Web Letters: Root and Branch

I wouldn't claim to know nearly as much about the philosophy of science, or vice versa, as Prof. Hacking. I do, however, know something about H.L. Mencken, having read as much of his work as came to my hand over the past thirty-five years, as well as roughly a half-dozen biographies. When the Professor accuses Mencken of "monstrous self-confident complacency" in his dispatches from the Scopes trial, I can hear HLM's shade begin to chuckle; and when he takes the Sage to task for failing to tailor his writing so as to promote "uptake by the people," the chuckling turns to outright guffaws. If there was ever an ambition which Mencken regarded as futile, it was any ambition to remedy the endemic credulity of our species, and so I am quite sure that he would find Prof. Hacking's criticism inapposite (not to mention hilarious). As for the Professor's dictum to the effect that "that part of the American population that believes God made man in His own image has a heartfelt contempt for know-it-alls"... surely the Professor intended a qualifying footnote: "That is, know-it-alls who aren't popes, bishops, evangelists et al."?

Mencken was never very popular among academics, nor were most academics very highly regarded by him. It's good to see that some things remain unchanged.

Robert Hampton

Henrietta, TX

In his generally astute review, Ian Hacking wrongly rejects the terms "antievolution" and "creationism" to describe those attempting to undermine the teaching of evolution in the public schools. In particular, Hacking contends that "the label 'anti-Darwin' seems the right umbrella term for creationism, antievolutionism--and Behe." Michael J. Behe, a biochemist--not, pace Hacking, a biologist--is the author of The Edge of Evolution, one of the books under review. Neither of Hacking's reasons for his terminology is valid, and it is important for understanding the antievolution movement in the United States to understand why.

Hacking writes, "Behe says, in effect, 'Sure, I believe in evolution by natural selection--it just doesn't do all it is supposed to.'" But the late Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research, and his fellow young-earth creationists also accept evolution by natural selection, if only within limits of the Biblical "kinds" (for instance, Genesis 1:25 (KJV): "God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind." Ironically, as Ronald L. Numbers has observed, young-earth creationists have taken to invoking extraordinarily rapid natural selection to explain the vast amount of diversification they are forced to assume to have occurred in the 4,000 years since Noah's Flood.

Hacking also writes that Behe "does not officially argue for special acts of creation." But "irreducible complexity" is clearly intended to indicate where God miraculously intervened in the biological world. Although Behe believes that the designer is God, it is true that he and his "intelligent design" colleagues generally refrain from claiming scientific warrant for that conclusion. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that their reticence is dictated not so much by a recognition of the limitations of their arguments as by their desire to skirt the First Amendment's ban on the advocacy of religion in public school science classrooms (see the Supreme Court's decision in the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard).

"Antievolution" in the phrase "antievolution movement" is a metonymy; it is not evolution per se that creationists are fighting against but evolution education. Since Behe has actively participated in efforts to compromise the quality of evolution education, from the notorious "intelligent design" textbook Of Pandas and People onward, he is unquestionably a member of the antievolution movement.

Famously, Behe testified for the losing side in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School Area School District, where he humiliated himself by admitting that "intelligent design" is just as scientific as astrology. Less famously but more revealingly, he is serving as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in ACSI et al. v. Stearns et al., arguing that biology classes in fundamentalist Christian schools that use young-earth creationist biology textbooks are just as good as classes in public schools that use biology textbooks presenting mainstream biology.

Hacking's preferred label "anti-Darwin" is misleading in its own right. Evolutionary theory, as he acknowledges, is not confined to Darwin's work alone, and creationists--whether of the young-earth, old-earth, or intelligent design variety--are not attacking just Darwin but anything in the entire edifice of evolutionary science that happens to offend their various religious predilections. Hacking cites the title of Behe's first book, Darwin's Black Box, to make his point that Behe is best described as anti-Darwinian. He should have looked further, to its subtitle: The Biochemical Case Against Evolution.

Glenn Branch
National Center for Science Education

Oakland, CA

Reading Ian Hacking's article (and there are almost a dozen articles like this a month in Arts & Letters Daily, which condemn anything and anyone that challenges any aspect of the entrenched orthodoxy of the Darwinian theory of evolution), I had to ask myself why are guys like Ian Hacking driven to write 4,595 word essays about how "alive" Darwinian evolutionary theory is--all the more so because of its many problems--and how dead and static ID is because it bases its existence in the holes of said theory, and gains much traction from those holes, which are considerable and even possibly grave.

If you were to teach a class in the theory of evolution that both expressly called it a theory only and not a fact, and in this class you were to point out at any length the massive flaws in the theory--without even positing an alternative theory or hint of God--well that would be a fair scientific attitude, right?

Well, wrong, according to Ian Hacking.

It would be "dead science", whatever that means. "Dead science" doesn't sound like a very scientific term to me. It sounds rather like a term used by a man whose pet is being wounded, and that pet is an animal that should have never, ever been a pet, not to any person who claims true science as their lifelong discipline, anyway. There are no pets that are theories, only potentially perishable specimens.

Kevin Battle

Pacifc Grove, CA

With a thesis ripped from the pages of a 1990s-era episode of Star Trek, Mr. Hacking has provided an article meticulously calibrated to appease his target audience, supplying in turns enough anger and smugness (tempered by a few populist platitudes as an escape hatch) to get his readers through another month in Bush's America. I read this. like all the best ancient commentators and the wisest designers, as allegory.

Randall Gremillion

Santa Monica, CA

Mr. Hacking really does seem to be channeling Immanuel Kant at the end of his excellent essay--above all the Kant who said, in his "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens" (1755): "The essential ability of the natures of things to lift themselves to order and perfection is the most beautiful demonstration of God's existence."

This was, of course, the same Kant who later, in his "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781) argued that there can be no scientific theology, that is, no scientific theory or proof of God--another claim that I believe Mr. Hacking understands and appreciates.

I can forgive Mr. Hacking for the condescension that at least one reader hears in his tone. In my opinion, condescension and pity are the only possible forms that love can take toward those whom we cannot admire--and surely the disciples of anti-Darwinism belong to this category. And what exactly is stopping the hardworking masses from reading Kant, Hegel etc. themselves? If they really are so hardworking, unlike us lazy academics, then surely this task is not too much for them.

Indeed, I would even go so far as to point out that we US-Americans (including a few so-called academics) are somewhat responsible for our own reflexive anti-intellectualism, which only poses as skepticism. It was not for nothing that Kant (in a 1784 essay entitled "What is Enlightenment?") called the Enlightenment the "departure of humankind from its self-inflicted immaturity."

Eric Paul Jacobsen

Saint Paul, MN

Can we, for the sake of civil society, stop calling this not-so-veiled attempt at unconstitutionally imposing religious doctrine upon our youth as creation "science?" There is very little that is scientific about it, including the notable absence of actual peer review, which under the dogma of creation fiction (which is the only thing we can call this mockery of the scientific community) cannot help but fail, not to mention the inability of anybody currently living upon this globe to have observed a supreme being creating anything. Lastly, can we start calling it Christian creation fiction? My working knowledge is such that many of the Native American tribes might object to this particular version of human existence, not to mention Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Confucianists, Taoists and, most of all, atheists.

Nicholas Schreiter

Appleton, WI

Ian Hacking refers to the Discovery Institute as a conservative think tank. Judging from its website, it is a completely specialized anti-Darwinian organization. Hacking's article, should any other conservative read it, would tend to recruit conservatives to the anti-Darwinian cause.

Maybe most conservatives are anti-Darwinian, but remember that the Kansas School Board members who took evolution out of the biology curriculum were defeated in the Republican primary and replaced by people who put evolution back in.

John McCarthy

Stanford, CA

As a convinced Creationist, on scientific, ethical, rational grounds, I am quite pleased with Mr Hacking's article.

He accuses the creationists of skirting problems they will not face, but he does just this with his "celebration" of problems. In fact the piece is merely a name-calling tirade, albeit one with a measure of literary style, but science and rational argumentation it is not.

This kind of stuff is the best that evolutionists can do when faced with creation science done by the best of creation scientists. Hacking admirably demonstrates that Darwinism is dead science, pseudo-science and unabashed "faith" in the derogatory sense of the word, but instead of abandoning the sham, because the alternative is totally unacceptable to minds as dishonest as the evolutionists', they flog the dead horse passionately, as if they believe in the resurrection of the dead by corporal punishment.

So well done to Mr Hacking, for showing the best that evolutionists can do is no threat to real science or to real faith in the living God: No intelligent creationist need fear the posturing glove puppet that is evolutionism.

Steve Meikle

Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand

While natural selection is self-evident, we can all agree that the theory of evolution is itself evolving. Professor Hacking's suggestion that the fundamental concept of "species" may only be a taxonomic vestige is an example of the work-in-progress nature of the theory of evolution. Thus when evolutionists speak with absolute--and often demeaning--certainty, they give ammunition and added incentive to creationists, et al.

Doug McMillan

Malone, FL

I do wish one of these articles could be written without the obligatory attack on Hitchens, Harris and Company. (Where is Dawkins? or did Hacking prefer to omit such a stalwart Darwinist?) If anyone wonders why a far-right wing party has governed America during the twenty-first century, one place to start is by examining liberals' attacks on liberals to prove how liberal they are. Yes, I suppose those aggressively atheistic books are rude sometimes, but they never advocate stoning anybody to death in accordance with the law of Leviticus. They just challenge religious believers to produce a single rational argument for their beliefs.

The books are futile, not because they are impolite and even contemptuous, but because no force on earth can open a closed mind. And they are old news to readers of the late-nineteeth-century literature, produced by a cadre of eloquent agnostics, that made all the arguments it is possible to make to disprove the divine inspiration of the Bible. But these are not good reasons for atheists and secular humanists to wring their hands over a few books that state the obvious about Biblical literalism. Is scorn too strong an emotion to feel toward those who not only disdain rationality, logic and empiricism but themselves condescend with mighty arrogance toward all skeptics and regularly say that we are too immoral and too cowardly to embrace their true religion? Perhaps the New Atheists have done nothing to convince any fundamentalist to change his mind--does Hacking have a Plan B on that score? In the meantime, is there anything so wrong with at least making the case that we should drop our exaggerated show of respect for religious postures that are not only intellectually bereft but, all too often, morally corrosive?

Stephen Kennamer

Durham, NC

The difficulty many Americans have with accepting Darwin's ideas is all the more surprising considering that, to take the current debate about health insurance as only one example, some aspects of life in America are themselves rather "Darwinian," i.e., the strong support for the idea of the survival of the fittest.

Peter Smith

Vienna, Austria

Professor Hacking, whom are you writing for? Was this article rejected by the Journal of Philosophical Terminology and "The Academic Journal for Mentioning Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Aguinas, Liebniz et al.? Your pompous and shameful wordsmithing could be more precisely entitled; "Selling the Academic Self in Supernation at War."

You state; "The people do not trust those who present themselves as an elite." Yessir.

A casual aside: The people do vote their choices--either Demo or Repub, Yale Law or Harvard, Plato or Aristotle, Darwin or Behe... I've heard it called individual choice theory. That's academic, ain't it?

"Whads dis here shid bout skulls and boners? Boola boola whad."

And the condescending classic, "God bless the people, even when they get it wrong." Oh, the people--how I love the people! "God bless the people." The poor schmuckery are so good and pure in their hearts. They may be bewildered and bamboozled by big bucks and peeyar, but they are sooo good. You understand, do you not? "God Bless you" too, Professor Hacking.

I can see that you have studied long and hard. You are learned in the craft, and you have achieved the pinnacle of philosophical success. Hacking knows the territory. Oh, how he knows it.

But I love Science, Darwin, and Democracy too much to respect your pretentious philosophical name-dropping fog. A man of your credentialed learning and academic status should know better. Some working stiffs might call you "a pompous bastard."

May I suggest to you that medieval English lawyer/priests were paid by the word.

Sir, do you read what you write?

And God bless.

Gerald Spezio

Willits, CA