Category Archives: Darwinism

The passing of Queen Elizabeth over the weekend saw an outpouring of grief in Britain and her also in Australia.

The Australian flags, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, will be flown at half mast, federal parliament will cease sitting for 15 days and an official public holiday was announced following the news of her death at Balmoral.

Indigenous responses here to the news have not surprisingly included a rejection of the monarchy and its role.

For Indigenous people here and across the globe, the British empires history of colonialism, represented by the Crown, from Ireland, to Africa, to West Indies to North America and Australia was sadly based on lack of respect and founded in racial violence.

This was an era of Darwinism and belief in Europeans being a superior race of people.

While some countries succeeded in decolonizing, Ireland after decades of civil war being noteworthy, most did not.

In North America and New Zealand, treaties were negotiated by the British with Indigenous people, establishing formal relationships between the Crown and Indigenous people.

Its not clear why the British engagement with Australia took such a different turn Captain James Cook was given clear instructions from Britain to take possession only with the consent of the Indigenous people.

The Law of Nations established those colonizing nations were not to take lands without consent or agreement of Indigenous people.

Agreement or consent was evidenced through treaties, such as the Treaty of Waitangi which plays an important role in New Zealand today.

Lands could also be acquired through conquest or war. Land that was empty or belonging to no one could be claimed under the doctrine of Terra Nullius, and this legal fiction was adopted in Australia.

The International Court of Justice in the case of Western Sahara (1974) rejected outright the colonial misuse of the Terra Nullius doctrine in this manner, condemning it as unacceptable and racist.

Our High Court in the case of Mabo also rejected Terra Nullius as one of the darkest moments in our history.

The Mabo decision led to national native title legislation, but the Court refused to grapple with the question of Aboriginal sovereignty, which is still not resolved.

Accordingly, many Aboriginal people today maintain that we remain Sovereign people, not subjects of the British Crown.

Our sovereignty was never ceded and our ties to this land run deep with 60,000 years of connection to our lands or Boodjah we cannot be colonized.

As Britain, and even Australia, mourn the death of the Queen and the announcement of the King, we can reflect also on our history with the British Crown and relationships today.

Following news of the Queens death there have been calls for the Australian Republic, but PM Albanese rightly responded that Voice will come first.

After all, we have serious unfinished business to attend to.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart and process of Voice, Treaty and Truth seeks to resolve the unlawful acquisition of Australia by the British Crown in 1788.

The commitment to Voice and a referendum will ensure Aboriginal people will always hold a place in the Australian nation moving forward.

Constitutional recognition of Indigenous people is outstanding business, with commitment from Australian governments dating back more than two decades and flowing from the final report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

The fundamental principle of self-determination means that Indigenous peoples views must be heard and respected on all matters affecting us.

Treaty making is now happening in the Northern Territory, Victoria and most recently Queensland with commitments also being made in South Australia by Kyam Maher, the first Indigenous elected Attorney.

Notwithstanding our commitment to Close the Gap, the West Australian government is failing to recognize Aboriginal peoples rights to self-determination, heritage and sacred sites, Aboriginal childrens safety and right to Indigenous identity and is clearly violating human rights that are well established through the UN system of treaty law.

Aboriginal incarceration, child removal and suicides are continuing to rise.

We need a Treaty at the national level to address human rights violations that are a blight on our nation and increase respect for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Truth-telling is imperative to raising awareness, understanding, and promoting reconciliation in Australia.

Unfortunately, history has been whitewashed and the British history of slavery and its impact here is still unacknowledged.

But truth telling processes cannot take the place of substantive rights and measures to address systemic and structural discrimination today.

This week as Australia reflects on its continuing ties to Britain, we can also consider the nation building needed to address the past damage of British colonization and strengthen our country in a way that ensures in future respectful relations with First Nations people.

Read more:

What now for the British monarchy and its legacy for First Nations people? - National Indigenous Times

Photo: George Romanes, by Elliott & Fry, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The theory of natural selection was the co-discovery of two men, but by the mid 1860s one of its progenitors began to reject his own theory, scarcely more than a half decade after first announcing it to the world. Towards the end of his life Alfred Russel Wallace would resolve the conceptual confusion surrounding the curious half-and-half dualism which initially prompted him to claim that it was only mankindsmentalfaculties which had been designed, natural selection having fashioned our bodies. That improbable thesis was later to be replaced by his contention that the totality of (wo)man body and mind had arisen from what today would be called intelligent design, and, moreover, that the same applied to the whole sentient universe. This was indeed a root-and-branch apostasy from his prior convictions.

Why have people not registered this rejection of the theory by its co-author more strongly? Why is it Charles Darwins view which has persisted while Wallaces has been airbrushed out of history? Predictably, the quintessentially English subject of class has been invoked to answer this question. Sociologists of science often point to the fact that the progress of scientific ideas advances in part as a form of social process, and Darwin, unlike the impoverished and socially less well-placed Wallace, was fortunate to have an upper-middle-class support group to promulgate his ideas.

How convincing is this thesis as an explanation for Darwins greater success? I have argued elsewhere that the major role in the acceptance of Darwinism depended not so much on social factors but on the truly seismic changes in attitudes to religion experienced by all classes of society by the middle of the 19th century. But this does not mean that social factors played no part at all. How might those factors be characterized?

There are indications that Darwin over time gained something of the de facto status of a cult leader (in an unexceptionably benign sense). There cannot be many natural scientists who have inspired a follower to write a fulsome, 50-page poem in their memory, but after Darwins death in 1882 this is precisely what occurred. A younger acolyte, the naturalist George Romanes (pictured above), venerated Darwin so greatly this side idolatry seems the entirely appropriate phrase that he chose this form of laudation for a commemorative poem titled with lapidary simplicity, Charles Darwin: A Memorial Poem.1 There is ample evidence in Darwins voluminous correspondence with both indigenous and overseas scholars continued without interruption even when chronic illness kept him house-bound and in the pilgrimages to Down House he inspired from his old boys network of former college friends and tutors, that he had an enviable gift for friendship, even to the point of being able to inspire forms of fraternal love.

Only on the assumption of such personal magnetism can we understand such things as his limitlessly supportive inner circle meeting regularly to discuss matters of personal and professional interest with him. The severe-looking photographs of the bearded patriarch that have come down to us clearly give few hints of the sheer charisma he must have projected to inspire such admiration and affection. Romaness poem, which set off the high honour already accorded to Darwin in his burial in the north aisle of the nave of Westminster Abbey, near toSir Isaac Newton,might have suggested to some an aura close to sanctity or at the very least a symbolic assumption into a form of scientific empyrean.

To those acquainted with modern Britain, a place which frowns on nepotism and cronyism (at least officially), and which has opened itself up to meritocratic selection procedures and the importation of foreign talent, it is rather surprising that the same cast of characters keep popping up again and again in the drama of Darwins life.2Clergyman and botanist Professor John Stevens Henslow (1796-1861)3would regularly hold soires at his home, attended by Darwin and Darwins Cambridge tutors, William Whewell and Adam Sedgwick, the latter having been Darwins companion on a number of geological field trips when Darwin was younger and in better health. Henslows daughter was later to marry one of Darwins closest friends, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. It was Henslow who recommended Darwin for theBeagleexpedition in the early 1830s and again Henslow who chaired the famous Oxford debate in 1860 where Bishop Wilberforce squared off against Darwins bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley. Despite his reservations about Darwins ideas, Henslows avuncular relationship with Darwin bade him always do his best to protect Darwin from harsh criticism.4The same was the case with Adam Sedgwick. Sedgwick disagreed with Darwins ideas in theOriginso radically that, far more in sorrow than in anger, he once described Darwins ideas in a confidential letter to palaeontologist Richard Owen as being at one and the same time saddening and risible. For him, his erstwhile protg was a teacher of error instead of the apostle of truth.5Notwithstanding these reservations, he remained on commendably friendly terms with Darwin for the remainder of his life.

The recipient of this amount of indulgence from his friends clearly had every reason to feel secure in the knowledge that he commanded a supportive in-group whose loyalty he could depend on absolutely. So it was that in 1856, at a hush-hush meeting at Down House convened by Darwin, he took soundings with Hooker and Huxley as to how best to proceed with his heretofore secret ideas concerning evolution. Huxley, despite the fact that he had condemned ideas similar to those of Darwin when they had been presented in Robert ChamberssVestiges of the Natural History of Creation(1844), and that he wouldnever reconcile himself with Darwins special theory of natural selection, immediately volunteered to defend Darwins ideas, being more than willing to take Darwins corner against the high authority of Richard Owen. In the words of Iain McCalman, alluding to the fact that so many of Darwins intimates were part of an old sea-dog confraternity who had made voyages of scientific discovery of their own, Huxley had come aboard and joined Darwins fleet.6Huxley might have been, in Peter Bowlers phrase, a pseudo-Darwinian (that is, a believer in evolution but not natural selection), yet he would not hear a word said against Darwinism in any of its facets.

There is no getting away from the socially parochial aspect of English life at this time. The same names recur in the Darwin story simply because debate about matters of high import at the time were debated and largely decided by an upper crust of ex public7school boys and Oxbridge graduates. These persons would typically not even meet, let alone converse with members of lower social classes (except in trading transactions) because it was tacitly accepted that it was only the views of the social elite whichcounted.

Tomorrow, Why Darwin Eclipsed Wallace: Darwin Comes to America.

Link:

Why Darwin Eclipsed Wallace: Darwin and the English Class System - Discovery Institute

Photo: Vatican, by Luc Mercelis, via Flickr (cropped).

A new episode ofID the Futurebrings the first part of a friendly debate/discussion between Lehigh University biologist and intelligent design proponent Michael Behe and Catholic theologian Matthew Ramage. The discussion is led by Philosophy for the People podcast host Pat Flynn. Behe notes that he is a lifelong Catholic who accepted from childhood that, as he was taught in school, if God wanted to work through the secondary causes of Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms to generate the diversity of life, who were we to tell him he shouldnt or couldnt do it that way? Behe says that his skepticism toward neo-Darwinism arose many years later and stemmed purely from his scientific research.

Ramage, who specializes in the thought of Pope Benedict XVI, sees God as indispensable to creation but also embraces universal common descent and emphasizes Gods ability to work through secondary causation. Ramage asks Behe if he agrees with common descent. Behe explains why he finds the issue trivial and says the crucial issue is what Behe argued for inDarwins Black Box, namely that mindless Darwinian mechanisms lack the creative power to have generated lifes diversity, and that we have compelling positive reasons to conclude that the purposeful arrangement of parts, such as we find in mousetraps and molecular biological machines, is the work of intelligent design. Ramage urges Behe to spend more of his rhetorical energy distinguishing himself from creationists who reject evolution in toto. Behe again pushes back, saying he doesnt care two hoots for the issue of common descent, and that the important thing to focus on is how the science has turned against modern Darwinism and its emphasis on random changes and natural selection.

Behe acknowledges that Darwinian evolution nicely explains things like the emergence of wooly mammoths from elephants, or polar bears from grizzly bears, but he says these are examples of life filling various evolutionary niches via devolution. It doesnt get you the evolution of all living things through mindless evolutionary mechanisms. There are many other elements and nuances in this lively conversation between a Catholic scientist and a Catholic theologian. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

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Michael Behe Debates Evolution and Catholicism - Discovery Institute

Protests over George Floyds 2020 murder were the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. The brutal footage of officer Derek Chauvins suffocating knee on George Floyds neck led many white Americans to, at least briefly, acknowledge the reality of structural racism in policing. In response, corporations questioned their diversity policies, defund the police became an activist rallying cry, and books on anti-racism became unexpected bestsellers. A narrative arose that America experienced a racial reckoning that challenged white racisms worst excesses.

Conservative media and think tanks, fearing a lost battle in the war of ideas over racism in American life, counter-mobilized. Morality plays need villains, and conservative activists conjured a caricature of critical race theorya forty-year-old academic frameworkas an ominous and pervasive evil. Conservative groups claimed their villain was everywherefrom the federal bureaucracy to elementary schoolsand fomented a moral panic over anti-racist education. Pundits credited Virginia Governor Greg Youngkins win to his scaring white parents into thinking their children might learn about the nations history of white supremacy. Conservative lawmakers have exploited the panic, attempting to remake the educational landscape with banning so-called divisive concepts that might make white kids uncomfortable. Propaganda victories are victories, nonetheless. And killing the messenger can destroy the message (if you cant beat them, ban them). Facts dont care about your feelings has become a conservative rallying cry. But critical race theorys merchants of doubt, by legislating against accurate teaching of Americas racial history, put their feelings over empirical facts.

But victories aside, propaganda exposes its proponents intellectual bankruptcy. Conservative caricatures of critical race theory are unrecognizable to scholars familiar with the idea. According to the Washington Post, Christopher Rufo, the principal architect of the anti-critical race theory of moral panic admitted his crusade distorted the meaning of critical race theory when he tweeted:

We have successfully frozen their brandcritical race theoryinto the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

Incoherence and confusion are virtues for opponents of anti-racist teaching. And Rufo and his fellow travelers are simply updating the misinformation campaigns targeting accepted scholarship that elements of the right have trafficked in for decades. Heedless of both the actual content of critical race theory and the human cost of their panic, conservatives turned to propaganda because the weight of empirical evidence undermines their ideological preferences.

In their classic book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway outline a series of propaganda campaigns designed to undermine the scientific consensus on many of our most pressing collective problems. Conservative scientists, politicians, and think tanks sowed confusion over the link between cancer and smoking, acid rains environmental impact, and civilizational threats over global warming. Conspirators exploited the structure of scientific inquirywhich contains inherent uncertaintiesto cast doubt on settled facts. Conspirators also played the media, manipulating the false objectivity of both-sides framing to claim equal time for scientific consensus and quackery. The strategy of sowing confusion works not because anti-empirical claims are correct but because manufactured uncertainty is often enough to bring political action to a halt.

Anti-scientific campaigns, whether focused on acid rain or climate change, often relied upon a close-knit cabal of think tanks, funders, and individual scientists (who sometimes lacked subject area expertise). Corporate profits and individual livelihoods were at risk if facts about the harms of smoking or environmental crisis were acknowledged and regulated. For short-term financial or political gain, anti-science propagandists made progress on long-term collective problems difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In the meantime, these propagandists profited as the harms from industries they were protecting were passed onto an unsuspecting and credulous public.

Critical race theorys merchants of doubt use strategies similar to those of previous anti-intellectual propaganda campaigns. And like these prior movements, the moral panic over critical race theory rests on a weak intellectual foundation.

No serious analyst doubts that American society is rife with racial inequality. Yes, there is debate among social scientists about the cause of racial inequality. But the consensus among honest scholars is that racial inequality is a long-standing, complex, intractable, and pressing social problem. The empirical evidence on structural racism and the inequality it produces is massive, overwhelming, and hard to contest. From unemployment to life expectancy, it is difficult to find a domain of American life where Black people arent worse off. Critical race theorists developed a flexible set of tenets that showed how often seemingly neutral social processes reproduce racial inequality. And these tenets were so useful theyve been adopted by scholars of education, public policy, and sociology. Critical race theorys main principlesthat race is a social construction and racial progress is fragile and easily overturnedhave substantial empirical support.

Intellectual weakness on race matters doesnt make the anti-critical race theory campaign any less dangerous. Desperation and ruthlessness born of knowing facts arent on their side may make the campaigns more treacherous. Accuracy isnt necessary to terrify teachers into changing lesson plans and avoiding basic truths about the American past (and present) or mangling lectures to make understanding difficult. Teachers are worried that clear explanations of slavery and Native American genocide may run afoul of the law and have received physical threats for vowing to teach the truth about American history.

Im hardly the first analyst to connect attacks on critical race theory and prior ignorance promoting campaigns. Several historians have shown the similarities between the Scopes Money Trialperhaps the paradigmatic case of anti-intellectual campaigns in U.S. historyand the moral panic surrounding critical race theory. Adam R. Shapiro notes that Darwinism had been around for about half a century, when it became the object of conservative ire. Shapiro claims that it wasnt Darwins theory, per se, that led to opposition. The scientific consensus around Darwinism was representative of larger cultural trends that worried conservatives. Evolution stood in for a broad swath of economic, cultural, and political changes. The backlash to critical race theory is driven by a similar set of fears of lost white prerogative amidst cultural and demographic change.

Historical connections between the Scopes Monkey Trial and the current moral panic arent simply analogies. Christopher Rufo, who has been credited with taking the moral panic mainstream, is a former employee of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute. Perhaps better described as an anti-think tank, the Discovery Institute promotes misinformation around evolutionary theory, arguing that in place of the scientific consensus, schools should teach the controversy. Of course, there is little controversy among biologists aside from what the Discovery Institute itself foments. Claiming there is a scientific controversy where none exists muddies the waters, allowing unscrupulous actors to push their political agenda. Conspiracy theories travel in packs, and the Discovery Institute also promotes climate change denial and raises questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Ideas from critical race theory can help explain moral panic. Moral panics are immoral exercises, designed to create group cohesion, target ideological or political enemies, and shape norms. Critical race theorists draw attention to structural racism to find solutions to racial inequality. Critical Race Theorists maintain that structural racism is a profitable political system for the systems beneficiaries. Finding solutions to climate change and tobacco addition threaten those who benefit from emissions and smoking. And finding solutions to racial inequality threatens those who benefit from structural racism. 2020s protests put these beneficiaries on notice, so its no surprise they responded to defend their interests. Banning teaching about racism is a justification of existing racial inequality and a prelude to producing more. Barring teaching about diversity distorts basic facts about American life and creates the idea that difference is strange or dangerous.

Legislators claim they want to stop divisive teaching and are worried about lessons that demonize white people. But what is more divisive than outlawing basic descriptive facts about American history? Critical race theory doesnt demonize white people. But by blocking teaching about Americas segregationists, eugenicists, and white citizen councilors, legislators may end up demonizing themselves. Dr. King warned about the dangers of this racial ignorance when he said, Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.

Academic knowledge production depends upon good faith and verifiable fact. And when facts about structural racism make their way into the schools, they ban books and threaten teachers. It makes collective problems harder to solve.

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Critical Race Theory's Merchants of Doubt | Time - TIME

It is tempting to postulate technological determinism as the answer to this question: Why are extremism, irrationality, fear and censoriousness especially rampant where they should be next to nonexistent?

However, to blame social media for the anti-social behaviors that today characterize academia misses a larger, darker truth.

What is still referred to, reflexively and anachronistically, as higher education is supposedly run by and for persons who are products of, and devoted to, learning.

Today, this supposition is false.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the reading of which is in equal measures fascinating and depressing, recently published Joseph M. Keegins bracing essay The Hysterical Style in the American Humanities: On the ideological posturing and moral nitpicking of the very online. Keegin, a philosophy student at Tulane University, argues that, confronted with the slow slide of academe into oblivion, scholars especially in humanities departments, which are losing undergraduates, prestige, jobs and funding desperately grasp for relevance. They seek it by becoming professors of academic Twitter.

They have, Keegin says, by and large subordinated their work as professional intellectuals and historians to the news cycle, yoking their reputations to the delirious churn of outrage media. Succumbing to Twitter-induced presentism, academics are captured by and shackled to Keegins terms social media, and they treat the past as not of interest either for its own sake or as a means of illuminating the complexity of the present. It is, rather, little more than a wellspring of justifications for liking and disliking things in the world today.

Keegin cites the cultural critic Katherine Dees hypothesis: What motivates someone to spend 10 hours a day on Twitter resembles what motivated people to camp out in front of theatres to see the next installment of Star Wars, or dress up in costume for the release of the latest Harry Potter book. Dee considers this a species of fandom. Keegin says, Whatever it is, it certainly isnt the fruit of serious reflection and study.

It is purely performative, done for the performers satisfaction of doing it. Although it is, superficially, all politics all the time, it actually lacks what gives real politics gravity: concern with patiently, incrementally achieved consequences.

Extremely online academics embrace a debased intellectual Darwinism: survival of the briefest.

So, they lean on status and credentials for authority. They resort, Keegin says, to prefacing an opinion with as a scholar of or as an expert in, perhaps putting Dr. or PhD in ones Twitter display name.

Keegin directs his readers attention to something worth watching, Mark Sinnetts 2022 commencement address at St. Johns College in Annapolis, whose splendidly eccentric curriculum emphasizes the great books, not excluding those by dead Europeans. A retired tutor at the school, a mathematician specializing in quantum mechanics and a Presbyterian minister with a theology doctorate from Cambridge University, Sinnett spoke without a text, as someone with a well-stocked mind can do. On YouTube, you can see him unpack St. Pauls statement that we are perplexed but not despairing.

For many Americans today, Sinnett said, perplexity means despair. So, various public personalities pronouncements consist of supposedly determinant, unrevisable knowledge. Sinnett told the diploma recipients that after youve forgotten the details of your studies here, I hope youll always remember how terribly difficult knowledge is, and how rare. Knowledge is a very small part of what any of us have at our disposal. People inundating us with spurious claims of knowledge feel free to condemn to perdition those who doubt their authority. Dogmatism even infects discourse about what is now suddenly termed the science, placed beyond debate by the definite article. But everyone, scientists included, is perplexed. Perplexity, Sinnett said, is what human existence is. and every persons perplexity is unique. Society needs joyous perplexity because we are joined in a great community of perplexity.

Sinnetts deeply civilized call to rejoice in lifes rich diversity of perplexities is discordant with the tenor of dogmatism in academe.

There, diversity is praised in the abstract but suppressed in fact.

In flight from perplexities of their own, and intolerant of those of others, many academics are not captured by Twitter; it is their safe space. Their febrile shallowness is not Twitter-induced; Twitter is a response to it. They are not shackled to social media; they cling to those platforms as shipwrecked sailors cling to flotsam.

Academe is increasingly populated by people who, having neither an inclination nor an aptitude for scholarship, have no business being there.

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Survival of the briefest | Strictly Opinion | richmondregister.com - Richmond Register

CA School District Considers Ban On Critical Race Theory

Students against the CRT ban make their views known while pro-ban speakers talk during the public comment portion of a meeting of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School Board in Placentia on Wednesday, March 23, 2022 to consider banning the academic concept of critical race theory in the district. Some parents worry that language in a proposed CRT resolution could lead to the loss of Advanced Placement classes. Credit - Leonard Ortiz-MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/ Getty Images

Protests over George Floyds 2020 murder were the largest civil rights demonstrations in American history. The brutal footage of officer Derek Chauvins suffocating knee on George Floyds neck led many white Americans to, at least briefly, acknowledge the reality of structural racism in policing. In response, corporations questioned their diversity policies, defund the police became an activist rallying cry, and books on anti-racism became unexpected bestsellers. A narrative arose that America experienced a racial reckoning that challenged white racisms worst excesses.

Conservative media and think tanks, fearing a lost battle in the war of ideas over racism in American life, counter-mobilized. Morality plays need villains, and conservative activists conjured a caricature of critical race theorya forty-year-old academic frameworkas an ominous and pervasive evil. Conservative groups claimed their villain was everywherefrom the federal bureaucracy to elementary schoolsand fomented a moral panic over anti-racist education. Pundits credited Virginia Governor Greg Youngkins win to his scaring white parents into thinking their children might learn about the nations history of white supremacy. Conservative lawmakers have exploited the panic, attempting to remake the educational landscape with banning so-called divisive concepts that might make white kids uncomfortable. Propaganda victories are victories, nonetheless. And killing the messenger can destroy the message (if you cant beat them, ban them). Facts dont care about your feelings has become a conservative rallying cry. But critical race theorys merchants of doubt, by legislating against accurate teaching of Americas racial history, put their feelings over empirical facts.

But victories aside, propaganda exposes its proponents intellectual bankruptcy. Conservative caricatures of critical race theory are unrecognizable to scholars familiar with the idea. According to the Washington Post, Christopher Rufo, the principal architect of the anti-critical race theory of moral panic admitted his crusade distorted the meaning of critical race theory when he tweeted:

We have successfully frozen their brandcritical race theoryinto the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

Incoherence and confusion are virtues for opponents of anti-racist teaching. And Rufo and his fellow travelers are simply updating the misinformation campaigns targeting accepted scholarship that elements of the right have trafficked in for decades. Heedless of both the actual content of critical race theory and the human cost of their panic, conservatives turned to propaganda because the weight of empirical evidence undermines their ideological preferences.

In their classic book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway outline a series of propaganda campaigns designed to undermine the scientific consensus on many of our most pressing collective problems. Conservative scientists, politicians, and think tanks sowed confusion over the link between cancer and smoking, acid rains environmental impact, and civilizational threats over global warming. Conspirators exploited the structure of scientific inquirywhich contains inherent uncertaintiesto cast doubt on settled facts. Conspirators also played the media, manipulating the false objectivity of both-sides framing to claim equal time for scientific consensus and quackery. The strategy of sowing confusion works not because anti-empirical claims are correct but because manufactured uncertainty is often enough to bring political action to a halt.

Anti-scientific campaigns, whether focused on acid rain or climate change, often relied upon a close-knit cabal of think tanks, funders, and individual scientists (who sometimes lacked subject area expertise). Corporate profits and individual livelihoods were at risk if facts about the harms of smoking or environmental crisis were acknowledged and regulated. For short-term financial or political gain, anti-science propagandists made progress on long-term collective problems difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In the meantime, these propagandists profited as the harms from industries they were protecting were passed onto an unsuspecting and credulous public.

Critical race theorys merchants of doubt use strategies similar to those of previous anti-intellectual propaganda campaigns. And like these prior movements, the moral panic over critical race theory rests on a weak intellectual foundation.

No serious analyst doubts that American society is rife with racial inequality. Yes, there is debate among social scientists about the cause of racial inequality. But the consensus among honest scholars is that racial inequality is a long-standing, complex, intractable, and pressing social problem. The empirical evidence on structural racism and the inequality it produces is massive, overwhelming, and hard to contest. From unemployment to life expectancy, it is difficult to find a domain of American life where Black people arent worse off. Critical race theorists developed a flexible set of tenets that showed how often seemingly neutral social processes reproduce racial inequality. And these tenets were so useful theyve been adopted by scholars of education, public policy, and sociology. Critical race theorys main principlesthat race is a social construction and racial progress is fragile and easily overturnedhave substantial empirical support.

Intellectual weakness on race matters doesnt make the anti-critical race theory campaign any less dangerous. Desperation and ruthlessness born of knowing facts arent on their side may make the campaigns more treacherous. Accuracy isnt necessary to terrify teachers into changing lesson plans and avoiding basic truths about the American past (and present) or mangling lectures to make understanding difficult. Teachers are worried that clear explanations of slavery and Native American genocide may run afoul of the law and have received physical threats for vowing to teach the truth about American history.

Im hardly the first analyst to connect attacks on critical race theory and prior ignorance promoting campaigns. Several historians have shown the similarities between the Scopes Money Trialperhaps the paradigmatic case of anti-intellectual campaigns in U.S. historyand the moral panic surrounding critical race theory. Adam R. Shapiro notes that Darwinism had been around for about half a century, when it became the object of conservative ire. Shapiro claims that it wasnt Darwins theory, per se, that led to opposition. The scientific consensus around Darwinism was representative of larger cultural trends that worried conservatives. Evolution stood in for a broad swath of economic, cultural, and political changes. The backlash to critical race theory is driven by a similar set of fears of lost white prerogative amidst cultural and demographic change.

Historical connections between the Scopes Monkey Trial and the current moral panic arent simply analogies. Christopher Rufo, who has been credited with taking the moral panic mainstream, is a former employee of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute. Perhaps better described as an anti-think tank, the Discovery Institute promotes misinformation around evolutionary theory, arguing that in place of the scientific consensus, schools should teach the controversy. Of course, there is little controversy among biologists aside from what the Discovery Institute itself foments. Claiming there is a scientific controversy where none exists muddies the waters, allowing unscrupulous actors to push their political agenda. Conspiracy theories travel in packs, and the Discovery Institute also promotes climate change denial and raises questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Ideas from critical race theory can help explain moral panic. Moral panics are immoral exercises, designed to create group cohesion, target ideological or political enemies, and shape norms. Critical race theorists draw attention to structural racism to find solutions to racial inequality. Critical Race Theorists maintain that structural racism is a profitable political system for the systems beneficiaries. Finding solutions to climate change and tobacco addition threaten those who benefit from emissions and smoking. And finding solutions to racial inequality threatens those who benefit from structural racism. 2020s protests put these beneficiaries on notice, so its no surprise they responded to defend their interests. Banning teaching about racism is a justification of existing racial inequality and a prelude to producing more. Barring teaching about diversity distorts basic facts about American life and creates the idea that difference is strange or dangerous.

Legislators claim they want to stop divisive teaching and are worried about lessons that demonize white people. But what is more divisive than outlawing basic descriptive facts about American history? Critical race theory doesnt demonize white people. But by blocking teaching about Americas segregationists, eugenicists, and white citizen councilors, legislators may end up demonizing themselves. Dr. King warned about the dangers of this racial ignorance when he said, Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.

Academic knowledge production depends upon good faith and verifiable fact. And when facts about structural racism make their way into the schools, they ban books and threaten teachers. It makes collective problems harder to solve.

See the rest here:

Critical Race Theorys Merchants of Doubt - Yahoo News

Our fascination with space is one that began when we started looking up at the sky. Curiosity has enabled us to seek the answers to questions about whether we are alone in the vast cosmos or if there is more that is waiting to be explored. This zeal to uncover the unknown can be seen in the billions of dollars and years of research poured into discovering and understanding what lies outside our blue planets boundary.

Experts, including technology investor and science philanthropist Yuri Milner, have several thoughts on aliens, our cosmic neighbors. These opinions are featured in his book, Eureka Manifesto, in which Yuri Milner argues that we should look beyond Earth for human civilizations mission.

Jill Tarter, a leading astronomer best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, compared the investigations carried out since the Green Bank conference in 1961, at which experts came together to discuss the search for extraterrestrials. She likened these searches to dipping glass into the ocean and wondering why you dont catch a fish.

The universes vastness is nearly immeasurable, and although we may be looking in the right places, we may be looking with the wrong methods. There is no certainty that if extraterrestrial life existed, they could speak our language or that there would be any foundation for understanding. Silence in this search can also mean that humanity is alone in the vast expanse of the universe.

Another opinion is that other civilizations might be immensely older and more advanced in science and technology. From history, we can see that encounters between cultures with a considerable difference in technological advancement typically result badly for the less technological one. Hence, meeting another civilization can pose an extinction threat.

In Yuri Milners opinion, considering that the more advanced civilization would not be hostile does not help matters. Relying on aliens to pursue humanitys mission to explore and understand the universe may not be the wisest decision. Looking through the lens of Darwinism, no civilization or colony is safe from extinction. With the uncertainty of surviving in such a universe indefinitely, maximizing the use of our resources to intensify our effort toward understanding and expanding into space is the most plausible decision.

Besides pointing out the threats that human civilization faces from itself and outside our planet, Yuri Milner, in his manifesto, proposes that to combat these threats, we should spread out into space. This mission stays valid even if there is no extraterrestrial life. While science and technology will serve as humanitys spearhead in this journey, we can foster the mission by investing in space exploration, celebrating innovation, and advancing the ability of artificial intelligence to solve scientific problems.

As well as supporting the search for life through its Breakthrough Initiatives, Yuri Milners nonprofit Breakthrough Foundation champions the Breakthrough Prize, the worlds most significant scientific award, which celebrates researchers who have made stellar advances in fundamental physics, the life sciences, and mathematics. There is also the Breakthrough Junior Challenge for high school students that helps to foster enlightenment and education about the universe.

However, Yuri Milner is not alone on the quest to further humanitys place in the universe. The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were on the Breakthrough Starshot Board. Another notable mention is Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and a leading visionary in humanity settling on Mars. The central theme remains that advancement in science and technology is necessary to sustain society and our expansion in the universe.

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Experts Share Opinions on Aliens and Humanity's Role in Space Exploration - The Future of Things

Photo: Asian black bear, by Joydeep, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

On a new episode ofID the Future, distinguished German paleontologist Gnter Bechly continues a discussion ofhis new argumentagainst modern evolutionary theory. According to Bechly, contemporary species pairs diverge hardly at all over millions of years, even when isolated from each other, and yet were supposed to believe that the evolutionary process built dramatically distinct body plans in similar time frames at various other times in the history of life. Why believe that? He suggests this pattern of relative stasis among species pairs strikes a significant and damaging blow to Darwinian theory.

In this Part 2 episode, Bechly and host Casey Luskin discuss mice/rat pairs, cattle and bison, horses and donkeys, Asian and African elephants, the Asian black bear and the South American spectacled bear, river hippos and West African pygmy hippos, the common dolphin and the bottle-nosed dolphin, and the one outlier in this pattern, chimpanzees and humans. If chimps and humans really did evolve from a common ancestor, why do they appear to be the lone exception to this pattern of modern species pairs differing in only trivial ways? Bechly notes that whatever ones explanation, there appears to be clear evidence here of human exceptionalism. He and Luskin go on to cast doubt on the idea that mindless evolutionary processes could have engineered the suite of changes necessary to convert an ape ancestor into upright walking, talking, technology-fashioning human beings.

What about Hawaiian silversword plants? They seem to have evolved into dramatically different body plans in the past few million years. Are these an exception to Bechlys claimed pattern of species pair stasis? After all, the differences among silverswords can be quite dramatic, with differences far more extensive than what we find between, say, Asian and African elephants or horse and donkey. Drawing ona second articleon the topic, he notes that some extant species of plants possess considerable phenotypic plasticity. They have the capacity to change quite dramatically and still breed with other very different varieties. This appears to be the case with silverswords. There is more to his argument. Tune in to hear Dr. Bechly respond to additional objections that Dr. Luskin raises. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Part 1 of their conversation ishere.

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Gnter Bechly: Species Pairs Wreck Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Image source: Seattle Municipal Archives, via Flickr (cropped).

An article inThe Guardianby science journalist Stephen Buryani represents something remarkable in the way the public processes the failures of evolutionary theory. In the past, those failures have been admitted by some biologistsbut always in settings (technical journals, conferences) where they thought nobody outside their professional circles was listening. Its like if a married couple were going through rough times in their relationship. Theyd discuss it between themselves, with close friends, maybe with a counselor. But for goodness sake they wouldnt put it on Facebook, where all marriages are blessed exclusively with good cheer and good fortune.

Well, the field of evolutionary biology has just done the equivalent of a massive Facebook dump, admitting that Jim and Sandy, who always seemed so happy, are in fact perilously perched on the rocks. In a very long article, top names in the field share with Buryani what intelligent design proponents already knew, but fewGuardianreaders guessed. The headline from the left-leaning British daily asks, Do we need a new theory of evolution? Answer in one word: yes. The article is full of scandalous admissions:

Strange as it sounds,scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it isabsurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing,it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ.And it isnt just eyesthat the traditional theory struggles with. The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology, says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. And yet, we still do not have a good answer.This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact and whether other forces might also be at work has become the subject ofbitter dispute. If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now, the Yale University biologist Gnter Wagner told me, we must find new ways of explaining.

[T]his is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also astruggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. The issue at stake, says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology. And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question:whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up. [Emphasis added.]

Absurdly crude and misleading? A classic idea that has so far fallen flat? A fairytale we need to finally give up? Scientists locked in a desperate struggle for professional recognition and status? What about for the truth? This is how writers forEvolution Newshave characterized the troubles with Darwinian theory. But I didnt expect to see it inThe Guardian.

Buryani runs through a familiar narrative: the modern synthesis, the challenge from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the 2016 New Trends in Evolutionary Biologymeeting at the Royal Society (which was covered here extensively), how some evolutionists condemned the conference while other embraced its revisionist messaging, efforts to prop up unguided evolution with exotic ideas of plasticity, evolutionary development, epigenetics, cultural evolution, etc.

If youve ever owned an automobile toward the end of its life, the situation will be familiar: the multiple problems all at once, the multiple attempted fixes, the expense, the trouble, the worry about the car breaking dying at any inconvenient or dangerous moment (like in the middle of the freeway), all of which together signal that its time not to sell the car (who would want it?) but to have it towed off and donated to charity for a tax credit.

Buryani doesnt mention the intelligent design theorists in attendance at the Royal Society meeting Stephen Meyer, Gnter Bechly, Douglas Axes, Paul Nelson, and others. He doesnt mention the challenge from intelligent design at all. Thats okay. I didnt expect him to do so. Anyway, readers ofEvolution Newswill already be familiar with most everything Buryani reports.

He concludes with seemingly despairing statements from evolutionists along the lines of, Oh, we never needed a grand, coherent theory like that, after all.

Over the past decade the influential biochemist Ford Doolittle haspublished essaysrubbishing the idea that the life sciences need codification. We dont need no friggin new synthesis.We didnt even really need the old synthesis, he told me.

The computational biologist Eugene Koonin thinks people should get used to theories not fitting together. Unification is a mirage. In my viewthere is no can be no single theory of evolution, he told me.

I see. Evolutionists have, until now, been very, very reluctant to admit such things in the popular media. Always, the obligation was heeded to present an illusory picture of wedded bliss to the unwashed, which, if given some idea of the truth, would draw its own conclusions and maybe even take up with total heresies like intelligent design. Now that illusion of blessed domesticity has been cast aside in a most dramatic fashion.Read the rest of Buryanis article. Your eyebrows will go up numerous times.

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Donate Darwinism for a Tax Credit? Evolutionists Admit Their Field's Failures - Discovery Institute

Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.

You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

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For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isnt just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology, says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact and whether other forces might also be at work has become the subject of bitter dispute. If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now, the Yale University biologist Gnter Wagner told me, we must find new ways of explaining.

In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article in the leading journal Nature that asked Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Their answer was: Yes, urgently. Each of the authors came from cutting-edge scientific subfields, from the study of the way organisms alter their environment in order to reduce the normal pressure of natural selection think of beavers building dams to new research showing that chemical modifications added to DNA during our lifetimes can be passed on to our offspring. The authors called for a new understanding of evolution that could make room for such discoveries. The name they gave this new framework was rather bland the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) but their proposals were, to many fellow scientists, incendiary.

In 2015, the Royal Society in London agreed to host New Trends in Evolution, a conference at which some of the articles authors would speak alongside a distinguished lineup of scientists. The aim was to discuss new interpretations, new questions, a whole new causal structure for biology, one of the organisers told me. But when the conference was announced, 23 fellows of the Royal Society, Britains oldest and most prestigious scientific organisation, wrote a letter of protest to its then president, the Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse. The fact that the society would hold a meeting that gave the public the idea that this stuff is mainstream is disgraceful, one of the signatories told me. Nurse was surprised by the reaction. They thought I was giving it too much credibility, he told me. But, he said: Theres no harm in discussing things.

Traditional evolutionary theorists were invited, but few showed up. Nick Barton, recipient of the 2008 Darwin-Wallace medal, evolutionary biologys highest honour, told me he decided not to go because it would add more fuel to the strange enterprise. The influential biologists Brian and Deborah Charlesworth of the University of Edinburgh told me they didnt attend because they found the premise irritating. The evolutionary theorist Jerry Coyne later wrote that the scientists behind the EES were playing revolutionaries to advance their own careers. One 2017 paper even suggested some of the theorists behind the EES were part of an increasing post-truth tendency within science. The personal attacks and insinuations against the scientists involved were shocking and ugly, said one scientist, who is nonetheless sceptical of the EES.

What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. The issue at stake, says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology. And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

Behind the current battle over evolution lies a broken dream. In the early 20th century, many biologists longed for a unifying theory that would enable their field to join physics and chemistry in the club of austere, mechanistic sciences that stripped the universe down to a set of elemental rules. Without such a theory, they feared that biology would remain a bundle of fractious sub-fields, from zoology to biochemistry, in which answering any question might require input and argument from scores of warring specialists.

From todays vantage point, it seems obvious that Darwins theory of evolution a simple, elegant theory that explains how one force, natural selection, came to shape the entire development of life on Earth would play the role of the great unifier. But at the turn of the 20th century, four decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species and two after his death, Darwins ideas were in decline. Scientific collections at the time carried titles such as The Death-bed of Darwinism. Scientists had not lost interest in evolution, but many found Darwins account of it unsatisfying. One major problem was that it lacked an explanation of heredity. Darwin had observed that, over time, living things seemed to change to better fit their environment. But he did not understand how these minute changes were passed from one generation to the next.

At the start of the 20th century, the rediscovery of the work of the 19th-century friar and father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, started to provide the answers. Scientists working in the new field of genetics discovered rules that governed the quirks of heredity. But rather than confirm Darwins theory, they complicated it. Reproduction appeared to remix genes the mysterious units that programme the physical traits we end up seeing in surprising ways. Think of the way a grandfathers red hair, absent in his son, might reappear in his granddaughter. How was natural selection meant to function when its tiny variations might not even reliably pass from parent to offspring every time?

Even more ominous for Darwinists was the emergence of the mutationists in the 1910s, a school of geneticists whose star exponent, Thomas Hunt Morgan, showed that by breeding millions of fruit flies and sometimes spiking their food with the radioactive element radium he could produce mutated traits, such as new eye colours or additional limbs. These were not the tiny random variations on which Darwins theory was built, but sudden, dramatic changes. And these mutations, it turned out, were heritable. The mutationists believed that they had identified lifes true creative force. Sure, natural selection helped to remove unsuitable changes, but it was simply a humdrum editor for the flamboyant poetry of mutation. Natura non facit saltum, Darwin had once written: Nature does not make jumps. The mutationists begged to differ.

These disputes over evolution had the weight of a theological schism. At stake were the forces governing all creation. For Darwinists especially, their theory was all-or-nothing. If another force, apart from natural selection, could also explain the differences we see between living things, Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species, his whole theory of life would utterly break down. If the mutationists were right, instead of a single force governing all biological change, scientists would have to dig deep into the logic of mutation. Did it work differently on legs and lungs? Did mutations in frogs work differently to mutations in owls or elephants?

In 1920, the philosopher Joseph Henry Woodger wrote that biology suffered from fragmentation and cleavages that would be unknown in such a well-unified science as, for example, chemistry. The divergent groups often feuded, he noted, and it seemed to be getting worse. It began to seem inevitable that the life sciences would grow more and more fractured, and the possibility of a common language would slip away.

Just as it seemed that Darwinism might be buried, a curious collection of statisticians and animal breeders came along to revitalise it. In the 1920s and 30s, working separately but in loose correspondence, thinkers such as the British father of scientific statistics, Ronald Fisher, and the American livestock breeder Sewall Wright, proposed a revised theory of evolution that accounted for scientific advances since Darwins death but still promised to explain all of lifes mysteries with a few simple rules. In 1942, the English biologist Julian Huxley coined the name for this theory: the modern synthesis. Eighty years on, it still provides the basic framework for evolutionary biology as it is taught to millions of schoolchildren and undergraduates every year. Insofar as a biologist works in the tradition of the modern synthesis, they are considered mainstream; insofar as they reject it, they are considered marginal.

Despite the name, it was not actually a synthesis of two fields, but a vindication of one in light of the other. By building statistical models of animal populations that accounted for the laws of genetics and mutation, the modern synthesists showed that, over long periods of time, natural selection still functioned much as Darwin had predicted. It was still the boss. In the fullness of time, mutations were too rare to matter, and the rules of heredity didnt affect the overall power of natural selection. Through a gradual process, genes with advantages were preserved over time, while others that didnt confer advantages disappeared.

Rather than getting stuck into the messy world of individual organisms and their specific environments, proponents of the modern synthesis observed from the lofty perspective of population genetics. To them, the story of life was ultimately just the story of clusters of genes surviving or dying out over the grand sweep of evolutionary time.

The modern synthesis arrived at just the right time. Beyond its explanatory power, there were two further reasons more historical, or even sociological, than scientific why it took off. First, the mathematical rigour of the synthesis was impressive, and not seen before in biology. As the historian Betty Smocovitis points out, it brought the field closer to examplar sciences such as physics. At the same time, writes Smocovitis, it promised to unify the life sciences at a moment when the enlightenment project of scientific unification was all the rage. In 1946, the biologists Ernst Mayr and George Gaylord Simpson started the Society for the Study of Evolution, a professional organisation with its own journal, which Simpson said would bring together the sub-fields of biology on the common ground of evolutionary studies. This was all possible, he later reflected, because we seem at last to have a unified theory [] capable of facing all the classic problems of the history of life and of providing a causalistic solution of each.

This was a time when biology was ascending to its status as a major science. University departments were forming, funding was flowing in, and thousands of newly accredited scientists were making thrilling discoveries. In 1944, the Canadian-American biologist Oswald Avery and his colleagues had proved that DNA was the physical substance of genes and heredity, and in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick leaning heavily on work from Rosalind Franklin and the American chemist Linus Pauling mapped its double-helical structure.

While information piled up at a rate that no scientist could fully digest, the steady thrum of the modern synthesis ran through it all. The theory dictated that, ultimately, genes built everything, and natural selection scrutinised every bit of life for advantage. Whether you were looking at algae blooming in a pond or peacock mating rituals, it could all be understood as natural selection doing its work on genes. The world of life could seem suddenly simple again.

By 1959, when the University of Chicago held a conference celebrating the centennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the modern synthesists were triumphant. The venues were packed and national newspaper reporters followed the proceedings. (Queen Elizabeth was invited, but sent her apologies.) Huxley crowed that this is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject to evolution.

Yet soon enough, the modern synthesis would come under assault from scientists within the very departments that the theory had helped build.

From the start, there had always been dissenters. In 1959, the developmental biologist CH Waddington lamented that the modern synthesis had sidelined valuable theories in favour of drastic simplifications which are liable to lead us to a false picture of how the evolutionary process works. Privately, he complained that anyone working outside the new evolutionary party line that is, anyone who didnt embrace the modern synthesis was ostracised.

Then came a devastating series of new findings that called into question the theorys foundations. These discoveries, which began in the late 60s, came from molecular biologists. While the modern synthesists looked at life as if through a telescope, studying the development of huge populations over immense chunks of time, the molecular biologists looked through a microscope, focusing on individual molecules. And when they looked, they found that natural selection was not the all-powerful force that many had assumed it to be.

They found that the molecules in our cells and thus the sequences of the genes behind them were mutating at a very high rate. This was unexpected, but not necessarily a threat to mainstream evolutionary theory. According to the modern synthesis, even if mutations turned out to be common, natural selection would, over time, still be the primary cause of change, preserving the useful mutations and junking the useless ones. But that isnt what was happening. The genes were changing that is, evolving but natural selection wasnt playing a part. Some genetic changes were being preserved for no reason apart from pure chance. Natural selection seemed to be asleep at the wheel.

Evolutionary biologists were stunned. In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesists, Theodosius Dobzhansky. He was visibly distraught at the non-Darwinian evolution that some scientists were now proposing. If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular, he said. This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense. Where once Christians had complained that Darwins theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.

Other assaults on evolutionary orthodoxy followed. The influential palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge argued that the fossil record showed evolution often happened in short, concentrated bursts; it didnt have to be slow and gradual. Other biologists simply found that the modern synthesis had little relevance to their work. As the study of life increased in complexity, a theory based on which genes were selected in various environments started to seem beside the point. It didnt help answer questions such as how life emerged from the seas, or how complex organs, such as the placenta, developed. Using the lens of the modern synthesis to explain the latter, says the Yale developmental biologist Gnter Wagner, would be like using thermodynamics to explain how the brain works. (The laws of thermodynamics, which explain how energy is transferred, do apply to the brain, but they arent much help if you want to know how memories are formed or why we experience emotion.)

Just as feared, the field split. In the 70s, molecular biologists in many universities peeled off from biology departments to form their own separate departments and journals. Some in other sub-fields, such as palaeontology and developmental biology, drifted away as well. Yet the biggest field of all, mainstream evolutionary biology, continued much as before. The way the champions of the modern synthesis who by this point dominated university biology departments dealt with potentially destabilising new findings was by acknowledging that such processes happen sometimes (subtext: rarely), are useful to some specialists (subtext: obscure ones), but do not fundamentally alter the basic understanding of biology that descends from the modern synthesis (subtext: dont worry about it, we can continue as before). In short, new discoveries were often dismissed as little more than mildly diverting curiosities.

Today, the modern synthesis remains, mutatis mutandis, the core of modern evolutionary biology wrote the evolutionary theorist Douglas Futuyma in a 2017 paper defending the mainstream view. The current version of the theory allows some room for mutation and random chance, but still views evolution as the story of genes surviving in vast populations. Perhaps the biggest change from the theorys mid-century glory days is that its most ambitious claims that simply by understanding genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on earth have been dropped, or now come weighted with caveats and exceptions. This shift has occurred with little fanfare. The theorys ideas are still deeply embedded in the field, yet no formal reckoning with its failures or schisms has occurred. To its critics, the modern synthesis occupies a position akin to a president reneging on a campaign promise it failed to satisfy its entire coalition, but remains in office, hands on the levers of power, despite its diminished offer.

Brian and Deborah Charlesworth are considered by many to be high priests of the tradition that descends from the modern synthesis. They are eminent thinkers, who have written extensively on the place of new theories in evolutionary biology, and they dont believe any radical revision is needed. Some argue that they are too conservative, but they insist they are simply careful cautious about dismantling a tried-and-tested framework in favour of theories that lack evidence. They are interested in fundamental truths about evolution, not explaining every diverse result of the process.

Were not here to explain the elephants trunk, or the camels hump. If such explanations could even be possible, Brian Charlesworth told me. Instead, he said, evolutionary theory should be universal, focusing on the small number of factors that apply to how every living thing develops. Its easy to get hung up on you havent explained why a particular system works the way it does. But we dont need to know, Deborah told me. Its not that the exceptions are uninteresting; its just that they arent all that important.

Kevin Laland, the scientist who organised the contentious Royal Society conference, believes it is time for proponents of neglected evolutionary sub-fields to band together. Laland and his fellow proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, the EES, call for a new way of thinking about evolution one that starts not by seeking the simplest explanation, or the universal one, but what combination of approaches offers the best explanation to biologys major questions. Ultimately, they want their sub-fields plasticity, evolutionary development, epigenetics, cultural evolution not just recognised, but formalised in the canon of biology.

There are some firebrands among this group. The geneticist Eva Jablonka has proclaimed herself a neo-Lamarckist, after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 19th-century populariser of pre-Darwinian ideas of inheritance, who has often been seen as a punchline in the history of science. Meanwhile, the physiologist Denis Noble has called for a revolution against traditional evolutionary theory. But Laland, a lead author on many of the movements papers, insists that they simply want to expand the current definition of evolution. They are reformers, not revolutionaries.

The case for EES rests on a simple claim: in the past few decades, we have learned many remarkable things about the natural world and these things should be given space in biologys core theory. One of the most fascinating recent areas of research is known as plasticity, which has shown that some organisms have the potential to adapt more rapidly and more radically than was once thought. Descriptions of plasticity are startling, bringing to mind the kinds of wild transformations you might expect to find in comic books and science fiction movies.

Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are much more content living underwater, she says. But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles. Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them. Their entire appearance transformed. They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land, Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir is adapting to land in a single generation. He sounded almost proud of the fish.

Moczeks own area of expertise is dung beetles, another remarkably plastic species. With future climate change in mind, he and his colleagues tested the beetles response to different temperatures. Colder weather makes it harder for the beetles to take off. But the researchers found that they responded to these conditions by growing larger wings. The crucial thing about such observations, which challenge the traditional understanding of evolution, is that these sudden developments all come from the same underlying genes. The speciess genes arent being slowly honed, generation by generation. Rather, during its early development it has the potential to grow in a variety of ways, allowing it to survive in different situations.

We believe this is ubiquitous across species, says David Pfennig of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works on spadefoot toads, amphibians the size of a Matchbox car. Spadefoots are normally omnivorous, but spadefoot tadpoles raised solely on meat grow larger teeth, more powerful jaws, and a hardy, more complex gut. Suddenly, they resemble a powerful carnivore, feeding on hardy crustaceans, and even other tadpoles.

Plasticity doesnt invalidate the idea of gradual change through selection of small changes, but it offers another evolutionary system with its own logic working in concert. To some researchers, it may even hold the answers to the vexed question of biological novelties: the first eye, the first wing. Plasticity is perhaps what sparks the rudimentary form of a novel trait, says Pfennig.

Plasticity is well accepted in developmental biology, and the pioneering theorist Mary Jane West-Eberhard began making the case that it was a core evolutionary force in the early 00s. And yet, to biologists in many other fields, it is virtually unknown. Undergraduates beginning their education are unlikely to hear anything about it, and it has still to make much mark in popular science writing.

Biology is full of theories like this. Other interests of the EES include extra-genetic inheritance, known as epigenetics. This is the idea that something say a psychological injury, or a disease experienced by a parent attaches small chemical molecules to their DNA that are repeated in their children. This has been shown to happen in some animals across multiple generations, and caused controversy when it was suggested as an explanation for intergenerational trauma in humans. Other EES proponents track the inheritance of things like culture as when groups of dolphins develop and then teach each other new hunting techniques or the communities of helpful microbes in animal guts or plant roots, which are tended to and passed on through generations like a tool. In both cases, researchers contend that these factors might impact evolution enough to warrant a more central role. Some of these ideas have become briefly fashionable, but remain disputed. Others have sat around for decades, offering their insights to a small audience of specialists and no one else. Just like at the turn of the 20th century, the field is split into hundreds of sub-fields, each barely aware of the rest.

To the EES group, this is a problem that urgently needs to be solved and the only solution is a more capacious unifying theory. These scientists are keen to expand their research and gather the data to disprove their doubters. But they are also aware that logging results in the literature may not be enough. Parts of the modern synthesis are deeply ingrained in the whole scientific community, in funding networks, positions, professorships, says Gerd B Mller, head of the Department of Theoretical Biology at the university of Vienna and a major backer of the EES. Its a whole industry.

The modern synthesis was such a seismic event that even its flatly wrong ideas took up to half a century to correct. The mutationists were so thoroughly buried that even after decades of proof that mutation was, in fact, a key part of evolution, their ideas were still regarded with suspicion. As recently as 1990, one of the most influential university evolution textbooks could claim that the role of new mutations is not of immediate significance something that very few scientists then, or now, actually believe. Wars of ideas are not won with ideas alone.

To release biology from the legacy of the modern synthesis, explains Massimo Pigliucci, a former professor of evolution at Stony Brook University in New York, you need a range of tactics to spark a reckoning: Persuasion, students taking up these ideas, funding, professorial positions. You need hearts as well as minds. During a Q&A with Pigliucci at a conference in 2017, one audience member commented that the disagreement between EES proponents and more conservative biologists sometimes looked more like a culture war than a scientific disagreement. According to one attender, Pigliucci basically said: Sure, its a culture war, and were going to win it, and half the room burst out cheering.

To some scientists, though, the battle between traditionalists and extended synthesists is futile. Not only is it impossible to make sense of modern biology, they say, it is unnecessary. Over the past decade the influential biochemist Ford Doolittle has published essays rubbishing the idea that the life sciences need codification. We dont need no friggin new synthesis. We didnt even really need the old synthesis, he told me.

What Doolittle and like-minded scientists want is more radical: the death of grand theories entirely. They see such unifying projects as a mid-century even modernist conceit, that have no place in the postmodern era of science. The idea that there could be a coherent theory of evolution is an artefact of how biology developed in the 20th century, probably useful at the time, says Doolittle. But not now. Doing right by Darwin isnt about venerating all his ideas, he says, but building on his insight that we can explain how present life forms came from past ones in radical new ways.

Doolittle and his allies, such as the computational biologist Arlin Stoltzfus, are descendants of the scientists who challenged the modern synthesis from the late 60s onwards by emphasising the importance of randomness and mutation. The current superstar of this view, known as neutral evolution, is Michael Lynch, a geneticist at the University of Arizona. Lynch is soft-spoken in conversation, but unusually pugnacious in what scientists call the literature. His books rail against scientists who accept the status quo and fail to appreciate the rigorous mathematics that undergirds his work. For the vast majority of biologists, evolution is nothing more than natural selection, he wrote in 2007. This blind acceptance [] has led to a lot of sloppy thinking, and is probably the primary reason why evolution is viewed as a soft science by much of society. (Lynch is also not a fan of the EES. If it were up to him, biology would be even more reductive than the modern synthesists imagined.)

What Lynch has shown, over the past two decades, is that many of the complex ways DNA is organised in our cells probably happened at random. Natural selection has shaped the living world, he argues, but so too has a sort of formless cosmic drifting that can, from time to time, assemble order from chaos. When I spoke to Lynch, he said he would continue to extend his work to as many fields of biology as possible looking at cells, organs, even whole organisms to prove that these random processes were universal.

As with so many of the arguments that divide evolutionary biologists today, this comes down to a matter of emphasis. More conservative biologists do not deny that random processes occur, but believe theyre much less important than Doolittle or Lynch think.

The computational biologist Eugene Koonin thinks people should get used to theories not fitting together. Unification is a mirage. In my view there is no can be no single theory of evolution, he told me. There cannot be a single theory of everything. Even physicists do not have a theory of everything.

This is true. Physicists agree that the theory of quantum mechanics applies to very tiny particles, and Einsteins theory of general relativity applies to larger ones. Yet the two theories appear incompatible. Late in life, Einstein hoped to find a way to unify them. He died unsuccessful. In the next few decades, other physicists took up the same task, but progress stalled, and many came to believe it might be impossible. If you ask a physicist today about whether we need a unifying theory, they would probably look at you with puzzlement. Whats the point, they might ask. The field works, the work continues.

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Do we need a new theory of evolution? - The Guardian