WHICH IS WHY MAYR DISTINGUISHED IT FROM SCIENCE:

An Idiot’s Guide to Evolution (Stephen Webb, May 15, 2007, First Things)

The dirty Darwinian secret is now out of the closet: If evolution is true, then it must be true about everything. Most Darwinians used to be very restrained about the relevance of their theory for cultural and moral issues, for obvious reasons. If evolution is true about everything, then randomness and competition are the foundations for the highest human ideals as well as the lowest organic life forms. Scientists have trouble enough restricting Darwinism to biology. What if that restriction is unscientific? What parents would want their children being taught that Darwinism explains not only speciation but also altruism?

Some Darwinians take inordinate glee at the prospects for a thoroughly Darwinized curriculum and the wreckage it would cause for traditional moral and religious beliefs. Others are eager to persuade us that Darwinian imperialism would be good for us. David Sloan Wilson, distinguished professor of biology at Binghamton University, falls into the second camp. In Evolution for Everyone (2007), he laments the specializations in higher education that keep Darwin’s theory from being applied to every field of knowledge. He is, he says, an “evolutionist without any qualifiers.” This might sound threatening, but he reassures his readers that “the basic principles are easy to learn,” and indeed they are. You pick an object or agent, whether individual, social, or culture, and you ask how it is has changed in a given situation. Then you try to figure out what advantage it gained by changing. “Just about anyone,” he enthuses, “can become an evolutionist by learning to think like Darwin.”

Truer words were never spoken--all it takes to be a Darwinist is the mind of a mid-19th Century white British male.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 15, 2007 12:00 AM