by Phillip E. Johnson
Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley


This paper was originally delivered at a plenary session of the Southwestern
Anthropological Association in Berkeley, California in April, 1992. It was
subsequently published in the California Anthropologist and in Rivista di
Biologia (1994) (in Italian and English). A similar lecture is included in the
collection Darwinism: Science or Philosophy?(Buell & Hearn ed. 1994).


My starting point is a book review which Theodosius Dobzhansky published in
1975, critiquing Pierre Grass's The Evolution of Life.(1) Grass, an eminent
French zoologist, believed in something which 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. Grass
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" which
seemed to compel many individual lines of descent to converge at a new form of
life. Grass 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 Grass,

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)

Grass 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 which form a great cathedral do
not differ essentially from the same materials in the rocks and quarries of the
world; the difference is man's 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)

Grass argued that the Darwinists who dominate evolutionary biology have failed,
due to their uncompromising commitment to materialism, 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 Grass'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 summarized Grass's central thesis succinctly:

The book of Pierre P. Grass 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.

Grass 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 Grass, 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) Grass 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.
Grass 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 Grass 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 Grass 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, Grass 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 acces- sible 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 dis- covery which may
explain it all, is contrary to sound scientific method. The sentence with
which Grass ends his book is disturbing: "It is possible that in this domain
biology, impotent, yields the floor to metaphysics."

I began with the Dobzhansky/Grass 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 Grass 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 within the limits of the existing genotype
and not a source of genuine evolutionary innovation. To put the point in the
language used by some contemporary biologists, Grass proposed to "decouple
macroevolution from microevolution." Such proposals have generally foundered 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.) Grass differed from the Darwinists in that he
was willing to consider the possibility that science does not know, and may
never know, how new quantities of genetic information have come into the world.
From Dobzhansky's viewpoint, to consider such a possibility would be to give up
on science. As Dobzhansky 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 Grass
had in mind. In the absence of a better theory, however, Darwinists consider it
reasonable to assume that these observable 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 which 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 can also
propose a research strategy for investigating it. To Dobzhansky, therefore,
Grass's insistence that the sources of new genetic information might be a
mystery to our science was pointless and harmful to the cause of science.
There is a political and religious dimension to the issues Grass and Dobzhansky
were debating which must also be considered. To say as Grass 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 with 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 24-hour days, and 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent, not the God-guided
gradual creation of the 40 per cent. 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)

"Evolution" is a vague term which can be used in a variety of senses. When it
means only that a certain amount of natural change occurs in nature, it has no
great philosophical consequences. What Simpson was describing was something much
more specific, which I prefer to call the "blind watchmaker hypothesis," after
the famous book by Richard Dawkins. According to Dawkins, "Biology is the study
of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a
purpose."(8) Dawkins wrote his book to convince the public of something that
Darwinians take for granted: The appearance of purposeful design in biology is
misleading, because all living organisms, including ourselves, are the products
of a natural evolutionary process employing random variation and natural
selection. As Dawkins explains,

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see
ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living
results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of
design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design
and planning.(9)

We might therefore say that the watchmaker is not only blind, but unconscious.
The really important meaning of "evolution" is not that creation was a gradual
process that required billions of years. It is that the process was supposedly
undirected and purposeless. The prestige of the scientific establishment, and of
the intellectual class in general, is heavily committed to the proposition that
evolution -- in the blind watchmaker sense -- 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 a 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, most contemporary Darwinians "show a strong liberal
commitment" in both their politics and their sexual morality.(10) Advocates of
creation, on the other hand, want to restore a "morality based on narrow
Biblical lines" with respect to marriage and sexual behavior. Ironically
Darwinism, which has at so often been associated with ideologies of racial
superiority, eugenics, and unrestrained competition, is currently enlisted in
the fight against that trinity of political incorrectness: racism, sexism, and
homophobia. 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."(11)

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 had 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 cherished doctrine 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 belief in the Big Bang has had
wonderful political and moral consequences, and we must all work to see that the
Big Bang has a wonderful future, surely we would begin to wonder about their
objectivity.

Darwinism's rules of reasoning not only protect the cultural authority of
Darwinists. They also permit Darwinist writers to take the mutation/selection
mechanism for granted even when they are describing evidence which directly
contradicts it. This feat of intellectual contortionism is strikingly
illustrated by Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life. Gould's bestseller 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 there is nothing that 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."(12)

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 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).(13)
The two graphics in Figure 1 illustrate both the problem the Cambrian Explosion
poses for any theory of evolution, and the way a museum exhibition attempts to
control the damage. The Exhibition is titled "Life Through Time: The Evidence
for Evolution," and it is at the California Academy of Sciences Museum in Golden
Gate Park in San Francisco. The lower diagram shows only the evidence, with the
phyla appearing on parallel lines and absolutely no evidence of any common
ancestors or transitional intermediates. The museum exhibit represented by the
upper diagram adds the common ancestors and alters the vertical dimension
representing the age of the fossils, in order to give the impression that the
recalcitrant data constitute the required "evidence for evolution." At the
intersection point where the common ancestors ought to be, the curators have
placed magnifying glasses. Similar devices are used elsewhere in the exhibit to
mark tiny animals or fossils. Unsophisticated museum visitors are likely to get
the impression that the invisible common ancestors are known to science, but
just a little too small for the naked eye to see. By such means even a
spectacular example of absence of evidence for evolution can be transformed into
evidence for evolution, and even evidence for the creative power of natural
selection.

The museum exhibit illustrates the Cambrian Explosion with just a few well-known
groups and thus understates the difficulty in reconciling the facts with any
known theory of evolution. Reclassification of the Burgess Shale fossils has now
established some 15 or 20 Cambrian 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
diversifies to create the various 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?(14)

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 Grass'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. [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 the evolution of complexity unexplained.]

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 1960's, 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."(15) In place of the dead orthodoxy Gould predicted the emergence of
a new macroevolutionary theory based on the views of the geneticist Richard
Goldschmidt, another heretic whose views were every bit as obnoxious to
Darwinists as those of Grass. 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 purposeless of the process that
created humans. Instead, he indulged freely in just such speculation himself,
rightly judging that his audience of intellectuals would accept an atheistic
interpretation of the evidence uncritically. 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 there is absolutely nothing in the Burgess Shale fossils to support
Gould's speculation that the universe is indifferent to our sufferings, or to
discredit 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
evidence which is thoroughly contrary to Darwinism supports Darwinism.
Darwinian evolution will surely remain 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 persons philosophically
committed to excluding the Creator from the Cosmos have been able to invent. The
neo-Darwinian synthesis is a vague and flexible conglomeration that readily
incorporates any seemingly non-Darwinian elements -- such as the molecular
clock, or punctuated equilibrium, or even the ability of bacteria to summon
needed mutations -- that appear from time to time. If Dobzhansky's team makes
the rules this conglomeration of naturalistic ideas wins, because all the
powerful critical points made by such informed critics as Pierre Grass are
excluded a priori from consideration.

To Darwinists evolution is by definition a single phenomenon. Dobzhansky's
fruitfly variations constitute evolution, and evolution is also the grand
creative process that produced fruitflies and human beings in the first place.
Of course new genetic information originates by some combination of random
genetic changes and natural selection: how else could it originate without the
participation of some force unknown to our science? Darwinism is the product of
Dobzhansky's rules, and to protect the theory contemporary Darwinists insist
that those rules are binding upon all who would ask questions about how complex
life came into existence. Does Darwinian selection really have the creative
effect that Darwinists claim for it? The question doesn't arise. The power of
natural selection to create was settled long ago -- not by evidence, but by the
cultural power of those who made the rules. Anyone who questions those rules --
even if he is President of the French Academy and the most knowledgeable
zoologist in the world -- is dismissed out of hand. He doesn't understand how
science works.

I have the honor of speaking today to an audience of anthropologists in an age
which is often characterized as "post- modern." Surely this audience above all
others ought to understand how a priesthood can maintain its cultural authority
by enforcing rules of discourse that prevent consideration of alternatives that
the priests disfavor. I assume that this audience also has some acquaintance
with the literature of the philosophy of science. If so, you are not likely to
be fooled by persons who proclaim that there is a unitary activity called
"science," which has fixed boundaries and is governed by a set of rules that no
one may question. Philosophers know better. Here, for example, is the concluding
paragraph of Larry Laudan's famous article, "The Demise of the Demarcation
Problem:"

Through certain vagaries of history, ...we have managed to conflate two quite
distinct questions: What makes a belief well founded (or heuristically
fertile)? And what makes a belief scientific? The first set of questions is
philosophically interesting and possibly even tractable; the second question
is both uninteresting and, judging by its checkered past, intractable. If we
would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms
like "pseudo-science" and "unscientific" from our vocabulary; they are just
hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us.... Insofar as our concern is
to protect ourselves and our fellows from the cardinal sin of believing what
we wish were so rather than what there is substantial evidence for (and surely
that is what most forms of "quackery" come down to), then our focus should be
squarely on the empirical and conceptual credentials for claims about the
world. The "scientific" status of those claims is irrelevant.(16)

Surely Laudan is on the right track. For example, whether mutation and selection
can create complex organs like wings and eyes is a question to be resolved by
evidence. To insist that belief in the creative power of natural selection is
"scientific," and doubt on the subject is inherently "religious," or even an
instance of the thought crime known as "creationism," is simply to try to
prejudice the inquiry with a tendentious use of labels. Perhaps those who
attribute creation to a Creator are committing what Laudan called "the cardinal
sin of believing what they wish were so rather than what there is substantial
evidence for." On the other hand, perhaps this is still more true of Darwinists,
who are so eager to believe on slight evidence that natural selection can do all
the work of creation.

The points in dispute can only be settled by an unbiased examination of the
evidence. Those who have confidence in their evidence and their logic do not
appeal to prejudice, nor do they insist upon imposing rules of discourse that
allow only one position to receive serious consideration, nor do they use vague
and shifting terminology to distract attention from genuine points of
difficulty. Still less do they heap abuse and ridicule upon persons who want to
raise questions about the evidence and the philosophical assumptions that
underly a theory. When an educational establishment has to resort to tactics
like that, you can be sure that some people are getting desperate.

Notes

1. Pierre P. Grass, L'Evolution du Vivant (1973), published in English
translation as The Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) (hereafter Grass). The
review of the original French edition by Dobzhansky, titled "Darwinian or
`Oriented' Evolution?" appeared in Evolution, vol. 29, pp. 376-378 (June 1975).
2. Grass, p. 130.
3. Grass, p. 2.
4. Grass, pp. 7-8.
5. Grass, 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. Grass, p. 168.
7.George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution, pp. 344-45 (rev. ed. 1967).
8. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Longman, England 1986, p. 1.
(Hereafter Dawkins)
9. Dawkins, p. 21.
10. Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (Addison Wesley, 1982), p. 280.
11. Ruse, supra, p. 328-329.
12. Dawkins, p. 229.
13. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (1989), pp. 271-273.
14. Ibid.
15. Stephen Jay Gould, "Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?",
Paleobiology, vol. 6, pp. 119-130 (1980), reprinted in the collection Evolution
Now: A Century After Darwin, (Maynard Smith ed. 1982).
16. Larry Laudan, "The Demise of the Demarcation Problem," reprinted in the
collection But Is It Science? (Ruse ed. 1988).