16} Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb, p.20.

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