ADVERTISEMENTS

You know how the Undiscovery Institute is always on the lookout for usages by scientists of the words "intelligent design," in that order, prior to 1987, in an attempt to disprove the evidence by Barbara Forrest at the Kitzmiller trial showing how the "cdesign proponentsists" writing Of Pandas and People were just using ID as a ploy to avoid the consequences of Edwards v. Aguillard?

So, how come they haven't picked up on this usage by a guy pretty well known in biology circles, found by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York?

The point which you raise on intelligent Design has perplexed me beyond measure; & has been ably discussed by Prof. Asa Gray, with whom I have had much correspondence on the subject. ... One cannot look at this Universe with all living productions & man without believing that all has been intelligently designed ...

That was a certain Mr. Darwin writing to John Herschel about Herschel's book, Physical Geography of the Globe. Herschel himself was one of the leading British scientists of the day, renown for his work in astronomy and geography and as a philosopher of science and the scientific method. While Darwin and Herschel were discussing the possibility of directed variation in species that would subsequently be subject to natural selection, the point translates perfectly well to the proposals of ID advocates, who frequently state that they accept a limited role for selection in biology. So why hasn't the DI picked up on this usage by two of the greatest scientists of the 19th Century?

I suppose, for one thing, they don't want to risk the uninitiated finding out that ID is really a very old idea, not the cutting edge science they'd like to pretend, that has not changed at all since the time it was more honestly known as "natural theology," with the exception of moving their examples from such macroscopic objects as the vertebrate eye to the microscopic bacterial flagellum.

Another might be the continuation of Darwin's thought:

... yet when I look to each individual organism, I can see no evidence of this. For I am not prepared to admit that God designed the feathers in the tail of the rock-pigeon to vary in a highly peculiar manner in order that man might select such variations & make a Fan-tail; & if this be not admitted ... then I cannot see design in the variations of structure in animals in a state of nature, -- those variations which were useful to the animal being preserved & those useless or injurious being destroyed.

Still another might be the really devastating critique of the idea Darwin put to Charles Lyell:

But astronomers do not state that God directs the course of each comet & planet. -- The view that each variation has been providentially arranged seems to me to make natural selection entirely superfluous, & indeed takes [the] whole case of appearance of new species out of the range of science. ... I wonder whether Herschel would say that you ought always to give the higher providential Law, & declare that God had ordered all certain changes of level that certain mountains should arise. -- I must think that such views of Asa Gray & Herschel merely show that the subject in their minds is in Comte's theological stage of science [the first of three stages in the development of knowledge].

One thing we know ... it isn't out of any sense of shame.
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