Heir spends family fortune to discredit evolution theory

If you can't imagine how an ultra-conservative California savings and loan heir could be linked to the shaping of Ohio's new science standards, you probably have never heard of Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson.

For years, the reclusive philanthropist and evangelical Christian has channeled millions from his family's fortune to a variety of causes designed to discredit and defeat Darwin's evolution theory that living things share common ancestors but have changed over time.

Some of those millions have gone to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the nation's best-known, best-organized and best-funded proponent of intelligent design - the concept that living things have been "designed" by some purposeful but unknown being because they are too complex to have occurred by chance.

Discovery, despite criticism from some of the nation's top Darwinists, had a prominent role in this year's origins debate in Ohio. Discovery President Bruce Chapman, who founded the institute in 1990, meets those blows with a mixture of anger and amusement.

"I think the materialists had better get some better material," said Chapman, who founded Discovery in 1990 after serving as director of the U.S. Census Bureau and as an assistant to former President Ronald Reagan. "A lot of our foes are pretty ruthless. They'd like us to go away, but what they're reduced to is slurs against the people giving us grants."

If 2002 was any indication, the Discovery Institute isn't going away anytime soon. Senior fellows from the institute were invited to sit elbow-to-elbow with evolutionists at high-profile debates involving intelligent design this summer in Columbus and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The issue has captured the public's imagination and landed the institute on the front-page of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, as well as on CNN.

Some believe Discovery scored its biggest victory earlier this month when Ohio adopted science standards that require students to examine criticisms of biological evolution. The Ohio Board of Education explicitly stated it wasn't pushing intelligent design, but Discovery fellows hailed the new standards as a historic victory, a triumph of democracy and academic freedom over the rigid edicts of the science establishment.

But the institute, which has a $2.5 million annual budget, has plenty of work not connected to intelligent design, including public transportation, technology, Social Security reform and the environment.

"I was very much impressed by both the range and the quality of their work," said University of Washington Professor Herbert Ellison, who served on the institute's advisory board. "Their ideas and opinions have had considerable impact in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, and across the country and abroad."

Still, Discovery's most visible impact has been with intelligent design. Often derided as stealth creationism, the concept has shown some legs in the ageless argument about the origin and development of life on Earth.

Through its Center for Science and Culture, Discovery has tried to position itself as a scientific rather than creationist player.

Instead of embracing biblical literalists who believe God created the Earth in six days or that Adam and Eve shared the planet with dinosaurs, Discovery has offered up reputable scholars with impressive academic pedigrees, including Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, Baylor University mathematician William Dembski and University of California-Berkeley molecular and cell biologist Jonathan Wells.

Behe's "Darwin's Black Box," which theorizes evolution cannot explain the complexity of cells, and Wells' "Icons of Evolution," which argues that evolution textbooks are filled with mistakes, are two of the movement's defining books.

"An important thing about them is the big-tent approach," Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, a leading Darwin defender, said. "Within the guts of the movement, you can find rather nasty arguments between the Biblical literalists and the intelligent-design advocates. They [intelligent-design supporters] say, 'We might disagree on things like the age of the Earth and the fossil record, but we have a common enemy.' "

Eugenie Scott, a physical anthropologist and director of the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education, noted wryly that Discovery recently shortened the name of its "Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture" to "Center for Science and Culture" to make itself sound more "scientific." She said the name change doesn't mask the fact that the institute's contributions to science have been nearly nil.

Scott and others say the institute's efforts to be accepted as a serious player are also being undercut by the source of its money.

Ahmanson, whose family made billions in the savings and loan business, was associated at times with Christian Reconstruction, a radical faction of the Religious Right that sought to replace American democracy with a theocracy based on biblical law and under the "dominion" of Christians. For years, the Orange County multimillionaire served on the board of the Chalcedon Foundation, the movement's think tank.

Ahmanson gave Discovery $1.5 million to help start its Center for Science and Culture. Fieldstead & Co., which is owned by Ahmanson and his wife, Roberta, has pledged $2.8 million through 2003 to support the institute's work.

Discovery Institute adviser Phillip Johnson, arguably the nation's best-known anti-evolutionist, dedicated his 1997 book, "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds," to "Howard and Roberta." Johnson said his relationship with Discovery is limited.

"I'm very loosely connected," he said during an October visit to Northeast Ohio. "I don't direct it and I don't take any money from them."

Discovery also received $350,000 from the Tennessee-based Maclellan Foundation. Foundation officials were quoted publicly as saying the grant was to help researchers prove that "evolution was not the process by which we were created."

Ahmanson rarely grants interviews, and calls to him and to Maclellan Foundation executive director Tom McCallie were not returned. Chapman said linking the institute to the radical Christian Right is a ploy not unlike the red-baiting antics of former U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

He also said evolutionists have put Discovery in a classic catch-22: The institute is frozen out from publicly funded research grants and excluded from science publications, and then criticized for its lack of "serious" research in peer-reviewed journals.

So Discovery fellows have followed the lead of an unlikely role model who also drew heat for publishing his findings in a book rather than scientific journals.

My wife and I were doing some Christmas shopping this past weekend in a used bookstore. While looking in the science section, I stumbled on a couple of copies of Darwin's "Origins of Species". This is the first time I had seen it in print and picked up a copy to see what edition it was. You see, I stumbled on an interesting fact about a year ago.

The second edition of his book contains the following phrase in the last paragraph.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into few forms or into one ...

The first edition does not contain the phrase "by the Creator - with a capital 'C') thus lacking the words implying Darwin did have some belief in God. I had never shared this with my wife before and pointed out the copyright page. There it states the publisher (in 1979) published the first edition of Darwin's work but included a biographical and other supporting information from the sixth edition. I asked my wife the question that begs for asking when reading this statement ... "Why would a publisher not use the latest and presumedly most up to date information when publishing a scientific reference?" Of course there is no logical answer available until you do as I did and turn to the last page and point out the missing phrase from the primary edition.

This is intellectually dishonest and exposes an agenda that attempts to eliminate God from a discussion of our existence. By the way, you will find this true also of online discussions of Darwin's work. Nearly all references will quote only from the first edition when posted on sites critical of Christianity. While looking in the science section, I stumbled on a couple of copies of Darwin's "Origins of Species". This is the first time I had seen it in print and picked up a copy to see what edition it was. You see, I stumbled on an interesting fact about a year ago.

The second edition of his book contains the following phrase in the last paragraph.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into few forms or into one ...

The first edition does not contain the phrase "by the Creator - with a capital 'C') thus lacking the words implying Darwin did have some belief in God. I had never shared this with my wife before and pointed out the copyright page. There it states the publisher (in 1979) published the first edition of Darwin's work but included a biographical and other supporting information from the sixth edition. I asked my wife the question that begs for asking when reading this statement ... "Why would a publisher not use the latest and presumedly most up to date information when publishing a scientific reference?" Of course there is no logical answer available until you do as I did and turn to the last page and point out the missing phrase from the primary edition.

This is intellectually dishonest and exposes an agenda that attempts to eliminate God from a discussion of our existence. By the way, you will find this true also of online discussions of Darwin's work. Nearly all references will quote only from the first edition when posted on sites critical of Christianity.

This is from the Discovery Institute's so-called "Center for Science and Culture": About the Center.

During recent decades, evidence from many scientific disciplines has suggested the bankruptcy of strictly materialistic thinking in science and the need for new explanations and perspectives. Consider:
In cosmology, evidence suggests the universe--including all matter, space, time, and energy--came suddenly into existence a finite time ago, contradicting the earlier picture of an eternal and self-existing material cosmos.
In physics, evidence has shown that the universe is "finely-tuned" for the existence of life, suggesting the work, as Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle puts it, "of a superintellect."
In biology, the presence of complex and functionally integrated machines has cast doubt on Darwinian mechanisms of self-assembly, and has sparked new interest in the design hypothesis.
In molecular biology, the presence of information encoded along the DNA molecule has suggested the activity of a prior designing intelligence.
In "artificial intelligence" research, the persistence of the so-called "frame" and "consciousness" problems suggests a fundamental chasm separating machine intelligence and the human mind.
Predictably, many defenders of the status quo have refused to address the new evidence and have simply exhorted each other to keep faith with materialism. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, for example, urges scientists to embrace a "materialism [that] is absolute" and to stick with "material explanations, no matter how counter intuitive."
The Center for Science and Culture takes a different view, and that's why we are supporting scientists who aren't afraid to follow the evidence where it leads.

Looks like an agenda heavily loaded with junk science. They say they follow the evidence. Then why reject the big bang? Why the desire to abandon natural evidence? Why consider ID, without evidence of a designer? Why imagine that secret messages are encoded in our DNA? These people are whackos!

At age sixteen, Darwin left Shrewsbury to study medicine at Edinburgh University. Repelled by the sight of surgery performed without anesthesia, he eventually went to Cambridge Univeristy to prepare to become a clergyman in the Church of England. After receiving his degree, Darwin accepted an invitation to serve as an unpaid naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle Link

Darwin did poorly in school, and so could not secure employment following his graduation from divinity school. However, he was able to secure a position as ship's naturalist aboard the H. M.S. Beagle. The Beagle Link

But was Darwin intelligent? I don’t know but his autobiography quotes one particular beetle hunt in detail:-

"I will give a proof of my zeal: one day on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one".

According to Moore's latest research, eugenics was the natural child, so to speak, of Charles Darwin's personal anxiety. The father of evolutionary theory profoundly feared the results of inbreeding in his immediate family, says Moore, and he passed those fears on to his children and ultimately his country… …The reproductive relationships in the Darwin family are enough to make your head spin. Charles Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood. His sister also married one of her Wedgewood cousins and two other Wedgewood cousins married their Darwin first cousins. In all there were four first-cousin marriages constituting what Moore calls the Darwoodian pedigree.

Though it wasn't uncommon for first cousins to marry in the 19th century, "Charles worried about this for a number of reasons," says Moore. "He knew from his contact with animal and plant breeders that inbreeding can cause both bad and good things to happen. It's clear that from the very beginning of his engagement, he was keen to interpret their relationship, and later the children who would be born, as natural history phenomena."

Darwin observed his children as closely as he monitored "apes in the London Zoo," to see which inherited traits they displayed. Sure enough, all of them fell victim to his own defective digestive condition. His eldest daughter died at age 10 with severe gastrointestinal problems, and one after another, the remaining seven children fell ill at about the same age. "Over a period of 15 years, Darwin discovered how heredity works when first cousins marry," says Moore.

Darwin's five surviving sons became actively involved in the eugenics movement. His son George compiled statistics on the offspring of first-cousin marriages and also checked lunatic asylums for traits of inferior human beings. His youngest son Horace, the sickliest of the lot, started an engineering company to make anthropometric instruments used in measuring body parts to assess genetic quality. And both sons worked closely with Francis Galton, founder of the eugenics movement in the 1880s, which was hailed as "a new basis of moral obligation." Link

One hundred and fifty years ago, according to Gillespie (1979), most naturalists accepted the idea of common ancestry, but they differed on how new forms arose. The Establishment at Oxford (Buckland, for instance) evidently thought that God occasionally remodeled an existing form into a perfectly adapted new type (Rupke, 1983). The Radical Materialists such as Grant and Knox followed Lamarck in considering matter itself energized with an intrinsic tendency for unifomm development (Desmond, 1989). The followers of German Naturphilosophie (Richard Owen, for instance) held the theory that autonomous extra-material archetypes shaped lineages progressively into their own images (Desmond, 1982). All the schools (with the exception of Louis Agassis) viewed fossil sequences as demonstrations of common descent. They differed on the nature of the power that shaped biological form, but not on whether things shared common ancestry. One further note: although they differed in their philosophies of nature, each school had both Christian and non-Christian adherents.

According to historian James Moore (1982), however, around 1840 a new movement of young middle-class reformers calling themselves "Naturalists" appeared. This group as young adults typically changed their creed from Christianity (which they felt was morally bankrupt) to one based on "Nature." They were "poets and lawyers, doctors and manufacturers, novelists and naturalists, engineers and politicians." The group included such well-known individuals as George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, Francis Galton, J. A. Froude, G. H. Lewes, Charles Bray, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Tyndall, F. W. Newman, A. H. Clough, Harriet Martineau, F. P. Cobbe, and, of course, T. H. Huxley. Moore shows that the central feature of this new creed was the redefinition of human nature, society, order, law, evil, progress, purpose, authority, and nature itself in terms of the Naturalists' particular view of Nature, as opposed to the Christian Scriptures. In fact, they tended to attack the Christian Scriptures as the true source of societal evil. God, if he existed, was to be known only through the Nature which he made. Thus, according to Moore (1982) and Young (1980), "positivism" was not primarily a methodology for science, but a religious movement that sought to replace the cultural dominance of the Established Church.

Charles Darwin launched his theory of biological change in this context. He proposed a mechanism for the appearance of new forms that did not depend on any pre-existing or exterior shaping forces. The environment became the only needed constraint. It was a theory of strategic importance for the Naturalists, particularly for the "X" club, Huxley's "Young Guard" party in science.

The Naturalists succeeded. The "Young Guard" used the trappings of religion to sacralize their "science." Three centuries of cooperation between science and religion were forgotten and their history was rewritten as "warfare." Hymns to nature were sung at popular lectures before the giving of "lay sermons" by a member of Galton's "Scientific Priesthood." Museums were built to resemble cathedrals, and following frantic string-pulling by Lubbock (a member of the "X" club) Charles Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey. The new church was established (Moore, 1982).

If the professionally validated "scientist" is viewed as the only one who can adequately understand nature, and if Nature has replaced Scripture as the source of moral and teleological truth, ipso facto the scientist has replaced the priest. Thus, the "professional" position at stake was as much the pulpit as the lectern.

It is a fact that God is continuously being publicly discussed by very well-known scientists- just read Gould, Dawkins, Hull, Provine, Wilson, Simpson, Futyama, Sagan, Hawking, and others. From a nineteenth century perspective, books like The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins, 1986) and Wonderful Life (Gould, 1989) are simply Bridgewater treatises such as Paley, Owens, and Roget wrote, works in which up-to-date science is used for the task of world-view apologetics.

Is it true that biology cannot live without evolution, that (to quote Dobzbansky) "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution"?

First, is it the unifying theory in modern biology? Why not cell theory? or molecular energetics? or hierarchy theory? or ecosystem dynamics? or cybernetic control theory? The fact that a theory applies to all living things does not mean that it is the essential organizing framework. In reality, what is probably meant by evolution in this "unifying" context is simply philosophical materialism, but that is general philosophy rather than science.

If materialist neuroscientists are correct that the brain secretes thoughts the way the liver does bile, why are they my thoughts? Bile, after all, is a chemical concoction produced in that metabolic factory called the liver; but thoughts are not chemicals, just thoughts. "How is it," as Thomas Huxley once put it, "that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue?" Source
Source

Deconstructing Darwin

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