"What is it about even the slightest dissent from Darwin's theory of natural selection that drives liberal elites (and even some conservative elites) bonkers?" Adam Wolfson asks that question in "Survival of the Evolution Debate: Why Darwin Is Still a Lightning Rod," an essay published in the January 16, 2006 edition of The Weekly Standard.
Wolfson now serves as consulting editor of Commentary magazine and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. He formally served as editor of The Public Interest, which was for many years one of America's premier intellectual journals.
In this essay, Wolfson wonders aloud why Darwin, together with his theory of evolution, still serves as such a lightning rod for controversy in American culture. In one sense, Wolfson seizes the opportunity to suggest that controversies over Darwinism are often, if not usually, easily traced to the fact that intellectual elites will accept no criticism of Darwinism whatsoever.
Looking back to the 1920s and the infamous (and usually misunderstood) Scopes trial, Wolfson acknowledges that the elites were offended "that anyone could believe the story of Genesis in a literal way." Five decades later, the scientific establishment and the elites were driven to apoplexy by the emergence of "creation science," often reaching the front pages of the nation's leading newspapers. The intellectual elites cannot abide such naysayers in their presence, so they attempt, as Wolfson helpfully explains, to marginalize, ridicule, dismiss, and send into exile anyone who refuses to swallow Darwinism hook, line, and sinker.
As Wolfson cleverly adapts H. L. Mencken, "Liberals are haunted by the specter that someone, somewhere harbors doubts about Darwin's theory." Criticism of evolutionary theory is most commonly found among those who reject the overarching evolutionary worldview. Most often--and most naturally--this group would include conservative, Bible-believing Christians who understand the unavoidable collision between evolutionary theory and biblical authority. Beyond this, the huge worldview implications of the debate transform every point of the controversy into a debate of major significance.
In reality, the issue of evolution not only divides, generally speaking, liberals from conservatives in our current age of ideological conflict. Beyond this, the question of Darwinism divides even some conservatives, revealing a split between conservative Christians and those whose conservatism is more directly linked to social, economic, or political concerns. The Weekly Standard has emerged as one of the flagship institutions of modern conservatism. Accordingly, Wolfson's essay is written in a rather detached mode, as Wolfson's main point appears to be that the elites are overreacting to the challenge of Intelligent Design, and thereby revealing their own intellectual insecurity and the inherent weaknesses in the theory of evolution.
Indeed, Wolfson asserts that, in truth, most people nowadays do believe evolution's basics--which is to say that species evolved--and most people believe that natural selection explains part of the change of adaptation." The debate, he asserts, "is over whether natural selection explains everything."
The "all or nothing" character of Darwin's theory is often glossed over (if not explicitly denied) by many proponents of evolution. Yet, as Wolfson acknowledges, Charles Darwin understood this dimension of his thought all too well. "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down," Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species.
In effect, Darwin invited a challenge to his own understanding of evolutionary theory. In recent years, that challenge has been taken up by the proponents of Intelligent Design, whose central argument is that the complexity of the cosmos cannot possibly be explained by the blind and purely accidental process Darwin described. The concept of "irreducible complexity" counters Darwin's faith in natural selection with an assertion that such complexity would be mathematically impossible without the presence of intelligence and design guiding the process.
