Stupid Evolution Quote Prizes

The Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week goes to Mark Gladwin (04/25/2007) who said something the gentler sex will probably wince at: “Study the pregnant women, because that’s where you’ll see evolution in action.” No offense intended, we hope.  A runner-up goes to Deborah Charlesworth, who in Current Biology April 17 named Darwin as a scientific hero and associated Darwin-doubters with militant ducks.  Asked what is the biggest current challenge facing the scientific community, she said,

I think it is the difficulty of communicating an understanding of what science really is.  This is affecting young people who don’t feel the fascination of science, and it is allowing the spread of all kinds of irrational beliefs, such as quack medicine.  Evolutionary biology is under repeated attack from those who think, or wish, that non-natural processes must be involved.

Another contestant was Charles Lineweaver in Astrobiology Magazine who, in reviewing a book about the Gaia hypothesis, swept away Darwin-doubters with one hand while scratching his head over a fundamental Darwinian question with the other hand: “Forget the debates with creationists and intelligent designers; the scientific debate about the unit of selection is one of the most important challenges that Darwinism has ever had to face.”
    A new prize for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Month should probably be instituted for contestants like the following.  David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote in an editorial entitled “The Age of Darwin” that evolution has become the “unifying grand narrative” of the modern age.  Writing from Jerusalem, where he compared the holy sites to the Rockefeller Museum, he wrote in superlatives that would make Darwin blush:

And it occurred to me that while we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around.  Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere….
    According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code.  We are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species….
    The cosmologies of the societies represented in the Rockefeller Museum looked up toward the transcendent.  Their descendants still fight over sacred spots like the Holy of Holies a short walk away.  But the evolutionary society is built low to the ground.  God may exist and may have set the process in motion, but he’s not active.  Evolution doesn’t really lead to anything outside itself.  Individuals are predisposed not by innate sinfulness or virtue, but by the epigenetic rules encoded in their cells.

He ended, “We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history.  We have a central cosmology to embrace, argue with or unconsciously submit to.”
    This editorial by David Brooks (read it in its entirety at Free Democracy) brought sharp rebukes from Richard Kirk at The American Spectator and Bruce Chapman at the Discovery Institute.  Kirk accused Brooks of personification in his depiction of the “logic” of evolution: “One must slip a personifying image of Mother Nature through an intellectual back door to make the term mean what Brooks implies in his paean-of-sorts to Richard Dawkins’ ‘Blind Watchmaker.’”
    But the bluntness of the wording in the editorial led some to believe that surely Brooks was satirizing Darwin.  That’s what Logan Gage at Discovery Institute first thought, but now he’s not sure.  Maybe our readers can tell if it was all just a joke.
Update 04/28/2007: The verdict is in.  Logan Gage wrote again for Evolution News that despite his incredulity Brooks would say such things, he stands corrected: Brooks would, and did.

For the sake of Mr. Brooks’ reputation, we certainly wish he had been joking.  A worse statement of utter capitulation to Darwin could hardly be found.  It is totally groundless, self refuting, simplistic and uninformed – if he meant it seriously.
    Current Biology, true to form, dredged up another Darwin lover for its biweekly interview.  The answer to the obligatory question “Do you have any scientific heroes?” must include “Darwin” or else you get dunked.  It’s all a game the editors play.  Deborah Charlesworth, like her husband Brian, are card-carrying members of the Darwin Party attack force.  This means they have to portray the peace-loving Visigoths as the attackers.  At least she also included Gregor Mendel as a scientific hero.
    Charles Lineweaver showed the childlike faith in Darwin, characteristic of good disciples, that can permit the most damning questions to remain unanswered while ignoring those who have a different approach.  Oddly, he can give the time of day to weird science like Gaia, but not offer one short sentence to the kind of theistic science that built modern science in the first place (online book).
    It’s quotes like these that lead one to resign oneself to the strategy of Max Planck who, when asked why quantum mechanics became accepted, remarked that the doubters simply died off.  Sad to say, a younger generation of more open-minded scientists willing to consider design arguments will likely have to tolerate the rantings of Darwin’s old fogies (like certain Senators) for a few more years.