Some of them are on display in this article, which reviews two recent books on creationism: The Wars Over Evolution by Richard C. Lewontin New York Review of Books (10/20/05 issue). He gives a good description of the basic scam behind "intelligent design", aka ID:
God, the Bible, and religion in general are not mentioned in the doctrine of ID. Rather, it is claimed that an objective examination of the facts of life makes it clear that organisms are too complex to have arisen by a process of the accumulation of naturally selected chance mutations and so must have been purposefully created by an unspecified intelligent designer. An alien from outer space? But the theory of ID is a transparent subterfuge. The problem is that if the living world is too complex to have arisen without an intelligent designer, then where did the intelligent designer come from? After all, she must have been as complex as the things she designed. If not, then we have evolution! Otherwise we must postulate an intelligent designer who designed the intelligent designer who..., back to the original one who must have been around forever. And who might that be? Like the ancient Hebrews the ID designers fear to pronounce Her name lest they be destroyed, but Her initials are clearly YWH.
But he also reminds us that creationists and Christian fundamentalists aren't always and everywhere political reactionaries in other respects:
The political identification of creationism with conservative politics is recent. Before World War II, rural populism in the Southwest and Midwest, motivated by resentment against politically and socially powerful Northern urban elites, included both creationism and socialism. In the election of 1912, the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma and Arkansas gave more votes to Eugene Debs than did the urban populations of Chicago and New York. At the same time the best-selling weekly in America was the Appeal to Reason, a socialist periodical published in Girard, Kansas.
Of course, this is based more on geographic assumption than on any referenced analysis of voting patterns. The fact that Gene Debs got votes from poor people in 1912 does suggest that there may have been some significant overlap between adherents of fundamentalist Christianity and fans of radical economics. Or it may be mostly coincidence.
But the example of William Jennings Bryan is very suggestive in this regard. The last public fight of the Great Commoner was over evolution, and he took the fundamentalist side. But he earned his fame as a leader of the Populist Party and as Woodrow Wilson's more-or-less pacifist Secretary of State.
On the other hand, Bryan's increasing absorption in fundamentalism does seem to have been a retreat for him into a much narrower range of thought than earlier in his life.
And the 1920s were a long time ago. And the complications of politics at that time, especially the nature of the Democratic Party with its twin bases in the rural South and the urban North, don't necessarily give us a guide to what we can expect today.
Lewontin also gives this good illustration of the process of natural selection:
A classic case is the evolution of mimicry in butterflies. Some butterflies taste bad to their potential bird predators and the birds quickly learn from a few revolting trials to recognize them by their wing coloration and to avoid trying to eat them. Other species of butterflies that taste good have evolved wing patterns that make them look like the nasty-tasting species, and so are also avoided by their potential predators. This evolution was possible because butterfly wing patterns are genetically variable from individual to individual. In the past, an individual butterfly that tasted good and whose wings somewhat resembled those of the uneatable species would sometimes fool a bird and be spared from predation. The offspring of this survivor would on average resemble it. Some would be lucky enough to have combinations of genes from its two parents that resulted in its looking even more like the nasty species and their lives would be even more likely to be spared. The final result of these repeated generations of selection in favor of the mimics would be the evolution of an essentially perfect mimic.
His article discusses a number of current and recent attempts to apply Darwinian evolution to cultural development. Their value is mixed.
Although he seems to be skeptical of it, Lewontin is too generous to the field known as "evolutionary psychology." Just as "intelligent design" is basically a new label for creationism, "evolutionary psychology" is not much more than a newer label for Social Darwinism.
His article also raises an intriguing question: why do creationists raise heck over teaching scientific theories of biology, but not of physics? After all, the science of physics is hardly compatable with a "literalist" reading of the Book of Genesis. He has his own suggestion of an answer. I tend to think it is connected with the fundis' obsession with sex, which is very much a part of biology, but not much of physics.
