Darwinism defined: the difference between fact and theory - essay

This error arose for the following reason. A small splinter group of cladists (not all of them, as Kristol claims) -- ''transformed'' or ''pattern'' cladists by their own designation -- have adopted what is to me an ill-conceived definition of scientific procedure. They've decided, by misreading Karl Popper's philosophy, that patterns of branching can be established unambiguously as a fact of nature, but that processes causing events of branching, since they can't be observed directly, can't be known with certainty. Therefore, they say, we must talk only of pattern and rigidly exclude all discussion of process (hence ''pattern cladistics'').

This is where Bethell got everything arse-backwards and began the whole confusion. A philosophical choice to abjure all talk about process isn't the same thing as declaring that no reason for patterns of branching exists. Pattern cladists don't doubt that evolution is the cause behind branching; rather, they've decided that our science shouldn't be discussing causes at all.

Now I happen to think that this philosophy is misguided; in unguarded moments I would even deem it absurd. Science, after all, is fundamentally about process; learning why and how things happen is the soul of our discipline. You can't abandon the search for cause in favor of a dry documentation of pattern. You must take risks of uncertainty in order to probe the deeper questions, rather than stopping with sterile ecurity. You see, now I've blown our cover. We scientists do have our passionate debates -- and I've just poured forth an example. But as I wrote earlier, this is a debate about the proper approach to causes, not an argument about whether causes exist, or even whether the cause of branching is evolution or something else. No cladist denies that branching patterns arise by evolution.

This incident also raises the troubling issue of how myths become beliefs through adulterated repetition without proper documentation. Bethell began by misunderstanding pattern cladistics, but at least he reports the movement as a small splinter, and tries to reproduce their arguments. Then Kristol picks up the ball and recasts it as a single sentence of supposed fact -- and all cladists have now become doubters of evolution by proclamation. Thus a movement, by fiat, is turned into its opposite -- as the purest of all methods for establishing genealogical connections becomes a weapon for denying the mechanism that all biologists accept as the cause of branching on life's tree: evolution itself. Our genealogy hasn't been threatened, but my geniality has almost succumbed.

When I ask myself why the evidence for evolution, so clear to all historical scientists, fails to impress intelligent nonscientists, I must believe that more than simple misinformation lies at the root of our difficulty with a man like Irving Kristol. I believe that the main problem centers upon a restrictive stereotype of scientific method accepted by most non-practitioners as the essential definition of all scientific work.