The Measure of Design
A Conversation About the Past, Present & Future of Darwinism & Design
Jed Macosko, who received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley for his work on influenza hemagglutinin and HIV RNA and then received a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health, will begin teaching biophysics at Wake Forest University this August. Paul A. Nelson has published articles in popular and scholarly journals and contributed to the anthologies Mere Creation and Signs of Intelligence. His forthcoming monograph, On Common Descent, critically evaluates the theory of common descent, and is being edited for the series Evolutionary Monographs, produced by the University of Chicago’s Department of Ecology and Evolution. See the other writers’ articles in this issue for their biographies. The answers begin with those by Phillip E. Johnson, as the leader of the movement, followed by the others in alphabetical order.
Touchstone: Who are the “prophets” who anticipated the intelligent design (ID) movement? (I mean people writing before Phillip Johnson.) Did anyone influential listen to them?
Phillip E. Johnson: I would name, first, Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, author of The Scientific Alternative to Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, who pioneered the “origin of information” analysis (see http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/sa.htm), and Dr. Michael Denton, author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Both these brilliant men were noticed to some degree, but prejudice prevented their ever gaining a fair hearing.
William A. Dembski: I would add to Phil’s list Michael Polanyi and Marcel Schützenberger. Like Wilder-Smith and Denton, they were deeply critical of scientific materialism and the reductive approach to biology that it fostered. They also had stellar reputations in the secular intellectual world, so it was hard to dismiss them as cranks.
Paul Nelson: I’d list Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen, who published The Mystery of Life’s Origin in 1984, a book that anticipates many of the central concerns of the ID community. If you ask Charlie Thaxton who he was reading, however, in the years that led to Mystery, I think he’d mention people such as the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, mathematician and biologist Marcel Schützenberger, and the theologian Francis Schaeffer. And A. E. Wilder-Smith, a polymath who thought hard about exactly why Darwinism failed.
What do you say to people who say—in one way or another—it’s just not plausible that mainstream science took such a wrong turn?
Johnson: Freud, Marx, and Darwin were all revered as major scientific heroes throughout the twentieth century. Of the three, only Darwin retains any scientific standing.
Nelson: Look at the history of science: plenty of wrong turns. Taking and then discovering that one has taken a wrong turn is what science is all about.
Edward Sisson: The history of science for the past 500 years includes many such “wrong turns” by the mainstream science of the day, including Ptolemy’s earth-centered universe (replaced by Copernicus’s sun-centered theory), Galen’s theory of the four humors of the blood (replaced by Harvey’s work on blood circulation), the theory that now-extinct land animals crossed to different continents by means of now-submerged “land bridges” (replaced by the theory of plate tectonics), and other now-rejected theories as discussed in the landmark work by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Thus, opponents of Darwinism are not, as this kind of objection suggests, asserting something that has no precedent in the history of science.
Darwinism has gained and maintained its position because it is a theory that scientists very much want to be true, because it removes one of the main lines of argument asserted by religious leaders: that there must be a God because no natural force could explain the diversity of life. By removing that line of argument, science enhances the authority of scientific leaders in competition with religious leaders on matters of great public importance. That is what the famous debate between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce was all about: who would be humiliated and who would control the podium.
James M. Kushiner is the Director of Publications for The Fellowship of St. James and the former Executive Editor of Touchstone.
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more on evolution from the online archives
23.6—November/December 2010
Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas
The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage
22.8—November/December 2009
Looking for Beauty & Justice 150 Years After Darwin’s Classic by Charles Taliaferro
32.2—March/April 2019
Flight from the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West, Volume II by Paul Gosselin by Louis Markos
more from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
on Childhood Encounters with a Christmas Icon by Rebecca Sicree
27.5—Sept/Oct 2014
The Culture of Death's Campaign Against the Catholic Church by Brantly Millegan
33.1—January/February 2020
on a Saint's Charism That Cures Toxic Perfectionism by Colleen Carroll Campbell
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