Thoughtful reader Eric makes a good point. I asked the other day, wouldn’t it be enlightening if you were to sit a Darwinist and a Darwin skeptic together for an extended period of time to talk and see what really lies at the bottom of their disagreement? Eric thinks the idea is naïve. And it’s been done already. Maybe he’s right.

You wrote:

“I asked Berlinski and Denton what they thought was the nub of intellectual difference between a thoughtful Darwkin skeptic and a thoughtful Darwin loyalist. If you sat the two down in a room and made them argue their cases, what would turn out to be the bottom line issue that divided them?”

Darwin skeptics and Darwin loyalists in a room arguing their cases.

I think that experiment was performed over 50 years ago at the Wistar conference. Here is how Phillip Johnson summarized the exchanges that took place, based on the published information from the conference.

“The probability of Darwinist evolution depends upon the quantity of favorable micromutations required to create complex organs and organisms, the frequency with which such favorable micromutations occur just where and when they are needed, the efficacy of natural selection in preserving the slight improvements with sufficient consistency to permit the benefits to accumulate, and the time allowed by the fossil record for all this to have happened. Unless we can make calculations taking all these factors into account, we have no way of knowing whether evolution by micromutation is more or less improbable than evolution by macromutation.

“Some mathematicians did try to make the calculations, and the result was a rather acrimonious confrontation between themselves and some of the leading Darwinists at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1967. The report of the exchange is fascinating, not just because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example, the mathematician D.S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C.H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must only be apparent. Ernst Mayer observed that Ulam’s calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that ‘Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.’

“The Darwinists were trying to be reasonable, but it was as if Ulam had presented equations proving that gravity is too weak a force to prevent us all from floating off into space. Darwinism to them was not a theory open to refutation but a fact to be accounted for, at least until the mathematicians could produce an acceptable alternative. The discussion became particularly heated after a French mathematician named Schützenberger concluded that ‘there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology.’ C.H. Waddington thought he saw where this reasoning was headed, and retorted that ‘Your argument is simply that life must have come about by special creation.’ Schützenberger (and anonymous voices from the audience) shouted ‘No!,’ but in fact the mathematicians did not present an alternative.”

(Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial, pp. 38, 39)

Darwin skeptics and Darwin loyalists in a room arguing their cases.

I think this event underscores the same conclusion made by your unnamed source in your recent article about “No Escape from Theistic Evolution?” The core issue is presuppositional. The Darwin loyalists were arguing from a philosophical position of assumed certainty.

“Sir Peter Medawar and C.H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must only be apparent. Ernst Mayer observed that Ulam’s calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that “Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.”

For the Darwin loyalists, there was no debate about whether some kind of Darwinian evolution had taken place. That debate didn’t exist as a real question. That was taken as fact. The only questions were about the details, whether it went by this way or that way.

When a position is treated as an axiom, then as long as that assertion is maintained, it becomes unassailable by subsequent evidence and reason. As your friend said, everything contrary becomes merely “nothing more than another temporarily unsolved problem for naturalistic science.”

That imposes the hardest limits on rational discourse.

And that was exactly David Berlinski’s point in the conversation, as Eric knows.

Update: Eric adds a correction:

I wouldn’t actually call the idea “naïve.”  That would make it sound too much like one shouldn’t even bother to try. Instead, the lesson I would draw is that one would need to address presuppositions directly and up front. (That didn’t happen at Wistar.) I’m personally still naïve enough myself to hope that even some with faith in Darwinism might reconsider.

Photo: Wistar Institute, by Jeffrey M. Vinocur [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY 2.5 ], from Wikimedia Commons.