Since the Dover PA case in 2006, when a Judge Jones tossed out ID as not being science, we have been told that Darwinism is victorious, that Darwinism won. The good judge has gone on the lecture circuit, getting accolades and dollars for recycling the enthusiasm. We've got scientists regularly if not monotonously reporting how finally their research has finally proven Darwin right. We've even got politicians telling us how belief in evolution is essential for the US economy!

But there's this nagging doubt, if Darwin is just obviously right, why is everyone so eager to keep proving it? Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Mike Behe returned from the Cold Spring Harbor Lab conference on evolution where his was the only poster on ID, bemused at the number of anti-ID papers that were delivered. I am reminded of the five stages of a scientific theory: preposterous nonsense; dangerous nonsense; irrelevant nonsense; inconsequential sense; and, absolutely fundamental as I've said all along. ID is moving between stage 2 and 3 at the moment.

Should this transition be inevitable as I predict, then what is the significance of Darwin? I mean, suppose Darwin was wrong after all, and all those accolades to his genius will be forgotten by fickle history, would it matter? After all is said and done, has Darwin made an impact on society that can't be so easily undone?

Yes. And it is pervasive. Let's look at the effect on several fields, and the necessary steps to undo the damage.

Biology.

When Trofim Lysenko decided that Lamarck was more Marxist than Darwin, convincing Stalin and directing Communist biology for 20 years, the West bemoaned the traitorous Russians. Typical of western comments is this one from Wikipedia:  Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.  Today, however, there is a resurgence of Lamarckian biology, with admission that the West has acted as censorious as Lysenko in promoting Darwin. Alexander Vargas writes that the suicide of pioneering epigeneticist Paul Kammerer was instigated by allegations of fraud.All that is left is the rehabilitation of Lysenko.

 Yet so adamant were they against Lamarck that all research into epigenetics was essentially stopped, just as all research into astrobiology/panspermia was stopped, because it threatened the Darwinist paradigm. Perhaps more surprisingly, research into natural selection/mutation of bacteria was also stopped, simply because it was getting the wrong answer. Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld write in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews How the Microbial World Saved Evolution from the Scylla of Molecular Biology and the Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis. 

This is the story of how biology of the 20th century neglected and otherwise mishandled the study of what is arguably the most important problem in all of science: the nature of the evolutionary process. This problem has suffered the indignity of being dismissed as unimportant to a basic understanding of biology by molecular biology; it went effectively unrecognized by a microbiology still in the throes of trying to find itself; and it became the private domain of a quasi-scientific movement, who secreted it away in a morass of petty scholasticism, effectively disguising the fact that their primary concern with it was ideological, not scientific.

They write of four discoveries which were suppressed because they violated the Darwinist dogma:

1) All single-celled organisms are NOT descended from bacteria.

“All these organisms share the distinctive structural properties associated with the procaryotic cell . . . and we can therefore safely infer a common origin for the whole group in the remote evolutionary past." (1962)
This dogmatic approach to the essence of microbiology would shunt development away from the problem of the nature of cellular organization, which Stanier and van Niel had solved by fiat....Stanier and van Niel’s assertion that all bacteria were prokaryotes was an eminently testable hypothesis—the only problem being that neither the authors nor microbiologists in general perceived it that way.

2) Microbiology is NOT just chemistry inside a membrane--reductionism.

It is difficult to imagine that the discipline which defined biology in the last century—that taught us so much and provided such benefit to the ambient society—is fundamentally flawed. But that is the case. Molecular biology expressly established itself within the (classical) Newtonian worldview. As such, its perspective was fundamentally reductionist. In other words, all things were explainable, completely and solely, as the sum of their various parts—which also meant that they could (in principle) be predicted a priori...
It is one thing to hold a perspective in principle, another to apply it in detail. Thus, in the early decades of the 20th century, molecular biology’s fundamental reductionist perspective was innocuous—especially when there were many problems that could benefit from a (simple) reductionist approach. It was another thing altogether when molecular biology began reconceptualizing biology in an exclusively reductionist fashion. Then the inadequacies of reductionist metaphysics began to show. The major wrong turn in biology’s course was its conceptualization and subsequent handling of the problem of the gene. It would come to a point where the discipline had to choose between the obvious biology of the situation and the tenets of reductionism. Molecularists choose the latter, thereby taking off the table a major biological question....
This turn in the road (of applying reductionist metaphysics to the understanding of the biological world) would become a superhighway that dead-ended before it reached molecular biology’s ultimate goal, that of understanding the essence of “livingness” and directly answering the question of how molecules come to life.

3) The modern evolutionary synthesis model is NOT the actual evolutionary process.

We have seen that molecular biology, the dominant biological discipline of the time, did not even recognize the evolutionary process as a scientific problem. Given its overview (axiomatic assumptions), molecular biology took evolution simply as biological epiphenomenology, “historical accident”—which means that evolutionary considerations have no bearing whatsoever on any fundamental understanding of living systems...
The modern evolutionary synthesis should have been the 20th century’s evolutionary bastion, the forefront of research into the evolutionary process. No such luck!
The basic understanding of evolution, considered as a process, did not advance at all under its tutelage. The presumed fundamental explanation of the evolutionary process, “natural selection,” went unchanged and unchallenged from one end of the 20th century to the other. Was this because there was nothing more to understand about the nature of the evolutionary process? Hardly! Instead, the focus was not the study of the evolutionary process so much as the care and tending of the modern synthesis. Safeguarding an old concept, protecting “truths too fragile to bear translation” is scientific anathema.

4) Inherited (and improved) genes are NOT as fundamental to evolutionary processes as horizontal gene transfer.

Dogmatic thinking has prevailed all too often in our account, with disastrous consequences for the progress of the fields of microbiology, molecular biology, and the study of the evolutionary process. It led to the stagnant and scientifically invalid notion of the prokaryote; it led to the redefinition of the problem of the gene; and through a slavish adherence to the modern evolutionary synthesis, it led to a premature declaration of victory in the struggle to understand the evolutionary process.
Today, we know that horizontal gene transfer is a powerful evolutionary force in the microbial world, well-documented in the phylogenetic record, and one whose ecological significance is only beginning to be fully understood. Spurred on by advances in genomic technology, microbial ecology is presenting new insights into the workings of the biosphere, demanding a synthesis with the evolutionary process, and forcing evolutionary biology to pay attention. The power of horizontal gene transfer is so great that it is a major puzzle to understand why it would be that the eukaryotic world would turn its back on such a wonderful source of genetic novelty and innovation. The exciting answer, bursting through decades of dogmatic prejudice, is that it hasn’t. There are now compelling documentations of horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes, not only in plants, protists, and fungi, but in animals (including mammals) as well. The evolutionary implications have not yet been worked out, but we are confident that a fully worked out theory of the evolutionary process is required in order to properly meet the challenges posed initially by microbiology.

To sum up the respected Carl Woese, we've lost a century of molecular biology because of Darwinist dogma. And that's just microbiology. We could include just about every subfield in biology which has been hamstrung by dogma. In the world of bad biology guides, Trofim was a piker.

Astrobiology

It is a small field, with a few sputterings from Arrhenius around the turn of the 20th century, and some sporadic support from meteoriticists in the early 1960's, followed by maverick Sir Fred Hoyle's spirited defense in the 1980's. I've blogged on this before, but the astounding thing to me is just how eagerly the scientific community concluded that the entire affair of life on comets was a huge fraud. One is reminded of the KGB's smear campaign of Pope Pius XII after his death, following Beria's dictum that people are more likely to believe false stories than true. So it was in meteoritics, and the "contaminated meteorite" paper went unchallenged, despite its clear fabrication and inability to explain the data it purported to deny. Even today, the conclusion, "contamination" remains unassailed, despite the discrediting of its origin, which can only be attributed to Darwinist dogmatic rejection of the implications of panspermia. This implicit Darwinism is echoed in the first and loudest objection to the discovery of life on comets, "But your data still doesn't explain where life originated!", which is to say, evolution is merely a sophisticated wrapper around an atheistic origin-of-life belief, and if an anti-theistic OOL is not asserted, the theory is unacceptable.

Education

This same implicit atheism has likewise afflicted education.There was a telling interview in Scientific American, where Berkeley psychologist Tania Lombrozo talked to SciAm's Steve Miller about the results of a survey on the beliefs of evolutionary theory. To her surprise, religious Christians were just as likely to believe evolution as non-religious, there wasn't a strong correlation between degree of rejection and degree of belief, rather it was the kind of belief. Theistic evolutionists tended to straddle the middle, being ardent evolutionist who nonetheless believed in God. Even more surprising, was the dashing of the stereotype that anti-evolutionists were ignorant, gullible people likely to believe in anything. In her words,

One thing that you don't find is a general propensity for people to have supernatural beliefs. So you might have thought that someone who rejects evolution in general might be more willing to accept supernatural ideas about everything, like the pyramids being created by supernatural forces or UFOs or astrology, for example, and you actually don't find a correlation between endorsing creationism or other kind of supernatural, counter human origins and those kinds of traditionally supernatural beliefs aren't associated with Christianity.

Then all that anti-science bashing about congressmen who don't accept evolution isn't actually true. But then you already knew that. Even more interesting is the admission that educators have a choice, to either teach the science or teach the belief. Here's the interchange:

Steve: Yeah, it was surprising to me when your data were presented. So what [does] that mean for, you know, education in the country? What should people be thinking about if they have a desire to have evolutionary theory be more accepted by more people?

Lombrozo: I think it has a couple of consequences. So, one of them is that any kind of educational intervention that increases people's understanding of evolutionary theory is not necessarily going to have a consequence to whether or not people accept evolution. I think that's surprising, but it also raises a lot of complicated ethical issues; whether or not it's even appropriate in the classroom for teachers to be trying to deliberately influence students' acceptance of evolution as opposed to whether or not they understand it. We normally think about the role of education as being one to communicate basic concepts, to communicate scientific theories, not to actually change whether or not people accept a particular theory that might conflict with their relative views. So I think it raises some complicated issues there.

Steve: So it may be justifiable to say, "Here's what we understand about evolution as a science. We don't care whether you accept it; we just want you to understand it."

Lombrozo: I think that's the way a lot of people think about education, and I think that's a way to sidestep some complicated ethical issues about whether or not it's appropriate to present ideas that could conflict with people's beliefs. On the other hand, people's policy making decisions, their medical decisions and a lot of other decisions might depend not only on whether or not they understand evolution, but on whether or not they accept it. So in some sense, I think the public has a lot at stake in whether or not people accept evolution; but I am not sure the best way to proceed given these kinds of findings about the dissociation between acceptance and belief.

The dilemma could not have been phrased more starkly. Do we teach the science, or do we teach the religion? What is the payoff of teaching the religion instead? As Tania describes elsewhere in this interview: a poor ability to understand the content of evolution. But when it comes to making medical (read: ethical) decisions, then the Darwinist religion is all-important.

If it is behaviour we are after, then by all means, teach religion, because that is what religion is for. But that raises the important question, "what exactly is Darwinist behaviour, and why is it both unscientific and unchristian? And what does it do to the ethics of those children who grow up to be scientists?" I think we already know the answers to these questions. This is the legacy Darwin has left for our children.

Philosophy

I would have liked to trace the influence of Darwin on philosophers such as Whitehead, Bergson, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the rediscovered Hegel. In many of these cases, teleology is denied and the history of philosophy is reduced to method. The rediscovery of Hegel is fascinating, because Hegel began with a very fundamental teleology, but his modern proponents have substituted a Darwinist parody. Like the Marxist inversion of Hegel, this modern version is also an inversion, but more importantly, it removes the search for God from the list of approved investigations. Perhaps at a later time, we can explore the psychological appeal of Darwinism which has profoundly infected philosophy.

Theology

Theology likewise shows a deep influence from Darwin. Most obviously it is found in the writings of the apostate Teilhard de Chardin, or the existentialism of Paul Tillich and the rise of Open Theism, which combined with Gnosticism, is the unofficial theology of The Episcopal Church. So whether we look at Catholic Jesuits or Reformed Protestants or Episcopalian half-breeds, we find the influence of the God who evolves. Perhaps it isn't so surprising, since for the past 300 years, theology has been the younger sister to philosophy, tagging along with a me-too metaphysics.

Physics

But what is, at least to me, a truly surprising development is the effect of Darwin on physics. Physicists note with pride the dependence of the other sciences on physics, because physics is the ultimate reductionist science. But reductionism can't every achieve the satisfaction of purpose, of synthesis, of aesthetic delight. And so, in a perverse way, physics has relied on theology for its overall unity, which in the last few decades, has become the theology of evolution. Lee Smolin argues that to avoid the evidence that the creation was designed requires a belief in a Hegelian view of time (which itself owes a great deal to Darwin). Leonard Susskind objects strenuously, that we need only allow universes to evolve. (No, I'm not making that up. Evidently there's this place called the multiverse where baby universes are born and if they don't have the right stuff, they die.) Here's his actual words:

Darwin was not particularly interested in astronomy or physics, yet his impact on cosmology was enormous but in a way subconscious. In successfully explaining the origin of species, he eliminated superstition and set a new standard for what an explanation of nature should be like. As I wrote in my book The Black Hole War (Little Brown, 2008), Darwin’s masterstroke was to have “ejected God from the science of life”. True, Darwin was not the first scientist to cast out supernatural beliefs. Two centuries earlier, Newton — another great Cambridge scientist — had done so more than anyone before his own time... In other words, before Darwin, even the greatest physicists had little alternative to a supernatural explanation of the origin of life, and therefore of nature itself. It was the success of Darwinism that forced the issue and set the standard for future theories of origins, whether it be it of life or of the universe. Explanations must be based on the laws of physics, mathematics and probability — and not on the hand of God.

If you missed that bit of genuflection, here's his conclusion

Whether string theory with its huge landscape, and eternal inflation with its reproducing pockets of space [both=evolving universes], will prove to be correct is for the future to decide. What is true is that as of the present time, they provide the only natural explanation of the universe that lives up to the standard set by Darwin.

Recall that Darwin believed in an eternal, God-free cosmos, so he merely had to find an atheistic solution to the origin of life. Now that we know Darwin was wrong about the universe, Susskind merely has to find an atheist solution to the origin of the universe to fix the atheism. So if you bought that bridge from Darwin, have we ever got a deal for you! The important point to notice here, is the circularity of the logic. Since the universe is eternal, then life also does not need a creator; but once we know that the universe is not eternal, then since life didn't need a creator, neither does the universe. No other option, says Susskind, preserves our atheism intact.

Then when physicist Frank Tipler writes a book like "The Physics of Immortality", where he argues that religion is based on physical principles, he states that the final condition of the universe as described by physics must evolve because the theory of evolution is true. Once again, physics is turning to evolution for metaphysical confirmation of the nature of reality. It is perhaps no surprise, that Tipler's immortality seems to be a pseudo-scientific gloss on Tielhard de Chardin's.

Political Science

Despite vociferous denials, Richard Weikart's masterful "Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress" describes precisely how Darwin affected the 3rd Reich. Nor should we leave out Communism with its strident atheism and evangelical materialism. The real surprise comes from Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism", that charts the influence of Darwin on American politics. It is needless to remind one that the politics of the 20th century were dominated by Darwin. What is still unknown is his effect on the 21st century, though one thing is clear: Darwin has an advocate in President Obama.

Conclusions

Yes Darwin does matter, and as we saw with physics, his atheism lives on long after his cosmology is overturned. Or as we saw with education, his moral relativism lives on long after we stop teaching the science. Or as we saw with political science, his philosophy gets resurrected whenever a capricious leader covets greater power. These are a few of the reasons why the science must be thoroughly and completely discredited, so that all these efforts can be seen for the naked atheism they embody. That is the singular goal of ID, and its best justification. And that also explains the raw hatred towards ID.