The best demonstration that evolution is incorrect is the continued persistence of creationists and the more recent fruit cakes in the Intelligent Design camp. Today, Robert Bartley strangely swerves into a discussion of evolution. A discussion that is horribly confused.
Bartley claims:
On net, religious impulses are probably growing. September 11 persuaded others besides George Bush that evil is an active force in the world. The science of the Big Bang and DNA looks much more like the work of a creator than the cold world of Newtonian Laws and Darwinian evolution. And at least indirectly the horrors of the 20th century showed that the latter provides no moral compass.
I’m not quite sure what the work of a creator looks like and that is the essential problem with creationists–anything fits their claims. Other than finding ‘engineered by Yahweh’ inscribed on some DNA there really isn’t much to argue about here. One can accept on faith that God created the universe, but through means that follow natural methods. Insisting that God’s actions must be telegraphed seems a bit more in line with Greek Deities and not the God of the Bible.
More troubling is that Bartley thinks that a scientific theory is a philosophy. Of course, it is not. The method of scientific discovery is philosophically based, but is not a normative enterprise in terms of its practice. It is absurd to expect a description of how life on Earth evolved to explain moral questions. Bartley might as well be suggesting that explanations for El Nino are responsible for Peruvian corruption.
The Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, the great defeat of the fundamentalists, has in particular come in for reassessment. Noting for example that the ACLU advertised for a plaintiff, a 2002 PBS documentary let the people of Dayton, Tenn. say that they were not the dolts depicted by the news dispatches of H. L. Mencken and the 1960 movie "Inherit the Wind." And in his new Mencken biography "The Skeptic," Terry Teachout points to the unlovely side of the philosophy animating his account: A disdain of democracy, for example, in favor of credo of Social Darwinism, applying survival of the fittest to human communities, and its corollary of eugenics, shortly later discredited by the Third Reich.
I’m not sure how one gets to be a editor of a major national paper and cannot tell the difference between biological evolution as a science and social darwinism and eugenics as completely different concepts?