Not Just for Conservatives | Evolution News and Science Today

Editor’s note: This essay is republished with the permission of Professor Shedinger from the journal Agora: The Liberal Arts at Luther College.

The seeds of my fall 2023 sabbatical go back a decade, to the fall semester 2013 when I taught for the first time a course on the relationship between science and religion. This had been a long-standing course at Luther College taught by Loyal Rue who had just retired. As someone with an undergraduate engineering degree and a PhD in religious studies, I had a natural interest in the science/religion relationship. But I knew I needed to get up to speed on the issues animating contemporary debates, especially the acrimonious debate around evolution and intelligent design. At the time, I knew little about intelligent design and perhaps even less about evolutionary theory, the latter of which I simply accepted as true without question. For this reason, I dedicated a fall 2014 sabbatical to an in-depth reading of many of the seminal texts in the history of evolutionary theory, starting, of course, with Darwin’s Origin of Species, but also working through texts by figures like Sewell Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Francis Crick, as well as more contemporary writers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. I also began reading texts by noted intelligent design advocates like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer to see what all the fuss was about

A Grand Narrative

What I discovered shocked me. First, while I expected intelligent design books to be filled with biblical quotations and tendentious religious arguments, I found them instead to be scientifically substantive. They seemed to be raising significant questions about the sufficiency of the modern Darwin-inspired evolutionary theory, questions without easy answers. Second, as I read the literature of evolutionary theory from the perspective of a humanities scholar, I began to tease out a grand narrative of Darwinian triumph that consistently overrides any attempt to engage with the very real challenges to modern evolutionary theory discussed in the intelligent design literature. I eventually formulated this insight into a 2019 book The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion. 

The research for this book introduced me to the correspondence of Charles Darwin, the official publication of which the Luther library had begun collecting in the 1980s. Just for fun I began reading this correspondence, not knowing if it would lead to anything. But I was quickly hooked and ended up reading the first eleven volumes (the collection is now over 30 volumes!), over four thousand pages worth of letters written both by and to Darwin by family members and scientific associates. Volume 11 took me up to the year 1863, four years past the publication of the Origin of Species. To my surprise, these letters revealed a Darwin very different from the Darwin that emerges from most biographies and textbook summaries. These latter serve the aforementioned grand narrative of Darwinian triumph, but the Darwin who narrates his own life through his letters turns out to be a far more ambiguous figure. 

For example, we learn from the correspondence that Darwin viewed the Origin of Species as a mere abstract of his theory lacking much of the evidence and authorities on which his ideas are based. And in fact, the Origin was a mere abstract. Prior to 1859, Darwin had been working on what he called his Big Book on species that he planned to publish as three separate volumes. But when he was about three-quarters finished, circumstances forced him to lay the Big Book aside and abstract it in the form of the Origin instead. He promised his readers that he would follow up the Origin in about two to three years with his longer work, a work that would contain the evidence and authorities he had left out of the Originsince it was only an abstract. People waited and waited for the appearance of the Big Book so they could better evaluate the arguments made in the Origin. But they would wait in vain. Darwin never completed nor published the promised Big Book, but instead followed up the Origin with a monograph on orchids. 

Never Adequately Answered

Why Darwin let his readers down has never been adequately answered. Most of Darwin’s unfinished Big Book manuscript survived among his papers and was published by Cambridge University Press in 1976, making it readily available to scholars. But it has been widely ignored. Why? Highlighting it, I believe, would undermine the carefully guarded myth that the Origin of Species was Darwin’s magnum opus, when in fact its own author viewed it as an imperfect abstract of a much larger work that he promised but never delivered. Having myself read the criticisms leveled at the Origin by Darwin’s scientific correspondents, and having compared the Origin with the Big Book manuscript, I have concluded that Darwin knew the Big Book would not adequately answer these criticisms and he therefore abandoned its publication. I made this argument in Darwin’s Bluff: The Mystery of the Book Darwin Never Finished, published in February 2024. 

This brings me to my fall 2023 sabbatical. Part of this time involved making publisher-suggested revisions to Darwin’s Bluff. But I also began working on a new project. After a decade of immersing myself in Darwin studies, evolutionary theory, and intelligent design, I find myself unexpectedly supportive of the intelligent design position. I say unexpectedly, because the prevailing stereotype holds that intelligent design is merely religiously motivated pseudoscience pushed by conservative Christians. The institutional home of the modern intelligent design movement, Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, is itself a politically and socially conservative think tank. I consider myself very liberal politically, socially, and religiously, so I have found myself in the awkward position of supporting an idea — intelligent design — almost universally understood as explicitly connected to religious, political, and social positions diametrically opposed to my own. But upon further investigation, this awkwardness has dissipated as I have come to realize that the stereotype about intelligent design is just that, a stereotype; it does not accord with reality.

Not Just for Conservatives 

While some high-profile supporters of intelligent design are evangelical Protestants (Stephen Meyer) or conservative Catholics (Michael Behe), the religious profile of the ID movement is far more diverse than usually presented. It would also include figures like David Berlinski (secular Jew), Leif Jensen (secular Dane with an interest in Hinduism), Michael Denton (agnostic), and a host of others who fail to fit the stereotype. I now realize that I can engage with intelligent design on its scientific merits without giving up my liberal commitments in other areas of life. It turns out that intelligent design is not just for conservatives. Thus, my sabbatical also involved beginning to write a short book tentatively titled Why Liberals Should Ditch Darwin and Consider Intelligent Design. In the balance of this report, I will give a brief outline of this work in progress. Why should liberals consider ditching Darwin?

First of all, Darwin himself was a deeply conservative figure. His theory of natural selection and the struggle for existence over finite resources was deeply tied to the competitive capitalism of the British Empire from which Darwin benefitted greatly as a member of the wealthy class who never held a paying job. Moreover, his formative opportunity to sail around the world on the H. M. S. Beagle was only possible due to his father’s wealth and the exploitative colonialism of the British Empire. In addition, though a supporter of abolitionist causes, Darwin was still deeply racist. In his letters, he (and his wife, Emma) threw around the N-word quite casually as an endearing way to refer to each other as the other’s slave. And when Darwin’s botanist friend Joseph Dalton Hooker made comments about Darwin’s obscure writing style, Darwin responded, “Thank you for telling me about obscurity of style in the Origin. But on my life no nigger with a lash over him could have worked harder at clearness than I have.”¹ If slaves under the lash had only had Darwin’s problems!

No Fan of Multi-Culturalism

Darwin was also no fan of multi-culturalism. He was horrified by the sight of the indigenous peoples he met on the Beagle voyage. Yet he wrote to Charles Kingsley on February 6, 1862, “In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.”² Darwin’s thinking on human evolution had a deep impact on the development of the eugenics movement founded by his cousin, Francis Galton, from which German Nazis borrowed much of their racist ideology. 

Finally, Darwin was no feminist, believing strongly in the principle of male superiority. Because men had to struggle with each other for mating opportunities, they naturally grew stronger, faster, and smarter than women. He wrote in the Descent of Man, “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman — whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.”³ Whether the issue is economics, race, or gender, Darwin was no friend of ideals important to liberals. And liberal scholars are beginning to notice.

Take Joan Roughgarden for example, a professor emerita of evolutionary ecology at Stanford University. In 2004, she published Evolution’s Rainbow to highlight the way Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is based on heteronormative assumptions not characteristic of what we actually find in nature. That males are the sexually aggressive ones and females are coy and choosy (Darwin’s view) is exploded by the great diversity of gender expression and sexual orientation found throughout nature. As a transgender woman herself, Roughgarden’s approach is a queering of Darwin’s sexual selection theory. And she is not alone. A paper appearing in 2024 in the journal Human Genetics and Genomics Advances, titled “Queering Genomics: How Cisnormativity Undermines Genomic Science,” argues that cisnormative assumptions underlying genomics research is having a deleterious effect on transgender and intersex people when it comes to medical research. There is increasing recognition that Darwin’s scientific work was deeply influenced by the conservative social mores of Victorian England in a way that challenges its scientific credibility.⁴

A Feminist Approach 

In terms of gender relations, Holly Dunsworth, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island, takes a feminist approach to Darwin’s sexual selection theory, arguing that size differences between males and females are not due to males needing to struggle with each other for mating opportunities, but have more to do with hormone levels. She concludes, “an updated answer to why there are sex differences in the human skeleton is less likely to be interpreted to justify cultural conceptions of masculinity, femininity, and rigid binaries of sex and gender with ‘human nature.’”⁵ Liberal criticisms of Darwin coming from queer and feminist scholars are now becoming mainstream. 

Of course, criticizing Darwin is not the same as making a positive case for intelligent design as an alternative. And there is certainly not the space in this brief sabbatical report to make such a case.⁶ But a few comments are in order.

Some people will be familiar with the 2005 Kitzmiller decision where a Federal judge in Pennsylvania concluded that intelligent design is not science. This seemed to many to put the nail in the coffin of the intelligent design movement. But while the case itself was, I believe, rightly decided (the Dover Area School District did have explicitly religious motivations for its actions), the judge’s decision to go beyond the case at hand and opine about the larger question of what constitutes science was very problematic. Whether intelligent design is or is not science is not a legal question, and even the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel has been harshly critical of the judge’s reasons to deny intelligent design the status of science.⁷

A Science Stopper?

Another question that arises is whether intelligent design is a science stopper. Does proposing the involvement of an intelligent agent in the origin and evolution of life end the scientific search for a naturalistic explanation? In reality, modern intelligent design theory would not be possible without the great advancements made in science over the last century. When Darwin looked at a cell through a microscope, all he could see was a lump of jelly-like proto-plasm. It did not look very complex. But modern technology has allowed us to resolve the cell down to its dizzying complexity of molecular parts and interacting networks, raising the question of what kind of gradual, undirected process could possibly create such an exquisite entity. The origin of life from non-life truly remains one of the most perplexing questions in all of science. Proposing the activity of an intelligent agent in the origin and evolution of life only makes sense in light of scientific advancements — it is not a rejection of them.

Another issue that should concern liberals is academic freedom. Liberals rail when conservatives try to ban books like Nikole-Hannah Jones’s 1619 Project. And well they should. But liberals grow silent when anyone showing even an interest in intelligent design gets drummed out of academia or even the editorship of a peer-reviewed journal that had the temerity to publish a paper favorable to intelligent design. Many careers have been derailed by a liberal cancel-culture when it comes to intelligent design. Academic freedom cannot be invoked only to support ideas one agrees with. Either it pertains to everyone or to no one. 

A Dialogue with Stephen Meyer

An increasing number of people are beginning to recognize that intelligent design researchers are actually the ones doing better science by delving into the weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory that the biological establishment continues to ignore. In the June 18, 2024, issue of Compact, we find an article by David Moulton titled “Two Cheers for ‘Intelligent Design.’” Now Moulton identifies as a secular, gay agnostic; not the kind of person you would expect to harbor a positive attitude toward intelligent design. Nevertheless, he writes, “The first person to get me to take Intelligent Design seriously was a secular scientist; even though my acquaintance rejected Intelligent Design as a positive inference, he still valued it as a critique of the dominant evolutionary paradigm.” Moulton interviewed intelligent design advocate Stephen Meyer and came away with a real appreciation of Meyer’s scientific acumen and his humility in the face of hard questions. 

In closing, we should remember that liberals turning to intelligent design is not a new phenomenon. Darwin’s contemporary who independently developed the idea of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, became an early supporter of intelligent design and held very liberal views on many subjects. He was a socialist economically, a supporter of environmental causes, someone with great appreciation for the knowledge of the indigenous peoples he lived among, and a man of no particular religious sympathies. Yet while he agreed with Darwin on the power of natural selection to do some things, he believed the development of mind and consciousness in living organisms spoke to the existence of a creative intelligence. 

I conclude with wise words from Wallace:

My first point is, that the organizing mind which actually carries out the development of the life-world need not be infinite in any of its attributes — need not be what is usually meant by the terms God or Deity. The main cause of the antagonism between religion and science seems to me to be the assumption by both that there are no existences capable of taking part in the work of creation other than blind forces on the one hand, and the infinite, eternal, omnipotent God on the other.⁸

Modern intelligent design theory does not require positing the identity of any particular creative intelligence. It merely posits that certain aspects of biological organisms are best explained as the result of intelligent activity, not a blind, undirected process. Intelligent design may not in the end prove to be correct, but it does deserve a fair hearing. And one need not be a Bible-thumping, anti-science, religious zealot to see where the evidence is going. There are very good reasons today for liberals to consider ditching Darwin to take a serious look at intelligent design. 

Notes

1. May 11, 1859, letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker. See Frederick Burkhardt et al., eds. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Vol. 7 (Cambridge University Press), 296.
2. February 6, 1862, letter to Charles Kingsley. See Burkhardt, Correspondence, Vol. 10, 71.
3. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Modern Library Edition, 1950), 873.
4. For more on this, see Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
5. Holly M. Dunsworth, “Expanding the Evolutionary Explanations for Sex Differences in the Human Skeleton,” Evolutionary Anthropology 29 (2020): 14.
6. A good place to start would be Stephen C. Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2013).
7. Thomas Nagel, “Education and Intelligent Design,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2008): 187-205.
8. Alfred Russel Wallace, The World of Life; a Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose (Chapman and Hall, 1911), 392.