Human Events

Critics Want More Facts, While Darwinists Push Their Faith
PBS's Evolution: The Broadcast of an Ideology
By Jonathan Wells
The Week of October 1, 2001

Stephen Jay Gould says it's time for us to take a "Darwinian cold bath" by
"staring a factual reality in the face." The "factual reality" is that all
living things are descended from a common ancestor through directionless
natural processes-mainly survival of the fittest.

It is factual, according to Gould, because it "has been validated" as much
as the "roughly spherical shape of our planet." And it will be cold because
Darwinian evolution has "substituted a naturalistic explanation of cold
comfort for our former conviction that a benevolent deity fashioned us
directly in his own image."

The bath is a four-day, eight-hour miniseries titled Evolution. Just
broadcast (September 24-27) on PBS-our tax-supported television network-the
series is accompanied by a privately financed, multi-million-dollar campaign
to influence teachers, local school boards and government officials. And for
$30 you can buy a glossy companion book titled Evolution: The Triumph of an
Idea, with an introduction by Gould that includes the lines quoted above.

According to a June 15 memo from its producers to PBS affiliates, the
guiding vision of Evolution is to convey "the importance of evolution" to
the American people. The focus of the series is "understanding the
underlying evidence behind claims of fact and proposed theories, and
reporting on those areas where the science is sound. . . . In keeping with
solid science journalism we examine empirically testable explanations for
'what happened,' but don't speak to the ultimate cause of 'who done it'-the
religious realm."

Yet some of the "evidence" presented in Evolution is known to be false, and
the remaining evidence provides surprisingly little support for Darwin's
theory. In place of scientific evidence, Evolution relies on a parade of
experts to assure us that Darwin had it right, and that the only people who
disagree are ignorant Biblical literalists. Religion is OK in its place, but
its place is not to challenge Darwinian evolution.

Evolution is science, we are told, because it is supported by evidence. And
that "powerful evidence" is that all living things are descended from a
common ancestor-a basic tenet of Darwin's theory-is the universality of the
genetic code. The genetic code is the way DNA specifies the sequence of
proteins in living cells, and the narrator of program tells us the code is
the same in all living things.

But biologists have been finding exceptions to the universality of the
genetic code since 1979, and more exceptions are turning up all the time. In
its eagerness to present the "underlying evidence" for Darwin's theory,
Evolution ignores this awkward-and potentially falsifying-fact.

Evolution also claims that "a tiny handful of powerful genes" are now known
to be the "engine of evolution," because all animals inherited the same set
of body-forming genes from their common ancestor. The principal evidence we
are shown for this thesis is a mutant fruit fly with legs growing out of its
head. [Error. It should have read: "The principal evidence we are shown for
this is a mutant fruit fly with an extra pair of wings."] But perceptive
viewers will see that the second pair of wings is inert.

The fly is a hopeless cripple, not the forerunner of a new and better race
of insects. In fact, the similarity of these genes in all types of animals
is a problem for Darwin's theory: If flies and humans have the same set of
"body-forming genes," why don't flies give birth to humans? Evolution
doesn't breathe a word about this well-known paradox.

Most of the remaining evidence in Evolution shows us that things are not
what they used to be, or it shows us minor changes within existing species.
But changes within existing species were known to domestic breeders long
before Darwin was born. The revolutionary claim in Darwin's theory was that
this same process could produce not only new species, but also completely
new forms of organisms.

Show Me the Evidence

Evolution has lots of interesting stories about scientists studying changes
within existing species-such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria-but
nowhere does it provide evidence that such changes can lead to new species,
much less new forms of living things.

Episode one, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," takes its name from a book by
philosopher Daniel Dennett, who regards Darwinism as a "universal acid" that
eats through virtually all traditional beliefs, especially Christianity. On
camera, Dennett tells us that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural
selection was "the single best idea anybody ever had."

People "used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from
the top down," Dennett says, but we must now "replace the traditional idea
of God the creator with the idea of the process of natural selection doing
the creating."

Biologist Stephen Jay Gould also talks about God. "The Darwinian revolution
is about who we are," Gould says, "it's what we're made of, it's what our
life means insofar as science can answer that question."

And one thing science tells us is that we originated like every other living
thing, through Darwinian evolution. "You could construe it in another way,
that is (I like to say) more user-friendly: You could have thought, well,
God had several independent lineages and they were all moving in certain
pre-ordained directions which pleased His sense of how a uniform and
harmonious world ought to be put together-and Darwin says, No, it's just
history all coming [through] descent with modification from a single common
ancestry."

We meet biologist Kenneth Miller sitting in church, where he says: "I'm an
orthodox Catholic and I'm an orthodox Darwinist." He explains that, "if God
is working today in concert with the laws of nature, with physical laws and
so forth, He probably worked in concert with them in the past. In a sense,
in a sense, He's the guy who made up the rules of the game, and He manages
to act within those rules."

The episode concludes with historian James Moore, who tells us that
"Darwin's vision of nature was, I believe, fundamentally a religious
vision."

All this in the first episode of a series that supposedly doesn't "speak to
the ultimate cause of 'who done it'-the religious realm."

Episode two claims that "our bodies are built from the same genes that build
all other animals," and then it uses Michelangelo's painting of God touching
Adam as a backdrop for its message that we are no exception to evolution.
The evidence, it seems, is that lemurs (who "most closely resemble our
tree-dwelling ancestors") are capable of a wide variety of movements.

And Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous "Lucy" fossil, assures us that
in producing human beings "evolution has worked the same way with us as it
has with every single organism on this planet."

No evidence is presented, however, to show that this is actually the case.

Episode three explains how mass extinctions supposedly open up opportunities
for the few remaining organisms to evolve. Of course, we don't want to help
other organisms evolve by going extinct ourselves, and we depend on complex
interactions among other species for our existence, so much of this episode
focuses on saving the rainforest.

It also shows how cattle ranchers in North Dakota use beetles to control a
weed infestation, which is designed to give us the impression that evolution
is essential to agriculture. But farmers have been using beneficial insects
to control pests for centuries; Darwin had nothing to do with it.

Episode four tries to convince viewers that evolution is essential to the
practice of medicine. Darwinian theory, in fact, may help us to understand
what's happening when bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. But when
we meet TB victims in a Russian prison, we learn that they succumbed to the
disease in the first place because their immune systems were weakened by
poor nutrition and a bad lifestyle. Nothing especially Darwinian about that.

Then a geneticist speculates on the evolutionary origin of a virus, in
domestic cats, that resembles HIV, though this does nothing to help humans
suffering from AIDS. Finally, an evolutionary biologist explains that the
best way to avoid cholera epidemics is to drink clean water. But we already
knew that.

Episode five is all about sex. It begins by telling us that "from an
evolutionary perspective, sex is more important than life itself."

No doubt many of the adolescents watching the series in their biology
classes will be pleased to hear this. Sex is "our immortality," we are told,
and many of our behaviors were inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.
This is graphically illustrated by scenes of apes having heterosexual and
homosexual intercourse in almost every position imaginable.

Then evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller tells us that the human
brain, like the peacock's tail, evolved through sexual selection: "It wasn't
God, it was our ancestors-they were choosing their sexual partners." Darwin
conceived his theory of sexual selection, however, to explain why peacocks,
but not peahens, have large and colorful tails. Yet women's brains seem to
be just as large and colorful as men's.

Conspicuously absent from episode five are the many Darwinists who think
evolutionary psychologists such as Miller have gone off the deep end.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, has
compared evolutionary psychology to now-discredited Freudian psychology: "By
judicious manipulation, every possible observation of human behavior could
be (and was) fitted into a Freudian framework. The same trick is now being
perpetrated by the evolutionary psychologists. They, too, deal with their
own dogmas, and not in propositions of science." Evolution completely
ignores such in-house critics of "evo-psycho."

Episode six is about "the mind's big bang." Psychologist Steven Pinker
assures us that "there were lots and lots of mutations over a span of tens,
maybe even hundreds of thousands of years that fine-tuned and sculpted the
brain." We see no evidence for such mutations, however.

Instead, we are shown some similarities between humans and chimpanzees, and
we are told that deaf-mutes in Nicaragua created their own sign language
without any help from sign-language experts.

The episode draws to a close with people crossing an African plain to the
music of the kyrie eleison from the Missa Luba, an African version of the
Roman Catholic mass.

A Roman Catholic mass? More religion, in a series that supposedly doesn't
speak to the religious realm.

If we had any doubt that the message of Evolution was fundamentally
religious, those doubts are dispelled in the seventh and last episode. "The
majesty of our Earth, the beauty of life," the episode begins. "Are they the
result of a natural process called evolution, or the work of a divine
creator?"

We are told that the only people who reject Darwinian evolution are ignorant
Biblical literalists, and that people who want to sneak religion into
science classrooms often intimidate or censor scientists. Nothing is said
about the many critics of Darwinian evolution who are not even Christians,
much less Biblical literalists. And nothing is said about the large and
growing number of cases in which Darwinists intimidate and censor their
critics.

It seems that Evolution is not so much a science documentary as a propaganda
piece. And the propaganda aims to leave us with two take-home messages.
First, Darwin's theory is fully confirmed by overwhelming evidence. Second,
religion is OK in its place, but its place is the subjective realm of
beliefs about meaning and morality, not the objective realm of events in the
real world. Both of these messages are stunningly and unmistakably false.

The Evolution series itself demonstrates the falsity of the first. The
evidence we are shown for Darwin's theory is embarrassingly thin. Fossils
prove that things are not what they used to be; there are similarities and
dissimilarities among living things; and minor changes occur within species.

Darwinism As a Personal Philosophic Commitment

But all these were known before Darwin, and scientists made good sense of
them without his theory. It turns out that belief in Darwinian evolution is
not so much a matter of scientific evidence as a matter of personal
philosophical commitment. The oft-repeated claim that Darwinism is supported
by "overwhelming evidence" is not a scientific statement, but an advertising
slogan.

Second, many religious affirmations are not based on subjective feelings,
but on events in the real world. There would be no Christianity if certain
space-time events had not occurred 2,000 years ago. True, some modern
Christians have accommodated themselves to secular philosophies by
retreating to a subjective realm, but, in this respect, these people have
abandoned classical Christianity, and they do not represent that historic
and intellectually vibrant Christianity, expressed, for example, in the work
of C.S. Lewis or Francis Schaeffer.

The Darwinists' message to Christians in Evolution is: Believe whatever you
like, as long as you leave objective reality to us. In response, the
Christians' message to Darwinists should be: Stick to the evidence, don't
confuse your materialistic ideology with empirical science, and stop
teaching our children that you have a monopoly on the whole of reality.

Stephen Jay Gould and the producers of Evolution want to immerse the rest of
us in their cold bath of materialistic ideology. Using the same metaphor,
the opposite of a Darwinian cold bath could be a warm shower of scientific
truth that follows the evidence wherever it leads.

POWRÓT