going after darwin
Creationists don’t like Charles Darwin. Never had. And modern times are no different as the Discovery Institute began its attack on evolutionary science through a mix of politics and pseudoscience. Energized by creationism’s sudden rise from the grave, its proponents renewed their attacks on the naturalist who penned On The Origin of the Species and began a paradigm shift in biology. They try to label him a eugenicist, pointing to a mutilated version of a questionable paragraph in Descent of Man and that a cousin of his started the movement. They assault his lack of knowledge of genetics, his woefully incomplete fossil collections. Some even go as far as to claim that he recanted on his deathbed. Which of course, isn’t true.
Their attacks have one goal in mind. They want to show that evolution has to be wrong because the man behind it wasnt the benevolent visionary or the resourceful naturalist presented to the public today. To some extent, their complaints about how Darwin is presented in the scientific press have a valid point. He did indeed write some things which bear the trademark of Victorian arrogance and there are a lot of things he had to guess quite inexactly. Scientists and science writers are loath to concede that he was and is somewhat lionized because they feel accepting critiques of Darwin is to give the ID and creationist movement a needless concession and fuel for future ridicule.
But this dog pile on Darwin misses the big picture and provides an insight into how creationists think. Like all good theories, evolution has outlived Darwin. He was a pivotal point, but when we discovered the structure of DNA and how to sequence it, when we started finding more fossils and began to piece all the evidence together, we found that at their core, Darwin’s conjectures were correct. The fact is that all life on Earth is built from the same genetic toolkits and shares vast swaths of DNA. We have more than 600 million years worth of evidence to see how these toolkits change with replication errors and environmental effects on DNA. We salute Darwin for directing us down the right path. But creationists think that evolution is a religious belief, just like theirs, and they use the “your-prophet-is-a-crackpot” propaganda tactic used to ridicule a competing belief. They’re sure that by making people doubt Darwin, it will somehow help them suppress the evil evolutionist religion and make people listen to their claims.
It won’t negate the evidence or give their constant violations of the scientific method any sort of legitimacy. Attacking Darwin to dismantle evolution is the equivalent of disparaging Newton to negate our observations of gravitational effects in space.
