Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – January 22, 2006.

There is a very interesting essay-review of two books on evolution and creationism in today’s New York Times Book Review. Written by Judith Shulevitz, who regularly writes on religion, the piece makes the interesting point that it is the broader social implications that various people have drawn—dubbed “evolutionism”—that really underlies the continued presence of creationism (and its latest manifestation, “intelligent design”) in America and elsewhere. But in reading the piece, I felt that the true nature of the ongoing struggle was obscured: resistance to the social implications (whatever they are—many people have seen very different sorts of implications) may be the motive, but the fight is ALWAYS over evolution itself. The bottom line is to keep evolution out of the classroom as much as possible—and that is a huge threat to the integrity of American science education.

I urge everyone to read Shulevitz’s Essay “When Cosmologies Collide” (www.nytimes.com/books); meanwhile, below is the text of my Letter to the Editor voicing my concerns:

To the Editor:

Judith Shulevitz’s Essay (Book Review, January 22, 2006, p. 10) contends that scientists often do not acknowledge the broader social implications of “evolutionism”—the melange of often conflicting philosophical conclusions that have been drawn by disparate people from the very idea that life has evolved. It is this evolutionism, she says, that continues to inspire much of the resistance to evolution. But in so arguing, she gives short shrift to the fact that nearly all of the rhetoric of creationists—including contemporary “intelligent design” proponents—consists of ill-informed attacks on evolutionary biology itself, rather than on the inchoate philosophical ramifications of “evolutionism.”

Beyond the cardboard assertions of “irreducible complexity” in the supposed outboard motor-like apparatus of bacterial flagella and a few other one-liners in the current intelligent design canon, lie reams of tired old assertions of the supposed failings of evolutionists to explain natural phenomena. There is every reason for us evolutionary biologists to fight back—especially when the stakes are so high: the further dilution of integrity in science teaching in our nation’s secondary schools.

Science does not offer equal-opportunity choices: like it or not, apples fall, continents move around and organisms evolve—all according to natural law that is the subject matter of scientific investigation. Resistance to evolutionism may indeed supply the motive, but the fight is always over the veracity of the scientific evidence for evolution itself.

Niles Eldredge

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