The Deniable Darwin
David Berlinski“You must clear your mind of cant,” Dr. Johnson advised Boswell. It is not easy; I have been trying. I have named this collection The Deniable Darwin because it has been this essay more than any other that has prompted a gratifying commotion. And for obvious reasons. Darwinism has become far more than a narrow and not very interesting nineteenth-century theory of speciation; it is a way of thought, an attitude, and so an ideology. As political correctness is the reigning ideology of social and political life, so Darwinism is the reigning ideology of scientific life. Both ideologies are forms of cant; they are expressions of attitude and in the case of Darwinism, the attitude runs straight through almost everything that has loosely collected under the name of science itself.
It is most typically an attitude of confident conviction in the scientific enterprise itself, and it has as its correlative an attitude of confident contempt for doubt or even rational uncertainty. There is obviously Darwinism among the Darwinians; but there is Darwinism where physicists get together, and psychologists as well. It is a vile but universal fluid, one that seeps into every interstice, with even journalists splashing happily in the stuff. So I have decided to call this collection The Deniable Darwin and I hope that the reader understands that what is being denied is more than that poor drab Darwin ever advanced. I am against the spirit that he engendered.