Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing by William Dembski

Author:William Dembski
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781497649071
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Published: 2014-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

James Barham

10. WHY I AM NOT A DARWINIST

Darwinism means different things to different people. To most, it is probably synonymous with evolution—the idea that all living things are genealogically related, having descended from one or a few original forms. However, there were people who believed in common descent before Darwin ever lived,1 and others afterwards who believed in it but doubted Darwin’s theory of natural selection.2 Therefore, it is incorrect to simply equate Darwinism with belief in evolution. The term “Darwinism” should properly refer to Darwin’s own contribution, the idea that evolution is explained by natural selection.

Yet another important distinction should be made, one between what I shall call the empirical and metaphysical forms of Darwinism. Empirical Darwinism is the proposition that natural selection causes evolution. To be more exact, it is the idea that the formation of new species is due to random changes in individual organisms that happen to be “selected” by the environment. From time immemorial, farmers, animal breeders, and others have known that systematically culling a population can alter the statistical distribution of traits appearing within it over time. Empirical Darwinism is the idea that an analogous process, acting through the competition between organisms for limited resources, has been responsible for evolutionary change.

Even this empirical form of Darwinism is not nearly so well founded as is usually assumed. For one thing, we do not yet understand in either genetic or physiological detail how the reproductive systems of two populations of organisms that belong to the same species can change in such a way as to make successful interbreeding between them impossible. Since we cannot produce new species at will, we are in no position to state categorically that natural selection is the driving force behind evolution. For another thing, the theory of natural selection operates at such a high level of abstraction that it has relatively little empirical content. This quality of abstraction makes Darwinism difficult to distinguish from the bald claim that evolution has occurred, which in turn makes it very hard to test. Nevertheless, as we learn more about the interaction between genomes and the organisms of which they are a part, it should be possible someday to demonstrate how speciation occurs, and so either confirm or refute Darwin’s hypothesis.

The real problem with the evolution debate is not empirical Darwinism. Rather, it is a sort of theory creep in which a bold but circumscribed scientific claim becomes conflated with a much more sweeping philosophical claim. The philosophical claim is then presented as though it were a confirmed scientific fact. Metaphysical Darwinism maintains that the theory of natural selection has successfully reduced all teleological and normative phenomena to the interplay of chance and necessity, thus eliminating purpose and value from our picture of the world.3 Metaphysical Darwinists regard belief in objective values as a primitive superstition, on a par with belief in witches and ghosts. What is worse, they perpetrate a fraud on the public by draping their profoundly speculative philosophy with the mantle of scientific authority.

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