Darwinism defined: the difference between fact and theory - essay

Kristol needs a history lesson if he thinks that current creationism is a product of scientific intransigence. Creationism, as a political movement against evolution, has been a continually pow- erful force since the days of the Scopes trial. Rather than using evolution to crusade against religion in their texts, scientists have been lucky to get anything at all about evolution into books for high school students ever since Scopes's trial in 1925. My own high school biology text, used in the liberal constituency of New York City in 1956, didn't even mention the word evolution. The laws that were used against Scopes and cowed textbook publishers into submission weren't overturned by the Supreme Court until 1968 (Epperson v. Arkansas).

But what about Kristol's major charge -- anti-religious prejudice and one-dimensional dogmatism about evolution in modern textbooks? Now we come to the heart of what makes me so sad about Kristol's charges and others in a similar vein. I don't deny that some texts have simplified, even distorted, in failing to cover the spectrum of modern debates; this, I fear, is a limitation of the genre itself (and the reason why I, though more of a writer than most scientists, have never chosen to compose a text). But what evidence can Kristol or anyone else provide to demonstrate that evolutionists have been worse than scientists from other fields in glossing over legitimate debate within their textbooks?

Consider the evidence. Two textbooks of evolution now dominate the field. One has as its senior author Theodosius Dob zhansky, the greatest evolutionist of our century, and a lifelong Russian Orthodox; nothing anti-religious could slip past his watchful eye. The second, by Douglas Futuyma, is a fine book by a kind and generous man who could never be dogmatic about anything except intolerance. (His book gives a fair hearing to my own heterodoxies, while dissenting from them.)

When we come to popular writing about evolution, I suppose that my own essays are as well read as any. I don't think that Kristol could include me among Darwinian dogmatists, for most of my essays focus upon my disagreements with the strict version of natural selection. I also doubt that Kristol would judge me anti- religious, since I have campaigned long and hard against the same silly dichotomy of science versus religion that he so rightly ridicules. I have written laudatory essays about several scientists (Burnet, Cuvier, Buckland, and Gosse, among others) branded as theological dogmatists during the nineteenth-century reaction; and, while I'm not a conventional believer, I don't consider myself irreligious.

Kristol's major error lies in his persistent confusion of fact with theory. He accuses us -- without giving a single concrete example, by the way -- of dogmatism about theory and sustains his charge by citing our confidence in the fact of transmutation. ''It is reasonable to suppose that if evolution were taught more cautiously, as a conglomerate idea consisting of conflicting hypothe- ses rather than as an unchallengeable certainty, it would be far less controversial.''