THE REPUBLICAN PARTY is supposed to be the elite of the States, and therefore of the globe; they are the ones who have devoted their lives to study and to duty, they and only they consider the Long Run, they can balance the budget, can insist on free trade and free travel, can demand that army and navy be manned with volunteers, can nominate high-minded jurists to judicial appointments, can scorn the oft-fatal lure of popularity – they concentrate on making the people better off absolutely, not merely some relative to others.
Except that, when the party sends forth its ten champions to lead the battle against the populists and panderers, we find that all except three are still defending the theory that evolution explains the origin of species.
This theory has the appealing feature that it can be taught in the public schools by even the least sophisticated teachers; we all know that siblings, even twins, can be distinctly different, so that over many generations these differences can accumulate – those that promote survival persist and vice versa, you can usually guess whether someone comes from the arctic or the tropics.
It is possible that the school-teachers actually believe that these random mutations have slowly, slowly, slowly created distinct species, such as forest elephants, bush elephants, and Indian elephants, but the scholars do not; they see in the fossil record species remaining unchanged over protracted periods – the esoteric term is “punctuated equilibrium” – and across widely different environments. After all, it is quite some time since homo sapiens emerged from the shallow seas, but babies can still swim at one day old.
Worse still, the philosophers are heard to object that the theory of evolution is not science; science is pursued because it excludes many possibilities – ideally, all except one – and therefore allows one to predict how some desired outcome (perhaps, to travel to the Moon and back) can be achieved. Scientific theories typically have short lives before being refuted; Newton’s theory of gravitation has been superceded by Einstein’s relativity, elements that used to be recognized by their chemical properties are now identified by their atomic masses. If the theory of evolution excludes no form of life, then it cannot be disproved and is intellectually discredited.
Unbeknownst to the Republican candidates, however, the twenty-first century has brought enlightenment. Andrew Parker, a British fossil expert, has shown that the faculty of vision – which Darwin himself recognized as an extremely improbable development – actually appeared in six phyla [a phylum is a division of a kingdom] concurrently (i.e. In the Blink of an Eye on the geological scale of time.) This plainly non-random outcome can be explained on the theory of intelligent design: when the Designer had brought vision to pass in one phylum, by trial-and-error over many, many, many generations, then He (or She) could reproduce it in other phyla in only a few generations.
Certainly, presidential candidates are not running for a school board, they do not need to be familiar with the latest academic literature. However, the theory of evolution (as an explanation of the origin, as well as the preservation, of species) has been around for literally centuries, and has been exposed as non-science for decades – at the least, since Karl Popper demonstrated that science comprises falsifiable (i.e. universal, “every swan is . . . “) propositions in the mid-twentieth century. One had supposed that it was because Americans are well able to follow a train of logical reasoning, and to devise hypotheses to accord with the data, that we win all – or at least most – of the Nobel prizes. It would be encouraging if more than a minority of important public figures showed some evidence of, at the very least, reading contemporary literature.