A reader writes, “After considering your latest attack on Charles Darwin, I have to wonder, what did the man ever do to you?” I love letters like this, which immediately suggest that in addition to being totally opposed to my views, a reader may have a sense of humour.
It is a fair question, and it has been asked both humourously, and humourlessly, by quite a number of correspondents. And even by those sympathetic to the balance of “David Warren Thought,” I am sometimes asked why I would stray into a specialized scientific field that has, or should have, nothing to do with politics or economics or religion, especially when I lack any formal qualifications. In their view, it only offers my critics an easy target, and my beleaguered supporters one more eccentricity to excuse.
Most letters are simply for or against, and are like cumbersome voting in an Internet poll: one that I usually lose. Most of these, on both sides, are demonstrably ignorant of the most elementary facts of biology.
It is perhaps worth mentioning, moreover, that as a class, I have found the people I refer to affectionately as “Darwinoids”—those who defend Darwinism explicitly because it is materialist, evolutionist, scientistic, and atheist—are the rudest of all my correspondents, not excluding radical feminists. I received a considerable volume of mail some years ago from radical Islamists, and in retrospect I must say they were, by comparison to the Darwinoids, consistently modest and respectful, even when delivering death threats. And, let me add, most appeared to be far better informed about the Shariah than any of the Darwinoids about Natural Selection.
Curiously, letters from those who actually know something about the subject, and have some appropriate credentials, are generally favourable, and when not, at least thoughtful and civil. For these are people who know what I am referring to, when I adduce classical and modern arguments against “random mutation,” “gradualism,” and so forth. They grasp that what works on the microevolutionary scale is an open question on the macro level; that it is going to remain open for a considerable time. And they allow, as Charles Darwin himself allowed, that Darwinism makes an ugly ideology.
The letters that really get to me, however, typically begin: “I read with some frustration your piece concerning the term ‘Darwinism’. I am not a scientist, and even I know that the term Darwinism is in an improper description of present-day evolutionary theory.”
To these I am genuinely tempted to reply, “You’ve got it, Pontiac!” or, “That was 90 per cent of my point, Mr. Brains!” or, “Good morning, Starshine, you have indeed detected the smell of the coffee.” For as I have repeatedly observed, and as anyone may observe, contemporary biology owes very little, if anything at all, to The Origin of Species (though much to the evolutionary paradigm, which long predated Darwin). Darwin’s may be the Victorian family portrait on the wall, but the advanced work in genetics and microbiology, and the actual fieldwork in natural history, would be no different had Darwin somehow escaped being born.
So why do I bother with him? I should have thought the reason was obvious, in this “Year of Darwin.” The man has survived, not as a man, nor as a biological theory, nor even as a chapter in the history of science, but as a living cosmology and philosophy of life—with a remarkable power for evil. And while it will be dismissed as “guilt by association,” the fact that Darwin’s portrait was also very publicly on the wall as the scientific ancestor for Nazi eugenic schemes and Communist notions of scientific materialism should give its supporters real pause.
Materialist, evolutionist, scientistic and atheist ideologies, which deny the ontological uniqueness of man, were responsible for the slaughter of well over 100 million souls in the last century, and we await the score for this one. And they have always been able to depend on a cheering section of fellow travellers and useful idiots, wherever intellectuals congregate.
I oppose “Darwinism” for two reasons. The lesser one is that, as science, it is not merely superannuated, but false. As such it is unhelpful to real empirical science, for it provides conceptual obstacles that get in its way. But that is the lesser reason, and one relies on nature herself to provide the material that cumulatively overturns the false hypothesis.
The greater reason to oppose “Darwinism”—in exactly the way it is presented today by Richard Dawkins and various other proselytizers for an activist Atheism—is that the ideas encased in this old amber are incredibly vile and destructive. The hypothetical reduction of man to a chance product of “natural processes” undermines, and can only undermine, all moral values, and replace them only with exigencies.
Even at best, Darwinism has been the great obliterator of that holy sense of wonder in the presence of nature that is intrinsic to our humanity. It replaces the rich world of gorgeous particularities with the steady drone of a feeble-minded atheistic propaganda.
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