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A nice series of articles. They are excellently argued. I really don't know what all this talk is about "straw men," since Osgood does, indeed, fairly represent what Darwinists and Social Darwinists have actually said. He focuses on their major arguments and easily demolishes them.

The three great exponents of the hermeneutics of suspicion in the modern age were Darwin, Marx, and Freud. For whatever reason, Freud and Marx are now effectively dead among all but the most foolish academic ideologues, but Darwin still appears to have some currency.

I view this more as a kind of fad of fashion than as the result of logical or scientific argument. When the time comes, Darwin will go out of fashion too. By all signs, that time won't be very long from now.

I really don't know what all this talk is about "straw men," since Osgood does, indeed, fairly represent what Darwinists and Social Darwinists have actually said.

...which just goes to show that both you and Osgood are working off the same distorted misrepresentations of evolutionary science. The typical creationist "critique" of evolution looks a lot like Tom Daschle's view of conservatism -- misunderstood from the ground up.

Part of what makes this whole ramble by Osgood a straw man is that it takes a side issue (the alleged moral implications of evolution) and then tries to pretend it is a square-on attack on evolution itself. It's not. Osgood doesn't get within ten miles of an actual examination of the physical and experimental evidence for evolution, nor does he attempt in the least to deal with the core of the theory itself. Osgood is in effect arguing that nuclear physics can't be right because if it were it would allow horrible bombs to be built which could kill millions. Unfortunately for Osgood, the correctness of a scientific theory does not depend on whether one might be horrified by the implications (and in Osgood's case, he's *really* stretching the alleged "implications").

Furthermore, he puts words and concepts into people's mouths based more on Osgood's own prejudices against "Darwninists" than on anything they might actually hold. And even when he quotes one (Darwin) he dishonestly takes the quote out of context to make it appear more "Hard" than it is. For example, IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING the passage Osgood quotes Darwin writes, in the very same paragraph still:

Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of man's nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, etc., than through natural selection

Osgood could not possibly have missed this passage when he extracted the first half of the paragraph from it. Osgood is being remarkably dishonest -- he was trying to paint Darwin as what Osgood calls a "Hard man", and yet in the VERY SAME PARAGRAPH Darwin expresses a clear statement that man's "higher nature" owes it origins to such sources as man's customs, intelligence, learning, and *religion*.

Osgood is clearly just picking and choosing his points to bolster his own biases, and *not* trying to present a fair, balanced analysis of someone's views.

Finally, the loony, way-out-there nature of Osgood's rants can be seen when he makes such amazing assertions as, "Instead of saying, what Darwinism really implies, that governments and priesthoods are hallucinations...". Um, excuse me? "Darwinism" in no way implies that governments or priesthoods are "hallucinations". Nor can I recall ever reading any philosophy-of-science work which even remotely made any such ridiculous assertion. I'd like to know what fever-dream Osgood pulled *that* fantasy from. It's nothing that is either logically connected to evolution in any way, nor propounded by anyone I know of (present or past) who studies evolution. It is, quite simply, a straw man of the most extreme, worst type.

I view this more as a kind of fad of fashion than as the result of logical or scientific argument. When the time comes, Darwin will go out of fashion too. By all signs, that time won't be very long from now.

The Scientific American indirectly addressed your implication within a series of replies to creationist objections which were featured this past summer. I'll just post this as an FYI, in case you're interested:

4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.

No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.

Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly fruitless.

Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes). In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously.

To elaborate briefly with my own remarks: in order for the field of biology to abandon evolutionary science in the manner which you suggest, there must first exist at least some vague semblance of an alternative scientific exegesis. As of this point in time, that not only appears less than imminent, but indeed a rather speculative and remote possibility.