Evolving Thoughts

It’s been a great conference. Simon Conway Morris was fun (but wrong! It’s OK, he says I am too). Peter Bowler’s talk on “what-if history” – what if Darwin had drowned on the Beagle? was actually interesting and raised some nice points about both the nature of the theory of evolution that would have resulted if Darwin had not been there, a kind of early evo-devo, and also whether eugenics and social “Darwinism” would have developed anyway (almost certainly yes, as the ideas were around long before Darwin, although they may not have had such strong hereditarian tendencies; Weikart is wrong on everything he says).

Jean Gayon was excellent on the prospects for Darwinian thought*, and I really liked most of the other speakers too. When an ID proponent stood up and berated the speakers for dismissing and deriding ID, Francisco Ayala gave the best response: they are just plain embarrassing to have around. Bernard Wood went further: it’s animal cruelty, like shooting fish in a barrel. Phil Sloan, one of the organisers, was more measured – this is a forward looking conference on science and religion, not backward looking. I think they call that a backward compliment.

One thing that has struck me is that nobody ever suggested that evolution, in particular Darwinian evolution, was false or mistaken. Given that this is a Catholic event jointly organised as part of the Pontifical Council for Culture, this is significant. There is not the slightest hint of creationism or ID among these people. I take this as a sign that if either have any purchase in Catholic culture, it is in contradiction to Catholic doctrine and authority.

* I disagree with him that the “web of life” will replace the “tree of life” as if you can identify lateral transfer, you must be able to identify the taxa that transfer is later with respect to, and if everything is a web, then you have a tokogenetic relationship, not a taxonomic one.

Tomorrow I fly to San Francisco and then train to Berkeley. I meet up with systematists at Berkeley and try to sell the book, and on Saturday with my internet friends (I have more of them in America than friends in Australia, which is sad, in one way, except when I come to America). Pizza is likely at both events. Then home on Sunday, arriving Tuesday Australian time, before I fly to Queensland for a job interview. By the next weekend I may be dead.