No need, they pretty much make caricatures of themselves:
For modern examples, check out the goofiness of Gish, Hovind, Baugh, and so on.
And of course, creationists never reduce evolution to the simplest caricatures, do they? </sarcasm>
Oh boy! Another lying creationist who claims that evolution = atheism!
No need, they pretty much make caricatures of themselves:
For modern examples, check out the goofiness of Gish, Hovind, Baugh, and so on.
And of course, creationists never reduce evolution to the simplest caricatures, do they? </sarcasm>
But expecting intellectual honesty of a creationist is like expecting a pig to fly.
Absolute Truth Laughing Stock
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Darwinism
Everett Olson was a noted mainstream paleontologist (not an "eminent observer") who AFAIK totally supported the ToE. Does anyone know anything about this, "everyone is too frightened to speak out" quote?
Rodney Stark’s “Fact, Fable, and Darwin” (September) claims incorrectly that, “There is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species.” Variation from one generation to the next, combined with the geographical isolation of groups, can be expected to give rise to the development of new species. Not only are there firm theoretical foundations for believing this; there is direct evidence, in the form of laboratory experiments and field observations. A quick Internet search on “observed instances of speciation” will take you to several Web sites presenting such evidence.
Stark’s statement, “The boundaries between species are distinct and firm—one species does not simply trail off into another by degrees,” is similarly incorrect. In some families of tropical butterflies, for example, over a quarter of the species are known to hybridize with each other. To give a more familiar example, lions and tigers are able to interbreed, despite the fact that they are different species. How can this be, if the boundaries between species are, as Stark claims, “distinct and firm”? The boundaries between species are “leaky” if species share a recent common ancestor (as is the case with lions and tigers) and firm if the common ancestor was less recent (as in cats and dogs).
Robert Stovold
Brighton, England
Rodney Stark’s conclusions about evolution are merely a 3,000-word confirmation of the notion he inappropriately chides his antagonist Richard Dawkins for holding—that if any scholar criticizes any detail of Darwinian theory, “that
fact is seized upon and blown up out of proportion.”
How else to explain the fact that, aside from its discussion of Bishop Wilberforce, his column is a virtual reprint of the standard, shopworn, disproven creationist attacks on evolution, from its simplistic invocations of chance, mathematical probabilities, gaps in the fossil record, and Popperian philosophy of science, down to its closing suggestion that something other than evolution be taught in public schools?
I am but a layman, yet judging from the rubbish Stark asserts about the status of evolutionary biology, I can only conclude that he is—like those whom he alleges helped the legend of the Wilberforce-Huxley debate grow—one of those academics who knows nothing outside his own special subject.
Mark Lowe
Rancho Cucamonga, California
Rodney Stark's "Fact, Fable, and Darwin" (September) ranks with the work of Bishop Berkeley , whose Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician found the Principia Mathematica filled with" much emptiness, darkness, and confusion" and Cardinal De Polignac, who warned that the theory of gravitation "bordered on atheism." Neither bothered to inform his opinions by actually learning Newtonian mechanics.
Stark's exegesis is likewise untroubled by evolution's roots in molecular biology, the punctuated evolution of artificial life, the heuristic growth of genomics or the paradox of his embroilment in a biotechnology debate arising directly from the evolutionary biology whose existence he denies. He presents instead a catalog of 19th century objections as far removed from contemporary Darwinism as a Durer woodcut of the crystalline spheres from a Hubble telescope image of galaxies in collision.
Republicans who take science seriously may recognize that materialism is too important to be left to the Marxists, and that faith-based policy is the nemesis of science and religion alike. But to judge by Stark's essay, it is beyond their power to arrest the devolution of neoconservative anti-Darwinism into the teleology of fools.
Russell Seitz
Watertown, Massachusetts
Rodney Stark replies:
My article sought to make only two points. 1) All prominent biologists agree that there is no theory of the origin of species. 2) As these writers demonstrate, those who claim that there is such a theory are zealous true believers.
Stark's standards of scholarship are abysmal. There's so much in this relatively short text that is distorted, blatantly wrong, or stupidly hyperbolic that I could just about start anywhere. Take the discussion of the Huxley-Wilberforce encounter, for instance:
"I was happy enough to be present on the memorable occasion at Oxford when Mr. Huxley bearded Bishop Wilberforce. ... Then [Wilberforce] turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey? On this Mr. Huxley ... spoke these tremendous words. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous."This marvelous anecdote has appeared in every distinguished biography of Darwin and of Huxley, as well as in every popular history of the theory of evolution.
EVERY distinguished biography and EVERY popular history, eh? Blanket assertions of this sweep rarely survive much scrutiny. Even if this one were not wildly wrong (which it is) consider, just on the face of it, what an intemperate and incautious claim this is for a supposed scholar to make. The Darwin literature runs to many hundreds of volumes. Has the Sociologist Stark justified this broad assertion by surveying even a fraction of it? Apparently not.
I was fully aware of multiple and varying accounts of Wilberforce's and Huxley's 1860 exchange at Oxford solely from reading the standard sources which Stark claims suppresses them. I found nothing new when I later came across quibbles and debunkings from antievolutionists, at lest until today. Although I've read extensively on Darwin, the Darwinian controversies, and associated figures, I was until now unfamiliar with the specific account Stark quotes! I do have a copy of Irvine's Apes, Angels, and Victorians, the one example Stark provides, but only dipped into it enough years ago to decide that it was a popularization not using the best or latest sources and not worthy of my time. Apes, Angels actually uses Huxley's Life and Letters for most of the details, but uses the above for the crucial quotes from both Wilberforce and Huxley.
If anyone is curious, here's the full cite for Stark's "A Grandmother's Tale's" (apparently so titled because it contained other reminiscences, that is the "Grandmother" appears to be the author, not Huxley's ape ancestor as mooted by Wilberforce): Macmillan's Magazine, LXXVIII, no. 468, Oct. 1898, pgs. 433-4. Here's a good article that gives a longer and seemingly complete quotation of the relevant passage, and much else besides: Lucas, J. R. ``Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter'', The Historical Journal, 22, 2 (1979), pp. 313-330. Scroll down to the bottom and note that Lucas participated (as the Bishop) in a recreation of the Wilberforce-Huxley encounter with Darwin scholar Janet Browne. There are links to his preparatory notes and a "semi-transcript" of the recreation.
Most of my library is packed away, but so you don't have to rely on my recollections I clambered into the attic to root around and pull out a few relevant volumes.
I only have one biography of Huxley, Mario A. Di Gregorio's T.H. Huxley's Place in Natural Science (Yale Univ Press, 1984). It's coverage of the Wilberforce encounter is as follows (in total, the ellipses deleting concatenated material addressing other issues) from page 151:
Huxley is widely thought of as ... the man who defeated the church at Oxford ... [This] point overstates what really happened at Oxford; historians are now aware that there is no reliable account of the Oxford clash between Huxley and Wilberforce [two footnotes to scholarly works on the correspondence of Hooker and biographical writings of Huxley].
One strike for Stark.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin certainly qualifies as a "distinguished biography," and is my personal favorite. Their discussion of the Oxford meeting runs eight pages, 492-499. Here's a bit from the beginning (emphasis, italics, added, but the 'scare quotes' are in the original):
Every potential triumph was now talked up by the evangelical Darwinians. Feeling themselves beleaguered, they needed visible gains. Thus it was that a witty bit of repartee on Saturday 30 June 1860 ... was destined to be blown out of all proportion to become the best known 'victory' of the nineteenth century, save Waterloo.
In general this account deflates the mythological and triumphalist account that Stark falsely characterizes as universal. There are fourteen footnotes, many listing three and four distinct sources, both original sources and scholarly works, NOT including "A Grandmother's Tale's".
Strike two for Stark.
Janet Browne's is one of the major Darwin biographies. Unfortunately I only have the first volume which concludes well before 1860. Anyone have the second? Browne is a careful and important scholar of Darwin, and in spite of her recent participation as a stand in for Huxley in the recreation with Lucas, I'd bet a fair sum that she offers a fair account that takes in all sources.
Next in the stack I pulled from the attic is Charles Darwin's own autobiography but the Wilberforce incident is not covered.
Next up is Darwin: A Life In Science by Michael White and John Gribbin (Dutton, 1995). This is another book I collected (cheap at a used book store) but never bothered to read as Gribbin is not a Darwin specialist. Gribbin's account of the Oxford clash, pages 221-24, comes the closest yet to Stark's fraudulent characterization. But even Gribbin, who openly favors the view that Wilberforce was shamed and Huxley triumphant, notes several times that others disagree. His sole footnote cites the Lucas paper I link above.
Gribbin does use the more extreme version of Wilberforce quote -- wherein Wilberforce asks whether Huxley's ape ancestry was on his grandfather's or grandmother's side of the family, disparagement of grandmothers being course and shocking in the Victorian context. (Other contemporary accounts suggest Wilberforce less offensively referred to Huxley's own belief in ape ancestry without bringing grandmothers into it. Still other accounts don't mention any apish comments being related specifically to Huxley's ancestry.) But, although of similar type, Gibbin's quotes do not appear to come from "A Grandmother's Tale's".
In short the reader is clearly informed that Gribbin is offering a traditional account that is disputed.
This should be strike three, but I'll be very charitable and give Stark a foul instead.
Next up is Richard Milner's delightfully eclectic The Encyclopedia of Evolution: Humanity's Search for Its Origins (Facts On File, 1990). The first listing of "Wilberforce" in the index leads to the entry on John Lubbock, where it is simply noted that "Lubbock gave a long, effective defense of Darwinism using evidence from embryology" at the Oxford meeting.
The next listing for Wilberforce is the entry "MILITARY METAPHOR: 'Warfare' of Science vs. Religion". Here Milner, despite being an enthusiastic evolutionist, takes an opposite tack from the scientific confrontationalism that Stark dogmatically attributes to his ilk. Citing (evangelical Christian) James R. Moore's The Post Darwinian Controversies (an excellent work that I also retrieved from the attic, but maybe more on it in a later message) Milner pours water on the heated rhetoric often associated with science and religion issues, pointing out that many leading scientistists, including many evolutionists, were "believers in traditional Christianity," that "the vast majority of early naturalists and geologists were actually Churchmen themselves," that those who unveiled the records of ancient life were pursuing the aim of "reconciling the geological record with the Bible," and so on.
Wilberforce also makes a brief appearance in the entry for Roderick Murchison, wherein it's noted that the Bishop gave a speech in 1849 honoring the eminent geologist and declaring him, to hurrahs from all assembled, the "modern King of Siluria" (for the geologic system, The Silurian, which Murchison identified and named) as he had so greatly extended the realm held by the ancient king Caractacus.
However in coming to Milner's entry "OXFORD DEBATE: 'Darwin's Bulldog' vs. The Bishop," and despite having elsewhere noted that such confrontations were not representative of relations between science and religion, and having depicted Wilberforce as a booster of modern science, here Milner give us only the triumphalist version of the event. Wilberforce is depicted as "overconfident" rather than mendacious, but we get the "grandmother" version of his question, we get Huxley responding "calmly" (his own account, although others, including Darwin's close friend Hooker, who was on-stage, have the effectiveness of his response marred by excessive agitation) and we have the room "rebound[ing] in laughter" (the closest, btw, any of these accounts come, including Apes, Angels to Stark's false assertion that "every writer tells how the audience gave Huxley an ovation").
Now if we evaluate Stark's actual claim, that "every distinguished biography of Darwin and of Huxley, as well as in every popular history of the theory of evolution" invokes "this marvelous account" -- "A Grandmother's Tale's" published decades after the event -- then he has been consistently wrong by the evidence of my own library, for even Milner does not detectably use the 1898 magazine blurb. (He has no footnotes, but seems to be using original if selective sources such as Huxley's own contemporary account.) However I've been applying a more reasonable standard than Stark's own, and simply asking whether each book offers only the triumphalist version of events (Huxley triumphant, Bishop shamed) and suppresses sources that suggest it may have been otherwise, or whether the book includes or at least acknowledges a fulsome range of the divergent contemporary accounts that exist in the historical record.
On this ground, with the count at two strikes, Stark finally gets a base hit with Milner. But based on this sample, randomly chosen from the books I had to hand, it's pretty clear that Milner will strike out before he gets a runner in.
Other specific claims by Stark about the Oxford meeting, or how it has been presented, will be examined in a later message when I have the time. We will find that Stark's mythologizing and slovenly, biased scholarship is at least as bad as what he (often falsely in the universalism of his denunciations) accuses others of.
I could, and possibly will, time permitting, tear this mess apart on other counts as well. It is an utter load.
The author is deliberating being misleading. Theories of evolution prior to "Origin of Species" were almost entirely formulated on religious grounds.
Professor Richard Owen was one of Darwin's critics. One example of his antomical theories:
However, Owen did not believe that his archetype was anything like an ancestor to the vertebrates. Rather, the archetype represented an idea in the Divine mind, which also "foreknew all its modifications."
Sounds like modern Creationism/ID to me.
An intro to the Professor is here.