In the Kingdom of the Blind. . .

. . . the one-eyed man still doesn't see very well.

Found this post by Marc Ambinder via Andrew Sullivan, whose sole comment, in a post titled "Palin: The Dumber Kind of Creationist," is "Ambers explains."

Ouch. "Ambers," as he is known in that collegial collection of the almost-profound who inhabit The Atlantic, manages to screw up from the first sentence. Time to parse.

Much more so than abortion, the issue of life's origins wedges itself between the scientifically literate elite and everyone else.

Frankly, the idea that the scientifically literate form an elite is scary. It also makes me wonder what happened to all that money we spend on education in this country? Oh, and given that this is a post about creationism and evolution, let me just point out that evolution, at least, does not deal with life's origins. Evolution starts with the statement "life exists" and takes it from there.

This is the Big Question, and it has implications for politics: what is humanity? What do we owe each other? From where do we derive our ethics? How do we solve irreconcilable value claims?

Can someone explain to me what any of these questions have to do with evolution? These are large philosophical and theological questions, and don't really have much to do with the ways in which life achieved the rich variety that we see around us. It doesn't seem to have occured to Ambinder that those are questions we answer for ourselves, and we don't really need to rely on evolution to do it for us. We can, if we want to, but we don't have to, and we're probably better off not making that connection.

Its acceptance in the years after Charles Darwin popularized the concept fundamentally established science as the foundational text of modernism. Most biological scientists don't believe in God. Those who do, like the new chair of the NIH, Francis S. Collins, are Christian Deists; they accept that "progress" in evolution seems random, but they believe that, somewhere beneath the quarks, the God spark is slowly directing this complicated process - or that God created the laws of the universe in such a way so as to lay favorable conditions for evolution. But they don't reject the evidence.

There's no basis for saying that most biological scientists don't believe in God. As one of Ambinder's commenters points out, there is a full range of belief among the scientific community, from the devout to the atheistic. You probably won't find a lot of Biblical literalists among biologists, but I doubt that you'll find them in any branch of knowledge that relies on curiosity and understanding the importance of evidence.

Evolution, the change over time of species by various unguided (but not always random) selection pressures, is as close to a fact of science as there is. It is as much of a historical fact as the Holocaust.

Two points here: natural selection, the driving mechanism of evolution, is a double-layered event. First comes meiosis, the process by which gametes divide, and in so doing, mix up the organism's genetic heritage. This is pretty random -- mistakes happen, sequences get duplicated or lost, genes get recombined. Once a new organism is created -- i.e., the egg is fertilized and development begins -- the selection criteria are not random at all. The requirements of the environment are the deciding factor in the survival of the individual. (And I might point out that this is a life-long requirement.) He's sort of right in saying that evolution is as close to a factof science as possible, but calling it a "historical fact" on the order of the Holocaust is pushing it, I think. The existence of the theory, and its acceptance, is certainly historical fact, but the theory itself cannot be, by definition. This is where we get into the phenomenon of sliding definitions. Biologists take evolution as a fact and will until the unlikely event that some piece of evidence disproves it -- and eventuality which becomes more and more remote. But to translate this into the common parlance as a fact is risky: it doesn't mean the same thing. (The parallel is the different meanings of "theory," which the creationists have so much fun manipulating.)

The American people are finicky about their creation/evolution debate. Even though a majority of Americans clearly believe at least a thin form of "intelligent design," about a majority staunchly opposes something called "creationism" -- even though it is, in the real world, indistinguishable from creationism in its animating principles and aims. What this means is that Americans accept the chronology of evolution without accepting the science of evolution. Disproving evolution to scientists would mean finding a rabbit fossil in the Burgess Shale. Disproving "intelligent design" to most Americans would mean disproving the existence of God.

Granted that he's talking about the popular perception here, I still have to object to the idea of "disproving" intelligent design. You can't -- that's why it's not science. (Well, that's only one of many reasons, but it's the one that's germane here.)

One thing that I find very interesting about this post is what Ambinder doesn't say. Granted, he's talking about Sarah Palin, who's an outlier, but nowhere does he point out that most mainstream Christian denominations -- starting with the Roman Catholic Church -- accept the theory of evolution as valid. One of the commenters even quotes Pope Benedict XVI:

"Currently, I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a somewhat fierce debate raging between so-called "creationism" and evolutionism, presented as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator would not be able to conceive of evolution, and those who instead support evolution would have to exclude God. This antithesis is absurd because, on the one hand, there are so many scientific proofs in favour of evolution which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such. But on the other, the doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man? I believe this is of the utmost importance."

And yet Ambinder just blindly follows the idea that belief in evolution precludes belief in God, at least to the extent of accepting it as a valid view simply because it's held by a certain percentage of Americans. Sorry, but that doesn't make it true.

Fortunately, Ambinder's readers are on the ball, and several of him ripped him a new one for this piece. I'm reminded of a lesson I learned early on: if you don't know what you're talking about, keep quiet.