Calls it phony: Conservatives are, by definition, anti-intellectual, especially in the Bush era, so what gets written by the smarty-pants among them can be viewed with some suspicion. This is especially so if that smarty-pants is Charles Krauthammer, a colunnist for the Washington Post and one of the hordes of Gop apologists on Fox News.
But in a column today under the headline, “Phony Theory, False Conflict: ‘Intelligent Design’ Foolishly Pits Evolution Against Faith,” Krauthammer takes the central tenet at the heart of rightwing anti-intellectualism:
Let’s be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological “theory” whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge — in this case, evolution — they are to be filled by God. It is a “theory” that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, “I think I’ll make me a lemur today.” A “theory” that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science — that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution — or behind the motion of the tides or the “strong force” that holds the atom together?
As I sit here, coffee in hand, I have a vision of Charles Krauthammer giving up the political beat and switching to covering science. I could live with that and wish him well in the process.
Now, if we can just get David Frum to start covering Sports and Jonah Goldberg to switch to the farm beat…
As much as it pains me to admit, the condescending twit Krauthammer, who makes me gag to look at his ferret-like face, is right on this one. But then, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
What I wish progressives would hammer home, however, is that this so-called “intelligent design” argument is not in conflict with evolutionary biology. In fact, they are skew lines of argument. Intelligent design presumes to speculate as to how life originally began. Evolutionary biology does nothing of the sort. Evolution only explains how life progressed after it began – namely from less complex life forms to more complex ones. And in that regard, the evidence is irrefutable.