Readers acquainted with the history will recall that followers of Darwin -- the crusading, anti-religious zealots who formed the "smart set" in later Victorian biology -- had no time for Gregor Mendel. When they mentioned him at all, they dismissed his meticulous cross-breeding experiments as trivial, and mocked the man himself as a Catholic priest. Mendel was working without so much as a microscope, in the obscurity of a monastic garden. What a laugh.Well, yes, if "Darwinism" turns out to be "anything that eventually proves to be true-ism," count me in.
Indeed Mendel, who also made significant contributions to physics and meteorology, had to give up science, after his genetic breakthrough, to devote the rest of his life to fighting the Austro-Hungarian tax authorities who were threatening the very existence of monasteries such as his own in Brno. It was not till the dawn of the 20th century that his ideas were exhumed, tested, and found to be brilliantly true and game-changing. They put the older Darwinism into eclipse, since "natural selection" could predict nothing, nor give a single result that could be replicated.
It took the once-fashionable Darwinian atheists three decades to recover from this setback. They did so by announcing the formation of the "modern evolutionary synthesis" -- i.e. pure Mendelism, relabelled as "neo-Darwinism."
That is one leg upon which our contemporary Darwinism stands: appropriated genuine science.The other leg has just been overthrown.
Few have ever disputed "common descent," but many have asked: What sort of "accident" hatched the first reproducing creature?(Curtsy: American Digest)
The sort of environmental flukes on which the Darwinian depends for his salvation are all very well if you have infinite time. But as we began to realize, about the time Primordial Soup was first served, the universe wasn't nearly old enough -- by a factor approaching infinity-- for any meandering and purposeless scheme to achieve the sort of results we see all around us.
But wait, committed Darwinists! Intelligent Design is likewise on the block this morning. Stephen Barr says it's a failure.
None of this is to say that the conclusions the ID movement draws about how life came to be and how it evolves are intrinsically unreasonable or necessarily wrong. Nor is it to deny that the ID movement has been treated atrociously and that it has been lied about by many scientists. The question I am raising is whether this quixotic attempt by a small and lightly armed band to overthrow “Darwinism” and bring about a new scientific revolution has accomplished anything good. It has had no effect on scientific thought. Its main consequence has been to strengthen the general perception that science and religion are at war.I don't agree with him, actually. He's right that the ID movement is not "Science" as such; it is philosophy, and represents the intellectual rediscovery of formal and final causes after decades of philosophical materialism.
But anyway, everybody re-group, tend to your wounded and fight again tomorrow.
