Posted on 08/18/2005 5:17:34 PM PDT by curiosity
The appeal of "intelligent design" to the American right is obvious. For religious conservatives, the theory promises to uncover God's fingerprints on the building blocks of life. For conservative intellectuals in general, it offers hope that Darwinism will yet join Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of pseudoscience. And for politicians like George W. Bush, there's little to be lost in expressing a skepticism about evolution that's shared by millions.
In the long run, though, intelligent design will probably prove a political boon to liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives. Like the evolution wars in the early part of the last century, the design debate offers liberals the opportunity to portray every scientific battle--today, stem-cell research, "therapeutic" cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering--as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism. There's already a public perception, nurtured by the media and by scientists themselves, that conservatives oppose the "scientific" position on most bioethical issues. Once intelligent design runs out of steam, leaving its conservative defenders marooned in a dinner-theater version of Inherit the Wind, this liberal advantage is likely to swell considerably.
And intelligent design will run out of steam--a victim of its own grand ambitions. What began as a critique of Darwinian theory, pointing out aspects of biological life that modification-through-natural-selection has difficulty explaining, is now foolishly proposed as an alternative to Darwinism. On this front, intelligent design fails conspicuously--as even defenders like Rick Santorum are beginning to realize--because it can't offer a consistent, coherent, and testable story of how life developed. The "design inference" is a philosophical point, not a scientific theory: Even if the existence of a designer is a reasonable inference to draw from the complexity of, say, a bacterial flagellum, one would still need to explain how the flagellum moved from design to actuality.
And unless George W. Bush imposes intelligent design on American schools by fiat and orders the scientific establishment to recant its support for Darwin, intelligent design will eventually collapse--like other assaults on evolution that failed to offer an alternative--under the weight of its own overreaching.
If liberals play their cards right, this collapse could provide them with a powerful rhetorical bludgeon. Take the stem-cell debate, where the great questions are moral, not scientific--whether embryonic human life should be created and destroyed to prolong adult human life. Liberals might win that argument on the merits, but it's by no means a sure thing. The conservative embrace of intelligent design, however, reshapes the ideological battlefield. It helps liberals cast the debate as an argument about science, rather than morality, and paint their enemies as a collection of book-burning, Galileo-silencing fanatics.
This would be the liberal line of argument anyway, even without the controversy surrounding intelligent design. "The president is trapped between religion and science over stem cells," declared a Newsweek cover story last year; "Religion shouldn't undercut new science," the San Francisco Chronicle insisted; "Leadership in 'therapeutic cloning' has shifted abroad," the New York Times warned, because American scientists have been "hamstrung" by "religious opposition"--and so on and so forth. But liberalism's science-versus-religion rhetoric is only likely to grow more effective if conservatives continue to play into the stereotype by lining up to take potshots at Darwin.
Already, savvy liberal pundits are linking bioethics to the intelligent design debate. "In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs," Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote last week, "can the U.S. afford--ethically or economically--to raise our children on fraudulent biology?" (Message: If you're for Darwin, you're automatically for unfettered cloning research.) Or again, this week's TNR makes the pretty-much-airtight "case against intelligent design"; last week, the magazine called opponents of embryo-destroying stem cell research "flat-earthers." The suggested parallel is obvious: "Science" is on the side of evolution and on the side of embryo-killing.
Maureen Dowd, in her inimitable way, summed up the liberal argument earlier this year:
Exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas; fights over sex education . . . a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which could lead to more of a "culture of life" than keeping one vegetative woman hooked up to a feeding tube.
Terri Schiavo, sex education, stem cell research--on any issue that remotely touches on science, a GOP that's obsessed with downing Darwin will be easily tagged as medieval, reactionary, theocratic. And this formula can be applied to every new bioethical dilemma that comes down the pike. Earlier this year, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued ethical guidelines for research cloning, which blessed the creation of human-animal "chimeras"--animals seeded with human cells. New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade, writing on the guidelines, declared that popular repugnance at the idea of such creatures is based on "the pre-Darwinian notion that species are fixed and penalties [for cross-breeding] are severe." In other words, if you're opposed to creating pig-men--carefully, of course, with safeguards in place (the NAS guidelines suggested that chimeric animals be forbidden from mating)--you're probably stuck back in the pre-Darwinian ooze with Bishop Wilberforce and William Jennings Bryan.
There's an odd reversal-of-roles at work here. In the past, it was often the right that tried to draw societal implications from Darwinism, and the left that stood against them. And for understandable reasons: When people draw political conclusions from Darwin's theory, they're nearly always inegalitarian conclusions. Hence social Darwinism, hence scientific racism, hence eugenics.
Which is why however useful intelligent design may be as a rhetorical ploy, liberals eager to claim the mantle of science in the bioethics battle should beware. The left often thinks of modern science as a child of liberalism, but if anything, the reverse is true. And what scientific thought helped to forge--the belief that all human beings are equal--scientific thought can undermine as well. Conservatives may be wrong about evolution, but they aren't necessarily wrong about the dangers of using Darwin, or the National Academy of Sciences, as a guide to political and moral order.
Scripter writes "Are you saying you agree with the poster that said "evolutionism makes positive statements about unobserved, unrecorded history?"
Nope. Cause our genes and the fossil record the history of our evolution, in the same way that the Earth's rock record records the history of our planet and the light from distant galaxies records the history of our Universe..
All that is well and good. However, I recognized what the intent of the original poster's statement was. It was predicated on the false logic, that if nobody observed an event, then we can't draw firm conclusions about it.
Its laughable as well, that you fell for it, thinking it was a good point. WHich is why I asked you, "Should felons convicted solely on the basis of forensic evidence be realeased from prison?"
If you agree with the faulty logic that firm conclusions can't be obtained regarding events in the past unless they occurred under direct human observation, then in order to be logically consistent, you must also agree that convictions solely based on forensic evidence are intrinsically suspect and should be voided.
I trust you now understand why the original statement is foolish. It is foolish because direct human observation isn't necessary and there is a record of the change in life through geologic time, both in rocks and in our genes.
I guess thats why you didn't answer my question.
there is a record of the change in life through geologic time, both in rocks and in our genes.
I hope you don't mind if I disagree.
Makes us look like crack-pots to whom...other Liberals?
They already see conservatives as crack-pots....it doesn't matter if a conservative has an evolutionary scientific world view....liberals will see them as crackpots any way!
Makes us look like crack-pots to whom...other Liberals?
They already see conservatives as crack-pots....it doesn't matter if a conservative has an evolutionary scientific world view....liberals will see them as crackpots any way!
there is a record of the change in life through geologic time, both in rocks and in our genes.
scripter writes "I hope you don't mind if I disagree."
You can disagree all you want. You're still wrong on both counts.
I appreciate you sharing your opinion.
Scripter writes: "I appreciate you sharing your opinion."
While we're sharing:
http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/natsci/vertpaleo/fhc/firstCM.htm
http://campus.northpark.edu/physics//bts3910/schimmrich/horses.html
http://www.cruzio.com/~cscp/index.htm
Some of the links I used are below - I've tried to clean up the links but I'm sure some of the links are no longer working.
http://www.uky.edu/Ag/Horsemap
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf033/sf033p14.htm
http://www.equinestudies.org/historical.htm
http://www.horseracingdirectories.com/horse_evolution_4_.html
http://www.freethought-web.org/ctrl/gould_fact-and-theory.html
http://home.primus.com.au/bonno/evolution10.htm
http://www.mirthe.org/interests/evolution.php
http://www.aqd.nps.gov/grd/geology/paleo/paleo_4_1
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/6733_creation_or_evolution_12_7_2000.asp
http://www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/evoevidence.html
http://www.hku.hk/philodep/courses/max/Phil2130/l12-14.html
http://www.ecotao.com/holism/bp.htm
The study left me with more questions. If the evolution of the horse was the premier of evolution at one point, then the TOE was in much worse shape than I first realized.
scripter writes "The study left me with more questions. If the evolution of the horse was the premier of evolution at one point, then the TOE was in much worse shape than I first realized."
LOL. Horse evolution is of many premier examples.
One can only wonder what you mean by "was".
Of course its rather odd that you don't state what the difficulty is.
For some reason you think I'm interested in engaging you in a long discussion on the subject when I'm not even remotely interested. Nothing has changed and as I see it, the evidence for horse evolution is still non-existent so why waste all that time for a second round... Thanks, but no. That's all my time you'll get for now.
Scripter wrties:
"For some reason you think I'm interested in engaging you in a long discussion on the subject when I'm not even remotely interested. Nothing has changed and as I see it, the evidence for horse evolution is still non-existent so why waste all that time for a second round... Thanks, but no. That's all my time you'll get for now."
SO much for "teach the controversy"...
THis is the typical response of the IDers and their creationist travelers.
I have no idea what you're talking about. But it's incredible that you think you can monopolize my time at a whim.
No, moderates who care about science.
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