John Derbyshire Whoops Up On George Gilder

Not long ago, George Gilder — one of the founders of the Discovery Institute — wrote a piece called Evolution and Me for the print edition of National Review. (It’s online at the Discovery Institute though).

Yesterday in a shockingly violent manner, John Derbyshire (also at the National Review) was caught mercilessly pummeling Gilder’s piece beyond recognition. It’s nice to see that the National Review is keeping it in house.

Derbyshire’s piece, though long, is a poignant response to Gilder’s article, and includes some good insights.

I’ll also say that I write the following with some reluctance. It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn’t actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It’s boring.

While Gilder argues that throwing off the search for natural (that is material) means of explaining the world around us is the only way science will break new ground, Derbyshire points out that on the contrary, biology is just hitting it’s golden age and evolution is squarely at the center of it all.

Speciation via evolution underpins all of modern biology, both pure and applied. Note that in the latter category fall such things as new cures for diseases and genetic defects, new crops, new understandings of the brain, with consequences for pedagogy and psychology, and so on. To say to biologists: “Look, I want you to drop all this nonsense about evolution and listen to me,” is like walking into a room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers and telling them that classical aerodynamics is all hogwash.

Biologists are of all scientists least in need of a new metaphysic. Neurophysiology aside, it is in the “hard” sciences that our epistemological underwear is showing. When physicists have to resort to explanations involving teeny strings vibrating in scrunched-up eleven-dimensional spaces a trillion trillion trillion trillionth of an inch across, or cosmologists try to tell us that entire universes are proliferating every nanosecond like bacteria in a petri dish, there is a case to be made for a metaphysical overhaul. Not that work in these fields has come to a baffled dead stop, as George seems to imply. Far from it; the problem in fundamental physics and cosmology is not so much that we have run out of theories, as that we have too many theories. I’ll grant that there are epistemological issues, though.

Biology, by contrast, really has no outstanding epistemological problems. With the tools of modern genomics at its disposal, it is in fact going through a phase of great energy and excitement, so that biologists are much too busy to be bothered with epistemological issues. To modify the simile I offered above: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, around 1930. “Hey, those machines of yours don’t really fly, you know…”

He then hits the nail squarely on the head by pointing out the utter and total emptiness of intelligent design.

That brings us to the second problem that scientists have with George’s system: After being around for many years, it has not produced any science. George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science? In all those years, not a single paper of scientific standing has come out of (nor even, to the best of my knowledge, been submitted by) the DI or the CSC. I am certainly willing to be corrected here. If the DI or CSC have any papers of scientific standing — published or not — I shall post links to them to NRO for qualified readers to scrutinize.

Scientists discover things. That’s what they do. In fast-growing fields like genomics, they discover new things almost daily — look into any issue of Science or Nature. What has the Discovery Institute discovered this past 16 years? To stretch my simile further: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, never having flown or designed any planes themselves. Are they really surprised that they get a brusque reception? [emphasis in original]

With so much of the objections to evolutionary theory coming from the political right, I’m always happy to see conservatives like Derbyshire (or George Will or Charles Krauthammer for that matter) trying to correct the record. I’d be just fine with de-politicizing science in our culture.