Warfare Thesis Failure Leaves Evolution Desperate For Canards

Pop Psych to the Rescue

Ever since Voltaire mythologized the Galileo Affair, Hume�s Philo demolished Cleanthes, and Gibbon blamed pretty much everything on the Christians, evolutionary thinking has had an unbeatable template: The Warfare Thesis. Anyone who opposes or even questions evolution is automatically branded as having religious motives. Religion is at war with science. That claim has failed the test of historiography over and over, but so what? Who cares about history? Certainly not journalists, policy makers, federal judges, textbook authors, and anyone else who matters. But now there is an entirely different, empirical, falsification of the Warfare Thesis, and evolutionists are in full-panic.

Evolutionists began to realize there were problems with blaming skepticism of their warmed over Epicureanism on the Warfare Thesis a few years ago when Neil deGrasse Tyson asked �How come this number isn�t zero?� That �number� Tyson referred to was not the number of backwoods fideists, but rather the number of scientists, who reject evolution. The greatest minds in history didn�t buy it and a non trivial percentage of today�s scientists also aren�t quite sure that astronomical entropy barriers have repeatedly been climbed an astronomical number of times by, err, random chance events. The Warfare Thesis canard was showing signs of wear.

More recently, studies are showing that people generally tend to reject evolutionary concepts at a gut level. This has nothing to do with religious beliefs. It seems that the evolutionary ideas that (i) the species are nothing but snapshots in a continuum, rather than essentialistic, and that (ii) the world is nothing but a randomly evolving blob, rather than there being an underlying teleology, don�t make much sense to people. All people.

This is particularly evident in young children. As the Guardian reports:

Developmental psychologists have identified two cognitive biases in very young children that help to explain the popularity of intelligent design. The first is a belief that species are defined by an internal quality that cannot be changed (psychological essentialism). The second is that all things are designed for a purpose (promiscuous teleology). These biases interact with cultural beliefs such as religion but are just as prevalent in children raised in secular societies. Importantly, these beliefs become increasingly entrenched, making formal scientific instruction more and more difficult as children get older. � teleology is prevalent in children regardless of how their parents describe the world to them or the religious culture that they are growing up in. This widespread function compunction is neither outgrown nor fully replaced by formal scientific education.

The Warfare Thesis continues to fail, and evolutionists need a new canard why people just won�t go along with their age-old idea that the world arose spontaneously.