Evolution -- with a small e

Like us, Peter Wood, provost of the King’s College in New York City, rejects the notion of any contradiction between evolution and intelligent design.

In his National Review essay, he writes:

This battle (between Outraged Scientists and Unrelenting Creationists) is unnecessary and intellectually irresponsible ... in fact, evolution and intelligent design can coexist without the universe cracking asunder. All we need here is a little theoretical modesty and restraint.

A good place to start is to distinguish between the theory of evolution (without the capital E) and Evolution as a grand and, apart from a few rough edges, supposedly comprehensive account of speciation and genetic change. Small-e evolution is an intellectually robust theory that gives coherent order to a huge range of disparate facts. In contrast, capital E Evolution, is a bit illusory. Like a lot of scientific theories, on close inspection it is really a stitched-together fabric of hypotheses.

Evolutionary theory hits a wall in trying to explain what happened with the emergence of fully modern humans about 150,000 years ago.

We can give a name to what happened: with the biological emergence of modern humans came both the capacity for and the realization of "culture."

But to speak of the beginning of culture and the emergence of our species by way of some genetic mutations from anatomically similar ancestors does little to explain the profound mystery of the event. Of course, if we are convinced in advance that genetic mutation is a random, material event, the results of which are sorted out by the struggle for survival, the immense mystery dissolves into happenstance blips in strands of East African DNA, c. 150,000-200,000 years ago.

But at that point, we have moved beyond scientific evolution to doctrinaire Evolution. The randomness of the mutation cannot be demonstrated or proved; it is simply an article of belief, no different in character from a belief that an intelligent Creator nudged the adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine bases of that DNA strand into the right order.

At bottom the dispute between Evolutionists and Creationists always comes down to the question, "What is random?"

Actually, a line of argument that depends on seeing events as random is in a rather worse position than one that postulates, even if it can't prove, underlying order. In science, what's random today is frequently modeled tomorrow. To base a theory of life on ever-more-emphatic repetition of the idea that, "No, it's random," is a bit like stamping your foot and saying, "It's so because I say it's so."