A conservative humanist criticism of the "intelligent design" scam

Through the Atlantic Review site that I mentioned on Sunday, I've come across the Dialog International blog by "David from Maine", which focuses broadly on issues of German-American relations and takes a generally liberal approach to issues.

He recently posted about the "intelligent design" hustle, in the context of an article in the Berlin paper Der Tagesspiegel that wondered at the continuing controversy over evolution in the United States: Darwin and Scientific Humanism 12/12/05.

He quotes Edmund O. Wilson on the controversy, arguing against the flat-earthers. But Wilson is hardly a liberal. He has a solid reputation for some of his writing on science. But he's also identified with "sociobiology", which is a somewhat recent incarnation of Social Darwinism. The most recent version to gain any significant attention, so far as I'm aware, was "evolutionary psychology".


It's ironic, because Wilson explicitly advocates "scientific humanism" as an alternative worldview to a religious one. Which would sound to the Christian Right very much like the "secular humanism" they view as an evil rival religion. Yet Wilson is well-known as a conservative thinker, and is even identified with one of the most conservative of all social theories, Social Darwinism.

So it's not just a liberal conspiracy out to discredit "intelligent design". At least some conservatives who haven't embraced a completely "faith-based" approach to the real world are also against it. Back in the 1980s, an elderly Edward Teller - a hardline hawk if there ever was one and no kind of liberal either - energetically objected to an attempt to impose creationism in science teaching in the public scools in Livermore, CA, where the Livermore Lab is located. He asked, how could we ever hope to compete with those ever-menacing Russians if we didn't have solid science education for the country?

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