Thursday, April 24, 2008
Evolution and aliens
Linda Whitlock
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
Richard Dawkins believes in intelligent design. That's Ben Stein's conclusion, anyway, after Dawkins tries to account for the origin of life in an interview in Stein's new movie, "Expelled." It probably comes as a shock to those who've read "The God Delusion." But not to worry, Dawkins' designing intelligence isn't God.
Following in Francis Crick's footsteps, Dawkins surmises an advanced alien civilization might be responsible. Even granting Dawkins his alien civilization (for which we have less evidence than we do for God's existence), that accounts for life on Earth only. It doesn't explain how life originated.
As one interviewee in the film notes, a doctor doesn't have to believe in evolution to do good medicine.
By the same token, a scientist doesn't have to have an explanation for life's origins to believe evolution explains the variation in species. Still, it's a question that has to haunt evolutionists.
"Expelled," though, is neither a diatribe against evolution nor a paean to intelligent design. "The debate over the merits or lack thereof of Darwin's theory," screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi writes on her blog, "is really just the broad canvas for the movie's more basic contention that a society in which open thought is suppressed will devolve into injustice and even brutality."
No question injustice has already been done in service of Darwin's theory. As the movie shows, several scientists and academics have had their careers damaged or ruined for failing to worship at the altar of evolution. Why? To protect science from any ideas that might threaten the prevailing evolutionary dogma, apparently. Hmm. Religion by any other name. ...
The religious impulse, in fact, is always present in the human spirit. Human beings are wired for worship, and worship they will. Whatever the object -- God, science, education, technology, atheism, environmentalism or any other -ism -- people will believe in something and devote themselves to it, some more passionately than others.
The totalitarian impulse is always present in the human spirit, as well, as Jonah Goldberg shows in his recent book "Liberal Fascism." Marry the two -- generally in the name of the greater good -- and censorship, injustice and oppression inevitably follow. Nazi Germany is a case in point.
"Expelled" has been criticized for implying a link between evolutionary theory and Hitler's murderous policies. But the link clearly is there. Evolution provided the rationale for the eugenics movement and eugenics the justification for getting rid of the unfit, which, to the Nazis, included the Jews. For the greater good.
If evolution is true, it's true. Blinding ourselves to its possible consequences is foolhardy.
But what if it isn't true? What if something else -- some sort of intelligence, if you will -- is running the show? That's the tantalizing question some scientists have been asking. Some things just don't fit neatly into the evolutionary model. They seem, well, designed.
If a super-intelligence is required to explain the origin of life, as even Dawkins seems to believe, why not the origin of the species, too? Or the origin of some aspects of the species? All that information encoded in DNA had to come from somewhere. But those are questions true believers in evolution don't seem to want asked. For the greater good.
As "Expelled" demonstrates, from universities to the Smithsonian, the scientific community, perhaps with good intentions, has misrepresented and muzzled dissenters. Intelligent design theorists, evolutionists claim, are just creationists in pseudo-scientific garb. If allowed a toehold, they'll soon corrupt science (not to mention the innocent minds of America's schoolchildren) with their religious nonsense.
If intelligent design is true, it's true. Silencing its advocates won't change that. If it isn't true, science has nothing to fear from it. Given time, it will self-destruct. In either case, tyranny doesn't become us. Not even for the greater good.
Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.
