Scopes redux all over again (cont.)
By Jack Cashill
(cont.)
What the ID movement challenges is Darwinian mechanics, random variation and natural selection. As Darwin saw it, nature preserved genetic variations that proved beneficial to the species. Over time, these adaptations would culminate in significant changes, even new species. An elegant idea in 1859, but in 1999 it’s still just an idea. Neo-Darwinians have as much trouble explaining how complex organisms like a wing or an eye could be the result of unguided, incremental change as Darwin did. Without all parts in perfect synchronicity, a wing or eye would be useless.
Darwin could only hope that the fossil record would one day prove him right. It hasn’t. If anything, it has done the opposite. No evidence has surfaced of an unsupervised step by step transition from one species to the next. Nor has anyone offered a satisfactory explanation for the rash of new animal life that abruptly and inexplicably entered the fossil record during the so-called Cambrian explosion.
In Topeka, ordinary citizens skillfully waged these arguments in the face of a hostile scientific community. One young guy in work clothes apologized that the other speakers had “perty near played out all my thoughts” and then proceeded to make an impressive case for honoring the scientic process.
Science, says board member Steve Abrams, is something that is “observable, measurable, repeatable, and falsifiable.” Darwinian macro-evolution appears to Abrams, a veterenarian, to be none of the above. It sustains itself now on the belligerent myopia of academics who proclaim, as one did at the hearing, that evolution is as "valid as the theories explaining gravity."
It ain’t.
Although the educators in Topeka would not admit it, gravity has a lot more staying power than Darwinism. More and more scientists, particularly in the fields of physics and astronomy, have come to accept the possibility of design in the universe. The “big bang” may unnerve the young earthers, but it has created more than a few theists in the science community.
