by John Gilder
September 24, 2001
WorldNet Daily


"It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to
believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but
I'd rather not consider that)."


Leading Darwinist Richard Dawkins
The wicked and insane will presumably have to fend for themselves, but for the
rest of us, PBS has undertaken a massive new "educational" project to promote
the "understanding of evolution."

Apparently there's a lot of misunderstanding out there, as tech billionaire Paul
Allen has ponied up some $15 million for the project (PBS refuses to disclose
exactly how much). The centerpiece is an eight-hour documentary series for the
week of Sept. 24 through 27, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Much of
Allen's money is going into a national "outreach" program aimed at our public
schools. Cadres of "special teachers" are being trained to prep school boards
and biology teachers across the country on how to respond to skeptical students
and parents. They will be aided by subsidized teaching materials, videos and a
special interactive website devoted to clearing up any "misunderstandings" the
public might have.

Having sat through all eight hours of the evo-epic, however, I suspect the
biggest problem is going to be keeping the students from lapsing into
unconsciousness out of the sheer boredom of it all.

Except for a brief lesbian lovemaking scene in the segment about sexual
reproduction, which no doubt the kids will be checking out for extra credit,
Evolution flows more turgidly than the backwaters of the Amazon basin,
meandering listlessly through its subject matter (much of which, it would seem,
having little to do with evolution) before finally getting stuck in some
stagnant pool of political correctness. (AIDS, feminism, homosexuality, the rain
forests, and man's threat to species diversity, all get airtime.)

How on earth does one make evolution boring? Whatever one thinks of it as
science, evolution has all the wonder and fascination of a modern day creation
myth. And as anybody knows who's watched the Discovery Channel, with its
seemingly infinite supply of wildlife footage of lions taking down gazelles and
whatnot, evolution makes great television.

So what went wrong? One can only make an educated guess, but it seems that the
evolutionists were blindsided by their own propaganda. It has become such an
article of faith with them that any critique of evolution can only come from
"creationists" and is thus by definition unworthy of their attention that
they were unaware of the growing body of evidence against Darwinism.
Last October, however, U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. biologist Jonathan Wells published
his groundbreaking Icons of Evolution. By that time, one assumes that most of
the pre-production of Evolution was complete, including detailed scripts.
Probably a fair amount of film was already in the can. And here comes a closely
argued, thoroughly documented scientific critique, that basically blows their
story out of the primordial soup.

The Darwinian story, after all, has remained relatively unchanged for
generations. It's what most of us learned in biology class, and it's still
taught much as we learned it. There's the Miller-Urey experiment that created
the "building blocs" of life in a test-tube. There are Haeckel's embryos showing
that all vertebrates pass through almost identical stages in development (the
source of the famous phrase, "ontology recapitulates phylogeny"). There are the
bones of bird wings, horse legs and human hands that appear so similar as to
prove common ancestry. There are the peppered moths, the finches' beaks, and the
clear line of ascent in the fossil record from ape to human.

As evidence of Darwinian evolution it was, taken altogether, extremely
convincing. It has indeed, convinced generations of lay and science students
that Darwin, with some minor modifications, had it right.

The problem is that none of it is true, or is so fraught with inconsistencies,
misinterpretation and bad (sometimes fraudulent) data as to be worthless as
science. Icons of Evolution dismantles these "proofs" one by one. Miller and
Urey never came close to creating "life in a tube" and recent discoveries about
the true nature of Earth's early atmosphere make "abiogenesis" the creation of
living organisms from non-organic chemicals more of a Chimera than ever.
Haeckel's embryos turn out to be an outright forgery, a fact that was known even
in Darwin's day, though they continue to appear in standard biology texts. Early
vertebrate embryos, it turns out, are radically different in look, size and
manner of development, and, despite what we're told over and over again, human
embryos never, ever have "gill slits," like little fishes.

"Homology" the similar structures of some animals is as good a proof of
design (more about that later) as it is of evolution and common descent,
especially considering the frequent number of homologous structures that even
evolutionists don't believe developed from a common ancestor (think of the
"duck-billed" platypus). The peppered moths had to be glued to tree trunks
where they rarely rest in nature for that experiment to yield the right
(pro-evolutionary) result, and the finches' beaks, which did grow longer during
droughts, reverted to their original size once the drought is over evidence
not of evolution but its opposite, the extraordinary stability of species.
One can't blame the producers for not knowing this. Most evolutionary "experts"
were equally in the dark.

While the problems with each specific "proof" of evolution might be known to
people in that specialized discipline (moth experts, for instance), apparently
none of them had bothered to share notes. Thus the college-level biology
textbook edited by Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of sciences,
to this day presents Haeckel's forged embryos as factual, and leading biologist
and evo-enthusiast Jerry Coyne was shocked to only recently discover the truth
about peppered moths.

The response of the Darwinist camp was largely to ignore Wells' scientific
critique (there wasn't much they could say, after all) or offer only ad hominem
attacks. Wells, they claimed, was religiously motivated. Why else would he
publish such a book? None seemed particularly concerned that generations of
students had been fed misinformation under the guise of science. A few of the
textbook writers themselves averred that one had to "simplify" examples to help
students' understanding, which is a bit like teaching them that the sun rotates
around the earth because it's so much simpler to grasp. And then, many of these
books were intended for college and post-graduate biology students.
Their final line of defense was that even if all of these proofs of evolution
were wrong, it didn't matter, because there were so many other and better
examples out there. The world was just full of them.

Well, judging by eight hours of Evolution, apparently not. Clearly the producers
had to scramble for material to fill their eight hours, which is why we have
long digressions into what appear to be AIDS awareness seminars, great swatches
of pre-packaged "save our planet" environmentalism, long speculations about sex
from sociobiologists, and enough humping bonobo apes to warm Peter Singer's,
well, cockles.

The rest is rife with error. The Discovery Institute, a non-profit founded by
old Reagan-hand Bruce Chapman, and a center for Intelligent Design science (more
about this in a moment), has published a 150-page critique of "Evolution"
documenting its numerous factual errors, historical distortions, suppositions
masquerading as scientific proof and wholly gratuitous condescension toward the
religious beliefs of the vast majority of the American people. For those
interested, the full Evolution errata can be accessed online. (For purposes of
full disclosure, this author is also connected with Discovery Institute.)
There are too many errors in Evolution to itemize here, but let's examine what
the producers clearly believe to be their strongest example: the development in
bacteria of antibiotic resistance. If one wants to demonstrate evolution in
action, as the producers claim, bacteria are certainly the best candidates. Some
of these microbes reproduce several times an hour, producing thousands and
thousands of generations within a single year. Evolution thus takes us into a
tuberculosis-infested Russian jail, and sure enough, the little pests quickly
develop resistance to each new drug the doctors introduce. Case closed.
Well, not quite.

All the producers have demonstrated is the quite unexceptional occurrence of
what is called micro-evolution, the small changes within species that we see all
around us. The most obvious example one Darwin himself used is dog breeding.
The thousands of different types of dogs extant today were all created, probably
from some common wild ancestor, by selective breeding.

The question is, can these relatively small changes within basic species types
be extrapolated to macro-evolution big changes in body types, such as the
evolution of birds from reptiles, say, or humans from apes. The fact is, nothing
of the sort has ever been observed. Darwinists counter that when dealing with
large animals even fruit flies there simply isn't enough time. The breeding
cycles are too long. Fair enough. But what about bacteria?

With selective breeding, one should be able to produce new species within a
reasonable time. Yet and this the producers don't tell us it has never been
done. As British bacteriologist Alan H. Linton recently remarked, despite
multitudes of experiments exposing bacteria to caustic acid baths and intense
radiation in order to accelerate mutations, in the "150 years of the science of
bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into
another."

The producers of Evolution unwittingly give the game away when they remark that
the bacteria clearly identifiable as the same as modern TB have been found on a
6,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. Like the Galapagos finch beaks, what we seem to
be seeing here is not macro-evolutionary change, but the extraordinary stability
of species.

The producers repeat much the same error in a long segment on the HIV virus,
which ends with doctors taking their patients off the anti-viral drugs (which
appear to do more harm than good) and voila! the HIV returns to its original
"wild-type." Once again, we have stasis, not evolution.

On other issues, Evolution mostly commits sins of omission (that is, omission of
any evidence contrary to the simple story of Darwin's mechanism and "change over
time" which they hammer away at endlessly). The program glosses over problems
with the fossil record and sidesteps the challenge of the "Cambrian Explosion,"
in which, in direct contradiction to Darwinian theory, all the major animal
groups (phyla) of modern animals appeared in a geologic instant, with no
plausible precursors. Searching for a more contemporary spin, the program
misstates the universality of DNA as evidence of descent from a common ancestor,
when important exceptions that undermine this hypothesis have been known for
over 20 years. And on and on.

But of course, the 5,000 pound primate in the middle of the room that the
Darwinists won't even mention is what has come to be known as the Intelligent
Design movement, or ID for short. In eight hours, I caught only one glancing
reference to Intelligent Design in the last episode, and even that was a
mischaracterization. For this series, ID is the dog that didn't bark. And from a
purely strategic point of view, they are right to ignore it, because once the
theory of Intelligent Design is allowed into the debate, Darwin is destined to
follow Freud and Marx onto the ash heap of history.

At this point, perhaps, we need to take a time out for some personal
information. It is practically axiomatic among Darwinists that the only people
who would question Darwinism are religiously motivated, Bible-thumping
fundamentalists from out there in those strange red areas of the map. This is a
point, indeed, that is endlessly reiterated in various forms throughout the
eight hours of Evolution. Everyone else knows or in the words of Harvard
biologist Ernst Mayr, "every educated person" knows that Darwinian evolution
is a "simple fact."

Well, for the record, evolution never offended my religious sensibilities. It
seemed to me that if God wanted to create the natural world through a process of
evolution, it wasn't my place to tell him no. And, in as much as being a
conservative often means emphatically not knowing what "everybody knows" that
missile defense will never work, for example, or that Reagan's tax cuts produced
"the worst economy ever" I long took comfort that, when it came to evolution
at least, I was right in line with elite opinion.

The trouble started, as it usually does, when I began to pay attention. In 1996,
a molecular biologist at Lehigh University by the name of Michael Behe published
a book entitled Darwin's Black Box that raised new and interesting theoretical
objections to Darwinism. While the biological details were tough sledding for
your average layman (e.g., me), the basic theoretical argument was not. Behe
pointed out that the knowledge base in the fields of biochemistry and molecular
biology has exploded in size over the last 50 years, leaving Darwinism decades
behind on the learning curve. We now know that the cell, for instance, which
Darwin thought to be barely more than a lump of protoplasm, is in fact a miracle
of nanotechnology, a tiny factory full of miniature machines far more complex
than anything human beings could design today.

Behe's striking insight, however, was not simply that these biological systems
are complex, but that they are what he calls irreducibly complex. Like many
mechanical devices of our own invention, these biological machines are made up
of many interlocking parts, each one of which has to be fully developed and
integrated into the whole for the machine to function. If one part is taken
away, or is not fully developed, the whole mechanism breaks down. For a
biological organism, that means it confers zero added survival value.
And there's the rub, because Darwinian evolution assumes that these biological
machines developed gradually over millions of years by means of random variation
and natural selection. (Even Darwinists agree that the chance of such an
assemblage happening all at once in one "lucky accident" is beyond the realm of
possibility.) Imagine a car engine developing gradually, and one gets a sense of
the difficulty here. You might have the engine block, but if you've got to wait
around another million years for the spark plugs or pistons, you're not going
anywhere.

There have been many thoughtful critiques of Darwinism over the years, but what
Behe had done here was raise a conceptual threshold that the Darwinists had to
cross for their theory to retain even theoretical plausibility. Given the
stakes, you might expect the Darwinists would be quick to come up with a
counter-argument. You might, but five years later you'd still be waiting.
Richard Dawkins, of the above quotation, did give a revealing reply when asked
about Behe's book on Ben Wattenberg's program Think Tank:
I'm not the best person equipped to think about it because I'm not a
biochemist. I don't have that biochemical knowledge. Behe has. Behe should
stop being lazy and should get up and think for himself about how the
flagellum [one of Behe's examples] evolved. "

In other words, the truth Darwinian evolution is preordained and it's the
scientists' job to only find the "facts" that fit.

Since that time Dawkins like the other famous popularizer of Darwin, Stephen
Jay Gould has refused to debate Behe, choosing instead the Darwinists'
preferred tactic: They accused him of religion. Both Gould and Dawkins have
repeatedly called him a "creationist," which is as good as writing him out of
the legitimate scientific community, and has the further benefit of making it
unnecessary to actually answer his critique of Darwinism.

Behe is indeed religious. He is a Roman Catholic as are many scientists who
call themselves Darwinists but he was a Catholic through most of his
scientific career when, like many of his colleagues, he unquestioningly accepted
Darwinism. He's still a Catholic now that his scientific investigations have led
him to reject standard evolutionary theory. Behe doesn't believe in a literalist
interpretation of the Bible, accepts what modern geology tells us about the age
of the earth, and even believes in some form of common descent. Hardly what most
people mean by "creationist."

What does carry uncomfortable religious connotations for avowed atheists like
Gould and Dawkins, however, is the scientific outgrowth of Behe's insights,
namely the theory of Intelligent Design. This theory simply says that if these
biological systems couldn't have developed through purely natural processes, but
had to be assembled all at one time (something, as noted above, that chance is
simply incapable of doing) then there is a high probability that they were
designed. And our experience of the world tells us, every designed artifact must
have an intelligence behind it doing the designing.

Who or what that intelligence is obviously has far reaching philosophical
implications, but has little to do with the science of Intelligent Design
itself, which is silent of the identity of the designer. It might be the
Judeo-Christian God, it might be Shiva, it might be some alien intelligence (not
so silly as it sounds: Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA believes that life
was seeded on this planet from outer space) or it might be what physicist Paul
Davies speculates is some, as yet undiscovered, "emergent" property in matter
itself. (Neither Crick nor Davies are followers of ID, but their problems with
Darwinian explanations of life are emblematic of how shaky Darwinian theory
actually is.) Intelligent Design scientists themselves cover the range of
religious belief and unbelief.

What the theory does say is that design is an empirically testable hypothesis,
and in the past several years, a growing body of scientists in fields as
diverse as biology, genetics, mathematics, physics, cosmology and even computer
science has adopted the theory as a fruitful line of investigation.
Interestingly, the mathematicians, physicists and cosmologists have always been
more open to such ideas. As the great astronomer Fred Hoyle once said, "there
are so many odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems
required to account for them." Nobel prize laureate Arno Penzias said these
coincidences suggested a "supernatural plan." Biology, and the study of how
living organisms, including man, came into being, strikes closer to home,
however, and this is where the real battleground is today.

Which brings us back to PBS's epic Evolution series and the urgency they feel to
as stated in an internal PBS memorandum "co-opt [the] existing local
dialogue about teaching evolution in schools" with a massive marketing campaign
(including "viral" and "guerilla" marketing) aimed at "niche audiences,"
particularly "educators" and "public officials."

In the past, the courts have been their best allies, ruling "creation science"
unfit for public schools because of its religious taint. ID, however, is a
different animal altogether, and no matter how often they conflate it with
"creationism" they won't be able to beat it back with the "separation of church
and state" stick forever. Even the New York Times and Los Angeles Times have run
front-page articles on Intelligent Design, acknowledging it as a real scientific
endeavor.

But not PBS.

PBS claims there was no stonewall. The producers say that they contacted the
Discovery Institute a center of much of the ID movement and invited its
scientists to participate. Indeed the producers did, but only in the last
segment, "What About God," and only to give their personal testaments of faith.
In as much as ID is a scientific movement, and not a religious one, the
scientists declined. It was an especially wise decision, since the producer of
the "What About God?" episode, Bill Jersey, was well known for a 1992
documentary on religious fundamentalism that more or less equated American
evangelicals with Muslim terrorists in the Mideast. As it turns out, Mr.
Jersey's contribution to Evolution was very much in character, a condescending
and offensive look at antievolution fundamentalists and their beliefs.
At a recent PBS press conference I asked the overall series producer, Richard
Hutton, why Intelligent Design's scientific critique of evolution was completely
ignored. He answered that he'd looked into it and decided there was nothing
there. That's one way to decide important scientific disputes let a TV
producer decide.

As it happens, one of the leading ID theorists is University of Chicago-trained
mathematician and probability theorist Bill Dembski. He's got multiple Ph.D.s,
has published work in the prestigious Cambridge University press and has done
postdoctoral work at Cornell, M.I.T., Chicago and Princeton. He is highly
regarded in his field for the contributions he's made to the rather arcane field
of probability theory. In November he will be publishing a book, No Free Lunch,
which applies his theoretic insights to Darwinian evolution. Already, he's got
enough enthusiastic blurbs from top scientists to cover several book jackets,
but one, from leading Darwinist Michael Ruse, is particularly applicable. Even
"those of us who do not accept his conclusions," Ruse writes, "should read this
book. He should not be ignored."

That, of course, is the voice of someone whose first passion is science the
search for true knowledge, wherever it may lead. But for PBS, science is clearly
beside the point. It doesn't matter with propaganda if your facts are wrong.
With 15 or so million dollars of Paul Allen's money, and a free-ride on
America's public airwaves, not to mention the publicly-funded infrastructure of
PBS stations and affiliates, no doubt the producers of this series will, for a
time at least, "co-opt" the dialogue on evolution. But only for a time. In
science, where there is still some respect for facts after all, the truth does
have a way of coming out in the end.

Josh Gilder was a Reagan speechwriter and is the former editor of the American
Spectator.