The Heirs of Galileo
Louis Markos on Evolution & Reasonable Science
In a critique of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement published in The New York Review of Books, the literary critic Frederick Crews argued that “Neo-Darwinian natural selection is endlessly fruitful, enjoying corroboration from an imposing array of disciplines, including paleontology, genetics, systematics, embryology, anatomy, biogeography, biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology, physical anthropology, and ethology.” He is, of course, quite right in this assertion. The evolutionary paradigm set forth by Darwin does indeed undergird that colossal, multi-storied structure that is modern (post-Enlightenment) science.
But Crews was not satisfied merely to trace and celebrate the pervasiveness of evolutionary theory. His article was also a polemic designed to dismiss ID as an ideological construction whose real agenda is to promote, as “scientific,” Christian claims that cannot be sustained by “real” (read, evolutionary) science. He began the second installment of his two-part critique with this unapologetic claim:
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Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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more on evolution from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
Flight from the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West, Volume II by Paul Gosselin by Louis Markos
22.8—November/December 2009
Looking for Beauty & Justice 150 Years After Darwin’s Classic by Charles Taliaferro
23.6—November/December 2010
Darwin, Design & Thomas Aquinas
The Mythical Conflict Between Thomism & Intelligent Design by Logan Paul Gage
more from the online archives
32.6—November/December 2019
Historical Truth, Beguiling Stories & Three Kinds of Hearers by Anthony Esolen
29.4—July/August 2016
Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer by Hunter Baker
32.2—March/April 2019
on Preserving Physical & Spiritual Nourishment by Nathanael Devlin
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