Methinks the writer may be presenting a false dichotomy--

And such efforts may be having an effect. According to a Gallup survey released last November, only about a third of Americans believe that Darwin's theory is well supported by the scientific evidence, while nearly half believe that humans were created in more or less their present form 10,000 years ago.

Don't the leading ID theorists accept an old age for the earth?

The Wife listened to Science Friday this week on NPR and they interviewed a reporter from Kansas on the Darwinism in schools controversy. He said repeatedly that opponents weren't proposing that a Creationist currriculum nor an I.D. one replace Darwinism, just that Evolution be taught with the skepticism it warrants. At the end host Ira Flato signed off by saying that they'd been discussing the attemnt to impose Creationism in the classroom.

Doctrinaire Darwinists need the strawman. Support for the faith and the catachism would crumble without it.

You don't need Doctrinaire in that sentence.

Darwin supplied a new intellectual framework for deveoping an understanding of the natural world. The doctrinaire followers reach unsustainable conclusions based on the theory. I think there is a distinction, maybe I'm wrong.

The framework is merely a rival religion:

"By the 1870s, Darwin was an international celebrity. Even if people did not believe they descended from apes, they talked about it--and about Darwin. And for many of those who did believe, Darwin became a kind of secular prophet or high priest. Secluded in his remote country home at Downe, perpetually ill or supposedly so according to some, Darwin played the part of hermit sage receiving favored guests on his own terms. [...] Surveying the scene, Huxley sent Darwin a sketch of a kneeling supplicant paying homage at the shrine of Pope Darwin. Given their almost visceral contempt for Catholicism, both Huxley and Darwin surely enjoyed the irony."

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1390/

"The doctrinaire followers reach unsustainable conclusions based on the theory."

Who would you see as falling into that category?

creeper's right, it's all of them, not a select group.

As usual, Orrin is so desperate to agree with me that he'll nilly-willy ascribe opinions to me.

Anyway, Tom, I'd still be interested in your answer.

Those who reach a materialistic conclusion regarding the nature of man and would otrganize society around those conclusions.

BTW-

Did anyone see the History Channel's recreation of the Columbine Massacre? Interesting profile of the murderers. One was an overmedicated, amoral kid wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with "Natural Selection" while killing his teachers and fellow students. In an earlier tape he had concluded that since America was 'the home of the free' that it justified his thefts from easy marks. The kid had a police record.

The philosopher's right but it might be even more accurate to point to the "Boy who cried wolf" syndrome. After using Darwinism for one century to justify racism and euthanasia/sterilization of those with inferior genes, and for nearly two centuries to attack religion and promote a destructive atheism, and then trumpeting "scientific" evidence like Piltdown Man which turns out to be fraudulent, the loudest evolutionists are naturally seeing all their assertions questioned, even ones that have a scientific basis.

pj:

Bingo.

Paul, you might want to go read the scientific (as opposed to the popular) literature on Piltdown.

It was controversial because it didn't smell right. Duh. But it was difficult to refute by armchair argument, because science proceeds by observation, not fiats. It took a few years for new evidence to be found.

However, science was far from trumpeting Piltdown as proof of Darwinism. Just the reverse, in fact.

As W. Edwards Deming used to say about manufacturing,
'You've got to have a theory. If you don't have a theory, how can you tell when you are wrong?'

Your argument could be -- and should be -- directed against Christian science, which 'trumpeted' the fact that projectiles made 90-degree turns.

Both Christian physics and Piltdown collapsed when someone got around to making some observations.

Piltdown collapsed almost immediately, Christian physics only after a run of many centuries.

That ought, at least, to suggest something about the relative efficiencies of differing methodologies.

pj,

Instances of fraud are of course damaging to legitimate science, sometimes far beyond their original scope, but the modern theory of evolution rests on a large body of scientific knowledge, observation and experimentation. The Piltdown Man fraud was exposed back in the 1950s, had already been widely disregarded by the scientific community years earlier and has been irrelevant to the theory of evolution for quite some time.

Piltdown came at a moment when Darwinism had died and served to rescue it. The hoax was exposed and accepted as hoax only after it had served its purpose.

But, heck, you still can't even accept that the peppered moth was a hoax. Mustn't question our own faiths too deeply.

creeper:

Many Christians are dubious of miracle claims now, but they served to establish the religion.

I'm not particularly concerned about whether Kettlewell's peppered moth experiment was a so-called hoax or not (though from what I know at least some, if not all, of the charges leveled at Kettlewell have in turn been debunked), since the findings of his experiments were subsequently found to be qualitatively correct by other researchers.

"Piltdown came at a moment when Darwinism had died and served to rescue it."

Actually it was the combination with Mendel's theories that kept Darwin's theory going, which eventually resulted in the modern synthesis.

creeper:

What was the experiument and what was it trying to prove? If you spell it out you should be able to see why it was a hoax from the start.

Actually, it was Watson and Crick who killed off Darwin, except in middle-brow culture.

Darwin's theory of natural selection is still featured in today's theory of evolution, though of course not to the exclusion of all else, as some anti-evolutionists have made themselves believe. Darwin was never "killed off", though many of the gaps in Darwin's knowledge (like the existence of DNA) were subsequently filled in.

I have no idea why anti-evolutionists obsess about Darwin so much. It's probably just an easy way to avoid addressing current theories.

David:

How so?

creeper: I'm not antievolutionist.

Jeff: Because once we understood the mechanics of genetic inheritence, we understood that Darwin wasn't so much studying a process as the interstices between two or three seperate processes.

I thought the sort of person who used to become a devout Darwinist now believes in the Earth Goddess instead.

In other words, the remaining evolutionists are real scientists.

David:

Perhaps you are focusing too much on Darwin, and not enough on Evolution.

Darwin didn't know about DNA, or viruses, continental drift, or occasional natural catastrophes.

So DNA no more killed off Darwin, than Einstein killed off Newton.

Further, your assertion seems off base in another way. For natural selection to work, inheritance had to be particulate, rather than blended. (An excellent example showing Evolutionary theory to be a hypothetico-deductive entity possessing deductive consequences)

By the mid-1920s, Darwin's theory had waned significantly because scientists presumed inheritance was blended--fatally contradicting Darwin--and Mendel's research showing otherwise was practically forgotten.

In the mid-20s, though, that research was rediscovered, demonstrating that Darwin was right, and conventional wisdom wrong.

Finding DNA to be the agent of particulate inheritance doesn't seem to change that much.

But Creeper raises the more fundamental point: the term Darwinism is a strawman bearing practically no resemblance to actual Evolutionary theory.

Why is that?

Jeff:

Because there's no easier shorthand. Also, religions often take the name of their founders.

Jeff: All I care about is Darwin. I mostly accept evolution.

"All I care about is Darwin. I mostly accept evolution."

Thank you for the honesty.

But why care about Darwin?

OJ:

Evolution (shorthand for current evolutionary theory) works just fine.

I rather suspect the reason for using such a flagrantly inaccurate strawman is that it provides a far less difficult proposition for the theologically exercised than the real thing.

Because, after all is said and done, the animus is against any naturalistic explanation, present or future, because the theologically exercised can't stand the thought that the way Creation actually works cares very little for "divinely" revealed descriptions thereof.

Jeff:

Everyone believes in evolution though. It is the specific claim of Darwinists--that Nature suffices for evolution--that is disputed.

Orrin,

"Everyone believes in evolution though."

Only if you twist the meaning of the word evolution to include biblical literalism, but we've been over that already ad nauseam.

Yes, so Darwinism is used to differentiate one sort of evolutionary faith from the others.

Only if you twist the meaning of the word evolution to include biblical literalism which it does not include – but we've been over that already ad nauseam.

And of course you're keeping your distance from the actual theory of evolution.

OJ:

Precisely. The theologically exercised a priori dispute any naturalist explanation, because it would contradict their notion of Revealed Truth.

Even if such a naturalistic explanation reveals the way God actually works.

It seems a bit hubristic to so reflexively conflate religion with God.

Jeff:

Yes, so we use Creationism for everyone who believes God is involved, Darwinism for everyone who thinks it's just Nature, and I.D. for those who discern the involvement of intelligence in evolution but don't feel confident saying it's God.

They're just easy names.