Why do evolutionistic biologists like to participate in creationistic debates?

If you look at the Web pages devoted to the polemic of Darwinism versus Creationism and Intelligent Design, you'll notice the great amount of biologists taking part in them. Many of the participant biologists back an undefined evolutionism, only partially Darwinist, sometimes incorporating punctuationistic or symbiogenetic elements. The way they participate is very interesting. In many cases, they begin with a friendly and pedagogical attitude, speaking of facts, of classic tests, also of the sense in which Darwinism and Creationism are or are not scientific theories. In time, their attitude usually becomes rather rougher, until they adopt a unionist way of speaking; despising anyone who "talks with no enough knowledge". They finally use expressions such as "obscurantism", "dogmatism", "pseudoscience", and any other qualification whose objective seems to be giving a sudden end to the debate, just to aboard "more interesting subjects". Nevertheless, they go on participating, and they attack again against all odds. Sometimes they write just a sardonic sentence and they stay at margin, but we still feel their presence.
Why does it happen? I can imagine a very simple reason: boredom. At least the more popular version of evolutionism -the 50’s Great Synthesis, that joined Darwinism with Population Genetics- has become boring. That is not for lacking of interesting elements. We'll not object neither its verisimilitude, nor its macro evolutionary achievements. That is not the problem. The problem is that Synthesis is able to explain everything about life almost successfully. That is horrible. Nothing is more horrible than to manage to reach the XVIII century Enlightenment goal: abolishing obscurantism, abolishing all shadow and all mystery.
What does a biologist who dedicates to count genes, to compare and to process arduous phyllogenetic trees in his free time? He looks for enemies. His task is a tough one. He will get to know in detail every living being branch sprout from the common ancestor's tree, he will manage to imagine how the first colony of bacteria appeared in the primitive soup, and later it will arrive to a Great Emptiness. Just when Evolutionism did that, it will quench itself in a fate of glory and forgetfulness. As the evolutionary biologist senses this is what is going to happen, he watches around and looks for enemies. He knows animals need someone to fight with. Since he has sublimated too much, along so much time, biologist come in the virtual space and shows his claws and his teeth thirsty of blood. He wishes to face a difficult struggle and looks for getting hurt, just linguistically hurt.
Perhaps, in the middle of the fight, something the enemy could say would surprise him, something that would save him from the torture of knowing everything about his speciality. Perhaps, he would do the same as those viruses, which carry along with them a part of the genome of the cell they have destructed. If that happens, the discussion has not been in vain.
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved .

A necessary conservatism

Biology seems to be the only science that conserves, in an extended version, a more than one hundred years old Research program: Darwinism. Although it is not just the Darwinism of Darwin - who knew nothing about DNA, RNA or proteins- the persistence of this explanation about the origin of species is weird. It keeps on conserving a rigid nucleus that has survived an important crisis that took place at the beginning of XX century. The Neo-Darwinism of the Fifties has surpassed this crisis.
Recently, abolition of teaching of the Darwinism (or teaching it along with alternative evolutionary models) in Natural Sciences lessons of certain American schools has been attempted. From then, the idea of a beginning of fracture in a structure considered so impregnable has become popular. In the discussion were involved those whom, as Behe, were for the idea of an Intelligent Design. Popular disagreement has increased still more by taking knowledge of alternative models, such as Kauffman’s Complex Systems Theory, or as Margulis’s Symbiogenesis. That happened after years learning at school -in a clearly vulgarized and wrong way - that "Men descend from monkeys".
In consequence, certain Spanish Universities accepted to give conferences about Intelligent Design in its cloisters. Many scientists, who returned to Darwinian project, objected this.
Darwinism does not die by a generalized indifference due to this controversy.
This discussion has also stimulated the resurgence of alternative ideas proposing modifications in physic rules statements. These ideas invoke an astral plane of cosmic forces, named “counter-space", capable of creating atoms "from nothing". They also invoke the capacity of mitochondrion to operate like particle accelerators, capable to transmute pure chemical elements into others by means of a cold fusion process.
I’ m specifically thinking about an spanish engineer trained in the school of Rudolf Steiner called Francesc Fígols. This author develops a sort of wonderful coherent dream in which he joins all the commonly named pseudo sciences, like homeopathy, with other disciplines seated just in the periphery of science, like Gaia Theory. He claims that life had not an origin in Earth, because Earth was always alive. Mountains formerly had properties of fluidity and locomotion, as well as Earth has emerged from Sun, like a sort of developing embryo. Earth has sheltered embryonic living forms that ramified into "crystallized species ". For a while, a central human core waited for the proper conditions to lose its cartilaginous character in order to acquire a solid and perfect skeleton, with a maximum capacity brain, doing better than other hominids. This hominids were not more than degenerated forms of what was going to come. There has never been one more opposite position to Darwin’s, although it’s based on nearly the same evidence.
It is not too strange that a dream like this had appeared at a time of paradigm crysis like which Biology suffers nowadays. I say “dream” to oppose it to official science, understood like “vigil”.
It is not an original idea. Plato spoke of an involution of the species, and even then he sets humanity at the top of the living hierarchy. I only want to discuss two of the Fígol’s ideas, summarized from the reading of the book Cosmos and Gea.
In first place, his theory requires too many changes in other scientific disciplines to be accepted as an alternative project of investigation respect of Darwinism. For instance, he assumes the existence of forces coming from the totality of Cosmos towards the living beings. These forces would give them form in an astrological way. In addition, he accepts cold fusion and creation of stuff "from nothing". All this turns to be unacceptable due to which I would name a "necessary conservatism".
It’s a simple thing: if everything is allowed, nothing can be explained. The creation and the transmutation of stuff put ourselves one step behind which the own Darwinism would dare to accept in matter of hazard. Movement of life could even transcend the physical and chemical restrictions. There is no science without rules, nor rules without restrictions and principles of conservation. In a universe where a fact cannot be repeated (not even approximately), nothing is a fact.
Secondly, it is interesting that Fígol’s theory draw on to the same Darwin’s argument for the non-existence of a complex fauna in the Pre-Cambrian era: the soft bodies do not leave fossil traces. This is why men in cartilaginous or embryonic state have not been discovered. The common trunk from which has sprout the mineralized branches was constituted -according to Fígols- by that embryonic men.
All this does not mean that this charming work, mixture of science, magic and science fiction, lacks of some sparkles of ideas, sparkles of possible future scientific development. I would compare this Fígol’s work with Olaf Stapledon’s "Star Maker" (a novel containing an interesting anticipation of Symbiogenesis Theory).
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel. All rights reserved.

Our proposal

We try to explain the logic behind the complex molecular mechanisms, wich are the true architects in order to create living beings and regulate their functioning.
We approach different fields of Biology, including Physiology, Ecology, the Theory of the Evolution and the hypotheses about the Origin of Life, assuming the perspective of Molecular Biology, largely the more vertiginously developing biological discipline.
Far from assuming partisanships that would only contribute to increase the actual confussion between political, religious and philosophical issues, we draw away from all that, in order to focus in the paradigmatic aspects involved in actual discussions about Evolution, Intelligent Design and Free Order in Systems at the Edge of Chaos, discussions in which Gould, Kauffman, Goodwin, Margulis, Lovelock, Behe, and many others have participated.
We propose a non-reduccionist perspective considering the Complexity of Life, and avoiding to fall into the deceit of the "badly raised analysis". This deceit claims that to divide a system in its
components it is just like to arrive to its foundations and to go back in time towards the origins of the analyzed system.
We believe that Life is an event with a hidden being, and that Biology is the construction of an endless speech trying to catch that real being which cannot be turned into language.
We are looking for realizing the movement that is drawn between that removed being and the speech that intends to illuminate it.
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel and Mirta Elena Grimaldi. All rights reserved.