The Peak

Don’t mess with Darwin

By Various

In university there are a lot of groups you should avoid offending, lest ye be burned: the sustainability people, the women’s centre, the bubble club. But in reality, maybe the worst people to annoy are evolutionists.

Their wrath is a mixture of both intellectual and moral outrage, and the discussion is always tinted by the largely invisible presence of parallel arguments over religion, free speech, and academic standards. While other controversial topics, like abortion, are discussions of the interpretation of facts, evolution is a discussion of the facts themselves. As such, people tend not to stay quiet when they feel it is being treated badly, and this week’s flood of reader responses certainly confirmed that idea.

Ian Bushfield, the student to whom Seo was responding [The atheist fallacy, March 22], claims that Seo barely addressed his points at all, and instead went on an ill-conceived tangent that did not refute any of his actual points. “Specifically,” he writes, “I questioned on what basis we should favour Biblical Christian creationism over other creation myths if we are to include them in science classrooms. The Pastafarians, and their Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster have all the legitimacy of Seo’s narrow Christian interpretation, in terms of scientific evidence.”

But other students were inspired to write in as well. Jakob Liljenwall took a more sarcastic tone. “I agree with you Isaac! That is to say, I agree that the straw-man version of evolution you pulled out of your ass is on equal scientific footing to creationism. Rather than force school children to choose between two things that you made up, however, I believe we should simply present the scientific theory of evolution that currently provides the basis for much of modern biology and medicine . . . While no one can stop you from amusing yourself by attacking viewpoints of your own devising, perhaps that’s the sort of thing you ought to do in private.”

Christopher Burrows also accused Seo of creating a straw-man version of evolution, insisting that the characterization of the scientific side of the argument is unrealistic and dishonest. “When Seo makes the totally unqualified statement that science claims it is ‘the only way to know anything’, he is attacking a straw man. Of course this claim is not true, which is why it is never actually made.”

Several students took issue with Seo’s appeal that schools should “teach the controversy” over evolution. Burrows wrote: “The ‘Teach the Controversy’ solution has been the tactic of anti-evolutionists, ever since the famous Dover trial, where the courts ruled it unconstitutional to teach Intelligent Design in American schools.”

He continues, “Fortunately, the universe is not bounded by Seo’s incredulity and limited imagination. The development of consciousness can be nicely explained by modern evolutionary theory, although the question of just what is consciousness is as philosophical as it is scientific.”

Unsurprisingly, a major point of response was the claim that believers in evolution must also believe that “all disabled and handicapped people should be killed, especially in an overpopulated world.” Seo argued that “evolution gives us reason to step on the weak.”

On this topic, Lana Friesen said that “the parallel Mr. Seo has drawn between improvement and evolution implies that evolutionists are necessarily believers in eugenics, which is simply not the case. . . . Evolution should not be considered progress or improvement. . . . One life form replaces another according to prevailing conditions, which arise from evanescent and purely chance circumstances. As such, it is clear that believing in evolution does not put eugenics or genocide on your agenda.”

Parsian Asgari wrote to refute Seo’s ideas about sciences’ alleged claims of being the only way of acquiring useful information. “Science does not claim to be the only way to knowledge, but rather it was selected as the optimal method to discover and form knowledge, because it can explain nature and forecast the system’s behaviour very accurately. . . . It became the dominant method of understanding nature, by proving to be the best solution over long periods of time.”

It seems almost cruel to publish creationist sentiment on a campus like this; the volume and uniformity of the response would be intimidating for anyone to deal with. Most respondents were quite measured, however, and tried to sum up their arguments in as gentle a fashion as possible. Ian Bushfield said that “while I respect Seo for standing by his beliefs and being willing to defend them, I will not lie and say that I respect his view that he ought to be able to wedge creationism into the science classroom without following the proper scientific route.”

Christopher Burrows had similar sentiments. “I appreciate voices such as Seo’s which challenge me to analyze my own beliefs. Seo, unfortunately, has done so without having read up on his Biology first, or his logic.”

Evolution is one of those issues, the zombie topics, which never goes away, and about which students never seem to tire of debating. However, unlike abortion, swearing, Israel-Palestine, or indeed religion, the evolution debate seems to be getting simultaneously more one-sided, and less shrill.

Evolutionists seem to be magnanimous in the feeling of security that comes from being by far the dominant school of thought on campus. Depending on your point of view, this could be a good or a bad thing, but one thing’s for sure: being a creationist at university sure can’t be easy.